Fugitive pieces (12 page)

I know only fragments of what Athos’s death contained: no less than all the elements and their powers, ten thousand names for things, the humility of lichen. The instincts of migration: stars, magnetism, angles of light. The energy of time that alters mass. The element that reminded him most of his country, salt: olives, cheese, vine leaves, sea foam, sweat. Fifty years of intimacy with Kostas and Daphne, his memory of their bodies at twenty; his own body, as a child, at fifteen, at twenty-five and fifty, the selves that remain as we age, just as words remain on the page though darkness erases them. Two wars, which are both the rotten part of the fruit that can’t be cut away and the fruit; that there’s nothing a man will not do to another, nothing a man will not do for another. But who was the woman who first unbuttoned for him the two birds of her breasts in a night garden? Did he remember Helen’s hands holding his or were they in his hair or were her arms outstretched when his head rested on her thighs? Did they imagine children, what words did he regret? Who was the first woman whose hair he washed, what song could have been his own voice singing of love when he first heard it?

When a man dies, his secrets bond like crystals, like frost on a window. His last breath obscures the glass.

I sat at Athos’s desk. In a small flat in a strange city in a country I did not yet love.

In Toronto, Athos had recreated his study on Zakynthos. It was a chaotic site from which a variety of objects could be excavated. On Athos’s desk the night he died: a wooden box full of Meccano, the same set of metal wheels and hinges he had as a boy. A photomicrograph of the frail lamellae of waterlogged Biskupin oak. A photo of Kispiox totems paperclipped to an analysis of earth and weather conditions. A glass paperweight enclosing a sample of lepidodendron. A miniature birch-bark canoe. An article on the Vestfold Hills in Antarctica as a site for freeze-drying wood artifacts. Notes for an upcoming waterlogged wood conference in Ottawa. A pen and ink sketch of the fossil trees at Joggins, Nova Scotia. Kazantzakis’s translations of Darwin’s
Origin of Species
and Dante’s
Comedy.
A cup with coffee grounds trailing the last incline of the cup to his lips.

In his desk, I found a packet of letters…. The intimacy that death forces on us. At first I did not want to look at them. I recognized Athos’s elegant Greek script. The letters were to Helen, written when both she and Athos were studying in Vienna, the year before he went to Cambridge. I fingered the envelopes and smoothed the onionskin. The silence of the empty flat pressed in on me with the weight of self-pity.

“When you are alone— at sea, in the polar dark— an absence can keep you alive. The one you love maintains your mind. But when she’s merely across the city, this is an absence that eats you to the bone.”

“My father approves of Vienna, but he still hopes to persuade me against geology. I stand firm, despite his shrewd argument that if I were an engineer I would still confront karst, while planning railways and water supplies. …”

While he was in Vienna, exploring intellectual and actual landscapes, honeycombed with caves and swallow-holes, tunnels and sinks, Athos also tumbled through the sense-bruised surface of things, into love.

In our flat, where no word has been spoken for weeks, I imagine Athos walking alone late at night, past the modern buildings of the Ringstrasse and pale baroque churches, streets that would soon be transformed by war. As I read his letters, written half a century before to a woman I know almost nothing of, his “H,” I am shaken by my own longing. I’m embarrassed to be eavesdropping on Athos’s young voice, the voice of my koumbaros when he was my age.

“Your family—your mother and your sister whom you love—want to know everything; but a real marriage must always be a secret between two people. We must guard it under our tongues like a prayer. Our secrets will be our courage when we need it.”

“As for your brother’s unhappiness, I’m naive enough to think that love is always good, no matter how long ago, no matter the circumstances. Fm not old enough yet to imagine the instances where this isn’t true and where regret outweighs everything.”

His arteries silted up like an old river. The heart is a fistful of earth.
The heart is a lake
, …

All I know of Athos’s Helen is what I learned from the letters. There is a photograph. Her expression is so open and earnest it calls across the years. Her dark hair is piled high and woven elaborately as a corbeille. Her face is too angular to be pretty. She is beautiful.

In the same drawer as the letters and Helen’s photograph, there is a thick folder containing faint blue carbons and newspaper cuttings: Athos’s search for my sister, Bella.

When you’ve hardened yourself in certain places, crying is painful, almost as if nature is against it.

“I know the records are incomplete …” “Please post the following every Friday for one year…” “I know I have written to you before …” “Please check your lists … taking into account possible variations of spelling … for the period of time …” Athos’s last inquiry was dated two months before he died.

I thought that he had given up years before. But I understood why Athos had kept this to himself. I lay on the carpet in his study. “Love is always good, no matter the circumstances … our secrets will be our courage when we need it.” I tried to believe this but I hadn’t yet learned that true hope is severed from expectation, and his words, like his search for Bella, seemed painfully innocent. But I held the file folder the way a child holds a doll.

Once in a while a tram squealed past. Through the floor I felt the heavy iron wheels rumbling on their tracks. My father’s finger, dipped in bootblack, draws a tram on a corner of newspaper, illustrating the Y-shaped wires by which Warsaw streetcars attach to the sky. “In Warsaw,” my father says, “engines travel through the streets.” “They move by themselves?” I ask. My father nods, “No horses!” I woke up. I turned on the light and lay down again and closed my eyes.

When I sat down to write the news to Kostas and Daphne, and to tell them I would someday bring Athos’s ashes to Zakynthos, I could barely move my pen across the page. “I will bring Athos home, to land that remembers him.” Koumbaros, how can a man write such news with a beautiful hand.

For many nights following Athos’s death, I continued to sleep on the floor in his study among his boxes of random research. We had always meant to organize it together. But Athos’s work on Nazi archaeology grew to take all his strength. He started documenting immediately after the war, as soon as information began to flow. Our eyes slowly became accustomed to the darkness. Athos could speak about it, he needed to speak of it, but I couldn’t. He asked endless questions to order his thoughts, leaving “why” to the last. But in my thinking, I started with the last question, the “why” he hoped would be answered by all the others. Therefore I began with failure and had nowhere to go.

But in the first months of living alone, I again depended on a familiar drug; to inhabit the other world Athos and I had shared: guileless knowledge, the history of matter. During the night I dipped into the boxes, haphazardly labelled in groups of essays and notes: “the sexual adventures of conifers … the poetics of covalent bonding … a possible process for freeze-drying coffee beans.” Fascinating but explicable forces; winds and ocean currents, tectonic plates. The transformations caused by trade and piracy; how minerals and wood changed the map. Athos’s essay on peat alone was long enough for a small book, as was his “A Covenant of Salt.” In Vienna he’d begun collecting examples for a project on parody within cultures he called “From Relic to Replica.”

He often applied the geologic to the human, analyzing social change as he would a landscape; slow persuasion and catastrophe. Explosions, seizures, floods, glaciation. He constructed his own historical topography.

During the nights among his boxes, in the months after Athos died, his thinking came to resemble in my imagination an Escher etching; walls that are windows, fish that are birds, and the brilliant leap of modern science: the hand that draws itself.

For the next three years, I compiled Athos’s notes on the SS-Ahnenerbe as well as I could. Working in his study, alone now in our flat, I felt Athos’s presence so strongly I could smell his pipe, I could feel his hand on my shoulder. Sometimes, late at night, an alertness would seize me and I would see him from the corner of my eye, looking in on me from the hallway. In his research, Athos descends so far that he reaches a place where redemption is possible, but it is only the redemption of tragedy.

I knew that, for me, the descent would go on and on, long after my work for Athos was finished. At that time, I was earning a part-time living as a translator for an engineering company. After the day’s work was done, I slumped at Athos’s desk, in despair at his many files and boxes of facts. Sometimes I went out for dinner with Maurice Salman, who now had a job at the museum. Maurice’s companionship saved me; he saw I was in trouble. By then, Maurice had met and married Irena. Often Irena would cook for us while we discussed the seemingly unending task of completing Athos’s book,
Bearing False Witness.
Sometimes I would look into the kitchen and see her reading a cookbook while she stood over the stove, her long yellow braid over her shoulder like a scarf, and I would have to look away from emotion. Such an ordinary sight, a woman stirring a pot.

The night I finished the work of my koumbaros, I wept with emptiness as I typed his dedication, for his colleagues at Biskupin: “Murder steals from a man his future. It steals from him his own death. But it must not steal from him his life.”

In our cold, dark Canadian flat, I pour fresh water into the sea, recalling not only the Greek lament “that the dead may drink” but also the covenant of the Eskimo hunter, who pours fresh water into the mouth of his quarry. Seals, living in salt water, suffer perpetual thirst. The animal has offered its life in exchange for water. If the hunter does not keep his promise, he will lose all his good fortune; no other animal will allow itself to be captured by him.

The best teacher lodges an intent not in the mind but in the heart.

I know I must honour Athos’s lessons, especially one: to make love necessary. But I do not yet understand that this is also my promise to Bella. And that to honour them both, I must resolve a perpetual thirst.

PHOSPHORUS

I
t’s a clear October day. The wind scatters bright leaves against the blue opalescence of air. But there’s no sound. Bella and I have entered a dream, the animate colour surrounding us intense, every leaf twitching as if on the verge of sleep. Bella is happy: the whole birch forest gathers itself in her expression. Now we hear the river and move towards it, the swirls and eddies of Brahms’s Intermezzo No. 2 that descend, descend, andante non troppo, rising only in one final gust. I turn and Bella’s gone; my glance has caused her to vanish. I wrench around. I call, but the noise of the leaves is suddenly overwhelming, like a rush of falls. Surely she’s gone ahead to the river. I run there and dig for clues of her in the muddy bank. It’s dark; dogwood becomes her white dress. A shadow, her black hair. The river, her black hair. Moonlight, her white dress.

Like my childhood encounter with the tree, I stare a long time at Alex’s silk robe hanging from the bedroom door, as if it is my sister’s ghost. 1968, in our small Toronto bedroom, in the flat I used to share with Athos. In the dimness, the most liquid of Brahms’s intermezzos flows on and on.

Everything is wrong: the bedroom with its white furniture, the woman asleep beside me, my panic. For when I wake I know it’s not Bella who has vanished, but me. Bella, who is nowhere to be found, is looking for me. How will she ever find me here, beside this strange woman? Speaking this language, eating strange food, wearing these clothes?

Just as I leaned over her while she was reading, I badgered Bella while she practised, with the same appetite—to penetrate the mystery of the black symbols on the page. Sometimes my father would play, but he wasn’t half as good as Bella, and he was ashamed of the leather polish he could never completely remove from his hands. But I loved to hear him limp through a piece and, looking back, it seems right to see work-bruised hands on a clean keyboard, as if marked by the effort of making such sounds.

I was too young to remember the composers or the names of the pieces Bella played, so if I wanted her to play something for me, I hummed the tune. I’ve wanted so often over the years to sing to her, so she would teach me the names of things. I knew only two pieces by title, because I asked her to play them more than anything else. A Brahms intermezzo and Beethoven’s “Moonlight.” When she played the Beethoven, my sister told me to imagine a deep lake surrounded by mountains, where the wind becomes trapped and the waves move in every direction under the moon. While I was skipping stones into the moonlight, perhaps Bella was constructing an elaborate fantasy about Ludwig and his Immortal Beloved. In my memory she plays as if she understood intimately his adult passions, as if she too could imagine writing in a letter, “impossible to leave the world until I’ve brought forth all that is in me…. Providence, grant me but one day of pure joy.”

The music library was a few blocks from the flat, in the middle of a park. It was what a listening library should be, wood-panelled rooms, plush chairs, trees swimming in the windows. To listen to music alone and in public, like dining alone in a restaurant, seemed a strange and embarrassing activity, yet after
Bearing False Witness
was published, it became my habit to walk there once or twice a week, after dinner. I’d decided to listen systematically through the alphabet, one composer for each letter, and then start again.

One cold night in March, I stood at the checkout desk, having just returned Fauré’s nocturnes. I had the newspaper with me and was contemplating the crossword while waiting patiently for the librarian to bring me the quintets for piano and strings.

“Hip hip Fauré.”

I turned around to eyes as blue as the Kianou caves. To eagerness, strength, and energy.

“I’m making a check list, is Liszt Czech?”

Her cardigan was open and, underneath, her silky blouse clung to her with static electricity.

“No,” I managed. “Also,” after a few seconds, “… nix Bach, Bax, and Bix.”

“Did you get the one about the city in Czechoslovakia?” she asked, pointing to the crossword…. “Oslo¡ You know, Czech-oslo-vakia.”

At that moment, the librarian came back with the quintets. Not knowing what to say I took the record and mumbled my way over to the bins of sheet music. A few minutes later I saw her put on her coat. With a jolt of courage I scrambled out the door behind her.

“I love the spring,” I said stupidly, then noticed she was clutching her coat tight against the wind.

She asked me if I knew about the concerts at the conservatory.

“They’re free. WEA.”

I looked at her blankly.

“Workers’ Education Association … the union … every Sunday afternoon at two.”

I stood, helpless, watching strands of her auburn hair blow against her black wool tarn. Then I looked down at my feet and at her long legs and her short fur-topped boots.

“Goodbye,” she said.

“So long …”

“Ceylon¡ Abyssinia Samoa. Can’t Roumania; Tibet. Moscow!”

She strode off and looking back once, gave me a jaunty salute, like a WAC in a recruiting poster.

That’s how I met Alexandra.

Her father called her Sandra and she didn’t mind. With him, Alex had nothing to prove. She called her father Dr. Right—which wasn’t a Freudian signal but simply cockney slang for Dr. Maclean—he’ll make you right as rain.

Dr. Maclean marinated his young daughter in British military pride. He told her how his fellow Londoners had carried historical treasures—including the just unearthed Sutton Hoo helmet—into the underground at Aldwych station, to protect them from the bombings. He told her stories about Major General “The Salamander” Freyberg under whom he’d served as medical officer in Crete. Freyberg had buried Rupert Brooke on Skyros and, like Byron, swam the Hellespont. Alex Gillian Dodson Maclean was -regaled -with-tales- of British intelligence agent Jasper Maskelyne who, in civilian life, came from a family of master magicians. He helped win the war with magic. Aside from concocting ordinary ruses—false road signs, exploding sheep, artificial forests disguising landing fields, and mock battalions created with shadows — Maskelyne also staged wizard japes, large-scale strategic illusions. He hid the entire Suez Canal with reflectors and searchlights. He moved Alexandria harbour a mile up the coast; each night a papier-maché city was bombed in its stead, complete with fake rubble and canvas craters.

When she told me about these illusions, I thought of Speer’s phantom architecture, his pillars of searchlights at Nuremberg, the ghost coliseum that vanished at dawn. I thought of his neo-classical columns dissolving in the sun while the chamber walls stood. I thought of Houdini, astonishing audiences by stuffing himself into boxes and trunks, then escaping, unaware that a few years later other Jews would be crawling into bins and boxes and cupboards, in order to escape.

Her mother died when Alex was fifteen. Her father hired a housekeeper. Alex and the doctor spent at least one evening a week playing Scrabble and did the London
Times
crossword together on the weekend. Alex built up an arsenal of word wit. She worked as the medical secretary in her father’s clinic, which he shared with two other doctors. In spare moments she made up medical anagrams — Physician, heal yourself: 111? Pay-shy? Our fee in cash. She thought about becoming a doctor herself, but she had too much on the go. Her passion was music; she was a professional listener. She went to the symphony, the jazz clubs, she heard recordings and could identify who was playing cornet or the piano after a few bars. Meeting Alex at the music library was like a gift of a beautiful bird on the windowsill. She was like freedom just over a border, an oasis in the sand. She was all legs and arms, gangly and elegant, all bits and pieces with one united appeal. The teenager peeped from her face or her limbs just when she was trying to be most sophisticated. This unsettled innocence was like iron filings to a magnet; she was everywhere on my heart, spiky and charged, itchy and there to stay.

I suppose I was similarly unsettled, but had no sense of how I appeared in the world. We were both skinny as lock-picks. What did she see when she looked, in love, at me? Her father had filled her with Europe, where it was always raining and romantic, where things were intense and at stake. When not in the safety of the British enclave of her schoolmates, she gravitated to the immigrant element, to union-organized events. Her father had a special respect for Greeks, ever since he’d witnessed the old women of Modhion resisting the Germans with brooms and shovels. I suppose Alex thought I was the romance he’d prepared her for.

Alex came out swinging, but was always hoping, or so she thought, for someone to wrestle her arms to her sides. She was a character in a screwball comedy searching in vain for a serious moment. She spent a lot of energy being modern to the minute and at the same time wanted a life of the mind—without all the reading. Good intentions are the last thing to vanish in a relationship. We fastened on to each other in an instant and it took five years to come apart. She would leap up and fling her arms around my neck like a child. She bought red shoes and only wore them when it rained because she liked how they looked on the wet pavement. She was a perpetual-motion machine that wanted to talk philosophy. When Alex wasn’t dancing, she was standing on her head.

We sat in Bassel’s or in Diana Sweets; we talked in the haze of Constantine’s bakery where the smell of cigarettes obliterated even the smell of bread. She called Constantine’s place “Yreka Bakery” — a palindrome. Alex adored palindromes and we habitually hauled out a few favourites on our walks downtown. “Too far Edna we wander afoot.” “Are we not drawn onward, we few, drawn onward to new era?”

But Alex was most in her element sharing a mickey with her friends at the Top Hat or at the Embassy Club or the Colonial. She sat at the small, round, linen-covered tables at the Royal York and seductively dangled her leftist ideas like high heels. Once we were joined by a sad young man. His father owned a mattress factory but the son was on the side of the union. His shame had two masters. Later, walking home, Alex laughed. “Don’t waste your sympathy on him¡ He got in trouble following a skirt through the union doors!”

Alex shocked me, just as she intended. She shrugged off expectation with language; her hardness was a form of swearing. She swaggered the delicious phrase “following a skirt” and I ached with tenderness for all the frustrated innocence in her extravagant tongue.

Alex was a sword-swallower, a fire-eater. In her mouth English was dangerous and alive, edgy and hot. Alex, Queen of the Crossword.

She went on intellectual benders, arguing all night, leaning against men in crowded bars, stuffing herself with ideals. She was stunning. But she was a political debauchee. I didn’t have the confidence to argue Canadian politics with her blue-blood Marxist friends. How could I discuss their upper-class communism with them, those who shone with certainty and had never had the misfortune of witnessing theory refuted by fact? I felt maggoty with insecurities; I had European circuitry, my voltage wrong for the socket.

Alex lacked confidence in only one area. Too proud to reveal her innocence, she flirted to keep men away. I admired her armour of words, learning from her how to endure my own shyness secretly. As Maurice might say, Alex was a squeeze in a tight squeeze, a woman on the fast track who couldn’t jump off her high horse for a roll in the hay. But my obvious, painful inexperience drew out her desire. She knew I was immobilized just standing close enough to smell the perfume at her hairline, the back of her neck.

When I was with Maurice and Irena, an ordinary word —jacket, earring, wrist—blinded me in the middle of a conversation. I fell dumb. If Maurice saw disaster, he also saw that Alex was lithe as an otter, a coy explosion in a fitted suit or with one trousered leg draped over the arm of a chair.

Upon first opening her eyes as my wife in our room at the Royal York, Alex yawned. “Just once I’d really like to mess up a hotel room.”

Alex’s sweater on a chair, her scent lingering in the wool. Tucked behind furniture were her various handbags, from which mysterious items were transferred, one to another, whenever she went out. She’d moved into the flat I’d shared with Athos and now I explored the place like a stranger. I had entered the ancient civilization of women. The polyglycols in her perfumes and makeup, in her lotions and talcs, replaced Athos’s vials of linseed oil and sugar compounds, his polyvinyl acetate and microcrystalline wax, his alkylene oxides and thermosetting resins.

When Maurice and Irena invited Alex and me for dinner, Irena used her wedding silver and a lace tablecloth. Irena was a flustered and radiant hostess, and served us her poppyseed cake with an embarrassed pride. Alex wanted to enjoy these evenings but she was restless. She brought along some scotch and cigarettes and tucked her feet under her in the wingchair, but I could see she was ready to bolt. Whenever we were at Maurice and Irena’s, she felt she was missing something, everything, elsewhere. If she went into the kitchen to help Irena or gave Irena a little hug when we said goodnight, my heart dilated with hope that someday Alex would really learn to love us all, as we were.

Alex could make the rest of us feel like parents and she the wilful, spirited child. She followed Irena and looked into the pots and tasted things appreciatively, then sat on the kitchen stool and smoked. While chopping vegetables, she told Irena about her father’s clinic or about her latest jazz genius, then got distracted and lit another cigarette, Irena finishing the job. Marriage gave Alex moral security, her hijinks and wildness were now socially harmless. She did appreciate our conversations, our long walks; she appreciated that I cooked for us since I was doing translations now in earnest and worked at home. Alex shared the domestic work but drew the line at laundry and mending; as she would say, “Euripedes? Eumenides.” I was also translating Greek poems for Kostas’s friend in London. And for a while I taught night-school English to other immigrants. I still wasn’t writing much poetry, but I did write some very short stories. They were always, in one sense or another, about hiding; and they only came to me when I was half asleep.