Stork Mountain Read Online Free Page B

us—we had started up the road again. “Come back tomorrow,” he called. “I’ve just received some of your favorite tea. We’ll play backgammon. Bring the boy.” The old man raised his hand as if to give a maybe.
    â€œHis name is Osman Rejep, but everyone calls him Baklava Osman. I gave him this nickname myself, when he was still a boy. Why? Only God remembers.”
    To this, I had absolutely nothing to say. We rounded a corner. We had arrived.
    The house was of the modern kind. The mica in its plaster glistened in the sun and gave it a gentle glow. The old man slammed his fist against the yard gates and they rang like a bell. He kept on pounding.
    â€œWhy don’t you slam harder?” a woman cried from inside the house. “That ought to make me run faster.” The front door flew open and a barefooted girl flapped across the tiled path in the yard. She was adjusting her headscarf—a blue kerchief with blooming red carnations imprinted in the cloth—but when she recognized the old man she flung the scarf away and shoved it in the back pocket of her jeans. She was younger than me, but not by much, her hair short, like a boy’s. Her face was flushed, and sweat ran down her cheeks in trickles, down her neck.
    â€œ Marhaba , Grandpa,” she said as she opened the gates and flashed us her bone-white teeth. Then she saw the rooster and her smile expired.
    â€œSo you’ve brought a rooster,” she said, and looked at me. “Two roosters.” There was something cruel in the way she pursed her thin lips, in the way her large black eyes watched me, unblinking. Maybe that’s why I was reminded of the girl from the station.
    â€œGrandpa,” she said, “tell him to pick his jaw up off the ground.”
    Oh, please, I wanted to say. But, knowing that my accent thickened in moments of anxiety and anger, I kept quiet. The girl was leading us across the yard when somewhere behind the hilltops the whistle of a songbird rang and then grew quiet. The old man halted and so did the girl. They listened intently, and only after another bird had answered, somewhere from within the village, did they resume. I watched her scarf wave from her back pocket like a fox’s tail. Her jeans rustled with every step up, up the outside staircase to the second floor, and a new kind of uneasiness flooded my head.
    The stench of something burned slapped us at the threshold. In a flash, I saw my mother helping me plant candles in a church sandbox, for the dead. Careless, still a child, I’d held the candle much too close. The stench of burned hair had haunted me for weeks. It was this smell I tasted now as the girl led us through the dark hallway.
    For the first time I thought of the sick girl we were about to meet. What was her illness and how were we supposed to help her? And gradually, all sense of adventure left me. Listen, old man, I was about to say, but then the rooster crowed. It flapped its wings as if behind the door we stood by was rising the morning sun.
    â€œAll night, Grandpa,” the girl said. “All night Aysha jumped and danced about the room. So Father tied her down to the bed, but even then she kept on wailing. When the sun rose, she wailed louder. So we covered the window, like you told us to, and only then did she fall asleep. But I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t study. And I can’t fail another exam.”
    Clumsily, the old man petted the girl’s head. “Elif, Elif,” he said. Then Elif pushed the door open and led us in.
    The room was pungent with the stink of soot. Dressed in a white gown and tied to the bed with a thin rope lay Aysha, the sick girl. Her face was pale in the gloom and perfectly still, like a frozen puddle, and only her eyes flittered under her closed lids. She looked ten, no older. The rope snaked over a red pillow on her chest, a pillow on her thighs, a pillow on her ankles. The soles of her feet were