“Like a rehearsal,” I said.

She shrugged, before grimacing and spitting out the orange slice into her hand. “It’s bitter as fuck.”

Jordan appeared in an adjacent doorway and waved us over. Apparently the group had been looking for us and were eager to leave. When we arrived back at the jeep, Ana’s parents, uncle, and aunt were waiting in their respective places in irritated silence. For the last half of the drive, as the sun grew low and iridescent, I tried to read some more of Kristeva’s book. I felt shy reading it around others. It felt like posturing. Which it probably was. It was nearly impossible to read the fine print in the back of the jeep on the uneven road, and yet for some reason I persisted, until I came upon a line that seemed to refract a prismatic light through the day’s events: “The various means of purifying the abject — the various catharses — make up the history of religion, and end up with that catharsis par excellence called art, both on the far and near side of religion.”

As the last light burned red in the west, we turned off onto a dirt side road that pulverized what was left of our bones. On the outskirts of Tuja were Roma encampments with cooking fires casting silhouetted columns of smoke into the mountain air. Ana’s grandmother was waiting for us outside the front gate of her house, a tin and cinderblock construction blanketed in flowering ivy. Beside her stood her third son, Dimo, who crushed my hand as I offered it in greeting. Chicho Dimo, as Ana called him, was the youngest of the three siblings; in his early forties with a thick black beard, he wore a red jumpsuit with two guns in a black holster around his waist. Nana Ana looked a bit like Yoda, and as I bent down to hug her I could feel each notch of her spine through her floral dress. As I straightened up, she grabbed hold of my just-crushed hand with surprising conviction and began to lead me through the yard into her house — a perfectly preserved time capsule of a bygone era.

“Some serious communist realness going on,” I murmured to Ana as we stepped into the kitchen. To my chagrin she promptly turned to her grandmother and translated what I’d just said.

Nana Ana chuckled and made some kind of snappy retort.

“She said she misses communism,” Ana said, before Nana Ana interrupted with another flurry of invectives. “And says… that… mark her words… the fascists will be back.” Ana smiled and knelt down to her grandmother’s eye level. “But not in our lifetimes, Nana.” Nana placed her wizened hands on either side of Ana’s face and replied with gravity. “She said maybe not in her lifetime, but in ours.”