I looked around. The houses were dark, the street safely empty. I raised my voice. “‘Foolish one, don’t be so dense, don’t you have any common sense? Smoke is taller than a house, a cat is faster than a mouse….’”
Up Grace, along Henderson, up Manning to Harbord I whimpered; my spirit shape finally in familiar clothes and, with abandon, flinging its arms to the stars.
But the street wasn’t empty as I thought. Startled, I saw that the blackness was perforated with dozens of faces. A forest of eyes, of Italian and Portuguese and Greek ears; whole families sitting silently on lawnchairs and front steps. On dark verandahs, a huge invisible audience, cooling down from their small, hot houses, the lights off to keep away the bugs.
There was nothing for it but to raise my foreign song and feel understood.
At night, lying in bed unable to sleep, my body pointed painfully towards its great ignorance.
I imagined kissing the girl I saw in the library, the skinny one who kept tipping over in her high heels…. She’s lying next to me. We’re holding each other but then she wants to know why I live with Athos, why I’ve collected all those articles about the war that are in piles on the carpet, why I stay up half the night examining every face in the photographs. Why I keep to myself, why I don’t know how to dance.
When Athos went into his study after dinner, I stepped into the night. But we both entered the same convulsion of time; the events we lived through without knowing, while we were on Zakynthos. I stood on the steps of the escarpment on Davenport Road and looked out at the lit city, displayed like a circuit board. I walked past the knitwear and pencil factories, the General Electric plant, the typesetting warehouses and lumberyards, the dry cleaners and autobody shops. Past signs advertising Jerry Lewis at the Imperial and Red Skelton at Shea’s. I followed the train tracks to the coal silos on Mt. Pleasant Road, or down to the rusted ships waiting by the grain silos of Victory Mills.
I took in the cold beauty of Lakeshore Cement, with its small gardens someone thought to plant at the foot of each massive silo. Or the delicate metal staircases, a lace ribbon, swirling around the girth of the oil reservoirs. At night, a few lights marked port and starboard of these gargantuan industrial forms, and I filled them with loneliness. I listened to these dark shapes as if they were black spaces in music, a musician learning the silences of a piece. I felt this was my truth. That my life could not be stored in any language but only in silence; the moment I looked into the room and took in only what was visible, not vanished. The moment I failed to see Bella had disappeared. But I did not know how to seek by way of silence. So I lived a breath apart, a touch-typist who holds his hands above the keys slightly in the wrong place, the words coming out meaningless, garbled. Bella and I inches apart, the wall between us. I thought of writing poems this way, in code, every letter askew, so that loss would wreck the language, become the language.
If one could isolate that space, that damaged chromosome in words, in an image, then perhaps one could restore order by naming. Otherwise history is only a tangle of wires. So in poems I returned to Biskupin, to the house on Zakynthos, to the forest, to the river, to the burst door, to the minutes in the wall.
English was a sonar, a microscope, through which I listened and observed, waiting to capture elusive meanings buried in facts. I wanted a line in a poem to be the hollow ney of the dervish orchestra whose plaintive wail is a call to God. But all I achieved was awkward shrieking. Not even the pure shriek of a reed in the rain.
I made one lasting friend through Athos’s connection with the university, a graduate student of his named Maurice Salman. Maurice was even more of a stranger to the city than we were, having only just moved from Montreal when we first met. Athos invited him for dinner. Maurice was thin in those days but so was his hair, and he wore a beret pushed back off his forehead. We began to take walks together, to go to a concert or an art gallery. Sometimes he and Athos and I went to the movies where we developed conflicting passions; Athos for Deborah Kerr (especially in King Solomon’s Mines), Maurice for Jean Arthur, and I for Barbara Stanwyck. Maurice and I were already hopelessly out of date and would remain so. We should have been dreaming about Audrey Hepburn. On the way home we stopped at a restaurant or Maurice came home with us to our bachelor kitchen where we argued over our paramours’ relative merits. Kerr, said Athos, was clearly a woman with whom one could discuss Pascal’s wager over breakfast, in the finest hotel or in the bush. Maurice thought Jean Arthur was a woman one could definitely go camping with or dancing all night and who would still remember where you left your keys or the children. I loved Barbara Stanwyck because she was always in a jam and was loyal to her heart and most of all because in Ball of Fire slang flew from her mouth like song. “Stop beating up with the gums and shove in your clutch!” “Clip the mooch!” “I’m no bungalow-apron!” She lived in a world of plenty gestanko and solid senders. She was a dish, a smooch, for whom one would need a bundle of scratch, dough, moolah, smackeroos, a two-ply poke. I was wacky about her. In these discussions none of us mentioned bare shoulders or satin over breasts; certainly no one mentioned legs at all.
But we didn’t spend many evenings together because soon after we met Maurice, Athos died.
“Athos, how big is the actual heart?” I once asked him when I was still a child. He replied: “Imagine the size and heaviness of a handful of earth.”
On his last night, Athos had come home from giving a lecture on the conservation of Egyptian wood. It was about half past ten. He usually reported some observation of the evening, or even recounted the main details of his talk, but since I’d typed it for him earlier that day the latter was unnecessary, and he was tired. I heated some wine for him then went to bed.
In the morning I found him at his desk. He looked as he often did, asleep in the middle of work. I embraced him with all my strength, again and again, but he would not come back. It is impossible to reach the emptiness in each cell. His death was quiet; rain on the sea.
I know only fragments of what Athos’s death contained: no less than all the elements and their powers, ten thousand names for things, the humility of lichen. The instincts of migration: stars, magnetism, angles of light. The energy of time that alters mass. The element that reminded him most of his country, salt: olives, cheese, vine leaves, sea foam, sweat. Fifty years of intimacy with Kostas and Daphne, his memory of their bodies at twenty; his own body, as a child, at fifteen, at twenty-five and fifty, the selves that remain as we age, just as words remain on the page though darkness erases them. Two wars, which are both the rotten part of the fruit that can’t be cut away and the fruit; that there’s nothing a man will not do to another, nothing a man will not do for another. But who was the woman who first unbuttoned for him the two birds of her breasts in a night garden? Did he remember Helen’s hands holding his or were they in his hair or were her arms outstretched when his head rested on her thighs? Did they imagine children, what words did he regret? Who was the first woman whose hair he washed, what song could have been his own voice singing of love when he first heard it?
When a man dies, his secrets bond like crystals, like frost on a window. His last breath obscures the glass.
I sat at Athos’s desk. In a small flat in a strange city in a country I did not yet love.
In Toronto, Athos had recreated his study on Zakynthos. It was a chaotic site from which a variety of objects could be excavated. On Athos’s desk the night he died: a wooden box full of Meccano, the same set of metal wheels and hinges he had as a boy. A photomicrograph of the frail lamellae of waterlogged Biskupin oak. A photo of Kispiox totems paperclipped to an analysis of earth and weather conditions. A glass paperweight enclosing a sample of lepidodendron. A miniature birch-bark canoe. An article on the Vestfold Hills in Antarctica as a site for freeze-drying wood artifacts. Notes for an upcoming waterlogged wood conference in Ottawa. A pen and ink sketch of the fossil trees at Joggins, Nova Scotia. Kazantzakis’s translations of Darwin’s Origin of Species an
d Dante’s Comedy. A cup with coffee grounds trailing the last incline of the cup to his lips.
In his desk, I found a packet of letters…. The intimacy that death forces on us. At first I did not want to look at them. I recognized Athos’s elegant Greek script. The letters were to Helen, written when both she and Athos were studying in Vienna, the year before he went to Cambridge. I fingered the envelopes and smoothed the onionskin. The silence of the empty flat pressed in on me with the weight of self-pity.
“When you are alone— at sea, in the polar dark— an absence can keep you alive. The one you love maintains your mind. But when she’s merely across the city, this is an absence that eats you to the bone.”
“My father approves of Vienna, but he still hopes to persuade me against geology. I stand firm, despite his shrewd argument that if I were an engineer I would still confront karst, while planning railways and water supplies. …”
While he was in Vienna, exploring intellectual and actual landscapes, honeycombed with caves and swallow-holes, tunnels and sinks, Athos also tumbled through the sense-bruised surface of things, into love.
In our flat, where no word has been spoken for weeks, I imagine Athos walking alone late at night, past the modern buildings of the Ringstrasse and pale baroque churches, streets that would soon be transformed by war. As I read his letters, written half a century before to a woman I know almost nothing of, his “H,” I am shaken by my own longing. I’m embarrassed to be eavesdropping on Athos’s young voice, the voice of my koumbaros when he was my age.
“Your family—your mother and your sister whom you love—want to know everything; but a real marriage must always be a secret between two people. We must guard it under our tongues like a prayer. Our secrets will be our courage when we need it.”
“As for your brother’s unhappiness, I’m naive enough to think that love is always good, no matter how long ago, no matter the circumstances. Fm not old enough yet to imagine the instances where this isn’t true and where regret outweighs everything.”
His arteries silted up like an old river. The heart is a fistful of earth. The heart is a lake, …
All I know of Athos’s Helen is what I learned from the letters. There is a photograph. Her expression is so open and earnest it calls across the years. Her dark hair is piled high and woven elaborately as a corbeille. Her face is too angular to be pretty. She is beautiful.
In the same drawer as the letters and Helen’s photograph, there is a thick folder containing faint blue carbons and newspaper cuttings: Athos’s search for my sister, Bella.
When you’ve hardened yourself in certain places, crying is painful, almost as if nature is against it.
“I know the records are incomplete …” “Please post the following every Friday for one year…” “I know I have written to you before …” “Please check your lists … taking into account possible variations of spelling … for the period of time …” Athos’s last inquiry was dated two months before he died.
I thought that he had given up years before. But I understood why Athos had kept this to himself. I lay on the carpet in his study. “Love is always good, no matter the circumstances … our secrets will be our courage when we need it.” I tried to believe this but I hadn’t yet learned that true hope is severed from expectation, and his words, like his search for Bella, seemed painfully innocent. But I held the file folder the way a child holds a doll.
Once in a while a tram squealed past. Through the floor I felt the heavy iron wheels rumbling on their tracks. My father’s finger, dipped in bootblack, draws a tram on a corner of newspaper, illustrating the Y-shaped wires by which Warsaw streetcars attach to the sky. “In Warsaw,” my father says, “engines travel through the streets.” “They move by themselves?” I ask. My father nods, “No horses!” I woke up. I turned on the light and lay down again and closed my eyes.
When I sat down to write the news to Kostas and Daphne, and to tell them I would someday bring Athos’s ashes to Zakynthos, I could barely move my pen across the page. “I will bring Athos home, to land that remembers him.” Koumbaros, how can a man write such news with a beautiful hand.
For many nights following Athos’s death, I continued to sleep on the floor in his study among his boxes of random research. We had always meant to organize it together. But Athos’s work on Nazi archaeology grew to take all his strength. He started documenting immediately after the war, as soon as information began to flow. Our eyes slowly became accustomed to the darkness. Athos could speak about it, he needed to speak of it, but I couldn’t. He asked endless questions to order his thoughts, leaving “why” to the last. But in my thinking, I started with the last question, the “why” he hoped would be answered by all the others. Therefore I began with failure and had nowhere to go.
But in the first months of living alone, I again depended on a familiar drug; to inhabit the other world Athos and I had shared: guileless knowledge, the history of matter. During the night I dipped into the boxes, haphazardly labelled in groups of essays and notes: “the sexual adventures of conifers … the poetics of covalent bonding … a possible process for freeze-drying coffee beans.” Fascinating but explicable forces; winds and ocean currents, tectonic plates. The transformations caused by trade and piracy; how minerals and wood changed the map. Athos’s essay on peat alone was long enough for a small book, as was his “A Covenant of Salt.” In Vienna he’d begun collecting examples for a project on parody within cultures he called “From Relic to Replica.”
He often applied the geologic to the human, analyzing social change as he would a landscape; slow persuasion and catastrophe. Explosions, seizures, floods, glaciation. He constructed his own historical topography.
During the nights among his boxes, in the months after Athos died, his thinking came to resemble in my imagination an Escher etching; walls that are windows, fish that are birds, and the brilliant leap of modern science: the hand that draws itself.
For the next three years, I compiled Athos’s notes on the SS-Ahnenerbe as well as I could. Working in his study, alone now in our flat, I felt Athos’s presence so strongly I could smell his pipe, I could feel his hand on my shoulder. Sometimes, late at night, an alertness would seize me and I would see him from the corner of my eye, looking in on me from the hallway. In his research, Athos descends so far that he reaches a place where redemption is possible, but it is only the redemption of tragedy.
I knew that, for me, the descent would go on and on, long after my work for Athos was finished. At that time, I was earning a part-time living as a translator for an engineering company. After the day’s work was done, I slumped at Athos’s desk, in despair at his many files and boxes of facts. Sometimes I went out for dinner with Maurice Salman, who now had a job at the museum. Maurice’s companionship saved me; he saw I was in trouble. By then, Maurice had met and married Irena. Often Irena would cook for us while we discussed the seemingly unending task of completing Athos’s book, Bearing False Witness. Sometimes I would look into the kitchen and see her reading a cookbook while she stood over the stove, her long yellow braid over her shoulder like a scarf, and I would have to look away from emotion. Such an ordinary sight, a woman stirring a pot.
The night I finished the work of my koumbaros, I wept with emptiness as I typed his dedication, for his colleagues at Biskupin: “Murder steals from a man his future. It steals from him his own death. But it must not steal from him his life.”
In our cold, dark Canadian flat, I pour fresh water into the sea, recalling not only the Greek lament “that the dead may drink” but also the covenant of the Eskimo hunter, who pours fresh water into the mouth of his quarry. Seals, living in salt water, suffer perpetual thirst. The animal has offered its life in exchange for water. If the hunter does not keep his promise, he will lose all his good fortune; no other animal will allow itself to be captured by him.
The best teacher lodges an intent not in the mind but in the heart.
I know I must honour Athos’s lessons, es
pecially one: to make love necessary. But I do not yet understand that this is also my promise to Bella. And that to honour them both, I must resolve a perpetual thirst.
PHOSPHORUS
It’s a clear October day. The wind scatters bright leaves against the blue opalescence of air. But there’s no sound. Bella and I have entered a dream, the animate colour surrounding us intense, every leaf twitching as if on the verge of sleep. Bella is happy: the whole birch forest gathers itself in her expression. Now we hear the river and move towards it, the swirls and eddies of Brahms’s Intermezzo No. 2 that descend, descend, andante non troppo, rising only in one final gust. I turn and Bella’s gone; my glance has caused her to vanish. I wrench around. I call, but the noise of the leaves is suddenly overwhelming, like a rush of falls. Surely she’s gone ahead to the river. I run there and dig for clues of her in the muddy bank. It’s dark; dogwood becomes her white dress. A shadow, her black hair. The river, her black hair. Moonlight, her white dress.
Like my childhood encounter with the tree, I stare a long time at Alex’s silk robe hanging from the bedroom door, as if it is my sister’s ghost. 1968, in our small Toronto bedroom, in the flat I used to share with Athos. In the dimness, the most liquid of Brahms’s intermezzos flows on and on.
Everything is wrong: the bedroom with its white furniture, the woman asleep beside me, my panic. For when I wake I know it’s not Bella who has vanished, but me. Bella, who is nowhere to be found, is looking for me. How will she ever find me here, beside this strange woman? Speaking this language, eating strange food, wearing these clothes?