Fugitive pieces by Anne Michaels

story full of heartache and eros.”
    “And poverty and hashish,” said Athos.
    “After Vito sang, he played santouri music that somehow told the story again. One night he did not sing first, but played something so mysterious … a story I seemed to know, to remember. It gave me an ancient, suspenseful feeling, like an orchard when the sun moves in and out of the clouds … and later that night Daphne and I decided to marry.”
    “And if you hadn’t heard the song?” I asked.
    They laughed.
    “Then it would have been moonlight, or the cinema, or a poem,” said Kostas.
    Athos rubbed my hair. “Jakob writes poems,” he said.
    “Then you have the power to make people marry,” said Daphne.
    “Like a rabbi or a priest?” I asked.
    They laughed again.
    “No,” said Athos. “Like a cook in a café.”
    In Athens, we stayed with Daphne and Kostas—Professor Mitsialis and his wife—old friends of Athos’s who lived on the slopes of Lykavettos in a small house with rubble where the front steps had been. Daphne had set a pot of flowers in the pile. A vegetable and herb garden in the back. Past Kolonaki Square, between Kiphissia and Tatoi, past the foreign embassies, palms and cypresses, past parks, past tall white apartments. Past the statue of revolutionary Mavrocordatos, where an Athenian kneeled in 1942 and sang Solomos’s national anthem and was shot.
    It had taken Athos and me close to two weeks to travel the wounded landscape from Zakynthos to Athens. Roads were blocked, bridges out, villages in ruins. Farmland and orchards had been devastated. Those without a scrap of land to work or money for the black market were starving. This would be the case for years. And, of course, peace did not come to Greece at the end of the war. About six months after the fighting ended in Athens between communists and British, with an interim government still in place, Athos and I closed up the house on Zakynthos and crossed the channel to Kyllini on the mainland.
    In Athens, Athos would begin to search for news of Bella and the only other member of my family I knew of, an aunt I’d never met, my mother’s sister Ida, who’d lived in Warsaw. We both understood that Athos must search so that I could give up. I found his faith unbearable.
    On the boat, Athos brought out bread and a spoonful of honey for our breakfast, but I couldn’t eat. Looking out at the waves of Porthmos Zakinthou, I thought nothing would ever be familiar again.
    We took lifts whenever we could, in carts and on the backs of bone-rattling lorries that stirred up the dust climbing hairpin turns and spiralling down again. We travelled long distances me ta podhia—on foot. There are two rules for walking in Greece that Athos taught me as we climbed a hill and left Kyllini behind. Never follow a goat, you’ll end up at the edge of a cliff. Always follow a mule, you’ll arrive at a village by nightfall. We paused often to rest, in those days more for my benefit than Athos’s. When we were both worn out, we waited with our satchels by the side of the road, hoping someone might come by to take us to the next village. I looked at Athos in his frayed tweed jacket and his dusty fedora and saw how much he’d aged in the few years I’d known him. As for me, the child who’d entered Athos’s house was gone, I was thirteen years old. Often while we were walking, Athos put his arm across my shoulders. His touch felt natural to me, though all else was like a dream. And it was his touch that kept me from falling into myself too far. It was on that journey from Zakynthos to Athens, on those crumbling roads and in those dry hills, that I realized what I felt: not that I owed Athos everything but that I loved him.
    The landscape of the Peloponnesus had been injured and healed so many times, sorrow darkened the sunlit ground. All sorrow feels ancient. Wars, occupations, earthquakes; fire and drought. I stood in the valleys and imagined the grief of the hills. I felt my