ODE TO MEMORY

ANNE MICHAEL'S POETIC NOVEL OF SURVIVING AND LOVING THE PAST

Author: By Gail Caldwell, Globe Staff

Date: SUNDAY, March 9, 1997

Page: M15

Section: Books

I've often wondered what draws an artist at one end of the literary spectrum to travel to the other; maybe it is simply the magnetic north of possibility -- the promise of language always to exult. Canadian Anne Michaels has written two books of poetry, ``Miner's Pond'' and ``The Weight of Oranges,'' and ``Fugitive Pieces'' is her first novel, which she reportedly worked on for nearly a decade. Word by blessed word, it is a gorgeously written book: aflame with the subzero cold of history and the passions of emotional comprehension. The place it falters is on that larger hilltop. By the time the reader recognizes this failure, though, so much wisdom and breathtaking language have been imparted that one almost doesn't care. ``Fugitive Pieces'' is a novel conceived with eloquence and care, and the first half of it is thrilling in the depth it possesses.

Most of it told in the first person, the novel is the story of Jakob Beer, a Polish-born Jewish poet and translator who escaped the Holocaust as a child. From his hiding place in the family kitchen, he watched his mother and father being murdered by the Nazis; the cries of his sister, Bella, he could never locate, and her spirit accompanied him for the rest of his life. Alone, he fled to the forest, where he buried himself at night to sleep and ate anything he could. He was 7 years old. His savior was a Greek geologist named Athanasios Roussos -- Athos -- who looked up from his digging one day in the woods and saw a boy covered in peat, half-feral, ``crying,'' as he later told him, ``with the abandonment of your age.'' Jakob remembered it this way: ``So hungry. I screamed into the silence the only phrase I knew in more than one language, I screamed it in Polish and German and Yiddish, thumping my fists on my own chest: dirty Jew, dirty Jew, dirty Jew.''

Athos smuggled Jakob across borders to his home, the Greek island of Zakynthos, and hid him for four years. The boy lay at his protector's feet at night while the man read, crawled into a drawer when Athos left the house, watched the stars at night when he could lie upon the roof. From Athos he learned not just the power of love and sacrifice but also Greek, geology, paleobotany, the properties of salt and wood. The beauty of sphagnum moss. The ice-pure struggles of polar exploration. Metaphors of land and sky. How to go on. Each time the boy walked through a doorway, he waited long enough to let Bella go through first, ``making sure she was not left behind.'' As he listened to Athos's incantations -- hymns to knowledge, to the reverie and grace of story -- he found his own torturous memories first emerging, then converging with the light of day. Athos had first given him a future, and now, night by night, was giving him a way to have a past.

``Fugitive Pieces'' is an ode to memory: to the poetry and salvation of one man's life, but also to the mythic pull of the collective past and the duties of history. With its scattered affection for fact, it bears a curiosity both moral and scientific, with echoes of writers from Annie Dillard to Primo Levi. How else do you explain a writer who cares about the imprint left by bison upon the prairie, who sees prisoners of war, forced to unearth the mass graves of their loved ones, and declares their hands to be holy? The sorrow and searching of ``Fugitive Pieces'' are sometimes unbearable; it is an unstoppably rich novel, where meaning supplants plot like a flood across the land.

You can feel Michaels herself succumb to these high waters, particularly in the second half of the novel, when Jakob and Athos leave Greece to resettle in Toronto. Another voice eventually takes over the story, belonging to a young man who, in the work of Jakob Beer, discovers a poet and thinker who ennobles his own life. Thematically this leap is appropriate -- another generation scarred by the Holocaust, finding through literature a narrative for himself -- and yet the traditional demands of fiction are given less and less attention. The women who surface through various parts of Jakob's story begin to seem interchangeable; the tangible realities of work and place give way to an eerie timelessness that often feels unmoored. It is an odd failing, and most certainly an error of passion, as though Michaels felt far too much about the galaxies she plumbs -- places of loss and despair and stunning beauty -- to bother much with individual character. The inside of the mind and spirit, both Jakob's and Athos's, is what we come to love here, as well as the more ethereal longing they each possess: Bella's music, history's dirge, the lamentations of the earth itself.

Ultimately one realizes that Jakob has given us this elegy to consciousness and memory, his effort ``to set down the past in the cramped space of a prayer.'' We realize, too, the futile necessity of his life focus -- what he calls the ``haunting trinity'' of perpetrator, victim, witness. Near the end of his life, a woman who meets Jakob Beer later announces in awe that he seems like a man ``who has finally found the right question,'' a pilgrimage that defines the geography of this novel. Somewhere between an atrocity and a prayer lies the essential miracle of a lemon skin, or a child standing in spring rain, or a sister playing Beethoven, and Anne Michaels has dared to walk far into that vast territory. ``Fugitive Pieces'' sometimes staggers under the weight of its own moral imperative, but it seems to me as full of humanity and promise as anything I've read in a long time.

How many centuries before the spirit forgets the body? How long will we feel our phantom skin buckling over rockface, our pulse in magnetic lines of force? How many years pass before the difference between murder and death erodes?

Grief requires time. If a chip of stone radiates its self, its breath, so long, how stubborn might be the soul. If sound waves carry on to infinity, where are their screams now? I imagine them somewhere in the galaxy, moving forever towards the psalms.

Alone on the roof those nights, it's not surprising that, of all the characters in Athos's tales of geologists and explorers, cartographers and navigators, I felt compassion for the stars themselves. Aching towards us for millennia though we are blind to their signals until it's too late, starlight only the white breath of an old cry. Sending their white messages millions of years, only to be crumpled up by the waves.

ANNE MICHAELS

From ``Fugitive Pieces''