It was twilight, and snow had started to fall again. The whips snapped lazily and a horse snorted through its powerful nostrils. The priest, deep in thought, counted his prayers on a string of agate beads. The cherry-red stones knocked against each other with a sweet, quiet sound, shaking under the priest’s furry phalanges, one of which was only a stub. His right index finger had withered and dropped off in a few seconds, when, as a young monk with downy beard, he had first touched a woman’s nipple, breaking his vows of purity and propriety. Now the stub began to itch and the agate beads glowed, as had the brazen blackberry of that breast. The moment he began to be afraid and to whisper prayers into his beard to ward off the Unclean One, he saw the ruin. It was a soft light in the blood-red field, like the last molar in the mouth of an old woman. They stopped, climbed down beside the abandoned walls, holding a lantern up to one almost-finished wall and one half done that made a corner in a pile of snow-covered stones. The walls were painted inside, following the norms of piety — saints with parted beards, gold haloes, wide vestments, and blue skirts, olive-faced and frowning. There was no doubt that a church had once stood there, beautiful and famous. There were over forty saints painted on the two walls, each unrolling a parchment cylinder with letters nestled inside. Each had his own little house, separated from the others with thick, scarlet lines. And in an odd coincidence, one of them like the priest had a deformed stub in place of his left index finger. This was unheard of in a holy painting, since if a saint had missing parts, he would be imperfect. Weaklings, yes: this would demonstrate the way the spirit overcomes the flesh, but the handless, the gimps, and the blind could not be saints. Trembling in front of everyone, in the flickering lanterns, the priest held out his hand against the saint’s. At that moment, they all felt the earth move and they dropped to their knees. They would never be able to say whether it was the earth that leapt or their spirits within, or both at once. The fact is that in the passionate murmurs of prayer, flakes of fire fell from the sky and sat upon each of them, and suddenly, men, women, and children began to prophesize and speak in tongues, with their eyes wide, shouting and laughing and chortling in tears, while walls of glittering air grew from the earth, elongating the walls that stood, vaults of air arched over the glowing heads, and a steeple of air rose toward the heavens. Slowly, the new walls condensed. They became milky, then translucent, then metallic matte, finally covered in masterful paintings, matching the ruined walls, which now were clean and couldn’t be distinguished from the new church. Cathedrals with carved flowers and vines, an iconostasis covered in images, and an altar dressed in expensive items added themselves to the miraculous collection. Meanwhile, the priest’s stub grew into a ghostly crystal finger, with slender bones inside it, and a transparent nail on the tip. Capillaries wove through the flesh, while skin sprouting with thin threads of gray hair dressed the finger. When the priest took his hand from the saint’s painted palm, he saw that the saint also had a new finger to replace the one that had been left out.
They founded the village of Tântava there, between the Argeş and Saba. First they dug cottages into the strangely soft clay, and as spring came closer, they built houses, each with an entryway and two rooms, gathered around the grandeur of the church like sheep around their shepherd. Beside the church, they dug long beds for vegetables, and by summer the little village was as happy among its greens and vines as it had been in the Rhodope Valley. Over the next quarter century, the first Badislavs in Muntenia became the land’s inhabitants — they lived, they procreated, and they forgot their old language and learned what the people around them spoke. They extended their lands and drank their brains out at the bodega that soon appeared in the village center. The bar was a place to toast the Devil, the Lord’s little brother (as the older ones believed), to kill each other with tomato stakes over a woman, to hold vigils over old men in agony, so that they wouldn’t have to die without a candle on their chests, and to look for rainclouds in the sky, all without ever imagining that, in fact, they weren’t building houses, plowing land, or planting seeds on anything more than a gray speck in a great-grandson’s right parietal lobe, and that all their existence and striving in the world was just as fleeting and illusory as that fragment of anatomy in the mind that dreamed them.
7
THE past is everything, the future nothing, and time has no other meaning. We live on a piece of plaque in the multiple sclerosis of the universe. An animal, small and compact, a single particle a billion times smaller than a quark, and a billion billion times hotter than the center of the sun, encompassed the entire design that our mind perceives in the moment it is given to perceive, uniting it in the breath of a single force, with balls of space and strings and the foggy droppings of the galaxies and the political map of the planet and the unpleasant smell of someone’s mouth you’re talking to on the bus and Ezekiel’s vision on the banks of the Chebar and every molecule of melanin in a freckle under the left eyebrow of the woman you undressed and possessed a night ago and the wax in the ear of one of the ten thousand immortals of Artaxerxes and the group of catecholaminergic neurons in the medulla oblongata of a badger asleep in the woods of the Caucasus. It encompassed everything our mind has never known and will never understand, because, in a sense, that point actually was our mind, the thought that thinks itself, like a sword so sharp it cuts itself to pieces. It was the absolute past, without fissure. It was metaphysical flesh, homogenous and fiberless, without any distinction, aside from some at first unobservable filaments of the future. When and why did the symmetry shift? Who created the initial estrangements, and how? Who could have withstood the first crack of the fissuring All? The future, that is, estrangement, separation, and cooling, broke the original globe into a thousand shards and gouged hideous wounds into the body of the oneness of being, spaces that widened ever more, separating the granules of substance and letting a photonic blood gurgle between them. A purulent night wrapped every corpuscle into being, in a dark and hopeless schizophrenia. The universe, which was once so simple and complete, obtained organs, systems, and apparatuses. Today, it’s as grotesque and fascinating as a steam engine displayed on an unused track at a museum. It demonstrates its rods and levers under a bell jar. And until the bell of our minds is incorporated into the universal desolation, it will function as an internal organ reflecting the whole, the way a pearl reflects the martyred flesh of an oyster.