Free Fugitive pieces by Anne Michaels

showed me the difference it made if she placed plums in a green bowl or in a yellow bowl before she set them on the table. She took me into her painting room and made a sketch of my face with fine pencil lines. In the afternoons while Athos was attending to our move to Canada, I helped Daphne clean her paint brushes or prepare dinner, or Kostas and I practised my English in the warm garden where sometimes we both nodded off.
    I listened to the ebb and flow of Athos and Kostas’s political discussions. They always tried to include me, first soliciting my opinion, then debating seriously my ideas until I felt like a pundit, a peer.
    When I had my nightmares, they all came to me, the three of them, and sat on my bed, Daphne gently scratching my back. They talked to each other until, in the comfort of their low voices, I fell asleep again. Then they wandered down to the kitchen. In the morning I saw the plates from their midnight party still on the table.
    Once, Daphne sent me out to fetch some herbs while she was preparing dinner. I was frightened to go out alone, even just into the garden. As I stood at the back door, Kostas noticed my distress and put down the paper. “I need a stretch, Jakob, let’s see what the evening air is like.” And we stepped outside together.
    On the eve of our departure for Canada, I sat on the bed and watched Daphne pack for me, Kostas leaping up to retrieve some extra thing to put into my suitcase, a book or another pair of his socks. Daphne patted each item carefully into place. Neither of them had been to Canada. They speculated on the climate, the people, each speculation resulting in the addition of another eccentric item— a compass, a tie clip.
    I remember Daphne, on that last night, turning back at the doorway of my room after saying goodnight and coming over to give me one more fierce squeeze. I remember her cool hands on my back under my cotton pyjamas, her gentle scritch-scratch, my mother’s, Bella’s, soothing me to sleep.

    Before we’d left Zakynthos, Athos said: “We must have a ceremony. For your parents, for the Jews of Crete, for all who have no one to recall their names.”
    We threw camomile and poppies into the cobalt sea. Athos poured fresh water into the waves, that “the dead may drink.”
    Athos read from Seferis: “‘Here finish the works of the sea the works of love. You who will someday live here … if the blood chances to darken your memory, do not forget us.’“
    I thought: It’s longing that moves the sea.
    On Zakynthos sometimes the silence shimmers with the overtone of bees. Their bodies roll in the air, powdery with golden weight. The field was heavy with daisies, honeysuckle, and broom. Athos said: “Greek lamentation burns the tongue. Greek tears are ink for the dead to write their lives.”
    He spread a striped cloth on the grass and we sat down to eat koliva, bread, and honey by the sea—that “the dead may not go hungry.”
    Athos said: “Remember. Your good deeds help the moral progress of the dead. Do good on their behalf. Their bones will bear the weight of the waves for eternity; as my countrymen’s bones will bear the weight of earth. We will not be able to exhume them according to custom; their bones will not join the bones of their families in the ossuary of their village. The generations will not be bound together; they will melt under the sea, or in the soil, desolate….”
    I heard in my head their cries and imagined in the waves their shiny, almost human skin, their brine-soaked hair. And, as in my nightmares, I placed my parents under the waves where it was clear and blue.
    Athos lit a lamp— a jar filled with olive oil— and used a tightly wound bundle of dried quince as a wick.
    Athos said: “The shepherds will not know to lament them, no prayers will be heard from distant fields amid the cries of sheep and goats. So let us pass the koliva and light the candle and sing ‘Death ate my eyes’… If our duties —