Fugitive pieces (17 page)

It’s late, almost afternoon, when she says, though I may have dreamed it, though it’s just something Michaela might ask: Are you hungry? No…. Then perhaps we should eat so that hunger won’t seem, even for a moment, the stronger feeling….

Michaela’s hands above her head; I stroke the fragile place on the back of her smooth, soft upper arms. She is sobbing. She has heard everything—her heart an ear, her skin an ear. Michaela is crying for Bella.

The light and heat of her tears enter my bones.

The joy of being recognized and the stabbing loss: recognized for the first time.

When I finally fall asleep, the first sleep of my life, I dream of Michaela—young, glistening smooth as marble, sugary wet with sunlight. I feel the sun melting over my skin. Bella sits on the edge of the bed and asks Michaela to describe the feel of the bedcover under her bare legs, “because you see, just now I am without my body….” In the dream, tears stream down Michaela’s face. I wake as if I've been dug out of the dream and lifted into the world, a floating exhaustion. My muscles ache from stretching into her, as I lie in sunlight across the bed.

Every cell in my body has been replaced, suffused with peace.

She sleeps, my face against her back, her breasts spilling from my hands. She sleeps deeply like a runner who’s just emerged from the Samaria Gorge, who’s heard only her own breathing for days. I drift and wake with my mouth on her belly, or on the small of her back, drawn home by the dream into her, her breasts soft: loam, hard, sore seeds.

Each night heals gaps between us until we are joined by the scar of dreams. My desolation exhales in the breathing dark.

Our coming together is as unexpected, as accidental, as old Salonika itself, once a city of Castillian Spanish, Greek, Turkish, Bulgarian. Where before the war you could hear muezzins call from minarets across the city, while church bells rang, and the port went quiet on Friday afternoons for the Jewish Sabbath. Where streets were crowded with turbans, veils, kippahs, and the tall sikkes of the Mevlevis, the whirling dervishes. Where sixty minarets and thirty synagogues surrounded the semahane, the lodge where dervishes spun on their invisible axes, holy tornadoes, blessings drawn from heaven through the arms, brought to earth through the legs….

I grasp her arms, bury my brain in the perfume at her wrists. Bracelets of scent.

To be saved by such a small body.

Across the city, across a hundred milky backyards, Michaela is sleeping.

I’ve barely put my head down when I hear Yosha and Tomas stomping along the hall and their stage-whispers outside my door. Michaela’s smell is on me, in my hair. I feel the rough material of the sofa against my face. I’m heavy with lack of sleep, with Michaela, with the boys’ voices. Shadows of early light line the thick curtains.

What have you done to time…
…

I listen to the sounds of their breakfast-making, sounds that hurt. I listen to Yosha, each note learning the air. Lips of gravity press me to earth. Frozen rain clings to new snow, silver and white. On Maurice’s sofa, reeds tangle along the banks, spring rain rushes in tin troughs, the room underwater with weather. Each sound—touch. Rain on Michaela’s bare shoulders. So much green we’ll think something’s wrong with our eyes. No signal taken for granted. Again, again for the first time.

At Maurice’s party where I met Michaela, there was a painter, a Pole from Danzig born ten years before the war. We talked a long time. “All my life,” he said, “I’ve asked myself one question: How can you hate all you have come from and not hate yourself?”

He told me that the year before, he’d bought tubes of yellow paint, every shade of the brightest yellow, but he couldn’t bring himself to use them. He continued to paint in the same dark ochres and browns.

The serenity of a winter bedroom; the street quiet except for a shovel scraping the sidewalk, a sound that seems to gather silence around it. The first morning I woke to Michaela—my head on the small of her back, her heels like two islands under the blanket—I knew that this was my first experience of the colour yellow.

We think that change occurs suddenly, but even I have learned better. Happiness is wild and arbitrary, but it’s not sudden.

Maurice is more than delighted, he’s amazed. “My friend, my friend—finally, after a million years. Irena, come here.
It's like the discovery of agriculture.
“

In Michaela’s favourite restaurant, I lift my glass and cutlery spills onto the expensive tiled floor. The sound crashes high as the skylight. Looking at me, Michaela pushes her own silverware over the edge.

I fell in love amid the clattering of spoons…
…

I cross over the boundary of skin into Michaela’s memories, into her childhood. On the dock when she is ten, the tips of her braids wet as paint brushes. Her cool brown back under a worn flannel shirt, washed so many times it’s as soft as the skin of earlobes. The smell of the cedar dock baking in the sun. Her slippery child’s belly, her bird legs. How different to swim later, as a woman, the lake fingering her with cold; and how, even now in a lake, she can’t swim without romance shaping her energies as if she were still a girl swimming into her future. In the evening the sky lightens with dusk, above the darkening fringe of trees. She rows, singing verses of ballads. She imagines the stars as peppermints and holds them in her mouth until they dissolve.

In our first weeks together, Michaela and I drive through many northern lakeside towns, the air laced with woodsmoke, lamps lit in small houses, or past clapboard cottages boarded up against the snow. Towns that keep their memories to themselves.

White aspens make black shadows, a photographic negative. The sky wavers between snow and rain. The light is a dull clang, old, an echo of light. Michaela at the wheel, my hand on her thigh. The joy of returning to her flat in the late Sunday-afternoon dark.

In the spring, we drive further north, past copper mines and paper mills, the abandoned towns born of and rejected by industry. I enter the landscape of her adolescence, which I receive with a bodily tenderness as Michaela relaxes and imperceptibly opens towards it: the decrepit houses of Cobalt, their doorways facing every direction except the road, which was built after. The elegant stone railway station. The gaping mouths of the mines. The faded, forlorn Albion Hotel. All this I saw she loved. I knew then I would show her the land of my past as she was showing me hers. We would enter the Aegean in a white ship, the belly of a cloud. Though she will be the foreigner, agape at an unfamiliar landscape, her body will take to it like a vow. She’ll turn brown, her angles gleaming with oil.
A white dress shines against her thighs like rain.

“My parents took to the highway at the least opportunity. Not only in summer, but in winter, in any weather. We drove north from Montreal, west to Rouyn-Noranda and further, to an esker forest, and to an island…. The further north you drive, the more compelling the power of the metal in the ground….”

As a child, in the speeding night car, her face against the cold rear window, she imagined she could feel the pull between the stars and the mines, a metal dependency of concepts she didn’t understand: magnetism, orbits. She imagined the stars straying too close to the earth and being forced to the ground. Windows open, highway air against summer skin, her bathing suit still damp under her shorts, sometimes sitting on a towel. She loved those nights. The dark shapes of her parents in the front seat.

“On the island the harbour stores smelled of wool and mothballs, chocolate and rubber. My mother and I bought cotton sunhats there. We bought old boardgames and jigsaw puzzles of bridges and sunsets; the cardboard pieces always seemed slightly soggy…. The pioneer museum made me afraid of ghosts of Indians and settlers and the spirits of hunted animals. I saw the clothes of men and women who hadn’t been much taller than me, even when I was only ten or eleven. Jakob, their small clothes terrified me¡ There’s a legend, that the Manitoulins once burned the island down to soil, destroying the forest and their own settlements, in order to dislodge a spirit. To save themselves, they set fire to their homes. I had nightmares of men running through the forest, a trail of torches. The island was supposed to have been purified, but I worried that the spirit was planning its revenge. I think a child knows intuitively that it’s the most sacred places that are the most frightening…. But there was also a happiness on the island that I’ve never been able to recreate. Meals outside, lanterns, glasses filled with juice that had been chilled in the lake. I taught myself about root systems and mosses, I read Steinbeck’s
The Red Pony
on the screened porch. We rowed. My father taught me new words that I imagined were followed by an exclamation mark representing his pointing finger: cirrus¡ cumulus¡ stratonimbus¡ When we were up north my father wore canvas shoes. My mother wore a scarf over her hair….”

Just as Michaela is wearing, as she tells me these stories. The fabric outlining her profile, drawing out her cheekbones.

“Later, when I returned to those places, especially the beaches of the North Channel— as an adult driving north alone—I felt there was someone with me in the car. It was strange, Jakob, as if an extra self was with me. Very young or very old.”

As she talks, we pass through deserted lakeside towns, sand drifting across the road from the spring beach. The poignancy of northern resort towns in off-season silence. Porches heaped with firewood, toys, old furniture; glimpses of lives. Towns that wake briefly for the short weeks of hot weather, like flowering cereus. And I can’t breathe for fear of losing her. But the moment passes. From Espanola to Sudbury, the quartzite hills absorb the pink evening light like blotting paper, then pale under the moon.

Finally, Michaela takes me to one of the meccas of her childhood, a birch forest growing out of white sand.

This is where I become irrevocably unmoored. The river floods. I slip free the knot and float, suspended in the present.

We sleep among the wet birches, nothing between us and the storm except the fragile nylon skin of the tent, a glowing dome in the blackness. Wind rolls in from the distance, catches in the high antennae of branches then rolls past us into the rain, full of electricity. I cover Michaela, inside the sleeping bag, conscious of the tent as if it were a wet shirt against my back. Lightning. But we are grounded.

She rises to me unhesitatingly. What does the body make us believe? That we’re never ourselves until we contain two souls. For years corporeality made me believe in death. Now, inside Michaela yet watching her, death for the first time makes me believe in the body.

As the wind gathers in the trees and then moves on, rippling through the forest, I disappear in her. Glinting seeds scatter in her dark blood. Bright leaves into the night wind; stars on the starless night. We are the only ones foolish enough to be sleeping out in the April storm. In the shaking tent Michaela tells me stories, my ear on her heart until, with the rain against the frail nylon, we sleep.

When we wake, there is pool of water by our feet. It is not on Idhra or on Zakynthos but among Michaela’s birches that I feel for the first time safe above ground, earthed in a storm.