Kinderland, page 11
Wow, Obama says, very impressed, and where do these Moldovans come from?
(Here, a kid, one of Obama’s councilors, has to show him where Moldova is on the map.) — A country this little has such great construction workers?
No, siiir Obama, Moldova is their office, they’re everywhere in the world.
The geography teacher gave us homework to draw a map of our village and to write the names of the countries where the villagers have gone to on the map. Everyone from the neighborhood or just our parents and relatives. Then, during class, we’d each tell her what we knew and she’d write all the countries on the board. From our village, the only place no one’s gone to is Africa. Yet.
Then we play police. A boy with a belly (he stuffs his hat or a jacket in his shirt to look fatter) plays the role of the police officer. Two people on a farm catch a robber who had just been trying to steal their pig. We’re gonna tell the police officer on you. They go and tell the police officer everything. Yes, we’ll take care of it, we’ll set things right. You go home, he tells them. The police officer goes to the crook’s house: So you tried to steal the pig from off the people’s farm. Seven years jail time . . . or, I need some help too, I’m building a house and I need some people to work on it, I’ve already got a couple other guys just like you, but I want it completely finished in a month. It would be a pity for you to go to jail for seven years for a pig you weren’t even capable of stealing. And I’ll see to those people.
And another police scenario, one we love: a man is selling grain and bran cheaper than at the market and he’s doing well. There’s a line outside his gate, the man is making a lot of money. The police officer comes by, he sees he’s doing well, but you could use some security, you need protection. The man says he isn’t that rich and what robbers live in our village? So he doesn’t need anyone. And then the police officer goes to the robber, his friend, and says to him: Hey, go over to that guy one night and mix his grain and bran a little, so he knows whether or not he needs our protection. No sooner said than done. And that man never sold anything anymore and he never got richer, because he didn’t want to split the money with the police officer.
Yes, kinderland is our favorite game. We play it after class, in the evening, during vacations. The little kinderland, the big kinderland. The one we laugh about and the one we cry about. We also play hide-and-seek, tag, red rover, we jump rope, we build things in the sandbox.
With my brothers, we play Mom, Dad, and baby. A kind of family kinderland. I’m the mom, usually, Dan’s the dad, and Marcel, the baby. Lately, though, Marcel doesn’t want to be the baby anymore, he wants to be the dad, but Dan won’t let him, so Marcel’s the mom, and I’m the baby. I cry very nicely as a baby, and I say: Me want milkie, me want bottle, and Marcel melts with delight. I’ve said it before that Marcel should’ve been a girl! I let his hair, which grows into ringlets, get long. First it turns up at the tips, like a duckling’s, then it gets all curly. Mom says we all had ringlets when we were little, then our hair straightened out.
When we cut Marcel’s hair, it was pure drama! Dad, when he had come home, had said to him:
— Marcel, you’re a big boy, and it’s hot outside, let’s cut your ringlets a bit, so you can be like us men.
He agreed to it, he sat quietly on the chair, and Dad cut his hair. But when we brought him a mirror and he saw himself, he started bawling:
— Put my hair back! I want my hair back!
So for now I’m letting him keep his hair long, we’ll see about it later.
A village all our own must exist somewhere, one with its own laws, with a way of life that’s inaccessible and hidden to others. Where life carries on beautifully, generously, compassionately, without meanness, longing, and waiting. A village of good children. Notice I said “good.” Not just a village of children, that already exists. Every village in Moldova is a village of children, the entire country . . . Especially if we count the old people, who have also become childish. Normal, healthy men and women, capable of working, who live in the village are a rarity, a minority. The children’s Moldova. That sounds really nice. We’re building a bright future for our children. Yes, except that we’re building it in Spain, Italy, Russia, because we’ve already built everything in the Czech Republic and they don’t need any more construction workers. Spain, actually, is in an economic crisis. Kids with parents in Spain were happy about that. Crisis—a magic word, which means parents will come home, to their kids. But none of them came back.
My new friend’s name is Alisa. Her mom is from Ukraine and her dad is Moldovan. Her parents work in different countries, she’s lived more with her grandmothers. Her grandma from our village does witchcraft. They say that Alisa is learning by watching her. At first, I didn’t even know her name, everyone called her the Witch. She’s a bit taller than me, she has blond hair and light colored eyes, she says they’re gray now, but they were once blue, then green, and when she becomes a woman, they’ll change again. They’re her transitional eyes. She doesn’t have any other close friends besides me. She’s been to our village before, but I’ve gotten to know her better only this summer. She came to our house with a pail of summer apples and called to me at the gate. She also had a jump rope with her and we played together a bit. Then she told me a secret. That she’s a witch and she can teach me to be one too. First, I have to learn how to stare the way she does, I’m not able to yet, I have a lot to learn. Alisa told me that witches have eyes that can make others afraid. Come closer and look at me. I came closer and looked straight into her eyes. Her eyes got bigger and bigger, and then they started shining. I got scared, I screamed and ran away, and then I calmed down. I like Alisa a lot.
Though she hasn’t spent much time in our village, because she usually lives with her mom, Alisa knows all the crossroads, all the magical or terrifying places, all the dried-up and abandoned wells, the hole the nymph is chained up inside, waiting to be freed, the little path that ends at the former den of a bear or another very big animal, the fork in the road where singing is heard at night, she knows all the old baba witches in our village, friends or enemies of her grandma. She said that our village is blessed with gentle creatures, for whose sake the rest of us are tolerated. And that for now we don’t have monsters in our village. I don’t believe in these kinds of stories.
I thought that Alisa speaks Ukrainian, but even at home with her mom she speaks our language, and she knows only a little Ukrainian, she’s learning it only now. The thing she’d like most is knowing all the languages people speak and she has lots of little books from which she studies all the languages of the world. And during the fall she has a private teacher in her village, but she also goes into the city on Saturdays, to learn more foreign languages. She tells me words in her different languages, which I forget.
Alisa knows where there’s living water and where there’s dead water in our village. Every village has living water and dead water, she didn’t learn about that from the fairytale by Ion Creangă, but from her grandma, who’s old now and can’t wander through forests or on hills in search of springs anymore, so Alisa has gone over all the forests and hills. In the morning, while the dew’s still out, without eating, clean, you have to wash yourself really well, her grandma gives her an herbal bath with different plants, then she blesses her, and sends her out in search of springs. May no one bite you and no wild villain come upon you to tempt you. And Alisa was protected from dangers and she found healing water. It really does help you sleep well and it’s good for healing wounds, stomach problems, blisters, and other things. Dead water keeps for longer and it stinks of rotten eggs, living water is good only until the next day, but you can’t tell others about the spring so they don’t pollute it. I can’t tell you where it is. You have to find it yourself.
She brought me plants to make into a little pillow for sleeping at night, for tea that should be taken in the morning or the evening, for my brothers’ scrapes, for protection against the evil eye, pain, and the surrounding wickedness, for softening and taming wild animals or people, for the well-being of our household. And two pebbles for Mom and Dad, so that they’d be healthy and nothing bad would happen to them, and for them to come home quicker.
Alisa said it’s better if you share what you know with people. She also came over in the evening, when my tired brothers were going to bed. She got close to my brothers and rubbed their ears and shoulders, so that they’d sleep better, and said that I should massage them at night too. They lay there as still as cats, they didn’t move a muscle. Then the two of us stayed up and talked and I found out all kinds of secrets from her grandma, who had allowed her to share them with me.
She said that for people like us, who understand the nature of things, life will be hard. Not everyone can learn the art of healing and you have to agree to take on difficult things. It’s a sin not to help people, especially since it’s so simple sometimes, so little is needed, sometimes even just squeezing someone’s hand can heal something. And she squeezed my hand in many ways. See? Yes, there are bad witches as well. They have the same amount of power as the good ones. But the largest group by far are those who don’t care about anything and are untouched by any spell, who are just taking up space on earth.
She told me you can live every day as if you were on holiday, feeling like you’re floating or shining with joy. But not now, only after you accumulate good deeds. The more good you do—not only to people, but to all creatures, in general, you can take care of a little tree, it’s still a good deed—the more soul you accumulate. Do you know that there are people who can really float? They have so much soul that it lifts them off the ground.
Alisa talks a lot and I listen to her without ever getting tired. We make all kinds of plans, we write all kinds of spells for situations that come up in daily life, she teaches me all kinds of magic touches for improving health or fulfilling wishes. We eat the summer apples she brought me. Our family doesn’t grow any, few people in our village have apples like these. Her grandma sent her to bring us some. Our neighbors have already picked theirs and they don’t have a single apple left, but in any case, they weren’t as sweet and juicy as these are. Alisa will leave soon. It seems as if, even though we haven’t seen each other that often, I’ve known her for a lifetime, and each of our visits has been so full of stories, events, trips, miracles, everything around her is so intense, it’s as if she had stayed a year in our village. She sometimes plays with some of the neighbors’ girls, who I know too, but late at night, carrying apples, she visits only me. And only us two invent magic games. And when she leaves, I’ll stay and crack an egg at the crossroads from time to time, and pour out a glass of water for the abandoned nymph, and wait for the bear in front of its den . . . I want to transform into a nature girl, like her. I want my eye color to change and my eyes to shine too.
Alisa called her dad and he came. She cast spells for him to come with flowers and herbs, she put out pebbles, lifted spells, and thought about him a lot. She had barely gotten to know him at all before she was already big. Her grandma loved her and Alisa would come to our village to visit her, but her dad was never home. Always working abroad. If she was able to call him and he came, I can call my parents home too.
I learned that the place of troubles is a space that’s half enclosed, with deep walls, hidden, remote, abandoned, forgotten by everyone, damp, overrun with weeds and moss. It’s also called the place of fears and you come here to rid yourself of lesser fears, pain and sickness, sadness and disappointments, especially those caused by love.
— The place of meetings is the best place to go when you have wishes you want to be fulfilled. You find this place at crossroads, lots of people pass by there, they meet, they cross paths, they don’t leave their dread here, but their joys. It makes people happy when they meet. Not neighbors they’re fighting with, but people they haven’t seen in a long time. Even if it doesn’t make them happy, they say hello, study each other, look at and smell each other, the way animals do. The street is a social institution. Even if they can’t stand each other, a husband and wife don’t fight on the street where people can see them, they dress nicely, they eat before heading out, they’re calm. The message they’re sending to others is one of health, well-being: Everything’s going well for me, I look and feel good. The crossroads is the place of beautiful thoughts and it’s best at twelve o’clock, day or night. But you have to not see a soul in any of the four directions of the road. No one can be on the road, exactly at twelve, and you have to spin around nine times, in the middle of the crossroads, with your hands in . . .
— And the egg?
— The egg stays in your pocket.
She had said that the first time you touch the egg you’re sacrificing, you put it on your chest, between your breasts, on your stomach, over your belly button, and you keep your eyes closed. And you put a spell on it. If you go to the crossroads at night, before that, at twelve during the day, the egg has to look at the sun, not long, so it doesn’t go bad. If you go to the crossroads during the day, you leave it out at twelve at night, to look at the moon. That is, you leave it out during the night because nothing will happen to it, it won’t go bad, nighttime is cool. You first grab the egg with your left hand, you’ll want to take it fresh from your own roost, not from the roost of someone else, who’s touched it with who knows what thoughts. After that it doesn’t matter what hand you hold it in, what matters is that you break it using your left hand as well, at the crossroads, you lift it up three times, this way, in your hand, and the third time, you smash it against the ground. It’s better if you pick up the shells so that no one comes along and takes them and steals your wish. What would someone who sees eggshells in the middle of the road think? They’d immediately think that there’s something unclean about that. You pick up the shells and bury them the way you bury impossibility, and possibility remains in the middle of the road with lots of people passing by, they’re all going somewhere and they arrive at their destination. The same way people reach where they’re going, may your wish arrive safely, may no one stop it. Shells are the thick parts that remain on the ground when a bird emerges from an egg and flies away. A chick hatches from an egg by breaking the shell. In the same way, may your mother fly at the thought of coming home, may she be overcome with longing for her children. In the same way, may your mother arrive home before the chick hatches from the egg.
But the hardest thing is to order your thinking, Alisa had said. A wish is a thought. You might not believe it, but sickness is also a thought, even people, as a whole, are a bunch of thoughts. Dressed in flesh and bones, and clothes.
Good thoughts and bad thoughts are the same distance away from us, they both envelop us. If people would let only good thoughts win, the world would look different. But many people can’t defend themselves against bad thoughts, and others even search them out, they need them. Evil is just as nourishing as goodness, people who rejoice at evil feel as satisfied as good people.
Evil isn’t always the opposite of goodness. We, kids, don’t understand that. Nothingness is their opposite, nothingness is a kind of politeness, apathy, indifference. Evil is alive and it’s closer to goodness than indifference. It’s like love and hate, which are only one step away from each other. Evil is a state with feelings like regret, remorse. Indifference is a state of deadness, without any feelings. It’s hard to fight against it.
Thoughts have to be educated, disciplined. Especially when you take a thought to the crossroads. Your thought has to travel a long way, it has a lot of work to do, and sometimes a lot of fighting to do. Your thought has to be clean. Any other smaller idea, hidden, forgotten, drags it to ground and prevents it from reaching its destination.
— My thought is for Mom to come home. A very short thought: Mom home!
— Then go with it, with this thought, to the crossroads at night. Italy isn’t that far away, if you fly in a plane, but thoughts aren’t made of steel, a thought passes through thousands of other similar thoughts, because all kids dream of their mothers coming home and they ask them in their thoughts to come back and then the thoughts get mixed up. The mothers get mixed up and who knows whose mother will be called by your thought and which happy child will enjoy his mother’s return. Or the thought is too weak and it dries up along the way, or it gets there without any real strength, the mother cries for three minute over her babies left at home, then she dries her tears with the edge of her sleeve or with a disposable tissue and continues working there among strangers. Also, the thought shouldn’t be sent to the heart, but to the head. At the heart it will lead to a few tears and that’s it. It has to be felt by the head, so it thinks rationally about whether perhaps what she’s gaining isn’t worth what she’s losing, whether being with her family and children isn’t better than living alone far away, with strangers.
