Fugitive pieces (4 page)

When Athos was seven, his father brought him home fossils from Lyme Regis. When he was twenty-five, he was entranced by Europe’s new sweetheart, a limestone fertility goddess that had risen from the earth fully formed, the “Willendorf Venus.”

But it was Athos’s fascination with Antarctica, which began when he was a student at Cambridge, that was to become our azimuth. It was to direct the course of our lives.

Athos admired the scientist Edward Wilson, who was with Captain Scott at the South Pole. Among other things, Wilson, like Athos, was a watercolourist. His pigments — the deep-purple ice, the lime-green midnight sky, white stratus over black lava—were not only beautiful but scientifically accurate. His paintings of atmospheric phenomena—parhelions, paraselenae, lunar haloes—depicted the exact degrees of the sun. Athos relished that Wilson made watercolour sketches in the most perilous circumstances, then at night read the adventures of Sherlock Holmes and poetry in the tent. I was intrigued to know Wilson tried his own hand at writing the occasional poem— an activity, Wilson noted modestly, “that is perhaps an early symptom of polar anaemia.”

Always hungry ourselves, we commiserated with the starving explorers. In their howling tent, the exhausted men ate hallucinatory meals. They smelled roast beef in the frozen darkness and savoured each bite in their imaginations as they swallowed their dried rations. At night, rigid in their sleeping bags, they discussed chocolate. Silas Wright, the only Canadian on the expedition, dreamed of apples. Athos read me Cherry-Garrard’s account of their food nightmares: shouting at deaf waiters; sitting at laden tables with their arms tied; the plate that falls to the floor the moment it’s served. Finally, just as they taste their first mouthful, they fall into a crevasse.

At their base at Cape Evans during the long winter night, each member of the expedition gave a lecture on his particular specialty: polar sea-life, coronas, parasites…. This was serious passion for knowledge; a biologist once traded a heavy pair of socks for extra geology lessons.

Geologizing quickly became a mania, even among the non-scientists. Strongman Birdie Bowers turned into a rockhound, and every time he brought in a sample for identification he made the same announcement: “Here’s a gabbroid nodule impaled in basalt with feldspar and olivine rampant.”

Like the lectures at Cape Evans, these tales were told by Athos in the evenings, with the lantern on the floor between us. The light animated lithographs of Carboniferous ponds and polar wastes, and glinted off the glassed-i n shelves of minerals and wood samples, the jars of chemicals. Details gradually came clear, as I learned the words. By late evening the floor would be littered with volumes open to pictures and diagrams. In that lamplight, we might have belonged to any century.

“Imagine,” said Athos, his pale voice an emanation in the dark room, “reaching the pole only to discover Amundsen had reached it first. The entire globe hung beneath their feet. They no longer knew what they looked like, not the distant white flesh under their clothes, nor their leather faces. The sight of their own naked bodies was as far from them as England. They’d walked for months. Ceaselessly hungry. The snow turned their eyes to tinder and their faces glowed blue with frostbite. Across endless terrain split by invisible seams ready to swallow them without warning and without a sound. It was forty degrees below. They stood beside the only human evidence for a thousand miles—a mere square of cloth, Amundsen’s flag— and knew they faced every step of the homeward journey. Yet, there’s a photo of Wilson at their camp at the bottom of the world, and the camera has caught him with his head leaned back. Laughing.”

At the head of the Beardmore Glacier, in the rare exposed surface, Wilson collected fossils from the fringe of an inland sea three million years old. These rocks later helped prove that Antarctica had been tectonically torn from an immense continent, from which Australia, India, Africa, Madagascar, and South America fractured, crumbled, strayed. India smashed into Asia, the crumpled point of collision becoming the Himalayas. All of which the earth achieved with staggering patience— a few centimetres a year.

The men, barely able to drag themselves, continued to haul back thirty-five pounds of fossils from the Beardmore. Wearied beyond recovery, Wilson kept on recording his observations: ice that resembled, to his homesick eyes, gorse or sea-urchins. The rest of the expedition waited for the five who’d made the final march to the pole. When winter set in, they knew their companions would never return. In the spring, a search party discovered the tent. When the bodies were dug out of the snow, Scott’s arm was around Wilson, and the bag of fossils was lying next to them. They’d carried it with them to the end. This thrilled Athos, but for me, another detail proved Wilson’s nobility. Wilson had borrowed a book of Tennyson’s poetry for the final march to the pole and, even when every ounce tore at his thighs and shoulders, he persisted in carrying it back, in order to return it to its lender. I could easily imagine carrying a favoured item to the ends of the earth, if only to help me believe I’d see its beloved owner again.

After the First World War, Athos had returned to Cambridge to visit the new Scott Polar Research Institute. Of England he recounted nothing of castles or knights. Instead he described flowstone, dripstone, and other marvellous cave formations; spasms in time. Marble curtains bulging with petrified breezes, gypsum blossoms, clusters of stone grapes, limestone flukes shining with breath. He’d brought back a small postcard of the Scott Institute, which he showed me. And hanging above his desk was an especially prized possession: a reproduction of Wilson’s “Paraselena at McMurdo Sound,” which gave me a shock when I first saw it. It was as if Wilson had painted my memory of the spirit world. In the forefront was a circle of skis like a sparse and ghostly forest and, above, the breathtakingly divine haloes of the paraselena itself, swirling, suspended like smoke.

For many months all I saw were stars. My only prolonged experience of the outside world was late at night; Athos let me climb through the bedroom window to lie on the roof. Flat on my back, I dug a hole in the night sky. I inhaled the sea until I was light-headed, and floated above the island.

Alone, in space, I imagined the Antarctic auroras, billowing designs of celestial calligraphy, our small portion of the sky like the corner of an illuminated manuscript. Stretched out on a cotton mat, I thought of Wilson, lying on an ice-floe in the darkness of a polar winter, singing to Emperor penguins. Looking up at the stars, I saw massive islands of ice swaying on the sea, opening and closing a passage, the wind moving floes from hundreds of miles away; one of Athos’s lessons in “remote causes.” I saw ice-fields pale gold with lunar light. I thought of Scott and his frozen men starving in the tent, knowing that an abundance of food waited, inaccessible, only eleven miles away. I imagined their last hours in that cramped space.

The Germans looted the harvests of the fruit groves. Olive oil was as rare as if we lived on the ice cap. Even on lush Zakynthos we craved citrus. Athos carefully sliced a lemon in half and we sucked out the sourness down to the skin, ate the skin, then smelled our hands. Since I was still young, the rationing and restrictions affected me more than Athos. Eventually my gums began to bleed. My teeth came loose. Athos watched me falling apart and wrung his hands with worry. He softened my bread in milk or water until it was a spongy porridge. As time went on, no one had anything left to sell. We grew what we could, and Athos foraged the sea and the hedges, but it was never enough.

We survived on the overlooked sea peas and vetches, on hyacinth beans and nasturtium pods. Athos described his plant-hunting to me as he prepared our meals. He tugged out capers growing from cracks in the limestone and pickled them; we were inspired by the sturdy contrariness of the plant, which sprang from the rocks and had a marked preference for volcanic soil. Athos looked up recipes in Theophrastus and Dioscorides; he used Pliny’s
Natural History
as a cookbook. He unearthed yellow asphodels and we ate “roasted tubers à la Pliny.” He boiled asphodel stems, seeds, and roots to remove the bitterness and mixed the smashed concoction with a potato to make bread. We could even have made a liqueur from the flower, and then after dinner resoled our shoes or bound a book with glue made from the roots. Athos pored over Parkinson’s
Theatre of Plants,
a useful book that tells you not only what to cook for supper but how to dress your wounds if you have an accident in the kitchen. And, if the meal is a complete disaster, Parkinson even tells you the best recipe for mummification. Athos liked Parkinson’s book because it was originally published in 1640, which, as he explained, was “the year the first cafe opened in Vienna.” Athos took pleasure in rhyming off long Latin names while dishing out a sinister-looking green soup. Just as I lifted the spoon to my lips, he commented slyly that “the soup contains capers, not to be confused with ‘caper spurge,’ which is highly poisonous.” Then he waited for the effect. The spoon hovered outside my mouth while he casually speculated, “Unfortunate errors have, no doubt, occurred.…”

The Italian soldiers who patrolled Zakynthos had no quarrel with the Jews of the zudeccha—the ghetto. They saw no reason to disturb the three-hundred-year-old community, a peaceful mix of Jews from Constantinople, Izmir, Crete, Corfu, and Italy. On Zakynthos at least, the macaronades seemed mystified by the German agenda; they lounged in the afternoon heat and sang to the sunset crinkling over the waves. But when the Italians surrendered, life on the island changed drastically.

The night of June 5, 1944. Through the rustling darkness of the fields, late-night voices: a wife turns to her husband who’s already asleep telling him there will be another child by Christmas; a mother calls for her son across the sea; drunken promises and threats of German soldiers in the kafenio in Zakynthos town.

In the zudeccha, the Spanish silver siddur with hinges in the spine, the tallith and candlesticks are being buried in the earth under the kitchen floor. Letters to absent children, photos, are buried. While the men and women who place these valuables in the ground have never done so before, they go through the motions with centuries of practice guiding their hands, a ritual as familiar as the Sabbath. Even the child who runs to bring his favourite toy, the dog with the little wooden wheels, in order to place it in the hold in the kitchen floor, seems to act with knowledge. All across Europe there’s such buried treasure. A scrap of lace, a bowl. Ghetto diaries that have never been found.

After burying the books and dishes, the silverware and photos, the Jews of the Zakynthos ghetto vanish.

They slip into the hills, where they wait like coral; half flesh, half stone. They wait in caves, in the sheds and animal stalls of the farms of Christian friends. In their cramped hiding places, parents tell their children what they can, a hurriedly packed suitcase of family stories, the names of relatives. Fathers give their five-year-old sons advice for married life. Mothers pass down recipes not only for the haroseth on the Seder plate but for mezedhes, for cholent as well as ahladhi sto fourno—baked quince, for poppyseed cake and ladhera.

All night and day and night, on the floor next to the sea chest, I wait for the sign from Athos. I wait to close myself up inside. In the hot silence I can’t read or think past listening. I listen until I sleep, until I wake again, listening.

It was the night the families of the zudeccha went into hiding that Old Martin’s son, Ioannis, and his family came to us. The following night, Ioannis took them to a better hiding place, on the other side of the island. At the end of the week he came again, with news. He was stricken. His narrow face looked even narrower, as if it had been squeezed through a pipe. We sat in Athos’s study. Athos poured Ioannis the last inch of ouzo then filled the glass with water.

“The Gestapo ordered Mayor Karrer to write down the name and profession of every Jew. Karrer took the list to Archbishop Chrysostomos. The archbishop said: Burn the list. That’s when they sent the warning to the zudeccha. Almost everyone managed to escape the night we came to you. The next day, the streets were empty. I passed through the ghetto on the way to my father’s. In the daylight it seemed impossible that hundreds of people could have disappeared so quickly All you could hear were the trees rustling.”