Blinding: Volume 1

by Mircea Cărtărescu

  UNUSUALLY for me, I started to linger at the table after eating, talking with Mamma, who was happy to remember one thing or another from the past. The table, with its torn plastic cloth, was laden with chipped and dirty plates, and with spoons and forks that, no one knows why, were larger than any others I had ever seen. Their metal, maybe plated, was twisted in strange ways: hunched spoons, forks with bent tongs, teaspoons as big as other people’s serving spoons, and a gigantic ladle. Mamma, silhouetted against the summer sky (where the tips of poplar trees rose, full of seed puffs and the crenellations of the Dâmboviţa mill), with her face thin like mine and her skin soft, spoke more for herself than for me, her attention inward, her voice mixing with the sound of doves and the scent of summer. I pushed a wasp into the honey and watched it writhe, heavy, a bubble of air between its jaws, while Mamma told old stories about her childhood in the country, with my grandparents “Mămica” and “Tătica,” who appeared in her dreams almost every night, about the family house, old and rotted, in Tântava, with all the rituals of Romanized Bulgarians, wrapped in the mystical incense of Orthodoxy and an ancient, un-Christian fear, talking about Christ and the Virgin and archangels without knowing the first thing about the Bible, singing their carols like petrified stories, with no clue who Herod was or the magi. As children, Mamma and the other girls her age had sent balls of eggshell-covered clay down the waters of the Argeş, the same river where today they cast kolaches with burning candles toward the souls of the dead. During droughts she had helped whip and then chop down the troiţe and icons, the vengeance of the village on a persecuting God. She had seen the Mother of God and Infant Son spit on and lashed by people who had knelt and kissed her since before they could remember, who now moaned like people in a trance: “Give us rain! Give us rain!” She had seen the gypsy girls led to the edge of the village and doused with trays and vials of water while they danced for rain, naked and black paparuda, hips already womanly, the udders of their breasts starting to fill, covering their blameless embarrassment, not yet hairy, with a few elderberry leaves. After the dance, they were given to the gypsy men, the bear keeper and the violin player, who took them into the forest and raped them in turns, so it would rain. The country people would swear that next the girls were given to the bear, who crushed their thin bones under arbors of raspberries. As a kid, nothing scared Mamma so much as the priest, because whenever one of the village kids cried, rocked on their mothers’ legs or in wooden cradles, they’d be told “the priest will cut off your tongue,” and here there must have been a memory housed not in the mind, but in the infants’ bodies, naked and snatched up brutally by the priest, his paw held over their noses and mouths as he dunked them three times in the icy fount. Bearded and vicious, in mystical vestments, the village priest ravaged the dreams of children sleeping with their heads on straw pillows. Mamma also remembered apocalyptic winters, with snow drifts up to the windows, and the blind furies of her father, who grabbed her one night by the hair and threw her – she would have been five or six – into the piles of snow, in the dark, wearing just her shirt. The terrified little girl had to sleep in the barn, pressed against a cow’s stomach, covered in straw and dung.

  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.

  A LINE of sleighs without bells, pulled by small, puffy-maned horses with hooves wrapped in str
ips 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.

  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.