One summer afternoon a neighbour from down the hall knocked on our door and handed me a Classics Illustrated comic book. My mother was particularly shy of Mr. Dixon, who worked in a men’s clothing store and was always immaculately dressed. Mr. Dixon had bought the comic for his grandson, who, it turned out, already had that issue—#105, Jules Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon, My mother tried to pay him, insistent, until it was clear Mr. Dixon wouldn’t accept any money. Then she pressed him with thanks. Meanwhile I was on my way to the balcony, already reading: “When a man is nearly doomed to a lifetime of circling the moon, then survives the plunge of 200,000 odd miles into the Pacific, he learns not to be afraid.”
After that, I wrenched money from my mother in order to collect the illustrated versions of literary masterpieces. I devoured each one from the dramatic cover to the last nagging entreaty: “Now that you’ve read the Classics Illustrated edition, don’t miss the added enjoyment of reading the original.” After consuming the pulp, I even chewed up the rind: edifying essays on a variety of topics filled the final pages. Brief biographies (“Nicholas Copernicus —Key Man in Study of Solar System” ), the plots of famous operas, and arcana I’ve never forgotten. For example, at the back of Caesar’s Conquests: “There are 6,000 men in a legion;” “Greek ships had eyes painted on their bows so the ships could see;” “Caesar always wrote of himself in the third person.”
There was also a series on “Dog Heroes” : Brandy, the quick-thinking setter who saved a young boy from a bull.Foxy, Hero of the Resistance, whose master was hiding from the Hun.
The first comic I bought was a sea adventure by Nordhoff and Hall. I followed the narrator through encounters with hurricanes and mutinies (“We’ve seized the ship….’ ‘What, are you mad, Mr. Churchill?’“) I chose Men Against the Sea because I opened it and read: “I have asked for pen and paper to write this account of all that has happened … to ward off the loneliness already upon me….”
After weeks of importuning, when I was fourteen, my mother agreed to let me go with some school friends to the Canadian National Exhibition, an annual fair. I’d never felt such exhilaration, such unmediated, anonymous belonging as that day in the crowd. Our T-shirts were stained, our hands and the soles of our shoes were sticky— and the whole glutinous throng bubbled over energetically in the August sun. We gaped at colour television, watches that didn’t require winding, and were galvanized by the wonders of circuit board technology in the Better Living Building. We toured the midway, shrieked to earth on the Flyer and the Wheel of Fire. When we needed to rest we slung over fences in the agriculture pavilions and watched the sheep-shearing and the milking machines in action. I collected glossy brochures on the latest domestic gadgets to please my mother—floor polishers, electric drink mixers, electric can openers. My shopping bag bulged with cardboard pennants and hats, pens advertising various companies and products, Beehive Corn Syrup scribblers, miniature samples of aftershave and stain remover, boxes of cereal and packets of teabags. We opened our satchels indiscriminately to anything offered to us.
When I came home I excitedly spilled everything onto the table for my mother’s inspection. She looked at my bounty, then anxiously crammed it back into the bag. She couldn’t believe the things I’d taken were free; she thought I must have made a mistake. She held up a handful of pens and pencils. I shouted, “They gave them away¡ I swear it¡ They’re called ‘free samples’ because they’re free¡ …” I was hysterical.
My mother made me promise not to show my father, to hide the bag in my room. Early the next morning, I walked to the corner and threw my treasure into a public trash can.
Now we had another kind of bond between us. My mother referred to the incident slyly from time to time. Though she was certain I’d taken these things improperly — admittedly by accident—she would protect me. My fault. Our secret.
From then on I began to extend my boundaries, to make detours on my way home from school. I began to learn about the city. The ravines, the coal elevators, the brickyard. Although I wouldn’t have been able to put it into words then, aftermath fascinated me. The silent drama of abandonment of the empty factories and storage bins, the decaying freighters and industrial ruins.
I thought I was encouraging my mother to stop waiting for me by the window or on the balcony, to give me my freedom, not to expect me until late. I’d like to think I didn’t know at the time how cruel this was. When my father and I left the apartment in the morning, my mother never felt sure we’d return at all.
I learned not to bring school friends home. I worried that our furniture was old and strange. I was ashamed by my mother’s caution and need as she hovered. “What is your last name … what do your parents do … where were you born … ?” My mother begged my father and me for news from our world; news of teachers and classmates, my father’s piano students, the personal lives of whom we knew frustratingly little. When she left the apartment for groceries, or in summer to admire the gardens in the neighbourhood (she loved gardening and watched over a window box and trellis on our balcony), my mother prepared carefully. She carried our passports and citizenship papers in her purse “in case of a robbery.” She never left a dirty dish in the sink, even if she were just walking to the corner store.
To my mother, pleasure was always serious. She celebrated the aroma each time she unscrewed the lid of the instant coffee. She stopped to inhale each fragrant fold of our freshly washed linens. She could spend half an hour eating a slice of store-bought pastry as if God had baked it with His Own Hands. Every time she purchased something new, usually a necessity (when an article of clothing had been mended too many times), she fondled it like the First Blouse or the First Pair of Stockings. She was a sensualist of proportions you, Jakob Beer, could never even estimate. You looked at me that night and placed me in your human zoo: another specimen with a beautiful wife; just another academicus dejecticus. But it was you who were embalmed¡ With your calmness, your expansive satiety.
The truth is you didn’t acknowledge me at all that night. But I saw Naomi open like a flower.
I was about to start my second year of university and was determined to be on my own, a fact my mother had refused to accept all summer. One sun-worn August morning I carried my boxes of books down to the damp coolness of the cement parking garage and loaded up the car. My mother retreated behind the closed door of her bedroom. Only when I’d carried out the last box and was really leaving did she emerge. Grimly she prepared a parcel of food, and something was lost between us, irrevocably, the moment that plastic bag passed from her hand to mine. Over the years, the absurd package—enough for a single meal, to stop hunger for a second—was handed to me at the threshold at the end of each visit. Until it hurt less and less and the bag was simply like the roll of candy my mother passed to me from the front seat on our Sunday drives.
The first night in my own apartment, I lay in bed only a few miles across town and let my mother’s phone calls ring into the dark. I didn’t call for a week, then weeks at a time, though I knew it made them ill with worry. When I finally did visit, I saw that, though my parents continued in their separate silences, my defection had given them a new intimacy, a new scar. My mother still bent towards me with confidences, but only in order to withdraw them. At first I thought she was punishing me for her need of me. But my mother wasn’t angry. My efforts to free myself had created a deeper harm. She was afraid. I believe that for moments my mother actually distrusted me. She would begin a story and then fall silent. “It’s nothing that would interest you.” When I protested, she suggested I go into the living room and join my father. This happened even more frequently once Naomi entered our lives.
My father’s behaviour remained unchanged. When I visited, I still found him either impatient, looking at his watch with desperation, or immobile, staring at a book in his room— another survivor account, another article with photographs. Afterwards, in my apartment on the upper floor of an old house near the university, I stared
at the weave of my bedspread, at the bookshelf. At the dry cleaner’s, flower shop, and drug store across the street. I knew my parents were awake too, our insomnia an old agreement to keep watch.
On weekends I took long self-pitying walks across the city and back again; at night, ascending into books. I spent most of my undergraduate years alone except for classes and working part time in a bookstore. I had a romance with the assistant manager. We kept on after our first embrace, just to be sure it was as joyless as it seemed. Her form was wondrously full, a firmness to everything, but especially her politics. Under her black caftan she wore shirts with slogans on them past which I never ventured: “The left hand giveth what the right taketh away.” Sometimes I joined a few classmates for a meal or a movie, but I made no real effort at friendship.
For a long time I felt I had expended all my energy walking out my parents’ front door.
My father was a man who had erased himself as much as possible within the legal limits of citizenship. So I expected a long fight when the time came for him to apply for his seniors’ pension, despite the fact that the income was essential to them. I had phoned the appropriate office to find out what documents he needed and had given the information to my mother.
A few weeks later I came for dinner. My father was in his room with the door closed. My mother turned down the heat on the stove and sat at the kitchen table.
“Don’t talk to your father about getting his pension anymore.”
“We’ve been through all this—”
“He went there yesterday.”
“Good. Finally.”
My mother waved a hand at me as if dismissing a fool.
“You think you understand everything…. He went to the right place. He had all the right papers with him. He handed his birth certificate to the man at the desk. The man said, ? know very well the place you were born.’ Your father thought the man must have been from there too. But then the man lowered his voice, ‘Yes, I was stationed there in 1941 and ‘42.’ The man stared at your father, and then your father understood. The man leaned over his desk and said so quietly your father could barely hear, ‘You don’t have the right papers.’ Your father left as fast as he could. But he didn’t come home for hours.”
I pushed back my chair.
“Don’t, Ben. Leave him alone. If he knows I told you he won’t come out of his room for dinner.”
I knew he wouldn’t come out for dinner anyway. My mother might even have to cancel his classes for a few days.
“You made him go. You talked him into it. You think getting things for free is so easy.”
Most discover absence for themselves; trees are ripped out and sorrow floods the clearing. Then we know what we loved.
But I was born into absence. History had left a space already fetid with undergrowth, worms chewing soil abandoned by roots. Rains had made the lowest parts swampy, the green melancholia of bog with its swaying carpet of pollen.
I lived there with my parents. A hiding place, rotted out by grief. Right from the start Naomi seemed to know us. She gave her heart, natural as breathing. But for me, love was like holding my breath.
Naomi stood on firm ground and stretched out her arm. I took her hand but otherwise didn’t move.
Naomi didn’t recognize her own beauty. Her features were strong, spare, her skin flushed as she spoke, her colour a reliable emotional indicator. She wasn’t thin or extravagant, but plush as velvet. She denigrated herself, ignoring the evidence of her athletic legs and full fair hair, wishing she were taller, slimmer, more elegantly shaped; focusing on the slightest bit of flesh she hated above her waistband. As with her physical attributes, Naomi didn’t acknowledge the power of her mind, ignoring all she’d read to focus on all she hadn’t. Naomi could listen closely and then with painful exactitude come out with a statement that sliced to the heart of things — a swordsman cross-sectioning fruit with one sure flick of the wrist. For instance, in the car on the way home from Maurice Salman’s that night. With one deft stroke, Naomi said: “Jakob Beer looks like a man who has finally found the right question.”
Shortly after my teaching job at the university became permanent, I began to research my second book, on weather and war. Naomi again threatened to accompany me culinarily, with various bombes and dishes served flambé. But thankfully she decided there was nothing funny about it. The book took its title, No Mortal Foe, from a phrase of Trevelyan’s. He was referring to the hurricane that destroyed the British naval force during the war with France. Trevelyan was correct in his identification of the real enemy: a hurricane at sea means spray crossing the deck at one hundred miles per hour, a screaming wind that prevents you from breathing, seeing, or standing.
During the First World War, in the Tyrolean Mountains, avalanches were deliberately set off to bury enemy troops. Around this time strategists also thought of creating tornadoes as a weapon, an idea never taken up, only because one couldn’t be certain the tornado wouldn’t turn against one’s own lines.
On his way from Paris to Chartres, Edward III nearly died in a hailstorm. He vowed to the Virgin he’d make peace if he were spared from the giant stones, a promise he kept in the form of the Treaty of Bretigny. England was saved by the storm that destroyed the Spanish Armada. Hailstorms swept five hundred miles through France, ruining the harvest, creating the food shortages that contributed to the French Revolution. Russia’s old ally, winter, overcame Napoleon’s Grand Army. Tornadoes were created by the firebombing of Hamburg. The military term “front” was borrowed from the weatherman in the First World War….
When the Germans invaded Greece, all weather broadcasts from Athens were deliberately shut down by the RAF and the Greek Forecasting Service. They had to make a hole in the Mediterranean weather map so the Germans wouldn’t have the advantage of Greek forecasting for their aerial tactics.
Himmler believed that Germany had the power to alter even the weather of their occupied lands. As he rubbed Polish soil—” now German soil” —between his fingers, he speculated how Aryan settlers would plant trees and “increase dew and (form) clouds, force rain, and thus push a more economically viable climate further towards the East….”
Naomi had audited one of my courses, Forms of Biography. When I first met her, she reminded me of an eccentric sister. In those days, she had a preference for loose clothes that looked as if they’d been borrowed from an older sibling. I found this extremely appealing. It made me want to get at her through her big pockets and up her ample sleeves.
Naomi’s apartment was so tiny it was like living in a medicine cabinet. Out of necessity, everything was hidden behind something else, ready to topple. She kept her liquor on a bookshelf behind B for booze, behind Bachelard, Balzac, Benjamin, Berger, Bogan. Scotch was behind Sir Walter. She loved her lame jokes, the lamer the better, sent herself into paroxysms. These antics continued into our married life. On one birthday she created an elaborate treasure hunt, with the last clue leading, of course, to the cake.
Naomi was a fan of 1950s science-fiction movies, which we would often stay up late to watch. She was always on the side of the lonely monster, usually an ordinary creature that had been irradiated and subsequently grew gigantic. She called to the television screen, encouraging the oversized octopus to go ahead and crush the bridge with its expressive tentacles. Naomi claimed that the young woman scientist invariably called to the scene to destroy the atomic squid (or gorilla, spider, or bee) was her secret role model; the nuclear physicist, the marine biologist, who made a lab coat look sexier than an evening gown.
She loved music and listened to everything, Javanese gamelan, Georgian choirs, medieval hurdy-gurdy. But her pride was her collection of lullabies, from everywhere in the world. Lullabies for the first born, for the child who wants to stay awake with his brother, for the child who’s too excited or too frightened to sleep. War-time lullabies, lullabies for abandoned children.
Naomi first sang to me from the end of her couch. The window was open, a wa
rm, windy September night. Her voice was low as whispering grass. It made me imagine the moonlight on the roof. She sang a ghetto lullaby, a sadness that seemed to me confusingly sweet. In the dark I could smell the tanning lotion on her arms and legs, and in the thin cotton of her flowered skirt. “Clasp the alphabet to your heart, though there are tears in every letter.” “I sing in your little ear, let sleep come, a little handle closing a little gate.”
Something in me glimmered, far down. I summoned myself: the biggest action of my life, lifting my head long enough to place it in her lap. I pressed breath kisses into her filmy skirt. Her face hung above me, half a moon, with her draping hair.
Now eight years later, Naomi still collects lullabies but listens to them by herself in the car. Old songs that I imagine make her weep in traffic. It’s a long time since Naomi last sang to me. It’s a long time since I’ve heard a riddle song or a Gypsy song or a Russian song, not a partisan song or a song from the French Foreign Legion, not a single Ay-li-ruh or Ay-liu-liu-liu to soothe fish in the sea, or a Bayushki-bayu to make birds dream on the bough. Now all the humour has gone out of her longing.