The Bestiary

by Nicholas Christopher

  He paused, but I remained silent.

  “Good ships are always in demand,” he continued. “This one should yield you a solid income for many years, as it did your father. Of course you can also sell the Makara outright next year. I would estimate its worth at around three million dollars. Even after taxes, there would be a good amount to reinvest.”

  I tried to read his eyes—for what, I didn’t know. Never wavering, they matched his tone, calm and matter-of-fact. Meanwhile, all sorts of feelings were churning up in me: rage, resentment, guilt. I said, “I had no idea what my father owned, and I never gave a thought to what he might leave me.”

  “He’s left you everything.”

  “By default?”

  “Oh no. You are the stipulated beneficiary. He had no other survivors.”

  “What about his other ships?”

  “There are no other ships. The Makara was his single largest asset. He bought it thirteen years ago. It was the first ship he owned. That’s when I became his lawyer.”

  “What happened to the rest of his fleet?”

  Arvanos poured himself a glass of mineral water. He offered me one. Then he told me the story—framed succinctly as a legal brief—of my father’s life in the years he had known him.

  “Two years after your father bought the Makara, he married a woman named Eléna Louritis.”

  He paused, studying my face.

  “If you’re wondering if I knew,” I said, “the answer is no. But I’m not shocked. I suspected it. I always asked myself why he was so secretive. I used to think he had a second family here. I came up with all sorts of scenarios.”

  “There was no family—no children. The marriage was short-lived and unhappy. Eléna came from a wealthy family—the wealthiest, in fact—in the town in Crete where your grandparents were born, Asprophotes. Most of the Louritis family left there long ago, and settled in Irakleion, but they kept their houses and land. Your father met Eléna in Irakleion, courted her aggressively, and proposed marriage. She accepted. She was over forty years old, plain-looking and shy. She had nearly given up on the idea of marriage. But she was impressed by your father’s imposing presence, his physical strength. She’d had suitors before, but never one like him, a real seaman. It was impressive the way he had pulled himself up out of the boiler room. Working overtime, taking out high-interest loans, risking everything, really, and never flinching until he got what he wanted: a ship. Eléna’s grandfather, the patriarch, had gone to sea as a young man and then made a fortune in shipping. But, unlike your father, he had some capital to start with. His son, her father, assembled a fleet of oil tankers and freighters, thirty ships in all. When he died, her two brothers ran the business. But she inherited a third of it. So, for a time, after she married your father, he oversaw a fleet of eleven ships, including the Makara. Your father could never have married into the Louritis family if they knew he had previously been married and had a child.”

  The look on my face stopped him. He cleared his throat, then offered me a cigarette. I declined, and he lit one himself.

  “These people are Cretans, from the mountains,” he went on. “They haven’t changed their ways in centuries. That is why your father kept your existence a secret. Beyond that, he did not confide in me. I cannot speak for his innermost thoughts. He and Eléna lived here in Athens for two years. Then, as her health declined, they moved to Crete. She wanted to be nearer her family. It was clear that her true loyalty was to them—not a good formula for any marriage. Add to that your father’s duplicity, and you see they had a shaky foundation. Eléna insisted they were leaving Athens because of the smog. She had weak lungs. They went to Hydra. There are no automobiles or motorcycles permitted on that island. It’s peaceful. Your father bought a house in the town, up high, overlooking the harbor. Many shippers have homes there. That’s where Eléna died, of a heart attack. Your father was at sea, as he was much of the time. Before his return, her family took her body to Crete and buried her in their plot at Asprophotes. In her will, all her property reverted to her brothers. Under Greek law, that is not something a husband can contest. So your father was left with the house in Hydra and the Makara. For a while he owned a piece of a ferry company. He began to live on Hydra year-round. He always lived simply. He would come to Athens for a few weeks at a time, to do business. He rented an apartment near Vathis Square. Last year he sold the house in Hydra and moved here full-time. He said he was having trouble getting around on the island. He was fifty-seven years old, but he looked older. His arthritis was plaguing him. It was bad in his shoulders and spine, from his early years in those boiler rooms. He died at his apartment last month. It was a massive stroke. There was no warning. He was alone. The landlady found him the next day.” He sat back, laying his palms on the desk. “I’m sorry.”

  Through the slats in the blinds I watched the traffic crawl toward the city center, so slowly it seemed as if the same cars—gray Mercedes taxi, yellow van, a black sedan—had been there ever since I’d sat down. Though Arvanos had presented the facts in the most orderly fashion, as soon as I took them in they became disordered: the more I tried to fix on them, the faster they flew apart. Trying to imagine my father, who had been so physically imposing, deteriorating to that extent, at that age, rattled me. When I reached for my glass of water, my hand was trembling.

  “Where was my father buried?” I asked.

  “He wasn’t. He was cremated the day after he died. His ashes were scattered in the sea. There was no church service. No wake. Those were his wishes.”

  Apparently all of my father that was left on this earth were the freighter Makara and me.

  Averting my eyes from Arvanos to Odysseus and the Sirens, I began to feel ashamed, not for myself so much as for my father. I don’t know how Arvanos felt about seeing me before him, a living person, after all those years. But it couldn’t have been any more pleasant for him than it was for me. That my father had abandoned me was bad enough; that he had denied my very existence seemed even worse. That was my bad luck. My father’s seemed to lie in marriage. He had married once for love and once for money, and lost both wives prematurely. The double life I had imagined for him had turned out to be anything but elaborate. And he had remained a loner to the end.

  “Outside of money—the tuitions, the allowance—did my father ever speak to you about me?”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Did he ever talk about what I was like, where I lived in New York, who I lived with?”

  “I knew you lived with your grandmother and a housekeeper. I knew your mother died in childbirth. I received the grade reports from your schools and passed them along.” He hesitated. “So I knew what you were studying.”

  After an awkward silence, I said, “Is that it? Did you have any idea what I looked like?”

  “I saw a photo once. When you were a boy.”

  “Did my father ever say why he never brought me here to see him?”

  “No.”

  “Or why he didn’t have me come after his wife died?”

  “No.”

  “When was that, by the way?”

  “She died in December 1967.”

  “So I was seventeen. I guess I should be grateful that he never told me. After working so hard to establish that I didn’t exist, maybe he believed it himself.”

  Arvanos let out a long breath. “I know this: your father assumed he would be rich, and for a while he was. Perhaps he rationalized that his short-term actions would be justified when he passed some of that wealth on to you.”

  “Excuse me, but I don’t buy that. My father shut me out long before he got married, or got rich. I don’t care how he dealt with his guilt—if he had any.”

  “Yet you want to know his motivations.”

  “Wouldn’t you?”

  “Yes,” he said quietly. “I would. I wish I could be more helpful. And I understand that you are angry.”

  “Yeah, I’m angry. You’ve just told me that, in order to marry for m
oney, my father disowned me.”

  “I’m not here to judge,” Arvanos replied evenly. “I was his lawyer. He gave me instructions and I followed them. When it came to shipping, he asked my advice and I gave it. With personal matters, that never happened. We were not friends.”

  “Fine. Let’s leave it at that. Do you know of any friends he had here in Athens?”

  “It’s not something I would know.”

  “Or in Hydra?”

  He shook his head. “I know the details about his marriage and his dealings with the Louritis family because they overlapped with business matters. I rarely met with him outside of this room. I can tell you little of what he did outside of his business.”

  “Sure.” I felt defeated.

  Arvanos leaned forward. “Let me tell you something that might be helpful.” This was the only time I thought he deviated from his prepared remarks. “During all the years I sent you your allowance, your father told me to give you whatever you asked for. This was true even when his wealth diminished dramatically. In the end, I was sending you about half his income.”

  I frowned. “Mr. Arvanos, it was never money that my father withheld from me. And you don’t owe me any explanations.”

  I left his office soon afterward with a sheaf of documents pertaining to the Makara, a copy of the will, and two addresses I requested.

  I visited the first address early the next morning, a nondescript apartment building on an anonymous street in the Vathi district. It was midway between the Archaeological Museum and the military cemetery. The exterior was white concrete. The lobby was bare, the elevator cramped. The handyman let me look into Apartment 405, so long as I remained at the threshold while he held the door open. The rooms were already empty. Walls had been patched and plastered. The painters were about to begin their work. Their cans and rollers were piled beside a stepladder.

  I noted that, like every apartment my father rented in my childhood, this one had terrible light, slanting in off a cramped courtyard. He had died in the sort of dark room he preferred.

  Later that morning I took a taxi to Piraeus and boarded the hydrofoil to Hydra. As we left the harbor, we passed near the Makara. It towered over us. Reading its dimensions was nothing like seeing them firsthand. I was still amazed that I owned it. The largest thing I had ever owned was a car; I didn’t even own a house. A ship like this seemed far too huge to be the property of anything but a corporation or government, not a single person. It looked well maintained, just as Arvanos had said. Freshly painted, the hull was white with a yellow border, the upper decks blue, the stacks yellow. Two seamen were hosing down the deck. An officer was standing by the pilothouse. Above the bridge the radar antenna was revolving. The Makara was registered in Ecuador, and the flag of that country was flapping on the mast: a tricolor centered by a snowcapped mountain and a steamship on a river, over which a condor hovered.

  The town of Hydra is like an amphitheater in which the rows of houses, gray or white with terra-cotta roofs, rise steeply, curving around the harbor. It was a warm day. The outdoor cafés were filled, and many boats were anchored at the docks, but still the waterfront felt calm. I was struck at once by the quiet of a place with no motor vehicles. Not even bicycles were allowed on the island. People carrying baggage who disembarked with me hired mules to take it up the hills.

  I asked a mule driver about the address Arvanos had given me. He directed me up a series of twisting alleys. As I climbed, the alleys narrowed. The harbor’s marble pavement gave onto whitewashed granite. The silence deepened. Distant sounds carried: a donkey braying, a dog’s bark. I entered an old neighborhood with large houses. Potted geraniums lined the verandas. Cats sunned themselves on the walls. I passed a widow hanging her laundry and a girl with a basket of eggs. Then there was no one.

  I reached a plateau from which the boats below looked like toys. My heart was beating fast from the climb. But also because I knew this was the place Arvanos had described: the last of three houses off a sunbaked square. I understood why someone with an arthritic spine would have had trouble climbing that hill, or even riding up on a mule. The house was old, but well kept: two stories, white with blue shutters, a garden in back, lemon trees in front. Bougainvillea covered the façade. Grape clusters hung from a trellis. There was a weather-worn coat of arms above the door, from the island’s Venetian days: a full-masted galley with a lion in the prow. The front gate was locked. The windows shuttered. The air hummed with insects, and cicadas were clicking in the grass. Far out on the water the boats trailed ribbons of foam. The panoramic view surprised me, the fact he had given himself something so grand. More likely that was his wife’s doing.

  I sat down on the steps before the gate, shaded by one of the lemon trees. According to Arvanos, my father had occupied this house on and off for eight years. But it was hard for me to place him there: except for the time he took me to school in Maine, I had never seen him outside of New York or Boston. I had so narrow a context in which to situate him that my imagination was stymied: I always pictured him in a vacuum, like a cutout figure without a background. I had never even seen him on a ship, his true home, or at the seashore. Neither those bare rooms in Athens nor this other place he called home were going to provide any more closure than a gravesite. And what exactly had come to an end, after all?

  Back at the harbor, I waited for the last hydrofoil to Piraeus. Dusk was falling. The fishing boats went out, churning slowly. I wandered into the marble church with the bell tower that was the largest building in town. All afternoon, I’d heard those bells ringing on the hour. Candles were burning beside the icons. The church had been built by shipowners. The nave was adorned with the busts of sea captains. There was a mural of Christ, cold-eyed and muscular, walking on the waves swinging a lantern. From the chandeliers, tiny silver ships hung on fine chains. And, behind the altar, on the rounded door to the sacristy, Saint George in blue armor was impaling a mottled dragon with his lance. Like all Saint Georges, he was on horseback, but his was a seahorse, with glowing eyes and a mane that was not hair, but sea foam. The saint’s helmet was a gold triton and his saddle was studded with nautilus shells. In the vestibule there was a brass plaque that listed the names of drowned sailors and their ships, dating back to 1701; at the bottom were engraved the names of those who had paid to erect the plaque. One of the names was my father’s, looking as permanent as the inscription on a tombstone. He might as well have been one of the drowned, not one of the donors—it was all the same now.

  Before I left the church, I stuffed a wad of drachmas into the poor box. But I didn’t light a candle, not for my father, not for myself.

  A FEW DAYS LATER, Arvanos arranged for me to take a tour of the Makara. “It’s your property, it’s an investment, you ought to see it,” he said, sounding like my own lawyer, rather than my father’s executor. In fact, I had formally retained him now that I had real need of counsel.

  A launch from the ship picked me up in Piraeus, piloted by the first mate. His name was Carmine. He was a wiry young man with a shaved head, polite but reserved. It was a humid, overcast day. I had never been on a ship larger than a ferry and never boarded one by scaling a ladder with the sea swirling below. The captain, a man twice my age, welcomed me on deck with a strong handshake and addressed me as “sir.” He introduced himself as Marco Salice. He was a Sardinian, shorter and slighter than the first mate, but—to my eye—even tougher. His gray hair was curly, his salt-and-pepper beard neatly trimmed. His eyes were intelligent. The furrows in his brow looked as if they had been carved with a penknife. With a sailor’s rolling gait, he took me around: the quarterdeck, pilothouse, radar room, engine room, galley, mess hall, crew’s quarters, and the catwalks atop the tremendous three-story holds from which sixty tons of fabric from Singapore and Malaysia had recently been unloaded. It was a complex, orderly world, alien to me in every way. The seamen going about their tasks either stared at me openly or cast furtive glances. Captain Salice kept up a running commentary, detai
ling the ship’s specifications (300 feet long, 80 feet wide, with 220,000 square feet of deck space); engine type (20,000-horsepower Daimler-Hamburg); top speed (17 knots); tonnage (29,000); fuel capacity (2,000 gallons); size of crew (14); guest quarters (for 7); cargo capacity (91,000 cubic feet); date of construction (1953). He had arranged for our lunch to be served in his cabin, the last stop on my tour. But first he wanted to show me what he called “the owner’s cabin.”

  “Just as it was your father’s,” he said, “it will be yours now whenever you’re aboard.”

  Arvanos had mentioned it in the most perfunctory way, so I was surprised to enter a stateroom-sized cabin with a gleaming mahogany bed and chest, a large pigeonhole desk, a Persian carpet, and a well-appointed bathroom. For my father, austere in all things, this was opulent.

  “Everything looks so new,” I said.

  “It is new. Your father’s health had been declining. He had not sailed with us in two years. He told me he would never go to sea again. Last year he had the cabin refurbished. No one has stayed in it since then.”

  Amazing as it seemed, he had evidently had it refurbished for me. What other conclusion could I draw?

  “Let me know if there is anything you would like modified,” the captain said tactfully.

  I shook my head. “It’s fine.”

  “There is also an envelope for you, in the desk.” He hesitated. “Perhaps you would like a moment here alone.”

  “Thank you.”

  I walked around the cabin. I peered out the two portholes. I opened the closets and drawers, which were empty. As was the medicine cabinet. In his will my father had ordered that his material possessions be auctioned off or destroyed. Obviously that had included the contents of this cabin. I sat down on the bed. It was a hard mattress, the kind he liked. Beneath my feet I felt the humming of the ship’s pumps and engines and its powerful generators.