Fugitive pieces (19 page)

When I was at university,
Bearing False Witness
had just been reissued, thick as a small dictionary. Salman had already introduced his students to Athos’s lyric geology via the salt book. Athos’s impassioned descriptions—what a splendid anthropomorphist—even down to the generosity of an ionic bond. To believe there’s no thing that does not yearn. Dramatic and slow earth events as well as the rise of human commerce and culture, all an evolution of longing. How could you not have been shaped by such storytelling? You were fortunate to be trained by a master. When you turned your attention to your own poems, in your
Groundwork
, and you recount the geology of the mass graves, it’s as if we hear the earth speak.

I could smell the loneliness in Salman after your death, the specific loneliness that is between men, that is like no other. Salman reminisced— anecdotes about your twenties, how you walked together all night through the city, in every season, talking at first about Athos’s work and then about poetry and finally about Salman’s wounds though not about yours (not for many years). Stopping at the twenty-four-hour restaurant exhausted and hot, or exhausted and chilled, for pie and coffee, parting at two a.m., saying goodbye in the empty street. Salman watched you walk along St. Clair Avenue to your apartment where you lived alone after Athos died, and again years later after your first marriage ended, how disheartened you looked…. Salman told me about your habits, your trustworthiness, your moral seriousness. Your depressions. He told me about the perfection of Michaela, your new wife.

“Ben, when we say we’re looking for a spiritual adviser, we’re really looking for someone to tell us what to do with our bodies. Decisions of the flesh. We forget to learn from pleasure as well as pain,” said Salman after you died. “Jakob taught me so many things. For instance: What is the true value of knowledge? That it makes our ignorance more precise. When God asked the Jews in the desert to choose no other God, he wasn’t asking them to choose one God over another, but rather: choose one God or none. Jakob put great store in the incisiveness of dilemmas. You recall the opening image in his
Dilemma Poems
, one man staring at an impossibly high wall, another man staring at the same wall from the other side. … I remember someone at one of our parties talking about particle/wave duality. After a while Jakob said: ‘Perhaps it’s just that when light is up against the wall it’s forced to choose.’ Everyone laughed, listen to the layman talk about physics¡ But I knew what Jakob meant. The particle is secular man; the wave, the deist. And whether you live by a lie or live by a truth makes no difference, as long as you get past the wall. And while some are motivated by love (those who choose), most are motivated by fear (those who choose by not choosing). Then Jakob said: ‘Perhaps the electron is neither particle nor wave but something else instead, much less simple— a dissonance—like grief, whose pain is love.’“

We think of weather as transient, changeable, and above all, ephemeral; but everywhere nature remembers. Trees, for example, carry the memory of rainfall. In their rings we read ancient weather—storms, sunlight, and temperatures, the growing seasons of centuries. A forest shares a history, which each tree remembers even after it has been felled.

Only Maurice Salman, or Athos Roussos, would look at a student who can’t decide between an interest in the history of meteorology and in literature and say: “Why not find a way to keep studying both? In some cultures a man has more than one wife….” Naively, I told Salman that a formal comparison could be made between a weather map and a poem. I told him that I wanted to call my literature thesis “A Line of Weather.” Afterwards, I stepped from Salman’s office into the street; the October twilight was radiant with a pure pale gegenschein. I walked home, wishing for someone with whom I could share my news, wishing there was a woman waiting for me, so I could slip my cold hands under her sweater, across her warm skin, and explain what Salman had suggested instead for my thesis: the real-life objective correlative—weather and biography.

Years later when I turned my thesis into a book, Naomi nourished my research. … A severe December morning in St. Petersburg, 1849. Horse-whinny hangs whitely in the air, the jangle of traces; steaming manure, wet leather, and snow. I climb from the prison coach and follow Dostoyevsky into the gelid orange light of Semyonovsky Square. He shivers in the spring coat he’d been arrested in months before, his nose turning red against waxy cheeks, pale from incarceration. Blindfolded, he and the other supposed Petrashevsky radicals are lined up to be executed in the bitter winter wind. I stare hard into his face. Even under the blindfold, his transformation is obvious. The guns are cocked. Each man experiences the bullet breaking open his chest, the hot bite, the staggering fist the size of a child’s finger. Then the blindfolds are removed. Never before have I seen faces to match those, with the bare revelation that still they live, that there has been no shot. I fall with the weight of life; that is, with the weight of Dostoyevsky’s life, which unfolds from that moment with the intensity of a man who begins again.

While I travelled across Russia in leg-irons, Naomi carefully placed ivory potatoes, cooked until they crumbled at the touch of a fork, into chilled vermilion borscht. While I fell to my knees with hunger in the snow at To-boPsk, downstairs Naomi sliced thick slabs of stone-heavy bread. These edible jokes I termed the “culinary correlative.” I spent afternoons in Staraya Russa, then came downstairs to a supper of sweet cabbage soup.

Reading weather is one thing: all the expected examples of thunderstorms and avalanches, blizzards and heat waves, monsoons.
The Tempest
, the blasted heath in
King Lear.
Camus’s sunstroke in
The Stranger.
Tolstoy’s snowstorm in “Master and Man.” Your
Hotel Rain
poems. But biography…. The snowstorm that detained Pasternak in a dacha, where he fell in love while listening to Maria Yudino play Chopin (“Snow swept over the earth … the candle burned …” ). Madame Curie refusing to come out of the rain when she heard the news of her husband’s death. The Greek summer heat while the war boiled out of you like a fever. Dostoyevsky was the first example I thought of; his brutal convict march to Siberia. The prisoners stopped at Tobol’sk, where the old peasant women took pity on them. The good women stood on the banks of the Irtysh River, thirty below, and gave them bundles of tea, candles, cigars, and a copy of the New Testament with a ten-ruble note sewn into the binding. In this state of extremity, their charity permanently entered Dostoyevsky’s heart. In the howling sunset and the pastel snow, the women shouted blessings for the journey to the pitiful caravan of prisoners, a slack rope drawing its line across the white landscape, the wind biting their skin through their thin clothes. And Dostoyevsky trudged on, wondering how it could be too late, so early in his life.

The memories we elude catch up to us, overtake us like a shadow. A truth appears suddenly in the middle of a thought, a hair on a lens.

My father found the apple in the garbage. It was rotten and I'd thrown it out—I was eight or nine. He fished it from the bin, sought me in my room, grabbed me tight by the shoulder, and pushed the apple to my face.

“What is this? What is it?”

“An apple—”

My mother kept food in her purse. My father ate frequently to avoid the first twists of hunger because, once they gripped him, he’d eat until he was sick. Then he ate dutifully, methodically, tears streaming down his face, animal and spirit in such raw evidence, knowing he was degrading both. If one needs proof of the soul, it’s easily found. The spirit is most evident at the point of extreme bodily humiliation. There was no pleasure, for my father, associated with food. It was years before I realized this wasn’t merely a psychological difficulty, but also a moral one, for who could answer my father’s question: Knowing what he knew, should he stuff himself, or starve?

“An apple¡ Well, my smart son, is an apple food?”

“It was all rotten—”

On Sunday afternoons we’d drive into the farmland bordering the city or to their favourite park at the edge of Lake Ontario. My father always wore a cap to keep his few stray hairs from flying into his eyes. He drove with both hands gripping the wheel, never violating the speed limit. I slouched in the back seat, learning Morse code from the
The Boy Electrician
, or memorizing the Beaufort Scale (“Wind force o: smoke rises vertically, sea like a mirror. Force 5: small trees sway, whitecaps. Force 6: umbrellas used with difficulty. Force 9: structural damage occurs.” ). Once in a while my mother’s arm would appear over the front seat, a roll of candy dangling from her hand.

My parents would unfold their lawnchairs (even in winter) while I scrambled out alone, collecting rocks or identifying clouds or counting waves. I lay on grass or sand, reading, sometimes falling asleep in my heavy jacket under a clay sky with
The Moonstone
or
Men Against the Sea
with its waterspouts and volcanoes (“I cannot recall the hours that followed without experiencing something of the horror I felt at the time. Wind and rain, rain and wind, under a sky that held no promise of relief. In all that time, Mr. Bligh did not leave the tiller, and he seemed to have an exhilaration of mind that grew greater as our peril increased …” ). In good weather my mother set out the lunch she’d prepared, and they sipped strong tea from a thermos while the wind searched through the cold lake and cumulus chuffed across the horizon.

Early Sunday evenings, while my mother made dinner, I listened to music with my father in the living room. Watching him listen made me listen differently. His attention dissolved each piece to its theoretical components like an X-ray, emotion the grey fog of flesh. He used orchestras—other people’s arms and hands and breath—to signal me; a wordless entreaty, all meaning pressed into chords. Leaning against him, his arm around me—or, when I was very young, lying with my head on his lap—his hand on my hair absentmindedly but, for me, feral. He stroked my hair to Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Beethoven, Mahler’s lieder: “Now all longing wants to dream,” “I have become a stranger in the world.”

Those hours, wordless and close, shaped my sense of him. Lines of last light over the floor, the patterned sofa, the silky brocade of the curtains. Once in a while, on summer Sundays, the shadow of an insect or bird over the sun-soaked carpet. I breathed him in. The story of his life as I knew it from my mother—strange episodic images — and his stories of composers, merged together with the music. Cow breath and cow dung and fresh hay on Mahler’s muddy night road home, moonlight a spiderweb over the fields. Under the same moonlight, marching back to the camp, my father’s tongue a thong of wool; unbearably thirsty as he walked at gunpoint, past a bucket of rainwater, its small circular mirror of stars. Praying for rain so they could swallow what fell on their faces, rain that smelled like sweat. How he ate the centre of a cabbage in a farmer’s field, leaving it hollow but looking whole so no one would trace his escape from the soldiers in the grove.

I looked up from my father’s lap to his concentrating face. He always listened with his eyes open. Beethoven with the storm of the Sixth in his face, pacing in the forest and fields of Heiligenstadt, the real storm at his back, at my father’s back, mud weighing down his feet like overshoes, the shrill, desperate cry of a bird in the rainy trees. My father concentrating, during one long march, on a sliver in his hand, to keep his thoughts from his parents. I felt my skull under his fingers as he combed through my short hair. Beethoven frightening oxen with his windmill-waving arms, then stopping stock-still to look at the sky.My father staring at a lunar eclipse beside the chimneys, or staring at the sun’s dead light like scum on the potholes. The gun in my father’s face, how they kept nudging with their boots the cup of water from his reach.

As long as the symphony lasted, the song cycle, the quartet, I had access to him. I could pretend his attention to the music was attention to me. His favourite pieces were familiar, finite journeys we took together, recognizing signposts of ritardando and sostenuto, key changes. Sometimes he played a recording by a different conductor and I experienced the acuity of his ears as he compared interpretations: “Ben, do you hear how he rushes the arpeggios.” “Listen to how he draws it out … but if he emphasizes here, he’ll ruin the crescendo later on!” And the following week we’d go back to the version we knew and loved like a face, a place. A photograph.