Sea of Many Returns

by Arnold Zable

  Manoli built boats in the yard of the house. It was his enduring passion. His rage subsided only when he was out on the bay. There were times when he stormed out and did not return for days. He rarely spoke of Andreas, his brother, or his mother, Melita, and he cursed Stratis, his father. He poured venom on his wife Sophia, and forbade her to visit Mentor.

  When, at last, we broke the prohibition, Mentor claimed he could turn my mouse into a rat. All he needed, he told me, was a three-month loan of the mouse. I was ten at the time. The cage in which he housed the mouse stood on his worktable, beside the human skull he used as a weight on his manuscript.

  Sophia told me the story many times—as I have now told Martina, who was born a year after my mother died—tales of the skull, and of her father, Mentor the hypnotist, the magician and kite flier, fiddler and fiddle maker, chef and self-appointed healer, the village boy who descended the mountain and set out for new worlds.

  ‘After the death of my mother, Fotini, it was the kites that kept him going,’ Sophia claimed. ‘And the backyard shed in which he made them.’ Years earlier, when Sophia was a child, he held the skull in his right hand on the night he performed his magician’s act ‘The defeat of the devil’. The back-curtain was draped with a painting of a flight of stone steps rising from ancient ruins scattered over a mountainside.

  ‘The devil was dressed in black from hood to leather boots,’ said Sophia. ‘He held a pistol, finger on the trigger, while I waited on a ladder behind the curtain. I wore a white gown with angel wings. My father tugged at the curtain and I slid down on a rope, wings flapping. I hated it. I heard members of the audience snigger, but Mentor did not care what anyone thought.

  ‘At that time one of my chores was to go outside and polish the plaque on the front gate. “Mentor the Hypnotist”, the engraved letters read. “Can cure neuralgia, insomnia, headaches, nervous disorders. Relief guaranteed. Enquire within.”

  ‘The usually compliant Fotini put her foot down, and refused to perform this chore. My mother wanted nothing to do with Mentor’s experiments in the occult. It was left to me. I polished the plaque until it glowed. I did not dare look up lest I caught the eye of a passer-by. When the job was done, I ran inside.’

  ‘You have forgotten about the angel,’ I reminded my mother.

  Sophia laughed at the memory.

  ‘I slid towards him, wings outstretched,’ she said. ‘My job was to tap him on the shoulder as I was lowered to the stage. As soon as I touched him his posture straightened. His resolve tightened. The touch of an angel gave him courage to face the devil. The devil adjusted his pistol, took aim and fired. The shot sent a shudder through the audience. Mentor caught the bullet between his teeth. The audience gasped. Cynics reached for their worry beads before remembering they no longer carried them. The applause was louder than the sniggers.

  ‘When the curtain was lowered, I packed away my wings,’ Sophia concluded. ‘I could not get them off quickly enough. What could I do? I had to play the part, polish the plaque, and do what I was told. That is how I was taught, to do as I was told.’

  I set out with Martina on the mule path to Exogi, early in the morning. The path breaks from the road into a forest of oak and cypress. Drops of dew hang from ripening olives. A dung beetle hauls droppings five times its size. The forest floor is littered with yellow toadstools.

  Halfway up the mountain we pause at the ruins known as Homer’s School. The diggings are boarded over; in summer, archaeologists will resume their excavations. The roots of olive trees split through rock formations that villagers claim are millennia old. A yellow-striped lizard basks in the sun. Like the tortoise of the Agora, it slips away before Martina can grasp it. A flight of stone steps ascends against a rock face. The ancient stairway leads nowhere, yet figures large in Mentor’s manuscript.

  We return to the path, which widens into a walkway between perimeter walls. Minutes later, we see the blue dome of St Marina, and the first homes of Exogi, built into the mountain. Stone steps provide short cuts between clusters of houses. We pause by the pile of rubble that was once the home Mentor was raised in, and break clear of the village on a path that runs towards the gate of a chapel beneath the summit.

  On the lee side of the ridge the land plunges into a hidden valley, its sides indented with derelict terraces. From our vantage point, Exogi appears precariously perched on the edge of a cliff. With just one tremor, it seems, the entire village would be torn from the mountain and hurled into the sea by an enraged Cyclops.

  We climb higher. A black goat lifts its head and gazes intently. The lower peaks and escarpments extend beneath us. We can imagine the entire island, the full expanse of it. It is small enough to be known, yet large enough to contain mysteries. Its mountains are high enough to conceal valleys, and its coastline long enough to obscure harbours.

  A sea hawk circles above us. We are mesmerised by its cool mastery of space, but moments later it is caught by a gust of wind and hurled off-course. The battle between hawk and wind continues as we scale a dirt path to the telecommunications tower. Satellite dishes flash in the sun. The earth is littered with goat dung. The sea, in a three-hundred-degree sweep about us, is a sheet of mercury.

  We are fully exposed to the wind. It alternatively erupts in violent gusts and dies back to silences. Within its invisible kernel I discern a hissing and bellowing, a tumbling and rising like the sinuous notes of a violin. For a moment I am afraid that Martina will be lifted and catapulted into the waters far below us. I clasp her hand as we battle our way against the wind, the final metres over a field of boulders, to the summit.

  BOOK III

  Mentor’s manuscript

  MELBOURNE 1967, ITHACA 1895–1916

  IT IS my curse. I am in love with the summit: underfoot, the rocky earth, between boulders smooth as dinosaur eggs. Beyond the boulders, the limestone crust curving over cliffs into solitary coves, the sea stretching like a rumpled sheet, north to the island of Lefkada and west, to Kefallonia. So close, I can make out the settlements within its mountainous folds. And the sun, moving, spotlighting shepherd’s tracks, the lower hamlets, the silver flecks of an olive grove.

  Even now, over fifty years later, the scene comes upon me as I walk the streets of Melbourne, the city I have lived in more than half a lifetime. I stop, lean against a wall, catch my breath and smile the blessed smile of a man who is grateful that the island exists on this earth.

  Perhaps it is true what they whispered in the Ithacan Club after my first-born, Demos, died. ‘Mentor has gone mad,’ they sighed, as they arranged their cards. ‘Trellos ine. The death of his son was too much to bear. He was a master chef, a fiddler, an Ithacan brother. Now he no longer plays at our weddings, no longer stuffs the intestines of lambs, nor joins us for a hand of cards. What a pity,’ they muttered with the distracted air of those who are intent on the game. ‘A man who spends too much time alone courts madness.’

  Who could blame them? I had left my job and retreated to the domed reading room in the State Library. I was no comfort to my wife, Fotini. Neither of us could be consoled. I needed solace. I wanted to understand the cruel logic of fate. I wanted to know my purpose on this earth. I unnerved them. I have always unnerved people, though it has never been my intention. It is the lot of silent ones to make others feel unnerved.

  I can only stay true to my nature, and it has its advantages. In my silence I am patient, and because I am patient I enjoy solitude, even on busy Russell Street, at a cafe table in the Greek quarter. I have always sought the silence that lies behind sounds. I isolate them as Mikhalis the fiddler taught me to do, break them down into components: the grunt of a truck, a snatch of song emanating from the music store, the lilt of conversations drifting through cafe doors.

  Fragments of sound draw out fragments of memory. We all have our fragments to assemble and make sense of. We all harbour the secret wish, like blind Homer, to take the lyre in hand and recount our tales. For now, let an old man invoke the scenes of hi
s childhood. I am indulging in nostalgia some would say, but I don’t see it that way. The memory lives, and is as real as the world I see around me.

  Nostalgia may be a curse, yet it is also one of life’s pleasures, a pastime for the mind. In my ageing it is a salve to conjure the past. It enables me to play with time rather than be its slave. Have you noticed how many times a day we check our watches? It is a symptom of our disease. We cannot even abide the few seconds it takes for the traffic lights to turn from red to green. I have seen drivers reading newspapers as they wait. We cannot sit still.

  Once I came across a line that encapsulated my thoughts. I had not been in Melbourne long. It was my habit at that time to take a break from work and stroll to the State Library. It was a ten-minute walk from the cafe in which I worked to the wrought-iron gates on Swanston Street. The gates are no longer there but the stone steps remain.

  I paused in the forecourt, stepped into the foyer, and climbed the marble stairs to the domed reading room. I picked out books at random and flipped through the pages to test my understanding of the new language. I piled selected volumes on a desk, adjusted the swivel chair, and began reading. I found the line in a compendium of sayings, and copied it down. Over the years I have kept it in my wallet: ‘Man’s problem is not being able to stay alone in his room.’

  When Demos died, the reading room became my haven. There was space beneath the dome to weep and not be seen. I took comfort in the stacks of books that were lined up like mute witnesses to my follies. I sat beside readers quietly immersed in their obsessions. I rested my head on the leather writing pads and lost myself in the scent of ageing pages.

  The loss of a child, however, is a wound that can never heal. Not even the memory of the summit can obliterate the pain. Yet the scene can assail me at any time. I have no choice in the matter. It can rear up without my bidding; and I return to the beginning.

  I was born on the mountain. Within hours of my birth, my father stepped out, lifted me above his head and shouted, so loud he could be heard at the furthest limits of the village, ‘I have a boy. I have a boy.’ His voice carried over the terraces, mule paths and barren ridges of the upper reaches. He proclaimed the news loud enough to penetrate the skulls of the men immersed in card games in the coffee house.

  They grabbed their winnings, or made do with their losses, rushed out to the streets, and dashed up the flight of steps that led to our house. Dimitri lifted me one last time, handed me to my aunts, and accompanied the men back to the coffee house for celebratory drinks. As you can see, I glimpsed the summit before I tasted my mother’s milk.

  In time I acquired the sturdy walk of those who are born on mountains. My thighs grew thick, my calves hard, and my ankles supple enough to withstand the shock of rocks and boulders. The peak greeted me each day as I stepped out of the house. It drew me to the path beyond the village, and above terraces planted with flax, corn and vines. The path arced past the last church and graveyard. I inhaled the incense trailing through its open doors, and climbed above the receding homes towards the chapel beneath the summit.

  I dashed through the forecourt, skirted the belltower, hoisted myself over the perimeter wall, and clambered over the final barrier of rocks. I scoured the sky for the sea hawk. I wanted to exchange my arms for wings and survey the island through its predator eyes.

  I had no need of company. I enjoyed the subtle presence of goats. I had only to follow the bleating of the mother to see the placenta within minutes of birth. The kid struggled up to the teats, while the placenta lay on a crag, pulsating, for a moment, before being torn to shreds by sea hawks.

  On the mountain there are no creatures better to emulate than goats. They are sure footed and find sustenance where other creatures would starve. They tear the bark off trees and, if out of reach, piggyback on sheep to grab hold of succulent leaves. They know when a storm is looming, and when it descends, their faces peer from, and disappear into, the clouds.

  I roamed the mountain alone, or with Stratis. Four years older, Stratis lived in a lower hamlet, the Village of The Forty Saints. I followed him like a faithful kid bleating at his heels. At night we became fiends. We raided gardens and ran from enraged dogs. We fled up trees like terrified cats and did not come down until dawn. We stole watermelons, but they tasted so bitter we threw them away. In the morning we saw that we had bitten into pumpkins. The daylight revealed the insanity of our nights, but when darkness fell we succumbed to the temptation all over again.

  We crept out and met by the ruins of Homer’s School. It stood on the wooded slopes midway between our villages. We gathered fallen branches, lit a fire and laid out a supper of figs, feta and olives, and washed down our feast with wine Stratis had siphoned from a barrel in the katoi.

  One glass was enough to inspire us to howl like wolves. The shadows cast by the fire played upon geckos clinging to rock-walls, millennia old. We picked our way through the ruins to a flight of steps cut into the rock, stood on the highest rung, and ran a knife over our right thumbs. We pressed the thumbs together and declared ourselves blood brothers.

  On ensuing nights we climbed beyond Stratis’ village to the Marmakas. We followed the cliff path above Afales Bay, paused by the mill, and advanced to the leeside where we slept in shepherds’ huts. On windless nights we returned to the mill and dozed on the platform beside the grinding stone. On warmer nights we slept outside. We looked up at the skies and hurled abuse. We had learnt the art of blaspheming, and skies do not answer back.

  Not content with the shepherds’ huts of the Marmakas, we embarked on a more ambitious trek. Stratis guided me over mule paths from Exogi to the wooded slopes overlooking Polis Bay. We skirted the village of Stavros, and clambered over mountain passes to the isthmus that divides north from south. The sun was sinking as we climbed the slopes of Mount Aetos to the citadel ruins.

  We gulped down wine and tested each other to see who could walk in a straight line. We stumbled over slopes littered with ceramic tiles, and dodged the remains of retaining walls. We scattered a flock of sheep asleep on their feet, lifted our arms to the heavens, and proclaimed ourselves kings of Ithaca. Our first act as monarchs was to fall into a stupor.

  We were not the only ones who played pranks. One night I was awoken by a commotion in the square. I jumped out of bed and raced through the streets. Old Niko the drunk lay prostrate on a bier outside St Marina’s surrounded by a growing crowd. Four pallbearers hoisted the bier to their shoulders. We followed the procession to the cemetery grounds. Niko was barely conscious as we chanted the incantations for the dead. The natural order of things was being turned upside down. A new festival was being born and Niko was its patron.

  The pallbearers carried him back through St Marina’s doors and laid him out on the floor. They placed two candles by his head, two by his feet. We retreated to the dark recesses of the church and waited until he awoke. Niko sat up with a start, stared at the candles and pressed his hands to his face as if making sure he was there. He staggered to his feet and stumbled from the church into the first light of day. We followed and mimicked his gestures. The younger children threw stones. ‘Hey Niko, are you alive or dead?’ we chanted. From that day on we greeted him with these words.

  Old Niko lived in a hovel on a hillock that protruded like a vertebra from a spur above the village. He wheezed his way through the winter months and on warmer days sat sunning himself by the hovel door. He slept on a mattress amid rotting sea-trunks and wicker chairs. His skin was lizard bronze, his eyes rheumy brown. He was a mystery I could not fathom, a drunkard who had known better days. His isolation struck fear. He was being eaten by syphilis, the villagers laughed. The children kept a wide berth. I too kept clear of him, but there would come a time when he would give voice to my absent father.

  The periods of my father’s journeys were unfathomable. They had something to do with the waters that glistened below us, and the double-masted brig that vanished over the horizon soon after he left. He would leave when t
he winter was over. He would still be away as the days grew warmer, and our crops were ready for the reaping.

  And just as I thought he had become a ghost of his former presence, he would be back. He returned when the harvest was long over, and the snakes had curled into their winter burrows. On each return he bent down, lifted me up, and drew me level with his eyes. He smelt of salt and wind, and the odour of forgotten days. He looked at me intently, measuring the changes since we had last met; then set me down and opened his knapsack to retrieve his homecoming gifts.

  One year he brought me a Turkish dagger. He gripped the silver handle between his forefinger and thumb, and hurled it at the almond tree beside the house. The dagger caught the sun as it whirled. It vibrated as it lodged in the bark and came to rest embedded in the trunk. I carried the dagger with me whenever I roamed the mountain. I threw it at cypress and oaks, and fought hand-to-hand battles with imaginary foes. I sharpened its blade against the rocks and polished it with oiled cloth until it flashed.

  The following year my father brought me a telescope. He did not hand it over immediately. ‘We must catch the light before it dies,’ he said. We followed the path that rose above the village. I felt small beside him as we walked, a little afraid of this stranger whose mind always appeared to be somewhere else. The sun was well on its descent when we scrambled to the summit.

  ‘Close your eyes,’ he said, as he handed me the telescope. ‘Lift it to your right eye. Now look!’ I made out the chimneys of houses on the slopes of neighbouring isles. I saw caiques at anchor and boats returning to port. I saw the wild foliage of un-pruned vines and the dense undergrowth beneath olive groves. I followed the final fifty metres of an old woman’s trek to the doors of a mountain chapel and watched her step inside.

  I swung the telescope round to take in the white cliffs called Sappho’s Leap glistening off the Lefkada coast. I saw the sclerotic limbs of an olive tree jutting from a cliff face. A hawk swooped so low I recoiled from its claws. When I lowered the telescope all sprang back into its rightful place.