Full Moon City

Country Mothers’ Sons by Holly Phillips

Now we live on the edge of the bombed quarter of the Parish of St. Quatain in the City of Mondevalcón. The buildings are crooked here, tall tenements shoved awry by the bomb blasts and scorched by the fires. At home in our valleys we whitewashed the houses every spring, even the poorest of us, brightening away the winter’s soot. Here, for all the rent we pay, the landlords say they are too poor to paint, and we live in a dark gray, soot-streaked world, leaning away from the wind and the dirty rain. Spring comes as weeds sprouting in the empty lots where no one has yet begun to build. Build what? We are outside the rumors, we who only moved here after the war. My village was only a hundred miles away, but I am a foreigner here. Stubbornly, like most of us, I am still in my heart a native of my village; I only happen to live in this alien place.

Elena Markassa lives high at the top of a creaking staircase, in her “tower,” she says, where she can look far out and down. They are bright rooms, though cold and restless with the wind that sneaks in through the broken and never-mended panes. But the rest of us live lower down, out of the reach of the sun, so we often gather there, wrapped in our sweaters and shawls. Lydia Santovar huffs and puffs after the climb, but Agnola Shovetz and I are mountain women and too proud, even carrying a sack of potatoes between us. Elena Markassa never leaves her flat; she’s an antiquated princess in her gloomy tower, waiting for her perennially absent son to come home.

We all have absent sons.

“These boys!” Agnola Shovetz says with a toss of her hands and a note of humor in her voice, but Elena Markassa’s broad face is heavy as she brings the flour tin from the pantry. We are making peroshki today, a long and fussy chore demanding company.

“They need work,” Lydia Santovar says.

“My boy works,” Agnola Shovetz says, ready for a mild quarrel.

“I don’t mean that kind of work. Waiting tables! I can’t blame my boy, even grown men take what they can find these days, but what kind of work is that for a man? And all for a pocketful of small bills. I hardly saw a coin from one end of the month to the other, back home. Who needed it? We worked the land, and it gave us what we needed. The apple trees and the barley fields and the cows: there was always something that needed doing at home. That was work, all of us together, building up the farm. That was where the wealth was, and you always knew where the boys were…”

At home. Is this all we talk about? Home. The war took it away from us, or took us away from it. The land we all thought eternal was ruined or lost, simply lost, as if the mountains had closed in, folding the valleys away out of reach. It’s true, the word conjures our small house with the walls of plaster over stone, and the icon of St. Terlouz growing dark as an eclipsed sun over the hearth. But it’s also true that when I hear that word I think of Georgi out on the mountain slopes, running through the streams of moonlight that splash through the spruce boughs and shine off the patchy remnants of snow. How he could run! Not a handsome man, my Georgi, and with a shy, hostile look with strangers, as if he were poised between a snarl and a fast retreat, but oh, to see him moving across the steep meadows, dancing from rock to rock above the backs of the scurrying sheep. Our son moves a little like that, so that it hurts sometimes to see him hemmed in by all these stony walls. Mountains, buildings, my boy says to me, it’s all rock, Mama. Either way, it’s only rock.

It isn’t the buildings, his father would have said. It’s the walls.

Lydia makes a well in the mound of flour on the table and I start cracking eggs while Elena fills the big kettle at the tap.

“This morning,” Elena says, pitching her voice over the rush of the water, “I had to hear from my neighbor across the hall on the other side, she looks over the roofs going down to the harbor. She says all last night she heard the boys out on the roof, drinking, fighting, God knows what they get up to-”

“My boy’s not a fighter,” Agnola says.

“Whatever they do,” Elena says, “this morning the roofs were covered with dead birds. Feathers like a ruined bed, that’s what my neighbor said, and the birds all lying there like a fox went through the henhouse, dead.”

“They keep hens on the roof over there?” Lydia says. Her strong arm is pumping as she beats the eggs into a yellow froth.

“Not hens,” Elena says. “Pigeons, seagulls. Should I know? City birds. Nobody keeps hens here.”

“People keep doves,” Agnola says. She has a worried look, always on the verge of hunger.

“Not for eating,” Elena says authoritatively. Perhaps living in her tower has made her an expert on the city’s heights. “They’re racing pigeons, for sport.”

“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.

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.

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.

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 good-byes. 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 good-byes.