Fugitive pieces (2 page)

The man excavating in the mud at Biskupin, the man I came to know as Athos, wore me under his clothes. My limbs bone-shadows on his strong legs and arms, my head buried in his neck, both of us beneath a heavy coat. I was suffocating but I couldn’t get warm. Inside Athos’s coat, cold air streaming in from the edge of the car door. The drone of engine and wheels, once in a while the sound of a passing lorry. In our strange coupling, Athos’s voice burrowed into my brain. I didn’t understand so I made it up myself: It’s right, it’s necessary to run.…

For miles through darkness in the back seat of the car, I had no idea where we were or where we were going. Another man drove and when we were signalled to stop, Athos pulled a blanket over us. In Greek-stained but competent German, Athos complained that he was ill. He didn’t just complain. He whimpered, he moaned. He insisted on describing his symptoms and treatments in detail. Until, disgusted and annoyed, they waved us on. Each time we stopped, I was numb against his solid body, a blister tight with fear.

My head ached with fever, I smelled my hair burning. Through days and nights I sped from my father and my mother. From long afternoons with my best friend, Mones, by the river. They were yanked right through my scalp.

But Bella clung. We were Russian dolls. I inside Athos, Bella inside me.

I don’t know how long we travelled this way. Once, I woke and saw signs in a fluid script that from a distance looked like Hebrew. Then Athos said we were home, in Greece. When we got closer I saw the words were strange; I’d never seen Greek letters before. It was night, but the square houses were white even in the darkness and the air was soft. I was dim with hunger and from lying so long in the car.

Athos said: “I will be your koumbaros, your godfather, the marriage sponsor for you and your sons. …”

Athos said: “We must carry each other. If we don’t have this, what are we.…”

On the island of Zakynthos, Athos—scientist, scholar, middling master of languages—performed his most astounding feat. From out of his trousers he plucked the seven-year-old refugee Jakob Beer.

THE STONE-CARRIERS

T
he shadow-past is shaped by everything that never happened. Invisible, it melts the present like rain through karst. A biography of longing. It steers us like magnetism, a spirit torque. This is how one becomes undone by a smell, a word, a place, the photo of a mountain of shoes. By love that closes its mouth before calling a name.

I did not witness the most important events of my life. My deepest story must be told by a blind man, a prisoner of sound. From behind a wall, from underground. From the corner of a small house on a small island that juts like a bone from the skin of sea.

On Zakynthos we lived close to the sky. Far below, the restless waves surrounded us. According to myth, the Ionian Sea is haunted by an error of love.

There were two rooms upstairs and two views. The small bedroom window opened emptily to sea. The other room, Athos’s study, looked down our stony hill to the distant town and the harbour. Winter nights, when the wind was relentless and wet, it seemed we were on the bridge of a ship, shutters creaking like masts and rigging; the town of Zakynthos shimmered, luminescent, as if under the waves. During the darkest part of summer nights, I climbed through the bedroom window to lie on the roof. In the days, I stayed in the small bedroom, willing my skin to take on the woodgrain of the floor, to take on the pattern of the rug or the bedcover, so I could disappear simply by stillness.

The first Easter in hiding, at the midnight climax of the Anastasimi Mass, I watched from the window in Athos’s study. The procession candles were carried, a faint snaking line flickering through the streets, retracing the route of the epitafios then dispersing into the bare hills. At the edge of town, as each worshipper walked home, the line broke into sparks. With my forehead against the glass, I watched and was in my own village, winter evenings, my teacher lighting the wicks of our lanterns and releasing us into the street like toy boats bobbing down a flooded gutter. Wire handles clinked against the hot globes. The rising smells of our damp coats. Mones swinging his arms, his lamp skimming the ground, his white breath glowing from below. I watched the Easter procession and placed this parallel image, like other ghostly double exposures, carefully into orbit. On an inner shelf too high to reach. Even now, half a century later, writing this on a different Greek island, I look down to the remote lights of town and feel the heat of a lamp spreading up my sleeve.

I watched Athos reading at his desk in the evenings, and saw my mother sewing at the table, my father looking through the daily papers, Bella studying her music. Any given moment—no matter how casual, how ordinary—is poised, full of gaping life. I can no longer remember their faces, but I imagine expressions trying to use up a lifetime of love in the last second. No matter the age of the face, at the moment of death a lifetime of emotion still unused turns a face young again.

I was like the men in Athos’s stories, who set their courses before the invention of longitude and never quite knew where they were. They looked at the stars and knew they were missing information, terra nullius raising the hair on their necks.

On Zakynthos we lived on solid rock, in a high and windy place full of light. I learned to tolerate images rising in me like bruises. But in my continuous expectation of the burst door, the taste of blood that filled my mouth suddenly, many times a day, I couldn’t conceive of any feeling stronger than fear. What is stronger than fear; Athos, who is stronger than fear?

On Zakynthos I tended a garden of lemon balm and basil in a square of light on the floor. I imagined the thoughts of the sea. I spent the day writing my letter to the dead and was answered at night in my sleep.

Athos—Athanasios Roussos—was a geologist dedicated to a private trinity of peat, limestone, and archaeological wood. But like most Greeks, he rose from the sea. His father had been the last Roussos mariner, carrying to conclusion the family shipping business dating from the 1700s, when Russian vessels sailed the Turkish Straits from the Black Sea to the Aegean. Athos knew that no ship is an object, that a spirit animates the ropes and wood, that a sunken ship becomes its ghost. He knew that chewing raw fish quenches thirst. He knew that there are forty-four elements in sea water. He described the ancient Greek cedar galleys, caulked with bitumen and outfitted with sails of silk or bright linen. He told me about Peruvian balsa rafts and Polynesian straw boats. He explained how the huge Siberian rafts made of spruce from the taiga were built on frozen rivers and set free when the ice melted in the spring. Sometimes two rafts were bound together, creating a vessel so large it could carry a house with a stone fireplace. From his father, Athos inherited sea charts that had been passed down from captains and hydrographers, augmented by generations. He drew his great-grandfather’s trading routes for me in chalk on a black slate learner’s globe. Even as a child, even as my blood-past was drained from me, I understood that if I were strong enough to accept it, I was being offered a second history.

To share a hiding place, physical or psychological, is as intimate as love. I followed Athos from one room to the other. I was afraid, as one who has only one person to trust must be afraid, an anxiety I could only solve by devotion. I sat near him while he wrote at his desk, contemplating forces that turn seas to stone, stone to liquid. He gave up trying to send me to bed. Often I lay at his feet like a cat, surrounded by books piled ever higher on the floor beside his chair. Late at night, while he worked— a solid concentration that put me to sleep—his arm dangled like a plumb line. I was soothed by the smells of bindings and pipe tobacco and the weight of his safe, heavy hand on my head. His left arm reaching down to earth, his right arm reaching up, palm to heaven.

During the long months, I listened to Athos recount not only the history of navigation—heightened dramatically by ancestral anecdote, pictures from books and maps —but the history of the earth itself. He heaped before my imagination the great heaving terra mobilis: “Imagine solid rock bubbling like stew; a whole mountain bursting into flame or slowly being eaten by rain, like bites out of an apple. …” He moved from geology to paleontology to poetry: “Think of the first phototropic plant, the first breath inhaled by any animal, the first cells that joined and did not divide to reproduce, the first human birth….“ He quoted Lucretius: “The earliest weapons were hands, nails, and teeth. Next came stones and branches wrenched from trees, and fire, and flame.

Gradually Athos and I learned each other’s languages. A little of my Yiddish, with smatterings of mutual Polish. His Greek and English. We took new words into our mouths like foreign foods; suspicious, acquired tastes.

Athos didn’t want me to forget. He made me review my Hebrew alphabet. He said the same thing every day: “It is your future you are remembering.” He taught me the ornate Greek script, like a twisting twin of Hebrew. Both Hebrew and Greek, Athos liked to say, contain the ancient loneliness of ruins, “like a flute heard distantly down a hillside of olives, or a voice calling to a boat from a shore.”

Slowly my tongue learned its sad new powers. I longed to cleanse my mouth of memory. I longed for my mouth to feel my own when speaking his beautiful and awkward Greek, its thick consonants, its many syllables difficult and graceful as water rushing around rock. I ate Greek food, drank from Zakynthos’s wells until I too could distinguish the different springs on the island.

We entered a territory of greater and greater tenderness, two lost souls alone on deck on a black and limitless ocean, the wind howling off corners of the house, no lights to guide us and none to give our position away.

By early morning Athos was often close to tears of admiration for his brave lineage, or for the future: “I will be your koumbaros, your godfather, the marriage sponsor for you and your sons…. We must carry each other. If we don’t have this, what are we? The spirit in the body is like wine in a glass; when it spills, it seeps into air and earth and light…. It’s a mistake to think it’s the small things we control and not the large, it’s the other way around¡ We can’t stop the small accident, the tiny detail that conspires into fate: the extra moment you run back for something forgotten, a moment that saves you from an accident—or causes one. But we can assert the largest order, the large human values daily, the only order large enough to see.”

Athos was fifty when we found each other at Biskupin. He was bluntly handsome, heavyset but not heavy, and his hair was halfway grey, the shade of a good silver ore. I watched him comb his hair, wet against his scalp, into deep furrows, I continued to scrutinize, as if watching a science demonstration, his hair turning thick as foam as it dried, his head slowly expanding.

His study was crammed with rock samples, fossils, loose photos of what seemed to me to be undistinguished landscapes. I'd browse, picking up an ordinary-looking lump or chip. “Ah, Jakob, what you hold in your hand is a piece of bone from a mastodon’s jaw … that’s bark from a thirty-five-million-year-old tree….”

Immediately I put down whatever I held; scalded by time. Athos laughed at me. “Don’t worry, a rock that’s survived so much won’t be hurt by a boy’s curiosity.”

He always had a cup of coffee on his desk—schetos — black and strong. During the war when his supply ran out, he reused the same grounds until he said there was not an atom of flavour left. Then futilely he tried to disguise a bland blend of chicory, dandelion, and lotus seeds by continuing to prepare it in his brass briki one cup at a time, a chemist experimenting with proportions.

Bella would have said Athos was just like Beethoven, who counted out exactly sixty beans for each cup. Bella knew everything about her maestro. Sometimes she piled her hair on top of her head, put on my father’s coat (on Bella, a clown’s coat with sleeves hanging past her fingertips), and borrowed his unlit pipe. My mother obliged with the composer’s favourite meal: noodles and cheese (though not Parmesan) or potatoes and fish (though not from the Danube). Bella drank spring water, which Ludwig apparently imbibed by the gallon—a predilection that pleased my father, who, in these costume dramas, drew the line at Beethoven’s beer drinking.

After dinner, Bella pushed her chair from the table and loped towards the piano. When she took off my father’s loose coat, she shed all comedy. She sat, collecting herself, pressed like a cameo in the amber of the piano lamp. During dinner she’d made her secret choice of music, usually slow, romantic, yearning with sorrow; sometimes, if she felt well-disposed towards me, “The Moonlight.” Then my sister played, drunk and precise, trying to keep on the straight line while swaggering with passion, and my mother would wring the dish towel in her hands with pride and emotion, and my parents and I would sit, stunned again by our silly Bella’s transformation.

They waited until I was asleep, then roused themselves, exhausted as swimmers, grey between the empty trees. Their hair in tufts, open sores where ears used to be, grubs twisting from their chests. The grotesque remains of incomplete lives, the embodied complexity of desires eternally denied. They floated until they grew heavier, and began to walk, heaving into humanness; until they grew more human than phantom and through their effort began to sweat. Their strain poured from my skin, until I woke dripping with their deaths. Daydreams of sickening repetition—a trivial gesture remembered endlessly. My mother, after the decrees, turned away by a storekeeper, then dropping her scarf in the doorway, bending down to pick it up. In my mind, her whole life telescoped into that single moment, stooping again and again in her heavy blue coat. My father standing at the door, waiting for me to tie my laces, looking at his watch. Skipping stones on the river with Mones, wiping the mud off our shoes with the long grass. Bella turning the pages of a book.

I tried to remember ordinary details, the sheet music beside Bella’s bed, her dresses. What my father’s workshop looked like. But in nightmares the real picture wouldn’t hold still long enough for me to look, everything melting. Or I remembered the name of a classmate but not his face. A piece of clothing but not its colour.