Sea of Many Returns

by Arnold Zable

  ‘Enough of your tales,’ exclaims one of the guests, interrupting the Gambler mid-flight, ‘we’ve heard them all before.’ And the company bursts out laughing. Laughter gives way to conversations that subside to whispers and, finally, silence. And from the silence, a solitary humming, then one voice, giving way to two, and soon many, finding their way, hesitantly at first, like the blind stumbling in the dark.

  The voices search until they are in full harness: to each other, to the lapping of the river, the drift of laughter, the breaking swells on the incoming tide. The singers look like a flock of birds that have returned to their breeding grounds, and I am glad to be of them, and a part of them. They possess something as vast as the heavens, and as mysterious as the horizon that yokes the stars to the bay. The melody belongs here on this veranda by the mouth of the river, yet it belongs, more surely, somewhere else.

  Ithaca. I cannot recall the first time I heard the word. It has always been there like an ancient longing welling up from the sea. Perhaps this is where the birds go when they leave the swamps for their flight north. Perhaps Ithaca is the goal of their migrations, an island beyond the limits of vision, somewhere out there in the dark. Ithaca is in the harmonies of cantathas, a mystery that fills me with awe and warmth.

  The cantathas give way to quiet talk that returns to the croaking of frogs, the trill of crickets, the muted thud of boats against their berths. One by one the guests fall silent, leaving behind the last sentences that had slipped from their mouths; and when I wake I am back in bed and the sun is out, the curtains drawn. From the kitchen comes the sound of laughter, the clutter of dishes, and I come upon the guests seated at the kitchen table, bent over their coffees, eating and talking, as if this is the company they keep every morning.

  After breakfast they set out, the men in jackets, white shirts and ties, stove-piped trousers and pointed shoes, the women in flared cotton dresses and high heels, carrying fold-up stools, picnic baskets, buckets and blankets which they deposit in the verge of bush that extends between the foreshore and road.

  When the tide is out we clamber over the reefs, a tribe of scavengers, buckets in hand, to prise mussels from the rocks. I swim with my distant cousins, and run about in the midday sun. Ela tho. Come here! Our mothers shout and finally draw us to the blankets they have spread beneath gums and tea-trees. The blankets are covered with food: stuffed tomatoes, fried marrows and eggplant, feta in oil, fish roe dips, and slabs of meat left over from the slaughter of the previous day. When the eating is done and washed down with wine, the older guests lie back on the blankets and doze, while we run back to the water for relief from the sweltering sun.

  Late afternoon the company trudges home, bellies full, bodies tired. They disappear into the cool recesses of the house to resume their siestas, and re-emerge hours later on the veranda. Conversations ebb and flow, and the nights beget days that beget afternoon sojourns crowded in Manoli’s boat, from which the company returns in the evenings, to veranda nights by the bay.

  And by the seventh night they are gone, leaving behind the dying echoes of their songs, the ripple of their laughter, and my father’s brooding presence, and night sorties out to sea. They disappear as surely as the boat over the horizon. The summer is over, the veranda empty, and Manoli is somewhere out there, the night prowler, alone.

  ‘I will not go to that house,’ Manoli shouts.

  He paces the rooms.

  ‘I want nothing to do with Mentor and your accursed family.’

  Sophia and I remain silent.

  ‘Look at you, eh! The hen and her chicken,’ he says, with contempt.

  Sophia holds her ground.

  ‘Stuff you,’ he hisses. And turns, slams the back door and retreats to the car. Minutes later, he is gone.

  I walk with Sophia to the station. A neighbour is cutting his lawn with a hand mower as he does every Sunday morning. A horse grazes in a paddock, swishing its tail at flies on his rump. The starlings beneath the railway bridge are taking flight. I wonder where they will spend the day. A boat emerges from under the bridge, backwash rippling from its stern. We pause to watch its progress to the bay.

  The train can be heard approaching. We hurry to the station and arrive in time to dash in through the carriage doors. The railway runs beside the highway, lined by houses and shacks. I glimpse the sea at the ends of streets running from the tracks to the beach. I watch for the familiar landmark, a dental surgery with window displays of life-size dolls that appear to be suffocating against the panes.

  As the train moves inland, I look down from the carriage windows at a succession of backyards. Tricycles and toys lie where last discarded. Clothes droop from lines and hoists. A woman in a black scarf cleans a tombstone in the Cheltenham cemetery. Approaching the inner city, the rails multiply into a lace-work of tracks. We disembark at Flinders Street Station, and continue our journey north by tram.

  Mentor awaits our arrival in Brunswick, seated on the veranda in a wicker chair. He walks to the gate and escorts us into the house. My grandfather possesses gravitas in all he does. Fotini had died three years ago, and though tidy, the house is neglected and dark. Sophia draws back the heavy curtains and allows the light in. Mentor insists on making the tea, and sets out the cups and saucers on the kitchen table. Sophia stays behind to air the house, while Mentor ushers me into the backyard. ‘The rat is waiting for you,’ he says with a conspiratorial wink.

  A gaggle of bantams peck at a crop of tomatoes interspersed with basil and marigolds. A well-tended grapevine trails against the walls of the washhouse. Mentor unlocks the door to the shed. Bookshelves line two walls. Years later Sophia will remind me that they included volumes on hypnotism and architecture, travellers’ accounts of journeys to Ithaca, magician’s manuals, and books on the occult. Violins and kites hang from the rafters. Against a third wall stands a gramophone and beside it, a box containing vinyl platters of violin concertos and arias recorded by singers of pre-war times.

  On the gramophone stand framed photos of Enrico Caruso and Yasha Heifitz: one the greatest singer, and the other the greatest violinist, of all time, Mentor claims; and beside them a photo of Mentor playing the violin at a community function as a young man. He wears a tuxedo and bow tie, and is recognisable by his upright bearing and the dignified expression on his face.

  On the desk sits a manuscript beneath a human skull, and on the wall above, hangs a cage housing a yellow cockatiel. A map of Ithaca is glued beside a small window, and, in the margin there’s a hand drawing of a sea hawk in flight. Mentor allows the cockatiel out, after making sure that the door is closed. He reaches over, lifts a cage from the floor and places it on the desk. ‘I have kept my promise,’ he says, pointing to the fat rodent scurrying inside. ‘Your mouse is now a rat.’

  ‘Diet is the secret,’ he adds. Mentor speaks sparingly. He opens a drawer and takes out a biscuit tin from which he extracts a gold brooch. The brooch is cast in the shape of Ithaca, the gold moulded to the contours of the mountains. The hamlets are marked by tiny pearls, the larger villages by minute rubies. The paths between them are silver, one millimetre wide. The port of Vathy is a stone of turquoise, and the summit, above Exogi, a diamond embedded in the gold.

  After his death the brooch passed to Sophia, and since her death, nine years ago, it has become mine. I have brought it to the island and placed it on the table alongside Mentor’s manuscript. The brooch has returned to its rightful place.

  Mid-afternoon I walk with Mentor to a nearby park, carrying a kite shaped as a sea hawk. I handle it with care, as if entrusted with a mission. ‘Do not think life is a mere plaything,’ he says. Mentor speaks to me as an adult, though he places a hand on my shoulders as if guiding a child.

  We move to the centre of the park, a field of parched late-summer grass, well clear of a verge of eucalypts and shrubs. Mentor places the kite on the ground and lifts it up on its end. I hold it in place by the apex as he backs away, unravelling the string. As soon as I loosen my grip th
e kite breaks for the sky.

  Mentor works with an economy of movement. Just a few gentle tugs and the kite swirls in figures of eight. It gusts upwards, shifts sideways, and hangs stationary, mid-air. When the kite is stable he passes the baton into my hands. I am shocked by the strength in the wind: it almost tears the baton from my grip.

  ‘Hold fast,’ Mentor says. ‘Fix your eyes on the kite.’

  ‘Feel the currents through the string,’ he adds. ‘Follow the hawk.’

  For a minute, the kite obeys my desperate tugs, then, plummets nose first into the ground. I run to the wreckage as if coming to the rescue of a wounded bird. Mentor walks calmly behind me. The shaft is broken, the cloth torn. I look up, expecting his stern gaze, but instead, I am greeted by a smile.

  ‘Air currents are cruel,’ he says. ‘Just as you think you are in control, they tear you apart. They are as forceful as ocean currents. Not even a powerful eagle can withstand their force.’

  It is dark when Sophia and I leave Mentor’s house. The city is now a different beast. The passengers are focused inwards, lulled by the sway of the tram. The faces of the town hall clock look like silver moons. We hurry from the tram to Flinders Street Station, and down a flight of steps to the platform, in time to catch the next train on the Frankston line. It hurtles out of the city past shadowy backyards and well-lit rooms, inhabited, I am certain, by families far more harmonious than mine.

  Nearing Mordialloc, the smell of the sea begins to drift through the windows. We are moving back into familiar territory, returning home after all. The streets of Carrum are deserted, the shopfronts dark. We glance from the bridge at the empty berth, and know Manoli is out.

  He would return at dawn, but this Sunday would be the last time we saw Mentor until, months later, when I filed by his open coffin in church, and viewed him laid out in a tuxedo on a cushion of white silk. I gazed at his sunken eyes and thought of the skull on his work desk.

  At the wake in his house, after the funeral service, I mingled with the guests: Ithacans farewelling one of their own. I slipped out to the backyard, and saw the garden run wild, the grapes shrivelled on the vine. I switched on the light in Mentor’s shed, sat down at his desk and, with great trepidation, moved the skull and examined the manuscript.

  I ran my eyes over the Greek text with little understanding of Mentor’s neat script, and with no inkling it would one day reveal so much. And for weeks I dreamt of his face in repose, carved out of cold stone, dissolving into a skull, and awoke, in fright, and recalled my final glimpse of Mentor alive, standing by the tram stop, waving, then slowly turning for home, his bearing erect, walking through the streets of Brunswick, carrying the burden of his gravitas.

  I walk the road from Stavros with Martina at night. There are things we see now that we do not notice by day. Exogi is a cluster of lights eyeing our progress from the heights. Cats scurry across our path, but their strength in numbers neutralises bad luck.

  Martina is awed by the outline of animals corralled behind mesh wire fences that lean by the road. The last donkey of northern Ithaca grazes in a paddock of its own. Sheep huddle in an almond grove. ‘Animals are clever in the dark,’ Martina remarks.

  When Martina is asleep I return to my manuscript. Where she discerns wisdom, I see only fragments. By putting them down on paper perhaps they will fall into place. I am working my way through the seasons in some attempt at sequence, though the images I conjure span the four years I lived with Manoli in the weatherboard house.

  I recall unexpected reveries at random: an autumn sun descending over the bay. The rays flow through the estuary, contained by the riverbanks. They are channelled upstream beyond the highway bridge, and cast a red sheen upon river, sea and swamp: a three-part harmony of water. One moment the sun is there, a burning red dome above the waterline, and then it is gone, and in its wake, the gift of serenity, despite it all.

  ‘Do not go to the swamps,’ Manoli has warned me. I wait until he is out, and take the pointer on the upstream walk. On the rim of the wetlands we come upon wader-birds in the shallows. Disturbed by our presence they rise like a rush of arrows.

  Within minutes there are thousands, wheeling and regrouping. The few have become many, and the many one vast flock concealing the skies. They wheel and change direction as sinuously as wisps of smoke. In their collective movement there is strength, and in their whirring, a resonant hum. They move apart and descend to their feeding grounds.

  When I return to the bay, a flock of gannets circles above shoaling fish, fifty metres off shore. There is frenzy in the water, and madness in the air. The sea churns and froths. There is no order, nor decorum, but a brutal whirl of feathers as each bird readies itself for the assault. When they attack, it is sharp and abrupt. They bombard the water with vertical dives and emerge with their prey in their beaks. They carry the struggling fish to a nearby outcrop of rocks, gulp them down, and return to the fray.

  Manoli is right. It is kill or be killed. It can be seen in the cool menace of the predatory bird, circling, in command of space. It can be seen in the frenzied bombardment that continues above the shoaling fish. It can be felt in the sting of the jellyfish, the sharpness of the gannet’s beak. It can be sensed in the bleached ribs of dead birds washed up on the beach. And it can be seen in the stealthy stroll of a curlew in the shallows, curved beak readied like an unsheathed sword.

  Within weeks the curlew will be bound for its northern breeding grounds, and flocks of waders will sweep up from the swamps, on the first leg of their marathon flights. They will crowd the space above the water and quickly ascend to the heights. I will follow their trajectory from the foreshore until they are no longer within sight. Their departure takes place in a matter of days, heralding the coming winter and the descent of darkness upon sea and swamp.

  I associate the departing birds with Ithaca, and with that nebulous place called the North. At some point I will begin to know something of the species and their routes. I remember sitting beside Mentor scanning a book of maps depicting migratory routes. There are birds, he claims, that sleep on the winds while they continue their flights. ‘The sky is criss-crossed with invisible trails,’ he says, pointing to flight paths extending to the extremities of the earth.

  Like Stratis, years before me, I have returned to Ithaca well prepared. I had packed them between clothes so they would not be damaged: books on wetlands, field guides to migratory birds, and essays with contending theories about their flights. I consult them at the living-room table as I write. Their journeys to and from the bayside are far more astonishing than I’d imagined as a child.

  The eastern curlew, sharp-tailed sandpiper, and greenshank make for the Siberian wastes. The bar-tailed godwit heads for Alaska and the Arctic, the Latham snipe for the north islands of Japan. The birds refuel on interim feeding grounds before resuming their flight. The round journey to Siberia is twenty-five thousand kilometres. There are birds that fly up to five thousand kilometres in one uninterrupted leg; and tiny sandpipers that clock enough distance to have flown to the moon in the course of their lives.

  There are many theories as to how they navigate. Some say that the sense is embedded in their genes. Others claim they employ the earth’s magnetic field, or navigate as the seamen of old, by the movement of sun, moon and stars. They cover vast distances, yet return with faithful regularity at the appointed time. They live their lives in perpetual motion between their breeding and feeding grounds. And they journey to survive.

  My ancestors were also driven by a need to find fertile feeding grounds. I think of the frenetic tales of Old Niko. At first, Ithacans had voyaged to places from which there was a possibility of annual returns. As the routes to the Black Sea were cut off they journeyed further still. They breached the hemisphere with the promise that they would return wealthy men.

  They could not foresee there would come a time when their journeys would stall. Perhaps their instincts failed them. Perhaps, they were compelled to eke out a living on past
ures new. Perhaps they were constrained by endless warring in the old world. Or perhaps, like Manoli, they delayed and prevaricated too long. He once booked an airline ticket to Ithaca, Sophia told me long after he died, and had intended to take me with him. But he had pulled out a week before the scheduled flight.

  This much I now know, the true impact of his journeying can not be deduced from maps and nautical charts, but in the unguarded moments I recall, decades later, by the living-room table in the patriarchal house. I write them as they come. The only attempt at order, as I have said, is the succession of the seasons. Like the Black Sea traders of old, I follow the passage of the seasons in determining my route back home.

  The small park on the foreshore by the river mouth is deserted. The carnival gypsies, who park their caravans in summer and set up tents and carousels, are long gone. In the centre of the park stands a monument to soldiers of the Great War. From the pediment there rises a granite statue of a soldier in a slouch hat. He stands fully upright, holding the barrel of an upturned rifle in his right hand.

  We file from the primary school to the park bearing wreaths. Our teachers shepherd us through the streets towards the foreshore beside the highway bridge. We assemble by the statue and the Anzac Day ceremony begins. On the pediment are listed the names of Carrum residents who, the headmaster says, had made the supreme sacrifice in the Great War.

  I am afraid of the word sacrifice. It speaks of death and the admonitions of old men. The soldier is young, yet he reminds me of Mentor as I last saw him, laid out in a casket. Mentor, in death, seemed carved out of cold stone. The statue, however, is hot under a mid-morning sun. The sun beats down on the parched grass, and the headmaster’s voice is a distant drone. I can no longer look at the soldier. He is eternally trapped in an ideal of sacrifice, back turned to the bay, condemned to stare at rail-track and bitumen, highway and commerce, the demands of every day.