I was the same age when I went to Tântava for the first time. The roads were covered in snow. In the center of the village, wafts of ţuica brandy came from the bar. Peasants in shaggy wool coats dotted the snow here and there. If you got close to one of them, you could smell smoke and garlic. We went on our way and, after a long walk, came to my Tataie’s house. We opened the whitewashed gate and entered the yard, stopping between two quince trees. The demon-black dog clanged his chain dementedly, running back and forth, his body so thin you could see his ribs. For all his work, he’d get a dinner of corn meal mămăligă. Into the doorway came Tataie, showing no pleasure, old and fierce with a prickly white beard, his head white and almost completely shaved, with a stripe of darker hair in the middle. The house glowed white like an eggshell in the flames of smoldering dusk. I climbed onto the porch and entered through a thin, bright-red door with a four-paned window. I passed through the entryway, with its dirt floor and whitewashed stove and vents, which opened to the other room, and I entered a place that smelled of goat fur, the room where they sat during the day. The only light was the violet flame (it would change to yellow in an hour) that came in through the window, where the pear tree branches knocked, and reflected in the crooked mirror, high, near the beams. On the walls were cheap paper icons, strident, framed in black: St. George killing a gall-green dragon, the archangel Michael in medieval armor, a flag wrapped around his lance, God himself, in wide blue and yellow robes, holding open a book where something was written in red letters. Many times had I climbed onto the scratchy, quilt-covered beds to look up-close at all these creatures of a ghostly and multifarious world, at the angels’ wings, at the odd, melancholic Omega between the eyebrows of the Mother of God, at the venerable, blackish face, long locks, and white beard of an angry God … I went to the other wall, where, under the same washrags that my mother and her sister had sewn as girls, other images glowed under the pane, this time in strange pink frames of crushed glass. They were tan photos, yellow, sepia, ashen, almost totally faded, where country men and women stood rigid under hats and headscarves, with perhaps two weddings — my mother’s and Aunt Sica’s, pictures I knew from copies in the red bag — and a soldier with a long, old rifle, bayoneted, that was taller than he was. It was Tataie, Dumitru Badislav, the same man who was at that moment pouring hot ţuica into clay cups as small as a thimble. I flopped onto the bed, while the big people sat on three-legged stools by a round table and had a treat. The almost-dark evening, the smell of goat and peppered ţuica, the monotonous small talk, and Tataie’s quiet, wheezing voice all sounded like they came from another age and another world, everything strange and solemn, and it became more otherworldly when the gas lamp on the wall, with its glass and round reflector, was lit. The creatures of transparent wax, flickers and darkness, grave like the Last Supper, and the silence that could happen only in the country — they calmed me, stilled me, with my wide eyes alongside the square table, where the ancient radio and Tataie’s old glasses sat in a dusty still life. My mother’s sister, who puttered around the oven, brought in mămăligă, put it in the middle of a round table and then brought a platter with roast chicken, then another one, smaller, enameled and painted with flowers, with a white garlic sauce. It was a peace from another century, a small world, that belonged to one family, a world protected by winged and holy faces. A smell of clay and holiness filled the room that was now the center of the center of the world. We slept head-to-head in hard beds that were propped on stakes, we rolled into old sheepskin coats and slept heavily, and through the thin walls of our dreams we heard the snow falling. Curled up like a fetus in a belly of old wool and crackling straw, eaten by dozens and hundreds of fleas, I rested my head beside Tatie’s and dreamed his dreams. When a little owl spooked me and I opened my eyes in the dark, I clearly saw — blue, separate, fluttering — a halo of pure light around his spiky head, an intense nimbus like the flame of the stove burners where it emerged from his skull, rarified and yellow, then, a palm’s width to one side, it became perfectly circular, with a line of liquid diamond outlining it precisely, like a great, miraculous platter of rays, on which the old head would be placed. I felt in my sleep how, in this geyser of light, my own cranium became transparent, how the wrinkled hemispheres of my brain, wrapped in their skin, looked like the meat of walnuts yet unformed. The neurons under the pia mater, like spores bedded under asphalt, swelled here and there, growing hundreds of church spires under the sky of my skull, each one with a bell tolling for a funeral, until the pearly skin broke in hundreds of places and the neuron bells opened like wonders, like sea urchins on their peduncles, rocking and undulating in the solar wind of my Tataie’s halo. I then descended into a delirious Scythia.
6
A LINE of sleighs without bells, pulled by small, puffy-maned horses with hooves wrapped in strips of leather, led the entire Badislav Clan to salvation — their bold and hearty infants and women, their sacks of grain, hanks of lard-smothered pork, and the vestments, icons and stoles for the priest, who sat dressed like an ordinary peasant and lashed the mare’s shiny brown back while she plodded calmly between the reins in front of him. The mare whipped him on the cheek with her coarse, golden tail, flashing her pitch black birther between her haunches. There was no visible road ahead, only the field that led to the Danube and to escape, covered with a snow that reached the horses’ chests. Glades of thin, young trees with twigs petrified in the frozen air, as if painted with sepia, fell behind on one side and the other. Crows, like black leaves, hopped between trees, shaking snow from the boughs. A melted-gold sun pushed out transparent shadows behind the sleighs and drew thin trees onto the waves of snow, growing from the same roots as the vertical trees, but they stretched longer and seemed to have more branches. The seven sleighs were packed with all that remained of the village they had left, charred and smoking, its alleyways and cottages filled with dead bodies, picked at by wolves and vultures. In that year of terror, no Turks had devastated them, no gale of flame or Albanian warlords. If you had asked one of the Bulgarian women with a mantle of coins and a scarf pulled over her ugly face, her desperate and quivering eyes limpid as a goat’s, she might have winced and crossed herself, but she would not have answered you, because all of them wanted nothing more than to forget. In their sheepskin coats, the children huddled together at the bottom of the sleigh, some with a black puppy whose hips trembled as though possessed. They would only let themselves remember the isolated hamlet in a ravine in the Rhodope mountains, surrounded by basalt peaks, just a footpath through the rock, overlooking flowering fields and fertile gardens as far as you could see. The village was held together by complicated sets of relations — everyone was someone’s cousin or godparent, everyone lived in fear of God near the little church without a steeple in the village’s center. In summer, they bent over rows of tomatoes and green peppers, while the children took the cows to graze. They made endless dandelion chains or fought with beautifully carved and decorated staves. The sky above was brilliant like a flower opening its transparent-blue petals over the valley.