The priest’s Holy Writ, bound with golden wire, smoldered like embers in the purple, transparent, rayless sun of the morning. The large, leather Gospel, weathered as hard as iron and braced in tarnished silver, was held open by four children to the page where those fleeing Egypt, led by Moses, crossed the Red Sea between walls of water. The priest spoke the black and red Cyrillic letters, chanting and censing, and then motioned for the peasants to strip Vasili, the chosen boy. In spite of the wind that made his skin mist like a steaming horse, he was quiet, not trembling or rubbing his hands over the gooseflesh of his chest, where he wore a small, shining brass cross. Only a rag clung to his hips. He moved slowly toward the cliff-like bank of the river, his bare feet sinking into the snow, and the villagers followed a little behind. He was avoiding the lines of squawking crows on the roots, when suddenly his shadow became as long and pointed as the black hand of a watch and flowed onto the ice. The villagers knelt and made large crosses over their bodies, from their foreheads to their navels, while the priest prayed that the great frozen god would accept this sacrifice and let them cross safely to the other side. The boy held his arms out to the sides, and his shadow, close to the bank since the river ran from west to east, followed his lead. A long cross, blackish-pink, now stretched over the mirror of the water. “Receive, receive the shadow,” murmured the Badislavs ceaselessly, and then, before their eyes, the cross-phantom began to eat itself away, to evaporate like wet spots in the sun. The long trunk and the beam of the arms became thinner, broke into splinters, and were sucked one after the other into the river. After a few minutes, Vasili, pallid, the short golden hair of his arms and breast on end, had no trace of a shadow. He was moaning and crying. The others embraced him and quickly put his clothes back on, covering his shoulders with a shaggy sheepskin. The child climbed into the sleigh, covered himself in a blanket and mourned his shadow, lost now forever.
The horses now stepped easily and powerfully across the ice, and the Badislavs marveled at what they saw through its transparent glass. They never would have imagined that there was such beauty frozen in the thick crust of ice. But the garden of the Lord is greater than the mind of man, and its wonders are many. The line of sleighs moved forward in silence and cold over the enchanting sight. On every side, at the depth of a fathom beneath the crystal, there were butterflies with spread wings. Their delicate, furry bodies like little worms, scarlet or light yellow or black, were more than twenty paces long, and their wings sometimes spanned forty paces. Their thin little feet were extended, three on each side, and their proboscides for drinking the fog of flowers (but where were there palace-sized flowers for these miraculous insects?) were turned like the hands of a watch under their heads, under their large, bloodshot eyes. Their scintillating wings were azure, touched with a painful velvet of Tyrian purple, and almost had the taste of a rotten cherry, a pistachio, an orange peel, or a Persian rug rubbed between the fingers of the eyelids. The exuberant floral patterns, with swallow tails, peacock eyes, ferret eyes, wasp eyes, sinful eyes and weasel eyes overlapped in the waters and multiplied all the way to the lilies of the field, which toil not, neither do they spin, but, to quote Matthew, even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. Everywhere along the length of the river, as far as the eyes could see, were colored butterflies with their wings spread, a few steps from each other, in a dizzying mosaic. Those far away were small and hazy, in a blue fog, while those beneath the crossing sleighs looked like enchanted animals, the kind of sprite that old men prattled on about — like an unseen doe, an ostrich, a basilisk, or a milk-white unicorn. The sun, beating on their frozen wings, already near the cross of heaven and glowing like a yellow coin, reflected the butterflies’ colors onto the horses’ middles and muzzles and the faces of the people in the sleighs, staining them with blue, gold, scarlet, and saffron — select, luxurious colors, more beautiful than the ancient red of the icons at home.
The convoy stopped to rest and eat, plum in the middle of the frozen Danube. They unpacked zacusca and cherry liquor, and sat on pallets of blankets, here and there, on the verdant glass. Shanks of pork stewed in pots of their own fat, along with the tripe that for so long had satisfied the convoy. They could see the back of a gigantic butterfly beneath them, only a few paces under the ice, like the neck of a dolphin under the waves of the sea. “I wonder what butterfly meat tastes like?” said a teenager with luminous snot on his upper lip, and, suddenly inspired, the peasants began to offer opinions: maybe it’s like goose breast, maybe the slimy foot of a snail, maybe like the tender, soft flesh from the shell of a boiled lobster. In the end, in spite of the priest’s advice to ponder the matter further, a few villagers lit up on hooch took out their shovels and heated stakes in the flames and began to break the ice. They lit more fires around, to lift out the entire winged midge. The crowd worked for a few hours, until they could touch the velvet fur on every side of the ringed stomach and palm the little goldfish scales on the wings. And when, suddenly, a tremor blew through the trim, budded horns of the butterfly and its thin feet began to twitch, the villagers took a scythe to the barrel-sized head and sent it rolling away. Blue, thick blood splattered the executioner. Then they began to cut hunks out of the butterfly’s back. The meat was as shiny and wiggly as aspic, but a little firmer, and sweet-smelling. Not one bone ran through it, but the skin and ivory needles held it in place like in a glittering net. They boiled it in clay pots and hung it from an iron tripod. All of them ate the flesh, except the priest, who thought he spotted one of the Impure One’s ploys. But nothing bad happened: the peasants licked their fingers with pleasure. Cracking the shell of the legs, they found a kind of marrow that tasted even better. Once they smashed the head to bits, they didn’t find anything inside but a fist-sized bit of brains that smelled revolting, like mold. With their stomachs set to rights and happy as clams, they took their curved knives and began to chop up the wings, like sails of a ship painted a thousand colors, calling their women and holding ragged blankets around their hips. “Not even the czarina has a skirt like this, old woman,” they smiled and laughed, while the women, wiser than they, dismissed them and left, saying that only a gypsy would wear clothes that gaudy. In the end, they made sheets from the wings and bundled themselves up in the sleighs, and set off again. They left behind a giant butterfly hacked to pieces, the veins of its wings spread on each side like rags, its mutilated legs strewn around in puddles of ash and burnt corn cobs.
Over the course of 1845, Vasili and his kin continued along on the snowy paths of Muntenia. As far as they could see, flat fields stretched out around them that seemed to reach the ends of the earth. In some places, villages of cob houses and straw roofs lifted smoke toward a sky as white as cream. The peasants were mean and quick-witted, always thinking of tricks, the men thinner and darker than the gardeners in the sleighs. The women, in contrast, were much more beautiful. They were painted like city women, and knew how to make their eyes shine with a certain boiled plant. When the convoy stopped in the middle of a village, dogs barked at them, and they were surrounded by kids with pointy hats. The villagers, well paid in copper mahmuds, stabled their unbridled horses, and after they had knelt in the church (which was rounder than theirs, with lead-shingled steeples, but painted and furnished more poorly), the fifty Bulgarians were welcomed into the rooms of their willing hosts, where they drank hot ţuica brandy, spun wool, and told jokes. The two priests drained cup after little cup by themselves, trying to communicate in baptismal-fount Slavonic, and they ended up singing the holy drones and benedictions together. The others mixed with the Vlachs, talking with their hands and trading shots of rachiv, laughing without knowing why, marveling at each other’s strangeness. The Bulgarian boys, stout and awkward, with unibrows and thick, red-purple cheeks, ran their eyes over the thin mountain girls, whose faces were masterfully made up like Easter eggs. Not infrequently, knives came out as dawn broke, after the gazes got too bold, but the more level-headed ones separated the boys and calmed them down. Then the Badislavs made pallets for sleeping in someone’s entryway, and they slept as heavily as the ground, wrapped in their butterfly wings, protected by the candle that marked the wall with melted gold. They left as dawn broke, and a pale light stretched over the field. After three days and three more nights, they found the place.