Nonetheless, Hydra was seen as a kind of free state where people could do what they wanted, living out their desires without much interference. The foreign community grew steadily. The island had also long been favoured by rich Athenians who came on weekends and holidays. They had their little palaces high on the hillsides, with magnificent views over the Aegean, and they arrived for the weekends with their kitchen maids and other servants and baskets full of fresh flowers.
Marianne observed and breathed in the atmosphere of Greek daily life. They were foreigners — xenoi — and the island’s inhabitants regarded them with friendly curiosity. The Greeks with whom they developed real friendships came from aristocratic and intellectual circles. That very first summer they got to know George Lialios. An educated young man, George spoke several languages and was interested in philosophy. Aside from serving in the diplomatic corps, his father was a composer and musician. George introduced Marianne and Axel to many of the highly educated and wealthy Greeks who lived or vacationed on the island. The Lialios family had a large estate on the Peloponnese where they produced olive oil and had also invested in a stately house with a view over the whole town of Hydra.
Inviting them to drink wine before the big open fireplace in his kitchen, George presented Marianne and Axel to a core of Greek intellectuals who had come to Hydra for many of the same reasons as they had. They were young people with various artistic ambitions who were searching for something. They were also introduced to the Russian Lily Mack, who was married to Christian Heidsieck from the famous champagne dynasty. Lily was so wild and eccentric that Marianne was almost afraid of her, but Christian was a potter and he taught Marianne to work with clay. When the ceramic objects were baking in the oven Christian and Marianne sat in the ochre-painted restaurant near his house in Kamini and they read Ibsen together. Christian’s English was fluent, while Marianne slowly broadened her vocabulary through Shakespeare and translations of Ibsen.
COCKTAILS WITH THE UPPER CRUST
In spite of their poor dress and simple standard of living, Marianne and Axel found themselves being invited to drinks and cocktail parties by the Greek upper class. The Greeks were awed that the young blond couple had come all the way to Hydra and were curious about them. Rich Madame Paouri — who painted the window frames of all her houses a special shade of blue and who had donated blue dresses with white dots to all the schoolgirls on Hydra — held the swankiest parties.
“Drinks before dinner. Six o’clock at our house.”
Marianne and Axel went in t-shirts and trousers, which was just about all the clothing they had. It was at one of these cocktail parties that they first met the shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis. When Onassis heard that they were from Norway he said, “Oh, I go fishing there!” He’d spent several seasons salmon fishing in Norway and he asked how they had come to Hydra. Oh, so Axel was an author? What did he write about?
Their presence at posh gatherings was soon taken for granted. Themselves shoeless, they were served by stewards in impeccable white uniforms. On board the yachts champagne poured from spouts shaped like dolphin mouths. Young Greek women married to old rich men with big bellies mingled on the luxurious boats. The women had diamonds on their fingers and dresses that Marianne had seen only in magazines.
* * *
So far Marianne was satisfied with being the muse who sat at Axel’s feet while he created. She read his manuscript and made suggestions. A little red star marked the places where she lost interest in the story but she didn’t speak about it until Axel said that he appreciated her notations and asked her to elaborate. She explained where the narrative engaged her and where it ceased to hold her attention, and she told him that in her opinion he sometimes over-expounded, going on for longer than he needed to. Axel listened to what she had to say but became irritated when she spoke of numbers of pages, retorting that a book needed a certain length to be called a book.
Axel was still trying to make Marianne more self-aware and conscious of her own strengths. She filled page after page in her journal with her doodles and poems, thoughts and dreams. Pen and paper in hand, she often went to the pebble beach in Kamini, where she sat on a rock and jotted down her last dream on a blank page in her journal:
Was about to get married. Choosing an apartment with lots of windows. Had a choice between the first and third floors. There was a hole in the floor with a railing around it. Thought the third was best because then no one could throw anything down at me. Green curtains, had to shut the windows so the dogs wouldn’t fall out. The house was in the middle of Oslo. Later met a train carrying refugees at Central Station and it surprised me that the police didn’t come.
I wanted a child that I could dress up and wheel around the streets in a baby carriage. Wanted just one, preferably a boy.
Foreigners came and settled on Hydra in growing numbers. Many of the newcomers were writers and painters. Some months after the arrival of Marianne and Axel, a young Swedish writer named Göran Tunström showed up. At that time having published just one collection of poems, he’d worked as a grave-digger to scrape together enough money to travel south. He’d heard about the Norwegian author Axel Jensen and rented a house just below Marianne and Axel in Kala Pigadia. Just two years older than the likeable Swede, Marianne thought of him as the little neighbour boy who came to visit. She stood on the terrace and called maternally, “Göran, time to come and eat!” Marianne nicknamed him “Bastiano” and made cacao for him in the evenings when the air had a chilly draft.
Axel always wanted to push ideas and myths as far as he could when he discussed them during their evenings out. One person he often ended up arguing with was the Englishman David Goshen. They provoked each other and when their arguments came to a head they nearly wound up brawling. It wasn’t unusual for conversations to heat up and temperaments to flare among the foreigners on Hydra. Goshen was married to a Scottish aristocrat who was a sculptor. He wore pyjamas during the day, had titles and a spinet, but no money. The first time Marianne tasted stinging nettle soup it was at the home of David and his wife, who were so poor that they picked wild greens and berries to eke out their subsistence.
* * *
The days were pleasant. Axel worked diligently on the follow-up to Ikaros. Marianne followed her own routine. Shopping at Katsikas’, she announced one day that she would like to sell a kilo of rice. The proprietors felt that Marianne’s Greek had become good enough that they could correct her, so they taught her how to say that she would like to buy a kilo of rice.
For Marianne, that first year on Hydra was wonderful. They had established a home base and a routine of daily tasks for themselves. Meanwhile, Axel was increasingly in demand as an author back in Norway on account of the enormous success of Ikaros.
Marianne remained behind on Hydra when Axel was travelling. She had tumbled into the cream of Greek society, and when Axel was on one of his trips to Oslo, she ran into Peter Nomikos at the port. He belonged to one of the prominent shipping families in Greece and was studying engineering in London. When he heard that Marianne was on her own, he invited her on board his yacht, where a professor from his English university was a guest along with his wife. Marianne accepted, though she wasn’t feeling very well. She had contracted ringworm from their adopted cats; her face was covered with small black rings just under her skin. Peter immediately decided to dispatch her to his family’s doctor in Athens.
The next morning a seaman from the yacht picked her up outside her house. Marianne trotted off in sandals and sailor pants, a little bag under her arm. A suave, gallant man about her own age, Peter told her she was incredibly beautiful, as many other men had. He attended to her every need, and they sailed southward until the sun was high in the sky. The little party anchored in a bay and shared a sumptuous lunch of smoked salmon and lobster before setting course for Piraeus. The Nomikos family home in Athens consisted of an entire apartment block with elevators descending directly
into the various residences. Peter had the penthouse. Marianne was offered the best medical help from the family’s doctor. With blood-red medicine smeared on every blemish, Marianne looked as if she’d come down with spotted fever when she rode the ferry back to Hydra and Axel, who had returned from Oslo and was waiting for her.
* * *
It was 1958 and Axel was well into the novel he was writing. They had been on Hydra for nearly a year but as work on the book proceeded the predictability of their lives was rattled by money worries. They lived on advances from the publisher and their finances were a recurring source of conflict. Henrik Groth, Axel’s publisher, had tremendous faith in the new book, believing it could be ground-breaking literature of which Norwegian readers had never seen the likes.
Marianne was lonely when Axel went to Norway, just as she had been in Oslo when Axel was travelling and she had feared losing him. Now, together on Hydra, discord arose between them with growing frequency. She felt that Axel wasn’t fully present in her life, and Axel was vexed by her insecurity. The expatriates sat at Katsikas’ and introduced themselves to newly arrived foreigners: “I’m a writer”; “I’m a painter”; “I write poetry.” Thus they presented themselves, one after the other. When it was Marianne’s turn, she said with as much conviction as she could muster: “I’m living. Life is my art.” She caught Axel’s withering look and shrank from it. In Hydra’s arty circles, no one ever questioned what she did: she had always been embraced by the Greeks and the resident foreigners alike. Though no one expected her to take up writing or painting, she couldn’t help feeling inferior because she didn’t stand on her own feet creatively or economically. The “only” thing that Axel asked of her was that she find her own place in the world and, as he put it, become a complete human being. That was easier said than done. Why did she never feel that she was good enough as she was?
* * *
Some hundred metres above their house lived an old woman known as Kyria — Mrs. — Sophia. Sophia sold flour and sugar and a few other basic necessities from her house and passersby could sit down there to a light meal. The little room was painted light green, the moulding in the brightest shades of pastel pink. Crosses and icons hung on the walls, along with delightful arrangements of pots and pans, ropes of garlic and family photographs. Marianne regularly stopped in and sat a while with the grey-haired woman. Short and almost as wide as she was tall, Sophia wore a kerchief and apron and had a strong, warm gaze. Noticing when Marianne was sad, she stroked her cheek and comforted her as if she were a little girl.
“Kardoula mou, s’agapo.” Sweetheart, I love you.
It was soothing to sit quietly with the old woman. It softened the lump in her chest that formed when she had rowed with Axel or when she feared he would abandon her.
Sophia took care of a pair of orphan siblings as if they were her own. Marianne saw them often when she was visiting Sophia, observing how the old woman cared for them without fuss, as she comforted Marianne when she needed it. The children had never gone to school and were illiterate. The girl was short and skinny and didn’t say much. The boy was disabled, and one of his legs dragged. The story was that a donkey had kicked his mother in the stomach when she was pregnant with him. He went fishing whenever he was offered the chance, scuttling bare-legged down the stony lanes to the sea. Marianne heard the other children shout taunts at him as he limped down the street. Marianne thought about how a Greek tragedy was always close at hand.
* * *
Axel wrote intensively from morning to evening. When Marianne felt unable to keep up with Axel’s rapid transitions of thought and his impulsive actions she retreated to the role she knew she had mastered: housewife. They were like night and day. She was practical and happiest when the days were predictable. He floated in the clouds and lived through his work, eager to break boundaries in literature as well as in life.
Axel wrote regularly to John Starr Cooke on the other side of the Atlantic. The two of them exchanged long, somewhat incoherent letters with each other about how everything on the planet was connected. On the 16th of September, 1958, John wrote that he had become a damn good astrologer and asked Axel to send him the date, time and place of his birth — and Marianne’s — so he could cast their horoscopes.17
Axel dabbled in astrology and had filled a pad with drawings, astrological charts and interpretations of the various star signs. Born under the air sign of Aquarius, Axel noted that people born under this sign sought new ways to express old ideas; for Aquarians the path was more important than the end point. Marianne was a Taurus, an earth sign, and Axel had written with a thin black marker in his notepad that Taureans were preoccupied with family, single-minded, stubborn and didn’t find it easy to accept others’ points of view, but they were often kind. With Venus guiding inspiration and intuition for Taureans, he wrote, they love beauty and harmony.
THE DARK-HAIRED WOMAN
On one of his trips to Oslo, Axel crossed paths with a beautiful dark-haired woman. He invited her to Hydra, convinced that they were meant for each other and that this woman aroused something different in him than did Marianne. He spent five days together with this woman and was in love when he came back to Hydra. Marianne stood in the kitchen and heard him say, gravely, “I’ve found another woman, she’s dark-haired and she’s coming.” Axel had made up his mind that his relationship with Marianne was over.
Her grandmother had told Marianne that as long as she was breathing she was still alive, and she must always remember that. Marianne remembered Momo picking her up when she’d fallen off her bicycle as a little girl. “BREATHE, Marianne, BREATHE,” she’d exhorted her, and the pain had abated. Thinking about Axel, Marianne slowly inhaled and exhaled to keep calm.
She inspected herself in the mirror and contemplated her sunbleached hair. She decided then to try to become someone else, to become the one that Axel would want. She put on tennis shoes, slung her bag on her arm and took the boat to Piraeus. She went into the first hair salon she came across and asked to have her hair dyed black.
The next morning, back on Hydra, she looked with surprise at the dark hair on the pillow and asked herself who she was and what she was going to do with her life. She was terrified of going home and admitting defeat. Were Mother and Father right after all when they said that Axel wasn’t someone to count on? Marianne packed her bag and decided to go to Athens for a few days — in any case she couldn’t be home on Hydra when the other woman came. She took the next boat and checked into a fleabag hotel in the old part of the city called Plaka.
* * *
In Athens Per and Else Berit learned the latest news from Hydra and on the 8th of September, 1958, Else Berit wrote a letter to their common friends in Oslo telling them that her old prediction had been realized. The break-up between Marianne and Axel was now a fact:
Axel is a strange person, with an impressive intellect on the one hand and a vulnerable, sensitive, CHILDISH mind on the other. Marianne, who can’t follow all of his bizarre, high-flying thoughts, tries to assert herself in other ways, by striking at Axel’s weaknesses, wounding him and so on. It’s impossible for this kind of relationship to be harmonious and before Axel went to Norway both of them were aware that they had reached a critical point in their lives together.
When Axel was in Norway he met (as you know) a woman with whom, after 5 days of acquaintance, he became deeply fascinated, so much so that after he returned to Greece he couldn’t forget her. He claimed that in her he found something he had not found in any other woman, and that he could not continue his life with Marianne before he had arrived at an understanding with this other woman. The end of it was that he and Marianne agreed to separate, and the other woman, Sonja, is coming to Greece to live with Axel on Hydra. He has sent her train tickets and pocket money and is just waiting to hear when she’s coming.
Marianne is staying in Athens and wants to try to get a job here, somewhere or other, because understanda
bly enough she has no desire to go home. She was amazingly calm and realized the inevitability of Axel’s action but it is of course very hard for her to know that someone else is going to take her place in the house she and Axel fixed up and made a home of, caring for the cat and dog, etc. etc. She says that she has never felt as close to Axel as now.18
In big bold letters Else Berit related how she’d advised Marianne not to run right back to Axel should Sonja fail to arrive or if Axel discovered that he’d made a mistake. She maintained that Marianne should think profoundly about what being together with Axel would really mean over the course of a whole life. True enough, Marianne had matured considerably during the last eight months she had spent on Hydra, in the company of all kinds of odd artistic types. She had become broad-minded and open, but Else Berit believed that deep inside she was too conventional to spend the rest of her life living like a Bohemian, something she would be condemned to do with Axel. Marianne would probably be a good deal happier with a less complicated man who would give her a more orthodox relationship, and Else Berit hoped for the sake of all parties that Marianne and Axel wouldn’t bolt into each other’s arms in desperation if Sonja didn’t show up.
From California, John sent Axel a letter studded with “dear friend!” and exclamation points. John thought it was bad news that good Marianne was now out of Axel’s life. He had felt that Axel had been in safe waters with Marianne around him. Now he was less certain about how things would go for Axel — he had to sit down with Axel’s horoscope to see what direction this would take.19
So Long, Marianne Page 6
