After my mother died, almost instantly my father slipped beyond reach. He heard things, white as whispering. When his brain was tuned to the frequency of ghosts, his mouth was a twisted wire. During one visit on an autumn Sunday about a year after my mother’s death and two years before his own, I watched him from our kitchen window while Naomi made tea. He sat in our yard; the book he hadn’t been reading had slipped to the grass. Someone in the neighbourhood was burning leaves. I thought about the cool, smoky air on his freshly shaven face, skin I hadn’t touched for years. How strange that this memory has become beautiful to me. My father alone in the garden, lost in loneliness for his wife. He held his cardigan on his lap like a child asked to hold something without knowing why. The trace of beauty I now sense is this: perhaps, for the first time in a long life, my father was experiencing pleasure at looking back on a happier time. He sat so still the birds weren’t afraid of him, plummeting from newly bare branches, sweeping a breath above the lawn around him. They knew he wasn’t there. In his face the expression I now recognize from all those Sunday afternoons we sat together on the couch.
My father’s last night. Holding the dial tone against my ear, waiting for Naomi to come to the hospital. I will always associate the dial tone with the mechanical horizon of death, of no heartbeat. I realized then I’d been wrong about him all my life, thinking that he wanted death, was waiting for it. How is it possible I never knew, never guessed? Truth grows gradually in us, like a musician who plays a piece again and again until suddenly he hears it for the first time.
On a March evening, about two months after my father died, I was going through my parents’ closets and pockets and my father’s chest of drawers. I had left the clearing out of their bedroom for last. In the humidor, which he never used for cigars, in an envelope, a single photograph. We think of photographs as the captured past. But some photographs are like DNA. In them you can read your whole future. My father is such a young man I barely recognize him. He poses in front of a piano, an infant in the bend of his arm. His other hand directs the face of a little girl towards the camera. She is perhaps three or four years old and hangs onto his leg. The woman standing beside him is my mother. If it is possible to speak without opening your mouth, without making a sound or altering the muscles in your face—that is how my parents look. On the back floats a spidery date, June 1941, and two names. Hannah. Paul. I stared at both sides of the photograph a long time before I understood that there had been a daughter; and a son born just before the action. When my mother was forced into the ghetto, twenty-four years old, her breasts were weeping with milk.
I brought the photograph home to show Naomi. She was in the kitchen. It happened in an instant. As I was taking the photograph out of the envelope, before I’d uttered a word of explanation, Naomi said, “It’s so sad, it’s so terrible.” Then she saw the shock her words had given me and stopped scraping the plates over the garbage can.
My parents, experts in secrets, kept the most important one from me to their last breath. Yet, in a masterful stroke, my mother decided to tell Naomi. The daughter she longed for. My mother guessed that my wife wouldn’t readily mention something so painful, but she knew that if she confided in Naomi, the truth would eventually be passed on. Naomi knew how much her intimacy with my parents upset me. But Naomi didn’t know she was keeping a secret.
Still, I blamed her.
Privacy is the true profundity of a marriage, the place my mother’s story invaded.
The past is desperate energy, live, an electric field. It chooses a single moment, a chance so domestic we don’t know we’ve missed it, a moment that crashes into us from behind and changes all that follows.
My parents must have made a promise to each other, which my mother kept almost until the end.
Naomi explained something else I’d never known. My parents prayed that the birth of their third child would go unnoticed. They hoped that if they did not name me, the angel of death might pass by. Ben, not from Benjamin, but merely “ben” —the Hebrew word for son.
The snow gradually disappeared from under the trees, leaving wet shadows. Detritus hidden all winter lay strewn across lawns and floating in gutters.
In the weeks after cleaning out my parents’ apartment, I began to scavenge the Humber, collecting objects that had eroded from the early-spring banks — a souvenir spoon, a doorknob, a rusted mechanical toy. I rinsed them in the river and kept them in a box in the trunk of the car. I didn’t find anything I remembered.
One day the rain soaked through my coat, my sleeves and back were raw. At home I emptied my pockets of china shards, small as mosaic tiles, and washed the broken dishes in the bathroom sink. I cleaned the bottom of the river from under my nails. I sat in my wet clothes on the edge of the empty tub. After a while I changed and went into my study. I could smell supper—tomato sauce, rosemary, bay leaves, garlic wafting up from downstairs. I sat until I could no longer see the roofs of the lane and the back-yard fences, only my own lamp and bookcases reflected in the window.
I went into the bedroom and lay down. I heard Naomi climb the stairs, heard her take off her shoes. I felt her lie down beside me in her favourite position, back to back, her small stockinged feet against my calves, a gesture of intimacy that filled me with hopelessness. I imagined her staring into her view of the dark bedroom. I could have stood it, no matter how many times she said it: I thought you knew, I thought you knew. If only she hadn’t put her small feet against my calves — as if nothing had changed.
I knew I must not open my mouth. The misery of bones that must be broken in order to be set straight.
Waking in our tiny house, on our street with the old elms and chestnut trees, I knew without raising the blinds, sometimes without even opening my eyes, whether it was raining or snowing. I knew instantly the time of morning or evening by the quality of light filming over dresser, chair, radiator, Naomi’s wooden brush on the night table. Different in winter, in March, in midsummer, in October. I knew that, in half a year’s time, the two sugar maples in the yard would change colour differently, one more copper than scarlet. I was sick with noticing. The pale degrees of change, the diurnal decay.
And then there are days when the atmosphere signals an anniversary of error. An unnamed moment only weather remembers. The place we’d be if all were well.
I thought about my father, who used food to forget his body. Who was alive in music, where time is an instruction.
You died not long after my father and I can’t say which death made me reach again for your words. On Naomi’s desk was your last book, What Have You Done to Time, and on mine was Groundwork.
One evening, while nervously moving our dinner around in a skillet, Naomi suggested that I help Maurice Salman, and offer to retrieve your notebooks from Idhra, now that he’s no longer well enough to travel. It was Naomi’s idea: a separation.
A few days later, I stood in the kitchen doorway and spoke to the back of her head.
“I’ve rearranged things so I don’t have to teach until next January.”
Naomi pressed her palms into the kitchen table and stood up. The imprint of the chair was on the back of her thighs. This made me so sad I had to close my eyes.
“But you’ll be away for your birthday—the mortgage will have to be renewed soon—I already have your present….”
A ship in the middle of the ocean won’t perceive the tsunami; in the trough there are eighty-five miles between crests. At that moment, fear should have stung me, I should have smelled the whiff of ether, felt the knife edge. But I didn’t. Instead I squandered our life together and only said: “I’ll write to you.…”
Naomi’s body to me was so familiar a map, folded so often at the same places, tearing along the folds. I never unfurled her anymore; opened her only a small square at a time, the district I addressed in darkness.
The June night before I left for Greece, it was sti-flingly hot. Naomi came dripping from the cold shower and lay on top of me. Cold as wet sand.
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A few years after my mother’s death, during the brief time he lived with Naomi and me, my father seemed to give up sleep entirely. At night we heard him wandering around the house. Finally, I convinced him to see a doctor, who, to my relief, prescribed sleeping pills. But, suddenly able to answer the dilemma of hunger that had plagued him so long, he took them all.
VERTICAL TIME
I came to Idhra with the meltemi, the cool Russian wind evaporating off the Balkans, which swells Greek sails and snaps shirts in the summer afternoon. I arrived with the intrepid shearwater, which flies south thousands of miles from the Arctic Circle, white as ice chips off glaciers and bergs. They skim the purled sea, their sharp wings tear open the blue envelope of sky. The meltemi is a horsetail of a wind, preventing the humidity from settling. It scrubs the air until you can see the grain of a wooden door under its paint; until you can see the pores in lemon skin and the crease of ice in a glass on a table in a harbour-side café; until you can see the dampness of a dog’s snout as it sleeps in the shadow of a wall—twenty minutes before you land. No matter your age, the meltemi tightens your skin, it soothes the desperate traveller’s Brow, the traveller who has not yet travelled long enough to have left his future behind. If you open your mouth on deck, the meltemi will scour and rinse your skull smooth as a white bowl, every thought will be new, and you will be filled with an appetite for clarity, the pull of precise muscles, precise desires. You will feed pinches of your past like bread to the seabirds, watch the pieces bloat and sink, or be scooped up by sharp beaks and swallowed mid-air.
From every angle but one, Idhra is bare blue rock, barnacled with lichen, a whale in a shallow pool. The ship curves one last time and the island suddenly lifts its head, opens its eyes. A bouquet of wildflowers pulled from a magician’s sleeve. For hundreds of years, whether on a fifteen-ton sakturia or a fifty-ton lateen-rigged latinadika, sailors of this route through the Saronic Gulf—from the ports of Constantinople to Alexandria, Venice, Trieste, and Marseille—as they round the curve into the steep amphitheatre of Idhra harbour have heard newcomers gasp. They haul and pull, ignoring the gleaming gold lamé of nets strewn on the dock, ignoring the lava-red roofs liquid with light, the saturated blue or yellow doors of a hundred white houses gleaming as if with wet paint. And you feel foolish for the strain in your throat, for the eagerness of your eyes.
Salman warned me that the boat would arrive too late in the afternoon to walk to your house the first day. He wrote ahead on my behalf, to Mrs. Karouzos, whose quiet hotel is converted from an admiral’s mansion and is run by her son, Manos. Mrs. Karouzos’s is about halfway to your house; from there, according to Salman, the rest of the way can easily be achieved in the morning. The rooms look out onto a central courtyard, which is an outdoor dining room. It’s probably just as Salman remembers it. A dozen small tables. Lanterns hanging from the stone walls. I washed my face and lay down. From the bed, the window was a square of porous colour, a blue painting.
Voices from the courtyard below woke me, the window was now black and sprayed with stars. I listened to the clinking of silverware and dishes.
I added water to my glass and watched the ouzo turn to fog.
When I arrived on Idhra I was convinced I’d succeed for Salman, who is haunted by the idea of your notebooks languishing somewhere in your house. You would be pained to see your old friend, who longs for one last conversation. He hoped that he’d be recovered enough to search for himself, to visit Greece once more. Mrs. Karouzos shipped him your papers, but your journals weren’t there. So Salman thinks they must look like books, hardcover, because he’d told her not to bother sending any books. I promised him I would excavate gently.
I would spend weeks inside your house, an archaeologist examining one square inch at a time. I looked in drawers and cupboards. Your desk and cabinets were empty. Then I began to go through your library: immense in scope and size, climbing almost every wall of the house. Books on the aurora borealis, on meteorites, on fogbows. On topiary. On semaphore signals. On Ghana high life, pygmy music, the sea shanties of Genoan longshoremen. On rivers, the philosophy of rain, on Avebury, the white horse of Uffington. On cave art, botanical art, on the plague. War memoirs from several countries. The most vigorous collection of poetry I’ve ever seen, in Greek, Hebrew, English, Spanish.
I would be distracted by marginalia, slips of paper tucked between pages, scraps of bills used as markers. I handled carefully books that were falling apart, that had been read and reread; like A Guide to Classical Architecture, a ruin itself that practically crumbled in my hands.
I would lose an hour in a book on ceremonial headdress, another two in the life of a dock worker in Athens who became a labour organizer. Once I pulled Michaela’s record book of expenses off the shelf, and another listing things to be sought out on various excursions to Athens or on trips back to Canada. One thick hardbound book turned out to be Michaela’s masters thesis on ethics in museology, which focused on the tragedy of Minik, the Greenland Inuit who was turned into a living exhibit at the American Natural History Museum. Minik discovered that his own father’s skeleton was part of a display. Michaela’s writing style was not academic, and the sorrow of Minik’s story and the afternoon heat suddenly filled me with uselessness.
In the end, when it was clear I wouldn’t find your notebooks easily, I began to imagine you’d hidden them outside among the rocks, like the paper brigade which saved precious books during the war by burying them in the grounds around Vilna’s Strashoun Library. Like all the letters of witness buried under the floorboards of houses in Warsaw, Lodz, Cracow. I even considered digging in your garden and in the sparse patches of stony soil surrounding the house. I imagined breaking apart the walls.
But my mistake would be to look for something hidden.
From your front door, I gazed down to the distant harbour —from this height, only a tiny abstract of colours, as if an overturned cart had spilled its goods into the bay.
A boat, drydocked and badly in need of paint, sat near the edge of the cliff overlooking the sea. It seemed ready to sail into the air at any moment. It must have taken a dozen strong men and mules to haul it to the hilltop.
It was a perfect morning. The breeze kept the heat away. I stood for a while on the stoop before I went inside.
Wands of light from the edges of the shutters crisscrossed the room. Alarm rushed across my skin. Waiting in the dimness, naked to the waist except for her hair, a woman gleamed. I stared into the room until I realized she was wood, a ship’s figurehead, so large she was disorienting, as if the whole ship was behind her and had crashed into the house.
I went back outside and unhooked the shutters from two windows, then stepped through the wide door for the first time. The light was speckled with dust. Some of the furniture was shrouded with sheets and looked like snow drifts, eerie in the intense heat.
A rough wooden parapet encircled the main room, like the deck of a ship. From this walkway you could look down into the living room. The upper walls were lined with sagging, overburdened bookcases. Later I saw that beyond this balcony was your small study, tucked into a corner of the roof. It too was filled with books. A floorlamp made from a branch, with a paper shade, a hammock, a wing-chair piled with more books, a porthole of a window looking out high above the garden and the waves. Several paintings of atmospheric phenomena, including a lovely old impression of a paraselena. On the desk, various stones, an oil compass, a pocketwatch with a sea monster engraved on the case, and a shallow dish filled with an exotic collection of buttons. Buttons shaped like animals, like fruit; gold sailor buttons embossed with anchors, buttons of silver, glass, shell, wood, bone.
The house was bigger than it seemed from outside, twisting back into the hill, rooms full of treasure. Old ornamented barometers. Wind charts, tide charts, bells. Several globes, including a blank one made of slate, presumably so a student could learn the positions of the continents and countries by drawing them. Several smaller figurehe
ads, flying from the walls, one of them an angel of salt-eaten wood, with her hand over her breast, the sea wind in her tangled hair.
The house was a breccia of affections. Everything was wind-worn or sea-worn, old and odd, mostly only of personal value.
A dozen ships in bottles, a map of the moon. An old sea chest with black iron ribs arching across the lid. A glass case across one wall with a jumbled collection of fossils. Sills with fantastic shells, stones, bottles of blue glass, of red glass. Postcards. Driftwood. Candlesticks made of ceramic, wood, brass, glass. Oil lamps of every size and shape. Door-knockers of different sizes, each shaped like a hand.
Mrs. Karouzos, too old to care for the house herself, had sent her daughter to cover the furniture. Even the clothes in the cupboards were draped with sheets. It’s a strange relationship we have with objects that belonged to the dead; in the knit of atoms, their touch is left behind. Every room emanated absence yet was drenched with your presence. When I uncovered the couch, I found a blanket still dripping from one end of it, and the indentations of your bodies—invisible weight—still in the cushions. Pottery from Skyros with plumes and swirls the colours of watermelon and waves. A wide wooden table with a chair pushed from it, as if you or Michaela had only just stood up.
In the kitchen, a well-used cookbook of Greek-Jewish cooking, open to the page on pastry dough, and an equally used and obviously mislaid copy of Pliny’s Natural History. I imagine you came into the kitchen to read a passage to Michaela and absentmindedly left it there. Or perhaps she called to you to take down something for her from a high shelf, or to ask your advice about a sauce, and you embraced her and dinner was temporarily forgotten, the book left behind.
When I saw your jumble of sandals by the door, I saw my parents’ shoes, which after their deaths retained with fidelity not only the shape of their feet, but the way they walked, the residue of motion in the worn leather. Just as their clothes still carried them, a story in a rip, a patch, their long sleeves. Decades stored there, in a closet or two. A house, more than a diary, is the intimate glimpse. A house is a life interrupted. I thought of the families frozen into stone by the eruption of Vesuvius, with their last meal still in their bellies.