by Gregory Day
*
Once again Brian did his money in the WT Jaynes Handicap, and once again, having still abstained from making a tip, I looked like a know-all. But, of course, I knew nothing of what mattered to me, and given the third race was coming up, the maiden trot, I was beginning to amass dark clouds inside. Out of pure frustration, I blatantly declared my hand for the trot, stating firmly that Bonny Cologne, who had missed out on the gallop, would square the ledger. No risk, I told them, out of the sheer depressed sense of love having no future.
Truth was, I didn’t give a fig who won, and was starting to care even less about the kind Robinsons’ money. The fact that I’d turned about in my assessment of Bonny Cologne interested Brian, who said that he’d known it to happen before, a fancied galloper turning out better on the trot, like a footballer who arrives with big wraps as a full forward and ends up club champion as the very opposite in craft and mentality, a full back. So, strangely enough, my tip had an air about it of the unforeseen and the ‘just maybe’, which can of course be deadly. And thus it was that, by the time I was descending the hill again to find my way through the strains of ‘Wild Colonial Boy’, the Robinsons and I were finally in concert and I had pledged a whole pound of my own to sit on top of theirs on Bonny Cologne and, as I found out when I stepped up to Dawson, at better odds than in the gallop.
It was as I stepped away from Dawson with the single betting ticket in my hand that I saw her. Or, rightly put, I saw her Uncle True, obscuring his niece with a ragged brown suit, a trilby perched like a tern on his head, a smoke hanging like a stalk of grass from his lips, a shadowy bottle of Boag’s in his hand, until suddenly she sidled round him. At the sight of her, rather than feeling finally pleased or even relieved, I quaked, not with romance but with the instantaneous worry of what she would make of me, as I was suddenly thrust from that race day slope back into my shame and the terrible consequences that had finally occurred on the high terrace of Agio Dormiton. All of which she now knew about from the last package I’d sent.
XXVI
As the winter passed its difficult peak and the year of ’41 was left behind for ’42 it was clear to me that I couldn’t stay at Agio Dormiton forever. Andreas had pickled and salted and dried his foods over the warmer months but, even so, I noticed our meals growing smaller at night: fewer seeds and grains, one marrow instead of two, less bread, even the olives were less plentiful as he rationed them to carry us over into spring. I began to feel like a burden to the monk, who, despite the ferociously cold winter, maintained his consistent routines of early rising, praying, cooking, cleaning, bell ringing, and talking with me. We had spoken of so much since I’d arrived, his company was both a university, a seminary, and a kind of nuthouse for me, and I began to wonder how he was benefitting from it at all. Would he have preferred complete solitude, to be alone with his labyrinth, even in the eye of winter, I wondered. Perhaps, but I knew it was somehow irrational to journey on in this weather, and anyway, where would I go and what would I do? There seemed not one path open to me that I could take, except of course to stay hidden. And so I resigned myself to stick it out and eat less until the time, or a new resolution, came.
It was not long after this that I began to feel as if I existed truly for nothing in this life. The kind of feeling for which the Australian lingo, as it’s spoken every day, has no expression. There was nothing humorous about it, nothing jaunty or dry. I could not be a soldier, I was not a monk, I was in a foreign land, and a foreign land under siege, with a man whose intensity was as trying to me as no doubt my presence in his monastery was at times to him. It was winter, I could not be useful, the only book I had was a Zane Grey western that took no exhausting whatsoever, my feet were healed, I was physically fit but felt like a ghost of the former man I was. Gradually too, even my dreams of Vern began to fade, or should I say, to be replaced by dreams of a composite of Pendlebury and Vern, a kind of Oxbridge savant with an Australian accent, who would ride the dormant volcanoes of Corangamite in search of Minoan shards. This figure was like a brilliant shimmer on the edge of the lakes, part Arthurian, part boundary rider, and I would be sent out to fetch him back for the old man but never get close. Pendlebury/Vern would gallop away from me in full declamation, thundering down the steep green craters of my childhood and up again to the treeless rims on the other side. I would cooee across the chasms but to no avail, my voice swept aside by the lake winds, just as I felt my identity was being erased by the cruel elements of my war.
Andreas had never shown me through the other rooms of Agio Dormiton, the warren of corridors and cells he would emerge from into the kitchen each lunchtime, nor the clerestoried rooms on the three terraces above the cell where I slept. But one morning, waking to that lost feeling of chagrin and uselessness that held me increasingly in its grip, I found myself stepping up to the terrace garden on the kitchen rooftop and then further beyond, up the next flight of stairs.
I came to a stone terrace on that next level, rectangular and loosely paved, with a small white room at its southern end and a small bare winter tree by the wall on the other. Under the tree was a stone bench and a mossy-looking birdbath, the kind you’d see in the gardens of the bigger western district piles back near home. Beside the birdbath was a neat pile of leaves.
I imagined monks sitting here in less conflicted times, Kiefer and Dimitrios perhaps, or any number of monks going all the way back to Byzantine days, resting or praying, enjoying the views over the wall to the mountains after an hour in the garden. Peace had reigned here once but now it seemed a peace abandoned. And it was me on that second terrace, not a monk. I had done no gardening, no praying. I was a worn-back soldier and yet I’d not even done any fighting for the last few months. I felt as if this tranquil and level terrace should rise up in disgust at my presence, rather than remaining flat and cold and calm.
I walked across the paving to where the low room stood alone at the southern end and peered inside through a small window by a heavy black door. What light there was in the cold February air had found its way through the higher windows and was switching on and off as clouds sailed past the sun. There was a low divan I could see, like in my room, but also a bookcase and a chair. I turned the door handle and went inside.
The room smelt ever so mildly of paint, and also stale cigarette smoke. I stood in the doorway then walked over and sat on the edge of the chair. I inspected the books on the low shelves – all the titles in Greek of course, and illegible to me, except for two books on the bottom shelf in German, which, although I did not speak or read, was almost as familiar to my eyes as the Greek, it being the language of the occupation. I presumed from those two German books that this room had once been the monk Kiefer’s.
It occurred to me that perhaps a change of rooms might pep me up and I wondered if Andreas would allow it. Well, I couldn’t see why not, Kiefer would not be returning any time soon, or if he did it would not be in the name of peaceful devotion to the virgin.
Rising from the chair by the bookshelf, I walked over the cold white floor to test the monk’s bed. Lying back, I found it softer than the one in my own room, softer and lumpier too, like a mattress from home.
I sank into it and closed my eyes. Saw immediately a pattern of Messerschmitts. The black and white swastikas.
Opening my eyes again, cotton-wool clouds were moving through the clerestory window under the ceiling. I watched as the clouds were severed at each joist and frame. The weather’s procession sectioned up like the companies of a battalion.
Before long heavier cloud moved in, the sky became a deep and uniform grey as the morning darkened. I began to feel unwell again. Horribly alone. There was only a thin embroidered cover on the divan but I got in under it. Before long, my head began to spin, my body began to shake, as the rain began to fall outside.
When Andreas found me in the late afternoon I was still in the grip of it. Still with eyes shut and curled like a slater into a black bal
l under the blue embroidered cover. On the shore of things I was distracted by a flicker of phosphor. An unbunching ligament of light which moved towards a glowing hare until it ran up under my eyelids and out of view.
And then he was holding my hand and talking, in a deep husky baritone. I was being towed back in.
*
The monk pulls the chair up beside the bed. I feel his touch. He is holding my hand. Squeezing it from time to time. My eyes see but in reality I am still a long way out.
He brings a glass of water to my lips. I drink by rote. I speak too, though not normally: one weird phrase, which seems to use my tongue for its own purposes:
I grieve like cockatoos.
Some time later we were standing up in the white room, but still I was falling. Through a murk of blue now. My neck was outstretched. Across the cold space where things used to be. Before unity broke apart into the rough fragments that became its creatures.
We left the room. He led me down the two flights of steps and back onto the plane tree courtyard.
Then he said: ‘I have a task for you.’
*
We stepped across damp flagstones and into the kitchen, down the three steps and through a door in the far wall beyond the hearth, into rooms I’d never seen: an unlit warren of musty corridors and cells with their doors flung open, each with a divan, a small table, an icon of the assumption of the virgin on its white wall.
The narrow corridor curled to the right until it wound back to the left before abruptly ending at a tiny timber door. Andreas fished a skeleton key from within the folds of his soutane. He opened the door to reveal an even narrower winding stair.
‘Come,’ he said.
Like another species of human entirely I followed him up the small slab steps.
We arrived at the spiral’s end: a trapdoor above our heads in the ceiling. Andreas hauled himself up through the hole then, with mittened fingers, beckoned me to follow.
We stood in a belfry. A clear space sprung with a brown wooden floor. Its walls were painted orange, quite startling after the previous gloom. In a dormer of cut stone facing north to the melting mountains I saw a bell with a black rope trailing down from it. At the bottom of the rope was a stone, what looked like an ordinary sea stone, tied both as a grip and a weight.
I began to feel my feet on the beams of the floor, began to understand again that I had limbs. So that when Andreas motioned for me to step forward and ring the bell, I did so.
Gripping the cold stone at the end of the rope, I pulled. I felt the knock before I registered the sound. A dull thud, then the peal.
The sound sliced like silver through the earth and, by the second ring, my induction back into the land of the living had begun. It was as if I had come back to the surface, like Pendlebury’s shard, after thousands of years of burial and exile.
Through the dormer above our heads I watched oscillating iron swinging in the retreating light of the island dusk. The tones rang out, thousands of granules of sound fitting together to make an impression on the air.
I listened and then gripped the sea stone with both hands again and pulled, the bell was struck and rang, this time with a deepening round, a ship sounding its horn in a fog. I had seen things that only courage and cowardice can see, and so, after a moment’s pause, I rang the bell once more, as if to say that I had mourned and wept my way, and travelled to the source of things, first by walking and then, as monks always do, by remaining still to the point of vanishing, and that somehow I was keen to re-emerge and accomplish a safe harbour.
Andreas was studying me, assessing my progress and no doubt considering the task he would confront me with next. The bell had jolted me clear, and along with the relief I felt, my respect for my host, the concave-faced Andreas of Agio Dormiton, instantaneously deepened. He was a master I had never known existed or needed to exist.
*
Dinner after the day I’d had came as an after-glowing ordinariness: no void, no bell, just a single stewed marrow, thin olives, and a scrap of bread with oil in the kitchen. As I ate Andreas stood, not in his usual pensive position but instead busying himself with damping the fire in the stove and with polishing the monastery knives and ladles. When I asked him if he was going to eat he came immediately over to the table and took a single olive, but that was all. Then, when I’d guiltily finished what food there was in my bowl, he said: ‘It has been a day of new horizons. You have finally become useful at Agio Dormiton. You have rung the bell that welcomes in the darkness. Perhaps you know now that there is no light without it. The night must cover the earth. We sleep to dream, Wesley, we must be disciplined to achieve peace.’
I looked at him, no doubt adoringly. But the monk frowned, hung another polished ladle on its rack in the corner.
‘Each day we see only so far and no further,’ he said. ‘We continue in the hope that each new day, with the help of the darkness in between, we will see a little more.’
‘Like digging for shards,’ I said.
‘Each day at Agio Dormiton is a fresh toiling, a new layer of discovery.’
I beamed at him from the table. I couldn’t help it. I felt I had personal proof of what he was describing. I felt somehow ordained, ridiculously renewed.
‘So now, if you come with me . . .’
He picked up a smoke-stained lantern from the bench under the knives and ladles, lit the taper with a match, and walked up the kitchen steps and out into the night.
*
The room on the highest terrace was beautifully warm after the cold outside. As opposed to the clean austerity of my own cell, and the one on the second terrace, it also looked very much in use. In the far left-hand corner as I stood at the door was a lit magali with a half-empty basket of chopped fuel beside it. In the opposite corner to the magali was an unmade bed, its black and grey blankets rumpled. On the long wall beside the magali was a bookcase stuffed with loose sheaves of paper and many books, and beside it, on a long trestle table running to the room’s far corner was, to my great surprise, a wireless set not unlike the one which Simmo had carried for myself and Spenser up to the Lasithi plateau. Beside the wireless, and the table strewn with more papers and books, under a curtained window on the southern wall, was an armchair of orange leather and another smaller bookcase, this one with only two shelves, one of which was taken up with devotional objects: icons of the Dormiton, brass incense dispensers, and the like.
Andreas bent down on his haunches by the magali, reached into the basket of wood and stoked the fire. ‘Please sit down,’ he said coolly, motioning with long fingers towards the armchair on the southern wall.
I did his bidding and, once he was satisfied with the state of the magali, he came and sat on a wooden chair in front of the wireless. Raising his knuckles gently to his lips, he peered at me in his customary way, as if trying to gauge my response to the room.
I could not hold his gaze. In the bookshelf behind him I noticed that, as with the room on the second terrace, some of the books titles were in German. And in the smaller shelf to my left I saw a handful of books in Greek but also in German, Italian, and English.
‘Before the war this was our modest library,’ Andreas explained. ‘But after the invasion of Greece, myself and Kiefer divided those books of a theological nature and stored them in a cell beyond the kitchen. This room we kept aside for more immediate affairs.’
I nodded.
‘Then, at about that time, we were fortunate to come by this wireless set.’
He gestured to where the switches and dial of the wireless sat somehow complicit on the trestle table.
‘At which point,’ he continued, ‘we were able to give this room over entirely to monitoring the war.’
‘I see.’
‘This being the highest terrace of Agio Dormiton it is practical for receiving signals. Dimitrios was convinced to exchange cells with Ki
efer, who had previously slept on the second terrace. Brother Kiefer then slept on the bed in here and, since his departure, I have taken to doing the same.’
‘And so . . . you listen to the wireless here?’
Andreas smiled benevolently. ‘I do.’
He turned in his chair and flicked the metal switch of the receiver and began moving the dial. He hadn’t moved it far at all before a German voice was transmitted into the room.
‘Radio Bremen,’ Andreas announced over his shoulder. ‘Very informative. Do you have any Deutsch at all, Wesley?’
‘I do not,’ I replied.
‘Yes, well my own is not so good, though Kiefer was instructing me before he left.’
The monk bent forward, his neck leaning towards the radio, his knuckles folded on the table in front of it, listening intently to the voice. I sat in the armchair, beginning to feel unsettled again.
Absorbed in the broadcast, the monk remained with his back to me, focused on the voice coming through the crackle of the set. I was left sitting there, and became suddenly confused. By appearances it would have been easy to construe the room I was in as the lair of a fifth columnist.
To steady myself, I reminded myself that Andreas was a monastic scholar. The room, the German books, the wireless, were all part of his search, his vocation. How, for instance, could a friend of Pendlebury’s possibly be a fifth columnist? It was absurd. I was exhausted by the day’s events, I should calm down and avoid any more psychological traps. Hadn’t I already undone the brainwashings, hadn’t Andreas shown me a truth beyond the oppositions of war, beyond an earth carved into regiments, beyond manipulative notions like the free world? The world could only be free if we stayed conscious of the virgin’s death, faithful to the dolphin and his riders. It was impossible that a monk who had spent years in meditation on the death of the Madonna could be at work on behalf of Hitler.
