Fugitive pieces (13 page)

We’d been married about two years when my nightmares returned. Even so, it would be some time before Alex and I no longer considered the deep achievement of our marriage to be our nocturnal happiness.

Alex liked to go out for greasy breakfasts on rainy Sundays, followed by a matinée. Since Maurice and I had been going to the movies together for years and since the first time Maurice and Irena met Alex was when we went to see
Ben-Hur
together, it was tradition for the four of us to see whatever was playing at the Odeon near Maurice and Irena’s house. We never chose the movie, instead we simply went to the same cinema every time. This was probably the one issue upon which we all agreed; whatever was playing was fine with us.

We’d just been to
Cleopatra
and I could see Maurice was developing a crush on Elizabeth Taylor. He was walking ahead with Alex, who was trying to pry out of him the latest gossip at the museum, where Maurice was now in charge of meteorology. Alex turned around to Irena and me, and she pointed to a coffee shop.

“How about a long way home’?”

This was Alex’s rhyming slang for palindrome, which in this case we all knew referred to one of the best in her arsenal: “Desserts, I stressed.” Alex would never dream of saying simply, Let’s stop for a rice pudding.

It was unusual for Alex to suggest extending our visits with Maurice and Irena; I deduced she was probably just hungry. She looked at me and knew what I was thinking. She rolled her eyes. Caught out.

“Jakob, your wife always wants to know what’s going on at work. Doesn’t she know the museum is no place to find hepcats? All I can tell her is old news. Now Alex, if you want to hear about past lives—”

“Why not? Hepcats have nine lives, don’t they?”

“She’s impossible,” said Maurice, holding his head in mock despair.

“Well, never mind,” said Alex. “Besides, I get more than enough history at home.”

One can look deeply for meaning or one can invent it.

Of all the portolanos—harbour guides, sea charts — to survive from the fourteenth century, the most important is the Catalan Atlas. It was commissioned by the King of Aragon from the cartographer and instrument-maker Abraham Cresques Le Juif. Cresques, the Jew from Palma, founded a long-lived school of mapmaking on the island of Majorca. Religious persecution forced the Cresques workshop to relocate in Portugal. The Catalan Atlas was the definitive mappamondo of its time. It included the latest information brought back by Arabic and European travellers. But perhaps the atlas’s most important contribution was what it left out. On other maps, unknown northern and southern regions were included as places of myth, of monsters, anthropophagy, and sea serpents. But the truth-seeking, fact-faithful Catalan Atlas instead left unknown parts of the earth blank. This blankness was labelled simply and frighteningly Terra Incognita, challenging every mariner who unfurled the chart.

Maps of history have always been less honest. Terra cognita and terra incognita inhabit exactly the same coordinates of time and space. The closest we come to knowing the location of what’s unknown is when it melts through the map like a watermark, a stain transparent as a drop of rain.

On the map of history, perhaps the water stain is memory.

Every day Bella practised finger-strengthening exercises; Clementi, Cramer, Czerny. Her fingers seemed to me, especially when we fought—chicken-pecking each other in the ribs—strong as ball-peen hammers. But when she played Brahms or when she wrote words on my back, she proved she could be as gentle as any normal girl.

The intermezzo begins andante non troppo con molto expressione
—

Brahms conducted and composed for the Hamburg Ladies’ Choir. According to Bella they rehearsed in the garden; Brahms climbed a tree and conducted from a branch. Bella adopted the choir’s motto as her own: “fix oder nix!” —” up to the mark, or nothing.” I imagined Brahms carving a line into the bark.

Bella memorized, repeating phrases until her fingers were so tired they gave up resisting and got it right. Unavoidably, my mother and I also learned her music by heart. But when she was finished memorizing—bar by bar, section by section— and played the piece without stopping, I was lost; no longer aware of a hundred accumulated fragments but only of one long story, after which the house would fall silent for what seemed a very long time.

History is amoral: events occurred. But memory is moral; what we consciously remember is what our conscience remembers. History is the Totenbuch, The Book of the Dead, kept by the administrators of the camps. Memory is the Memorbucher, the names of those to be mourned, read aloud in the synagogue.

History and memory share events; that is, they share time and space. Every moment is two moments. I think of the scholars of Lublin, who watched their holy and beloved books thrown out of the second-storey windows of the Talmudic Academy into the street and burned—so many books that the fire lasted twenty hours. While the academics sobbed on the sidewalk, a military band played marches and soldiers sang at the top of their lungs to drown out the cries of those old men; their sobs sounded like soldiers singing. I think of the Lodz ghetto, where infants were thrown by soldiers from hospital windows to soldiers below who “caught” them on their bayonets. When the sport became too messy, the soldiers complained loudly, shouting about the blood running down their long sleeves, staining their uniforms, while the Jews on the street screamed in horror, their throats parched with screaming. A mother felt the weight of her child in her arms, even as she saw her daughter’s body on the sidewalk. Those who breathed deep and suffocated. Those who asserted themselves by dying.

I seek out the horror which, like history itself, can’t be stanched. I read everything I can. My eagerness for details is offensive.

In Birkenau, a woman carried the faces of her husband and daughter, torn from a photograph, under her tongue so their images wouldn’t be taken from her.
If only everything could fit under the tongue.

Night after night, I endlessly follow Bella’s path from the front door of my parents’ house. In order to give her death a place. This becomes my task. I collect facts, trying to reconstruct events in minute detail. Because Bella might have died anywhere along that route. In the street, in the train, in the barracks.

When we were married I hoped that if I let Alex in, if I let in a finger of light, it would flood the clearing. And at first, this is exactly what happened. But gradually, through no fault of Alex’s, the finger of light poked down, cold as bone, illuminating nothing, not even the white point of contrast that burned away the ground it touched.

And then the world fell silent. Again I was standing under water, my boots locked in mud.

Does it matter if they were from Kielce or Brno or Grodno or Brody or Lvov or Turin or Berlin? Or that the silverware or one linen tablecloth or the chipped enamel pot—the one with the red stripe, handed down by a mother to her daughter—were later used by a neighbour or by someone they never knew? Or if one went first or last; or whether they were separated getting on the train or off the train; or whether they were taken from Athens or Amsterdam or Radom, from Paris or Bordeaux, Rome or Trieste, from Parczew or Bialystok or Salonika. Whether they were ripped from their dining-room tables or hospital beds or from the forest? Whether wedding rings were pried off their fingers or fillings from their mouths? None of that obsessed me; but—were they silent or did they speak? Were their eyes open or closed?

I couldn’t turn my anguish from the precise moment of death. I was focused on that historical split second: the tableau of the haunting trinity—perpetrator, victim, witness.

But at what moment does wood become stone, peat become coal, limestone become marble? The gradual instant.

Every moment is two moments.

Alex’s hairbrush propped on the sink: Bella’s brush. Alex’s bobby pins: Bella’s hairclips turning up in strange places, as bookmarks, or holding open music on the piano. Bella’s gloves by the front door. Bella writing on my back: Alex’s touch during the night. Alex whispering goodnight against my shoulder: Bella reminding me that even Beethoven never stayed up past ten o’clock.

I have nothing that belonged to my parents, barely any knowledge of their lives. Of Bella’s belongings, I have the intermezzos, “The Moonlight,” other pianoworks that suddenly recover me; Bella’s music from a phonograph overheard in a shop, from an open window on a summer day, or from a car radio….

The second legato must be a hair’s breadth, only a hair’s breadth slower than the first
—

When Alex wakes me in the middle of a nightmare I’m rubbing the blood back into my feet after standing in the snow. She’s rubbing my feet with hers and wrapping her smooth, thin arms around my side, down my thighs on the narrow wooden bunks, wooden drawers with breathing bones packed feet to head. The blanket is pulled away, I’m cold. I’ll never get warm. Then Alex’s firm, flat body, a stone across my back as she climbs, her leg over my side, scrambling, turning me over. In the darkness, my skin taut, her breath on my face, her small fingers on my ear, a child holding onto a coin. Now she is still and light as a shadow, her head on my chest, her legs on my legs, her narrow hips and the touch in the cold wooden bunk in the dream— revulsion— and my mouth is closed with fear. “Go back to sleep,” she says, “go back to sleep.”

Never trust biographies. Too many events in a man’s life are invisible. Unknown to others as our dreams. And nothing releases the dreamer; not death in the dream, not waking.

The only friends of Athos’s from the university I kept up with were the Tuppers. Several times a year I took the tram east to the end of the line where Donald Tupper picked me up, and we drove back to his house on the Scarborough Bluffs. Sometimes Alex joined me; she liked the Tuppers’ sheepdog, which she and Margaret Tupper walked, out along the cliffs overlooking the clear expanse of Lake Ontario. I trailed behind with Donald, who was distracted as ever by the landscape and talked about the geography department while every so often buckling to his knees without warning to examine a stone. One autumn evening I was at least ten yards away before I realized he’d hit the ground. I turned around to find him lying on his back in the grass looking at the moon. “See how deep the maria look tonight from here, at the edge of the Great Lakes. You can almost see the silicates evaporating from the young earth to settle in the craters.”

Every year the Tuppers’ back yard eroded a few inches more until one summer their vacant dog house vanished over the edge of the bluffs during a storm. Margaret thought that this was taking soil science a bit too far and her husband reluctantly agreed they’d have to move inland. Alex related this to her father one night while he was visiting us. “Why would anyone build on the bluffs in the first place,” asked the Doctor, “if the cliffs have been eroding for thousands of years?” “Precisely because they’ve been eroding for thousands of years, Daddy-o,” answered my clever Alex.

Every moment is two moments.

In 1942, while Jews were crammed into the earth then covered with a dusting of soil, men crawled into the startled darkness of Lascaux. Animals woke from their sleep underground. Twenty-six feet below they burst to life in lamplight: the swimming deer, floating horses, rhinos, ibex, and reindeer. Their damp nostrils trembled, their hides sweating iron oxide and manganese, in the smell of subterranean stone. While a worker in the French cave remarked, “What a delight to listen to Mozart at Lascaux in the peace of the night,” the underworld orchestra of Auschwitz accompanied millions to the pit. Everywhere the earth was upturned, revealing both animals and men. Caves are the temples of the earth, the soft part of the skull that crumbles under touch. Caves are repositories of spirits; truth speaks from the ground. At Delphi, the oracle proclaimed from a grotto. In the holy ground of the mass graves, the earth blistered and spoke.