At the Edge of Waking (11 page)

She turned back to the door and fumbled it open, stepped out into the equally black hall. One step, and she was enveloped, immersed, in the folds of a curtain.
Ah—!
said the voice, and the curtain, thin and damp, pressed close to her face, her mouth, and her arms, even her shins. She jerked back. It clung. She put out her hands, prying away from her mouth and nose, feeling the impossible pressure, the restraint. She pushed hard, made her fingers into claws, and tore through, and ran in the dark to the open door of the room and the window that was growing light, and found him waiting for her there.

The lavatory had no mirror, but she knew, by the change of texture under her palms, that her hair was growing in. No longer than his, perhaps, but the stiff stubble had changed to a close cap of fur. Too short still, and she knew they would be looking for her, but how long . . . ? She asked him: “How long will I have to stay here?”

“It isn’t safe yet. They’re looking hard, because of the men who were killed.”

The men he had killed.

He seemed to have recognized the quality of her hunger, and had brought her an apple and a thick-skinned winter carrot, which he cut into thin, uniform slices with a large pocket knife. She had not forgotten the day he had come with blood on his hands, and watched his hands, the knife, with a chill under her skin. But she could smell the apple like a draft from the pages of one of his books.

“You must have other safe houses,” she said, forcing her gaze away. “Your friends . . . ”

“Friends?” He pronounced the word oddly, as though it were new to him.

“Your organization.”

He did not look up, though the apple was sliced and pared, the carrot cut into fingers thinner than hers. Misgiving shook her.

“You said . . . you had a system. You said . . . an organization . . . ”

He wiped the knife, folded it and put it away.

“Well, don’t you? Someone to get me a, a wig, and clothes, and—papers—you said—”

He looked at her at last. “I can find those things. When they are not watching me so closely.”

A white flame ignited in her skull. “You don’t have any friends, do you?”

He looked away, stood with his empty hands at his sides.

“Do you? No organization, no system. Just you, hiding in this room.”

He had a statue’s eyes, cold and blind. “I signed the order,” he said.

The order . . . for her rescue? She couldn’t make sense of it, of him. The white flame guttered into confusion.

“I signed the order,” he said, “and then I came here. To think. It’s the only place safe enough to think in. And I thought: it’s supposed to be a hospital. I thought: it’s supposed to be for healing the sick, for giving peace to the troubled. And I thought: death is a kind of peace. But still, I thought. Still. I can’t help but think there are other kinds of peace. And it wasn’t your fault, in the end. Your brother, your father. It wasn’t your fault they didn’t care enough in the end. So then I came to wish it was undone. And I did what I could, to undo it.”

She sat in silence, piecing together the meaning of all this. The order, she thought. The order he had signed was to have her killed. And the hospital he was talking about wasn’t this one, but the one in which she had been a prisoner. Peace to the troubled. This place, those books. Peace to the troubled. He was insane.

She hardly knew whether the pity she felt was for him or herself, but it was as intense in this moment as grief.

“But you can still help me,” she said, more in response to this last realization than to what he had said. “You can still get me clothes, and papers. You can still . . . ” Her voice failed on a breath of tears. “You can still . . . let me go.”

“It isn’t safe yet,” he said, and stirred, the statue come back to some semblance of life. “Not yet. Maybe in the spring.”

Spring, she thought, when the tender leaves were budding in the pastoral woods, in some chapter of a book.

“That would be . . . nice,” she said raggedly, carefully. “Maybe then we . . . could go into the country. When the flowers are blooming. In the spring.”

His face softened, the strain in his body eased. He smiled—but it was as though his mouth was unaware of the blank despair in his eyes, the collapse of his mind. He turned and placed the apple and carrot slices in the bowl.

“Here,” he said. “It will do you good.”

She took the bowl, and coughed.

Country Mothers’ Sons

Now we live on the edge of the bombed quarter of the Parish of St. Quatain in the City of Mondevalcón. The buildings are crooked here, tall tenements shoved awry by the bomb blasts and scorched by the fires. At home in our valleys we whitewashed the houses every spring, even the poorest of us, brightening away the winter’s soot. Here, for all the rent we pay, the landlords say they are too poor to paint, and we live in a dark gray soot-streaked world, leaning away from the wind and the dirty rain. Spring comes as weeds sprouting in the empty lots where no one has yet begun to build. Build what? We are outside the rumors, we who only moved here after the war. My village was only a hundred miles away, but I am a foreigner here. Stubbornly, like most of us, I am still in my heart a native of my village; I only happen to live in this alien place.

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.