Fugitive pieces (6 page)

The Zohar says: “All visible things will be born again invisible.”

The present, like a landscape, is only a small part of a mysterious narrative. A narrative of catastrophe and slow accumulation. Each life saved: genetic features to rise again in another generation. “Remote causes.”

Athos confirmed that there was an invisible world, just as real as what’s evident. Full-grown forests still and silent, whole cities, under a sky of mud. The realm of the peat men, preserved as statuary. The place where all those who have uttered the bony password and entered the earth wait to emerge. From underground and underwater, from iron boxes and behind brick walls, from trunks and packing crates….

When Athos sat at his desk, soaking wood samples in polyethylene glycol, replacing missing fibres with a waxy filler, I could see—watching his face while he worked— that he was actually traipsing through vanished, impossibly tall Carboniferous forests, with tree bark like intricate brocades: designs more beautiful than any fabric. The forest swayed one hundred feet above his head in a prehistoric autumn.

Athos was an expert in buried and abandoned places. His cosmology became mine. I grew into it naturally. In this way, our tasks became the same.

Athos and I would come to share our secrets of the earth. He described the bog bodies. They had steeped for centuries, their skin tanning to dark leather, umber juices deep in the lines of palms and soles. In autumn, with the smell of snow in the dark clouds, men had been led out into the moor as sacrificial offerings. There, they were anchored with birch and stones to drown in the acidic ground. Time stopped. And that is why, Athos explained, the bog men are so serene. Asleep for centuries, they are uncovered perfectly intact; thus they outlast their killers — whose bodies have long dissolved to dust.

In turn I told him of the Polish synagogues whose sanctuaries were below ground, like caves. The state prohibited synagogues to be built as high as churches, but the Jews refused to have their reverence diminished by building codes. The vaulted ceilings were still built; the congregation simply prayed deeper underground.

I told him of the great wooden horses that once decorated a synagogue near my parents’ house and were now desecrated and buried. Someday perhaps they would rise in a herd, as if nothing had occurred, to graze in a Polish field.

I fantasized the power of reversal. Later, in Canada, looking at photographs of the mountains of personal possessions stored at Kanada in the camps, I imagined that if each owner of each pair of shoes could be named, then they would be brought back to life. A cloning from intimate belongings, a mystical pangram.

Athos told me about Biskupin and its discovery by a local teacher out for an evening stroll. The Gasawka River was low and the huge wooden pylons perforated the surface of the lake like massive rushes. More than two thousand years before, Biskupin had been a rich community, supremely organized. They harvested grain and bred livestock. Wealth was shared. Their comfortable houses were arranged in neat rows, the island fortification resembling a modern subdivision. Each gabled home had ample light as well as privacy; a porch, a hearth, a bedroom loft. Biskupin craftsmen traded with Egypt and the Black Sea coast. But then there was a change in climate. Farmland turned to heath, then to bog.

The water table rose inexorably until it was obvious that Biskupin would have to be abandoned. The city remained underwater until 1933, when the level of the Gasawka River dropped. Athos joined the excavation in 1937. His job was to solve the preservation problems of the waterlogged structures. Soon after Athos made the decision to take me home with him, Biskupin was overrun by soldiers. We learned this after the war. They burned records and relics. They demolished the ancient fortifications and houses that had withstood millennia. Then they shot five of Athos’s colleagues in the surrounding forest. The others were sent to Dachau.

And that is one of the reasons Athos believed we saved each other.

The invisible paths in Athos’s stories: rivers following the inconsistencies of land like tears following the imperfections on skin. Wind and currents that stir up underwater creatures, bioluminescent gardens that guide birds to shore. The Arctic tern, riding Westerlies and Trades each year from Arctic to Antarctica and back again. On their brains, the rotating constellations, the imprint of longing and distance. The fixed route of bison over prairie, so worn that the railway laid its tracks along it.

Geography cut by rail. The black seam of that wailing migration from life to death, the lines of steel drawn across the ground, penetrating straight through cities and towns now famous for murder: from Berlin through Breslau; from Rome through Florence, Padua, and Vienna; from Vilna through Grodno and Lodz; from Athens through Salonika and Zagreb. Though they were taken blind, though their senses were confused by stench and prayer and screams, by terror and memories, these passengers found their way home. Through the rivers, through the air.

When the prisoners were forced to dig up the mass graves, the dead entered them through their pores and were carried through their bloodstreams to their brains and hearts. And through their blood into another generation. Their arms were into death up to the elbows, but not only into death—into music, into a memory of the way a husband or son leaned over his dinner, a wife’s expression as she watched her child in the bath; into beliefs, mathematical formulas, dreams. As they felt another man’s and another’s blood-soaked hair through their fingers, the diggers begged forgiveness. And those lost lives made molecular passage into their hands.

How can one man take on the memories of even one other man, let alone five or ten or a thousand or ten thousand; how can they be sanctified each? He stops thinking. He concentrates on the whip, he feels a face in his hand, he grasps hair as if in a passion grasp, its matted thickness between his fingers, pulling, his hands full of names. His holy hands move, autonomous.

In the Golleschau quarry, stone-carriers were forced to haul huge blocks of limestone endlessly, from one mound to another and back again. During the torture, they carried their lives in their hands. The insane task was not futile only in the sense that faith is not futile.

A camp inmate looked up at the stars and suddenly remembered that they’d once seemed beautiful to him. This memory of beauty was accompanied by a bizarre stab of gratitude. When I first read this I couldn’t imagine it. But later I felt I understood. Sometimes the body experiences a revelation because it has abandoned every other possibility.

It’s no metaphor to feel the influence of the dead in the world, just as it’s no metaphor to hear the radiocarbon chronometer, the Geiger counter amplifying the faint breathing of rock, fifty thousand years old. (Like the faint thump from behind the womb wall.) It is no metaphor to witness the astonishing fidelity of minerals magnetized, even after hundreds of millions of years, pointing to the magnetic pole, minerals that have never forgotten magma whose cooling off has left them forever desirous. We long for place; but place itself longs. Human memory is encoded in air currents and river sediment. Eskers of ash wait to be scooped up, lives reconstituted.

How many centuries before the spirit forgets the body? How long will we feel our phantom skin buckling over rockface, our pulse in magnetic lines of force? How many years pass before the difference between murder and death erodes?

Grief requires time. If a chip of stone radiates its self, its breath, so long, how stubborn might be the soul. If sound waves carry on to infinity, where are their screams now? I imagine them somewhere in the galaxy, moving forever towards the psalms.

Alone on the roof those nights, it’s not surprising that, of all the characters in Athos’s tales of geologists and explorers, cartographers and navigators, I felt compassion for the stars themselves. Aching towards us for millennia though we are blind to their signals until it’s too late, starlight only the white breath of an old cry. Sending their white messages millions of years, only to be crumpled up by the waves.

VERTICAL TIME

“I
met Athos at the university,” said Kostas Mitsialis. “He shared my office. Whenever I came in, no matter how early or how late, he was already there, reading by the window. The books and articles piled on the sill¡ English poetry. How to preserve leaf skeletons. The meaning of pole carvings. He had a beautiful watch from his father. It had an inlay of a sea monster on its case and on its face, with a tail that curled around eleven o’clock. Athos, do you still have it?”

Athos smiled, opened his jacket, and dangled the watch from its chain.

“I told Daphne about him, the shy fellow who took away my privacy in my own office¡ She wanted to see for herself. One afternoon she came to pick me up, greeting me with a tug on my ears the way she still likes to do. Daphne was only twenty then and always in a good mood. Come to dinner, she said to Athos. Athos asked, Do you like music?

“Those days between the wars, the tavernas were filled with tango, but we had no use for Spaniard music because we had our own: the slow hasapiko and the songs sung with bouzouki that come from the sailors on the docks and the hamals and the plum-juice vendors.”

“And the drug dens,” winked Athos.

“He took us to a small place off Adrianou Street. There we heard Vito for the first time. His voice was a river. It was glikos, black and sweet. Athos, do you remember? Vito was also the cook. After preparing the food, he came from the kitchen rubbing the rosemary and oil from his fingers onto his apron, and then he stood among the tables and sang a rembetiko that he made up on the spot. A rembetiko, Jakob, always tells a story full of heartache and eros.”

“And poverty and hashish,” said Athos.

“After Vito sang, he played santouri music that somehow told the story again. One night he did not sing first, but played something so mysterious … a story I seemed to know, to remember. It gave me an ancient, suspenseful feeling, like an orchard when the sun moves in and out of the clouds … and later that night Daphne and I decided to marry.”

“And if you hadn’t heard the song?” I asked.

They laughed.

“Then it would have been moonlight, or the cinema, or a poem,” said Kostas.

Athos rubbed my hair. “Jakob writes poems,” he said.

“Then you have the power to make people marry,” said Daphne.

“Like a rabbi or a priest?” I asked.

They laughed again.

“No,” said Athos. “Like a cook in a café.”

In Athens, we stayed with Daphne and Kostas—Professor Mitsialis and his wife—old friends of Athos’s who lived on the slopes of Lykavettos in a small house with rubble where the front steps had been. Daphne had set a pot of flowers in the pile. A vegetable and herb garden in the back. Past Kolonaki Square, between Kiphissia and Tatoi, past the foreign embassies, palms and cypresses, past parks, past tall white apartments. Past the statue of revolutionary Mavrocordatos, where an Athenian kneeled in 1942 and sang Solomos’s national anthem and was shot.

It had taken Athos and me close to two weeks to travel the wounded landscape from Zakynthos to Athens. Roads were blocked, bridges out, villages in ruins. Farmland and orchards had been devastated. Those without a scrap of land to work or money for the black market were starving. This would be the case for years. And, of course, peace did not come to Greece at the end of the war. About six months after the fighting ended in Athens between communists and British, with an interim government still in place, Athos and I closed up the house on Zakynthos and crossed the channel to Kyllini on the mainland.

In Athens, Athos would begin to search for news of Bella and the only other member of my family I knew of, an aunt I’d never met, my mother’s sister Ida, who’d lived in Warsaw. We both understood that Athos must search so that I could give up. I found his faith unbearable.

On the boat, Athos brought out bread and a spoonful of honey for our breakfast, but I couldn’t eat. Looking out at the waves of Porthmos Zakinthou, I thought nothing would ever be familiar again.

We took lifts whenever we could, in carts and on the backs of bone-rattling lorries that stirred up the dust climbing hairpin turns and spiralling down again. We travelled long distances me ta podhia—on foot. There are two rules for walking in Greece that Athos taught me as we climbed a hill and left Kyllini behind. Never follow a goat, you’ll end up at the edge of a cliff. Always follow a mule, you’ll arrive at a village by nightfall. We paused often to rest, in those days more for my benefit than Athos’s. When we were both worn out, we waited with our satchels by the side of the road, hoping someone might come by to take us to the next village. I looked at Athos in his frayed tweed jacket and his dusty fedora and saw how much he’d aged in the few years I’d known him. As for me, the child who’d entered Athos’s house was gone, I was thirteen years old. Often while we were walking, Athos put his arm across my shoulders. His touch felt natural to me, though all else was like a dream. And it was his touch that kept me from falling into myself too far. It was on that journey from Zakynthos to Athens, on those crumbling roads and in those dry hills, that I realized what I felt: not that I owed Athos everything but that I loved him.

The landscape of the Peloponnesus had been injured and healed so many times, sorrow darkened the sunlit ground. All sorrow feels ancient. Wars, occupations, earthquakes; fire and drought. I stood in the valleys and imagined the grief of the hills. I felt my own grief expressed there. It would be almost fifty years and in another country before I would again experience this intense empathy with a landscape.

At Kyllini, we saw that the great medieval castle had been dynamited by the Germans. We passed outdoor schools, children in rags using slabs of rock as desks. A shame hung over the countryside, the misery of women who could not even bury their dead, whose bodies had been burned or drowned, or simply thrown away.

We descended the valley to Kalavrita, at the foot of Mount Velia. Since disembarking at Kyllini, everyone we’d spoken to had told us of the massacre. At Kalavrita, in December 1943, the Germans murdered every man in the village over the age of fifteen—fourteen hundred men—then set fire to the town. The Germans claimed the townspeople had been harbouring andartes — Greek resistance fighters. In the valley, charred ruins, blackened stone, a terrible silence. A place so empty it was not even haunted.

At Korinthos, we climbed aboard a lorry that was filled to overflowing with other travellers. Finally, on a hot afternoon in late July, we arrived in Athens.

Dusty and tired, we sat in Daphne and Kostas’s living room, with Daphne’s paintings of the city on the wall— all light and edges, a radiant cubism that in Greece is close to realism. A small glass table. Silk cushions. I was afraid that when I stood up my dirty clothes would leave an imprint on the pale sofa. A little dish of wrapped candies on the table distracted me, gave me a painful glimmer, as when part of you falls asleep and then blood returns to the place. I didn’t understand I could help myself. My elbows rubbed against my sleeves, my legs against my shorts. In a large silver-framed mirror, I saw my head looming above the thin stem of my neck.

Kostas led me into his room and he and Athos picked out some clothes for me. They took me to a barber for my first real haircut. Daphne drew me to her, her hands on my shoulders. She was not much taller than me and almost as thin. She was, as I look back, like a very elderly girl. She wore a dress with a pattern of birds. Her hair was fastened in a knot on top of her head, a little grey cloud. She served me a stifhado of beans and garlic. I ate karpouzi outside with Kostas, who showed me how to spit the melon seeds all the way to the bottom of the garden.

Their kindnesses were mysterious and welcome to me as the city itself—with its strange trees, its blinding white walls.

The morning after we arrived, Daphne, Kostas, and Athos began to talk. Starved, they fell into conversation, cleaning their plate as if they’d find a truth painted on the bottom. They talked as if everything must be told in a single day. They talked as if they were at shivah, at a wake, where all the talk cannot fill the absent chair. Once in a while Daphne got up to replenish their glasses, to bring bread, small cold bowls of fish, peppers, onions, olives. I could not follow it all: the andartes, EAM, ELAS, communists, Venizelists, and anti-Venizelists…. But there was also much I did understand—hunger, shooting, bodies in the street, how suddenly everything familiar is inexpressible. I paid such close attention that, as Kostas said, history wore me out, and around four o’clock when we moved into the garden, with the breeze and sun in my freshly trimmed hair, I fell asleep. When I woke, it was twilight. They were leaning back in their chairs in a silent melancholy, as if the long Greek dusk had finally drawn every memory out of their hearts.

Kostas shook his head.

“It’s as Theotokas says: ‘Time was cut by a knife.’ The tanks came down Vasilissis Sofias. Even when one German walks through a Greek street it’s like an iron rod so cold it burns your hand. It wasn’t even noon. We heard it on the radio. All morning the black cars made a trail through the city like a line of gunpowder.”

“We closed the drapes to the sun and Kostas and I sat at the table in the dark. We heard sirens, anti-aircraft guns, yet the church bells kept ringing for early Mass.”

… When they pushed my father, he was still sitting in his chair, I could tell afterwards, by the way he fell.

“Our neighbour Aleko came to the back door to tell Kostas and me that someone saw swastikas hanging from balconies on Amalias. They flew, he said, over the palace, over the chapel on Lykavettos. It wasn’t until evening, when we saw the flags ourselves, and the flag over the Acropolis, that we wept.”

… I could tell by the way he fell.

“At the beginning, we continued to go to the taverna, just for the company and to hear some news. There wasn’t anything to eat or drink. At the beginning, the waiter still pretended, brought out the menu; it became a ritual joke. People still told jokes then, didn’t they, Daphne? Sometimes we even heard the one from student days when we were so poor and someone used to call out to the waiter: ‘Cook an egg, there are nine of us!’“

… When I was in the ground and my head was prickling, I dreamed my mother was scrubbing the lice from my hair. I imagined skipping stones with Mones on the river. Mones once caught his finger in a door and his nail came off, but he could still make the stones jump more times.

“Daphne’s brother heard that when they found Korizis, he had a gun in one hand and an icon in the other.”

“After the macaronades and before the Germans, there were the British and Aussies everywhere. They took sun baths without their shirts.”

“They sat around Zonar’s and sang songs from
The Wizard of Oz.
They burst into song at the slightest provocation, Fioca and Maxim’s suddenly seemed like sets for operetta. … I went looking for pipe tobacco at the King George. I thought maybe there they’d still have some, but they didn’t. And maybe to pick up the
Kathemerini
, the
Proia
, any newspaper I could find. A British soldier in the lobby offered me a cigarette and we had a long discussion about the differences between Greek and British and French tobacco. The next day Daphne answered the door and there he was, bringing us meat in tins.”

“That’s the only time one of Kostas’s vices has ever been useful,” called Daphne from the kitchen where she was pouring me a glass of milk.

… Mrs. Alperstein, Mones’s mother, made wigs. She used to rub her hands with lotion to keep them smooth for her work. She gave us milk while we were studying and the glass always smelled of lotion, it made the milk taste pretty. When my father came home from work his hands were black, just like he was wearing gloves, and he used to scrub them until they were almost pink, though you could still smell the shoe leather—he was the best bootmaker— and you could still smell the polish, which came in tins and was soft as black butter.

“They made us take in a German officer. He stole from us. Every day I saw him take something—knives and forks, needle and thread. He brought home butter, potatoes, meat—for himself. He watched me cook it and I had to serve him, while Kostas and I ate only carrots, boiled without oil, without even salt. Sometimes he made me eat part of his meal in front of Kostas but wouldn’t let Kostas eat. …”

Kostas stroked his own cheek with Daphne’s hand.

“My dear, my dear. He thought it would make me crazy, but truly I was happy to see you have enough for once.”

“At night, after curfew, Kostas and I lay awake and we heard the sentries marching up and down Kolonaki, as if the whole city was a jail.”

“Athos, you remember how they wanted our chrome before the war. Well, when they didn’t have to pay for anything, they took what they wanted from the mines: pyrites, ore, nickel, bauxite, manganese, gold. Leather, cotton, tobacco. Wheat, cattle, olives, oil….”

“Yes, and the Germans stood around Syntagma Square chewing olives and spitting out the pits so they could watch the little children scramble to pick them up off the ground and suck dry whatever was left.”

“They drove their trucks to the Acropolis and took tourist photos of each other in front of the Parthenon.”

“Athos, they turned our Athens into a city of beggars. In ‘41, when it snowed so much, no one had coal or wood. People wrapped blankets around themselves and stood in Omonia Square and just waited there for help. Women with infants …”

“Once, after the Germans loaded up a train at Larissa, a patriot decided to liberate the cargo. The train exploded as it pulled out of the station. Oranges and lemons flew, raining into the streets. A glorious sweet smell mixed with the smell of gunpowder. Balconies glistened, lemon juice dripped in the sunlight¡ For days after, people found an orange in the crook of a statue, in the pocket of a shirt hanging to dry. Someone found a dozen lemons under a car—

“Like eggs under a hen.”

… I saw my father and Mrs. Alperstein shake hands and I wondered if they had traded smells and if all the shoes would smell like flowers and all the wigs like shoes.