Light the lamp, cut a long wick. One day when you Ve almost forgotten, I pray you’ll let us return. That through an open window, even in the middle of a city, the sea air of our marriage will find you. I pray that one day in a room lit only by night snow, you will suddenly know how miraculous is your parents’ love for each other.
My son, my daughter: May you never be deaf to love.
Bela, Bella: Once I was lost in a forest. I was so afraid. My blood pounded in my chest and I knew my heart’s strength would soon be exhausted. I saved myself without thinking. I grasped the two syllables closest to me, and replaced my heartbeat with your name.
II
THE DROWNED CITY
The Humber River flows southeast across the city. Even a generation ago, for most of its one-hundred-kilometre course it was still a rural river, meandering through outskirts, casually linking lonely boroughs like Weston and Lambton Woods to the city downstream. For three thousand years, isolated communities, mills, and palisades were scattered along its banks.
Over time, the growth of the city could be measured by travelling upriver. As Toronto expanded, suburbs slowly spread north, filling up the wide, grassy floodplain, until even secluded communities such as Weston were embraced by the metropolis. The houses closest to the Humber cleaved to the river, nestled among cottonwood, box elder, and bur oak. Plover and blue heron wandered in back yards, among impatiens and wild grape.
Today much of the riverbank again looks as it did before the encroachment of the city. The riverine marshes, the serpentine lower reaches, are inhabited only by painted turtles and mallard ducks. The deserted plains of Weston are gentle parkland; lawn grows peacefully to the river’s edge.
If you descend the short, steep bank to the water, you’ll see, past the glinting surface, the river bottom glinting too. If you turn around to look at the muddy escarpment, or simply look down at your feet, you’ll begin to notice the Humber’s distinctive sediment, laid down in October 1954.
In the bank, four wooden knobs, evenly spaced: excavate an inch or two and the legs of a chair will emerge. A few feet downriver, a dinner plate—perhaps with the familiar and ever-popular blue willow pattern—sticks out of the bank horizontally like a shelf. You can slip a silver spoon out of the mud like a bookmark.
The books and photos have rotted by now, but the buried tables and shelves, lamps, dishes, and rugs remain. The river washes over pebbles of crockery. Fragments of a ceramic flowered border, or of the words “Staffordshire, England,” are underlined by reeds.
Hidden beneath the grass, all around you, the wide, silent park is studded with cutlery.
The humidity is a dense current; slow as dream time. Naomi comes from an icy shower; her skin condenses in the hot air. She lies on top of me, heavy and cold as wet sand.
You must abandon your illusions every time you speak.
It’s only five o’clock but the sky is a dark front; the ions that smell always of night.
The summer we were married there was a heat wave like this, the air a blanket, cling wrap. Every inch of us slick with sweat. My shirts turning sheer and limp. We kept our small apartment in perpetual twilight, curtains drawn against it; the heat and dark were excuses to stay undressed. Like the Invisible Man, seen only by virtue of the gauze he’s wrapped in, Naomi moved from room to room, her white cotton underwear glowing in the dimness.
For over a week it had been too oppressive to sleep. We drifted until morning, every few hours one re-entering the consciousness of the other, returning from the kitchen silent as a messenger through the forest. Framed by the light in the hall, Naomi’s body pouring heat, carrying a glass of juice so cold its flavour was a mystery. Frozen from holding the glass, my hands on the scalding small of her back; until she whispered, “Ben,” a chill rising through her. Or she rolled plums from the fridge, frosted blue ovals, along my arms to my mouth, so icy they made my teeth hurt; plum juice drying in brown tears down her neck, her skin stiffening with sweetness. Or one of us with face or feet under the faucet, the other slipping back into sleep, to the dream sound of far-off, mill-borne water.
Sometimes, even at the last, at the end of a long Sunday when we’d both been working at home, after she’d ordered fast food, which we ate without a word of importance between us, after the greasy cartons had been tossed into the sink or into the bin so we wouldn’t have to look in the morning at the remains of what we’d consumed, we turned to each other in the dark, still silent, until she was a climber on a rock face, limbs precise, pinned against space, until with closed eyes she looked down between her legs from a height, and then I didn’t move and meaning flooded us. Before sleep her muscles twitched, a mechanism released. Soon I felt her against me, breathing with the steady intensity of a machine.
We slept close, knowing we could not have such pleasure without such muteness.
There was no energy of a narrative in my family, not even the fervour of an elegy. Instead, our words drifted away, as if our home were open to the elements and we were forever whispering into a strong wind. My parents and I waded through damp silence, of not hearing and not speaking. It soaked into the furniture, into my father’s dank armchair, a mildew in the walls. We communicated by slight gestures, surgeons in an operating theatre. When my parents died, I realized I’d expected sound suddenly to enter the apartment, to rush into the place so long prohibited. But no sound came into the apartment. And though I was alone, packing boxes, sorting their belongings, the silence was now eerie. Because the place itself felt almost the same as before.
I was surprised to discover not everyone sees the shadow around objects, the black outline, the bruise of fermentation on things even as light clings to them. I saw the aura of mortality like a snake that sees its prey in infrared, the pulse-heat. It was clear to me as cut fruit turning brown on the plate, a lemon peel shrivelling to scent.
I grew up thankful for every necessity, for food and drink, for my father’s well-made shoes —” the most important thing.” I was thankful for the whiskers that appeared on my father’s face each morning because it was, he said, “a sign of health.” When my parents were liberated, four years before I was born, they found that the ordinary world outside the camp had been eradicated. There was no more simple meal, no thing was less than extraordinary: a fork, a mattress, a clean shirt, a book. Not to mention such things that can make one weep: an orange, meat and vegetables, hot water. There was no ordinariness to return to, no refuge from the blinding potency of things, an apple screaming its sweet juice. Every thing belonged to, had been retrieved from, impossibility—both the inorganic and the organic—shoes and socks, their own flesh. It was all as one. And this gratitude included the inexpressible. Not more than five years old, watching my mother proud in her gardening gloves, by the roses. Even then I knew I would want for this all my life: my mother stooping to pull up weeds, sunlight, an endless day.
Even younger, I was visited by an angel in the middle of the night. She stood like a nurse at the foot of my bed and wouldn’t go away. My eyes hurt from staring. She motioned to me. I went to the window to look out at the winter street, my first recognition of beauty, an ice forest, with the fineness of etched silver, in the streetlamp light. The angel was sent to wake me, so I wouldn’t sleep past that vision into morning; and the sight put a temporary end to nightmares of doors axed open and the jagged mouths of dogs. I finally understood the meaning of that winter night and that moment with my mother in the garden, Jakob Beer, when I read your poems. You described your first experience of the flesh of a sleeping woman as alive, sudden as if you’d surfaced into air from under water, breathing for the first time.
When we finally met, at Irena’s birthday party that late-January night, I saw that Maurice Salman hadn’t exaggerated. He’d described you and Michaela perfectly —ouzo and water. Separately, clear and strong; together, you both turned cloudy. The mystery, said Salman, of two people who share “an impressive physical life.” You know Salman¡ When he talks about you h
is eyes go small. He settles himself in his chair like a boulder on a beach. The sublime’s his slang. What a charming combination of acuity and corn. He speaks piercingly of passion yet wears the look of a sneaky lover planning a flat tire or an empty gas tank. Straight out of the old movies he adores. He’s like someone who offers an astonishing and expensive wine, then brings out a plate of peanut brittle to go with it. Perhaps I exaggerate. Salman gives the impression of offhand hyperbole but, in fact, he’s astute and precise.
I’d never heard of you until, in class, Salman recommended your book of poems, Groundwork, and recited the opening lines. Later I saw that the book was dedicated to the memory of your parents and your sister, Bella. My love for my family has grown for years in decay-fed soil, an unwashed root pulled suddenly from the ground. Bulbous as a beet, a huge eye under a lid of earth. Scoop out the eye, blind the earth.
I know that the more one loves a man’s words, the more one can assume he’s put everything into his work that he couldn’t put into his life. The relation between a man’s behaviour and his words is usually that of gristle and fat on the bone of meaning. But, in your case, there seemed to be no gap between the poems and the man. How could it be otherwise, for a man who claimed to believe so completely in language? Who knew that even one letter—like the “J” stamped on a passport—could have the power of life or death.
In your later poems, it’s as if history reads over our shoulder, casts its shadow on the page, but is no longer in the words themselves. It’s as if you’d decided something, made a deal with your conscience. I wanted to believe language itself had freed you. But the night we met I knew it wasn’t language that had released you. Only a remarkably simple truth or a remarkably simple lie could put such peace in a man. The mystery darkened in me. A birthmark in my own pallor of disorder.
And I knew I was standing on the bank watching, while you, long escaped from dusty rock, lay between the wet thighs of the river.
That night at Salman’s your serenity was so profound it could only be described as sensual. Experience had wrung excess from you. Or as a geologist might say, you’d reached the pure state of residual concentration. One couldn’t help but feel the force of your presence, your hand heavy as a cat on Michaela’s thigh. What is love at first sight but the response of a soul crying out with sudden regret because it realizes it has never before been recognized? Of course Naomi was moved, and soon was telling you about her parents, her family. Naomi, usually so shy, spoke about the last summer with her dying father at the lake, then about my parents—for which I found myself not annoyed but curiously grateful. Tell him, I thought, tell him everything.
You listened, not like a priest who listens for sin, but like a sinner, who listens for his own redemption. What a gift you had for making one feel clear, for making one feel—clean. As if talk could actually heal. All the while with one hand touching Michaela somewhere, on her shoulder or forearm, or holding her hand. Your eyes with us, your body with her. Only once did Naomi pause, suddenly self-conscious, to say that perhaps you thought her foolish, visiting their graves so often, bringing flowers. To which you gave your unforgettable reply: “On the contrary. It seems right to Iteep bringing them something beautiful now and then.” And I saw gratitude on Naomi’s face it pains me to remember, because I’d been so annoyed with her for those visits—my parents!—accusing her of every pathology, of not being able to get over her own parents’ deaths, of needing to live in mourning since she was eighteen. Characteristically, she didn’t repeat your comment afterwards. No one’s silences are more generous than Naomi’s, who rarely clamps her jaw with frustration or anger (these come out in tears); her silence is usually wise. I was often thankful for this, especially in the months before I left, when Naomi spoke less and less.
By the time we were leaving Salman’s that night and Naomi was pushing her arms into the sleeves of her coat, my wife’s transformation was invisible yet obvious. Your conversation had wrought a change in her body. And I saw Naomi’s pleasure as Michaela admired her coat and scarf, and her flushed face when you shook her hand goodnight.
I learned something else that evening, about Maurice Salman and his wife. I saw them standing together by the window. She’s so small, an impeccable package, expensive shoes, silk blouse, a face that elongates into sadness. Salman held her elbow like a teacup in his paw. He carried her sweater on his enormous suited arm, handkerchief on an elephant’s back. One small gesture: she reached up, her child palm on the flatness of his huge cheek. She touched him as if he were the thinnest porcelain.
When I was at university, Bearing False Witness had just been reissued, thick as a small dictionary. Salman had already introduced his students to Athos’s lyric geology via the salt book. Athos’s impassioned descriptions—what a splendid anthropomorphist—even down to the generosity of an ionic bond. To believe there’s no thing that does not yearn. Dramatic and slow earth events as well as the rise of human commerce and culture, all an evolution of longing. How could you not have been shaped by such storytelling? You were fortunate to be trained by a master. When you turned your attention to your own poems, in your Groundwork, and you recount the geology of the mass graves, it’s as if we hear the earth speak.
I could smell the loneliness in Salman after your death, the specific loneliness that is between men, that is like no other. Salman reminisced— anecdotes about your twenties, how you walked together all night through the city, in every season, talking at first about Athos’s work and then about poetry and finally about Salman’s wounds though not about yours (not for many years). Stopping at the twenty-four-hour restaurant exhausted and hot, or exhausted and chilled, for pie and coffee, parting at two a.m., saying goodbye in the empty street. Salman watched you walk along St. Clair Avenue to your apartment where you lived alone after Athos died, and again years later after your first marriage ended, how disheartened you looked…. Salman told me about your habits, your trustworthiness, your moral seriousness. Your depressions. He told me about the perfection of Michaela, your new wife.
“Ben, when we say we’re looking for a spiritual adviser, we’re really looking for someone to tell us what to do with our bodies. Decisions of the flesh. We forget to learn from pleasure as well as pain,” said Salman after you died. “Jakob taught me so many things. For instance: What is the true value of knowledge? That it makes our ignorance more precise. When God asked the Jews in the desert to choose no other God, he wasn’t asking them to choose one God over another, but rather: choose one God or none. Jakob put great store in the incisiveness of dilemmas. You recall the opening image in his Dilemma Poems, one man staring at an impossibly high wall, another man staring at the same wall from the other side. … I remember someone at one of our parties talking about particle/wave duality. After a while Jakob said: ‘Perhaps it’s just that when light is up against the wall it’s forced to choose.’ Everyone laughed, listen to the layman talk about physics¡ But I knew what Jakob meant. The particle is secular man; the wave, the deist. And whether you live by a lie or live by a truth makes no difference, as long as you get past the wall. And while some are motivated by love (those who choose), most are motivated by fear (those who choose by not choosing). Then Jakob said: ‘Perhaps the electron is neither particle nor wave but something else instead, much less simple— a dissonance—like grief, whose pain is love.’“
We think of weather as transient, changeable, and above all, ephemeral; but everywhere nature remembers. Trees, for example, carry the memory of rainfall. In their rings we read ancient weather—storms, sunlight, and temperatures, the growing seasons of centuries. A forest shares a history, which each tree remembers even after it has been felled.
Only Maurice Salman, or Athos Roussos, would look at a student who can’t decide between an interest in the history of meteorology and in literature and say: “Why not find a way to keep studying both? In some cultures a man has more than one wife….” Naively, I told Salman that a formal comparison could be made between a
weather map and a poem. I told him that I wanted to call my literature thesis “A Line of Weather.” Afterwards, I stepped from Salman’s office into the street; the October twilight was radiant with a pure pale gegenschein. I walked home, wishing for someone with whom I could share my news, wishing there was a woman waiting for me, so I could slip my cold hands under her sweater, across her warm skin, and explain what Salman had suggested instead for my thesis: the real-life objective correlative—weather and biography.
Years later when I turned my thesis into a book, Naomi nourished my research. … A severe December morning in St. Petersburg, 1849. Horse-whinny hangs whitely in the air, the jangle of traces; steaming manure, wet leather, and snow. I climb from the prison coach and follow Dostoyevsky into the gelid orange light of Semyonovsky Square. He shivers in the spring coat he’d been arrested in months before, his nose turning red against waxy cheeks, pale from incarceration. Blindfolded, he and the other supposed Petrashevsky radicals are lined up to be executed in the bitter winter wind. I stare hard into his face. Even under the blindfold, his transformation is obvious. The guns are cocked. Each man experiences the bullet breaking open his chest, the hot bite, the staggering fist the size of a child’s finger. Then the blindfolds are removed. Never before have I seen faces to match those, with the bare revelation that still they live, that there has been no shot. I fall with the weight of life; that is, with the weight of Dostoyevsky’s life, which unfolds from that moment with the intensity of a man who begins again.
While I travelled across Russia in leg-irons, Naomi carefully placed ivory potatoes, cooked until they crumbled at the touch of a fork, into chilled vermilion borscht. While I fell to my knees with hunger in the snow at To-boPsk, downstairs Naomi sliced thick slabs of stone-heavy bread. These edible jokes I termed the “culinary correlative.” I spent afternoons in Staraya Russa, then came downstairs to a supper of sweet cabbage soup.