My Scholarship Entry

I’m sitting on the stone steps of the albergue, smoking. After eight hours of walking, my rollie and warm beer are the best I’ve ever tasted. My fellow modern-day pilgrims are scattered around the dusty courtyard, laughing in groups or hanging out clothes, writing in journals and checking Facebook on their phones. I am in Zubiri, Spain, on the second day of the Camino de Santiago. The albergue is plain but clean. Rickety bunk beds. At five euros, it’s a deal.
He sits beside me, holding a needle, and begins to thread a blister on the side of his foot.
You should not smoke, he says, without looking up. His accent is thick. Eastern Europe.
I know, I say.
You smoke, you die.
Everyone dies.
The man is a bear, a full head taller than me, brown clear eyes between a beard and waist-length hair. He’s dressed entirely in white cotton, like a Balkan messiah. His teeth are very white.
He nods, concentrating on his foot. I know the process. Leave a small strand of thread through a particularly large blister, letting it drain before it bursts and gets infected.
Where are you from? I ask, to change the subject.
Transylvania, he says.
What do you do?
He finishes with the blister and grins. I speak. And I work with my hands.
A musician?
No. I am a puppeteer. An artist. I make puppets, and I tell stories. No great money, but good puppets.
I laugh, not quite believing him. He holds up one hairy finger to silence me, and stands, walking a few yards away, barefoot in the dirt. He reaches behind his back and pulls out an imagined ball, his curved fingers and taut wrist showing its size and weight, and tosses it towards me.
I can’t resist playing along. I catch it with both hands, letting the momentum push me back a little, and place it carefully on the step. He throws me another, and another, until I have all three lined up neatly. With a grin and a tip of an imaginary hat, he gathers up the front of his cotton shirt, and nods that I throw them back.
I pick one up and toss it. He watches it coming through the air, and then gives a little stagger as he lets it fall into the front of his shirt. But by some trick he makes the cotton drop and bulge, and I can see the ball come to a rest between the folds. He does the same with the next, and the next, and then lets the empty shirt drop and sits back down.
Later, he says, I make soup. One euro a bowl. It is difficult, this trip. Expensive.
I nod, and roll another cigarette.