Excerpt from Stork Mountain by Miroslav Penkov, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

ONE

SOMEONE WAS BEATING THE DOOR of the station and I heard a man cry out, "Let us in, you donkeys. The storm's on my tail and inching closer." But I hadn't slept in thirty hours and maybe I was dreaming of voices. Or maybe I didn't want to get up, snug as I was on the floor in the corner. The handful of peasants around me began to stir, uneasy. The stench of wet wool, of sweat and tobacco, rose like mist from their ancient bodies and the waiting room fogged up. I knew they expected me, the young boy, to wrestle the door open, to let into safety whoever was out there. So I pretended that I was sleeping.

I had arrived on a bus from Sofia early that morning, a four-hour wobble east to the middle of nowhere. "You wait here," the driver had told me, "for the bus to Klisura. It comes around noon. A blue bus. With a big sign.To Klisura. Will you be able to read it?" He'd spoken to me the way people speak to foreigners, drunks, or the dim-witted. I'd smiled and nodded and wondered which of the three he'd thought I was.

Outside, the fist kept pounding. A growing wind whipped the windows and their glass creaked on the verge of breaking. Through the veil of my eyelashes, I spied an old woman make for the door, limping. An old man got up to help her. Next thing I knew, wind was roaring around us, much too scorching for the middle of April.

When they shut the door again I heard the man who'd been banging, now on the inside. "Ashkolsun, Grandma." Then I saw him, slapping sand off his tracksuit trousers, off his brown leather jacket. He kissed the old woman's forehead and, without as much as a glance at the people around him, marched to one end of the station, where old benches had been piled up, all the way to the ceiling.

"You come here and help me," he called, still not turning.

By the door there now stood a young woman. A girl really, in blue shalwars and a silk dress; it seemed like she'd sprung out from the nothing. She was untying her headscarf, white with roses imprinted on it, but when the man called, she rushed to aid him. They lugged the bench together, a good five, six meters.

"And my demijohn?" he said. "Did you forget it?" Once more the girl sprinted back to the exit, her face as red as the roses, her bare feet kicking up the sand she'd tracked in.

At once I felt lighter. The eyes of the peasants, which had crushed me for hours, had now latched on to the couple. I didn't blame them. I too wanted to know what the girl was doing, but I was afraid her man would catch me staring. So I moved to the window to watch her reflection in secret.

And at the window, I saw the storm approaching. There was a road outside the station, fissured by heat, frost, and hail, and a vast, barren field beyond it. Two rows of wind turbines stretched on the horizon, and scattered across the field I counted a dozen small mounds. Thracian tombs; I knew that much. In the distance, beyond the mounds and the turbines, a wall of red sand was pouring from the sky, violent, muddy, and racing in our direction.

"Simooms," said a voice beside me. "Scoop up sand from the Saharan desert. Bring it here, across two thousand kilometers."

A plume of smoke hit the glass on the inside and bounced back to choke me. When the smoke settled, I saw an old man reflected, ghostly transparent, except for his thick mustache the color of rusted metal.

"My missus makes me dye it," he said, smoothing the hairs and nodding at a withered woman on one of the benches. Dressed in a black skirt, black apron, black headscarf, she resembled a shadow. The old man turned his gaze to the girl in the corner. "I reckon if I wasn't married, I'd steal her." And he coughed a long time in place of laughter.

I had the urge to tell him there were no simooms in Bulgaria, never had been. But who was I to correct him? Maybe even the climate had changed in my absence. Were we in danger? Should I step away from the window? But asking him required I speak the language I hadn't used in so many years, and this scared me far more than a sandstorm.

Excerpted from Stork Mountain by Miroslav Penkov. Copyright © 2016 by Miroslav Penkov. Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.