And this year, Elif told me, the fever had turned to madness. “You saw how Father had roped Aysha down. You saw my mother’s blackened eye. What else is there to see?”
NINE
WE HAD WALKED as far out of Klisura as the bank allowed us. From here on, the bushes were too thick. Blooming branches crisscrossed over the river to form a tunnel through which we had to pass. Sitting down on the grass, Elif removed her headscarf and stuffed it in her pocket. She tousled her short hair, then slipped her sneakers off and began to roll up the legs of her jeans.
“Hey, amerikanche”—she had taken to calling me “little American”—“you can’t imagine the fight I had to fight with my father so he would let me walk around in jeans. The things he’d do to you, to both of us, if he found us together here, alone. If he knew you could see my toes and feet. You like them?”
I think she laughed. Sheep bells were ringing up the hill or maybe closer. I pictured a shepherd, resting on his crook, watching us and twisting his mustache. The shepherd would speak to Elif’s father, who then would come for me. I sneezed.
“I’ve seen goats faint when they are scared,” she said, “but never a man sneezing when something spooks him,” and, laughing, she splashed upstream. Shoes in hand and trousers rolled up, I followed. The water sliced me, knee-deep and razor-cold. Elif was crying in pain or pleasure. I couldn’t tell. We walked the tunnel, twisting, turning, brushing away the blossoming branches overhead. My nose ran, my eyes smarted, and every other step I sneezed.
At ten sneezes, Elif began to count them. At twenty she was laughing so hard, she had to stop and catch her breath. She told me to splash my eyes with water, which helped a bit. At thirty sneezes, the tunnel had ended and we were out in the open.
What spread before us was an island, a perfectly flat meadow, as wide as a baseball field, which split the river into two turbulent streams. One stream came from Turkey. The other was Bulgarian. They merged here and together they flowed eastward to the Black Sea.
Where the two streams met, the water was black with mud. It churned dry leaves and twigs, like a giant centrifuge, but because the basin was so wide, the water never reached above our knees.
And in the meadow I saw a tree. A giant, whose trunk a dozen men would not encircle hand in hand. Each of its lower branches could be a tree itself. It reached so high I strained to see its top. I felt at once protected and exposed, completely at its mercy. The tree was dead. But all the same, it bloomed in massive charcoal blossoms that weighed its branches down, from top to bottom.
“Stork nests,” said Elif beside me. Each year, on their way from Africa to Europe and then back, the storks passed over the Strandja Mountains. The Via Pontica, she said. Once, as a little girl, she’d tried to count the nests on the tree. At fifty, she’d lost track. But there were more. Not just in its branches, but in the oaks along the banks as well.
The giant was a walnut tree. As old as Klisura and maybe older. Under its branches once upon a time the nestinari danced. Look, can you see the soot on its bark? And there by its trunk, in the mist, can you see it? A tiny hut, its roof covered with stones from the river? The shack of the nestinari.
“I was inside it once. Found nothing. Except a twisted saint who tortures little girls.” She laughed. We sat on the ground and rubbed our feet to warm them. Mist still floated here in the meadow and the sweet stench of rotting grass filled my nostrils. At least I wasn’t sneezing.
“You’re shivering,” she said with a laugh. I nodded. I had told Grandpa the same last night and now I wondered if he was still in my bed, if he was feeling better. I wondered what he had felt when inevitably, many years back, he’d first seen the giant tree. Who had stood by his side then, the way Elif now stood by me?
“Look, see,” she said, and dug her fingers in the ground, scooped up a handful, and pulled it out of the mist.
“Feathers. The whole field is blanketed with them. Tell me, is there a thing sadder than feathers rotting in the ground? A thing more pretty?” She tossed them behind her back and dusted off her palms. “Let’s go get high,” she said. She put on her shoes and, as if she were a little girl, smacked me on the neck. “You’re it,” she said, then jumped up and, laughing, sprinted toward the tree. “I’ll race you to the top!”
Her yell carried across the meadow, bounced back in the oaks along the banks, and drowned in the mixing rivers. I watched her through the mist, a little speck against the walnut that stretches its arms and legs, somehow connects with the bark and climbs it. Up she went, up beyond the lower branches, in a straight line, quick and assured. Ten, fifteen meters into the air. She straddled a branch and, with her feet dangling on either side, moved toward a giant nest in its middle, where other branches crossed into a firm foundation. She threw herself into the nest, the way she must have done a thousand times before, and for a moment I lost her from my sight. When she reemerged, she was waving her motley scarf. The scarf slipped from her fingers and spiraled down, down through the mist.
I remembered the storks that gathered in my childhood town in August, wheeling high above the rooftops of houses, blocks of flats, catching warm currents in the air, their cartwheels growing larger, thicker with every new arriving stork. And I remembered how we had watched them from our balcony, and Grandpa asking, “My boy, which stork are you?”
TEN
THERE WAS A VILLAGE once upon a time that would have lain some fifty miles south of Klisura. Today this land was in Turkey and two hundred years ago, not just this land, not just Klisura, but all of Bulgaria belonged to the Ottoman Empire. In this ancient village, the Christians — some strange mix of Bulgarians and Greeks — were allowed to build tall churches, to worship their god with the kind of freedom Christians across the empire did not enjoy. Why the sultan allowed such liberty to a handful of his rayas, Elif couldn’t say. Nor could the hag who had told her this story. One night three years ago, intrigued by her sister’s affliction, Elif had snuck across the bridge into the Christian hamlet and sought the hag who had examined the sickly girls. And in the cloak of darkness, the hag had told her the story of how the fire dancers had first set foot in Klisura.
We were sitting in the stork nest now, our bent legs almost touching at the knees. The nest walls were sticks entwined and balls of straw and wool and feathers. The sticks poked me, but I didn’t mind. Sheltered from the wind, I was no longer freezing.
Elif had fished a nylon pouch out of the hay that lined the nest’s bottom and was rolling a joint. Her secret stash, she called the baggie. Her happy place, this nest. Ever since she was a little girl she’d hide here from her father, from all the troubles in her life. She’d carved steps in the tree trunk, built herself a stairway. “I’m a hot-air balloon,” she said, and licked the edge of the rolling paper. “My troubles are the sandbags I throw out one by one. Up the bark I climb until at last I’m lighter even than air itself.”
She lit the joint and took a drag. The stench of pot, of rotting hay mixed in one noxious fume. “I go to the university in Burgas,” she said. “I get some money for my good grades and this is what the money buys me.” She passed the joint, which I refused.
“Suit yourself,” she said, and leaned her head back on the entwined sticks. Through an opening in the hedge I could see the shack of the nestinari, rainwater pooling on the flat stones of its roof. The pools glimmered with sun, which had tangled midway in the dry branches of our tree. The rivers boomed and Elif began to speak.