Fugitive pieces (15 page)

Witnessed by those who lived near the incinerators, within the radius of smell. By those who lived outside a camp fence, or stood outside the chamber doors. By those who stepped a few feet to the right on the station platform. By those who were born a generation after.

If I use my second finger instead, I'll be ready for the middle voice in the next bar
—

Irony is scissors, a divining rod, always pointing in two directions. If the evil act can’t be erased, then neither can the good. It’s as accurate a measure as any of a society: what is the smallest act of kindness that is considered heroic? In those days, to be moral required no more than the slightest flicker of movement— a micrometre—of eyes looking away or blinking, while a running man crossed a field. And those who gave water or bread¡ They entered a realm higher than the angels’ simply by remaining in the human mire.

Complicity is not sudden, though it occurs in an instant.

To be proved true, violence need only occur once. But good is proved true by repetition.

I must keep the same tempo into the pianissimo
—

On Idhra I finally began to feel my English strong enough to carry experience. I became obsessed by the palpable edge of sound. The moment when language at last surrenders to what it’s describing: the subtlest differentials of light or temperature or sorrow. I’m a kabbalist only in that I believe in the power of incantation. A poem is as neural as love; the rut of rhythm that veers the mind.

This hunger for sound is almost as sharp as desire, as if one could honour every inch of flesh in words; and so, suspend time. A word is at home in desire. No station of the heart is more full of solitude than desire which keeps the world poised, poisoned with beauty, whose only permanence is loss. Of the poems I published before I returned to Idhra, Maurice had a definite opinion, which he stated in a voice of compassion for the unwise: “These aren’t poems, they’re ghost stories.”

What he also meant but didn’t say was: Before our son Yosha was born, I also thought I believed in death. But it was only being a father that convinced me.

After a year on Idhra, at the end of the summer, Maurice, Irena, and Yosha, who was still a toddler, came to visit.

Maurice and I spent many hot afternoons in the small courtyard of Mrs. Karouzos’s taverna while Irena and Yosha rested.

One afternoon as we talked, Maurice rolled a lemon under his flat palm, over the blue and white tablecloth. He said: “Sa” —he always begins a remark he’s particularly proud of with Vest ca,” which in his rush to make the point comes out in a slur—” you want to be like Zeuxis, master of light, who painted his grapes so realistically, the birds tried to eat them!”

I leaned back in my chair, tipping the front legs, with my head against the stone wall. The courtyard tilted. The green shutters and pure sky. Then I looked at Maurice’s flushed, very round face. He and Irena were my only friends on earth. I couldn’t stop laughing and soon he was laughing too. The lemon escaped Maurice’s palm and wobbled down the narrow street to the harbour.

From the first, I felt at home in these hills, with broken icons hovering over every abyss, every valley, the spirit looking back upon the body. Their Lord’s blue robes dimmer than the flowers, the face of their Redeemer fractured with weather. Icons in wooden boxes small as birdhouses, with peeling paint and wood fraying like rope from rain and sun. I wrote in the tranquil buzz, in the heat that shellacked the leaves, turned the houses white with sweat, red hot roofs squirming under the glare.

But I also knew I would always be a stranger in Greece, no matter how long I lived here. So I tried over the years to anchor myself in the details of the island: the sun burning away night from the surface of the sea, the olive groves in winter rain. And in the friendship of Mrs. Karouzos and her son, who looked after me from a distance.

I tried to embroider darkness, black sutures with my glinting stones sewn safe and tight, buried in the cloth: Bella’s intermezzos, Athos’s maps, Alex’s words, Maurice and Irena. Black on black, until the only way to see the texture would be to move the whole cloth under the light.

At the close of Maurice and Irena’s first visit, after climbing back up to the house and watching the boat cross the water, I didn’t think I could bear to stay on Idhra alone. But that second winter, Maurice and Irena kept me company through the mail as I finished
Groundwork
, and I felt them with me as I had years before while I worked alone on Athos’s book.

“Write to save yourself,” Athos said, “and someday you’ll write because you've been saved.”

“You will feel terrible shame for this. Let your humility grow larger than your shame.”

Our relation to the dead continues to change because we continue to love them. All the afternoon conversations that winter on Idhra, with Athos or with Bella, while it grew dark. As in any conversation, sometimes they answered me, sometimes they didn’t.

I was in a small room. Everything was fragile. I couldn’t move without breaking something. My hands melted what they held.

The pianissimo must be perfect, it must be in the listener’s ears before he hears it
—

Nazi policy was beyond racism, it was anti-matter, for Jews were not considered human. An old trick of language, used often in the course of history. Non-Aryans were never to be referred to as human, but as “figuren,” “stücke” — “dolls,” “wood,” “merchandise,” “rags.” Humans were not being gassed, only “figuren,” so ethics weren’t being violated. No one could be faulted for burning debris, for burning rags and clutter in the dirty basement of society. In fact, they’re a fire hazard¡ What choice but to burn them before they harm you…. So, the extermination of Jews was not a case of obeying one set of moral imperatives over another, but rather the case of the larger imperative satisfying any difficulties. Similarly, the Nazis implemented a directive against Jews owning pets; how can one animal own another? How can an insect or an object own anything? Nazi law prohibited Jews from buying soap; what use is soap to vermin?

When citizens, soldiers, and SS performed their unspeakable acts, the photos show their faces were not grimaced with horror, or even with ordinary sadism, but rather were contorted with laughter. Of all the harrowing contradictions, this holds the key to all the others. This is the most ironic loophole in Nazi reasoning. If the Nazis required that humiliation precede extermination, then they admitted exactly what they worked so hard to avoid admitting: the humanity of the victim. To humiliate is to accept that your victim feels and thinks, that he not only feels pain, but knows that he’s being degraded. And because the torturer knew in an instant of recognition that his victim was not a “figuren” but a man, and knew at that same moment he must continue his task, he suddenly understood the Nazi mechanism. Just as the stone-carrier knew his only chance of survival was to fulfil his task as if he didn’t know its futility, so the torturer decided to do his job as if he didn’t know the lie. The photos capture again and again this chilling moment of choice: the laughter of the damned. When the soldier realized that only death has the power to turn “man” into “figuren,” his difficulty was solved. And so the rage and sadism increased: his fury at the victim for suddenly turning human; his desire to destroy that humanness so intense his brutality had no limit.

There’s a precise moment when we reject contradiction. This moment of choice is the lie we will live by. What is dearest to us is often dearer to us than truth.

There were the few, like Athos, who chose to do good at great personal risk; those who never confused objects and humans, who knew the difference between naming and the named. Because the rescuers couldn’t lose sight, literally, of the human, again and again they give us the same explanation for their heroism: “What choice did I have?”

We look for the spirit precisely in the place of greatest degradation. It’s from there that the new Adam must raise himself, must begin again.

I want to remain close to Bella. I read. I rip the black alphabet to shreds, but there’s no answer there. At night, at Athos’s old desk, I stare at photos of strangers.

Brahms wrote the intermezzos for Clara, and she adored them because they were for her
—

I want to remain close to Bella. To do so, I blaspheme by imagining.

At night the wooden bunk wears through her skin. Icy feet push into the back of Bella’s head.
Now I will begin the intermezzo. I must not begin too slowly.
There is no room. Bella’s arms cover herself.
At night when everyone is awake, I will not listen to the crying. I will play the whole piece on my arms.
Her skin is coming apart at her elbows and behind her ears.
Not too much pedal, you can spoil Brahms with too much pedal, especially the intermezzos, the opening must be played clear as — water. Bar 62, crescendo, pay attention, but it’s hard because that’s where he’s so — in love. The first time he played this for her, she listened knowing he wrote it for her.
The cuts on Bella’s head are burning. She closes her eyes.
After the intermezzo I will practise parts of the Hammerklavier. By then most of the barrack will be asleep.
Against her sore scalp, the feet are wet and send the ice into her.
The two notes at the beginning of the adagio Beethoven added after, at the publisher'; the A and C# that change everything.
Every raw place on her scalp bursts with cold.
Then I can play it again. Without the two notes.

When they opened the doors, the bodies were always in the same position. Compressed against one wall, a pyramid of flesh. Still hope. The climb to air, to the last disappearing pocket of breath near the ceiling. The terrifying hope of human cells.

The bare autonomie faith of the body.

Some gave birth while dying in the chamber. Mothers were dragged from the chamber with new life half-emerged from their bodies. Forgive me, you who were born and died without being given names. Forgive this blasphemy, of choosing philosophy over the brutalism of fact.

We know they cried out. Each mouth, Bella’s mouth, strained for its miracle. They were heard from the other side of the thick walls. It is impossible to imagine those sounds.

At that moment of utmost degradation, in that twisted reef, is the most obscene testament of grace. For can anyone tell with absolute certainty the difference between the sounds of those who are in despair and the sounds of those who want desperately to believe? The moment when our faith in man is forced to change, anatomically— mercilessly—into faith.

In the still house, the visitation of moonlight. It occupies the darkness, erasing everything it touches. It has taken me years to reach this fabrication. Even as I fall apart I know I will never again feel this pure belief.

Bella, my brokenness has kept you broken.

I wait for daylight before daring to move. The dew soaks my shoes. I walk to the edge of the hill and lie down in the cold grass. But the sun is already hot. I think of my mother’s overturned glasses of steam that drew fevers from the skin. The sky is a glass.

In experiments to determine the mechanisms of migration, scientists locked warblers in cages and kept them in darkened rooms where they couldn’t see the sky. The birds lived in bewildered twilight. Yet each October, they huddled, agitated, turned inside out with yearning. The magnetic pole pulled their blood, the thumbprint of night sky on their inner eye.

When you are lost to ones you love, you will face south-southwest like the caged bird. At certain hours of the day, your body will be flooded with instinct, so much of you having been entered, so much of you having entered them. Their limbs will follow when you lie down, a shadow against your own, curving to every curve like the Hebrew alphabet and the Greek, which cross the page to greet each other in the middle of historia, bent with carrying absence, cargoes from distant ports, the power of stones, the sorrow of those whose messiahs have made them leave so much behind….

In the early darkness of Greek winter afternoons, in rooms cold at the windows, I raise my hands to my face and smell Alex in my palms.

I long for memory to be spirit, but fear it is only skin. I fear that knowledge becomes instinct only to disappear with the body. For it is my body that remembers them, and though I have tried to erase Alex from my senses, tried to will my parents and Bella from my sleep, this will amounts to nothing, for my body betrays me in a second. I have lived many years without them. Yet it’s the same winter afternoon that draws Bella close, so close I can feel her powerful hand on my own, feel her gentle fingers on my back, so close I can smell Mrs. Alperstein’s lotion, so close I feel my father’s hand and Athos’s hand on my head and my mother’s hands pulling down my jacket to straighten me out, so close I can feel Alex’s arms reaching around me from behind, and upon me her maddeningly open eyes even as she disappears into sensation, and suddenly I’m afraid, and turn around in empty rooms.