Fugitive pieces (14 page)

While the German language annihilated metaphor, turning humans into objects, physicists turned matter into energy. The step from language/formula to fact: denotation to detonation. Not long before the first brick smashed a window on Kristallnacht, physicist Hans Thirring wrote, of relativity: “It takes one’s breath away to think what might happen to a town if the dormant energy of a single brick were to be set free … it would suffice to raze a city with a million inhabitants to the ground.”

Alex is constantly turning on lights. I sit in late-afternoon dimness, a story eating its way to the surface, when she bursts home, full of the Saturday market and crowded trams and the daily world I’m missing— and turns on all the lights. “Why do you always sit in the dark? Why don’t you turn on the lights, Jake? Turn on the lights!”

The moment I’d spent half my day gnawing through misery to reach vanishes under a bulb. The shadows slip away until the next time, when Alex again barges in with her shameless vitality. She never understands; thinks, certainly, that she’s doing me good, returning me to the world, snatching me from the jaws of despair, rescuing me.

And she is.

But each time a memory or a story slinks away, it takes more of me with it.

I begin to feel Alex is brainwashing me. Her Gerrard Street scene, her jazz at the Tick Tock, her coffeehouse politics at the River Nihilism, owned by an origami artist who folds birds out of dollar bills. Her Trudeaumania and her cornet mania. Her portrait painted by the artist who wears half a moustache. The length of her, the edgy sexuality of which she’s now fully in control— all of it is making me forget. Athos replaced parts of me slowly, as if he were preserving wood. But Alex—Alex wants to explode me, set fire to everything. She wants me to begin again.

Love must change you, it can only change you. Though now it seems I don’t want Alex’s understanding. Now her lack of understanding seems proof of something.

I watch Alex get dressed to meet her friends. She is dishearteningly perfect. She clips a thick gold bracelet around a slim black sleeve. Her dress is as tight as a bud. Each item she zips, clasps, pins, lets loose the power of her beauty.

When Alex goes out with “the kids,” “the cats,” “the crowd,” I stay home, the grim reaper. “You’ll have a better time without me.”

To Alex’s father, to Maurice and Irena, Alex has walked out on me. But it’s I who have abandoned her.

She comes in late and lies on top of me. I smell the smoke in her dress, in her hair. “I’m sorry,” she says. “I won’t go without you again.” We both know she says this only because it isn’t true. She pulls each of my fingers separately, a long stroke along each stretch of bone. She kisses my palm. A flush spreads across her skin.

I draw my hands through her silky hair. I feel the birthmark at the tip of her scalp. After a few minutes her shoes thump to the floor. I pull down the long zipper and the soft black wool separates, a wake of pale skin opening. I work out the knots in her back, from too many hours in high heels, too many precarious bar stools and hours of conversation, leaning to hear above the din. I circle her smooth hot back slowly, like kneading the air out of bread. I imagine the faint impression of her garters on her thighs. She is thin and light, the bones of a bird. Her smoke-filled hair falls over her open mouth, her mouth open against my throat. Fully clothed, her limbs outline mine under the blanket—now I’m inside Athos’s coat. I feel the wetness of her breath, her small ear.

No surge of desire moves me to trace her spine with my tongue, to speak her, inch by miraculous inch.

I lie awake while she sleeps. The longer I hold her, the further Alex recedes from my touch.

There’s the decrescendo in the ninth bar, and then from pianissimo to piano so quickly, but not quite as soft as the diminuendo in the sixteenth bar
—

Bella sits at the kitchen table with the music in front of her. She practises fingering on the tabletop and writes on the score what she must remember. It’s Sunday afternoon. My father is asleep on the sofa and Bella doesn’t want to wake him. I can hear the tapping now, lying next to Alex. I can hear Bella tapping on the wall between our rooms, a code we invented so we could say goodnight from our beds.

On the way home from buying eggs for my mother, Bella told me the story of Brahms and Clara Schumann. Uncharacteristically, Bella leaped at the chance to run the errand, because it was raining and she wanted to use the elegant new umbrella my father had bought for her birthday. She allowed me to walk under it with her, but she insisted on carrying it like a parasol and neither of us stayed dry. I yelled at her to hold it straight. I pulled it from her, she grabbed it back, and then I sulked outside its precious periphery until I was soaked and she was repentant. Bella always told me stories when she wanted me to forgive her. She knew I couldn’t resist listening. “When he was twenty, Brahms fell in love with Clara Schumann. But Clara was married to Robert Schumann, whom Brahms revered. Brahms worshipped Robert Schumann¡ Brahms never married. Imagine, Jakob, he was true to her his whole life. He wrote songs for her. When Clara died, Brahms was so upset that on the way to her funeral he took the wrong train. He spent two days changing trains, trying to reach Frankfurt. Brahms arrived just in time to throw a handful of earth on Clara’s coffin….” “Bella, that’s a terrible story, what kind of a story is that?”

It’s said that during the forty hours he spent on the trains, Brahms’s head was already filling with his last composition, the choral prelude “O Welt ich muss dich lassen” —” O World, I must leave thee.”

That they were torn from mistakes they had no chance to fix; everything unfinished. All the sins of love without detail, detail without love. The regret of having spoken, of having run out of time to speak. Of hoarding oneself. Of turning one’s back too often in favour of sleep.

I tried to imagine their physical needs, the indignity of human needs grown so extreme they equal your longing for wife, child, sister, parent, friend. But truthfully I couldn’t even begin to imagine the trauma of their hearts, of being taken in the middle of their lives. Those with young children. Or those newly in love, wrenched from that state of grace. Or those who had lived invisibly, who were never known.

A July evening, the windows are open; I hear children shouting in the street. Their voices are suspended in the heat evaporating from pavement and lawns. The room is motionless against the rushing trees. Alex respects me enough to bother saying the words: “I can’t stand this anymore.” I’m too tired to lift my head from my arm on the table and I open my eyes to the blurry pattern of the cloth, too close to focus.

When she says, “I can’t stand this anymore,” it also means, “I’ve met someone else.” Perhaps a musician, a painter, a doctor who works with her father. As to leaving, she wants me to watch: “This is what you want isn’t it? Every last speck of me will be gone … my clothes, my smell, even my shadow. My friends whose names you can’t remember…. ”

It’s a neurological disorder, I know what I must do but I can’t move. I can’t move a muscle or a cell. “You’re ungrateful, Jake, that dirty word you hate so much….”

When Mama and Papa first brought me here, there were thirty-two tins.

More than enough for a little boy like you, Mama said. Remember, two tins every day. Long before you run out of tins, we ?? be back. Papa showed me how to open them. Long before the tins are finished, we’ll be back for you. Don’t open the door to anyone, not even if they call you by name. Do you understand? Papa and I have the only key and we’ll come fetch you. Don’t ever open the curtains. Promise to never, never open the door. Don’t ever leave this room, not for a minute, until we get back. Wait for us. Promise.

Papa left me four books. One is about a circus, one is about a farmer, the other two are about dogs. When I finish one, I start the next and when I finish all four, I start again. I don’t remember how many times.

At the beginning I walked around the room anytime I felt like it. Now I have one place for the morning, another for after lunch. When the sun is between the rug and the bed, then I can eat supper.

Yesterday was the last tin. I'll be very hungry soon. But now that the last tin is gone, Mama and Papa will come back. The last tin means they Ve coming.

I want to go out but I promised I would never leave until they came back. I promised. What if they came back and I warn h here?

Mama, I'd even eat cooked carrots¡ Right now.

Last night there was a lot of noise outside. There was music. It sounded like a birthday party.

The last tin means they’ll be here soon.

I'm floating. The floor is far away. What if I don’t open the door, what if I leave through that little crack in the ceiling…
.

A week has passed since Alex moved out. If she were to return, she would find me in the same place she left me. I lift my head from the table. The July kitchen is dark.

TERRA NULLIUS

I
arrive in Athens at midnight. Leaving my bag at the Hotel Amalias, I walk back out into the street. Each step is like passing through a doorway. I seem to be remembering things only as I see them. The leaves whisper under the streetlamps. I climb steep Lykavettos, lurching, stopping to rest. Soon I can’t feel the heat, my blood and the air are the same temperature.

I stare at the house that used to be Kostas and Daphne’s and which looks recently redecorated, flowers dripping from window boxes. I long to open the front door and enter the vanished world of their kindness. To find them there, small as two children, their feet barely skimming the floor as they lean back on the sofa.

Kostas, in the last letter he sent me before he died: “Yes, we have the democratic constitution. Yes, the press is free. Yes, Theodorakis is free. Now we can again watch our tragedies in the amphitheatre and sing rebetika. But not for a day do we forget the massacre at the polytechnic. Or the long imprisonment of Ritsos—even when he accepts his honorary degree at Salonika University or reads his ‘Romiosini’ at Panathinaiko Stadium….”

Standing outside Kostas and Daphne’s house, it doesn’t seem possible that they are gone, that Athos has been dead close to eight years. That Athos, Daphne, and Kostas never even met Alex.

I want to call Alex long distance, to turn around and take a plane back to Canada; as if it’s essential to tell her what it was like, those few weeks with the three of them in that house when I was young. As if this is the missing information that could have saved us. I want to tell her that now I could be roused, if only she could want me back.

In my hotel room I lie awake until I’m ready to weep from exhaustion. I’ve been awake since Toronto; two days and two nights. The traffic never stops on Amalias. All night I hear the noise of the street as I travel out of the past.

In the morning I’m unprepared for the German language in Syntagma Square, unprepared for the tourists everywhere. I take the first flight of the day to Zakynthos. The shortness of the journey by air disorients me. But the landing strip is surrounded by fields I recognize. Wild calla and high grass sway silently in the hot wind.

I walk uphill in a trance.

The earthquake has turned our little house into a cairn. I bury Athos’s ashes under the stones of our hiding place. The asphodels that we used so long ago to make bread are growing everywhere through the broken pile. It seems proper that with Athos gone, the house should also be gone. After, in the partially rebuilt town, I inquire at the kafenio and learn that Old Martin died the year before. He was ninety-three and everyone in Zakynthos attended his funeral. Since the earthquake, Ioannis and his family have lived on the mainland. A few hours later, I leave Zakynthos on
The Dolphin
and cross the channel. The orange plastic deck chairs glint like hard candy. The sky is a billowing blue tablecloth suspended by the wind. At Kyllini I board a bus back to Athens. I eat a very late dinner from a tray, on the balcony of my hotel room. When I wake in the morning, I am still fully dressed.

I sailed the next day to Idhra. From the boat, I left behind a swarm of tourists. As I climbed the narrow streets, the town, with its whitewashed walls of pure sunlight, fell away.

Athos’s family house—where I now sit and write this, these many years later—is a record of the Roussos generations. The various pieces of furniture give the impression of having been hauled up the hill during different decades and, rather than being carried downhill, have simply been left and added to, like aggregate rock. I’ve often tried to guess which item of furniture represents which Roussos ancestor.

Mrs. Karouzos seemed pleased that at last the house would be opened again. She was still a child in the twenties, when Athos’s father came to Idhra for the last time. I wondered whether she found me wanting as she looked me over, whether or not she was thinking, So this is what the Roussos line has come to.

That first night, the moon in the window frozen like a coin in mid-toss, I explored Athos’s library. Again I found myself in his care.

There were many volumes of poetry, more than I remembered, as well as Athos’s lessons: Paracelsus, Linnaeus, Lyell, Darwin, Mendeleyev. Field guides. Aeschylus, Dante, Solomos. So familiar—but not only what was inside: my hands remembered the crazed and embossed leathers, corners eroded to board, paperbacks soft from the sea air. And slipped between books, newspaper clippings fragile as mica. When I was young I searched among them for the one book that would teach me everything, just as I would look for one language, just as some would look for one woman’s face. There’s a Hebrew saying: Hold a book in your hand and you’re a pilgrim at the gates of a new city. I even found my prayer shawl, a gift from Athos after the war, never worn, folded carefully and still stored in its cardboard box. The shawl’s bottom edge the clearest blue, as if it has been dipped in the sea. The blue of a glance.

I held the lamp close to the shelves. I decided on the slim hardcovered Psalms, bound in red leather darkened by many hands. Athos had found it in a bin in the Plaka. “Perfectly right. Oranges. Figs. Psalms.”

I was very tired from travelling, and the heat. I took the little book into the bedroom and lay down.

“Grief has eaten up my life, groans have eaten away years … those who know me are afraid when they hear my name. I have been forgotten like a dead man who is not considered, like a pot that is broken.…”

“My strength has dried like the baked earth … there are dogs around me, I am cut off by a crowd of wicked men. They have torn my hands and feet…. They will divide my clothes between them.”

“On the day of evil he will take me into his house, he will hide me in his tent, he will lift me onto high rock….”

I stretched out on the cotton bedcover. The cleansing summer wind—the meltemi—found its way under my shirt to my damp skin. Mrs. Karouzos had filled all the lamps. For the first time in almost two decades, they added their light to those of the village’s below.

“I will speak a dark language with the music of a harp.”

There are places that claim you and places that warn you away. On Idhra the pang of smells opened in me with the prickly sting of memory. Burros and dust, hot stones washed down with salt water. Lemon and sweet broom.

In Athos’s room, in the house of his father. I heard the cries and they grew louder, filled my head. I moved closer inside myself, didn’t turn away. I clutched the sides of the desk and was pulled down into the blueness. I lost myself, discovered the world could disappear. During long evenings, in the blush of the lamp, in the purity of white pages.

The child was licking dew from the grass. Zdena had no water with her, so she told the girl to suck on a finger “… and when you are really hungry — chew. ” The little girl looked at her for a moment, then put her forefinger in her mouth.

“What's your name, little one?”

“Bettina. ” A clean name, thought Zdena, for a girl who’s now so dirty.

“How long have you been waiting here, like this, by the road?”

“Since yesterday, ” she whispered.

Zdena kneeled down beside her.

“Someone was supposed to come for you?”

Bettina nodded.

Zdena took the little girl's bag from her, she saw there was blood on the handle. She opened Bettina’s hands, which were striped from gripping.

It was six miles back to town. Zdena carried a square of cloth filled with weeds for cooking. At home she had a bone for soup and the herbs would give flavour to the stock. Part of the time Zdena supported the girl, and sometimes the girl stood on Zdena’s boots and they walked together.

While they walked, Bettina sucked the ends of her hair into wet points. She devoted her attention to the ends of her hair and did not look around her.

That evening the little girl watched Zdena make soup. She dipped her bread into the watery broth and crammed in sopping mouthfuls, her lips close to the edge of the bowl They lived quietly. Bettina liked to count the pattern on Zdena’s dress, placing her finger in the centre of each cluster of flowers. Zdena felt Bettina's little finger through the thin cloth on different places on her body; it was like the game of connect-the-dots. Zdena took shape.

The little girl sat on her lap and listened to stories. Zdena felt her forty-year-old breasts and belly go warm against the weight of the child. The grief we carry, anybody’s grief Zdena thought, is exactly the weight of a sleeping child.

One August afternoon, the mud-locked roads now powdery with weeks of dry summer, a man stopped at Zdena’s house. He heard that she was the shoemaker’s daughter (Zdena’s father had no sons) and his boots needed mending.

The man waited on the verandah in his socks while Zdena made the repairs. Each heel required five small nails. Bettina watched carefully. It was very hot. When she was finished, Zdena brought out a cup of water for each of them.

The child burrowed her face into Zdena’s skirt, her small arms circled Zdena
V
legs. It was not clear whether she wanted to be comforted or was intent on comforting.

“She looks just like you,” the man said.

I came to Idhra to press to tearing certain questions.

Questions without answers must be asked very slowly. My first winter on the island I watched the rain fill the sea. For weeks at a time, sheets of dark water draped the windows. Every day before supper I walked to the edge of the cliff and back again. I ate at my desk, like Athos, with my empty plate holding open a book.

Though the contradictions of war seem sudden and simultaneous, history stalks before it strikes. Something tolerated soon becomes something good.

I must not use so much pedal at the first ritardando
—

It’s Hebrew tradition that forefathers are referred to as “we,” not “they.” “When we were delivered from Egypt. …” This encourages empathy and a responsibility to the past but, more important, it collapses time. The Jew is forever leaving Egypt. A good way to teach ethics. If moral choices are eternal, individual actions take on immense significance no matter how small: not for this life only.

A parable: A respected rabbi is asked to speak to the congregation of a neighbouring village. The rabbi, rather famous for his practical wisdom, is approached for advice wherever he goes. Wishing to have a few hours to himself on the train, he disguises himself in shabby clothes and, with his withered posture, passes for a peasant. The disguise is so effective that he evokes disapproving stares and whispered insults from the well-to-do passengers around him. When the rabbi arrives at his destination, he’s met by the dignitaries of the community who greet him with warmth and respect, tactfully ignoring his appearance. Those who had ridiculed him on the train realize his prominence and their error and immediately beg his forgiveness. The old man is silent. For months after, these Jews—who, after all, consider themselves good and pious men—implore the rabbi to absolve them. The rabbi remains silent. Finally, when almost an entire year has passed, they come to the old man on the Day of Awe when, it is written, each man must forgive his fellow. But the rabbi still refuses to speak. Exasperated, they finally raise their voices: How can a holy man commit such a sin—to withhold forgiveness on this day of days? The rabbi smiles seriously. “All this time you have been asking the wrong man. You must ask the man on the train to forgive you.”

Of course it’s every peasant whose forgiveness must be sought. But the rabbi’s point is even more tyrannical: nothing erases the immoral act. Not forgiveness. Not confession.

And even if an act could be forgiven, no one could bear the responsibility of forgiveness on behalf of the dead. No act of violence is ever resolved. When the one who can forgive can no longer speak, there is only silence.

History is the poisoned well, seeping into the ground-water. It’s not the unknown past we’re doomed to repeat, but the past we know. Every recorded event is a brick of potential, of precedent, thrown into the future. Eventually the idea will hit someone in the back of the head. This is the duplicity of history: an idea recorded will become an idea resurrected. Out of fertile ground, the compost of history.

Destruction doesn’t create a vacuum, it simply transforms presence into absence. The splitting atom creates absence, palpable “missing” energy. In the rabbi’s universe, in Einstein’s universe, the man will remain forever on the train, familiar with humiliation but not humiliated, because, after all, it’s a case of mistaken identity. His heart rises, he’s not really the subject of this persecution; his heart falls, how can he prove, why should he prove, he’s not what they think he is.

He’ll sit there forever; just as the painted clock in Treblinka station will always read three o’clock. Just as on the platform the ghostly advice still floats: “To the right, go to the right” in the eerie breeze. The bond of memory and history when they share space and time. Every moment is two moments. Einstein: “… all our judgements in which time plays a part are always judgements of simultaneous events. If, for instance, I say the train arrived here at seven o’clock, I mean: the small hand of my watch pointing to seven and the arrival of the train are simultaneous events … the time of the event has no operational meaning. …” The event is meaningful only if the coordination of time and place is witnessed.