The herbarised specimen were cut and you couldn’t see the roots which are really something, Edelweiss Man said, all tangled together like snakes when they make love.

  Edelweiss Man was a believer in karma. He had done some very bad things in his youth and didn’t expect to go anywhere nice when he carked it, he said. That’s why he liked to visit the ‘miraculous’ icon in a monastery, brought in the Middle Ages from Athos by a monk whose destination was Rila Monastery to the north, but he got lost in a storm and ended up here, taking shelter in a small abandoned forest monastery. Years later, locals saw coloured lights in the woods. And there, inside the building, were the remains of the monk and next to him – the icon, giving out unearthly light. We drove there. It was a high, dangerous forest road that climbed into the mountain, a hermit’s road, a road where you won’t be found for years, unless you hug an icon that shines. The icon was indeed shiny – Mary and her son were wholly made of wrought silver, only their faces were painted and nestled within the armour. The monastery was named after Panteleimon, a lucreless healer from Asia Minor who healed the blind with prayer. And mineral water. The monastery had been cared for by a brave lone nun called Domenika. She came as a young woman in the early years of Communism and must have lived a peaceful life in the forest with her hens and goats. The numerics of her lifespan bookended the twentieth century with inscrutable symmetry.

  9.9.1919 and 9.9.1999

  A drunk woman with a moustache was the caretaker of the monastery now, so we didn’t linger.

  On the way down, Edelweiss Man told me about his friend who, during the campaign against the Pomaks, had been ordered to bulldoze their graves. He didn’t want to do it, but they bullied him.

  ‘I wanted to bring him to the icon but he wouldn’t come. Two years later he died.’

  ‘Maybe it was the mine,’ I said.

  ‘It was the graves. Not the mine. A cause-and-effect thing.’ Edelweiss Man didn’t meet my eye and I wondered if he too had bulldozed graves.

  ‘Make sure you go to the old baths,’ Edelweiss Man said when he dropped me off. ‘Before they turn them into another hotel for the rich in this land of the poor. My back is fucked from the uranium mine and the only time the pain stops is when I sit in the men’s pool.’

  I’d been avoiding them because of their neglect, but now I went into the old baths.

  You gave 70 cents to a woman in a white overcoat and you could spend the whole morning inside. Though staying in the pool for more than thirty minutes was not recommended. You could get a headache or pass out – which I nearly did after spending two hours inside on my first day.

  There was no clock inside, because time was replaced by water. Everything in the echoey building spoke of the past – of the 1930s when it was built with high glass cupolas in the main men’s and ladies’ pools and inlaid with those handmade mosaics that you don’t see anymore, and the decades of Communism when things fell apart, and of the last decades when that which had fallen apart was not fixed. Taps dripped. The voices of water came from all sides. All was vapours, drips and rumblings and at first it was hard to see who was inside. Someone was inside. Even when empty, a presence was here: water.

  You entered naked and climbed into the pool down the tiled steps in an involuntary prayer that felt as old as humanity. You climbed into the warm mouth of the earth and paid your respects.

  There was just one woman in the pool, my age, with a handsome face and hard eyes. She was from here but had spent decades working in the city because there was no work here, except in hotels. Her belly bore the marks of long-ago childbirths.

  ‘Every weekend, I come home,’ she said. ‘Because I’m in my place here.’

  Conversation in the ladies’ pool is brief. There is a code. You come naked, no towels, you don’t ask questions, you don’t stare, you don’t take up more space than you have to and if you are asked to rub another woman’s back with her hand mitt, you do it. Being asked is a show of trust.

  Women descend into the pool, slow, naked. Or sit by the individual basins with milky-blue glaze that has been stripped away. They sit, plug and fill the basin with warm water – the taps are broken and water drips anyway – and pour it over their backs and heads with measured movements, using the small bowls provided. The old women bring shampoo and wash their hair, a nod to their childhood when houses didn’t have baths and this was it. Soapy water runs down the blue tiles.

  Throughout the day, women of different ages arrive and enter the steam. Their bodies disappear. Bodies that have given birth, endured surgeries, sat at sewing machines for decades, planted and uprooted vegetable gardens, emigrated, returned, aged, been pounded then abandoned by children and men, lain exhausted on narrow beds. Under the dirty glass dome with the drip-dripping, these rumbling memories rippled through us all, as if it was a single body in the ladies’ pool.

  Drip-drip. All of us are young and old.

  Everybody takes a turn under the lion-headed brass spout. It is the sweet spot. A large Roma woman placed the top of her head underneath it – for headaches. A bird-like old woman held her broken hand under the spout. I bent my head and let the warm stream hit my crunchy neck, where Trendafilka saw spurs. Too much reading, too much looking down, instead of up at the stars.

  You can’t play a role in the ladies’ pool. You just bend your head under the lion spout and have your spikes become softened by the warm water. And you accept things as they are. Dripping taps, decay and all.

  The hard-eyed woman handed me a towel-mitt and asked me to rub her back. When someone bares their back to you, they are defenceless. Few things are so vulnerable-making as exposing your naked back to a stranger. The mitt felt like a gauntlet, the task was intimate and responsible because of the red streaks it leaves, no matter how gently you do it. Her back was long and thin, and I realised that I’d never seen a woman’s back close up. Then she sits next to her overflowing basin and pours water over her head, her face motionless, her eyes closed, a sphynx. One bowl after another.

  I look at the other women and I’m struck with awe at the female back. Later, I rub the back of the bird-like old woman with the broken hand whose face is crisscrossed with lines and whose teeth are gone. Yet her back is astonishingly smooth, untouched by the many burdens she has shouldered. It’s a young woman’s back. It is the same with the other women – their backs are decades younger than their fronts.

  Silence. The bird-like woman thanks me, barely making eye contact. When the large Roma woman offers to scrub my back, I feel timid and decline. She smiles – she sees I am a virgin of the ladies’ pool.

  We sit by our chipped basins, and pour water over our heads and backs. A shard of light hits the glass dome. I pour the noble water over my head and the essence of water hits me: everything flows, everything runs away. We are the water running down heads and backs, and we are the women that never change even as we age. Our backs are like water. Our long hair, our short hair, our raven hair, our white hair, our thinning hair through which the scalp shows – our heads are vulnerable and soft under the water, yet indestructible. We have broken Berlin walls with our heads and we’re not done yet.

  Bowl after bowl, I pour water over my head and I cry. There’s something about pouring warm mineral water on your head that dissolves you.

  It’s involuntary. I cry not for anything in particular. I cry because I am bewitched by these singing mountains, this talking land blighted by greed that still rises to hum a perfect note. Orpheus’s head sang after being torn from his body. For these backs, these heads, these hard lives, these tributaries that crisscross the mountains like the lines on the bird-woman’s face, for the builders, the gatherers, the planters, the healers, the mushroom pickers, the small-scale farmers, the labourers, the cleaners, the caretakers, the emigrants who return and those who don’t.

  I cry because time runs away, yet it pools in my basin long enough to see my reflection.

  I cry because nothing is ours except our own backs, yet we give weight to things that are worth nothing. We carry loads that we can put down. We come to the warm mouth of the lion spout and bend our head, and we are equal.

  This is how women pour water over their heads.

  A fortified settlement was here in the sixth century BC above the present one. The Good Place still had a dozen old churches in place of pagan temples. And seventeen springs.

  The first religion was clean water. The last will be, too.

  They too sat here and poured water over their heads. Their backs were smooth and young even when old. And they cried, then laughed again. They gathered herbs and gave them to their men and horses to eat, drink and rub on – to make them strong when they rode into battle, to make them faithful, to kill them. Prostate trouble was forever the bane of riders. And when the men were away picking cotton in the Aegean south or fighting someone else’s war, the women turned into men. They guarded the flocks in the giant forest, they made tar from pine in vats to sell in goatskin bags, they tilled the sloping furrows, they gave birth and buried children, they washed their linens and their wounds in springs that never changed.

  What happens in the ladies’ pool happens in the men’s pool. The men sit by the dripping basins and pour water over their aching heads, their herniated stomachs, their lonely genitals, their sore backs, and their coughs echo in the chamber when they clear their emphysema lungs.

  I cry because good things are dwindling. Snow, edelweiss, mursala, clean water, and I am meeting creatures shortly before they become extinct.

  Today, a woman in the ladies’ pool told me how as children, they jumped into the overflowing pool, that’s how high the level was and now it didn’t cover your chest. Households always had access to the mineral water, but new hotels with pools tipped the balance.

  Those springs that are left alone haven’t changed their output for a thousand years.

  Today, I crossed the cauldron to a highland Rila village with a peculiar church. It was built in the early seventeenth century on top of the old Byzantine one, by a spring that’s good for the eyes – another one. The water neither increased nor decreased, it’s always the same temperature, and so is the church, its little body made of different parts like its story. Inside it were hundreds of painted figures, saints as soldiers and soldiers as saints and a large procession of female saints – Marina, Anna, Ekatherina, Varvara, Evdokia, Zlata, Nedelya. The artists had not left their names, but legend said that one of them was a woman. Faces whispered in the dark. Who lived here, who died, who washed their eyes in the spring?

  The blind soldiers of Samuil, went one tale. In the wake of the eleventh-century battle between Tsar Samuil and Emperor Basil II, some of Samuil’s blinded soldiers wandered here. The water relieved their eye wounds and they stayed. The singing school for the blind started by them continued for 900 years and until the twentieth century, the village was a hub for singing beggars. They busked from town to town and recruited disabled children for their bands.

  The church patron was Theodore Stratilates, a Roman soldier from the Black Sea, and so stratilati lived here, went another tale, the multi-ethnic Balkan mercenaries who owned land and in exchange fought in Europe’s endless wars. Like the crusader knights and Ottoman spahi, when called up, they mustered an army and left home under a foreign flag. The survivors returned to the mineral cauldron, hoped their wives were still there and washed their wounds in the spring that didn’t increase or decrease. And maybe took up singing for their sins.

  A soldier could turn bard when broke and broken. But a bard could not turn soldier. Rules and rulers came and went, soldiers lost their jobs, bards didn’t.

  Songs and stories were scattered like pollen across these mountains by the odd and the marginal, the deaf and the blind, the autistic with a genius for memory, who forgot to wash but memorised clan histories and long-ago battles, the outcasts and the wounded healers, mad magus magpies who carried memory with nothing but a bag of herbs and sheep lard to nibble and seal wounds, who stopped at springs to wash their matted hair, find bread and sheep’s milk and move on at sunrise with the ragtag army of singing children who were born old, and in whose faces was all the pain of this world. Blind bards without borders.

  The Christ is painted with a long braid, like a peasant woman, and holds the baby-soul of his mother. Then he departs in a red comet of pure ether.

  The spring bubbled. Nothing goes away. I have been here before because others have been here before. Specks of them live in me like stardust. I saw it clearly, as if a veil dropped. I don’t want to live behind a veil anymore. I want to sing a ballad to the mountain and walk along dusty roads in odd clothes, with my hair uncut and crazy herbs in my bag.

  Today, I went to Banya (Bath), built on Roman thermae, to see a fortune-teller called Maria. Edelweiss Man took me there. When he got married, she saw his wife’s head in thirty years’ time. In thirty years’ time, his wife died of a brain tumour. When his edelweiss was stolen, she saw the thief. Maria’s father worked with Edelweiss Man in the mine and died young, and when you’re down in the mine, there’s no Gypsies, Edelweiss Man said, because when the vault collapses, it’s the Gypsy who saves your life, and racists should work in a mine.

  I saw Maria from the back. She had short spiky hair and a stocky back in a T-shirt with silver studs, like a teenaged goth. She lived in the small Gypsy slum next to the pink ruins of the Turkish baths where women wash rugs in a hot cemented spring, next to a new luxury hotel that sucks the spring, next to a row of rubbish containers rummaged by dogs.

  Steam and vapours everywhere. Unemployment was ninety per cent and the men worked abroad. In the slum’s café-shop, Maria held court like a queen of the rubbish dump, drinking from eight in the morning till night, so you had to catch her early.

  When she turned from the bar with a glass of vodka, I saw a face that was gnomic, toothless, dark-skinned with a boxer’s nose, the face of an Indian shaman. She seemed sober as she took my measure and when our eyes met, I shuddered. The men in the café, their faces wrecked, were in awe of her, her word was law and her second sight revered. She was doctor, therapist, friend and mother of the neighbourhood. On her neck was a pendant of a bat.

  This is some of what she saw in my cup, after it sat upside down and she picked it up and made a quick circle with its rim on the saucer, a gesture made a thousand times. I loved my work and ‘had a lot of talent and kudos’, I was at a crossroads, and a spell was cast on me by ‘a woman on an island, surrounded by water.’

  ‘My mother,’ I said.

  ‘Could be, luv, I dunno. She’s done you a deed, so that wherever you go, you’d return to her out of guilt. And you turn round and round like a fly trapped in this glass,’ she swirled the vodka in her glass. ‘You take two steps forward, three steps back. Do you get my dialect?’

  She laughed with pink gums. She could say anything to anyone.

  ‘We can get Edelweiss Man to translate.’ She winked at me, then volunteered: ‘He grows a pure plant but his soul is stained.’

  She’d been drinking since she was a child. ‘It’s my elixir,’ she cackled, and the men laughed with her and raised a glass. Steam rose. Everything was ruined, plundered, alive.

  Her face was slashed by a scar. When she was in hospital after a car crash, the doctors gave up trying to take the bottle from her and just lined up with their coffee cups. Her skill was blunted by the accident, however.

  ‘Aye,’ she said, ‘I don’t like to moan but if one bear chases you, two bears chase me.’

  She offered to lift the spell cast by the woman on the island – all I had to do was write my name and date of birth on a piece of paper, leave it with her and return for instructions. She would give me an amulet. I didn’t care for coffee cups and amulets, but her power was beyond doubt, even if I didn’t understand where it came from and how it worked. I was afraid to give her my name and date of birth on a piece of paper. I was afraid of her fathomless eyes, her X-ray vision, her bottle-a-day sobriety, her end-of-days laughter.

  She was thousands of years old. She had been here all this time, by the Thracian baths, the Roman baths, the Turkish baths, the communist baths, the plague baths – a different guise, but the same force.

  When she took my money and turned to the bar for a ‘wee dram’, her back was once again the back of a teenager.

  I could see Maria in the ladies’ pool by a cracked basin, mirthful with her dark priestess eyes. The bodies melt into the steam and take their chipped coffee-cup destiny with them, yet the water sprites remain. I see her joining the sprites – whispering, cackling with dark mouths, coming and going, drip-drip-drip. The sprites dive in and out of this reality.

  I hear Maria’s laughter. Have a wee dram in the ruins! Laugh, laugh without teeth, because nothing is solid, because the true destination has no name, because – who said that to be empty of yourself is to be full of the world? I pour water over my head, my back is young though I am old. I am somewhere towards the end, but perhaps there is no end. Not if hot water breaks from the earth’s loins, ceaselessly giving and taking nothing in return.

  Pirin

  * * *

  AIR

  Therefore come with me

  To the palace of Nowhere

  Where all the many things are One.

  Chuang Tzu

  Meadows of Asphodel

  I squeezed through Maiden Gorge without stopping. Pesho the siren’s watermelon was chilling in the roadside fountain. All was well, then. I passed the village of red onions, stork nests, refuge for old donkeys and the nun who’d loved men. Pirin loomed above. Its higher gates might just open, this time.

  I passed the ruins of Nikopolis, the elephant-skinned sycamores of Thunder and Fire. The sunflower field blackened with seeds, all heads turned to the sun.

  In the interregnum of sunflowers, the valley was the earth and despite it all, the earth was complete. Nothing was missing. Even as it was changing and ending lives, the virus felt peripheral here, like all events. While events succeeded each other on a flatline, spirals of another kind churned under the surface. They sped up and slowed down to their own tune.