Algren at Sea

by Nelson Algren

  She told me these people had been far ahead of the Greeks, and I told her I never knew anybody who was far ahead of a Greek unless it was an Armenian, but the joke had gone to pieces too.

  Anyhow, the Cretans used to give bright Greek boys and girls fellowships to come to study here and, on the other hand, the Cretans had learned a lot from the Egyptians, so in what the Greeks later picked up from Crete there was a lot of Egypt.

  Nobody knows anything about the Cretans except that they had things their own way around the Mediterranean for some time and were remarkable athletes.

  The particular fresco revealing this shows an acrobat somersaulting over a bull’s back. That any human could have grasped a bull by the horns and somersaulted over its back is for somebody else to believe.

  We had lunch on a restaurant overlooking the plain where the palace of Phaestos once stood. Behind it rose the mountain where Zeus was born. Above us someone had put two stupid canaries in a glass cage.

  Not that canaries are ever particularly bright—but these two were the pit. The cage had been fitted with an electric bulb, and every time the waiter switched it on, this pair would start to chirp because the sun was coming up. That’s what I call stupid.

  The waiter had a different attitude.

  “Greek television,” he explained, and walked off.

  Later the same waiter put a dish of black olives on the table. They looked sad. An olive that has at least an outside chance of being the beginning of a Martini is an olive that has hope. But, even as olives, this plateful were plainly second-class citizens. The waiter helped himself to one.

  “Greek mutton chop,” he explained, popped it into his mouth and walked away again.

  “They know how to laugh without laughing,” Milly had to point out.

  “That’s because they belong to us now,” I assured Milly.

  And wondered, looking out at the sun slanting across the ruins of the palace of Phaestos above the plain of Messara, whether the Phaecians, in their time, had been a people who knew how to laugh without laughing. From what the poet of another people wrote of them it would seem so:“But the things in which we take perennial delight are the feast, the lyre, the dance, clean linen in plenty, a hot bath and our beds. So forward now, my champion dancers, and show us your steps, so that when he gets home our guest may be able to tell his friends how far we leave all other folk behind in seamanship, in speed of foot, in dancing and in song.”

  Then we rode back to old Herakleion where sellers of sponges walk the parks.

  I bought Milly a sponge as a token of my esteem. And her confusion.

  King Minos of Crete lived in Egyptian luxury among gardens perfumed by the jasmine flower. His merchant marine kept his seas in hand while the Greeks were barely making it on dry land. The Greeks couldn’t resist feeling sorry for themselves, a tradition maintained to the present day.

  Paul of Ephesus got around to telling the Cretans off—The Cretans, ever cheats, brute beasts and idle windbags—a bad rap he had picked up from one of the Cretan’s own philosophers.

  As the Greeks saw it, the reason King Minos had it so good was that Zeus had been born there and apparently hadn’t yet left. The Greeks not only had no gods, but didn’t even have a boat in which to row to Crete and steal the plans for one.

  Eventually a Greek infiltrated King Minos’ shipyard and stole the plans for a ship. As soon as the Greeks had a boat of their own, things began to change. By rowing steadily for six weeks they were able to bring King Minos his annual tribute instead of him having to send somebody to pick it up.

  We know that Athens paid tribute to Minos because the Minoans have left pictures all over Crete showing the Athenians coming to King Minos bearing wooden bracelets they had gilded to resemble gold. It wasn’t too hard to can King Minos in an operation such as this, as he thought wood was a precious metal. He would scrape off the gold, throw it away, and make wooden crowns for himself.

  At this time the Greek C.I.A. reported that Minos was running short of wood, so they decided to bring him down a peg.

  Instead of bringing him the annual tribute, they sent an emissary who said, “Here, King, call this a tribute,” and pitched him a herring.

  Minos, who would eat anything, pushed the whole deal into his face, gills and all, swallowed once and spat out the bones. Some king.

  “Fry me a pan full of tributes,” he commanded his mess sergeant, “but this time leave out the bones.”

  Minos really liked that fish.

  Ever since that day the fishermen of old Herakleion have been going out to sea toward evening and returning just after the break of day with a boatload of herring for the morning market.

  I hung around the dock of the blue Aegean watching the men of the Anna prepare their nets. Every time the Anna went to sea I felt left behind. I would wave them off but nobody would wave back. I got up before day to see the Anna return.

  During the day I watched local boys, stripped to the. waist, fishing for octopus with their hands.

  The first thing you do, when an octopus comes at you, I saw, is to realize he doesn’t see well or he’d go the other way. The surest method of holding him at bay is to beat his brains out.

  Don’t wait till his screams grow faint before throwing him into the pot. Pity has no part in preparing octopus soup. His shrieks of agony as he hits the boiling water add a special poignancy. There’s all kinds of crazy stuff in the ocean.

  If you’re the kind of person who goes for a second helping simply because it tastes as though the brute died bitterly, that’s a lot more than anyone can say for Australian corned mutton, who die like sheep.

  Your best bet when going after devilfish is to hire a boat, as he isn’t likely to knock on your hotel door and turn himself in. By the time you’re so far out to sea that you can’t tell helm from portside, just stand leeside and watch for white water. When that happens you know a devilfish is surfacing. Your job is to leap overboard with a sardine in your teeth. The purpose of this is to get in good with the Captain. If you don’t care what the Captain thinks of you, stay aboard and eat the sardine yourself.

  Always carry a master key while aboard, as European canners of anything don’t put a key on the can. This bemuses the American who keeps turning the can around thinking the key is lost; but it saves a lot of key making.

  On the other hand, the Medusa is a changeable creature, as he looks dirt-brown near bottom but turns a sickly violet as he surfaces. It makes him sick to turn violet and it makes me sick to see him do it. He will never look another medusa in the eye—they’re both afraid somebody is going to get turned to stone. As a matter of fact, medusae are much less enthusiastic about living in the ocean than herring, and are forever trying to get ashore.

  I sat on the prow of a small boat and watched them just below. The water was so clear that I could even see which couples were going steady. There were so many that it looked like they were going on a convention where both parties would be represented. I hope they elected somebody who didn’t take a threat, by some other medusa, to bury every other medusa, as a sign that all loyal medusae should start living underground to save expense on both sides.

  These useless monsters raise pure hell with people who have just put up their life savings to buy a small hotel, and advertised it as having a beach perfect for swimming in hope of accommodating vacationers touring the Aegean. It may also turn out to be perfect swimming for medusae who are touring the Aegean too. All the denials then about medusae haunting your waters won’t bring one screaming American back to your hotel.

  All you see of him at first is one of him—a brownish blob near the bottom that may be anything till you see that it is moving and that there is another brownish blob, and another and another and the whole fool sea is full of the varmints and if the sight of him don’t make you queasy it ought to, as he’ll make you wish you were in a hospital with your back broke.

  The boy medusa hates his mother secretly because she turns such a beautiful
violet when she surfaces, while all the old man does is make a brown blob of himself and won’t get off the bottom. He senses that nobody wants him, not even people, because if he crawls into a net with some herring, people keep the herring and throw him back.

  “People expect so much of me and I have so little to give,” the medusa realizes that he has disappointed everybody. That makes him want to burn people just for the pure meanness of it. So it’s better to fish for sunfish and better for the sunfish too. A sunfish gets ecstatic at the prospect of being caught. The medusa has the stronger mind but the sunfish has all the fun and that’s all there is to it.

  I found a Cretan fisherman who understood English, as he studies it two evenings a week in Herakleion. His name is Ionnis Romanos, and he looked uneasy when I offered to pay for a night’s passage on the Anna.

  “We are poor men, we do not take money,” was his answer. Meaning these men earn their few piastres as fishermen, not as guides. Could I bring a few bottles of wine aboard, then? No, when Greek fishermen go to work they go to work, not to drink. The prospect of facing the Aegean with nothing to drink was frightening, but I decided I’d live till morning.

  We left Herakleion aboard the smack Anna, towing half a dozen lighters in our wake, on the afternoon of August 6th. Outside the fact that the men didn’t have to row it, and it had a single light bulb strung onto the mast, it was essentially the same craft as that in which the Minoan fishermen went to sea six thousand years ago.

  Although they have held their own with King Minos in methods of catching herring, they have gained not at all in the comfort department. Men of Herakleion put out to sea barefoot, without life preservers, to risk their lives for the sake of a few boxes of fish; yet they make light of their very hard lot.

  “Biggest net in Herakleion,” Romanos boasted of the Anna’s net.

  And as their lives are balanced to the rocky soil of Crete, so is the Anna balanced to their sea. The Anna that looked stodgy in dock, turned into a spare, ascetic creature when the waters moved about her. Yielding as deceptively to the sea as a wrestler who gives ground, hoarding her strength secretly against an infinitely more powerful opponent, she awaited the moment that the opponent would let his strength lapse, then would right her self lightly.

  All that afternoon, through an amber mist, the sea tried the Anna with wave upon wave. Sometimes it tossed the light green waves lightly as if in contempt; then threw a darker sea against her like a threat. It grew seductive, sucking us into deeper waters. So far out that the rim of the mountains behind Herakleion was lost, the huge mute waters took a firmer hold, pressing the Anna from stem to stern.

  The Anna would yield, push on in a lifting movement, then slide down-wave with a few yards gained.

  Romanos was feeding the depth line off a rude spool to a fisherman who passed it overboard as it was fed. Neither man wore gloves.

  “It do cold,” Romanos said.

  The line sank fast, and the sea held still as though watching like an aging animal that has seen the same thing done time out of memory, and yet cannot understand.

  And the moon of King Minos rose seven-eighths full. Four hours out of the Port of Herakleion.

  “We find out how deep same way King Minos do,” Romanos laughed at himself while half-blaming old Minos—“Ah, it do do cold.”

  “We do like King Minos do,” he repeated, fearing I had not understood.

  “Then you haven’t lost any ground,” I encouraged everybody.

  The bulb between the masts blinked out as the moon’s full light came on. Now the waters were strangely renewed. Now they came like hunting-waves, unafraid. Now was the hour when all things, sea and cloud-wrack and moon, are against men. Now was the hour when sleep is man’s hiding-cave.

  I heard the silver-lit sea seeking, I heard it moving all about. How old, I thought, how very old, is the ceaselessly-seeking sea. And fell asleep to its seeking.

  When I wakened, the men in the lighters encircling the Anna were calling over the water and the men of the Anna were hauling the net. They were closing in on the herring as farmers do on rabbits in a field, by starting on the circumference of the net—“the biggest net in Herakleion”—and gradually cutting the field down.

  By the time the net came in it was filled with leaping herring and a fewer larger fish. Including a squid who didn’t like me any more than I liked him.

  The herring were boxed for market aboard ship. We started back, through the first break of dawn, for Herakleion. Now it was the sea’s turn to sleep; the hour when men are the victors.

  Romanos insisted on depriving himself, by sharing his morning meal with me, that I could have foregone as easily as I could have given up eating cat on a rainy night. His breakfast consisted of cold okra in oil, and black olives and Spam canned in France. This particular delicacy never had an appeal for me before World War II, and my experience with it in that interval left me with greater revulsion than I ever felt toward land mines. I had to share it or hurt his feelings; so I shared it, as well as the cold okra.

  Greek coffee is the best in the world, but there was no Greek coffee. There was no coffee, period. But Romanos broke a loaf of bread with his hands, handed me half, and apologized—“Greek bread knife.”

  When he whistled to a man on the other end of the boat, he added, “Greek telephone.”

  I don’t know what would happen to Ionnis’ mind if he ever sat down to bifteck poivre and a bottle of Beaujolais. It would snap, that’s all.

  A dusty South Italian light was beginning to fall aslant the walls of the Venetian fortress that guards old Herakleion. Behind us the sun came up Egyptian gold.

  Romanos strung a dozen herring together and tied on the squid who didn’t care for me. It was money out of the pockets of the men, yet nobody grumbled. It was a gift. I took it.

  “Send me postcard, Eiffel Tower,” Ionnis Romanos asked me. Behind the desk at the hotel the clerk was still sleeping. I tied the line of fish to his chair and laid the squid on his desk.

  Maybe it would like the clerk better than me was my thinking.

  ISTANBUL

  WHEN A MUSLIM MAKES HIS VIOLIN CRY, HEAD FOR THE DOOR

  The singular plan the management of the Conrad-Istangump had devised for non-Muslims consisted of placing a non-Muslim sporting a bow tie, namely myself, upon a veranda overlooking the Sea of Marmara. Here I was forced to strain my eyes to make out the small print of my guidebook because the batteries of the tie had gone dead that same morning.

  Encyclopedic Istanbul, Including a Dictionary of Prominent Persons was by one Monim Eser, and one was enough.

  “Turks are members of the White Race,” Monim lost no time in cheering me up, for that’s how I got my own start and I’m not going to turn on society now by asking Under What Circumstances Did You Leave Your Last Employer, Kemal? If someone wants to wait till the last possible minute to join a losing organization, that’s nobody’s business but some other Turk’s. The moment for a fresh extension of the White Western world had come and, speaking personally, I was pleased to look upon these simple folk with new eyes; this being the color that bears closest watching.

  Whether my waiter or the Sea of Marmara would be the first to make a funny move was 6-5, and take your pick. Sure enough, it turned out to be our new member. He put something down on me that tasted like a cross between English grog and the hair of a hyena that has been out all night. One glance at the sneak who’d served me this deathly potion and my worst suspicions about hyenas were confirmed. They’ll date anybody.

  He stopped beaming idiotically long enough to make a circular movement with his dial finger while inquiring, “You wish to do shoppings?”

  For reply I pitched the contents of his hyenafied grog over the veranda rail—not so much out of disgust with the stuff as in hope of hitting somebody below.

  Should my mood appear foul, bear in mind that it was one imposed upon me, like all that sea water, by a management that had promptly disclaimed its responsibility.


  And also considering that the most cheerful note of my childhood was my father’s Saturday-night pealing of my mood was about as light as anyone has a right to expect.

  O sweet Dardanella

  I love your hair ’n’ eyes

  Pa’s lifelong confusion about Turkish women was only an extension of his confusion about all women. When Black Oak, Indiana, lost him to Chicago in 1893, my own difficulties began. He came to see the World’s Columbian Exposition, but all he recalled of it later was Little Egypt. His reminiscing eventually led me to haunt the burlesque houses of South State Street in search of some Little Egypt of my own.

  The closest I came was my discovery, in 1929, of Miss June St. Clair. Had it not been for her I might well have completed a four-year high-school course in four and a half years. Because of Miss St. Clair, it took me only five.

  So in expecting someone either to take me off the veranda or to remove the Sea of Marmara, I was hardly asking more than I richly deserved.

  I resolved, nonetheless, that any personal disappointment I felt in the Near East would not be taken out upon this innocent countryman unless an opportunity presented itself.

  “Turks are fine-looking people, something like North Italians of medium size,” Monim filled me in, “with light-blond or dark-colored hair and brown to dark-colored eyes, many having green and blue eyes and small feet.” I glanced at my waiter’s shoes and saw he had been obtained in a cultural exchange with the Harlem Globetrotters. Who they’d be playing in Turkey is an issue that still gives me wakeful nights.

  “U.S. tourists know to tip,” Monim had to concede, “but for their information there is no limit to generosity. Tip an additional 5 to 10 per cent at restaurants, bellboy, maid, porter and suitable sum to doorman and elevator but never involve friendship with sightseeing.”

  Not only have I never been involved in friendly fashion with a sightseer but I haven’t yet tipped a waiter and don’t plan to begin. Not after once having suffered entrapment at the hands of one in The Oak Room. Had he cleared that table instead of nattering away with the chef, the half-dollar under the saucer would never have come to the attention of my hand just as the sneak padfooted up.