For some nights the stars began to fill more and more of the sky, and the darkness hung against the firmament became deeper, bluer, with clusters and tendrils of stars. Each day became warmer, more snow melted, the drip of icicles rained from the branches in groves, and the hooves splattered a warming mix of water and snow. The gray light became sparkling yellow, and the early spring, with its troubling scents, filled the white sphere that had in its center the small, dark worm of the sleighs. One morning, a blue band as wide as the entire horizon appeared to the pilgrims. As they approached, the band widened into a snake knotting through the horizon, until the land began to descend and, whipped by new branches on the trees, pierced by the squawking flight of crows, they could finally take in the miraculous sight. It was the greatness of the Danube river, so wide that the trees on the other side were barely visible, plain reeds in a purple fog. A skin of thick glass over the entire verdant expanse, lustered by a warm wind, hid the terrifying tumult of the waters underneath, and its blinding mirror reflected the sun in its orbit through space. “Dunav! Dunav!” cried the children, who jumped from the sleighs and ran, crunching the snow under their pigskin-wrapped feet, to the enormous frozen presence. But the priest yelled at them loudly, and the small people came back, stroking the horses’ hot bellies as they passed.
Before you cross its depths, a river must be blessed. A sacrifice was required, so all would not perish in a furious shatter of ice. The servant of God remembered that once, in his youth, when bringing the miraculous tooth and other holy relics from the north, he’d seen the priest cut a hole in the Danube. After praying over the hole and dousing it with holy water, leaning now and then to read from the Gospels open on the ice beside him, the priest took the shoulders of the girl fate had chosen, kissed her eyes, and dropped her into the frozen water. A lifetime had passed since then, and times were not as harsh. The elders had come to believe that, as long as it was not the body but the person’s soul that the powers of Creation wanted, be they luminous or unfriendly, and as long as the shadow was nothing other than spirit, it would be enough to sacrifice the shadow alone. So if a house was ever to be built, a river crossed, or a bridge constructed, the sleepless powers of the place were given the shadows of living people, in place of the old sacrifices of flesh and blood.
They had to wait until dawn, which after a night of collective vigil, under stars that were swallowed by clouds, and then emerged again sparkling more purely, as though they were glasses washed with raw silk, appeared like a bouquet of fire. The peasants rubbed their faces with snow. Their eyes were shining red and round like birds’ eyes, and in their white gowns with wide sleeves, they did look like a flock of great water birds, fooled by the weather into visiting the Danube before the start of spring. This time, fate chose the boy who would become the grandfather of old Babuc, that is, my Tataie. He was a lost child, different from the others. Ten springs earlier, a flock of girls had gone gathering twigs and violets in a nearby glen. They tied them into crowns and wandered among the trees with green bark that marked the air with a dizzying scent, one they would be shocked to recognize a few years later, when on certain holidays, young men took them up the mountain and made them women: the fresh bark smelled like men. Under the sky torn by bare branches, the girls themselves were torn by a dark and strange longing. Wasting away with languorous eyes, they left their toe prints in the barely grown grass, drizzled with the purple and yellow of gentian flowers that smelled, actually, repulsive. In one spot, the trees thinned out, withered into tan clusters of sticks, and the crocuses were not brilliant in their usual color, but black, drops of pitch drizzled over the short grass. A crust of snow with large beads of water tarried around the roots and glowed like a diamond. Their hair warmed by a western wind, the girls set toward this strange clearing, and even from a distance they could see, on the grass fur stained with black, a small pink creature lying still, surrounded by a crown of sunrays like paintings of saints in the church. It was a chubby, naked infant asleep, its toes twitching, enveloped in a round crystal husk, thin as a fingernail, glowing in the sunlight. The girls cocked their heads and walked around the vision. Their rings of hair stuck to the transparent egg, which they lifted carefully, so that they could get a better look at the sleeping baby. They were surprised. He was as beautiful as only a three-month-old little sausage can be, but there was something impure about him. He was a golden child with long lashes and large eyebrows, a tender, pouty mouth, pale titties like two lentil pods and a wee-wee frowning between his dimpled thighs, and he had no sign of a navel, a fact which completed the miracle. They took him to the village and tried to remove him from the capsule of hardened tears, but even the blacksmith, the woodsman, and the priest, using all of their skills, couldn’t break through the membrane. The infant woke up and began to cry. He was already hungry, and his little hands were trembling. They called the village witch, an old baba forgotten by time, who lived in the trunk of an enormous linden tree that in the night seemed to hold the enormous coin of the moon by its crest, like a vase. She stuck the egg and the infant under her dress, against her stomach. Holding her hands against the bump, like a pregnant woman, she lay down by the hearth. At dawn, in front of the wondering village elders, her labor began. She roared and convulsed, foaming at her mouth with her eyes hanging out like a snail’s, until the pseudo-stomach began to soften and slacken. Under the baba’s quilts that smelled of grass and roots, something started to move. The midwife slid the infant out, still in its flaccid skin, which she slit with a sausage knife. The boy spurted meconium and wailed like a cat. The midwife washed and swaddled him and gave the child to a woman still raising her own, who took this new boy into her care. They baptized him that same dawn, plunging him three times into the font and liberating him from Satan’s power. The boy grew up alongside the village children. Aside from his missing navel, he was no different from the others until the day when, after the devastating year of the poppy, fate chose him to lean his shadow over the frozen Danube.
There were chilling stories about people who lost their shadows. Within a year, they said, their legs wasted away, they were covered in sores from their heads to the soles of their feet, white worms with black heads burst out of their bodies and crawled along the surface of their skin, and when they died, their guts slithered out of their stomachs like tangles of snakes and vanished into holes in the earth. Their souls went to Hell the moment their shadows were taken off, leaving their putrid corpses behind to wander briefly under the sun. The devils took the souls into a hole in the rocks, hung them upside-down from a redhot iron hook over a fireplace crackling with flames, and in the red air, in the stench of sulfur that burned more than the fire, in the screams more rending than the sulfur, the devils cut their tongues, pulled off their balls, burst their eyes, flayed their flesh, scratched their long nails across their livers, hearts, and kidneys, and jabbed a reddened stake into their anuses, and over and over again, without pause, for every moment of eternity.