Fugitive Pieces Read online

  There were two rooms upstairs and two views. The small bedroom window opened emptily to sea. The other room, Athos’s study, looked down our stony hill to the distant town and the harbour. Winter nights, when the wind was relentless and wet, it seemed we were on the bridge of a ship, shutters creaking like masts and rigging; the town of Zakynthos shimmered, luminescent, as if under the waves. During the darkest part of summer nights, I climbed through the bedroom window to lie on the roof. In the days, I stayed in the small bedroom, willing my skin to take on the woodgrain of the floor, to take on the pattern of the rug or the bedcover, so I could disappear simply by stillness.

  The first Easter in hiding, at the midnight climax of the Anastasimi Mass, I watched from the window in Athos’s study. The procession candles were carried, a faint snaking line flickering through the streets, retracing the route of the epitafios then dispersing into the bare hills. At the edge of town, as each worshipper walked home, the line broke into sparks. With my forehead against the glass, I watched and was in my own village, winter evenings, my teacher lighting the wicks of our lanterns and releasing us into the street like toy boats bobbing down a flooded gutter. Wire handles clinked against the hot globes. The rising smells of our damp coats. Mones swinging his arms, his lamp skimming the ground, his white breath glowing from below. I watched the Easter procession and placed this parallel image, like other ghostly double exposures, carefully into orbit. On an inner shelf too high to reach. Even now, half a century later, writing this on a different Greek island, I look down to the remote lights of town and feel the heat of a lamp spreading up my sleeve.

  I watched Athos reading at his desk in the evenings, and saw my mother sewing at the table, my father looking through the daily papers, Bella studying her music. Any given moment—no matter how casual, how ordinary—is poised, full of gaping life. I can no longer remember their faces, but I imagine expressions trying to use up a lifetime of love in the last second. No matter the age of the face, at the moment of death a lifetime of emotion still unused turns a face young again.

  I was like the men in Athos’s stories, who set their courses before the invention of longitude and never quite knew where they were. They looked at the stars and knew they were missing information, terra nullius raising the hair on their necks.

  On Zakynthos we lived on solid rock, in a high and windy place full of light. I learned to tolerate images rising in me like bruises. But in my continuous expectation of the burst door, the taste of blood that filled my mouth suddenly, many times a day, I couldn’t conceive of any feeling stronger than fear. What is stronger than fear; Athos, who is stronger than fear?

  On Zakynthos I tended a garden of lemon balm and basil in a square of light on the floor. I imagined the thoughts of the sea. I spent the day writing my letter to the dead and was answered at night in my sleep.

  Athos—Athanasios Roussos—was a geologist dedicated to a private trinity of peat, limestone, and archaeological wood. But like most Greeks, he rose from the sea. His father had been the last Roussos mariner, carrying to conclusion the family shipping business dating from the 1700s, when Russian vessels sailed the Turkish Straits from the Black Sea to the Aegean. Athos knew that no ship is an object, that a spirit animates the ropes and wood, that a sunken ship becomes its ghost. He knew that chewing raw fish quenches thirst. He knew that there are forty-four elements in sea water. He described the ancient Greek cedar galleys, caulked with bitumen and outfitted with sails of silk or bright linen. He told me about Peruvian balsa rafts and Polynesian straw boats. He explained how the huge Siberian rafts made of spruce from the taiga were built on frozen rivers and set free when the ice melted in the spring. Sometimes two rafts were bound together, creating a vessel so large it could carry a house with a stone fireplace. From his father, Athos inherited sea charts that had been passed down from captains and hydrographers, augmented by generations. He drew his great-grandfather’s trading routes for me in chalk on a black slate learner’s globe. Even as a child, even as my blood-past was drained from me, I understood that if I were strong enough to accept it, I was being offered a second history.

  To share a hiding place, physical or psychological, is as intimate as love. I followed Athos from one room to the other. I was afraid, as one who has only one person to trust must be afraid, an anxiety I could only solve by devotion. I sat near him while he wrote at his desk, contemplating forces that turn seas to stone, stone to liquid. He gave up trying to send me to bed. Often I lay at his feet like a cat, surrounded by books piled ever higher on the floor beside his chair. Late at night, while he worked— a solid concentration that put me to sleep—his arm dangled like a plumb line. I was soothed by the smells of bindings and pipe tobacco and the weight of his safe, heavy hand on my head. His left arm reaching down to earth, his right arm reaching up, palm to heaven.

  During the long months, I listened to Athos recount not only the history of navigation—heightened dramatically by ancestral anecdote, pictures from books and maps —but the history of the earth itself. He heaped before my imagination the great heaving terra mobilis: “Imagine solid rock bubbling like stew; a whole mountain bursting into flame or slowly being eaten by rain, like bites out of an apple. …” He moved from geology to paleontology to poetry: “Think of the first phototropic plant, the first breath inhaled by any animal, the first cells that joined and did not divide to reproduce, the first human birth….“ He quoted Lucretius: “The earliest weapons were hands, nails, and teeth. Next came stones and branches wrenched from trees, and fire, and flame.

  Gradually Athos and I learned each other’s languages. A little of my Yiddish, with smatterings of mutual Polish. His Greek and English. We took new words into our mouths like foreign foods; suspicious, acquired tastes.

  Athos didn’t want me to forget. He made me review my Hebrew alphabet. He said the same thing every day: “It is your future you are remembering.” He taught me the ornate Greek script, like a twisting twin of Hebrew. Both Hebrew and Greek, Athos liked to say, contain the ancient loneliness of ruins, “like a flute heard distantly down a hillside of olives, or a voice calling to a boat from a shore.”

  Slowly my tongue learned its sad new powers. I longed to cleanse my mouth of memory. I longed for my mouth to feel my own when speaking his beautiful and awkward Greek, its thick consonants, its many syllables difficult and graceful as water rushing around rock. I ate Greek food, drank from Zakynthos’s wells until I too could distinguish the different springs on the island.

  We entered a territory of greater and greater tenderness, two lost souls alone on deck on a black and limitless ocean, the wind howling off corners of the house, no lights to guide us and none to give our position away.

  By early morning Athos was often close to tears of admiration for his brave lineage, or for the future: “I will be your koumbaros, your godfather, the marriage sponsor for you and your sons…. We must carry each other. If we don’t have this, what are we? The spirit in the body is like wine in a glass; when it spills, it seeps into air and earth and light…. It’s a mistake to think it’s the small things we control and not the large, it’s the other way around¡ We can’t stop the small accident, the tiny detail that conspires into fate: the extra moment you run back for something forgotten, a moment that saves you from an accident—or causes one. But we can assert the largest order, the large human values daily, the only order large enough to see.”

  Athos was fifty when we found each other at Biskupin. He was bluntly handsome, heavyset but not heavy, and his hair was halfway grey, the shade of a good silver ore. I watched him comb his hair, wet against his scalp, into deep furrows, I continued to scrutinize, as if watching a science demonstration, his hair turning thick as foam as it dried, his head slowly expanding.

  His study was crammed with rock samples, fossils, loose photos of what seemed to me to be undistinguished landscapes. I'd browse, picking up an ordinary-looking lump or chip. “Ah, Jakob, what you hold in your hand is a piece of bone from a mas
todon’s jaw … that’s bark from a thirty-five-million-year-old tree….”

  Immediately I put down whatever I held; scalded by time. Athos laughed at me. “Don’t worry, a rock that’s survived so much won’t be hurt by a boy’s curiosity.”

  He always had a cup of coffee on his desk—schetos — black and strong. During the war when his supply ran out, he reused the same grounds until he said there was not an atom of flavour left. Then futilely he tried to disguise a bland blend of chicory, dandelion, and lotus seeds by continuing to prepare it in his brass briki one cup at a time, a chemist experimenting with proportions.

  Bella would have said Athos was just like Beethoven, who counted out exactly sixty beans for each cup. Bella knew everything about her maestro. Sometimes she piled her hair on top of her head, put on my father’s coat (on Bella, a clown’s coat with sleeves hanging past her fingertips), and borrowed his unlit pipe. My mother obliged with the composer’s favourite meal: noodles and cheese (though not Parmesan) or potatoes and fish (though not from the Danube). Bella drank spring water, which Ludwig apparently imbibed by the gallon—a predilection that pleased my father, who, in these costume dramas, drew the line at Beethoven’s beer drinking.

  After dinner, Bella pushed her chair from the table and loped towards the piano. When she took off my father’s loose coat, she shed all comedy. She sat, collecting herself, pressed like a cameo in the amber of the piano lamp. During dinner she’d made her secret choice of music, usually slow, romantic, yearning with sorrow; sometimes, if she felt well-disposed towards me, “The Moonlight.” Then my sister played, drunk and precise, trying to keep on the straight line while swaggering with passion, and my mother would wring the dish towel in her hands with pride and emotion, and my parents and I would sit, stunned again by our silly Bella’s transformation.

  They waited until I was asleep, then roused themselves, exhausted as swimmers, grey between the empty trees. Their hair in tufts, open sores where ears used to be, grubs twisting from their chests. The grotesque remains of incomplete lives, the embodied complexity of desires eternally denied. They floated until they grew heavier, and began to walk, heaving into humanness; until they grew more human than phantom and through their effort began to sweat. Their strain poured from my skin, until I woke dripping with their deaths. Daydreams of sickening repetition—a trivial gesture remembered endlessly. My mother, after the decrees, turned away by a storekeeper, then dropping her scarf in the doorway, bending down to pick it up. In my mind, her whole life telescoped into that single moment, stooping again and again in her heavy blue coat. My father standing at the door, waiting for me to tie my laces, looking at his watch. Skipping stones on the river with Mones, wiping the mud off our shoes with the long grass. Bella turning the pages of a book.

  I tried to remember ordinary details, the sheet music beside Bella’s bed, her dresses. What my father’s workshop looked like. But in nightmares the real picture wouldn’t hold still long enough for me to look, everything melting. Or I remembered the name of a classmate but not his face. A piece of clothing but not its colour.

  When I woke, my anguish was specific: the possibility that it was as painful for them to be remembered as it was for me to remember them; that I was haunting my parents and Bella with my calling, startling them awake in their black beds.

  I listened to Athos’s stories in English, in Greek, again in English. At first I heard them from a distance, an incomprehensible murmur as I lay face down on the rug, anxious or despondent in the long afternoons. But soon I recognized the same words and began to recognize the same emotion in Athos’s voice when he talked about his brother. I rolled onto my stomach so I could see his face, and eventually I sat up to learn.

  Athos told me about his father, a man who’d scorned tradition most of his life, who’d raised his sons more European than Greek. His father’s maternal relatives had been prominent in the large Greek community in Odessa, and his uncles had moved in tie social circles of Vienna and Marseilles. Odessa: not far from the village where my father was born; Odessa, where, as Athos told these stories, thirty thousand Jews were being doused with gasoline and burned alive. His family had shipped the valuable red dyes for shoes and cloth from Mount Ossa to Austria and made their fortune. From his father, Athos learned that every river is a tongue of commerce, finding first geological then economic weakness and persuading itself into continents. The Mediterranean itself, he reminded me, had seduced its way out of rock—the “inland sea,” the womb of Europe. Athos’s older brother, Nikolaos, died at eighteen in a traffic accident in Le Havre. Shortly after, his mother fell ill and died. Athos’s father was convinced the family was being punished for his own sin of neglecting the Roussos origins. So he returned to the village of his birth, the place where his father had also been born. There, he paved the town square and built a public fountain in Nikos’s name. And this is where Athos took me: the island of Zakynthos, scarred by earthquakes. Its barren west and fertile east. Its groves of olives, figs, oranges, and lemons. Acanthus, amaranth, cyclamen. These were the things I did not see. From my two small rooms, the island was as inaccessible as another dimension.

  Zakynthos: mentioned with affection by Homer, Strabo, Pliny. Twenty-five miles long and twelve miles wide, its highest hills fifteen hundred feet above the sea. A port on the maritime trade route between Venice and Constantinople. Zakynthos was the island birthplace of no less than three beloved poets—Foscolo, Kalvos, and Solomos, who wrote the words to the national anthem there when he was twenty-five. A statue of Solomos presides over the square. Nikos bore a slight resemblance to the poet, and when Athos was a child he thought the statue had been erected to honour his brother’s memory. Perhaps this was the beginning of Athos’s love for stone.

  When Athos and his father returned to Zakynthos after the deaths of Nikos and his mother, they went on a night journey to Cape Gerakas to watch sea turtles lay their eggs on the beach. “We visited the salt pans at Alykes, the currant vineyards in the shadow of the Vrachionas Mountains. I was alone with my father. We were inconsolable. We stood silent at the blue grotto and in the pine groves.” For two years, until Athos could no longer avoid school, they were inseparable.

  “My father took me along while he did his business with the shipbuilders at Keri Bay. I watched them caulking seams from the springs of pitch that bubble up from the black beach. We saw a man at the docks who knew my father. The muscles of his arms bulged like massive figure-eights, his licorice hair melted with sweat, he was stained with pitch. But he spoke katharevousa, the high Greek, like a king. After, my father scolded me for my rudeness; I’d been staring at him. But it was as if his voice came from a ventriloquist¡ When I said that, my father was truly angry. It was a lesson I never forgot. Once, in Salonika, my father left me in the charge of a hamal, a stevedore, while he attended to business with the harbour master. I sat on a bollard and listened to the hamal's fantastic tales. He told me about a ship that had sunk completely and then risen again. He’d seen it with his own eyes. Its cargo was salt and when it dissolved in the hold the ship bobbed up. That was my first encounter with the magic of salt. When my father retrieved me, he offered the hamal some money for looking after me. The man refused. My father said, ‘That man is a Hebrew and he carries the pride of his people.’ Later I learned that most of the men who worked at the docks in Salonika were Jews and that the yehudi mahallari, the Hebrew quarter, was built along the harbour.

  “Do you know what else the hamal told me, Jakob? ‘The great mystery of wood is not that it burns, but that it floats.” ‘

  Athos’s stories gradually veered me from my past. Night after night, his vivid hallucinogen dripped into my imagination, diluting memory. Yiddish too, a melody gradually eaten away by silence.

  Athos pulled books off the shelves and read to me. I dove into the lavish illustrations. His was an old library, a mature library, where seriousness has given way to youthful whim. There were books on animal navigation and animal camouflage, on the hi
story of glass, on gibbons, on Japanese scroll painting. There were books on icons, on insects, on Greek independence. Botany, paleontology, waterlogged wood. Poetry, with hypnotizing endpapers. Solomos, Seferis, Palamas, Keats. John Masefield’s Salt Water Ballads, a gift to Athos from his father.

  He read to me from a biography of the sixteenth-century Flemish botanist Clusius, who went on plant-hunting expeditions in Spain and Portugal where he broke his leg, then fell off a cliff on his horse, breaking his arm, landing in a prickly shrub he named Erinacea, hedgehog broom. In similar fashion he stumbled upon two hundred new species. And from the biography of the eighteenth-century botanist John Sibthorpe, who went to Greece to hunt all six hundred plants described by Dioscorides. On his first journey, he met with plague, war, and rebellion. On his second, he travelled with an Italian colleague, Francesco Boroni (immortalized by the boronia bush). They came down with fever in Constantinople, botanized their way to the summit of Mount Olympus, and escaped capture by Barbary pirates. Then, in Athens, Boroni fell asleep by an open window and fell out, breaking his neck. Sibthorpe continued their work alone until he became ill at the ruins of Nicopolis. He staggered home to die at Oxford. His work was published posthumously, except his letters, which were accidentally burned as rubbish.

  For four years I was confined to small rooms. But Athos gave me another realm to inhabit, big as the globe and expansive as time.

  Because of Athos, I spent hours in other worlds then surfaced dripping, as from the sea. Because of Athos, our little house became a crow’s nest, a Vinland peathouse. Inside the cave of my skull oceans swayed with monstrous ice-floes, navigated by skin boats. Mariners hung from mizzenmasts and ropes made from walrus hide. Vikings rowed down the mighty rivers of Russia. Glaciers dredged their awful trails across hundreds of miles. I visited Marco Polo’s “celestial city” with its twelve thousand bridges, and sailed with him past the Cape of Perfumes. In Timbuktu we traded gold for salt. I learned about bacteria three billion years old, and how sphagnum moss was pulled from swamps and used as surgical dressing for wounded soldiers because it contained no bacteria. I learned how Theophrastus thought fossil fish swam to mountaintops by way of subterranean rivers. I learned that fossil elephants were found in the Arctic, fossil ferns in Antarctica, fossil reindeer in France, fossil musk ox in New York. I listened to Athos’s story of the origins of islands, how the mainland can stretch until it breaks at the weakest points, and those weaknesses are called faults. Each island represented a victory and a defeat: it had either pulled itself free or pulled too hard and found itself alone. Later, as these islands grew older, they turned their misfortune into virtue, learned to accept their cragginess, their misshapen coasts, ragged where they’d been torn. They acquired grace— some grass, a beach smoothed by tides.