Fugitive pieces by Anne Michaels Read Free Book Online Page B

in a passion grasp, its matted thickness between his fingers, pulling, his hands full of names. His holy hands move, autonomous.
    In the Golleschau quarry, stone-carriers were forced to haul huge blocks of limestone endlessly, from one mound to another and back again. During the torture, they carried their lives in their hands. The insane task was not futile only in the sense that faith is not futile.
    A camp inmate looked up at the stars and suddenly remembered that they’d once seemed beautiful to him. This memory of beauty was accompanied by a bizarre stab of gratitude. When I first read this I couldn’t imagine it. But later I felt I understood. Sometimes the body experiences a revelation because it has abandoned every other possibility.

    It’s no metaphor to feel the influence of the dead in the world, just as it’s no metaphor to hear the radiocarbon chronometer, the Geiger counter amplifying the faint breathing of rock, fifty thousand years old. (Like the faint thump from behind the womb wall.) It is no metaphor to witness the astonishing fidelity of minerals magnetized, even after hundreds of millions of years, pointing to the magnetic pole, minerals that have never forgotten magma whose cooling off has left them forever desirous. We long for place; but place itself longs. Human memory is encoded in air currents and river sediment. Eskers of ash wait to be scooped up, lives reconstituted.
    How many centuries before the spirit forgets the body? How long will we feel our phantom skin buckling over rockface, our pulse in magnetic lines of force? How many years pass before the difference between murder and death erodes?
    Grief requires time. If a chip of stone radiates its self, its breath, so long, how stubborn might be the soul. If sound waves carry on to infinity, where are their screams now? I imagine them somewhere in the galaxy, moving forever towards the psalms.

    Alone on the roof those nights, it’s not surprising that, of all the characters in Athos’s tales of geologists and explorers, cartographers and navigators, I felt compassion for the stars themselves. Aching towards us for millennia though we are blind to their signals until it’s too late, starlight only the white breath of an old cry. Sending their white messages millions of years, only to be crumpled up by the waves.

VERTICAL TIME
    “I met Athos at the university,” said Kostas Mitsialis. “He shared my office. Whenever I came in, no matter how early or how late, he was already there, reading by the window. The books and articles piled on the sill¡ English poetry. How to preserve leaf skeletons. The meaning of pole carvings. He had a beautiful watch from his father. It had an inlay of a sea monster on its case and on its face, with a tail that curled around eleven o’clock. Athos, do you still have it?”
    Athos smiled, opened his jacket, and dangled the watch from its chain.
    “I told Daphne about him, the shy fellow who took away my privacy in my own office¡ She wanted to see for herself. One afternoon she came to pick me up, greeting me with a tug on my ears the way she still likes to do. Daphne was only twenty then and always in a good mood. Come to dinner, she said to Athos. Athos asked, Do you like music?
    “Those days between the wars, the tavernas were filled with tango, but we had no use for Spaniard music because we had our own: the slow hasapiko and the songs sung with bouzouki that come from the sailors on the docks and the hamals and the plum-juice vendors.”
    “And the drug dens,” winked Athos.
    “He took us to a small place off Adrianou Street. There we heard Vito for the first time. His voice was a river. It was glikos, black and sweet. Athos, do you remember? Vito was also the cook. After preparing the food, he came from the kitchen rubbing the rosemary and oil from his fingers onto his apron, and then he stood among the tables and sang a rembetiko that he made up on the spot. A rembetiko, Jakob, always tells a