At the Edge of Waking Page 9

  Elena Markassa lives high at the top of a creaking staircase, in her “tower,” she says, where she can look far out and down. They are bright rooms, though cold and restless with the wind that sneaks in through the broken and never-mended panes. But the rest of us live lower down, out of the reach of the sun, so we often gather there, wrapped in our sweaters and shawls. Lydia Santovar huffs and puffs after the climb, but Agnola Shovetz and I are mountain women and too proud, even carrying a sack of potatoes between us. Elena Markassa never leaves her flat, she’s an antiquated princess in her gloomy tower waiting for her perennially absent son to come home.

  We all have absent sons.

  “These boys!” Agnola Shovetz says with a toss of her hands and a note of humor in her voice, but Elena Markassa’s broad face is heavy as she brings the flour tin from the pantry. We are making peroshki today, a long and fussy chore demanding company.

  “They need work,” Lydia Santovar says.

  “My boy works,” Agnola Shovetz says, ready for a mild quarrel.

  “I don’t mean that kind of work. Waiting tables! I can’t blame my boy, even grown men take what they can find these days, but what kind of work is that for a man? And all for a pocket of small bills. I hardly saw a coin from one end of the month to the other, back home. Who needed it? We worked the land, and it gave us what we needed. The apple trees and the barley fields and the cows: there was always something that needed doing at home. That was work, all of us together, building up the farm. That was where the wealth was, and you always knew where the boys were . . . ”

  At home. Is this all we talk about? Home. The war took it away from us, or took us away from it. The land we all thought eternal, ruined or lost, simply lost, as if the mountains had closed in, folding the valleys away out of reach. It’s true, the word conjures our small house with the walls of plaster over stone, and the icon of St. Terlouz growing dark as an eclipsed sun over the hearth. But it’s also true that when I hear that word I think of Georgi out on the mountain slopes, running through the streams of moonlight that splash through the spruce boughs and shine off the patchy remnants of snow. How he could run! Not a handsome man, my Georgi, and with a shy, hostile look with strangers, as if he were poised between a snarl and a fast retreat, but oh, to see him moving across the steep meadows, dancing from rock to rock above the backs of the scurrying sheep. Our son moves a little like that, so that it hurts sometimes to see him hemmed in by all these stony walls. Mountains, buildings, my boy says to me, it’s all rock, mama. Either way, it’s only rock.

  It isn’t the buildings, his father would have said. It’s the walls.

  Lydia makes a well in the mound of flour on the table and I start cracking eggs while Elena fills the big kettle at the tap.

  “This morning,” Elena says, pitching her voice over the rush of the water, “I had to hear from my neighbor across the hall on the other side, she looks over the roofs going down to the harbor. She says all last night she heard the boys out on the roof, drinking, fighting, God knows what they get up to—”

  “My boy’s not a fighter,” Agnola says.

  “Whatever they do,” Elena says, “this morning the roofs were covered with dead birds. Feathers like a ruined bed, that’s what my neighbor said, and the birds all lying there like a fox went through the henhouse, dead.”

  “They keep hens on the roof over there?” Lydia says. Her strong arm is pumping as she beats the eggs into a yellow froth.

  “Not hens,” Elena says. “Pigeons, seagulls. Should I know? City birds. Nobody keeps hens here.”

  “People keep doves,” Agnola says. She has a worried look, always on the verge of hunger.

  “Not for eating,” Elena says authoritatively. Perhaps living in her tower has made her an expert on the city’s heights. “They’re racing pigeons, for sport.”

  “We used to snare wood doves and cook them into pies,” Agnola says.

  “You can’t eat city birds,” Lydia says. She’s a little short of breath. “No better than rats, with what they eat.”

  “It’s the dead birds I’m talking about.” Elena bangs the kettle down on the stove and turns to us. “Of course I had to hear it from my neighbor. He comes home almost at dawn, when all night I hardly slept for wondering where he is, and ‘Where were you?’ I say, but it’s ‘Mama, I have to go to work, do I have any clean socks?’ ”

  “Oh, but my boy’s just the same,” says Lydia. “They’re all the same, aren’t they, Nadia?”

  They look at me, because they think my boy is the ringleader, the troublemaker, the one whose role in life is to lead the innocent astray. But what can I say? That, no, unlike their boys he tells me everything, sitting on the edge of my bed in the dark?

  The clouds blew away before midnight last night, and the moon shone so bright the birds mistook it for day. Down below, far below the height of rooftops on the hill, the harbor looked like a circle of sky, black water and moon sequins embraced by a lunar crescent of headlands. The water trembled under the wind that cleansed the air of its night smokes, and the birds confused by the brilliance of the moon lifted their wings, half aloft as the sea air flowed over and around them. Multitudes of pigeons on the roof leads leaned silently into the wind, bright eyes colorless, ruffled feathers like pewter. They stood in ranks like a congregation waiting for the hand of God to part the curtain of sky and sweep them away to another world; city doves, gray as the pavements, waiting for the right hand of God. And all around, like lumps of creosote on chimneys, finials on church spires, heat-slumped lightning rods and weather vanes frozen by the cold light, perched the owls.

  If you move slow enough, not stalking-slow, but easy, you have to have some humor about it, be a little careless—but if you’re easy you can walk right among them. They’re used to people, it’s like feeding them in the square, except they’re so still, in a trance, soft around your feet. In the cold you can feel the warmth of them against your ankles, the soft feathers of their breasts.

  I can feel it. I can see the sleepy shutter-blink of their eyes as they stare out to sea, bemused, be-mooned.

  The boys climb the roofs as if tenements were mountain peaks and they were wolves climbing into the thin air to serenade the moon. And what happens to the hundreds of souls under the roofs when the roofs are no longer roofs, the buildings no longer buildings but hills, and the streets are only ravines, black with moon-shadow? What happens to all the dreamers when our boys are alone with the birds on the high hills? Do we dream beneath their feet like the dead dream, locked in the solid earth?

  The boys stood on the steep roof slope, feet warmed by pigeons and faces icy in the wind. The pigeons with their wings half spread, and maybe the boys, too, with their arms thrown wide, so many saints on so many crosses of moonlight, waiting for the right hand of God. And the owls, their yellow eyes the only color in the world, lifting free from chimney and spire, more silent than the blustering wind.

  And you’ll never know, mama, you’ll never know how it is to see the plunge, the hard short fight, the feathers flying like confetti at a wedding, and feel the hot bloody claws clench your arm. They’re so strong. They’re so strong.

  But I do know. You can’t tell your son that, not when he’s sitting on the edge of your widow’s bed with his young blood running so hot and fast in his veins. But I know. I can see it still, and breathe the cold air that pours like slow water off the edge of the snowfields. Spring in the valleys, but winter on the heights, so cold there is ice in the air to catch the light of the moon. The waning snow is so white it turns the rest of the mountain to shadow; and the broke-neck grouse, wings wide and head lolling below a halo of scattered feathers; and my Georgi, a shadow, with only his eyes bright with moon. Is that why I left the mountains? Not because there was nothing left but scarred fields and a gutted house, nothing for my son but the choice between brigandry and hunger. But because as long as I am here, or anywhere else, I can see my husband there, as if I had to leave before he could come home from
the war.

  But the women, my country friends, are looking at me, waiting for an answer. “Yes,” I say with just the right sort of sigh, “these boys, they’re all the same.” And I reach for a potato and a paring knife, taking my share of the chore.

  When you’re trudging through the gray streets, with maybe a shopping basket in one hand, an umbrella in the other, bumping along with all the other umbrellas on the way to market to buy vegetables off a truck without even a crumb of good dirt in sight—when you’re walking the daytime streets, you’d think there’s only two kinds of animal in the world: the pigeons and the cats. Maybe if you look hard you see the little house sparrows, brave as orphans snatching up what the pigeons are too slow to grab, and the seagulls lording it up on the gutters and the gable ends; and there are cormorants down in the harbor, drying their wings like so many broken umbrellas on the pilings; and of course there are the poor city dogs, tugged about on leashes when they’re not trapped inside; and rats you only ever hear scrabbling in the walls. But the city belongs to the pigeons and the cats, like rival armies in a battle as old as the city, and this city is very old. Very old.

  Somehow, it’s the pigeons that believe themselves in the ascendant, though you’d think it would be the cats, arrogant with their armament of teeth and claws. But it’s the pigeons who bustle around like women on market day, keeping a sharp eye out for a good bit of gossip and a bargain, while the cats slink about on the edges of things, holding themselves equally ready for a fast retreat or a lightning raid. Only at night, when the pigeons hide from the dark and the streets are quiet, do the cats quietly take command.

  Mondevalcón is a snarl of streets, a tip-tilted tangle running across the hills that rise between the harbor and the high black mountains inland. Even with the new electric streetlights going up there is a lot of darkness here at night, and of course the streetlights are going up first among the palaces on the hill and the docks down by the water. In between, where most of us live, there is still darkness, deep as the sea. Only sometimes the moon slips in, canny and elusive as the little gray tabby that comes to my balcony for her saucer of milk or her bit of egg every morning. Yes, moonlight comes like a cat, easing silently down one street angled just so, skipping across the battered roofs, running rampant in the bombsites, then darting, sudden and bright, down an alley so narrow you would have sworn it hadn’t been touched by natural light for a thousand years. And one night the foxes from the wild mountains followed the moon into town.

  You should have seen them, mama! my son says in the dark of my curtained room. I can hardly see him for the darkness, just the shape of a gesture or the glint of an eye, but I can smell the sharp sweat of him, still more boy than man, and the fruit tang of the liquor he shares with his friends. I hear, too, the wild energy that still has him it its grasp. He won’t sleep until it lets him go, so I prop a second pillow under my head and listen. You should have seen them, he says.

  Cats are solitary creatures and seldom gather, so it’s a curious thing when they do. They came so quietly, as if they gathered substance out of the night air, appearing like the dew on the cobblestones of the street, on wide marble steps and the lofty pediments of the grand old buildings, the banks and palaces and guild halls, that survived the war. There is one wide avenue on the seaward face of the Mondevalcón hill, Penitents Climb, that rises, steep and nearly straight, from the harborfront to Cathedral Square. It runs on from the square, the same wide street though its name has changed, down the back side of the hill, past the townhouses of the rich, and up again, past the train yards and coal depots and feedlots, and up still more into the harsh black rock country of the high mountains, shaded here and there by juniper and pine. This was the road the foxes took as they came dancing on their long black-stockinged legs, their grinning teeth and laughing eyes bright in the light of the moon. They were not silent. Like soldiers marching into town with a weekend leave before them, they stepped with a quick hard tapping of claws and let out the occasional yelp, or a vixen scream to tease the lapdogs barking and howling from the safety of their masters’ houses, and so their coming was heralded.

  The cats waited where Penitents Climb runs into the square. The bombed cathedral stood in its cage of scaffolding, as if it were half a thousand years ago and it was being raised for the first, not the second, time. The cobblestones, where light once fell from jewel-toned windows, were dark, and the square, domain of pigeons in the daylight, was a black field waiting for battle to be joined. How did the boys find themselves there, so far from their usual harborside haunts?

  We followed the moon, my sons says, though perhaps they only followed the cats.

  The silent cats. In the moonlight you could see the wrinkled demon-masks of their small faces when they hissed, the needle-teeth white, the ears pressed flat, and the eyes. Eyes black in the darkness, black and empty as the space between the stars. Even in the colorless light of midnight you could see all the mongrel variety of them, small and dainty, long and rangy, big and pillow-soft in the case of the neutered toms; and the coats, all gray, it’s true, but showing their patches, their brindles, their stripes. All the cats of the city, alley cats and shop cats and pampered house cats, thousands of cats, as many and as silent as the ghosts of the city’s dead, so many killed by the bombs, and all gathered there to repel the invasion of the mountain wilds.

  The foxes came skipping into the square, long tongues hanging as they drooled at the daytime scent of the pigeons. Is that what drew them down from the mountains? Or did they, like our mountain sons, only follow the moon?

  Battle joined. One fox makes a meal of one cat, if the cat is surprised before it can climb. Foxes are long-legged and long-jawed, clever and quick, and born with a passion for mayhem. But for every fox there was a dozen cats or more, and a cat defending its nest of kittens is a savage thing, with no thought for its own hurt.

  The foxes took joy in it, you could see that, the way they pounced four-footed or danced up on two. It almost seemed the cats were the wild ones. No fun in them, no quarter, no fear of death but no thought for anything else, either. Your heart could break for them when they died. You could love them for it, thrown broken-backed and bleeding from some grinning dog-creature’s mouth, but they were fearsome, too, so many of them in such a bloodthirsty crowd. I could imagine them turning on us like that. One black she-cat turned such a face to me, with her white, white teeth and the eyes black as holes, that I was almost afraid, forgetting how small she was. Like a lioness.

  And so they prevailed, the cats, though terribly many of them died. As the moon slipped away behind the black mountains the foxes seemed to lose the fun of the thing, or maybe it was only that the moon’s setting called the signal for retreat. And so the sun rose, and the pigeons, never knowing the battle that was fought for their safety, gathered to hunt for crumbs on the bloodstained cobbles of the square.

  “And now there are police about asking questions!” Lydia Santovar says.

  It is just the two of us today. Elena Markassa, up in her leaning tower, has pleaded a headache, and Agnola Shovetz is cleaning offices, to her chagrin, so Lydia has come to my small flat to make our pies. We have wrinkled apples from the winter store, rhubarb crisp and fresh with sour juice, and hard little raisins that look like nothing so much as squashed flies. This has a satisfying appearance of bounty spread out on my counters along with the sacks of flour and sugar and the tin of lard, something to take pleasure in, in the face of all our worries about money. Beyond homesickness, I am thinking more and more about our weed-choked fields and ruined barns back home. I have rented our pastures to the shepherds and that gives us our tiny income—that and my son’s small wage from cleaning trolley cars—but oh, to have enough to hire a man to rebuild the house and plow the fields! Oh, to have a man, my man, back again! So I am not listening very closely to Lydia’s tale.

  “You have had a theft in your building, Lydia? I hope you lost nothing yourself.”

  “You aren’t listening
, Nadia Prevetz.”

  Well, this is true.

  “It’s the cats I’m speaking of. Surely you must have heard!”

  What I have heard is what my son tells me, but nothing more, so to play it safe I say, “Someone has been stealing cats?”

  Lydia looks at me strangely. Does she doubt my innocence, or my sense? “Killing them, Nadia. Someone has been killing the cats all over the city. The police say nothing, you know how they are, but everyone has been talking— But you must have heard this?”

  I have a slice of apple in my mouth and can only shake my head no.

  “Everyone says it is the work of a madman, or perhaps even a wicked gang, and now with the police everywhere asking about men seen out late at night, and in the newspaper today a letter about bringing the curfew back into force . . . Well, you can see what they think, that soon it won’t be just cats but people that are getting killed.”

  “But surely . . . ” I keep my eyes on my hands, the neat curl of apple peel sliding away from the knife. “Isn’t it just as likely to have been animals?”

  “That’s what I say! It’s just animals. Even if it is some gang of fiends.”

  It’s clear what kind of newspapers Lydia reads. I bite my lip to keep from smiling. “What I mean to say is, isn’t it likely that it was dogs or some such that killed the cats? I think a pack of dogs roaming the streets makes more sense than a gang of cat-murderers.”