Once upon a time, there lived a king and a queen, both young and beautiful, but heartbroken because they couldn’t have children. They had tried everything: going to physicians and philosophers, astrologers and soothsayers—all for nothing. They had lost hope when, one day, they heard of an old medicine man from a village not far from the castle, so they went to see him.
“Whatever you’re searching for,” the medicine man told them, “it will only bring you sorrow.”
“We didn’t come here to ask you about sorrow,” the king said, “but to ask if you have medicine that could help us have a child.”
“That I have,” the old man said, “but you’ll only have one child, a boy. He’ll be handsome and brave, but you won’t have him around in your old age.”
The queen and the king took the medicine and returned to their castle full of hope. Not long after, the queen was with child. The kingdom, the court, and the servants all celebrated the news.
When the time came, the unborn baby started crying from his mother’s womb and refused to be born. The royal physicians tried everything to make the baby stop crying and be born, but nothing helped.
“Hush, my son, hush,” the king said, “and I’ll give you a great kingdom to rule over when you grow up.”
The baby kept crying.
“Hush, my son, hush,” the king said, “and I’ll give you a beautiful princess to marry when you grow up.”
The baby kept crying.
“Hush, my son, hush, and I’ll give you ageless youth and deathless life.”
The baby stopped crying and was finally born, and the kingdom celebrated the news of an heir for an entire week.
The baby grew into a smart and brave little prince. The king and the queen sent him to school and to philosophers, and what other children learned in a year, the prince learned in a month. His parents were proud of him, and the people of the kingdom rejoiced, for their future king would be as wise as King Solomon himself. But the prince grew thoughtful and sad as the years passed.
At his fifteenth birthday feast, while his parents celebrated together with their merry courtiers, the prince rose from his seat and spoke. “Father, it’s time for you to give me what you promised when I was born.”
“My son,” the king said, “how can I give you such an impossible gift? What I said back then was only to make you stop crying.”
“If you, my father, can’t give me what you promised,” the prince said, “then I’ll have to search the world and find the thing I was born for.”
The king and the queen begged him to stay. The courtiers fell to their knees. “Your father is growing old,” they said. “Soon we’ll make you our king…”
Nothing could change the prince’s mind, though, so the king gave him his blessing. The queen saw to the journey preparations.
The prince went to the royal stables, where his father kept the strongest and fastest horses in the entire land. He seized each stallion by the tail and wrestled them to their knees, until not one remained standing. Then he looked around once more and spotted an old, plague-ridden, and wretched horse at the back of the stable. The prince went to it and grabbed its tail, but the horse turned its head and spoke in the tongue of men.
“At last, a prince worthy of serving! What are your wishes, my lord?”
The horse stood firm while the prince tried to force him to kneel.
“If you seek ageless youth and deathless life,” the horse said, “ask your father for his sword, spear, bow, quiver of arrows, and the armor he wore at your age. Then, for six weeks, you must care for me yourself and feed me barley boiled in sweet milk.”
After days of searching through the castle, the prince found his father’s old armor and weapons inside a dusty coffer in the cellar. They were all rusty and broken, but he mended them himself until they looked new and shiny again. And after six weeks of grooming, the horse shook his mane and turned into a beautiful stallion with four wings on his back, ready to leave whenever the prince gave the word.
The court and the entire kingdom were heartbroken. The prince, astride his winged horse, with his shiny sword in hand, said goodbye to the queen and the king, to the courtiers, the servants, and the people. One last time, they begged him to stay, but he cleared the way for the convoy of carriages and soldiers his parents had sent for the journey. At the border, he halted the procession, divided the gold and food among the soldiers, and sent them back home. He kept only what his horse could carry and headed east.
After three days and three nights, they arrived at the edge of a field strewn with sun-bleached human bones.
“We’re now on Gheonoaia’s land,” the horse said. “Gheonoaia used to be a woman, but the curse of the parents she disrespected reached her, and she turned into a monster. No one who ventured onto these lands made it out alive. Right now, Gheonoaia is with her children, but tomorrow, she’ll catch up with us in that forest on the horizon, and she’ll try to kill us. She is huge and fast, but you shouldn’t be afraid. Be ready with your bow and arrows, keep your sword and spear handy, and we’ll prevail.”
They journeyed into the forest and rested there, taking turns on watch. The next day at dawn, they started crossing the forest when they heard a roar and a howl behind them, unlike anything they had ever heard before.
“Hold on to me,” the horse said. “Gheonoaia is coming.”
And coming she was, knocking down trees in her path. The horse flapped his wings and rose above the forest, above Gheonoaia, and from up there, the prince shot an arrow that cut off her left leg. He picked up the leg and put it in his bag. He pulled a second arrow from his quiver and fit it to his bow.
“Stop, Prince,” Gheonoaia said. “I promise I won’t hurt you.”
The prince didn’t believe her, so she wrote it down in her own blood.
“Great horse you have there, Prince,” Gheonoaia said. “If it weren’t for him, I would’ve eaten you alive. Instead, you defeated me. Until today, no mortal had crossed my forest. The fools who tried didn’t get farther than the field where you saw their bones scattered.”
She invited them to her house, where she lived with her three daughters, all beautiful as angels. She served them the finest food she had, but while the prince and the horse ate and rested, Gheonoaia moaned in pain from her severed leg. The prince took pity on her and pulled the leg out of his bag. Gheonoaia took it and put it back in its place, where it healed in an instant. She was so happy that she asked the prince to pick one of her daughters as his bride.
“I’m not looking for a wife,” the prince said, “but for ageless youth and deathless life.”
“With your horse and your courage,” Gheonoaia said, “I’m sure you’ll find it.”
Three days later, the prince mounted and headed east. The horse took him beyond Gheonoaia’s lands to a field half covered in colorful flowers, half covered in tar and ashes.
“Why is the grass burned over there?” the prince said.
“We’re now on Scorpia’s land,” the horse said. “Scorpia is Gheonoaia’s sister—meaner and stronger—and she has three heads instead of one. She had also disrespected her parents, and their curse had reached her as well. Scorpia and Gheonoaia hate each other and try to steal each other’s land. When Scorpia is angry, she spouts hot tar and burns down everything in her path. It seems they had a quarrel not long ago. Let’s rest now and be ready tomorrow at dawn.”
The next morning, they got up and started crossing Scorpia’s land when they heard an even louder roar and howl than ever.
“Hold on to me,” the horse said. “Scorpia is coming.”
And coming she was, devouring earth and sky, pouring fire and tar on every living thing in her path. The horse let her get close, then flapped his wings and rose into the sky above. The prince pulled out his sword, slashed off one of Scorpia’s heads, and put it in his bag. As he readied his sword again, Scorpia asked him to forgive her and promised not to harm him or his horse. The prince didn’t trust her, so Scorpia wrote it down in her own blood.
The prince went to Scorpia’s house, where they feasted together with Scorpia’s beautiful daughters. The prince took pity on her and gave her back her head. Scorpia put it back on her neck, and it healed right away. Three days later, the prince and the horse left again, heading east.
After they crossed Scorpia’s lands, they found themselves in a field covered in flowers, where it was always springtime, and sweet scents drifted in the cool breeze.
“We’ve made it here,” the horse said, “but we have one more trial before the end of our journey. Beyond this field stands the palace of ageless youth and deathless life, surrounded by a large forest, tall and thick, and guarded by wild beasts. They never sleep at night, and they never tire of watching the palace. There’s no way of defeating them, so we won’t even try. Instead, we’ll fly over the forest, and I hope my wings will take us all the way there.”
They rested for three days as the horse regained his strength.
“This is the time of day when the fairies feed the beasts,” the horse said, “and they’re all gathered in the palace courtyard. This is when we should fly over the forest. Hold on to my saddle and pull in my reins. Don’t hinder me! Here we go!”
The horse flapped his wings and rose into the sky, and from up there they saw the palace of ageless youth and deathless life. It shone in the morning sun, and neither the prince nor the horse had ever seen anything so beautiful in their entire lives. The horse flew over the forest and nearly reached the edge, but he was so tired. As he descended onto the front steps of the palace, his back hoof brushed the top of a tree, and the entire forest erupted with howls as the raging beasts joined the clamor.
The lady of the palace rushed out and calmed down her babies, as she called them. She was a beautiful fairy, slender and sweet, and the prince couldn’t utter a word when he first saw her. The fairy looked at him with tenderness and asked why he had come.
“I’m looking for ageless youth and deathless life,” the prince said, once he found his voice.
“If that’s what you’re looking for,” the fairy said, “you’ve found it.”
The prince left the horse to rest in the garden and followed the fairy into the palace, where he met her two older sisters, who were just as beautiful and welcoming. He thanked them for saving him and his horse from the beasts, and the fairies prepared a wonderful meal served on golden plates. Then they took the prince and the horse and introduced them to the beasts of the forest, so they could wander safely from then on.
The fairies welcomed the prince into their home so they wouldn’t be alone anymore. The prince didn’t need to be asked twice to make the palace of ageless youth and deathless life his home. On the day of his wedding to the youngest fairy, the three sisters told him he was free to wander wherever he wished within the borders of their kingdom—except for a valley behind the palace called the Vale of Tears. They warned him never to go there, for a terrible thing would happen to him if he did.
They all lived happily, unaware of the passage of time. The prince remained as young as he had been on the day he arrived at the palace. Each day was bliss. He would walk through the forest, stroll along the golden corridors of the palace, spend time with his beautiful wife and her sisters, breathe in the perfume of flowers, and rest under the mild sun and gentle breeze.
Sometimes he went hunting for rabbits and little birds. One day, as he was following a white rabbit, he shot an arrow and missed. He shot another and missed again. Annoyed, he followed the rabbit and, with his third arrow, struck it. He walked over, picked it up by the ears, and put it in his bag. That was when he realized he had set foot in the Vale of Tears.
On his way home, he felt, for the first time, a painful longing for his mother and father, for his kingdom, and for the people and places he had left behind. He didn’t dare tell the fairies, but they soon noticed the sadness in his eyes and his restlessness.
“Oh, my poor husband, have you stepped into the Vale of Tears?” the youngest fairy said.
“I did, but without knowing,” the prince said. “And now I’m wasting away with longing for my parents and my country. But I don’t want to leave you. We’ve been so happy here. I think I should go home one more time, just to visit, and then I’ll return and never leave again.”
“Don’t even think about it,” the fairies said. “Your parents have been dead for centuries. If you leave this place, you’ll never come back. Please stay with us! You’ll perish if you leave.”
All their pleading and all their tears couldn’t change the prince’s mind. Not even the horse could quench his longing for home.
“Whatever happens to you,” the horse said, “it will be your fault and yours alone. But you are my prince, and I’ll take you back if that’s what you wish. On one condition: when we get there, if you want to stay for even an hour, you must let me go.”
“I will,” the prince said.
They got ready for their journey back. On the front steps of the palace, the prince hugged his sisters-in-law, kissed his wife, and left the three fairies sobbing and wiping their tears. They traveled westward and, after a while, they reached the field where Scorpia used to dwell—but found towns and roads instead. The forests were now fields of wheat.
The prince asked the locals if they knew what had happened to Scorpia and her daughters. The people laughed at him and said their grandparents had heard stories about Scorpia from their grandparents, but those were just bedtime tales for little children. Their laughter angered the prince, and he spurred his horse, not noticing that his hair and beard had turned gray.
He asked the same questions when he reached Gheonoaia’s lands and received the same answers and the same scorn. He couldn’t understand how so much had changed in the few years he had been gone. He spurred his horse again, but this time he noticed that his legs were weak and his white beard reached down to his waist.
After crossing the border of his father’s kingdom, he found more towns, more roads, but nothing he remembered. Where the castle of his childhood had once stood, there were now ruins overgrown with weeds, where spiders dwelled. He dismounted. The horse asked him if he was going to stay a while.
“Not for long…” the old prince said.
“Then I must say goodbye to you, my beloved prince. If you want to return to the fairies, I can take you there, but we must leave right now.”
“You go…” the prince said, “and I’ll follow you…soon.”
The horse flapped his wings and flew away. The prince stayed behind and wandered through the ruins, dragging his tired feet from roofless room to crumbled hallway, around thick trees that grew out of broken flagstone. He sighed and wept as he remembered the proud and beautiful castle that once stood there. He tried to recall his parents’ faces—but couldn’t.
His white beard now reached down to his knees. His eyelids were heavy, and he was tired. He found the ruins of the stables where he had first met his horse. He found the stairs to the cellar where his father had kept his armor and weapons. He climbed down, holding onto the walls, and at the bottom, he sat on a coffer to catch his breath and wipe his tears.
He stood up again. He had nowhere to go but back to the fairies’ palace. The coffer he had sat on looked familiar, so he lifted its lid. The rusty hinges creaked.
“You’re here, at last,” said a weak voice from the bottom of the coffer. “Had you been any longer, I would have died waiting for you.”
The prince’s Death rose from the coffer, thin and famished. She slapped him, and he fell dead and turned to dust.
***
I took these pictures in my hometown of Galaţi, Romania, in the summer of 2010, when, after almost a decade of living in America, I went back to visit. I had to. For the previous couple of years, random smells and colors and sounds triggered, again and again, flashbacks from my childhood. Images, no more than fleeting images: a corner of my street, the entrance of my high school building, the thickets on the shores of the Danube. My parents had visited me in Seattle a few times, once in a while I talked over the phone with uncles and aunts and cousins, and I had a busy life in Seattle, but I just had to go back. So I packed my one-year-old daughter and got on a plane. The people I found in Galaţi were older, and the streets were cleaner, and the trees were thicker, with bigger branches that reached higher and wider than I remembered. My extended family welcomed me, and I had a great time visiting, but the images I had been searching for were gone, hidden, overgrown with new vegetation, new buildings, new faces. There was no place for me to sit down and feel at home.
When I was a kid, I didn’t like “Ageless Youth and Deathless Life,” with its unhappy, weird ending. A few years after I arrived in the US, I translated it into English for the first time, from a collection of Romanian folktales edited by Petre Ispirescu and published in Bucharest in 1882. Now that I’m older, this is my favorite fairy tale and the one story I know that captures the essence of an immigrant’s sense of not belonging. Not really. Not anywhere.
Note: I met Radu Codrescu (name changed for privacy reasons) in 2001 in Redmond, Washington. In 2002, we sat down for a series of interviews about his past, and we continued our conversations in 2006 and in 2013. The series Our Borders is based on those interviews and on my own experience of growing up in Romania during the ’80s and the ’90s.
