The light and heat of her tears enter my bones.
The joy of being recognized and the stabbing loss: recognized for the first time.
When I finally fall asleep, the first sleep of my life, I dream of Michaela—young, glistening smooth as marble, sugary wet with sunlight. I feel the sun melting over my skin. Bella sits on the edge of the bed and asks Michaela to describe the feel of the bedcover under her bare legs, “because you see, just now I am without my body….” In the dream, tears stream down Michaela’s face. I wake as if I've been dug out of the dream and lifted into the world, a floating exhaustion. My muscles ache from stretching into her, as I lie in sunlight across the bed.
Every cell in my body has been replaced, suffused with peace.
She sleeps, my face against her back, her breasts spilling from my hands. She sleeps deeply like a runner who’s just emerged from the Samaria Gorge, who’s heard only her own breathing for days. I drift and wake with my mouth on her belly, or on the small of her back, drawn home by the dream into her, her breasts soft: loam, hard, sore seeds.
Each night heals gaps between us until we are joined by the scar of dreams. My desolation exhales in the breathing dark.
Our coming together is as unexpected, as accidental, as old Salonika itself, once a city of Castillian Spanish, Greek, Turkish, Bulgarian. Where before the war you could hear muezzins call from minarets across the city, while church bells rang, and the port went quiet on Friday afternoons for the Jewish Sabbath. Where streets were crowded with turbans, veils, kippahs, and the tall sikkes of the Mevlevis, the whirling dervishes. Where sixty minarets and thirty synagogues surrounded the semahane, the lodge where dervishes spun on their invisible axes, holy tornadoes, blessings drawn from heaven through the arms, brought to earth through the legs….
I grasp her arms, bury my brain in the perfume at her wrists. Bracelets of scent.
To be saved by such a small body.
Across the city, across a hundred milky backyards, Michaela is sleeping.
I’ve barely put my head down when I hear Yosha and Tomas stomping along the hall and their stage-whispers outside my door. Michaela’s smell is on me, in my hair. I feel the rough material of the sofa against my face. I’m heavy with lack of sleep, with Michaela, with the boys’ voices. Shadows of early light line the thick curtains.
What have you done to time… …
I listen to the sounds of their breakfast-making, sounds that hurt. I listen to Yosha, each note learning the air. Lips of gravity press me to earth. Frozen rain clings to new snow, silver and white. On Maurice’s sofa, reeds tangle along the banks, spring rain rushes in tin troughs, the room underwater with weather. Each sound—touch. Rain on Michaela’s bare shoulders. So much green we’ll think something’s wrong with our eyes. No signal taken for granted. Again, again for the first time.
At Maurice’s party where I met Michaela, there was a painter, a Pole from Danzig born ten years before the war. We talked a long time. “All my life,” he said, “I’ve asked myself one question: How can you hate all you have come from and not hate yourself?”
He told me that the year before, he’d bought tubes of yellow paint, every shade of the brightest yellow, but he couldn’t bring himself to use them. He continued to paint in the same dark ochres and browns.
The serenity of a winter bedroom; the street quiet except for a shovel scraping the sidewalk, a sound that seems to gather silence around it. The first morning I woke to Michaela—my head on the small of her back, her heels like two islands under the blanket—I knew that this was my first experience of the colour yellow.
We think that change occurs suddenly, but even I have learned better. Happiness is wild and arbitrary, but it’s not sudden.
Maurice is more than delighted, he’s amazed. “My friend, my friend—finally, after a million years. Irena, come here. It's like the discovery of agriculture. “
In Michaela’s favourite restaurant, I lift my glass and cutlery spills onto the expensive tiled floor. The sound crashes high as the skylight. Looking at me, Michaela pushes her own silverware over the edge.
I fell in love amid the clattering of spoons… …
I cross over the boundary of skin into Michaela’s memories, into her childhood. On the dock when she is ten, the tips of her braids wet as paint brushes. Her cool brown back under a worn flannel shirt, washed so many times it’s as soft as the skin of earlobes. The smell of the cedar dock baking in the sun. Her slippery child’s belly, her bird legs. How different to swim later, as a woman, the lake fingering her with cold; and how, even now in a lake, she can’t swim without romance shaping her energies as if she were still a girl swimming into her future. In the evening the sky lightens with dusk, above the darkening fringe of trees. She rows, singing verses of ballads. She imagines the stars as peppermints and holds them in her mouth until they dissolve.
In our first weeks together, Michaela and I drive through many northern lakeside towns, the air laced with woodsmoke, lamps lit in small houses, or past clapboard cottages boarded up against the snow. Towns that keep their memories to themselves.
White aspens make black shadows, a photographic negative. The sky wavers between snow and rain. The light is a dull clang, old, an echo of light. Michaela at the wheel, my hand on her thigh. The joy of returning to her flat in the late Sunday-afternoon dark.
In the spring, we drive further north, past copper mines and paper mills, the abandoned towns born of and rejected by industry. I enter the landscape of her adolescence, which I receive with a bodily tenderness as Michaela relaxes and imperceptibly opens towards it: the decrepit houses of Cobalt, their doorways facing every direction except the road, which was built after. The elegant stone railway station. The gaping mouths of the mines. The faded, forlorn Albion Hotel. All this I saw she loved. I knew then I would show her the land of my past as she was showing me hers. We would enter the Aegean in a white ship, the belly of a cloud. Though she will be the foreigner, agape at an unfamiliar landscape, her body will take to it like a vow. She’ll turn brown, her angles gleaming with oil. A white dress shines against her thighs like rain.
“My parents took to the highway at the least opportunity. Not only in summer, but in winter, in any weather. We drove north from Montreal, west to Rouyn-Noranda and further, to an esker forest, and to an island…. The further north you drive, the more compelling the power of the metal in the ground….”
As a child, in the speeding night car, her face against the cold rear window, she imagined she could feel the pull between the stars and the mines, a metal dependency of concepts she didn’t understand: magnetism, orbits. She imagined the stars straying too close to the earth and being forced to the ground. Windows open, highway air against summer skin, her bathing suit still damp under her shorts, sometimes sitting on a towel. She loved those nights. The dark shapes of her parents in the front seat.
“On the island the harbour stores smelled of wool and mothballs, chocolate and rubber. My mother and I bought cotton sunhats there. We bought old boardgames and jigsaw puzzles of bridges and sunsets; the cardboard pieces always seemed slightly soggy…. The pioneer museum made me afraid of ghosts of Indians and settlers and the spirits of hunted animals. I saw the clothes of men and women who hadn’t been much taller than me, even when I was only ten or eleven. Jakob, their small clothes terrified me¡ There’s a legend, that the Manitoulins once burned the island down to soil, destroying the forest and their own settlements, in order to dislodge a spirit. To save themselves, they set fire to their homes. I had nightmares of men running through the forest, a trail of torches. The island was supposed to have been purified, but I worried that the spirit was planning its revenge. I think a child knows intuitively that it’s the most sacred places that are the most frightening…. But there was also a happiness on the island that I’ve never been able to recreate. Meals outside, lanterns, glasses filled with juice that had been chilled in the lake. I taught myself about root systems and mosses, I read Steinbe
ck’s The Red Pony on the screened porch. We rowed. My father taught me new words that I imagined were followed by an exclamation mark representing his pointing finger: cirrus¡ cumulus¡ stratonimbus¡ When we were up north my father wore canvas shoes. My mother wore a scarf over her hair….”
Just as Michaela is wearing, as she tells me these stories. The fabric outlining her profile, drawing out her cheekbones.
“Later, when I returned to those places, especially the beaches of the North Channel— as an adult driving north alone—I felt there was someone with me in the car. It was strange, Jakob, as if an extra self was with me. Very young or very old.”
As she talks, we pass through deserted lakeside towns, sand drifting across the road from the spring beach. The poignancy of northern resort towns in off-season silence. Porches heaped with firewood, toys, old furniture; glimpses of lives. Towns that wake briefly for the short weeks of hot weather, like flowering cereus. And I can’t breathe for fear of losing her. But the moment passes. From Espanola to Sudbury, the quartzite hills absorb the pink evening light like blotting paper, then pale under the moon.
Finally, Michaela takes me to one of the meccas of her childhood, a birch forest growing out of white sand.
This is where I become irrevocably unmoored. The river floods. I slip free the knot and float, suspended in the present.
We sleep among the wet birches, nothing between us and the storm except the fragile nylon skin of the tent, a glowing dome in the blackness. Wind rolls in from the distance, catches in the high antennae of branches then rolls past us into the rain, full of electricity. I cover Michaela, inside the sleeping bag, conscious of the tent as if it were a wet shirt against my back. Lightning. But we are grounded.
She rises to me unhesitatingly. What does the body make us believe? That we’re never ourselves until we contain two souls. For years corporeality made me believe in death. Now, inside Michaela yet watching her, death for the first time makes me believe in the body.
As the wind gathers in the trees and then moves on, rippling through the forest, I disappear in her. Glinting seeds scatter in her dark blood. Bright leaves into the night wind; stars on the starless night. We are the only ones foolish enough to be sleeping out in the April storm. In the shaking tent Michaela tells me stories, my ear on her heart until, with the rain against the frail nylon, we sleep.
When we wake, there is pool of water by our feet. It is not on Idhra or on Zakynthos but among Michaela’s birches that I feel for the first time safe above ground, earthed in a storm.
Accessible from only one harbour, one angle, Idhra has a crooked spine, its head turned away. We lean against the railing, my arms around Michaela’s waist. The ship’s flag grabs at twilight. Heat washes away under the rushing fountain of stars.
On Idhra spring stirs like a young woman after her first night of love, adrift between an old life and a new. Sixteen years a girl and two hours a woman, that’s how Greece wakes from winter. One afternoon the colour of light sets, a glaze hardening on ceramic.
Olive leaves store the sun relentlessly, the strong Greek sun, until they become so dense in colour that the green turns purple, the leaves bruised by their own greed. Until they become so dark they can take in no more and, shiny, reflect the light like smoky mirrors.
High in the blue air, the light splashes like scented oil over skin. We are sticky with the musk of grapes and salt water. Michaela, clothed in summer heat, grinds coffee, sets out honey and figs.
Michaela forgets her body for hours at a time. I love to watch her while she’s thinking or reading, her head leaning on her hand. On the floor or in a chair, her limbs abandoned to gravity. The more intense her concentration, the more abstract the problem she contemplates, the farther her body roams. Down long roads, her legs swinging, or across open water, her hair wandering down her back. This is her body’s truancy, its mischievousness. Freed from Michaela’s disciplining mind, it runs away, goes outdoors. When she looks up and catches me watching her, or simply stops reading—” Jakob, Hawthorne actually pretended to be ill so he could stay home and read Carlyle’s essay on heroes” —her body is there again, reappearing suddenly in the chair. And I feel deep appreciation for those heavy, sneaky limbs that have defied her mind’s authority without it knowing. She looks at me, all presence. While her body and I share our delicious secret.
Listening to Michaela read, I remember how Bella read poetry; how the yearning in her voice reached me as a child, though I didn’t understand the feeling. I realize, half a century after her death, that though my sister never felt herself moving in a man’s hands, she must have already loved so deeply, so secretly, that she knew something about the other half of her soul. This is one of Michaela’s blessings. Michaela, who pauses, because it has just occurred to her: “Do you realize Beethoven composed all his music without ever having looked upon the sea?”
Each morning I write these words for you all. For Bella and Athos, for Alex, for Maurice and Irena, for Michaela. Here on Idhra, in this summer of 1992,1 try to set down the past in the cramped space of a prayer.
In the afternoons I search Michaela for fugitive scents. Basil on her fingers, garlic transferred from fingers to a stray hair; sweat from her forehead to her forearm. Following a path of tarragon as if carried by long division from one column to another, I trace her day, coconut oil on her shoulders, high grass sticking to her sea-damp feet.
We light the storm lamps, accompanied by the sound of cicadas, and she tells me plots of novels, history, childhood stories. We read to each other, eat and drink. Fresh fish bought from the village with domates baked in olive oil and thyme; eggplant and anginares grilled and soaked in lemon. On a table graced with stillness and smells, the wild order of plums.
Sometimes Mrs. Karouzos’s son climbs up from the town to bring gifts from his mother “for old Jakob and his young bride” : bread, olives, wine. Manos sits with us in the evenings, and the faint decorum he brings to our table sharpens my desire. I look at their faces across the table. Our guest’s gentle privacy, his restrained affection, and Michaela, bursting with health and radiating pleasure, looking—is it possible?—like a woman well loved.
I watch Michaela bake a pie. She smiles and tells me that her mother used to roll the pastry this way. Unknowingly, her hands carry my memories. I remember my mother teaching Bella in the kitchen. Michaela says: “My mother used to cut the dough this way, which she learned from her aunt, you know, the one who married the man who had a brother in New York. …” On and on, casually, offhand, Michaela’s mother’s stories of relatives from the next town, from across the ocean, unroll like the crust. The bold dress cousin Pashka wore to her niece’s wedding. The cousin who met and married a girl in America but she came from his own home town, can you believe it, he had to travel halfway around the world just to meet the neighbour’s daughter. … I remember my mother urging Bella not to reveal the secret ingredients of her honey cake—the envy of Mrs. Alperstein—not ever, except to her own daughter, God willing. A few tablespoons of porridge so it will be smooth and moist as cream, and honey from acacias so the cake will come out golden…. Remembering this, I think of the ancient Japanese sword-makers who recited stories as they folded the steel— bending it thousands of times for strength and flexibility—stories timed to accompany the tempering process. So that when they fell silent, the steel was ready; the stories a precise recipe. I’m missing what Michaela’s telling me, a family story about a wife who finally throws the kettle at the husband, because I’m remembering how my mother sometimes chastised Bella for her temper: “Tough birds are only good for soup,” “If you’re thinking bad thoughts the cake won’t rise” — and here’s Michaela cajoling the dough as she puts it in the oven, whispering to her pie to come out just right.
There’s no absence, if there remains even the memory of absence. Memory dies unless it’s given a use. Or as Athos might have said: If one no longer has land but has the memory of land, then one can make a map.
&nbs
p; Now I’m not afraid when harvesting darkness. I dig with my eyes into the night bedroom, Michaela’s clothes tangled with mine, books and shoes. A brass lamp from a ship’s cabin, from Maurice and Irena. Objects turn to relics before my eyes.
Night after night my happiness wakes me. Sometimes, asleep, the pressure of Michaela’s leg against mine translates into a dream as warmth, sunlight. Stilled by light.
Silence: the response to both emptiness and fullness.
The lamplight casts us in bronze. In the yellow pool waking the dark, one stares, one sleeps, both dream. The world goes on because someone’s awake somewhere. If, by accident, a moment were to occur when everyone was asleep, the world would disappear. It would whirlpool into dream or nightmare, tripped by memory. It would collapse to a place where the body’s simply a generator for the soul, a factory of longing.
We define a man by what he admires, what raises him.
All things aspire, even if only atomically. A body will rise quietly until caught by the surface. Then the moon pulls it to shore.
I pray that soon my wife will feel new breath inside her own. I press my head against Michaela’s side and whisper a story to her flat belly.
Child I long for: if we conceive you, if you are born, if you reach the age I am now, sixty, I say this to you: Light the lamps but do not look for us. Think of us sometimes, your mother and me, while you’re in your house with the fruit trees and the slightly wild garden, a small wooden table in the yard. You, my son, Bela, living in an old city, your balcony overlooking medieval street-stones. Or you, Bella, my daughter, in your house overlooking a river; or on an island of white, blue, and green where the sea follows you everywhere. When it rains, think of us as you walk under dripping trees or through small rooms lit only by a storm.