An Imaginary Life: Chapter 4 Summary & Analysis

Winter sets in. Even in his fifth year, Ovid is not used to the long months of enclosure. Everyone spends all day and all night silently huddled together in huts, listening to the wind. Ovid writes a little by candlelight, but it is difficult to keep the flame burning. He and others sleep often throughout the day and always feel “thick-headed,” barely awake. Ovid estimates he spends 12 to 15 hours of each day asleep. The days pass quickly and blur together, marked only by his night shift standing guard on the wall, which comes every five days.

The Child sits staring into the gloom for hours on end, unmoving and unspeaking. He barely interacts, and Ovid fears they will lose the progress they’ve made together. When Ovid makes a bird call, the Child acts hysterical, making animal noises and trying to throw himself out the high window. Ryzak’s mother, the old woman, watches the Child at all hours and seems afraid that he truly is a beast in child form, and that his spirit will leave his current body and possess another. Indeed, Ovid senses that often the Child’s mind is not with him, but away, traveling the winter landscapes. Ovid wishes he could let the Child return to the woods, but knows that he would not survive anymore. His hardiness has left him, and he shivers against the cold like any other human being, newly “vulnerable.”

The Child comes down with a bad fever and his body alternates between freezing and burning. Ovid suspects that the boy is experiencing what it means to be cold for the first time. He thinks of his lost brother and what it will feel like if the Child dies as well. The old woman refuses to help, since she believes that the fever is a result of the Child’s demon struggling to break free of his body. Lullo’s mother, the young woman, is sympathetic at first and gives the Child food and water, but the old woman convinces her that the Child’s beastly spirit might break free and occupy her own son instead, so she starts to keep her distance.

Despite the young woman’s fear, when Ovid cries for help in the middle of the night, the young woman helps care for the Child. Ovid has been watching him for five days straight, and his body is nearly failing in exhaustion. He begins to fall back asleep while the young woman cares for the Child during his feverish spasms. In the midst of one, while his tongue lolls, the Child involuntarily speaks his first word in the village tongue. This mark of humanity excites Ovid, but terrifies both the young woman and the old woman, who take it as a sign that the Child’s demon has “snatched away another soul” and taken the place of Lullo.

The old woman curses Lullo’s mother for exposing him to danger, setting her into a panic. The old woman strips Lullo’s clothes off, looking for a mark where the demon entered his body. By the time Ryzak enters, within an hour, Lullo already shows signs of fever. Although Ovid would otherwise be pleased by the Child’s grasp of a human word, he realizes they are now both in grave danger. He wonders how Lullo managed to catch the same fever, and suspects that the boy’s fear somehow weakened his body, making him more susceptible to the disease.

Lullo’s mother accepts the old woman’s suspicion that the Child passed his illness on to Lullo, weakening his body so as to steal his spirit. The Child recovers and grows stronger while Lullo sinks further into his fever dreams, and even Ryzak becomes suspicious of the Child. Ovid fears that the suspicion will turn to violence if Ryzak’s grandson dies, first directed at the Child and then at Ovid himself when he tries to protect the boy. However, after five days, Lullo recovers, and the house is at peace for the first time in more than a week. Everyone falls asleep.

Winter nears its end and the snow begins to melt away, allowing Ovid and the Child the chance to move around a bit and sit with the animals below. In the wake of the fevers, Ryzak lost his control of the household; the old woman now reigns. She claims “her magic” saved Lullo’s life and Ryzak must agree, since he himself had no solution for the illness. Ovid senses that the old woman has long craved this opportunity to usurp her son, to take control away from him.

The old woman orders Ryzak to catch a wild puppy for her to sacrifice at the next full moon. She keeps it in the house for 10 days, next to the Child. The boy finds its fearful whimpering torturous and Ovid suspects the old woman intended to hurt the him, as if this is somehow the start of her “exorcism of the Child.” The Child grows more restless each day, but Ovid does not know if this is due to the puppy, the coming full moon, or the Child’s sense of his own captivity.

On the night of the full moon, the old woman leads all of the village women out to their special clearing, where men are not permitted, to perform the “offices of the moon,” the embodiment of “women’s power.” Ryzak, sitting with Ovid in the village, seems ill at ease while they are gone. Even after the women return, the Child does not sleep all night. Ovid thinks the air feels strange.

In the morning, Ovid hears raspy breathing. Ryzak fell ill during the night and appears gray. Animal-like growls rise from his throat. The old woman checks under his clothes and finds what she was looking for: small teeth marks on his wrist, where the beast’s spirit entered Ryzak’s body. She shrieks, realizing that her ritual of the night before failed, and “wail[s] for the dead.”

Ryzak’s mouth foams, and his limbs spasm and contort. Even to Ovid it seems like an animal is taking over Ryzak’s form. The shaman arrives but immediately flees, claiming that Ryzak is too far gone. The old woman declares that the Child’s demon has finally left him to take another soul. After five days, Ryzak does not die, but lays still in a coma. Everyone in the hut, even Ovid, sits motionless and terrified, looking for indicators that the demon is moving around the room. The Child holds tight to Ovid.

Ovid recalls that the rest of the day feels like a dream. He and the Child leave the house and hide in their small summer hut. The village women enter in their place and perform a ritual by burning mind-altering herbs and striking stones against each other, making noise to distract the demons while Ryzak dies. The elders enter and beat Ryzak to death, so that his spirit will be stirred to violence and rise, too fearsome for other dark spirits to try to claim it.

When Ryzak dies, the ritual ceases, replaced by the long moaning of Ryzak’s mother and daughter-in-law. The village elders spend the next hours dancing and drinking themselves into a stupor to distract the demons, while the women prepare Ryzak’s body for burial. In the midst of all of this, Ovid realizes he and the Child must flee—Ryzak was their only protection in the village, and now he is gone.

Ovid wakes the Child and takes him away from Tomis, heading toward the river. When they pass the marshes, the Child joyfully thinks they are returning to their lessons. When Ovid sternly leads him on, the child senses the gravity of his mood. Ovid hopes to cross the frozen river, two or three days ahead of them, and flee into the north. He thinks of all his dreams of crossing the river to dig his own grave, or to meet the gods in the form of horsemen. Ovid is going into the “unknown,” into the “clear path of my fate.” He feels it’s fitting that life should be a “continual series of beginnings,” since death is no more than the “refusal to […] grow and suffer change.”

Ovid and the Child make their way to the River Ister, which Ovid has always somehow considered to be the “final boundary” between him and his “true life.” He finds it strange that his easy childhood and “metropolitan” adulthood should lead to this crossing into the unknown. Ovid and the Child reach the frozen river while it is dark and set across. Halfway, they can see neither the shore behind them nor the shore in front of them, and Ovid imagines that the far side of the river may not actually exist, that all beyond it is only an illusion. However, they manage to reach the other side of the River Ister, and Ovid feels they are stepping into a new world.