Fugitive pieces (5 page)

Ioannis drained the glass with one tilt of his head.

“Athos, did you know my wife’s family is from Corfu? They lived on Velissariou Street, Velissariou Street, near Solomou….”

Athos and I waited. The shutters were half closed against the sun. The room was very hot.

“The boat was overflowing. I saw it with my own eyes. The boat was so full of Jews from Corfu that when it reached Zakynthos harbour the soldiers couldn’t cram on a single soul. The poor few they rounded up were waiting in the noon sun. Mrs. Serenos, old Constantine Caro¡ In Platia Solomou, right under the Virgin’s nose, with their hands above their heads, at gunpoint. But then the boat didn’t stop. My father and I waited at the edge of the square, to see what the Germans would do. Mr. Caro started to weep. He thought he was saved, you see, we all thought that, we weren’t thinking properly, and we weren’t thinking too that if our Jews were saved, it was because the Corfu Jews had been taken in their place.”

Ioannis stood, he sat down. He stood up again.

“The boat sailed right past the harbour. Archbishop Chrysostomos said a prayer. Mrs. Serenos started to shout, she began to walk away shouting that she’d die in her own home, not in the platia with all her friends looking on. And they shot her. Right there. Right in front of us all. In front of Argyros’s where she used to shop … sometimes she brought a little toy for Avramakis … she lived across the street…. ”

Athos put his hands over his ears.

“The others were pushed onto a truck that stayed in the blazing platia the rest of the afternoon, with SS all around, drinking limonadha. We were trying to think what to do, to do something. Then suddenly the truck took off, in the direction of Keri.”

“What happened to them?”

“No one knows.”

“And the people on the boat? Where were they taking them?”

“My father guesses to the train station at Larissa.”

“And Karrer?”

“No one knows where he is, my father heard he escaped by kaiki the same night we came to you. The archbishop stayed with the Jews, he wanted to get in the truck with them but the soldiers wouldn’t let him. He stood all day next to the truck, talking to the poor people inside. …”

He paused.

“Maybe Jakob shouldn’t hear any more.”

Athos looked uncertain.

“Ioannis, he’s already heard so much.”

I thought Ioannis was going to weep.

“If you’re looking for the ghetto of Hania, Crete’s two-thousand-year-old ghetto, look for it a hundred miles off Polegandros, at the bottom of the sea. …”

As he spoke, the room filled with shouts. The water rose around us, bullets tearing the surface for those who took too long to drown. Then the peaceful blue sheen of the Aegean slipped shut again.

After a while Ioannis left. I watched as Athos walked with him partway down the hill. When he returned, Athos went to his desk and wrote down what Ioannis had told us.

Athos would no longer let me go out on the roof at night.

He had been so careful to maintain order. Regular meals, daily lessons. But now our days were without shape. He still told stories, to try and cheer us, but now they were aimless. How he and Nikos learned about Chinese kites and flew a handmade dragon above Cape Spinari while the children from the village perched on the coast, waiting their turn to feel the tug of the string. How they lost the kite in the waves. … All his stories went wrong halfway through, and reminded us of the sea.

The only thing that calmed Athos was to draw. The greater his despair, the more obsessively he drew. He took down a battered copy of Blossfeldt’s
Elementary Forms
and, in pen and ink, copied the photographs of magnified plants that transformed stems into burnished pewter, blossoms into fleshy fish mouths, pods into hairy accordion pleats. Athos collected poppies, lavatera, basil, broom, and spread them on his desk. Then, in watercolours, he made precise renderings. He quoted Wilson: “ ‘Nature’s harmonies cannot be guessed at.’“ He explained as he painted: “Broom grows in the Bible. Hagar left Ishmael in a clump of broom, Elijah lay in broom when he asked to die. Perhaps it was the burning bush; even when the fire goes out, its inner branches continue to burn.” When he was finished, he gathered what was edible and we used it for supper. Important lessons: look carefully; record what you see. Find a way to make beauty necessary; find a way to make necessity beautiful.

By the end of summer Athos rallied enough to insist that our lessons resume. But the dead surrounded us, an aurora over the blue water.

At night I choked against Bella’s round face, a doll’s face, immobile, inanimate, her hair floating behind her. These nightmares, in which my parents and my sister drowned with the Jews of Crete, continued for years, continued long after we’d moved to Toronto.

Often on Zakynthos and later in Canada, for moments I was lost. Standing next to the fridge in our Toronto kitchen, afternoon light falling in a diagonal across the floor. About something I can’t remember Athos answered me. Perhaps even then the answer had nothing to do with the question. “If you hurt yourself, Jakob, I will have to hurt myself. You will have proven to me my love for you is useless.”

Athos said: “I can’t save a boy from a burning building. Instead he must save me from the attempt; he must jump to earth.”

While I hid in the radiant light of Athos’s island, thousands suffocated in darkness. While I hid in the luxury of a room, thousands were stuffed into baking stoves, sewers, garbage bins. In the crawlspaces of double ceilings, in stables, pigsties, chicken coops. A boy my age hid in a crate; after ten months he was blind and mute, his limbs atrophied. A woman stood in a closet for a year and a half, never sitting down, blood bursting her veins. While I was living with Athos on Zakynthos, learning Greek and English, learning geology, geography, and poetry, Jews were filling the corners and cracks of Europe, every available space. They buried themselves in strange graves, any space that would fit their bodies, absorbing more room than was allotted them in the world. I didn’t know that while I was on Zakynthos, a Jew could be purchased for a quart of brandy, perhaps four pounds of sugar, cigarettes. I didn’t know that in Athens, they were being rounded up in “Freedom Square.” That the sisters of the Vilna convent were dressing men as nuns in order to provide ammunition to the underground. In Warsaw, a nurse hid children under her skirt, passing through the ghetto gates, until one evening— a gentle twilight descending on those typhus-infected, lice-infested streets — the nurse was caught, the child thrown into the air and shot like a tin can, the nurse given the “Nazi pill” : one bullet in the throat. While Athos taught me about anabatic and katabatic winds, Arctic smoke, and the Spectre of the Brocken, I didn’t know that Jews were being hanged from their thumbs in public squares. I didn’t know that when there were too many for the ovens, corpses were burned in open pits, flames ladled with human fat. I didn’t know that while I listened to the stories of explorers in the clean places of the world (snow-covered, salt-stung) and slept in a clean place, men were untangling limbs, the flesh of friends and neighbours, wives and daughters, coming off in their hands.

In September 1944, the Germans left Zakynthos. Across the hills, music from town spun through the air frail as a distant radio. A man rode across the island, his high-pitched yelps and the Greek flag snapping above his head. I didn’t go outside that day, though I went downstairs and looked into the garden. The next morning Athos asked me to sit with him by the front door. He carried two chairs outside. Sunlight blared from every direction. My eyeballs jangled in my skull. I sat with my back against the house and looked down at myself. My legs did not belong to me; thin as lengths of rope knotted at the knees, skin dripping where muscle used to be, tender in the strong light. The heat pressed down. After a while Athos led me, dazed, inside.

I grew stronger, each day climbing further down and up the hill. Finally I walked with Athos to Zakynthos town, which gleamed as if an egg had been cracked on the sharp Venetian details and dripped shiny over the pale yellow and white plaster. Athos had described it so often: the hedges of quince and pomegranate, the path of cypresses. The narrow streets with laundry drying from the grillwork balconies, the view of Mount Skopos, with the convent Panayia Skopotissa. The statue of Solomos in the square, Nikos’s fountain.

Athos presented me to Old Martin. There was now so little to sell that his tiny shop was mostly empty. I remember standing next to a shelf where a few cherries were scattered like rubies on ivory paper. During the occupations, Old Martin tried to satisfy the cravings of his patrons. This was his private resistance. He bartered secretly with ship captains for a delicacy he knew a customer pined for. Thus, cunningly, he bolstered spirits. He kept track of the larders of the community, efficient as a caterer at a fine hotel. Martin knew who was buying food for Jews in hiding after the ghetto was abandoned, and he tried to save extra fruit and oil for families with young children. The Patron Saint of Groceries. Old Martin’s short hair stood up in several directions. If Athos’s hair was silver ore, Martin’s was jagged and white as quartz. His knobbly arthritic hands trembled as he reached deliberately for a fig or a lemon, holding one at a time. In those days of scarcity his shaking care seemed appropriate, an acknowledgement of the value of a single plum.

Athos and I walked through the town. We rested in the platia where the last Jews of the zudeccha had waited to die. A woman was washing the steps of the Zakynthos Hotel. In the harbour, ropes tapped against the masts.

For four years I'd imagined Athos and myself sharing secret languages. Now I heard Greek everywhere. In the street, reading signs for the farmakio or the kafenio, I felt profanely exposed. I ached to return to our little house.

In India there are butterflies whose folded wings look just like dry leaves. In South Africa there is a plant that’s indistinguishable from the stones among which it grows: the stone-copying plant. There are caterpillars that look like branches, moths that look like bark. To remain invisible, the plaice changes colour as it moves through sunlit water. What is the colour of a ghost?

To survive was to escape fate. But if you escape your fate, whose life do you then step into?