In the poor and remote province of Maramureş in the northern Carpathians, cut off by bad mountain roads from the rest of Romania to the south, the ancient body measures persist. Anything approaching six feet long – a plank of wood or a table – is a râf, the span of a man’s arms; a cot is a cubit, from elbow to fingertip; a ţol – about an inch – is the length of the last joint of the thumb; and a palmă is a hand’s breadth, the distance between the outstretched tips of the thumb and fingers of one hand.

Sitting in a cafe or in people’s kitchens over a cup of coffee or a glass of palincă, the same palmă gesture recurs: the fingers held out over the table, tensed, overstretched, the most that a hand can cover. The palmă isn’t much, but it isn’t nothing, something you can imagine mattering more in a moment of passion or fear than it would before or after.

The word can turn metaphorical, so that a palmă de pământ, a hand’s breadth of land, can stand for those little patches, the slim border zones between holdings, pieces of land whose ownership is uncertain, which are also sometimes called “battlegrounds”, luptă terenuri, literally “fighting lands”. Every year in Maramureş neighbours kill each other for these contested slips of territory. At times there have been 40 such violent attacks in 12 months, and week after week, much as road accidents are described in other parts of the world, the local press reports another man – always a man – killed for a hand’s breadth of land.

After the act, the murderers usually give themselves up, shocked at what they have done, going back into their kitchens to wait for the police to arrive and, when the case comes to trial, pleading guilty, as if something had burst up within them for which they were not responsible.

We – I – now live almost entirely insulated from these competitive realities. Our rivalries are expressed in remarks at home, after a party when the guests have gone, or in non‑replies to emails or phone messages. In that way our relationships are made and unmade almost at will. Physical neighbourhood – the ever-present contact of poor farming life – is not like that, and seems older and more elemental. In Maramureş it is, for example, the practice to bury large stones along your boundary, only parts of which appear at the surface. They are difficult to move and it would be even more difficult to conceal the marks of their having been moved, but they also work as a kind of psychic fact. Their dark and buried bulk, known but unseen, contains the silent but implicitly violent distinction between what is yours and what is mine.

This is an old practice but there is something slightly more complicated in play than the survival of ancient behaviour into modern life. The hand’s breadth murders in modern Maramureş are something more disturbing than that, signs of modern dysfunction and dispossession, of traditional systems failing, of the modern substitutes proving inadequate, of naked, unregulated behaviour leaving in its wake decades of pain and grief, widowed women and orphaned children.

Every piece of land is important here. People in Maramureş, with an inheritance of poverty and crowdedness, are what they are because of the land they have. Land is a constituent of the person. To enter another man’s land, particularly the yard around his house, is as intimate a penetration as putting your fingers in his mouth. A sophisticated, multilingual journalist in Baia Mare, who did not want to be named, told me that if someone came “into his land” – that was his expression, as if the land were an entirely enclosed space – he would kill him. “It is a border he has crossed. And when he sees my eyes he would understand. It has happened to me, men coming on to the land with guns. I told them they had to leave within 10 seconds. ‘If you enter again, I don’t give you the chance.’”

Walk through any of these valleys in the springtime and nothing is more impressive than this all-embracing physicality – the intimate connection of body with place and mind, the ways in which the physical elements of existence are dense with social and emotional meaning. I was in Maramureş with the photographer Gus Palmer and the Romanian journalist Teo Ivanciuc. One morning early last May, we were walking along the lanes of a little side valley above the River Iza, near the big village of Ieud. It was the moment at the end of winter when the land has to be “arranged”, as they say; cleaned and cleared for the growing year. People – mostly the old; not the young men and women away earning euros – were out on the roads. Farms are tiny – half of all the nine million farms in the EU are in Romania – and made up of even tinier strips scattered across the parishes. Almost no one has a car and so this is a walking world. No motor noise, no jet sound. Cuckoos and woodpeckers in the woods, skylarks above us, cocks crowing in the farmyards. The whole valley was filled with people ploughing, hoeing, axing out the dead wood, levelling molehills, cutting bean sticks, planting potatoes, raking old leaves, putting out dung. Women walked at the heads of the horses, the men behind the wooden ploughs. Pastures were being scoured with ox-drawn dredges, ploughlands broken up with horse-drawn harrows. The final cartloads of last summer’s hay were being taken back to the winter barns before the cattle were let out on to the spring grazing. The only sound on the road was the oiled creak of the cart axles as they passed.

It is easy enough to feel bewitched by the charm of this landscape, of people living in an animated, Brueghelian, pre-mechanised world. If you didn’t know better, you might think it perfect. But then, in another light, you see the tools of violence being carried into the fields: the steel crowbar, the ranga, for making holes in the earth, the axe with its bright and burnished edge, the cleft oak posts, the hoes, the hedge slashers – all the instruments with which management can be imposed. Cutting, controlling, slicing, hacking, killing: these are aspects of everyday existence.

Divided strips of farmland, outside Breb, Maramureş. Photograph: Gus Palmer

Maramureş is almost entirely mountain, high, hard and forested. Both geography and climate reinforce the idea of defensiveness as the core relationship to land. Wolves and bears still live here. The only valuable land, from which bread can actually be derived, is down in the narrow valleys, where people cluster, where villages are almost continuous ribbons of buildings along the valley roads, and the strips of land are as treasured as any family heirloom. “We are Maramureş,” Teo said only half ironically. “We are very aggressive, very nervous. Everyone here will always reach for the knife in his pocket.”

This is high and late country. The growing season was 100 days at best (it has lengthened with global warming), limited by frosts in May at one end and heavy rains in September at the other. Life had to be squeezed out of that growing year, and most families were unable to survive without the wages earned by men labouring elsewhere in Romania and Austro- Hungary. “People here have always been fighting for their life,” Dr József Béres of the Sighetu museum said. “The land is mine, it is my family’s, it came from the past. The word peasant might mean ‘a man in love with the land’, but there is not enough land. Big land was always occupied by the nobility and so the peasants were always short of it. It is a form of devotion but also of unending anxiety and desperation, a predicament shared with every neighbour you have.”

After the 1848 revolutions in the Austro-Hungarian empire, of which Transylvania was a part, the serfs were liberated and allowed to own the land they had previously worked for the nobility. From the 1860s onwards, each fragmented, multi‑strip holding was carefully mapped in a meticulous register. There were many local ways of policing this complex pattern of land ownership. Villages employed field wardens, gornici, to mediate in arguments between neighbours: where the boundaries lay, where cattle could or could not graze, whose hay grew in which meadow. The gornici were organised by a birau, a “mayor of the fields”, paid by the village, either through a local tax or by receiving the fines raised from malefactors.

But little was stable here. After the defeat of Austria-Hungary in the first world war, 3.9m hectares were distributed to Romanian peasants; in 1945 a further 1.4m hectares were expropriated from the German peasants and one million hectares redistributed. Communism and the collectivisation of most farmland in the decade after 1949 was only the most radical step in this series of disruptions. Along with the local authority of the priest, the council of elders in each village was done away with. Most land and all tools were gathered up, even the yokes of the cows, the ploughs, the wheelbarrows. The agents of the party, the New Men, usually the landless, the poorest in the village, became the agents of confiscation. People talking of that time can become speechless with the pain of it. The richest and most influential villagers, who employed others or had wide networks of cousins and supporters, were given impossible quotas or tasks – to plough, for example, their entire 10-hectare holding in one day – and could be imprisoned if they failed.

The palmă – a hand’s breadth – is a traditional measure and a term used to describe a narrow piece of contested land. Photograph: Gus Palmer

The New Men began to impose collective solutions and in the 1950s violent neighbour-hatred ballooned. Administrative change can scarcely address the loyalties of the heart and, needless to say, ancient memories of possession and belonging persisted under the new collectivised regimes. Those ghost memories of ownership – with the pain of dispossession rising up into the surface of everyday life – lie behind the murder of a farmer called Todor Lumei in the autumn of 1972.

His daughter Viorica, now 57, lives next door to her sister Maria, who is five years younger, in the house they were both born in. It is on the rural western edge of Sighetu Marmaţiei, the provincial capital of Maramureş, tucked up in a little valley that once belonged to their family, above the River Tisza. The sisters have divided the small wooden house in two and each has raised a family in their own inherited half. Cherry and apple trees blossom around their yards and gardens where the onions are already planted out. Dogs are kept in wooden runs, and chickens peck among the fallen blossom petals on the grass.

The worn air of loss filled Viorica’s hot yellow kitchen. She told the story, twisting her hands, folding and unfolding her fingers, while Maria listened, playing with her phone.

“The whole hill here was once owned by our grandfather. But during communism many others were settled here. The road is still our property but …” Viorica said, with a shrug and half a smile. “I was 15 in 1972. It was in the autumn. And I was grazing the sheep with my younger brother. He was 14. We were looking after the lambs in the field up here” – she pointed to the hill behind the house – “and the lambs went off into another piece of land, part of the collective farm then, and they ate some hay from the collective farm haystack.”

Next to that haystack was the little wooden house and the yard of the man who had made the hay for the collective. It was not his hay, but he had done the work and had built the stack. “His wife started to shout and scream at us from her yard. ‘What are you doing? Your lambs are eating our hay!’”

Just then, by chance, her father came up the hill. He heard the woman shouting at his children. “So he said to her, ‘Why are you making that noise? Why are you arguing with the children? If you have something to say, say it to me. I am here.’ He went into their farmyard to deal with it. ‘If I did something against you, just tell me, we can sort it out.’” Then the neighbour’s small dog tried to bite Viorica’s father. All his attention was given to keeping it away. And while he was concentrating on the little dog, the woman came up behind him and stabbed him with a little knife in the back. “He was not mortally wounded,” Viorica says. “It was just a small wound. He didn’t pay attention to it, because he was still fighting the dog. Then the woman shouted, ‘Come and kill him! If you don’t come and kill him, I will kill you!’ Her husband came out of the house with an enormous knife and stabbed my father with it in the back and he fell down dead in one second.” With her hands she measures out the length of the blade on the plastic of the tablecloth, about two feet apart, each hand slightly cupped.

Her brother ran down the hill to call for help. The murderer ran down after him, trying to stab him too

Viorica shouted for her brother and when he got to her and saw what had happened, they both started to scream so loudly that they could be heard in the town of Sighetu. Her brother ran down the hill to call for help. The murderer ran down after him, trying to stab him too, but he escaped. Then, quite suddenly, the murderer came to his senses and went into his house, with his wife, to wait for the police. Viorica stayed in the farmyard by the body of her father, on the stones and the muck from the animals.

The neighbour was arrested. At court his family arranged things so that the wife was not accused and the murderer was sentenced to eight years, so little because he was already 68. During communism, many general amnesties were issued and after one year and two months he was released. “For such a murder,” Viorica said, half under her breath.

Compensation was set by the court. The murderer had no money and no goods, so they received only his small wooden house, “Seven by four metres, a room and a porch.” It was valued at 17,000 lei, 15 months’ wages at that time, but that figure draws sceptical laughs from the women. “It was worth much less but we took it,” Maria said. “It was rotten, very rotten and so we didn’t have much timber from it. We built a barn with it.” The man’s wife died when he was in prison and afterwards he moved away. “And can you believe,” Viorica said, “he lived until he was over 90?”

What explains this? Why the rage of the murderer’s wife? There had been no trouble before. But the ghosts of history were in play. The murder site had never been part of Maria and Viorica’s grandfather’s property, but memories of class distinctions hung on. They had been rich peasants; the murderer was the poorest of the poor. The land on which the haystack stood and on which he had made the hay had been his before collectivisation. And so rage and resentment and the grief of loss found its outlet in that moment. Had their father somehow, even inadvertently, been acting the richer peasant? Had the murderer’s wife thought he was coming for a fight, and so attacked him first?

These questions drifted around the kitchen, as they have these last 40 years. After the murder, Viorica went to work in a restaurant and then a hospital, to help her family. She has been unwell ever since. “I was so deeply affected that I have had several strokes. Of course you can never get away from it. It is always in your mind. It is always in my memory.” Their mother fell ill. The family borrowed money from relations for the funeral and to cover the fees of the priests, then worked for years to pay them off. Grief took up residence beside them.

We went up the hill to see where the killing had happened. The meadow has been planted since then with a plum orchard, the trunks painted white, the trees coming into leaf, the blossom already falling like spring snow onto the grass.

When Nicolae Ceaușescu’s dictatorship was brought to a violent end in the revolution of 1989, demand surged for restitution of the lands that had been collectivised during the years of communism. More than 1.5m Romanian farmers started court cases against their neighbours for land claims in the 1990s. Those who had been using the land during communism thought they had as good a claim to it as the descendants of those who had owned it before. Many of the descendants had moved away and were now in the cities. How did they have more of a right to land than those who had been working it for decades? Corruption and complexity swamped the process. Village land commissions, run by the mayors and deputy mayors, became the means of rewarding friends and punishing rivals.

People had forgotten where their land was meant to be. The maps, which were ignored by the communists and recorded nothing that had happened since 1948, were rejected in favour of hazy witness statements. By mid-1994, 6,236,507 claims had been filed for the return of land. Some 4,897,573 were accepted, for a total of 9.2m hectares, two-thirds of Romania’s farmland. Just under half of all holdings were less than one hectare, 82% under five hectares. But fog still hangs over the whole process. With the collapse of collective agriculture, this dissolution of the known order, hand’s‑breadth murders peaked again, and continued on into the new century.

Can one see any of this from the other side? Is it really possible to regard murder as a normal part of everyday life? Of how things are? Of what men do to each other? As an unfortunate, spontaneous eruption of anger that does not need to disrupt the flow of life? Could I see how these land murders looked from the point of view not of the victim’s family, but the killer’s?

Ileana Pașca’s husband Ianoș was killed while he sat by a river with his granddaughter. Photograph: Gus Palmer

There had been one particularly horrible murder on the edge of Săliștea de Sus, where the victim, Ianoș Pașca – a big, violent and angry ex-miner from a family of famous anti‑communist partisans – ended up lying dead in the shallows of the River Iza. The local press had been able to photograph him one long afternoon in May 2009, his shirt up over his hips and the back of his head bloody.

He had been sitting on the river bank across from his house, just at the spot where a favourite cousin of his had died years before, accidentally electrocuted when illegally electrofishing in the river. Pașca had bought the land a few years previously – good valley land but only 1,800 square metres – because it was ancestral ground. His grandfather used it but his father had actually bought it and then given it as a dowry for one of Pașca’s sisters. Pașca then bought it from his sister. His wife, Ileana, had urged him not to buy it because, as she said to me, “Everyone wanted it. It was fighting land. There were many other things he could have bought but he bought that land. His mind was fixed.”

Everyone wanted it. It was fighting land. There were many other things he could have bought, but his mind was fixed

The person who wanted it more than anyone was Pașca’s cousin Mărtin Grad, a small man, known as Mărtinuc or Little Martin, who lived in the same village. His father and Pașca’s were brothers, and, despite the documents to the contrary, Mărtinuc and all the Grads thought that the slip of land, just at the point where the side valley called Tătarului comes down to the Iza, should belong to them. Pașca and Mărtinuc had been at each other’s throats for years. Pașca had complained more than 20 times to the police that Mărtinuc was threatening him. And he had said to Ileana: “I am going to kill him.”

On 21 May 2009, the feast day of Saints Constantine and Helen, Mărtinuc had been drinking with a friend. It was a holiday and, as the story told in the village had it, just before four o’clock in the afternoon he stood up and told his friends: “Now I am going to kill someone.” Pașca was sitting by the river with Mimi, his treasured three-year-old granddaughter, in his arms. Mărtinuc crept up behind him and hit him in the back of the head – it is generally thought with an axe, or perhaps with a split-oak fence post. He tried to kill Mimi too, to get rid of a witness, but he was drunk and she ran away. She remembers her bag dropping into the river.

Mărtinuc went home, said, “I killed him,” and waited for the police. He was given 12 years, will serve six and is due to be released this year. Pașca’s widow Ileana was awarded 100m old lei compensation for murder, about €2,300, but she has yet to receive it. Worse than that, when she came home from court and walked past the gate to the killing land, Mărtinuc’s family, quite illegally, were there with their hoes and forks. As she walked past, she recalled, one of them said: “We will kill you just as our father killed your husband.”

Six years after the murder, Ileana Pașca lives in a state of dread. She is 67 and has spoiled her eyes “with cheap Russian glasses”. Her face is saggy with emotion and exhaustion. Mimi, her granddaughter, spends much of her time with her, solemn and almost entirely silent. Meanwhile, gossip ripples around the village: that before the trial, Mărtinuc had been looking after the chief of police’s sheep; his children had been making the chief of police’s hay. Mărtinuc himself had been in the front row of church every week and the priest loved him. Ileana told me that the priest had even visited him in prison and urged her to forgive him. To which she shot back: “If your wife had been killed, would you be ready to forgive the murderer?”

I started asking in the village for Mărtinuc’s family. It was not easy. Mărtinuc? Mărtin Grad? Aren’t there two people of that name? The one who killed that man by the river and walked off? Oh no, I don’t know that one. I know the other one. Then going on their way down the village street, the relief palpable in their bodies, the cigarette in one hand, the small black hat resettled on the top of the head. Or, with people who were connected to him, that look of difficulty and defence, of thoughts in mind that are not to be expressed. No, not a nice person. And that result was final proof, wasn’t it? Ioana Iuga, running the bar and related both to the Grads and to the Pașcas, thought maybe Mărtinuc had some relations living up the little narrow valley called Tătarului, up in the hills, the very valley at the foot of which he had struck Pașca in the head.

A stony lane curls its way up the valley alongside the stream, with willows and cherries in blossom the length of it. Here and there are tiny poor farms. Little strips of meadow are slipped into the foot of the valley. Most of the ground is too steep to plough or dig, so steep, one farmer told us as we passed, that the upper plough horse would tumble down over the other if you tried. The forest is a solid wall above the lowest few yards of the valley. It is bear and wolf country. Three years ago, one winter night, 150 sheep and eight dogs were killed by a pack of three wolves about 15 miles from there. Teo was carrying a pepper spray in his pocket, more for the dogs than anything else. “I have been bitten too often in places like this.”

We asked at the little houses for Mărtinuc’s family. “Yes, further up” – that waving, flicking hand gesture meaning “not here, up there, further away”.

Finally, we came to the place where they said Mărtinuc’s daughter lived. Three dogs on chains guarded it from any approach. Each dog had worn to dust the ground within reach of its chain. A tiny cabin, scarcely a house, stood a yard or two inside the fence and gate, with a ragged broken henhouse and pig house beside it. There was no spot of level ground. Five yards from the door of the house, the wall of the valley rose into the forest. Washing hung on a line attached to a cherry tree.

It was a beautiful corner but no one would live here unless they had to. And thinking of those lovely level square metres of land by the river, where a family could spread itself in ease, and with the knowledge that whatever they planted would grow in the alluvium on which they lived, you might well feel that envy and hatred was inseparable from being stuck up here in the beauty of this hard and impoverished place.

Ioan Vlad survived an attack by a bear. Photograph: Gus Palmer

We stood at the gate and a middle-aged woman came out of the house, short-sleeved shirt, strong arms, an unquestionable presence about her, and we began talking. She was Ioana Grad, Mărtinuc’s daughter, married to Ioan Vlad who was away that afternoon, working on the railway. Her son-in-law was on the far side of the yard, clipping the wool from an old ewe, with his wife and baby daughter beside him. He saw us, stood up and slowly walked over, the pair of long-bladed shears in his hand, held out in front of him, the blade upright, his fist around the handle resting on his thigh, his eyes, under a peaked forage cap, intently fixed on us as we stood there outside the yard, talking to the woman across the gate, not crossing the all-important boundary. The last words of this family to Ileana Pașca were in my mind. There is no mistaking the big, swinging, self‑establishing manner of a fighting man, and we reacted as animals do in these circumstances, looking down and away, no meeting of those eyes.

We talked about the EU, how no grants were available for farmers with less than 50 sheep, or farms as tiny as theirs; about the valley, their goats, the weather and the bears. “Is that why you are here?” Ioana asked. “Because Ioan was bitten by the bear?” “Ah yes,” I said, “because of that.” And with this talk the air of threat and distance started to shrink away. The son-in-law Stefan lowered his blade and Ioana asked us into the house. She had just baked an apple cake. Would we have coffee?

We sat beneath a small fluorescent icon of the holy family at a table two feet square, covered in a plastic lace cloth. They felt they had nowhere to go, nowhere to be. Unlike other, richer families from these valleys, they do not have the resources to go west within the EU to earn the sort of wages that can buy cars, build new houses and change lives. “But you want to know about Ioan and the bear?”

It was 1991, 14 September, the Day of the Holy Cross. At 10 in the morning, Ioan Vlad was looking after the cows only a few yards from the farm on the edge of the forest when a bear ran out between them. After Ioan hit it with a stick, the bear put a thumb into Ioan’s mouth and grasped his face with his other claws. “With that one hand the bear broke all the bones in Ioan’s face,” his wife said.

“He had 72 operations on his face and still now he cannot eat easily because some of the bones in his head are still loose. And one of his eyes can no longer have any tears.”

Ioan returned from work, one half of his face visibly slumped and broken. “Everything you see on my face was down,” he said. “You could see the other side of this eye. And this is the eye from which tears will not come now.”

While Stefan and his wife Maria returned to clipping the urine-coloured wool from the old sheep, Ioan took me to see his cow, and as he talked he held her lip tenderly and sweetly between the fingers of his hand. “She is a lovely creature, isn’t she?” he said.

Such gentleness and such intimacy in a world where violence seems as natural as the blossom on a springtime tree. There is no boundary between violence and love. The two coexist in the same hand, the same face, the same slip of contested territory. It is not that these valleys are particularly violent places; only that in such a deeply corrupt society, with government ministers and officials siphoning off subsidies meant for farmers, dodgy bank deals, the abuse of power by local bigwigs, magistrates, the police and even the postmen, all living in a culture of mutual scavenging, taking whatever their power will allow them to take, violence is the resort of the dispossessed. That is true whether it is the bear threatened in his diminishing forest or the poor, marginal farmers for whom flat and fertile land at the foot of the valley looks like a paradise of riches. Was it so inconceivable, in this place high up in the valley of Tătarului, that you might attack and kill another man you hated because he owned something that you thought was yours? Would you not feel justified in killing him because his ownership of that land itself felt like a kind of murder? It is a logic of claim and revenge. It is what happens in a place where revenge is the only justice.

This is an edited extract of The Hand’s Breadth Murders, from the current issue of Granta. To order a copy for £9.99 (RRP £12.99), go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min. p&p of £1.99.

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