Athos put his hands over his ears.
“The others were pushed onto a truck that stayed in the blazing platia the rest of the afternoon, with SS all around, drinking limonadha. We were trying to think what to do, to do something. Then suddenly the truck took off, in the direction of Keri.”
“What happened to them?”
“No one knows.”
“And the people on the boat? Where were they taking them?”
“My father guesses to the train station at Larissa.”
“And Karrer?”
“No one knows where he is, my father heard he escaped by kaiki the same night we came to you. The archbishop stayed with the Jews, he wanted to get in the truck with them but the soldiers wouldn’t let him. He stood all day next to the truck, talking to the poor people inside. …”
He paused.
“Maybe Jakob shouldn’t hear any more.”
Athos looked uncertain.
“Ioannis, he’s already heard so much.”
I thought Ioannis was going to weep.
“If you’re looking for the ghetto of Hania, Crete’s two-thousand-year-old ghetto, look for it a hundred miles off Polegandros, at the bottom of the sea. …”
As he spoke, the room filled with shouts. The water rose around us, bullets tearing the surface for those who took too long to drown. Then the peaceful blue sheen of the Aegean slipped shut again.
After a while Ioannis left. I watched as Athos walked with him partway down the hill. When he returned, Athos went to his desk and wrote down what Ioannis had told us.
Athos would no longer let me go out on the roof at night.
He had been so careful to maintain order. Regular meals, daily lessons. But now our days were without shape. He still told stories, to try and cheer us, but now they were aimless. How he and Nikos learned about Chinese kites and flew a handmade dragon above Cape Spinari while the children from the village perched on the coast, waiting their turn to feel the tug of the string. How they lost the kite in the waves. … All his stories went wrong halfway through, and reminded us of the sea.
The only thing that calmed Athos was to draw. The greater his despair, the more obsessively he drew. He took down a battered copy of Blossfeldt’s Elementary Forms and, in pen and ink, copied the photographs of magnified plants that transformed stems into burnished pewter, blossoms into fleshy fish mouths, pods into hairy accordion pleats. Athos collected poppies, lavatera, basil, broom, and spread them on his desk. Then, in watercolours, he made precise renderings. He quoted Wilson: “ ‘Nature’s harmonies cannot be guessed at.’“ He explained as he painted: “Broom grows in the Bible. Hagar left Ishmael in a clump of broom, Elijah lay in broom when he asked to die. Perhaps it was the burning bush; even when the fire goes out, its inner branches continue to burn.” When he was finished, he gathered what was edible and we used it for supper. Important lessons: look carefully; record what you see. Find a way to make beauty necessary; find a way to make necessity beautiful.
By the end of summer Athos rallied enough to insist that our lessons resume. But the dead surrounded us, an aurora over the blue water.
At night I choked against Bella’s round face, a doll’s face, immobile, inanimate, her hair floating behind her. These nightmares, in which my parents and my sister drowned with the Jews of Crete, continued for years, continued long after we’d moved to Toronto.
Often on Zakynthos and later in Canada, for moments I was lost. Standing next to the fridge in our Toronto kitchen, afternoon light falling in a diagonal across the floor. About something I can’t remember Athos answered me. Perhaps even then the answer had nothing to do with the question. “If you hurt yourself, Jakob, I will have to hurt myself. You will have proven to me my love for you is useless.”
Athos said: “I can’t save a boy from a burning building. Instead he must save me from the attempt; he must jump to earth.”
While I hid in the radiant light of Athos’s island, thousands suffocated in darkness. While I hid in the luxury of a room, thousands were stuffed into baking stoves, sewers, garbage bins. In the crawlspaces of double ceilings, in stables, pigsties, chicken coops. A boy my age hid in a crate; after ten months he was blind and mute, his limbs atrophied. A woman stood in a closet for a year and a half, never sitting down, blood bursting her veins. While I was living with Athos on Zakynthos, learning Greek and English, learning geology, geography, and poetry, Jews were filling the corners and cracks of Europe, every available space. They buried themselves in strange graves, any space that would fit their bodies, absorbing more room than was allotted them in the world. I didn’t know that while I was on Zakynthos, a Jew could be purchased for a quart of brandy, perhaps four pounds of sugar, cigarettes. I didn’t know that in Athens, they were being rounded up in “Freedom Square.” That the sisters of the Vilna convent were dressing men as nuns in order to provide ammunition to the underground. In Warsaw, a nurse hid children under her skirt, passing through the ghetto gates, until one evening— a gentle twilight descending on those typhus-infected, lice-infested streets — the nurse was caught, the child thrown into the air and shot like a tin can, the nurse given the “Nazi pill” : one bullet in the throat. While Athos taught me about anabatic and katabatic winds, Arctic smoke, and the Spectre of the Brocken, I didn’t know that Jews were being hanged from their thumbs in public squares. I didn’t know that when there were too many for the ovens, corpses were burned in open pits, flames ladled with human fat. I didn’t know that while I listened to the stories of explorers in the clean places of the world (snow-covered, salt-stung) and slept in a clean place, men were untangling limbs, the flesh of friends and neighbours, wives and daughters, coming off in their hands.
In September 1944, the Germans left Zakynthos. Across the hills, music from town spun through the air frail as a distant radio. A man rode across the island, his high-pitched yelps and the Greek flag snapping above his head. I didn’t go outside that day, though I went downstairs and looked into the garden. The next morning Athos asked me to sit with him by the front door. He carried two chairs outside. Sunlight blared from every direction. My eyeballs jangled in my skull. I sat with my back against the house and looked down at myself. My legs did not belong to me; thin as lengths of rope knotted at the knees, skin dripping where muscle used to be, tender in the strong light. The heat pressed down. After a while Athos led me, dazed, inside.
I grew stronger, each day climbing further down and up the hill. Finally I walked with Athos to Zakynthos town, which gleamed as if an egg had been cracked on the sharp Venetian details and dripped shiny over the pale yellow and white plaster. Athos had described it so often: the hedges of quince and pomegranate, the path of cypresses. The narrow streets with laundry drying from the grillwork balconies, the view of Mount Skopos, with the convent Panayia Skopotissa. The statue of Solomos in the square, Nikos’s fountain.
Athos presented me to Old Martin. There was now so little to sell that his tiny shop was mostly empty. I remember standing next to a shelf where a few cherries were scattered like rubies on ivory paper. During the occupations, Old Martin tried to satisfy the cravings of his patrons. This was his private resistance. He bartered secretly with ship captains for a delicacy he knew a customer pined for. Thus, cunningly, he bolstered spirits. He kept track of the larders of the community, efficient as a caterer at a fine hotel. Martin knew who was buying food for Jews in hiding after the ghetto was abandoned, and he tried to save extra fruit and oil for families with young children. The Patron Saint of Groceries. Old Martin’s short hair stood up in several directions. If Athos’s hair was silver ore, Martin’s was jagged and white as quartz. His knobbly arthritic hands trembled as he reached deliberately for a fig or a lemon, holding one at a time. In those days of scarcity his shaking care seemed appropriate, an acknowledgement of the value of a single plum.
Athos and I walked through the town. We rested in the platia where the last Jews of the zudeccha had waited to die. A woman was washing the steps of th
e Zakynthos Hotel. In the harbour, ropes tapped against the masts.
For four years I'd imagined Athos and myself sharing secret languages. Now I heard Greek everywhere. In the street, reading signs for the farmakio or the kafenio, I felt profanely exposed. I ached to return to our little house.
In India there are butterflies whose folded wings look just like dry leaves. In South Africa there is a plant that’s indistinguishable from the stones among which it grows: the stone-copying plant. There are caterpillars that look like branches, moths that look like bark. To remain invisible, the plaice changes colour as it moves through sunlit water. What is the colour of a ghost?
To survive was to escape fate. But if you escape your fate, whose life do you then step into?
The Zohar says: “All visible things will be born again invisible.”
The present, like a landscape, is only a small part of a mysterious narrative. A narrative of catastrophe and slow accumulation. Each life saved: genetic features to rise again in another generation. “Remote causes.”
Athos confirmed that there was an invisible world, just as real as what’s evident. Full-grown forests still and silent, whole cities, under a sky of mud. The realm of the peat men, preserved as statuary. The place where all those who have uttered the bony password and entered the earth wait to emerge. From underground and underwater, from iron boxes and behind brick walls, from trunks and packing crates….
When Athos sat at his desk, soaking wood samples in polyethylene glycol, replacing missing fibres with a waxy filler, I could see—watching his face while he worked— that he was actually traipsing through vanished, impossibly tall Carboniferous forests, with tree bark like intricate brocades: designs more beautiful than any fabric. The forest swayed one hundred feet above his head in a prehistoric autumn.
Athos was an expert in buried and abandoned places. His cosmology became mine. I grew into it naturally. In this way, our tasks became the same.
Athos and I would come to share our secrets of the earth. He described the bog bodies. They had steeped for centuries, their skin tanning to dark leather, umber juices deep in the lines of palms and soles. In autumn, with the smell of snow in the dark clouds, men had been led out into the moor as sacrificial offerings. There, they were anchored with birch and stones to drown in the acidic ground. Time stopped. And that is why, Athos explained, the bog men are so serene. Asleep for centuries, they are uncovered perfectly intact; thus they outlast their killers — whose bodies have long dissolved to dust.
In turn I told him of the Polish synagogues whose sanctuaries were below ground, like caves. The state prohibited synagogues to be built as high as churches, but the Jews refused to have their reverence diminished by building codes. The vaulted ceilings were still built; the congregation simply prayed deeper underground.
I told him of the great wooden horses that once decorated a synagogue near my parents’ house and were now desecrated and buried. Someday perhaps they would rise in a herd, as if nothing had occurred, to graze in a Polish field.
I fantasized the power of reversal. Later, in Canada, looking at photographs of the mountains of personal possessions stored at Kanada in the camps, I imagined that if each owner of each pair of shoes could be named, then they would be brought back to life. A cloning from intimate belongings, a mystical pangram.
Athos told me about Biskupin and its discovery by a local teacher out for an evening stroll. The Gasawka River was low and the huge wooden pylons perforated the surface of the lake like massive rushes. More than two thousand years before, Biskupin had been a rich community, supremely organized. They harvested grain and bred livestock. Wealth was shared. Their comfortable houses were arranged in neat rows, the island fortification resembling a modern subdivision. Each gabled home had ample light as well as privacy; a porch, a hearth, a bedroom loft. Biskupin craftsmen traded with Egypt and the Black Sea coast. But then there was a change in climate. Farmland turned to heath, then to bog.
The water table rose inexorably until it was obvious that Biskupin would have to be abandoned. The city remained underwater until 1933, when the level of the Gasawka River dropped. Athos joined the excavation in 1937. His job was to solve the preservation problems of the waterlogged structures. Soon after Athos made the decision to take me home with him, Biskupin was overrun by soldiers. We learned this after the war. They burned records and relics. They demolished the ancient fortifications and houses that had withstood millennia. Then they shot five of Athos’s colleagues in the surrounding forest. The others were sent to Dachau.
And that is one of the reasons Athos believed we saved each other.
The invisible paths in Athos’s stories: rivers following the inconsistencies of land like tears following the imperfections on skin. Wind and currents that stir up underwater creatures, bioluminescent gardens that guide birds to shore. The Arctic tern, riding Westerlies and Trades each year from Arctic to Antarctica and back again. On their brains, the rotating constellations, the imprint of longing and distance. The fixed route of bison over prairie, so worn that the railway laid its tracks along it.
Geography cut by rail. The black seam of that wailing migration from life to death, the lines of steel drawn across the ground, penetrating straight through cities and towns now famous for murder: from Berlin through Breslau; from Rome through Florence, Padua, and Vienna; from Vilna through Grodno and Lodz; from Athens through Salonika and Zagreb. Though they were taken blind, though their senses were confused by stench and prayer and screams, by terror and memories, these passengers found their way home. Through the rivers, through the air.
When the prisoners were forced to dig up the mass graves, the dead entered them through their pores and were carried through their bloodstreams to their brains and hearts. And through their blood into another generation. Their arms were into death up to the elbows, but not only into death—into music, into a memory of the way a husband or son leaned over his dinner, a wife’s expression as she watched her child in the bath; into beliefs, mathematical formulas, dreams. As they felt another man’s and another’s blood-soaked hair through their fingers, the diggers begged forgiveness. And those lost lives made molecular passage into their hands.
How can one man take on the memories of even one other man, let alone five or ten or a thousand or ten thousand; how can they be sanctified each? He stops thinking. He concentrates on the whip, he feels a face in his hand, he grasps hair as if in a passion grasp, its matted thickness between his fingers, pulling, his hands full of names. His holy hands move, autonomous.
In the Golleschau quarry, stone-carriers were forced to haul huge blocks of limestone endlessly, from one mound to another and back again. During the torture, they carried their lives in their hands. The insane task was not futile only in the sense that faith is not futile.
A camp inmate looked up at the stars and suddenly remembered that they’d once seemed beautiful to him. This memory of beauty was accompanied by a bizarre stab of gratitude. When I first read this I couldn’t imagine it. But later I felt I understood. Sometimes the body experiences a revelation because it has abandoned every other possibility.
It’s no metaphor to feel the influence of the dead in the world, just as it’s no metaphor to hear the radiocarbon chronometer, the Geiger counter amplifying the faint breathing of rock, fifty thousand years old. (Like the faint thump from behind the womb wall.) It is no metaphor to witness the astonishing fidelity of minerals magnetized, even after hundreds of millions of years, pointing to the magnetic pole, minerals that have never forgotten magma whose cooling off has left them forever desirous. We long for place; but place itself longs. Human memory is encoded in air currents and river sediment. Eskers of ash wait to be scooped up, lives reconstituted.
How many centuries before the spirit forgets the body? How long will we feel our phantom skin buckling over rockface, our pulse in magnetic lines of force? How many years pass before the difference between murder and death erodes?
Grief requires
time. If a chip of stone radiates its self, its breath, so long, how stubborn might be the soul. If sound waves carry on to infinity, where are their screams now? I imagine them somewhere in the galaxy, moving forever towards the psalms.
Alone on the roof those nights, it’s not surprising that, of all the characters in Athos’s tales of geologists and explorers, cartographers and navigators, I felt compassion for the stars themselves. Aching towards us for millennia though we are blind to their signals until it’s too late, starlight only the white breath of an old cry. Sending their white messages millions of years, only to be crumpled up by the waves.
VERTICAL TIME
“I met Athos at the university,” said Kostas Mitsialis. “He shared my office. Whenever I came in, no matter how early or how late, he was already there, reading by the window. The books and articles piled on the sill¡ English poetry. How to preserve leaf skeletons. The meaning of pole carvings. He had a beautiful watch from his father. It had an inlay of a sea monster on its case and on its face, with a tail that curled around eleven o’clock. Athos, do you still have it?”
Athos smiled, opened his jacket, and dangled the watch from its chain.
“I told Daphne about him, the shy fellow who took away my privacy in my own office¡ She wanted to see for herself. One afternoon she came to pick me up, greeting me with a tug on my ears the way she still likes to do. Daphne was only twenty then and always in a good mood. Come to dinner, she said to Athos. Athos asked, Do you like music?
“Those days between the wars, the tavernas were filled with tango, but we had no use for Spaniard music because we had our own: the slow hasapiko and the songs sung with bouzouki that come from the sailors on the docks and the hamals and the plum-juice vendors.”