Here was evidence of a life so achingly simple: days spent in thought and in companionship. Reading alone; reading aloud. Days of planting vegetables, of swimming, and of sleeping in the heat of the afternoons, hours to work out an idea, to think, until it was time to fill the lamps.
I sat on your terrace and looked at the sea. I sat at your table and looked at the sky.
I felt the power of your place speaking to my body. Imperceptively, my envy dimmed. My legs grew stronger from the daily climb to your house, from the pure food I carried each day—fruit, cheese, bread, olives — to eat in the shade of your garden. One morning my bad dreams of the night before paused halfway up the hill and hesitantly turned around to float back down, as if they’d reached an invisible border. I began to understand how here, alone, in the red and yellow of poppies and broom, you had felt safe enough to begin Groundwork. How you descended into horror slowly, as divers descend, with will and method. How, as you dropped deeper, the silence pounded.
Every day I discovered another talisman of beauty, clues of the life you and Michaela shared: stubs of candles, hard pools of wax in shelters of rock in the garden where you must have sat together at night, no doubt your cleft of stone opened by flame. Your images were everywhere.
I discovered your various stations on the terrace by patiently following the sun’s circadian trail across the flagstones. Scraping chairs following the shade. The place where oil had dripped each time the lamps were replenished.
Above the bed, a broadsheet of “What Have You Done to Time,” the Greek translation written in ink under the English, a shadow; the Hebrew translation written above, an emanation. You wrote of meals in night air, meals where one comes to the table perfectly hungry, starving after a swim, a climb, or love; ravenousness that will be sated and will return. The circular language of Michaela’s arms.
In the evenings, sitting on your terrace, wrapped in the overgrown drapery of lavender and rosemary, I thought about the meaning of your “Night Garden,” and didn’t place the emphasis on the first word of the title. The one moment you bring your life entire to another. Shaking like a compass needle. A moment of pure decision.
The house did possess the silence that is the wake of a monumental event. Evident in the furniture, in the wild garden with its sleep-inducing fragrances that have absorbed a thousand daydreams. In the cushions by the windows. In a forgotten cup on the terrace, now filled with rain.
Your poems from those few years with Michaela, poems of a man who feels, for the first time, a future. Your words and your life no longer separate, after decades of hiding in your skin.
You sat on this terrace at this table, and wrote as if every man lives this way.
Is there a woman who will slowly undress
Far below, salt pulls the heavy scent of lilacs into the sea, the fragrance drowns, sweet purple, in piercing blue. The sweetness drowns without a sound. Ecstatic.
The leaves, a million hands greener than energy, soundless past the closed window. The hot room, the smell of wooden sills and floors baking in the sun. Looking out at the dry hills, so bright, the eye manufactures shadows.
Is there a woman who will slowly undress my spirit
If I could draw, I’d hold a square of paper up to this view from your window and let the landscape burn into it, seep into it like a grasp leaving its stain, like photosensitive paper turning dark with desire for a place one will never apprehend. The hills dissolve as I look; but the loss I feel is that of one who has already passed the point of apprehension. Like writing to a man who no longer wishes to be found.
Is there a woman who will slowly undress my spirit, bring my body
Until the lemon bending the branch, the weight of the shadow separating one leaf from another, presses that place in you. Until the hills burn your eyes, until you give in. Until the seam of density that separates leaf from air/is not a gap, but a seal Is there a woman who will slowly undress my spirit, bring my body to belief
Until the beautiful buzzing of flies wakes me.
For weeks I drifted in the heat, in the smell of rooms long closed, slowing down more and more in my search for your notebooks. From the open door, the wafting fames of scorched grass.
One afternoon my eyes sprang open. I felt with a rush of adrenalin that you and Michaela might appear in a doorway. A shadow had passed through the house, as brief as a thought, though nothing had changed from one moment to the next.
The idea seized me: you’re still alive. You’re hiding, to be left alone in your happiness.
An energy of intention I’d never experienced before crackled through me.
PHOSPHORUS
Before the eighteenth century, lightning was thought to be an emanation from the earth or the friction of clouds rubbing together. It was a popular pastime to try to discover its true nature because no one fully realized the danger. Lightning can’t be domesticated. It is a collision of hot and cold.
A hundred million volts accumulate between earth and cloud, until a white-hot dart shoots down, followed by another, and another—the zigzag of ions that form a channel for lightning to surge up from the ground—in a fraction of a second. The surrounding air molecules glow.
In the electrified area beneath the thundercloud, between strikes, rocks have been heard to hum shrilly, and metal— a watch, a ring—to sizzle like oil in a frying pan.
Lightning has evaporated glass. It has struck a field of potatoes and cooked them underground, the harvester turning them up perfectly baked. It has roasted geese in mid-flight, which have rained down, ready to eat.
The sudden intense heat can expand fabric. People have found themselves naked, their clothes scattered around them, their boots torn from their feet.
Lightning can so magnetize objects they are able to lift three times their own weight. It has stopped an electric clock then started it again, the clockhands moving backwards at twice their normal speed.
It has struck a building then struck the fire alarm, bringing firemen to put out the blaze it started.
Lightning has restored a man’s sight and also his hair.
Ball lightning enters through a window, a door, a chimney. Silently it circles the room, browses the bookshelf and, as if unable to decide where to sit, disappears through the same air passage by which it entered.
A thousand accumulated moments come to fruition in a few seconds. Your cells are reassembled. Struck, your metal melted. Your burnt shape is branded into the chair, vacancy where once you inhabited society. Worst of all, she appears to you as everything you’ve ever lost. As the one you’ve missed most.
Petra chose a table at the edge of the Karouzos’s courtyard. She sat alone. One could tell immediately from her clothes and manner that she was American.
Her hair was a sleek curve of water. Her large mouth and blue eyes. The sun was in her skin, from long days spent entirely outside. A white dress shines against her thighs like rain.
She tossed her head back. My desire a rough edge of metal that suddenly appears smooth in a glare of light.
Sometimes, when lightning passes through objects and then through human tissue, it imprints the object onto a hand, an arm, a belly—leaving a permanent shadow, a skin photograph. Whole landscapes have appeared on the sides of animals. Across the courtyard, I imagined Petra had the divine tattoo: in the middle of her back, a Lichtenberg flower. I imagined she’d been imprinted as a child, that the rubber tires of her bicycle had saved her. In the small of her brown silky back, past an invisible down of hair, the faint breath of electricity remained. A flower so faint you feel it could be washed away or, like a frost flower, vanish with your gasp. “From your lips to the ear of God.” But your adoration will not have the slightest effect. The flower is ghostly and permanent; maddening stigmata.
I adorn Petra’s wrists and ears. The rushing sound of lemon leaves, and her bracelets slipping together down her arms as she lifts her heavy hair from her neck: the sounds of green and gold. After meals, bottles and glasses, c
rusts and dishes, intimate as clothes scattered around a bed.
Her casualness stabs me: “When we leave the island,” “Back home,” “My friends …”
Her hair drips from her swim. On her wet body, a bathing suit of grass.
Blindness drips into my eyes. Afternoon into evening, the window blue, then deeper blue. Like conversation drifting up from the courtyard, single words rise into consciousness: Petra, earth. Salt.
She sleeps with an abandon that is almost shocking, her black hair splashed on the sheets.
In the morning, when Petra’s hair disappears under her cotton dress, I feel the coolness over my own shoulders.
I learn Petra’s smells, her hair still damp in its thickness, close to her scalp, at the back of her neck. I know the line of sweat under her breasts, the smell of her hands and wrists against my face. I can identify her in darkness, the tastes that aren’t erased by the sea. I know her body, every smoothness, every line between light and dark, every shape. Each line of bone stretching the surface, each crease traced before birth—the line behind the knee, behind the elbow, the lines in the palm, on the neck. I memorize the curve of her eyebrows, the contours of her feet. I know her teeth, her tongue. My tongue knows her ears, her eyelids. I know her sounds.
Late September. At night the wind lifted the corners of the tablecloths in the courtyard. Except for Stavros the architect, on the island to restore a portion of the harbour, Mrs. Karouzos’s was empty. I’d been on Idhra almost four months, known Petra for almost three. Every day before she swam—her slim legs, long as the tails of quarter notes/firm as a fish in the shallows—Petra slipped off the bracelets I'd bought her, the rings of Saturn. Afterwards she put them back on, two lines of honey glowing on her tanned arms. She lay on the rocky ledges and let the waves stroke her legs. Maybe she wanted to be an actor, a teacher, a journalist, she hadn’t decided. She was twenty-two, she didn’t want to go home.
She told me about her school friends; about the first part of her travels, in Italy and Spain. About the Australian computer salesman who proposed to her in Brindisi on the dance floor. “Right there in the middle of the Café Luna.”
I confess I didn’t listen too closely. As she talked I slipped stones under the bands of her underwear or her bathing suit until they were salty and dark. I retrieved them, put them in my mouth. Lost parts.
We followed your footsteps, Jakob, over the island. In our weeks together, like a tour guide, I recounted all the facts Salman had so faithfully preserved and passed on to me, on a hand-drawn map of Idhra: Here’s where Jakob began “The Compass.” Here’s where he and Michaela swam. Here’s where they read the newspapers every Saturday.
I told her how sometimes you and Michaela used to take the boat to Athens to buy books and odd condiments at a shop that sold British products —HP Sauce and curry powder, Cadbury’s Drinking Chocolate and Bird’s Custard— then spent the night at a little hotel in the Plaka, returning to the island the next day.
I told her how you wrote “In Each Strange City” —in each strange city I learn again/your distant and beloved face— when you were staying alone in a London hotel and above the bed hung the same Monet waterlilies as on the postcard at home on Michaela’s night table.
I wanted Petra to wear clothes I bought for her. I loved to watch her taste food from my plate or drink from my glass. I wanted to tell her everything I knew about literature and storms, to whisper into her hair until she fell asleep, my words inventing her dreams.
In the mornings, my body was dull and sensitized with pleasure. I shook myself free of a million lives, an unborn for every ghost, over Petra’s firm belly and brown thighs and slept carelessly, while souls seeped into the extravagance of sheets and flesh. Having emptied myself completely, I slept as though too full to move.
At last, I took her to your house. Petra sensed that your place had become a shrine and walked through the rooms as if in a museum. She exclaimed at the view. She undressed in the afternoon sun, warm even in mid-October, and stood fully naked on the terrace. I held my breath. I saw Naomi, the day before I left, in the green rain light of the back yard, the wet sheets in her arms. At the back door, Naomi peeled off her shorts, soaked to the skin; her drenched shirt on the kitchen counter, trickling into the sink. I saw my wife’s beauty and didn’t embrace her.
Petra led me inside, and I followed her upstairs. She opened the door to your study, then to the room beside it, then found your bedroom. She opened the curtains and the simple room turned resplendent; everything startlingly white except for the turquoise cushions on the bed, as if the tide of sunlight had rushed in and left behind fragments of sea.
Then Petra started to pull down the heavy bedcover.
We found Michaela’s note where she’d left it. Planned as the surprise ending to a perfect day. Among the cushions, waiting for your discovery, the night you and Michaela never returned from Athens. Two lines of blue ink.
If she’s a girl: Bella If he’s a boy: Bela
I stripped away the rest of the bedcover and Petra and I lay on the floor.
Petra, perfect, not a blemish or a scar. I pounded myself into her until I hurt us both. Tears streamed down her face. I clenched my jaw and poured myself onto her belly, into the air. I stained the bedcover and lay back, sweating, and drew her hair over my face.
There was a lullaby my mother sang to me: “Shtiler, shtiler—Quiet, quiet. Many roads lead there, but no roads lead back. …”
My father was offered his first conducting job in the town where he was born. Shortly before the war, my parents moved there from Warsaw. Nearby was a peaceful old forest. My parents used to go there for weekend picnics. In 1941, the Nazis removed the name of the forest from the map. Then, over three years, they killed in that little grove. Afterwards, the remaining Jews and Soviet prisoners were forced to reopen the seeping pits and cremate the eighty thousand dead. They dug the bodies out of the ground. They put their bare hands not only into death, not only into the syrups and bacteria of the body, but into emotions, beliefs, confessions. One man's memories then another’s, thousands whose lives it was their duty to imagine….
The workers were chained together. Secretly, for three months they also dug a tunnel over thirty metres long.
On April 15, 1944, the prisoners carried out an escape. Thirteen made it through the tunnel alive. Eleven, including my father, reached a partisan group hiding deeper in the forest. My father and the others had dug the tunnel with spoons.
Naomi says a child doesn’t have to inherit fear. But who can separate fear from the body? My parents’ past is mine molecularly. Naomi thinks she can stop the soldier who spat in my father’s mouth from spitting into mine, through my father’s blood. I want to believe she can rinse the fear from my mouth. But I imagine Naomi has a child and I can’t stop the writing on its forehead from growing as the child grows. It’s not the sight of the number that scares me, even as it bursts across the skin. It’s that somehow my watching causes it to happen.
I’ll never know whether the two names on the back of my father’s photograph, if they had ever been spoken, would have filled the silence of my parents’ apartment.
Lying with Petra, I returned to the kitchen to find my mother weeping at the table surrounded by ingredients for supper. To find, at the same table, Naomi holding my mother’s hand.
I returned to the kitchen where Naomi recognized the photo my father had kept hidden so many years; where Naomi and I sat in silence, the scraps of our dinner swelling with dishwater.
The night you and I met, Jakob, I heard you tell my wife that there’s a moment when love makes us believe in death for the first time. You recognize the one whose loss, even contemplated, you’ll carry forever, like a sleeping child. All grief, anyone’s grief, you said, is the weight of a sleeping child.
I woke to find Petra in front of the bookcase; volumes scattered on the table, left open on the chair and couch as she rummaged through your possessions. Her perfect nakedness, while she
desecrated what had been for years so lovingly preserved.
I sprang, held her wrists.
“Are you crazy?” she screamed. “I’m not doing anything. I’m just looking around—”
She grabbed for her clothes, pushed her feet into her sandals and was gone.
The heat was astounding. Drops of sweat fell onto the precious leather bindings in my hands. I stood at the door and watched Petra’s black mane swinging above her hips and heard her swearing as she slipped past the rocks, down the path.
I looked back at the gaps on the shelves.
It was difficult to leave things as she’d left them; not to put things back as they’d been. I hesitated at the door for some time.
The boat arrives in late afternoon then circles back to Athens. Petra had returned to Mrs. Karouzos’s with plenty of time to pack.
I was the only guest that night. Manos fastened down the tablecloth and I ate alone in the gusty courtyard.
Manos lowered his eyes, raised his shoulders, and I knew he was thinking: When it comes to a woman who’s not your wife, what can a man say?
I remembered someone I knew in university who’d confided in me once, with almost adolescent curiosity— had I experienced this as well?—that after lovemaking, his mind always flooded with childhood memories. For years he mistook this deep feeling of well-being, the restoration of boyhood simplicity, for love of the women. Then he realized it was purely physiological. The body, he said, fools us perfectly. At the time, I’d envied him the women. Now I envied him the solace of his nostalgia.
All the nights, stunned with complexity lying next to Petra, she was waiting to leave.