Fugitive pieces (10 page)

With a few words (an incantation in Greek or English) and the sweep of his hand, Athos sliced a hill in half, drilled under the sidewalk, cleared a forest. He showed me Toronto cross-sectioned; he ripped open cliffs like fresh bread, revealing the ragged geological past. Athos stopped in the middle of busy city streets and pointed out fossils in the limestone ledges of the Park Plaza Hotel or in the walls of a hydro substation. “Ah, limestone, accumulating one precious foot every twenty-five thousand years!” Instantly, the streets were flooded by a subtropical salt sea. I imagined front lawns crammed with treasure: crinoids, lamp shells, trilobites.

Like diving birds, Athos and I plunged one hundred and fifty million years into the dark deciduous silence of the ravines. Behind the billboard next to Tamblyn’s Drugstore we dipped down into the humid amphitheatre of a Mesozoic swamp, where massive fronds and ferns tall as houses waved in a spore-dense haze. Beneath a parking lot, behind a school; from racket, fumes, and traffic, we dove into the city’s sunken rooms of green sunlight. Then, like andartes, resurfaced half a city away—from under the bridge near Stan’s Variety or from behind the Honey Dew Restaurant.

Athos showed me samples of the distinctive mottled Zumbro stone in the train station, explaining how it differed from the Tobermory or Kingston or Credit Valley stone. He pointed out Toronto’s only example of lustrous black labradorite, from Nain, flashing blue in the sunlight on Eglinton Avenue.

One of our earliest excursions was a walk to Grenadier Pond, to see where Silas Wright had made his first ice experiments. Then we went to find Silas Wright’s old house on Crescent Drive. I'd heard the story many times. It was Wright who first sighted Scott’s tent, buried by the fatal blizzard within a few inches of its tip. Wright pointed with his ski pole into the immaculate distance and uttered the famous words: “It is the tent.” It gave me great satisfaction to stand with Athos on the street one windy November morning and announce, in impeccable Canadian English: “It is the house.”

It was a cold spring evening, our first spring in Toronto. It began to rain. A cracking April thunderstorm, when the sky turns dark green and the world takes on a gangrenous fluorescent glow. Athos and I ducked under the thick trusses of the Governors Road bridge. We weren’t alone. A couple of young boys carrying jars filled with cloudy pond water and a teenage boy with his dog gathered for shelter. No one spoke as we stood awkwardly listening to the sewers flash-flooding, the metal gutters of the bridge rushing with water, the great bone-snap of thunder. Then a screech tore the air, then another, like the cry of mammoth jays, and we saw the two boys blowing into their hands, grass pulled taut between their thumbs.

The older boy followed, the primitive reeds producing a squawking caterwaul that reverberated under the bridge. Then the sudden rain slowed, and one by one our companions fell silent and stepped out into the dripping haze as if in a trance. Not a word had been spoken.

Athos and I made up characters and stories during our Sunday walks, to practise my vocabulary. We invented a suspense serial involving two detectives, Peter Moss and Peter Bogg. In one episode, they trailed a villain who “took things for granite” (my most accomplished malapropism); he robbed museums and left, as his mark, a block of stone in the empty space. Athos created a complicated story involving a gang of British sailors who plundered dockside warehouses just so he’d have an excuse to use the title: “The Mystery of the Loch and Quay.”

Puns were a kind of core sample: they penetrated into the heart of comprehension, a real test of mastery of a new tongue. Each of my terrible puns represented a considerable achievement; I recited them at dinner for Athos’s praise. (What did the biologist say when he dropped his slides on the lab floor? Don’t step on mitosis.)

From puns I attempted poetry, hoping that in my sonnets the secret of English would crack open under my scrutiny. “Perhaps a sonnet,” suggested Athos, “is not dissimilar to the linguistic investigations of the kabbalists.” I copied out well-known poems, leaving space between each line where I wrote my own version or response. I wrote about plants, rocks, birds. I wrote lines without verbs. I wrote only using slang. Until suddenly a word seemed to become itself and a quick clarity penetrated; the difference between a Greek dog and a Canadian dog, between Polish snow and Canadian snow. Between resinous Greek pines and Polish pines. Between seas, the ancient myth-spell of the Mediterranean and the sharp Atlantic.

And later, when I began to write down the events of my childhood in a language foreign to their happening, it was a revelation. English could protect me; an alphabet without memory.

As if determined by historical accuracy, the Greek neighbourhood bordered the Jewish. When I first discovered the Jewish market, I felt a jolt of grief. Casually, out of the mouths of the cheese-seller and the baker came the ardent tongue of my childhood. Consonants and vowels: fear and love intertwined.

I listened, thin and ugly with feeling. I watched old men dip their numbered arms into barrels of brine, cut the heads off fish. How unreal it must have seemed to them to be surrounded by so much food.

From wooden cages, chickens stared with a look of snobby incomprehension, as though they were the only ones who understood English and therefore couldn’t make out the babble around them.

Athos’s backward glance gave me a backward hope. Redemption through cataclysm; what had once been transformed might be transformed again. I read about Toronto’s dried-up, rerouted rivers —now barely gutter streams — that once were abundant tributaries fished by torchlight. Salmon were speared and scooped from the quick vein; nets were dipped into live currents of silver. On maps, Athos outlined the regal paths of the ice ages as they surveyed the province and swept out again, gouging and strafing the land. “Their frozen robes trailed behind them, leaving a rocky wake of glacial till!” Before the city, Athos cried— showman, barker—there was a forest of conifer and hardwood, huge ancient stands inhabited by giant beavers as big as bears. At supper, we sampled native cuisine that was exotic to us, such as peanut butter, and read to each other about our new city. We read that stone spears, axes, and knives had been discovered in a farmer’s field on the outskirts; Athos explained that the Laurentian People were contemporaries of the inhabitants of Biskupin. We learned of an Indian settlement under a school. We empathized with the perplexity and grumpiness of Mrs. Simcoe, the genteel eighteenth-century pioneer wife of the lieutenant-governor, transposed into the wilderness of Upper Canada. She soon came to represent, rather unfairly, a general state of disgruntledness. She inspired a private joke whenever we found ourselves at a loss, bewildered by the wordless signals that are the essence of every culture: “What would Mrs. Simcoe make of this?”

Late Sunday afternoons, we climbed from the lake bottom, covered with prehistoric ooze, to surface under a billboard on St. Clair Avenue; the tram tracks shining dully under the weak winter sun, or stropped bright under the streetlights, the evening sky purple with cold or cyanotype summer blue, the darkening shapes of the houses against the dissolving bromide of twilight. Muddy, clinging with burrs of enchanter’s nightshade (stowaways on trouser legs and sleeves), we headed home for a hot dinner. These weekly explorations into the ravines were escapes to ideal landscapes; lakes and primeval forests so long gone they could never be taken away from us.

On these walks I could temporarily shrug off my strangeness because, the way Athos saw the world, every human was a newcomer.

Athos and I both kept up correspondences with Daphne and Kostas. I mailed them poems in English and reported to Daphne how well I was doing at school and how well we’d been eating, passing along pastry recipes from Constantine. Kostas’s letters to Athos were filled with politics. Athos would sit at the table shaking his head. “How can he write such awful news with such a beautiful hand?” Kostas’s handwriting was fluid and fine as a braided stream.

As Kostas had warned me, Athos fell into depressions, like a literal stumble into ruts in a road. He tripped, pulled himself up, carried on. Darkness dogged him. He burrowed in his room to work on his book,
Bearing False Witness
, which he knew somehow he would never finish, a debt left unpaid to his colleagues at Biskupin. He didn’t come out for meals. To tempt him, I bought cakes from Constantine. When Constantine saw me instead of Athos, he knew Athos was feeling bad. “It’s the illness of his work,” he said. “Stale bread gives a man a stomach-ache. Tell Athos that Constantine says if he’s going to keep stirring up historia, he must remember to open the lid slowly, to let the steam out of the pot.”

Often I came into the kitchen at two or three in the morning and found Athos in his heavy dressing gown or, in summer, in his vest and limp boxers, dozing with his glasses on his forehead, a pen falling out of his hand. And, reverting to the habits of one who used to eat many meals alone, a book was held open on the table, an empty plate or a fork across the pages.

Bearing False Witness
plagued Athos. It was his conscience; his record of how the Nazis abused archaeology to fabricate the past. In 1939, Biskupin was already a famous site, already nicknamed the “Polish Pompeii.” But Biskupin was proof of an advanced culture that wasn’t German; Himmler ordered its obliteration. It wasn’t enough to own the future. The job of Himmler’s SS-Ahnenerbe—the Bureau of Ancestral Inheritance—was to conquer history. The policy of territorial expansion—lebensraum—devoured time as well as space.

One oppressively hot summer morning, Athos and I set out on our Sunday walk, dressed as coolly as possible, almost formal in white cotton shirts. Our destination was Baby Point, which had once been the site of an Iroquois fortressed camp. Although we’d left early, the air was already thick and droning with insects.

“This week I found out that a man I went to school with in Vienna was in the Ahnenerbe.”

Athos’s shirt was stuck to his back. His face was pink. The trees moved in the heavy breeze, the leaves looked like wet paint splashing against the hazy sky.

“With Himmler paying his salary, suddenly he found swastikas in every handful of dirt. This man, who’d been at the top of our prehistory class, actually presented the ‘Willendorf Venus’ to Himmler as proof that ‘Hottentots’ had been conquered by ancient Aryans¡ He falsified digs to prove that Greek civilization started in … neolithic Germany¡ Just so the Reich could feel justified in copying our temples for their glorious capital.”

“Koumbaros, it’s hot.”

“Everything that’s been destroyed: the relics, the careful documentation. These men still have their careers, even though they were hired by Himmler. These men are still teaching!”

“Koumbaros, it’s so hot today….”

“I’m sorry Jakob, you’re right.”

We stopped for lunch at the Royal Diner, which was owned by Constantine’s brother, and reached Baby Point in the early afternoon. It had turned overcast, and the smell of rain filled the heat. We stood on the sidewalk and imagined the Iroquois fortress. We imagined an Iroquois attack on the affluent neighbourhood, flaming arrows soaring above patio furniture, through picture windows into living rooms, landing on coffee tables that instantly ignited. I stood on the darkening sidewalk and transformed the smells of car wax and mown lawns into curing leather and salted fish. Athos, carried away, described the murder of fur trader Etienne Brulé. Auto da fe.

The afternoon heat was thick with burning flesh. I saw the smoke rising in whorls into the dark sky. Ambushed, memory cracking open. The bitter residue flying up into my face like ash.

“Jakob, Jakob. Let’s take a taxi home.”

By the time we reached the flat, the rain was falling in sheets, the smell of dust rising from the steaming pavement. I stuck my head out the car window and gulped it in. The burning smell was gone.

Koumbaros, we are lightning rods for time.

That night, I dreamed of Bella’s hair. Shiny as black lacquer under the lamplight, plaited tight as a lanyard.

Sitting at the table, my parents and Bella pretended calm, they who claimed so often to have no courage at all. They remained in their seats as they’d planned they would, if it came to that. The soldiers pushed my father over in his chair. And when they saw Bella’s beauty, her terrified stillness—what did they make of her hair, did they lift its mass from her shoulders, assess its value; did they touch her perfect eyebrows and skin? What did they make of Bella’s hair as they cut it—did they feel humiliated as they fingered its magnificence, as they hung it on the line to dry?