When the bus lets us off in Fetinino, still a kilometer's walk to Anufrievo, we take a shortcut path into the village that passes through a swamp. Two slabs of rotting wood along the path make it possible to walk without sinking. I look down at my feet waddling along the boards and watch the heels of the woman in front of me. I am on an unfamiliar path in the cold wind. This will be my home.

Men walking down a street in Anufrievo.

The house where I will be living has been painted bright yellow, and in the yard stands a bush whose leaves are flaming red. My hosts will be Ludmila Ivanovna and Alexei Alexeevich Gromov, a married couple in late middle age, with grown children. The inside of their house smells of sour milk, sweet wood rot and fresh hay.

Members of the Russian intelligentsia have provided me with two models for thinking about what this village will be like. In their sharply dichotomized views, rural Russia is either the locale of all that is good in the "essence" of Russianness, where people are simple-hearted, wise, expansive and soulful (a romantic view borrowed whenever necessary by nationalists); or, it is the pit of all that is humiliating in the Russian existence -- poverty, ignorance, brutality and baseness. Always one or the other: salvation or damnation.

October 17, 1994

It seems that I have fallen into a remarkable situation. Alexei Alexeevich is a well-known healer in the region. People constantly come here -- from Belozersk, Kirillov, other nearby towns and villages -- to get cures from Alexei. Today a woman came from Kirillov about her son, who has bone cancer and whose leg was just partly cut off.

Alexei's healing method is linked to the general method for spell casting in the traditional Russian practice of sorcery, where incantations are whispered into a bottle of water and the water is taken by a client. What distinguishes him from a traditional healer is that he "turns toward the saints" when reading his incantations, and not toward various "unclean forces" such as forest, barn and lake sprites, demons and ghosts -- all of whom I've heard stories about here. The Russian Orthodox Church is officially against these kinds of healing practices because of their pagan origin. Alexei thinks of himself as a Christian, however, and has sought out the blessing of the church for his work.

When preparing the water, Alexei sits alone by his bed, facing the icons. There must be relative quiet. Does he help people? Certainly there are those who believe he does. To an extraordinary degree, he is ready to open his home and his heart to the sick and the cursed. He sits with them for hours sometimes, talking them through their problems, from cancer to alcoholism, from family difficulties to visitations of ghosts. People leave him a little bag of tea, a piece of chocolate or a freshly caught fish as a sign of their gratitude and in the hope that the cure will work.

February 27, 1995

Women in one of the planting fields of Anufrievo examining seed potatoes.

I went for a walk down the road toward Fetinino to clear my head. After passing the crossroads, I came upon Antonina Ivanovna Malikhova and some other women standing and chatting in a group. They called me over and wished me a happy holiday and we talked for a while. I liked being there --it was light and easy and we laughed about how I was going to sing their dirty chastushki (four-lined rhymed songs) to my professors when I go to defend my thesis.

The holiday is Maslenitsa (Mardi Gras) and I asked the women to describe to me how they used to celebrate it. They told me about baking pancakes, riding around on the horse-drawn sleigh, singing and dancing. They told me about some games they used to play as children in the snow. Antonina painted a picture of the beautiful past again, the one that she and others have described for me so many times, and then she finally said, "God, my heart hurts when I think of the war -- those boys that died..." Fifteen boys from her native village were killed during World War II.

A villager honors the dead with a drink on Troitsa, or Trinity, a Russian Orthodox Holiday celebrated even during the Soviet Period.

She and I walked back toward her house and she tightened my scarf and pulled up my fur coat and ordered me not to walk on the slippery part of the snow. She said that I should come and live in the village for good. Antonina is my favorite babushka to visit and has exactly two personalities: one when her teeth are in and the other when her teeth are out. Without teeth, she has droopy eyes and a sad, sorry expression. She refers to herself as "stupid and illiterate" and speaks of her aches and pains. But once the teeth are in, her eyes shine with irony and savvy. We sit and laugh -- her jokes about sex and politics are right on target. I love hearing stories about her youth. She told me once about how when the village was required to collectivize, the villagers signed a petition against it -- but instead of signing their names in a list, they signed them in the space of a circle, so no one could know who had signed first.