Fugitive pieces (18 page)

Accessible from only one harbour, one angle, Idhra has a crooked spine, its head turned away. We lean against the railing, my arms around Michaela’s waist. The ship’s flag grabs at twilight. Heat washes away under the rushing fountain of stars.

On Idhra spring stirs like a young woman after her first night of love, adrift between an old life and a new. Sixteen years a girl and two hours a woman, that’s how Greece wakes from winter. One afternoon the colour of light sets, a glaze hardening on ceramic.

Olive leaves store the sun relentlessly, the strong Greek sun, until they become so dense in colour that the green turns purple, the leaves bruised by their own greed. Until they become so dark they can take in no more and, shiny, reflect the light like smoky mirrors.

High in the blue air, the light splashes like scented oil over skin. We are sticky with the musk of grapes and salt water. Michaela, clothed in summer heat, grinds coffee, sets out honey and figs.

Michaela forgets her body for hours at a time. I love to watch her while she’s thinking or reading, her head leaning on her hand. On the floor or in a chair, her limbs abandoned to gravity. The more intense her concentration, the more abstract the problem she contemplates, the farther her body roams. Down long roads, her legs swinging, or across open water, her hair wandering down her back. This is her body’s truancy, its mischievousness. Freed from Michaela’s disciplining mind, it runs away, goes outdoors. When she looks up and catches me watching her, or simply stops reading—” Jakob, Hawthorne actually pretended to be ill so he could stay home and read Carlyle’s essay on heroes” —her body is there again, reappearing suddenly in the chair. And I feel deep appreciation for those heavy, sneaky limbs that have defied her mind’s authority without it knowing. She looks at me, all presence. While her body and I share our delicious secret.

Listening to Michaela read, I remember how Bella read poetry; how the yearning in her voice reached me as a child, though I didn’t understand the feeling. I realize, half a century after her death, that though my sister never felt herself moving in a man’s hands, she must have already loved so deeply, so secretly, that she knew something about the other half of her soul. This is one of Michaela’s blessings. Michaela, who pauses, because it has just occurred to her: “Do you realize Beethoven composed all his music without ever having looked upon the sea?”

Each morning I write these words for you all. For Bella and Athos, for Alex, for Maurice and Irena, for Michaela. Here on Idhra, in this summer of 1992,1 try to set down the past in the cramped space of a prayer.

In the afternoons I search Michaela for fugitive scents. Basil on her fingers, garlic transferred from fingers to a stray hair; sweat from her forehead to her forearm. Following a path of tarragon as if carried by long division from one column to another, I trace her day, coconut oil on her shoulders, high grass sticking to her sea-damp feet.

We light the storm lamps, accompanied by the sound of cicadas, and she tells me plots of novels, history, childhood stories. We read to each other, eat and drink. Fresh fish bought from the village with domates baked in olive oil and thyme; eggplant and anginares grilled and soaked in lemon.
On a table graced with stillness and smells, the wild order of plums.

Sometimes Mrs. Karouzos’s son climbs up from the town to bring gifts from his mother “for old Jakob and his young bride” : bread, olives, wine. Manos sits with us in the evenings, and the faint decorum he brings to our table sharpens my desire. I look at their faces across the table. Our guest’s gentle privacy, his restrained affection, and Michaela, bursting with health and radiating pleasure, looking—is it possible?—like a woman well loved.

I watch Michaela bake a pie. She smiles and tells me that her mother used to roll the pastry this way. Unknowingly, her hands carry my memories. I remember my mother teaching Bella in the kitchen. Michaela says: “My mother used to cut the dough this way, which she learned from her aunt, you know, the one who married the man who had a brother in New York. …” On and on, casually, offhand, Michaela’s mother’s stories of relatives from the next town, from across the ocean, unroll like the crust. The bold dress cousin Pashka wore to her niece’s wedding. The cousin who met and married a girl in America but she came from his own home town, can you believe it, he had to travel halfway around the world just to meet the neighbour’s daughter. … I remember my mother urging Bella not to reveal the secret ingredients of her honey cake—the envy of Mrs. Alperstein—not ever, except to her own daughter, God willing. A few tablespoons of porridge so it will be smooth and moist as cream, and honey from acacias so the cake will come out golden…. Remembering this, I think of the ancient Japanese sword-makers who recited stories as they folded the steel— bending it thousands of times for strength and flexibility—stories timed to accompany the tempering process. So that when they fell silent, the steel was ready; the stories a precise recipe. I’m missing what Michaela’s telling me, a family story about a wife who finally throws the kettle at the husband, because I’m remembering how my mother sometimes chastised Bella for her temper: “Tough birds are only good for soup,” “If you’re thinking bad thoughts the cake won’t rise” — and here’s Michaela cajoling the dough as she puts it in the oven, whispering to her pie to come out just right.

There’s no absence, if there remains even the memory of absence. Memory dies unless it’s given a use. Or as Athos might have said: If one no longer has land but has the memory of land, then one can make a map.

Now I’m not afraid when harvesting darkness. I dig with my eyes into the night bedroom, Michaela’s clothes tangled with mine, books and shoes. A brass lamp from a ship’s cabin, from Maurice and Irena. Objects turn to relics before my eyes.

Night after night my happiness wakes me. Sometimes, asleep, the pressure of Michaela’s leg against mine translates into a dream as warmth, sunlight. Stilled by light.

Silence: the response to both emptiness and fullness.

The lamplight casts us in bronze. In the yellow pool waking the dark, one stares, one sleeps, both dream. The world goes on because someone’s awake somewhere. If, by accident, a moment were to occur when everyone was asleep, the world would disappear. It would whirlpool into dream or nightmare, tripped by memory. It would collapse to a place where the body’s simply a generator for the soul, a factory of longing.

We define a man by what he admires, what raises him.

All things aspire, even if only atomically. A body will rise quietly until caught by the surface. Then the moon pulls it to shore.

I pray that soon my wife will feel new breath inside her own. I press my head against Michaela’s side and whisper a story to her flat belly.

Child I long for: if we conceive you, if you are born, if you reach the age I am now, sixty, I say this to you: Light the lamps but do not look for us. Think of us sometimes, your mother and me, while you’re in your house with the fruit trees and the slightly wild garden, a small wooden table in the yard. You, my son, Bela, living in an old city, your balcony overlooking medieval street-stones. Or you, Bella, my daughter, in your house overlooking a river; or on an island of white, blue, and green where the sea follows you everywhere. When it rains, think of us as you walk under dripping trees or through small rooms lit only by a storm.

Light the lamp, cut a long wick. One day when you Ve almost forgotten, I pray you’ll let us return. That through an open window, even in the middle of a city, the sea air of our marriage will find you. I pray that one day in a room lit only by night snow, you will suddenly know how miraculous is your parents’ love for each other.

My son, my daughter: May you never be deaf to love.

Bela, Bella: Once I was lost in a forest. I was so afraid. My blood pounded in my chest and I knew my heart’s strength would soon be exhausted. I saved myself without thinking. I grasped the two syllables closest to me, and replaced my heartbeat with your name.

II
THE DROWNED CITY

T
he Humber River flows southeast across the city. Even a generation ago, for most of its one-hundred-kilometre course it was still a rural river, meandering through outskirts, casually linking lonely boroughs like Weston and Lambton Woods to the city downstream. For three thousand years, isolated communities, mills, and palisades were scattered along its banks.

Over time, the growth of the city could be measured by travelling upriver. As Toronto expanded, suburbs slowly spread north, filling up the wide, grassy floodplain, until even secluded communities such as Weston were embraced by the metropolis. The houses closest to the Humber cleaved to the river, nestled among cottonwood, box elder, and bur oak. Plover and blue heron wandered in back yards, among impatiens and wild grape.

Today much of the riverbank again looks as it did before the encroachment of the city. The riverine marshes, the serpentine lower reaches, are inhabited only by painted turtles and mallard ducks. The deserted plains of Weston are gentle parkland; lawn grows peacefully to the river’s edge.

If you descend the short, steep bank to the water, you’ll see, past the glinting surface, the river bottom glinting too. If you turn around to look at the muddy escarpment, or simply look down at your feet, you’ll begin to notice the Humber’s distinctive sediment, laid down in October 1954.

In the bank, four wooden knobs, evenly spaced: excavate an inch or two and the legs of a chair will emerge. A few feet downriver, a dinner plate—perhaps with the familiar and ever-popular blue willow pattern—sticks out of the bank horizontally like a shelf. You can slip a silver spoon out of the mud like a bookmark.

The books and photos have rotted by now, but the buried tables and shelves, lamps, dishes, and rugs remain. The river washes over pebbles of crockery. Fragments of a ceramic flowered border, or of the words “Staffordshire, England,” are underlined by reeds.

Hidden beneath the grass, all around you, the wide, silent park is studded with cutlery.

The humidity is a dense current; slow as dream time. Naomi comes from an icy shower; her skin condenses in the hot air. She lies on top of me, heavy and cold as wet sand.

You must abandon your illusions every time you speak.

It’s only five o’clock but the sky is a dark front; the ions that smell always of night.

The summer we were married there was a heat wave like this, the air a blanket, cling wrap. Every inch of us slick with sweat. My shirts turning sheer and limp. We kept our small apartment in perpetual twilight, curtains drawn against it; the heat and dark were excuses to stay undressed. Like the Invisible Man, seen only by virtue of the gauze he’s wrapped in, Naomi moved from room to room, her white cotton underwear glowing in the dimness.

For over a week it had been too oppressive to sleep. We drifted until morning, every few hours one re-entering the consciousness of the other, returning from the kitchen silent as a messenger through the forest. Framed by the light in the hall, Naomi’s body pouring heat, carrying a glass of juice so cold its flavour was a mystery. Frozen from holding the glass, my hands on the scalding small of her back; until she whispered, “Ben,” a chill rising through her. Or she rolled plums from the fridge, frosted blue ovals, along my arms to my mouth, so icy they made my teeth hurt; plum juice drying in brown tears down her neck, her skin stiffening with sweetness. Or one of us with face or feet under the faucet, the other slipping back into sleep, to the dream sound of far-off, mill-borne water.

Sometimes, even at the last, at the end of a long Sunday when we’d both been working at home, after she’d ordered fast food, which we ate without a word of importance between us, after the greasy cartons had been tossed into the sink or into the bin so we wouldn’t have to look in the morning at the remains of what we’d consumed, we turned to each other in the dark, still silent, until she was a climber on a rock face, limbs precise, pinned against space, until with closed eyes she looked down between her legs from a height, and then I didn’t move and meaning flooded us. Before sleep her muscles twitched, a mechanism released. Soon I felt her against me, breathing with the steady intensity of a machine.

We slept close, knowing we could not have such pleasure without such muteness.

There was no energy of a narrative in my family, not even the fervour of an elegy. Instead, our words drifted away, as if our home were open to the elements and we were forever whispering into a strong wind. My parents and I waded through damp silence, of not hearing and not speaking. It soaked into the furniture, into my father’s dank armchair, a mildew in the walls. We communicated by slight gestures, surgeons in an operating theatre. When my parents died, I realized I’d expected sound suddenly to enter the apartment, to rush into the place so long prohibited. But no sound came into the apartment. And though I was alone, packing boxes, sorting their belongings, the silence was now eerie. Because the place itself felt almost the same as before.

I was surprised to discover not everyone sees the shadow around objects, the black outline, the bruise of fermentation on things even as light clings to them. I saw the aura of mortality like a snake that sees its prey in infrared, the pulse-heat. It was clear to me as cut fruit turning brown on the plate, a lemon peel shrivelling to scent.

I grew up thankful for every necessity, for food and drink, for my father’s well-made shoes —” the most important thing.” I was thankful for the whiskers that appeared on my father’s face each morning because it was, he said, “a sign of health.” When my parents were liberated, four years before I was born, they found that the ordinary world outside the camp had been eradicated. There was no more simple meal, no thing was less than extraordinary: a fork, a mattress, a clean shirt, a book. Not to mention such things that can make one weep: an orange, meat and vegetables, hot water. There was no ordinariness to return to, no refuge from the blinding potency of things, an apple screaming its sweet juice. Every thing belonged to, had been retrieved from, impossibility—both the inorganic and the organic—shoes and socks, their own flesh. It was all as one. And this gratitude included the inexpressible. Not more than five years old, watching my mother proud in her gardening gloves, by the roses. Even then I knew I would want for this all my life: my mother stooping to pull up weeds, sunlight, an endless day.

Even younger, I was visited by an angel in the middle of the night. She stood like a nurse at the foot of my bed and wouldn’t go away. My eyes hurt from staring. She motioned to me. I went to the window to look out at the winter street, my first recognition of beauty, an ice forest, with the fineness of etched silver, in the streetlamp light. The angel was sent to wake me, so I wouldn’t sleep past that vision into morning; and the sight put a temporary end to nightmares of doors axed open and the jagged mouths of dogs. I finally understood the meaning of that winter night and that moment with my mother in the garden, Jakob Beer, when I read your poems. You described your first experience of the flesh of a sleeping woman as alive, sudden as if you’d surfaced into air from under water, breathing for the first time.

When we finally met, at Irena’s birthday party that late-January night, I saw that Maurice Salman hadn’t exaggerated. He’d described you and Michaela perfectly —ouzo and water. Separately, clear and strong; together, you both turned cloudy. The mystery, said Salman, of two people who share “an impressive physical life.” You know Salman¡ When he talks about you his eyes go small. He settles himself in his chair like a boulder on a beach. The sublime’s his slang. What a charming combination of acuity and corn. He speaks piercingly of passion yet wears the look of a sneaky lover planning a flat tire or an empty gas tank. Straight out of the old movies he adores. He’s like someone who offers an astonishing and expensive wine, then brings out a plate of peanut brittle to go with it. Perhaps I exaggerate. Salman gives the impression of offhand hyperbole but, in fact, he’s astute and precise.

I’d never heard of you until, in class, Salman recommended your book of poems,
Groundwork
, and recited the opening lines. Later I saw that the book was dedicated to the memory of your parents and your sister, Bella.
My love for my family has grown for years in decay-fed soil, an unwashed root pulled suddenly from the ground. Bulbous as a beet, a huge eye under a lid of earth. Scoop out the eye, blind the earth.

I know that the more one loves a man’s words, the more one can assume he’s put everything into his work that he couldn’t put into his life. The relation between a man’s behaviour and his words is usually that of gristle and fat on the bone of meaning. But, in your case, there seemed to be no gap between the poems and the man. How could it be otherwise, for a man who claimed to believe so completely in language? Who knew that even one letter—like the “J” stamped on a passport—could have the power of life or death.

In your later poems, it’s as if history reads over our shoulder, casts its shadow on the page, but is no longer in the words themselves. It’s as if you’d decided something, made a deal with your conscience. I wanted to believe language itself had freed you. But the night we met I knew it wasn’t language that had released you. Only a remarkably simple truth or a remarkably simple lie could put such peace in a man. The mystery darkened in me. A birthmark in my own pallor of disorder.

And I knew I was standing on the bank watching, while you, long escaped from dusty rock, lay between the wet thighs of the river.

That night at Salman’s your serenity was so profound it could only be described as sensual. Experience had wrung excess from you. Or as a geologist might say, you’d reached the pure state of residual concentration. One couldn’t help but feel the force of your presence, your hand heavy as a cat on Michaela’s thigh. What is love at first sight but the response of a soul crying out with sudden regret because it realizes it has never before been recognized? Of course Naomi was moved, and soon was telling you about her parents, her family. Naomi, usually so shy, spoke about the last summer with her dying father at the lake, then about my parents—for which I found myself not annoyed but curiously grateful. Tell him, I thought, tell him everything.

You listened, not like a priest who listens for sin, but like a sinner, who listens for his own redemption. What a gift you had for making one feel clear, for making one feel—clean. As if talk could actually heal. All the while with one hand touching Michaela somewhere, on her shoulder or forearm, or holding her hand. Your eyes with us, your body with her. Only once did Naomi pause, suddenly self-conscious, to say that perhaps you thought her foolish, visiting their graves so often, bringing flowers. To which you gave your unforgettable reply: “On the contrary. It seems right to Iteep bringing them something beautiful now and then.” And I saw gratitude on Naomi’s face it pains me to remember, because I’d been so annoyed with her for those visits—
my
parents!—accusing her of every pathology, of not being able to get over her own parents’ deaths, of needing to live in mourning since she was eighteen. Characteristically, she didn’t repeat your comment afterwards. No one’s silences are more generous than Naomi’s, who rarely clamps her jaw with frustration or anger (these come out in tears); her silence is usually wise. I was often thankful for this, especially in the months before I left, when Naomi spoke less and less.

By the time we were leaving Salman’s that night and Naomi was pushing her arms into the sleeves of her coat, my wife’s transformation was invisible yet obvious. Your conversation had wrought a change in her body. And I saw Naomi’s pleasure as Michaela admired her coat and scarf, and her flushed face when you shook her hand goodnight.

I learned something else that evening, about Maurice Salman and his wife. I saw them standing together by the window. She’s so small, an impeccable package, expensive shoes, silk blouse, a face that elongates into sadness. Salman held her elbow like a teacup in his paw. He carried her sweater on his enormous suited arm, handkerchief on an elephant’s back. One small gesture: she reached up, her child palm on the flatness of his huge cheek. She touched him as if he were the thinnest porcelain.