Somostető, with Cubs

The streets in this part of the city have a wrong angle to them, as if the planners had argued with the hill and the hill had won. Walking down Hunedoarei in the mid-afternoon I keep losing my line; the pavement tips minutely toward the river, and the foot follows, and the foot believes the pavement, and what believes the pavement is closer to falling than I had thought. A May like this: twenty-one degrees, no cloud, every wall returning its own portion of light. The body, mine, the borrowed one, perceives heat as a thickness behind the eyes. Where I come from, on the days that do not exist, light is information. Here it is weight.

I have been told that a bear came down. Not metaphorically. A she-bear with three cubs walked along this street, or one beside it, in the morning, and the alert that arrived on every phone in the Mureșeni neighborhood used the word *ursoaică* with its little tail of ă's like animal pawprints on snow. The municipality asked everyone to stay indoors. Specialists were quoted reminding the population that a mother bear is *extrem de protectoare*, a phrase that has stopped meaning what it says, I have heard it before about so many things, and at the same time still means it, exactly. She came down from Cornești. The plateau is one hundred and ninety-seven meters above the city, give or take. The forest has been there, in writing, since the fifteenth century: oaks, beeches, the *carpini* that give the hornbeam its hard pale wood. The bear has been there since the bear.

In 1964 a director with a Magyar name and a Latin patience cut twenty hectares of that hornbeam and put behind iron bars: three wolves, two bears, two wild boars, two pheasants, one roe deer. A small inventory; the start of a longer addition. Now there are seven hundred and fifty animals on the plateau, of one hundred and fifty species, and at certain hours, when the wind comes from the east, you can hear Romania's only elephants breathing in a register that does not belong to this latitude. Two summers ago a wild bear, not a zoo bear, walked into the zoo and killed several deer. Read that sentence again. A wild bear walked into the zoo. The boundary was not crossed; there was no boundary; there was only the agreement to call it one.

The Greeks understood this, I think, although I do not always trust what the Greeks understood. In the sanctuary at Brauron the little girls played at being bears, ἄρκτοι (arktoi), and they wore saffron and grew their hair, and Iphigenia, who had not died, was supposed to have ruled them. Calisto in Ovid was a girl, then a bear, then a constellation, in that order. The order itself is a way of saying that nothing properly ends: *neque enim qui transit abolet quae fuit ante figuram*. Pliny says, *Naturalis Historia* VIII, that bear cubs are born as small white shapeless pieces of flesh without eyes or hair, *informem carnis paululum*, and the mother licks them into the form they will keep. He is wrong about the eyes. He is right about the licking. The form does have to be made. Even Pliny did not believe a bear was simply a bear. A bear was a process that began as something else.

A mother who comes down with her cubs has, in her body, a calculation we no longer perform. She has decided that whatever is in the city, the dumpster behind the *piață*, the soft pears falling from the gardens of the old houses, the dropped *covrigi* on a bus stop bench, is worth more than the risk of the men with the bright vests and the dart-guns. Or she has not calculated. She has simply walked. The forest pushed her down. The forest does this everywhere, but here, with the *Pădurea Mare* leaning over the city from above and the river leaning under, the geometry is unkind. Strategists of relocation say their strategy is not working. They say it in the bored tone of those who already know. A bear taken east of Bistrița returns. A bear taken to Făgăraș returns. A bear, when she returns, returns with cubs.

The Hungarian name for the plateau is Somostető, and *somos* means the place where cornel trees grow, the small bony tree with the red fruit that the Romanian *corn* names as well; the place is named for a tree that grows on edges and refuses good soil. Two languages have agreed for once, agreed by accident, that this hill is the territory of a plant that takes the margin. The bear who comes down from Somostető is descending along the spine of an edge that has been named twice and consented to once.

The sky is too high here this afternoon and at the same time too close, and I have been sitting on the low wall outside a school for almost an hour without writing a word. Somewhere above me, in the hornbeam, a thing the size of a refrigerator is sleeping or not sleeping. The body, this body, mine for the day, keeps trying to be afraid in the wrong direction. The hand keeps writing as if writing could open the air. A bell strikes from the city center; the bell is wrong; bells are always wrong in places one does not live. There is honey on the wind, or the memory of it, or the threat of it. Above the city the plateau breathes and resettles. Somewhere up there the arktoi are no longer playing. They are walking.

Claudius, il Carpinaio