Next to the hamlet was a cemetery crowded with crosses, bent by time, inscribed in tremulous Cyrillic letters. The oldest stones were so laden with moss and pocked by lichen that they looked like deformed sponges, discarded onto the black earth, surrounded by crocuses and wild arum. In the incense-filled church, the priest prayed for the living and dead as often as possible, and tallow candles constantly burned, blackening the low ceiling like the bottom of a pot. Kolaches and coliva, rice with milk and smoked prunes were the food of the dead. They were sent down the thread of water called Bârzova Creek in little wooden boats loaded with candles at the proper liturgical times. The old people of the village passed into their dormition in God with slow songs in their ears, all through the night of vigil, describing the pilgrimage that awaited them: how they would have to befriend an otter to cross the black waters, a wolf to find their path through the thick forest, a golden weasel to guide them toward their family’s house, where they would embrace their mother and father, and they all would be pulled close to She who Gave Birth to God and to the Infant of Light.
That year, however, had been the year of the poppy. As early as the winter, the Badislavs’ bruised palms had held the tiny, ashen poppy seeds, unknown to them at the time, brought by a caravan that traveled the Balkans, thieving and reading the future in snail shells. While combing the fleas from their bears, the gypsies had told of a miraculous flower that made dreams, that quieted infants and kept them asleep like logs through the night, that widened a woman’s pupils and gave her the desire to mate. The seeds were good in aromatic pastries, kneaded with honey, and if you squeezed the saints’ milk from the pods, you went to heaven while you were still alive and you met angels in the clouds. For the seeds, for a little sack full of seeds, the gypsies asked for four beautiful fiddles that still smelled of pine sap, with sheep-gut strings, the craft of some of the villagers. Then the caravan left, all at once, melting into the air as though it had never been.
The poppy seeds, light as paper, stayed behind, and the Badislavs planted a full row of them in the black, buttery earth, between the zucchini and lettuce. In the depth of summer, the flowers opened their purple petals with black folds, like the tongues of hanged men, on stalks with pallid green-blue leaves, splashed with lime-white. After the petals withered and became one with the earth, the milky pods were left, releasing a stench so sweet that birds would not fly over the poisoned field, nor would beetles or locusts brave the pale stalks. Soon, the pods grew as big as babies’ heads and their seeds rattled inside. The women held scythes and walked through breast-high fields and spent the day cutting poppies, weak with laughter, since the pods reminded them of the hanging fruits of their men. They carried the pods in baskets to their front porches, and there in the twilight, still laughing, they wrung out the thick, spermy sap and spread the “gypsy seed,” as they called it in the end, to air on copper platters. After a few days the milk curdled. First it turned as hard as cheese, then as hard as rocks. It looked like a soapy chalk, a white-blue crust that the women pressed into pills and ground as fine as the dust of the road. They made kolaches and Turkish pastries, scattering the magic powder into the sweetness of jams and honey. They mixed it with wine and pear brandy, they put it in milk with mămăligă and cigarettes that they rolled themselves from dried corn husks. The entire village came together for an unforgettable festival, as though it were the middle of winter. They drank and told jokes until the poppy vapors went to everyone’s heads at once. From boys to old men, they all fell into a strange trance, for an angel of light showed itself to them, naked, with a woman’s breasts and a man’s shame, with golden hair in thousands of braids. And the angel said to them, “You are without sin. Be like your Adam and your Eve, because your sins have been forgiven.” And everyone, boys and girls, husbands and wives, took off their sheepskin coats and long shirts and began to mate together in a writhing pile among the dogs and children, mothers with sons, fathers with daughters, brothers with sisters, their pupils as big as their irises and clear, cold sweat dripping from their cheeks, and they didn’t stop until autumn appeared, first as mild as grape juice, then as bitter as black wine. Flickering gold and rust touched the hills, while in the valley, the village slowly fell apart and the cattle moaned with hunger. Smoking mahorka mixed with gypsy seeds, the women lay on benches, staring at the wood in the stove and ignoring everything else. The women gazed at their children and let them toddle off through the ravines. Then they went to the village, their faces and nipples painted, to find some hardy soul whose weight they had yet to feel. Feeling their way inside a dark barn full of straw bales and bugs with cross-marked backs sated in the center of their cobwebs, the women, who had married as virgins and never dared to raise their eyes from the ground in front of their men, now pulled their skirts up to their faces to exhibit their thick thighs and the hairy mounds between them, and they let themselves be mounted there, on sacks of grain, among bridles and reins rubbed with tallow.
Webs with tiny spider babies at one end filled the golden air, tangled in the tender curling grapevines and garden trellises, and were pushed toward the edge of the village, where the old cemetery sat in the sun like a toad in Brumaire’s last days. There, the arms of the crosses caught so many spider webs that soon the entire cemetery wore a silky lace. Below ground, in narrow pine houses, the dead were starving. For the past forty days, no one had come to the church to remember them. While the old priest wept among the icons like the captain of a leaky boat, for forty days no kolaches or coliva or rice with milk had come down from the living. Fearful they would die a second time, from hunger and oblivion, the dead began to stir, like a dangerous underground river. Chattering their powerful teeth, they began to break the shards of wood, spongy and full of cockchafer larvae, and they dug tunnels to each other like moles, to consult in twos or threes or, finally, all of them together, in their underground village, packed into an alcove whose walls ran with roots, where the urns above their skulls glowed like crystals. Three hundred dead, weak from the long fast, but animated with a fury only the departed can know, knocked their livid, moldy skulls and chafed their blackened clothes against each other. They held long, frenzied meetings, and stared at each other with gaping eye sockets full of worms. At the start of winter, at nightfall on the feast day of Saints Mina, Ermoghen, and Eugraf, a putrid, dry, and bare-toothed host broke a path toward the white world. There were the old dead with shanks as yellow as a cow’s, so addled they couldn’t keep track of their bones, who left knuckles and jaws behind in their ancient caskets. There were younger dead, still wrapped in long shifts, with vines of flesh as dry as pastrami on their faces and torsos, and dead women with the butterflies of their hips widened by births, and their ribcages wrapped in flesh like unbeaten hemp. There were dead children a few years old, overcome by skulls too heavy for their delicate cadavers. There were rotting dogs and cats raised up by the mania of the host they followed alongside. The poisoned air swirled overhead like green smoke, blowing toward the night’s first stars. Once they reached the houses, each went to his own people to begin the terrifying carnage, while dogs howled desperately in the courtyards. The ghouls poured through the doors and into bedrooms, where, under the eyes of women who thought they were dreaming, they pulled swaddled infants from their cribs and gleefully tore at their tender flesh, staining the clay floor with a thin layer of blood. They turned to the women, they mounted them on benches and penetrated them with their black, ithyphallic worms that hardened for the first time in ages. They cornered young men in barns, masterfully parrying desperate jabs from their pitchforks and finally grabbing them by their long braided hair, pulling off their hands and legs like they were bugs, and chomping their teeth into the nape of their necks and feeding down to the bone. Dying of fright, many villagers took the side of the undead, beating their own wives and children and then, with glassy eyes and shaking joints, going outside to slice the dog’s throat and drink its black blood. Large, wet snowflakes started to fall over the alleyways, melting into scarlet puddles. Corpses wandered at random from house to house, searching out the living. They felt for them under beds and pulled them out from behind stoves, unfazed by their screams, and then martyred them, impaling and flaying them, until late in the night, when it seemed like no one in the village was left alive. Then they set fire to the houses, and all fifty cottages began to smoke and stick out red tongues like the dragons in their icons. Only the small church in the middle of the village was black and silent, under its high, clay-tile roof with a silver fringe of snow. In front of the church, in the yard where the villagers would dance hora on Sundays, the dead gathered, one by one, filing in from the narrow streets. The sweet smell of the flesh of living, whole people wafted through the cracks in the old walls, and it made the people from under the earth hungry. The last surviving villagers were huddled in the holy site, where they knelt with clenched eyes and fingers, shaken from their purple-poppy inebriation, and prayed to the merciful Mother of God. The priest, meanwhile, the only one in the village who had never ceded to the dark flower, was preparing his tools of war, in which he put all his hope. He donned his high holy vestments, and put a silver chain around his neck, from which hung, covering his entire chest, an ebony cross inlaid with old, crooked mother-of-pearl. Arranged in front of him, taken from the church walls, were the icons that worked the greatest miracles. In a large pocket in the front of his robe, he had the glass box that held the church’s priceless treasure: the tooth of one of the two hundred adepts of the martyred Saint Nicon. In his right hand, the priest held the censer burning with incense, and in his left, the Gospels, opened to the page in which Christ the Lord drove demons from a passel of hogs. Each of the roughly forty Badislavs hung holy icons over their chests and wore an oily mark of myrrh on their foreheads.