The Humber River flows southeast across the city. Even a generation ago, for most of its one-hundred-kilometre course it was still a rural river, meandering through outskirts, casually linking lonely boroughs like Weston and Lambton Woods to the city downstream. For three thousand years, isolated communities, mills, and palisades were scattered along its banks.
Over time, the growth of the city could be measured by travelling upriver. As Toronto expanded, suburbs slowly spread north, filling up the wide, grassy floodplain, until even secluded communities such as Weston were embraced by the metropolis. The houses closest to the Humber cleaved to the river, nestled among cottonwood, box elder, and bur oak. Plover and blue heron wandered in back yards, among impatiens and wild grape.
Today much of the riverbank again looks as it did before the encroachment of the city. The riverine marshes, the serpentine lower reaches, are inhabited only by painted turtles and mallard ducks. The deserted plains of Weston are gentle parkland; lawn grows peacefully to the river’s edge.
If you descend the short, steep bank to the water, you’ll see, past the glinting surface, the river bottom glinting too. If you turn around to look at the muddy escarpment, or simply look down at your feet, you’ll begin to notice the Humber’s distinctive sediment, laid down in October 1954.
In the bank, four wooden knobs, evenly spaced: excavate an inch or two and the legs of a chair will emerge. A few feet downriver, a dinner plate – perhaps with the familiar and ever-popular blue willow pattern – sticks out of the bank horizontally like a shelf. You can slip a silver spoon out of the mud like a bookmark.
The books and photos have rotted by now, but the buried tables and shelves, lamps, dishes, and rugs remain. The river washes over pebbles of crockery. Fragments of a ceramic flowered border, or of the words “Staffordshire, England,” are underlined by reeds.
Hidden beneath the grass, all around you, the wide, silent park is studded with cutlery.
The humidity is a dense current; slow as dream time. Naomi comes from an icy shower; her skin condenses in the hot air. She lies on top of me, heavy and cold as wet sand.
You must abandon your illusions every time you speak.
It’s only five o’clock but the sky is a dark front; the ions that smell always of night.
The summer we were married there was a heat wave like this, the air a blanket, cling wrap. Every inch of us slick with sweat. My shirts turning sheer and limp. We kept our small apartment in perpetual twilight, curtains drawn against it; the heat and dark were excuses to stay undressed. Like the Invisible Man, seen only by virtue of the gauze he’s wrapped in, Naomi moved from room to room, her white cotton underwear glowing in the dimness.
For over a week it had been too oppressive to sleep. We drifted until morning, every few hours one re-entering the consciousness of the other, returning from the kitchen silent as a messenger through the forest. Framed by the light in the hall, Naomi’s body pouring heat, carrying a glass of juice so cold its flavour was a mystery. Frozen from holding the glass, my hands on the scalding small of her back; until she whispered, “Ben,” a chill rising through her. Or she rolled plums from the fridge, frosted blue ovals, along my arms to my mouth, so icy they made my teeth hurt; plum juice drying in brown tears down her neck, her skin stiffening with sweetness. Or one of us with face or feet under the faucet, the other slipping back into sleep, to the dream sound of far-off, mill-borne water.
Sometimes, even at the last, at the end of a long Sunday when we’d both been working at home, after she’d ordered fast food, which we ate without a word of importance between us, after the greasy cartons had been tossed into the sink or into the bin so we wouldn’t have to look in the morning at the remains of what we’d consumed, we turned to each other in the dark, still silent, until she was a climber on a rock face, limbs precise, pinned against space, until with closed eyes she looked down between her legs from a height, and then I didn’t move and meaning flooded us. Before sleep her muscles twitched, a mechanism released. Soon I felt her against me, breathing with the steady intensity of a machine.
We slept close, knowing we could not have such pleasure without such muteness.
There was no energy of a narrative in my family, not even the fervour of an elegy. Instead, our words drifted away, as if our home were open to the elements and we were forever whispering into a strong wind. My parents and I waded through damp silence, of not hearing and not speaking. It soaked into the furniture, into my father’s dank armchair, a mildew in the walls. We communicated by slight gestures, surgeons in an operating theatre. When my parents died, I realized I’d expected sound suddenly to enter the apartment, to rush into the place so long prohibited. But no sound came into the apartment. And though I was alone, packing boxes, sorting their belongings, the silence was now eerie. Because the place itself felt almost the same as before.
I was surprised to discover not everyone sees the shadow around objects, the black outline, the bruise of fermentation on things even as light clings to them. I saw the aura of mortality like a snake that sees its prey in infrared, the pulse-heat. It was clear to me as cut fruit turning brown on the plate, a lemon peel shrivelling to scent.
I grew up thankful for every necessity, for food and drink, for my father’s well-made shoes – “the most important thing.” I was thankful for the whiskers that appeared on my father’s face each morning because it was, he said, “a sign of health.” When my parents were liberated, four years before I was born, they found that the ordinary world outside the camp had been eradicated. There was no more simple meal, no thing was less than extraordinary: a fork, a mattress, a clean shirt, a book. Not to mention such things that can make one weep: an orange, meat and vegetables, hot water. There was no ordinariness to return to, no refuge from the blinding potency of things, an apple screaming its sweet juice. Every thing belonged to, had been retrieved from, impossibility – both the inorganic and the organic – shoes and socks, their own flesh. It was all as one. And this gratitude included the inexpressible. Not more than five years old, watching my mother proud in her gardening gloves, by the roses. Even then I knew I would want for this all my life: my mother stooping to pull up weeds, sunlight, an endless day.
Even younger, I was visited by an angel in the middle of the night. She stood like a nurse at the foot of my bed and wouldn’t go away. My eyes hurt from staring. She motioned to me. I went to the window to look out at the winter street, my first recognition of beauty, an ice forest, with the fineness of etched silver, in the streetlamp light. The angel was sent to wake me, so I wouldn’t sleep past that vision into morning; and the sight put a temporary end to nightmares of doors axed open and the jagged mouths of dogs. I finally understood the meaning of that winter night and that moment with my mother in the garden, Jakob Beer, when I read your poems. You described your first experience of the flesh of a sleeping woman as alive, sudden as if you’d surfaced into air from under water, breathing for the first time.
When we finally met, at Irena’s birthday party that late-January night, I saw that Maurice Salman hadn’t exaggerated. He’d described you and Michaela perfectly – ouzo and water. Separately, clear and strong; together, you both turned cloudy. The mystery, said Salman, of two people who share “an impressive physical life.” You know Salman! When he talks about you his eyes go small. He settles himself in his chair like a boulder on a beach. The sublime’s his slang. What a charming combination of acuity and corn. He speaks piercingly of passion yet wears the look of a sneaky lover planning a flat tire or an empty gas tank. Straight out of the old movies he adores. He’s like someone who offers an astonishing and expensive wine, then brings out a plate of peanut brittle to go with it. Perhaps I exaggerate. Salman gives the impression of offhand hyperbole but, in fact, he’s astute and precise.
I’d never heard of you until, in class, Salman recommended your book of poems, Groundwork, and recited the opening lines. Later I saw that the book was dedicated to the memory of your parents and your sister, Bella. My love for my family has grown for years in decay-fed soil, an unwashed root pulled suddenly from the ground. Bulbous as a beet, a huge eye under a lid of earth. Scoop out the eye, blind the earth.
I know that the more one loves a man’s words, the more one can assume he’s put everything into his work that he couldn’t put into his life. The relation between a man’s behaviour and his words is usually that of gristle and fat on the bone of meaning. But, in your case, there seemed to be no gap between the poems and the man. How could it be otherwise, for a man who claimed to believe so completely in language? Who knew that even one letter – like the “J” stamped on a passport – could have the power of life or death.
In your later poems, it’s as if history reads over our shoulder, casts its shadow on the page, but is no longer in the words themselves. It’s as if you’d decided something, made a deal with your conscience. I wanted to believe language itself had freed you. But the night we met I knew it wasn’t language that had released you. Only a remarkably simple truth or a remarkably simple lie could put such peace in a man. The mystery darkened in me. A birthmark in my own pallor of disorder.
And I knew I was standing on the bank watching, while you, long escaped from dusty rock, lay between the wet thighs of the river.
That night at Salman’s your serenity was so profound it could only be described as sensual. Experience had wrung excess from you. Or as a geologist might say, you’d reached the pure state of residual concentration. One couldn’t help but feel the force of your presence, your hand heavy as a cat on Michaela’s thigh. What is love at first sight but the response of a soul crying out with sudden regret because it realizes it has never before been recognized? Of course Naomi was moved, and soon was telling you about her parents, her family. Naomi, usually so shy, spoke about the last summer with her dying father at the lake, then about my parents – for which I found myself not annoyed but curiously grateful. Tell him, I thought, tell him everything.
You listened, not like a priest who listens for sin, but like a sinner, who listens for his own redemption. What a gift you had for making one feel clear, for making one feel – clean. As if talk could actually heal. All the while with one hand touching Michaela somewhere, on her shoulder or forearm, or holding her hand. Your eyes with us, your body with her. Only once did Naomi pause, suddenly self-conscious, to say that perhaps you thought her foolish, visiting their graves so often, bringing flowers. To which you gave your unforgettable reply: “On the contrary. It seems right to keep bringing them something beautiful now and then.” And I saw gratitude on Naomi’s face it pains me to remember, because I’d been so annoyed with her for those visits – my parents! – accusing her of every pathology, of not being able to get over her own parents’ deaths, of needing to live in mourning since she was eighteen. Characteristically, she didn’t repeat your comment afterwards. No one’s silences are more generous than Naomi’s, who rarely clamps her jaw with frustration or anger (these come out in tears); her silence is usually wise. I was often thankful for this, especially in the months before I left, when Naomi spoke less and less.
By the time we were leaving Salman’s that night and Naomi was pushing her arms into the sleeves of her coat, my wife’s transformation was invisible yet obvious. Your conversation had wrought a change in her body. And I saw Naomi’s pleasure as Michaela admired her coat and scarf, and her flushed face when you shook her hand goodnight.
I learned something else that evening, about Maurice Salman and his wife. I saw them standing together by the window. She’s so small, an impeccable package, expensive shoes, silk blouse, a face that elongates into sadness. Salman held her elbow like a teacup in his paw. He carried her sweater on his enormous suited arm, handkerchief on an elephant’s back. One small gesture: she reached up, her child palm on the flatness of his huge cheek. She touched him as if he were the thinnest porcelain.
When I was at university, Bearing False Witness had just been reissued, thick as a small dictionary. Salman had already introduced his students to Athos’s lyric geology via the salt book. Athos’s impassioned descriptions – what a splendid anthropomorphist – even down to the generosity of an ionic bond. To believe there’s no thing that does not yearn. Dramatic and slow earth events as well as the rise of human commerce and culture, all an evolution of longing. How could you not have been shaped by such storytelling? You were fortunate to be trained by a master. When you turned your attention to your own poems, in your Groundwork, and you recount the geology of the mass graves, it’s as if we hear the earth speak.
I could smell the loneliness in Salman after your death, the specific loneliness that is between men, that is like no other. Salman reminisced – anecdotes about your twenties, how you walked together all night through the city, in every season, talking at first about Athos’s work and then about poetry and finally about Salman’s wounds though not about yours (not for many years). Stopping at the twenty-four-hour restaurant exhausted and hot, or exhausted and chilled, for pie and coffee, parting at two a.m., saying goodbye in the empty street. Salman watched you walk along St. Clair Avenue to your apartment where you lived alone after Athos died, and again years later after your first marriage ended, how disheartened you looked…. Salman told me about your habits, your trustworthiness, your moral seriousness. Your depressions. He told me about the perfection of Michaela, your new wife.
“Ben, when we say we’re looking for a spiritual adviser, we’re really looking for someone to tell us what to do with our bodies. Decisions of the flesh. We forget to learn from pleasure as well as pain,” said Salman after you died. “Jakob taught me so many things. For instance: What is the true value of knowledge? That it makes our ignorance more precise. When God asked the Jews in the desert to choose no other God, he wasn’t asking them to choose one God over another, but rather: choose one God or none. Jakob put great store in the incisiveness of dilemmas. You recall the opening image in his Dilemma Poems, one man staring at an impossibly high wall, another man staring at the same wall from the other side…. I remember someone at one of our parties talking about particle/wave duality. After a while Jakob said: ‘Perhaps it’s just that when light is up against the wall it’s forced to choose.’ Everyone laughed, listen to the layman talk about physics! But I knew what Jakob meant. The particle is secular man; the wave, the deist. And whether you live by a lie or live by a truth makes no difference, as long as you get past the wall. And while some are motivated by love (those who choose), most are motivated by fear (those who choose by not choosing). Then Jakob said: ‘Perhaps the electron is neither particle nor wave but something else instead, much less simple – a dissonance – like grief, whose pain is love.’”
We think of weather as transient, changeable, and above all, ephemeral; but everywhere nature remembers. Trees, for example, carry the memory of rainfall. In their rings we read ancient weather – storms, sunlight, and temperatures, the growing seasons of centuries. A forest shares a history, which each tree remembers even after it has been felled.
Only Maurice Salman, or Athos Roussos, would look at a student who can’t decide between an interest in the history of meteorology and in literature and say: “Why not find a way to keep studying both? In some cultures a man has more than one wife….” Naively, I told Salman that a formal comparison could be made between a weather map and a poem. I told him that I wanted to call my literature thesis “A Line of Weather.” Afterwards, I stepped from Salman’s office into the street; the October twilight was radiant with a pure pale gegenschein. I walked home, wishing for someone with whom I could share my news, wishing there was a woman waiting for me, so I could slip my cold hands under her sweater, across her warm skin, and explain what Salman had suggested instead for my thesis: the real-life objective correlative – weather and biography.
Years later when I turned my thesis into a book, Naomi nourished my research…. A severe December morning in St. Petersburg, 1849. Horse-whinny hangs whitely in the air, the jangle of traces; steaming manure, wet leather, and snow. I climb from the prison coach and follow Dostoyevsky into the gelid orange light of Semyonovsky Square. He shivers in the spring coat he’d been arrested in months before, his nose turning red against waxy cheeks, pale from incarceration. Blindfolded, he and the other supposed Petrashevsky radicals are lined up to be executed in the bitter winter wind. I stare hard into his face. Even under the blindfold, his transformation is obvious. The guns are cocked. Each man experiences the bullet breaking open his chest, the hot bite, the staggering fist the size of a child’s finger. Then the blindfolds are removed. Never before have I seen faces to match those, with the bare revelation that still they live, that there has been no shot. I fall with the weight of life; that is, with the weight of Dostoyevsky’s life, which unfolds from that moment with the intensity of a man who begins again.
While I travelled across Russia in leg-irons, Naomi carefully placed ivory potatoes, cooked until they crumbled at the touch of a fork, into chilled vermilion borscht. While I fell to my knees with hunger in the snow at Tobol’sk, downstairs Naomi sliced thick slabs of stone-heavy bread. These edible jokes I termed the “culinary correlative.” I spent afternoons in Staraya Russa, then came downstairs to a supper of sweet cabbage soup.
Reading weather is one thing: all the expected examples of thunderstorms and avalanches, blizzards and heat waves, monsoons. The Tempest, the blasted heath in King Lear. Camus’s sunstroke in The Stranger. Tolstoy’s snowstorm in “Master and Man.” Your Hotel Rain poems. But biography…. The snowstorm that detained Pasternak in a dacha, where he fell in love while listening to Maria Yudino play Chopin (“Snow swept over the earth … the candle burned …”). Madame Curie refusing to come out of the rain when she heard the news of her husband’s death. The Greek summer heat while the war boiled out of you like a fever. Dostoyevsky was the first example I thought of; his brutal convict march to Siberia. The prisoners stopped at Tobol’sk, where the old peasant women took pity on them. The good women stood on the banks of the Irtysh River, thirty below, and gave them bundles of tea, candles, cigars, and a copy of the New Testament with a ten-ruble note sewn into the binding. In this state of extremity, their charity permanently entered Dostoyevsky’s heart. In the howling sunset and the pastel snow, the women shouted blessings for the journey to the pitiful caravan of prisoners, a slack rope drawing its line across the white landscape, the wind biting their skin through their thin clothes. And Dostoyevsky trudged on, wondering how it could be too late, so early in his life.
The memories we elude catch up to us, overtake us like a shadow. A truth appears suddenly in the middle of a thought, a hair on a lens.
My father found the apple in the garbage. It was rotten and I’d thrown it out – I was eight or nine. He fished it from the bin, sought me in my room, grabbed me tight by the shoulder, and pushed the apple to my face.
“What is this? What is it?”
“An apple –”
My mother kept food in her purse. My father ate frequently to avoid the first twists of hunger because, once they gripped him, he’d eat until he was sick. Then he ate dutifully, methodically, tears streaming down his face, animal and spirit in such raw evidence, knowing he was degrading both. If one needs proof of the soul, it’s easily found. The spirit is most evident at the point of extreme bodily humiliation. There was no pleasure, for my father, associated with food. It was years before I realized this wasn’t merely a psychological difficulty, but also a moral one, for who could answer my father’s question: Knowing what he knew, should he stuff himself, or starve?
“An apple! Well, my smart son, is an apple food?”
“It was all rotten –”
On Sunday afternoons we’d drive into the farmland bordering the city or to their favourite park at the edge of Lake Ontario. My father always wore a cap to keep his few stray hairs from flying into his eyes. He drove with both hands gripping the wheel, never violating the speed limit. I slouched in the back seat, learning Morse code from the The Boy Electrician, or memorizing the Beaufort Scale (“Wind force 0: smoke rises vertically, sea like a mirror, Force 5: small trees sway, whitecaps. Force 6: umbrellas used with difficulty. Force 9: structural damage occurs.”). Once in a while my mother’s arm would appear over the front seat, a roll of candy dangling from her hand.
My parents would unfold their lawnchairs (even in winter) while I scrambled out alone, collecting rocks or identifying clouds or counting waves. I lay on grass or sand, reading, sometimes falling asleep in my heavy jacket under a clay sky with The Moonstone or Men Against the Sea with its waterspouts and volcanoes (“I cannot recall the hours that followed without experiencing something of the horror I felt at the time. Wind and rain, rain and wind, under a sky that held no promise of relief. In all that time, Mr. Bligh did not leave the tiller, and he seemed to have an exhilaration of mind that grew greater as our peril increased …”). In good weather my mother set out the lunch she’d prepared, and they sipped strong tea from a thermos while the wind searched through the cold lake and cumulus chuffed across the horizon.
Early Sunday evenings, while my mother made dinner, I listened to music with my father in the living room. Watching him listen made me listen differently. His attention dissolved each piece to its theoretical components like an X-ray, emotion the grey fog of flesh. He used orchestras – other people’s arms and hands and breath – to signal me; a wordless entreaty, all meaning pressed into chords. Leaning against him, his arm around me – or, when I was very young, lying with my head on his lap – his hand on my hair absentmindedly but, for me, feral. He stroked my hair to Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Beethoven, Mahler’s lieder: “Now all longing wants to dream,” “I have become a stranger in the world.”
Those hours, wordless and close, shaped my sense of him. Lines of last light over the floor, the patterned sofa, the silky brocade of the curtains. Once in a while, on summer Sundays, the shadow of an insect or bird over the sun-soaked carpet. I breathed him in. The story of his life as I knew it from my mother – strange episodic images – and his stories of composers, merged together with the music. Cow breath and cow dung and fresh hay on Mahler’s muddy night road home, moonlight a spiderweb over the fields. Under the same moonlight, marching back to the camp, my father’s tongue a thong of wool; unbearably thirsty as he walked at gunpoint, past a bucket of rainwater, its small circular mirror of stars. Praying for rain so they could swallow what fell on their faces, rain that smelled like sweat. How he ate the centre of a cabbage in a farmer’s field, leaving it hollow but looking whole so no one would trace his escape from the soldiers in the grove.
I looked up from my father’s lap to his concentrating face. He always listened with his eyes open. Beethoven with the storm of the Sixth in his face, pacing in the forest and fields of Heiligenstadt, the real storm at his back, at my father’s back, mud weighing down his feet like overshoes, the shrill, desperate cry of a bird in the rainy trees. My father concentrating, during one long march, on a sliver in his hand, to keep his thoughts from his parents. I felt my skull under his fingers as he combed through my short hair. Beethoven frightening oxen with his windmill-waving arms, then stopping stock-still to look at the sky. My father staring at a lunar eclipse beside the chimneys, or staring at the sun’s dead light like scum on the potholes. The gun in my father’s face, how they kept nudging with their boots the cup of water from his reach.
As long as the symphony lasted, the song cycle, the quartet, I had access to him. I could pretend his attention to the music was attention to me. His favourite pieces were familiar, finite journeys we took together, recognizing signposts of ritardando and sostenuto, key changes. Sometimes he played a recording by a different conductor and I experienced the acuity of his ears as he compared interpretations: “Ben, do you hear how he rushes the arpeggios.” “Listen to how he draws it out … but if he emphasizes here, he’ll ruin the crescendo later on!” And the following week we’d go back to the version we knew and loved like a face, a place. A photograph.
His absent fingers combing through my short hair. Music, inseparable from his touch.
Feeling the lines of my father’s thin legs under his trousers, barely believing they were the same legs that walked those distances, stood those hours. In our Toronto apartment, images of Europe, postcards from another planet. His only brother, my uncle, whose body vanished under a squirming skin of lice. Instead of hearing about ogres, trolls, witches, I heard disjointed references to kapos, haftlings, “Ess Ess,” dark woods; a pyre of dark words. Beethoven, wandering in old clothes, so shabby his neighbours nicknamed him Robinson Crusoe; the shifting wind before a storm, leaves cowering before the slap of rain, the Sixth, Opus 68; the Ninth, Opus 125. All the symphony and opus numbers I learned, to please him. That grew in my memory, under his fingers as he stroked my hair; the hair on his arm, his number close to my face.
Even my father’s humour was silent. He drew things for me, cartoons, caricatures. Appliances with human faces. His drawings offered the glimpse: how he saw.
“Is an apple food?”
“Yes.”
“And you throw away food? You – my son – you throw away food?”
“It’s rotten –”
“Eat it…. Eat it!”
“Pa, it’s rotten – I won’t –”
He pushed it into my teeth until I opened my jaw. Struggling, sobbing, I ate. Its brown taste, oversweetness, tears. Years later, living on my own, if I threw out leftovers or left food on my plate in a restaurant, I was haunted by pathetic cartoon scraps in my sleep.
Images brand you, burn the surrounding skin, leave their black mark. Like volcanic ash, they can make the most potent soil. Out of the seared place emerge sharp green shoots. The images my father planted in me were an exchange of vows. He passed the book or magazine to me silently. He pointed a finger. Looking, like listening, was a discipline. What was I to make of the horror of those photos, safe in my room with the cowboy curtains and my rock collection? He thrust books at me with a ferocity that frightened me, I would say now, more than the images themselves. What I was to make of them, in my safe room, was clear. You are not too young. There were hundreds of thousands younger than you.
I dreaded my piano lessons with my father and never practised when he was home. His demand for perfection had the force of a moral imperative, each correct note setting order against chaos, a goal as impossible as rebuilding a bombed city, atom by atom. As a child I did not feel this as evidence of faith or even anything as positive as a summoning of will. Instead I absorbed it as a kind of futility. All my sincere efforts only succeeded in displeasing him. My fugues and tarantellas unravelled in the middle, my bourrées clumped along, so aware was I of my father’s uncompromising ear. Eventually his abrupt dismissals of me in the middle of a piece, my unhappiness, and my mother’s pleading at us both, convinced my father to give up instructing me. Not long after our final lesson, on one of our Sundays at the lake, my father and I were walking along the shore when he noticed a small rock shaped like a bird. When he picked it up, I saw the quick gleam of satisfaction in his face and felt in an instant that I had less power to please him than a stone.
When I was eleven, my parents rented a cottage for the last two weeks of the summer. I’d never before experienced absolute darkness. Waking at night, I thought I’d gone blind in my sleep – any child’s terror. But made palpable by the dark was another old fear. I lowered my legs and thrust my arms into the dangerous air until I found the lamp. This was a test. I knew it was essential to be strong. After nights of sleeping with a flashlight in my fist, I made a decision. I forced myself out of bed, put on my sneakers, and went outside. My task was to walk through the woods with the flashlight off until I reached the road, about a quarter of a mile away. If my father could walk days, miles, then I could walk at least to the road. What would happen to me if I had to walk as far as my father had? I was in training. My flannel pyjamas were clammy with sweat. I walked with useless eyes and heard the river, modest knife of history, carving its blade deeper into the earth; rusty blood seeping through the cracked face of the forest. A fine mesh of insects on the heavy breath of the night, the slap of ferns weirdly cold against my ankles – nothing alive could be so cold on such a hot night. Slowly the trees began to emerge from the differentiated dark, as if embossed, black on black, and the dark itself was a pale skin stretched across charred ribs. Above, the far surf of leaves, a dark skirt of sky rustling against skeletal legs. Strange filaments from nowhere, the hair of ghosts, brushed my neck and cheeks and would not be rubbed away. The forest closed around me like a hag’s embrace, all hair and hot breath, bristly skin and sharp fingernails. And just as I felt overwhelmed, sick with terror, suddenly I was in clear space, a faint breeze over the wide road. I turned on the flashlight and followed, running, its white tunnel back along the path.
In the morning I saw my legs were smeared with mud and tea-coloured blood from bites and branches. The rest of the day I discovered scratches in strange places, behind my ears, or along the inside of my arm, a thin line of blood as if drawn by red pen. I was certain that the ordeal had purged my fear. But I woke again that night in the same state, my bones cold as steel. Twice more I repeated the journey, forcing myself to face the darkness of the woods. But I still couldn’t bear the darkness of my own room.
When I was twelve, I befriended a Chinese girl not much taller than me, though considerably older. I admired her leather cap, her dark skin, her elaborately twisted hair. Imagine a strand of hair four thousand years old! I also befriended an Irish boy and a Dane. I had discovered the perfectly preserved bog people in National Geographic, and derived a fascinated comfort from their preservation. These were not like the bodies in the photos my father showed me. I drew the aromatic earth over my shoulders, the peaceful spongy blanket of peat. I see now that my fascination wasn’t archaeology or even forensics: it was biography. The faces that stared at me across the centuries, with creases in their cheeks like my mother’s when she fell asleep on the couch, were the faces of people without names. They stared and waited, mute. It was my responsibility to imagine who they might be.
Like a musical score, when you read a weather map you are reading time. I’m sure, Jakob Beer, that you would agree one could chart a life in terms of pressure zones, fronts, oceanic influences.
The hindsight of biography is as elusive and deductive as long-range forecasting. Guesswork, a hunch. Monitoring probabilities. Assessing the influence of all the information we’ll never have, that has never been recorded. The importance not of what’s extant, but of what’s disappeared. Even the most reticent subject can be – at least in part – posthumously constructed. Henry James, who might be considered coy regarding his personal life, burned all the letters he received. If anyone’s interested in me, he said, let them first crack “the invulnerable granite” of my art! But even James was rebuilt, no doubt according to his own design. I’m sure he kept track of the story that would emerge if all the letters to him were omitted. He knew what to leave out. We’re stuffed with famous men’s lives; soft with the habits of our own. The quest to discover another’s psyche, to absorb another’s motives as deeply as your own, is a lover’s quest. But the search for facts, for places, names, influential events, important conversations and correspondences, political circumstances – all this amounts to nothing if you can’t find the assumption your subject lives by.
Any details of my parents’ lives before they came to Canada I learned from my mother. Afternoons, before my father came home from the music conservatory, the grandmothers and my mother’s brothers, Andrei and Max, congregated in the kitchen, where all ghosts like to gather. My father was unaware of these revenant encounters under his roof. Only once do I remember mentioning any member of my father’s vanished family in his presence – someone we were talking about at the dinner table was “just like Uncle Josef” – and my father’s gaze jolted up from his plate to my mother; a terrifying look. The code of silence became more complex as I grew older. There were more and more things to keep from my father. The secrets between my mother and me were a conspiracy. What was our greatest insurrection? My mother was determined to impress upon me the absolute, inviolate necessity of pleasure.
My mother’s painful love for the world. When I witnessed her delight in a colour or a flavour, the most simple gratifications – something sweet, something fresh, a new article of clothing, however humble, her love of warm weather – I didn’t disdain her enthusiasm. Instead, I looked again, I tasted again, noticing. I learned that her gratitude was not in the least inordinate. I know now this was her gift to me. For a long time I thought she had created in me an extreme fear of loss – but no. It’s not in the least extreme.
Loss is an edge; it swelled everything for my mother, and drained everything from my father. Because of this, I thought my mother was stronger. But now I see it was a clue: what my father had experienced was that much less bearable.
As a boy, twisters transfixed me with their bizarre violence, the random precision of their malevolence. Half an apartment building is destroyed, yet an inch away from the vanished wall, the table remains set for dinner. A chequebook is snatched from a pocket. A man opens his front door and is carried two hundred feet above the treetops, landing unharmed. A crate of eggs flies five hundred feet and is set down again, not a shell cracked. All the objects that are transported safely from one place to another in an instant, descending on ascending air currents: a jar of pickles travels twenty-five miles, a mirror, dogs and cats, the blankets ripped from a bed leaving the surprised sleepers untouched. Whole rivers lifted – leaving the riverbed dry – and then set down again. A woman carried sixty feet then deposited in a field next to a phonograph record (unscratched) of “Stormy Weather.”
Then there are the whims that are not merciful: children thrown from windows, beards torn from faces, decapitations. The family quietly eating supper when the door bursts open with a roar. The tornado prowls the street, it seems to stroll leisurely, selecting its victims, capricious, the sinister black funnel slithering across the landscape, whining with the sound of a thousand trains.
Sometimes I read to my mother while she made dinner. I read to her about the effects of a Texan tornado, gathering up personal possessions until in the desert it had collected mounds of apples, onions, jewellery, eyeglasses, clothing – “the camp.” Enough smashed glass to cover seventeen football fields – “Kristallnacht.” I read to her about lightning – “the sign of the Ess Ess, Ben, on their collars.”
From conversations with my mother, when I was eleven or twelve, I learned that “those with a trade had a better chance of survival.” I went to the library and found Armac’s The Boy Electrician and set about acquiring a new vocabulary. Capacitors, diodes, voltmeters, induction coils, long-nosed pliers. I raided the “Pageant of Knowledge” series, Electronics for Beginners, The Living World of Science. Then I realized that knowing the right words might not be enough. Hesitantly I asked my father for money for my first circuit board and a soldering iron. Though he knew little about such things, I wasn’t surprised that he saw the use of it and he encouraged my interest for a while. We went together to Esbe Science Supply for toggles and switches and various knobs and dials. For my birthday he bought me a microscope and slides. The rest of my equipment I acquired myself: my wet- and dry-bulb hygrometer, Bunsen burner, Z-tubes and funnels, pipettes, conical flasks. My mother generously cleaned out a closet to make room for my laboratory, where I spent hours alone. Even the lab coat she sewed for me from a torn sheet didn’t deter me. I wasn’t very good at any of it and had to follow a book at all times, having no instinct for electricity or chemistry, but I loved the smell of solder and was amazed when my first circuit lit a bulb in that dim closet.
One summer afternoon a neighbour from down the hall knocked on our door and handed me a Classics Illustrated comic book. My mother was particularly shy of Mr. Dixon, who worked in a men’s clothing store and was always immaculately dressed. Mr. Dixon had bought the comic for his grandson, who, it turned out, already had that issue – #105, Jules Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon. My mother tried to pay him, insistent, until it was clear Mr. Dixon wouldn’t accept any money. Then she pressed him with thanks. Meanwhile I was on my way to the balcony, already reading: “When a man is nearly doomed to a lifetime of circling the moon, then survives the plunge of 200,000 odd miles into the Pacific, he learns not to be afraid.”
After that, I wrenched money from my mother in order to collect the illustrated versions of literary masterpieces. I devoured each one from the dramatic cover to the last nagging entreaty: “Now that you’ve read the Classics Illustrated edition, don’t miss the added enjoyment of reading the original.” After consuming the pulp, I even chewed up the rind: edifying essays on a variety of topics filled the final pages. Brief biographies (“Nicholas Copernicus – Key Man in Study of Solar System”), the plots of famous operas, and arcana I’ve never forgotten. For example, at the back of Caesar’s Conquests: “There are 6,000 men in a legion”; “Greek ships had eyes painted on their bows so the ships could see”; “Caesar always wrote of himself in the third person.”
There was also a series on “Dog Heroes”: Brandy, the quick-thinking setter who saved a young boy from a bull. Foxy, Hero of the Resistance, whose master was hiding from the Hun.
The first comic I bought was a sea adventure by Nordhoff and Hall. I followed the narrator through encounters with hurricanes and mutinies (“‘We’ve seized the ship….’ ‘What, are you mad, Mr. Churchill?’”) I chose Men Against the Sea because I opened it and read: “I have asked for pen and paper to write this account of all that has happened … to ward off the loneliness already upon me….”
After weeks of importuning, when I was fourteen, my mother agreed to let me go with some school friends to the Canadian National Exhibition, an annual fair. I’d never felt such exhilaration, such unmediated, anonymous belonging as that day in the crowd. Our T-shirts were stained, our hands and the soles of our shoes were sticky – and the whole glutinous throng bubbled over energetically in the August sun. We gaped at colour television, watches that didn’t require winding, and were galvanized by the wonders of circuit board technology in the Better Living Building. We toured the midway, shrieked to earth on the Flyer and the Wheel of Fire. When we needed to rest we slung over fences in the agriculture pavilions and watched the sheep-shearing and the milking machines in action. I collected glossy brochures on the latest domestic gadgets to please my mother – floor polishers, electric drink mixers, electric can openers. My shopping bag bulged with cardboard pennants and hats, pens advertising various companies and products, Beehive Corn Syrup scribblers, miniature samples of aftershave and stain remover, boxes of cereal and packets of teabags. We opened our satchels indiscriminately to anything offered to us.
When I came home I excitedly spilled everything onto the table for my mother’s inspection. She looked at my bounty, then anxiously crammed it back into the bag. She couldn’t believe the things I’d taken were free; she thought I must have made a mistake. She held up a handful of pens and pencils. I shouted, “They gave them away! I swear it! They’re called ‘free samples’ because they’re free! …” I was hysterical.
My mother made me promise not to show my father, to hide the bag in my room. Early the next morning, I walked to the corner and threw my treasure into a public trash can.
Now we had another kind of bond between us. My mother referred to the incident slyly from time to time. Though she was certain I’d taken these things improperly – admittedly by accident – she would protect me. My fault. Our secret.
From then on I began to extend my boundaries, to make detours on my way home from school. I began to learn about the city. The ravines, the coal elevators, the brickyard. Although I wouldn’t have been able to put it into words then, aftermath fascinated me. The silent drama of abandonment of the empty factories and storage bins, the decaying freighters and industrial ruins.
I thought I was encouraging my mother to stop waiting for me by the window or on the balcony, to give me my freedom, not to expect me until late. I’d like to think I didn’t know at the time how cruel this was. When my father and I left the apartment in the morning, my mother never felt sure we’d return at all.
I learned not to bring school friends home. I worried that our furniture was old and strange. I was ashamed by my mother’s caution and need as she hovered. “What is your last name … what do your parents do … where were you born …?” My mother begged my father and me for news from our world; news of teachers and classmates, my father’s piano students, the personal lives of whom we knew frustratingly little. When she left the apartment for groceries, or in summer to admire the gardens in the neighbourhood (she loved gardening and watched over a window box and trellis on our balcony), my mother prepared carefully. She carried our passports and citizenship papers in her purse “in case of a robbery.” She never left a dirty dish in the sink, even if she were just walking to the corner store.
To my mother, pleasure was always serious. She celebrated the aroma each time she unscrewed the lid of the instant coffee. She stopped to inhale each fragrant fold of our freshly washed linens. She could spend half an hour eating a slice of store-bought pastry as if God had baked it with His Own Hands. Every time she purchased something new, usually a necessity (when an article of clothing had been mended too many times), she fondled it like the First Blouse or the First Pair of Stockings. She was a sensualist of proportions you, Jakob Beer, could never even estimate. You looked at me that night and placed me in your human zoo: another specimen with a beautiful wife; just another academicus dejecticus. But it was you who were embalmed! With your calmness, your expansive satiety.
The truth is you didn’t acknowledge me at all that night. But I saw Naomi open like a flower.
I was about to start my second year of university and was determined to be on my own, a fact my mother had refused to accept all summer. One sun-worn August morning I carried my boxes of books down to the damp coolness of the cement parking garage and loaded up the car. My mother retreated behind the closed door of her bedroom. Only when I’d carried out the last box and was really leaving did she emerge. Grimly she prepared a parcel of food, and something was lost between us, irrevocably, the moment that plastic bag passed from her hand to mine. Over the years, the absurd package – enough for a single meal, to stop hunger for a second – was handed to me at the threshold at the end of each visit. Until it hurt less and less and the bag was simply like the roll of candy my mother passed to me from the front seat on our Sunday drives.
The first night in my own apartment, I lay in bed only a few miles across town and let my mother’s phone calls ring into the dark. I didn’t call for a week, then weeks at a time, though I knew it made them ill with worry. When I finally did visit, I saw that, though my parents continued in their separate silences, my defection had given them a new intimacy, a new scar. My mother still bent towards me with confidences, but only in order to withdraw them. At first I thought she was punishing me for her need of me. But my mother wasn’t angry. My efforts to free myself had created a deeper harm. She was afraid. I believe that for moments my mother actually distrusted me. She would begin a story and then fall silent. “It’s nothing that would interest you.” When I protested, she suggested I go into the living room and join my father. This happened even more frequently once Naomi entered our lives.
My father’s behaviour remained unchanged. When I visited, I still found him either impatient, looking at his watch with desperation, or immobile, staring at a book in his room – another survivor account, another article with photographs. Afterwards, in my apartment on the upper floor of an old house near the university, I stared at the weave of my bedspread, at the bookshelf. At the dry cleaner’s, flower shop, and drug store across the street. I knew my parents were awake too, our insomnia an old agreement to keep watch.
On weekends I took long self-pitying walks across the city and back again; at night, ascending into books. I spent most of my undergraduate years alone except for classes and working part time in a bookstore. I had a romance with the assistant manager. We kept on after our first embrace, just to be sure it was as joyless as it seemed. Her form was wondrously full, a firmness to everything, but especially her politics. Under her black caftan she wore shirts with slogans on them past which I never ventured: “The left hand giveth what the right taketh away.” Sometimes I joined a few classmates for a meal or a movie, but I made no real effort at friendship.
For a long time I felt I had expended all my energy walking out my parents’ front door.
My father was a man who had erased himself as much as possible within the legal limits of citizenship. So I expected a long fight when the time came for him to apply for his seniors’ pension, despite the fact that the income was essential to them. I had phoned the appropriate office to find out what documents he needed and had given the information to my mother.
A few weeks later I came for dinner. My father was in his room with the door closed. My mother turned down the heat on the stove and sat at the kitchen table.
“Don’t talk to your father about getting his pension anymore.”
“We’ve been through all this –”
“He went there yesterday.”
“Good. Finally.”
My mother waved a hand at me as if dismissing a fool.
“You think you understand everything…. He went to the right place. He had all the right papers with him. He handed his birth certificate to the man at the desk. The man said, ‘I know very well the place you were born.’ Your father thought the man must have been from there too. But then the man lowered his voice, ‘Yes, I was stationed there in 1941 and ′42.’ The man stared at your father, and then your father understood. The man leaned over his desk and said so quietly your father could barely hear, ‘You don’t have the right papers.’ Your father left as fast as he could. But he didn’t come home for hours.”
I pushed back my chair.
“Don’t, Ben. Leave him alone. If he knows I told you he won’t come out of his room for dinner.”
I knew he wouldn’t come out for dinner anyway. My mother might even have to cancel his classes for a few days.
“You made him go. You talked him into it. You think getting things for free is so easy.”
Most discover absence for themselves; trees are ripped out and sorrow floods the clearing. Then we know what we loved.
But I was born into absence. History had left a space already fetid with undergrowth, worms chewing soil abandoned by roots. Rains had made the lowest parts swampy, the green melancholia of bog with its swaying carpet of pollen.
I lived there with my parents. A hiding place, rotted out by grief. Right from the start Naomi seemed to know us. She gave her heart, natural as breathing. But for me, love was like holding my breath.
Naomi stood on firm ground and stretched out her arm. I took her hand but otherwise didn’t move.
Naomi didn’t recognize her own beauty. Her features were strong, spare, her skin flushed as she spoke, her colour a reliable emotional indicator. She wasn’t thin or extravagant, but plush as velvet. She denigrated herself, ignoring the evidence of her athletic legs and full fair hair, wishing she were taller, slimmer, more elegantly shaped; focusing on the slightest bit of flesh she hated above her waistband. As with her physical attributes, Naomi didn’t acknowledge the power of her mind, ignoring all she’d read to focus on all she hadn’t. Naomi could listen closely and then with painful exactitude come out with a statement that sliced to the heart of things – a swordsman cross-sectioning fruit with one sure flick of the wrist. For instance, in the car on the way home from Maurice Salman’s that night. With one deft stroke, Naomi said: “Jakob Beer looks like a man who has finally found the right question.”
Shortly after my teaching job at the university became permanent, I began to research my second book, on weather and war. Naomi again threatened to accompany me culinarily, with various bombes and dishes served flambé. But thankfully she decided there was nothing funny about it. The book took its title, No Mortal Foe, from a phrase of Trevelyan’s. He was referring to the hurricane that destroyed the British naval force during the war with France. Trevelyan was correct in his identification of the real enemy: a hurricane at sea means spray crossing the deck at one hundred miles per hour, a screaming wind that prevents you from breathing, seeing, or standing.
During the First World War, in the Tyrolean Mountains, avalanches were deliberately set off to bury enemy troops. Around this time strategists also thought of creating tornadoes as a weapon, an idea never taken up, only because one couldn’t be certain the tornado wouldn’t turn against one’s own lines.
On his way from Paris to Chartres, Edward III nearly died in a hailstorm. He vowed to the Virgin he’d make peace if he were spared from the giant stones, a promise he kept in the form of the Treaty of Bretigny. England was saved by the storm that destroyed the Spanish Armada. Hailstorms swept five hundred miles through France, ruining the harvest, creating the food shortages that contributed to the French Revolution. Russia’s old ally, winter, overcame Napoleon’s Grand Army. Tornadoes were created by the firebombing of Hamburg. The military term “front” was borrowed from the weatherman in the First World War….
When the Germans invaded Greece, all weather broadcasts from Athens were deliberately shut down by the RAF and the Greek Forecasting Service. They had to make a hole in the Mediterranean weather map so the Germans wouldn’t have the advantage of Greek forecasting for their aerial tactics.
Himmler believed that Germany had the power to alter even the weather of their occupied lands. As he rubbed Polish soil – “now German soil” – between his fingers, he speculated how Aryan settlers would plant trees and “increase dew and (form) clouds, force rain, and thus push a more economically viable climate further towards the East….”
Naomi had audited one of my courses, Forms of Biography. When I first met her, she reminded me of an eccentric sister. In those days, she had a preference for loose clothes that looked as if they’d been borrowed from an older sibling. I found this extremely appealing. It made me want to get at her through her big pockets and up her ample sleeves.
Naomi’s apartment was so tiny it was like living in a medicine cabinet. Out of necessity, everything was hidden behind something else, ready to topple. She kept her liquor on a bookshelf behind B for booze, behind Bachelard, Balzac, Benjamin, Berger, Bogan. Scotch was behind Sir Walter. She loved her lame jokes, the lamer the better, sent herself into paroxysms. These antics continued into our married life. On one birthday she created an elaborate treasure hunt, with the last clue leading, of course, to the cake.
Naomi was a fan of 1950s science-fiction movies, which we would often stay up late to watch. She was always on the side of the lonely monster, usually an ordinary creature that had been irradiated and subsequently grew gigantic. She called to the television screen, encouraging the oversized octopus to go ahead and crush the bridge with its expressive tentacles. Naomi claimed that the young woman scientist invariably called to the scene to destroy the atomic squid (or gorilla, spider, or bee) was her secret role model; the nuclear physicist, the marine biologist, who made a lab coat look sexier than an evening gown.
She loved music and listened to everything, Javanese gamelan, Georgian choirs, medieval hurdy-gurdy. But her pride was her collection of lullabies, from everywhere in the world. Lullabies for the first born, for the child who wants to stay awake with his brother, for the child who’s too excited or too frightened to sleep. War-time lullabies, lullabies for abandoned children.
Naomi first sang to me from the end of her couch. The window was open, a warm, windy September night. Her voice was low as whispering grass. It made me imagine the moonlight on the roof. She sang a ghetto lullaby, a sadness that seemed to me confusingly sweet. In the dark I could smell the tanning lotion on her arms and legs, and in the thin cotton of her flowered skirt. “Clasp the alphabet to your heart, though there are tears in every letter.” “I sing in your little ear, let sleep come, a little handle closing a little gate.”
Something in me glimmered, far down. I summoned myself: the biggest action of my life, lifting my head long enough to place it in her lap. I pressed breath kisses into her filmy skirt. Her face hung above me, half a moon, with her draping hair.
Now eight years later, Naomi still collects lullabies but listens to them by herself in the car. Old songs that I imagine make her weep in traffic. It’s a long time since Naomi last sang to me. It’s a long time since I’ve heard a riddle song or a Gypsy song or a Russian song, not a partisan song or a song from the French Foreign Legion, not a single Ay-li-ruh or Ay-liu-liu-liu to soothe fish in the sea, or a Bayushki-bayu to make birds dream on the bough.
Now all the humour has gone out of her longing.
Over the years, Naomi’s non-sequiturs continued to catch me off-guard like a sunshower. In the produce section of the supermarket, I reaped the benefits of being married to a non-fiction editor. Choosing lettuce I learned that Chopin’s own “Funeral March” was played for him when he died. While figuring out our taxes I was informed that “Baa baa black sheep” and “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” share the same melody. I’ve learned many things while shaving or bundling the newspapers. “After World War One, a German chemist tried to extract gold from sea water to help Germany repay its war debt. He’d already extracted nitrogen from the air to make explosives. Speaking of war, did you know Amelia Earhart nursed veterans in Toronto in 1918? And speaking of nursing, Escher had to have emergency surgery when he was in Toronto to give a lecture.”
For several months Naomi worked on a series on municipal affairs.
“Tell me what’s happening in the city.”
In bed, in her favourite grey T-shirt shapeless as an amoeba, she seduced me with details. Lawyers, architects, bureaucrats; from her descriptions I knew them all. From their tastes in books and music, to awkward incidents in public and private places – all the minutiae of prominent lives – I came to an irregular and intimate knowledge of the city. Cities are built on compromising encounters, on shared affections for certain foods, on chance meetings in indoor pools. By the third week she could tell me, with a meaningful look, of a certain politician’s penchant for antique glass and I’d understand the new parking bylaws. Naomi told these stories like a courtier. Not as flabby, loose-lipped gossip, but with the cool acknowledgement that she was revealing the inner mechanisms of civic power. And sometimes, when she stopped talking, I rose to her with a pang of expectation like a taste crushed open in my mouth.
I reciprocated by feeding her bedtime stories: weather reports. When snow is ready to avalanche, the slightest disturbance will trigger the disaster: the jump of a rabbit, a sneeze, a shout. A faithful mascot waited three days by a mound of snow until someone investigated; they excavated the bewildered postman of Zurs who survived because most of freshly fallen snow is air.
In Russia, a tornado dug up a treasure and rained a thousand silver kopecks into the streets of a village.
A freight train was lifted from the tracks and placed down again, facing the other direction.
Once in a while, I admit, I made things up. Naomi could always tell. “Name your source, name your source!” she’d say, beating me with a pillow, dangling my glasses by the stem.
We used to play a game in the car. Naomi knew so many songs, she claimed she could match a lullaby or a ballad to anyone. One winter day I asked Naomi what songs she thought of when she thought of my parents. She answered almost immediately.
“For both your parents, ‘Night.’ Yes, ‘Night.’”
I looked at her. She was flustered that I didn’t understand; wary.
“Well … because they heard Liuba Levitska sing it in the ghetto.”
I glared at her. She sighed.
“Ben, keep your eyes on the road – Liuba Levitska. Your mother said she had a beautiful coloratura, that she was a real singer. She’d sung Violetta in La Traviata when she was twenty-one. In Yiddish! She gave children singing lessons in the ghetto. She taught them ‘Tsvey Taybelech’ – ‘Two Little Doves,’ and soon everyone was singing it. Someone offered to hide her outside the walls, but she wouldn’t leave her mother. They were both killed there…. Halfway through the war, she sang at a memorial concert in the ghetto for those who had already died. There was a big argument because a man complained that it was wrong to have a concert in a cemetery. But your mother said your father told him that there wasn’t anything more holy than hearing Liuba Levitska’s ‘Night.’”
“And what song would you choose for Jakob Beer?”
Again Naomi answered too quickly, as if she’d decided long before I asked.
“Oh, ‘Moorsoldaten,’ definitely the ‘Peat Bog Soldiers.’ Not only because it’s about bogs … but because it was the first song ever written in a concentration camp, in Borgermoor. I mentioned it to him when we met at Maurice’s. Of course he’d heard of it. The Nazis didn’t allow prisoners to sing anything except Nazi marching songs while they cut the peat, so it was real rebellion to invent a song of their own. It spread to all the camps. ‘Everywhere we look, bog and moorland stare … but winter cannot reign forever.’”
We drove on for a few minutes in gloomy silence. That February day was particularly wet, and the roads were a mess. I remembered how my classmates and I used to squeeze the slush between our boots, draining the water, leaving little molehills of white ice. We worked industriously until the schoolyard was a miniature range of mountains.
“It’s the only thing you can do for them,” Naomi said.
“What is? For who?”
“Never mind.”
“Naomi.”
My wife pulled at the fingers of her wool gloves and pushed them on again. She opened the window a crack, let in a whiff of snow, then closed it.
“The only thing you can do for the dead is to sing to them. The hymn, the miroloy, the kaddish. In the ghettos, when a child died, the mother sang a lullaby. Because there was nothing else she could offer of her self, of her body. She made it up, a song of comfort, mentioning all the child’s favourite toys. And these lullabies were overheard and passed along and, generations later, that little song is all that’s left to tell us of that child….”
Just before sleep Naomi experimented until she found the right position wrapped against me in some way. She moved about, adjusted limbs, searched for the right angles, and like a penguin under the ice, found the best breathing hole between bodies and blankets. She nuzzled, adjusted, nuzzled again, then slept with the resolve of an explorer out to conquer a dream landscape. Often she was in exactly the same position when she woke.
Sometimes looking at Naomi, the sweetness of her ways – settling into bed with her work, a little dish of licorice allsorts beside her, wearing her crazy misshapen T-shirt, such childlike contentment in her face – tightened my heart. I pushed away her papers and lay on top of the covers, on top of her. “What’s wrong little bear? What’s wrong …”
My mother taught me that the extra second it takes to say goodbye – always a kiss – even if she were simply rushing to the corner for milk or to the mailbox – was never misspent. Naomi loved this habit in me, for the plain reason one often finds a lover’s habits charming: she didn’t understand its origin.
What would I do without her? I began to be afraid. So I picked fights with her over anything. Over saying kaddish for my parents. And that’s when she was driven to an edge: “You want to punish me for my happy childhood, well screw you, screw your stupid self-pity!”
Because she was right, Naomi was sorry for having said those words. All candour eventually makes us sorry. I loved her, my warrior who swept aside the war in fits of frustration with a single “screw you.” Even Naomi, who thinks love has an answer for everything, knows that that’s the real response to history. She knows as well as I that history only goes into remission, while it continues to grow in you until you’re silted up and can’t move. And you disappear into a piece of music, a chest of drawers, perhaps a hospital record or two, and you slip away, forsaken even by those who claimed to love you most.
When my parents came to Toronto, they saw that most of their fellow immigrants settled in the same downtown district: a rough square of streets from Spadina to Bathurst, Dundas to College, with waves of the more established rippling northward towards Bloor Street. My father would not make the same mistake. “They wouldn’t even have the trouble of rounding us up.”
Instead, my parents moved to Weston, a borough that was quite rural and separate from downtown. They took out a large mortgage on a small house by the Humber River.
Our neighbours soon understood my parents wanted privacy. My mother nodded a hello as she scurried in and out. My father parked as near as he could to the back door, which faced out onto the river, so he could avoid the neighbour’s dog. Our major possessions were the piano and a car in decline. My mother’s pride was her garden, which she arranged so the roses could climb the back wall of the house.
I loved the river, though my five-year-old explorations were held in close check by my mother; a barrage of clucks from the kitchen window if I even started to take off my shoes. Except for spring, the Humber was lazy, willows trailed the current. On summer nights, the bank became one long living room. The water was speckled with porch lights. People wandered along it after dinner, children lay on their lawns listening to the water and waiting for the Big Dipper to appear. I watched from my bedroom window, too young to stay out. The night river was the colour of a magnet. I heard the muffled thump of a tennis ball in an old stocking against a wall and the faint chant of the girl next door: “A sailor went to sea sea sea, to see what he could see see see …” Except for the occasional slapping of a mosquito, the occasional shout of a child in a game that always seemed dusky far, the summer river was a muted string. It emanated twilight; everyone grew quiet around it.
My parents hoped that, in Weston, God might overlook them.
One fall day, it would not stop raining. By two in the afternoon it was already dark. I’d spent the day playing inside; my favourite place in the house was the realm under the kitchen table, because from there I had a comforting view of my mother’s bottom half as she went about her domestic duties. This enclosed space was most frequently transformed into a high-velocity vehicle, rocket-powered, though when my father wasn’t home I also set the piano stool on its side and swivelled the wooden seat as a sailing ship’s wheel. My adventures were always ingenious schemes to save my parents from enemies; spacemen who were soldiers.
That evening, just after supper – we were still at the table – a neighbour pounded at the door. He came to tell us that the river was rising and that if we knew what was good for us we’d get out soon. My father slammed the door in his face. He paced, washing his hands in the air with rage.
The banging that awakened me was the piano bobbing against the ceiling beneath my bedroom. I woke to see my parents standing by my bed. Branches smacked against the roof. It wasn’t until the water had sloshed against the second-storey windows that my father agreed to abandon the house.
My mother tied me in a sheet to the chimney. The rain hit; needles into my face. I couldn’t breathe for the rain, gulping water in mid-air. Strange lights pierced the wind. Icy tar, my river was unrecognizable; black, endlessly wide, a torrent of flying objects. A night planet of water.
With ropes, a ladder, and brute strength, we were hauled in. As if released from the grasp of searchlights from the shore, when our house plunged into darkness, it was swept, like every other on the street, fast downstream.
We were fortunate. Our house was not one of the ones that floated away with its inhabitants still trapped inside. From high ground I saw erratic beams of light bouncing inside upper floors as neighbours tried to climb to their roofs. One by one the flashlights went dark.
Shouts flared distantly across the river, though nothing could be seen in the pelting blackness.
Hurricane Hazel moved northeast, breaking dams, bridges, and roads, the wind tearing up power lines easily as a hand plucking a stray thread from a sleeve. In other parts of the city, people opened their front doors to waist-high water, just in time to see an invisible driver backing their floating car out of the driveway. Others suffered no more than a flooded basement and months of eating surprise food because the paper labels had been soaked off the tins in their pantries. In still other parts of the city, people slept undisturbed through the night and read about the hurricane of October 15, 1954, in the morning paper.
Our entire street disappeared. Within days, the river, again calm, carried on peacefully as if nothing had happened. Along the edges of the floodplain, dogs and cats were tangled in the trees. Alien bonfires burned away debris. Where once neighbours strolled in the evenings, they now wandered the new banks looking for remnants of personal possessions. Again, one might say my parents were fortunate, for they didn’t lose the family silverware or important letters or heirlooms however humble. They had already lost those things.
The government distributed restitution payments to those whose houses had been washed away. It was only after my parents died that I discovered they hadn’t touched the money. They must have been afraid that someday the authorities would ask for it back. My parents didn’t want to leave me with a debt.
My father took on as many pupils as he could find. We vanished into a cubbyhole of an apartment nearer to the music conservatory. My father preferred living in an apartment building, because “all the front doors look alike.” My mother was frightened whenever it rained, but she was happy to be living high up and also that there were no trees too close to the building to threaten our safety.
When I was a teenager I asked my mother why we hadn’t left the house sooner.
“They banged at the door and shouted at us to leave. For your father, that was the worst.”
She peered from the kitchen into the hallway to see where my father was, and then, with her hands cupped around my ear, whispered: “Who dares to believe he will be saved twice?”
That my mother took Naomi into her heart chafed me, a jealousy that grew intense. Like my father, I was being thrust out. The first time I was startled to attention by their familiarity, I was waiting for Naomi to finish scrubbing a pot. I had twisted the dish towel into a crown, a trick my mother had taught me. Offhand, innocently, Naomi said: “Just like your cousin Minna.”
My mother held kitchen conferences with Naomi, in the guise of discussing ingredients or dress patterns, while I sat mute with my father in the living room, scanning the bookcases and shelves of phonograph records for the umpteenth time. How my mother must have pressed Naomi’s hand, held on to her, conspired with her. Naomi emerging from the kitchen smiling with a recipe for honey cake. All the loving attention she lavished on my parents, the care so characteristic of Naomi – ever-considerate, generous to a fault – I began to read as insinuation, manipulation, a play of power. Later I even distrusted her visits to my parents’ graves, her gifts of flowers and stones of prayer. As if Naomi were buying me a guiltless conscience the way a man buys jewellery for his mistress. Why do you do it, why? – thinking, what good does it do? She’d always say the same thing, a reply that made me ashamed, lowering her head like a felon: “Because I loved them.”
How could anyone simply love my parents? How could an untrained eye see past my father’s silence, his crabbed rigidity and rage, his despair; past the diminished piano teacher to the once elegant student conductor in Warsaw? How could an unskilled heart see past my birdlike mother’s paisley dresses and cut-glass brooches to the passionate woman who kept a pair of elbow-length, white leather opera gloves wrapped in scented tissue in her drawer, and a postcard collection in a shoebox in her cupboard, who cooked to remember generations, who gardened on her balcony so she could have fresh flowers without my father’s disapproval? By what right did Naomi earn their trust?
I began to recall the brusque affection she evoked in my father when she spoke of her own father’s love for music. She was so blatant with them! For a long while I had no idea how much this hurt me. In fact, I’d even come to believe I liked this familiarity, this family feeling Naomi brought to that empty apartment. She was blunt and sweet, a crayon, when everything before her had been written in blood. She blundered in with her openness, her Canadian goodwill, with a seeming obliviousness to the fine lines of pain, the tenderly held bitterness, the mesh of collusions, the ornate restrictions. And while I now see that nothing could have pried open my father or melted him – even at the end of his life – I began to believe he had shared himself somehow with Naomi. Of course he had, but they hadn’t been the sort of confidants I’d suspected. A foreigner, a stranger in our midst, Naomi entered the powder-box apartment and instead of blowing our furtiveness sky-high had simply brought flowers, sat on an ottoman, accepted our ways, never overstepping her position. Decorous, patient, an impeccable guest. What I had mistaken for confidentiality from my father was simply the relief of a man who realizes he won’t have to give up his silence. It’s the ease Naomi’s grace encourages in everyone. She will honour privacy to the end.
People ask, do you dream in colour? But I wonder, is there sound in your dreams? My dreams are silent. I watch my father lean over the table to kiss my mother, she’s too frail to sit up long. I think: Don’t worry, I’ll comb your hair, I’ll carry you from the bed, I’ll help you – and realize she doesn’t know me.
In dreams, my father’s face, with the expression he wore on Sundays listening to music, contorts; a reflection in the still surface of a lake smashed by a stone. In dreams I can’t stop his disintegration.
Since his death, I’ve come to respect my father’s caches of food around the house as evidence of his ingenuity, his self-perception. It’s not a person’s depth you must discover, but their ascent. Find their path from depth to ascent.
In the back of my mother’s closet was a small suitcase, the contents of which my mother revised as I grew. This small suitcase, which I feared as a child, now represents to me the enormity of their self-control.
My mother was suddenly old. She had turned herself inside out; her skin hid behind her bones. I noticed the pull of fabric over her curved back, her thin hair over her scalp. She looked as if she might close up, clatter like a folding chair. All that was left of her were the parts that would make a terrifying sound – skeleton, eyeglasses, teeth. Yet at the same time as she was disappearing, she seemed to become more than her body. And that’s when I realized how deeply Naomi’s daughterly attentions were injuring me, each small jar of scented hand lotion, each bottle of perfume, each nightgown. Not to mention the distress evoked by the futility of objects that outlast us.
After my mother died, almost instantly my father slipped beyond reach. He heard things, white as whispering. When his brain was tuned to the frequency of ghosts, his mouth was a twisted wire. During one visit on an autumn Sunday about a year after my mother’s death and two years before his own, I watched him from our kitchen window while Naomi made tea. He sat in our yard; the book he hadn’t been reading had slipped to the grass. Someone in the neighbourhood was burning leaves. I thought about the cool, smoky air on his freshly shaven face, skin I hadn’t touched for years. How strange that this memory has become beautiful to me. My father alone in the garden, lost in loneliness for his wife. He held his cardigan on his lap like a child asked to hold something without knowing why. The trace of beauty I now sense is this: perhaps, for the first time in a long life, my father was experiencing pleasure at looking back on a happier time. He sat so still the birds weren’t afraid of him, plummeting from newly bare branches, sweeping a breath above the lawn around him. They knew he wasn’t there. In his face the expression I now recognize from all those Sunday afternoons we sat together on the couch.
My father’s last night. Holding the dial tone against my ear, waiting for Naomi to come to the hospital. I will always associate the dial tone with the mechanical horizon of death, of no heartbeat. I realized then I’d been wrong about him all my life, thinking that he wanted death, was waiting for it. How is it possible I never knew, never guessed? Truth grows gradually in us, like a musician who plays a piece again and again until suddenly he hears it for the first time.
On a March evening, about two months after my father died, I was going through my parents’ closets and pockets and my father’s chest of drawers. I had left the clearing out of their bedroom for last. In the humidor, which he never used for cigars, in an envelope, a single photograph. We think of photographs as the captured past. But some photographs are like DNA. In them you can read your whole future. My father is such a young man I barely recognize him. He poses in front of a piano, an infant in the bend of his arm. His other hand directs the face of a little girl towards the camera. She is perhaps three or four years old and hangs onto his leg. The woman standing beside him is my mother. If it is possible to speak without opening your mouth, without making a sound or altering the muscles in your face – that is how my parents look. On the back floats a spidery date, June 1941, and two names. Hannah. Paul. I stared at both sides of the photograph a long time before I understood that there had been a daughter; and a son born just before the action. When my mother was forced into the ghetto, twenty-four years old, her breasts were weeping with milk.
I brought the photograph home to show Naomi. She was in the kitchen. It happened in an instant. As I was taking the photograph out of the envelope, before I’d uttered a word of explanation, Naomi said, “It’s so sad, it’s so terrible.” Then she saw the shock her words had given me and stopped scraping the plates over the garbage can.
My parents, experts in secrets, kept the most important one from me to their last breath. Yet, in a masterful stroke, my mother decided to tell Naomi. The daughter she longed for. My mother guessed that my wife wouldn’t readily mention something so painful, but she knew that if she confided in Naomi, the truth would eventually be passed on. Naomi knew how much her intimacy with my parents upset me. But Naomi didn’t know she was keeping a secret.
Still, I blamed her.
Privacy is the true profundity of a marriage, the place my mother’s story invaded.
The past is desperate energy, live, an electric field. It chooses a single moment, a chance so domestic we don’t know we’ve missed it, a moment that crashes into us from behind and changes all that follows.
My parents must have made a promise to each other, which my mother kept almost until the end.
Naomi explained something else I’d never known. My parents prayed that the birth of their third child would go unnoticed. They hoped that if they did not name me, the angel of death might pass by. Ben, not from Benjamin, but merely “ben” – the Hebrew word for son.
The snow gradually disappeared from under the trees, leaving wet shadows. Detritus hidden all winter lay strewn across lawns and floating in gutters.
In the weeks after cleaning out my parents’ apartment, I began to scavenge the Humber, collecting objects that had eroded from the early-spring banks – a souvenir spoon, a doorknob, a rusted mechanical toy. I rinsed them in the river and kept them in a box in the trunk of the car. I didn’t find anything I remembered.
One day the rain soaked through my coat, my sleeves and back were raw. At home I emptied my pockets of china shards, small as mosaic tiles, and washed the broken dishes in the bathroom sink. I cleaned the bottom of the river from under my nails. I sat in my wet clothes on the edge of the empty tub. After a while I changed and went into my study. I could smell supper – tomato sauce, rosemary, bay leaves, garlic wafting up from downstairs. I sat until I could no longer see the roofs of the lane and the back-yard fences, only my own lamp and bookcases reflected in the window.
I went into the bedroom and lay down. I heard Naomi climb the stairs, heard her take off her shoes. I felt her lie down beside me in her favourite position, back to back, her small stockinged feet against my calves, a gesture of intimacy that filled me with hopelessness. I imagined her staring into her view of the dark bedroom. I could have stood it, no matter how many times she said it: I thought you knew, I thought you knew. If only she hadn’t put her small feet against my calves – as if nothing had changed.
I knew I must not open my mouth. The misery of bones that must be broken in order to be set straight.
Waking in our tiny house, on our street with the old elms and chestnut trees, I knew without raising the blinds, sometimes without even opening my eyes, whether it was raining or snowing. I knew instantly the time of morning or evening by the quality of light filming over dresser, chair, radiator, Naomi’s wooden brush on the night table. Different in winter, in March, in midsummer, in October. I knew that, in half a year’s time, the two sugar maples in the yard would change colour differently, one more copper than scarlet. I was sick with noticing. The pale degrees of change, the diurnal decay.
And then there are days when the atmosphere signals an anniversary of error. An unnamed moment only weather remembers. The place we’d be if all were well.
I thought about my father, who used food to forget his body. Who was alive in music, where time is an instruction.
You died not long after my father and I can’t say which death made me reach again for your words. On Naomi’s desk was your last book, What Have You Done to Time, and on mine was Groundwork.
One evening, while nervously moving our dinner around in a skillet, Naomi suggested that I help Maurice Salman, and offer to retrieve your notebooks from Idhra, now that he’s no longer well enough to travel. It was Naomi’s idea: a separation.
A few days later, I stood in the kitchen doorway and spoke to the back of her head.
“I’ve rearranged things so I don’t have to teach until next January.”
Naomi pressed her palms into the kitchen table and stood up. The imprint of the chair was on the back of her thighs. This made me so sad I had to close my eyes.
“But you’ll be away for your birthday – the mortgage will have to be renewed soon – I already have your present….”
A ship in the middle of the ocean won’t perceive the tsunami; in the trough there are eighty-five miles between crests. At that moment, fear should have stung me, I should have smelled the whiff of ether, felt the knife edge. But I didn’t. Instead I squandered our life together and only said: “I’ll write to you….”
Naomi’s body to me was so familiar a map, folded so often at the same places, tearing along the folds. I never unfurled her anymore; opened her only a small square at a time, the district I addressed in darkness.
The June night before I left for Greece, it was stiflingly hot. Naomi came dripping from the cold shower and lay on top of me. Cold as wet sand.
A few years after my mother’s death, during the brief time he lived with Naomi and me, my father seemed to give up sleep entirely. At night we heard him wandering around the house. Finally, I convinced him to see a doctor, who, to my relief, prescribed sleeping pills. But, suddenly able to answer the dilemma of hunger that had plagued him so long, he took them all.