by Arnold Zable
Nina Simone’s ‘Pirate Jenny’ brings to mind other songs, taught by my elders, performed throughout my childhood: It’s burning, brothers, it’s burning, our impoverished shtetl is burning. Songs of the feats of children who stole through the sewers, and smuggled in bottles and fuel that were fashioned into Molotov cocktails and broken-down pistols that locksmiths restored and readied for battle. Lullabies sung by mothers to provide a moment of comfort within the terror: Close your eyes my dear one, birds are coming; they assemble here my child, by the pillow on your bed. Songs they clung to on their final journeys. Songs of quiet despair and defiance, Quiet, quiet, hush be silent, corpses are growing here. Songs of partisan poets who drew upon the yearning of their people, and songs of hope and vengeance, sung in underground schools, at clandestine gatherings and in the heat of camp uprisings. Of ghetto fighters leaping from buildings, bursting through flames and scorched debris, and of partisans wading through swamps and assembling in forest hideouts on the eve of battle.
And I recall the first time I heard Nina perform the song, in New York, circa 1970, stalking the stage in Central Park in front of an audience of thousands. Then sitting down at a grand piano, pounding the keys, and grabbing the mic to resume her stalking. She is enraged, refusing to sing, haranguing the audience, berating and cajoling.
It is years since the event, yet I recall the essence of what she was saying. She rails against the recent jailing of black activists, and at the death of black children in church bombings, at the assassinations and lynching. She recounts the tale of her debut as a classical pianist, at the age of eleven, in North Carolina, when her parents were asked to move from the front to the back row just as their daughter was about to begin her first public performance. And in an act of rebellion, she had refused to play until they were allowed back to their seats in the front row. ‘This is how it is,’ she says. ‘This is how it’s been for too long now. Can’t you see it? If you don’t like what I’m saying, get out. I’m not going to sing for you, goddamn it.’
The crowd is thinning; the disgruntled concertgoers are leaving. The rain has set in as a gentle drizzle. And Nina turns to the audience. Her rage has drained. Her voice has softened. ‘Y’all are so beautiful,’ she says. ‘Y’all stayed with me despite the rain. You’ve weathered the storm. It’s a pleasure to sing for you.’
She performs for hours, a lithe, regal black woman, alternating between the stage floor and the piano: songs of sinner-men and angels in the morning, of would-be messiahs sinking like stones in the water, of black bodies swaying in the southern breeze, of children sitting in jail and lovers parting, of willows that are no longer weeping, and of chilled winds that are no longer blowing. And of Pirate Jenny, who is boarding the ship, the black freighter, and sailing out of the harbour now that her slave-masters have been vanquished.
High-rise apartment buildings wrap the park. They are barely visible through a veil of showers, and as Nina sings the metropolis is disappearing. All that exists is the voice of a performer for whom singing is an exorcism, a matter of survival, and perhaps a way to stave off an encroaching madness. She sings until it is midnight by the clock, and justice has been done, and the black freighter is vanishing out to sea. The struggle is finally over, and the crowds are dispersing, making their way home, invigorated by the ferocity of her performance.
The afternoon sun lights the Nuremburg Tribune. Learner drivers are cruising the weed-infested runway. Nearby, circus performers are unloading their gear, erecting tents, feeding lions and elephants. Autumn leaves are being swept into piles by city gardeners, and a family is setting out a picnic in the parklands.
I turn to Anna and embrace her. We are brother and sister, daughter and son of perpetrator and survivor, of the damned and the haunted: the offspring of history’s madness. Releasing each other from its elusive shadow.
Threnody
There was a time when language and song were one, when to speak was to sing, and when the song was a cry of rage against an unforgiving sea, an impassive sky. And this is how it was, eight years ago on the island of Ithaca, with the death of a boy.
The boy’s father was born and raised in the Village of the Forty Saints. He grew up surrounded by sea and, like many young men of the island, he was schooled in the maritime arts. For ten years he worked as a seaman on cargo boats. He berthed on every continent, and sailed from Gdansk to Napoli, from the Baltic to the Mediterranean and to Southern Hemisphere ports.
In time the allure of foreign lands began to pall. On each return to the island he found it harder to depart. He no longer felt the thrill of the first approach of land, that surge of anticipation as the ship moved towards a new port. He longed to stay put.
When he retired from seafaring he found work as the secretary of the villages on the northern heights. He issued licences and permits, and collected information on births, marriages and deaths. He presided over disputes concerning title deeds and took note of complaints. But the sea remained his grand passion, his first love.
He acquired a fishing caique and had it moored in the port of Frikes, a twenty-minute ride by motorbike from his two-storey home above Afales Bay. He set off when the weather allowed. It could be dusk, or midnight or three in the morning when he set out, and dawn when he returned.
He would sail out beyond the breakwater and head north, shadowing the mountain range on the east coast. He rounded the northernmost cape to Afales Bay, where he would drop anchor and lay his nets. From the boat he could make out his home above the cliffs and the clusters of lights that marked the villages on the upper slopes. He ventured further and came to know the fishing grounds off neighbouring isles.
When his son was born he was overjoyed. He took him out to sea before he was able to walk. The boy came to know the movements and habits of particular fish, and the caves and crevices where they lurked. He came to know the coves on nearby islands where they would shelter from sudden storms.
He came to know what lay beneath the waters. Father and son donned snorkels and masks and dived deep, spear guns in hand. They snared their share of fish, but dived also for the pleasure of identifying rare species. They took photos of seabeds littered with refuse cast from passing ferries and freighters. They wrote stories on Ionian sea lore and pollution, and had them published in journals of marine life.
Father and son would be seen on the motorbike, the boy clinging to his father, careering down from the village on the descent to the port and skidding to a halt by the breakwater where the boat was permanently moored.
The boy graduated from high school and enrolled in university to study mathematics. He stayed with relatives in Athens during the semesters but whenever time allowed he returned home. His life was a cyclical movement from island to mainland, from village to Athens, and the homecoming to Ithacan ports, his father waiting by the quay, then father and son on the familiar ascent by motorbike to the two-storey house overlooking Afales Bay.
He began his second year of study in the autumn of 2003. There was unrest brewing at the university. Lecturers and staff went out on strike. The campus was shut down, and the boy took advantage of this unexpected break.
It is a four-hour journey by ferry to Ithaca over the Ionian Sea from the port of Patras. The boy was always elated at the first sight of the island. It grew larger, seeming to rise as one land mass before separating into two islands as the ferry drew closer: the smaller island, Ithaca, in the foreground, and the mountain peaks of Kefalonia towering behind it.
The following morning the boy set out for a day of fishing. He went down with his diving partner to the harbour beneath the village of Stavros. They call it ‘the little summer of St Dimitri’, this sojourn of sunny days before the onset of winter. It was the time of the olive harvest and the pickers were out in the groves.
The boys set sail from Polis Bay. They turned south and stayed close to the island on the west coast. They let down the anchor by an outcrop of rocks, adjusted their masks and snorkels, and eased themselves from
the deck carrying spear guns. Just one hundred metres separated the boat from the limestone cliffs above the shore. The day was drifting towards the hour of siesta. Shopkeepers were drawing in their shutters, closing their doors. The school bus was wending its way back on the cliff road. The partners dived twice and surfaced. Then the boy decided on one more dive. When he did not surface his partner raised the alarm.
A wave of panic washed across the island. Fishing boats that had returned with their catches at dawn set sail in search of the boy. Islanders rushed to the waterfront, or picked their way down overgrown paths within sight of the outcrop of rocks.
His father knew that the boy was gone. ‘He is no more,’ he said. He shook his head and refused to be comforted by words of hope. Late afternoon, divers on a passing yacht retrieved the body. Church bells tolled the death for hours in an incessant monotone.
The boy was buried days later in the graveyard, overlooking the bays he had so often sailed. The church overflowed with the many islanders who had known him. Those who could not squeeze inside gathered on the terrace beneath the belltower. Half the island was in attendance. The boy was loved for his good nature and generous spirit.
‘He was more than a son,’ said his father to the crowd. ‘I have lost my companion, my best friend. There are no words that can describe my loss.’
We arrived on the island ten days after the boy, our nephew, drowned. We had known him since he was an infant. What we had planned as a family reunion was now a wake. At night we walked the streets of the village to the house overlooking Afales Bay. Every night Ithacans would come to the house to provide company. As is the custom, they would not allow the family to be alone in their grief.
We knew the familiar markers on the way from previous journeys: the satellite dishes rising from a neighbour’s home, two white saucers hovering in the darkness like spacecraft; the bends in the road; and the sea vistas that open out at each turn. We walked past the crumbling shells of homes long abandoned and houses that had been restored by Ithacans returning after years abroad.
At night the northern heights are given over to wind gusts and barking dogs. The summer is long over and the season of hibernation is approaching. There are fewer lights with each passing week as houses close down for the winter. On clear nights, the villages in the neighbouring islands are scatterings of lights in swathes of dark. There are nights when the rains descend and lightning unveils the chapel on the heights, the jagged peaks and limestone ridges. Torrents pour upon the wooded slopes, yet still we make our way to the house.
We dread the first moments, the first sight of the stricken eyes of the boy’s mother, her ongoing battle to comprehend what had taken place. We dread the depths of her disbelief at the calamity that has befallen her, and the dead weight upon her face. We dread the inconsolable anguish of the boy’s grandmother.
The boy was her first grandchild and his death is an unbearable blow. She had looked after him since the day of his birth. She had comforted him through illnesses and rejoiced at his milestones and triumphs. Now she sits on a sofa in the lounge room and shakes her head. Grief is engraved on her face. It can never be erased. She clasps her hands in her lap and lifts them in a wringing gesture.
The straight back she had retained well into her ageing now sags in defeat. For the first time in the years that we have known her she is not attending her duties. She looks at us in bewilderment and falls into our arms like a wounded child. She is broken.
‘Ti na kanoume, ti na kanoume,’ she says. ‘What can we do, what can we do?’ She lapses back into silence. ‘Ola ine tikhe, ola ine tikhe,’ she whispers. ‘All is luck, all is fate.’
We hear the same refrain wherever we go. Ti na kanoume, the villagers say when the death of the boy is raised. Ti na kanoume, the goatherd says when we come across him driving his flock to mountain pastures. Ti na kanoume, says the physics professor as he ascends to the house he has built for his retirement. Ti na kanoume, the old seamen say as they bend over their cards in the coffee house.
They have endured their time at sea and long absences in distant lands. Now they sit by tables and wait for the end. Their cards fall onto the green felt hour upon hour. They are there every morning, return after the siesta, and remain long into the night. There is little that can affect them now. But they are deeply disturbed by the death of the boy. ‘He left for the sea and never returned,’ they say, and turn back to their cards.
‘Ti na kanoume,’ says a neighbour. ‘The whole island is crying for him.’ She adds her version of events: he was tired and weighed down by the fish tied to his waistband. He did not have a balloon attached by a line to his foot to indicate where he had gone down. His partner knew it was time to return to the boat after two dives, but he had insisted on one more. He was fearless, as the young so often are.
‘There was something so beautiful about him this final summer,’ she says, her eyes lost to the memory. ‘He possessed the glow of youth.’ She is trying to fathom the mystery, the unfairness that one so young should encounter such a fate. She shrugs, then sings:
Life has two doors
I opened one,
And came in one morning
And by the time evening arrived
I had left by the other
She has always been tough, and tougher still in the past ten years since the untimely death of her husband. She opens the shutters every morning with a cigarette between her lips, waters her plants, and sets out for the olive groves with a chainsaw. Her body is strong and youthful for a woman of seventy. She has endured many seasons of labour and become hardened and stoic, but she cannot abide the death of the boy. ‘He was so beautiful this last summer,’ she whispers.
‘Ti na kanoume,’ says the boy’s father when we see him next. It is near midnight. The house is full of smoke and talk, the gathering swelled by the continual arrival of family and friends. The boy’s mother moves about like an apparition. With her helpers she has laid the table, poured the wine and served the fish and meat.
This is how it is night after night. Out of tragedy, a coming together. The mood has lifted as it does every night by this hour. There is banter and animated conversation. The talk is of politics and sport, the upcoming soccer match with the neighbouring island, analyses of recent matches, and the travails of the national team.
The boy’s father and I step out. We walk from the house the short distance to the path beside the cliff. We see the familiar outline of the windmill. The sails are long gone, but the circular walls are intact. At this hour it is a dark presence on the crest of the mountain, at the point where the cliff road vanishes, several kilometres ahead.
We stop and look out over Afales Bay. I have stood here many times. It is my most treasured place on earth. Over the strait to the north can be seen a scattering of lights on the island of Lefkada. Just beyond are the white cliffs known as Sappho’s Leap, where the poet of Lesbos is said to have thrown herself into the sea, propelled by unrequited love. So the story goes. Mountains rise behind us like tiers in a massive amphitheatre: the northern bays provide the stage, and the sea, the ongoing drama.
Directly behind us, lined up against a white stonewall, are sacks of olives, the spoils of one family’s day in the groves. The sacks will be thrown onto the back of a utility and taken at dawn to the olive presses. On the darkened slopes are the family olive trees we have picked during previous stays. Below us the waves are washing up against a strip of pebbled beach at the cliff base. At all hours through the night, ferries make their way past en route to far-flung harbours.
‘I was born overlooking the bay,’ says the boy’s father. ‘I know every rock, every species of fish. I know where the fish will congregate when a particular wind blows. I know the swells and currents, every inlet and indentation, every tree that clings to the cliff-side.
‘I know the gradations of sky and sea, every nuance over the full range of the colour spectrum. I have caught thousands of fish here, and observed many more, photographed them
, and followed them to their lairs. I know the subtleties of the bay. I have fished, dived, sailed and swum upon and within it. And over the past nineteen years I have done so in the company of my boy.’
I have known the boy’s father for the two decades since I first began coming to the island. Known him as a thinker and an anarchic spirit, tempered by a patience cultivated in his years at sea. I have sat with him in conversation for many hours, drawn by his contemplative nature.
‘This is my fault,’ he says. ‘There are times when I have dived down and not wanted to return. I have wanted the sea to take me, to keep me in its depths. I have had to will myself to resist the temptation, and I infected my boy with the same madness. I should have been the one taken. It was always the two of us. I cannot bear the thought of returning to the boat. The sea is dead for me now.’
He says this as a plain statement of fact, without rancour, without a trace of self-pity. ‘Children should bury their parents,’ he adds, echoing a universal lament. He sees it all, the nights and days on the bay with his boy, his friend and comrade. He sees the two of them on the boat making its way into the bay, letting out the nets and dropping anchor. He sees the path on which we are now standing from his vantage point on the deck of a boat in the waters far below us, with the boy beside him. He burns with his sorrow.
‘I hate the sea,’ he says. ‘I hate the day I first took my boy on the boats. I hate myself for encouraging the mania that killed him. I will never sail again. I will sell my accursed boat and be done with it.’
Ti na kanoume, ti na kanoume. What can we do, what can we do? Ola ine tikhe, ola ine tikhe. All is luck, all is fate. The refrain is a threnody, from the Greek, threnoidia, from threnos, ‘wailing’ and oide meaning song, a dirge, a lament for the dead. An unashamed keening, a raging against fate. It is the song that comes unbidden when all else fails us. All that is left in the wake of tragedy. All that can be said.
