Fugitive pieces (8 page)

Before we’d left Zakynthos, Athos said: “We must have a ceremony. For your parents, for the Jews of Crete, for all who have no one to recall their names.”

We threw camomile and poppies into the cobalt sea. Athos poured fresh water into the waves, that “the dead may drink.”

Athos read from Seferis: “‘Here finish the works of the sea the works of love. You who will someday live here … if the blood chances to darken your memory, do not forget us.’“

I thought: It’s longing that moves the sea.

On Zakynthos sometimes the silence shimmers with the overtone of bees. Their bodies roll in the air, powdery with golden weight. The field was heavy with daisies, honeysuckle, and broom. Athos said: “Greek lamentation burns the tongue. Greek tears are ink for the dead to write their lives.”

He spread a striped cloth on the grass and we sat down to eat koliva, bread, and honey by the sea—that “the dead may not go hungry.”

Athos said: “Remember. Your good deeds help the moral progress of the dead. Do good on their behalf. Their bones will bear the weight of the waves for eternity; as my countrymen’s bones will bear the weight of earth. We will not be able to exhume them according to custom; their bones will not join the bones of their families in the ossuary of their village. The generations will not be bound together; they will melt under the sea, or in the soil, desolate….”

I heard in my head their cries and imagined in the waves their shiny, almost human skin, their brine-soaked hair. And, as in my nightmares, I placed my parents under the waves where it was clear and blue.

Athos lit a lamp— a jar filled with olive oil— and used a tightly wound bundle of dried quince as a wick.

Athos said: “The shepherds will not know to lament them, no prayers will be heard from distant fields amid the cries of sheep and goats. So let us pass the koliva and light the candle and sing ‘Death ate my eyes’… If our duties — kathikonda—bring them release—anakoufisi—then the dead will send a message to us on the wings of birds.”

The air was, in fact, filled with storks and swallows and wild doves. Rosemary and basil swayed like censers in the afternoon heat.

Athos said: “Jakob, try to be buried in ground that will remember you.”

When we stand on the high slope above Zakynthos town, I imagine driftwood washing up on the gravelly beach below, only it’s not wood but their long bones, their curved bones that have washed up with the tide. Coarse sand gleams with the polished debris. The birds don’t come, there’s nothing left for them. Only the skulls stay in the sea. Too heavy, they settle on the bottom; on the ocean floor is a city of white domes. They glow in the depth. Burned into the bone, last thoughts line the skulls. Silently the fish slip home through the eyes, through the mouths.

For years after the war, even the smallest decision was an agony. I examined my steps before I took them, even before the most trivial excursion. If I go to the store now instead of later, what will happen? I extrapolated minutely. “Jakob, I could recite half of Homer every time I wait for you ….”

Nothing is sudden. Not an explosion—planned, timed, wired carefully—not the burst door. Just as the earth invisibly prepares its cataclysms, so history is the gradual instant.

The week before Athos and I left for Canada, I went with Kostas for a long walk along Vasilissis Sofias, down Amalias to the Plaka. He carried a cane that he didn’t use much; sometimes he wound his arm, fragile as a willow branch, through mine. He showed me the Pedagogic Academy where Daphne used to teach English. He showed me the university. We shared a gazoza in the courtyard of an old hotel.

“Did Athos teli you he was once married? No, I can see by your face he didn’t. He rarely speaks of Helen even to us. Some stones are so heavy only silence helps you carry them. She died during the first war.”

I felt ashamed, I felt I had betrayed Athos, that somehow I had not been worthy enough for him to have revealed this secret.

“Athos has left us many times; he’s lived away from Greece for many years. But now it’s different. He wants to leave. Greece will never be the same. Perhaps it will be better. But he’s right to take you away. Jakob, Athos is my best friend. We’ve known each other forty years—you can’t yet understand what that means. What I want to say to you is this: Sometimes Athos becomes very sad, you know, he can be sad for long months and there may be times when he will need you to take care of him.”

My eyes went hot.

“Pedhi-mou, don’t worry. Athos is like his beloved limestone. The sea will dissolve him into caves, dig holes into him, but he lasts and lasts.”

On the way home we passed walls scrawled with a huge V—Vinceremo, we shall overcome — in black paint. Or M—Mussolini Merda. Kostas explained why no one wanted to erase those symbols. During the occupation, graffiti required swiftness and courage. Graffitos who were caught were executed by the Germans on sight. A single letter was exhilarating, it was spit in the eye of the oppressors. A single letter was a matter of life and death.

We passed a church and Kostas told me how, right where we stood, there had been a riot the first time the gospel was read in the demotic. “Did they think God only understood katharevousa?” “Yes, pedhi-mou, exactly!” And when the
Oresteia
was performed in the demotic for the first time, Kostas said some of the audience died in the logomachy that followed.

On Zakynthos, there was the statue of Solomos. In Athens, there was Palamas and the graffitos, whose heroism was language. I already knew the power of language to destroy, to omit, to obliterate. But poetry, the power of language to restore: this was what both Athos and Kostas were trying to teach me.

Athos had worked in England, France, Vienna, Yugoslavia, Poland; he went where interesting tasks took him. He had a professional reputation for both eclecticism and a very defined expertise in the conservation of waterlogged wood. But the reason we were invited to Canada was salt.

I would come to discover that Athos’s interest in Scott’s Antarctic travels was not entirely impersonal. In fact, Athos himself had briefly considered applying for the expedition, for he was at Cambridge at the time and, like many Mediterraneans, had a contrary passion for things polar. But Athos was newly married and never went to Scott’s recruiting office in London; nor did he ever regret this, because, as it turned out, he and Helen had only five years together before Helen died. There were two geologists on the expedition, Frank Debenham and Griffith Taylor. Athos didn’t know Debenham or Taylor at Cambridge. Athos met Debenham later, during the First World War. Debenham was stationed in Salonika and he heard Athos give a lecture on salt. Debenham had travelled far and seen much and known the hearts of men thrown together in dangerous places, and now he found himself sitting under a ceiling fan in a claustrophobic lecture room moved by Athos’s descriptions of the desirous ionic bond. Sodium chambers like solid fog in the black earth. Miners, lovers, the sea stained with that ancient taste. The lofty salt hills of Thaikan, the baked salt cakes used as money in Kain-du.

Between the wars, Debenham had helped establish the Scott Polar Institute. He and Athos wrote to each other occasionally, and it was Debenham who told Athos that Griffith Taylor was setting up a new department of geography at the University of Toronto.

Griffith Taylor knew something of Toronto because another member of Scott’s team, Silas Wright, had been born and raised there. Taylor and Wright had walked from Cambridge to the Antarctic recruiting office at St. Paul’s, a waggish stunt to convince Scott of their mettle. They carried hard-boiled eggs and slabs of chocolate to keep up their strength on the twelve-hour march. Wright, used to canoeing and hiking in the wilds of Northern Ontario and British Columbia, was particularly sensitive to the suggestion that scientists might not have as much muscle as navy men, and on the voyage south he was reefing and hauling with the best of them. In fact, as soon as he returned from the hardships of Antarctica, Wright took Debenham on a camping trip in northwestern Canada.

In the midst of the very British Antarctica, Wright asserted his Canadian roots, for which he was heartily mocked. Taylor was fond of referring to Wright as “the American,” a comment for which Taylor endured his due punishment. As Taylor reports in his diary: “Wright fell upon me and succeeded in tearing my pocket.”I

Taylor’s Antarctic diary is studded with exclamation marks, as if he’s continually astonished by what he’s writing, as if the whole frozen experience might be an hallucination. He recounts the day trips he took with Wright, including a march to Cape Royds to find Shackleton’s abandoned hut. They opened the door to a spotless cabin. A two-year-old lunch was waiting for them, the table set and laden with biscuits and jam, scones and gingerbread and condensed milk, preserved by the cold. Taylor and Wright stepped into the ghostly room, sat down and ate, as if they’d been sent an invitation by their long-absent host and two years later had arrived just in time.

It was one of Athos’s regrets that he never met Wright, who had been visiting with Taylor only a week before our arrival in Toronto. The two Antarctic explorers went to the Canadian National Exhibition, where they ate snow-cones, rode the midway, and attended the horse show. These were the same men who’d been the first to cross Antarctica’s Dry Valley together, a mysterious zone where not a drop of moisture has fallen for over two million years. Now Wright was back in his home town, showing Taylor the fair he went to as a boy.

Taylor liked the idea of hiring Cambridge men to teach in his department, and he had heard about Athos from Debenham. Taylor and Athos arranged to meet briefly in Athens in 1938 when Taylor was touring Greece on his way to deliver his “Correlations and Culture” lecture in Cambridge. While walking through the city, they discovered that they shared the same ideas about geography and pacifism, the belief that science must be used as a peace measure, what Taylor came to call his “geopacifism.” Specifically, they spoke of Nazism’s “Nordic fetish” and anti-Semitism, and how geography could be used against the dangerous fabrications of politics. They impressed each other, as two men who share the same passionate convictions often do.

Taylor invited Athos to Toronto to teach and Athos accepted though, as it turned out, he wasn’t able to take up the offer as early as he’d hoped, because of the war. We would only be in Toronto a few years when Taylor was diagnosed with cancer. Soon after, he retired and returned to his native Australia.

Because the Torontonian Wright went south with Taylor and Debenham; because Debenham was stationed in Salonika; because of salt—Athos and I found ourselves on a boat to Canada.

Athos loved the broken hills of his country, mended by groves and sheep. He carried in his wallet a photo of the hilltop view from the house on Zakynthos.

“Love makes you see a place differently, just as you hold differently an object that belongs to someone you love. If you know one landscape well, you will look at all other landscapes differently. And if you learn to love one place, sometimes you can also learn to love another.”

Before we left Zakynthos, we’d packed Athos’s library and addressed the crates to the Mitsialises in Athens. Athos marked the boxes so Kostas would know which to send on to Canada and which to have delivered to the Roussos family house on the island of Idhra. Idhra is much closer to Athens, less than a day’s travel from Piraeus. Athos didn’t know how many years we’d be away; moving his books was a precaution against earthquakes.