I cycled beside her. The morning sunlight was scattered by the arms of the trees, like balls of fire thrown back and forth above us by the gods. Betka surprised me with her strength and fitness: while I puffed and sweated, she talked calmly, hardly panting from the exercise. She told me the names of trees and birds; she stopped to read the old German milestones, and drew my attention to stone walls, to the enclosures built for animals and to a broken shrine to the Virgin above a spring of fresh water. All these things were precious to her, and seemed to reach to her from the ground where they were half-interred like the supplicating fingers of the dead. We reached a fork, where a path of old flagstones diverged from the metaled road. Here we left our bicycles by the road and followed the paved path to a chapel, surrounded by cottages and consisting of a single large room with stucco walls, crowned by a bell gable of brick from which the stucco had crumbled away. This, Betka told me, was her church, Our Lady of Sorrows, closed now for five years, but still a place of prayer for those who knew how to enter it.
