I thought Metya Chaush was a person. When we met on Wednesday, which was apparently the right day of the week for this ritual, there was a second woman there; the mother of the girl with the rash. We set off for St George’s Hill above the neighbourhood where Kadrié’s parents lived. There were several women in The Birches who performed healing and exorcising rituals, and her mother was one of them: a mageshnitsa.

  ‘We’ll drop in later,’ Kadrié said.

  A church stood at the end of her parents’ neighbourhood and next to it: the destroyed plague cemetery. A lone turbaned headstone remained in the ground.

  ‘Saint George,’ Kadrié pointed at the church. ‘When I couldn’t conceive, I spent a night there on St George’s Day.’

  It was Pomak female tradition. St George’s Day, also called Ederlezi, was the best day of the year to bring blankets, light a candle, chant a prayer with the priest, sleep on the floor with other women, then take a piece of paper inscribed with a prayer from the Bible and dissolve it in water that you drink for health, a baby or the end of suffering. Just like the hodjas! Magical Islam and magical Orthodoxy have always been in conversation because they come from the same place.

  ‘Anyway, I promised the choicest lamb kurban to Saint George,’ said Kadrié.

  And?

  ‘And a little bird said “Amen,” she said, an expression I’d not heard before. ‘I gave birth in November 1989. I gave her a Christian name and two days later, a Muslim one.’

  Her daughter was born at the exact time that the old regime died.

  We climbed into a sparse grove. She and the other woman browsed the undergrowth. I realized that Metya Chaush was a plant, but also a person.

  ‘Once upon a time, there was a woman who couldn’t get pregnant,’ Kadrié began. ‘Then she found a herb that helped her. She found selemet in it.’

  Selemet is salvation and also cure. When a boy was born to that woman, she named him Metya. At some point he became a chaush, a low-ranking Ottoman officer.

  ‘And she gave the herb the same name. Metya Chaush. Until then, that herb had no name.’

  From the hillside, The Birches lay at our feet, bathed in sun, its scorched hills the colour of dried tobacco.

  And there it was – the herb with a human name. When it flowered, its blue blossoms resembled green Alkanet.

  ‘We need three plants,’ Kadrié said.

  When we found a small colony, Kadrié opened up her bag and laid out her tools: little flat breads smaller than digestive biscuits, a steel knife and a pack of salt.

  ‘The bread is made with flour, salt and water. I baked it this morning.’

  There were nine of the little breads and they looked tasty. But they were not for us.

  ‘Metya Chaush is for skin disorders, venereal diseases and eye problems,’ Kadrié said.

  All of these went under the folk name of ‘the red one’, tsarvénoto. It was understood to mean inflammation of the soft tissue.

  The mother of the girl with the rash was briefed. She was here because two women were needed and ideally, one would be close to the afflicted. She’d taken her daughter to specialists but nothing had helped.

  ‘My mother and I only treat people that can’t be helped by conventional means,’ Kadrié said. Because you didn’t want to harness the spirit of plants willy-nilly.

  She placed three mini breads at the base of each plant, like fairy offerings. Three times three. She then sprinkled salt on top of each bread with a spoon. To fix the intention. The two women kneeled by the plants, one on each side. Kadrié picked up the knife and circled the first plant by running the knife’s point clockwise in the soil around it – three times. The two women said the spell, which was in two voices. The blade caught the morning sun. The girl’s name was Dulezar.

  ‘Bismillah Rahmani Rahim,’ began Kadrié.

  ‘What do you sever?’ asked the mother.

  ‘I sever to sever Dulezar’s rash,’ said Kadrié with steely intent.

  ‘What do you sever?’

  ‘I sever to sever Dulezar’s rash.’ Kadrié circled with the knife.

  ‘What do you sever?’

  ‘I sever to sever Dulezar’s rash.’

  I was glad the aim was to cure. There was something so concrete about the elfish bread, the knife, the plant, the circling, the repetition of ‘sever’, the two sturdy women willing the forces of the earth and the ether to come together in the service of Dulezar’s face, that I felt what it meant to be under a spell. It’s a biddable state. That was how the plant was meant to feel. Kadrié moved along the plants from west to east. You summoned plants west to east for good and east to west for bad.

  Then Kadrié said:

  I sever to sever.

  I sever to sever.

  I sever to sever.

  And with the practised move of an elf assassin, she severed each plant near the base, then placed it face down on top of the mini-breads. It had to be face down. The idea was to sever the course of Dulezar’s disease by transferring it to the plant. You fed the spirit of Metya Chaush with wheat and salt and starved Dulezar’s face of the rash. The plant’s face took the disease from Dulezar. It was a sacrifice.

  Alliteration and repetition is key in spells because a good spell is a poem, just as a good poem is a spell. It sounded like this:

  Séka da préseka.

  Séka da préseka.

  Séka da préseka.

  There was something about human skin and Metya Chaush. Kadrié was clear that this didn’t work for other ailments, even if she had forgotten why and why it had to be this plant, and on a Wednesday. It’s just something the women of The Birches had always done. The plant name had changed over time but the ritual had not. Metya is an affectionate name for Mehmed and during the Ottoman era, Chaush became an occupational name, like Smith.

  ‘That’s it,’ she said and we rose, brushing off our legs.

  Kadrié placed her tools back in the bag and said: ‘Now we walk away from it without looking back.’

  That’s what we did. There is something powerful about walking away without looking back, as Orpheus discovered in the underworld, too late.

  I didn’t find out the fate of Dulezar’s rash. But after seeing the ritual, I think of skin problems differently – as a separate thing that feeds off you. Perhaps that’s true of every disease; it is an entity that shares your cells and might eat you in the end. As the disease grows, you shrink. The trick was to distract it away from you, so that it vanishes. War, tyranny, illness. To paraphrase Herodotus, misfortune never does vanish, it simply moves on to another host.

  Later, I identified the plant as viper’s bugloss, a type of borage. It is an arid plant with strong anti-inflammatory chemicals and has had wide medicinal use in all things skin-related – from snake bites to boils, bruises, all manner of inflammatory ‘redness’ and was even used in facial creams for its linoleic acids. You can juice the leaves or make tea with them, and it must be a favourite with foxes because it is also called fox’s grass.

  It still puzzled me how exactly that woman had used it to conceive her child-plant named Metya Chaush. But Kadrié was at ease with puzzles. The exact was less important than the essential. And the essential was to know the plant.

  That week with Gyulten and Kadrié, I realised how isolated I was by my river in Scotland, going out to meet plants face to face without a guide. My herbalist lived far away and I knew no foragers in the area. Plus, experienced foragers in Britain must be paid. Plant knowledge is a commodity, not a pastime with your friends.

  In the valley, you learned from others and every village had experienced plant pickers. You went into the woods together and you smelled, chewed, spat out and collected your plants. In Scotland, I relied on the internet and books. I stayed up at night looking up plants, instead of looking up symptoms. Herbalism had happily supplanted hypochondria. But I tended to look up the plant after I tasted it – like the time I nibbled some umbrella-like white flowers of cow parsley and soon felt dizzy and nauseated. It hadn’t had the usual carroty taste. I had also nibbled the leaves. It wasn’t cow parsley at all. Sweet cicely or fool’s parsley? Or something else? I rushed home to my books and discovered hemlock, an exact lookalike. Hemlock is called Conium maculatum, I read in a daze, because its flowers resemble the white cone hats of whirling dervishes, which is how you feel shortly before you die from toxic shock. You feel like Socrates after he drank the juice of the hemlock. The world spins. Your body is paralysed but you are lucid and after all the books you’ve read, you know that you know nothing.

  The ancient Greeks said it: There are three ways to learn. Alone in the wild. With a guide. And in books. The last way is the worst. The first way can be the shortest-lived. The middle way is best.

  We went to see Kadrié’s parents.

  We found them in a large empty room with a bed and a table. Her mother sat on the bed in a commanding way, blue-eyed, with her legs up. Her father, ninety years old, sat in a chair. He was a gaunt, haunted-looking man who didn’t say a word but listened to his daughter and wife. The mother wore a gauze-like head-and-shoulders scarf, hand-painted with red flowers. Her velvet shalvars were black with red flowers and her feet were in knitted socklets embroidered with a red butterfly.

  We decided that she’d do the egg ritual for me. She sat me on the bed next to her and gave me an egg to hold while Kadrié prepared a jar of clean water, a packet of sugar and a long stem of dried basil. Her mother then took the egg from me and holding it to her mouth, whispered an opening prayer in Arabic. We all kept quiet and concentrated.

  ‘Come closer. I’ll do the egg spell,’ she said.

  She leaned over and made circular motions over my face and chest with the egg, mumbling an incantation in Bulgarian that I could just about make out.

  A pleasant sensation started in my forehead and ran through my body. I don’t know if it was her rumbling voice, like a mountain spring, or the calming circles, but I felt stroked by feathers. The sensation was similar to that with baba Acivé and the melted lead. The egg that was solid now but liquid a moment later, the bullet that became molten lava, the water waiting to receive it all – it was therapeutic. Like lying under a belladonna bush on a summer’s afternoon. The bush whispers. The baba whispers. You relax.

  She opened with the universal surah ‘In the name of Allah the beneficent the most merciful’:

  Bismillah Rahmani Rahim.

  A little from me

  More from Allah.

  What’s your name?

  Okay, Kapka.

  Here’s for uroki,

  For fright

  For urama

  For deeds done to you

  For all the bad.

  Let it go like lightest feather

  Like purest silver

  Let it go

  To mountains

  To forests

  To cold waters

  To thick shadows

  To green grasses.

  Let it go.

  Gone.

  She said this three times and broke the egg in the jar of water. Mother and daughter peered at it.

  ‘Oh!’ said Kadrié. ‘You’ve got uroki. There’s the eyes on top. And you’ve got urama.’

  ‘She does.’

  ‘A huge evil eye there. Yep. And there’s the mist, see the mist?’

  ‘The mist is rising,’ her mother confirmed.

  ‘Mist means urama,’ said Kadrié.

  The eyes were large bubbles. I knew uroki – a type of evil eye, except that evil eye can be accidental but uroki is always malicious.

  Urama was new to me. It literally means that you’ve been ‘circled’, that is, you’ve picked up something while treading on contaminated or taboo ground. Graveyards, rubbish dumps, under bridges, borders of townships, peripheries – you had no business in such places lest you disturbed the resident spirits.

  ‘Aye, you’ve picked it up somewhere.’

  Urama was understood to come from djinns or samodivas – demons that are neutral when minding their own business, but turn dark when disturbed.

  Just like humans.

  The mother put a few grains of sugar into the jar.

  ‘To sweeten the bad,’ said Kadrié, meaning the demon.

  Ritual sweetening of spirits is as old as Dionysus here.

  ‘Aye, I sweeten the bad ones to distract them from you. Now, you’re gonna lie down next door. You lie down without a word. You don’t speak once you sweeten up … You’re gonna dip your finger in the water and go like this. Like this and like this.’

  The mother showed me where to ‘sweeten up’ with the water: on the lips, cheeks, chin, forehead, inside the palms and the tops of the hands, the soles and tops of the feet – which made me think of Christ crucified, but these are simply energy centres in the body.

  ‘And you say the little duva I told you as you sweeten up. Remember?’

  Of course I didn’t. It was in Arabic.

  ‘Kadrié, where’s that basil?’

  ‘Here,’ Kadrié handed her mother the bunch and they stuck it in the jar like a long spoon. Even dried, its aroma filled the room.

  ‘It has to be basil,’ Kadrié said.

  They took me next door where I lay on a large bed with the jar next to me. I stared at a plaster sunburst feature on the ceiling which was painted purple to match the curtains. Purple was fashionable in Pomak households and plaster features were all the rage. They were ugly imitations of the original ceilings from carved wood. I suddenly grasped why people had such poor taste in home decoration here, yet their gardens were lush. It wasn’t just the loss of tradition and the influx of Chinese mass-manufactured ersatz. It was also that their sense of beauty was still attuned to the outdoors. That’s where their lives had been lived until recently. Our lives.

  Then I drifted. I daydreamed of beings with wings. They floated above me and held plants whose names I didn’t know. Their intentions were ambiguous.

  Then mother and daughter came in, holding plants like staffs, and sprinkled me with the basil in all the indicated places while reciting the duva. Again, the sensation of feathers.

  Before I left, her mother showed me a dried flower. Orange and tufted.

  Marigold!

  ‘We call it funda,’ said Kadrié.

  Marigold again! It seemed to follow me. When dried, it had a pungent sweetish smell.

  ‘If you have uterine fibroids, funda is your mother,’ said Kadrié, using a folk expression. When something is your mother, it’s the solution. ‘A friend shrank her fibroids with an infusion of funda and iodine drops,’ she added. Not the same woman as Gyulten’s friend.

  I took it and heard Gyulten’s voice: ‘Everybody has uterine fibroids, sooner or later!’

  ‘There are two types of marigold,’ said her mother. ‘You want the orange one. Not the red.’

  Orange marigold soothes swellings – internal, like tumours and inflamed lungs, and external – like eczema, acne and calluses, with its high amount of flavonoids, etheric oils and carotene. In pre-Hispanic Mexico, the marigold was like the European lily, the flower of the dead. But it’s also used in South America as a culinary herb and a tea – a growth-shrinking tea.

  When I did an online search in English, the topics were: ‘Is marigold poisonous? Do cats hate marigold? Why is marigold dying? Where to buy hybrid marigolds.’

  When I did a search in Bulgarian, I got: ‘Learn about the long medicinal history of the marigold. Therapeutic uses of the wonder plant marigold. What Tagetes can do for you.’

  This happened with many plants. It tells a tale: there was a fork in the vegetal-human road. The East stuck to the path of relationship, the West took the path of severance. Now that we are all ailing, East and West, South and North, we are rapidly coming to a convergence of paths.

  ‘Why the egg, by the way?’ I asked.

  The egg was meant to draw out the negative from me, like a sponge. I was not convinced, but I hadn’t come to be convinced. I’d come to have an experience.

  ‘Because the egg draws things out like nothing else,’ said Kadrié’s mother with finality.

  Later, I learned that among the current witches of The Birches, Kadrié’s mother was top of the heap.

  Kadrié and I walked down to the river. She carried the jar with the egg and I had the marigold and the basil. I asked about her father.

  ‘I don’t know where to begin,’ Kadrié said.

  In the 1960s, the state carried out its first modern assimilation assault on the Pomak communities and was met with civil resistance. They repeated it ten years later with tanks. For his refusal to tow the line that first time, Kadrié’s father was deported to Belene, a notorious camp for political prisoners on a Danubian island. There, he was subjected to nine months of forced labour and torture. Then he was moved to another detention camp and the whole family were internally deported for a time, which meant that they were torn away from The Birches and forced to live with strangers in another part of the country, doing menial work. When Kadrié’s mother went to visit him, she saw him on a river barge but when he tried to wave to her, a soldier bashed him with a spade. Her mother collapsed on the banks of the Danube.

  We walked and Kadrié wiped her sudden tears quickly, trying not to spill the jar. That’s how her childhood had been. Later, Kadrié wanted to study gynaecology, but because of her father’s political record there was no chance. She had a musical gift but developing it required leaving home for the city and that was another no – this time from her parents.

  ‘So I made it my hobby to collect stories and songs.’

  Her grandfather and other survivors had walked home from the Macedonian Front west of here at the end of the First World War. Sucking lead bullets and chewing wheat from their pockets.

  ‘Like birds, grain by grain. For forty days and forty nights, they walked over the mountains.’

  They came across ‘enemy’ soldiers who were drinking horse urine. ‘Good?’ the Birchers asked. ‘Good!’ the poor soldiers grinned. Forty days is a symbolic period in Orthodox Christian and Balkan Islamic tradition, and in ritual magic. It’s a bardo, when the soul is between realms. To lift a deed done to you, you collect forty herbs. You soak them outside at full moon and you wash your body at sunrise.