G133: What Have We Done (11 page)

Warren was still gazing over the tundra below. ‘Our elders taught us to look for ravens. When a raven swoops, something is down there. If there’s a bunch of them, they might be following a moose or a bear. If you suddenly hear seagulls, something’s crossing the river.’

The land was so flat, and the air so clear, you could have seen a raven, or heard a gull, miles away.

Too soon we had to leave, edging back down into the confines of the river channel to the waiting boat. Down there, the dream vision of the land was gone.

B
ack at the shingle beach, Patrick had kept the fire burning. The rain had passed. Again the sisters set to work – now we would eat salmon. They took one of the morning’s catch, wrapped it in tinfoil and set it in the hot embers. Then the fishing lines came out again, and as the first fish baked, they landed more. ‘Subsistence fishing’, they call this. Despite the grocery store, many villagers still live off the land. Winter would soon come, and supplies had to be laid down. When the salmon was ready we hunkered round the fire, eating its hot, pink flesh with our fingers, and it was good. Then came a gateau bought from the store, only slightly bashed. Having eaten, we travelled downstream again, bringing Patrick with us. They’d come back another day for the boat with the faulty engine. Right now we were going with the flow, still looking out for bears, for moose and beaver and birds, though the noise of the engine would most likely scare them away and it was mid-afternoon, bear siesta time.

But we weren’t done fishing. Some miles down we put into a certain creek, a slow green backwater aside from the main river. Here, in the waters around a grassy islet, flashed the scarlet sides of sockeye salmon, dozens of them. Like silk slashes in a Tudor sleeve, the red fish parted the water’s surface as they moved. Again we left the boat, again the rods came out. It was appalling. Having spawned,
the salmon were rotting even before they died. Red and stylish in the water, they emerged from it like things of nightmare, mouldering, hook-faced, blotched. They were so plentiful all our hosts had to do was choose one, throw a hook at it and haul it in. One after another the fish were landed. They flapped listlessly on the mud, then were beaten over the head. Fifteen, then twenty fish skulls broke with a wet smacking sound.

As Teddi had predicted, bears had indeed been here, and perhaps still were, though we couldn’t smell them. On the ground among the riverside shrubs were strewn the half-chewed bodies of a dozen fish. Such profligacy!

Having killed the fish, Teddi sliced off their heads with the curved blade of her
ulu
. The red flesh would be cut into strips, then hung to dry on wooden frames down at the village. When she threw the salmon heads back into the clear water, dozens of smaller fish shoaled round to investigate.

I wasn’t going to get off without fishing, and soon enough Warren handed me his rod and line, and showed me how to hold it. I stood in the stern of the boat and inexpertly dangled the hook in the water. In two minutes a trout came, simple as that, like a magic creature out of a folk tale, surrendering itself to me. I pulled and wound it in, the rod bending, the fish’s colours gleaming as it rose.

F
or the few weeks of the digging season, the archaeologists took up residence in the village hall, which served as refectory, social hub, Wi-Fi station and laboratory. Sometimes in the evening Quinhagak people came by to see what we’d been up to, and to examine the day’s finds. They came in ones or twos. Mostly, they spoke little, but if we did have conversations I noticed how often and how modestly they described encounters with the natural world. For example, one evening after work Teddi came by. She sat next to me at a long plastic trestle table. I don’t know how the subject came up, but in her soft voice, she told me about a cloud that had once come to her aid. She had been picking berries alone out on the tundra, and had stayed too
long. She had become exhausted and a bit sunstroked. Then, out of a clear sky, right above her, a little cloud had formed itself. The cloud let down rain, filling leaves with water for her to drink. How grateful she was to that cloud! More than one person expressed the opinion that the tundra is watchful. They said, ‘Out on the tundra, it’s like something’s looking at you.’ Sometimes you see odd things there.

John Smith is an elder with a penchant for blue jeans and Johnny Cash, who carves artefacts from walrus ivory. He told me about an encounter he’d once had with a spirit woman ‘just this high’ who had appeared before him, dancing to the beat of her tiny drum.

Another man told me about hunting a bear. He spoke with no self-aggrandisement or swagger. On the contrary. He’d been young at the time and out hunting with his father. ‘Shoot it!’ his father had said. He’d shot the bear. His father had scored lines on the dead bear, as if he was going to skin it. Then the father handed the knife to his son, saying, ‘Your bear, your responsibility.’

‘It took me three days to skin that bear. I never hunted bear again.’

If you imagine all these incidents together, all the looking and listening, the stories and encounters, remembered and repeated and layered over thousands of years, built up slowly like the frozen peat of the tundra, you might indeed come to know your own backyard. And how it might help you. From two different sources I heard the story of the young man, some decades ago, who went with friends out onto the sea ice. They’d been hunting, but he somehow got separated from the others, and when he tried to reach land and home he couldn’t, because the ice had drifted away from the shore. Alone on the ice, he survived
for four months
. All he had were the clothes on his back, and his tools and weapons – and the knowledge his elders had bequeathed him.

I was told these stories not in a sod hut, lit by a seal-oil lamp, certainly not in an igloo, but in the village hall – a metal-clad shed raised on stilts, harsh with electric strip lights. The hall was itself a disused grocery store, scheduled to become a bingo parlour. Does that matter? The stories came from people so softly spoken, and
arrived so unexpectedly, and were over so soon, I wondered if I’d heard them at all. They were there and then gone. For a visitor like myself they offered a glimpse of a vastness, like the sight of the land we were afforded when we went upriver.

T
he next day Warren was again striding towards his office, harassed as ever, cell phone pressed to his ear, but when he spotted me he came over to deliver a formal thank-you.

‘In our tradition,’ he said, ‘the first fish you catch you must give to an elder. I gave your trout to my mother. She sends her thanks. She says, “Now my belly is full.”’

I
n the poor and remote province of Maramureş in the northern Carpathians, cut off by bad mountain roads from the rest of Romania to the south, the ancient body measures persist. Anything approaching six feet long – a plank of wood or a table – is a
râf
, the span of a man’s arms; a cot is a cubit, from elbow to fingertip; a
țol
– about an inch – is the length of the last joint of the thumb; and a
palmă
is a hand’s breadth, the distance between the outstretched tips of the thumb and fingers of one hand.

Sitting in a cafe or in people’s kitchens over a cup of coffee or a glass of
palincă
, the same
palmă
gesture recurs: the fingers held out over the table, tensed, overstretched, the most that a hand can cover. The
palmă
isn’t much, but it isn’t nothing, something you can imagine mattering more in a moment of passion or fear than it would before or after.

The word can turn metaphorical, so that a
palmă de pământ,
a hand’s breadth of land, can stand for those little patches, the slim border zones between holdings, pieces of land whose ownership is uncertain, which are also sometimes called ‘battlegrounds’,
luptă terenuri,
literally ‘fighting lands’. Every year in Maramureş neighbours kill each other for these contested slips of territory. At times in this mountain province there have been forty such violent attacks in
twelve months, and week after week, much as road accidents are described in other parts of the world, the local press reports another man – always a man –
ucis pentru o palmă de pământ:
killed for a hand’s breadth of land.

After the act, the murderers usually give themselves up, shocked at what they have done, going back into their kitchens to wait for the police to arrive and, when the case comes to trial, pleading guilty, as if something had burst up within them for which they were not responsible.

I have wondered if this is a glimpse into antiquity, beyond the agreements of modernity; an archetype of the failure of human relations, or at least an eruption of the underlying facts of rivalry, loathing, violence and hatred? It is certainly behaviour as old as any record of human life. In the
Iliad
, Homer compared the Greeks and Trojans fighting across a blood-spattered wall to ‘two men, with measuring-rods in hand, tussling over the landmark stones in a common field’, and Patrick Kavanagh, remembering an incident at home in Ireland in 1938, when the neighbours were suddenly at war over ‘half a rood of rock, a no-man’s land’:

Kavanagh called his little fourteen-line poem, in which the rhymes never quite rhyme, ‘Epic’ because:

We – I – now live almost entirely insulated from these competitive realities. Our rivalries are expressed in remarks at home, after
a party when the guests have gone, or in non-replies to emails or phone messages. In that way our relationships are made and unmade almost at will. Physical neighbourhood – the ever-present neighbour-touch of poor farming life – is not like that, and seems older and more elemental. In Maramureş it is, for example, the practice to bury large stones along your boundary, only parts of which appear at the surface. They are difficult to move and it would be even more difficult to conceal the marks of their having been moved, but they also work as a kind of psychic fact. Their dark and buried bulk, powerfully present in their hiddenness, known but unseen, have threat crouched within them, the silent but implicitly violent distinction between what is yours and what is mine.

This is an old practice but there is something slightly more complicated in play than the survival of ancient behaviour into modern life. The hand’s breadth murders in modern Maramureş are something more disturbing than that, signs of modern dysfunction and dispossession, of traditional systems failing, of the modern substitutes proving inadequate, of naked, unregulated behaviour leaving in its wake decades of pain and grief, widowed women and orphaned children.

I
was in Maramureş with the photographer Gus Palmer and Romanian journalist Teofil (or ‘Teo’) Ivanciuc. We went looking together for the stories behind these murders. The first piece of land we found for which a man had died was a
palmă
of 1,800 square metres, or 0.44 acres.

It is about fifteen yards wide and about one hundred yards deep, next to the long fast road that runs through the village of Săcălăşeni in north-western Maramureş. The village is now a dormitory suburb for the provincial capital Baia Mare just to the north, with fewer than thirty cows where even ten years ago there used to be seven hundred. An air of lifelessness hangs over it, with no one about in the daytime. On the patch of murder-land, which has been uncared for since the killing, you have to push through a thick pelt of buttercups and
foxtail grasses to reach the willows that are now springing up along the boundary fences.

Just along the road, the dead man’s brother, Ciprian Radu, is living in a small house at the side of an unused yard – no animals, no muck. This is the house where his brother was killed three years ago. It is a weekday mid-morning. Ciprian is welcoming but he has been drinking and his handsome, high-cheekboned face is flushed and puffy. There is a smell of drink in the air and both maleness and poverty seep from the walls. A soft-porn calendar hangs in one corner of the living room, a tapestry of da Vinci’s
The Last Supper
is up behind the sofa, there is a crumpled paper icon of Christ pinned by the door and, on the television, people in traditional Maramureş costumes perform songs for a bare-shouldered hostess while colours flicker on the set.

In April 2012 the three Radus – Ciprian, his elder brother Calin, a big man aged thirty-five, and their younger brother Petru, twentyeight, anxious and flighty – were here in their grandmother’s house. It was a holiday, one week after Easter, in the middle of the day and they were drinking:
palincă
, the plum brandy which features in most of these stories. Calin, over eighteen stone, had just been left by his wife. He was unhappy as she had kept the children. Petru was getting overwrought. ‘He had a nervous disease,’ Ciprian says. And so Calin rang for an ambulance to take him to hospital. ‘But Petru could be aggressive when he was drunk.’

An argument started about the land. Calin had been working for many years in England, as a builder and in a car park. He had also had some money from their mother. Petru suggested they sell the land down the road – it had belonged to their father – but insisted that the proceeds should be shared only between him and Ciprian. Calin surely had enough money already. ‘I was trying to separate them,’ Ciprian says, ‘but I couldn’t stop them arguing so I left.’ It was a familiar situation: they had been arguing for years and Ciprian was away from the house for about forty minutes, to visit his aunt, but more than anything to escape a scene he hated.

When he was away, Petru, who was only eight or nine stone, took a knife that happened to be lying on the table, simply to threaten and scare Calin. ‘He just touched him with the knife on the right shoulder, not a deep one. He had no plan to kill him but he just touched the artery and the blood started to flow. Just there.’ Ciprian pointed to the corner by the door, the brown carpet below the paper Christ.

Ciprian is anxious with the memory. ‘When I came back, the knife was outside, covered in blood. Calin was lying down here on the bench still alive. The room was bloody and he was pale and bloody. Petru was lying on the other bed here.’

By the time the police and ambulance arrived Calin was dead. ‘I thought when I went away the fight was just with fists, but when I came back I saw the knife and I understood what had happened. How easy it is for someone to die. It was almost an accident. How easily someone can die. A little stab and someone dies. It was that, a little stab.’

Ciprian seemed still to be suffering a form of shock. Something was inexplicably missing, the dead brother removed from life as if by a force that had arrived momentarily in this house, leaving him pale and gasping on the bench, and then killing him.

Petru tried to plead in court that he had acted in self-defence, that Calin had come for him, but there were no witnesses and the magistrate did not accept the plea. The crime was thought particularly severe because it was brother murdering brother, a breaking of bonds within the family. Petru was sentenced to pay one hundred euros a month (about a quarter of an average monthly wage) to the dead man’s little daughters, and the judge recommended that Calin’s widow should have the equivalent of €20,000 from the murderer. She refused to ask for it ‘because she understood it was an accident. And knew that Petru did not have this money.’ Or so Ciprian says. Petru is in Gherla Prison now, a place for serious criminals, sentenced to ten years, as severe as any hand’s breadth murder sentence because, as Ciprian says, ‘They were brothers. The accidental nature of the crime was not taken into account.’ He will probably be out in five
years. Calin’s widow now lives in England. And the family goes on as if catastrophe were part of the weave of life.

E
very piece of land is important here. People in Maramureş, with an inheritance of poverty and crowdedness, are what they are because of the land they have. Land is a constituent of the person. To enter another man’s land, particularly the yard around his house, is as intimate a penetration as putting your fingers in his mouth. A sophisticated, multilingual journalist in Baia Mare, who did not want to be named, told me that if someone came ‘into his land’ – that was his expression, as if the land were an entirely enclosed space – he would kill him. ‘It is a border he has crossed. And when he sees my eyes he would understand. It has happened to me, men coming onto the land with guns. I told them they had to leave within ten seconds. “If you enter again, I don’t give you the chance.”’

One evening in the main street of Săliștea de Sus, a big rawboned village in the valley of the River Iza, we talked to an old lady called Ileana Vlad. She was sitting and knitting on one of the ‘gossip benches’ that line the street outside every farm gate. Things were not going well, she said quietly.

‘My husband died on the fifteenth of December. Now I cannot find a little pig in the market. And you can’t live without a pig and some chickens. It’s only women left now. All the men are in the cemetery. A life without a man is not worth living. Why not? Because there is no one left to do the repairs! What can we do?’

She was knitting a black winter waistcoat with sparkly red and green threads in the wool. I asked her about land murders in the village. Not pausing from her needles, she said, ‘Oh yes, a man killed a shepherd two years ago up there’ – she pointed to the meadows on the valley side high above us, below the forest edge, where the cherries were in blossom and the beech trees were coming into new leaf. ‘He killed him with a fence post; he shoved it into his mouth’ – she gesticulated – ‘because the shepherd walked over his land with his sheep. One eye of the shepherd jumped out onto the ground when
the stick went in. He was from Moldavia.’ This unlikely phenomenon appears in the
Iliad
too, when Patroclus smashes a stone into the forehead of a Trojan prince Cebriones ‘and both his eyes jumped out into the dust at his feet’.

Ileana’s lack of surprise, the click of her needles, her acceptance of extreme violence as part of how things are, the making of the winter waistcoat in the warmth of the spring sunshine, the need for a pig – all of it is part of a phlegmatic attitude to life, a lack of fuss at how difficult existence can be.

In the outdoor ethnographic museum in Sighetu Marmaţiei – a project of the passionately nationalistic Ceaușescu years – where the most beautiful examples of Maramureş wooden architecture were gathered before they disappeared from the villages, there is one house from Vadu Izei, a few miles up the road from Săliștea de Sus. It had belonged in the late nineteenth century to the two Arba brothers. When their parents died, they could not agree on how to divide their inheritance. Rather than kill each other, they decided, in effect, to kill the house and together sawed it in half. One half remained in the old farmyard with one brother while the other took his timbers and rebuilt his half in another part of the village. Only in 1970 did the museum in Sighetu buy both halves where they are now reconnected as a single house.

Walk through any of these valleys in the springtime and nothing is more impressive than this all-embracing physicality – the intimate connection of body with place and mind, the ways in which the physical elements of existence are dense with social and emotional meaning. One morning early last May, Gus, Teo and I were walking along the lanes of a little side valley above the River Iza, near the big village of Ieud. It was the moment at the end of winter when the land has to be ‘arranged’, as they say; cleaned and cleared for the growing year. People – mostly the old; not the young men and women away earning euros – were out on the roads. Farms are tiny – half of all the nine million farms in the EU are in Romania – and made up of even tinier strips scattered across the parishes. Almost no one has a car and
so this is a walking world. No motor noise, no jet sound. Cuckoos and woodpeckers in the woods, skylarks above us, cocks crowing in the farmyards. The whole valley was filled with people ploughing, hoeing, axing out the dead wood, levelling molehills, cutting bean sticks, planting potatoes, raking old leaves, putting out dung. Women walked at the heads of the horses, the men behind at the wooden ploughs. Pastures were being scoured with ox-drawn dredges, ploughlands broken up with horse-drawn harrows. The last cartloads of hay were being taken back to the winter barns before the cattle were let out onto the spring grazing. The only sound on the road was the oiled creak of the cart axles as they passed.