Fugitive pieces by Anne Michaels Page A

ancient stands inhabited by giant beavers as big as bears. At supper, we sampled native cuisine that was exotic to us, such as peanut butter, and read to each other about our new city. We read that stone spears, axes, and knives had been discovered in a farmer’s field on the outskirts; Athos explained that the Laurentian People were contemporaries of the inhabitants of Biskupin. We learned of an Indian settlement under a school. We empathized with the perplexity and grumpiness of Mrs. Simcoe, the genteel eighteenth-century pioneer wife of the lieutenant-governor, transposed into the wilderness of Upper Canada. She soon came to represent, rather unfairly, a general state of disgruntledness. She inspired a private joke whenever we found ourselves at a loss, bewildered by the wordless signals that are the essence of every culture: “What would Mrs. Simcoe make of this?”
    Late Sunday afternoons, we climbed from the lake bottom, covered with prehistoric ooze, to surface under a billboard on St. Clair Avenue; the tram tracks shining dully under the weak winter sun, or stropped bright under the streetlights, the evening sky purple with cold or cyanotype summer blue, the darkening shapes of the houses against the dissolving bromide of twilight. Muddy, clinging with burrs of enchanter’s nightshade (stowaways on trouser legs and sleeves), we headed home for a hot dinner. These weekly explorations into the ravines were escapes to ideal landscapes; lakes and primeval forests so long gone they could never be taken away from us.
    On these walks I could temporarily shrug off my strangeness because, the way Athos saw the world, every human was a newcomer.
    Athos and I both kept up correspondences with Daphne and Kostas. I mailed them poems in English and reported to Daphne how well I was doing at school and how well we’d been eating, passing along pastry recipes from Constantine. Kostas’s letters to Athos were filled with politics. Athos would sit at the table shaking his head. “How can he write such awful news with such a beautiful hand?” Kostas’s handwriting was fluid and fine as a braided stream.
    As Kostas had warned me, Athos fell into depressions, like a literal stumble into ruts in a road. He tripped, pulled himself up, carried on. Darkness dogged him. He burrowed in his room to work on his book, Bearing False Witness , which he knew somehow he would never finish, a debt left unpaid to his colleagues at Biskupin. He didn’t come out for meals. To tempt him, I bought cakes from Constantine. When Constantine saw me instead of Athos, he knew Athos was feeling bad. “It’s the illness of his work,” he said. “Stale bread gives a man a stomach-ache. Tell Athos that Constantine says if he’s going to keep stirring up historia, he must remember to open the lid slowly, to let the steam out of the pot.”
    Often I came into the kitchen at two or three in the morning and found Athos in his heavy dressing gown or, in summer, in his vest and limp boxers, dozing with his glasses on his forehead, a pen falling out of his hand. And, reverting to the habits of one who used to eat many meals alone, a book was held open on the table, an empty plate or a fork across the pages.
    Bearing False Witness plagued Athos. It was his conscience; his record of how the Nazis abused archaeology to fabricate the past. In 1939, Biskupin was already a famous site, already nicknamed the “Polish Pompeii.” But Biskupin was proof of an advanced culture that wasn’t German; Himmler ordered its obliteration. It wasn’t enough to own the future. The job of Himmler’s SS-Ahnenerbe—the Bureau of Ancestral Inheritance—was to conquer history. The policy of territorial expansion—lebensraum—devoured time as well as space.
    One oppressively hot summer morning, Athos and I set out on our Sunday walk, dressed as coolly as possible, almost formal in white cotton shirts. Our destination was Baby Point, which had once been the site of an Iroquois