by Arnold Zable
For twelve years Andreas and Manoli plied the Ionian. In time, the movement took hold, an eternal orbit of casting off and return. The brothers came to know the veil that falls as one island recedes and the next is yet to appear. In calmer weather they surrendered to the drift and savoured their moments of respite; the labour of departure behind them, the labour of arrival yet to come.
At night the caique sailed through a protean world. Shadows took fleeting form before giving way to darkness. Chapels and monasteries on deserted heights appeared abruptly, and dissolved like pallid ghosts. Phantom-like figures could be seen moving on mountain paths. Hamlets twinkled with the promise of warm hearths. Come, the Ionian whispered. Come and know the Ionian light, the stark contrast between whitewashed days and becalmed nights.
It was Manoli, the younger brother, who began to long for other worlds. He scanned the horizon with a gnawing restlessness. He was lured to oceans bigger than the confined sea on which he sailed. He envied those islanders who had set out on voyages to the Americas, Africa, Asia and Afstralia, the Great Southern Land. After all, his father had made the journey and, Manoli reasoned, unlike Stratis he would be away for a restricted time.
He would return pockets bloated with cash, and enough wealth to place the finest marble on his mother’s grave. He would return wealthier than his father and build a home overlooking Afales. He would ply the Ionian, and establish trading routes by way of the Adriatic to Venice. He would build bigger boats and run them to the Black Sea and through the mouth of the Danube. He would replicate the Ithacan shipping dynasties of centuries past, and construct a fleet of liners and freighters. He pictured the day of his return, his arrival back in the village, the children chasing him, chanting: Manoli is back! Manoli is back!
No matter how hard Andreas tried to dissuade him, Manoli clung to his plans. Andreas ferried his younger brother, as they had both ferried many others on the first leg of their journeys. For the final time the brothers descended from the Village of the Forty Saints. They were silent as they walked, and remained silent as they moved away from the port of Frikes to sail south, within sight of the east coast.
Manoli did not allow himself to dwell on the landscape. He did not register the three windmills on the headlands of Kioni Bay. He did not glance up at towering Mount Neriton as they spiralled into the Gulf of Molos. He remained detached as the boat bent past Mount Aetos into Vathy Bay. He avoided his brother’s eyes as Andreas helped him deposit his suitcases on the waterfront. He did not look back when he stepped aboard the larger boat.
Andreas untied the ropes and set out for the journey home. For the first time, he sailed the caique alone, and he could not dispel the words that recurred, unbidden. ‘He has turned his back on the island.’ No matter how hard he tried to erase them, the words pursued him on the voyage home: ‘He has turned his back on the island.’
The sun was barely on the ascent as Manoli stood on the deck, bound for Patras, the mainland port. His mind teemed with grandiose plans. He was oblivious to the island’s receding presence. The first to wane were the sharper colours, the ochres on the upper slopes. He lost sight of the windmills and Kathara monastery, perched on the Mount Neriton heights. The peaks sank under the horizon; the island was completely shrouded within itself.
Only then did he realise that he had cast off without the prospect of imminent return. He had not counted on this. He was seized by a sense of panic, the first suggestion of a nagging doubt. Perhaps nothing would become of him. He tossed in his bunk at night, and paced the decks, consumed by conflicting thoughts. There were no familiar harbours within reach, nor familiar seas to ferry him home.
No matter how much he tried to ignore them, he was plagued by images of his caique moving homewards, huddled against wind and rain, lit by rising suns. And in the cabin, the smell of tobacco, the map of the Ionian, a pot of basil, and the ancient amphorae they had pulled from the sea.
He dwelt on the homecoming ritual: the dropping anchor, the flinging of ropes, stepping ashore to gut and clean the night’s catch, spreading the nets to dry. And the village madman, limping towards them, chanting his habitual refrain: ‘Ah. You are back from the sea. Did you bring any fish?’
Weeks later, as the ship moved over the equator, Manoli’s doubts sharpened. One thought, above others, repeated itself. It grew more incessant with each kilometre. It resonated as he sighted the white sands of the west coast and moved towards the port of Fremantle. It persisted as he sailed east from Albany along a deserted coast. It pursued him through the entrance of Port Phillip Bay, the final landfall. Would he ever see Ithaca again? Would he ever see his Ithaca again?
BOOK II
Return to Ithaca
XANTHE: 2002
IT IS a long flight from Melbourne to Athens. I sit beside my daughter Martina and watch the lights of the city vanish. We stop for several hours in Singapore and wander the shopping arcades. We no longer know what time it is, but we know it is night and we are tired and disoriented, and seduced into purchasing goods we do not need. Passengers cheer when the plane lands in Athens, and release the grip on their worry beads.
We haul our luggage aboard the bus to the city, timed to arrive as the working day begins. Snarled in the early morning traffic, we crawl through suburbs littered with scrap metal yards, advertising hoardings, foundries and junkyards, crushed beside apartment blocks that rise from the lower slopes like asthmatics gasping for air. After ten years, I am back in a Levantine city, trapped in an infernal battle with heat and decay.
Even at this hour the city veers between fatigue and defiance. Grit settles on cracked facades. Streaks of rust triumph over walls recently painted white. Antennae and airconditioning units sprout from roofs and walls. There are leafier suburbs with luxurious homes tucked away elsewhere, but for the most part, Athens, as I have come to know it, is a chaos of commerce tempered by apartments spawning balconies that vie for a glimpse of neighbourhood square, a sliver of sky. A city of a thousand villages coalesced into one sprawl that strives to live like the one village that started it all.
Yet at the core there is something else. I see it from the bus as it nears the final stop. The Acropolis rises above the chaos; on its plateau I glimpse the Parthenon and Temple of Nike, the symmetries of a more ancient past. Even after the long journey, weighed down by weariness, I am elated. I know now, as I always do at this moment, that regardless of what follows, I am glad to have embarked on the journey.
As soon as I have found a room, I set out with Martina for the climb. I am struck by the resemblances between Martina and my mother, Sophia, and for a moment my regret returns, a regret known only to daughters whose mothers have died before the birth of their first child.
On the descent we pause to sit on a perimeter wall. Viewed from the heights Athens is a maze of rectangular white shapes, softened by distance and fading light. This climb to and from the summit of the Acropolis has become a private ritual born out of previous journeys and, in this moment, poised above the city, the ritual conveys me, as it always has, to a sense of calm.
The ritual is not complete. The following morning we walk from the pension through the streets of the Plaka to the Agora, where the citizens of the ancient polis gathered to gossip and conduct their affairs. I bypass the excavated remains of stellae, pediments and colonnades, and make my way to the assumed site of the state prison.
All that can be seen are fragments of wall overgrown by wild grasses and clovers. Shards of ceramic are embedded in the paths. A dog wanders by in search of shade; emaciated cats nestle against moss-grown rocks. The wind rustles through olives and pines. It is an ideal place to contemplate what took place here over two millennia ago.
In 399 BCE, surrounded by disciples and friends, Socrates swallowed a goblet of hemlock as directed by those who had condemned him to death. He was not the first, and certainly not the last, to be murdered for the subversive act of asking questions.
Martina is eight years old. I tell her that it is not
so much the fact that Socrates may have died on this site that brings me here, but that he was an independent thinker, a lover of knowledge.
‘It is sad that he died,’ she says.
A tortoise diverts her attention. The carapace is barely visible, all but camouflaged in the ruins.
‘Is the tortoise dead?’ Martina asks.
She reaches out for the carapace, but before she can touch it the head darts out and the tortoise shuffles off to a safer retreat.
Martina has eyes for tortoises. And cats. And there are many. They slip between the stones of the Agora, slink down alleys, hide and seek among rubbish bins, crouch in derelict buildings, and scavenge at the tables of pavement cafes. The cats are an underclass unto themselves, mangy foragers who eke out an existence in the netherworlds. Whenever we eat out, Martina forsakes half her meal to feed them.
‘Watch out, they are carriers of disease,’ says a passer-by.
‘Mind your own business,’ snaps Martina, and tries to corner one. The cats of Athens are survivors, adept at eluding any grasp.
There are other beings, apart from cats, that move discretely. The streets of Athens may be paved with dust, but in the eyes of the new beholders the dust glints with the promise of gold. They flit like shadows, the newcomers, from Africa, Asia and impoverished corners of Europe, clutching sacks slung over their shoulders. The sacks are filled with belts, shoes, bras, watches, handbags, jackets and socks. Occasionally one stops on a patch of pavement, spreads a blanket, upends the sacks, and sets up shop. With the approach of the police, he hastily packs and vanishes like an elusive breeze.
Each group has staked its modest claim. Pakistanis labour alongside Albanians on building sites. A Bulgarian housemaid cleans the rooms of our pension. Nigerians spread out woodcarvings and snakeskin drums, and stalk the pavements with pirated CDs. Romanians on accordions and fiddles serenade diners, with the ill-humoured grins of reluctant performers. A young man from Bangladesh moves between cafe tables, selling roses. Disappointment skitters over his face when he is rebuffed. He moves on, trailing the bitter taste of humiliation.
A gypsy girl plays a mouth organ and holds out her free hand for cash. She has no energy, nor desire to smile. Chinese hawkers ferry imported goods from warehouses into cars, and set out for the port of Piraeus to sell them through the islands. Late at night, prostitutes from Eastern Europe circle Omonia Square, while their pimps keep a watchful eye for the police from the shadows. Greece is no longer a land of emigrants.
In the evening I open the shutters onto a direct view of the Acropolis. Jutting out from one of the flanks is a solitary palm. In the distance behind it, a hint of mountains and reddening skies, and in the foreground, the Plaka, a congregation of buildings that rise as far as the lower slopes. Not one leaf is moving on the rooftop gardens. No sign remains of the late night revelry. All is still, everything at rest. The ritual is complete. I have retrieved the rhythm of travel, a sense of detached movement, of the journey unfolding. Tomorrow I will return to the island.
The balcony of the patriko, the patriarchal house, overlooks the tiled roofs of Ageii Saranda, the Village of the Forty Saints. Two metres to the left, the open shutters of the bedroom windows are clipped to the white-stone wall. Whenever I am on the island I sleep in the bed in which Manoli, my father, was born. Martina now sleeps with me. On the first night she was afraid of the gnawing rats trying to forge a way into the room. Now that we have slept here several nights, she feels at ease.
We awake to the premature boast of a rooster, and the tinkling of sheep bells. The sheep are being driven past the house. Costas, the village shepherd, walks beside them, staff in hand. He strides the mountain like a colossus. He knows the lairs of trap-door spiders, and where the vipers burrow for their hibernation. He knows who lights the lamps in remote chapels and for whom the death bell tolls.
We step out on the balcony. Sit here long enough, as I did with Uncle Andreas, Manoli’s brother, and you will see the entire island go by. A millennium has drawn to a close and the village is changing before our eyes. Two homes have been bought and restored by Germans, a derelict house acquired by Italians. In the lower reaches lives an English woman whose house is locked and boarded in the winter. She returns in spring, flings open the shutters, expels the dust, stocks the larder and, once the work is done, heads, towel in hand, to the pebbled beach of Afales.
Houses long abandoned have been restored by Ithacans who have returned to the island after years of toil in foreign lands. On the lower fringe of the village, an Athenian icon painter has transformed the husk of a cottage into a studio. An Albanian family has for the past decade rented a house nearby. Now that their fortunes are rising they are building a villa of their own. On the verge of the hairpin bend by the lower end of the village, they have erected a stone where one of their kin was killed when his motorcycle careered off the road. A plaque bears his ghostly photograph.
At siesta time the Albanians are still at work unloading sand and gravel, laying concrete, drilling and bulldozing, hammering, sawing, charged with the energy of those who, after years of oppression, have seized an unexpected opportunity to begin life anew. In the thousands they have crossed: from the Albanian mainland to Corfu, and south over the Ionian Islands. I have seen them in past journeys, mainly single men on the move, standing about in town squares, on street corners, stomping their feet to keep warm on cold mornings, stoic, in search of work.
Yet some things remain the same. Families of gypsies still pass through. They arrive on the ferry in the port of Frikes, and I hear them from the balcony proclaiming their wares over speakers as they ascend the northern roads. They journey like the carpet sellers of old, entire families, from grandmothers in white kerchiefs to babies swaddled in woollen clothes. One van is crammed with household utensils, plastic buckets, crockery, aprons and shirts. Another van follows, full of shoes.
And there are those who still wait for the call, and rely on agents in Piraeus to provide them with work on the boats. Cousin Andonis, Andreas’ son, would like nothing more than to stay on the island and fish, but he must take his caique ever further from the coast. The seas are being fished out. Illicit dynamite and poachers have wiped out entire species.
Andonis lives in the lower village, near Frikes, where his fishing caique is moored. He lifts Martina up and greets her eye to eye. His fifty-year-old body radiates a physical energy that seems to burst beyond his taut confines. He is a tough muscular nugget who speaks with a bemused smile. He has children to support and must rely on his skills as a ship’s engineer on oil tankers. His assignments take him from Argentina to Newfoundland, the Indonesian archipelago to San Francisco, from the icy waters of Vladivostok to the sapping heat of tropical ports.
‘Once the agents would come looking for us,’ he says. ‘Now we have to go to them cap in hand.’ All this for months at sea in the wombs of corroded hulks, fine-tuning the motors of tankers while choking on diesel fumes.
The living room of the patriko too is as it was when I saw it on my first visit two decades ago. A walnut table occupies the centre. A chest of drawers, a worn divan, and glass-panelled cupboard lean against the walls. The room is governed by a framed photo of Stratis, my grandfather, beside his wife Melita. His head and shoulders are visible above his two sons, Andreas and Manoli, aged twelve and ten.
Look closely and you will notice that Stratis is not truly present. He was in Australia at the time. His image has been skilfully inserted, but no amount of skill can hide his distracted gaze. His thoughts are elsewhere. He is a disembodied presence, a white haired patriarch lost to other worlds. And, missing in the photo entirely is my grand aunt, Irini, Melita’s younger sister, who took care of the boys after she died.
The house is two hundred years old, or more. No one knows exactly how old. Andreas and Manoli added a kitchen when they were fourteen and twelve, so the story goes. Stratis was still absent, the boys had to make do. Their kitchen was demolished six years ago. I appreciate the c
onvenience of the spacious kitchen that replaced it, but miss what has gone.
Imagine a Chagall painting of a crooked room. The brothers built the kitchen without planning or forethought. They whitewashed the walls, painted the shutters green, and the perimeter of the fireplace black. They did not see, until it was too late, that they had fashioned the room to their own height. The angles were not quite right, the walls tilted, but the size did not deter visitors.
It became the most lived-in room of the house. Aunt Ourania, Andreas’ wife of fifty years, would sit at the table by the open window and observe the neighbours as they moved past. On cooler nights, long after she had retired, Andreas and I remained by the kitchen fire. ‘The fire is burning,’ he would say. ‘And the fire loves us.’
One evening I was mesmerised by a burning log crowded with ants. They had retreated in the thousands to the edge of the log. As the flames moved closer, the ants began to scurry about. Some darted into the flames. Others fell into the smouldering coals. I tried to herd them from the flames with a stick, but to no avail. They had lost their bearings. Perhaps they no longer cared to live with the loss of their queen. Unaware of their presence, Andreas leaned over, grabbed the edge of the log, and shoved it into the fire.
On warmer nights we sat on the balcony. It was here that Andreas first told me the tale of the boat called Brotherly Love, and he embellished it in the kitchen, and as we walked about the village. In his ageing he was a restless man. I would come across him leaning against the cast-iron balustrade, and soon after, seated on the veranda outside the kitchen. Then he would be gone, and I would catch him standing below the balcony, gazing at the mountains.
‘We are born to die,’ he said, ‘all of us, except the mountains. They only get smaller.’ An hour later, I would come across him sitting in a neighbour’s courtyard, gesticulating in his rapid fire Greek. Then he’d be gone, and would reappear on the road, hunched over his walking stick, in search of a way to whittle away the hours.
