A very broad old man with an ancient, shriveled face consumed by time, but as wide as a garden spade. Yellow-grey skin clung to his sagging jowls as a papier-mâché scab. This was the figure who appeared in the crooked doorway, who answered my weary knock with a saliva-lubed grimace, sagging face hoary with several days growth of grizzle, and the eyes of liquor-tinged nightmares.
“Finally! You’re here,” he said in a deep phlegmy voice. I’d never seen him before, but he knew me.
This stranger was less than five feet tall, bald, with a fringe of hair the colour of wood ash falling around the perimeter of his head to below the collar of his tattered flannel shirt. This he wore beneath overalls, knees crusted with mud and who knew what else, and a thick cocoon of cardigans and jackets he left unbuttoned so that his rotund belly protruded through the muddle of fabric.
Somehow recognizing this geriatric peasant, with a displaced sense of propriety, I fell to my knees on his doorstep. What seemed like appropriate reverence, met with a rebuking snort.“Stop that,” he snorted disdainfully. “Back on your feet, goddammit, and get inside before all the heat blows out.”
A grim smile was forbidding welcome to enter the leaning hovel, an uneven slate floor, plank benches and table, plank shelves groaning under dozens of sealed jars, like the cargo of an antique shipwreck. In the doubtful light of the single oil lamp hanging from a nail over the table, the jars looked like they were full of bloody organs. A bare solitary light bulb dangled on a wire, dusty and unlit. Only marginally warmer inside than out, I unslung my pack but kept my jacket on.
I couldn’t tell you how I came across this place. I had no distinct memory of my journey to his door. Vague misgivings, a sore impulse to tread a path laid centuries before my birth. I vaguely remember an airport, the grimy terrazzo floor and sick hospital green of something built when aircraft still had propellers and half the world was ruled by grim ideologues in grey uniforms. Then a long train journey. Pulling a spare sweater out of my pack as padding for the hard wooden bench. I pulled out my cellphone, but it was dead. Jerking past the dirty window, angular red-tiled roofs and chimneys exhaling black soot, warrens of narrow, twisting cobblestone streets. And then many long bone-numbing hours through hilly, deeply wooded countryside, interrupted by olive drab pasture, manure-coloured farms wounded by muddy cart tracks, loosely bandaged with grey snow.
The stamp of jackboots still echoed through these rural valleys, across railway sidings dense with rusty iron scrap and cinders sharp enough to open bare feet to the bone. A land sullenly shouldering a burden that might never be heaved away, so cold and still. Brief glimpses of old toddling women in headscarves and woolen leggings, and even older men wearing boots held together with knotted rags. Little to ease my sense of abandonment. I kept going back to my dead phone, thumbing buttons with increasing anxiety. But there was no sign of life, so I finally put it away.As the train pulled into a village, a florid-faced conductor shouted at me in some Cyrillic alphabet until I understood that this was where I had to get off. Not even a platform, and the train didn’t come to a full stop as I jumped down onto the cinders. Around me, dirty clusters of shacks stitched together with rusty wire fencing, all
disappearing into the maw of failing overcast light. Frosty deep indigo, the kind of invasive damp that makes unwelcome visits near the Winter Solstice. It started to snow. In just a few minutes, I would be lost in the nighttime. Not even able to remember what country I was lost in, the first notes of panic screeched in my mind.
Without any idea of where I was to go, I wandered up a muddy track that climbed steeply between two hills. On the way, I passed a solitary old hag, crooked with age. She stood by the roadside, one eye socket just a dark empty cup, one arm extended, pointing up the road. She didn’t say a word as I followed the direction of her extended bent finger.Maybe a kilometer on, I found myself knocking on the old man’s door. Until he answered, I had begun to think I might be forced to spend a night outside.
