BRUCE MCALLISTER
It was the Cold War, and my father, who worked in antisubmarine warfare for the Navy, was stationed in Europe to help fight that war quietly, the way it was almost always fought. My friends from school in the little fishing village where we would live for three years weren’t afraid, of course. It wasn’t like a real war. There were no planes at night, no bombs, no radio announcements of impending invasions, and no wounded, bleeding men—nothing like the war their parents had fought in countless villages fifteen years earlier. And except for my own parents’ occasional mention of “nuclear missiles” and “the communist threat,” I wasn’t afraid either. Why would I be? I was thirteen. We all were thirteen—young, innocent and trusting. We went about our business, which was the business of growing up. What could there possibly be to scare us?
But there was one thing that frightened my friends—something that had nothing at all to do with war—and it was the cobblestone path that led from our village, little Lerici with its medieval church and castle, up through the olive groves to the hilltop where the villas of the old aristocratic families overlooked the Ligurian Sea. My friends, all born in Lerici, were scared of that path, and admitted it. It wasn’t that you couldn’t stay on the path and avoid the fork that took you to the even tinier village of Magusa halfway up the hill. It was that when the path did fork, you felt the strange pull of Magusa’s olive groves and doorways with their red hammers and sickles (or what looked like hammers and sickles), and it felt like a spell, a trick of magic, one that left you feeling a little sick. That’s how my friends put it anyway, loving the drama of it.
The grownups saw it differently. Magusa was a communist village, they said—if you could call something that small a village—and a communist village angrier than most; and that (the grownups declared) was all you needed to know. Lots of people in Italy were communists—churchgoing, card-carrying communists who had no trouble believing both in God and the rights of the working man, of common people shortchanged by the aristocracy for far too long—but the residents of Magusa were different: They were communists so poor and so angry with the world that their comrades in other villages, no strangers to red bandanas and shouting crowds, didn’t want to be around them. The residents of Magusa weren’t even from Liguria, the grownups said. The original families, all olive pickers, had come from the farthest south. They looked like Southerners, too—short and darker—and that didn’t help. Northerners had always looked down on Southerners, and always would. Or, as the grownups put it, the villagers of Magusa had never really “adjusted” to being Ligurians.
But my friends knew better, they told me one day after school. Sure, the doorways of the village were short, which said Southerners perhaps, and certainly said poor. The houses, lined up side by side and touching on both sides of a cobblestone path no more than a few meters wide, were narrow and dark and damp, and the doorways were shorter than most men. But this wasn’t, my friends insisted, because the villagers of Magusa were small, though they were indeed squat and small. It was because the villagers wanted to keep something out—out of their houses—something bigger than men.
And though (my friends insisted) the bright red slashes of paint on every door did indeed look a little like hammers and sickles—those infamous symbols of communism—they really weren’t hammers and sickles at all. They were something else, something much stranger.
Maybe the inhabitants of Magusa were communists, they said, and maybe they weren’t. What mattered was not what the crude design in red paint on every doorway “represented,” they said, but what it did.
“Che dice?” I said. After a year of tutoring and middle school, I spoke the language well enough. “What do you mean ‘did’?”
“The doorways aren’t enough,” Gianluca, my best friend—the one with the long eyelashes who dreamed of working for Interpol when he grew up—said quietly. I was trying to get my friends to take the fork to Magusa that day because it was the shortest route by far to the trattoria in Romito—the one that had the best ice cream on the coast—and I was in a mood for ice cream. We were bored as hell that afternoon, our geography and Roman history tests behind us, and ice cream was—in my case anyway—going to break the boredom. They’d argued with me—saying that the gelato at Trattoria Livia or del Golfo on the waterfront was better—but I knew they just didn’t want to walk all that way, especially if it meant going through Magusa.
“They’ve got the best pistachio,” I’d said, “and you know it. You’re just scared.”
“No,” blue-eyed Maurizio had said, turning red the way he always did when he lied. “We just don’t want to walk to Romito for your damn ice cream.”
No one uttered a word for a moment, and then Gianluca said what they were all feeling:
“We don’t want you to go alone.”
Carlo, always the bravest and cockiest, snorted, and said, “Speak for yourself, Gianluca.”
“I am, Carlo.”
Carlo snorted again, but didn’t say anything else.
“Why not?” I asked. I knew, but wanted them to say it. I didn’t believe it, and I wanted to give them a hard time.
“You know why,” Maurizio said shyly.
“All of this—everything you’ve told me before about Magusa,” I began, “you have gotten from adults who know?”
“No …” Maurizio said.
“You have imagined it, then?”
“No!” Gianluca frowned. “We have put it together, like detectives. We have lived here longer than you and we have had time to do detective work.”
Gianluca’s boast embarrassed Carlo, who looked away, but still said nothing.
“Just the three of you—you three detectives?” I teased.
“Of course not,” Carlo said suddenly. “The calculations began with my uncle, Paolo, who is twenty years older. He started, with his friends, to put two and two together when he was young; and my brother, Emiliano, who is ten years older, did the same. The detective work, if you want to call it that, has been accumulating for at least twenty years, Brad.”
“And how do boys know what adults do not?” I asked, a part of me wanting to believe, but the rest not wanting to be a fool. Why did getting ice cream have to be so complicated?
Gianluca took the condescending tone he sometimes had—the one you wanted to shoot him for, even if he was your best friend. “You are so naïve, Brad. You are an American and do not understand such things.”
“Yes,” Carlo agreed. “You are like the adults who want to think what they want to think, to make sense of a world that doesn’t always make sense, and so they do not really think. They do not use their brains.” Carlo was a little older, had the highest grades in our subjects and would be an attorney some day, we knew—maybe even city attorney of La Spezia, the port to the north.
“They do not,” he went on, “really want to discover the truth.”
“And so,” Gianluca added, “they do not explore; they do not bother to find out—to find out important things.”
This was getting ridiculous. “Things? Like what?”
“Like a baby crying in the night,” Carlo answered.
“What’s strange about that?”
My friends didn’t answer. They were looking at each other now.
“This baby cries in Magusa,” Carlo answered.
“There’s a crying baby in any village,” I responded, exasperated. Could this get any sillier?
“But we’ve all heard it,” Maurizio was saying.
“So?”
“It’s just one baby,” Maurizio went on, “and when it cries, it doesn’t stop.” He was staring at me, pleading, as if to say: Please believe us. I would not lie to you, Brad.
And he wouldn’t.
“When?”
“In the night.”
“But it is,” Carlo insisted. “We recognized it. There are no other voices, no people, no children, no other babies. Just this one and it cries all night.”
I didn’t know what to say. I’d gotten a shiver, the way Carlo was telling it, but that just made me mad because I knew he wanted me to shiver. He loved to scare people. He’d learned it from his dad, who’d have a glass of wine and off he’d go with a ghost story until the women told him to stop. “You’re scaring us all, Marco, so zito, please!”
“So you heard it, Carlo—”
“Yes, he did,” said Gianluca. “We all did.”
“How?”
“Before you and your family came to live here,” Gianluca said. “Maybe two years ago. We went to Magusa, we took the fork, we stayed in the groves until night, and we waited. We had flashlights. We wanted to explore the village at night, using flashlights, but suddenly we were scared. Something scared us and we stayed in the trees all night.”
“We thought dogs would smell us or hear us and we’d have to run,” Maurizio said.
“But they don’t have dogs,” Gianluca said.
“What?”
“They don’t,” Gianluca said again, “have dogs.”
“You’ve never heard dogs barking at Magusa?”
“No.”
“No one has. Ever.”
“Even the adults say they haven’t. They think it strange, but not strange enough to change how they think.”
“Bene. I agree,” I said, “that’s strange, but a baby crying isn’t strange. You’re trying to make that village stranger than it is because you just don’t want to walk to Romito.”
“No,” Maurizio said quietly. That Maurizio believed it—that was what was most persuasive of all. He was the clearest thinker in school, the calmest, the kindest, the most reasonable; and if he believed … I felt a chill again.
“There was just that one infant,” Gianluca insisted.
“I doubt that a village has just one baby,” I said, repeating myself, but not wanting to give up that easily. Finding a thing unbelievable was not the same as being afraid to believe it, I knew.
“We stayed,” he went on, “in the bushes until after midnight. We knew we would get in trouble with our parents, but we were—”
“You, Gian, were afraid to move even a centimeter,” Carlo interrupted smugly.
“So were you!” Gianluca glared at him.
Carlo said nothing.
Gianluca calmed down, looked at me and went on.
“All we could do was listen to that baby cry.”
“Until after midnight?”
“Yes … all all that time.”
“How many hours?”
“Six, maybe a little more.”
“I don’t believe you sat in the bushes not moving for six hours.”
“We do not lie, Brad,” Maurizio said.
“You didn’t have to go to the bathroom?”
“We went to the bathroom.”
“Right there? In the bushes?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because we had to go … but we couldn’t leave.”
I was staring at the three of them, looking for any sign on their faces that it was a joke. There was nothing. “Mary Mother of God,” I said. “You are all crazy. You got yourself scared that night like little kids. You scared each other. You couldn’t even move? You went in the grass?”
They looked at me for a second, and it was Maurizio who spoke:
“You wouldn’t have been able to move either, Brad.”
“Why?”
“Because it was as if the baby were alone—that’s what its crying sounded like—as if no one were there to hold it or nurse it—as if all of the people in the village were gone and only the baby was there alone—as if …” Maurizio ran out of words, and his mouth hung open for a moment.
“Just one baby—you’re sure?”
“Yes.”
“No adult voices?”
Gianluca sighed. “No adult voices anywhere.”
They were standing on the path with me, and we were all silent. I’d run out of questions and they’d run out of answers. I believed them, I suppose—enough that I was still feeling the whisper of a chill—but I sure had no idea what it meant.
“So … let’s go,” I said.
“What?” they said. It was the exact opposite of what they wanted to hear. I was supposed to be scared now. I was supposed to want to go anywhere but Magusa.
“Let’s take the fork,” I went on. “Let’s find out what it means. It’s daytime. There are four of us. What do we have to be afraid of?”
They’d all stepped back as if I’d sprayed them with a hose.
I know why I said it. I was angry. I was angry that they’d scared me with their story, and I wanted to get back at them. I didn’t really want to go to Magusa now, and they didn’t either, so the last thing I expected was Carlo’s next words:
“Va bene. Let’s go.”
“What?” Now it was my turn.
“You’re right, Brad. The time to go there is daytime, when there are as many of us as possible. Besides….”
I didn’t know what the “besides” meant, but the others did.
“Besides?”
“You’re an American, and that may protect us.”
“If they’re communists,” I countered, “they certainly won’t want to see an American.”
“Maybe,” Carlo said. “If they’re communists. But what may protect us—”
The others were nodding now, as if they’d all talked about it.
“—is your red hair. If they are, as our parents say, from the South, that should frighten them. Barbarossa. The devil’s beard. The evil eye. It wouldn’t frighten Northerners because they have red hair sometimes—look at Nardi—but if they’re Southerners, maybe they’ll think you’re the devil.”
I wanted to say, And what if they are the devil?, but didn’t. I was suddenly very self-conscious of my hair.
“We don’t think you’re the devil,” Gianluca said, as if I needed the assurance. “But Carlo is right—maybe they will.”
Again I thought they were joking—how could they say such a thing with a straight face?—but they weren’t smiling, they weren’t laughing.
“It should,” Carlo added somberly, like an old priest, “give you power over them.”
“It is daylight, too,” little Maurizio added brightly, “so they will see your hair better.”
I wanted to laugh—to break the tension and help me breathe—but for some reason the idea of my own laughter scared me even more than Carlo’s tone.
So we did it. We took the fork. Our hearts were beating louder than our footsteps on the cobbles—at least mine was—and we kept scanning the shadows of the olive groves on either side of us like soldiers looking for an enemy. The cobbles on the fork were rougher, and we tripped a lot, our eyes on the trees where things could hide, watching us. No one said a thing, as if speaking would bring the shadows to life, and it took an hour to reach the village when it should have taken half that.
I looked at innocent Maurizio, he looked back, and I knew what he was thinking: See how much sunlight there is here, Brad! They’ll be able to see your red hair perfectly. It almost glows!
The village was about a block long. No one was on the path that led through it, or in the doorways that lined it. No voices reached us from anywhere—houses or olive groves beyond them. No one was there to watch us arrive, and no one appeared as we walked past the doorways with their red paint. I had walked this path once before, with my parents, not long after we’d arrived in Lerici. We’d been taking a Sunday walk to the Villa Mitiale on the ridge to say hello to the Contessa, who’d befriended my mother in our first weeks in the country—as the aristocracy of any country tends to do with military officers, who are, after all, the military’s own aristocracy—and we’d taken the Magusa fork by accident. I hadn’t paid much attention. I was chubbier then, completely out of shape, and walking that far uphill had winded me. I saw the red paint and knew what hammers and sickles were, so when my father pointed them out calling them just that, I nodded. Then he said, “Have we been here before?” and my mother said, “No, Jimmy, we haven’t. And I’m really not sure we should be here.” “I’m not sure either,” he answered quickly. Their instant of fear made me afraid, too. An American family—a symbol of oppression, as the newspapers put it, to the downtrodden here—should not be wandering into a little village so off the beaten track and so full, we knew, of ardent communists. It wasn’t that I really thought the townspeople would hurt us, clubs or knives or fists or anything like that. It was simply that I didn’t want to be screamed at, which had already happened to us on a bus tour in Rome; but I also didn’t want to insult them, by walking where I shouldn’t walk. Their lives were hard. You could tell that from the tiny, dark and damp houses they lived in. You could tell from the size of their doorways. If you’re a symbol of wealth and power—something they’d never had and never would have—why would you want to rub it in, parading up their cobblestone path, a red-haired boy, a tall blue-eyed father of military bearing, a pretty mother in a nice dress, all three so very American? If you did that, maybe you deserved to be shouted at, I told myself.
That day with my parents no one had come out of the houses either. It had been a Sunday afternoon and no one would be in the groves picking olives or pruning the trees or weeding under them; and yet no one was on the path or in the doorways. What a strange little town, I thought, but nothing more. When we mentioned it later to my tutor—that we had taken that path by accident—the Dottore, a dignified man from La Spezia who held his cigarettes tightly, as if they might somehow escape him, said, “Please do not do that again, Capitano. That is not an appropriate place for an officer and his family—American or Italian.” Even he did not seem to feel it had been that dangerous an outing—only that Magusa was a place where upper-class people should not, by propriety, go. No more than that. No more dangerous than Naples in daylight. Just common sense—common sense in a world where social classes did not always get along, Capitano.
As my three friends and I walked through the village now, the hammers and sickles didn’t look much like hammers and sickles at all. About that my friends had been right. The crude design looked more like a big crescent moon with a cross slapped over it. At first I told myself it had been easier, faster, for whoever had painted them to do it this way: You make a crescent for the sickle, leave off the handle, and paint the hammer so fast it looks like a cross. Everyone will still know what it is, right? But as we walked on, I saw that every doorway had it exactly the same—sickle without a handle, ends tapering like a crescent moon, and the cross definitely a cross.
Some of the designs were large, some small, and couldn’t have been made by the same person; and yet the design was always the same: crescent moon and cross.
“You’re right,” I said at last. “Those aren’t hammers and sickles.”
“Of course not,” Carlo answered proudly, as if I were complimenting him.
A sound farther up the path made us freeze.
Where the last houses were on the path, just up ahead, a door had started to open. My heart jumped, and I knew what the others were thinking because I was thinking it too: Now it’s going to happen. Someone is going to step from a house and start screaming at us—but isn’t that better than what we’d imagined?
But it didn’t happen. Instead, from the doorway a head peered out. It was too far away to see whether it was man or woman, and it peered at us for a second even as a hand reached down to pick something up from the cobbles in front of the doorway. Then the hand stopped, withdrew, the head disappeared, and the door closed.
When the door stayed closed, we started walking again, and when we reached the front of that doorway, slowed. There, on the cobbles, was a bucket, and inside it, paint, red paint, the surface starting to harden, the paint separating into different fluids. That’s what it looked like anyway as we reached the bucket, looked down in it, and found ourselves stopping to stare. We didn’t want to stop. We didn’t want the person inside the house to step out and start screaming at us—“Who do you think you are, ragazzi maleducati, sons of engineers and draftsmen, children of privilege!—with an American boy with you as well!”—but we couldn’t stop looking at the paint. It was obviously the paint they used on the doors. It was what they used to make the hammers and sickles that weren’t hammers and sickles at all.
Carlo, always the bravest of us, or the most full of bravado, was leaning, actually leaning, over the bucket to get a good look, saying, “What is that?”
“What is what?” I said. I could see inside the bucket from where I stood, but I certainly wasn’t going to get as close as Carlo was to it.
“That,” he said, pointing at the paint.
We looked in all directions to make sure we were safe, and then, as if given permission by God or someone, crowded around the bucket.
There were three layers of fluid in the bucket. There was the bright red paint, but also two layers on top of that—one a clear, yellowish fluid, like what comes from a cut on your finger, and the other a clotted material that was red, too, but darker than the paint below it.
We all stepped back, even Carlo. Not everything in that bucket is paint, we were thinking. But if it isn’t paint …
In the bucket was a stick—one from an olive tree—one that had been used to mix the paint and that was covered with all three—yellow fluid, dark clots, bright red paint.
“That’s blood,” Carlo said, sure of himself.
No one argued.
Carlo moved suddenly and we all jumped. He was reaching down with his right hand and with his index finger touching it.
“Are you pazzo?” Gianluca whispered hoarsely, taking another step back, as if the bucket were going to explode and we’d all be covered with what was in it. “That’s blood, Carlo!”
“I know, idiota,” Carlo answered. He had touched the dark clots and was raising his finger to look at it. Carlo might have been the bravest of us, but he also needed to make sure we knew it—and sometimes this made him do stupid things.
“Wipe it off! Wipe it off!” Gianluca was whispering.
“Why?”
“Because—because—”
Carlo was smelling his fingertip now, and I was ready to scream, too, it was so close to his face, his eyes, his mouth.
“Wipe it off,” I said. “Please, Carlo. We know you’re brave.”
This annoyed him. He glared at me.
“Don’t you want to be brave, too?” he asked.
“No …” I said.
He started to wipe it on his shorts and Gianluca grabbed his arm. “Not your shorts!”
He wiped it instead on the lip of the bucket, and, as he did, the door opened. We didn’t even look. We just started running.
You’d think it would take a shouting voice to make you run faster, but that day in Magusa it was the silence of whoever stood in that doorway behind us—someone we never turned to see—that made us run faster. Just one baby crying in the night, I remember thinking as I ran. No one there on a Sunday … no one ever there … hammers and sickles that were moons and crosses … buckets that held more than paint …
I heard later from Gianluca that Carlo developed a rash on his hand—the hand that had touched what was in the bucket—but who knows whether that was true. Carlo was always putting his nose (and his hands) where they didn’t belong. All I know is that we ran as hard as we did from Magusa that day—on to Romito and ice cream that wasn’t so great after all—because of the silence and a baby we never even heard.
It never occurred to me that the village of red paint would get me to return—and return alone—for a dog.
When the village called again, I was two years older and (I liked to think) tougher—the way that life’s lessons make you tougher. One of the three old women—the “witches,” streghe—who lived in the olive groves near our house—had poisoned my cat, Nieve, that first year in Lerici. I had watched the little thing die in my bathtub and then, because I was sure which witch had poisoned her, had made my way to the old woman’s stone hut wearing my anger proudly, only to learn that she had lost even more, and that the poisoning, a trick of magic, had been a mistake. A year after that I’d stood up for a working-class friend, Emilio—whose family lived in a dark, tiny apartment attached to the convent down the road from us—against both my tutor’s snobbery and the merciless teasing of another American boy, a bully whose father was also stationed at the center; and because I did, seen magic at work again, in the way the little metal cross on my friend’s wall had glowed faintly until the bullying stopped. And throughout our stay my mother, frustrated that she couldn’t teach because she didn’t know the language well enough, had too much time to sit and think—to think about my baby brother who’d died when I was four from meningitis and, thinking of him, to cry and sometimes not be able to stop crying. I’d gotten stronger in two years, in other words, and was now as good as my dad at consoling her when she was feeling her darkness, when her eyes were like shadows, and her crying no longer scared me. I was able to give her what light I could—that is what love is, isn’t it?—a light we give?—and sometimes it was enough.
In other words, I’d grown up a lot in two years, or at least told myself I had; and if I was older and had grown up a lot, I must be tougher—and if I was tougher, I must be on my way to becoming a man. I’d read enough stories about boys and men and their dogs to know that if I wanted to be a man, I did need a dog. Not a cat, a dog. Real men didn’t have cats—everyone knew that—and so soon I was petting every dog, mongrels especially or big purebreds, I could find in the village, all the while daydreaming of my own.
Without that thought—that you couldn’t be man without a dog—I’m sure I’d never have followed Ciccio to Magusa that night.
The dog in question was a white, mid-sized mongrel with a few large black spots, the kind of coloration dairy cows sometimes have, but it was no cow. It was as skinny as a greyhound, nervous as hell, and had appeared one day in our backyard, which angled from the back patio up into the olive groves. I heard a yelp and saw our maid, Elisa, with her one blue eye and one white eye, trying to shoo it away. I said, “No, let it be,” and she smiled the kind smile she always had for me, knowing how much I liked animals, and perhaps feeling, in her affection for me, that I deserved (for as long as my parents would let me keep it) a dog—even one as scrawny and mongrely as this one. “Va bene,” she said. “Vuoi dargli da mangiare? Would you like to feed it?”
“Of course!”
I gave it a hotdog from the refrigerator—just the wiener—and when it had gobbled it up, another, and another.
“Non troppo,” she said. “Poverino, finirà per sentirsi male.” Poor tummy, it will get sick.
“Yes,” I said. Sometimes pity—even compassion—can hurt another, I remember thinking.
Elisa went about her business—laundry and mopping—and I sat on the flagstone stairs and petted the creature, whose coarse and dirty coat was a miracle to me. It was a dog, after all, and that’s all that mattered. It had no collar. It might have been a runaway from one of the villages high in the hills. And it might soon be mine.
It sat beside me for a while, hoping I might give it more, and when I didn’t, it began to wander off. I called to it. It stopped, looked at me, saw nothing in my hand, and kept on, disappearing into the grove next to us. I was disappointed, sure, but what could I do? Even if I petted it until my hand was numb, the dog would be thinking of and worrying about food, and so would keep moving.
But the dog was back the next day, and around the same time. It had a cut over its right eye, and that worried me. It seemed healthy otherwise, though, and I wondered whether it was making the rounds—going from villetta to villetta on Via San Giuseppe, like a panhandler who knew who to hit up for money. Or had it come to our house—just ours—after rooting for food in the alleys down by the waterfront—because it remembered the wieners and the petting … and maybe even because it liked me.
I fed him for six straight days—wieners until they were gone, then old bread from the bakery near the school, then cans of cat food Nieve had never had a chance to eat, then leftovers from one dinner after another—and he returned each day in the afternoon as if he knew that on school days at least I wouldn’t be home until then.
I was mustering the courage to ask my parents if I could keep him. We had no other pets; and though my mother talked constantly of getting a cat to replace “poor little Nieve,” I knew it wasn’t going to happen. My mother was afraid of things dying, and had good reason to be.
“Please,” I rehearsed silently, “I’ve never had a dog before, and I’m old enough to take care of one, to be responsible for him…. and I … really really really want one!” My speech needed work—especially the really’s—and I kept working on it.
On the seventh day, he didn’t return. I’d been calling him Ciccio—a joke, since “Ciccio” means “chubby—and he had started on the fourth day to answer to his name. When he didn’t appear on the seventh, I wandered around the olive groves near us, calling to him, but with no luck. Back at the house, I took cardboard from the trash, put two wieners on it, and laid them on the low wall in the backyard where the olive groves began, the ones that continued up the hill to Magusa and on to the old villas of the wealthy.
The next morning, the wieners were untouched, and I gave up rehearsing my speech. I knew what it meant. I was old enough to have heard that wandering dogs usually keep wandering, and that was better than thinking he’d been hurt, or worse.
Two days later—after a big test on Garibaldi’s diary that I’d studied hard for with my friends—I was in the back yard moving the trashcans, and heard another yelp. It was from far away, up in the groves where the cobblestone path wound toward the hilltops, toward Magusa and Romito and the villas, so I thought nothing of it. A dog. Someone’s dog. Not mine.
Then it yelped again, louder this time, and I went to the low wall to look over it. There, far up the hillside in the olive grove, was what certainly looked like Ciccio. He yelped again, started toward me in the grass and then stopped, as if someone had jerked him back. I blinked, trying to see. Was someone holding him on a leash? But I couldn’t see any leash—I couldn’t see any someone. Just grass, olive trees and Ciccio.
He yelped again, tried to move toward me, and again something I couldn’t see jerked him back. Was he tangled in something? Had he stepped in a trap of some kind?
I climbed over the wall and began toward him. There was no tree near him. No rope, no net, no trap that I could see. His feet were free. What held him had him by the throat, jerking him again and again, but I couldn’t see it.
Red doorways flashed before my eyes—even with my eyes open I could see them—and I felt a pull, the kind my friends had said they felt at the fork in the cobblestone path, the kind I’d never felt until now.
“Ciccio!” I called, feeling a chill on my skin that had nothing to do with any breeze, and walked faster. He whimpered and yelped in response, looking at me, trying to break away from what held him.
No matter how far and fast I walked up the hillside, through the trees, the distance between us somehow remained the same. It was like a dream where your feet don’t work, where you want to run but can’t. He would dig in his paws, struggling against the invisible leash, and I’d get maybe twenty feet closer; but then the invisible hand would pull at him again so hard he’d be wrenched around, fall, scramble up, and be dragged farther up the hill again toward … toward what pulled at me, too. The path. The fork. The doorways.
If you don’t follow him, the breeze in the trees whispered, whatever has him will have him forever.
I was panting hard, walking as fast as I could, jogging when the hillside flattened even for a moment, but the invisible hand was even faster.
When he disappeared suddenly over a little rise, into tall grass, I was sure I had lost him; but as I came over the rise, stopping to catch my breath, there he was, sitting as dogs sit, panting too, happy to see me, his rump on the cobblestone fork.
And then he jerked, jerked again, and the invisible leash pulled him roughly once more toward Magusa.
The sun was beginning to fade. It was probably 6 o’clock now, and if I were to save him—though I had no idea how I would do that—it would have to be soon.
As the first houses of Magusa came into view, Ciccio did what I hoped he wouldn’t. He was yanked suddenly to the side, left the path, fell, got up, and began half-running and half-falling again—but to where? How would I see him in the groves without light?
He had left the path just before the village began, and so I left it too, running now, dodging back and forth to make sure I could still see his whiteness among the trees, afraid that if I lost sight of him I would not, in the wind that had come up, hear his whine or yelps.
Why he was approaching the houses from the groves—why the invisible leash wanted this—I didn’t know.
I expected to see at least a few lights from the houses, but there were none. In the growing shadows of the groves I hit my head on something, slowed, looked up, squinted, and saw around me what looked like bags, burlap bags, some large, some smaller, hanging from tree limbs. I didn’t stop to inspect them—I’d lose Ciccio if I did—and if they were important, wouldn’t my friends have mentioned them from their night in the groves? Maybe they held olive-picking tools? Maybe they contained food that was being aged, dried? It didn’t matter. What mattered was that I kept my eyes on the flashes of white that were Ciccio.
Then I lost him again. It was near the back of one of the little houses, and all of a sudden his flashes were gone. My heart flipped and began to beat hard enough that I could hear it in my ears.
Then I heard a cough—yes, a cough—and I froze. When the cough came again, I stepped behind a dark, gnarled trunk that couldn’t possibly hide me if anyone really looked. I could see the back of the little house through the trees, in the deepening darkness, but I couldn’t see who’d coughed. There was a wall the height of an ordinary man blocking any view of a backyard. A gate in that wall was open, but there was no one by it.
The cough came again, closer to the house, and I heard a door shut.
I stepped toward the gate, and, as I did, another bag hit me in the head. I looked up at it, but it was too dark to see clearly. I rubbed the side of my head, felt a wetness, but didn’t bother looking at my hand in the dim light.
I was to the open gate in two or three strides, and there, sitting upright on the moss of a tiny walled-in yard, was Ciccio, staring straight ahead, perfectly still, making no sound.
I wanted to shout his name, but this was no place to make noise.
I took a step, expecting Ciccio to hear me, but he didn’t move. He kept staring. It was as if he were deaf …
I was in plain sight now—he should have seen me—but he still didn’t move.
… and blind.
I took another step, through the gate this time, and stopped breathing.
There, in the yard—two in one corner, one in the other—were three other dogs, a big black, hairy one, and two about Ciccio’s size, just as mongrely.
They, too, were sitting and staring, motionless, silent.
Whatever holds them, I remember thinking, is magic, and who am I to stop magic?
There were four buckets of paint, too, in the middle of the mossy yard, and a stool beside them. Watching to make sure the other dogs didn’t wake from their spells, I inched slowly into the yard. Whatever held the animals held them tightly.
Each bucket, I could see now, had a stick—just like the one in the bucket my friends and I had looked into that day in Magusa—and each bucket seemed to be full of paint, too.
And what else? I wondered. And then, as the wind picked up even more, I happened to look up at the one tree in the little yard. I don’t know why I looked. There had been no sound. Nothing had moved in the tree. Perhaps I’d seen it—the bag hanging there—from the corner of my eye. Perhaps I’d even seen it dripping, like the bag that had touched my head. Whatever made me look, I squinted—
—and nearly screamed.
It wasn’t a very large bag—much smaller than Ciccio—but a dog’s head, its eyes closed, was sticking from the top of it, and there was something else—
I didn’t want to see it, but I had to. I stepped toward the tree, squinted again and saw what was sticking from the bag just behind the head.
A dog’s leg.
A leg that had been skinned.
What was dripping from the bag was blood—the dead dog’s blood.
My heart thundered so loudly I couldn’t think. Dog and leg and bag and blood floated in my head like snapshots, like a strange family album, and I thought I was going to faint. My hands shook, and my legs, which were cold now in my shorts, were shaking just as hard.
Can people hear it when we shake? my head asked stupidly.
Can people hear it when our hearts thunder?
I could, I knew, be killed as easily as the dog had been killed. It wouldn’t even take magic to kill me. All it would take was a man or two and whatever weapons, whatever tools, they had—even bare hands. No one would hear me. Magusa was too far away. I needed to run—to get away from this place—and it didn’t matter what direction I ran.
But I couldn’t run—not without Ciccio.
I stepped over to him, and the instant I touched his head—I was afraid to, but more afraid not to—he looked up as if waking from a dream, whined, stood up, and began to move in little jerks, as if his legs weren’t yet working.
I’d broken the spell—that was obvious. But if he yelped or whined, we might still be caught. I picked him up, hoping it would calm him, but it scared him, and he flopped and flailed in my arms. I lost my grip, he hit the ground, and all I could do was hold him by the skin of his neck and talk to him gently. “Don’t make a sound, Ciccio. I’m here. I’m here…”
I heard the cough again inside the house, and then footsteps.
Ciccio whimpered once and for a moment the footsteps stopped, only to start again and get louder.
Telling Ciccio “Stay!”, I ran to the two smaller dogs and touched them, ran to the big black dog to touch him as well, and, as their spells broke, too, the yard exploded in noise and motion—dogs running this way and that, the two smaller ones snapping at each other and the big black one woofing like a canon.
At that very moment a figure opened the back door and stepped out brandishing a big knife, one covered with something that glistened and that I knew wasn’t paint.
The figure was small, but in the faint light that fell upon him he didn’t look like any Southerner I’d ever seen. My father had taken us to Naples the summer before, and the summer before that we’d taken a cruise to Sicily and Libya; and this man looked nothing at all like the men I’d seen in those countries. He was squat, his head just as squat as his body, his ears like handles, his teeth too small for his mouth, and his face hairless.
I expected him to shout or scream, but, like the head that had appeared in the doorway that day with my friends, he made no sound. He moved, however, and it was toward me that he came.
The only thing that allowed Ciccio and me to escape was the two snarling little dogs and the big booming black dog, all of whom decided at the same moment to flee before the man could reach them, too. We all collided at the gate, but with a common mission—to get away from that knife—so no one snarled, no one bit, and in a moment Ciccio and I were out into the grove again.
It was dark and the bags, dozens of them, hung from the trees like strange fruit. All I could do was run and try to duck them.
We had gone only a dozen yards when Ciccio stopped suddenly and began to back up. For a moment I imagined the invisible leash had gotten him again, but his legs were moving differently this time. He was whining, the way dogs do when they’re afraid, and backing up, the way dogs do. I squinted into the darkness and saw something move. In the corner of my eye, even closer to us, I saw something else move, too, and a bag in a tree started swaying.
There, straight ahead of us and silhouetted by the last light of the sun, was an upright figure taller than any man; and to our left, where the bag was swaying, another figure, tall enough that its head was in the tree branches. It was pushing at a bag with its snout, snuffling, sniffing.
Other than that, the two creatures made no sound, seemingly unaware of us, though that might change.
I could smell them. It had to be them. The smell of dogs, but not the kind you kept on your lap or let sleep on your bed—not Ciccio’s kind of dog. It was the smell of a wild animal: wet, filthy and rancid from what it ate. A dog bigger than any other dog, and upright—a creature from a dark dream.
I wanted to throw up. I wanted to scream. I wanted to lie down, cover my face, go to sleep and wake up from the nightmare of it; but Ciccio was whining next to me, backing up still, and I knew what we had to do, crazy as it was:
We had to return to the village.
Whatever was in the olive groves—and I didn’t want to imagine what the faces of creatures as tall as olive branches, creatures that might sniff and swat at bags with dead dogs in them might look like—we were not going to get past them if we stayed in the grove; and frightening though the village was, it couldn’t be any scarier than this.
Ciccio didn’t need me to call his name. When I turned and began running, he was at my side.
I listened for heavy bodies behind us, heard nothing, but could not be sure. When they ran, did the creatures fall to four legs or did they run like men? Were their footsteps loud, or as quiet as wolves? We wouldn’t be able to cut between the houses to reach the cobblestone path. The houses touched. We would have to stay in the groves until we reached the path, and this we did, stumbling from the grass and trees onto the cobblestones and into the village at last.
There was moonlight at least. I remember feeling grateful for that. Not much—a bright crescent moon, if any crescent moon could be called bright—but more light than there’d been in the groves behind the house.
Looking behind me for the creatures, I twisted my ankle on a cobble and fell. Ciccio waited for me to catch up; and when I reached him we both stopped for a moment to look up the path that ran between the houses—between the doorways with their paint and blood. The blood of dogs.
There was no one on the path except us, no doors starting to open, no voices in the houses.
And then I heard the baby cry.
I thought it was a whine from Ciccio, but the sound came again, and it was indeed a baby’s cry.
There were no other voices. Just the baby’s. And cry it did—as if there would never ever be anyone to pick it up and hold it.
As Ciccio and I stared at the empty path, we saw the creatures. We’d expected them from the groves behind us, but there they were, ahead of us somehow. I started to turn, ready to run once more, but these creatures too seemed not to see us. They’d been there on the path all along, I realized suddenly, but we just hadn’t seen them. They’d been down on all fours, and now some of them were standing up.
They were looking at something on the path. The ones still on all fours were pawing at the cobbles. Those that had stood were staring and sniffing at the air.
Ciccio didn’t move beside me. He didn’t whimper, and for a moment I was afraid the invisible leash had gotten him once more; but he was only hypnotized, just as I was, by the sight of the creatures, their big heads and chests, their long, sinewy legs, their fur—all of it lit faintly now by the crescent moon.
Was this how an ordinary dog—the kind that men knew and loved—acted when it felt true terror? Paralyzed? The sight and smell and soundless sounds of dogs so large that their jaws could snap you in half, and yet walking upright, like your master? Was this what ordinary dogs dreamed when they kicked in their sleep, whined, in the worst nightmares of their innocent, loyal lives?
Three of the creatures—there were six in all—were down on all fours, sniffing and pawing at the cobbles, while two remained upright looking at the same spot and a sixth sniffed at the nearest doorway, but didn’t touch it. It sniffed the wood, the paint, jerked back again and again from what it smelled, and finally, as if tired of the impasse, returned to the five who were so intent on the stone path and whatever was there.
The baby still cried. It wasn’t in a house. It wasn’t in the groves. It was as if the sound were coming from the ground, from the cobbles themselves.
I squinted, and there in the cobblestones at the creatures’ feet, I saw a faint light glowing.
How could light be coming from cobbles?
I took a step, then another, ready to run if the creatures turned to look at us. I managed four steps and squinted again. The light was indeed coming from the cobbles—as if through a crack in the pavement—and the creatures hadn’t noticed us yet simply because they wanted so badly to get to that light.
The baby kept crying and the crying came from the light. How was it possible?
There was something—a room, a space of some kind—under the cobblestone path, a place lit by a light, and in that space the baby cried. There was no other explanation. The creatures wanted the light because they wanted the baby. They wanted the baby’s blood.
I don’t know how I knew this, but I did. It made sense of everything.
The creatures were going crazy. They were pawing frantically at the cobbles, at the light, at the sound coming from the light. They were smelling things I couldn’t imagine, and the smells were driving them crazy, too. Two had broken away from the group and were sniffing at doors, daring to touch them now, pushing hard with their snouts, pawing with long paws, then jerking back as if the paint made them sick. And why not? I remember thinking. Dog’s blood. The wrong blood. The blood of kin.
The baby had stopped, but was starting again.
And then one of the creatures saw us.
Perhaps it was Ciccio. Perhaps the creature smelled him, a brother. Perhaps it was my smell, or perhaps we’d made a sound. Perhaps, in its hysteria, it had looked everywhere and its eyes had finally fallen on us.
The creature stared at us, and as it did, its brethren turned in our direction, too, stood up, and cocked their heads. It was a dog they were seeing—a cousin, skinny and white with black spots—and that was all right—but there was something else standing by that dog, something upright and hairless and not unlike the baby that cried forever in the night.
They began toward us. I wanted Ciccio to run, to run to safety; “They don’t want you!” I wanted to shout—but of course he didn’t run. He started barking furiously and took a step toward them.
“No, Ciccio!” I grabbed him by the skin of the neck. He turned, snarled, stopped when he saw it was me, and let me pick him up, back legs kicking as if running for us both. Barely able to carry him, I stumbled toward the nearest doorway.
Whatever was inside the house would not, I told myself, be as bad as what was coming towards us. And there was no way I could outrun them whether they dropped to all four or stayed upright.
The door was unlocked, and I remember thinking giddily: Why not? The villagers knew the creatures couldn’t enter. The crescent moon and cross and dog’s blood would stop them, and the doorways were too small anyway for them to get through. The villagers knew this because it had all been happening for a long time, the squat smooth-skinned people and the dog-creatures, the doorways and the crying baby. Perhaps at the beginning there had been no paint at all, just blood, old dark blood making the sign of the crescent moon and the cross. Perhaps (I thought giddily) the cross had been a—
I got us both inside and shut the door. Would there be a crash? Would the hinges hold? Would the creatures even try? Would there instead be a squat man in the darkness with a knife, a dog-skinning knife, who’d kill us both and put us in bags and hang us in the trees?
Nothing happened. There was no crash. No man in the dark came at us. There may have been sniffing and snuffling on the other side of the door, but how would I know, I was panting too loudly. I couldn’t even tell if Ciccio was whining in my arms.
I blinked and saw a faint light near the floor. There was no light from another room. No light through windows, if there were any windows. Just that faint light near the floor.
I put Ciccio down, and he stayed.
When my eyes had adjusted as much as they were going to, I could see that the light was a crack in the floor, and, when I stepped over to it, that there was a handle on the floor, one dimly lit by that light.
There was a door in the floor—that’s what it was—and the light was the same light that had been driving the creatures crazy outside.
I took the handle and started to pull up.
The baby was crying again. I could hear it now, and it wasn’t coming from outside, from the path. It was coming, like the light itself, from below us, under the door in the floor. I started to pull again on the handle, and stopped. Why wasn’t I afraid of what was below me, the light, the crying baby?
Because, a voice said, and it was my own, I know—the wisest one in me—wherever the baby is, the creatures cannot be.
So I lifted the door in the floor and found the dirt and stone stairs I somehow knew would be there, ones lit faintly by the light somewhere beyond them.
Ciccio didn’t want to go. I had to pull him onto the stairs with me, quickly shutting the door over us.
We followed both the baby’s crying and the light, which grew brighter as we stepped from the last stone stair onto the bare earth, turned right into a passageway, and began to walk under what I knew was the front of the house, where the creatures no doubt still stood, trying to figure out how to reach the light that was driving them so crazy.
I don’t know if I’m leaving things out when I say, as I always do, that we reached at last the big room, and the villagers there, and the baby in the center of them all. I have told this story—the story of Magusa—many times in my life, and, though I’m sure I have gotten some things wrong, I’ve remembered what matters most: The immense underground room, the villagers of Magusa filling it silently; the baby, on a stone table in the center, crying; hundreds of votive candles in the corners of the room to light it; lanterns on the dirt walls; and the light, though gentle and flickering, bright enough to shine through a crack in the cobblestone path above. Is all of this true? It must be since what we experience when we are young is burned like God’s truth into our brains. What I saw that night—while my parents worried where I was—is as true as anything I have ever lived, and why I will tell this story again and again until my lips can no longer make words.
When Ciccio and I reached the great room—our noses full of dust, candle smoke, and something else—something metallic I’d smelled in the little yard where I’d saved Ciccio from the man’s knife—the villagers were there, all of them, even the same squat man with the knife. And they were all there because the baby was bleeding.
They stood around it, watched it and did more than watch. But they were not what I was looking at. I was looking at the baby.
He was as dark-skinned as they were, but a baby like any other. He was naked on the stone table—an ancient, worn thing—and all I could think for a moment was how cold, how incredibly cold, he must be. To be alive, to be crying for someone to hold you, and yet to lie on cold stone. What must it be like, my child, to do this forever?
For he had indeed been doing it forever. This I knew, too.
And I recognized the metallic smell. The smell of copper. The smell of blood.
The baby was bleeding. He was bleeding slowly, and he was bleeding a lot; but this was not why he was crying. He felt nothing as he bled. He was crying for his mother, who wasn’t there, and never would be, for she had died long ago.
The stone table under him, which was sloped, had little channels, and it was down these channels that his blood, red and bright, like the paint on the doors, moved like honey into little cups—some stone, some ceramic, some metal—all old and chipped and bent—as he cried and would not stop crying for someone who could not come. My brother, in the year of life he’d had, had cried that way, too, but someone had always come.
Perhaps it was the way the villagers were standing, waiting patiently, or the way the baby lay on his back, arms and legs still, no one stepping to him, as if he, the baby, had the power, and they did not, that told me how long this had been happening. Whether it happened only at crescent moons or at other times as well, it did not happen every night, I knew. It had not happened the night my friends had stayed the night in the trees, since they had met no dog-creatures.
To bleed forever …
He was bleeding from his hands and feet, from wounds he’d been born with that would always bleed, and the villagers knew this, as their ancestors had known it, just as they knew that all they had to do to get the blood they needed in order to live forever, too, was wait for the right moon, and keep the creatures away, and let the baby bleed….
Born too soon, or too late, a voice said quietly, and whether it was a voice from the room, the village, or my own mind making sense of what should make no sense, I’ll never know.
Born too soon or too late, the voice said again, and it was true. A mistake. An infant who would never take his true place in the world—even if he lived forever.
There were four old women standing apart from the group, and it didn’t take a genius to know who and what they were. They were the women who protected the village—and the baby—from the creatures who came every crescent moon, the creatures who wanted his blood, too, for what creature does not wish to live forever? They were the streghe who knew the spells that could drag dogs on invisible leashes to the village, who knew how to mix a paint that wasn’t a paint, who knew the design a door should have, and how big the doorway should be. They hadn’t invented this magic themselves. They had learned it from old women before them, and that was enough to keep their story going.
These are the women of the moon and blood, the voice said. These are the women who protect a child who isn’t theirs and give a village what it has needed for a thousand years.
I wanted to go to the child, and I knew why. If I did, perhaps (a part of me whispered) I would find my baby brother there, pick him up and hold him, then take him home at last.
But he wasn’t my brother—the idea was crazy—and the villagers would stop me anyway. They would have to. The squat man would produce his knife and that would be the end.
Neither I nor Ciccio had made a sound, but a little girl turned at that moment and saw us. Her mother had given her a cup. The girl had drunk from it slowly, eyes closed, as if trying to taste what could not be tasted. And when she handed the cup back to her mother, she happened to look our way. She stared for a moment, tugged at her mother’s black dress, and her mother turned too.
I’d imagined a shout would go up. I was sure one would. Ciccio and I had violated this room, discovered their secret, and a shout would go up. The villagers would swarm over us, and we would be beaten, perhaps killed—and why shouldn’t we be? To intrude on their story. But a shout did not go up. A dozen faces were looking at us now, then another dozen, heads turning like echoes of a thought. But there were no shouts, no mutterings, and no knives.
They just stared—at the pale, red-haired boy and his skinny dog who were standing in the archway to the great room. They stared and blinked and what I saw in their faces, their wide-set eyes that had seen the centuries pass and would see more, world without end, was not anger or insanity or fear.
It was a sadness and below that, a shame. I didn’t understand it, and then of course did.
They had no choice. They had to drink his blood—the child’s—to keep living, and because they did, they would never be free.
They too are forsaken.
So the villagers stared at the boy and his dog, both of whom were free to live, love and die, and, as they did, felt their prison even more, tasting it on their lips, on the rims of battered cups, in the coppery air, in the blood of a child that would cry for them forever.
Ciccio fidgeted beside me, and I fidgeted back. We were free to go, but where? The creatures were still out there on the path and in the groves, and would be there all night.
So I headed, Ciccio beside me, toward the flickering torches that led to the stairs and to the one-room house above them. No one followed. The villagers had turned away—only the little girl and two boys kept staring at us—and were again waiting for their cups to be filled. It would take all night, and it would take forever.
The stone floor of the house—the one with the door in its floor—was cold, but there was a blanket, one I found by crawling from corner to corner, touching everything I could until I found it. It was wadded up in a corner and smelled of sweat, ordinary sweat, and of something else—something strange—but I wasn’t going to be picky. I wrapped myself in it and Ciccio lay down beside me. We would keep each other as warm as we could.
We woke twice to the sounds of footsteps near us. I expected bodies to lie down beside us or voices to tell us to leave, but neither happened. The footsteps stopped both times, and the room fell silent again.
Dawn light woke Ciccio first. There was one tiny window in the wall facing the groves, and dogs always wake before men. I woke a second later and looked around the room—at the little table and chairs I’d touched in the darkness, at the stone-and-mortar walls, and at the door to another room, one I hadn’t known was there. I got up, folded the blanket, put it in a corner, and led Ciccio out, closing the door behind us quietly in case people were sleeping in that other room.
There was no one on the cobblestone path, but I could hear men talking in the groves beyond the houses. Olive-picking was what they did in the day, what they did with their lives that wasn’t magic, and what they’d done in every country on this sea—this olive-growing sea—since the beginning. It was the one thing, the only thing, that let them live like ordinary men and women.
When I got home, my parents were relieved, but angry, too, as all parents are when their children scare them. I lied. I told them I’d hidden in an abandoned hut in the groves all night because three boys—ones who were probably drug users from Parma, in Reggio-Emilia—had chased me at sunset when I was looking for Ciccio, and how one even had a knife, and how I’d been too scared to leave the hut, fallen asleep and woken only at dawn. But at least I’d found Ciccio, see?
They believed me. What other story would make sense? I wasn’t a bad boy. I didn’t drink beer with friends (how could I? my friends drank wine and only at meals), I didn’t vandalize property, and no one my age in the village had a girlfriend.
My mother cried for a while, as if worrying about me had reminded her of my brother. My dad sighed—anger was never really his way—and kept patting me on the back in that gentle way of his. He even patted Ciccio to let me know man to man that everything was okay.
I didn’t tell my friends what really happened. They’d have had question after question, and it would have taken days to explain, and maybe they’d have believed me, and maybe not. Mainly, they’d have been mad, feeling left out. Friends can be that way. “You almost got killed? Wonderful! Why didn’t you take us with you?”
I did worry about the child, but when, a few weeks later—unable to keep quiet any longer—I started to tell my dad how I’d heard a baby crying in Magusa as if someone were hurting it, my dad said, “I’m not surprised, Brad, but there’s nothing to do about it. Didn’t your friends tell you? Magusa is empty. Everyone’s gone. The olive trees in those groves have a blight, and the carabinieri think they’ve gone to the mountains to join the more radical communists around Montalcino. That certainly makes sense. I’m sorry about the baby. By the way, how did you hear it crying, Brad?”
I didn’t answer, and he didn’t press. He looked at me strangely for a few days, and then the conversation was forgotten.
My parents let me keep Ciccio, of course. He slept in my room after we bathed and de-fleaed him, and I had him for a good week before he ran away. It wasn’t any invisible leash that took him. He’d been acting stir-crazy, and the last time I saw him he was down by the wharf, letting a fisherman pet him. I called to him. He looked around, saw me, but didn’t come; and he didn’t return home that night either. Wandering dogs usually keep wandering, I remembered, and that was okay. It was okay, I told myself even then, to know love and magic—to have good friends or a scrawny dog or a terrible night in a village forgotten by God—for just a moment in time, and then to move on, living your life as you needed to live it to become what you needed to become, in a world where war sometimes did not feel like war at all, and blood did not always mean dying.