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A silent lunar dust descended over the earth that night with noble intent; like a gentle spray from a waterfall, the sparkling motes caressed the belly of the sweat-soaked woman, and the seed slid propitiously from her womb. Sunny came into being. His voice struck the air, his eyes perceived the radiance, his body sensed the closeness of another human being. Sunny, the child whose name was borrowed from the sun, began the eternal cycle of parting and reunion. That night the Fates, from whose decrees there is no escape, said:
May this child’s eyes radiate tenderness and firmness like those of a holy icon. The second one said: may both calm and turbulent winds be his companions; may he sport with them as though with brothers. The third one said: may he discover all the colors of the spectrum, may he combine them, may he have the power to see even the tear of the queen bee; and may he search farther and deeper, in the shadow of a dream, and in the dirty rains.
And so it came to pass. In summer he was visited by snow, and in winter sweltering heat. Like all travelers.
*
Sunny had many journeys in life. The first and most important for him began when his young eyes, which had yet to sense a different kind of gaze, fluttered and trembled from the closeness of Luna, the girl whose name was borrowed from the moon. Another began when he boarded a ship.
The heavy anchor delivered a parting kiss to the seabed, and we set sail. How we all managed to get on board the ship even I don’t know. One way or another, we were shoved head over heels down below, down to the very bottom, into the darkness, piled up against one another as if we were a stack of kindling, freshly cut from the woods, loaded onto a donkey, and tightened securely with a rope so we couldn’t move, so we wouldn’t make any trouble.
That night somehow we managed to lie down. But I neither slept nor dreamed. I just lay there, and in the muffled chorus of sleepy voices, I sifted through flashes of my departure from Macedonia for America. I didn’t understand those first dreamlike visions in the belly of that giant sea monster. All I know is that the ship transformed into something else, something equally huge, but above all impalpable—like my father’s shoes, one size too big, which often carried him home much later than they should, when all the knobbly logs in the fireplace had burned out and the house had become as cold as a tomb; or his hunting rifle, which he paid more attention to than to my mother, who lay awake waiting for him to come home, stroking us gently as we slept. Those gentle strokes often woke me. But when I grew up a bit, around the age of eight or nine, I didn’t push her hand away. Instead, I let her stroke me, because we all have a need to be human and to feel something human; and my mother was human, deeply human.
Naturally, every night while traveling on the ship, I reawakened Luna in my heart, the girl with the liveliest eyes, with the most remarkable name, whose hands were covered in needle pricks from threading tobacco, and were blackened by the muddy leaves, a mud that can’t be washed or scraped off, and that remains on the person the whole summer long as the obligatory mark of poverty bestowed on the people who live in my parts.
I first saw her when her family moved to our town from their village. In a dress reaching to the ground, the bottom of which was lined with mud, and wearing two different sandals. She was staring at my piece of baked bread smeared with pork fat and sprinkled with red pepper finely ground by the patient and gnarled hands of my grandmother, who could pick out a sweet pepper from a bitter one and extract the tiniest motes of dust from it, just like a fairy godmother.
“Can I have a bite?” she asked.
I don’t know if she was smiling or not. I handed her the piece of bread, which she nibbled as if sampling one of the pastries that I stood before years later, staring at them through the shop windows in New York, thinking twice before parting with the money to buy one, a chocolate one, with a dollop of whipped cream and a cherry, a red cherry on top, like those we used to steal from our neighbors’ yard when we were small.
Luna chewed on the bread and stared straight into my eyes, without saying a word. My cheeks flushed hot.
“Do you know what my name is?” she asked.
“No,” I said, in a voice that didn’t seem to belong to me.
“It’s Luna. I’ve got an unusual name. And yours?”
“Sunny,” I said.
“You have an unusual name too. And you’re quite red in the face. Do you have a temperature?” she asked.
“No,” I answered briefly, as though frightened, lowering my eyes, and stealing a glance to see whether my face really was red.
“Let’s have a look. My mother puts her hand on my forehead to see if I have a temperature,” she said.
She pressed her hand against my forehead, holding it there for some time. I looked into her eyes and felt scared. I don’t know what made me take fright, and I began looking up instead of at her.
“You have a temperature,” she said.
“Can I have another bite,” she asked, and before I could reply, half the piece of bread was gone. She handed back the other half, and ran off home . . .
And so, after exchanging only a few words with her, Luna became the girl who made my tongue go dry for the first time, made it go numb, made it prick as though stung with nettles— and not just because of the image of her as a child holding a piece of bread in her hand, which had struck me at the time. The next day I asked my grandmother to make some more of that bread. She rolled her sleeves up higher, which she kept rolled up all winter and summer long—because old age brings on chills or hot flashes, depending on a person’s constitution, she used to say—and placed my future hopes for another encounter on the woodstove, while I ran to the outhouse because, even out of sight, Luna made my stomach churn from fear, or rather from something far more confusing, which I didn’t have a name for at the time. I didn’t see Luna for three days after that. I threw down three pieces of bread in front of her gate, just farther up our street. On the fourth day I saw her. We were playing marbles. She stopped to watch. I didn’t look at her. Out of fear.
After a short while she left. That night I fell asleep with my head in my grandmother’s lap. I regret not being able to recall my exact thoughts at the time, but I know that I’d never been happier, not even when my father took me hunting for the first time—the first and only time in my childhood—together with my neighbor Kole, and the two of us howled like wild hounds throughout the mountain to frighten the wild animals, to force the wild boar they were pursuing to run past us, so they could take its life with their rifles, which they also let us hold in our hands. That was the first time I ever felt close to my father, a feeling of closeness that quickly left me whenever he felt the need to go to the tavern.
Humans are the loneliest creatures on earth. When they’re born, the first to pay them a visit is loneliness; it nestles down in the scar of the navel, like a vile disease. Next comes pain, the origin of the first infant cry. Only after that does a person become acquainted with joy, which is cousin to comfort. The game is played between those four unequal forces.
