Short story "The Plane", part of a greater work in progress.

1. The Plane
A across the vil-
lage. Along the narrow, dusty road he was once more met by the
same group of barefoot children who were laughing at him and calling
him dirty names. Sometimes he would just shrug his shoulders and say
to himself that this is business as usual. At other times, he would try to
buy his way out of this ridicule using little bribes, pieces of candy sent
to him for this purpose by Solomon, a true friend and one of his few
converts.
Solomon, an astute dragoman† whose services were indispensable
to Adley, had warned him about the perils of this journey. “ ese
people are proud and stubborn,” he said. “ ey will never listen to a
stranger.” Nevertheless, Adley had been determined to leave Salonica
for good. e city described as the place “where all the vices of Sodom
flourish” had been the bane of his righteous aspirations. e last thing
he remembered of Salonica was being rushed out of town hidden
underneath his dragoman’s carriage, leaving behind him an angry mob
of locals who weren’t so enthusiastic about “the true light of the Bible”.
But a lost battle wouldn’t overcome Adley. Only hours after fleeing
to safety, he started planning his new endeavors in a new, unexplored
territory, where the seed of the Word of God would be sown. Solomon
was skeptical, but did it really matter? Adley had been contemplating
† interpreter

2. T S B T
a mission to the depths of the hinterland since long ago. Salonica’s
terrible weather, the sickening odors of the sewers and the tanneries,
and—last but not least—the indignities he had been subjected to would
be things of the past.
And so he made his mind up. So far, he had been totally dependent
on his Jewish dragoman and Albanian guard, but from that point and
on, he would be on his own. Solomon insisted that he should carry
arms for his own safety, but he refused. “I have no use for such things,”
he said with confidence, his eyes surveying the distant mountain tops
above the clouds. “ e hand of the Lord is my protection.” He
packed his few belongings in a pair of saddle bags with room only for
the necessary. Leaving Solomon behind him at a roadside khan† , he
galloped through the mist of the Vardar valley.
e thick, almost suffocating air started clearing up as Adley rode
westwards, but the journey became by no means easier. In the couple
of months that followed he advanced along the old post road, going
though dangerous passages, encountering vagabonds and eluding
highwaymen. He spent his nights in cold and decrepit old khans,
trying to rest on moldy straw mattresses, turning around ceaselessly
while suffering bedbug bites. Many times would he wake up from his
troubled sleep, wondering if he was back in his warm bedchamber in
Boston, momentarily failing to recognize the dripping ceiling above
him.
“A miserable exile.” He would repeat these words whenever he
thought of Salonica, as a spell to comfort himself on these tortuous
mountain paths. is phrase belonged to a delicate little damsel,
newly arrived in the city, who Adley had met on the balcony of the
American consulate. As she watched her steamer leave the harbor, she
put a mournful look on her face and said these words about Salonica
that Adley would thereafter make his own. “A miserable exile,” he
muttered through his grinding teeth, biting on the words as if they were
† inn

3. T P
a piece of wood in the absence of a better anesthetic. e numbness
he felt alternated with anticipation whenever he shifted his gaze to the
horizon.
en he finally arrived in Suborosh, a stone-built village sur-
rounded by fortified towers, the scenery instantly obliterated the ex-
haustion of his journey. Elegantly seated on a hilltop with glorious
mountains in the background and blessed by a refreshing breeze, it was
better than he had expected. Solomon had procured a reference letter
to the local Bey† , asking him to cater for Adley’s needs, to which the Bey
kindly obliged. He received Adley with great courtesy and familiarity,
providing him with his own place to stay and commissioning a local
woman, a widow called Bukuria, to be his servant. From that time and
on, Suborosh would be Adley’s new home.
A few months after settling in Suborosh, Adley was still quite
perplexed by this place. Despite the simplistic, rural way of life of its
inhabitants, there were some things that Adley just couldn’t grasp. In
Salonica, there were Jews, Christians and Muslims. Here? enever
the Bey would send out his men to collect the taxes, the people of
Suborosh would proudly declare that they were Muslims to pay only
half the tax they would otherwise pay as Christians. But when the same
men went out to conscript young boys to the Pasha’s army, the villagers
told them that they were Christians and started ringing the church bell,
raising a large mob to drive them out of the village.
As for their attitude towards Adley, his sermons in the village square
about “the true light of Bible” would arouse little—if any—interest. e
first few days after his arrival, the bizarre spectacle of an American
preaching to Albanians in broken Greek seemed to draw some attention
and Adley was surrounded by a small crowd of curious bystanders.
Later on, even this feeble—by any standard—interest would wither, and
Adley, faithful to his promise to the Lord, would continue to preach on
his desperately lonely podium, next to a worn-out poster of Jesus, while
† feudal lord

4. T S B T
everyone else had gone their way.
Adley, who was raised with humbleness as an ideal, both respected
and resented these people’s pride. “ ey will not serve any god
or master,” he thought, “any but Jesus Christ.” e aspiration of
converting these people to Christianity sustained him. At the same
time, he couldn’t help but notice that in the village there were two
otherworldly powers present, both feared and revered by the peasants.
e first one was the cat. Yes, the cat. Pitch-black and slender, fierce
and unruly as everyone else there, she was often spotted by her glinting
pair of eyes as she crossed the dark alleys of the village. In her mere
presence, the peasants would start swearing and gesticulating, touching
their genitals supposedly to fend of the evil. Several men of Suborosh
had died in a blood feud with the members of an opposing clan, and
the sight of the cat was said to be a sign of impending misfortune.
e other one was the old plane tree next to the village’s water
spring. Judging by the huge size of its trunk, it should have been
hundreds of years old. By some strange power, this tree didn’t lose
its leaves in winter, making it unique among the other plane trees in
the forest. People said that the tree marked the site of the death of a
holy man, Baba Ismail, held in awe by both Christians and Muslims.
During its long life spanning centuries, this rare evergreen plane had
become the center of Baba Ismail’s cult.
e tree could be spotted from afar thanks to its towering size, its
rich green foliage, and the offerings to the ghost of Baba Ismail hanging
from its branches. e offerings were lots of colorful ribbons, tied
closely to one another, and small bronze plates, each one depicting
the affliction of the person offering them. Someone with poor sight
would offer a plate engraved with a pair of eyes, while a childless pair
would dedicate the picture of a little child. As the wind blew through
the forest, the plates would clang with one another, making chiming
sounds ranging from hypnotic to eerie, supposedly reflecting the Baba
Ismail’s mood.

5. T P
At first, the cult of the plane bewildered Adley; he found the locals’
apparent devotion and affection to a tree strange, if not preposterous.
As he learned more about the holy man who had passed away under the
plane’s shadow, he grew more and more resentful to the cult. “Such a
vile syncretism,” he thought, “such a miscegenation of heresies!” His
public displays of self-righteous indignation in the village square were
largely ignored by the locals. He raised his voice high enough to scare
the birds out of the square, but not quite enough to make himself heard.
“At least I am safe here.” Many times did Adley comfort himself with
this thought, considering the nonchalance of his would-be audience
better than the many adversities he had so far encountered elsewhere.
In Suborosh, he enjoyed the protection of the Bey and the tolerance of
the locals. Every day at lunch time Bukuria, the widow, would place
a warm plate of food, a piece of bread and a jug of spring water on
his table. Her son, a sturdy young man no more than twenty years of
age, would come at harvest time with baskets full of fruit. Averse and
apprehensive to strangers, he would not exchange a single look or word
with the bemused Adley.
“ at is your name?” Adley had asked the widow’s son the same
question again and again, only to get a different answer each and every
time: Ali, Bekim, Gjerj, Xhafer, Burim... Always frowning, with a
deep vertical crease between his eyebrows like a suspended Damoclean
sword, this young man was so familiar to Adley and yet so unknown.
“Would you like to receive a Christian name, son?” Adley dared to ask
him once. “ at about James?” e young man laughed. “Don’t you
†
ever call me son, effendi ,” he replied. “My father is dead.”
“ y is this young man’s name a secret?” Adley asked Solomon in
one of his letters. Solomon himself grew deeply worried by reading
Adley’s account of the callousness and mistrust he was received with.
He replied promptly, making no effort to hide his concern: “Dear
Reverend,” he wrote, “Be warned that, if these people refuse to reveal
† Ottoman title roughly equivalent to “sir”

6. T S B T
their true names to you, it may be because they fear that you are able
harm them by such knowledge. One should never disregard the power
superstition exerts upon their poor lives, dominated by fear of wizards
and maleficent spirits. If they do suspect that you are a shaitán† , it is of
little use to struggle to convince them to the contrary. I advise you to
consider leaving Suborosh for any other place where you would likely
be received with more kindness.”
As Adley continued towards his house pondering on Solomon’s
words, he encountered many faces he had become familiar with in the
last few months. Gjon, Sali, Masiela, Vasile... Were these names their
real ones? And that word, shaitán, sounded suspiciously familiar... He
recalled having seeing old Gjon once reacting to his presence pretty
much as he would in front of the cat, making rude gestures and uttering
sacrilegious words towards Heaven. He had then laughed at the poor
old fellow, but now... Did he say shaitán?
A few steps from the gate, he found himself surrounded by the
swarm of children he had become familiar with. “Effendi, effendi!” they
cried playfully, smiling and extending their open hands towards him.
“Time for the usual bribe,” Adley thought and reached into his vest. He
scooped and searched and patted himself everywhere until he found a
few pieces of candy deep in his trouser pocket. “No news from Solomon
yet” he thought, realizing that his supply of candy had run short.
e children in the front swiftly picked the candy from his palm,
splitting his fingers open, kissing his hand with apparent gratitude and
laughing at the same time. ere was just one piece remaining. Adley
saw a little boy at the back. “Come here, boy!” he commanded holding
the candy high, beyond the reach of the others. “Here, this one is for
you.”
e crowd split in half and the boy took a few timid steps forward.
He looked at Adley once, then lowered his eyes towards the candy.
As if he was preparing to kiss him, the boy bent over his benefactor’s
† devil

7. T P
proffered hand. en in a sudden, audacious move he grabbed the
candy away, spat on Adley’s hand and ran away with his loot. e
rest of the gang disappeared in the streets of the village before the
flabbergasted Adley could say a thing.
“God, grant me patience with these children!” he thought to him-
self, hearing the laughs at a distance behind him. He pulled out his
handkerchief to clean himself up from the mess, trying to restore his
calmness without much success. From across the street, through the
latticed grilles of the windows, he had felt upon him the impertinent
gaze of unknown women who now bore witness to his embarrassment,
probably laughing at his expense. He hastily looked away and strode
towards the house with a fragile loftiness in his gait.
Back home, he met Bukuria who had brought him fresh water from
the spring. He looked at her hands: Cracked and callused from years of
hard work, they were so much unlike the delicate hands of every other
woman Adley had met in his life. His contemplation was interrupted
by a sudden epiphany: “She is Bukuria.” Yes, it was the Bey himself
who had introduced her to him, and the name he knew her by had to be
her real one. is made Adley sigh in relief.
“Bukuria,” he said, “are you afraid of me?” “Does it matter,
effendi?” she replied, lowering her eyes. “I only do what the Bey has
asked me to do.” “ at if I released you from your obligation to serve
me?” asked Adley. “Only the Bey himself can do that, effendi. I just
know one thing, that you are not like a pater† .”
e only pater Bukuria had ever known was the elderly, long-
bearded, black-clad Orthodox priest of a nearby village. “ is is
absurd” thought Adley, who had always thought of the Orthodox
clergy as ignorant and poorly educated. “How many years of neither
washing nor shaving would it take to make me look like such a priest?”
However, Adley’s scholarship, elegant Western fashions and polished
manners failed to impress Bukuria or anyone else in the village. His
† fr. Greek πάτερ, Orthodox priest

8. T S B T
reddish hair, pale face with prominent eyebrows and austere gaze
behind a smudged pair of spectacles failed to convince that he was
indeed a man of God.
As darkness started falling upon Suborosh, Adley sat by his window
to take a last look at the village before going to sleep. “Virtue comes
at a high price,” he thought, pulling in a deep breath of the evening
breeze. e vespertine silence was interrupted by the pound of an axe;
someone was chopping wood in the back yard. “It must be the son,”
he thought. A transient unrest glided through the streets of the village
and barks were heard from afar; then it was silence once more.
Adley took off his boots and looked down at his sore feet. e sight
of his bare ankles, usually hidden under the boots’ polished leather
made him feel miserable. “ is swelling only gets worse each time I
look...” He lay down on his divan resting his feet on a couple of thick
pillows, and then pulled his harmonica out of his watch pocket. e
tune of “Amazing Grace” filled his little room for a while, under the faint
light of an oil lamp.
His eyes were wide open and fixed on the flickering flame across
the room. It wasn’t only his aching feet that kept him from sleeping:
He felt a large lump of consolidated frustration in his throat, inert and
heavy as lead. “ y am I here?” He wanted to weep but he couldn’t; the
leaden clot in his throat twisted and pulled itself tight like a Gordian
knot, smothering him and silencing his sobs.
He reached for the last parcel Solomon had sent, now empty of
candy but full of other precious commodities. Wrapped inside a piece
of cloth, there was a small brown glass bottle and a set of measuring
spoons. With quivering hands, he tried to pour himself a spoonful of
laudanum but failed, spilling it all over the floor and himself. ere
was just one last swig left; he took it directly from the bottle, followed
by a bit of sugar to mask the stinging bitterness of the tincture. As he
swallowed, he felt the lump in his throat dissolving. He could then
breathe.

9. T P
e secret Eucharist he had just consumed worked his way within
him. e lamp emitted smoke plumes the size and shape of dragons,
soaring high above the transparent ceiling and then plunging down on
the trembling floor. e two serpents, each one in its magnificent black
armor, were chasing each other mercilessly, whirling and dancing in an
endless spiral above Adley’s chest. He breathed in, and, with a single
puff of air, blew them high into the night sky, scattering the shining
obsidian of their armor all over the fields of the village.
An agreeable warmth enveloped him, alleviating him from the
burden of his sensations. He was weightless, translucent, eternal. e
tortuous path to righteousness had become plain straight, and Adley
kept his pace, beckoned forth by the light at the distant end. He found
himself in luminous meadow, walking barefoot on the green grass along
a lonely stream. Rubbing his naked feet against the earth, he felt
nothing but sheer, overwhelming freedom.
As Adley was sinking deeper into this blissful oblivion, a familiar cry
erupted from afar: “Effendi, effendi!” e children of Suborosh thronged
and frolicked around him. Adley noticed the small boy that previously
had spat on him. “Oh, this little scoundrel!” he thought, seeing him
walk clumsily, sunk knee-deep in stiff riding boots much larger than
his size. He was goose-stepping, bragging and showing off his boots to
the rest of his cheerful gang, receiving their loud applause. “Amusing,”
thought Adley. Just as he was about to laugh at the spectacle, he made
a striking observation: e boots were his.
“Get thee behind me, Satan!” he cried as the children circled around
him. He walked through them with his eyes firmly shut, struggling
to dispel this hideous apparition. Distressed, he sat by the bank of
the stream and curled himself up, refusing to look back. “Our Father,
which art in Heaven...” As he prayed, the voices of the children behind
him started to fade in the distance. He stood up and looked around,
to see that there wasn’t any sign of the children anywhere between
himself and the horizon. “Behold the power of His Word!” us,

10. T S B T
he declared victory over this dreadful mirage—obviously a work of the
Tempter—and decided to go on his way.
For a moment ago he wouldn’t care less about his boots, but now
his feet did feel bare—helplessly, disturbingly bare. y had he ever
taken a step without them? Walking along the stream proved to be
more difficult than he had imagined, as the sharp feeling of the twigs
crushing under his feet became increasingly unpleasant. He walked on
nonetheless, driven by a profound desire to move forward, to find the
destiny awaiting him at the end of the path. “Don’t lose faith, Gideon,”
he kept telling himself, taking one painful step after another.
At last, he found himself in a covert glade dominated by a great
plane in its midst. e roots of the tree extended several yards around
its immense trunk, plunging deep into the ground, splitting rocks in
half at the very place where the stream sprang from. As the wind
swept through the glade, Adley heard an evocative sweet sound that
he instantly recognized: e chiming plates of the plane, and through
them, the voice of Baba Ismail speaking to him.
As the wind kept blowing, Adley began circumambulating the tree,
picking up the holy man’s whispers while the thread of fate was spun.
“Gideon...” He heard his name innumerable times: Voices familiar, like
the one of his mother, and voices strange were calling out to him; voices
so powerful that obliterated everything from the face of the Earth,
leaving just him and the plane under a starless, blazing Firmament.
He looked up into the tree to see a pair of human feet—two bare
feet with a morbid, cold blue hue. He discerned the shape of a man’s
body hanging high among the branches, the most gruesome of all the
offerings to the tree. He was overcome by ineffable terror. “It is a
mirage”, he thought. “It cannot be...” He closed his eyes and prayed.
He keened and wailed and asked the Lord for mercy but the specter
would not go away. It was right in front of him, visible through his
transparent eyelids, dangling lifelessly in the wind.
He knew that the body he saw was his own. And the feet, bearing the

11. T P
marks of his painful peregrinations, were now swollen from the blood
pooling and stagnating under the merciless gravity... “Oh Lord, let
this frozen blood come to life again. Let it thaw and revive my lifeless
limbs... Let it rush up to my head, let it become a scream of Your
righteous anger, let it shatter this demon into pieces!”
“A miserable exile...” e damsel of the consulate... Was she evoking
Adley through these words or was Adley conjuring her? She emerged
from the earth sky-clad, nubile, crowned with intoxicating vines. She
came forth as a vine sprout herself, climbed up and wrapped herself
around him, depositing these words on his lips with a kiss: “A miserable
exile...”
His limbs convulsed as he drew in her breath. He opened his eyes
and looked at the flickering lamp across the room, the flaming tongue
inside it crackling and spurting soot. e acrid aftertaste of the tincture
felt like ashes in his dry mouth. He swept the sweat from his forehead
with his sleeve, then turned on his other side and reached for a cup of
water left for him on his nightstand. “Someone must have been here,”
he thought as he gulped. As he watched the flame dwindle, her words
were still resounding inside him.
He opened his window to let the dusk in. Moist air, saturated with
the scent of decomposing leaves, filled up his room. Small drops of
drizzle fell down from the cloud-cast sky. e dawn, still a faint glow
over the horizon, cast a bleak light over the village. Everything had
folded into a single shade of gray.
“ y wrath lieth hard upon me, and thou hast afflicted me with all thy
waves.” at monstrous sin had he committed, by thought, word, or
deed to deserve such a punishment? Were his intentions false, or was
his heart impure?
e bare girl of his dream resurfaced violently in his thoughts as
an instant rapture, an orgasmic fit. A youthful, ecstatic and sanguine
image that Adley tried so hard to suppress, knowing that such thoughts
have the potential to evoke disasters. By no means were these thoughts

12. T S B T
his own; the ancient foe of mankind had planted this obnoxious seed
into him, tempting him and manipulating him. Now his feet were
tangled in poisonous vines emerging from the darker corners of his
room; tendrils pierced into his mind and impeded his thoughts.
“Compose yourself, Gideon!” He had to calm himself down and
focus in order to preserve his intellect. “In any right triangle, the square of
the hypotenuse equals the sum of the squares of the catheti.…” Casting logic
as a spell against madness, he looked for an exit out of the limbo that
had engulfed him. “ e answer must be out there…”
“My sin is no other than sloth,” he concluded, “it is what I have
not yet done that torments me.” He had been timid when he should
have been indignant, feeble when he should have been rampant. He
had tolerated idolatry for too long; he had become an accomplice by
inaction. “Trees eventually fall,” he thought. “ ey should either fall
or be felled.”
He set his eyes beyond the door of his muddy front yard, traversing
with his gaze the steep-sided alley flanked by the neighbors’ houses,
built at a breath’s distance from each other. A beam of sunlight escaped
through a brief crack in the clouds. At the end of the alley, he could
glimpse the cobblestones of the road shining as the rain washed them
down. He thought of the water trickling along the roadside throughout
the village, ending up in the stream. At the source of the stream there
was a glade; that glade was the abode of his arch-foe.
He summoned up his courage to put on his boots again. With his
overcoat hastily thrown over his shoulders, he went through the back
yard to retrieve the axe, left there next to a pile of chopped wood. He
tried to put on his overcoat properly, hiding the axe underneath it.
With his fingers, he combed his wet, disheveled hair backwards and
wiped the raindrops off his spectacles in a faint attempt to make himself
look decent. en he harried towards the front gate, leaving heavy
footprints in the mud.
He strode through the alley and into the road. He almost slipped a

13. T P
couple of times on the rain-slick cobblestones, while the sharp down-
ward slope of the road made walking by no means easier. Frustrated, he
paused for a moment to check if the axe was still under his overcoat. It
was there; he could feel its cold blade underneath his clothes. en he
looked around. He could not see a living soul on the road, and yet he
could sense an unfamiliar presence near him. He looked at the house
across the street, through the grilles of its windows. A fleeting glint of
eye-shine caught his attention.
“ o’s there?” he murmured through his teeth. Cautiously, he
approached the window and peered through the lattice; he could
discern the figures of two young girls sleeping next to each other,
sharing the same straw mattress. eir room was illuminated by
flickering lamplight; playful shadows were dancing on the walls and
the low ceiling. Yet there was no sign of anyone awake; everything
there was silent. “A mere illusion,” he thought.
He turned away slowly in order not to disrupt the serenity of their
sleep. It was about time for the villagers to rise and make their way into
the fields; the roosters were already crowing at the distance, summoning
the men and women of Suborosh to their daily toil. “I must hurry,”
he thought and hastened his pace. A sudden fiendish screech shook
him profoundly and paralyzed his limbs with terror. “Dear Lord!” he
exclaimed loudly, taking a couple of clumsy missteps before finally
losing his balance.
Adley found himself lying face down, struggling to pull himself
together. e blunt side of the axe was pressing firmly against his
chest, but Adley felt no pain at all. He watched the small streams of
rainwater trickling down the gaps between the cobblestones, a flow that
he somehow found wonderfully numbing. He raised his head slowly,
trying to recover from his unwilling prostration. Ahead of him, he
recognized the same glint of sulfurous eye-shine, the grim signature
of the perpetrator of this ordeal: “Damned cat!”