After a month or so the back seat of the car has been filled with empty plastic bottles, and then it's time to drive up into the mountains to the spring by the side of the road and fill them. We used to fill the empty bottles from the tap as reserves for those times that the water goes out. But then we saw the sediment in that water forming into brown algae-like clouds that rose to the surface of each container, and we smelled the toilet backing up through the shower drain, and we stopped trusting the tap water. We could buy it in the stores, and sometimes we do, but we try to get most of what we need from the springs, and today I went looking for one in Bajgora.
Halfway up the mountain I passed the mines, and then I entered the tunnel, slowly, because of the cows. There were four of them in there this time, one laying in the middle of the road, and the other three frantically licking the sides of the tunnel. They were pale colored, a dirty white with yellow and tan spots. Their horns flashed in the headlights, and they didn't seem to notice me as I wove between them, as if the time they spent down their had made them blind, or as if they'd been born that way, like enormous hairy albino newts in subterranean caverns. They sucked away at the slimy stone like leeches.
The spring was only a trickle, filling an enormous metal trough. Villagers passed by and said things to me. For all I know they were telling me “That spring is poisonous,” or “That's be ten dollars.” I finally found one who understood my mix of Albanian and English. He grinned and said, “Yes,” the water was good. Still, the rest of the village had so much to tell me I couldn't feel confident that I was understanding everything. Maybe I had offended them, or there was a trick to it, or maybe they just rarely had strangers up there.
I'm telling you this so you'll know how it was that I died, should I die. It was the water, from all the way up in Bajgora, that drips down across blind cow tongues, pass the entrance to the coal mines and seeps through piles of slag, into the rivers and lakes and then the pipes that empty into our sink, our toilet and tub: if I'm dead, then you'll know that the water turned out to be most deadly at its source.
