The Snake

road crush him in such a way that everything he had loved disappeared and those things he had believed in failed? Why were the roads of his sons such that he would never go down them? But most of all: what happens to us after death?

Spas Gospodov again wished to take the road that had led him in the past to Rossitsa.

And now he was walking back from Plovdiv to Pazardjik: a bare-footed, lanky old man with a sunburnt neck, tramping down the dusty road and thinking that like on an icy mountain, a man must not stop moving, because if he lost the road in front of him, he would be snowed under by the avalanche of past. But he wasn’t afraid of that avalanche. Spas Gospodov feared he might not find Rossitsa.  

And then he saw it, coiled up, in the middle of his road. He approached it silently and slowly. And afterwards all of a sudden he stepped on it.

Spas Gospodov felt the familiar bite in his ankle. He sat on the rock and took his penknife out of his back pocket and the snake out of his front pocket.

“Did you see,” Spas told it, “it’s possibly your granddaughter or maybe your great granddaughter.” 

Then he hung the snake on a branch by that same black road, sat on the rock again and felt that cold spread over him like on an icy mountain. He looked at the abyss and saw at the foot the white nurse’s hat with a red cross in the middle.

“What a beautiful descent it is!” Spas Gospodov said. “On the crest of the white waves!”

 

[1] Named with the meaning of God’s Man