Chapter 7
Episode 7
Kai girdžiu liks tik šaknys mirtis ateis nelaukta Šventoji dvasia tyras šaltinio vanduo pasakys kai visi šaltiniai dumblu miręs vanduo geriamasis ... Šulinius užvertė šaltinis nebegali duoti vandens XX migud karas užteršė vandenį Ukrainoje irgi. Vanduo purvinas nuo lavonų kanibalų ir srutų atsimenu Romos gladiatoriaus šaukimą nneee.... Maras antras vardas tavo mirties.... Ne uterus lotynus.
When I hear the word forever I see roots — only roots will remain, pale as peeled almonds, drinking the dark. I was taught this before I could speak it, at the well where the water had a taste of iron and old stone. Death will come uninvited. That is certain. It never calls ahead, never knocks, never waits for the soup to be warm. It arrives at the hour when we have stopped setting a place for it. The Holy Spirit is pure spring water: this, too, I was taught, though I did not understand it. The Spirit will speak at the end, when everything else has gone dumb, and what it says will be the last drinkable thing. It will say: when all the springs are dead of mud, the drinking water is dead. And we will understand, all of us at once, that water was the only word we ever needed.
The wells have been covered in the village. Stones rolled over their mouths like coins on the eyes of the dead. The spring can no longer give water; it is not a spring anymore, only a rumor going gray under the ground. I can still taste that old water when I close my eyes — limestone, cold, the earth's own body offering itself. They say the twentieth century made everything poisonous — XX migud, the war with the name written in mud — and now Ukraine too: the water is dirty there, thick with corpses, with cannibals, with sewers that were never meant to exist. I have never been to Ukraine, but I have seen the rivers on the news carrying things that should have been buried with names and mourners. The water remembers. Water is the earth's memory and ours, and we have made it drink our worst. I was sure, once, that I would live forever — the child's surety, the crocodile's tooth growing back — and so I drank that well water every day as if it were the Spirit itself, waiting for it to tell me my name.
I remember the cry of a Roman gladiator — nneee... — a sound that was not a word, not Latin, not anything that could be written down. We watched a documentary in school, the Colosseum rebuilt in pixels, and the prisoners knelt before the emperor and shouted the old oath: morituri te salutant, those about to die salute you. One of them — I have never forgotten his face, though I cannot remember his name — made that sound as the net came down. Nneee. A vowel that was also a no. The crowd did not pause. Death did not pause. Death has never paused; death has no ears, only roots. It reaches up through the floor of every house, through the bottom of every well. I used to think the Holy Spirit was a light, something shining above the altar. Now I think it is water, only water, and that when it speaks it will say the thing we refused to hear: you poisoned me, and you drank me anyway, and so you are what you drink.
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