Kinderland, page 12
For the wish to be fulfilled, you break the egg, you leave the yolk in the middle of the road, but that’s not enough, you have to send your thought and wish, the egg isn’t transformed into a bird that will deliver your thought. You offer something important to this place, and it will offer you something just as important. If you want to receive something, you also have to give something. You’ll notice that even when you find something, either you had lost something before and now you’re getting it back in a way, or you’ll lose something afterward, something just as precious. What you want from the crossroads is the energy of the people who have passed by there and have arrived where they wanted to go. The egg has what the crossroads doesn’t, life is born from the egg, the egg has everything and it doesn’t need anything. It is the center of all things. You believe, symbolically, that the crossroads needs this element and you offer the egg to it. I don’t know if the crossroads really needs something like that. Maybe not. But you have nothing better to offer. I think that crossroads have miraculous powers even when people don’t go by there that often or meet others there. I’ve gone down roads like that through the forest and they’ve charged me up with power. But I’m a nature person, even the trees offer me their warmth and strength. And you’re still a civilized person, you know how to read only a few people around you, a few signs from animals. You don’t even know that if you want to understand a person better and get along better with them, you have to start with little creatures, to understand smaller animals, plants, first. They’re simpler, clearer, kinder. And they’re so gentle that you can fill up your heart enough for an entire lifetime.
People ask for so much gentleness, they ask for love and sacrifices, without offering anything in return, as if they deserved everything. But it’s not right, because the more you want, the more you have to be prepared to offer. People who don’t understand this, who don’t know how to respond to every gift, they don’t love and they don’t respond tenderly, become stupider than animals. They’re a waste of space on this beautiful earth, as Grandma would say. They waste the treasures of this world that are given to them abundantly. They just sleep, eat, and poop. And they cover over everything with concrete. The earth shouldn’t offer these people anything. They completely ignore crossroads and magical places and they always want to dominate. And these rebellious places exist, unexpected spaces, where power gurgles up, it teems, gushes out, communicates, gives, asks for, fights against, takes revenge, plays, inspires awe, horror . . . And mankind wakes up and finds that it’s smaller and weaker than an ant . . .
— Besides the places I told you about earlier, there’s another kind of place, which you have to find by yourself, your soul has to guide your feet toward it. Sometimes you come across it without knowing. Inexplicably, you feel good there and you want to stay a while longer, to catch your breath a little. This is the place of happiness. You feel light there, you forget all your worries, you forget everything, your memory disappears, your hunger and all your needs disappear, nothing moves, time has stopped flowing and you feel complete peace all around you. And you surrender to that state, in which your body and soul are one with the nature surrounding you. I know several places like that, but I can’t tell you where they are, they’re mine alone. There are lots of them in this village, it’s a big-hearted village, alive and generous.
— I think I have a place like that. I call it the island. A place where I lie on the grass and look at the sky. When I’m there, I don’t miss my parents, I’m not hungry, I’m not scared, even though I’m alone. Even after I leave that place it’s a long time before I get hungry or miss anything or want anything. There, at the edge of the forest, in the abandoned orchard near our vineyard, is the place I visit every year. The first time I discovered it, I was little, my parents were working in the vineyard and I went to look for walnuts. I went in and everything stopped, maybe I disappeared in that circle of earth. My parents noticed I was missing and they were looking for me everywhere, they got scared, where had their little girl disappeared to, and I was close to them, but I didn’t hear anything and I was watching the clouds through the branches of the walnut tree. It was as if I had entered another world, as if I were practicing for heaven. I was lying in the grass and the bugs, butterflies, and little flies were landing on me and tickling me. When I got up and left that place, I was so happy it felt as if it were my birthday, and I had received many many toys and gifts, Mom and Dad were kissing and hugging me, and I had also eaten an Eskimo ice cream bar, made in Bălţi, and everything in a matter of seconds and all at once, all those pleasures combined. As if I had woken up from a very happy dream. Then I didn’t go back there for a long time, and when I returned, I was afraid that the miracle wouldn’t happen again, that it had lost its charm and was now like any other place. I would find it quickly each time, by its grass, the shade of the tree, and the ground seemed a bit higher there, like the tiniest little hill. And, each time, I lie in the grass and wait for nothing to happen, I tell myself, it was all an illusion of mine, I had fallen asleep and dreamed a place like this, an island like this, but slowly slowly everything starts up again, the very gentle fluffy clouds, the bugs that tickle me shyly and pleasantly, the soothing grass, and the sensation that all the possible joys and pleasures in the world are gathered together here, and they overwhelm you all at once, and you can hardly stand so much love, pleasure, and peace. Then everything slowly, slowly pulls back, returns to normal, the sky is the sky, the grass is the grass. And for a long time I feel this full, almost heavy beauty in my chest.
— Yes, that’s what it’s like. I feel the same way. I had gotten signs that the two of us could be kindred spirits. Maybe you’re the fairy of insects or tame clouds, I knew that you had the mark of flowers on you. Grandma told me that too. Maybe you’ll receive other signs as well.
Any kind of running water can be living water. But in our village living and holy water is the water into which the church’s icons were thrown. Our church is very old, its icons had been brought from far away, from Russian monasteries. People from all the neighboring villages would come to our church to see them and pray. Then new leaders came in, with new people and new laws, and they closed down the church. After a while, they thought, why should a place that could be useful for the community be closed? The directors went in, they tore out the icons, they took the carpets. They kept the carpets, but if they had kept the icons or one of the holy books, they would have been fired from their jobs. They could have let the villagers take them and keep them, but they didn’t want to. They went at night, in secret, into the forest and threw them away. People still search for them in the little streams that crisscross the forest.
Only once did someone, a girl who later became Alisa’s grandmother, find a splinter on which was drawn a hand with elongated fingers. Alisa’s grandmother showed the splinter to the old people in the village and they recognized it as a fragment of one of the church’s icons. It made the people very sad. They had been looking for icons in the river, they hadn’t known that before the icons were thrown in, they had been ruthlessly chopped up. How could you find pieces of icons after all these years? From then on, Alisa’s grandmother started healing sick people and animals. They say that the splinter with the long fingers, which she found in the stream, helps her do it. Meanwhile, the bosses who destroyed the icons are just fine, they haven’t been struck down by any divine curse. Everything’s going extremely well for them, their children, and their grandchildren. For now.
I don’t know if it’s true, but long after that regime and the people in power changed, they say that two delegates came to our school building during elections one summer to campaign for some party. One of them was tall and thin, the other was shorter and fat. The new outhouse had just been built and people likened the old outhouse to a romantic ruin but, in fact, the spot that grass had recently grown over was a dangerous swamp you could drown in. The two delegates fell in there, and when the tall one yelled Help! Help! trying to get out of the swamp, the short one screamed at him: Don’t make waves! Don’t make waves!
Now the old outhouse is used only for the butt-kissing of true friendship. When two kids declare themselves to be friends, they go to the abandoned outhouse and kiss each other on the butt. I don’t know where this tradition comes from . . . I don’t think our moms and dads did that.
When I was in first grade, all we had was that old outhouse and it already looked like something out of a horror movie. It had countless holes everywhere. The roof had caved in, due to shoddy construction. When it rained, it dripped everywhere inside the outhouse. The walls had big holes in them because the people nearby, when they needed stones, would come and break off pieces of the wall, being careful to take out the stones in such a way that the outhouse didn’t completely collapse. After all, it’s the school’s toilet, it belongs to all our children. When you walked in, the weaker slats on the floor had fallen into the stinky hole that was almost full. Our clothes would reek for an entire day after going in there. The little kids from the lower grades would burst into tears and go back, some had been there only once in their life and that had been enough for them. Once inside, most kids would pee out of fear, not just because they had to go. The walls dividing the girls’ and boys’ sections also had holes in them and the boys would watch the girls and then tell everyone what kind of underwear the girls had on, what color or what kind. The boys smoked there without fear of getting caught. Teachers never went in there, even now I can’t imagine a teacher peeing. The outhouse gave you the feeling that every bad spirit had gathered there and was watching you, that all the witches were inside hiding behind the corners. When you had an enemy, you wished with all your heart that they’d fall into that place. But I personally don’t know anyone who ever fell in besides the principal’s daughter. She was a beautiful girl with long golden hair, and when she fell into the toilet, the older boys pulled her out by the hair so she wouldn’t drown in the filth. The girl was my age then, now she’s graduated high school and has started college. She had stunk so badly and the kids wouldn’t stop laughing! Only after that did the principal order that a new, civilized outhouse be built. After we started using the new outhouse, the old one remained as it was, it took about two years for that swamp to dry up and harden, and then become overrun with weeds. After it dried up, it didn’t smell bad anymore, people kept stealing the stones but something resembling the former construction remained. The outhouse even had half a roof, and some pieces of its walls were still standing. Kids today maybe don’t even know that it was, in fact, the school outhouse. Now we go there rarely, about five or six of us classmates, filled with nostalgia and regret that time is passing so quickly, that even the school is getting old. No one remembers the stories and the things that happened in this place anymore, surrounded by trees and tall grass as it is now. No one knows for sure if the swamp has completely dried out, or whether, if you were to fall into that hole, some hideous toilet nymph wouldn’t drag you down to the bottom. When you think that our mothers had used the same toilet, except that in their time it was new and clean, without the tiniest hole in its walls . . . I’m still expecting to run into some spirit or a witch when I visit that outhouse. And I’m not the only one. All the kids are expecting that. We thought that something was haunting it, it’s a place that always gives rise to an inexplicable fear.
I went there one summer, when we swore true friendship, for life. Terrified, we kissed each other on the butt, as a sign of total loyalty. Usually, boys and girls kiss each other. I don’t think I’ve heard of a girl kissing a girl. I kissed Fedoraş on one of his butt cheeks, and he did the same to mine. We were tanned but our butts were white, like little kids who still drink from a baby bottle. Fedoraş felt from the tone of my voice when I said: Your butt’s so white! that he had disappointed me. I hadn’t realized that he was so young. He answered: It’ll get darker as I get older. As if he weren’t man enough with butt cheeks that white. Mine were just as white, but he didn’t say anything. We weren’t afraid only of spirits, ghosts, the dark, the wind that was whistling through the walls, but also of the kids who might catch us taking our underwear off. We looked around, terrified by all kinds of rustlings, we quickly kissed, no one had seen us. After this ritual, we got over our fear. That happened a long time ago, when Mom and Dad were at home, and I was Fedoraş’s girlfriend.
Years later, when Alisa the witch came to our village, I rediscovered the place. Without her, I never would have stepped there again. She taught us unbinding spells there. She said that unbinding spells can be taught only in magical places, like this one, and at a magical hour, the middle of the night. If Mom had been home, she wouldn’t have allowed me to go out by myself in the middle of the night. So I got to learn some unbinding spells, but I haven’t used them yet. These words carry a certain weight and you shouldn’t say them unless it’s necessary. If you say them just like that, whenever you want, the way you would a poem, or you tell someone who has asked to hear what an unbinding spell sounds like, then these words will lose their power. We spun around the outhouse, so we could gather strength. Alisa said this place isn’t an outhouse anymore, it’s a place of troubles. I didn’t understand why and she explained it to us: intense feelings and thoughts have been stored up here, fears, secret thoughts and desires, forbidden ones.
People have left their excrement here, all that’s bad in them, so this is a place of evil.
She said I was wrong. Children have gathered here, hundreds of kids, thousands of times, and child caca is sometimes even healing for adults and old people. But that’s of no interest to us. Kids were afraid here, they came to meet fear. When you get frightened, you lose energy. Kids produce more energy really quickly, but the energy that was lost stayed and got stored up in this place. Can’t you feel it when you enter? You don’t feel it during the day, because the sun is powerful and fear is afraid of light, that’s why you can feel the energy of frights only during the night. It can also be bad, but that depends on you.
— No one learns everything only from schoolbooks. You also learn from birds, animals, from the earth, and from your body. The ones who teach themselves are powerful. Eyes can look inside as well, not just outside.
Every person has a little marble, a little sphere, in their chest. In some people, it’s cloudy and heavy, in others, it’s light and see through. The sphere is shiny inside people who are happy. As if someone had polished it. The marble represents the harmony of things, peace and being reconciled to yourself and what surrounds you. It shines brighter in kids who are young and innocent, and in wise old people. In bad people, the marble darkens and then gets smaller and smaller, until it melts away and disappears. Those people become either like robots or like wild animals, without reason and without a soul. In order for little ones not to lose their sphere, they have to be loved, they have to be hugged lovingly. For grown-ups the rule changes. If you’re a grown-up and someone hugs you, it’s not a bad thing, but it’s not enough. You also have to give love, not just receive it.
Our witch also says the devil doesn’t exist. That he’s made up. It seems to us that the outhouse is a diabolical place. She says that it isn’t, that places like that don’t exist, that certain people can be diabolical, but not places. What exists are places that are hidden, chosen, full of energy, magical. She believes there’s only one kind of energy and each person is responsible for what they do with it. There are weak elements and strong elements, meaning weak people and strong people. In places like these, they can either create or destroy. They can raise themselves up or fall down. Strength is needed whether you’re climbing or descending. Your legs hurt both when you walk up too many steps and when you go down them. A powerful person isn’t someone who has simply been handed everything, money, fortune, influence, because you won’t be given that all the time throughout your life, maybe you’ll receive something once or a couple times. A powerful person is someone who knows how to obtain energy and strength from their own heart, the person who energizes themselves, builds their own hydroelectric plant. Which produces light from the inside. There are very few of these people. Actually, all people have their own hydroelectric plant, but they prefer to get their light from the government. They don’t realize what a source of light their own being is, what wealth they have inside them. People are walking treasures, there’s a reason why the other creatures submit and bow down to them. There’s something superhuman about people. They’re witches.
— Like you?
— No, much more bewitching. But they don’t know, they don’t realize, their eyes and hearts are blindfolded. And they die like that, without seeing their marble light up. They don’t even know how to look at the sun anymore. They don’t see how much beauty is in them and around them.
Our light can also be lit by the sun, the supreme energy. Sickness and sadness wouldn’t exist if we received from the sun everything it’s offering us. After all, the sun is like free medicine without an expiration date, you just have to know how much to take and how to take it.
