Fugitive pieces Read Free Page B

forget. He made me review my Hebrew alphabet. He said the same thing every day: “It is your future you are remembering.” He taught me the ornate Greek script, like a twisting twin of Hebrew. Both Hebrew and Greek, Athos liked to say, contain the ancient loneliness of ruins, “like a flute heard distantly down a hillside of olives, or a voice calling to a boat from a shore.”
    Slowly my tongue learned its sad new powers. I longed to cleanse my mouth of memory. I longed for my mouth to feel my own when speaking his beautiful and awkward Greek, its thick consonants, its many syllables difficult and graceful as water rushing around rock. I ate Greek food, drank from Zakynthos’s wells until I too could distinguish the different springs on the island.
    We entered a territory of greater and greater tenderness, two lost souls alone on deck on a black and limitless ocean, the wind howling off corners of the house, no lights to guide us and none to give our position away.
    By early morning Athos was often close to tears of admiration for his brave lineage, or for the future: “I will be your koumbaros, your godfather, the marriage sponsor for you and your sons…. We must carry each other. If we don’t have this, what are we? The spirit in the body is like wine in a glass; when it spills, it seeps into air and earth and light…. It’s a mistake to think it’s the small things we control and not the large, it’s the other way around¡ We can’t stop the small accident, the tiny detail that conspires into fate: the extra moment you run back for something forgotten, a moment that saves you from an accident—or causes one. But we can assert the largest order, the large human values daily, the only order large enough to see.”
    Athos was fifty when we found each other at Biskupin. He was bluntly handsome, heavyset but not heavy, and his hair was halfway grey, the shade of a good silver ore. I watched him comb his hair, wet against his scalp, into deep furrows, I continued to scrutinize, as if watching a science demonstration, his hair turning thick as foam as it dried, his head slowly expanding.
    His study was crammed with rock samples, fossils, loose photos of what seemed to me to be undistinguished landscapes. I'd browse, picking up an ordinary-looking lump or chip. “Ah, Jakob, what you hold in your hand is a piece of bone from a mastodon’s jaw … that’s bark from a thirty-five-million-year-old tree….”
    Immediately I put down whatever I held; scalded by time. Athos laughed at me. “Don’t worry, a rock that’s survived so much won’t be hurt by a boy’s curiosity.”
    He always had a cup of coffee on his desk—schetos — black and strong. During the war when his supply ran out, he reused the same grounds until he said there was not an atom of flavour left. Then futilely he tried to disguise a bland blend of chicory, dandelion, and lotus seeds by continuing to prepare it in his brass briki one cup at a time, a chemist experimenting with proportions.
    Bella would have said Athos was just like Beethoven, who counted out exactly sixty beans for each cup. Bella knew everything about her maestro. Sometimes she piled her hair on top of her head, put on my father’s coat (on Bella, a clown’s coat with sleeves hanging past her fingertips), and borrowed his unlit pipe. My mother obliged with the composer’s favourite meal: noodles and cheese (though not Parmesan) or potatoes and fish (though not from the Danube). Bella drank spring water, which Ludwig apparently imbibed by the gallon—a predilection that pleased my father, who, in these costume dramas, drew the line at Beethoven’s beer drinking.
    After dinner, Bella pushed her chair from the table and loped towards the piano. When she took off my father’s loose coat, she shed all comedy. She sat, collecting herself, pressed like a cameo in the amber of the piano lamp. During dinner she’d made her secret choice of music, usually slow, romantic, yearning