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 good-byes before he moves on.