I’m here in this black forest because the mountains stand guard over timber-and-thatch homes built along the snakes of streams. I’m here because, at these village crossroads—marked by bridges, cemeteries, and old mills—dwell the werewolves, ghostly babies, ghastly mothers.
In folk tales, the first six weeks after childbirth are a dangerous time—children are consumed by their mothers, mothers are consumed by their children, babies are snatched by spirits and replaced with changelings, mothers are transformed into monsters. One of the Brothers Grimm proclaimed that “women may never be left alone during the first six weeks following childbirth, for the devil then has more power over them.” And the things the devil made them do! Measure out the teaspoonfuls of laudanum, paregoric, or milk laced with lime; place the pillow over the baby’s mouth.
As it is in folk tales, so it is in genealogies. In fact, the Old English for genealogy was folctalu or literally, folk tales, family stories. One story is scrawled on the bottom of a family tree in my great-grandfather’s hand—Eva, she kill her one daughter.
A few weeks into my first pregnancy, I was rocked with vertigo and vomiting so constant I hadn’t slept for days. I lay flat on my back watching the ceiling rise and ebb, the new Berber carpet grinding into my back, my shirt twisted and stinking of bile: I wish this baby would die.
And nine months later, he did. Our first son was unbearably beautiful, seemingly perfect, but ill-equipped for our air. His heart struggled over the oscillator’s constant pump-and-suck. He lived for less than a day and died in our arms.
Rychwald, Eva’s village, was located on early maps in Terra Indagines, or, “the land in-between,” and this region is still considered a borderland, between nomad and homestead, between cult and Christianity. I’m also here in this borderland because I’ve been inhabiting my own borderland, the one between sanity and grief.
There are stories we transmit through folk tales because we can’t bear them any other way. One mother beats her infant to death, convinced she is a changeling left by the devil. Another mother so cursed drinks an elixir and it restores her maternal instincts. And another mother goes mourning-mad, sits at a magic rock waiting for her baby to wriggle back out, waiting until moss tunnels into her ears and quail nest in her skirts.
By the medical standards that reigned in Eva’s lifetime, Andrea Yates presented with a textbook case of puerperal insanity—she was refusing to eat, unable to sleep, losing weight, having delusions, and not wanting to touch her newborn. Yet that infamous June morning in 2001, a very ill Andrea Yates was left in charge of five small children. She systematically drowned them all in under an hour.
People magazine’s headline was “Nightmare.” The article went on to call Yates “ordinary,” and then offered up the following examples: “fresh-baked Christmas cookies [for the neighbors] . . . the whole family pitched in for landscaping chores.”
One phobia common to most anxiety sufferers is the fear that they will go crazy, that they will be transformed into what they most fear. Werewolf lore takes the sensation of being uncomfortable in your own skin to its most extreme: you wake in a predator’s skin, compelled by brutish instincts. So do contemporary infanticide narratives—the ordinary mother suddenly turned monstrous.
There are still days, more than a decade after the Yates case, when I methodically put away any sharp objects left out on the counter or sitting in the sink, fearful that I may suddenly go insane and attack my family with nail scissors or a paring knife.
It didn’t help that, during and after my second pregnancy, I was regularly screened for my propensity to snap. I would sit in the beige chair in the beige office, swelling and weary and still grieving—my dearest firstborn, you who smelled of milk and earth and had crystalline eyes that you opened exactly twice—and the psychiatrist would run through the Edinburgh Postnatal Depression Scale (EDPS). I was supposed to respond Yes/No to a series of ten statements about how I’d felt that past week, statements like I have blamed myself unnecessarily when things went wrong and I have been so unhappy that I have had difficulty sleeping and, of course, the thought of harming myself has occurred to me.
The psychiatrist also wanted to know how I was occupying my time, pregnant on modified bed rest, waiting until my second son was born and either died or didn’t. I told him I was making a quilt from the baby clothes. I told him I was boxing up all of the hospital bracelets, rereading the autopsy results, and storing the ashes inside an elaborate iron box.
You are still very tearful, the psychiatrist observed.
My baby is still dead.
He suggested yoga poses and breathing exercises I could do in bed. Or a craft of some sort, a project to keep me occupied.
I told him I was going to start researching a great-great-aunt who had murdered her child in the 1880s.
He frowned and leaned forward in his beige chair, but was careful to phrase his disapproval in the form of a question: Why do you think you feel compelled to do this?
My search officially begins in a 1970s-style church basement. I unspool microfilm and feed it into the projector, then scroll through amplified hieroglyphs projected onto white construction paper. These are the church records for the village formerly known as Rychwald in a region formerly known as the Kingdom of Galicia in what was once the Hapsburg Empire.
But these microfilmed church records stop at 1849, too early for me to find any evidence of my own great-great-grandfather Peter Zanowiak or his mysterious sister Eva. It takes another year of spinning other microfilm reels and wiring money to translators in remote archives before word comes from the Polish National Archives that there is hard evidence of Eva’s existence. She was born in 1866 in a small village with an ornate onion-domed church and grew up in a long, low home plastered and painted white, the youngest of the seven surviving children of a respectable farmer.
On a Thursday after weeks of ceaseless rain, raucous thunderstorms, high winds, and tornado warnings, I first glimpse a copy of her baptismal record. It will soon be the summer of Casey Anthony. Jury selection has just begun in the media circus of a case surrounding a young woman accused of killing her two-year-old daughter.
The contemporary media offers me only two narratives of infanticide: Women who kill their children are either mad or they are bad. They are either perfect mothers who inexplicably snap, like Andrea Yates, or they are defective women, incapable of maternal sacrifice, like Casey Anthony. The tabloid images in the newspapers and flashing across the TV screen show a slender tanned brunette at a nightclub, shot glass aloft. Monster mom partying four days after tot died is one headline.
I find even more archival evidence of Eva’s existence during the spring that Tonya Thomas shoots her four children and Stacey Smalls suffocates her eighteen-month-old twins, and the cover of Time asks, Are You Mom Enough?
And so, during the summer that Lisette Bamenga forces her two children to drink windshield wiper fluid, I walk the snake of asphalt that runs along the brook, past the goat and the satellite dish, and ask why she did it, why did Eva do it?
2. The Witnesses
I suppose my mother, with three little ones already, was simply sick of helping with homework, with elaborate projects—dioramas, posterboard displays—that required more out of her than of me. Fair enough. And maybe she didn’t snap as I remember, but something about that family tree project and her reluctance stuck with me.
Besides, who really wants to relive the steamer trunk and the acrid pallet, the watery soup, the cloudy water, the anthracite dust in trouser cuffs, then thread-chaff, then factory gates chained shut, the crescendo of cheap vodka, the slow rusting of the whole town?
And so I told my third-grade classmates I was a Romanoff descendant, the grandchild of a princess. This is early evidence of my flair for the dramatic, but also of my deep uncertainty about my origins. My classmates could say they were Irish, or Italian, or could offer up precise equations to account for themselves: I am half Turkish, one-quarter Japanese, and one-qu
arter Native American. My dream of being a Russian princess was rooted in the ship manifests and census records that listed my ancestors as Rusyn, or Rusynak, or Ruthenian.
I wasn’t quite sure what or where that meant.
My ancestors hailed from a place that had changed hands so many times, been subject to so many mass exterminations and exoduses, that it was scarcely a place at all. Ethnic Rusyns have never had their own homeland. My father’s branch of this ethnic group was ruled by Hungary. My mother’s branch lived under Polish, then Austrian, then Polish rule. In the nineteenth century, this northern branch became known as Lemkos, a nickname derived from their dialect, which uses the word lem to mean only, just, or but.
I can visit the remnants of Eva’s birthplace, a Lemko sheep-herding village in what is now southeastern Poland, but there may be no one left to tell Eva’s story.
Any ethnic Lemkos left in Rychwald after World War II were rounded up between March and June of 1947 and marched to the closest railway station. They were then loaded onto many of the same freight cars that had been used to transport their Jewish neighbors to the concentration camps. Those who resisted were shot. Before World War II, there were 140,000 Lemkos living in Poland. Today, that number is around 6,000.
Many villages were set aflame or razed to the ground; others, like Rychwald, were reduced to ghosts of their former selves and given new, more Polish names. According to the 1936 census, Rychwald held 1,050 Lemkos, thirty-three Roman Catholics Poles, and three Jews. By 1949, the village name had been changed to the Polish Owczary, and not a single Jew or Lemko remained. It is not just women who have been systematically silenced or erased, but entire peoples. Ghost children. Ghost villages.
My guide, Alicja, folds and refolds the maps while her boyfriend eases the car along in first gear, turning off onto a rutted dirt road that seems promising. This circuitous route into Eva’s village is how we acquire Anna, or rather, how she acquires us, for her immediate reaction is that of babas everywhere—she enthusiastically adopts us, and then immediately begins to scold us. Alicja translates her rapid-fire admonitions: We will come in. How can we bear to think of saying no to a lonely old woman? We haven’t eaten enough. We should not refuse her offer of coffee; that is rude. What will our mothers think of our manners? We should always listen to our mothers. She, herself, was a very obedient child.
The house is a single-level log and stucco home with plaster walls. She settles down on her bed, motioning at the wooden chairs and table for us. Anna’s personal style can be best summed up as Eastern European Utilitarian: a traditional embroidered kerchief over her hair, but also a man’s white undershirt, a man’s suit vest, black sweatpants, and orthopedic shoes. If her dress is utilitarian, the rest of her textiles are impractically decorative. Everything possible is embellished: the large tapestry on the wall behind Anna, the comforter on her bed, the hand towel, the tablecloths—embroidered with blond women in blue dresses, spindly trees and near-neon flowers, narrow saints and spring lambs.
Even Anna’s speech is embellished, by chortles and snorts, comical faces, emphatic gestures, and bits of song. Alicja can barely keep up with the conversation, and so her boyfriend, when he is not laughing, steps in as translator: Now she is telling us complaints about her dead husband . . . and now some story about drinking too much, but I am having trouble following . . . Now she would like us to come back and visit in July, when there is a big festival . . . Complicating matters, Anna’s songs are in a nearly extinct dialect neither of them can translate well. I scramble to try to record scraps of this mother tongue on my iPhone. After each song, she waits until we respond with applause. Then she promptly launches into another litany of complaints. Now she is telling how the cow keeps wandering off. She says she was once robbed by village boys . . . Now she is arguing with Alicja about what day we will come to visit next.
This is why the summer sky is low and gray with impending rain by the time we arrive in front of the wood-shingled church in the center of the village. The walk over revealed a rural village like most others, rolling green punctuated by haystacks, until this improbable fantasy with its three bulbous copper spires. Opieki Matki Bożej or Church of the Protection of the Mother of God, a UNESCO World Heritage site, is one of the oldest wooden churches in Europe, built entirely of larch shingles without a single nail.
Houses have burned and collapsed, fields have been left fallow, but the overall design and property lines are unchanged from when Rychwald was officially chartered in 1417. This means that I see some of the same structures as Eva’s parents did—her mother Rozalia in thick white and blue skirts, her father Daniel in his distinctive shepherd’s coat—when they left House #27 and trudged across the snowy road on December 9, 1866, to have their four-day-old daughter baptized. The same slant of sky, the same rolling hills. Someone’s woodpile; a tilting well; and other long and low wooden homes, stuccoed and lime-washed white or blue. In winter, the animals would have been stabled, but, now, in late June, there are cows in the pasture and sheep on the hill.
The church is surrounded by a low stone wall. A woman from the village unlocks the front gate. To enter, I must duck under a weathered plank with AHO DNI 1653 scalloped out in script. I find myself in a gilded world—icons with their long, flat faces refracted and multiplied by stained glass, illumined in an afternoon light both mournful and terrible. If the fields outside promise an infinity of one kind, the cycles of the harvest and the undulation of the hills, then this church promises another infinity, one that is layered and paneled, vaulted and iridescent. These simple country folk had scrimped and saved to create astounding artifice. While they lived in cramped, dark, and smoky quarters, they worshipped in glittering and airy spaces.
The church was built in the Greek Catholic tradition, which means the altar is hidden by an iconostasis, an elaborate partition that runs floor-to-ceiling and has been untouched since the seventeenth century, except by termites. This partition is topped by seven panels of somber saints and, at its center, an icon of Christ in the Tomb. Two baroque side altars—carved columns, cherubs, inlays, and more gilt—portray the Madonna with Child and the beloved St. Nicholas. I can sit in the same pew Eva sat in, Sunday after Sunday, I can stare at the same elongated saints, but I can get no closer.
Anna tells how there were no tanks, only vehicles, soldiers. But we were not lucky like the other villages who had two hours to pack—we were given exactly twenty-five minutes.
Anna tells how there were 360 Lemko houses here before World War II. In the 1950s, only seven Lemko families returned. She and her husband were the first, and they had to buy back the home that had been in the family for 250 years from its new occupants.
Anna had heard of the Zanowiak family, she could point to where their house once stood, but as much as she wanted to help us, she could conjure no village gossip about any Eva who had killed her daughter.
In the church cemetery, I find evidence of only one Zanowiak: the surname on a headstone, in stout and square Cyrillic, topped with a vaguely Mayan Madonna and child. There are dozens of cracked monuments, dozens of smaller stones, all children, uncounted.
3. The Means
Eva came of age during an epidemic of infanticide.
Folk tales from the period tell of murdered infants who refuse to stay buried, who continue to live stunted and underground. One Lemko villager claims that, when he was eight, he saw the following: “This little boy ran and squeezed under the house . . . He was barefoot and bareheaded and wore nothing but a very small shirt . . . The women told us it was a zmitca, that is a baby who never developed because the girl who had it smothered it when it was born.” In another folk tale, the zmitca lives under one of the porch steps. In a legend called “The Crying Child,” a servant girl suffocates her illegitimate child and buries his body under a shed. Now all who pass this shed hear an infant wailing. The folk tales say the babies will keep crying until given proper burials.
Infanticide was so pervasive in the Hapsburg Em
pire that, by special imperial decree, a specific door of Vienna General Hospital was designated for the use of unmarried women who wished to deliver anonymously. This entrance was in operation for seventy years, and similar entrances were designated in the hospitals of other large towns.
Between 1882 and 1898, when Eva would have been at her reproductive prime, there were 1,658 reported cases of infanticide in the entire Austrian Empire, an average of about 100 reported cases per year.
In Western Europe, especially England, infanticide rates were even higher. Consider that, in less than a year, a single London district reported as many infanticide cases as the whole Austrian Empire. In the whole of London, more than 200 infants were found dead in the streets every year. The press there was often apocalyptic about the epidemic of maternal monsters:
The metropolitan canal boats are impeded, as they are tracked along by the number of drowned infants with which they come in contact . . . We are told by Dr. Lankester that there are 12,000 women in London to whom the crime of child murder may be attributed. In other words, that one in every thirty women (I presume between fifteen and forty-five) is a murderess.
If English girls drowned their babies, wrapped in newspaper, soggy with sleep, in the Thames, Rusyn village girls did so in forest creeks or family wells. Among the lost Lemkos, drowned infants become a particular ghost, not zmitca but baby rusalki who haunted these creeks as water nymphs and will-o’-the-wisps.
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