Fugitive pieces Read Online Free PDF Page B

McMurdo Sound,” which gave me a shock when I first saw it. It was as if Wilson had painted my memory of the spirit world. In the forefront was a circle of skis like a sparse and ghostly forest and, above, the breathtakingly divine haloes of the paraselena itself, swirling, suspended like smoke.
    For many months all I saw were stars. My only prolonged experience of the outside world was late at night; Athos let me climb through the bedroom window to lie on the roof. Flat on my back, I dug a hole in the night sky. I inhaled the sea until I was light-headed, and floated above the island.
    Alone, in space, I imagined the Antarctic auroras, billowing designs of celestial calligraphy, our small portion of the sky like the corner of an illuminated manuscript. Stretched out on a cotton mat, I thought of Wilson, lying on an ice-floe in the darkness of a polar winter, singing to Emperor penguins. Looking up at the stars, I saw massive islands of ice swaying on the sea, opening and closing a passage, the wind moving floes from hundreds of miles away; one of Athos’s lessons in “remote causes.” I saw ice-fields pale gold with lunar light. I thought of Scott and his frozen men starving in the tent, knowing that an abundance of food waited, inaccessible, only eleven miles away. I imagined their last hours in that cramped space.

    The Germans looted the harvests of the fruit groves. Olive oil was as rare as if we lived on the ice cap. Even on lush Zakynthos we craved citrus. Athos carefully sliced a lemon in half and we sucked out the sourness down to the skin, ate the skin, then smelled our hands. Since I was still young, the rationing and restrictions affected me more than Athos. Eventually my gums began to bleed. My teeth came loose. Athos watched me falling apart and wrung his hands with worry. He softened my bread in milk or water until it was a spongy porridge. As time went on, no one had anything left to sell. We grew what we could, and Athos foraged the sea and the hedges, but it was never enough.
    We survived on the overlooked sea peas and vetches, on hyacinth beans and nasturtium pods. Athos described his plant-hunting to me as he prepared our meals. He tugged out capers growing from cracks in the limestone and pickled them; we were inspired by the sturdy contrariness of the plant, which sprang from the rocks and had a marked preference for volcanic soil. Athos looked up recipes in Theophrastus and Dioscorides; he used Pliny’s Natural History as a cookbook. He unearthed yellow asphodels and we ate “roasted tubers à la Pliny.” He boiled asphodel stems, seeds, and roots to remove the bitterness and mixed the smashed concoction with a potato to make bread. We could even have made a liqueur from the flower, and then after dinner resoled our shoes or bound a book with glue made from the roots. Athos pored over Parkinson’s Theatre of Plants, a useful book that tells you not only what to cook for supper but how to dress your wounds if you have an accident in the kitchen. And, if the meal is a complete disaster, Parkinson even tells you the best recipe for mummification. Athos liked Parkinson’s book because it was originally published in 1640, which, as he explained, was “the year the first cafe opened in Vienna.” Athos took pleasure in rhyming off long Latin names while dishing out a sinister-looking green soup. Just as I lifted the spoon to my lips, he commented slyly that “the soup contains capers, not to be confused with ‘caper spurge,’ which is highly poisonous.” Then he waited for the effect. The spoon hovered outside my mouth while he casually speculated, “Unfortunate errors have, no doubt, occurred.…”

    The Italian soldiers who patrolled Zakynthos had no quarrel with the Jews of the zudeccha—the ghetto. They saw no reason to disturb the three-hundred-year-old community, a peaceful mix of Jews from Constantinople, Izmir, Crete, Corfu, and Italy. On Zakynthos at least, the macaronades seemed