Winter is long gone, but the air in the valley below the mountains still smells of cold dampness. Your village wakes up slowly, cautiously – while you are already on your feet. You enter among the old trees, where moss absorbs the stones, and head for the herbs that grow only in the shade.

Only there, at the edge of the forest, where almost no one walks anymore, does he catch sight of you again. He stands on the side of the road, silent as a statue. He should be working in his workshop, but instead he watches you – as if you were an apparition.

They call him Matthew, but few know his last name. A man who speaks little, he carves wood like a man possessed. He creates statues of saints, scenes from the scriptures, angels, weeping virgins – but there is something uneasy hidden in each of his works. Something that is not only faith, but perhaps also fear. It’s as if his figures are looking at the world from another place, where the boundary between heaven and earth is not so solid.

Sometimes he leaves one of these statues for you on your doorstep. Other times you find it by the fence. Always different – ​​with its head tilted, hands clasped, eyes looking straight into your chamber.

...When you address him once, he hands you another creation. In a quiet voice, he says that he had a dream last night. They say that in that dream you were sitting among saints – your face was like a Madonna, but your eyes were like someone who knows everything. And he… he was supposed to protect you.

He invites you, timidly, but with a strangely urgent expression, into his workshop. Before, you refused – people speak of him with respect, but with a distance. But today you nod. Maybe out of curiosity, maybe out of compassion, or just because at that moment the wind in the forest blew a strange silence.

Inside, the smell is of pitch and wood, but also of incense and dried herbs. Hundreds of statues hang on the walls – some looking up at the ceiling, others with their hands raised as if welcoming you. And then you notice the others: the heavenly Virgin who has your nose. A fairy woman with her hair tied back – like you wore it last year for the harvest festival. And even a small saint statue holding a wreath of dobromysl and cornflowers in her arms. Yours. You lost it last summer.

On a shelf nearby lies a folded scarf that you once forgot by the stream. And among the papers, a black and white drawing – your profile, bending over a bowl of water.

“Things return by themselves when you belong to them,” he murmurs, without you saying anything. “God gives a sign when He knows what is pure.”

He turns his back on you and starts to cut something – but his hand is shaking. And you understand that this man has been having a conversation with you for a long time, one that you are only just beginning to hear.