The soldiers washed his blood away with water sloshed from buckets, the buckets their horses drank from. The rain fell after a while. The snow fell. Bells rang the hours, the Christmases, the New Years. A tank stopped with its treads on this stone. You’d think that that would leave a mark, a huge heavy thing like a tank, but the stone shows nothing. Only all the feet bare and shod over the centuries have worn a quality into it, not a smoothness, exactly, but a kind of softness, like leather or like skin. Unstained, unmarked, indifferent, it does have that quality of having been worn for a long time by life. So it is a stone of power, and who sets foot on it may be transformed.

This is a story.

This is a story. She let herself in with her key and called, "Mama? It’s me, Fana!"

And her mother, in the kitchen of the apartment, called, "I’m in here," and they met and hugged in the doorway of the kitchen.

"Come on, come on!"

"Come where?"

"It’s Thursday, Mama!"

"Oh," said Bruna Fabbre, retreating toward the stove, making vague protective gestures at the saucepans, the dishcloths, the spoons.

"You said."

"But it’s nearly four already – "

"We can be back by six-thirty."

"I have all the papers to read for the advancement tests."

"You have to come, Mama. You do. You’ll see!"

A heart of stone might resist the shining eyes, the coaxing, the bossiness. "Come on` she said, and the mother came. But grumbling. "This is for you," she said on the stairs. On the bus, she said it again. "This is for you. Not me. "What makes you think that?"

Bruna did not reply for a while, looking out the bus window at the gray city lurching by, the dead November sky behind the roofs.

"Well, you see," she said, "before Kasi, my brother Kasimir, before he was killed, that was the time that would have been for me. But I was too young. Too stupid. And then they killed Kasi."