That first sunny day, after the wind drew away the blanket of clouds that clung to the sky—twisting and tangling it with gray air reflecting the sullen sea and listless, dessicated leaves—filled me with the same fear, the same dread, I’d later feel when I thought mother was going to ask me when I was coming to see her. Sunlight fell and glinted like sleet striking glaciers of mirrors.
Even at such a young age, I could see that the sunlight—and the sun itself—weren’t the same ones that lit the previous November like a dream. The previous year’s light had already faded and dissipated into particles of green, yellow and the colors of bricks that disappeared from view any time I tried to explain them. Perhaps I’ve been fortunate for not having any illusions, ever, that I’m an artist of any sort. Some people think that anyone who gets away from this block, or from any of those other places that consume the youth of anybody who’s had to sleep in them, is a survivor. But I digress—I’ve left only because I could run, even if only for a time in my life. Even if I weren’t going through the transition I’ll soon culminate, I’d never be able to run that fast, for that long, again. Age has something to do with it, and so do the hormones. But I think—hope—the real reason is that I won’t have to run like that again.
But on that day I was describing, there was only raw, naked sunlight—not sunshine. And the cold. Sometimes, when I was a kid, I couldn’t believe the barren trees couldn’t feel it. Perhaps everyone’s born into it; that’s why mothers swaddle their babies everywhere in the world, even in climates that resemble the womb. I don’t know whether I was born into that light—I suspect I was. I know for a fact –at least from the most reliable sources I know—that two of my cousins (the ones I know about, anyway) were born in different years but in the same final autumnal shroud just before it was torn away by glinting, glittering cold.
One came just before graying November—the last man related to me, as far as I know. The other I’ve never met: He died on some nameless hill fighting in a country nobody on this block ever thinks about. (At least the women don’t, anyway.) When he was born, somebody—my grandmother, the doctor and my great-aunt say it was one of the others—declared him “not long for this world.” Which was strange because he wasn’t sickly: In fact, he was a larger and hungrier baby than any other born to this block—or so I’ve heard. I’ve also heard that his father—I never met him, either—said that on that day, he knew it was going to be a long, cold winter and there wasn’t a thing anybody could do about it.
From that year, when I first understood the middle of November (Now I know what Gertrude Stein meant when she said T.S. Eliot “looked like the fifteenth of November.”) I stopped remembering my dreams, except on very rare occasions. I also realized, then, that from that time of year until the spring I wouldn’t see Adam sitting on his stoop again. No one seemed to know what he did. Apparently, he stayed in the house, but nobody knew whether he slept, read books, drank or did some combination of those and other things. Whatever he did, it was hard to blame him: If this sun was too bright for my eyes, I couldn’t imagine how it affected him.
It’s hard to see how he couldn’t’ve been born at this time of year, into gray chill followed by blindingly clear cold. I’d’ve come to such a conclusion even if I hadn’t known his birthdate: what people in America call Veteran’s Day; what others call Armistice Day. On this block, it was probably just another day, just like any other—that’s how it was every year I can remember.
And the day he escaped from the concentration camp: As best he could tell, it was his 24th birthday. In those shadowy windowless chambers he’d lost track of day and night. It was only much later, when he tried to retrace the march of his days, that he concluded it must’ve been his anniversary, as he called it, or close to it.
He ran, across a frozen river, under the moon. It was the moon; he never mentioned “moon light.” The cold, and the moon—and the wind: They were his only guides as he ran in what he believed to be a direction away from the camp, away from the German Army. After hours—or so they seemed—a truck pulled up alongside him. “Get in!” The voice was in English.
He jumped onto the hay-bale and wheels lurched and rocked him along a road. The same voice later yelled, “Get out!” and soon after he did, the truck disappeared.
Fighting his own reluctance, he walked across a field of frost crystals to a half-timbered house. Inside, about fifteen men in different uniforms clustered around a fire. He didn’t follow the chatter, not only because he couldn’t understand whatever language(s) they spoke: their gathering had the quality of furtive cameraderie forged among people stranded in the same place by different circumstances.
He thought about jumping through the window, back out into the cold. But then he realized that at least two of the men were Americans and that two others, whatever they were, sided with la Resistance. But the realization that he could stay, at least for a while, frightened him almost as much as the thought that those same men could’ve been spies-in-waiting.
Poets love autumn in places like the mountains that surrounded that house. That season fits, almost perfectly, the definition of “melancholy”: a beautiful, gentle—or at least not violent—sadness. But the last flowers lose their grasp on the hillside; the silver air turns gray and the brutal, endless winter begins.
When the absence of the sun’s warmth accompanies an abundance of its light, colors disappear. Or at least one stops seeing them: they, without the filter of haze, seem to disappear; so do the sweet fruits and richly bitter vegetables. For months, he said, they lived on small animals they shot from the windows and dark, coarse peasant bread.
When he’d gotten to that house, he’d had no clothes but the prison uniform he’d worn since the day he escaped. The soldiers gave him cammoflage shirts, wool parachuter’s pants, socks—whatever they could drag up. They were all thicker and heavier than the striped shirt and pants from the camp, but he still felt cold, no matter how long he sat by the fire. Nobody pushed him aside, but he knew that sometimes he had to give the soldiers his space—by agreement, that’s what it was—because only half of them could sit by it at any given time.
It amazed me—but not him—that nobody came looking for him. In fact, no battalions, not even any individual soldiers, marched through that village for almost five months.
But the river he crossed melted; buds opened blood-red and the air filled with haze. Eventually, there were berries and other fruits, but neither he nor the other men could stay and eat them.
