I seek out the horror which, like history itself, can’t be stanched. I read everything I can. My eagerness for details is offensive.
In Birkenau, a woman carried the faces of her husband and daughter, torn from a photograph, under her tongue so their images wouldn’t be taken from her. If only everything could fit under the tongue.
Night after night, I endlessly follow Bella’s path from the front door of my parents’ house. In order to give her death a place. This becomes my task. I collect facts, trying to reconstruct events in minute detail. Because Bella might have died anywhere along that route. In the street, in the train, in the barracks.
When we were married I hoped that if I let Alex in, if I let in a finger of light, it would flood the clearing. And at first, this is exactly what happened. But gradually, through no fault of Alex’s, the finger of light poked down, cold as bone, illuminating nothing, not even the white point of contrast that burned away the ground it touched.
And then the world fell silent. Again I was standing under water, my boots locked in mud.
Does it matter if they were from Kielce or Brno or Grodno or Brody or Lvov or Turin or Berlin? Or that the silverware or one linen tablecloth or the chipped enamel pot—the one with the red stripe, handed down by a mother to her daughter—were later used by a neighbour or by someone they never knew? Or if one went first or last; or whether they were separated getting on the train or off the train; or whether they were taken from Athens or Amsterdam or Radom, from Paris or Bordeaux, Rome or Trieste, from Parczew or Bialystok or Salonika. Whether they were ripped from their dining-room tables or hospital beds or from the forest? Whether wedding rings were pried off their fingers or fillings from their mouths? None of that obsessed me; but—were they silent or did they speak? Were their eyes open or closed?
I couldn’t turn my anguish from the precise moment of death. I was focused on that historical split second: the tableau of the haunting trinity—perpetrator, victim, witness.
But at what moment does wood become stone, peat become coal, limestone become marble? The gradual instant.
Every moment is two moments.
Alex’s hairbrush propped on the sink: Bella’s brush. Alex’s bobby pins: Bella’s hairclips turning up in strange places, as bookmarks, or holding open music on the piano. Bella’s gloves by the front door. Bella writing on my back: Alex’s touch during the night. Alex whispering goodnight against my shoulder: Bella reminding me that even Beethoven never stayed up past ten o’clock.
I have nothing that belonged to my parents, barely any knowledge of their lives. Of Bella’s belongings, I have the intermezzos, “The Moonlight,” other pianoworks that suddenly recover me; Bella’s music from a phonograph overheard in a shop, from an open window on a summer day, or from a car radio….
The second legato must be a hair’s breadth, only a hair’s breadth slower than the first—
When Alex wakes me in the middle of a nightmare I’m rubbing the blood back into my feet after standing in the snow. She’s rubbing my feet with hers and wrapping her smooth, thin arms around my side, down my thighs on the narrow wooden bunks, wooden drawers with breathing bones packed feet to head. The blanket is pulled away, I’m cold. I’ll never get warm. Then Alex’s firm, flat body, a stone across my back as she climbs, her leg over my side, scrambling, turning me over. In the darkness, my skin taut, her breath on my face, her small fingers on my ear, a child holding onto a coin. Now she is still and light as a shadow, her head on my chest, her legs on my legs, her narrow hips and the touch in the cold wooden bunk in the dream— revulsion— and my mouth is closed with fear. “Go back to sleep,” she says, “go back to sleep.”
Never trust biographies. Too many events in a man’s life are invisible. Unknown to others as our dreams. And nothing releases the dreamer; not death in the dream, not waking.
The only friends of Athos’s from the university I kept up with were the Tuppers. Several times a year I took the tram east to the end of the line where Donald Tupper picked me up, and we drove back to his house on the Scarborough Bluffs. Sometimes Alex joined me; she liked the Tuppers’ sheepdog, which she and Margaret Tupper walked, out along the cliffs overlooking the clear expanse of Lake Ontario. I trailed behind with Donald, who was distracted as ever by the landscape and talked about the geography department while every so often buckling to his knees without warning to examine a stone. One autumn evening I was at least ten yards away before I realized he’d hit the ground. I turned around to find him lying on his back in the grass looking at the moon. “See how deep the maria look tonight from here, at the edge of the Great Lakes. You can almost see the silicates evaporating from the young earth to settle in the craters.”
Every year the Tuppers’ back yard eroded a few inches more until one summer their vacant dog house vanished over the edge of the bluffs during a storm. Margaret thought that this was taking soil science a bit too far and her husband reluctantly agreed they’d have to move inland. Alex related this to her father one night while he was visiting us. “Why would anyone build on the bluffs in the first place,” asked the Doctor, “if the cliffs have been eroding for thousands of years?” “Precisely because they’ve been eroding for thousands of years, Daddy-o,” answered my clever Alex.
Every moment is two moments.
In 1942, while Jews were crammed into the earth then covered with a dusting of soil, men crawled into the startled darkness of Lascaux. Animals woke from their sleep underground. Twenty-six feet below they burst to life in lamplight: the swimming deer, floating horses, rhinos, ibex, and reindeer. Their damp nostrils trembled, their hides sweating iron oxide and manganese, in the smell of subterranean stone. While a worker in the French cave remarked, “What a delight to listen to Mozart at Lascaux in the peace of the night,” the underworld orchestra of Auschwitz accompanied millions to the pit. Everywhere the earth was upturned, revealing both animals and men. Caves are the temples of the earth, the soft part of the skull that crumbles under touch. Caves are repositories of spirits; truth speaks from the ground. At Delphi, the oracle proclaimed from a grotto. In the holy ground of the mass graves, the earth blistered and spoke.
While the German language annihilated metaphor, turning humans into objects, physicists turned matter into energy. The step from language/formula to fact: denotation to detonation. Not long before the first brick smashed a window on Kristallnacht, physicist Hans Thirring wrote, of relativity: “It takes one’s breath away to think what might happen to a town if the dormant energy of a single brick were to be set free … it would suffice to raze a city with a million inhabitants to the ground.”
Alex is constantly turning on lights. I sit in late-afternoon dimness, a story eating its way to the surface, when she bursts home, full of the Saturday market and crowded trams and the daily world I’m missing— and turns on all the lights. “Why do you always sit in the dark? Why don’t you turn on the lights, Jake? Turn on the lights!”
The moment I’d spent half my day gnawing through misery to reach vanishes under a bulb. The shadows slip away until the next time, when Alex again barges in with her shameless vitality. She never understands; thinks, certainly, that she’s doing me good, returning me to the world, snatching me from the jaws of despair, rescuing me.
And she is.
But each time a memory or a story slinks away, it takes more of me with it.
I begin to feel Alex is brainwashing me. Her Gerrard Street scene, her jazz at the Tick Tock, her coffeehouse politics at the River Nihilism, owned by an origami artist who folds birds out of dollar bills. Her Trudeaumania and her cornet mania. Her portrait painted by the artist who wears half a moustache. The length of her, the edgy sexuality of which she’s now fully in control— all of it is making me forget. Athos replaced parts of me slowly, as if he were preserving wood. But Alex—Alex wants to explode me, set fire to everything. She wants me to begin again.
Love must change you, it can only change you. Though now it seems I don’t want Alex’s
understanding. Now her lack of understanding seems proof of something.
I watch Alex get dressed to meet her friends. She is dishearteningly perfect. She clips a thick gold bracelet around a slim black sleeve. Her dress is as tight as a bud. Each item she zips, clasps, pins, lets loose the power of her beauty.
When Alex goes out with “the kids,” “the cats,” “the crowd,” I stay home, the grim reaper. “You’ll have a better time without me.”
To Alex’s father, to Maurice and Irena, Alex has walked out on me. But it’s I who have abandoned her.
She comes in late and lies on top of me. I smell the smoke in her dress, in her hair. “I’m sorry,” she says. “I won’t go without you again.” We both know she says this only because it isn’t true. She pulls each of my fingers separately, a long stroke along each stretch of bone. She kisses my palm. A flush spreads across her skin.
I draw my hands through her silky hair. I feel the birthmark at the tip of her scalp. After a few minutes her shoes thump to the floor. I pull down the long zipper and the soft black wool separates, a wake of pale skin opening. I work out the knots in her back, from too many hours in high heels, too many precarious bar stools and hours of conversation, leaning to hear above the din. I circle her smooth hot back slowly, like kneading the air out of bread. I imagine the faint impression of her garters on her thighs. She is thin and light, the bones of a bird. Her smoke-filled hair falls over her open mouth, her mouth open against my throat. Fully clothed, her limbs outline mine under the blanket—now I’m inside Athos’s coat. I feel the wetness of her breath, her small ear.
No surge of desire moves me to trace her spine with my tongue, to speak her, inch by miraculous inch.
I lie awake while she sleeps. The longer I hold her, the further Alex recedes from my touch.
There’s the decrescendo in the ninth bar, and then from pianissimo to piano so quickly, but not quite as soft as the diminuendo in the sixteenth bar—
Bella sits at the kitchen table with the music in front of her. She practises fingering on the tabletop and writes on the score what she must remember. It’s Sunday afternoon. My father is asleep on the sofa and Bella doesn’t want to wake him. I can hear the tapping now, lying next to Alex. I can hear Bella tapping on the wall between our rooms, a code we invented so we could say goodnight from our beds.
On the way home from buying eggs for my mother, Bella told me the story of Brahms and Clara Schumann. Uncharacteristically, Bella leaped at the chance to run the errand, because it was raining and she wanted to use the elegant new umbrella my father had bought for her birthday. She allowed me to walk under it with her, but she insisted on carrying it like a parasol and neither of us stayed dry. I yelled at her to hold it straight. I pulled it from her, she grabbed it back, and then I sulked outside its precious periphery until I was soaked and she was repentant. Bella always told me stories when she wanted me to forgive her. She knew I couldn’t resist listening. “When he was twenty, Brahms fell in love with Clara Schumann. But Clara was married to Robert Schumann, whom Brahms revered. Brahms worshipped Robert Schumann¡ Brahms never married. Imagine, Jakob, he was true to her his whole life. He wrote songs for her. When Clara died, Brahms was so upset that on the way to her funeral he took the wrong train. He spent two days changing trains, trying to reach Frankfurt. Brahms arrived just in time to throw a handful of earth on Clara’s coffin….” “Bella, that’s a terrible story, what kind of a story is that?”
It’s said that during the forty hours he spent on the trains, Brahms’s head was already filling with his last composition, the choral prelude “O Welt ich muss dich lassen” —” O World, I must leave thee.”
That they were torn from mistakes they had no chance to fix; everything unfinished. All the sins of love without detail, detail without love. The regret of having spoken, of having run out of time to speak. Of hoarding oneself. Of turning one’s back too often in favour of sleep.
I tried to imagine their physical needs, the indignity of human needs grown so extreme they equal your longing for wife, child, sister, parent, friend. But truthfully I couldn’t even begin to imagine the trauma of their hearts, of being taken in the middle of their lives. Those with young children. Or those newly in love, wrenched from that state of grace. Or those who had lived invisibly, who were never known.
A July evening, the windows are open; I hear children shouting in the street. Their voices are suspended in the heat evaporating from pavement and lawns. The room is motionless against the rushing trees. Alex respects me enough to bother saying the words: “I can’t stand this anymore.” I’m too tired to lift my head from my arm on the table and I open my eyes to the blurry pattern of the cloth, too close to focus.
When she says, “I can’t stand this anymore,” it also means, “I’ve met someone else.” Perhaps a musician, a painter, a doctor who works with her father. As to leaving, she wants me to watch: “This is what you want isn’t it? Every last speck of me will be gone … my clothes, my smell, even my shadow. My friends whose names you can’t remember…. ”
It’s a neurological disorder, I know what I must do but I can’t move. I can’t move a muscle or a cell. “You’re ungrateful, Jake, that dirty word you hate so much….”
When Mama and Papa first brought me here, there were thirty-two tins.
More than enough for a little boy like you, Mama said. Remember, two tins every day. Long before you run out of tins, we ?? be back. Papa showed me how to open them. Long before the tins are finished, we’ll be back for you. Don’t open the door to anyone, not even if they call you by name. Do you understand? Papa and I have the only key and we’ll come fetch you. Don’t ever open the curtains. Promise to never, never open the door. Don’t ever leave this room, not for a minute, until we get back. Wait for us. Promise.
Papa left me four books. One is about a circus, one is about a farmer, the other two are about dogs. When I finish one, I start the next and when I finish all four, I start again. I don’t remember how many times.
At the beginning I walked around the room anytime I felt like it. Now I have one place for the morning, another for after lunch. When the sun is between the rug and the bed, then I can eat supper.
Yesterday was the last tin. I'll be very hungry soon. But now that the last tin is gone, Mama and Papa will come back. The last tin means they Ve coming.
I want to go out but I promised I would never leave until they came back. I promised. What if they came back and I warn h here?
Mama, I'd even eat cooked carrots¡ Right now.
Last night there was a lot of noise outside. There was music. It sounded like a birthday party.
The last tin means they’ll be here soon.
I'm floating. The floor is far away. What if I don’t open the door, what if I leave through that little crack in the ceiling….
A week has passed since Alex moved out. If she were to return, she would find me in the same place she left me. I lift my head from the table. The July kitchen is dark.
TERRA NULLIUS
Iarrive in Athens at midnight. Leaving my bag at the Hotel Amalias, I walk back out into the street. Each step is like passing through a doorway. I seem to be remembering things only as I see them. The leaves whisper under the streetlamps. I climb steep Lykavettos, lurching, stopping to rest. Soon I can’t feel the heat, my blood and the air are the same temperature.
I stare at the house that used to be Kostas and Daphne’s and which looks recently redecorated, flowers dripping from window boxes. I long to open the front door and enter the vanished world of their kindness. To find them there, small as two children, their feet barely skimming the floor as they lean back on the sofa.
Kostas, in the last letter he sent me before he died: “Yes, we have the democratic constitution. Yes, the press is free. Yes, Theodorakis is free. Now we can again watch our tragedies in the amphitheatre and sing rebetika. But not for a day do we forget the massacre at the polytechnic. Or the long imprisonment of Ritsos—even whe
n he accepts his honorary degree at Salonika University or reads his ‘Romiosini’ at Panathinaiko Stadium….”
Standing outside Kostas and Daphne’s house, it doesn’t seem possible that they are gone, that Athos has been dead close to eight years. That Athos, Daphne, and Kostas never even met Alex.
I want to call Alex long distance, to turn around and take a plane back to Canada; as if it’s essential to tell her what it was like, those few weeks with the three of them in that house when I was young. As if this is the missing information that could have saved us. I want to tell her that now I could be roused, if only she could want me back.
In my hotel room I lie awake until I’m ready to weep from exhaustion. I’ve been awake since Toronto; two days and two nights. The traffic never stops on Amalias. All night I hear the noise of the street as I travel out of the past.
In the morning I’m unprepared for the German language in Syntagma Square, unprepared for the tourists everywhere. I take the first flight of the day to Zakynthos. The shortness of the journey by air disorients me. But the landing strip is surrounded by fields I recognize. Wild calla and high grass sway silently in the hot wind.
I walk uphill in a trance.
The earthquake has turned our little house into a cairn. I bury Athos’s ashes under the stones of our hiding place. The asphodels that we used so long ago to make bread are growing everywhere through the broken pile. It seems proper that with Athos gone, the house should also be gone. After, in the partially rebuilt town, I inquire at the kafenio and learn that Old Martin died the year before. He was ninety-three and everyone in Zakynthos attended his funeral. Since the earthquake, Ioannis and his family have lived on the mainland. A few hours later, I leave Zakynthos on The Dolphin and cross the channel. The orange plastic deck chairs glint like hard candy. The sky is a billowing blue tablecloth suspended by the wind. At Kyllini I board a bus back to Athens. I eat a very late dinner from a tray, on the balcony of my hotel room. When I wake in the morning, I am still fully dressed.