by Arnold Zable
‘That sky would soon be buzzing with enemy planes, the sea I returned on would soon be littered with mines, and the famished earth on which we walked, would soon send me foraging in the hills of neighbouring islets. And that is all I have to say.’
Andreas stands up, paces the kitchen, and leans his forehead on the door. ‘Life is a lie,’ he says. ‘Man is nothing. Tipota.’ He steps out on the veranda. I help him sweep up the broken glass from the window, shattered at the outset of the storm. The upper slopes of the Marmakas are covered in black clouds. A gust of wind almost catapults him off his feet. Thunder rolls across the skies. ‘The angels are fighting,’ he shouts.
As soon as we step inside, he resumes his restless wandering. This is the final irony; the sea is within sight through the shutters, yet Andreas cannot reach it. He is marooned. He withdraws to his bedroom. I remain by the fire and hear the crackle of his transistor. He lies in bed thinking, thinking, and reappears abruptly.
‘Stratis could never kill his animals,’ he says. ‘He did not have the heart. Do you understand? And Manoli was an honest man. Why spit on the dead? They have no chance to speak back. That is what I fear about death. I will no longer be able to speak for myself. I have told you one version of the story and tomorrow I may tell it with a different slant. Each word I utter is true and false at the same time.
‘Why did Manoli leave? How can I know? I take back all I have said. I wish only to recite the facts. Stratis left. Melita waited. Melita died. Her sister Irini became our mother. Stratis returned. Irini departed. Despina arrived. Manoli left and did not return. Stratis waited. That is a tale you will hear on the island wherever you go. It is our book of Genesis. We do not say so and so begat so and so, on and on, page after page. We say so and so departed, and so and so returned. Or vanished. Perhaps the old women are right when they say that all has been written.’
Andreas is angry, and I am overcome by panic. I am a parasite, sucking the marrow from an old man, and from both the dead and the living. In exposing their tales I am betraying family, recasting their words with my interpretation. Retelling the story to serve my own ends.
‘There are no ends to tales,’ Andreas says, as if intuiting my thoughts. ‘We tell them to ride out the storm when holed up in foreign ports. We tell them to while away our time as we wait for death. The slant I have put on them takes no account of that which bound Manoli and I together: our mania for the sea. My own son, Andonis, is infected, and you can see where it has led him. He is somewhere out there, who knows where, tending to a never-ending cycle of shit in the engine rooms of oil tankers. It has all come to this. Perhaps I should never have led him, hand in hand, onto the boats, when he was barely able to walk.’
Andreas retreats to his room, lies down, and lights a cigarette. I remain by the fire, and hear snatches of words: ‘Wanker. Fascist. Fucking traitor. Go screw your Virgin Mary.’ Interspersed by fits of coughing, and the incessant babble of the radio, issuing weather reports, news bulletins, gossip and song, always song in a land of song. Sung at family gatherings, projected through the speakers of busses and ferries, trailing through car windows, rising from the pavements, drifting from balconies, squeezing through shutters, crackling from radios in the holds of fishing caiques.
The word music, mousike, derives from that which is inspired by the Muses. And it is music in part, that has inspired my quest, songs I first heard on the veranda of a weatherboard house in Carrum, their power and beauty, their expressions of longing. Songs accompanied by a deeper music: the ebb of the tides, the whirr of sea-birds, and the voices of contemporary Homers sitting on terraces and balconies, in kitchens and coffee houses, domesticating epics, taming life journeys into rhapsodies.
From rhapsodos, ‘singer of woven words’. Perhaps this is the heart of the Homeric quest, the rhapsodies the poet is said to have composed and refined, night after night, in the performing. Reflected in my clumsy attempts to capture the cadence of contemporary tellers: Andreas, weaving words in a cough-stained voice, worn down over the years to rapid-fire monologues tempered with endearments.
‘Come here my child,’ he says calling from the bedroom. ‘Listen. They are singing cantathas from Zakynthos.’ He lies on his back and conducts the song with a cigarette. ‘Song makes a man forget,’ he says. ‘During the war we sang songs of resistance day and night. People fell in love with the Movement through song. Do you understand? Even in the darkest days of occupation, song lifted our spirits.’
And it has lifted Andreas now. ‘They say that the Nidri ferry may resume its services tomorrow,’ he announces. ‘We must pack our bags and be ready to board when it arrives. We will sail to Lefkada and return to Ithaca the following day. I am sick of staring at the sea through the shutters.’
We leave for Frikes mid morning. The road is littered with shattered tiles and rocks dislodged by the storm. An electrician is working on cables, downed by the winds. An hour before the ferry is due Omeros is one of the few souls about. ‘I wonder what the sea is thinking today,’ he says as he limps by, fish trap in hand.
Platon pulls up in his van soon after. A plump and balding man, who moves about the islands selling vegetables, he is anxious to return to Lefkada and replenish his stocks after being confined to Ithaca for days. ‘The sea is as smooth as oil,’ he says when he steps out, as if willing it to be that way.
The coastguard skids to a halt on a motorcycle and announces that the boat is coming. The news travels fast. Cars, motorcycles, gypsy vans, trucks and cars descend on the waterfront. The coffee shops are filling. There is an air of celebration. The waiting of many days is being released. An hour later, as we pull from the shore, the port empties.
The ferry rounds the breakwater and moves north into the strait between the islands. I observe by day what I had seen at night on cousin Andonis’ caique. Through Andreas’ binoculars I make out stone shelters on the wooded slopes of the Marmakas. The sun breaks free of the clouds and trails a wake of silver. ‘The sea is far more treacherous than it appears,’ says Andreas. He is alert, his restlessness gone. He sniffs the air and declares that the gentle swell will not hold for more than a day.
‘There were times that we lost sight of all land,’ he says. ‘When the sea is calm and no shores are in sight, it is easy to believe this is all that exists, a caique manned by two brothers, a universe unto itself. Time bends and stretches. The horizon slips away and is replaced by an illusion of infinity. All day the caique drifts and when land finally appears it is a shock.’ Andreas’ voice flows with the swells, and I am lulled by the rhythm until the hoot of the ferry signals the port of Nidri.
At nightfall we eat in a restaurant on the ground floor of our pension. Entire families are out on the streets, taking advantage of the break in the storm. Coffee houses are overflowing with men watching televised soccer. A collective roar explodes through the doors whenever a goal is scored or averted, but Andreas takes no notice. He is focused on eating.
When he finishes he sits back, and lights a cigarette. There is no need for talk. I am Manoli’s daughter, and he, my father’s brother. We have been journeying for many years and tomorrow we are returning. We have ransacked history, and laid siege to memories. We are fully spent, and so close to our destination we need only scale the heights above the town to see the lights of Ithaca.
In the morning we are back on the waterfront for the return voyage. The skies are clearing, but there are doubts. Captain Aristides consults the coastguard and the ferry owners. ‘It is the devil’s calculus,’ says Andreas. ‘And lives depend on it.’ Platon has restocked his van with fruit and vegetables and is impatient to get moving. A busload of devotees bound for the tomb of St Gerasimos on Kefallonia, are eager to resume their pilgrimage. A family of gypsies in a battered utility stuffed with carpets, queues between an oil tanker and a truck weighed down by a pyramid of fodder. When the order to sail is finally issued, the crew is galvanised into action.
Within half an hour the heavily loaded ferry is m
oving past a string of islets. It sails close to Skorpios, a forested isle owned by Aristotle Onassis, the shipping magnate. Two large dwellings, a kilometre apart, peer from clearings high above the water. A middle-aged woman disputes the claim. ‘This is not Skorpios,’ she shouts. ‘It is too small. An island owned by Onassis has to be far bigger.’ Passengers try to calm her by showing her the island marked on their maps, but she cannot accept it. It violates her hunger for myth. She is angry, distraught. ‘Skorpios is far bigger’ she persists, as we break free of Lefkada.
Ithaca is within sight. We are edging closer, sailing towards the Bay of Afales. Above the cliff I can make out the walk to the windmill. Through the binoculars I see sheep being driven to pasture. I follow the path down to the village, and single out our balcony. Our destination is tantalisingly close. The strait is calm, the return imminent.
‘Do not believe it,’ Andreas warns. And slowly it registers. The troughs between the waves are deepening. The winds are rising, tinged with bitterness. The seas have grown dark and forbidding. Water careers over the deck, and changes direction with the boat’s lurching. The crew is worried. Their anxiety infects the passengers. One of the pilgrims begins to dance. She sings as she whirls. There is something sinister in her shrill voice and movements.
The rain slants across the deck and into our faces. We stumble to the lee side of the boat and fall back onto a bench beneath the awnings. The woman still dances on the open deck. She allows herself to be deluged. The chatter of passengers has been reduced to urgent whispers. The coast of Ithaca, so close minutes ago, is receding.
‘When does the Maistros blow?’
‘When it wants to,’ Andreas has insisted.
Now it blows and he is elated. It sweeps in and whips the swell into a fury. He conducts the ferry’s awkward lurching with his cigarette. ‘Kazantzakis may be right, after all, to include Odysseus as the fourth member of the pantheon,’ he says, ‘if only in one sequence.’
I know, instantly, the sequence he is referring to. Odysseus and his crew, shaken from their encounter with the one-eyed Cyclops, and grieving for the death of comrades, land on the floating island of Aeolia, home of the lord of the winds, Aeolus. The men are entertained and feted in Aeolus’ palace but, after years away on the battlefields of Troy, Odysseus is anxious to resume the return voyage.
Aeolus agrees to help. He makes arrangements for the journey and presents Odysseus with a leather bag made from the flayed skin of a full-grown ox. The bag is stowed in the hold of Odysseus’ ship and tightly secured with burnished silver wire to prevent any leaking. Within the bag Aeolus has imprisoned the wild energies of all the winds, bar Zephyr, the westerly, which he summons to blow the ships and crew back to Ithaca.
For nine days and nights the ships sail on, propelled by the fair westerly. On the tenth night the men are within sight of the homeland, so close they can see shepherds tending their fires. In his anxiety to speed the voyage, Odysseus had steered the ship without a break. Utterly exhausted and with landfall assured, he falls asleep.
The crew begins to discuss matters among themselves. Surely the bag contains a fortune in gold and silver. Why should they arrive home empty handed? They too had battled in Troy and endured the hazards of the journey. Did they not deserve a share of the spoils? Their evil counsel prevails and they undo the bag, allowing the winds to rush out.
In an instant the tempest is upon them, driving them headlong out to sea, away from the island. The distraught Odysseus and his crews are blown back to Aeolia. The lord of the winds is enraged by their folly. He condemns them to journey on without fair winds and divine guidance. They are destined to die, one by one, except Odysseus, and he will endure yet another decade of wandering until he is finally deposited on the shores of Ithaca.
‘I do not hold with the gods,’ says Andreas, ‘but Homer understood the seaman’s paradox, the allure of riches and conquest against the longing for the homeland. Even here, nearing the end of our journey,’ he says, ‘the seas are seething with blood and the watery graves of its victims.’ And he recounts a tale I have heard told on balconies overlooking the seas we are now floundering on.
A convoy of German boats was making its way through these waters on 21 May 1941, when attacked by the submarine, Papanikolis, hidden in a cave by the cape of Agios Ioannis. The first ship hit, it is said, was blown clean in half. Soon after, a part of the boat rose out of the sea, as if taking one last gasp of air. Hundreds of soldiers leapt into the water. Their screams could be heard from the northern heights above the bay of Afales.
It was a wonderful day, I have heard said in the village. Hundreds of German soldiers were drowning and we were making sweets. They had pillaged and murdered, and now they were dying. Thiaks ran to the shores and tore off clothes and shoes from the corpses. One fisherman steered his boat to the wreckage and salvaged motorcycles, but in his greed he took too many, and his boat capsized. The captain of the submarine climbed up to the Kathara monastery to offer thanks for the victory.
Andreas takes a different tack. ‘We saw them melting in the fires,’ he says, ‘choking on oil and water. Their vomit floated alongside the debris.’ He spits at the memory and the waters that contain it. ‘War is the wildest wind contained in the ox-skin bag,’ he exclaims. ‘Once released, you have no choice but to defend yourself against its fury. If you have not lived it, you cannot know it.
‘There were Ithacans who took pity, and waded out to help the soldiers. Some villagers took the wounded into their homes and gave them food and shelter. They saw them for what they were, young boys polluted with hatred instilled by their elders.
‘They were perhaps the same boys who would have obeyed the order to hoist the Nazi flag on the Acropolis,’ says Andreas, ‘the same boys who would strut through the streets of Athens, and starve and torture the people. Perhaps the same soldiers who, in December 1943, would march through the valley of Kalavrita, on the mainland, and murder fourteen hundred men aged between thirteen and eighty, before setting fire to the village. Perhaps among them were officers who would have massacred thousands of Italian soldiers on Kefallonia, among them men who had been stationed on Ithaca.
‘Even as the war ended, the ox-skin bag was not yet empty,’ Andreas tells me. ‘The storm did not cease with the defeat of the Germans. Within months the time we call “the division” came upon us. It was worse than all that had taken place before it. At least then, the enemy were foreigners. Now men we had grown up with dragged us out for interrogations and beatings. There is nothing more terrible than waging war on your own people, my Xanthe. Nothing. Neighbours were beaten, imprisoned, driven into exile. I can point to houses in Ithacan villages that belong to those who did the beatings, and to those who were beaten.’
The ferry rolls and lurches. ‘Manoli loved the storm,’ Andreas shouts. ‘He ran about tightening the rigging, bailing out water, laughing. He shook his fists at the winds and dared them to become wilder. He surveyed the skies and rejoiced when they were black and bloated. He would have ripped open Aeolus’ ox-skin bag willingly, not for the imagined riches, but to release mayhem and chaos. He preferred wild winds to the hearth, the storm to the returning. Who knows what drove him?’
The mad pilgrim is still dancing, barely maintaining her footing on the wet timber. Her movements are increasingly desperate and frenzied. Only the momentum of her spinning saves her from falling. Our destination is within sight, but we are stranded. And I see him, Manoli, my father, in his final months, motoring beyond the estuary.
He is shouting above the din of the engine, shaking his fists at Aeolus, at Zeus the cloud gatherer, Poseidon the earth shaker, and the lord of the skies, Ouranos. He is baying at the entire pantheon of gods who, despite it all, he cannot believe in. The waters of the bay evoke memories of Ionian voyages. The lights of the city are winking, the return beckoning, but he cannot yield.
He sails through the night and his madness is growing. He cannot shake off the sight of his mother’s corpse l
ying beside him. He inhales her scent of lavender and sage, of sweat and the rocky earth, and on that Easter morning, the odour of death. The bells are tolling, and he is running to the chapel of St John on the mountain, then hurtling down to the quay, exhilarated by the sight of boats departing.
I now know something of his tortured ambitions. He had left Ithaca, his spirit wounded. He had left like an enraged sea trapped within its own fury. He left vowing to shatter obsolete gods and superstitions. He left obsessed by ambition to surpass his father. He left lashing out at the brother he loved. He turned his back on the island, and did not dare look for fear of hesitating, breaking. And years later, before the final descent, his life crumbling, he understood, too late, that the winds would never cease howling. He had journeyed to far to have any hope of returning.
The mad dervish is spiralling towards hysteria. We are being driven further from our destination. The coast of Lefkada is again upon us. The lighthouse is issuing its warning. Though I have glimpsed the white cliffs many times from the balcony, for the first time I truly see them. They fall from the limestone promontory, cliffs known for millennia as Sappho’s Leap, the site of a lovers’ yearning. Here, legend has it, the poet of Lesbos threw herself into turbulent waters driven by her unrequited love for a seaman.
Whether the legend is true scarcely matters. It is made for these waters and the jagged coasts that frame them. It is made for the myth that at its base seethed the seas of the Underworld, and the River of the Dead, the gateway to Hades. It endures as a testament to the agony of those condemned to years of separation. With the ferry pitching between the islands, I sense both sides of the equation. Gazing down from the rocky heights are those condemned to the waiting, while those at sea are drifting ever further. The gap between them is widening, the umbilical cord stretched to breaking.
I look back at Captain Aristides. His grimace is dissolving. The ferry is in harness to the currents, gathering speed and composure. The mad dervish stops and looks about her, bewildered. Moments later she stumbles to a seat, weeping. A fellow pilgrim tries to console her, but she pushes her away and spits at the heavens. She screams above the dying winds, and the coast of Ithaca is again upon us. The island is implacable. ‘To know one place is to know all places,’ mutters Andreas.
