Fugitive pieces (26 page)

I wished I could lure you back with one of Naomi’s songs: “When you reach deep water do not drown from sorrow. When you reach a great fire do not burn from sorrow…. Little dove, little dove …” Naomi told me that when Liuba Levitska tried to smuggle a parcel of food for her mother into the ghetto, she was locked in solitary. Word soon spread that she was comforting the other prisoners. “Liuba is singing in the tower.” And each in his distress heard “Two Little Doves” from behind the walls.

I hadn’t realized the extent of Petra’s rampage. In the space of perhaps an hour, she had pillaged every room.

She had done the most damage in your study. The items on your desk rearranged, your desk drawers left hanging, books glanced at then cast aside, piled haphazardly, open on a chair. Your room appeared ransacked by a scholar who’d been granted a single minute to find the reference upon which his life depended.

Slowly I restored the house, pausing to appreciate each book as I smoothed its bent pages, sitting down to read a few paragraphs, to admire illustrations of ships and prehistoric plants.

It was when I was replacing the books in the room next to your study that I found them. Not in a stack abandoned by Petra, but merely revealed by the space on the shelf beside them. There were two books, both bashed at the corners, probably from having been often stuffed into a pocket or a picnic hamper. One looked slightly water-swollen, as if you’d left it out on the terrace overnight, perhaps after reading aloud to Michaela by the light of the storm lanterns. Inside the first, your name and the date, June 1992. In the second, November 1992; four months before your death.

Your writing was neat and small, like a scientist’s. But your words were not.

By late afternoon the rain had slowed; it meandered down the black windows. I could still hear the wind. I sat at your desk for a long time before I opened the first notebook. Then I read randomly.

Time is a blind guide…
…

To remain with the dead is to abandon them….

One becomes undone by a photograph, by love that closes its mouth before calling a name….

In the cave her hair makes….

It was well into the evening by the time I leaned your journals, with Michaela’s note tucked inside, by the front door next to my jacket and shoes.

I started to drape the sheets over the furniture.

Science is full of stories of discoveries made when one error corrects another. After revealing two secrets in your house, Petra had uncovered one more. Lying on the floor beside the couch, Naomi’s scarf.

You can’t fall halfway. For the first second over the edge it feels as though you’re ascending. But you will be destroyed by stillness.

In Hawaii, silence is an earthquake warning. It’s a ghastly silence because you only notice the sound of the waves when they stop.

I pick up the scarf and examine it under the light. I smell it. The scent is not familiar. I try to recall when I last saw Naomi wearing it.

I remember the night you stole Naomi’s heart. How tenderly you answered her. “It seems right to keep bringing them something beautiful now and then.”

I know it isn’t hers; I know she has one just like it. The scarf is a tiny square of silence.

Naomi, whom I’ve known for eight years —I can’t tell you what her wrists look like, or the knot of bone of her ankle, or how her hair grows at the back of her neck, but I can tell her mood almost before she enters the room. I can tell you what she likes to eat, how she holds a glass, what she would make of a certain painting or a headline. I know what she makes of her memories. I know what she remembers. I know her memories.

Naomi would go downstairs to start coffee then join me in the shower, our smells still on her, my soaped skin snuffing them out as I embraced her. I know that in our last months she longed for those winter mornings we woke early and drove, stopping somewhere outside the city for breakfast, all the small diners in the small towns — the Driftwood, the Castle, the Bluebird—wandering down roads, past fallow ground, the sketch of hills. Sometimes we stayed somewhere for the night, all the foreign beds we woke in, and I wasted love, I wasted it.

I looked back into the house for the last time. The sheets glowed faintly. The bright pillows and rugs, the figureheads, the sills crowded with pieces of the world collected on various journeys, your sultan’s tent, sea captain’s cabin, laird’s study—swallowed up.

From your stoop I could see the lights of Idhra town, like a scatter of coins. The wind was astringent.

I went back inside, climbed the stairs to the bedroom, and returned Michaela’s note.

I’m not sure whether I did this for your sake or in order to spare Maurice Salman, your old friend who so deeply misses you.

The dark wind had pushed the mass of clouds out to sea, and the night sky above the island was startlingly clear. In the beam of my flashlight the rain-flattened fields glistened.

I circled the house, fastening the shutters.

THE WAY STATION

A
cumulonimbus theatre towered over Athens’s Syntagma Square. The mist smeared under the wipers, the cab window squealing.

Rain in a foreign city is different from rain in a place you know. I can’t explain this, while snow is the same everywhere. Naomi says this is also true of dusk, that it’s different wherever you are, and once told me of the time she was walking in Berlin alone, lost on New Year’s Day, trying to find her way back to her hotel. She found herself at the end of a blind street, at the Wall, cement on three sides, in the near dark. She says she started to cry because it was twilight and New Year’s Day and she was alone. But I think it was Berlin that made her cry.

I felt a surge of companionship with the eaters around me as they took comfort from the bulwark of hot food and drink. It was the third day of wet weather. People chewed thick slabs of bread with a crust that worked their jaws, dipped buns and biscuits into massive mugs of steaming milky coffee.

Tavern, oasis, country inn on the king’s highway. Way stations. Dostoyevsky and the charitable women in Tobol'sk. Akhmatova reading poetry to the wounded soldiers in Tashkent. Odysseus cared for by the Phaiakians on Scheria.

Animal and field smells rose from wet wool and oiled jackets, even at the most popular café in downtown Athens. The restaurant was a cavern of noise; the espresso machine, frothing milk, loud conversation. A flash turned my head and I saw the two cuffs of gold snuffed out by her hair as Petra lifted its black mass from her neck. Then they reappeared, the rings of Saturn. She stood up. A man, his hand on the middle of her back, steered her between the tables into the crowded street.

I reached the door of the restaurant just in time to see them pass, like the bracelets lost in her dark hair, through the wall of light at the edge of the square. I watched as they disappeared into the unlit lanes of the Plaka.

It had stopped raining. People were already beginning to wander back out into the streets. Even the moon was emerging. Only the noise of cafes penetrated the darkness, and soon even the loud voices of drinkers dimmed into silence as I followed the dark lanes further into the Plaka, like an ant lost in the black type of a newspaper.

I found myself twisting up the mountain, the narrow market alleys gradually giving way to broken pavement, grass growing between the stones, empty lots between houses. Soon Athens in the valley was barely visible, flickering like moonlight on water, below the giant prow of the escarpment.

Jagged sidewalks, industrial fence, old wire and broken bottles, pinpoints of moonlight. Box gardens, clothing leaning over balconies, kitchen chairs left outside, the flooded remains of a meal forgotten on a small table. The houses were more settled in the rock, more decayed and vital, the higher I climbed. The debris of use, not abandonment.

The road emptied into an urban field littered with broken furniture, cardboard boxes, soggy newspaper. The garbage gave way to wildflowers. I waded through the soaked grass and looked out for a long while at the city below. The air was cool and new.

Then I realized I was sharing the darkness. I knew by their voices that the lovers weren’t young. I didn’t move. The man made his small shout, and a few moments later, they laughed.

It was not the proximity of their intimacy that unlocked me, it was that little laugh. I thought of Petra, turning to me in the dark, her eyes serious as an animal’s. I heard their faint voices and imagined them rearranging each other’s clothes.

On the boat from Idhra I’d overheard one young man explaining to another that in countries of big families husbands and wives often have to sneak from their small houses into the fields to escape the ears of the children. “No firstborn is conceived in the grass, but all the rest¡ Besides, a woman likes to look up at the sky.”

I heard the skim of their clothes as they crossed the field.

The light turned flimsy. By the time I found my way back to my hotel, the sky seeped with day.

When we married, Naomi said: Sometimes we need both hands to climb out of a place. Sometimes there are steep places, where one has to walk ahead of the other. If I can’t find you, I’ll look deeper in myself. If I can’t keep up, if you’re far ahead, look back. Look back.

In my hotel room the night before I leave Greece, I know the elation of ordinary sorrow. At last my unhappiness is my own.

For hours, leaning against the cold window, above the thick unmoving Atlantic, I foresee my return.

It’s five-thirty, Naomi’s just getting home. I imagine her at the front door struggling with her keys. A book, perhaps Hugill's
Shanties from the Seven Seas
, in one hand. In the other, a bag of groceries. Tangerines, their fragrant skins, their sweet vitamins. Bread creased by the oven’s heat, soft dough forced open from the inside. Naomi’s face pink with cold and mist, the backs of her stockings spattered with slush.

In the night cab from the airport I look out from the back seat of my parents’ car, remembering winter Sundays as a boy. We pass through the haunted emptiness bordering the lit city, pass flat farmland under the congealing November sky. The first starlight is a skin of frost over the fields. My boy’s feet are cold in my boots. Small city lawns, streets narrow with snow. The sound of a walk being shovelled somewhere in the neighbourhood, an idling car.

The cab passes the yellow glow of windows above purple lawns; perhaps Naomi isn’t home, the lights on in every house but ours….

—In Greece I saw someone with a scarf just like yours. I remembered you wearing it. Do you still have it?

—Hundreds of women must have that scarf. It’s from Eaton’s. What’s so important about a scarf anyway?

—Nothing, nothing.

Now, from twenty thousand feet, the ragged edge of the city appears, the wobbly boundary of a cell wall.

In bed I’ll tell Naomi about waterspouts that inhale luminous creatures, seaplants, in their path and become glowing, twisting tubes, swaying across the midnight ocean. I’ll tell her about the half-million tons of water lifted from Lake Wascana and the tornado that rolled up a wire fence, posts and all, like a ball of wool. But not about the couple who hid in their room until the tornado passed, opening their bedroom door to find the rest of the house had disappeared….

Naomi sits in the dark kitchen. I stand in the doorway watching her. She says nothing. It’s November but the screens are still on, damp leaves stuck to the mesh. The screens blur to grey glass and I’m frightened by the way she looks down at her hands on the table.

My wife shifts in her chair, her hair slashing her face in half. And when her face disappears like that, the sound will be in my mouth: Naomi.

I will stop myself from confessing I was on Idhra with a woman, that her hair fell from the edge of the bed to the floor. …

Naomi, I remember a story you told me. When you were a little girl you had a favourite bowl, with a design painted on the bottom. You wanted to eat everything, to find the empty bowl full of flowers.

The plane descends in a wide arc.

Once, I saw my father sitting in the snow-blue kitchen. I was six years old. I came downstairs in the middle of the night. There had been a storm while I slept. The kitchen glowed with new drifts piled against the windows; blue as the inside of a crevasse. My father was sitting at the table, eating. I was transfixed by his face. This was the first time I had seen food make my father cry.

But now, from thousands of feet in the air, I see something else. My mother stands behind my father and his head leans against her. As he eats, she strokes his hair. Like a miraculous circuit, each draws strength from the other.

I see that I must give what I most need.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

“When the ship was endangered, he remembered them….”

—
Nikos Pendzikis

Many books assisted me in my research of the war—original testimony as well as the work of historians; in particular Terrence Des Pres’s
The Survivor
renewed my resolve in the course of writing. My resolve was also strengthened by the work of John Berger. I would also like to acknowledge
The Politics of the Past
, edited by Gathercole and Lowenthal, and Apsley Cherry-Gar-rard’s
The Worst Journey in the World.
The brief quotations from Theotokas are from Mark Mazower’s
The Experience of Occupation, 1941-44;
quotations from Wilson, Bowers, and Taylor are from Griffith Taylor’s
With Scott, The Silver Lining
and Edward Wilson’s
Diary of the Terra Nova Expedition.
The translations of Yiddish song lyrics in Part I are from J. Silverman’s
The Yiddish Song Book;
in Part II, from Shoshana Kalisch’s
Yes, We Sang
, which also provided long-sought answers to specific questions. Quotations from
The Psalms
are from the translation by Peter Levi. The quotation from George Seferis is from the translation by Rex Warner.

A most special thank you to Jeffrey Walker for his invaluable encouragement.

Thank you to Ellen Seligman for her editorial acuity, her commitment and support. And to Heather Sangster for her insightful copyediting.

Thanks also to Sam Solecki, Vivian Palin, Bob and Grace Bainbridge, George Gait, David Sereda. Also to Beth Anne, Janis, Linda, Herschel, Dor, Luigi, and Nan—the granite-thief is for you. Thanks to the Michaelses, particularly Arlen and Jan. And an especial thanks to David Laurence.

Finally, my thanks to Nicholas Stavroulakis of the Jewish Museum of Greece and to Avraam Mordos and his family for their kindness in Athens.