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 son 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 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 shearing 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.