At the Edge of Waking

by Holly Phillips

  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.

  You have to keep moving. It’s the only rule: keep moving, and always go up instead of down.

  The chase, the glorious moonlit chase. Buildings are crowded here on the seaward face of the Mondevalcón hill. They press upwards like trees starved for sunlight, confined by the streets that are so narrow, some of them, a strong boy can leap from gutter to gutter like a mountain chamois, that nimble goat with horns so sharp they can stab through a wolf’s hide like a twin-bladed spear. So the chamois fled before the silent hunting pack, a light thunder of flinty hooves that drowned the quieter thump and pad of bare feet; running in fear, perhaps, but in challenge, too, the challenge their kind has always offered the would-be predators of the mountain heights. They fled across the hill and upwards, the way instinct led them, and the moon followed to its setting among the clouds trapped by the western peaks, and the late dew fell, the heavy dew of the ocean shore—

  —and when we looked he was gone. Just gone. He must have fallen without a sound. We didn’t know until we looked down and saw him on the street there, ten stories down.

  Lydia Santovar’s son. Lydia Santovar, my friend, who came from a village on the flat plain far inland, and whose son had never even seen mountains before the end of the war.

  “It was the war,” Elena Markassa says outside the church on the funeral day. “These poor boys, too young to fight—thank God!—but old enough to know what the fighting meant. And always with the threat of a bomb falling or the wrong partisan band coming through any day or night, the end of the world, for all a child knows, coming maybe today, maybe tomorrow or next week, next year. No wonder they grew so reckless. Poor boys!”

  “They need their fathers,” Agnola says, and we stand in silence a moment before going in, the three of us already in our widow’s black, ready for a funeral any day, today or tomorrow or next week. A funeral every day.

  My boy has come with me, as all the boys have, and I can feel him beside me as we stand and sit and kneel to the priest’s sure direction. He is a reassuring presence, the solid living weight of him, and it is hard for a widow with an only child not to clutch him, not to scold in mingled relief and fear. But I can feel the restlessness in him. For the first time, I see his father’s hunted look in his clear young face, the dark wariness that prepares itself for fight or flight at any moment. (Maybe today, maybe tomorrow . . . Elena’s words haunt me, drowning out the priest.) What does this mean for him, for his future life? I watch the priest,
I watch my friend Lydia, stony in her grief, but I see our mountain-shadowed home, the roofless house and weedy fields, the green pastures hemmed not by fences but by the dark mass of the trees. At the same time I see a doubled image, a shadow, the dark tenements hemming in the greening bomb sites, and I remember my son saying, Mountains, buildings, it’s all rock, mama. Either way, it’s only rock. But this place cannot be home to my Georgi’s son. Surely this tragedy proves as much? No matter that the wilderness has followed us—followed him—into the city. Surely, to such a boy, such a man, the city can never be home. Yet, even as he ducks away from Lydia’s accusing, tear-washed stare, my son refuses to admit we must go.

  Well, it is my mistake. It was my doing that brought us here, fleeing the burnt house and the ex-partisans and the hunger. It is my fault. I have no one to blame but myself. Perhaps even this death should lie heavy in my hands.

  The sun is shining above the inland peaks, the last long slant of sunlight before the mountain shadow comes, the last bright heat of the first warm day of spring, and we have made a feast of farewell. There are peroshki, of course, stuffed with potato and bacon, potato and sauerkraut, potato and onion, and drenched with melted butter. There are roast beets and sour cream. There is the stewed pork red with hot paprika, and the baked cockerel, and the leek and rabbit pie. There is soft white bread and bread as dark and thick as molasses, and hard cheese, and pink sausage reeking with garlic, and red sausage studded with black peppercorns, and butter packed in a little bowl of ice. There are pies, tart rhubarb and sweet apple, with crusts bubbled with golden sugar. And there is wine, the harsh, sour, country wine that is as familiar and as vital as the blood in our veins. The boys follow us, half unwilling, drawn as much by the smell of the food as by any sense of obligation to their fallen friend. He has been buried nine days, Lydia’s son, and it is time to make his final goodbyes before he moves on.

  We have spared no expense, and two black taxicabs carry us up to the cemetery gates and stand there while the drivers, bemused, help us unload our hampers. The city parishes have long since run out of room for their dead; the Mondevalcón cemetery stands high above the city, above even the palaces, on the first slope of the mountains. The grass is very green here, well fed and watered by the heavy fogs that haunt this coast, and there are flowers among the graves, roses and irises already blooming, and tiny white daisies scattered across the lawn. The black mountains rise above us in their scanty dress of juniper and pine; below us the city swells in a wave of dark roofs to the shining palaces with their towers and domes, and falls, roof piled against roof, to the blue water of the harbor; and beyond the dark headlands lies the sunlit blaze of the sea. There are seagulls crying, even this far from the water, and a clanging from the train yards, but there is still a great silence here, the enduring quiet of death and the open sky.

  The three boys are abashed by the amusement of the taxi drivers (this farewell feast is a country rite, it seems, and the men make them feel so young), but they help carry the big hampers through the iron gates and down the gravel path we all trod nine days ago. The smell of the food follows us, mingling with the scent of cut grass, mouthwatering in the open air. Seagulls perch on monuments nearby, white as new marble on the grimy little palaces of death.

  The boy’s grave is humble, still showing dirt beneath the cut sod, with only a wooden stake leaning at its head. Lydia straightens this with a countrywoman’s practical strength, as if she were planting a post for a new vine, while Elena Markassa, Agnola Shovetz, and I organize boys and hampers, and spread blankets politely between the neighboring graves. There will be a headstone in the fall, once the turned earth has settled; they don’t know it yet, but the boys will be saving the money they have been spending on liquor and cigarettes to help Lydia pay for a good marble stone.

  We spread the feast upon the blankets and the grass, open the bottles and toast the dead boy’s name. Lydia tells stories of his none-too-distant childhood and the living boys seem to shrink in their clothes, becoming even younger than they are, until they are children again, enduring their mothers’ company. They eat, guilty for their hunger; we all eat, and for us women, at least, there is a deep and abiding comfort in this act. There is no mystery here, and no great tragedy, just another family meal. We are all family now, with this spilled blood we share among us, and Lydia is at once ruthless and kind to the living boys, speaking bluntly about the life and death of their friend. There are four mothers here, and four sons, though one of them lies silent in his bed and leaves his plate untouched.

  The sun makes a bright crown on the mountain’s head, and then falls away, spilling a great shadow across the city as a vanguard of the night. We feel the chill even as the sunlight still flashes diamonds from the distant sea. The food has cooled, sparrows have the crumbs. The air is sweeter than ever with the smell of turned earth and new grass, and even the haze of coal smoke from the train yard adds no more than a melancholy hint of distance and goodbyes. The first stars shine out. The wine has turned sad in our veins. It is nearly time to shake out the blankets, stack the plates and pots and sticky pie tins, find the corks and knives and cheese rinds that have gone astray in the grass, and begin the long walk home.

  My son stands and looks above the monuments with their weeping angels to the mountains. They are very black now, clothed in shadow. He moves towards them, weaving among headstones and walking softly across the graves. I am struck again by how like his father he walks, that supple prowl, and in the fading light he looks older, almost a man, walking away from us, the mothers, old already in our widow’s shawls. I watch him with a pang in my heart, as if to see him thus is to lose him, as I lost his father, who walked away one day and never came home. I will call him in a moment to come and help me fold the blankets. The other boys have also stood, watching with a bright attention that excludes their mothers, and soon they have followed him, vanishing among the tombs, leaving us in the ruins of our feast while the color drains out of the world, into the deep clear blue of the sky.

  The moon is rising, out on the eastern rim of the world. The horizon gleams like a knife’s edge, the ocean catching the light even before the moon herself appears. So beautiful, that white planet, that silver coin. They tell us she is barren, nothing more than rock and dust, but there must be something more, something that calls out to the heart. How else could she be so beautiful? How else could she exert such force over the oceans of the world, and the hidden oceans in our veins? She rises, and all my longing comes over me again. Maybe here, whispers my most secret hope. My Georgi has been lost for so long. But maybe here, at last, he will follow the moon’s call to the eastern edge of the world, and find me once again.

  We watch the moon rise, silent at last, while the boys wander out of sight among the graves. And as we sit here, wrapped in our nighttime thoughts, we hear the first voice lifted in a long lament. A voice to make a stone weep. Surely the moon herself would weep to hear such a cry! A rising and a falling note so long it seems it will never end, and then a silence so deep we can hear the grass rustling to the passage of the worms. And then the voice sings again, and is joined by another, and a third, in a chorus of grief, of longing, of love so wild it trembles always on the edge of death. They sing the moon up into the zenith, and fall still, so that the silence folds gently about us, as deep and as peaceful as the grave. The rustling comes again, so quiet you would swear it was beetles or mice, but then we hear the paws striking the gravel path, the huff of breath and the faint clicking of claws, as the wolves follow the moon’s path into the city. We see them for only an instant, two shadows, three . . . four? . . . we sit a while, waiting to see if there are more to come. One more, is all I pray for. Oh please! Do I pray to God or the moon? One more of those quiet gray shadows come down from the mountains to pass among the graves. Please, let there be one more. But we are alone now, four widows with absent sons, and soon we must rise, and pack away the remains of our feast, and make our last goodbyes.

  Proving t
he Rule

  A busy pub at noon.

  He had his pocket notebook out on the table and was flipping past old stories, scratching out unconfirmed facts and unusable quotes: the merest gesture toward work. Someone jogged his table, but he saw it coming and lifted his pint out of danger. He drank, licked his lip, set the glass warily down. Should have ordered food, he thought. The crowd at the bar was two deep and if he got up now he’d lose the table and the chair he was saving for her. If she didn’t come he’d go hungry. But if he got up and she came? He went on leafing through the notebook, his head bent low.

  She slipped inside like a draft through an open window. He would have sworn that he felt her, that he looked up an instant before she came into view. The crowd parted for her like curtains; she lit him up like a ray of light. Resenting it, he refused to stand, but bad manners failed to hide his open face, his pencil falling to the floor. She smiled, pleased to see him, and sat in the saved chair.

  “What are you drinking?” she asked him.

  “Bitter. You won’t like it. Try the ale.”

  “All right. And food? Are you feeding me, too?”

  He fed her cold game pie and apples and cheese. The apples were from somebody’s cold store and under their wrinkled skins tasted of cider and old wood. They went well with the beer.

  She had the knack of elegance. She was dressed well, of course, something simple in green wool that hinted at the coming spring, but that was just money. The mystery was the rest of her. The way she could hum with greed, wrinkle her nose when she took a bite, catch a drop of mustard with her tongue, and still be elegant, dainty and refined. That wasn’t money, surely? Breeding, another woman of her class would say. But she was the daughter of a scandal and didn’t know who her father was.