Karcsi had weird thoughts and questions about the issue. Like, do the living dead feel? If so, how? What is their vision like? When I saw my first living dead walking in (it was Uncle Rudolf, of course), I couldn’t think about anything like that. Most people in the village are unable to do so. For us it’s too personal, because it’s our dead who walk back to us. No wonder only Karcsi could come up with such things. He wasn’t born in the village.

The living dead have a habit of returning to their relatives. Not to the house they had lived in, nor to their lovers or to their animals. They return to their own blood. This is why all relatives gather at the wake. They serve as a sort of beacon for the dead.

If the relatives were scattered all across the village it could confuse the dead. Then we would have to search for it, follow its screaming and wailing for hours on end. That would be terrible.

There are revenants without any living relatives. Andris Béres, for example, didn’t have anyone but us, his buddies at work. We knew he would come back, and he knew it too, so after he died we went to Old Béla to ask for guidance. Béla was over ninety at the time, and he had seen all that there was to see. We asked him what to do. He told us.

At nightfall we sat down in Andris’ garden with a drink in our hands – his friends and co-workers and some of his old lovers too. We all sang a song Old Béla had taught us that afternoon. It was a rather odd melody. It reminded me of sunsets I had never seen myself because they were before my time, and of sunsets I never will see, because they’ll happen long after I’m dead. I found it a very comforting thought, and it made me sing even louder. We kept on singing until Andris Béres found his way back to us from his grave. We felt relief as he crawled in through the open gate, like all the other revenants before him, his mouth open wide in a soundless scream, with the wet earth of the graveyard stuck in his throat.