Fugitive Pieces

Just as I leaned over her while she was reading, I badgered Bella while she practised, with the same appetite—to penetrate the mystery of the black symbols on the page. Sometimes my father would play, but he wasn’t half as good as Bella, and he was ashamed of the leather polish he could never completely remove from his hands. But I loved to hear him limp through a piece and, looking back, it seems right to see work-bruised hands on a clean keyboard, as if marked by the effort of making such sounds.

  I was too young to remember the composers or the names of the pieces Bella played, so if I wanted her to play something for me, I hummed the tune. I’ve wanted so often over the years to sing to her, so she would teach me the names of things. I knew only two pieces by title, because I asked her to play them more than anything else. A Brahms intermezzo and Beethoven’s “Moonlight.” When she played the Beethoven, my sister told me to imagine a deep lake surrounded by mountains, where the wind becomes trapped and the waves move in every direction under the moon. While I was skipping stones into the moonlight, perhaps Bella was constructing an elaborate fantasy about Ludwig and his Immortal Beloved. In my memory she plays as if she understood intimately his adult passions, as if she too could imagine writing in a letter, “impossible to leave the world until I’ve brought forth all that is in me…. Providence, grant me but one day of pure joy.”

  The music library was a few blocks from the flat, in the middle of a park. It was what a listening library should be, wood-panelled rooms, plush chairs, trees swimming in the windows. To listen to music alone and in public, like dining alone in a restaurant, seemed a strange and embarrassing activity, yet after Bearing False Witness was published, it became my habit to walk there once or twice a week, after dinner. I’d decided to listen systematically through the alphabet, one composer for each letter, and then start again.

  One cold night in March, I stood at the checkout desk, having just returned Fauré’s nocturnes. I had the newspaper with me and was contemplating the crossword while waiting patiently for the librarian to bring me the quintets for piano and strings.

  “Hip hip Fauré.”

  I turned around to eyes as blue as the Kianou caves. To eagerness, strength, and energy.

  “I’m making a check list, is Liszt Czech?”

  Her cardigan was open and, underneath, her silky blouse clung to her with static electricity.

  “No,” I managed. “Also,” after a few seconds, “… nix Bach, Bax, and Bix.”

  “Did you get the one about the city in Czechoslovakia?” she asked, pointing to the crossword…. “Oslo¡ You know, Czech-oslo-vakia.”

  At that moment, the librarian came back with the quintets. Not knowing what to say I took the record and mumbled my way over to the bins of sheet music. A few minutes later I saw her put on her coat. With a jolt of courage I scrambled out the door behind her.

  “I love the spring,” I said stupidly, then noticed she was clutching her coat tight against the wind.

  She asked me if I knew about the concerts at the conservatory.

  “They’re free. WEA.”

  I looked at her blankly.

  “Workers’ Education Association … the union … every Sunday afternoon at two.”

  I stood, helpless, watching strands of her auburn hair blow against her black wool tarn. Then I looked down at my feet and at her long legs and her short fur-topped boots.

  “Goodbye,” she said.

  “So long …”

  “Ceylon¡ Abyssinia Samoa. Can’t Roumania; Tibet. Moscow!”

  She strode off and looking back once, gave me a jaunty salute, like a WAC in a recruiting poster.

  That’s how I met Alexandra.

  Her father called her Sandra and she didn’t mind. With him, Alex had nothing to prove. She called her father Dr. Right—which wasn’t a Freudian signal but simply cockney slang for Dr. Maclean—he’ll make you right as rain.

  Dr. Maclean marinated his young daughter in British military pride. He told her how his fellow Londoners had carried historical treasures—including the just unearthed Sutton Hoo helmet—into the underground at Aldwych station, to protect them from the bombings. He told her stories about Major General “The Salamander” Freyberg under whom he’d served as medical officer in Crete. Freyberg had buried Rupert Brooke on Skyros and, like Byron, swam the Hellespont. Alex Gillian Dodson Maclean was -regaled -with-tales- of British intelligence agent Jasper Maskelyne who, in civilian life, came from a family of master magicians. He helped win the war with magic. Aside from concocting ordinary ruses—false road signs, exploding sheep, artificial forests disguising landing fields, and mock battalions created with shadows — Maskelyne also staged wizard japes, large-scale strategic illusions. He hid the entire Suez Canal with reflectors and searchlights. He moved Alexandria harbour a mile up the coast; each night a papier-maché city was bombed in its stead, complete with fake rubble and canvas craters.

  When she told me about these illusions, I thought of Speer’s phantom architecture, his pillars of searchlights at Nuremberg, the ghost coliseum that vanished at dawn. I thought of his neo-classical columns dissolving in the sun while the chamber walls stood. I thought of Houdini, astonishing audiences by stuffing himself into boxes and trunks, then escaping, unaware that a few years later other Jews would be crawling into bins and boxes and cupboards, in order to escape.

  Her mother died when Alex was fifteen. Her father hired a housekeeper. Alex and the doctor spent at least one evening a week playing Scrabble and did the London Times crossword together on the weekend. Alex built up an arsenal of word wit. She worked as the medical secretary in her father’s clinic, which he shared with two other doctors. In spare moments she made up medical anagrams — Physician, heal yourself: 111? Pay-shy? Our fee in cash. She thought about becoming a doctor herself, but she had too much on the go. Her passion was music; she was a professional listener. She went to the symphony, the jazz clubs, she heard recordings and could identify who was playing cornet or the piano after a few bars. Meeting Alex at the music library was like a gift of a beautiful bird on the windowsill. She was like freedom just over a border, an oasis in the sand. She was all legs and arms, gangly and elegant, all bits and pieces with one united appeal. The teenager peeped from her face or her limbs just when she was trying to be most sophisticated. This unsettled innocence was like iron filings to a magnet; she was everywhere on my heart, spiky and charged, itchy and there to stay.

  I suppose I was similarly unsettled, but had no sense of how I appeared in the world. We were both skinny as lock-picks. What did she see when she looked, in love, at me? Her father had filled her with Europe, where it was always raining and romantic, where things were intense and at stake. When not in the safety of the British enclave of her schoolmates, she gravitated to the immigrant element, to union-organized events. Her father had a special respect for Greeks, ever since he’d witnessed the old women of Modhion resisting the Germans with brooms and shovels. I suppose Alex thought I was the romance he’d prepared her for.

  Alex came out swinging, but was always hoping, or so she thought, for someone to wrestle her arms to her sides. She was a character in a screwball comedy searching in vain for a serious moment. She spent a lot of energy being modern to the minute and at the same time wanted a life of the mind—without all the reading. Good intentions are the last thing to vanish in a relationship. We fastened on to each other in an instant and it took five years to come apart. She would leap up and fling her arms around my neck like a child. She bought red shoes and only wore them when it rained because she liked how they looked on the wet pavement. She was a perpetual-motion machine that wanted to talk philosophy. When Alex wasn’t dancing, she was standing on her head.

  We sat in Bassel’s or in Diana Sweets; we talked in the haze of Constantine’s bakery where the smell of cigarettes obliterated even the smell of bread. She called Constantine’s place “Yreka Bakery” — a palindrome. Alex adored palindromes and we habitually hauled out a few favourites on our walks downtown. “T
oo far Edna we wander afoot.” “Are we not drawn onward, we few, drawn onward to new era?”

  But Alex was most in her element sharing a mickey with her friends at the Top Hat or at the Embassy Club or the Colonial. She sat at the small, round, linen-covered tables at the Royal York and seductively dangled her leftist ideas like high heels. Once we were joined by a sad young man. His father owned a mattress factory but the son was on the side of the union. His shame had two masters. Later, walking home, Alex laughed. “Don’t waste your sympathy on him¡ He got in trouble following a skirt through the union doors!”

  Alex shocked me, just as she intended. She shrugged off expectation with language; her hardness was a form of swearing. She swaggered the delicious phrase “following a skirt” and I ached with tenderness for all the frustrated innocence in her extravagant tongue.

  Alex was a sword-swallower, a fire-eater. In her mouth English was dangerous and alive, edgy and hot. Alex, Queen of the Crossword.

  She went on intellectual benders, arguing all night, leaning against men in crowded bars, stuffing herself with ideals. She was stunning. But she was a political debauchee. I didn’t have the confidence to argue Canadian politics with her blue-blood Marxist friends. How could I discuss their upper-class communism with them, those who shone with certainty and had never had the misfortune of witnessing theory refuted by fact? I felt maggoty with insecurities; I had European circuitry, my voltage wrong for the socket.

  Alex lacked confidence in only one area. Too proud to reveal her innocence, she flirted to keep men away. I admired her armour of words, learning from her how to endure my own shyness secretly. As Maurice might say, Alex was a squeeze in a tight squeeze, a woman on the fast track who couldn’t jump off her high horse for a roll in the hay. But my obvious, painful inexperience drew out her desire. She knew I was immobilized just standing close enough to smell the perfume at her hairline, the back of her neck.

  When I was with Maurice and Irena, an ordinary word —jacket, earring, wrist—blinded me in the middle of a conversation. I fell dumb. If Maurice saw disaster, he also saw that Alex was lithe as an otter, a coy explosion in a fitted suit or with one trousered leg draped over the arm of a chair.

  Upon first opening her eyes as my wife in our room at the Royal York, Alex yawned. “Just once I’d really like to mess up a hotel room.”

  Alex’s sweater on a chair, her scent lingering in the wool. Tucked behind furniture were her various handbags, from which mysterious items were transferred, one to another, whenever she went out. She’d moved into the flat I’d shared with Athos and now I explored the place like a stranger. I had entered the ancient civilization of women. The polyglycols in her perfumes and makeup, in her lotions and talcs, replaced Athos’s vials of linseed oil and sugar compounds, his polyvinyl acetate and microcrystalline wax, his alkylene oxides and thermosetting resins.

  When Maurice and Irena invited Alex and me for dinner, Irena used her wedding silver and a lace tablecloth. Irena was a flustered and radiant hostess, and served us her poppyseed cake with an embarrassed pride. Alex wanted to enjoy these evenings but she was restless. She brought along some scotch and cigarettes and tucked her feet under her in the wingchair, but I could see she was ready to bolt. Whenever we were at Maurice and Irena’s, she felt she was missing something, everything, elsewhere. If she went into the kitchen to help Irena or gave Irena a little hug when we said goodnight, my heart dilated with hope that someday Alex would really learn to love us all, as we were.

  Alex could make the rest of us feel like parents and she the wilful, spirited child. She followed Irena and looked into the pots and tasted things appreciatively, then sat on the kitchen stool and smoked. While chopping vegetables, she told Irena about her father’s clinic or about her latest jazz genius, then got distracted and lit another cigarette, Irena finishing the job. Marriage gave Alex moral security, her hijinks and wildness were now socially harmless. She did appreciate our conversations, our long walks; she appreciated that I cooked for us since I was doing translations now in earnest and worked at home. Alex shared the domestic work but drew the line at laundry and mending; as she would say, “Euripedes? Eumenides.” I was also translating Greek poems for Kostas’s friend in London. And for a while I taught night-school English to other immigrants. I still wasn’t writing much poetry, but I did write some very short stories. They were always, in one sense or another, about hiding; and they only came to me when I was half asleep.

  We’d been married about two years when my nightmares returned. Even so, it would be some time before Alex and I no longer considered the deep achievement of our marriage to be our nocturnal happiness.

  Alex liked to go out for greasy breakfasts on rainy Sundays, followed by a matinée. Since Maurice and I had been going to the movies together for years and since the first time Maurice and Irena met Alex was when we went to see Ben-Hur together, it was tradition for the four of us to see whatever was playing at the Odeon near Maurice and Irena’s house. We never chose the movie, instead we simply went to the same cinema every time. This was probably the one issue upon which we all agreed; whatever was playing was fine with us.

  We’d just been to Cleopatra and I could see Maurice was developing a crush on Elizabeth Taylor. He was walking ahead with Alex, who was trying to pry out of him the latest gossip at the museum, where Maurice was now in charge of meteorology. Alex turned around to Irena and me, and she pointed to a coffee shop.

  “How about a long way home’?”

  This was Alex’s rhyming slang for palindrome, which in this case we all knew referred to one of the best in her arsenal: “Desserts, I stressed.” Alex would never dream of saying simply, Let’s stop for a rice pudding.

  It was unusual for Alex to suggest extending our visits with Maurice and Irena; I deduced she was probably just hungry. She looked at me and knew what I was thinking. She rolled her eyes. Caught out.

  “Jakob, your wife always wants to know what’s going on at work. Doesn’t she know the museum is no place to find hepcats? All I can tell her is old news. Now Alex, if you want to hear about past lives—”

  “Why not? Hepcats have nine lives, don’t they?”

  “She’s impossible,” said Maurice, holding his head in mock despair.

  “Well, never mind,” said Alex. “Besides, I get more than enough history at home.”

  One can look deeply for meaning or one can invent it.

  Of all the portolanos—harbour guides, sea charts — to survive from the fourteenth century, the most important is the Catalan Atlas. It was commissioned by the King of Aragon from the cartographer and instrument-maker Abraham Cresques Le Juif. Cresques, the Jew from Palma, founded a long-lived school of mapmaking on the island of Majorca. Religious persecution forced the Cresques workshop to relocate in Portugal. The Catalan Atlas was the definitive mappamondo of its time. It included the latest information brought back by Arabic and European travellers. But perhaps the atlas’s most important contribution was what it left out. On other maps, unknown northern and southern regions were included as places of myth, of monsters, anthropophagy, and sea serpents. But the truth-seeking, fact-faithful Catalan Atlas instead left unknown parts of the earth blank. This blankness was labelled simply and frighteningly Terra Incognita, challenging every mariner who unfurled the chart.

  Maps of history have always been less honest. Terra cognita and terra incognita inhabit exactly the same coordinates of time and space. The closest we come to knowing the location of what’s unknown is when it melts through the map like a watermark, a stain transparent as a drop of rain.

  On the map of history, perhaps the water stain is memory.

  Every day Bella practised finger-strengthening exercises; Clementi, Cramer, Czerny. Her fingers seemed to me, especially when we fought—chicken-pecking each other in the ribs—strong as ball-peen hammers. But when she played Brahms or when she wrote words on my back, she proved she could be as gentle as any normal girl.

  The intermezzo begi
ns andante non troppo con molto expressione—

  Brahms conducted and composed for the Hamburg Ladies’ Choir. According to Bella they rehearsed in the garden; Brahms climbed a tree and conducted from a branch. Bella adopted the choir’s motto as her own: “fix oder nix!” —” up to the mark, or nothing.” I imagined Brahms carving a line into the bark.

  Bella memorized, repeating phrases until her fingers were so tired they gave up resisting and got it right. Unavoidably, my mother and I also learned her music by heart. But when she was finished memorizing—bar by bar, section by section— and played the piece without stopping, I was lost; no longer aware of a hundred accumulated fragments but only of one long story, after which the house would fall silent for what seemed a very long time.

  History is amoral: events occurred. But memory is moral; what we consciously remember is what our conscience remembers. History is the Totenbuch, The Book of the Dead, kept by the administrators of the camps. Memory is the Memorbucher, the names of those to be mourned, read aloud in the synagogue.

  History and memory share events; that is, they share time and space. Every moment is two moments. I think of the scholars of Lublin, who watched their holy and beloved books thrown out of the second-storey windows of the Talmudic Academy into the street and burned—so many books that the fire lasted twenty hours. While the academics sobbed on the sidewalk, a military band played marches and soldiers sang at the top of their lungs to drown out the cries of those old men; their sobs sounded like soldiers singing. I think of the Lodz ghetto, where infants were thrown by soldiers from hospital windows to soldiers below who “caught” them on their bayonets. When the sport became too messy, the soldiers complained loudly, shouting about the blood running down their long sleeves, staining their uniforms, while the Jews on the street screamed in horror, their throats parched with screaming. A mother felt the weight of her child in her arms, even as she saw her daughter’s body on the sidewalk. Those who breathed deep and suffocated. Those who asserted themselves by dying.