Archipelago of Souls

by Gregory Day

  ‘Ultimately John believed that the Fuhrer had mistaken himself for the dolphin. The way he parades across Europe in the guise of a predestined leap. But he also believed that this uniformed dolphin will be gored and the whole Nazi enterprise will sink. Yet all men have been caught up in this epic misapprehension. The British are caught up, all its dominions, the Greeks and Cretans. Your Australian army and your brother are included, Wesley. For the vain presumption is doomed to fail and when the war that has ridden on its back then ends, even the Allies will have nothing to hold on to. They too, slowly but surely, will also sink. Unless they learn the truth of the shard.’

  *

  Later that day, wrapped up in a coarse blanket under the plane tree in the courtyard, my mind grew troubled and filled with angry illogicalities, butting like persistent goats up against me, as I thought of Andreas’ words. It seemed clear that as a solitary monk Andreas lived a devotional life, as much in the mind as on the earth, but how could John Pendlebury, the man who Tassos had described as a pallikari, a great warrior, the man who had combed the island, revolver in hand, sword across his chest, harnessing the villagers’ fire to fight into a systematic force, how could he have reconciled such a transcendent attitude to the war, if that’s what it was?

  As I sat under the tree, feeling confused and unsure, looking out over the flat field through which I’d arrived in the footsteps of the hare, I once again imagined Vern in my place. Vern, who was known to shoot the odd hare from the saddle of his mare between dashing off poems in the days when he was alone on the farm. He undoubtedly would have held a better conversation with this monk than I.

  Eventually I closed my eyes and saw him again, this time not struggling to find his way out through the RN hatches but as a blurry figure on a fading gypsum shard. Yet he was not the innocent on the shard, not the child on the back of the man riding the dolphin, he was the rider himself. In a wince, I closed my eyes more tightly and saw that there was still a child on the shard. A child being flung. His hands were outstretched in desperation, his face alarmed and forsaken, as he fell helplessly off the man and the dolphin, slewn awkwardly through the air.

  The child was me.

  So the days passed in winter gloom and a series of severe windstorms which scoured down off the mountains and whistled up the big monastery chimney. The summer courtyard was now bare, the leafless plane tree opening up a grey sky etched with the pale brown tracework of its branches. My question was when, and if, and now for what purpose, I would press on to find a caique to take me to Alex or Cairo. Would I actually, as I had pretended to the good people of Marmaketo and to the Maori in the village tub, just rejoin my unit, now that Andreas had convinced me that buttonholing top brass with my questions about the Imperial would be a futile task?

  And yet still my desire for answers burned, as well as an almost gravitational reluctance to resume the war, a shithouse bitterness of feeling that seemed somehow embedded within me by the facts, even though in all likelihood there would be no official documentation of Vern’s death issued by HQ. I’m sure that, as far as the paperwork was concerned, he could have been as alive or as dead as I was. But I knew otherwise, and so, it seemed to me, did the sad whispery weather falling through the plane tree onto the flagstones of the courtyard at Agio Dormiton.

  Back in Iraklio Tassos had described how, in the days immediately preceding our arrival, Pendlebury had been working in a frenzy, venturing far and wide in a race against time to solidify the andarte networks. This was when he had taken to leaving his glass eye on the desk of his shambolic office, to let visitors know when he was away and could not be contacted. Instead he wore a black patch over the empty socket and, with the motley of military and local garb he was wearing, he cut a curious figure as he went about the valleys and plateaux marshalling the native networks.

  One afternoon in the kitchen, Andreas furthered Tassos’ rendition by describing how Pendlebury had visited Agio Dormiton on one last occasion during the days of the black patch.

  ‘He missed his wife and children, though not like a Cretan. They were a guilt that he lived with, I believe. A former life, which he had outgrown. But I understood this, not only because I lived alone here at Agio Dormiton but because I myself had been where not many Cretans had before me. When I was young my family had sent me to London in the days when Venizelos and the Royalists were bickering over our country’s entry into the First World War. From there I travelled extensively: along the coast of France and down the Italian peninsula, all as a Greek neutral you see, and I developed, in the midst of that other war, an affection for the discoveries of solitude. The train of thoughts you have when you travel alone. The pathways in the spirit you can pursue. Without the restraints of gossip or custom. Increasingly as I travelled this new condition deepened in equal measure with the deprivations that I saw, but I began to feel that it was not so much a discovery I was making as a reacquaintance I was experiencing. A reunion with a source, the familiar light of a known horizon. And gradually, in fact on an empty train one rainy afternoon between Oxford and London, I grew homesick for that horizon. Homesick for god.

  ‘When I discussed this journey with John he expressed similar feelings himself, indeed I believe they were feelings which united us. He spoke of thoughts he had on the long miles walking the massifs. His deepest peace, he said, was to be found in a pass gemmed with poppies, the scent of citrus in his nostrils, in solitary meditation on the meaning of the shard. The meaning he had dug for. The meaning he had had to journey so far from his home to find.’

  To my surprise, as I listened to this talk of redemption and solitude, I began to be seduced into thinking that perhaps I too was destined for a life which afforded me such insights. But, as if sensing my thoughts, Andreas began to talk then with great emphasis of the distance I had travelled. Not the distance over the plateaux and mountains from Iraklio but the further distance from the south of the world, from Australia. From my family. Which, as he said, was quite obviously a considerable ingredient of my distress.

  And so, by way of conducting confession almost, or as if he was some torturer bent on teasing out the truth, he had me describe the life we had on the lakes, the farming and the society, the drystoning and the birds, the fishing, the droughts and the floods. I found myself talking proudly of the country, the things my family had built there, and, just as I had on another faraway night when Adrasteia and I talked in the courtyard of her uncle’s villa in Iraklio, I told him enthusiastically about the craters of Red Rock, even laughing about the early years when first I, then Vern, were made to pick the scoria out of the paddocks when we were too young for other jobs.

  As I recounted it all to the monk, the use we made of the old rocks for fencing, the trips to Colac on the horse and jinker, I had the realisation that what I was describing was a way of life, rather than a way of thought such as he had described, and I saw, for the first time I believe, how we’d in fact lived like animals on the lake after our mum had died. We had land, it was good rich land, and in that both ourselves and our sheep were privileged, but in no other way. The closeness we were allowed as kids to the old family stories and songs, to the bandicoot and the bluetongue, was countered now by the way our lives were presented back to us. The identities we had foisted on us in the aftermath of our mother’s death. Shrill identities. ‘Upstanding. Hardworking. Australian.’ As opposed to ‘Amoral. Deep feeling. Stateless.’ Under the close watch of the monk of Agio Dormiton, the full sadness of this situation dawned on me greatly.

  ‘And your religion?’ Andreas asked, as if he once again was reading my mind. ‘What were your teachings, your rituals, your customary way of approaching the divine?’

  I scoffed loudly then, in full larrikin volume. I remember looking about at the monastery kitchen, the centuries of cooking smoke on its walls, the solidity and the grime, and then at the man in front of me who was peering into my eyes with an intensity almost vicious in the exte
nt of its feeling. And all that came to mind at that moment was sheep. Poor dumb sheep. The sheep I saw through my bedroom window every morning as a child. The sheep I sheared, knackered, dipped, shot, boiled. St Brendan’s was only a mile down the road and before Mum had gone we’d been regulars at mass, but not after that. And despite the fact we had pigs as well, horses and hens too, and geese and always dairy cows in the way of mixed farms like ours, all I could see in answer to Andreas’ question about religion was sheep. Speechless sheep, thoughtless even, on the slopes of our paddocks. The lambs of God. The soldiers of war.

  I looked for solace now in the eyes of the monk on the other side of the big table. But he simply stared, said nothing, until I found myself speaking further, filling the silence, delving deep into the gathering darkness.

  Time after time, I said, it was my father in his own grief who had let me down, and year after year he’d got it arseabout by sending me away and keeping Vern close. He never knew the sacrifices I’d have made for it to be otherwise. To be a young farmer full of nous and nods and grunts of dry surmise. I never got the chance to work the farm. Only to fight a war, supposedly for the farm. But it was a war I’d already lost in my own heart, and once you lose your heart like that can you ever find it again?

  *

  Later on that night, in my cot in the monk’s cell, I held the copper mug in my hands and sipped at the water Andreas had poured for me. The bed was firm and clean, the magali had warmed the room, but I lay thinking how all around us on the island the terror continued. Women and children were being lined up and shot, even as I lay there. To the south, across the sea to North Africa, to the east across to Smyrna and pushing out towards Russia, and back up the other way into the battlefields of Europe, the landscape was damp with human blood.

  A wave of guilt like dysentery washed through me for my relatively safe situation. But that’s all it was, a wave. It came, I felt it, and then it passed. I placed the mug up on the rough white sill, stoked up the magali for the night, and blew out the candle.

  I was done. Having described it to the monk I was done with what I was, who I had been. Done with sheep, with war, with other people’s company. I had at least matured enough to understand the solitude which Andreas had spoken of and I planned to seek it out further. It seemed the only logical response to the world. I was sure in my heart Vern would have felt the same.

  From the courtyard outside my cell I heard the sound of the monk taking his nightly piss against the base of the plane tree. Once again the stream of liquid battering the trunk seemed to go on and on. When it finally finished I turned to the wall and sank away gratefully into what seemed like a premonition of death: a black void.

  XXV

  The race days here on King have always been singular affairs, but very proud for that, and relished, among other things, for the true unlikeliness of them ever taking place. The runners are made up of mainland cast-offs and Tasmanian hand-me-downs, horses earmarked for the pasture or pure dotage who’ve been resuscitated to compete by the keen intent of new island owners and, of course, by the tasty grass. Like the islanders themselves these horses are more often than not rugged up through three or four seasons in heavy quilted wools but unlike their owners they are never fully exposed to the everpressing insinuations of the Bass Strait winds. Racing is a festival here, an ornament, and such nags that are lucky enough to avoid the abattoirs, are given every cosset in preparation for the race. They’re given snug hardwood stables fit for the Christ child himself, or, if outside, they stand in the leeside of Dutch barns, and on the best chomp as well, even at the expense of cattle and sheep whose only benefit to the farmer as race season approaches is mere money. The island racehorses, on the other hand, can bring their owners the genuine prerogatives of true one-upmanship and pride. And all with a tone of mirth, due to the absurdity of the races taking place on an island ideally suited to creatures who abide in burrows.

  The Fermoys had never raced a horse, partly due to the frivolity of the enterprise but mainly because horses weren’t Nat’s thing, but I had been asked by Brian Robinson to go to the cup with himself and Rose and figured there was some kind of chance, given the co-op’s involvement with running the meet, that Leonie would be there regardless. Although we’d had our day over the gurrying at Uncle True’s, I’d still not seen her at Wait-a-While since she left the box of ink at the door that first visit. Every now and again I’d arrive home to find another such delivery, of ink and my most recently sent pages, all repackaged and waiting for me under the bullnose. I knew from this that she must have been watching my movements but nevertheless I hadn’t been game enough – given what I’d written and given the added complication of what True had told me about the trouble with Rickie Keith – to front up at the co-op on one of her days there, let alone to head up north to seek her out. I’d come to rely, therefore, on my writing as a form of communication. Which still felt decidedly risky. When it came to the issue of actually seeing her I could only hope for pure happenstance, and, despite the smallness of King and how omnipresent she seemed upon it, that was not a foolproof solution. Good friends, even family, could go years on their circulations of the island without ever bumping into each other. And of course, if she knew when to drop off the packages without bumping into me then I felt as if she knew where I was the rest of the time as well. I reasoned though that she’d never pick me to attend a big social occasion and, as a consequence, I figured race day was the go.

  The morning of the meet, however, as if in anticipation of an event which I wasn’t sure my nerves could handle – not my shell-shocked nerves, which were being both stirred up and greatly helped by the writing, but my purely romantic nerves – (a man confesses to dubious things by post and then sallies off to the races to woo the girl who knows it all? From a certain distance one would have to say to that, and with clear derision: you’ve got Buckley’s) – I found upon waking that my eyes were stuck together as if by the heavy sea-mist that hung in the air; and that I could barely prise them open as the day demanded I awake.

  I’ve learnt since that some mornings are just like that here: the mist rises from the strait to meet the lenticular hovering like a halo above the swatch of land. The result is a sticky density in the air that I liken to nothing other than the density of a dream. You can see the motion of the mist like a sculpted thing, the light too, streaming past as you cut the wood, or pouring down the gullies with the mobility of solid water itself. But now, on the morning all my previous days on the island had been decidedly leading to – even the days before my arrival, even the months and years – the salt mist had jammed my lids in a bout of littoral conjunctivitis. I’d been blinded – well almost, I could just peer through my sticky lashes at the room – occluded anyway by the conditions of the tiny spot that is the island in the wide engulfing of blue-green fate and power.

  The body is a contrarian no doubt, and, as Lascelles had already pointed out to me that day in the pub, sometimes the body is your only voice. I’d gone so far as to admit to myself that yes I was prepared to accept Brian Robinson’s invite to the meet, but not so far as to prepare myself for the deeper course I was now set upon: to face up to love.

  I lay back and stopped trying. Pulled the blankets up around the stubble on my chin. Relaxing my eyes, I went where my body demanded my spirit should go.

  I had loved only once before, in puberty, or at least not long after. She was from a farm at Balintore, on the edge of Lake Colac, not even ten miles from our place on the shore of Corangamite. One summer, in the wake of Mum’s death, our fathers had a bit to do with each other, I still don’t know why looking back, although her father, Ray Murtagh, was known for his innovations and was probably helping the old man out by clueing him up on the science of the place, the chemistries of the dirt and what could be done with the gaps between the cooled volcanic lava or somesuch. That neighbourly gesture, or collaboration, or tutelage or whatever it was, didn’t last long, just th
at one summer in the middle of the Great Depression, but long enough to shape the man I was to become.

  So we were there one day, on the fresh lakeshore at Balintore, catching tench with her brothers from their jetty out front of their pile, and all was normal or thereabouts, when I was sent back up to the house with a full bucket of fish, to empty them in the trough and bring it back empty and ready to fill again. I was also to ask for passionfruit, which grew on their trellis, off their enclosed back courtyard and which could tide us over for the rest of the afternoon.

  I remember I emptied the fish into the trough, smelt the gunpowdery whiff of the darkened smithing shed nearby, but what I really can’t forget is when I came around the brighter side of the back of the house to get the passionfruit.

  She was down on her haunches amongst the quartz pebbles of the courtyard, her brown hair was wet and combed, she seemed freshly showered and was idling there on her own, as if in some wistful, reflective moment. Her skin was browned almost to the colour of her hair by the summer, her head was set at a languid or recollective angle, and as I unwittingly rounded the house side with the empty bucket, the sight of her changed the whole set-up of my world.

  One glance, the aromas around, her freshness and the unexpected privacy of the moment, along with the disinterested kindness she had shown me in previous encounters, and reality itself out there at Balintore seemed to gulp and then glide onwards into the serenest thing. The everyday lakeshore world was transported into full feeling right before my very eyes.

  What I can’t remember now is whether I too leant down amongst those white courtyard pebbles, or whether we spoke right then, or whether I just made my explanations and went straight to the passionfruit vines. To be honest I expect we must have spoken and that I too must have leant down and toyed with the pebbles, but it is the pure charge of my feelings at the first sight of her which overwhelms and dominates me. All else, really, is a consequence of that.