Cartes Postales From Greece

by Victoria Hislop

  She was the island ‘eccentric’, a curiosity for the tourists, usually to be found in a café on the seafront, where she advertised her ‘Icarus Tours’.

  I joined one of these conducted walks. Ten of us stood on the quayside in Agios Kirykos, under a huge modern sculpture that represented a pair of wings. Sweeping her hand in a southerly direction, Ariadne announced that she was going to tell us about ‘Two birds who came from Crete’.

  When Ariadne began to speak, her audience was immediately enthralled. She talked in the present tense, as historians often do in order to bring a story alive, and the imagination of the group was stirred as she relived the events that she described.

  As I listened, I was ready to believe not only that she was the most senior of all Ikarians but also that she had been born thousands of years before us all. Sometimes it is the storyteller, as much as the story itself, that makes a lasting impression.

  WAITING IN THE WINGS

  ‘I begin each day with an invigorating ice-cold shower. The water comes straight from a mountain stream. I hope the shock of its temperature will dispel all the dreams and thoughts that crowd my mind, fragments that never quite cohere and give me intense and frequent migraines. This is the penalty of a long life and having a million memories jostling for space inside my head.

  ‘Then I make my way to the beach. Only the rhythm of the sea and its gentle beat on the sand can settle the racing pulse of my heart and the maelstrom of thoughts that swirl in my brain. I can slow my breath by watching the rising sun and, on a good day, its steadfast path might bring me a brief moment of peace.

  ‘A French woman who runs a yoga retreat nearby sometimes brings her clients down to the beach. I watch as rows of skinny women in leggings face the sun, they are instructed to “live in the moment, live in the here and now, to be free of the past and the future”. It sounds so simple, but tranquillity like that is hard for me to find. And of course, each day, I have another obligation. But I will tell you more of that later. For now I must get on with the story. That’s what you’ve all paid for. It begins a long time ago …

  ‘It is a beautiful day, the skies are blue, the light is translucent. It is the middle of July and there is neither a cloud in the sky nor a breath of wind.

  ‘My friend has spotted something in the sky from a long way off. On these islands, we are used to seeing enormous birds of prey, of course: eagles, falcons, all kinds of buzzard are a common sight. Only last night, as I was on my way home in the dark, a huge owl swooped past and watched me from a tree as I walked by. So we are used to sharing our island with these great creatures, and this is why we assume that what we are looking at is a mighty bird.

  ‘But as this one gets closer, we begin to be afraid. It is a great deal bigger than anything we have ever seen. It’s an impossibly large bird. Then we realise that there is a second one coming behind. It’s a little smaller, but it’s unmistakably another vast raptor.

  ‘It is about mid-morning. The time of day when you stop for a break if you get up with the dawn. Word goes around the village very fast and we all gather on the rocks down by the sea to keep watch. As the moments go by, the fear in the air grows. No one is smiling or joking. Many of the men are away at sea, so we women are feeling vulnerable.

  ‘This is a spectacle that we must all see, or a threat we must be prepared to face. Nobody is sure.

  ‘We are all well used to pirates and vagabonds invading from the sea. This happens often! And we have caves and other secret places to escape to. But an attack from the air! It’s different.

  ‘A few people are seized with panic. They pick up their children and run. But I am mesmerised. My eyes are quite good even now, but in those days I have razor-sharp vision. Scores of us line up on the rocks just over there. The birds that we are watching are graceful, their massive wings wave gently up and down, up and down.’

  Ariadne moved her arms to imitate the bird, floating them slowly up and down, her elegant hands like the tip of the wing, always at a slight angle. As her arms went down, her hand pointed upwards and then, as her arms changed direction, her fingers flicked downwards. Up and down, up and down, up and down, her wrists soft.

  ‘They are approaching, very steadily. The two dots in the sky that seemed so close together now have more distance between them. The one in front is about two hundred metres away and closing in on us. We are fearful.

  ‘Suddenly, someone in the crowd cries out: “It’s a man!”

  ‘We have all reached the same conclusion, but we stare in disbelief. We can all see him clearly now. Yes. It is a man. A bird-man.

  ‘How often do we dream of having wings so that we could simply take off and fly? It can’t just be me who has those fantasies and thoughts? From childhood, we dream of it, don’t we?

  ‘His wingspan is immense, maybe four metres across, like a small, two-seater plane. By now there is quite an audience. We are looking out for more of these creatures, but it seems there are no more behind. Fascination takes the place of fear.

  ‘More and more of us are gathering. A meteor shower, an eclipse of the sun – nothing has ever had a bigger audience. The first “bird” seems to pause. It is like seeing someone treading water, but up in the sky. His legs are paddling, his wings steadily moving up and down. He is waiting for the other one to catch up, but then the one behind stops, too.

  ‘We can make him out more clearly now. He is slightly smaller, and the feathers are a lighter brown. It’s as though he starts to show off. We don’t know whether it is for our benefit, but we are cheering and clapping and whooping and calling to encourage him in this air display. He loops the loop, swoops and soars, and then flies higher and higher. The bigger “bird” is up to no such antics. He is still trying to maintain his position. The sun is high and burning hot in the sky now.

  ‘Then the smaller one hovers for a moment, as birds do when they are about to dive for prey, but instead of plummeting downwards he starts to rise. His great wings beat steadily, and slowly he rises higher and higher and higher.

  ‘He becomes a dot which is disappearing against the glare of the sun. We are all aghast. Instinctively, we know that something is not right. We can feel it.

  ‘We hardly dare raise our eyes. The sun is directly overhead, and we cannot keep looking at him or we will be blinded by its strength. I feel the sweat pouring down my face. At this time of day we are usually in the shade, sheltering from the blistering heat.

  ‘Someone dares to peek between his fingers.

  ‘“He’s gone.”

  ‘“What do you mean – he’s gone?”

  ‘“He’s just a speck against the sun.”

  ‘Then the speck starts to get larger again. And we are all watching a winged creature plummeting, spiralling faster and faster. There is a cloud of feathers as he falls, whirling like a gyroscope, then whole pieces of wing start to detach, unable to stand the speed or the action of the fall.

  ‘We can do nothing. The larger, darker bird is moving his wings up and down to try and maintain his position. He manoeuvres himself away, perhaps to avoid being hit. The small bird is coming down faster than a bullet.

  ‘There is a gasp from us all as he crashes into the sea. For a moment we are frozen, and then there is pandemonium.

  ‘“We have to get a boat out there!” says a woman.

  ‘There are a few small boats still moored in the harbour but most of the bigger ones are out on fishing expeditions.

  ‘I haven’t taken my eyes off the bigger bird. He is now hovering over the place where the other one splashed into the sea. People are now hauling a boat off the nearby beach. They are mostly strong, teenaged boys and it takes the six of them less than five minutes to row out there.

  ‘The bigger bird has landed on a rock but is still flapping his wings to stabilise himself. The whole construction looks unwieldy now he is on land, and a breeze has got up. He is struggling to maintain his balance. Two of the boys clamber up and help him remove his wings.


  ‘On the shore, we can’t hear anything, but the boys tell me later that the man kept repeating the same words. “My boy is down there. Help me find him. Please help me find him!”

  ‘They do their best. For an hour or more they dive, come up for air, dive again, come up for air. They take it in turns. The old man admits that neither he nor his son is a strong swimmer.

  ‘The rescue effort is hampered by the fact that the feathers and the wood have spread a shadow across the surface of the sea. Using the oars, the rescuers try to clear the layer of debris, and two of them jump in and dive as far down as their breath will allow them.

  ‘“He’s … over … there,” one of them splutters as he comes up for air.

  ‘Three of them swim to the point that he indicates.

  ‘The wood used for the construction is light when it is dry, but has become saturated in the sea and weighs the body down. The boy is on the ocean floor.

  ‘It takes all three of them to bring him up to the surface, and a supreme effort to get him in to the boat. The father is already sitting there. His sobs are audible to us, carried across the still sea to the rocks where we are waiting.

  ‘Slowly, the boys row back. There is no hurry now. It is a funeral cortege.

  ‘The body is carried to my house and we lay him out on the kitchen table. He is a beautiful youth, and I wash him lovingly, as if he were my own son. I put a wreath on his head, strew him with flowers, seal his mouth with a coin. All the while, his father sits in the corner of the room, his body convulsed with sobs. I believe nothing will console him.

  ‘Then I call the young men to carry the body up the hill.

  ‘We blend Ikarian and Minoan funeral rites and bury him with pots of food and drink and a small boat that his father has carved out of a piece of driftwood that morning. The man’s lamentations are loud. He throws himself on to the grave and howls, not just for a few minutes but for several hours. The other mourners leave not long after the burial, but I sit under the shade of a tree. I don’t feel that he should be entirely alone.

  ‘Eventually, he is silent, and I lead him back to my stone-built house. He can stay as long as he likes. It’s just me there. Each day for I don’t know how long he walks to his son’s grave and sits there for hours and hours until night falls, then he returns. For the first few days he eats nothing I put on the table. Then he lies, staring at the ceiling. Perhaps he sleeps, I don’t know, but once or twice I am woken by his shouts. I think he is having nightmares. For several days afterwards, debris from the boy’s wings is washed up on our beaches.

  ‘On the sixth night he is ready to speak. Days have passed without us exchanging so much as a word but, once he starts talking, he talks and talks and talks and it’s hard to stop him.

  ‘He has been through so much, even before this terrible accident, and now it seems as though talking helps him with his grief. He starts to tell me his story.

  ‘He is from an island a long way south of Ikaria, a place so big it is more like a country, with a king and a palace with hundreds of rooms. It sounds nothing like Ikaria, where there are no grand buildings and everyone is equal.

  ‘His name is Daedalus, and he tells me everything. He is an inventor, something like a Leonardo da Vinci figure, creative, intellectual, innovative. If he were alive today, he would probably have invented the internet, or perhaps constructed the tallest building in the world. He is clearly very clever, which is why he is summoned by this king, Minos, to build a complex maze in order to imprison a monster (it’s a monster given birth to by his wife). Men and women from Athens are sent into the labyrinth to be eaten by the monster, but one of them, Theseus, kills it and gets out. Ariadne (the king’s daughter), advised by Daedalus, has given Theseus a means of escape. He elopes with Ariadne but subsequently abandons her.

  ‘Minos is furious. First of all, his wife falls in love with an animal, then his daughter runs away. He imprisons Daedalus in a tower, along with his son, Icarus. For a man such as Daedalus, being locked up and away from the world is a terrible punishment, but someone as resourceful as he always finds a way round a problem.

  ‘With nothing to do all day but watch the birds soaring, swooping, enjoying the pleasure of flight, Daedalus is full of envy at their freedom. He and his son are imprisoned very high up to minimise their chance of escape. It is an excellent place to birdwatch and over the weeks, he begins to understand all the complexities of aerodynamics.

  ‘Being in this tower will drive him mad if he doesn’t escape, and he suddenly realises how he can. Over the next few months, he makes traps for the birds and gathers dozens of them, large, medium and small (he wants feathers in all sizes). Nature kindly gives him the “glue” that he needs: bees are nesting in a corner of the ceiling, and he simply steals their wax.

  ‘To start with, Icarus is upset to see all the dead birds but, when his father explains that this is their only hope, he happily plucks them and starts to arrange the feathers as his father wishes. His excitement begins to build. Flying! Who wouldn’t want to give it a try?

  ‘The day comes when two sets of wings are ready, and Daedalus knows that there will be no second chance. There is no test flight. It will be a question of standing on the window ledge and jumping.

  ‘He issues his son with a set of brief but strict guidelines. If they fly too close to the sea and get their wings wet, the weight will pull them down. Equally disastrous will be to go too high, as the sun will melt the wax that holds the feathers together. They have a long journey ahead, so they must fly steadily and stick together. As his father fastens the binding on his son’s wings, Icarus appears to be listening, but he is impatient to get going. People who sky dive tell me that when they did their first jump they were almost beside themselves with impatience to take that initial plunge. Daedalus can feel his son’s excitement. He shares it.

  ‘Of course, Daedalus will jump first. He tells his son that, if it is a disaster, he must abort the plan and stay where he is.

  ‘The moment of truth comes. They are both ready, their wings magnificent. Daedalus has attended to aesthetics as well as to engineering.

  ‘“Don’t forget, my darling boy, be cautious and stay close.”

  ‘It is too late to hug his son. He wishes he had thought of doing so before the wings went on.

  ‘Icarus gives his father a leg-up on to the window ledge. Daedalus leaps and Icarus sees his father drop for a moment (the boy’s heart is in his mouth), then, as he is caught by the thermals, he rises again. He begins to move his wings. His father is flying. He is really flying! Daedalus circles the tower, then heads out north in a straight line.

  ‘There is no time to waste. Icarus scrambles on to the ledge and launches himself off. Within a minute, he is laughing. Not just because he and his father are escaping but because the sheer joy of flight is beyond anything he could ever have imagined. No wonder there is a dawn chorus, he thinks: birds must be so happy to face a new day, much of which will be spent in flight.

  ‘By the time anyone notices they have gone, father and son are far across the Aegean. For a few hundred kilometres they make steady progress, passing over a few small islands, where residents mistake them for rare eagles. Warm, dry air and a south wind make for perfect flying conditions.

  ‘Then they near this island. By now, Icarus has become very confident. He is having a wonderful time. Daedalus is getting tired but they are well over half-way to Athens so he keeps going. Icarus isn’t tired at all.

  ‘Daedalus’s voice cracks in the retelling, and suddenly I feel guilty. I realise that Icarus was probably showing off for us, his audience. When he saw us all looking up, watching him, spectating, I think that’s when he decided to perform his tricks. To impress us. He did just what any teenaged boy would do.

  ‘Icarus’s pleasure in his freedom was intense and his love of the moment so overpowering that he abandoned moderation. I look at the weeping father, so wise, so clever, so accomplished, but in the end unable to control a son’s natu
ral instincts.

  ‘Daedalus is overwhelmed by his loss, and of course he blames himself for his son’s death and for having had the notion that the wings would be safe. This only adds to his grief. He is one of the most gifted men in the world, and yet this means nothing when you have lost everything you love.

  ‘He stays on another week or so. Most of each day is still spent by his son’s grave, but he starts to eat some of the food I make for him and soon he is sleeping better. The shadows around his eyes begin to disappear. We talk for hours each day and I sometimes accompany him to the graveside. One evening, we are eating together and I can tell that there is something on his mind. Eventually, he tells me what it is.

  ‘He is in a state of grief but he has a problem. He is still on the run, and King Minos will be looking for him.

  ‘I can see that he is torn between the desire to stay close to his son’s grave, to observe the rituals that will take Icarus safely to the afterlife, and the need to keep travelling.

  ‘Beautiful as it is, this island is no place for the ambitious. Daedalus has to complete his journey.

  ‘“What about my son, though …?”

  He looks me straight in the eye as he asks this.

  ‘“I will see to it that he continues on his way, so that you can continue on yours,” I hear myself saying.

  ‘I have spoken on the spur of the moment, without even thinking of the implications. But once I have made this promise there is no turning back. This will be my future, to remember Icarus and to offer libations at the graveside.

  ‘The man is overwhelmed with gratitude. He weeps, but not in the same way as he wept on the day that Icarus was buried. He puts his arms around me, and I feel his tears fall on my shoulder.

  ‘He leaves on a boat the following day. There are rumours that King Minos is on his trail. We all wish Daedalus well and a crowd gathers to wave him off.