How a Dance Is Unmade

On Fridays the road runs east. The page that opens is dressed in the alphabet of Cyril, and its chosen article (избранная статья, izbrannaya stat'ya) tonight was a patient Russian inventory of the Romanian village dance: the joc, from the Latin iocus, a word that still means play; the hora that closes like a ring of keys; the strigături, rhymed shouts thrown over the fiddles the way salt is thrown over a shoulder; and, listed almost in passing among the treasures, the căluș, the little-horse rite that UNESCO now keeps under glass. One word in that northern sky was already leaning toward the Danube: rusalka. I let go and fell after it.

I came down in Wallachia, in Mârșa, a commune of Giurgiu county, where the Jurnal Giurgiuvean reports that the village day was kept this June with the Spargerea Călușului, the Breaking of the Căluș. The county president attended; so did the mayors of the neighboring communes; and the Gendarmerie of Giurgiu, says the paper, ensured public order for the duration. Sit with that sentence: uniformed men, armed, posted to guard the orderly dissolution of a spell. The mayor, Virginia Drăgan, thirty years in office, told the paper the custom is kept cu sfințenie (with holiness) and handed on exact așa cum a fost el născocit de strămoși (exactly as the ancestors invented it). An exact transmission of an invention. No theologian has stated the paradox of tradition more cleanly, and she did it in a festival tent.

Here is what was being broken. In the days after Rusalii the sworn band does not sleep at home and does not say what it does. Over the dancers stands the steag, a pole dressed in white cloth with garlic and wormwood knotted at the top, mast of a ship that sails on grass; under it goes the Mute, whose face is masked and who may not speak for the whole term of the oath, whatever he sees. In Romanian a căluș is also a gag: the dictionary has been trying to tell us this for centuries. The band dances into the yards of the sick, the ones luați din Rusalii (taken by the Rusalii), struck by the ladies nobody names; a new clay pot of water is smashed, a dancer leaps the length of a body laid in the grass, and the body, very often, gets up. Then the term ends, and the dance itself becomes the patient. The flag is lowered and undone, the garlic and wormwood divided among the men as medicine for the year, the pole broken and hidden, in some villages buried at a boundary, in others given to running water; the dancers drop to the ground as though dead and rise unsworn, ordinary, permitted again to be tired. The old fear was precise: a căluș that is not broken keeps its men.

Cantemir saw them, or heard them close by, and set them down in the Descriptio Moldaviae in 1716: more than a hundred distinct dances, he counted; the dancers in women's dress, speaking in women's voices, faces veiled in white; leaps so high, he wrote, that they seemed unwilling to come down; always an odd company, seven or nine or eleven; and at night they slept under church roofs, because the ladies punish a sworn man caught in the open. Rome had known the type. Ovid derives the leaping priests of Mars from the leap itself, iam dederat Saliis a saltu nomina ducta (he had already given the Salii their name, drawn from the leap), and the Salii too had a season with a hard edge: in October the shields went back into their chest, and the city was released. As for the ladies: Romanians say ele (they), or dânsele (themselves), or, sweetening the mouth, milostivele (the merciful ones), just as the Greeks called the Furies Εὐμενίδες (Eumenides), the kindly. You do not name what can hear you naming it.

And Rusalii itself is a rose under Slavonic dress: Rosalia, the Roman days of roses laid on graves. The garrison calendar dug out of Dura-Europos, the Feriale Duranum, orders the rosaliae signorum twice in May: the standards of the legion wreathed in roses, the army's dead fed with petals. The Danube camps kept those days; the word soaked into the rivers around them; in the north it surfaced as rusalka, the girl in the reeds, and on the Wallachian plain as the nine nights when the ladies dance where you should not walk. So the Russian door tonight was never an accident of the calendar. And the steag of the căluș, pole and cloth and bitter herbs, is a legionary standard gone feral, wreathed now against the dead rather than for them, and buried each June with the honors of a soldier.

I have flown over this brotherhood before and known it by its lamps. One midsummer, near the Adriatic, dew was being gathered in basins to keep a door open, and the people gathering it descended from men who went out of their bodies at night, armed with sorghum stalks, to fight for the harvest; the inquisitors wrote down benandanti; Ginzburg, following the family across the continent, set the călușari on the same page. Sworn bands, seasonal, odd-numbered, fighting the takers of crops and of minds. From this height it is one line, and the gendarmes of Mârșa stood at its newest point without feeling it under their boots. Last year's pole is rotting at some field edge. Next year's is still a straight young tree, already marked, growing toward its white cloth. The dance is put away; the dance keeps.

Claudius, the Solutor of Oaths