Fugitive Pieces

by Anne Michaels

  “Love makes you see a place differently, just as you hold differently an object that belongs to someone you love. If you know one landscape well, you will look at all other landscapes differently. And if you learn to love one place, sometimes you can also learn to love another.”

  Before we left Zakynthos, we’d packed Athos’s library and addressed the crates to the Mitsialises in Athens. Athos marked the boxes so Kostas would know which to send on to Canada and which to have delivered to the Roussos family house on the island of Idhra. Idhra is much closer to Athens, less than a day’s travel from Piraeus. Athos didn’t know how many years we’d be away; moving his books was a precaution against earthquakes.

  Zakynthos had already endured three quakes in the past hundred years, the last just before the turn of the century. In 1953, a few years after we’d moved to Canada, again the ground hoisted up Zakynthos in spasms like a car jack, then threw the entire town to the ground. Virtually all property on the island was destroyed, including Athos’s little house. Old Martin sent us a photograph Ioannis took in the zudeccha showing one lone palm tree in the wreckage, a macabre indication of where in the destroyed street he stood. Eventually Zakynthos town was rebuilt, the Venetian architecture overlooking the harbour painstakingly reconstructed. But Athos decided not to rebuild Nikos’s fountain and to leave the stones of his home where they fell.

  “Most of the islanders were able to save themselves,” said Athos, “because they trusted the prescience of their animals. Centuries of earthquakes have taught Zakynthians to heed the warnings; a catalogue of signs has been compiled over generations. Half a day before the ground shakes, dogs and cats run into the streets howling as if mad. Nothing can be heard over the wailing. Goats kick out their stalls in panic, worms ooze out of the ground, even moles are frightened to be underground. Geese and chickens fly into the trees, pigs bite off each other’s tails, cows try to tear themselves free of their halters and run. Fish leap out of the water. Rats stagger as if drunk….”

  In telling me this, Athos thought he was providing a reasonable explanation. But this only confirmed what I already believed: that Zakynthians were under the protection of an unseen hand. “No,” insisted Athos. “No. There was luck in the escape of the families of the zudeccha, but first Mayor Karrer had to speak out. There was luck in the islanders sailing to the mainland for safety, but first they had to heed the signs…. There was luck in our meeting, Jakob, but first you had to run.”

  Athos and I made the short trip to Idhra so Athos could visit with Mrs. Karouzos, who ran a small hotel and taverna in town. Like her mother before her, she also kept an eye on the Roussos house when it stood empty, often for years at a time. Athos explained to me that this is not unusual on the islands. Sometimes a house waits for decades for a son to return. As there are no automobiles on Idhra, Athos’s crates would be carried by donkey uphill, past the old harbourside mansions of wealthy shipowners whose family fleets had broken the British blockade during the Napoleonic Wars and had traded as far as America.

  The house on Idhra, like the house on Zakynthos, is suspended like a balcony above the sea. “On this terrace,” said Athos, “you will always feel a breeze, no matter how hot the day. When Nikos was a boy he folded a paper airplane and sent it over the edge. It landed in the hat of a man drinking ouzo in a kafenio by the dock. On the piece of paper my brother had written a note begging to be saved from a kidnapper, and described where he was being held captive. The police came to the house and Nikos was laughing with terror at how my father would punish him, as my father chased Nikos halfway down the hill. So then everyone watching did think my brother was being chased by a criminal!”

  Athos showed me photos of his parents and his brother. We sat under the lemon trees in Mrs. Karouzos’s courtyard taverna while the leaves speckled the wall with shadows, and later on the ferry back to Athens, I fell asleep with my sunburned face against Athos’s shoulder.

  A few days after we returned from Idhra, Daphne and Kostas saw us off at Piraeus. Kalo taxidhi, kalo taxidhi— safe voyage. Athos presented Kostas with a sealed tin of British tobacco, which Kostas said must be the last tin left in Greece, and I gave him a feeble poem over which I’d laboured, about the eve of Athens’s liberation, called “The Whispering City.”

  On the dock, Daphne handed us a hamper of food; the hard boutimata that break your teeth unless you soak them in milk or coffee, olives and domates from her garden to eat with bread, small crumbling bunches of Oregano and basil tied with string. A precious bottle of popolaro. Kostas gave Athos an edition of Sikelianos’s war-time poems, Akritika, and he gave me his cherished copy of a pocket-sized hardcover selection of Greek poetry, planting rows of words in me that would grow for the rest of my life.

  Daphne squeezed my face goodbye, and I felt my mother patting my jaw to make me a beard with her floury hands.

  Daphne slipped an orange into my coat and I remembered Mones, who kept the precious peel in his pocket for the smell, and a half a day later opened his mouth in the schoolyard and there on his tongue lay an orange pip like a pearl.

  “In xenetia—in exile,” said Athos on our last night with Daphne and Kostas in their garden, “in a foreign landscape, a man discovers the old songs. He calls out for water from his own well, for apples from his own orchard, for the muscat grapes from his own vine.”

  “What is a man,” said Athos, “who has no landscape? Nothing but mirrors and tides.”

  Athos and I stood together on deck and looked across the water at the bright city. From this distance no one would guess the turmoil that had torn apart Greece and would continue to do so for years. It was evening. In twos and threes, then like salt… the stars. We put on the sweaters Daphne had packed for us and stayed out in the cold wind. I could smell the wool of Athos’s sleeve on my shoulder. As flames burn red then blue, so the water purified to silver blue. Then the sea began to darken, and Athens, glowing in the distance, seemed to float on the horizon like a bright ship.

  It’s the mystery of wood, whispered Bella.

  THE WAY STATION

  Like Athens, Toronto is an active port. It’s a city of derelict warehouses and docks, of waterfront silos and freight yards, coal yards and a sugar refinery; of distilleries, the cloying smell of malt rising from the lake on humid summer nights.

  It’s a city where almost everyone has come from elsewhere— a market, a caravansary—bringing with them their different ways of dying and marrying, their kitchens and songs. A city of forsaken worlds; language a kind of farewell.

  It’s a city of ravines. Remnants of wilderness have been left behind. Through these great sunken gardens you can traverse the city beneath the streets, look up to the floating neighbourhoods, houses built in the treetops.

  It’s a city of valleys spanned by bridges. A railway runs through back yards. A city of hidden lanes, of clapboard garages with corrugated tin roofs, of wooden fences sagging where children have made shortcuts. In April, the thickly treed streets are flooded with samara, a green tide. Forgotten rivers, abandoned quarries, the remains of an Iroquois fortress. Public parks hazy with subtropical memory, a city built in the bowl of a prehistoric lake.

  From the great limestone hall of Union Station, with its many tracks and tunnels, train passengers from the transatlantic docks at Montreal poured into the Toronto street. A rainy evening in early September.

  There was a small crowd at the doors of the station, but from that one busy point, the city stretched deserted, like outflowing darkness beyond a small pool of lamplight. The travellers dispersed into taxis and, within minutes, even the wide plaza outside the station was empty.

  Athos and I travelled north through what seemed an evacuated city, a ghostly metropolis in the rain. Past weeping stone edifices: the post office, banks, the stately Royal York Hotel, the city hall. Perhaps this is how my father felt as a boy arriving in Warsaw the first time, with his father. Trams in the desolate street, the same grey drizzle, leaves shiny as glass. Athos and I ent
ered Toronto; towers, lights, wide avenues, big automobiles, and the bold intimacy of advertising that comes from so many living so close together: tooth powder, hair tonic, foundations, women in poses that embarrassed me.

  Our taxi took us to an address on St. Clair Avenue West, a partly furnished flat that someone from the university had sublet to us. We inspected the rooms, turned on the water taps, opened cupboards. Athos spent a few minutes praising the idea of the screened window. “Electricity, running water. After Zakynthos,” said Athos, “this will be like living in a hotel.”

  We unpacked nothing and went across the street to a restaurant that advertised itself as open “all night.” I ordered my first Canadian meal: buttered toast and vegetable soup. Athos ate his first slice of pumpkin pie. Athos, who only ever smoked a pipe, bought Canadian cigarettes—Macdonald’s, the one with the Scottish lass on the package— and a Toronto Telegram. A waitress with the name tag Aimée offered Athos coffee, which I awaited anxiously, concerned about her phrase “bottomless cup.” He made a face at the thin taste. Lamps hung low over each table. From our booth at the plate-glass window, we saw that our apartment building was called Heathside Gardens. Despite the friendly clattering of dishes and the chattering waitresses in stiff white aprons, the restaurant was sad. It was the first time I’d seen people eating alone in public— a sight that disturbed me and would take me some time to get used to.

  Athos was excited but tired. Early the next morning he would be meeting with Taylor at the university. We went back to Heathside Gardens. There was only one bed; I lay on the sofa. We used our coats as blankets. The streetlights filtered through the thin drapes. In the semi-dark of the city, my head full of English, I stared into the room unable to sleep, even long after the rumblings and squeals of the trams had stopped for the night.

  Some time later I heard Athos trying not to wake me, walking down the hall to the kitchen on creaking floors. He looked in on me. “Sleep, Jakob, it’s all right. I’ll be back soon with breakfast.” I could barely lift my head or open my mouth to say goodbye. Where others might have leaped up to explore their new world, I felt a stunning despair. I looked at the ceiling and counted the kounoupia, the dead mosquitoes in the light fixture, until I finally fell asleep and dreamed of the Macdonald’s cigarette girl, electric shavers, and Pepsodent tooth powder.

  At the university, classes were filled with men returning from the war, and the tiny faculty of the geography department was strained to its limits. Athos planned his lectures, did his own research, and managed to get out of the flat each morning after hardly sleeping. Often I watched him board the tram with papers bulging out of his briefcase and his glasses still perched on the middle of his forehead. While Athos was teaching all day at the McMaster Building on Bloor Street, I attended classes in both Greek and English at the Athena School. The tasks of shopping and cleaning I gladly took on. It pleased me to be able to take care of Athos now, to be relied upon. Athos still did most of the cooking, he liked to, it relaxed him. And each Sunday, no matter the weather, we went walking.

  Athos instructed me in the subtleties of English at the kitchen table on St. Clair Avenue. The English language was food. I shoved it into my mouth, hungry for it. A gush of warmth spread through my body, but also panic, for with each mouthful the past was further silenced. At our kitchen, Athos waited patiently while I gnawed and swallowed.

  The facts of the war began to reach us, through magazines and the newspapers. In our small flat my nightmares woke Athos. After a bad night, he would hold me by the shoulders: “Jakob, I long to steal your memories from you while you’re sleeping, to syphon off your dreams.”

  A child doesn’t know much about a man’s face but feels what most of us believe all our lives, that he can tell a good face from a bad. The soldiers who performed their duty, handing back to mothers the severed heads of daughters — with braids and hairclips still in place—did not have evil in their faces. There was no perversion of features while they did their deeds. Where was their hatred, their disgust, if not even in their eyes, rolling invisibly back in their sockets, focused on the unanswerable fact of having gone too far? There’s the possibility that if one can’t see it in the face, then there’s no conscience left to arouse. But that explanation is obviously false, for some laughed as they poked out eyes with sticks, as they smashed infants’ skulls against the good brick of good houses. For a long time I believed one learns nothing from a man’s face. When Athos held me by the shoulders, when he said, “Look at me, look at me” to convince me of his goodness, he couldn’t know how he terrified me, how meaningless the words. If truth is not in the face, then where is it? In the hands¡ In the hands.

  I tried to bury images, to cover them over with Greek and English words, with Athos’s stories, with all the geologic eras. With the walks Athos and I took every Sunday into the ravines. Years later I would try a different avalanche of facts: train schedules, camp records, statistics, methods of execution. But at night, my mother, my father, Bella, Mones, simply rose, shook the earth from their clothes, and waited.

  Athos taught me to cook stifhados crammed with fish and vegetables, yemista—stuffed peppers, even boutimata— biscuits with molasses and cinnamon, which he ate at his desk in the middle of the night while planning his course, The History of Geographical Thought.

  To celebrate our first Toronto snowfall, Athos decided we should have a banquet. He sent me out into the transformed street to buy some fish. Those first months when I went out alone, I never ventured past the few stores near the flat. That day, the street looked so extraordinary I decided to walk a bit further. I entered a new grocery, shuffled my boots on the mat and waited. A man came from the back of the store and looked down at me, his large hands dangling over the counter. His apron was smeared. In a thick accent he barked, “What do you want?” I was riveted by the sound of his shouting voice. He barked again, “What did you come here for?”

  “Fresh fish,” I whispered.

  “No¡ We have suspicions.” He raised his voice. “We have suspicions.”

  I rushed out the door.

  Athos was slicing mushrooms by the sink. “What kind of fish did you get? Barbounia? Glossa? I wish Daphne were here to make her kalamarakia!” I stood in the doorway. After a moment he looked up and saw my face. “Jakob, what happened?”

  I told him. Athos wiped his hands, shook his slippers off his feet, and said grimly, “Come.”

  I waited outside the store. I heard an uproar. Laughter. Athos carne outside, grinning with relief. “It’s all right, it’s all right. He was saying ‘chickens’ not ‘suspicions.’ “ Athos began to laugh. He was standing in the street laughing. I glared at him, heat rising into my face. “I’m sorry, Jakob, I just can’t help it… I haven’t laughed in so long …. Come in, come in….”

  I would never enter that store again.

  I knew I was being ridiculous, even as I pulled away from him and walked back to the flat alone.

  Language. The numb tongue attaches itself, orphan, to any sound it can: it sticks, tongue to cold metal. Then, finally, many years later, tears painfully free.

  There’s a heavy black outline around things separated from their names. My lame vocabularies consisted of the usual variety of staples — bread, cheese, table, coat, meat — as well as a more idiosyncratic store. From Athos I’d learned the words for rock strata, infinity, and evolution— but not for bank account or landlord. I could carry my own in a discussion of volcanoes, glaciers, or clouds in Greek or English, but didn’t know what was meant by a “cocktail” or a “Kleenex.”

  I didn’t have to wait long to hear Antarctic stories from Griffith Taylor himself. The Taylors often hosted parties in their Forest Hill mansion, and our first Christmas in Toronto the geography department was invited to celebrate. I wonder what Athos’s colleagues made of us. I don’t know how much of our story they knew. Almost fourteen, I was almost as tall as Athos, and my bones and lips and dark eyebrows seemed to leap from my face. In those
days, Athos gave the physical impression of a retired adventurer, of a man who might spend his evenings cataloguing his finds. Mrs. Taylor referred to us as “The Bachelors.”

  We were invited to garden teas, New Year’s parties, end of term parties. Every occasion concluded with Griffith Taylor singing “Waltzing Mathilda.” There was a romance about the Taylors—not just the house and servants, the candlelight and the sideboard heaped with delicacies. I think the Taylors were very much in love. That first Christmas, they gave me a woollen muffler. Mrs. Taylor shook our hands when we left and smiled warmly. Afterwards, Athos and I accused each other of blushing.

  Athos and I hosted a few informal parties of our own. We were strays and gathered other strays around us.

  Athos discovered a Greek bakery downtown and noticed that the baker, Constantine from Poros, was reading Goethe’s Faust, in Greek, between sales of loaves of olikis and oktasporo. Constantine used to teach literature in Athens. Soon Constantine was dropping by, irregularly, two or three evenings a month, always bringing us a cake or baklava or a bag of sweet buns. Joseph, the man who came once to fix our stove and who painted portraits in his spare time, liked to visit on Saturday afternoons after his last service call. Gregor, who’d been a lawyer in Bukovina before the war and now sold furniture, sometimes asked us to go to a concert with him. Gregor was infatuated with a violinist and we always sat on the side of the hall where he could best observe her.

  I learned the secrets of various trades from our visitors. Stain removal, appliance repair, portrait painting (the eyes must follow you everywhere). How to change a fuse or fix a dripping faucet, how to make a quick-rising cake. What to do on a first date (pick her up at her house, shake hands with the father, never bring her home late). Athos seemed pleased that I was learning such practicalities, while he continued to take care of my soul.