If you manage to walk around the church with candle-breath still stoking back at you, your sins are erased. We are a shuffling crowd of coats and hats and candles, except for the mutri, the crime gangs, in their suits and gold chains. They bring shields for their candles so that no hint of breeze can get in, and they walk around the church with their candle flames as still as paintings, a procession of ritual purity. The next day Christo introduces me to a sad local boy who follows me and my camera around, watching me, pinning me to his landscape till it makes me nervous. He edges into all my photos like a dog sneaking closer to the dinner table, sidling into frame.
Snow shucks off the steep roofs.
The mountains are melting and tumbling along the river which ran red with patriot blood over a century ago. Heroism was inconceivable to me the night before, but today, after a snowball fight and with a studied comic outlook, it is possible to imagine people hiding with weapons behind the wooden corners of these houses. It is possible to imagine revolution. I leave them all there and head off with my celebrity of strangeness on a train through mountain tunnels and into the northern plains. I wish I had a ghost husband to make me respectable.