I sailed the next day to Idhra. From the boat, I left behind a swarm of tourists. As I climbed the narrow streets, the town, with its whitewashed walls of pure sunlight, fell away.
Athos’s family house—where I now sit and write this, these many years later—is a record of the Roussos generations. The various pieces of furniture give the impression of having been hauled up the hill during different decades and, rather than being carried downhill, have simply been left and added to, like aggregate rock. I’ve often tried to guess which item of furniture represents which Roussos ancestor.
Mrs. Karouzos seemed pleased that at last the house would be opened again. She was still a child in the twenties, when Athos’s father came to Idhra for the last time. I wondered whether she found me wanting as she looked me over, whether or not she was thinking, So this is what the Roussos line has come to.
That first night, the moon in the window frozen like a coin in mid-toss, I explored Athos’s library. Again I found myself in his care.
There were many volumes of poetry, more than I remembered, as well as Athos’s lessons: Paracelsus, Linnaeus, Lyell, Darwin, Mendeleyev. Field guides. Aeschylus, Dante, Solomos. So familiar—but not only what was inside: my hands remembered the crazed and embossed leathers, corners eroded to board, paperbacks soft from the sea air. And slipped between books, newspaper clippings fragile as mica. When I was young I searched among them for the one book that would teach me everything, just as I would look for one language, just as some would look for one woman’s face. There’s a Hebrew saying: Hold a book in your hand and you’re a pilgrim at the gates of a new city. I even found my prayer shawl, a gift from Athos after the war, never worn, folded carefully and still stored in its cardboard box. The shawl’s bottom edge the clearest blue, as if it has been dipped in the sea. The blue of a glance.
I held the lamp close to the shelves. I decided on the slim hardcovered Psalms, bound in red leather darkened by many hands. Athos had found it in a bin in the Plaka. “Perfectly right. Oranges. Figs. Psalms.”
I was very tired from travelling, and the heat. I took the little book into the bedroom and lay down.
“Grief has eaten up my life, groans have eaten away years … those who know me are afraid when they hear my name. I have been forgotten like a dead man who is not considered, like a pot that is broken.…”
“My strength has dried like the baked earth … there are dogs around me, I am cut off by a crowd of wicked men. They have torn my hands and feet…. They will divide my clothes between them.”
“On the day of evil he will take me into his house, he will hide me in his tent, he will lift me onto high rock….”
I stretched out on the cotton bedcover. The cleansing summer wind—the meltemi—found its way under my shirt to my damp skin. Mrs. Karouzos had filled all the lamps. For the first time in almost two decades, they added their light to those of the village’s below.
“I will speak a dark language with the music of a harp.”
There are places that claim you and places that warn you away. On Idhra the pang of smells opened in me with the prickly sting of memory. Burros and dust, hot stones washed down with salt water. Lemon and sweet broom.
In Athos’s room, in the house of his father. I heard the cries and they grew louder, filled my head. I moved closer inside myself, didn’t turn away. I clutched the sides of the desk and was pulled down into the blueness. I lost myself, discovered the world could disappear. During long evenings, in the blush of the lamp, in the purity of white pages.
The child was licking dew from the grass. Zdena had no water with her, so she told the girl to suck on a finger “… and when you are really hungry — chew. ” The little girl looked at her for a moment, then put her forefinger in her mouth.
“What's your name, little one?”
“Bettina. ” A clean name, thought Zdena, for a girl who’s now so dirty.
“How long have you been waiting here, like this, by the road?”
“Since yesterday, ” she whispered.
Zdena kneeled down beside her.
“Someone was supposed to come for you?”
Bettina nodded.
Zdena took the little girl's bag from her, she saw there was blood on the handle. She opened Bettina’s hands, which were striped from gripping.
It was six miles back to town. Zdena carried a square of cloth filled with weeds for cooking. At home she had a bone for soup and the herbs would give flavour to the stock. Part of the time Zdena supported the girl, and sometimes the girl stood on Zdena’s boots and they walked together.
While they walked, Bettina sucked the ends of her hair into wet points. She devoted her attention to the ends of her hair and did not look around her.
That evening the little girl watched Zdena make soup. She dipped her bread into the watery broth and crammed in sopping mouthfuls, her lips close to the edge of the bowl They lived quietly. Bettina liked to count the pattern on Zdena’s dress, placing her finger in the centre of each cluster of flowers. Zdena felt Bettina's little finger through the thin cloth on different places on her body; it was like the game of connect-the-dots. Zdena took shape.
The little girl sat on her lap and listened to stories. Zdena felt her forty-year-old breasts and belly go warm against the weight of the child. The grief we carry, anybody’s grief Zdena thought, is exactly the weight of a sleeping child.
One August afternoon, the mud-locked roads now powdery with weeks of dry summer, a man stopped at Zdena’s house. He heard that she was the shoemaker’s daughter (Zdena’s father had no sons) and his boots needed mending.
The man waited on the verandah in his socks while Zdena made the repairs. Each heel required five small nails. Bettina watched carefully. It was very hot. When she was finished, Zdena brought out a cup of water for each of them.
The child burrowed her face into Zdena’s skirt, her small arms circled Zdena V legs. It was not clear whether she wanted to be comforted or was intent on comforting.
“She looks just like you,” the man said.
I came to Idhra to press to tearing certain questions.
Questions without answers must be asked very slowly. My first winter on the island I watched the rain fill the sea. For weeks at a time, sheets of dark water draped the windows. Every day before supper I walked to the edge of the cliff and back again. I ate at my desk, like Athos, with my empty plate holding open a book.
Though the contradictions of war seem sudden and simultaneous, history stalks before it strikes. Something tolerated soon becomes something good.
I must not use so much pedal at the first ritardando —
It’s Hebrew tradition that forefathers are referred to as “we,” not “they.” “When we were delivered from Egypt. …” This encourages empathy and a responsibility to the past but, more important, it collapses time. The Jew is forever leaving Egypt. A good way to teach ethics. If moral choices are eternal, individual actions take on immense significance no matter how small: not for this life only.
A parable: A respected rabbi is asked to speak to the congregation of a neighbouring village. The rabbi, rather famous for his practical wisdom, is approached for advice wherever he goes. Wishing to have a few hours to himself on the train, he disguises himself in shabby clothes and, with his withered posture, passes for a peasant. The disguise is so effective that he evokes disapproving stares and whispered insults from the well-to-do passengers around him. When the rabbi arrives at his destination, he’s met by the dignitaries of the community who greet him with warmth and respect, tactfully ignoring his appearance. Those who had ridiculed him on the train realize his prominence and their error and immediately beg his forgiveness. The old man is silent. For months after, these Jews—who, after all, consider themselves good and pious men—implore the rabbi to absolve them. The rabbi remains silent. Finally, when almost an entire year has passed, they come to the old man on the Day of Awe when, it is written, each man must forgive his fellow. But the rabbi still refu
ses to speak. Exasperated, they finally raise their voices: How can a holy man commit such a sin—to withhold forgiveness on this day of days? The rabbi smiles seriously. “All this time you have been asking the wrong man. You must ask the man on the train to forgive you.”
Of course it’s every peasant whose forgiveness must be sought. But the rabbi’s point is even more tyrannical: nothing erases the immoral act. Not forgiveness. Not confession.
And even if an act could be forgiven, no one could bear the responsibility of forgiveness on behalf of the dead. No act of violence is ever resolved. When the one who can forgive can no longer speak, there is only silence.
History is the poisoned well, seeping into the ground-water. It’s not the unknown past we’re doomed to repeat, but the past we know. Every recorded event is a brick of potential, of precedent, thrown into the future. Eventually the idea will hit someone in the back of the head. This is the duplicity of history: an idea recorded will become an idea resurrected. Out of fertile ground, the compost of history.
Destruction doesn’t create a vacuum, it simply transforms presence into absence. The splitting atom creates absence, palpable “missing” energy. In the rabbi’s universe, in Einstein’s universe, the man will remain forever on the train, familiar with humiliation but not humiliated, because, after all, it’s a case of mistaken identity. His heart rises, he’s not really the subject of this persecution; his heart falls, how can he prove, why should he prove, he’s not what they think he is.
He’ll sit there forever; just as the painted clock in Treblinka station will always read three o’clock. Just as on the platform the ghostly advice still floats: “To the right, go to the right” in the eerie breeze. The bond of memory and history when they share space and time. Every moment is two moments. Einstein: “… all our judgements in which time plays a part are always judgements of simultaneous events. If, for instance, I say the train arrived here at seven o’clock, I mean: the small hand of my watch pointing to seven and the arrival of the train are simultaneous events … the time of the event has no operational meaning. …” The event is meaningful only if the coordination of time and place is witnessed.
Witnessed by those who lived near the incinerators, within the radius of smell. By those who lived outside a camp fence, or stood outside the chamber doors. By those who stepped a few feet to the right on the station platform. By those who were born a generation after.
If I use my second finger instead, I'll be ready for the middle voice in the next bar—
Irony is scissors, a divining rod, always pointing in two directions. If the evil act can’t be erased, then neither can the good. It’s as accurate a measure as any of a society: what is the smallest act of kindness that is considered heroic? In those days, to be moral required no more than the slightest flicker of movement— a micrometre—of eyes looking away or blinking, while a running man crossed a field. And those who gave water or bread¡ They entered a realm higher than the angels’ simply by remaining in the human mire.
Complicity is not sudden, though it occurs in an instant.
To be proved true, violence need only occur once. But good is proved true by repetition.
I must keep the same tempo into the pianissimo —
On Idhra I finally began to feel my English strong enough to carry experience. I became obsessed by the palpable edge of sound. The moment when language at last surrenders to what it’s describing: the subtlest differentials of light or temperature or sorrow. I’m a kabbalist only in that I believe in the power of incantation. A poem is as neural as love; the rut of rhythm that veers the mind.
This hunger for sound is almost as sharp as desire, as if one could honour every inch of flesh in words; and so, suspend time. A word is at home in desire. No station of the heart is more full of solitude than desire which keeps the world poised, poisoned with beauty, whose only permanence is loss. Of the poems I published before I returned to Idhra, Maurice had a definite opinion, which he stated in a voice of compassion for the unwise: “These aren’t poems, they’re ghost stories.”
What he also meant but didn’t say was: Before our son Yosha was born, I also thought I believed in death. But it was only being a father that convinced me.
After a year on Idhra, at the end of the summer, Maurice, Irena, and Yosha, who was still a toddler, came to visit.
Maurice and I spent many hot afternoons in the small courtyard of Mrs. Karouzos’s taverna while Irena and Yosha rested.
One afternoon as we talked, Maurice rolled a lemon under his flat palm, over the blue and white tablecloth. He said: “Sa” —he always begins a remark he’s particularly proud of with Vest ca,” which in his rush to make the point comes out in a slur—” you want to be like Zeuxis, master of light, who painted his grapes so realistically, the birds tried to eat them!”
I leaned back in my chair, tipping the front legs, with my head against the stone wall. The courtyard tilted. The green shutters and pure sky. Then I looked at Maurice’s flushed, very round face. He and Irena were my only friends on earth. I couldn’t stop laughing and soon he was laughing too. The lemon escaped Maurice’s palm and wobbled down the narrow street to the harbour.
From the first, I felt at home in these hills, with broken icons hovering over every abyss, every valley, the spirit looking back upon the body. Their Lord’s blue robes dimmer than the flowers, the face of their Redeemer fractured with weather. Icons in wooden boxes small as birdhouses, with peeling paint and wood fraying like rope from rain and sun. I wrote in the tranquil buzz, in the heat that shellacked the leaves, turned the houses white with sweat, red hot roofs squirming under the glare.
But I also knew I would always be a stranger in Greece, no matter how long I lived here. So I tried over the years to anchor myself in the details of the island: the sun burning away night from the surface of the sea, the olive groves in winter rain. And in the friendship of Mrs. Karouzos and her son, who looked after me from a distance.
I tried to embroider darkness, black sutures with my glinting stones sewn safe and tight, buried in the cloth: Bella’s intermezzos, Athos’s maps, Alex’s words, Maurice and Irena. Black on black, until the only way to see the texture would be to move the whole cloth under the light.
At the close of Maurice and Irena’s first visit, after climbing back up to the house and watching the boat cross the water, I didn’t think I could bear to stay on Idhra alone. But that second winter, Maurice and Irena kept me company through the mail as I finished Groundwork, and I felt them with me as I had years before while I worked alone on Athos’s book.
“Write to save yourself,” Athos said, “and someday you’ll write because you've been saved.”
“You will feel terrible shame for this. Let your humility grow larger than your shame.”
Our relation to the dead continues to change because we continue to love them. All the afternoon conversations that winter on Idhra, with Athos or with Bella, while it grew dark. As in any conversation, sometimes they answered me, sometimes they didn’t.
I was in a small room. Everything was fragile. I couldn’t move without breaking something. My hands melted what they held.
The pianissimo must be perfect, it must be in the listener’s ears before he hears it —
Nazi policy was beyond racism, it was anti-matter, for Jews were not considered human. An old trick of language, used often in the course of history. Non-Aryans were never to be referred to as human, but as “figuren,” “stücke” — “dolls,” “wood,” “merchandise,” “rags.” Humans were not being gassed, only “figuren,” so ethics weren’t being violated. No one could be faulted for burning debris, for burning rags and clutter in the dirty basement of society. In fact, they’re a fire hazard¡ What choice but to burn them before they harm you…. So, the extermination of Jews was not a case of obeying one set of moral imperatives over another, but rather the case of the larger imperative satisfying any difficulties. Similarly, the Nazis implemented a directive against Jews ownin
g pets; how can one animal own another? How can an insect or an object own anything? Nazi law prohibited Jews from buying soap; what use is soap to vermin?
When citizens, soldiers, and SS performed their unspeakable acts, the photos show their faces were not grimaced with horror, or even with ordinary sadism, but rather were contorted with laughter. Of all the harrowing contradictions, this holds the key to all the others. This is the most ironic loophole in Nazi reasoning. If the Nazis required that humiliation precede extermination, then they admitted exactly what they worked so hard to avoid admitting: the humanity of the victim. To humiliate is to accept that your victim feels and thinks, that he not only feels pain, but knows that he’s being degraded. And because the torturer knew in an instant of recognition that his victim was not a “figuren” but a man, and knew at that same moment he must continue his task, he suddenly understood the Nazi mechanism. Just as the stone-carrier knew his only chance of survival was to fulfil his task as if he didn’t know its futility, so the torturer decided to do his job as if he didn’t know the lie. The photos capture again and again this chilling moment of choice: the laughter of the damned. When the soldier realized that only death has the power to turn “man” into “figuren,” his difficulty was solved. And so the rage and sadism increased: his fury at the victim for suddenly turning human; his desire to destroy that humanness so intense his brutality had no limit.
There’s a precise moment when we reject contradiction. This moment of choice is the lie we will live by. What is dearest to us is often dearer to us than truth.
There were the few, like Athos, who chose to do good at great personal risk; those who never confused objects and humans, who knew the difference between naming and the named. Because the rescuers couldn’t lose sight, literally, of the human, again and again they give us the same explanation for their heroism: “What choice did I have?”