Sea of Many Returns

by Arnold Zable

  Anastasias, the manager of the cafe, emerged from the kitchen with bowls of oysters and crayfish. ‘He is from Castellorizo, but we don’t hold it against him,’ Stratis joked. ‘We are all fools on the same sinking ship.’

  We lowered our heads to the table and ate to the sound of shells cracking, earnest chewing and the slurping of wine. Only when our bellies were full were they prepared to tell me the tale. It moved around the table from teller to teller. Voices tumbled over each other, disputing details, adding interpretations, embroidering the drama.

  It had begun the previous Friday evening. On the following day the country was to vote in a referendum on conscription. The streets were crowded. The air was charged with impassioned pronouncements, extravagant claims. Orators proclaimed their opinions on soapboxes. Speakers thundered that those who would not fight were impostors and cowards. Others countered that the lives of the country’s young men were being sacrificed to foreign interests, Imperial powers.

  As darkness fell, a group of soldiers and civilian youths assembled at the Beaufort Street Bridge to drink and hatch plans. They egged each other on with talk of ‘enemy aliens’ and ‘the foreign traitors among us’; then set out, on the run, for the fish markets where they were sure to find them.

  Anastasias spread a street map on the table and traced the route: from the bridge to the markets, where the enraged men came across two fishmongers, Lakidis and Mavrokefalos, manning barrows with the afternoon catch from the Sicilian boats. The markets had closed. Their quarry had eluded them. The mob would have to make do with the fishmongers. They upended the barrows, scattered the prawns, and marched from the markets brandishing looted crayfish, singing patriotic songs: ‘Australia will be there’, ‘It’s a long way to Tipperary’.

  A drunken soldier tore a Union Jack from a building and waved it in front the cheering men. They paraded the streets behind the flag, until, responding to the directions of a ringleader, stampeded to Murray Street. They came to a halt outside Kyriakos Manolas’ restaurant, uncertain of what to do next. One of the men at the back of the crowd, growing impatient, hurled a crayfish at the glass. One begets many as is written in the book of Genesis, and a hail of crayfish battered the windows.

  When they were done, the men regrouped and marched through city streets led by a soldier blowing a bugle. Their appetites had been whetted. They craved more action. They recalled newspaper articles and cartoons that had lampooned their pro-conscription patriotism, and dashed to the offices of The Truth on Hay Street.

  The last crayfish rebounded from the plate glass with a dull thud. The men scurried to a pile of road metal, grabbed fistfuls and returned like a swarm of soldier ants to continue their assault. When the windows gave way they rushed to the offices of the Daily News on St George’s Terrace, gathering an assortment of missiles as they ran.

  Anastasias paused with his finger on the map, to work out the route the mob had taken from the offices to his cafe. ‘What does it matter?’ he finally said, shrugging his shoulders. The men had surged into the cafe and cleaned out his entire stock.

  The mobs continued their rampage, laying waste to Panos Koronaios’ Royal Dining Room. They raided the English and Continental Cafes owned by Russian émigrés; and attacked Sam Epstein’s Moana Cafe. ‘I am a naturalised Briton,’ Epstein pleaded, and was jeered at as the rocks took flight. One hundred patrons fled through a shower of glass. Looters sprinted inside and hurled boxes of chocolate out to the pavement. Children grabbed fistfuls of sweets and leapt for joy at their unexpected fortune.

  The undermanned police called in the Light Horse picket from the Claremont Camp. The crowd scattered and broke into smaller packs as the horses charged. Fistfights continued late into the night, and in the morning, when my compatriots surveyed the damage, they realised years of toil had been reduced to waste.

  ‘No matter how hard we try to remain quiet we have not escaped notice,’ said Anastasias. ‘We mind our own business, but every day there are newspaper reports about the Great War as they call it. They know that King Constantine’s wife is the sister of Kaiser Wilhelm and they believe that the palace is riddled with pro-German spies.

  ‘They know that mobs on the streets of Athens are attacking the republican followers of their ally, Prime Minister Venizelos, but they do not care to know that most of us support him. They have no time for subtleties. Their boys went off to do battle as if setting out for a picnic, and now that their loved ones are dying they need to wreak vengeance.’

  ‘It did not start yesterday,’ said Stratis. ‘They have despised us for a long time. It irks them that some of us have done well. They hate the sound of our foreign tongue. They hate the way we keep together. No matter how hard we try to be more British than the British we remain black traitors. So let’s split open a few more oysters and talk our gibberish, and they can go to hell.’

  Stratis pushed back his chair and circled the room singing. For the first time since I stepped ashore I saw the old Stratis, slipping over the stones of Aetos, barely able to hold a straight line, Stratis and I sealing our pact on the steps of Homer’s School with blood and a swig of wine.

  I rose to my feet and joined him. We lifted the stripped crayfish from the plates and brandished them in imitation of the mob. We marched around the room singing mock renditions of patriotic songs, and fell about laughing. When we came to our senses, we heard a voice rising: first as a humming, then as a wave building, voices sought each other out, easing into harmonies. Conversations gave way to cantathas, the most loved of Ionian musical forms.

  ‘Mavri xenitia,’ one of the men muttered as our voices trailed away. ‘Our black exile. We are marooned in a foreign land, and despite our constipated smiles and declarations of loyalty, our hopes of redemption are turning to dust.’

  Stratis and I left Perth by train the following morning. Our compartment was crowded with soldiers on leave. One leant against his wife, the only woman among us. Another sat with an arm in a sling, brooding. We were men without women headed for the Golden Mile. For the first time in my life the coast was out of sight. I had lost my familiar companions, sea and mountain. As we advanced inland, the trees grew smaller, shrinking to stunted shrubs upon stony dirt.

  ‘The first volunteers,’ said Stratis, ‘signed up in August 1914, when Britain declared war on Germany.’ He spoke softly, lest his Greek attract wary glances. In recent months men of foreign appearance had been attacked and beaten for speaking their native tongue. ‘The recruits came running: stockmen and drovers, railwaymen, labourers, carpenters, miners, gold prospectors, bushmen, timber contractors, office workers and shearers, from every corner of the state, young men, teenage boys.’

  ‘Like the Ithacans who volunteered for the Balkan Wars,’ I offered.

  Stratis ignored my remarks.

  ‘Hundreds gathered at the Kalgoorlie station to farewell the recruits who had been drinking all night. The town’s people pushed beer and baskets of food through the carriage windows. They waved Union Jacks and cheered when the train pulled out. The same scenes, I was told, were repeated at every station. The next day, the recruits were marched to the training camp at Blackboy Hill on the outskirts of Perth. Ten weeks later they were on their way to Fremantle where they boarded two troop ships.’

  Stratis paused, and noting the blank expressions on the passengers in the compartment, lowered his voice further. ‘I was in Fremantle, packing oysters in ice for the journey to Kalgoorlie. The wharves were crowded, brass bands played, streamers were thrown on board as the ships cast off. The recruits did not know where they were going. Many believed they were bound for Britain or the European fronts. Days later, on the Indian Ocean, the two ships joined a convoy of thirty-eight.

  ‘Imagine it my friend!’ Stratis exclaimed, ‘a flotilla of ships had sailed from New Zealand and Australian ports, and assembled in the port of Albany. Now they were on their way to the continent we had sailed from so recently.’ He shook his head in wonder. ‘Odysseus entered Troy with t
roops hidden in the bowels of a wooden horse. Three thousand years later, troops and live horses are sailing to do battle on the opposite ends of the earth.’

  Stratis leaned closer. ‘By the end of November the plans had changed,’ he said, his voice almost a whisper. ‘Under orders from the Imperial command in London the troops and horses disembarked in Alexandria; and five months later they were dying at the hands of the Turks, not far from the battlefields of Troy, their bodies strewn on the shores of our Aegean.’

  We continued our journey in silence. The land was scattered with oases of woodlands, copses of salmon gum, wild flowers, all the more brilliant because of the emptiness that surrounded them. We stopped at isolated stations: single timber waiting rooms beside a signal box and water tank. Passengers disembarked and vanished into nothingness. And just as it seemed the world itself had disappeared, Kalgoorlie was upon us, a dusty mirage rising from an ocean of red dirt.

  We sit around trapezia. This is how we find each other, at backroom tables scattered throughout the globe. We unfold our arms, lean forward, enter conversations, lean back and fall silent, then re-enter the fray, even as we curse, malacca, you wanker, even as we shake our fists and lament our black exile. And this is how it was, at the very first table, on my very first night in Kalgoorlie, in the back room behind the Parisian Cafe.

  My Ithacan compatriots were there to welcome me as they had in Perth: cafe proprietors, oyster mongers, tobacconists, fruiterers and confectioners. And the backroom boys: waiters, dishwashers, cooks and cleaners, apprenticed to uncles, older brothers and fathers, biding their time until they too would have enough capital to set up shop. Their tales fell from their lips in tandem with the cards they slapped on the table. And holding court among them was the Gambler, the know-all of know-alls, the patron saint of new arrivals, the loudest mouth in the room.

  Dressed in a jacket, waistcoat, white shirt and bow tie, his upper back was curved in the premature stoop of a man who had spent too many nights hunched over tables. His crooked nose accentuated the sharp features of his elongated face, and a mop of hair straggled from beneath a felt hat to his jacket collar. A cynical smile played upon his lips.

  ‘See what has become of the children of Odysseus!’ he laughed. ‘We have abandoned the seas to become city-mongers. Our clothes smell of rancid fruit and gutted fish. We are so tired we doze off on our feet.’ The Gambler shuffled the cards with a deft hand as he talked. A cigarette wiggled in his mouth, but barely interfered with the flow of his tales. His companions tried, with little success, to get a say in edgeways, while I listened in silence, a naïve newcomer hanging on every word.

  ‘I did not want to remain a slave for the rest of my life,’ he said. ‘After all I come from Kioni, the most beautiful village on Ithaca. I can see it now,’ he declared with mock nostalgia. ‘The three windmills standing like sentinels on the rim of the peninsula, our homes on steep slopes with perfect views of the harbour. Alas its beauty could not support us. Without wealth the most beautiful scenes appear ugly. When I have accumulated enough money I will return. This is what I live for.’

  ‘Ah, here it comes, the old chorus,’ interjected Stratis, winking at me. ‘We have heard it all before. Now you will tell us about your days at sea.’

  ‘Why not young man?’ the Gambler retorted. ‘After all, I spent a decade on cargo boats. The best voyage is always the maiden voyage. By the third voyage, sea-life becomes a weary succession of familiar ports. By the twentieth, I had endured enough of being tossed from wharf to wharf. On an impulse I jumped ship in Fremantle.’

  ‘Ithacan compatriots can be found in every port. I soon found work. The proprietor, from Vathy, worked me eighteen hours a day, and paid me a pittance. I doused myself with cold water to stay awake. He expected me to be grateful he had given me a job.

  ‘At first I thought I had little choice. I worked as a dishwasher and cleaner, and hauled the stinking rubbish bins into the lane. I held my breath to avoid the stench, brushed away the flies, returned to the cafe, and saw it in a new light. It was obvious that the action was centred on cards. There was money to be made at the backroom tables. Life is a gamble so why not make a living as a gambler, I reasoned. I threw off my apron, and told my boss to get fucked. I had discovered my mission in life. A game of cards, a group of men assembled around a table, this is what I live for.’

  ‘As long as you have control of the bank,’ laughed Stratis.

  ‘Why not, young man? I provide a service. I follow my compatriots and fellow riff-raff wherever they go. I seek you out wherever you are scattered on these godforsaken wastes. I have found you crawling in mine shafts, and scavenging oyster beds. I have seen you bent over stoves, waiting on tables like timid servants, smiling to prevent yourselves from throwing up. I have tracked you down herding cattle on stations as large as our entire island.

  ‘I sit with people wherever I find them and unite them with a pack of cards. I organise the bank, keep all in order, prevent needless fights and arguments, and in return I receive the gossip. A good story, Mentor, this is what I live for,’ he said, turning to me, his one willing listener. ‘I know every tale of every Greek who has had the misfortune to stumble into these parts.’

  ‘Now he will tell you about the Jacomas brothers,’ Stratis warned.

  ‘Why not, young man? The Jacomas brothers are the cunning heroes of journeys that would make Homer rejoice. Their native island, Castellorizo, is more destitute than ours, and doubly cursed since it lies off the Turkish coast. I have docked in its harbour many times en route to eastern ports.

  ‘Castellorizians were marine traders. They roamed the Mediterranean like wily Ithacans. The Ottomans, may they burn in hell, controlled the harbours and crushed them with taxes. They denied them access to the Anatolian forests where they obtained the timber for constructing their boats, and to rub salt into the wounds, the new European steamers outgunned the speed of their home-built craft.’

  ‘We do not need a history lesson,’ grumbled one of the men, impatient for his next hand of cards.

  ‘How can we understand a man’s fate if we do not know of such things?’ snapped the Gambler. ‘The Jacomas brothers did not suddenly appear from the desert! They came here because they were running away from the plague that has afflicted us all. A little bit of history won’t go astray. The brothers arrived here in the footsteps of Paddy Hannan, the prospector who first came upon this madness we now call Kalgoorlie.’

  The Gambler leant forward and rubbed his knees as Spiro Karpouzis, the cafe owner, delivered a tray of coffees. ‘The smell of coffee, the sight of the kaimaki frothing on the top, the anticipation of the first sip, this is what I live for!’ he exclaimed. ‘Who could have imagined that so much pleasure resides in such a tiny cup?

  ‘Paddy Hannan is the reason we are stuck here, in this black hole,’ he continued, addressing me, cigarette in mouth, cup in hand, unsure of which to indulge in next. ‘Hannan journeyed with his face glued to the ground, driven by the memory of the famine he had known as a youth. He had fled a country where his compatriots’ lips had turned green from their diet of grass. For thirty years he followed every gold rush, south to north, west to east, and across the Tasman Sea to the New Zealand coast. He scanned the earth for so long, he forgot there were skies.

  ‘He was fifty by the time he plodded here beside two packhorses and his companions, Shea and Flanagan. The three men staked their claim on the tenth day of June 1893. Every one in Kalgoorlie knows the date; it is inscribed on the pepper tree in the street that bears Hannan’s name. They set up camp when there was nothing but ugly stretches of scrub. They clawed at quartz embedded with fragments of gold. They found nuggets of alluvial gold scattered over the ground. The rumours travelled fast. Within days there were hundreds of prospectors pawing the Kalgoorlie dirt.

  ‘Now you will boast that you knew Hannan,’ said Stratis, ‘even though you were not here at that time.’

  ‘I didn’t meet him,’ the Gambler confesses, ‘b
ut of course the Jacomas brothers knew him. Like me, they made it their business to know people. Hannan was forever heading somewhere else, the brothers told me. He would disappear for weeks and return with the same secretive expression. He would have made a great poker player.

  ‘“What have you found?” the brothers asked in towns that had known better days. Hannan looked around as if making sure there was no one who could overhear him, then whispered, “I have found nothing. Nothing at all.”

  ‘The brothers were not so foolish. They had our islander cunning in their veins. They quickly saw what was what. Why waste one’s life grovelling in dust? They acquired wagons, loaded them with crowbars, picks, tomahawks and saws, pegs, nails, five-gallon drums filled with water, bags of sugar, tinned pudding, sacks of flour and potatoes, and set out like the gypsies who pass through our Ithaca.

  ‘They journeyed on routes inscribed by wagon grooves and bullock hooves, and raised their hats to graves marked by wood crosses and cairns. They paused by lone prospectors wheeling their belongings in barrows made of branches and bark. They greeted bearded men trudging with all they possessed on their backs, and stopped to serve weary prospectors foraging over parched creek beds. They collected water from condensing machines on the shores of salt-water lakes, and sold it to disoriented wanderers wilting from thirst.’

  The Gambler paused to dab his forehead with a handkerchief. ‘Like Ionian seamen, the early prospectors reaped the winds,’ he continued. ‘They hurled top sand into the air, and the dust was blown away, leaving behind specks of gold. They knelt like pious worshippers beside wooden cradles and rocked them to sift the dirt.

  ‘The Jacomas brothers could barely see them through the dust as they approached. They built a fortune selling cloths that wiped away the mess. They bartered and traded and took gold nuggets in lieu of cash. They knew every teamster, miner and merchant in every town and settlement on every field from Kalgoorlie to the west coast.