Fugitive Pieces Read online

  Reading weather is one thing: all the expected examples of thunderstorms and avalanches, blizzards and heat waves, monsoons. The Tempest, the blasted heath in King Lear. Camus’s sunstroke in The Stranger. Tolstoy’s snowstorm in “Master and Man.” Your Hotel Rain poems. But biography…. The snowstorm that detained Pasternak in a dacha, where he fell in love while listening to Maria Yudino play Chopin (“Snow swept over the earth … the candle burned …” ). Madame Curie refusing to come out of the rain when she heard the news of her husband’s death. The Greek summer heat while the war boiled out of you like a fever. Dostoyevsky was the first example I thought of; his brutal convict march to Siberia. The prisoners stopped at Tobol’sk, where the old peasant women took pity on them. The good women stood on the banks of the Irtysh River, thirty below, and gave them bundles of tea, candles, cigars, and a copy of the New Testament with a ten-ruble note sewn into the binding. In this state of extremity, their charity permanently entered Dostoyevsky’s heart. In the howling sunset and the pastel snow, the women shouted blessings for the journey to the pitiful caravan of prisoners, a slack rope drawing its line across the white landscape, the wind biting their skin through their thin clothes. And Dostoyevsky trudged on, wondering how it could be too late, so early in his life.

  The memories we elude catch up to us, overtake us like a shadow. A truth appears suddenly in the middle of a thought, a hair on a lens.

  My father found the apple in the garbage. It was rotten and I'd thrown it out—I was eight or nine. He fished it from the bin, sought me in my room, grabbed me tight by the shoulder, and pushed the apple to my face.

  “What is this? What is it?”

  “An apple—”

  My mother kept food in her purse. My father ate frequently to avoid the first twists of hunger because, once they gripped him, he’d eat until he was sick. Then he ate dutifully, methodically, tears streaming down his face, animal and spirit in such raw evidence, knowing he was degrading both. If one needs proof of the soul, it’s easily found. The spirit is most evident at the point of extreme bodily humiliation. There was no pleasure, for my father, associated with food. It was years before I realized this wasn’t merely a psychological difficulty, but also a moral one, for who could answer my father’s question: Knowing what he knew, should he stuff himself, or starve?

  “An apple¡ Well, my smart son, is an apple food?”

  “It was all rotten—”

  On Sunday afternoons we’d drive into the farmland bordering the city or to their favourite park at the edge of Lake Ontario. My father always wore a cap to keep his few stray hairs from flying into his eyes. He drove with both hands gripping the wheel, never violating the speed limit. I slouched in the back seat, learning Morse code from the The Boy Electrician, or memorizing the Beaufort Scale (“Wind force o: smoke rises vertically, sea like a mirror. Force 5: small trees sway, whitecaps. Force 6: umbrellas used with difficulty. Force 9: structural damage occurs.” ). Once in a while my mother’s arm would appear over the front seat, a roll of candy dangling from her hand.

  My parents would unfold their lawnchairs (even in winter) while I scrambled out alone, collecting rocks or identifying clouds or counting waves. I lay on grass or sand, reading, sometimes falling asleep in my heavy jacket under a clay sky with The Moonstone or Men Against the Sea with its waterspouts and volcanoes (“I cannot recall the hours that followed without experiencing something of the horror I felt at the time. Wind and rain, rain and wind, under a sky that held no promise of relief. In all that time, Mr. Bligh did not leave the tiller, and he seemed to have an exhilaration of mind that grew greater as our peril increased …” ). In good weather my mother set out the lunch she’d prepared, and they sipped strong tea from a thermos while the wind searched through the cold lake and cumulus chuffed across the horizon.

  Early Sunday evenings, while my mother made dinner, I listened to music with my father in the living room. Watching him listen made me listen differently. His attention dissolved each piece to its theoretical components like an X-ray, emotion the grey fog of flesh. He used orchestras—other people’s arms and hands and breath—to signal me; a wordless entreaty, all meaning pressed into chords. Leaning against him, his arm around me—or, when I was very young, lying with my head on his lap—his hand on my hair absentmindedly but, for me, feral. He stroked my hair to Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Beethoven, Mahler’s lieder: “Now all longing wants to dream,” “I have become a stranger in the world.”

  Those hours, wordless and close, shaped my sense of him. Lines of last light over the floor, the patterned sofa, the silky brocade of the curtains. Once in a while, on summer Sundays, the shadow of an insect or bird over the sun-soaked carpet. I breathed him in. The story of his life as I knew it from my mother—strange episodic images — and his stories of composers, merged together with the music. Cow breath and cow dung and fresh hay on Mahler’s muddy night road home, moonlight a spiderweb over the fields. Under the same moonlight, marching back to the camp, my father’s tongue a thong of wool; unbearably thirsty as he walked at gunpoint, past a bucket of rainwater, its small circular mirror of stars. Praying for rain so they could swallow what fell on their faces, rain that smelled like sweat. How he ate the centre of a cabbage in a farmer’s field, leaving it hollow but looking whole so no one would trace his escape from the soldiers in the grove.

  I looked up from my father’s lap to his concentrating face. He always listened with his eyes open. Beethoven with the storm of the Sixth in his face, pacing in the forest and fields of Heiligenstadt, the real storm at his back, at my father’s back, mud weighing down his feet like overshoes, the shrill, desperate cry of a bird in the rainy trees. My father concentrating, during one long march, on a sliver in his hand, to keep his thoughts from his parents. I felt my skull under his fingers as he combed through my short hair. Beethoven frightening oxen with his windmill-waving arms, then stopping stock-still to look at the sky.My father staring at a lunar eclipse beside the chimneys, or staring at the sun’s dead light like scum on the potholes. The gun in my father’s face, how they kept nudging with their boots the cup of water from his reach.

  As long as the symphony lasted, the song cycle, the quartet, I had access to him. I could pretend his attention to the music was attention to me. His favourite pieces were familiar, finite journeys we took together, recognizing signposts of ritardando and sostenuto, key changes. Sometimes he played a recording by a different conductor and I experienced the acuity of his ears as he compared interpretations: “Ben, do you hear how he rushes the arpeggios.” “Listen to how he draws it out … but if he emphasizes here, he’ll ruin the crescendo later on!” And the following week we’d go back to the version we knew and loved like a face, a place. A photograph.

  His absent fingers combing through my short hair. Music, inseparable from his touch.

  Feeling the lines of my father’s thin legs under his trousers, barely believing they were the same legs that walked those distances, stood those hours. In our Toronto apartment, images of Europe, postcards from another planet. His only brother, my uncle, whose body vanished under a squirming skin of lice. Instead of hearing about ogres, trolls, witches, I heard disjointed references to kapos, haftlings, “Ess Ess,” dark woods; a pyre of dark words. Beethoven, wandering in old clothes, so shabby his neighbours nicknamed him Robinson Crusoe; the shifting wind before a storm, leaves cowering before the slap of rain, the Sixth, Opus 68; the Ninth, Opus 125. All the symphony and opus numbers I learned, to please him. That grew in my memory, under his fingers as he stroked my hair; the hair on his arm, his number close to my face.

  Even my father’s humour was silent. He drew things for me, cartoons, caricatures. Appliances with human faces. His drawings offered the glimpse: how he saw.

  “Is an apple food?” “Yes.”

  “And you throw away food? You—my son—you throw away food?” “It’s rotten—” “Eat it. …Eat it!” “Pa, it’s rotten—I won’t—”

  He pushed it in
to my teeth until I opened my jaw. Struggling, sobbing, I ate. Its brown taste, oversweetness, tears. Years later, living on my own, if I threw out leftovers or left food on my plate in a restaurant, I was haunted by pathetic cartoon scraps in my sleep.

  Images brand you, burn the surrounding skin, leave their black mark. Like volcanic ash, they can make the most potent soil. Out of the seared place emerge sharp green shoots. The images my father planted in me were an exchange of vows. He passed the book or magazine to me silently. He pointed a finger. Looking, like listening, was a discipline. What was I to make of the horror of those photos, safe in my room with the cowboy curtains and my rock collection? He thrust books at me with a ferocity that frightened me, I would say now, more than the images themselves. What I was to make of them, in my safe room, was clear. You are not too young. There were hundreds of thousands younger than you.

  I dreaded my piano lessons with my father and never practised when he was home. His demand for perfection had the force of a moral imperative, each correct note setting order against chaos, a goal as impossible as rebuilding a bombed city, atom by atom. As a child I did not feel this as evidence of faith or even anything as positive as a summoning of will. Instead I absorbed it as a kind of futility. All my sincere efforts only succeeded in displeasing him. My fugues and tarantellas unravelled in the middle, my bour-rées clumped along, so aware was I of my father’s uncompromising ear. Eventually his abrupt dismissals of me in the middle of a piece, my unhappiness, and my mother’s pleading at us both, convinced my father to give up instructing me. Not long after our final lesson, on one of our Sundays at the lake, my father and I were walking along the shore when he noticed a small rock shaped like a bird. When he picked it up, I saw the quick gleam of satisfaction in his face and felt in an instant that I had less power to please him than a stone.

  When I was eleven, my parents rented a cottage for the last two weeks of the summer. I’d never before experienced absolute darkness. Waking at night, I thought I’d gone blind in my sleep— any child’s terror. But made palpable by the dark was another old fear. I lowered my legs and thrust my arms into the dangerous air until I found the lamp. This was a test. I knew it was essential to be strong. After nights of sleeping with a flashlight in my fist, I made a decision. I forced myself out of bed, put on my sneakers, and went outside. My task was to walk through the woods with the flashlight off until I reached the road, about a quarter of a mile away. If my father could walk days, miles, then I could walk at least to the road. What would happen to me if I had to walk as far as my father had? I was in training. My flannel pyjamas were clammy with sweat. I walked with useless eyes and heard the river, modest knife of history, carving its blade deeper into the earth; rusty blood seeping through the cracked face of the forest. A fine mesh of insects on the heavy breath of the night, the slap of ferns weirdly cold against my ankles —nothing alive could be so cold on such a hot night. Slowly the trees began to emerge from the differentiated dark, as if embossed, black on black, and the dark itself was a pale skin stretched across charred ribs. Above, the far surf of leaves, a dark skirt of sky rustling against skeletal legs. Strange filaments from nowhere, the hair of ghosts, brushed my neck and cheeks and would not be rubbed away. The forest closed around me like a hag’s embrace, all hair and hot breath, bristly skin and sharp fingernails. And just as I felt overwhelmed, sick with terror, suddenly I was in clear space, a faint breeze over the wide road. I turned on the flashlight and followed, running, its white tunnel back along the path.

  In the morning I saw my legs were smeared with mud and tea-coloured blood from bites and branches. The rest of the day I discovered scratches in strange places, behind my ears, or along the inside of my arm, a thin line of blood as if drawn by red pen. I was certain that the ordeal had purged my fear. But I woke again that night in the same state, my bones cold as steel. Twice more I repeated the journey, forcing myself to face the darkness of the woods. But I still couldn’t bear the darkness of my own room.

  When I was twelve, I befriended a Chinese girl not much taller than me, though considerably older. I admired her leather cap, her dark skin, her elaborately twisted hair. Imagine a strand of hair four thousand years old¡ I also befriended an Irish boy and a Dane. I had discovered the perfectly preserved bog people in National Geographic, and derived a fascinated comfort from their preservation. These were not like the bodies in the photos my father showed me. I drew the aromatic earth over my shoulders, the peaceful spongy blanket of peat. I see now that my fascination wasn’t archaeology or even forensics: it was biography. The faces that stared at me across the centuries, with creases in their cheeks like my mother’s when she fell asleep on the couch, were the faces of people without names. They stared and waited, mute. It was my responsibility to imagine who they might be.

  Like a musical score, when you read a weather map you are reading time. I’m sure, Jakob Beer, that you would agree one could chart a life in terms of pressure zones, fronts, oceanic influences.

  The hindsight of biography is as elusive and deductive as long-range forecasting. Guesswork, a hunch. Monitoring probabilities. Assessing the influence of all the information we’ll never have, that has never been recorded. The importance not of what’s extant, but of what’s disappeared. Even the most reticent subject can be—at least in part—posthumously constructed. Henry James, who might be considered coy regarding his personal life, burned all the letters he received. If anyone’s interested in me, he said, let them first crack “the invulnerable granite” of my art¡ But even James was rebuilt, no doubt according to his own design. I’m sure he kept track of the story that would emerge if all the letters to him were omitted. He knew what to leave out. We’re stuffed with famous men’s lives; soft with the habits of our own. The quest to discover another’s psyche, to absorb another’s motives as deeply as your own, is a lover’s quest. But the search for facts, for places, names, influential events, important conversations and correspondences, political circumstances — all this amounts to nothing if you can’t find the assumption your subject lives by.

  Any details of my parents’ lives before they came to Canada I learned from my mother. Afternoons, before my father came home from the music conservatory, the grandmothers and my mother’s brothers, Andrei and Max, congregated in the kitchen, where all ghosts like to gather. My father was unaware of these revenant encounters under his roof. Only once do I remember mentioning any member of my father’s vanished family in his presence—someone we were talking about at the dinner table was “just like Uncle Josef” — and my father’s gaze jolted up from his plate to my mother; a terrifying look. The code of silence became more complex as I grew older. There were more and more things to keep from my father. The secrets between my mother and me were a conspiracy. What was our greatest insurrection? My mother was determined to impress upon me the absolute, inviolate necessity of pleasure.

  My mother’s painful love for the world. When I witnessed her delight in a colour or a flavour, the most simple gratifications —something sweet, something fresh, a new article of clothing, however humble, her love of warm weather— I didn’t disdain her enthusiasm. Instead, I looked again, I tasted again, noticing. I learned that her gratitude was not in the least inordinate. I know now this was her gift to me. For a long time I thought she had created in me an extreme fear of loss — but no. It’s not in the least extreme.

  Loss is an edge; it swelled everything for my mother, and drained everything from my father. Because of this, I thought my mother was stronger. But now I see it was a clue: what my father had experienced was that much less bearable.

  As a boy, twisters transfixed me with their bizarre violence, the random precision of their malevolence. Half an apartment building is destroyed, yet an inch away from the vanished wall, the table remains set for dinner. A chequebook is snatched from a pocket. A man opens his front door and is carried two hundred feet above the tree-tops, landing unharmed. A crate of eggs flies five hundred feet and is set down
again, not a shell cracked. All the objects that are transported safely from one place to another in an instant, descending on ascending air currents: a jar of pickles travels twenty-five miles, a mirror, dogs and cats, the blankets ripped from a bed leaving the surprised sleepers untouched. Whole rivers lifted—leaving the riverbed dry— and then set down again. A woman carried sixty feet then deposited in a field next to a phonograph record (unscratched) of “Stormy Weather.”

  Then there are the whims that are not merciful: children thrown from windows, beards torn from faces, decapitations. The family quietly eating supper when the door bursts open with a roar. The tornado prowls the street, it seems to stroll leisurely, selecting its victims, capricious, the sinister black funnel slithering across the landscape, whining with the sound of a thousand trains.

  Sometimes I read to my mother while she made dinner. I read to her about the effects of a Texan tornado, gathering up personal possessions until in the desert it had collected mounds of apples, onions, jewellery, eyeglasses, clothing—” the camp.” Enough smashed glass to cover seventeen football fields—” Kristallnacht.” I read to her about lightning—” the sign of the Ess Ess, Ben, on their collars.”

  From conversations with my mother, when I was eleven or twelve, I learned that “those with a trade had a better chance of survival.” I went to the library and found Armac’s The Boy Electrician and set about acquiring a new vocabulary. Capacitors, diodes, voltmeters, induction coils, long-nosed pliers. I raided the “Pageant of Knowledge” series, Electronics for Beginners, The Living World of Science. Then I realized that knowing the right words might not be enough. Hesitantly I asked my father for money for my first circuit board and a soldering iron. Though he knew little about such things, I wasn’t surprised that he saw the use of it and he encouraged my interest for a while. We went together to Esbe Science Supply for toggles and switches and various knobs and dials. For my birthday he bought me a microscope and slides. The rest of my equipment I acquired myself: my wet- and dry-bulb hygrometer, Bunsen burner, Z-tubes and funnels, pipettes, conical flasks. My mother generously cleaned out a closet to make room for my laboratory, where I spent hours alone. Even the lab coat she sewed for me from a torn sheet didn’t deter me. I wasn’t very good at any of it and had to follow a book at all times, having no instinct for electricity or chemistry, but I loved the smell of solder and was amazed when my first circuit lit a bulb in that dim closet.