by Tamar Hodes
They sat together on the terrace, the five of them, all conscious of how strange it was, not only the fact that they were leaving but the way they were united, playing at families, thought Shane, pretending as children do with plastic teacups and empty plates.
As they sat in their uncomfortable circle, like schoolchildren forced to work in a group with those they did not know or like, George made some attempt at unifying comments.
‘Jeez, this time has flown by, hasn’t it?’ and, ‘Well, as our Greek adventure nears its end…’ but no-one responded.
Shane thought of her last love-making with Baptiste as he leant his weight carefully upon her on the narcissi mattress in their favourite wood. She wondered whether there were any other men who could make her feel that way or did everyone have only one soulmate in the world and she had just lost hers?
Charmian was thinking of Nature Boy, his hands caked in pigeon flesh and the way he ripped their clothes off, and then she smiled at the contrast with dear, genteel Tony, and his paint-stained, careful hands.
Martin remembered the words that Leonard had spoken to him: carry on writing; don’t be afraid of the dark; all writers are outsiders. He would never forget the wisdom and the kindness and it helped to make him feel stronger as a man and a writer.
George was thinking about the character of Cressida in his novel. How close could he make her to Charmian without annoying his wife? The infidelity; the pretence about her perfect childhood when it was so clearly a long way from that; the way she had of floating above the world, always out of reach – he had to include them. Those images were too good to waste.
Jason, the only one in the family who had never been to Australia, was thinking about the book his parents had given him about the wildlife there. He wondered if he would ever get to see a koala or a kangaroo, and whether the kids in school would laugh at his Greek accent.
And Sevasty thought, God protect that family: I fear for them.
Down at the harbour, once again, they gathered, the friends: Olivia and her family; Norman looking like he hadn’t eaten for a week; Gordon and Chuck harmonious as usual (did they ever fight? wondered Charmian), John Dragoumis; Marianne, and Leonard carrying Axel Joachim. This time Nick and Anthony Katsikas were there too, as well as Polixenes and The Gardenia Dwarf, looking exactly as she had done a year before: dressed in black, a fresh bloom tucked behind her ear. It occurred to Charmian that, whereas their lives had changed beyond measure, the locals seemed more or less to be the same. The smiling Benedictus family was there too, as was Baptiste, and wiping the tears from her eyes, Sevasty.
‘Remember,’ Leonard whispered to Martin, ‘you can always send me your work. Don’t stop writing,’ and the boy looked pleased that those were the last words spoken to him on that complex piece of earth.
There were hugs and farewells, and the family of five climbed into the larger boat that Alexis had arranged for today. The last image the bystanders had of the family was George raising his hand and waving; Jason smiling beatifically; Martin looking down shyly; Charmian’s wide-brimmed hat, defined against the sky; and the ring on Shane’s finger, catching the light, until the boat vanished into the distance and no-one could distinguish between the flashing of the lapis lazuli and the surface of the sea.
The only remnant of them was the sound of George’s coughing and even that eventually faded.
xxxx
So Leonard left his home just as it was, a shrine to their love. Yes, he packed some clothes and books and had his green typewriter shipped to the States, but as he owned the house, he thought he may well return. Marianne had packed up everything she and Axel Joachim owned and would have it all shipped to Norway. For the journey, she had little with her: a rucksack with some clothes for them both, Momo’s white shells and a few of the gifts from Leonard – the tortoiseshell comb, the silver mirror, the tiny scissors that opened like a bird’s beak, the cheque on which he had written that he paid Marianne his heart.
Tenants now lived in Marianne and Axel’s old house and she couldn’t even think about selling it. The last letter she had had from Axel told her that Lena was expecting their ‘first child’. She had been tempted to write back: no, Axel, it is not your first child, you already have one, but she stopped herself. It would only invoke a vitriolic response and that was the last thing she wanted at this difficult time.
Magda had taken Axel Joachim for the morning and would meet them at the harbour at two.
‘You were a good friend to me when I needed you,’ Magda said, when Marianne protested. ‘Please let me do something in return.’
Marianne and Leonard made love for the last time that late spring morning, the shutters open to the day and the light spiralling in. Each kiss, each touch carried with it an added poignancy. They treated each other gently, feeling the naked body, lips and tongue of the other as if committing that sensation to memory, knowing they would never have it again. Caressing her breasts, feeling her satin skin, was almost more than Leonard could endure. They took their time, affording themselves this luxury. They cried and kissed again, the salt tears dripping into each other’s mouths.
‘You have given me so much,’ he told her quietly, as they lay there, still, not wanting the experience to end. ‘At first, I admired you for your beauty. When I saw you that first day at the store, among the sacks of flour and grain, I thought how can a goddess walk among the ordinary? But then it became something else. I saw the way you looked at the moon. I watched you honour the spring flowers. I observed you dancing at night on the small, wet pebbles and that is what you have given me, Marianne. You opened up love for me to dream of.’
‘When I met you,’ she spoke through her tears falling on her lips, ‘I was so unhappy with Axel. I did not think that anyone could love me or value me as you have done, that anyone would see me as special. I thought perhaps that my time of love was over and that I was worthless.’
‘That could never be true. I have loved you and I have loved your child. When I close my eyes, I see you at a table, your son at the other side, and I am carrying flowers, wet with dew, and I want you to open yourself to me as I have entered the cave of your soul.’
‘I am frightened of the future, Leonard, a future without you. I do not want to live a life that does not contain you.’
‘I have promised that I will provide for you and Axel Joachim when you are back in Oslo and for ever. If you need anything at any time, I will send it.’
‘You are kind, Leonard, but I do not only need money. What I want from you cannot be posted or transferred to a post office account. I will miss you: your words, your skin, the darkness of your hair, the way you sing to me in your deep voice with the guitar purring beneath you. But I know that I cannot be with you, seeing you with other women throwing themselves at your feet and me, the little wife, carrying my child and wishing you would turn to us.’
‘That is your decision, Marianne. You know that I will carry you in my heart for ever.’
She slipped on her lemon cotton dress and sat in a chair on the terrace. Honeysuckle and jasmine twisted around the railings, releasing their sweetness into the fresh air. Leonard sat opposite and sketched her. He drew her in pencil to begin with – her short hair, her smooth, open face, her delicate nose, her soft neck. Then, with a yellow pastel, he shaded in her dress, blending it with white for her hair so that it looked bleached by the sun.
‘Your mother must be pleased that you are going to live with her again.’
‘Yes, she is, but I do not know if we will stay in Oslo. Maybe I will take Axel Joachim to Larkollen to Momo’s house so that he can gather shells and watch the water and experience what I did as a child.’
‘We have to be wary of returning, of expecting something to be the same as it was. We have to have new encounters, not try to replicate the old.’
‘I understand what you mean, Leonard. But maybe I can find the good parts of my childhood and open them up for Axel Joachim?’
‘Maybe, but he w
ill respond to life as who he is and with what he has. He cannot relive it through you.’
‘Yes, I see. Maybe I was hoping that my childhood could be improved if he finds it again, that I could be healed through him.’
Leonard did not answer; he had led Marianne to her own revelation.
‘I will let him live as he is.’
Beneath the dress, Leonard could see the curve of her breasts as if he could see through the material. He wished that he could slip the dress over her head and make love to her again and again, every day for the rest of his life, without end.
‘Are you going to visit Masha again?’
‘Yes, I will. She is very lonely.’
‘So maybe we are all returning home to our mothers, in one way or another.’
‘It could be.’ He was drawing her slender legs now and her bare feet, the toes perfect, her shins smooth.
‘Were we wrong, Leonard, to try to escape, to search for something else?’
‘No, I don’t think so.’ He drew the mountains behind her, roughly colouring them in purple and grey. ‘We have drunk the wine in the sunlight and the barrel is now empty.’
For the sky he shaded it blue with white and rubbed some ochre in.
He propped the drawing on a chair while they ate their lunch so that he had two versions of Marianne beside him. Kyria Sophia brought them their last meal: baked artichokes, which opened themselves out like waterlilies on a pond of rice, followed by kouneli stifatho, and a courgette-ribbon salad. Too full of food and emotion for dessert, they drank coffee from Leonard’s tiny ceramic cups. Marianne rubbed her finger over the rim of a saucer and thought: I will miss every detail of Leonard and his life. Now I am touching everything for the last time.
‘You know that we will meet again,’ he said as if reading her thoughts. ‘This is not the end. It is the start.’
‘It is the end of our love affair on Hydra,’ she whispered.
‘I do not recognise this notion of beginning and ending, Marianne. Did our love start on the day we met and end on the day we leave Hydra? No. You cannot say when it began; you cannot say where it will end. My love for you is beyond all conventional ideas of time. It exists and always will.’
Walking down hand in hand to the harbour, they saw how the island had rid itself of any hint of winter as if it refused ever to have another. The earth was clean and fresh, the air dotted with almond blossom and the sky stretched wide and open – a perfect day for a wedding. Marianne thought of the pop-up books that children read, where you open the covers and allow the world to emerge.
Down on the quayside the ever-small expat community gathered for the last time: Norman, John, Gordon and Chuck, Anthony, Olivia and family, Kyria Sophia dabbing her eyes with a tissue; and then Magda arrived with the two little boys, each glumly holding one of her hands, and Theodore shyly behind her, lacking the history and the bond that the others had. A group of Leonard’s fans stood a way off, taking photos.
‘Mama! Cone,’ called Axel Joachim when he saw them.
Marianne picked him up and kissed him. Leonard ruffled his soft hair.
The friends hugged and there were tears, especially between Marianne and Magda. ‘I will never forget your kindness,’ said Magda. ‘When you visited me in prison, wrote to me, you gave me hope. You have a good heart,’ and she slipped an amber necklace around Marianne’s neck.
‘Thank you, Magda. I shall treasure this as I shall always treasure our warm friendship and the way we have sustained each other.’ They embraced and sobbed. ‘I will write to you.’
Marianne and Axel Joachim were helped into Alexis’ boat and Leonard, his guitar strapped around him, stepped into another. When he looked up, he recognised the face of the boatman, although more gaunt and yet redder than when last he saw it.
‘Mikalis!’ he said with glee. ‘How lovely to see you again.’
Mikalis nodded as if to say yes, I am on the boat again, but I am not healed.
Marianne and Axel Joachim looked over expectantly to Leonard’s boat. He had promised a surprise.
The two boats began side by side, their curved wood touching, and then they moved apart, arching away. Leonard took his guitar and began to sing to Marianne. She listened, tears running down her face.
And Leonard sang his new song, So Long Marianne, to her.
She heard his beautiful, velvet voice move further away from her as the boats carved the water on their different journeys. Marianne saw Hydra and its red-rooved houses slip slowly away. She saw the single-belled chapel on the hill, and the monasteries shrink into the distance, as if they had never existed; it had all been a dream.
Holding Axel Joachim tightly she wondered what lay ahead for them, whether the future would be a disappointment after Hydra, whether she would ever have the capacity to love anyone the way she had loved Leonard.
Marianne listened to his words disappearing into the horizon and when she looked up, he was gone.
She gazed down at the sea, and she saw that it was dark, almost black, but when she peered more closely at the water, she could just detect a slight hint of blue, as if a painter had taken a thin brush and skimmed the surface, very gently, with light.
Subsequently…
Every limit is a beginning as well as an ending. Who can quit young lives after being long in company with them, and not desire to know what befell them in their after-years?
George Eliot, Middlemarch
Leonard Cohen had an international career as a musician, singer and composer. He lived in the US, had two children, Adam and Lorca, three grandchildren, and kept in touch with Axel Joachim. He died in November 2016, four months after Marianne.
Marianne Jenson moved back to Oslo (although she kept her grandmother’s house in Larkollen) and in 1979 married Jan Stang. He had three daughters from an earlier marriage. She was involved in Buddhism and painting, although she worked in the oil industry. She died in July 2016 and Leonard Cohen wrote a letter which was read to her before she passed away, saying that he was not far behind her.
Axel Jensen had two daughters with Lena but after they separated he married Pratibha in India. For the last ten years of his life, he had a debilitating illness, and friends, including Leonard Cohen, helped to pay his medical bills. He died in 2003.
Axel Joachim Jensen had an unsettled life, fulfilling his mother’s worries about him. He went for a while to Summerhill, the progressive school, which he did not like. He was close to both Leonard Cohen and his mother’s second husband.
George Johnston and Charmian Clift moved back to Sydney where they continued to write, but their drinking and smoking took their toll. Charmian took her own life in 1969, aged 45, on the eve of the publication of her husband’s novel Clean Straw for Nothing, and George died of tuberculosis in 1970, aged 58. Shane Johnston committed suicide in 1974 aged 26; Martin, accomplished as a poet and writer but an alcoholic, died in 1990, aged 42. Gae Johnston, from George’s first marriage to Elsie, died of a drugs overdose in 1988, aged 47.
Norman Peterson moved to the US, continued to work as an artist but eventually committed suicide under Brooklyn Bridge.
Magda Tilche married the sailor Theodore and they ended up happily married. She died in the old age home on Hydra in 2005.
James Burke had a worldwide career as a photographer, but he was killed in an accident in the Himalayas aged 49. He lost his footing on the mountain and fell 800 feet.
Anthony Kingsmill continued to paint, wrote a book about his time in Hydra, The Rings of Moss, and died in 1993.
Gordon Merrick carried on writing novels, mainly on gay themes. He and his partner Charles ‘Chuck’ Hulse (a dancer turned novelist) left Hydra and stayed together for 32 years until Merrick’s death in 1988.
Olivia de Haulleville lives in the Southern Californian desert and has written books about Buddhism. Her son, Michael, is a Tibetan monk.
Sources of Quotations
Chapter v
‘And now our feet…’ Psalm 122
‘The privilege…’ Carl Jung
‘The mountains…’ Psalm 114
‘Had I the heavens…’ W. B. Yeats. ‘He wishes for the cloths of heavens’ [also appears in Chapter xxi]
‘Set me as a seal…’ The Song of Solomon, Chapter 8
Chapter vii
‘Through the laurel branches…’ Federico García Lorca, ‘Of the Dark Doves’
‘Our words must seem…’ W. B Yeats
Chapter xix
‘On this, pale fear…’ Homer, The Odyssey, book 24
Chapter xx
‘Lay your sleeping head…’ W. H. Auden, ‘Lullaby’
Chapter xxviii
‘Morning sounds…’ Charmian Clift, Peel Me a Lotus
Chapter xxxvii
‘Blessed art thou…’ The Haggadah
Acknowledgements
I have found the following sources helpful:
Max Brown, Charmian and George: The Marriage of George Johnston and Charmian Clift (Rosenberg, 2004)
James Burke, photoshoot in Life magazine (1960)
Charmian Clift, Peel Me a Lotus (Hutchinson, 1959)
Leonard Cohen, The Favourite Game (Secker and Warburg, 1963) Leonard Cohen, Flowers for Hitler (McClelland and Stewart, 1964)
David Conley, ‘The magic of journalism in George Johnston’s fiction’ in Australian Studies in Journalism (2001–2)
Paul Daley ‘My Brother Jack at 50 – the novel of a man whose whole life led up to it’ in The Guardian, 23rd December 2014
Kari Hesthamar, transcript of the Interview with Leonard Cohen, Los Angeles, 2005 for Norwegian radio
Kari Hesthamar, So Long Marianne: A Love Story, translated by Helle V. Goldman (E.C.W. Press, 2014)
Aubrey Hodes, Dialogue with Ishmael (Funk and Wagnalls, 1968)
Aubrey Hodes, Encounter with Martin Buber (Penguin, 1971)
