2
Slivovitz and Snow
Peter trudged behind his father toward Chust, shivering as he went. Their hut lay a little way behind them, outside the village itself. St. Andrew’s Eve was still a few days off, and the snow was strong already. It would be a brutal winter. Through the cold Peter could smell his father; even the biting wind could not rid him of the constant reek of slivovitz and beer.
“Did you know Radu well, Father?” Peter said, simply so that there was something to say. His father didn’t reply, and Peter knew the answer anyway. They didn’t know anyone well—until they had come to Chust they had never stayed in one place long enough to know anyone at all. But Peter was aware that his father had helped Radu, the woodcutter from Koroceni, once or twice in the last year. Sometimes even the most solitary of woodcutters needed help felling a large tree.
The edge of the village was in front of them.
“Hurry,” said Tomas. “They won’t wait for us.”
“They can’t be starting,” said Peter. “I can’t hear the church bell.”
His father spat into the snow, but didn’t look around.
“There won’t be bells at a suicide’s funeral.”
He walked into the village, through a small gate in the rickety birch paling that marked the boundary. The fence, no more than knee-high, and capped by a ragged thatch, was designed to stop chickens from wandering too far. It ran right around the settlement, marking its perimeter; apart from a few fields, everything beyond it was forest. In places along its length, as here, were gates with little roofs.
Peter hesitated at this gateway. It wasn’t just that they weren’t liked in the village; there was more to it than that.
“Suicide?”
Peter ran after his father, and caught up quickly. The ground was a mess of frozen mud and slush, and his father was unsteady on his feet, as usual.
“Be quiet,” Tomas said, glaring at his son. He nodded at the huts, and Peter understood that he should not have spoken. That was all right. Peter was used to silence, used to keeping his own company; thanks to his taciturn father, most conversations Peter had took place in his own head.
Two sour-faced old women stood in the shadow of a low doorway. They spoke under their breath to each other and stared at Tomas and his son—a heavy man who looked older than he probably was, and his strong, young boy.
Peter knew they were not liked, and the village had little to offer. There was something bleak and unsettling about the place, something almost menacing, though Peter could not have put it into words, and yet for all that Tomas seemed content to stay. And in truth, Peter was happy to stay too. They finally seemed to have put down some roots after years and years of moving, and besides, there was Agnes.
They hurried on, down the slight hill that led to the area laughingly called “the square,” as if this were some great city in the south and not a godforsaken village in the middle of nowhere. Chust was home to no more than two hundred people, but here in the center there were houses in place of huts; a few of them had two storeys. As they went, Peter kept an eye out for Agnes, but it was not a day to be abroad unless you had business to attend to. They passed the end of the street where she lived with her mother, still in mourning after her husband’s death. Briefly Peter slowed his pace, hoping for some sign of Agnes, but there was none.
Slipping from the far corner of the square, a small track squeezed between two of the larger houses in the village, the priest’s house and the feldsher’s house. That way led to the church, which lay on a rise beyond. Peter could see its sagging wood-tiled roof with the onion-dome tower on its back, halfway along, like a boy riding a pig, but he was surprised when his father strode away toward the other side of the square.
He paused, and then understood. He should have known better. Radu was a suicide; there would be no bells, and there would be no holy ground for him either. Peter hurried on.
His father was nearly at the far side of the village.
“They think he killed himself?” Peter asked.
Tomas said nothing.
“Father?”
Tomas stopped for a moment and looked, not at his son, but somewhere away over his shoulder.
“He was found hanging from a tree by a rope round his neck. So he killed himself. Wouldn’t be the first lonely woodcutter to have done that.”
Something occurred to Peter.
“Why isn’t he going to be buried in his own village?”
His father grunted.
“That type of death. They wanted nothing to do with him. Said he died on Chust land so we could deal with him.”
“And we agreed?” asked Peter.
“Who is ‘we’? There is no ‘we’ here,” Tomas said abruptly. Then he sighed. “There was no choice. It was that, or leave him to the wolves. And anyway, the Elders commanded it.”
They were out of the village now, and through the trees they could see a few people gathered in a small clearing.
Peter thought about Radu, about how he might have died. His father told him he was a dreamer, but Peter couldn’t dream what might have happened to Radu. It was not the stuff of dreams, it was the stuff of nightmares.
“But Father,” Peter whispered, “you said Radu’s chest was burst, that his heart was pierced.”
“What of it?”
“Well, he can’t have done that to himself and then hung himself from a tree.”
“So it must have happened afterward.”
“You mean someone else did it to him after he was dead? Who would do that? Why?”
Tomas shrugged. “The wolves…?”
Peter was about to reply, but could tell his father was being deliberately obtuse.
“Listen, Peter. If a man is hanging from a tree by a rope, he killed himself. If Anna told them that’s what happened, then that’s what happened. Let it lie!”
Peter was not satisfied, but said no more. There was something troubling his father, he knew.
They made their way toward the meagre funeral party. There was Daniel, the priest; and Teodor, the feldsher—half doctor, half sorcerer. Radu might have been only a woodcutter, and not even from the village, but still two of its most important inhabitants had come to bury him. Peter wondered why. Why were both of them here? He knew they didn’t always get on. People were as likely to visit Teodor with spiritual needs as Daniel, and just as likely to pray for their health with Daniel as visit the doctor. Each man knew he had to tolerate the other. An uneasy alliance.
A little way away stood the village sexton, an old man with strong arms but few teeth. It was clear he wanted nothing to do with the affair, and having struggled to dig a shallow hole in the frozen ground, he leant on the top of his tall spade, sucking his gums, peering out from under a wide-brimmed black felt hat.
Snow continued to trickle down around and about as Tomas nodded greetings to the others.
Outsiders were never welcome, even though this father and son had taken to their work well enough. They were a strange pair. The father was a drunk, everyone knew that, but there was an air about him. Something in the way he held himself. He was fat from drink, his face flushed and his eyes milky, but he still had a head of strong black hair.
The son was a young man, really, new to the game. He had even darker, thicker hair, and his skin was smooth and brown, as if he was from somewhere in the south. His eyes were rich and dark brown, like Turkish coffee, but he was nervous, for all his young strength, and there was something about him that made him seem more refined than his father. Few of the villagers had ever wondered what might have happened to the boy’s mother, though it must have been from her that his refinement came.
Peter was absorbed in his own thoughts. Wolves couldn’t have done that to Radu’s chest after he hung himself from the tree. It didn’t make sense. Someone must have stabbed him through the heart with great force, and then hung his body in the tree afterward.
But why? Most murderers tried to conceal their victims’ bodies. Why display Radu’s body instead?
To Peter, it seemed like a warning, a warning that death was walking in the woods.
And Peter was right.