* * *
The wick crackles, the flame bends, and our shadows sway across the wall and ceiling. I am a boy and Grandpa is a grandpa, though Old Age is still a long ways off from him. The year is 1991. The month is maybe January. Tonight, the power won’t be coming back for one more hour. It’s much too soon for bed, so here we are: around the candle, in the kitchen. My father leafing through a paper in the gloom, my mother mending one of my socks. And Grandpa telling me a story.
“So dark!” my mother says. “All these stories you tell him. So unhappy.”
“If you ask me, not dark enough,” my father says, and rustles the pages of his paper. “It’s good for him to hear unhappy tales.”
“It’s bad for me,” my mother says, and keeps on talking. The candle flickers with her breath and our shadows stir again. Mine conquers her and Grandpa’s shadows, it swallows Father’s up. And then it’s me and Grandpa by the candle. And no one else. No grumpy parents, no power outages, no lines for milk and bread, no mobs demanding revolutions. Elif hasn’t come to pass yet. The storks haven’t come to pass, nor have the turbines. Even America is still a premonition, coiled within my father’s restless gut.
I am a boy and Grandpa is a grandpa. Between us stands a candle, not the ocean.
“Tell me, Grandpa, what happened to Lada?”
“Why, see it for yourself. Look into the flame. Watch the stories that its current drags. Beautiful Lada, blind and deaf, she has long forgotten Attila. But his body remains, buried in her hair. And so his spirit knows no rest.”
And sure enough, I see them, inside the flame. A face floating in a mountain creek, turning and tossing like a fish, mouth opening and closing. Lada has dipped her blistered feet to cool them and soon the face has tangled in her toes. It bites her as she peels it off and brings it to the surface. Let go of me! it cries. A handsome, dear face. It begs to be forgotten. Demands to be allowed to rest.
I see the goddess, stumbling down a dark path, following the trail of shadows. Tooth, nail, ax, and saber. All was in vain. No god, no mortal man could cut the tresses of her hair. So now she stands before the nether lord again and begs his help. “Release them for a day,” she asks, and as before he has no strength to turn her down.
Like wild water the horde of Huns ascended. A hundred horses with their riders, a thousand. Then a hundred thousand. Hooves of gold, long dead, now crossed and then re-crossed the tresses, and split them, one by one.
How heavy the ropes of hair fell at Lada’s feet. How light she felt now.
“They buried Attila’s coffin in the mountain,” Grandpa says. “Below the stones among which danced the maenads.”
“What happened to Attila’s Huns?” I ask. My fingers clasp the table tighter.
Death has tricked them once before, but now it’s they who have Him cheated. Goddess, they cry, we’ve tasted sun and birdsong once again. Don’t give us back to Veles!
“She pitied them the way a mother pities,” Grandpa says. “But even a loving mother holds no cure for death.”
I’ll let them go, said the nether lord when Lada begged him. But in their place, you’ll have to stay with me.
“She turned Attila’s Huns to birds of white plume,” Grandpa says.
“Like eagles?”
“Sure. Why not. Or maybe, more like storks. And then the maenads pulled her limb from limb so she might join her uncle in the dark.”
“What happened to the maenads, then?”
“Well. What do you think ought to happen?”
“She turned them into birds as well.”
“Why not. She is a goddess after all.”
“Black birds. Like storks.”
“Sounds good to me. And then each spring,” he says, “the netherworld is opened so Lada may ascend. And after her, the stork flocks follow.”
“Wherever trees and flowers bloom.”
“But in their flight,” he says, “they always come back to the mountain. To that one place where Attila rests.”
“And no one knows all this?” I say. “No one remembers?”
“Except maybe the storks, you know. And maybe the mountain.”
“And you and I,” I say.
“And you and I.”
The tiny flame of the candle dances. My parents are fighting once again. We must get out of this town, my father says. Go where exactly? asks my mother. But Grandpa and I no longer hear their fight. Eyes closed, we dream. And who’s to say what happens when our eyes flick open? And who’s to say we’re not still there, around that kitchen table, dreaming?
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
It is important to stress that this story is a fiction and that certain locations (Klisura — not to be confused with the historical town of the same name — and Kostitsa and Byal Kamak), certain characters (most notably Captain Kosta), and certain legends (most notably those of the goddess Lada and Attila) are also fictional.
I have attempted to remain truthful in my portrayal of the rituals and mysteries of the nestinari. Mihail Arnaudov’s Ochertsi po balgarskiya folklor was especially useful, as were my visits to the villages of Balgari and Kosti, the last two Bulgarian villages where the nestinari still dance. The volumes in Dimitar Marinov’s series Zhiva Starina were particularly helpful in my study of the kalushari (călușari).
I am deeply indebted to:
Emily Bell.
Nicole Aragi. Duvall Osteen.
Devon Mazzone, Amber Hoover, Abby Kagan, Scott Auerbach, Brian Gittis, and everyone at FSG for their continued support.
David Holdeman, Jack Peters, Diana Holt, Kevin Yanowski. Herbert Holl and Meredith Buie. The University of North Texas Institute for the Advancement of the Arts. My friends at UNT, colleagues and students alike.
Michael Ondaatje, for his kindness, wisdom, and generosity.
Jill Morrison and the entire staff of the Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative.
Sorche Fairbank. Carole Welch. Lisa Silverman. Kyle Minor. Raina Joines.
Boris Nikolaev. Hristo Stankushev. Ivan Chernev.
Isihia. Most of this book was written with their musical composition Ipostas playing in the background.
My wife, for her patience and encouragement.
My parents, for their love and support.
Thank you, kind reader, for reading.
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Miroslav Penkov was born in 1982 in Bulgaria. He moved to the United States in 2001 and completed an MFA in creative writing at the University of Arkansas. His stories have won the 2012 BBC International Short Story Award and The Southern Review’s Eudora Welty Prize and have appeared in A Public Space, Granta, One Story, The Best American Short Stories 2008, The PEN / O. Henry Prize Stories 2012, and The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2013. Published in more than a dozen countries, East of the West was a finalist for the 2012 William Saroyan International Prize for Writing and the Steven Turner Award for Best Work of First Fiction from the Texas Institute of Letters. In 2014–2015, Penkov was mentored by Michael Ondaatje as part of the Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative. He teaches creative writing at the University of North Texas, where he is the editor-in-chief of