We look for the spirit precisely in the place of greatest degradation. It’s from there that the new Adam must raise himself, must begin again.
I want to remain close to Bella. I read. I rip the black alphabet to shreds, but there’s no answer there. At night, at Athos’s old desk, I stare at photos of strangers.
Brahms wrote the intermezzos for Clara, and she adored them because they were for her—
I want to remain close to Bella. To do so, I blaspheme by imagining.
At night the wooden bunk wears through her skin. Icy feet push into the back of Bella’s head. Now I will begin the intermezzo. I must not begin too slowly. There is no room. Bella’s arms cover herself. At night when everyone is awake, I will not listen to the crying. I will play the whole piece on my arms. Her skin is coming apart at her elbows and behind her ears. Not too much pedal, you can spoil Brahms with too much pedal, especially the intermezzos, the opening must be played clear as — water. Bar 62, crescendo, pay attention, but it’s hard because that’s where he’s so — in love. The first time he played this for her, she listened knowing he wrote it for her. The cuts on Bella’s head are burning. She closes her eyes. After the intermezzo I will practise parts of the Hammerklavier. By then most of the barrack will be asleep. Against her sore scalp, the feet are wet and send the ice into her. The two notes at the beginning of the adagio Beethoven added after, at the publisher'; the A and C# that change everything. Every raw place on her scalp bursts with cold. Then I can play it again. Without the two notes.
When they opened the doors, the bodies were always in the same position. Compressed against one wall, a pyramid of flesh. Still hope. The climb to air, to the last disappearing pocket of breath near the ceiling. The terrifying hope of human cells.
The bare autonomie faith of the body.
Some gave birth while dying in the chamber. Mothers were dragged from the chamber with new life half-emerged from their bodies. Forgive me, you who were born and died without being given names. Forgive this blasphemy, of choosing philosophy over the brutalism of fact.
We know they cried out. Each mouth, Bella’s mouth, strained for its miracle. They were heard from the other side of the thick walls. It is impossible to imagine those sounds.
At that moment of utmost degradation, in that twisted reef, is the most obscene testament of grace. For can anyone tell with absolute certainty the difference between the sounds of those who are in despair and the sounds of those who want desperately to believe? The moment when our faith in man is forced to change, anatomically— mercilessly—into faith.
In the still house, the visitation of moonlight. It occupies the darkness, erasing everything it touches. It has taken me years to reach this fabrication. Even as I fall apart I know I will never again feel this pure belief.
Bella, my brokenness has kept you broken.
I wait for daylight before daring to move. The dew soaks my shoes. I walk to the edge of the hill and lie down in the cold grass. But the sun is already hot. I think of my mother’s overturned glasses of steam that drew fevers from the skin. The sky is a glass.
In experiments to determine the mechanisms of migration, scientists locked warblers in cages and kept them in darkened rooms where they couldn’t see the sky. The birds lived in bewildered twilight. Yet each October, they huddled, agitated, turned inside out with yearning. The magnetic pole pulled their blood, the thumbprint of night sky on their inner eye.
When you are lost to ones you love, you will face south-southwest like the caged bird. At certain hours of the day, your body will be flooded with instinct, so much of you having been entered, so much of you having entered them. Their limbs will follow when you lie down, a shadow against your own, curving to every curve like the Hebrew alphabet and the Greek, which cross the page to greet each other in the middle of historia, bent with carrying absence, cargoes from distant ports, the power of stones, the sorrow of those whose messiahs have made them leave so much behind….
In the early darkness of Greek winter afternoons, in rooms cold at the windows, I raise my hands to my face and smell Alex in my palms.
I long for memory to be spirit, but fear it is only skin. I fear that knowledge becomes instinct only to disappear with the body. For it is my body that remembers them, and though I have tried to erase Alex from my senses, tried to will my parents and Bella from my sleep, this will amounts to nothing, for my body betrays me in a second. I have lived many years without them. Yet it’s the same winter afternoon that draws Bella close, so close I can feel her powerful hand on my own, feel her gentle fingers on my back, so close I can smell Mrs. Alperstein’s lotion, so close I feel my father’s hand and Athos’s hand on my head and my mother’s hands pulling down my jacket to straighten me out, so close I can feel Alex’s arms reaching around me from behind, and upon me her maddeningly open eyes even as she disappears into sensation, and suddenly I’m afraid, and turn around in empty rooms.
To remain with the dead is to abandon them.
All the years I felt Bella entreating me, filled with her loneliness, I was mistaken. I have misunderstood her signals. Like other ghosts, she whispers; not for me to join her, but so that, when I’m close enough, she can push me back into the world.
THE GRADUAL INSTANT
When they were young, Maurice Salman’s sons, Yosha and Tomas, often sent strange things to me through the mail: envelopes filled with sand, drawings consisting only of loops or straight lines, pieces of plastic of unknown origin. I answered with rocks and foreign coins.
Maurice, Irena, and the boys visited me on Idhra, and I stayed with them whenever I returned to Toronto, camping in the den. Maurice’s museum work required that he teach two courses at the university, including Ancient Weather: Predicting the Past. “Almost as tricky,” he told his students, “as knowing what the weather will be next week.” The demand for Greek-English translation grew steadily, and I was able to make a sufficient living. Over the years, aside from my own writing, I compiled two books of Athos’s essays for publication and translated into Greek Bearing False Witness, Sometimes Donald Tupper, on behalf of the geography department, invited me to speak on Athos’s work.
Maurice and Irena have always thrived on disorder. The boys’ school projects—Livingstone’s diary written in shaky felt marker on foolscap, the corners of the pages burned dramatically by Irena at Yosha’s instruction—was swept to one side of the dining-room table at dinner time. The Gobi Desert in Plasticine and sand on the living-room floor—everyone simply walked over it. Emerging from relative solitude on the island, I was faithfully greeted by Maurice: “So. The monk runs away to join the circus.”
I would hear the boys come home from school. Downstairs, Yosha would begin to practise the piano. Then I would hear the door slam and I knew Tomas was outside by himself in the yard. Yosha played with maddening care. He was afraid of making mistakes and played slow as geology rather than hit a wrong note.
In their house, in the narrow time between afternoon and evening, among familiar shadows and familiar clutter, I often found myself lying on the old burgundy sofa, my head next to Maurice’s books, listening to Yosha’s straining piano beautiful as light.
I love Maurice and Irena’s boys, as I would have loved Bella’s children, and I often yearn to tell them yet again about my ancient afternoons at the river docks, the thin autumn sun in bright stripes on the thick reeds, green fur on the rocks in the shallowest parts of the river, the biblical cities Mones and I made out of mud and sticks. The frozen shore, the faintly greenish sky, the black birds, the snow. When they were very young I crouched down to Yosha and Tomas and held their frail, bony shoulders, hoping to remember my father’s touch.
I watch the boys lean against Irena, the way they still sometimes give in to her caress, resting their heads against her. Irena doesn’t take this love for granted. She wasn’t young when Yosha was born and never quite believed that Tomas would survive. You can see it clearly in her face.
I listened to Yo
sha’s earnest wish to never make a mistake, his aching melody that wasn’t broken but sounded as though it was; so much space between the notes.
For years after my marriage ended, Maurice and Irena pretended to envy my freedom; secretly they amused themselves with the challenge of finding me a second wife. On my visits to Toronto they connived like teenagers. Lunches, family parties, faculty dinners—every event a potential romantic minefield, with Maurice planting the bombshells. Maurice would make the introductions and then scram. I was accustomed to his refrain: “Now Jakob, I know this woman …” and remained unmoved.
But sometimes the world disrobes, slips its dress off a shoulder, stops time for a beat. If we look up at that moment, it’s not due to any ability of ours to pierce the darkness, it’s the world’s brief bestowal. The catastrophe of grace.
I had been visiting Toronto part of every year for over eighteen years before she walked into Maurice and Irena ‘s kitchen.
I don’t know what to look at first. Her light-brown hair or her dark-brown eyes or her small hand disappearing into the shoulder of her dress to adjust a strap.
“Michaela is an administrator at the museum,” says Maurice as he makes his exit.
Her mind is a palace. She moves through history with the fluency of a spirit, mourns the burning of the library at Alexandria as if it happened yesterday. She discusses the influence of trade routes on European architecture, while still noticing the pattern of light across a table….
There’s no one left in the kitchen. All around us are glasses and small towers of dirty dishes. The noise of the party in the other room. Michaela’s hips lean against the kitchen counter. Voluptuous scholar.
Michaela has only recently met Irena. She’s asking after her.
I find myself telling Michaela a story that’s a dozen years old, the story of Tomas’s birth, about my experience of his soul.
“When Tomas was born, he was very premature. He weighed less than three pounds. …”
I had put on a gown, scrubbed my hands and arms to the elbows, and Irena led me in to see him. I saw what I can only call a soul, for it was not yet a self, caught in that almost transparent body. I have never before been so close to such palpable evidence of the spirit, so close to the almost invisible musselman whose eyes in the photos show the faint stain of a soul. Without breath, the evidence would vanish instantly. Tomas in his clear plastic womb, barely bigger than a hand.
Michaela has been looking down at the floor. Her hair, glossy and heavy and parted on the side, covers her face. Now she looks up. Suddenly I’m embarrassed at having spoken so much.
Then she says: “I don’t know what the soul is. But I imagine that somehow our bodies surround what has always been.”
Standing together on the winter sidewalk, in the white darkness. I know even less than lamplight in a window, which knows how to pour itself into the street and arouse the longing of one who waits.
Her hair and hat circle her quiet face. She’s young. There are twenty-five years between us. Looking at her I feel such pure regret, such clean sadness, it’s almost like joy. Her hat, the snow, remind me of Akhmatova’s poem where, in two lines, the poet shakes her fists then closes her hands in prayer: “You’re many years late,/how happy I am to see you.”
The winter street is a salt cave. The snow has stopped falling and it’s very cold. The cold is spectacular, penetrating. The street has been silenced, a theatre of whiteness, drifts like frozen waves. Crystals glisten under the streetlights.
She points out her impractical boots, “party shoes,” and then I feel her small leather glove around my arm.
Michaela lives above a bank. Her flat is a monastic cell of a sensuous order. I’ve entered an old world; the specifications of a dream. Magazines —Nature, Archaeology, The Conservator— and piles of books —novels, art history, children’s stories — teeter on the floor next to the couch. Shoes left in the middle of the room; a shawl flung on the table. The clutter of hibernation.
Jumbled rooms breathe dimly in the shallow light. The dark autumn fabrics, the rugs and heavy furniture, a wall of small framed photographs, a child’s lamp in the shape of a horse— all seem in defiance of the strict world of accounting in the bank below.
I’m a thief who has climbed in through a window only to find himself struck frozen by a feeling of homecoming. The impossibility of it; the luck.
I wait for Michaela to return with tea. I feel the malaise of the warm room, the peace of the immaculate snowfall. Michaela’s crammed rooms have cast a spell. I’m already painted into the Rembrandt dimness.
She comes back, carrying a tray to the low living-room table; a silver pot, glasses edged in silver. Her shoes off, now wearing thick socks, she looks even younger. Now I see in Michaela’s face the goodness of Beatrice de Luna, the Marrano angel of Ferrara, who reclaimed her faith and gave refuge to other exiles of the Inquisition
In Michaela’s face, the loyalty of generations, perhaps the devotion of a hundred Kievan women for a hundred faithful husbands, countless evenings in close rooms under the sheets, discussing family problems; a thousand intimacies, dreams of foreign lands, first nights of love, nights of love after long years of marriage. In Michaela’s eyes, ten generations of history, in her hair the scents of fields and pines, her cold, smooth arms carrying water from springs….
“Tea?” she asks, pushing newspapers onto the rug, clearing a place.
She pauses in the middle of a family story; now she’s the one uncomfortable at having spoken so much. About her parents, “like embassies” —Russian and Spanish soil under them— as they sat in their Montreal living room. About her grandmother, who told Michaela stories of her life that were actually fiction, either wishing Michaela to remember her in a certain light or wishing, herself, to believe in her longest-held fantasies. Michaela’s grandmother described a huge house in St. Petersburg, the details of ornate fixtures, carved woodwork, even the personalities of servants. Drapery of green and gold, velvet dresses of wine and black. But mostly she insisted on her education, telling Michaela she’d been a student, a teacher, a writer for a newspaper.
Michaela offers her ancestors to me. I’m shocked at my hunger for her memories. Love feeds on the protein of detail, sucks fact to the marrow; just as there’s no generality in the body, every particular speaking at once until there’s such a crying out. …
I am leaning forward on the sofa, she is sitting on the floor, the small table between us. It seems to be absolution simply to listen to her. But I know that if she touches me my shame will be exposed, she’ll see my ugliness, my thinning hair, the teeth that aren’t my own. She’ll see in my body the terrible things that have marked me.
A last shudder of strangeness, a last flash of fear before longing pushes its blade into me, up to the hilt. Skinned alive. My hand reaches for hers and instantly I know I’ve made a mistake. I’m too old for her. Too old.
Now, impossibly—can it be without pity?—she is placing her cheek—soft sun-warmed peach— against my cold palm.
I begin to trace every line, her lengths and shapes, and realize suddenly that she’s perfectly still, her hands clenched, and I’m appalled by my stupidity: my longing humiliates her. Too many years between us. Then I realize she’s entirely concentrated, pinioned under my tongue, that she’s giving me the most extravagant permission to roam the surface other. Only after I explore her this way, so slowly, an animal outlining territory, does she burst into touch.
I’m paralyzed in the cave her hair makes. Then my hands move to feel her slim waist and suddenly I know how she would bend after a shower, twisting her hair into a wet turban, feel the shape her back would make, leaning over. I hear her small voice—long phrases of music and stillness like an oar balanced in its arc above the water, dripping silver. I hear her voice but not her words, so soft; the noise of her whole body is in my ears. Instead of the dead inhaling my breath with their closeness, I am deafened by the buzzing drone of Michaela’s body, the power lines
of blood, blue threads under her skin. Cables of tendons; the forests of bone in her wrists and feet. Each time she stops speaking, in each long pause, I renew the pressure of my grasp. I feel her slowly going heavy. How beautiful the blood’s pull towards trust, the warm weight of the sleeper entering her orbit, pulling towards me, fragrant, heavy and still as apples in a bowl. Not the stillness of something broken, but of rest.
It’s growing light when Michaela undresses, deliberate and dreamlike. Her clothes dissolve.
Even the wild molecules of objects in the room seem suddenly palpable. After years, at any moment, our bodies are ready to remember us.
She lies on top of me, the saddle of pelvis, the curve of skull, fibulas and femurs, sacrum and sternum. I feel the arches of her ribs, every breath flooding blood between the ossicula of her ears and of her feet.
But there is no tinge of death in Michaela’s skin. Even as she sleeps, I see in her nakedness the invisible manifest, flooding the surface of her. I see my beloved’s damp hair against her forehead, the stain of love like salt across her belly, the hipbone nudging the surface, complex with breath. I see the muscles pushing out her calves, firm as new pears. I see that she will again open her eyes and embrace me.
It’s late, almost afternoon, when she says, though I may have dreamed it, though it’s just something Michaela might ask: Are you hungry? No…. Then perhaps we should eat so that hunger won’t seem, even for a moment, the stronger feeling….
Michaela’s hands above her head; I stroke the fragile place on the back of her smooth, soft upper arms. She is sobbing. She has heard everything—her heart an ear, her skin an ear. Michaela is crying for Bella.