Fugitive pieces (11 page)

One of the last walks Athos and I took together was along the floodplain of the Don River, past the brick quarry and cliffs embedded with marine fossils. We intended to sit for a while in the terraced gardens of Chorley Park, the Government House, built spectacularly on the edge of the escarpment. The mansion was enormous, a Loire Valley chateau, built of the finest Credit Valley limestone.

Tourelles and pediments, tall chimneys and cornices: perched on the edge of wildness it summed up the contradictions of the New World. When Athos and I first discovered the immense estate, it no longer functioned as the lieutenant-governor’s residence. There’d been complaints about the cost of upkeep by union-supported politicians. Shortly after city councillors argued over whether or not to let him replace a single blown lightbulb, the embittered lieutenant-governor abandoned Chorley Park. It was then pressed into service as a military hospital and as a shelter for Hungarian refugees. We’d visited the grounds many times. Athos said Chorley Park reminded him of an alpine sanitarium.

We were discussing religion.

“But Athos, whether one believes or not has nothing to do with being a Jew. Let me put it this way: The truth doesn’t care what we think of it.”

We ascended the valley. The hills were scorched with sumac and sedge, cloudy with fraying thistles and milkweed. I could see patches of sweat darkening Athos’s shirt.

“Maybe we should rest.”

“We’re nearly at the top. Jakob, when Nikos died I asked my father if he believed in God. He said: How do we know there’s a God? Because He keeps disappearing.”

I heard the labour in his breath and sadness quickened in me.

“Koumbaros …”

“I’m fine thank you, Mrs. Simcoe.”

We bent down to pass through the bushes at the edge of the hill. We emerged from the scrub of the ravine into the garden and lifted our heads to emptiness. Chorley Park, built to outlast generations, was gone, as though an eraser had rubbed out its place against the sky.

Athos, stunned, leaned heavily on his walking-stick.

“How could they have torn it down, one of the most beautiful buildings in the city? Jakob, are you sure we’re in the right place?”

“We’re in the right place, koumbaros…. How do I know? Because it’s gone.”

Athos was growing tired somewhere deep in his body. He worried me; I fussed over him. He waved my concern away, “Fm fine, Mrs. Simcoe!” Though he still worked late into the night, he began to take naps at odd times of the day. He wouldn’t slow down. “Jakob, there’s an old Greek saying: ‘Light your candle before night overtakes you.’“ He insisted on proving his indomitability by hauling home groceries on the tram. He would no more leave something behind, however heavy, than he would leave behind samples from a site.

We were a vine and a fence. But who was the vine? We would both have answered differently.

Eventually I was enrolled in the university, taking courses in literature, history, and geography, and was earning some money as a lab demonstrator in the geography department. Kostas asked a friend of his in London to send me the work of poets banned in Greece. This was my introduction to translating. And translating of one sort or another has supported me ever since. For this intuition, I will always be grateful to Kostas. “Reading a poem in translation,” wrote Bialek, “is like kissing a woman through a veil;” and reading Greek poems, with a mixture of katharevousa and the demotic, is like kissing two women. Translation is a kind of transubstantiation; one poem becomes another. You can choose your philosophy of translation just as you choose how to live: the free adaptation that sacrifices detail to meaning, the strict crib that sacrifices meaning to exactitude. The poet moves from life to language, the translator moves from language to life; both, like the immigrant, try to identify the invisible, what’s between the lines, the mysterious implications.

One evening I walked up Grace Street, a summer tunnel of long shadows, the breeze from the lake a cool finger slipping gently under my damp shirt, the tumult of the market left blocks behind. In the new coolness and new quiet, a thread of memory clung to a thought. Suddenly an overheard word fastened on to a melody; a song of my mother’s that was always accompanied by the sound of brush bristles pulling through Bella’s hair, my mother’s arm drawing with the beat. The words stumbled out of my mouth, a whisper, then louder, until I was mumbling whatever I remembered. “ ‘What good is the mazurka, my heart is not carefree; what good’s the girl from Vurka, if she does not love me….’” “ ‘Black cherries are gathered, the green are left on the tree…. ’” All the way through to the opening verses of “Come to Me, Philosopher” and “How Does the Czar Drink His Tea?”

I looked around. The houses were dark, the street safely empty. I raised my voice. “‘Foolish one, don’t be so dense, don’t you have any common sense? Smoke is taller than a house, a cat is faster than a mouse….’”

Up Grace, along Henderson, up Manning to Harbord I whimpered; my spirit shape finally in familiar clothes and, with abandon, flinging its arms to the stars.

But the street wasn’t empty as I thought. Startled, I saw that the blackness was perforated with dozens of faces. A forest of eyes, of Italian and Portuguese and Greek ears; whole families sitting silently on lawnchairs and front steps. On dark verandahs, a huge invisible audience, cooling down from their small, hot houses, the lights off to keep away the bugs.

There was nothing for it but to raise my foreign song and feel understood.

At night, lying in bed unable to sleep, my body pointed painfully towards its great ignorance.

I imagined kissing the girl I saw in the library, the skinny one who kept tipping over in her high heels…. She’s lying next to me. We’re holding each other but then she wants to know why I live with Athos, why I’ve collected all those articles about the war that are in piles on the carpet, why I stay up half the night examining every face in the photographs. Why I keep to myself, why I don’t know how to dance.

When Athos went into his study after dinner, I stepped into the night. But we both entered the same convulsion of time; the events we lived through without knowing, while we were on Zakynthos. I stood on the steps of the escarpment on Davenport Road and looked out at the lit city, displayed like a circuit board. I walked past the knitwear and pencil factories, the General Electric plant, the typesetting warehouses and lumberyards, the dry cleaners and autobody shops. Past signs advertising Jerry Lewis at the Imperial and Red Skelton at Shea’s. I followed the train tracks to the coal silos on Mt. Pleasant Road, or down to the rusted ships waiting by the grain silos of Victory Mills.

I took in the cold beauty of Lakeshore Cement, with its small gardens someone thought to plant at the foot of each massive silo. Or the delicate metal staircases, a lace ribbon, swirling around the girth of the oil reservoirs. At night, a few lights marked port and starboard of these gargantuan industrial forms, and I filled them with loneliness. I listened to these dark shapes as if they were black spaces in music, a musician learning the silences of a piece. I felt this was my truth. That my life could not be stored in any language but only in silence; the moment I looked into the room and took in only what was visible, not vanished. The moment I failed to see Bella had disappeared. But I did not know how to seek by way of silence. So I lived a breath apart, a touch-typist who holds his hands above the keys slightly in the wrong place, the words coming out meaningless, garbled. Bella and I inches apart, the wall between us. I thought of writing poems this way, in code, every letter askew, so that loss would wreck the language, become the language.

If one could isolate that space, that damaged chromosome in words, in an image, then perhaps one could restore order by naming. Otherwise history is only a tangle of wires. So in poems I returned to Biskupin, to the house on Zakynthos, to the forest, to the river, to the burst door, to the minutes in the wall.

English was a sonar, a microscope, through which I listened and observed, waiting to capture elusive meanings buried in facts. I wanted a line in a poem to be the hollow ney of the dervish orchestra whose plaintive wail is a call to God. But all I achieved was awkward shrieking. Not even the pure shriek of a reed in the rain.

I made one lasting friend through Athos’s connection with the university, a graduate student of his named Maurice Salman. Maurice was even more of a stranger to the city than we were, having only just moved from Montreal when we first met. Athos invited him for dinner. Maurice was thin in those days but so was his hair, and he wore a beret pushed back off his forehead. We began to take walks together, to go to a concert or an art gallery. Sometimes he and Athos and I went to the movies where we developed conflicting passions; Athos for Deborah Kerr (especially in
King Solomon’s Mines
), Maurice for Jean Arthur, and I for Barbara Stanwyck. Maurice and I were already hopelessly out of date and would remain so. We should have been dreaming about Audrey Hepburn. On the way home we stopped at a restaurant or Maurice came home with us to our bachelor kitchen where we argued over our paramours’ relative merits. Kerr, said Athos, was clearly a woman with whom one could discuss Pascal’s wager over breakfast, in the finest hotel or in the bush. Maurice thought Jean Arthur was a woman one could definitely go camping with or dancing all night and who would still remember where you left your keys or the children. I loved Barbara Stanwyck because she was always in a jam and was loyal to her heart and most of all because in
Ball of Fire
slang flew from her mouth like song. “Stop beating up with the gums and shove in your clutch!” “Clip the mooch!” “I’m no bungalow-apron!” She lived in a world of plenty gestanko and solid senders. She was a dish, a smooch, for whom one would need a bundle of scratch, dough, moolah, smackeroos, a two-ply poke. I was wacky about her. In these discussions none of us mentioned bare shoulders or satin over breasts; certainly no one mentioned legs at all.

But we didn’t spend many evenings together because soon after we met Maurice, Athos died.

“Athos, how big is the actual heart?” I once asked him when I was still a child. He replied: “Imagine the size and heaviness of a handful of earth.”

On his last night, Athos had come home from giving a lecture on the conservation of Egyptian wood. It was about half past ten. He usually reported some observation of the evening, or even recounted the main details of his talk, but since I’d typed it for him earlier that day the latter was unnecessary, and he was tired. I heated some wine for him then went to bed.

In the morning I found him at his desk. He looked as he often did, asleep in the middle of work. I embraced him with all my strength, again and again, but he would not come back. It is impossible to reach the emptiness in each cell. His death was quiet; rain on the sea.