It must be the memory of Mad Anastasia from our childhood in Andritsaina. I hadn’t expected her today. Yet lately she has been visiting me more and more often.
The village madwoman.
She used to chase us down the road, pelting us with stones. We would torment her whenever we crossed paths, with that peculiar mixture of malice and thoughtlessness that belongs to children. She would answer with curses, fierce and inventive.
“What sort of soul will you hand over, witch? Madwoman? A soul black as the pitch of Hell?”
That was how our religion teacher had taught us to think of her during the compulsory catechism classes at Saint Nicholas. Anastasia was simple-minded, he said. Lost. Fallen. And while he spoke, he would fix our classmate Vangelio with the stern gaze of an inquisitor, catching her stealing glances at us boys from across the room.
The story everyone told was that, as a young woman, Anastasia had fallen in love with a handsome gendarme. He seduced her and left her. Some swore she had conceived his child.
Others whispered that her mother had rid her of it with herbs and rough village remedies.
When the affair became known, the police chief transferred the young officer away, and the scandal was buried. Anastasia, they said, never recovered. She lost her wits. She would stand outside the gendarmerie station and hurl stones at the men in uniform.
That was the story handed down to us.
By the time I knew her she was already old: toothless, dishevelled, her clothes hanging from her like rags. She spat at anyone who mocked her and never missed with a stone. Why would we have doubted what we had been told? The tale fitted neatly into our childhood imagination, which embroidered it still further.
Yet one image from those years lingered stubbornly in my mind: the image of a soul black as tar.
Black as the bubbling asphalt in the road-workers’ barrels when they resurfaced the old road to Bassae each summer. We would lift the lids just to inhale the acrid smell, then stagger away pretending to retch, boys performing for one another.
The memories remain. Only the heat has gone out of them.
And now, after all these years, I see things differently.
The tar-black soul was never Anastasia’s.
It belonged to those who judged her.
To the religion teacher. To the police chief. To the man who took her love and abandoned her. To all those respectable adults who laid claim to her story and remade it in their own image.
As for Anastasia, her soul has slipped free at last from the prison of my childhood memory. It no longer smells of tar. It smells of lilies and jasmine.
Lately I see it often: drifting across the sky, white upon white, like a great feathered cloud.
And whenever it appears, I find myself asking forgiveness—for the cruelty of children, for the easy courage of the young, for my own small share in both.
The years have taught me many things. Among them, that souls are not divided into the sane and the mad, nor even into the righteous and the sinful.
Only into the clean and the unclean.
And if there is one thing I believe now, it is that the souls of the teacher and the officer found their way to the Hell they preached. While Anastasia’s found its way elsewhere: to that gentler Paradise where the weary souls, wounded by this world, are finally allowed to rest.