Fugitive pieces (22 page)

Shortly after my teaching job at the university became permanent, I began to research my second book, on weather and war. Naomi again threatened to accompany me culinarily, with various bombes and dishes served flambé. But thankfully she decided there was nothing funny about it. The book took its title,
No Mortal Foe
, from a phrase of Trevelyan’s. He was referring to the hurricane that destroyed the British naval force during the war with France. Trevelyan was correct in his identification of the real enemy: a hurricane at sea means spray crossing the deck at one hundred miles per hour, a screaming wind that prevents you from breathing, seeing, or standing.

During the First World War, in the Tyrolean Mountains, avalanches were deliberately set off to bury enemy troops. Around this time strategists also thought of creating tornadoes as a weapon, an idea never taken up, only because one couldn’t be certain the tornado wouldn’t turn against one’s own lines.

On his way from Paris to Chartres, Edward III nearly died in a hailstorm. He vowed to the Virgin he’d make peace if he were spared from the giant stones, a promise he kept in the form of the Treaty of Bretigny. England was saved by the storm that destroyed the Spanish Armada. Hailstorms swept five hundred miles through France, ruining the harvest, creating the food shortages that contributed to the French Revolution. Russia’s old ally, winter, overcame Napoleon’s Grand Army. Tornadoes were created by the firebombing of Hamburg. The military term “front” was borrowed from the weatherman in the First World War….

When the Germans invaded Greece, all weather broadcasts from Athens were deliberately shut down by the RAF and the Greek Forecasting Service. They had to make a hole in the Mediterranean weather map so the Germans wouldn’t have the advantage of Greek forecasting for their aerial tactics.

Himmler believed that Germany had the power to alter even the weather of their occupied lands. As he rubbed Polish soil—” now German soil” —between his fingers, he speculated how Aryan settlers would plant trees and “increase dew and (form) clouds, force rain, and thus push a more economically viable climate further towards the East….”

Naomi had audited one of my courses, Forms of Biography. When I first met her, she reminded me of an eccentric sister. In those days, she had a preference for loose clothes that looked as if they’d been borrowed from an older sibling. I found this extremely appealing. It made me want to get at her through her big pockets and up her ample sleeves.

Naomi’s apartment was so tiny it was like living in a medicine cabinet. Out of necessity, everything was hidden behind something else, ready to topple. She kept her liquor on a bookshelf behind B for booze, behind Bachelard, Balzac, Benjamin, Berger, Bogan. Scotch was behind Sir Walter. She loved her lame jokes, the lamer the better, sent herself into paroxysms. These antics continued into our married life. On one birthday she created an elaborate treasure hunt, with the last clue leading, of course, to the cake.

Naomi was a fan of 1950s science-fiction movies, which we would often stay up late to watch. She was always on the side of the lonely monster, usually an ordinary creature that had been irradiated and subsequently grew gigantic. She called to the television screen, encouraging the oversized octopus to go ahead and crush the bridge with its expressive tentacles. Naomi claimed that the young woman scientist invariably called to the scene to destroy the atomic squid (or gorilla, spider, or bee) was her secret role model; the nuclear physicist, the marine biologist, who made a lab coat look sexier than an evening gown.

She loved music and listened to everything, Javanese gamelan, Georgian choirs, medieval hurdy-gurdy. But her pride was her collection of lullabies, from everywhere in the world. Lullabies for the first born, for the child who wants to stay awake with his brother, for the child who’s too excited or too frightened to sleep. War-time lullabies, lullabies for abandoned children.

Naomi first sang to me from the end of her couch. The window was open, a warm, windy September night. Her voice was low as whispering grass. It made me imagine the moonlight on the roof. She sang a ghetto lullaby, a sadness that seemed to me confusingly sweet. In the dark I could smell the tanning lotion on her arms and legs, and in the thin cotton of her flowered skirt. “Clasp the alphabet to your heart, though there are tears in every letter.” “I sing in your little ear, let sleep come, a little handle closing a little gate.”

Something in me glimmered, far down. I summoned myself: the biggest action of my life, lifting my head long enough to place it in her lap. I pressed breath kisses into her filmy skirt. Her face hung above me, half a moon, with her draping hair.

Now eight years later, Naomi still collects lullabies but listens to them by herself in the car. Old songs that I imagine make her weep in traffic. It’s a long time since Naomi last sang to me. It’s a long time since I’ve heard a riddle song or a Gypsy song or a Russian song, not a partisan song or a song from the French Foreign Legion, not a single Ay-li-ruh or Ay-liu-liu-liu to soothe fish in the sea, or a Bayushki-bayu to make birds dream on the bough. Now all the humour has gone out of her longing.

Over the years, Naomi’s non-sequiturs continued to catch me off-guard like a sunshower. In the produce section of the supermarket, I reaped the benefits of being married to a non-fiction editor. Choosing lettuce I learned that Chopin’s own “Funeral March” was played for him when he died. While figuring out our taxes I was informed that “Baa baa black sheep” and “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” share the same melody. I’ve learned many things while shaving or bundling the newspapers. “After World War One, a German chemist tried to extract gold from sea water to help Germany repay its war debt. He’d already extracted nitrogen from the air to make explosives. Speaking of war, did you know Amelia Earhart nursed veterans in Toronto in 1918? And speaking of nursing, Escher had to have emergency surgery when he was in Toronto to give a lecture.”

For several months Naomi worked on a series on municipal affairs.

“Tell me what’s happening in the city.”

In bed, in her favourite grey T-shirt shapeless as an amoeba, she seduced me with details. Lawyers, architects, bureaucrats; from her descriptions I knew them all. From their tastes in books and music, to awkward incidents in public and private places — all the minutiae of prominent lives—I came to an irregular and intimate knowledge of the city. Cities are built on compromising encounters, on shared affections for certain foods, on chance meetings in indoor pools. By the third week she could tell me, with a meaningful look, of a certain politician’s penchant for antique glass and I’d understand the new parking bylaws. Naomi told these stories like a courtier. Not as flabby, loose-lipped gossip, but with the cool acknowledgement that she was revealing the inner mechanisms of civic power. And sometimes, when she stopped talking, I rose to her with a pang of expectation like a taste crushed open in my mouth.

I reciprocated by feeding her bedtime stories: weather reports. When snow is ready to avalanche, the slightest disturbance will trigger the disaster: the jump of a rabbit, a sneeze, a shout. A faithful mascot waited three days by a mound of snow until someone investigated; they excavated the bewildered postman of Zurs who survived because most of freshly fallen snow is air.

In Russia, a tornado dug up a treasure and rained a thousand silver kopecks into the streets of a village.

A freight train was lifted from the tracks and placed down again, facing the other direction.

Once in a while, I admit, I made things up. Naomi could always tell. “Name your source, name your source!” she’d say, beating me with a pillow, dangling my glasses by the stem.

We used to play a game in the car. Naomi knew so many songs, she claimed she could match a lullaby or a ballad to anyone. One winter day I asked Naomi what songs she thought of when she thought of my parents. She answered almost immediately.

“For both your parents, ‘Night.’ Yes, ‘Night.’“

I looked at her. She was flustered that I didn’t understand; wary.

“Well… because they heard Liuba Levitska sing it in the ghetto.”

I glared at her. She sighed.

“Ben, keep your eyes on the road—Liuba Levitska. Your mother said she had a beautiful coloratura, that she was a real singer. She’d sung Violetta in
La Traviata
when she was twenty-one. In Yiddish¡ She gave children singing lessons in the ghetto. She taught them ‘Tsvey Taybelech’ —’Two Little Doves,’ and soon everyone was singing it. Someone offered to hide her outside the walls, but she wouldn’t leave her mother. They were both killed there…. Halfway through the war, she sang at a memorial concert in the ghetto for those who had already died. There was a big argument because a man complained that it was wrong to have a concert in a cemetery. But your mother said your father told him that there wasn’t anything more holy than hearing Liuba Levitska’s ‘Night.’“

“And what song would you choose for Jakob Beer?”

Again Naomi answered too quickly, as if she’d decided long before I asked.

“Oh, ‘Moorsoldaten,’ definitely the ‘Peat Bog Soldiers.’ Not only because it’s about bogs … but because it was the first song ever written in a concentration camp, in Borgermoor. I mentioned it to him when we met at Maurice’s. Of course he’d heard of it. The Nazis didn’t allow prisoners to sing anything except Nazi marching songs while they cut the peat, so it was real rebellion to invent a song of their own. It spread to all the camps. ‘Everywhere we look, bog and moorland stare … but winter cannot reign forever.’“

We drove on for a few minutes in gloomy silence. That February day was particularly wet, and the roads were a mess. I remembered how my classmates and I used to squeeze the slush between our boots, draining the water, leaving little molehills of white ice. We worked industriously until the schoolyard was a miniature range of mountains.

“It’s the only thing you can do for them,” Naomi said.

“What is? For who?”

“Never mind.”

“Naomi.”

My wife pulled at the fingers of her wool gloves and pushed them on again. She opened the window a crack, let in a whiff of snow, then closed it.

“The only thing you can do for the dead is to sing to them. The hymn, the miroloy, the kaddish. In the ghettos, when a child died, the mother sang a lullaby. Because there was nothing else she could offer of her self, of her body. She made it up, a song of comfort, mentioning all the child’s favourite toys. And these lullabies were overheard and passed along and, generations later, that little song is all that’s left to tell us ofthat child ….”

Just before sleep Naomi experimented until she found the right position wrapped against me in some way. She moved about, adjusted limbs, searched for the right angles, and like a penguin under the ice, found the best breathing hole between bodies and blankets. She nuzzled, adjusted, nuzzled again, then slept with the resolve of an explorer out to conquer a dream landscape. Often she was in exactly the same position when she woke.

Sometimes looking at Naomi, the sweetness of her ways—settling into bed with her work, a little dish of licorice allsorts beside her, wearing her crazy misshapen T-shirt, such childlike contentment in her face—tightened my heart. I pushed away her papers and lay on top of the covers, on top of her. “What’s wrong little bear? What’s wrong…”

My mother taught me that the extra second it takes to say goodbye— always a kiss—even if she were simply rushing to the corner for milk or to the mailbox—was never misspent. Naomi loved this habit in me, for the plain reason one often finds a lover’s habits charming: she didn’t understand its origin.

What would I do without her? I began to be afraid. So I picked fights with her over anything. Over saying kaddish for my parents. And that’s when she was driven to an edge: “You want to punish me for my happy childhood, well screw you, screw your stupid self-pity!”

Because she was right, Naomi was sorry for having said those words. All candour eventually makes us sorry. I loved her, my warrior who swept aside the war in fits of frustration with a single “screw you.” Even Naomi, who thinks love has an answer for everything, knows that that’s the real response to history. She knows as well as I that history only goes into remission, while it continues to grow in you until you’re silted up and can’t move. And you disappear into a piece of music, a chest of drawers, perhaps a hospital record or two, and you slip away, forsaken even by those who claimed to love you most.

When my parents came to Toronto, they saw that most of their fellow immigrants settled in the same downtown district: a rough square of streets from Spadina to Bathurst, Dundas to College, with waves of the more established rippling northward towards Bloor Street. My father would not make the same mistake. “They wouldn’t even have the trouble of rounding us up.”

Instead, my parents moved to Weston, a borough that was quite rural and separate from downtown. They took out a large mortgage on a small house by the Humber River.

Our neighbours soon understood my parents wanted privacy. My mother nodded a hello as she scurried in and out. My father parked as near as he could to the back door, which faced out onto the river, so he could avoid the neighbour’s dog. Our major possessions were the piano and a car in decline. My mother’s pride was her garden, which she arranged so the roses could climb the back wall of the house.