Free Fugitive pieces by Anne Michaels Page A

kathikonda—bring them release—anakoufisi—then the dead will send a message to us on the wings of birds.”
    The air was, in fact, filled with storks and swallows and wild doves. Rosemary and basil swayed like censers in the afternoon heat.
    Athos said: “Jakob, try to be buried in ground that will remember you.”
    When we stand on the high slope above Zakynthos town, I imagine driftwood washing up on the gravelly beach below, only it’s not wood but their long bones, their curved bones that have washed up with the tide. Coarse sand gleams with the polished debris. The birds don’t come, there’s nothing left for them. Only the skulls stay in the sea. Too heavy, they settle on the bottom; on the ocean floor is a city of white domes. They glow in the depth. Burned into the bone, last thoughts line the skulls. Silently the fish slip home through the eyes, through the mouths.

    For years after the war, even the smallest decision was an agony. I examined my steps before I took them, even before the most trivial excursion. If I go to the store now instead of later, what will happen? I extrapolated minutely. “Jakob, I could recite half of Homer every time I wait for you ….”
    Nothing is sudden. Not an explosion—planned, timed, wired carefully—not the burst door. Just as the earth invisibly prepares its cataclysms, so history is the gradual instant.
    The week before Athos and I left for Canada, I went with Kostas for a long walk along Vasilissis Sofias, down Amalias to the Plaka. He carried a cane that he didn’t use much; sometimes he wound his arm, fragile as a willow branch, through mine. He showed me the Pedagogic Academy where Daphne used to teach English. He showed me the university. We shared a gazoza in the courtyard of an old hotel.
    “Did Athos teli you he was once married? No, I can see by your face he didn’t. He rarely speaks of Helen even to us. Some stones are so heavy only silence helps you carry them. She died during the first war.”
    I felt ashamed, I felt I had betrayed Athos, that somehow I had not been worthy enough for him to have revealed this secret.
    “Athos has left us many times; he’s lived away from Greece for many years. But now it’s different. He wants to leave. Greece will never be the same. Perhaps it will be better. But he’s right to take you away. Jakob, Athos is my best friend. We’ve known each other forty years—you can’t yet understand what that means. What I want to say to you is this: Sometimes Athos becomes very sad, you know, he can be sad for long months and there may be times when he will need you to take care of him.”
    My eyes went hot.
    “Pedhi-mou, don’t worry. Athos is like his beloved limestone. The sea will dissolve him into caves, dig holes into him, but he lasts and lasts.”
    On the way home we passed walls scrawled with a huge V—Vinceremo, we shall overcome — in black paint. Or M—Mussolini Merda. Kostas explained why no one wanted to erase those symbols. During the occupation, graffiti required swiftness and courage. Graffitos who were caught were executed by the Germans on sight. A single letter was exhilarating, it was spit in the eye of the oppressors. A single letter was a matter of life and death.
    We passed a church and Kostas told me how, right where we stood, there had been a riot the first time the gospel was read in the demotic. “Did they think God only understood katharevousa?” “Yes, pedhi-mou, exactly!” And when the Oresteia was performed in the demotic for the first time, Kostas said some of the audience died in the logomachy that followed.
    On Zakynthos, there was the statue of Solomos. In Athens, there was Palamas and the graffitos, whose heroism was language. I already knew the power of language to destroy, to omit, to obliterate. But poetry, the power of language to restore: this was what both Athos and Kostas were trying to teach me.

    Athos had worked in England, France, Vienna, Yugoslavia, Poland; he went