Fugitive pieces Read Free

through my scalp.
    But Bella clung. We were Russian dolls. I inside Athos, Bella inside me.
    I don’t know how long we travelled this way. Once, I woke and saw signs in a fluid script that from a distance looked like Hebrew. Then Athos said we were home, in Greece. When we got closer I saw the words were strange; I’d never seen Greek letters before. It was night, but the square houses were white even in the darkness and the air was soft. I was dim with hunger and from lying so long in the car.
    Athos said: “I will be your koumbaros, your godfather, the marriage sponsor for you and your sons. …”
    Athos said: “We must carry each other. If we don’t have this, what are we.…”
    On the island of Zakynthos, Athos—scientist, scholar, middling master of languages—performed his most astounding feat. From out of his trousers he plucked the seven-year-old refugee Jakob Beer.

THE STONE-CARRIERS
    T he shadow-past is shaped by everything that never happened. Invisible, it melts the present like rain through karst. A biography of longing. It steers us like magnetism, a spirit torque. This is how one becomes undone by a smell, a word, a place, the photo of a mountain of shoes. By love that closes its mouth before calling a name.
    I did not witness the most important events of my life. My deepest story must be told by a blind man, a prisoner of sound. From behind a wall, from underground. From the corner of a small house on a small island that juts like a bone from the skin of sea.
    On Zakynthos we lived close to the sky. Far below, the restless waves surrounded us. According to myth, the Ionian Sea is haunted by an error of love.
    There were two rooms upstairs and two views. The small bedroom window opened emptily to sea. The other room, Athos’s study, looked down our stony hill to the distant town and the harbour. Winter nights, when the wind was relentless and wet, it seemed we were on the bridge of a ship, shutters creaking like masts and rigging; the town of Zakynthos shimmered, luminescent, as if under the waves. During the darkest part of summer nights, I climbed through the bedroom window to lie on the roof. In the days, I stayed in the small bedroom, willing my skin to take on the woodgrain of the floor, to take on the pattern of the rug or the bedcover, so I could disappear simply by stillness.
    The first Easter in hiding, at the midnight climax of the Anastasimi Mass, I watched from the window in Athos’s study. The procession candles were carried, a faint snaking line flickering through the streets, retracing the route of the epitafios then dispersing into the bare hills. At the edge of town, as each worshipper walked home, the line broke into sparks. With my forehead against the glass, I watched and was in my own village, winter evenings, my teacher lighting the wicks of our lanterns and releasing us into the street like toy boats bobbing down a flooded gutter. Wire handles clinked against the hot globes. The rising smells of our damp coats. Mones swinging his arms, his lamp skimming the ground, his white breath glowing from below. I watched the Easter procession and placed this parallel image, like other ghostly double exposures, carefully into orbit. On an inner shelf too high to reach. Even now, half a century later, writing this on a different Greek island, I look down to the remote lights of town and feel the heat of a lamp spreading up my sleeve.
    I watched Athos reading at his desk in the evenings, and saw my mother sewing at the table, my father looking through the daily papers, Bella studying her music. Any given moment—no matter how casual, how ordinary—is poised, full of gaping life. I can no longer remember their faces, but I imagine expressions trying to use up a lifetime of love in the last second. No matter the age of the face, at the moment of death a lifetime of emotion still unused turns a face young again.
    I was like the men in Athos’s stories, who set their courses before the