Now, as we began to climb the hill once more, the old women stood like wizened crows watching our slow ascent.
We’d already been walking for a good twenty minutes by the time a particularly ferocious blast of icy wind hit the procession. Everyone dipped their heads, turning away from it, eyes streaming. It froze your lungs; you couldn’t breathe at all.
In the distance the higgledy-piggledy crosses of the old cemetery finally came into view, with what looked like wishing wells – but were actually carefully constructed gables or little houses – over the graves. Ribbons and garlands, scarves and mementoes clanked and danced in the wind. It looked like, what did my dad say… heathen was the word… like something for gypsies.
“We take food and drink into the graveyard and leave it there,” my mother had explained when we’d set off from the house. The old ones had handed out round parcels for us to give. “It’s part of the special ceremony and must be left for the deceased. Nothing must be removed after it’s been taken in and offered. Not the flowers from the grave, the water, even the ropes used to lower the coffin into the ground – or they could be used to bring greater power to a curse.”
She fed my imagination with talk of superstition and bad luck. If the flowers strewn at the funeral were picked up, you risked transferring the disease of the dead one to yourself; you must not bring any dirt back on your hands or shoes from the cemetery, and never drink from the cup meant for the deceased. The table where the casket had rested back at the farmhouse would be turned over, an axe would be placed on the deathbed, and candles burned on water and salt instead of in candlesticks, the contents later tipped away and blessed. All of these precautions were to prevent illness and harm for the forty days following a funeral when the soul was transcending. Most of all, the bindings used on the body of the deceased must remain there at the site. And buried.
I had never considered being partly German would mean all this.
My mother read my mind. “The people here, the old ones, are from a different age, Eva. They came from a different place. These are very old Slavic traditions and something they wanted to preserve. It’s dying out now, though. So we do this for Baba Lenka and for our ancestors, okay?”
She looked away quickly, and for the first time a layer of doubt crawled in and wedged between us. First she didn’t know who these old people were and couldn’t understand them. Now she knew a whole lot more. And what did Slavic mean?
On the brow of the hill, the four elderly men set down the coffin while the rest of us caught up, the wooden cart they’d been pushing like a barrow now resting at an angle on the snowy ground. But as we neared, the men moved into position – one on each of the four sides of the cart, facing outwards. And the two women who had washed Baba Lenka’s body turned and stepped closer to it.
“What are they doing now?”
“It’s a crossroads,” my mother said, as if that should make sense.
With their backs to the coffin, the men stared outwardly ahead, grim-faced and expressionless, in the directions of the four winds while the women began to mumble and wail as they had earlier at the well. Those raggedy birds overhead circled and cawed, and the women’s cries, not those of sadness, quickly became frenzied. They stamped their feet and began to swirl around and around in a dance ritual. In an instant the bizarre scene became sinister, the women clapping, stamping and shrieking.
The priest pushed past us, marching forwards. “Nein! Nein… Achtung…”
I had a really bad feeling then in the pit of my stomach, something deeply foreboding. And no sooner had that thought consolidated when the day darkened as abruptly as if a switch had been flicked. The sun was no longer a hazy, wintry sun but that of a bright moon, all colours ebbing away in a tide. There was an intense feeling of being trapped in a place of impending doom, of being unable to move forwards in time or space, of things coming to an end. A skyline of withered trees seared onto my mind’s eye in a crackle of black and white, every bit as violently imprinted as the looming view of the glacier from the plane, with its tiny hut clinging to a precipice.
My mother’s grip tightened. Three sharp jabs. I wasn’t to speak but to stay put. She seemed to know something, to anticipate it, and by the time the vision of doom ended, she was already running uphill fast on the heels of the priest.
Just as suddenly as they’d started the tribal dance, however, the two old women fell silent and the four men turned back around to face the coffin. Events happened simultaneously. As the priest and my mother drew level, without any warning, the old ones picked up the coffin and began to rotate it, spinning it around and around and around – before flipping it upside down.
The corpse tipped over inside.
The lid gave way. And Baba Lenka’s body fell out.
Chapter Two
Amid all the gasps and shouts, a tiny object came hurtling down the hill with all the alacrity of a Catherine wheel flying off a wall.
At first it looked like a scrap of tumbleweed billowing down the lane, only taking form when it finally bumped the toe of my shoe – a strange little bundle of straw and feathers in the shape of a scarecrow.
To you…
Bending down, I quickly picked it up and pocketed it before anyone saw. They’d be bound to ask what it was and maybe snatch it away, so a cursory glance was all there was time for. Enough only to note the hooked beak and tiny crow-like skull, to feel the crepuscular rustle of its feathery arms in my fingers and the strongly bound cord of its hemp body. No one else had noticed it. Maybe my mother was quick enough to catch the guilty look on my face when she swung around a second later, but she didn’t see the poppet. No, she hadn’t seen…
As it turned out, the momentary distraction was a blessing. In fact, it would have been far preferable had I carried on staring at the straw dolly and thus never seen the contents of the overturned coffin. Instead, immediately after secreting the poppet, I glanced up. And the full impact of the tragedy struck with a force I would never forget to my dying day.
Baba Lenka had fallen badly. In their apparent haste to wash and inter the body, the old women had not bound the corpse properly or disguised the mutilation, let alone fastened the shroud securely enough. She lay at a distorted angle in the snow, the stem of her twig neck clearly snapped in two, her hands bent backwards in rictus claws, one blind opaque eye staring directly at me. The muslin shroud she was wrapped in had hitched up to expose where the backs of her ankles had been hacked to the bone, the heels stuffed with coarse black hair before being crudely sewn back together.
Everyone stared in freeze-framed horror. Baba Lenka’s meagre possessions lay strewn across the crossroads – smashed earthenware, shattered glass, a wooden hairbrush netted with a few wisps of grey hair, grainy photographs scooting across the snowy fields.
How could the nails have given way? How could the bindings holding her legs and arms together have come untied and flown high into the ether? They should have been buried, my mother had said so… And the cross that had been put underneath her body… how could it have pierced her spine like that?
It’s possible that my young mind blanked out what followed because I don’t remember a thing. I don’t even recall the flight home. All I remember and all I will ever remember is that the watery sun had turned into a bright moon, the whistling wind died on a whisper, and the day became unnaturally still. And I remember the old folk. I see their backs to this day, bent and black, as they threw themselves to the floor, wailing and hitting themselves with sticks and chains.