The Sun and Other Stars

by Brigid Pasulka

  The rest of the morning is slow. I close up at twelve thirty, wrap up three sandwiches, and bring them over to the beach. Fede’s on duty in the entrance hut, playing with his phone.

  “Look who’s suddenly coming to the beach every day.”

  “I’m working on my tan.”

  “Nice try. I think everybody knows exactly what you’re working on.”

  “What about you? You got your eye on any nannies these days?”

  “I told you. I’m taking a break. Why does nobody believe me?”

  I look over at the Ukrainians. Yuri’s holding court again, Papà sitting in the place of honor next to him, his pants rolled up, his toes digging into the sand. Zhuki is off to the side making a sand tower with Little Yuri and some of the other boys. I put one of the sandwiches on the counter and hold it down with my hand.

  “I need a favor, Fede.”

  He looks at the sandwich, then eyes me suspiciously. “What kind of favor?”

  “I need to borrow your moped.”

  Fede hesitates. After Luca’s accident, he sold the wrecked motorcycle and his other one to a guy in Albenga. They were both Japanese models—hypersports—zero to one hundred in three seconds, and to replace them, he bought a used moped that barely makes it over fifty. When he rides it, he looks like one of those clowns on a toy bike, his legs nearly doubled up.

  “No.”

  “Come on, Fede. Dai.”

  “No.”

  “Please? I want to take her up to the meadows, and I’ve got no other way.”

  He sighs and shakes his head. “I don’t know, Etto . . .” He looks over at Zhuki. She sees us and waves, hands her shovel off to one of the boys, and comes over to the boardwalk.

  “Ciao.” She gives me a one-armed hug around my waist. I let go of the sandwich and plead my case with my eyes.

  “Do you swear you won’t go over thirty?”

  “Thirty? I won’t make it up the hill.”

  “Forty, then. No faster. And both of you better be wearing helmets.”

  “Thanks, Fede.”

  “I mean it.”

  * * *

  I somehow manage to start it and rock it off the kickstand. We wobble through the alley and onto Via Londra, Zhuki gripping the rack behind her, the front tire rasping against the pavement as I overcorrect. I haven’t driven anything since Luca’s accident, and it bucks every time I touch the brake or the accelerator.

  “Are you sure you can’t tell me where we’re going?” she says in my ear as we idle at the stoplight, our helmets clacking together.

  “You’ll see.”

  The light turns green, and I twist the throttle. She switches her grip to my waist, and I can feel her knees pressing into the backs of mine. I creep around the curves as we drive through town and onto Via Aurelia, the sea on our left, the terraces on our right. No afraid, no afraid, I hear Yuri say in my head. I twist the throttle a little and feel the motor level out beneath me, the rattle of the chain falling into a rhythm. I can feel the breath entering and leaving her body, her weight leaning with mine around the curves.

  Shit, God, please don’t let us fly over the cliff. Please? If not for us, for Papà and Yuri.

  We pass the disco and Laigueglia, and go around the cape toward the valley of the Dianos. I make a quick apology to Fede as we pass fifty, and I open the throttle all the way. The wind whips at my face and hands, the sun reflecting up at me from the metal tank and the tar in the road. The cars are flying by, the sea unmoving to our left, the sun steady overhead. I think about Luca and the French girl, and my eyes start to water in the wind. Because you know what? I think God, he, she, it, whatever, wants this for us—to ride a moped down the coast in the embrace of a girl. Maybe this is exactly what God kicked us out of the garden for.

  We turn inland, and the road becomes narrow and ragged at the edges. They didn’t make this road until Papà was a boy, and everyone had to give up a small piece of their land to do it. It’s nothing but steep rises and hairpin turns snaking through olive groves and along garden walls, dodging around the backs of chicken coops and tiny chapels to the Virgin Mary.

  We used to come up to the meadows all the time when we were kids. Especially before Papà and Nonno had our side-by-side apartments renovated and installed the air-conditioning. August was the worst. The mugginess would rise up to our room, soaking into our skin until even the salt of the sea couldn’t wash it away. Sometimes Mamma would leave the shop early and collect us from the beach. She’d pile us into the back of the shop Ape, and we’d stay up in the meadows all afternoon, leaving just enough light to steer back down the hill. I don’t remember the first time or the last, only the habit of it—Luca and I bouncing in the bed of the Ape, the buzz of the motor, and the flush of green that met our eyes as we crested the hill.

  Zhuki and I round the final switchback. The hill rears up, then ripples into meadows, the rolling foothills of the Alps in the distance. Zhuki sighs. I cut the motor and let my feet skip along the ground as we coast, the road finally crumbling into dirt. There’s a nice breeze up here, like someone has thrown a bucket of water on the broiling sun.

  “I can’t believe it,” she says. She gets off, turning around in wonder and relief. “Who would ever think this is up here? I always thought our villa was the top of the hill.”

  “That’s the thing about the terraces,” I say. “They always trick you into thinking you’re finally at the top.”

  I dig the remaining two sandwiches out of the seat compartment, along with a blanket and some matches Fede must keep in there for when he’s trying to make nice with some girl. Good old Fede. We spend the rest of the afternoon up in the meadow with no plan, and it’s like being a kid again. We shut off our phones and take off our shoes. Zhuki shows me how to hunt for mushrooms, and I bring her to the stream I remember. We skip stones and build leaf boats, and she shows me what she promises are the most popular Ukrainian children’s games. There’s one that involves chasing and hitting each other with a belt, and one that is like hide-and-seek, only the penalty for being found is to get your arm rubbed until it burns.

  “They really toughen the kids up in Ukraine, eh?”

  “Most of them have a hard life ahead of them anyway.”

  “Do you think you’ll ever go back there?”

  “I doubt it.”

  “Not even when Yuri’s career is over?”

  “I don’t know. Yuri and I have talked about opening a restaurant. But probably not there.”

  “What kind of restaurant?”

  “Ukrainian food, of course. Vareniki, borscht, blintzes . . . but I would make my restaurant modern. Not so heavy. Euro-Ukrainian. I used to cook at such a place in Kiev.” She picks at the grass, extracting small wildflowers and collecting them in a bunch.

  “Why do you have to wait for Yuri? Why can’t you open a restaurant on your own? I’m sure he would loan you the money.”

  “But where?”

  I swallow hard. “Why not here? In Italy, I mean.”

  “Oh, it would be difficult to open a restaurant in Italy. People don’t know Ukrainian food at all, and there are so many good restaurants. Even in the small towns. And then if Yuri moves to a different team?” She pulls a long blade of grass and wraps it around the stems of the flowers.

  “You can always visit them.”

  “Oh, I cannot imagine this.”

  “No?”

  “Yuri is my entire family. Little Yuri. Principessa. Ihor. Mykola.”

  “Not Tatiana?”

  She makes a face. “Not Tatiana. Tatiana and I, we are very different women.”

  “Thank God.”

  She grins. “Yes. And what about you, Etto-Son-of-Butcher? Do you always want to be a butcher?”

  “I don’t even know if I’m a real butcher yet.”

  “That’s not what your papà says. He was talking to Yuri the other day and saying how proud he is of you. He says you are a natural.”

  “He did?” I try to im
agine Papà saying anything remotely like this.

  “You know, Etto, I think you’re lucky.”

  “Why?”

  “You have no questions about your life. You already know the answers. Where will you live . . . what profession will you have. You mustn’t keep asking and wondering what is around the corner. Your whole life is under control.”

  “It sounds really sad and pathetic when you put it like that.”

  “I don’t mean to say it this way.”

  I’ve never talked to anyone like this. With Mamma, I just assumed she knew, when maybe she didn’t, really. And with everybody else, especially in the last couple of years, it was like a punishment I could dole out, that if they couldn’t manage to ask me the right question when I was in the right mood, they didn’t deserve to know anything about me. But as Zhuki and I watch the sun go down over the foothills, I feel an urgency to tell her the things I left unsaid with Mamma and Luca, the things Papà and I can only skirt around.

  I stand up and brush the dirt and grass off my culo. “I want to show you something.”

  “That’s what all the boys say.”

  “You’re funny.”

  “What is it?”

  “It’s a surprise.”

  “A good surprise or a bad surprise?”

  “Trust me.”

  It’s much harder to steer the moped on the way down, and I have to brake almost constantly to fight the pull of gravity. By the time we reach Via Partigiani, the shadow of the hill swallows us up, the headlight slowly opening the infinite road. I drive up the service road, kill the engine, and coast. The kickstand won’t hold in the grass, so I balance the moped against Luca’s headstone.

  “What, you have some new moves or something?”

  “I wish.”

  I lead her to the liceo door and pull out the keys.

  She laughs. “We used to break into our liceo in Ukraine all the time, too,” she says. “We had codes on our doors, and the director always said they were changing them, but they never did.”

  I push the door open and flip on the lights in the corridor. They buzz and flicker as Zhuki looks around. She wanders along the class photos and reaches up to touch each one. “Are you in one of these?”

  “We never got to take our picture. It closed the year before we graduated.”

  “Your father, then?”

  I show her Papà’s and Nonno’s pictures, but she lingers on the others, too. The moonlight pools on the wooden floor and casts our shadows on the wall. I lead her down the corridor, but she takes her time, standing on her toes to look into the window of the director’s office and opening the door of each classroom along the way.

  “This is cool, Etto. Thanks for bringing me here.”

  I wait at the end of the corridor, in front of Charon’s door. My heart pounds as she reaches for the handle.

  “What’s in here?”

  I let her open the door herself, and she stands frozen in the doorway, her eyes darting around the room, taking it in. At first there’s almost a look of fear on her face, like I’ve been in here flaying my victims and sewing their skin into suits. She mutters a few words in Ukrainian and walks slowly around the edges of the table towers, her head flipped toward the ceiling in the same contortion I’ve held for the past two months.

  “You know,” I say, like some fottuto tour guide, “by the time he was finished, Michelangelo’s eyes were so warped, he couldn’t read a book unless he held it above his head and looked up.”

  “You did all this, Etto?” she says, and she starts to climb.

  “It’s stupid, I know. And I’m probably never going to finish it. I don’t even know why I started in the first place . . .”

  “Everyone is here. Look. There’s Fede. And Franco . . . Martina . . . Tatiana . . . your papà . . .”

  I climb up after her. “You recognize them?”

  “They’re really good, Etto. They look like they do in real life.” She stares at the panel of Papà kicking me out of the shop. She screws up her face and breaks into a laugh. “Is that you?”

  Her eyes are so bright, but I don’t look away. I feel her reaching for the front of my shirt, only this time instead of a push, I feel a pull. I put my hands on her waist, and it feels like we’re floating on the sea, the wooden table like the deck of a ship buoying us up, sent to right my listing life.

  I know, I know. You are used to my generation’s compulsion to report everything we do the instant we do it, and I can hear you over there saying, enough with the fottuto metaphors—what happened? And especially if you are American and obsessed with keeping tallies and statistics on every aspect of your life, you will probably even want to know what base I got to and if I “scored.”

  And I will answer you as I would answer Fede or Bocca or any of them:

  It’s none of your fottuto business.

  But if it were . . . if it were, I would tell you that there is nothing to compare to the touch of another human being. The bridging of a synapse. A spark of life.

  When I wake up on Sunday morning, there’s a low buzzing inside my veins, like the home-strung power lines that zigzag between the houses toward the top of the hill. I hear the distant sound of The Band coming closer, and I get up, open the shutters, and poke my head into the morning air. The Band is a bunch of guys mostly Papà’s age who go out in the streets and play whenever they feel like it. Sometimes it’s for the religious holidays or to serenade someone for a birthday or a new baby, but most of the time, there’s no reason at all. Once a summer at the height of the season, when the tourists are packed into every closet and storage room, they do an early morning march-by at full blast. Just to remind everyone who owns the town.

  I watch the tops of their heads as they pass by below. Claudia’s papà is one of the main organizers, so Casella’s been drafted into The Band, and sure enough, I spot his trumpet and his ponytail in the back of the line.

  “Looking good,” I shout.

  “Hey, Etto!” Claudia’s papà answers. “Say hello to my new son-in-law.”

  Casella lifts his head and gives a sleepy grin. He puts the trumpet to his mouth and blows a note that lasts until the end of the vico.

  I walk up the hill to pick up Nonna for church, and I don’t feel the incline at all. It’s like I’m still floating next to the ceiling of the aula, and as I sit in the courtyard of the church, my body fires off celebratory sparks. The doors are flung open to the warm sunshine, and as they cycle through the Holy, Holy, Holy, the Our Father, and the rest of it, I make up my own prayers.

  “Shit. Thank you, God. I don’t deserve her, but . . . shit. Thank you. Thank you. That’s all. Thank you. And sorry for the cursing.”

  The last song plays, and everyone exits, squinting as the sun hits their eyes.

  “Congratulations,” I tell Casella, and he smiles sheepishly. Claudia thrusts her hand in my face, the diamond sticking up like a lollipop.

  “Can you believe it, Etto? Can you believe he finally did it? He even got down on his knee, just like in the movies. . . .”

  But I’m only half listening to Claudia, because behind her, Zhuki is coming down the stairs with the nonne. She smiles at me, and my face must register it like a mirror because Claudia interrupts herself and turns around to look.

  “Ah, I’ve heard the rumor that Etto has a girlfriend, but I didn’t quite believe it,” she says.

  “She’s not really my girlfriend.”

  “Whatever, Etto.”

  Zhuki comes over to us. She’s wearing a blue skirt, and I try to think back and remember if she was wearing a skirt the other times I saw her at church.

  “Ciao.”

  “Ciao.”

  “How is it going?” she asks.

  “Claudia and Casella just got engaged.”

  Claudia thrusts the ring in Zhuki’s face.

  “Beautiful,” Zhuki says. “Congratulations.”

  I watch her as she asks all the polite questions about when the wedding will
be and how Casella asked her. Claudia talks on and on, Casella clinging to her side, the nonne stopping to congratulate them. But Zhuki is the only one in focus for me, everyone else blurring around her.

  “Are you going to the match this afternoon?” Casella asks me.

  “Of course. Are you?”

  “Sure.”

  “You’re going?” Claudia says.

  “Why not?”

  And Claudia starts talking again, something about her mother and the wedding, but it must be at a different frequency that only brides can hear, because all I sense is the same low buzzing in my veins as when I woke up.

  * * *

  After dinner, Nonno, Nonna, Papà, and I drive to the field in the 2CV. We pull up through the service road, and Nonno and I meet gales of laughter as we unload two large jugs from the back, sloshing with icy lemonade.

  “Ah, but you had to buy those lemons didn’t you, Caccia?”

  Cruel.

  If I live eight hundred years, I will never believe how many people have come up to the field on a Sunday afternoon. Not only the regulars from Martina’s but even people like Signor Cavalcanti, who has enough money to buy himself a nice Serie B team, and Benito, the other butcher, exiled for decades by his own arrogance. Even the students home from university for the summer, who usually want nothing to do with these backward old men. They are all out there on the field, chasing a fottuto calcio ball.

  While the first match runs, the women unpack blankets and picnic lunches. Tatiana is among them, standing expressionless in her dark glasses and capris, only clapping with her fingertips when Yuri or Vanni scores a goal, as if she’s too good to cheer for amateurs.

  But I have to say, for amateurs, they’re starting to look pretty good out there. The first day, each man tried to be his own superstar, his own Ronaldo, his own Eusébio. But with a full week of practice, they are passing foot to foot, and their bodies have begun to remember the formations of their youth. Today they have enough breath not only to run up and down the field without falling down but to scream out directives and encouragements to their teammates.