Archipelago of Souls

by Gregory Day

  The slanting roof of this rubbly hovel would have been barely six feet from the ground. I noticed two more buildings just like it further down the street, one with rush chairs out the front, and another two buildings even further along past that. The empty chairs all faced the empty shore, as if waiting for something that might never come, or as if the sea was a stage for favourite stories to be enacted upon, when and if its audience finally arrived. The ashen sky became a grey proscenium, and the whole scene was dwarfed by the towering massif I’d descended from. I felt like I’d stumbled into the strangest, saddest, village on earth.

  Two men came out onto the covered terrace of the taverna, talking like fellow townsfolk do the whole world over, about some important local issue no doubt, some person’s foible or small-time scandal in their midst. I could tell by the familiarity of the way they were enjoying their chat that they weren’t discussing anything as incomprehensible as the war.

  They must have noticed me standing out on the road between the terrace and the beach but they betrayed no sign of it. I listened to them speak, noted the familiar tones, the pleasure they took in disagreeing. The taller of the two men was dressed in a decidedly untypical way – in fact it was the first time in my life that I had seen a pair of the American-style denim jeans that became so popular after the war. Above the jeans he wore a dusty but nevertheless impressive houndstooth jacket, with a schoolmaster’s patches on its elbows, and in the breast pocket of this jacket hung a pair of steel-rimmed reflective sunglasses, which, like the jeans, seemed a great novelty to me in those days before I’d had anything to do with the Yanks.

  The worldliness of this character was the last thing I’d expected to find, and although his get-up could quite reasonably have given me cause for optimism, the sheer difference of it made me windy just the same. I s’pose I felt by now that no one on Crete was exactly as they appeared. There was no reason why this bloke should be the exception.

  His friend, dressed in the dark duds and shirt of an ordinary villager, showed no obvious deference towards the man in the worldly clothes and I would’ve bet they’d known each other all their lives. Even so, it was the unlikeliness of the tall man’s garb that I couldn’t trust and I turned and walked back the way I’d come, hoping that they would continue to ignore me in the midst of their conversation.

  I walked fast to the east till I felt clear of the village. I slowed, looked back over my shoulder onto the dry lonely road, and figured I was safe.

  Up on the rising slopes a few miles further along, I noticed the high cut of the gorge. I realised by its distance, and by one or two remarks of Andreas’ that had led me to believe the little port of Arvi was almost directly below the rocky cut, that the tiny settlement I had just encountered was not Arvi at all. I decided that it was a stroke of luck that I’d turned on my heel, and I resolved to keep going east, with the epic walls of the gorge as my bearing, in the hope that there was some turn-off from the road I had missed coming down that would cut across the lower slopes and lead me to the village of Arvi, where I hoped I stood some kind of chance of finding a boat.

  But when the road eventually took its turn away from the water and started gently to climb again back into the hills, I began to doubt myself. If I’d not seen a turn-off coming down why on earth would one magically appear going up the other way? Sure enough though, before too long a narrow turn-off did appear, an even rougher donkey road tilting sideways across the downslopes in the direction of what I imagined to be the open throat of the gorge.

  And so I went on, all that day, on what turned out to be a rigmarole of a track, trudging this way and that, first back up the slope then switching down through hairpin bends and dry-locked gullies, some of which were brief but all of which were unpleasant, cut off as they were from the distant hiss of the sea’s motion and therefore laden with an eerie silence.

  It was in one of these gullies that I thought I’d come to a hopeless dead end. An enclosed and lonely kind of place, its heavy silence was only sliced with dry reeds rustling occasionally, as if from thirst. At my feet, white skeletons were scattered everywhere – the gully seemed to double as a seabird cemetery – and my boots crunched through these discards as I moved along, frail limbs strewn by vultures or by bleached eddies of the wind. I had no choice but to stop and eat amongst them, feeling suddenly low again, without much energy to continue. I stood chewing, in a rotten mood under the sun, until I could stand it no more. I raised my face to the sky as if to make my final plea and, as it happened, sighted a glancing meander of the track some thirty yards ahead that I hadn’t seen before. Immensely relieved, I went bashing through the hip-high reeds right away, until once again I was treading over the rise and could sight the water, hugging the hill’s parched mouldings arcing east.

  I expected to be below the gorge by nightfall and thus to have worked out whether my reckonings of the whereabouts of the village were true, but no such luck. When night came I fell exhausted into a shallow cave on a south-facing hill, worried now that I was stuck in a donkey-track version of the Minoan labyrinth and would never arrive at Arvi. All through the day, the orange clay of the path had taunted me, the bearings of the gorge walls shifting in their proximity, first looming close up as a sure thing, then disappearing altogether behind the hill I toiled around, until when they reappeared they seemed more distant than ever. Whether it was tricks of the ashen sea-light, or illusions of the salt haze which hovered above the track, I still don’t know, but I was tested all that long day through.

  Such is the power of our expectations, I s’pose, the way they have of lifting our spirits or disappointing them. Whatever the case, as I rested later, with the car-coat wrapped tight around me in the tiny cave, I felt myself calming down a little at the thought of all I’d been dished up and all I’d survived, and how I’d seen not one bit of it coming. Not one bit.

  So the next morning, which dawned even warmer than the day before but with that ashen murk disappeared from the sky above the sea, I set out with the gorge of Arvi not so much as a landmark of my destination but as a reminder. It was Vern himself, who with notions of the mythic past, had cast his mind towards a glorious future, encouraged by all he’d read in Pommy books lionising the Greeks, and by Tiny Freyberg and his fluttering Union Jack, and in a deeper sense bolstered from above and below by the fighting spirit of our mum. But perhaps it was precisely this imagining of a great future that had so disillusioned him in the end. I promised myself that I would only proceed step by step, patousia me patousia, and what appeared as my right the day before I accepted now as only my aspiration.

  XXXI

  In my recurring dream Lascelles and I are walking along a beach. He is talking, attempting to ferret info out of me, about what happened before we ended up out here, washed up on this island. His mood is urgent but it’s not so much the words he says but the looks he gives me. The concentration in his eyes.

  What are the griefs you’ve felt, they ask, what are the horrors you’ve seen?

  I walk along in silence for a long time. We go right around the island in fact, for what seems like days, along the sand and over the bluffs and capes, past the shipwrecks and along the abandoned kelp tracks. The wind blows then stills, he walks beside me, but he doesn’t look straight ahead, he’s never watching where he’s going, he’s always looking across at me. I want to say only one thing, to tell him to watch out, that he might trip over, but I don’t. I don’t say a word.

  Eventually we make it all the way around the island, right back to the same beach where we started, but when we get there we simply continue. We carry on walking. And it’s then that I begin to speak.

  I could tell you, I say, how I endured frostbite and burning sun, I could tell you about the fleas, the screaming Stukas and the blood, the violence of women and priests, and how I stayed in the battle long after it had passed, long after the grey ships had come and let down their scramble nets to take us away. I could des
cribe how, in fact, the battle was far from over at that point, how it never ends, and how I slowly came to realise that, and how I then assembled a new face, with new eyes, a new uniform, a uniform built from the inside out, a ragtag uniform of the nation of the free man, the improvised fighter for freedom.

  I could tell you of the consequences of this new uniform too, what it meant in the realities of the occupation, the reckless deeds I performed, as my brother had before me, the ‘heroism’ entailed. And I could tell you how this heroism was actually something more akin to what you’d told me about the Japanese. The way they are prepared to die. In order to live more fully.

  But really, I say, as we walk on, none of that would tell you anything. None of it would tell you anything at all.

  He looks at me, perplexed, even a little horrified. Over the water a sea eagle circles. A dolphin with a child on its back pushes through the waves.

  What I really want, I say then, is for you to tell me. About how your mother died. So that then you can see where it is we are going. We have been travelling round and round in circles all along. Only when you see that, Lascelles, I say, finally, can we be friends.

  XXXII

  It was lunchtime as I came into the village – I could tell that not only by my gurgling guts but by the smell of cooking wafting out onto the road as I entered. A few tidy buildings fronted the water, and a little further along I could see two or three masts and the coloured bulk of a couple of caiques straining at their moorings.

  It felt unlikely that any German or Italian presence would be in such a remote area but of course I couldn’t entirely trust such a feeling. If what happened next was to take place as I planned – a berth on some seaworthy local boat, or even on one of the RN subs which Spenser’s mates on the wireless from Cairo had months ago mentioned would be searching the south coast – I had to proceed with my wits about me, and with any western district wool well and truly removed from my eyes.

  So I trod into the village with great caution. However, just as it had been at the Kavroulakis villa, so it was again. The combination of a Cretan woman and the taste of chicken saw me drop my guard, though this time the woman was neither young nor lithe, but stout, in her eighties, and the chook was already plucked and cooked.

  She came scuttling out into the road as I approached, ushering me with vigorous arms into the front downstairs room of a tall rough-plastered building, as if I was the chook rather than the hungry stranger. Her name was Maria she told me and within a few minutes she had me seated at a wooden table in the dark but refreshingly cool room, with a plate of hot steaming chicken and potatoes set in front of me.

  At first I didn’t know where to look and, against the growls of my stomach, feigned a firm reluctance. But the sight and smell of the food was too much and, negotiating a temporary surrender with myself, I tucked in, while the black widow, satisfied she’d snared her catch, disappeared through a doorway back into her kitchen.

  I sat at the table, looking straight out through a pair of open double doors, down a broken lane silent with sleeping dogs, onto the grey beach and milky blue water of the sea. I ate quickly, huffing through my nose at the pleasure of the food’s taste and heat. When I had finished everything on my plate I sat motionless for a long time, non compos mentis after what had been a two-day march across the unforgiving coastal slopes.

  Eventually Maria appeared again from the kitchen with coffee and freshly baked bread. She set it down in place of the empty plate, which she removed to a sideboard on the wall, and then sat down opposite me.

  ‘English, ne?’

  ‘No, no. Ohi.’

  ‘Ohi? Ne, you English soldier.’

  My motley costume quite obviously didn’t cut the mustard here, my Greek was limited, so I came right out with it.

  ‘Australian. Ine Australian soldier. I need a boat.’

  ‘Australien. Ne, ne.’

  ‘I need a boat.’

  ‘Kaiki?’

  ‘Ne, a caique, or bigger.’

  I stretched an imaginary accordion with my hands, not sure of the word. Maria nodded, smiling with intelligent, almond-shaped eyes. She clapped her brown hands with enthusiasm.

  ‘Kaiki,’ she repeated. ‘O hios mou. Kremeethia mas.’

  I looked at her, none the wiser.

  ‘Ne, ne, kaiki,’ she stressed, nodding again, full of earnestness. ‘O hios mou. To kaiki tou kremeethia mas.’

  ‘Your son? He has a boat?’

  ‘Ne, ne. O hios mou. Kaiki kremeethia mas.’

  I nodded approvingly and she rose from the table, picking up my dirty plate from the sideboard with one hand and motioning with the other for me to stay put while she went off, presumably to find her son.

  *

  Alone now on the chair in the black widow’s front room I slumped with a sigh and waited. Perhaps, after so much varying fortune, it was the almost childlike hospitality of certain Cretans that in the end made the greatest impression on me, an impression as indelible as the war itself, for it is certainly true that the two opposing principles: destruction and mercy, are on Crete like the separate braids of a single unbreakable twine. I sat at the table and gave thanks for the welcoming of strangers, reflecting also how this could never be entirely removed from the fear of annihilation. It is in fact a response to annihilation, the best possible response, being both incomparably dignified and strategically practical, for when the day comes for a god to turn up in your own small village, you can bet your bottom dollar he’ll seem like a stranger.

  As I sat at the table waiting for Maria to return with her son it was Tassos and Adrasteia that my mind kept returning to. They too were a twining braid, the uncle and the niece, welcoming us as they did into the heart of their house but alert always to their own immediate purpose. Tassos and Adrasteia lived as if all the untidy parables of history were bound into their flesh, as if every day was the subject of a mantinades, every second a chosen word, every minute a familiar melody, every hour a recurring verse, sung or unsung. We would all amount to something, our life is a story we must be proud to tell. When all is done and dusted, I wondered, was this purpose mine as well? Not to die like Vern but to follow the unbreakable braid made from destruction and mercy to the heart of the labyrinth, to slay the beast and then to live to tell the tale? Is that what Tassos and Adrasteia understood, in a way I could never have? Was that a wisdom they were holding as if in safekeeping for me, in safekeeping perhaps for the entire world?

  After all, what was I fighting for? My father’s farm? Or was there something before all that, something as ancient as our childhood’s volcano, something frightening but as ordinary as a lemon, which justified their derailing me on the night of the evacuation?

  I stared past the sleeping dogs to the sea at the end of the lane. My mother’s face came once more to my mind, so clearly now, more clearly than it had for years. I saw her lovely brown eyes, the tawny flecks within them, and in that light I saw the way she had sacrificed me, the way she had sacrificed her love for me, so that her husband would have a companion through the trials of his grief. He wouldn’t be alone. None of us would, if Mum had her way.

  It was a flawed decision, an impossible situation. We could not all of us sleep in her bed. Only the little one, only the baby.

  By the time Maria had returned from searching for her son my tears had dried. The western light was slanting across the dogs in the lane. I had been sitting alone at the table with a glass of water in front of me for hours.

  XXXIII

  It was a few years after we moved here to Naracoopa that Leonie really started to immerse herself in what is endemic to King. The island celery, the gale-shaped succulents, the wild herbs, the subspecies which have evolved in isolation since the inundation of Bass Strait waters some twelve thousand years ago cut the place off from the mainland. She had an image in her mind of the place before the farms, before the sealers and t
he skin trade, before the European grass seeds floated up from the shipwrecks, before the abattoirs and before her father’s bulls. The gashes being dozed through the centre of the island for the SS houses only encouraged this vision in her. We had the right amount of land, she told me, in the right spot, and she showed me an engraving a French naturalist made on Napoleon’s ship the Geographe, when it moored here in Naracoopa in 1802. Towering blackwoods flourished right down to the shore, in a way that is hardly imaginable today.

  Because of the money I’d inherited from the family farm, because of her skill with vegetables and fish, and all the good water here, she had no need to work at the co-op anymore, and having made the break from Nat she had no desire to either. So she began to fossick and search, combing the capes and lagoon lands again as she had as a girl, but this time in search of small tinctures of a past that she was convinced would refresh the future. She set out every which way on those daily field trips, and not always alone, often in fact accompanied by myself, and sometimes, on Sundays, by Lascelles, who could see the merits in her project, intellectually at least, even if he was not the most intrepid of explorers. I think he enjoyed the break from his own preoccupations though, from working the PO and manning the reading room, though it has to be said that Leonie kept the two of us well and truly busy on these forays, digging up roots, bagging plant samples, keeping our eyes peeled for what she may miss. Which in truth was very little.

  She brought the handful of old cages she’d got from the Robinsons down to the house too, as with the steady increase of vehicles on the island the rate of injured animals was growing enormously. It was not so much the deaths that affected Leonie – in fact, she has been known to scoop up freshly killed wallabies from the roadside and butcher them up for a stew that very same evening – but the woundings and shudderings and pain. The suffering.