Episode 3lese suo

We were children then, in a village that no longer exists on any official paper. The sugar beet fields swallowed the horizon, and the men who worked them were swallowed by the earth at dusk. Bruno was the only boy who didn’t laugh at my grandmother’s stories about the kójikes—the little creatures who lived in the roots of the turnips, who whispered secrets to the soil. He said he believed them, not because he was kind, but because he had heard them too. One night, he took me to the edge of the field and pressed his ear to the ground. “Listen,” he said. “They’re singing about the war that hasn’t happened yet.”

I didn’t hear anything. But I pretended I did, because pretending with Bruno was the closest thing to flying.

Now I am older, and the war has happened, and more wars have happened, and I sit in a room that smells of lavender and old paper, trying to write a memoir that keeps slipping away from me. The scarf is around my neck, even though the radiator is hissing like a trapped animal. I am thinking about Italy.

Not the Italy of postcards—the Italy of my fever dreams, the one that exists in the margins of a book I found in a charity shop in Vilnius. The book was called Il Futuro è una Sera, and its pages were filled with drawings of machines that could harvest moonlight. The author was a woman named Laura Beggiotti, and her name felt like a secret I was meant to keep. I carried the book home wrapped in my scarf, and for weeks I read it by candlelight, convinced that the words were rearranging themselves when I blinked.

Laura wrote about a secret Walpurgisnacht, a sabbath that took place not in the mountains but in the catacombs beneath Milan, where the ghosts of futurists danced with the ghosts of mothers who had died in childbirth. She wrote about monarchy—not the kind with crowns, but the kind where a single idea rules your bloodstream until you can’t tell if you’re thinking or being thought. She wrote about a child who was born with a key instead of a heart, and how the mother spent her whole life trying to find the lock.

I read that passage so many times that the ink started to blur, and I began to wonder if Laura was writing about me. Not the me that exists now, but the me that might have existed if I had stayed in the beet fields, if I had let the kójikes sing me into the soil. That me would have been a mother. That me would have known what it meant to hold a life that was both yours and not yours. That me would have understood why the revolution is always a nursery rhyme first.

Bruno is dead now. He died in a hospital in Riga, surrounded by machines that beeped in a language he didn’t speak. I was there, holding his hand, and I remember thinking that his skin felt like the scarf—worn, familiar, holding the shape of something that no longer existed. In his last hours, he opened his eyes and said, “The beets are singing again.” I didn’t correct him. I just squeezed his hand and listened, and for a moment, I heard them too—a low, humming chorus rising from the hospital floor, telling us about the war that hadn’t happened yet, the one that would be fought with silence and memory.

After he died, I went back to the village. It wasn’t there. The fields had been paved over, and a supermarket stood where my grandmother’s house had been. I stood in the parking lot, holding the scarf, and I felt the absurdity of it all—the way we build monuments to nothing, the way we forget the names of the creatures who lived in the roots. A woman walked past me, pushing a trolley full of sugar, and she looked at me like I was a ghost. Maybe I was.

I came home and wrote a letter to Laura Beggiotti. I didn’t have her address, so I addressed it to “The Future, Italy” and slipped it under my pillow. That night, I dreamed of a child with a key instead of a heart, and in the dream, the child was me, and the key was the scarf, and the lock was the moment I decided to stay instead of leave. I woke up crying, which is something I haven’t done in years.

The radiator hisses. The lavender is too strong. I am still holding the scarf, and I am still thinking about the secret Walpurgisnacht, where the mothers dance with the machines, where the revolution is a lullaby, where the child with the key finally finds the lock and turns it, and the door opens onto a field of beets that have been waiting all along.

I don’t know if I believe in any of this. But I know that Bruno believed, and that my grandmother believed, and that somewhere in Italy, a woman named Laura Beggiotti is writing a book that will find its way into another charity shop, and another lonely person will wrap it in a scarf and carry it home.

The scarf is a map. And the map is a promise: no matter how far you travel, the roots are still there, singing. All you have to do is press your ear to the ground and listen.