“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 climbed 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 brigandage 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. And somehow, it’s the pigeons that believe themselves in the ascendant, though you’d think it would be the cats, arrogant with their superior 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 bomb sites, 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 in 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 harbor front 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 the 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.