He hired a lawyer. The trial began. He would be damned if he let the imam build his rotten turbines.
And now finally I understood what this stubborn fight was all about.
Grandpa wasn’t saving the storks. It was Lenio he was saving.
“When one of the nestinari dies,” Lenio had told him a long, long time ago beside the walnut tree, “a stork is hatched up in a nest. When one of the storks dies, a new fire dancer is born. Take care then, teacher, not to ogle other women once I’m gone. Because I will be watching.”
I wondered if she was really watching now. If she could really see him — sitting by the stove so many years later, petting the stork, singing the songs she once had sung.
After all — I’d seen her world through her eyes. It seemed only fair that she should see my world through mine.
SIXTEEN
NO AMOUNT OF TEA could chase away the fever. Our foreheads had caught fire; the marrow in our bones had come to a boil. Yet we were deathly cold. Teeth chattering, muscles contracting, and chills sloshing up and down our spines like water from an icy stream.
Why then did the mercury refuse to rise?
“Broken,” I’d say, and shake the thermometer as if my spite could fix it. I’d pace across the stifling room and throw more wood into the fire.
“Dear God, my boy,” Grandpa would say, and button up his coat. “Sit down. Stop acting.”
But I wasn’t acting. He was. Pretending he was fine. Donning shirts, wool jackets, an old, moth-eaten hat, and drinking tea by the liter.
“You keep the room so hot,” he’d say. “My throat gets dry. I’m thirsty.”
“Drink water, then. Eat snow.”
No. We were burning up. And with each new day, denying it was proving a greater challenge. And with each new day, our heads were turning faster. We sat in the kitchen, by the stove. We even moved our beds there, too cold to go back to our rooms. We rarely spoke. Instead, we listened to the crackling of the wood and to the whistle of our breathing. Breathe in, breathe out. Breathe in and out. A delirious rhythm that spilled into my dreams.
I sometimes dreamed of Lenio. Sometimes of Grandpa as a young man. But mostly I dreamed of Elif. Each time I met her she wanted me to give her something back. The tresses I’d cut but hadn’t thrown away; the little photograph I cradled under my pillow.
“They aren’t yours,” she’d say. “So give them back.”
And soon an endless line of long-gone souls was marching through my dreams. Lenio, demanding her braid. Vassilko, claiming he should be the one to get it. Captain Kosta, asking for his pistol back, and even Nazar Aga, chasing after his severed head.
I saw refugees of war — Bulgarian, Greek, Turkish — wandering the mountains of my mind, searching for their long-lost brothers, sisters, mothers. “Give them back,” they cried, “our names, our bones, our blood. Return them to us.”
I tried to tell them I didn’t have these things. But all the same they kept on calling.
“Why do you need your hair?” I asked Elif in one dream, Lenio in another.
“Why do you need your pistol? Your head?”
“So we may throw them in the fire,” they answered like a single voice.
Until one evening, the line of souls appeared at our gates.
Grandpa was first to hear them coming. He jumped out of his chair and glued himself against the window.
“I heard it too,” I said, and stood beside him. Our reflections watched us, framed by darkness.
“A whistle,” Grandpa said.
“Right there over the hill.”
“No, it was closer. Hear!”
He threw the window open. Wind like knuckles punched our faces and whirled around us handfuls of shaved-off ice. The flame in the lamp went out and in the corner Saint Kosta began to beat his wings. Only the glimmer of the furnace spilled out scarlet and in that light our shadows stretched thin like rope across the yard.
We listened closely, but all we heard was howling wind. It sounded like the mountain, hill after hill, was calling us with whistles. So it was only natural that Grandpa too should call it back.
That’s how we saw them: swimming through the yard amid his whistles. I recognized their knives, the icons roped to the back of the one who led them. And then, as quickly as they’d come, they disappeared, returned once more into the shapes of our stretched-out shadows.
“We’d better keep the window open just a crack,” Grandpa said. “We’d better let some fresh air in.”
We sat down on the beds, my back to his. I could feel the room turning — the heat of the furnace leaking out, and the night flowing in, rich, intoxicating. I called for Saint Kosta, but he burrowed deeper in his blanket.
“We’ve got the nestinari fever, haven’t we?” I said at last.
“Or maybe we’re just pretending,” Grandpa answered.
“I’d say we’re doing a terrific job.”
“Yes, quite convincing.”
“Grandpa.” I turned around to face him. “You think we ought to go along?”
“Why are you asking me?” he said, and nodded at the stork.
SEVENTEEN
THE NIGHT BEFORE the big uprising, Transfiguration eve, 1903, Captain Kosta gathered his men around the fire. “Tomorrow,” he told them, “we meet the Turks in battle. I’ve taught you how to shoot your rifles and how to wield your knives. But should you find yourself out of bullets, should your blades dull in too many Turkish skulls, don’t stop your fighting. Find a burning fire and throw yourself into its flame.”
Then the captain threw a handful of gunpowder in a wooden bowl and filled the bowl with wine. He mixed the two with his dagger and walked the circle, from one man to the next, so each might drink. Their hearts filled up with courage. Their blood with gunpowder.
“Grandpa,” I said. I sat at the edge of his bed and shook him awake. It was still dark outside, the sun at least an hour from rising.
He didn’t know right away what it was I’d laid in his palm. He looked it over in the glimmer of the lantern. A little matchbox. Inside there was a pinch of soil, our land returned, the pinch he’d sent me in the mail so many years back. I’d brought it here with me, yet had been too ashamed to show him.
“We have no holy wine to drink,” I said. I filled a jar with water, dropped in the soil. The two mixed slowly, thread by thread, as if a root were branching off in all directions.
“But this should do.”
In one gulp each we drank our earth, our great-grandfathers, our dead. And we were ready for the fire.
EIGHTEEN
EVERY YEAR, for thirteen hundred years, the nestinari dance. Come spring, come June, come the feast of Saint Constantine, the feast of Saint Elena, they build tall fires, three cartloads of wood torched and burned to embers. And then, barefooted, they take the saint’s invisible and holy hand and plunge into the living coals. The drum beats wildly, the bagpipes screech. Sickness and worry, happiness and bliss — the fire consumes them all. Here in the Strandja Mountains, where the nestinari dance, the fire leaves nothing.
So what then if spring was still a long ways off? So what if we didn’t have a drum and bagpipes? Our mandolin rang like a bell. Our backgammon board rose a mighty ruckus. And who needed icons when we had the saint himself, glorious, though limping and with a broken wing, dressed in a red wool jacket, leading our way?