I knew Vinko had died even before a photo of his disfigured face appeared among the obituaries. I believe that a dying person’s soul searches for people they want to say goodbye to and sneaks into those who are near. I recognized him in the faces of the people in line at the bakery. I hadn’t seen him in two decades and was curious why he was looking for me.

          His head was deformed, his legs stilt-like, and his spine curved to the left. Some thirty years older than me, he’d passed his days helping a priest as an altar boy of sorts, but without a robe. He was something like a friend to me, more than any of the other villagers. He’d seen hell.

          They said he’d once been bright. Too young to be killed by the Germans or Italians and part of the generation that would survive.

          They said that a person who touches the priest’s robe during a burial would see where the soul of the deceased went. Vinko either couldn’t resist or didn’t believe in those stories. When his late grandfather was being buried, he grabbed the fringed hem of the priest’s robe. After that, everyone thought he’d lost his mind.

          They said that my grandmother drowned my father’s first wife. They claimed she lured her – I didn’t know what that meant at the time – while she was sleeping, to the well. They found her shoes near the well where she’d left them before she jumped.

          They said that I was my grandmother’s child, that I have the evil eye, that I scheme with fairies and talk to cattle. They said I was a witch. 

          Until my tenth birthday, I spent weekends in the countryside. Life revolved around funerals, where the rest of the family would fall to pieces and I didn’t understand their tears because I couldn’t fathom how someone could grieve over or even love someone I didn’t. I lived among poplars and wild blackberries, oaks and almond trees. I would get lost in the hills and in the damp leaves. I made friends with Vinko (whom my family feared and wanted me to stay away from), with a little calf, and with a host of imaginary sea characters. 

          Even now, it’s difficult for me to think of those days as reality. Were they part of some dreamy, lonely child’s fantasy? Or was reality truly different then—vibrant, colorful, otherworldly somehow? I sneaked into abandoned cottages shrouded in ivy, their insides damp and covered in moss. I would pretend they were underwater worlds, empires of a sea king that opened before me in all their eerie enchantment. At the time, I was obsessed with everything connected to the sea; I pestered my girlfriends from the city to play sea-depths, and in the evenings I devoured episodes of Fish Police. Inspector Gil and the singer Angel. The Little Mermaid, her sisters, and the witch. It didn’t matter who the characters were. I wanted to be every single one of them. I loved the captivating and desperate Angel as much as magical, naive Ariel. There was a threshing floor between the stables where I used to ride the little calf, pretending it was a dolphin. Vinko would play with us, roaring like a proper sea king. 

          Apart from me, there was only one other child who visited the village, a boy I saw in church. Fat, needy, showered with love. I hated him. He always sat between parents I thought he didn’t deserve. The two looked constantly at each other and during the prayer of Our Father they would stretch their arms behind the boy’s back and touch their pinky fingers together. The boy would throw blank, hawkish glances, his eyes fixed on his mother, waiting for her to look his way. Then she would pat the boy on the head and the father would place his hand on hers. I wanted them for myself. 

          After mass, we would go to the old house where my dad’s mother lived and there, over cherry pie baked every Sunday, we gossiped about church. The kitchen smelled of pepper and yeast, and grandma smelled of sherry. Sometimes relatives from the city would join us and mock the priest. Father Miro was a theater trapped inside a man. He behaved like an actor at church, waving his arms, endlessly changing his glasses—near-sighted, far-sighted, near again—preaching about constellations, reciting Ujević’s poems. I never again heard such guttural laughter at someone else’s expense. As if they were watching a stand-up comedian. I laughed with them, echoing them, as I used to do when I couldn’t read the subtitles on TV and instead followed along with the laugh tracks. Neda, my father’s unmarried, cross-eyed sister laughed, too, but only with her voice—not with her eyes, not with her throat, and by no means with her heart. Nights she read the poems Father Miro had recited, and days she watched the news on television. On the rare occasion she left the house, I would sneak into her bedroom and, with my heart in my throat, read her journals, which were filled with wild verses of desire. There, for the first time, I saw the words urge, passion, and groin. There were philosophy books hidden under the bed and two twigs in the shape of a crucifix hanging above her pillow. She was friends with Anka, who always smelled of burnt pig’s hair and sold sausages at the Saturday morning market in Split. In Father Miro’s presence, her breathing grew labored and she blushed.

          Our little calf I loved more than any human. I’d slip out at night, untie the calf, and we’d moon around on the bramble paths or sleep with my head against his, in the straw. Sometimes I went into other people’s stables, braided the horses’ hair, guzzled milk straight from the cows’ udders, kissed the lambs, and roused the dogs.

          But Mother had no mercy. I still have no idea how it all happened. I know she kept saying we needed money and that grandma was too old anyway to keep cows. She would slaughter them and sell off the meat.

          Grandma tried to silence my screams. The villagers were afraid of me. They came looking for my mother, trying to reason with her.

          “Spare the calf, Matilda, for the love of God,” they begged through my sobs. Everyone, even our neighbor Mirko, who never spoke to anyone and whose wife had hanged herself. And then his brother joined in, a hunter whose dogs howled along with my screams. Then Anka, Aunt Neda, our neighbor Kata who used to clean the church.

          I thought they were standing up for me, that they cared for me, but in their kitchens they whispered that a witch’s cries were a bad omen. They burned incense and sprinkled holy water. While I sat for days on the old Turkish stairway outside the house loudly grieving, Vinko sat beside me and matched my every whimper.

          She killed the calf. I ended up in the hospital together with my mother. I was suffering from shock and dehydration. And my mother, she’d cut off her hand while slaughtering the calf. After that, she never looked at me again. She told grandma that some violent force had taken possession of her arm.

          Two days later, an ice storm destroyed all the crops in the village. The animals fell ill, a strange disease that no vet could diagnose. Nobody whispered anymore. Now they yelled curses at my mother for what she’d done, and when they were near me, they threw their hands up in devil’s horns.

          My father, who had been living among shadows, obsessed with the memory of his first wife, now sank even deeper into despair. He barely noticed me, and when he looked at my mother, his eyes fell to where her hand had been. The longer his silences grew, the more her commands multiplied. She insisted that he bandage her stump even though she knew it disgusted him. She asked him to drive her to her friends’ place or to the store and always pestered him to reach for the mugs on the top shelf of the cupboard. Meanwhile, with me, she spoke only as a formality, as though I was an acquaintance she’d run into at the theater. 

          They continued taking me to the countryside and leaving me to my own devices. No one had to chase Vinko away from me now; he ran off on his own because he was afraid of me.

          I wanted that church boy’s parents so bad. On Sundays my eyes would fill with tears as I watched them from the back of the church, and when everyone knelt, I knelt too, praying to disappear because they were peeking at me past their folded hands to see if I was sticking out my tongue or showing the devil’s horns to the eucharist.

          The incident with the boy wasn’t planned. The ploughlands on the far side of the village were called Stanko’s field. There, hemmed in by a stone retaining wall, was a green pond covered in slimy grass. After the calf’s death, I used to sit by it. One day, the boy appeared there out of nowhere. I sprung to my feet, ran over and started hitting him. His weakness enraged me. I pushed him toward the pond. I had no intention of drowning him, I only wanted to scare him a little.

          Vinko, who followed me to the pond that day, made a big fuss. The boy had swallowed a lot of water, but he was alive.

          I was never brought to the village again.

          I heard that, several years later, the boy’s mother died, and shortly afterwards I saw his father in the city with another woman. He greeted me as if I hadn’t almost killed his son and told me that life belongs to the living, perhaps in reference to his new wife. I nodded shyly, but never managed to find the simplicity of mind to understand that thought.

          In the city I forgot all about the blooming orchards and nature’s arrogance. I didn’t visit when grandma died, nor after aunt Neda was found hanging from an almond tree behind the house.

          But then, a single accidental encounter made my body tingle: when I caught sight of an unfamiliar blue-haired woman at a bus stop. She looked like my childhood, like my imagination, like something impossible, like carelessness. She glanced back at me and, before I knew it, disappeared. It was the first time in twenty years that I’d wanted to return.

          On the day of Vinko’s funeral, I arrived just as the coffin was being lowered into the grave. I made my way to the grave so that everyone could see me. I finally knew why his soul was searching for me. In the city, I never thought about witchcraft, but here, among the desolate fields, the brambles, and the smell of wet soil, my skin crawled again with magic. I wanted to show it to them. I spread my hands, stamped my feet into the earth, and lifted myself high into the air.