It was a chilly night in October, when I arrived at the radio station in the center of Bucharest. This was a six-storey block with frosted windows, fronted by a tall and bare colonnade. The main door was stiff and heavy, and needed a sharp yank to budge. Inside, the click of my heels echoed through the empty hall. I said good evening to Cristian, the security guard, who sat with his feet up on a desk, laughing at dog videos on his phone.

The corridors were lined with dozens of locked doors. A staff of hundreds used to work here during the communist period, and a large number stayed on after the revolution. As the public finances shrunk, the state cut back on support for old media. Many of my colleagues retired, and we didn’t take on new recruits. But we retained this palatial building, though we worked in only a handful of its rooms.

Stuck to a padded door was a sign that read ‘DO NOT ENTER’. Turning the handle, I walked into the office, where my producer, Katia, leant forward in a leather armchair, cigarette dangling between her lips.

“Is she here?” I asked.

“Yes,” said Katia.

“You talked to her?”

“I did.”

“And the story?”

“It’s unbelievable.”

“Is it true?”

“I don’t know.”

“Could it be true?”

“Anything can be true.”

“Will it sound true?”

“When she tells it, yes.”

“What’s her name?”

“Ilinca.”

In the studio sat a small woman with a thick crop of white hair tied back in a red headscarf. As I settled opposite, wide green eyes stared at me, keen and penetrating.

“Ilinca, thank you for coming.”

“Thank you for listening to me.”

“Is Katia treating you alright?”

“She offered me coffee.”

“You don’t want any?”

“I never have trouble staying up.”

On the wall clock, the hour and minute hands were about to meet. I placed on a pair of padded headphones and adjusted the microphone arm to my height. A jazzy intro purred. The On Air light flashed red, and I slid up a volume track. The music faded.

“I’d like to welcome you to the midnight hour, with me, Catalin Irimescu. Tonight we’ll be speaking with Ilinca, who has a story to tell. Hello Ilinca.”

She leaned into the microphone.

“Hello.”

“Where are you from?”

“I live in Bucharest.”

“And what do you do?”

“I’m retired.”

“What did you do before?”

“I worked in a biscuit factory.”

“A good job?”

“A fine place until after the revolution.”

“What happened?”

“The factory shut down.”

“Why?”

“People changed their tastes. They didn’t like the biscuits we made. They were too crumbly, too dry, and lacked flavor. They wanted better biscuits. Ones from abroad. Ones that were both crunchy and chewy, with different ingredients, and covered in thicker and richer chocolate. Of course, I had to admit these were better biscuits than ours. But this meant I didn’t have a job anymore.”

“You have another story to tell?”

“I do.”

“About something that happened a long time ago?”

“When I was young.”

“Is it something nice?”

“It isn’t.”

“Go on.”

“I did things back then, things I had to do.”

“What do you mean?”

“They weren’t nice, either.”

“Ilinca, take your time. We have the night.”

I grew up in a small village, called Ciuperceni, on the plains in the south. No hills, mountains, forest or sea were near, so there was little to shield us from the elements. The winters were raw and bleak, and the summers harsh and bright, but spring and autumn played tricks on us. During these seasons, the mornings were frosty, so I left the house dressed in an overcoat. In the fields in the afternoon, the sun burned hard. I took off my coat and kept tilling the hay in no more than a shirt, but I was still drenched in sweat.

I lived a few minutes’ walk from the village, in a small cottage with a fruit and vegetable garden, and ten acres of land. Mum died giving me life, so I was left with Dad and Grandma. When it was warm, Dad found extra work on the bigger farms, picking fruit and digging ditches, but also counting produce, and writing in ledgers. Meanwhile, Grandma bottled gherkins in a local factory, until her arms, knees and hands became stiff and red, and the manager told her to leave.

What we grew, Grandma sold in the market, which brought us enough money for wood, milk and cheese. During the week I went to school, and on a Friday, we made a fire in our back garden. As we watched the flames, Dad taught me about the land and the sky, and how crops grew, and why the weather changed, and he shared songs with words that weren’t in our language. When I asked him what they meant, he didn’t know. “Maybe they don’t mean anything,” he said, “other than what we feel when we sing them.”

Grandma told us stories about the village before the wars. How the farmers and the peasants never left, but the bosses changed. There used to be Turks, Austrians and Greeks, and now it was the State. This was a new type of master. With the Turk, the Austrian and the Greek, she could look them in the eye, even if she didn’t know what they were saying to her, but how could she do this with the State? How could she look the State in the eye?

Dad said it had a face. The central Government had appointed an administrator, called Ionut Ispas, who was now running Ciuperceni. He was a local, who had been friends with Dad at school. The two of them ran barefoot around the nearby lakes, throwing stones at the carp, and catching frogs in jam jars. But Ionut was clever and quick, and soon moved to the capital to study numbers.

A few weeks later, I saw Mr Ispas on the mud-track of our village. Dressed in a white suit and bowler hat, he was smoking thin walnut-brown cigarettes that he kept in a leather pouch. He visited every house, asking the peasants and farmers to hand over their machinery, animals and land, so we could farm large areas together. Eventually, he came to our gate, and Dad greeted him.

“I have a great opportunity for my oldest friend,” said Mr Ispas.

“Go on,” said Dad.

“You will be part of this new system.”

“Don’t be too sure.”

“You can go far.”

“I am happy where I am.”

“It will help boost the yields in the village,” he went on. “If we produce a high quota of crops to pack and prepare for the lorries, County HQ will give us fuel and food for the winter, and new tools and machines for the spring.”

“So you say.”

“Will you join us?”

“No, friend,” he tapped his chest. “Only I know how to make the best of my earth.”

Over the next few weeks, Mr Ispas persuaded all the villagers to join the collective, except Dad. They mapped out bigger fields to plow, and used money from the HQ to build a warehouse to store the corn. Meanwhile, Dad worked longer hours, and didn’t come back till late at night. Grandma found it too painful to carry our vegetables to the market, so she sold what she could to the neighbors, and pickled what was left.

One afternoon, on my way back home from classes, I caught a whiff of cloves and petrol. Mr Ispas was standing outside our gate, his dark cigarette balancing between two fingers. Dad was in the garden, tying vines to a trellis.

“I respect you,” said the administrator.

“Then leave me be,” said Dad.

“And I like you.”

“We’ve always been straight with each other.”

“I don’t want what has to happen to happen to you.”

“If it has to happen, Ionut, it has to happen.”

“There’s no way I can stop it.”

Dad finished knotting a thread, and bit off the loose string.

“What’s mine,” he said, “will never be yours.”

The following morning, tires skidded outside our front garden. Two broad men in long black coats walked into our house, pushed their way into the kitchen, and pulled Dad out of his chair. Kicking their legs and spitting in their faces, he tried to struggle free, but the men dragged him outside, and threw him into the back of a van.

The next day he didn’t return, or the next week, or many weeks after that.

Although the collective seized the fields around our home, the peasants refused to cut the grass, or dig the earth. The land lay fallow, and weeds grew, hiding our fence in a curtain of vines and wildflowers.

A few months later, an envelope with my name arrived, in Dad’s handwriting, already opened. Inside was one sheet of paper, ripped from an exercise book, with scribbled words, almost unreadable. Dad told me how he was staying in a camp by a swamp, where the Danube forks and meets the sea. Every day, he cut reeds to make thatch for roofs, and every night, he slept in barracks with farmers, writers, and teachers. Three more letters came, where he talked about why the other men had been put in prison with him. Then there was a gap, which got longer and longer. I asked at the post office if there were any letters for me. The postmistress said if any would come, I’d get them, and not to bother her again.

Because Dad was in the camp, this meant I had done something wrong too. After I finished school, the state would not let me study anywhere else, or move to another town. I could only work as a laborer for the collective, where I joined the peasants pumping water from the lakes to the fields. Grandma couldn’t move from her room, so sat in her armchair all day, staring out of the window. In the afternoon, I cooked a soup of herbs, eggs and chicken stock, and baked bread and polenta. I helped Grandma eat dinner, and we sat and spoke of the past, until it was time to put her to bed.

Once a week, I made a fire, where I danced, and chanted the strange lyrics that I remembered as a child, over and over. I enjoyed how the sound moved through me, dizzily, hungrily, making me sick with energy. Far away, the villagers watched my shadow shifting in and out of the light. Through a net of weeds, I could see them stare. I knew they didn’t like what they saw or heard, but they said nothing.

As the collective grew, the leaders in the County HQ instructed us on using specific seeds, the place to sow them, and the time to harvest. Although the older farmers and peasants told Mr Ispas these orders did not respect nature, he still obeyed them, and made us follow them.

It was summer. No rain had fallen in May and June, and the forecast for the next months was dry. The stems of the wheat and the corn hung with limp, gray leaves, and refused to flower, or bear fruit and grains.

To save the crops, the farm needed water. But the wells in the village were too muddy, the rivers were too far from our pumps, and the collective had already drained the nearby lakes. Desperate, Mr Ispas went to the city to plead with his bosses for money and equipment. In the office of the County HQ, a supervisor told him the whole country had the same problem, and no one could organize the digging of ditches to a river, or the laying of pipes, at such short notice.

At a loss, the administrator came home.

Once word of his failure spread through the village, everyone felt nothing more could be done.

But there was one option left.

It was a morning in the third month of the drought, when I heard a clicking of the front gate, and I ran to the window, and pulled back the curtain. Walking up our garden path, Mr Ispas draped his white jacket over one arm, and removed his bowler hat, which he held against his chest.

From the armchair, Grandma’s eyes flared.

“You have to get out of here,” she said.

“I need to think of something.”

“You must flee.”

“The party won't let me.”

“You must.”

“Where to?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“There is nowhere I can go.”

“Then go nowhere.”

“I’d need permission.”

“Even for nowhere?”

“Yes, even for nowhere.”

At the porch, I asked Mr Ispas to sit in the shade of our vines, while I returned to the kitchen. From the worktop, I picked up a bottle of plum brandy and a shot glass, and laid this on a thin tray, which I carried out to him. Nodding in thanks, he poured the spirit, and sipped a large measure.

“The weather has failed us,” he said. “Technology has failed us. Now the party is failing us. But we have to make the quota.”

“Why did you come to me?” I asked.

“Because I know what people say.”

Sitting up straight, I folded my hands, and looked coldly at the guest.

“I don’t want anyone to hurt me,” I said.

“No one will hurt you,” he said, “if you can help us.”

“You won’t like what I have to tell you.”

“That doesn’t matter.”

Mr Ispas took another sip of brandy.

“There are two Gods,” I said. “The God of the Air and the Goddess of the Earth. They first met at sunset, when they fell in love. Together they were powerful. Out of the sea, they carved the mountains, hills and grasslands. When the sky was bright, it fed the ground with light, and when it was gray, it nursed the ground with rain. So the fields were lush, and the plants reached up high. Forests of fir and pine, or oak and beech, grew in the places where the Goddess loved the God, and where he loved her.

“Like all couples, they argued. Wherever they shouted at one another, a crack in the earth appeared, fire burst through the rocks, or the wind tore apart a plain, scattered the dirt, and left behind a desert. After one fight, the God refused to see the Goddess any more, and banished her.

She fled to where the sun and the wind couldn’t touch her, deep in the soil.

“Today she remains crawling through the dirt, avoiding contact with the light. She helps the plants to grow, and slips outside after dusk, to look after the animals of the night. Whenever her followers bless her with an offering of smoke and ash, she makes their land fertile. Because there are many in our village who believe in her, she rewards us, which is why the flowers grow so tall and the fruits are so rich in Ciuperceni. But her old lover can kill the crops by blowing the clouds away from our fields, and letting the sun hammer the earth. This is what has happened.

This is why we suffer.”

Mr Ispas topped up his glass, looked at the drink sadly, and knocked it back.

“What can we do?” he said. “Play nice with this… guy in the sky?

“No,” I said. “Make him angry.”

Closing his eyes, he sighed:

“How do we do that?”

“The God of the Air loves the birds, because of the beautiful way they fly and sing. So he caresses them with a breeze, and offers them strong currents for their long journeys. They are his friends. We must hurt them. You have to order a hundred peasants to capture a hundred magpies, and bring them to the land at dawn, on the last day of the month.”

In the meeting hall, Mr Ispas took me along to give the same speech to the farm-workers. He was expecting resistance to an eighteen-year-old girl preaching such strangeness. Once I told the peasants how to break this curse, they bowed, glanced between themselves, and nodded in agreement. It was clear that my idea satisfied everyone, and the crowd started talking about the God and Goddess, as though they had always honored them. They pretended to know the magpie spell, but said they had been afraid to suggest such sorcery to their boss, as it sounded stupid.

All the village—including the elders and children—scouted a nearby forest, the gardens of the houses, and rows of trees by the sides of the fields, using every trick possible to trap the birds. They put down bait that led to a cage, and placed ladders against tree-trunks, where they beat the branches with sticks, while holding out large sacks to catch the magpies.

In the gray before dawn, we all stood on the cracked earth, at the same distance from one another. Each of us held a live bird, our hands covering its head and beak, and gripping its wings. A thread of gold appeared, forming a dome, which grew over the horizon until we could see its full breadth from the plain. I shouted a phrase, and chanted twice, in the language my Dad had taught me. We freed our hands from the beaks, picked up a kitchen knife, and drew the blades across the animals’ throats. A jet of blood burst from each magpie, followed by a drizzle, and a weak sputter. Making sure not to cut off the whole head, the peasants folded in the wings, and rested the bodies on the field.

The morning moved into midday. The sun punched hard. Slowly, everyone began to leave the plain, grumbling about how this act was silly, and wasteful. But none of them dared come close to me, and tell this to my face.

For another hour, the administrator stood, staring upward. A few feet away, I was sitting in a white linen dress, stained blood-brown, with the corpse of a bird on my lap. Looking over the dry land at the poor creatures, I was hit with grief and regret.

“There’s a good reason why the country has had enough of this childishness,” Mr Ispas told me. “We have to move on, and so do you.”

As the heat surged in the late afternoon, and fell away in the evening, only I remained there.

When dusk settled, clouds massed from the north, curdling darkness, and broke upon the plain, pouring on the carcasses of the birds, and washing their blood into gaps in the black earth. As the storm refused to slacken, the peasants returned from the village, and climbed onto the wet field. Their shoes sodden with mud, and their shirts and breeches drenched, they sang old lyrics, while holding hands, and dancing in a ring.

The next day I made soup and polenta for Grandma, and sat in the garden, under the vines, where the fruits were taking shape. The soil was damp, and the leaves of the grapes and tomatoes carried a sweet, pine-like scent. No one from the village came to bring an offering of jam, bread or brandy. All day, I heard no tread of feet near our house, nor the stomp of hooves.

For the rest of the summer, I worked in the fields, cutting the thick grasses, pulling the blades from the corn and loading the cobs into boxes. The peasants never talked to me, unless they gave an order, but they didn’t gossip about me, or spit at my feet. One time, I saw Mr Ispas, patrolling the warehouse with a notebook, counting the produce. As he neared, he looked into the box I’d packed, and scribbled in his pages, but didn’t tilt up his head. Once the farm had gathered the yields and delivered them to the city, the quota was full. The village would have provisions and fuel for the winter, and a new tractor for the plowing season.

That December, I received a thin letter from the authorities, with my name typed on the front. I showed this to Grandma, who asked me what it said.

“Starting in the new year,” I told her. “I must move to Bucharest, to work on the assembly line of a biscuit factory.”

The studio was silent. Katia was standing in the office behind a window, gesturing at me to say something to our guest.

“If they hated you so much,” I said, “why didn’t they put you in jail, or force you to work in the swamp, like your Dad?”

Ilinca smiled, revealing a full set of white teeth.

“Because they feared me.”

“So they sent you to the capital?”

“Yes,” she said. “My plan was a success.”