CHAPTER ELEVEN
En Route to Mád
“What are those clumps?” I asked my husband, pointing to a mass of dark green vegetation clustered high in the branches of a leafless tree.
“Clumps? What is a clump?” Every so often, I used a word he did not know.
“That’s a clump. We’ve seen a lot of them. What are they, some kind of bird’s nest?”
“Those clumps,” said Jakub with a mischievous smile, “are mistletoe.”
“Are they really? So that’s how it grows.”
We were driving along a two-lane highway, a flat expanse of road bordered by muddy fields, stone houses abutting the edges. In summer I imagined it would be quite lush, green stretching all the way to the horizon, but our view that day was unrelentingly bleak. Once we’d gone beyond the city’s outskirts, the few towns we passed through seemed desert
