Fugitive pieces by Anne Michaels Page A

own grief expressed there. It would be almost fifty years and in another country before I would again experience this intense empathy with a landscape.
    At Kyllini, we saw that the great medieval castle had been dynamited by the Germans. We passed outdoor schools, children in rags using slabs of rock as desks. A shame hung over the countryside, the misery of women who could not even bury their dead, whose bodies had been burned or drowned, or simply thrown away.
    We descended the valley to Kalavrita, at the foot of Mount Velia. Since disembarking at Kyllini, everyone we’d spoken to had told us of the massacre. At Kalavrita, in December 1943, the Germans murdered every man in the village over the age of fifteen—fourteen hundred men—then set fire to the town. The Germans claimed the townspeople had been harbouring andartes — Greek resistance fighters. In the valley, charred ruins, blackened stone, a terrible silence. A place so empty it was not even haunted.
    At Korinthos, we climbed aboard a lorry that was filled to overflowing with other travellers. Finally, on a hot afternoon in late July, we arrived in Athens.
    Dusty and tired, we sat in Daphne and Kostas’s living room, with Daphne’s paintings of the city on the wall— all light and edges, a radiant cubism that in Greece is close to realism. A small glass table. Silk cushions. I was afraid that when I stood up my dirty clothes would leave an imprint on the pale sofa. A little dish of wrapped candies on the table distracted me, gave me a painful glimmer, as when part of you falls asleep and then blood returns to the place. I didn’t understand I could help myself. My elbows rubbed against my sleeves, my legs against my shorts. In a large silver-framed mirror, I saw my head looming above the thin stem of my neck.
    Kostas led me into his room and he and Athos picked out some clothes for me. They took me to a barber for my first real haircut. Daphne drew me to her, her hands on my shoulders. She was not much taller than me and almost as thin. She was, as I look back, like a very elderly girl. She wore a dress with a pattern of birds. Her hair was fastened in a knot on top of her head, a little grey cloud. She served me a stifhado of beans and garlic. I ate karpouzi outside with Kostas, who showed me how to spit the melon seeds all the way to the bottom of the garden.
    Their kindnesses were mysterious and welcome to me as the city itself—with its strange trees, its blinding white walls.
    The morning after we arrived, Daphne, Kostas, and Athos began to talk. Starved, they fell into conversation, cleaning their plate as if they’d find a truth painted on the bottom. They talked as if everything must be told in a single day. They talked as if they were at shivah, at a wake, where all the talk cannot fill the absent chair. Once in a while Daphne got up to replenish their glasses, to bring bread, small cold bowls of fish, peppers, onions, olives. I could not follow it all: the andartes, EAM, ELAS, communists, Venizelists, and anti-Venizelists…. But there was also much I did understand—hunger, shooting, bodies in the street, how suddenly everything familiar is inexpressible. I paid such close attention that, as Kostas said, history wore me out, and around four o’clock when we moved into the garden, with the breeze and sun in my freshly trimmed hair, I fell asleep. When I woke, it was twilight. They were leaning back in their chairs in a silent melancholy, as if the long Greek dusk had finally drawn every memory out of their hearts.
    Kostas shook his head.
    “It’s as Theotokas says: ‘Time was cut by a knife.’ The tanks came down Vasilissis Sofias. Even when one German walks through a Greek street it’s like an iron rod so cold it burns your hand. It wasn’t even noon. We heard it on the radio. All morning the black cars made a trail through the city like a line of gunpowder.”
    “We closed the drapes to the sun and Kostas and I sat at the table in the