Fiction Attic

The first time I visited Latvia, my parents took me to Ventspils to see the city where my father had spent his teen years, just prior to World War II. A small stone house a short distance from the city, near a village called Sarnate, was the place where my father spent his childhood summers. Its weathered front faces the Baltic Sea—white sands scattered with pieces of amber, tall pines leaning into the wind, and the house itself holding within it the echoes of seven generations. Seven generations of hard work, love of land and family, many births, many weddings, many funerals, one generation gradually passing into the next, surviving many wars. My father knows Ventspils; his heart, in part, still resides there.

It was a strange feeling, arriving in this place for the very first time, yet feeling myself at home. I was, yes, in a place that I knew instinctively—I belonged. At least, some part of me did and always would. When my parents went to the house of Andris’ parents to meet with old friends, we two met for the first time. The boy with dark hair and dark eyes of unusual intensity greeted me with a firm handshake and a polite nod of his head. As our parents talked over dinner, bridging the lost years and the great divide between the paths their lives had taken, Andris’ eyes never left me. Mine dipped away shyly. In silence, I took in my surroundings. The house was tiny. One room, really, with curtains dividing space at room’s end for a bedroom for his parents, a corner serving as kitchen, and a closet-like space curtained off at the opposite end that was his bedroom. They were fortunate, I learned, to have the luxury of their own home under Soviet occupation, however small. An even greater luxury was to own a telephone, but Andris’ mother quickly took the telephone, pulling the long cord taut, and placed it outside the door of the house while we sat down to dinner inside. Soviet residents knew that telephones were commonly used as listening devices, and few things interested the eavesdroppers more than visitors from the Western world. “Let them listen to the crickets,” she said.

Andris spoke to me quietly after dinner. He played his guitar for me. Music, they say, is an international language, crossing all borders, and it melted any remaining between us. By visit’s end we had exchanged addresses, and over the years our letters crossed the ocean, and the Iron Curtain, even as we grew into adults, married, had children, and lived our lives—he as a musician and composer and I as a writer. If his letters on occasion hinted at some stronger emotional bond, I gave it little credence. There was, after all, an Iron Curtain between us, and if the term was a metaphor, its reality was truly one of iron.

Fifteen years after our first meeting, Andris made his first trip to the United States. The Soviets had cautiously begun to allow a crack in the Curtain, a few carefully monitored visitors permitted to travel the world outside, quickly to return again, their property and family members held as something of a ransom. Married couples, for instance, were never allowed to travel together. I did not meet him that first trip. I was married, had two children, and, well, it just didn’t work out. Or, in some deeper part of me, I knew it shouldn’t.

Two years later, when he came to the States again, he found me separated from my husband and living alone with my children. Andris, too, was no longer living with his wife and boys. When I heard the knock on my door, I opened it to a tall, bearded man who little resembled the 15-year-old boy I had met in Ventspils so long ago, if only for the intensity of his penetrating eyes. Suddenly, there were no more barriers.

Only, there was. A vast ocean, after all, separated our homes. We married in a small church in the northern wilderness of Michigan that had a strong resemblance to Latvia. Before we could file papers requesting a change in his citizenship status, Andris’ father died in Ventspils. An only child (his half-sister, Laima, was born to his father in a previous marriage), he returned to help his mother settle her affairs and heal her heart. I soon joined him, my two small children in tow. Around this time, the Soviet Union split open like a rotten fruit, the Iron Curtain crumbled into a rusted heap, and Latvia entered a time of anarchy and rebirth. As excited as we were to see this newborn freedom, it was undeniably a dangerous time, powers being challenged, new governments being formed, and a people struggling to find their way. It was no place to raise two American-born children.

The day of our first anniversary, I returned to the United States with my children. Andris remained in Ventspils. For the next six years, I would travel between these two countries as others move from room to room. To allow for enough time to stay with my husband in Latvia, enough to maintain a marriage, each time I left the States I also left a job, an address, and what few belongings I would keep, carefully boxed and stored in my parents’ garage or basement. Each time I returned, I would have to start my life all over again. Find a new job, lease a new apartment, unpack a few boxes, establish a new if temporary home. Wherever I was, a part of me longed for the place I was not.

My joys in life were simple ones. To be with those I loved was something I never took for granted. In the United States, I raised and nurtured my children, working hard to support our little household. I went to the office, attended parent teacher conferences, drove across town to take care of my many errands as any single parent might. In Latvia, I braided my hair in the manner of Latvian women, and I shopped for fresh produce at the open-air market on a daily basis, washed our laundry by hand, and boiled a large vat of water on the wood-burning stove for our bath water that Andris carried up the stairs in buckets from the well. While life in the capital city of Riga was quickly becoming as modernized as in any city in Europe, the countryside remained as if caught in another time.

One of the happiest days in my memory from those years was an evening spent at my sister-in-law’s house in Ventspils. Hers was a grand two-story place with walls nearly two feet thick, having survived several wars. It had no indoor plumbing, and the stove in her small kitchen was wood-burning, but it always felt like luxury to me. Laima took us out to her garden to pick fresh vegetables for our dinner. I held my shirt out to collect the beans Andris snapped neatly from their stems. Laima dug into the loose soil to pluck out round new potatoes. Her partner, Peteris, cut green onions, his small blade gleaming and sharp. In the kitchen, we rinsed and cut and snapped and prepared our meal, laughing and at moments bursting into song as Andris strummed his sister’s guitar. Surely I had never tasted a better meal than that one, with my family in Latvia warm around me, raising a toast of old cognac in the air—“Prozit!” To us, Laima offered, to our Latvian hearts, surviving all, strong and sure, and to our bright new future ahead.

I last saw Andris on October 15, 1994. It was the hardest, most heart ripping decision I ever had to make. My children could not thrive in such constant change. I was beginning to see signs of damage. They needed me. Full time.

That moment when the steel door at the Riga airport closed on Andris’ face, separating us perhaps forever, haunts me still in my dreams. His dark gaze never wavered as the door slammed shut, never moving from mine.

For months, no, years, I was tormented with the sense that I should never have left. I would wake in the night and, for a moment, not know where I was… here? There? Then, through the dark would come a light rustling, a child’s sigh in dreams, one of my own sleeping in the next room, and I would settle again into the twisted sheets. I am back in the States. Yes, I know: where I belong. With one heart that holds many loves and two homes.

photos: Latvian countryside, 1994; Old Town section of Riga, 1993. Courtesy of Zinta Aistars

Zinta Aistars is the published author of three books. She is an editor and writer for LuxEsto, the Kalamazoo College alumni magazine and a contributing writer to County Wide News. She has published poetry, travel essays, stories, and articles in the United States, Latvia, England, Sweden, Germany, and Australia. Zinta publishes a monthly newsletter, Zeenythe Communications, for writers, and is one of a team of editors of the literary e-zine, insolent rudder.

books: Lithium for Medea (1979), Palm Latitudes (1988), Squandering the Blue (1990), Wonders of the West (1993), Small Craft Warnings (1998), Frantic Transmissions to and From Los Angeles: An Accidental Memoir (forthcoming 2006, winner of the Graywolf Nonfiction Prize)

interview conducted by Fiction Attic editor Michelle Richmond

1. What are you reading right now?

In my new mission to build a critical apparatus for this region, which I think is lacking because we are a unique post-historical conceptual region–that’s our legacy and reality–rather than a 20th century area measured in miles and area codes. So I read the National Book Award offerings, particularly Vollmann’s Europe Central which I loved, and Didion’s Year of Magical Thinking which I loathed. One is a revolutionary view and the other etiology of privilege. I want to make distinctions, from the text outward. A real political voice rises indigenous from the page effortlessly. A false one happens by inflicting the politics onto the page and then filling in a story. I can recognize the difference. I read Blaise Cendrares’s Prose on the Transsiberrain for the pleasure, as I pick up one of the same half a dozen poets and just read out loud for the music and transcendent joy. Plath. Neruda. Paz. I re-read, recently books of the 70’s, beginning with Hunter Thompson, ‘Robert Stone’s Dog Soldier and A Flag for Sunrise, Tom McGuane’s 92 in the Shade and Panama. I like to be read to. My husband is re-re-re reading out loud the LaCarre Tinker Tailor trilogy for the 8 or 9th time. That trilogy is better than Grahme Greene. I read very little, as reading is a work activity for me, as demanding as writing. I don’t read a book, but autopsey it. with somebody like Vollmann, one of his novels is like receiving the schematics for literary wmd’s.

2. It’s the 25th anniversary of the publication of Lithium for Medea. Congratulations! Any advice to writers on how to hang in there for the long haul?

When I began pubishing in the early and mid 70’s, it was the publishing world. Then it became the publishing business, then the publishing industry. When I began publishing, it was “a hand shake” situation, it was daring to use a female name, as the chances of publication were automatically diminished. My first stories were sent out with just initals, as was the custom then. K.E. Braverman. Not overtly belonging to that unpublishable caste, females.

How to hang in for 25 years, doing experimental work and taking the chance that the increasingly random maketerplace will not delete you, the spreading dumbness and numbness of a reading public that wants tiny conventional restatements of what they already know rather than engage in the trek of ambiguity and complexity a real literary work demands?Agents and publishers who care least about the literary merit but most about sales? Marcel Duchamp said if you’re 20 and you write poetry, you are 20. If you’re 50 and you write poetry, you’re a poet. I write because I have a calling I’ve been practicing for 30 years and it is the way I interface with reality. I am addicted and can not live without it. I’ve burned all the boats back, so I am marooned on this island where there is only landscape, dialogue blowing in with the vanilla scented wind and a word processor. No seasons, no climate, no time zones, just the work. It’s not a question of hanging in, but rather chancing to survive.

Most of the writers I meet don’t have a calling. I’ll do another 12 drafts of a piece that’s been rejected because I know I can make it better, get deeper, find where there’s an intersection I missed. Many writers I meet are not writing for the acts of alchemy that can occur when the page is entered into by convenant, caress and sacrifice. They are not using the page as it is meant to be used, but inflicting other mediums onto the innocent surface–as tv shows or tv sized ideas in book format. This is not a book, but a desecration. Why don’t those people simply write screenplays or treatments? Essentially, I’ve been reading San Francisco writers and re-reading.

3. Your husband is a musician, correct? Do you write to music? If so, was there a soundtrack of choice while you were composing your latest book, Frantic Transmissions to and From Los Angeles: An Accidental Memoir?

My husband is a research scientist, a molcular biologist, genetic enginner, biomaterials, nanotechology visionary, and futurist. We tied for the Economist Prize in 2003, he wrote about the ethics of nanotech and I wrote a prose poem about growing up in LA and we were astounded to tie for the prize. He’s writing a book about the implications of the new technology on our collective human future.

He’s a musican by love. Over the years, we’ve experimented with putting his music behind or collaged with my poems. He’s in charge of all the music. Now we’ve got about 90 minutes of set music with poems and will be performing then for the Lithium for Medea birthday parties I’ll be having in NY, Paris, Instanbul and other cities. I’m using the 15 poems I arbitrarily chose that were written in the same voice, and then wrote a narrative for and between, the poems that were the spine and anatomy of LFM

4. What is the significance of the title of your forthcoming book, Transgressions to and From Los Angeles: An Accidental Memoir? Were there any other titles in the running before you chose this one?

The new Graywolf Prize book didn’t have a sound track but the 7 seasons that lashed me as I wrote it in a farmhouse in the Allegheny Mts. of remote rural western NY State, just above PA where our nearest city was Buffalo and there was an 8 month virulent winter. It had a brutal yellow glare, since it’s about growing up in LA, moving to the country for that mythic second life in buccolic rural America. Then I spent a month in Prague and soaked up Gothic architecture and the lavendar on the cobblestones and the reds and purples of acres of Bohemian crystal and gave the book a certain softening gilt, garnets on the fingers, neck and wrists.

There were no alternative titles, but there was a new ending I wrote after I’d won the prize which GW rejected. I wonder if it was censored and will be trying to identify those I can ask to read the ending I wrote and tell me if they think the real end was censored and if it damaged the political trajectory. I suspect it did.

I need to keep my living environment as bland, unobtrusive, quiet visually and audio as possible. I don’t have a tv or subscribe to any print publications. I delete popular culture completely from my writing life. I’ve been lisening to the same dozen albums for 10 years. I’m not interested in fashion, sports, the sport of politics. I pull the blinds when I write. I keep my back to the wall when I work. I’m a method writer, I live what I write (and so much more) so I’ve almost got my skin off, I’m using the loose tissue for sails, so I am always vulnerable and find transitions between the writing region and ordinary world extremely difficult.

5. You’ll be doing some events in Paris upon the publication of Frantic Transmissions in February. What does Paris mean to you as a writer?

I told my French publisher, Quidam, that I always wanted to be avant garde, but 25 years was more than I had planned on. When the books were published in Italy, it was information presented and received in so listless and posthumous a fashion, another publisher, another problem, that I didn’t see a way of partipating effectively. With the French, I sought contact and established a personal relationship by email. I offered to go and this has turned into a real tour. Turkey is publishing LFM in Jan and Palm Lat, my 1988 novel in May, and after Paris, I’m going to Istanbul for Univ readings, tv and media. I just found out about this and am very excited. Paris holds a significance not only in the conventional literary sense one ordinarily thinks of, but as a sign that my work must find a global audience, that the political intentions of my work might not be acceptable to American audiences (after 30 years) in the demand on the reader to engage in illness, marginalization, racism, the struggles of single mothers, anti-Semitism, the degradation of the 60’s asethetic entirely—I ‘ve always thought my books would be better read outside this country which continues to swing to right=Christian side in a suffociating, frightening way.

6. Okay, we ask this of everyone: what’s your favorite San Francisco eatery?

I am not interested in food as fashion. I hardly eat at all, don’t drink alcohol, work odd hours and don’t have a single favorite restaurant. I am not interested in food any more. A bowl of brown rice, oatmeal, fruit. I live on the milk in cafe lattes and vitamins. I just lost interest in food, selecting it, carting it in, preparing it, cleaning it up. In the Allegeny Mt exile, there were no restaurants and social life was the senior faculty inviting one another over for dinner. I learned to cook, grew my own foods, once made 3 pies a day for an entire summer to perfect my crust. When our daguther left for college, I annnounced I was no longer cooking. When we moved to SF, I announced I was no longer shopping or washing dishes. The women’s arts are too time consuming–it takes me all day to make a dinner and clean it up. I don’t have six hours laying around like that. Or I chose not to. I have always resented the time and energy the correct wife and mother is supposed to give to banal unnecessary activities. I am disturbed by how easily women writers cave into the same traditional peer pressures, especially with children. I want to make a car bumper sign that says JUST SAY NO TO SOCCER. I’ve dealt with these issues in the 2 collections of unpublished stories I have. Professional women are gutting their work and personal schedules for the new holy collective hallucination of soccer. My daughter, who is graduating from law school in May was raised by a feminist artist who was not a dillatante, but actually worked all the time. I told her my writing life was as much a real job as being a doctor or lawyer, that I had hours of work, that I wasn’t available for her every whim. We live in a society where every kid’s stray spasm of enthusiaSM is met with an immediate new uniform and coach. It’s random. Like week of the “C”. Every kind has cello lessons, Chinese and calligraphy, canoe lessons. Then it’s “M” week. Mandolines, Mandarin study, Muslim awareness, micro something, Mars study. We give our children an emormous sense of entitlement by mutilating our professional and personal lives for childish passing whims. What kid actually possesses the plethora of gifts we routinely attribute to them? Virtually no one. It’s another passing fashion that I am passing on.

7. Climate is often such an enormous presence in your writing. Why?

I go native wherever I live. As a CA writer, as a writer without skin, I write on a molecular level using my synapses as tools, the external landscape is a character for me. I’ve been more intimate with certain landscapes than certain husbands. My aesthetics have an errotic compoenent. I love landscape in a profound way I can translate onto the page, which is a unique kingdom, with its own unique rules and seasons, like a continent, vast, mysterious, inexplicable and inexhorable. To be a CA woman, even more so in LA where I was based for 20 years. is to inhabit a non-traditional America, without seaons, closer to Mexico City or the Pacific Rim than Europe. In LA, it was always about keeping the indigenous out, that real art could actually be done by residents of the subliterate heathen masses was unthinkable when I began doing it. We have a different relationship to traditional anglo-europen writing. We don’t have Hawthrone’s dark forest, we’re not in opposition to our nature but coexist with it in harmony. Our cities are named for Spanish saints and butchers. Asia blows in our wind. It is a climate that encourages experimentation and a more confessional approach. That’s why SF has a legacy as an outlaw capital. We welcome the renagade, the outlawed, the visionary and eccentric here. LA does now, but only if the individual is carrying a pass from a studio and can prove they have a movie in a secondary phase of development. Climate has an impact that is defining. When I lived in rural isolation, where getting 12 miles to the town with a supermarket was often impossible, a certain smallness of ambition and possibility becomes an intrinsic compoenent of one’s actions and vision. I love SF, this port city built by desperate gold diggers and the adventuresome that have at least moored here at pivitol junctions.

8. Much of your work seems to beg to be performed. How would you describe the relationship between you and the audience during a live performance?

I began as a poet and one of the first poetry readings I attended was one I gave. As a poet and now a writer of incantory prose, such writing is intended to be read out loud. I have seen many opportunities during my career to put the work on stage. During the 70’s, when I came of age as a writer (I was a Haight Ashbury runaway at 15 and put myself through Berkeley High and Cal in LA (Hunter Thompson and the Beats are 20 and 30 years older then me) it was the time of Punk. Since many of the punk bands went through the Venice Poetry Workshop, which I was a director of at the time, poets and punk bands were performing together. I saw the change of dynamic becoming a performer would require and this did not appeal to me and my work on the page. I used to do readings with a pencil in one hand so I could live edit, feel the kinetics of where a piece was off. Trust your ear, not your eye. Trust the physical kinetics, not what the lines look like. I write music. I don’t write, I compose. I started to give live readings in SF after many years of not having a live audience and I loved it again, felt the thrill again. We would, over the years, do an occasional gig with music, but I didn’t want to put the energy into it—a form of washing dishes, dispensible. Now we’re doing it for fun, the classic poems with music written as for songs. The rush of connecting with an audience when you don’t have a book in your hand is up there with injecting drugs and sex. It’s an A list rush. Since moving to SF, I’ve become more experimental about the work in all forms, including considering stage and music, rythem, cadance, that which accentuates the incantory nature of the work. Our living room is now an ad hoc recording studio. We’re exploring a whole new terrain. I think I can write directly to the music and will be trying that as an experiment. Writers don’t experiment enough, take the wild chance, rearrange, restructure, re-experience, reinvent. Our approach with the sound collages is an entirely new synethesis. The possibilities are still unfolding.

9. Robert Polito, who judged the Graywolf Nonfiction Prize, called your prizewinning manuscript ” an enthralling mix of memoir, history, and fever dream.” What is the role of dream in literary creation? More specifically, fever dream?

Many answer, though few are called. To volantarily enter a sort of permanent house arrest, to live as though you are at all times engaged in a public psychoanalaytic session/AA sharing meeting, while feeling you are being interrogated by state police and confession to a priest is not for everyone nor should it be. To live with emotional malaria is not a wise decision and should only be taken if there is no alternative. They are graduating 10,000 certified MFA writers a year. That’s 10,000 unemployed writers who must get jobs teaching in MFA programs, of which few will be gainfully employed and fewer still will earn a living from the sales of their work.

In her great book on writing, The Writing Life, Annie Dillard observes that very few are writers and very little harm comes to them. I would add that the converse is also true. Looking at the artists of the last century in America, it’s a story of suicide, drug adiction, alcoholism, child abandonment, divorce, dysfunction, mental illness. Of course, when men engage in these behaviors, we say they not etching lives of brutal chaos, but are the embodiment of the mythic artist. When women engage in these identical behaviors, we call them mentally ill aberrations and degrade and dismiss their contributions. The fever dream, the complete surrender to a transcendent other has always been the province of males. When women enter this state of grace and vertigo, we call them mentally ill, promisicus, defective. Women are chained on the page as they are in life. The marketplace demands female versions of real characters that lack the epic dimensions males are permitted. This has not altered signifcantly during the 30 years of my work.

The new book is a complete experiment in subverting genre. It’s an “accidental memoir” and is, as all my work, rendered in my primary language, which is poetry, with its musical, incantory component. It’s real history, fiction, pure poetry, stand-up comedy monologues, essays I’d written for the LA Times during the Allegany exile, impressions by a CA woman on small town life. It’s about space, architecture, climate, region, identity, aging. It’s pushing the envelope on what nonfiction can do, and since Capote, Mailer, Didion and HST, nonfiction seems a fertile field, less fortressed, fewer crocodiles in the moats.I do wonder about the last chapter, which I may post on my web.

10: What’s in your attic?

Do you mean that metamorphically? My work is largely autobiographical, though the page requires a complete transformation of the original impulses. There are always 2 stories, the one you set out to tell and the dynamic that occurs when the page speaks. It’s a dance, you do some, the page does some. In this dynamic arises the discovery and revelation, the alchemy. My real life is much more exciting then what I’ve written in my 11 published and 5 still unpublished books. My life as a teenage runaway. My life in the LA Punk scene. My life in the barrio of LA where I had an illigitimate baby. My life on the run with my infant from prosecution by the authorities who wanted to decree that I tie my destiny to a stranger I didn’t want to know; most women wouldn’t run. I did. My activities as an anti-war activist during the 60’s. I think my attic has been open for decades. I invite the curious in.

author photo by Chris Felver

Visit Kate Braverman’s web site at www.katebraverman.com.

cut glass by Franci Claudon

When people came to the funeral, they came by foot. They came with plates of sweet pork and pound cake and sorrowful faces. The women in suits stood closest to the grave, dabbing their eyes with packaged tissues and thinking of what to cook for dinner. Behind the oaks, their children were fast asleep in fat parkas, their bellies heavy with meat and leaves. It wasn’t raining that day, but each mourner brought his own umbrella. Like mushrooms, they dotted the hill.

The mourners weren’t family. They were the talkers, the ones who told stories of the Leung house over poker games and laundry. “The husband was cruel. That’s why,” the women said. “Her mother-in-law was overbearing. Must be,” the men said. Sometimes families would argue over dinner, waving soup spoons to stress their version: she was crazy in the head, she had a lover and felt ashamed, she was lonely and hated the weather. They even talked about her when the television was on, rising out of their worn sofa seats. If it was a good program, they’d wait until the commercial. Whenever children would ask what their parents were talking about, they would bop them over the head and give them extra ginseng soup. Soon, the children became quiet.

At work, over the roar of the factory machinery, the father heard all of the stories told. Day after day, they told the story about the forbidden lover, who seduced the mother behind the prickle bushes. One of the co-workers always wrapped his arms around the group, winking as if the forbidden lover was standing right before them, holding the secrets to her modest curves. When the bell rang for lunch, the co-workers averted their eyes, convening in the gravel lot behind the factory with their brimming lunch pails. Alone, the father put on his cap and walked back to the house alongside the railroad tracks. Sometimes he took off his gloves and sat down on the tracks, picking out rocks and cheap beer caps. Sitting, he strained to hear the whistles and shouts of the school boys calling for the pretty girls across the field. He could imagine them unclasping their ties, swinging their jackets over their thin shoulders. When the train came, his body shook with its heated hum. Underneath a cloud of dirt and movement, he stumbled aside and watched as the train moved its way closer, its engine roaring steam. Soon, the train passed and he was left with silence. The boys had gone home. He wiped his eyes with his greased gloves and went on.

When the father came home from work, he entered the room under the attic trap with tall boots and a garbage pail. It was late. The grass tracked in was wet with morning and the grandmother had left. Carefully, he felt around his mother’s jars and bowls. As he touched the oranges, the fruit flies roused, moving their wings about his face. He felt the slow weight and the white rot of the oranges as he placed them into the garbage pail. It was then that he eased the ladder down, the old latch rusted and willing. In the attic, squirrels were dropping one by one, their tails oily and matted to the wooden slabs. The father stayed there in the attic, cleaning death with the garbage pail. Squatting on the damp planks, he picked up each small body and trembled as he felt their thin bones, useless as the insides lost form. It was here, at this hour, that he wondered why things died.

The grandmother heard the stories too, even though she stayed inside the Leung house. The voices seemed to worm their way into the molding, into the shutters and wallpaper cracks. They flew into the mushroom soup she ladled into bowls, into the pages of the old newspapers and mail coupons stuffed under the hungry couch. It was only when she prayed in the room under the attic trap that she began to speak. Sometimes, when her knees ached too much, she shuffled the girl’s plastic play stool into the room, the seat curved and cracked like a palm. Speaking softly, she rolled her weathered hands over the oranges and plums that lay by the shrine, ripening them until she fell asleep. The pictures, curling from the heat of the incense, seemed so distant when she spoke to them. Her parents’ framed, gray faces stared back at her blankly, wondering why she thought they knew everything.

The girl must have known the stories so the neighborhood children ran away from her, for fear of being bopped on the head. She was often found alone in the backyard garden, singing school songs (“Sunny after Rain”) and turning rocks over to find her father’s cigarette butts. The stumps looked like teeth to her, so she placed them into her dress pockets and saved them for tooth fairies. From counting class, the girl learned she was five. She used to give her mother five items – five flower buds, five candy wrappers, five potato bugs. The mother used to count with the girl (one two three four five) and place them into her pockets and tell the girl she wanted to take a walk alone. When the girl cried, she made her promise to find more fives for her when she came back. Surely, when she’d come back, the girl would have a pile of fives waiting for her in the garden. Once, when the mother came back, she was weeping. The tree beside them sighed down its leaves. “Don’t cry, I have fives,” the girl said, crawling into her mother’s willowy lap as the sun fell and the fireflies blinked. “You always do,” the mother whispered, smoothing her child’s hair. As the girl fell asleep in her lap and the sky plumed with color, the mother lifted her head back and placed the fives into the wet of her mouth.

Around dinner time, the mushrooms started to leave in packs, taking their empty plates and sleepy children with them. On the other side of the hill, the father and grandmother added spirit money into the fire, waiting until one curled and spit before putting in another. Fast asleep beside the flickering fire was the girl, her small lips pressed against the warm earth. The family stayed until there was nothing left to burn.

The three descended the hill and walked back to the house, past the neighbor’s dog fence, through the front door and into the lit kitchen. The grandmother took off her shoes, pulled up her wool socks and moved into her fraying slippers, which were waiting by the oven for her arrival. Above their heads, the squirrels skittered over the planks and pink filler. The girl stubbornly clapped her hands to her ears.

“Are you hungry?” the grandmother asked, putting water on the stove.

“No,” the father said, awkwardly lighting a cigarette. The pack fell on the floor and the paper fumbled in his mouth. He paused. “Are you?”

The grandmother shook her head. On the floor, the girl sighed and fidgeted, squashing ants with her hands and feet. The girl stared at the injured ants in her black dress with big eyes and freckles down her neck. Stunned, they stepped back. The girl looked up.

“Can you take me to the pond?”

The question should have been abrupt, but it wasn’t. A moment ago, the father had already begun to tremble as he trembled when he held the squirrels.

“Will you take me?” the girl asked again.

He couldn’t understand why the girl asked and why he couldn’t say no. Holding hands, father and daughter went through the kitchen door, past the neighbor’s dog fence, and down the street to the pond where the mother, hair splayed like a silk cobweb, had drowned.

When they reached the pond, the father felt the pull of the water, which lapped at the rocks. His hand grew sweaty and the girl’s hand slipped out of his. He couldn’t move from the grass. Something kept him there, his tall boots stuck in the worm mud. The slowness of his heart was frightening in the growing night and he pressed his thin frame against an elm tree. As the sky dimmed, the girl walked past him, her hair trailing in the cold (the father grew more fearful; the freckles on her neck were too familiar), and onto the oily rocks at the pond’s edge. There, she sat and played with the water bugs. She dipped her hand in and watched it move under the gleaming ripples.

“How do fish sleep?” the girl asked, her small voice casting its course across the water.

“They swim deep down in the water, the whole family, mother first, where the fish castle is. They wait until the clouds fall and then they have blankets. They close their eyes and move their fins slowly,” the mother replied, brushing her toes against the water.

“Mommy, what do they dream of?”

Her mother sighed and felt the weight of the rocks in her hands. “Of things that fish do. We don’t know.”

“I can dream like a fish, can’t I? Then I’ll know?” The girl looked at her hopefully.

“If you are a fish,” the mother promised, her hands, now scales, glimmering in the water’s reflection.

Taking her hands out of the water, the girl dipped her toes into the muddy bank. Slowly, she waded in until the water reached her waist. The black dress filled with air and puffed around her, weightless as she stood in the water, digging her toes into the pond weeds. The girl closed her eyes and tried to think like a fish would. She imagined her arms would spurt into fins and her mouth would open and close without talking. Looking back, she saw her father pressed against an elm, his hands over his face. The girl wanted to tell him not to cry. As the moon shone and the fireflies lit the air around the water, the girl waited for the clouds to fall as her father trembled. In the house down the street, the squirrels flooded every room, their tails and feet squirming to cover each crack of the flowered wallpaper. Underneath the attic trap, the grandmother laid her head down to the ground and listened as the animals covered her, whispering in their animal voices.

Jane Wong is a young writer from central New Jersey whose work has appeared in journals such as Chronogram, Bard Papers, and the Asians in America Project. She is also the poetry editor of Verse Noire, a literary magazine based out of Annandale-on-Hudson, New York.

Franci Claudon is a glass artist who lives in San Carlos. View her work at Wavecrest Designs.

by Mario Rigoni Stern
translated by Elizabeth Harris Behling

editor’s note: Le stagioni di Giacomo (Giacomo’s Seasons) won the 1996 Grinzane Cavour Prize and has been translated into French; it was also adapted as a play in Italy. An earlier excerpt of this novel, also translated by Elizabeth Harris Behling, appeared in issue 14.

15.

Autumn came early. The insistent rain that always marked the woodcocks’ leaving kept the recuperanti, the men who salvaged scrap weaponry, from going out much. One Sunday afternoon in November, four friends were huddled under Piero Ghellar’s cantilever roof. Hands in their pockets, shivering, they watched the sadness blowing gently over the piazza and the streets. A short while before, they’d added up their pocket change.

“Four of us!” one of them burst out. “And we can’t even come up with four lire to go to a movie–we don’t even have one lira to get ourselves a half-liter of wine at the tavern! What kind of life is that!”

“I’m joining the fascists. Then maybe I can get into the border guard.”

“You’d be better off trying for the forestry militia,” the first one said.

“It’s harder to get in,” another answered. “You’ve got to have good recommendations. And there’s no telling when those jobs will be posted, either.”

“Tomorrow,” the first one said, “I’m going to the town hall to see if there’s some jobs listed–any job. I can’t stay around here anymore. Maybe I’ll sneak into Switzerland and find some work, way up in the mountains. Like Toni Ballot did.”

“I think I saw a job posted over by the public bathhouse. Let’s take a look.”

It was a notice to sign up for two years in the royal carabinieri with reenlistment into regular service. The one who’d said he was anxious to leave slowly read the notice out loud. Then he said, “Tomorrow morning, I’m going to the Registry Office to get the forms. I’ll sell the recupero in my shed to get my papers stamped.”

“Not me,” another one said. “I’m not going into the carabinieri. I’m waiting for the forestry to be posted. And I’m joining the Fascist Party, too–and I sure hope my pink card doesn’t come in the meantime.”

That pink card was your draft notice ordering you to present yourself for military service that also served as a pass from home to your designated barracks.

The four men watched as Albino Vu made his way slowly up the street. They greeted him and asked if he was going to the movies.

“The movies!–what for?–life’s one big movie! Last night I was out drinking some and I wound up spending the night at the carabinieri’s. Good people, them carabinieri. So now I’m sober, and I’m headed back to Boscosecco.” He stopped and took a deep breath. He hadn’t talked that much in a long while. But he’d watched these four grow up, had known them since they were kids out hunting with their shotguns.

“There’s a good movie playing,” said the one who wanted to go into the forestry militia. “It stars a beautiful actress, Greta Garbo. She plays the queen of Sweden.”

“I don’t care if they’re beautiful or Garbo–don’t you listen to women’s garble.” Vu shuffled off again, his recupero sack over his shoulder.

People said Albino Vu acted that way because of what he’d discovered after he came home from the war: while he was off in the trenches, his girl was fooling around with his friend who’d been rejected by the army. After that, Vu left town, his house, everything. He headed into the mountains where he’d fought and he’d lost so many real friends–and he stayed up there, even in wintertime, in some pasture, or holed up in a bunker, waiting for spring. He didn’t need much to live on, almost nothing. He found quality recupero, not quantity, and always small stuff. Dried gun powder for the hunters that he traded for shoes or old clothes. Copper he’d sell to Seber to buy himself just enough food to hold him a time, and never more than that. The rest he’d spend on wine at Pozza’s or Toni della Pesa’s where he’d sit and have philosophical debates with Motorcycle Gigi. The four friends watched as Vu walked off, singing a song that cheered up the street.

The recuperanti had a crisis on their hands. The lira had been revalued, so metal prices dropped. Even worse–the forestry militiamen and the local woodsmen were saying the recuperanti’s digging was destroying the topsoil in the pastures and damaging the seedlings so the woods couldn’t grow back. Someone informed the authorities, and they threatened the recuperanti with fines, even prison.

One day–it was nearly summer of that year, 1931–we found out the National Fascist Party was planning to set up an enormous camp, right here by us, for the children of Italians in the Fascists Abroad Organization. They picked a spot in the fertile meadows around the Rendola River, and the hay was cut and gathered early.

“So,” the recuperanti said, “you get fined for digging up rocks in the mountains. But destroy our best meadows, and you’re a hero.”

Giacomo’s father went down to the Rendola one afternoon to get a look at this famous camp for himself. They were marking the spots for the tents, setting up the kitchens, and digging the latrines. Two commune workers were there and some folks he didn’t know who must have come up from the valleys. Maybe they were in the Volunteer Militia For National Security.

“Hey, you!” A man wearing shorts and no shirt was calling to him. “You wanna work?”

“Yeah, but not for free.”

“Get your jacket off and come here.”

So that’s how Giacomo’s father found work for almost two months. The first thing was arranging the tents in a row according to the blue prints. The entrance to the camp, down a lane off the local road, was framed by two enormous pennants with the tri-colored flag and the Savoy coat of arms. All along this lane were still more pennants with flags leading up the gentle slope to the top of the hill, and finally, to a huge portrait of Mussolini with his bald head. The clearing around this portrait would be for camp gatherings, for raising and lowering the flag. One tent could hold maybe twenty kids; there were enough metal-frame bunk beds for a thousand teenaged-fascist Avanguardisti. To carry water from the town aqueduct, the men had to build an above-ground piping system fitted to dozens of washtub taps. In other words, quite a job.

Right away you could tell Giacomo’s father knew what he was doing. He always went home at night with something in his jacket pockets: bread, bologna, quince fruit bars wrapped in tissue paper. They gave him a big noon meal and a snack at five–a real waste of food–so he brought the leftovers home for dinner.

He’d been working fifteen days when the province fascist party secretary and the fascist mayor, the podestà, arrived along with other officials up from Rome, all of them there to see how Camp Mussolini was coming along. Chauffeurs and aides were bouncing around like grasshoppers.

“You’re behind!” the party secretary said. “Get going! Get those pine branches up on the arches–and the fasces, too–get those axe blades and sticks tied together! And how about the sentry boxes? The truck will be here tomorrow with the muskets. Have you set up the gun racks? Hop to! Hop to!”

To speed things up (seeing how the volunteer militiamen liked to slip into the tents farthest out for a little nap after eating), Giacomo’s father told the director he ought to hire some other workers: “I know a couple of good men. Men who know how to work and to work hard.”

“Maybe you’re right,” the director said. “Bring them along tomorrow and we’ll see how they do.”

The next day Giovanni showed up with Moro and Moleta, two recuperanti. Between Moro Soll’s shouting and Moleta’s quieter approach, they got the workers moving.

The Avanguardisti started to arrive by cablecar. “Our fine boys from the Italians Abroad have heard Mother Italy’s great voice calling, and they answer with affection. They are coming to the Altipiano from all over the world. From scorching hot Africa and the wintry North. From the distant Americas to our neighbor nations of the Alps. Here in Camp Mussolini, Dante’s words beat a path into every heart. Our Mother Tongue, sweet vehicle of faith and solid fortress of our nation, stands proud among so many exotic languages, enchanting all with her sweet song. As these boys wander our mountains, they will grow to appreciate the beautiful, heroic stories of their fathers, those brave men who volunteered to fight for their country, who told their stories in a distant land, among a foreign people. Now, in our mountains, these fine boys will understand the silent eloquence of their fathers’ memories and they will be filled with a greater, ever more vital pride in being sons of Italy.” And so on.

One day the camp director (who was really a marshal on loan from the light infantry) asked Giacomo’s father if he knew how to cook, too. Giovanni automatically said yes. And that’s how he wound up a cook’s helper, along with Moro Soll.

The last of the Avanguardisti were there now. The days went by with the bugle call: reveille, breakfast, fall-in, flag-raising, prayers for the king, for Il Duce, for the country, for the far-off families. Choir practice: “Rising Sun,” “Youth.” Then gymnastics, close-order drill with muskets, group games for “instilling discipline and order, physical excellence, quick decision-making and reaction time, and for improving all bodily systems.” There were also group hikes in the sacred mountains of the motherland, everyone marching and singing:

  We are Fascists from abroad
   Marching fast and proud
   With Mussolini at our side
   We know how to fight
   We know how to die.
   If the reds dare show their snouts
   Smash’em!
   Give’em our heels and fists
   Smash’em!
   Then to show what we’re about
   Smash’em!
   We’ll finish ‘em off with a club
    finish ‘em off with a club!

At that song, Giovanni and Moro shook their heads. “Poor Italy,” they muttered.

After evening rations, lowering the flag, and changing the guard at the camp entrance, the Avanguardisti were off-duty. They went out in groups in their snappy uniforms, wandering through town, looking to strike up a conversation with some girls, trying to impress them by speaking another language, but they always swore in Italian. Mario and Nino met a few Avanguardisti from Casablanca and Salonica, and they and the girls would all wind up playing together on Via Mount Ortigara.

One morning the local officials and the podestà were inspecting the camp and saw Giacomo’s father at work in the kitchen, and they protested because “he was a suspicious element–not an official party member.” Old Sharpshooter (that’s what everyone was calling the technical director of Camp Mussolini by now) told these officials that it was fine by him, that he couldn’t care less if Giovanni was a white shirt, a black shirt, a red shirt, or a yellow shirt. Then came the night, after evening rations, when Giacomo’s father went off to the Villa Rossi grove with the leftovers from the kettle and almost got himself fired. Once again Old Sharpshooter came to his defense, this time against Padre Salsa, the hero-chaplain who had three rows of medals over the red cross on his chest. The padre had joined the camp to carry Faith and Country to these fine lads of the Fascists Abroad.

Giovanni had arranged things with Giacomo and the other local children to make sure any pasta or minestrone left over after rations got back to their homes. The children, crouching in a trench with their pots, would wait for him every afternoon and evening. Padre Salsa surprised him just as he was scooping some pasta out from the kettle.

“What’s this?–caught you, you thief!–you swindler!”

“Padre, sir, this was extra food. Leftovers. They were just going to throw it away.”

“Scraps should be saved for the farmer’s pigs!”

“But this is still good. Giving it to hogs–that’s such a pity. And these children going hungry.”

“These children are lazy, raggedy beggars! They’re never to show their faces around Camp Mussolini again! They’re a disgrace to Italy! Now–out!–out of here! Scat!”

The children fled, nearly crying, with what little pasta Giacomo’s father had been able to give them. Padre Salsa ordered the kettle knocked over; the rest of the pasta spilled into the dirt. He went straight to Old Sharpshooter. “This has got to stop–our boys from abroad mustn’t see them! Shameful! That man should be kicked out of here!”

“He’s worth more than five soldiers. I’ll see to it this doesn’t happen again.”

That night, after Giovanni and Moro Soll cleaned up the kitchen and prepared for the next day’s caffellatte and cocoa, they went home and decided on a plan. Every evening at the same time Padre Salsa ate at the Croce Bianca Inn. Moro would keep watch and at just the right moment, he’d whistle for the children hiding deep in the bushes. Old Sharpshooter pretended not to notice; so all that month the local children enjoyed Camp Mussolini’s delicious pasta and minestrone–and they weren’t the only ones. Things went the same the following year.

In the spring of 1932, work started on the ossario or “bone” monument. It was going up on the Laiten Hills, east of town, where the bombed-out houses had been left unrepaired. The boys from town, and their fathers before them, used to climb those hills to play.

In the spring, kites would rise in the sky. “Dragons,” they called them. Vittorini from the pharmacy could make the very best dragons out of wax paper, bamboo slats, and glue. He’d also come up with a type of wooden reel with iron pins that let out or wound the string, depending on what the dragon needed as he soared up above, higher than the larks, the crows, the circling hawks.

Summers, even though the owners didn’t like their meadows trampled, boys and girls went up and gathered armfuls of red lilies (“archpriests”) before the grass was cut.

In the fall, the Piazza boys and the Uptown boys used to have wars at the very top of the Laitens, on all the rocks from the cannon volleys, which had been piled in one big heap. Sometimes they’d have sling-shot battles with lead pellets for ammunition. Lucky for them, their helmets were Austrian, not Italian.

Winters, they set up a ski-jump on those hills where everyone had first learned how to ski. And that’s how Mario broke his arm one February afternoon, making a jump.

It was a summer day when the engineers and surveyors went up the hills escorted by the podestà and the fascist party secretary. With their range finders, their tape measures, their theodolites, the technicians got to work surveying, measuring, scribbling. And so, after numerous proposals, offers, conferences, tests, and on-the-spot investigations, the Roman authorities decided that a great monument was to be built and that this great monument holding the remains of our heroes who’d died on the Altipiano (for the country’s salvation) would go right here, on our hills of play. To make room for the imperial-style arch, all the quiet cemeteries in the meadows and woods were leveled. Hundreds of workers started in with picks and shovels, digging up the rocks, preparing the foundation, the cement and marble burial niches. Everything dug up was loaded onto Decauville handcarts, then brought down to the meadows near town and dumped, for future road construction.

17.

They were waiting on the spring thaw like they’d never waited before. The larks had returned to the sunny river banks, but since it still froze up here at night, the birds–or so the older people claimed–would fly back down to the plains at dusk. Everyone was waiting, too, for the jobs to start up again and for the time when they could start spreading manure on the potato fields. The Grass family was already hauling manure in panniers, early in the morning, step by step up a path, over icy snow and patches of bare ground: over “harnust and happar” as they used to say in the ancient tongue. The Grasses were getting a head start on all the field work, making sure everything was done at home in case jobs opened up on the huge ossario monument (the bone monument) or on some community road project.

And when the late-morning sun was high enough to warm the communal fields, Giacomo and his father would go up with picks and shovels and work their small plot of ground by the woods. Both Giacomo’s father and his grandmother thought this plot would be good for lentils, maybe even potatoes the year after that. Twenty kilos of lentils in the house by November meant good minestrone all winter.

They would borrow five kilos of seed lentils from the Zais, who’d had an excellent crop the year before with their big field on Poltrecche. If they couldn’t pay the Zai family back in lentils, they’d do it selling recupero.

And they weren’t the only ones clearing the communal fields by the woods, out past the private properties. With winter coming to an end, smoke rose from the burning brush and turf in the sunniest spots on the hilltop. Glacial moraine and rocks were gathered to make dry support walls for reducing the slope. The rocks and gravel piled up from the digging were placed below these walls. If there wasn’t enough manure to spread, beech leaves and red-spruce shavings would do. By the time the cuckoo returned in April, the finished plots would be so neat and orderly, so harmoniously sculpted from the landscape, so breath-taking as seen from Petareitle Hill, that they’d be called “The Gardens.”

With the noon bell, the neighbors gathered together to eat, to talk a little about life and smoke a pipeful in peace. Gigio Rizzo, the municipal guard, would pass by once in a while to check on their work and to make sure everything was going according to the unwritten laws: no damaging the woods, no trespassing. He also had the job of figuring out the total area tilled by each family for the annual municipal tax on their permanent lease. Gigio Rizzo was stern but fair, a man of a few, choice words. Always dignified in his forestry uniform and well-oiled boots, carrying that cornel-wood cane with the curved handle, walking with that fast, sure stride. You always felt his presence, even when he wasn’t there. He didn’t wear a sidearm and if he sometimes heard subversive talk, well, he certainly wasn’t reporting anything back to the podestà. Like that day Giacomo’s father blew up about all the misery and how Il Duce’s revaluing the lira and decreasing wages was helping out the capitalists, not the proletarians.

With snow creeping back toward the heights, the men started going out for recupero again, leaving the women to plant and tend the plowed fields.

And work started up again on the ossario monument. The touchy inspector from the public works office was incredibly stubborn about the big white blocks from our few Altipiano quarries–the slightest defect and the marble was rejected. Sometimes the quarry workers tried filling in a chip or flaw with marble dust and putty, but nothing got by the inspector. He’d smash the block with a sledge hammer so it couldn’t even be used on some less important job.

The blocks, from quarries sometimes as far as two hours away, were dragged up the Laiten Hills on horse- or mule-drawn carts. The stonecutters would finish the marble up there according to the designs: each block had its number and assigned place in the monument. With levers, rollers, jacks, and tackle, the workers hauled the blocks up to the masons, who set them in place. The construction site was one big swarming, organized ant hill. The foremen paid attention to every last detail. The engineers from Ferlini & Roncato Contractors were afraid of the touchy inspector–he’d pop up silently, bark out a few words, and with a single wave of his hand have whole sections knocked down–they’d been carelessly done–or a block already up there had to be replaced.

One hot, muggy June day, a foreman spotted a worker whose shirt wasn’t soaked in sweat.

“You! Yeah, you! Come here. Why aren’t you sweating? What have you been up to?–lying around in the shade?”

“I never sweat, Boss. I just naturally don’t sweat.”

“Bull. Don’t give me that. Everybody sweats here. We don’t want any wise guys working on our hero monument.”

“It’s not my fault I don’t sweat. My comrades’ll tell you. Ask anybody.”

“Doesn’t matter–you’re fired. And remember: ‘buddies,’ not ‘comrades.’ Come back Saturday for the rest of your pay.”

Maybe this foreman was in such a rotten mood because he’d gone into the workyard latrine that morning and seen “Death to Il Duce” scratched in charcoal on the planks. As a model for the workers, he pointed out the innocent giant who’d just been discharged from the mountain artillery and who, rumor had it, used to present arms with a 75/13 howitzer barrel. He was strong as a horse, with the spirit of a child. Using levers and rollers, he moved solid blocks of marble around like they were pumice stone.

At noon, the workers would find some shade in a ditch or by one of the monument walls under construction. They’d make a fire from carpenters’ shavings and set a mess kit on the embers, warming up their soup and polenta brought from home. During this hour break, some of the town boys would climb up the Laitens, maybe to see what their play-hills were going through, but also just curious about all the work. The boys started to know these laborers by name, these men from nearby towns. Some were young, almost boys themselves. Others were old and gray-haired. Many had been in the Great War, but they didn’t seem all that moved to be building this enormous monument for the bones of their comrades.

Mario climbed the hills almost every day. A number of the men knew his family, and one day a group asked if he’d bring them a bottle of wine. There were eight of them, sitting around a fire, toasting some polenta on the coals, and with thirty centesimi each, they came up with the two lire and forty centesimi needed for a bottle of local wine. Mario raced down to his family’s shop, bought the wine, and raced up the hills again, knowing the men had to get back to work. This way, they could at least have a couple of mugs of wine in peace.

Later at supper, Mario’s grandfather said, “You should go up there every day at ten-to-twelve with six bottles in a couple of baskets. I bet you can sell every last one.”

And so at the foreman’s whistle, Mario would make sure he was up on the Laitens with his baskets and his six bottles of wine. He’d work his way through the groups as the men put their money together for the two lire and forty centesimi. Sometimes when payday was far off, they’d ask for a bottle on credit and Mario, just like his grandfather taught him, always agreed without drawing up a note. The poor don’t cheat. When the wine was all sold, he’d sit and listen to the men’s stories.

One in particular stayed with him. Nando dell’Ecchele told them how he’d sold his recupero one night, then stopped at Margherita’s for a glass with Vu. Afterwards, going home, when he was just outside town by the cross, there was this silent line of soldiers on the road right in front of him. The full moon kept slipping through the clouds–it was bright out just then, so he got a good look. The soldiers were pale, silent, walking without a sound–except their sighing. The long line of soldiers was coming from the mountains to the south, marching through the hollow between the hills, and up again, through the Nos Valley, toward the higher mountains.

Other scattered groups of soldiers in single file trickled down from the mountains into the valley. You couldn’t see a beginning to them, or an end. Nando just stood there, absolutely still, until the dawn grew light, and the moon went down, and they all disappeared.

“The dead soldiers’ spirits,” said an old worker who’d been a driver in the war.

“Sure,” another said, “but were they Italian or Austrian?”

“I can’t remember,” Nando answered. “Maybe both.”

“You ask me,” another man said, “you had one glass too many with Vu. Who knows what that glass was telling you.”

“I barely had a drop. A half-liter’s nothing split two ways.”

“And now,” said the one who’d spoken first, “here we are, building a monument for the soldiers’ bones. And their spirits, out wandering the mountains.”

They stayed quiet until the foreman’s whistle called them back. Mario, unsettled, went straight home, not stopping in the meadows, and up in his room he sat at his desk and wrote a poem, long gone now. Just three lines are left:

In the cold moonlight
they walk the mountains together–
the living and the dead.

Mario Rigoni Stern is from Asiago, Italy, in the Veneto. He is one of the most prestigious writers of northern Italy and has published fifteen works of prose with Giulio Einaudi Editore and Il Melngolo. His Il sergente nella neve (1953), The Sergeant in the Snow, is considered one of the great novels about the Italians at the Russian front during World War II. His works have been translated into twelve languages, and he has won numerous awards, including the 1978 Campiello Prize for the novel, Storia di Tonle (The Story of Tonle) and the 1999 Pen Club Prize for the short story collection Sentieri sotto la neve (Paths Beneath the Snow). Le stagioni di Giacomo (Giacomo’s Seasons) won the 1996 Grinzane Cavour Prize and has been translated into French; it was also adapted as a play in Italy.

Elizabeth Harris Behling grew up in Arizona and Kentucky and now teaches creative writing at the University of North Dakota. For her translations, she has won several awards, including the Dudley Fitts Award and the Gary Wilson Award. Her stories and translations of Italian prose and poetry have been accepted in Other Voices, Denver Quarterly, Florida Review, Northwest Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, and other magazines. She has had fiction-residency fellowships at the Blue Mountain Center and the Ragdale Foundation.

The image: This poster was created by Luigi Martinati in 1935.

She had beautiful furniture and a number of fancy rugs. There was a bed, of course, with several well-worn quilts, a large comforter, and hundreds of pillows. On a cold day in Timisoara, it would lure you in and not let go. If the curtain was pulled back, you could lay there in luxury and warmth, and see all the way down Podul Decebal, over the river, and out past the bus stop where less fortunate people huddled together in ice and snow, waiting for a bus that might never arrive.

Mirceau Doviescue (1934-1992), The Girl From Arad

Raven Archives

photo courtesy of the Library of Congress

Just as I’m filling my mother’s glass with more wine, she tells me she doesn’t love my father.

Don’t say that, I tell her.

You don’t know me, she says.

She takes another drink of her wine and returns the glass to the table. We have just finished eating dinner. My husband is away and she says so is hers, but she does not mean it in the same way I do. My husband is fighting a war in Iraq and her husband is asleep on their twenty-year-old couch. It’s like we are living in two different worlds, my mother says. I wash the remains of our dinner into the sink and flick the switch for the disposal.

We have dinner together in silence, she says.

But my mother and father have always been silent with one another, even among words.

Behind my mother, on the buffet my husband and I bought together with our wedding money, there is a picture of my grandmother on Ellis Island. She is only eight years old in the photo, strapped to her uncle’s side like paste. I found the picture in my ninth grade history textbook, in a chapter called The American Dream, and despite the years I recognized her immediately. I showed my grandmother the book and she couldn’t stop touching the glossy pages.

Maybe you just don’t want to love him anymore, I say to my mother. She doesn’t answer. She picks her glasses up from the table and begins rubbing the lenses with her napkin. My napkin.

The day after my grandmother saw herself in my book she decided to take me to Ellis Island. You are a woman now, she said, and ready to know about struggle, the inevitabilities of life.

The American Dream, I said, remembering all I’d learned in school.

Genocide, she said, also remembering.

She had only been back there twice: once with my grandfather, and once with my mother. We walked through the building and said nothing to each other. Outside, between the East River and the Atlantic Ocean, between Brooklyn and Manhattan, between Manhattan and New Jersey, between New Jersey and Staten Island, between so much world and us, my grandmother said this: The worst was leaving my mother in Armenia. She kissed me and I knew we wouldn’t see each other again.

My mother puts her glasses back on. I should have known you wouldn’t understand, she says. She gets up from the table and walks into the bathroom. She turns the light on, stares into the mirror, looks back at me, and then closes the door. She does not come out for almost fifteen minutes.

When I first brought my husband home to meet my family, my grandmother didn’t like him because he said something about how Armenia and America are almost the same but with just a few letters in different places. She smiled to be polite and then left the table.

Come out of the bathroom, I say to my mother. It’s time for dessert. I can see her feet under my newly painted bathroom door, so clean and bright in its whiteness, just as I had wanted it to be. I walk back into the dining room and hear the handle turning and the bathroom door opening, and soon we are both back in our places at the table, eating dessert.

I’m leaving him, she says, her mouth full of chocolate cake. She has icing on her chin and I want to say something to her, but all I can do is hand her a napkin.

It’s not fair that they will take your husband like that, my grandmother said when I told her he was being sent to Iraq. There was a hummingbird feeding on sugar water outside her kitchen window.

Mom, I say and she stops thinking about whatever it is she is thinking about and turns to me. What did you feel when Grandma took you to Ellis Island? I have been wanting to ask her this for thirteen years.

Loneliness, she says. The tablecloth is worn and dirty and unsuitable for use anymore. And also anger and sadness. For her. What about hope, I say. I thought it was supposed to be a place of hope.

My mother leans back in her chair. I guess you know what everything is supposed to be, she says. She is moving the stem of her near-empty wine glass in circles on the tablecloth as though she is getting ready to drink the first sip and not the last.

It was not an easy life, my grandmother said on the ferry ride home from Ellis Island. I was never American.

You could have been, I said.

She looked at me, cold and foreign, and said: You think everything is so easy.

My mother gets up from the table and goes to the closet for her coat. I want to offer her something else but there is nothing left: the wine bottle is empty, our plates are bare and there are no words left for us to say. The night before my husband left, he asked me how to fight for things you’re not sure you believe in. We had just finished making love and his chest was still heaving under the sheet. I reached to the nightstand and turned the light out, because it was all I could think of doing.

I can’t stand the way he breathes, my mother says at the door, one more grievance to add to the list, as if she is still required to convince. He pushes the air out of his lungs so forcefully, like he’s disturbing it, making it do something it doesn’t want to do.

You have a choice, I say, because I still want to believe in something.

Kelly Lundgren Pietrucha holds a Masters in Fiction from Temple University, where she now teaches creative writing and literature. She also teach at Rutgers University and Camden County College in New Jersey. Her fiction has appeared in Pindeldyboz.

photo courtesy of Jerry Lodriguss

Every time Donald saw a UFO, he got an erection. The problem, of course, was that UFO’s didn’t seem to be quite as common a phenomenon as they’d been in his youth. Dr. Collins smiled politely, in appreciation, and studied the holes in the tops of his loafers.

“So what you need then . . . ” Dr. Collins said, narrowing his eyes to keep up, to record all this for his wife, “what you need is some way of bringing the aliens back, yes?”

Donald didn’t have to look away to answer. There was never any eye contact during the examinations. Dr. Collins had given up on that years ago; it was why he’d had the large window cut into the room - to give his patients trees to study, birds, squirrels, life. Anything but the fourteen -thousand dollar chair in the corner, the tile around it splashed with iodine.

“Maybe if they could just do a flyby once a week or something,” Donald said, smiling. “Flash their lights a little for the wife, y’know?”

The wife. Dr. Collins filed that one away too, crossed the floor to the side counter, for the prescription tablet he had to keep locked in the drawer now. The reason for Donald’s visit, according to the chart he’d filled out in the waiting room, was prostate, which he’d spelled prostrate. It meant to throw oneself facedown on the ground in humility.

Without looking up from his tablet, Dr. Collins asked, “Is that all you need, then? Some more, um . . . close encounters?”

“You can arrange them?” Donald said, his voice rising, incredulous, his hands gripping the examination table.

Dr. Collins signed his name with a flourish, letting the s trail out longer than usual - a comet tail, he thought - and shrugged for Donald, said, “You still have to provide the candles, I guess.”

Donald laughed with him, and for a moment they were just two gentlemen from different generations, each raised well enough to know how to discuss delicate subject matter. The way Dr. Collins would tell it to his wife, he knew, would involve some of the things he should have said, about implants, maybe, about how the discs they were both talking about were essentially the same, it was just a matter of scale, of provenance: one came glittering down from the sky, the other across the counter of a pharmacy. But then Donald stepped down, took the prescription Dr. Collins was offering. He looked from it up to Dr. Collins, then out the window again.

“I assure you -” Dr. Collins started, trying not to smile.

Donald didn’t let him finish, interrupted not so much with words but by centering Dr. Collins in his old man eyes, his face still angled slightly away, as if he were embarrassed.

“I think you maybe misunderstand, Doc,” he said, still picking through his words in a way that Dr. Collins could tell there were a lot not being said. “I didn’t get the hard - I didn’t get excited about the UFO’s myself, see. No, no. They never were much but a bother to me, with what they did to the corn and all.”

Now he was handing the prescription back. Dr. Collins looked at it between them like it was from another planet, and from it up to Donald, just as alien now.

“Then . . . what?” he said, not sure if he should be ready to smile or not.

Donald shrugged, rubbed his rough chin with the side of his hand in a way that Dr. Collins couldn’t tell if it was the hand itching or the chin.”The wife, I mean, y’know?” he said finally, looking outside now, but up, too. Dr Collins looked with him. “Every time they buzzed our house back then, me, I’d go for the barn, to keep the horses from kicking their stall doors out. But the wife, she’d run out after them, see? Then come back - God - come back to the porch an hour or two later, corn silk in her hair, spider web trailing off thesleeves of her dress like a shawl I guess, her chest just rising and . . .”

Dr. Collins studied the sky long after Donald was gone, his new prescription not a prescription at all, but a referral, for his prostate, spelled without the r. That’s what he had really been there for. Dr. Collins didn’t tell his wife about that part of it, though. Instead, the next morning, Saturday, he found himself awake in the house earlier than usual. No coffee in the air, no cars outside. Just dawn, seeping in through the blinds over the kitchen window in beams that, for a moment, seemed to be feeling, scanning.

Dr. Collins - Stan on the weekends - walked through the beams to the front door, and out onto the different world of the porch, the automatic sprinklers flowing up into silvery mushrooms, the whole landscape of the neighborhood suddenly alien, so that, until his wife came gasping up from the street, her morning run complete, he knew he believed.

“Getting too old for this,” his wife said when she could, her hands made into fists around the knees of her sweatpants, her lungs trying to wring all the oxygen they could from Earth’s thin atmosphere, and Dr. Collins shook his head no about that. She wasn’t.

Stephen Graham Jones is the author of three novels: The Fast Red Road-A Plainsong, All the Beautiful Sinners, and The Bird is Gone: A Manifesto. His first book of stories, Bleed into Me, was recently published by University of Nebraska Press. His latest novel, Demon Song, is forthcoming from MacAdam/Cage. An Assistant Professor of English at Texas Tech University, Jones is really, really into Elvis.