One of the Polish guards who moved Peter Dieter’s body patrolled the woods in winter. His main responsibility was to ensure that the border with the Czech Republic was blocked. He knew everyone from the area, constantly watching them as they went about their lives.

On New Year’s Eve, the guard struggled riding his motorbike through the snow. When he encountered a group of young adults, his mood soured further. When he asked for their identity cards, they brought him to their cabin. They were from the city, and offered him tea and cake. As he ate, he realized he was an intruder, despite them being the visitors to his home.

The guard left, but as he drove away, he thought the group were wolf people. He turned around, but fell into a snowdrift. Unable to get his bike out, the guard walked back toward the cabin, and heard the howl of a wolf. The guard soon heard paws on the snow, sensing the wolf nearby. He begged the wolf not to kill him with the authority of the Polish border. The wolf stopped following him, confused.

The narrator dreams that she wanders through an abandoned landscape, finding herself at a stream. She looks into the water, but does not recognize herself. She begins washing her face, but to her horror, her skin and flesh slough away. When she sees the bare bones of her fingers, she realizes that she died.

Marta often watches over the narrator’s shoulder as she works, annoying the narrator, unless the narrator is reading her ephemerides. Ephemerides are tables that show the position of the planets, which the narrator uses to assign meaning to the position of the planets. She connects the planets’ movements to real-world events, finding meaning in the meaningless. The tables give the narrator a calming sense of permanence and predictability. The comet she saw, however, was not in her tables.

Agnieszka tells the narrator that the comet signals the Pope’s impending death and heralds a difficult winter. She often makes prophecies, though these stories change frequently.

One day, the narrator returns home to see the fields above her house on fire. Agnieszka calls her, warning the narrator the fire will consume her house when the wind changes. The narrator keeps the fire at bay until firemen arrive and put it out. Marta shares that the field catches fire every few years, and the narrator mourns the blueberry bushes lost in the flames.

Paschalis wrote of Kummernis’s childhood and relationship with her father, including details the prioress did not know. She questioned Paschalis about such details, and he believed Kummernis spoke through him. He saw her everywhere, her pose on the cross always in his mind.

He wrote Kummernis’s story in the morning, before switching to transcribing her own writings, Tristia and Hilaria, in the afternoon. He felt connected to her words and her belief that God flowed through her. He dreamed of Kummernis, and in this dream, she kissed Paschalis. He told the prioress of his dream, and she pointed out that his hair grew, and he looked like a woman.

In early summer, Paschalis finished both his account of Kummernis’s life and the transcription of her writings. The prioress sent Paschalis out into the world. First, he was to show his works to the Bishop of Glatz, and then the Pope in Rome.

Both the narrator and R. are allergic to grass pollen, and suffer whenever it is produced. While the narrator believes they suffer because they are intruders, R. believes, “it’s the sacrifice our bodies make to the meadows, the only way the grass can relate to our existence” (131).

Franz Frost and his wife enjoyed church. Franz was particularly interested in a depiction of the Virgin Mary, which rested in a circular wooden frame. Shapes fascinated him, and he always wondered at the patterns hiding in the world he could not see.

In the early 1930s, Franz Frost felt the world change. People looked blurry, food tasted odd, and everything around him seemed slightly different. When he heard that a new planet was discovered, he wondered how it was possible he could live calmly while so much changed. Franz and his wife built a new house, and hoped for a child. It was difficult work. Bricks crumbled, and Franz realized they were building over an underground stream. Water flowed through their basement. When he laid roof tiles, he had nightmares of being in a strange valley, feeling completely lost.

Franz Frost’s wife became pregnant, but on the day of their son’s birth, Franz had a terrifying nightmare. In it, his wife fed their son poisonous mushrooms. When the son died, Franz buried him in the garden. He began to fear the night and sleep, blaming the new planet. To protect himself from it, Franz Frost carved a hat from the stump of an ash tree. The hat improved his life slightly, and he never took it off. When war came and the Wehrmacht drafted Franz, he continued to wear that hat, refusing a helmet, which was a fatal error.

One day, as Franz Frost’s wife swept outside their house, a boy that looked exactly like her son approached and asked to see his brother. She tied him to a chair in the kitchen before racing to Franz to tell him. Their son overhead, and asked to meet the boy.

They untied the boy, and their son and his double went out to play. Their son came back alone, and they never talked about the other child. After Franz left for the war, his wife and son went out into the meadow to pick mushrooms. They picked the delicious Agaricus campestris, a harmless mushroom. The son, however, could not distinguish these from Amanita verna, “the death cap of the meadows,” and put some in their basket (141).

The mother fried the mushrooms and fed them to her son. Later that night, he began vomiting. At the hospital, doctors pumped his stomach, but he died. Though telegrams were sent for Franz Frost at the front, no one found him.

The chapter concludes with a recipe for Amanita verna in sour cream.

The narrator wonders how Marta will die. She imagines death finding Marta through her senses. She thinks of it entering her eyes, ears, nose, and mouth. Each sense slowly deteriorating, making it difficult for her to live.

During winter, R. crashes his car into a truck, breaking his nose. After he heals, he detects a strange smell. He finds it in everything, but cannot identify it. Eventually, R. and the narrator agree it is the smell of death, ever-present. R. worries that he will never escape it, and questions everything he does.

The narrative shifts to passages from Kummernis’s Hilaria. One night, as the narrator is falling asleep, she rises from her body. She moves through objects at will and rises until she sees the entire world, surrounded by darkness. When she thinks of light, a bright one overwhelms her. She suspects it is the light of heaven and God. A force begins pushing her away from the light, and she senses an invisible border between herself and the light. Although she wishes to cross it, she is too weak to do so.

She believes time is a prison that keeps people away from God, and that only in death are they freed to join him. When she looks at the world, she sees it crumbling and changing, and realizes she is watching the end of time. It is Judgement Day, and she believes it will be an awakening. Life is dreaming, and only in death do people wake. She thinks the world is full of the dead, each dreaming that they are alive.

Marta tells the protagonist not to take what she sees seriously. The narrator realizes that sight can only capture moments and reflections, as the world is always changing. She thinks of landscapes, and how memories of landscapes are defined by the mood of those viewing it. It reflects who the person is at the moment they see it.

The narrator dreams she can, “enter people through their mouths” (150). She imagines they are built like houses, with rooms, stairwells, and apartments. She explores the houses, which are uninhabited, often forgetting that she is inside someone. Occasionally, she senses the body, seeing veins and sensing the pulsing of blood.

So-and-So told the narrator the story of the monster. After the war, in a pond in the village, there appeared a large monster: “It was huge, the size of a large cow, and the shape of a crocodile, with horny claws and a muzzle full of teeth as sharp as knives” (152). First, it ate all the fish before venturing out of the pond to eat birds, sheep, and dogs.

The men of the village tried to kill the monster in different ways, but to no avail, eventually electrocuting the water. They believed the monster was dead, but days later, the monster returned and ate a woman.

In retaliation, the people of the village drained the pond to reveal the monster. It was in the mud, badly wounded and weak. The men shot and killed it. For nights afterward, the villagers heard a wailing from across the Czech border. A month later, the body of a female monster turned up in the empty pond. She crossed the border to find her mate, and upon discovering tragedy, died.

On the narrator’s name day, there is a downpour. As they sit inside, R. tells her a story of a strange house down the road, hidden in the forest. The stream surrounds it, and it is damp. Inside lives the Slug family. They glide across the floor, leaving slime trails, and enjoy the cool damp.

The narrator decides to visit Marta. As she is about to step out, she sees that the small pond in their yard is overflowing. R. runs to it in hopes of saving his fish.

The narrator finds Marta working on her wigs. Marta asks her to sit and pick out hair for the narrator’s wig.

The rain continues, and by morning the pond and the fish disappear. At dinner later that day, R. tells the narrator about the Slug family again, and focuses on the father and his adventures to find food. On the radio, they hear of a flood.

The protagonist and Marta drive into the village, picking Krysia up on the way. When they arrive, they see the aftermath of the flood, as the townspeople and shopkeepers dry out their belongings. While walking around the village, the narrator and Marta meet the Prophet, who some call the Clairvoyant.