Sea of Many Returns

by Arnold Zable

  I continue beyond Frikes, three kilometres by road, and scale a steep pass into the village of Kioni. The houses rise on steep slopes encircling the harbour. Three disused windmills line a peninsula that all but encloses the water. I follow a bayside path to a graveyard. Bas-reliefs of crossed anchors and seagulls mark the tombs of seamen. On one stone there is an oval-framed photo of an eighteen-year-old boy. ‘My Yorgo, please come into my dreams so I can tell you of the pain in my heart,’ reads his mother’s words.

  ‘How did he die?’ I ask a widow tending her husband’s grave.

  ‘How do you think?’ she says. ‘He dived one time too many. The sea killed him. Do not let its beauty deceive you. This is what I warned my sons. Of course they did not listen. The sea took them from me. They live on the other side of the oceans while I remain here, tending their father’s carcass like an obedient fool.’

  The conversation is over, cut short. Like the white granite soldier of Carrum, the widow turns her back on the harbour. She is possessed by a compressed anger. She lights a lamp, removes weeds, and walks from the grave with measured steps. As I move off for the long walk home, I sense someone is following me. The black widow is closing in on my shadow.

  ‘No one cares about family any more,’ she shouts. ‘Everyone goes their selfish way. Our young have withdrawn like crabs into lives of their own. Have children!’

  I quicken my steps, but she is tough. She has trekked up and down these slopes for seven decades. She draws alongside and lunges towards me. ‘Have children,’ she shouts. I smell her breath through her blackened teeth. She is tiring, and I draw away with the advantage of youth. ‘Have children!’ she repeats as she drops back. ‘Have at least three.’

  I walk back to Frikes by the sea-road. Fishing caiques strain at their moorings. The cafe awnings have been dismantled, and umbrellas removed from their outdoor placements: the summer consigned to dark cellars. In the one coffee shop still open, a priest is seated with three men playing cards. An old dog sprawls at their feet. A man shuffles from the foreshore, clutching a fish trap in his right hand. He draws alongside, and without introduction, asks, ‘What is the sea thinking today?’

  There is something indeterminate about his age. His hair is white and unkempt, but when he smiles he looks like a child. When the smile subsides he assumes the expression of a perplexed man.

  ‘Omeros,’ he says, pointing at himself like an infant who has just learnt to say his name. He glances furtively up at the mountain and shuffles beside me as I begin my ascent from the waterfront. Fifty metres on, he stops by a two-storey house. The upper windows are boarded. The door creaks on its hinges as he pushes against it. He glances back at the port and lifts a hand to his chin. ‘What is the sea thinking today?’ he asks with a parting smile.

  At this time of year and time of day the road is deserted, apart from an occasional motorcycle or truck. I detour to cousin Andonis’ house. He sits in the courtyard, bent over a fishing net. ‘The weather is boss,’ he says. ‘There is not enough breeze for fishing today.’ He lets go of the needle and invites me inside.

  His wife Jovania is four months pregnant, he tells me as he pours me a cold drink. She is away, visiting a doctor in Vathy. On the walls hang the spoils of voyages past: an elephant carved in ivory purchased in the Congo, wooden masks crafted in Brazil, a ceremonial dagger from Istanbul, and a photo of Andonis arm-in-arm with uniformed sailors posing in front of the Pyramids. On a chest of drawers sits a ceramic doll from Japan and a statuette of a fat laughing Buddha.

  ‘I once loved working on the boats,’ he says. ‘But the excitement of new places wears off, and each farewell is more difficult than the last.’ Andonis had decided to remain on the island, but spends many months at sea each year on oil tankers as ship’s engineer. ‘The work is more dangerous, but the pay better,’ he shrugs. ‘I want to stay on the island and fish, but there’s not enough money in that.’

  Andonis’ words erupt and die back, like the wind gusts that had disturbed my dreams the previous night. His youthful enthusiasm is giving way to a sense of irony I will come to know well. When we finish drinking, he returns to the courtyard and takes up his seat over the nets. He can no longer be reached.

  ‘What have you seen today my child? Andreas asks.

  ‘Ghosts.’

  It is a warm night and we sit on the balcony. A half moon hangs over the mountain. I glimpse Afales Bay through a gap in the lower houses, and beyond it, the lights of Lefkada.

  ‘Where have you been today?’ Andreas asks, not registering my answer.

  ‘Frikes and Kioni.’

  ‘On the day we launched Brotherly Love the entire village accompanied us along the route you walked,’ Andreas replies, on his own tangent.

  ‘At the head of the procession, a step ahead of us, walked Stratis, and behind us came the boat, tied to a horse-drawn cart. Manoli designed it. He had a better eye for such things. He sketched designs for boats on scraps of paper, the backs of envelopes, and the wall above his bed: any blank space. And he was a better carpenter.

  ‘We climbed the Marmakas and cut the wood on full moon nights, up there,’ and Andreas points to the woodlands on the higher slopes. ‘The wood is stronger at that time my child. We tried to build the boat quickly. We lit an oil lamp in the katoi and worked through the nights. We wanted to take it out fishing. We couldn’t wait.’

  I want to know more about the boat, but Andreas has moved on. He does not like to dwell on personal tales. He smokes incessantly despite long coughing bouts. His thinning voice crackles in the dark. He leaps through centuries, tears apart myths, and reassembles them in his own way. He is like a sparrow pecking over the same patch of earth. He circles recurring themes that inevitably lead back to his trinity of personal gods: Christ, Marx, and Buddha.

  ‘These are the big three,’ he says. ‘Other philosophers said a few good things here and there, but these three changed the way we act.’

  ‘Kazantzakis added Odysseus as the fourth member of the pantheon,’ I say.

  ‘Odysseus was involved with too many gods,’ Andreas shoots back. ‘At least the Hebrews got it down to one, even though they put him somewhere in the sky, but the ancient Greeks had a whole company of them, apparently living on Mount Olympus. Who can live on Mount Olympus? It’s too cold,’ he laughs.

  As for Christ, he had spent fifteen years in the East, Andreas claims. There he had acquired the arts of healing. ‘The true Christ,’ he says, ‘was not the Son of God, but a man who cared for the downtrodden. Read the Sermon on the Mount. He was not a saint, but a socialist. People told many lies about him.

  ‘This is how it is everywhere my child. This is how it has been in our country in recent times. People turn on each other. Many were locked up. They endured years of beatings and torture after being set up by the people around them. Some people went mad from the beatings.’

  I try to steer Andreas back to questions about family, but he clings to his obsessions. ‘It has been a long night.’ He lifts his fingers and ticks them off: the Balkan Wars, the Great War, the Turkish-Greco war, the fall of Smyrna. He stops at Smyrna for a while.

  ‘I saw a ship full of prosphyges,’ he says, ‘refugees from Asia-Minor, in the summer of 1922. I watched as the ship berthed in Piraeus. Stratis was in Australia at the time. An uncle, Theo, had taken me with him to Athens. It was my first long voyage. I took in everything with my eleven-year-old eyes. Such scenes you never forget.

  ‘The bible thumpers talk of eternal damnation, but they do not have to look far to find it here on earth. There were seven thousand passengers crowded on a boat fit for five hundred at most. They dozed on their feet, and pissed where they stood. What choice did they have? There was not enough room for them to lie down. They came ashore in rags. Puss oozed from their wounds. When they lifted their heads, I saw no light in their eyes. They had become the walking dead. I know all about it.’

  Andreas pauses, stares straight ahead, lost to other worlds.

&nbs
p; ‘I accompanied Uncle Theo on business,’ he says, ‘and walked with him everywhere. He took me to the camp where the refugees had built dwellings out of sacks and branches, and five-gallon drums. Families crowded into backyards where they lived like stray dogs. They carved shoes out of tyres and sloshed through the stinking mud. They peddled goods from handcarts and cooked their food in tin cans. They picked over rubbish dumps and scavenged anything of the slightest worth.’

  ‘Theo took me to a city of tents at the feet of the temple of Zeus, in central Athens. The newcomers were strange creatures in their tattered clothes. The greater number were women, because many men had been killed or enslaved. I sat with my uncle in the coffee houses of Piraeus and listened as Theo talked to strangers. They spoke dialects of Turko-Greek, and told tales of the Massacre. My uncle beat me when I mimicked their accent. “Do not make fun of your brothers,” he shouted.

  Andreas stops and lifts his eyes towards the mountain. It is a gesture I will come to know well. ‘After the beating I strained hard to understand what they were saying,’ he tells me. ‘I recall little fragments. How can I forget them? They spoke of the events their descendants call the Catastrophe to this day. The city of Smyrna had been burnt to the ground. Men searched through the flames for their sons and daughters. Women who had been raped wandered the streets with the eyes of the dead.

  ‘There was nowhere to run but the harbour. When people swam out to the British ships they were pushed back into the sea. The British had encouraged us to make war with the Turks, and when the tide turned, they wiped their hands of us. For many months I dreamt of seas on fire. Between the two damnations, sky and harbour, there was nowhere to run. Why do priests talk about the fires of hell when they burn well enough here on earth?’

  Andreas extracts a pack of cigarettes from his jacket, and lights up the next as soon as the last is out. I see the years of his country’s agony embodied in his shrinking frame. ‘It did not end there,’ he says. ‘Before we had drawn our next breath, the Second World War was upon us, and Manoli was gone. I wished him good luck and sailed the boat home on my own.’

  I seize my chance. ‘Why did Manoli leave?’

  ‘Stratis thought of him all the time,’ Andreas continues. ‘On the day he died he lay in bed, very ill. He could not speak. He used his hands to ask for paper and pencil. With trembling hands he wrote down one word: “Manoli”.

  ‘I helped him out of bed and he walked to the toilet. He wanted to maintain his dignity to the end. When he returned he looked at each of us, lay back and died. The scrap of paper lay on the table beside the bed, and on it just one word.’

  Andreas falls silent. Beneath us, the katoi door is being unlocked. Minutes later the beat returns. Ourania is back at the loom.

  ‘It doesn’t matter. Let the dead remain in peace,’ says Andreas. His eyes are fixed on the mountain; and beneath us the weft and warp, the infernal beat, back and forth.

  I lie in bed after my first full day on the island and cannot sleep. My thoughts return to a tale of a boat called Brotherly Love. It is the first time I have heard it and I am seduced by its elegance. Yet I am suspicious. The tale’s perfection obscures more than it reveals. Something eludes me. Women clad in black pursue me. ‘There is nowhere to run, nowhere to hide,’ they hiss. ‘All is stenos kiklos, an enclosed circle. All is written. All is fate.’

  By eight the following morning, I am climbing a path that branches from the road to a forest, by the stream of Melanydros. I pause at Homer’s School, the site of excavation where, as village folklore has it, the poet learned the alphabet. There is something about this site that detains me, perhaps its intimate tangle of plant and rock, the worn stairways leading nowhere. The ruins are equidistant between my two ancestral villages, and far more ancient than both.

  I return to the path and continue my climb between perimeter walls. The path widens and becomes steeper. I see the dome of St Marina and scramble into the lower reaches of Exogi. I begin my search for the remains of the house Mentor grew up in: it is a pile of rubble. As I inspect it I hear a rustling behind me, and turn to see a woman pottering in an adjoining block.

  She is plump and slow, yet sure-footed and tough. She clears away the weeds despite her laboured breath. ‘Your grandfather’s family is long gone,’ she says, ‘and the house is little more than dust. You will find nothing of Mentor here.

  ‘So what?’ she continues. ‘Here, where I am standing, stood the home of my childhood sweetheart. He was a levendi with a rascal’s smile, a young man with the devil’s spark. And one day he left. What could I do? Stop him from going?’

  ‘Two years later I married his best friend,’ she says, bending over to remove some rocks. ‘He was away at sea for many months and, in one stretch, for years on end. We had three sons, and each one joined him on the boats. What could I do? Stop them from going?

  ‘Now my husband has left for the other world. His time was up. I observed the forty days of mourning,’ she says, ‘but as soon as they were over I took the bus to Vathy. I made my way to the hardware store, chose the brightest colours, and repainted every room: the kitchen yellow, the parlour sky blue, and the bedroom, I will keep as a surprise.

  ‘Now I write letters to my childhood boyfriend. “Return to Ithaca. It is not too late,” I tell him. He lives in Brisbane. His wife has recently died and he too is now free.’ Her voice drops to a whisper, although no one is within sight.

  ‘I tell him his land is being stolen, and that neighbours have shifted the boundary stones, a few metres here, a few there. I tell him I am building a fence around what is left. “Come home,” I write. “I’m keeping an eye on your property. I have visited the offices in Vathy and looked over the deeds. All is in order. Come and claim what is yours.”’

  The woman invites me inside, and guides me through her house. ‘While my husband was at sea I hauled the grain to the mills and waited. I planted my feet on the mountain and bent my back to my fate. I wove linen sheets, and bedspreads, and waited. I waited so long that my womb ran dry. Now I say, screw Penelope,’ she laughs, as she shows me into the bedroom, painted a lurid red.

  ‘When you return to Australia go and visit him. Perhaps he did not receive my letters. Tell the levendi that my husband is dead, and the house is freshly painted. Tell him the bedroom is red, the blankets and pillows crimson. Tell him I may be old, but I am soft and ripe.’

  As I retreat from the house, she shouts, ‘Tell the rascal that the bed is made, and the sheets are scented. Tell him his plot of land is well protected. Do you hear? Tell him it is not too late. Tell the levendi that the levendissa is waiting.’

  I walk to a clearing in the woodland. Within the clearing stand two obelisks. The structures are so large they can be seen from the valley. I look back at the village. For each intact house there are two that have collapsed. Exogi is a village of the departed.

  One derelict house is a mere doorframe to a single room. The roof has fallen in, the sky is framed by four walls. A lizard basks in a patch of sun. It eyes me for a moment, and darts under a pile of tiles. The winds have worked their way inside and the walls have been stripped. They lean precariously, as if frozen at the moment the earthquake struck. Or perhaps the house has succumbed to the slow death of abandonment.

  When a house collapses the fireplace is the last to go. It remains, shattered but defiant. Beside it lies a decaying trunk filled with bedspreads stinking with damp. Beneath the top layer I uncover a scattering of photos. I look behind them for the names of the studios in which they were taken: London, Athens, Sydney, at various times between 1922 and 1958.

  Two women walk by. ‘What are you looking for?’ one asks. ‘There are only ghosts here. Vricolakes. Kalinkantzari. Bloodsuckers. Demons. You can choose which ever you like,’ she cackles.

  ‘Trelli ine,’ I hear her companion saying, nodding towards me as they walk on. ‘She’s mad.’

  As I step from the forest back onto the road, mid-afternoon, Andonis speeds by on his moto
rbike. He skids to a halt, wheels the bike round, and doubles back. ‘It will be a perfect night for fishing,’ he says, when he stops alongside. His face is animated and flushed. We arrange to meet outside the house at two in the morning. He skids off the gravel and resumes the descent to Frikes Bay. The bike is weighed down with nets and supplies. He careers towards the port like a man possessed.

  ‘Where have you been my child?’ Andreas asks.

  ‘Exogi.’

  ‘What did you see?’

  ‘The obelisks.’

  ‘We call them the pyramids. I know all about it. Our little island is full of such stories, each with many versions, and we are all convinced ours is right. Of course my version is the only one you can trust,’ he laughs, and lights a cigarette. Andreas needs little prompting to launch into a tale.

  ‘Ioannis was born in Stavros in the last decade of the last century,’ he begins. ‘He left Ithaca many years ago. He was perhaps fifteen at the time. He was not heard of for forty years, although one rumour has it that he may have returned from time to time in disguise.

  ‘Some said he spent the years of the Great War in Paris. Others say he worked for years in the Congo. Some contend he worked as a spy, though no one seems to know for whom. Ithacan seamen claimed they had sighted him in Amsterdam, Alexandria, in Shanghai or Singapore. Some say he lived in New York, where he joined a Masonic lodge after making a fortune as a cloakroom attendant for theatre patrons. Others claim he was involved with shady dealings and fled back to Ithaca in fear of his life.

  ‘His mother would sit every evening, waiting on the front steps of the house. She waited so long she forgot why she was waiting, but she kept sitting, on the same step, each evening, at the same hour.