At the Edge of Waking (12 page)

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.”

Lydia refrains from giving me another look. I can feel it, though her hands are as busy as mine.

“Maybe that’s all it is,” she says. “But the police are about, with their questions and their eyes, and I’m keeping my boy in at night until it all settles down.”

“Well, you can try,” I say, with the smile fighting free. Try to keep the young men indoors with spring on its way!

“Maybe you should try too,” Lydia says, her voice sharp as my paring knife. “To be on the safe side.”

Still she forcibly refrains from looking at me, and my smile dies.

For here is another memory of home, and one I wish I could forget. Why is it that I need to build my memories of our house piece by piece, like our bedroom so small that our marriage bed, too big to fit through the door, had to be built inside the room—that room, warm as a hen’s nest in winter, with its white plaster walls and black beams and tiny two-paned window set to catch sunrise and moonrise in the east—I have to build it one eye-blink at a time, yet the bad memories leap sharp and wounding to the front of my mind. There is Georgi, with his hunted look and restless body, and there are the shepherds complaining of sheep dead in the sheering pen, and there is our son, so small and his eyes so wide, never understanding why these angry men have come to accuse his father . . . of what? Even they did not seem to know, except that we were the only people in the valley who did not raise sheep. My poor Georgi! I had to take them out and show them our goats, that I kept for milk and for the finer wool, and such a clamor did the does raise when they smelled the sheep blood on the men’s clothes that the boy started to cry and the men went away ashamed. But by then Georgi was also gone, back up into the high trees. The best hunter in the valley—as if he had to demean himself by slaughtering sheep penned and helpless! It was two sheep dogs that went bad, the way they sometimes do, and leapt the fence to savage the sheep they were meant to be guarding. The dogs were shot, but no one apologized to my Georgi. I don’t think he ever noticed, but I did, remembering how our little boy cried.

And now my boy, his father’s son, refuses to stay inside on nights when the sky is clear.

I spend all day in the maintenance shed with the stink of oil and paint, mama, I wouldn’t know if it was raining or snowing or dropping fish from the sky except that the trolley cars come back all covered with scales. I have to see the sky sometimes, don’t I? I’d go crazy! Listen, mama, don’t ever let them lock me away. If I wasn’t a lunatic when I went in, I would be before I could come out again.

And why would anyone lock him away? But I can see his eyes are dancing with mischief, he’s only teasing his sad old mother, and so I laugh with him about the fish.
But think, mama,
he says solemnly,
those scales had to come from somewhere.

Like the foxes did.

Oh, these bright nights of spring! For the spring is well advanced now, and for all I thought it would be invisible here in the midst of the gray old city, there seems to be sweet new green everywhere. Workers clearing the bomb sites must cut the wiry vines to free the rubble, and even the heaps of wilting greenery show white trumpet flowers still trying to open with the dawn. Every balcony has sprouted an herb garden, rosemary already dressed in faded blue, bergamot opening in orange and red, mint in vivid green despite the soot that dusts everything indoors and out. And at night, when the onshore wind drives the clouds onto the high mountain peaks and the blazing moon robs the world of color, the tenements are like cliffs seeming too sheer to climb but beckoning with tender leaves in every cranny and on every ledge. And the cloud-heavy peaks are still barren with snow.

Do you remember, mama, how papa used to take us up through the woods to the high meadows below the cliffs? He was always the one who saw them first. Do you remember? The way they would leap, you would swear, from nothing to nothing where the rock was so steep even stonecrop could barely cling. The way they would leap . . .

Do I remember? The steep meadows strewn with the earliest flowers, the yellow stars of avalanche lilies and the pale anemones too tender, you would swear, for the harsh high winds; and the black cliffs with their feet buried in the rubble of stone broken by ice in the winters when no one was there to see it fall; and the sharp-horned chamois like patches of dirty snow where no snow could cling, until they moved, leaping, as my son says, from nothing to nothing, or so you would swear. The chamois made my neat-footed goats look clumsy and earthbound, the tame and more than tame cousins condemned to valley life: debased. Or was that how I felt, trailing in the wake of my husband and my son, who seemed to have been born for the heights? But even they were banned from the steepest cliffs.

It was the challenge, mama. You don’t know, you don’t know . . .

The longing for the high places, the hot-blooded joy of risk.

The chamois came across the rooftops in the full noon of the moon. Did they ever touch the city ground? Perhaps they stepped from the mountain slope onto some steep outlying roof and leapt from there to the next, roof-edge to ridgepole, gutter to gable, never dropping to the mortal earth. I can see them under the moon, skirting the dome of some palace on the hill, leaping over skylights with a patter of hooves. I wonder what they thought, those people living in the topmost floors. Maybe they heard it as a sudden fall of hail. And then the airy descent to the window-box gardens, the heady herbs, the alarm of the reflection in the moonlit window glass, and the far greater alarm, the shock of prey, when the window slides up and the young man tests his weight on the high iron landing loosened by bomb blasts and eaten by rust.