Fugitive pieces (3 page)

When I woke, my anguish was specific: the possibility that it was as painful for them to be remembered as it was for me to remember them; that I was haunting my parents and Bella with my calling, startling them awake in their black beds.

I listened to Athos’s stories in English, in Greek, again in English. At first I heard them from a distance, an incomprehensible murmur as I lay face down on the rug, anxious or despondent in the long afternoons. But soon I recognized the same words and began to recognize the same emotion in Athos’s voice when he talked about his brother. I rolled onto my stomach so I could see his face, and eventually I sat up to learn.

Athos told me about his father, a man who’d scorned tradition most of his life, who’d raised his sons more European than Greek. His father’s maternal relatives had been prominent in the large Greek community in Odessa, and his uncles had moved in tie social circles of Vienna and Marseilles. Odessa: not far from the village where my father was born; Odessa, where, as Athos told these stories, thirty thousand Jews were being doused with gasoline and burned alive. His family had shipped the valuable red dyes for shoes and cloth from Mount Ossa to Austria and made their fortune. From his father, Athos learned that every river is a tongue of commerce, finding first geological then economic weakness and persuading itself into continents. The Mediterranean itself, he reminded me, had seduced its way out of rock—the “inland sea,” the womb of Europe. Athos’s older brother, Nikolaos, died at eighteen in a traffic accident in Le Havre. Shortly after, his mother fell ill and died. Athos’s father was convinced the family was being punished for his own sin of neglecting the Roussos origins. So he returned to the village of his birth, the place where his father had also been born. There, he paved the town square and built a public fountain in Nikos’s name. And this is where Athos took me: the island of Zakynthos, scarred by earthquakes. Its barren west and fertile east. Its groves of olives, figs, oranges, and lemons. Acanthus, amaranth, cyclamen. These were the things I did not see. From my two small rooms, the island was as inaccessible as another dimension.

Zakynthos: mentioned with affection by Homer, Strabo, Pliny. Twenty-five miles long and twelve miles wide, its highest hills fifteen hundred feet above the sea. A port on the maritime trade route between Venice and Constantinople. Zakynthos was the island birthplace of no less than three beloved poets—Foscolo, Kalvos, and Solomos, who wrote the words to the national anthem there when he was twenty-five. A statue of Solomos presides over the square. Nikos bore a slight resemblance to the poet, and when Athos was a child he thought the statue had been erected to honour his brother’s memory. Perhaps this was the beginning of Athos’s love for stone.

When Athos and his father returned to Zakynthos after the deaths of Nikos and his mother, they went on a night journey to Cape Gerakas to watch sea turtles lay their eggs on the beach. “We visited the salt pans at Alykes, the currant vineyards in the shadow of the Vrachionas Mountains. I was alone with my father. We were inconsolable. We stood silent at the blue grotto and in the pine groves.” For two years, until Athos could no longer avoid school, they were inseparable.

“My father took me along while he did his business with the shipbuilders at Keri Bay. I watched them caulking seams from the springs of pitch that bubble up from the black beach. We saw a man at the docks who knew my father. The muscles of his arms bulged like massive figure-eights, his licorice hair melted with sweat, he was stained with pitch. But he spoke katharevousa, the high Greek, like a king. After, my father scolded me for my rudeness; I’d been staring at him. But it was as if his voice came from a ventriloquist¡ When I said that, my father was truly angry. It was a lesson I never forgot. Once, in Salonika, my father left me in the charge of a hamal, a stevedore, while he attended to business with the harbour master. I sat on a bollard and listened to the hamal's fantastic tales. He told me about a ship that had sunk completely and then risen again. He’d seen it with his own eyes. Its cargo was salt and when it dissolved in the hold the ship bobbed up. That was my first encounter with the magic of salt. When my father retrieved me, he offered the hamal some money for looking after me. The man refused. My father said, ‘That man is a Hebrew and he carries the pride of his people.’ Later I learned that most of the men who worked at the docks in Salonika were Jews and that the yehudi mahallari, the Hebrew quarter, was built along the harbour.

“Do you know what else the hamal told me, Jakob? ‘The great mystery of wood is not that it burns, but that it floats.” ‘

Athos’s stories gradually veered me from my past. Night after night, his vivid hallucinogen dripped into my imagination, diluting memory. Yiddish too, a melody gradually eaten away by silence.

Athos pulled books off the shelves and read to me. I dove into the lavish illustrations. His was an old library, a mature library, where seriousness has given way to youthful whim. There were books on animal navigation and animal camouflage, on the history of glass, on gibbons, on Japanese scroll painting. There were books on icons, on insects, on Greek independence. Botany, paleontology, waterlogged wood. Poetry, with hypnotizing endpapers. Solomos, Seferis, Palamas, Keats. John Masefield’s
Salt Water Ballads
, a gift to Athos from his father.

He read to me from a biography of the sixteenth-century Flemish botanist Clusius, who went on plant-hunting expeditions in Spain and Portugal where he broke his leg, then fell off a cliff on his horse, breaking his arm, landing in a prickly shrub he named Erinacea, hedgehog broom. In similar fashion he stumbled upon two hundred new species. And from the biography of the eighteenth-century botanist John Sibthorpe, who went to Greece to hunt all six hundred plants described by Dioscorides. On his first journey, he met with plague, war, and rebellion. On his second, he travelled with an Italian colleague, Francesco Boroni (immortalized by the boronia bush). They came down with fever in Constantinople, botanized their way to the summit of Mount Olympus, and escaped capture by Barbary pirates. Then, in Athens, Boroni fell asleep by an open window and fell out, breaking his neck. Sibthorpe continued their work alone until he became ill at the ruins of Nicopolis. He staggered home to die at Oxford. His work was published posthumously, except his letters, which were accidentally burned as rubbish.

For four years I was confined to small rooms. But Athos gave me another realm to inhabit, big as the globe and expansive as time.

Because of Athos, I spent hours in other worlds then surfaced dripping, as from the sea. Because of Athos, our little house became a crow’s nest, a Vinland peathouse. Inside the cave of my skull oceans swayed with monstrous ice-floes, navigated by skin boats. Mariners hung from mizzenmasts and ropes made from walrus hide. Vikings rowed down the mighty rivers of Russia. Glaciers dredged their awful trails across hundreds of miles. I visited Marco Polo’s “celestial city” with its twelve thousand bridges, and sailed with him past the Cape of Perfumes. In Timbuktu we traded gold for salt. I learned about bacteria three billion years old, and how sphagnum moss was pulled from swamps and used as surgical dressing for wounded soldiers because it contained no bacteria. I learned how Theophrastus thought fossil fish swam to mountaintops by way of subterranean rivers. I learned that fossil elephants were found in the Arctic, fossil ferns in Antarctica, fossil reindeer in France, fossil musk ox in New York. I listened to Athos’s story of the origins of islands, how the mainland can stretch until it breaks at the weakest points, and those weaknesses are called faults. Each island represented a victory and a defeat: it had either pulled itself free or pulled too hard and found itself alone. Later, as these islands grew older, they turned their misfortune into virtue, learned to accept their cragginess, their misshapen coasts, ragged where they’d been torn. They acquired grace— some grass, a beach smoothed by tides.

I was transfixed by the way time buckled, met itself in pleats and folds; I stared at a picture in a book of a safety pin from the Bronze Age—a simple design that hadn’t changed in thousands of years. I stared at fossil plants called crinoids that looked like the night sky etched on rock. Athos said: “Sometimes I can’t look you in the eye; you’re like a building that’s burned out inside, with the outer walls still standing.” I stared at pictures of prehistoric bowls, spoons, combs. To go back a year or two was impossible, absurd. To go back millennia— ah¡ that was … nothing.

Athos didn’t understand, as I hesitated in the doorway, that I was letting Bella enter ahead of me, making sure she was not left behind. I paused when I ate, singing a silent incantation: A bite for me, a bite for you, an extra bite for Bella. “Jakob, you’re such a slow eater; you have the manners of an aristocrat.” Awake at night, I’d hear her breathing or singing next to me in the dark, half comforted, half terrified that my ear was pressed against the thin wall between the living and the dead, that the vibrating membrane between them was so fragile. I felt her presence everywhere, in daylight, in rooms I knew weren’t empty. I felt her touch on my back, my shoulders, my hair. I turned around to see if she was there, to see if she was looking, to see if she was standing guard, though if anything were to happen to me, she wouldn’t be able to prevent it. Watching with curiosity and sympathy from her side of the gossamer wall.

Athos’s house was isolated, a steep climb. Although we could see anyone approaching from afar, we also could be seen. It was a two-hour walk to town. Athos made the trip several times a month. While he was away, I barely moved, frozen with listening. If anyone climbed the hill, I hid in a sea chest, a box with a high curved lid; and each time less of me emerged.

We relied on one merchant, Old Martin, for supplies and news. He had known Athos’s father, and Athos since he was a child. Old Martin’s son, Ioannis, had a Jewish wife. One night, he and Allegra and their little son appeared at our door, their arms full of their belongings. We hid Avramakis—Match, for short—in a drawer. While German soldiers stretched out their legs under the tables of the Zakynthos Hotel.

Because Athos’s love was paleobotany, because his heroes were rock and wood as well as human, I learned not only the history of men but the history of earth. I learned the power we give to stones to hold human time. The stone tablets of the Commandments. Cairns, the ruins of temples. Gravestones, standing stones, the Rosetta, Stonehenge, the Parthenon. (The blocks cut and carried by inmates in the limestone quarries at Golleschau. The tombstones smashed in Hebrew cemeteries and plundered for Polish sidewalks; today bored citizens, staring at their feet while waiting for a bus, can still read the inscriptions.)

As a young man, Athos marvelled at the invention of the Geiger counter, and I remember him explaining to me, shortly after the end of the war, cosmic rays and Libby’s new method of carbon dating. “It’s the moment of death we measure from.”

Athos had a special affection for limestone—that crushed reef of memory, that living stone, organic history squeezed into massive mountain tombs. As a student, he wrote a paper on the karst fields of Yugoslavia. Limestone that develops slowly under pressure into marble—Athos describing the process made it sound like a spiritual journey. He was rhapsodic about the French Causses and the Pennines in Britain; about “Strata” Smith and Abraham Werner, who, he said, like surgeons “folded back the skin of time” while surveying canals and mines.