Marianne and the Rebels

by Жюльетта Бенцони

  She was a tall, lithe-limbed creature who carried herself proudly, and the face below the mass of black curls gathered on her neck was fine-featured and keen. Like most of her companions, she was tall and well-built, not in the least fragile, yet not without a certain gracefulness. Her dark eyes smiled briefly as they met Marianne's, and she held her for a moment before letting her go; then she resumed her steady walk as though nothing had occurred. But she left yet another question-mark in Marianne's mind: Sappho must make her girls train like young Spartans, because the body of the girl who had supported her had felt as hard as marble.

  The procession broke up when it reached the villa. One by one, the girls passed in front of Sappho and went through the gate, but when it came to Marianne's turn, the poetess took her hand and led her to the chapel.

  'It will be best if you do not mix with the others tonight. Stay here and I will bring you your supper in a little while.'

  Marianne obeyed meekly and closed the painted wooden door behind her. Inside, it was almost dark and there was a strong smell of fish which had not been there when she went out. She tried to discover where it came from and thought that she had found it when she saw a small flat fish gleaming on the floor beside the bed. She picked it up, automatically, and was still staring uncomprehendingly at it and wondering how it could have come there when Sappho reappeared, carrying on her head a basket containing food and an oil-lamp which she took out and placed on the table, lighting it at once.

  When she saw what Marianne was holding, she frowned, and took the fish from her.

  'I shall have to scold Yorgo,' she said, and the lightness of her tone rang a little false. 'He will leave his baskets in here when he comes back with his catch, because it is nearer than the kitchen.'

  Marianne smiled. 'It doesn't matter,' she said. 'I was only wondering how the fish came here.'

  'In a perfectly natural way, you see… it couldn't be more natural. Now you may eat.'

  She had been setting the table swiftly, with a helping of roast kid, some tomatoes, bread, cheese and the inevitable grapes, but now her hands seemed to linger a little over the bowls and other everyday things she had arranged, as if she were putting off the moment when she would have to say what she had come to say. Suddenly she seemed to make up her mind.

  'Don't go to sleep after you have eaten,' she said. 'I will come for you when it is quite dark.'

  'What for?'

  'Ask no questions. Not now. Later, you will understand much that must have seemed to you strange, even insensate. You need know only that I do nothing without a good reason, and it has cost me much thought, all day, before I made up my mind what I should do about you.'

  Marianne's throat felt suddenly dry. The woman's voice held a veiled but horrid menace. It occurred to her that perhaps she was really dealing with a lunatic who, like all those in that condition, refused to recognize her own madness. Nevertheless, she refused to show her fear and merely said quietly:

  'Ah!… And you have decided?'

  'Yes, I have decided… to trust you. But woe to you if you are deceiving me! The whole of the Mediterranean will not be big enough to save you from our vengeance. Eat now, and wait for me. Oh, I nearly forgot…'

  She took a bundle of black material from her basket and tossed it on to the bed.

  'Put this on. Darkness is a fine concealment if you know how to melt into it properly.'

  This Sappho was a strange creature, Marianne thought. She was still wearing her absurd classical garb but she was a very different person now from the one she had been hitherto. It was as though she had suddenly decided to throw off a mask and reveal her real face, and that face had something implacable about it that could be disquieting. Yet she had said that she had chosen to trust her, although there had been such a menacing note in her voice as she said it that it was almost as though she regretted her decision, or as though her attitude were not of her own choosing, to say the least, and she was merely bowing to circumstances.

  Whatever the truth of it, Marianne felt that it was best to do as she was told, since her fate depended on it, but at the same time to be on her guard. As she regained her strength, so she was regaining her appetite for life.

  She sat down at the table and began to eat, quite calmly and with relish. She even found herself enjoying the strong, heady wine which was the island's pride, and the agreeable sense of well-being it sent coursing through her veins. She had slept so well that she felt quite rested now and almost ready to face up to whatever new obstacles fate seemed to be taking a malign pleasure in putting in her way.

  Darkness had fallen long before Sappho returned to the chapel, and Marianne had long been ready and waiting, without impatience, sitting on a stool with her hands hugging her knees. She had put on the costume given to her, which turned out to be of the kind commonly worn by the peasant women of the Greek islands, consisting of a full black cotton skirt with a thin band of red round the hem, a tight-waisted bodice to match, and a large, black scarf covered with fine red embroidery which was worn over the head, completely hiding the hair.

  The other woman was dressed in almost identical fashion and she cast an approving glance over Marianne.

  'What a shame you don't speak our language! You might easily be taken for one of our girls. Even your eyes are as fierce as if you'd been born here! Now, put out the lamp and follow me, without a sound.'

  The darkness swallowed them. Marianne felt Sappho's hand take hold of hers in the blackness and draw her forward. Outside, the night seemed inky black and carried on its breath the scents of thyme and myrtle with a faint whiff of sheep. Without that guiding hand, Marianne would undoubtedly have fallen flat within a few steps, because she was walking blind, feeling the ground ahead with her foot before she put it down.

  'Come on!' Sappho whispered impatiently. 'We'll never get there at this rate.'

  'But I can't see,' Marianne protested. She refrained from inquiring where she was being taken in such haste.

  'That will pass. Your eyes will grow accustomed.'

  They did, far more quickly than Marianne would have thought possible. At the same time she understood the reason for Sappho's precautions in dressing her in dark clothes and enjoining her to keep silent. A few furlongs from the villa, and hidden from it until they were outside the broken wall, a fire was burning. The light came from outside a formless white building, something between a mosque and a barn, and illuminated the weird, mustachioed figures of a number of Turkish soldiers who were gathered round it, cooking something in a big copper cauldron suspended over the fire.

  The firelight also served to show Marianne that the path Sappho had taken passed close by this guard post, but already the poetess had put her finger to her lips and was leading her noiselessly behind a piece of ruined wall which must have belonged to some ancient fortification. The two women were engulfed at once in a thicket of tamarisk and juniper and, with the aid of this twofold cover, were able to move forward slowly, bent almost double and taking care to avoid the smallest snap of a twig underfoot. With this precarious shelter, they passed close enough to the Turks to smell their food cooking. Marianne felt the clutch of fear. At last the perilous part was over, and the two women walked on a little farther and then joined the path which was now winding through what must have been an ancient cemetery, dotted with antique steles and the empty stone troughs of what might once have been sarcophagi. At that point, Sappho turned sharp left up a stony sloping path, like nothing more than a mule track, which climbed precipitously towards the summit of the ridge.

  By now Marianne's eyes had grown sufficiently used to the dark for her to make out some details of the landscape, even distinguishing the white blurs of the cistus flowers that grew in patches along the path. It became dear that, for all its winding to and fro, this path was leading them to the hostile white walls of the monastery.

  Marianne pulled gently at her companion's sleeve as the other woman climbed ahead of her.

  'Surely we aren't goi
ng there?' she said as Sappho looked round, and she pointed to the ridge.

  'Yes, that is where we are going. To the monastery of Ayios Ilias.'[3]

  'Judging from what I saw earlier on, you aren't exactly on the best of terms with the monks there.'

  Sappho paused for a moment, hands on hips. She was breathing hard, for the climb was a tough and tiring one, even for someone who was used to it.

  'There is appearance,' she said, 'and reality. The reality is that the higoumenos Daniel is expecting us at eleven o'clock. What you witnessed at sunset was nothing more than a conventional exchange. My song required an answer – and the answer was forthcoming.'

  'With stones?' Marianne said, bewilderedly.

  'Precisely. Eleven stones were thrown. That meant eleven o'clock. It's time you should know, stranger, that all of us here, and on every other island in the archipelago, and throughout Greece, have sworn to devote our lives to shaking off the Turkish yoke which has oppressed us for centuries. We are all vowed to the service of freedom: rich and poor, peasants, brigands, monks… and madmen! But we must stop talking and press on, because the way is steep and it will take us a good quarter of an hour to reach Ayios Ilias.'

  In fact it was twenty minutes later when Marianne and her companion stood beneath the monastery's tall white walls. Marianne, still barely recovered from her recent ordeal, was breathless and thankful that it was night: by day, in the glare of the sun, the climb must be intolerable, for there was not so much as a tree or a blade of grass. She was sweating under her black cotton skirts and knew how to value the draught that swirled under the big entrance portico, a massive semicircular arch surmounted by an open pediment hung with bells. An iron gate, adorned with the two-headed eagle of Mount Athos, to which Ayios Ilias belonged, creaked open. A shadow stepped out from among the thick dark shadows of the doorway, but there was nothing alarming in it. It was the plump shadow of a fat little monk, bearded and pigtailed, who, to judge from the odour of sanctity that emanated from him, was not inclined to waste the island's precious water supply unnecessarily. He said something in an undertone to Sappho and then rolled away like a little ball on his short legs, leading the two women along a terrace by a white wall, past a stone-built cistern and elegant Byzantine basin, before plunging into a maze of passages, curved bays opening on to empty vestibules and stairways which, in the light of the smoky torches that burned here and there, looked as if carved out of snow. At last he opened a painted door into the monastery chapel.

  Two men were standing in the light of the great bronze lamp in front of a massive eighteenth-century iconostasis, carved and painted in a primitive style, like a child's picture book. But if there was something primitive about the chapel, with its silver-mounted icons and white walls decorated with the two-headed eagle of the Holy Mountain, its two occupants had nothing of the freshness and innocence of childhood about them.

  One, wearing a long black robe and gleaming pectoral cross, was the higoumenos Daniel. He had the narrow, emaciated face of the ascetic, made to look still longer by his grey beard, and his eyes were those of a visionary and fanatic. He had the power to annihilate time, and as she crossed the chapel towards him, Marianne had the unnerving feeling that he could see right through her, as though she had no real substance or personal identity.

  The other man was almost a giant. He was of bear-like proportions, and to his muscular figure was added a face strong to the point of savagery. His eyes were fierce and commanding, his long hair hung down his back from beneath a round cap with a silken tassel, his moustaches were arrogant, and stuck in the red belt which he wore under his sleeveless goatskin jacket there protruded the butt of a silver-mounted pistol and the hilt of a long knife.

  Sappho, meanwhile, having apparently forgotten all about her prayers to Aphrodite, had moved forward humbly to kiss the abbot's ring.

  'Here is she whom I told you, most holy father,' she said, speaking in a Venetian dialect. 'I believe that she may be of great use to us.'

  The Greek priest's eyes looked straight through Marianne but his hand made no move towards her.

  'If she so wills it,' he said slowly, and the habits of monastic life, with its eternal whispering, had given a curiously muffled, toneless quality to his voice. 'But does she?'

  Before Marianne could answer, the giant flung himself impulsively into the conversation.

  'Ask her rather if she would live or die! Or moulder here until the flesh shrivels from her bones. Either she helps us, or she never sees her own land again!'

  'Be quiet, Theodoros,' Sappho said quickly. 'Why should you treat her as an enemy? She is French and the French are not our enemies, far from it! Think of Korais! Besides, I know that refugees are given asylum in Corfu, and that is what she is here, a refugee. It was the sea brought her to us, and I believe with all my heart that it was for our good.'

  'That remains to be seen,' the giant growled. 'Did you not say she was cousin to the Haseki Sultana? That ought to teach you caution, Princess!'

  Marianne looked round, startled at the title which was clearly addressed to her companion. The worshipper of Aphrodite smiled at her surprise.

  'I belong to one of the oldest families in Greece. My name is Melina Koriatis,' she said, simply but not without pride. 'I told you that I was going to trust you. As for you, Theodoros, you are wasting precious time. You know quite well that Nakshidil is a French-woman carried off by Barbary pirates as a girl and given to old Abdul Hamid for his harem.'

  Seeing that the giant was still frowning obstinately, Marianne decided that she had remained silent long enough. It was time she took a hand.

  'I do not know yet what you want of me,' she said, 'but before you come to blows about it, would it not be simpler to tell me? Or must I agree without hearing? I owe you my life, I know – but it might occur to you that I have other things to do with it besides devote it to your affairs.'

  'I have told you the choice before you,' Theodoras said.

  'She is right,' broke in the abbot. 'And it is also true that we are wasting time. You agreed that she should come here, Theodoros, and you have a duty to listen to her. And you, young woman, listen to what it is we ask of you. You shall tell us afterwards what you feel but before you answer, beware. We are in a church and God's eye is on us. If your tongue is ripe for falsehood, then you had better go now. You do not seem very willing to aid us.'

  'I have no love for lies, or for dissimulation,' came the answer. 'And I know that if you have need of me, then I also have need of you. Speak.'

  The priest appeared to think for a moment. His head dropped on his breast and he closed his eyes briefly, before turning to the silver icon of St Elias, as if in search of counsel and inspiration. Only then did he begin.

  'You, in your western lands, know very little of Greece, or rather you have forgotten because, for centuries now, we have not owned the right to freedom, to live our own lives.'

  In his strange, flat voice, which could still show flashes of bitterness, anger and grief, the higoumenos Daniel gave Marianne a rapid summary of his country's tragic history. He described how the land that had produced the purest light of civilization had been ravaged successively by Visigoths, Vandals, Ostrogoths, Bulgars, Slavs, Arabs, the Normans of Sicily, and then by the crusaders from the west brought by the Doge, Enrico Dandolo, who after the capture of Byzantium had carved up the country into a multitude of fiefs. These fiefs, in turn, had fallen to the Turks and for almost two hundred years Greece had ceased to breathe. Abandoned to the mercy of despotic Ottoman governors, she had been reduced to slavery, ground beneath the heel of the pashas, who were never the sort to let the post of executioner go unfilled. The only freedom left to the Greeks had been freedom of worship, since the Koran displayed a fair degree of tolerance in this respect, and the one person who had to answer to the Sublime Porte for the behaviour of the enslaved nation was the patriarch of Constantinople, Gregorios.

  'But we have never lost hope,' the abbot went on, 'and we are
not yet quite dead. For fifty years, the corpse of Greece has been stirring and struggling to rise. The Montenegrins of Epirus rebelled in 1766, the Maniots in '69, and the Souliots, more recently, in 1804. The scurvy dog, Ali, crushed them as bloodily as others had been crushed before them, but the harvest is raised from the blood of martyrs. More than ever we are determined to shake off the yoke. Look at this woman.—'

  His thin hand, with the bright ring gleaming on it, rested affectionately on the so-called Sappho's arm. 'She comes of one of the wealthiest families of the Phanar, the Greek quarter of Constantinople. For a hundred years her people have been compelled to give pledges to the Turks and have occupied exalted positions. More than one has been hospodar of Moldavia, but the youngest among them chose freedom and made their way to Russia, our sister in the Faith, and are at this moment fighting the enemy in Russia's ranks. Melina herself is rich, powerful, and a cousin of the patriarch. She could have chosen a carefree life in her palaces on the Bosphorus or the Black Sea. And yet she has chosen to dwell here, in the guise of a madwoman, in a half-ruined house on this god-forsaken island ravaged every now and then by fire, for the very reason that Santorini, beneath which the volcano never wholly slumbers, is of all Greek islands the one least watched by the Turks, who have no interest in it and consider it a shame even to be sent here.'

  'Why do you do this?' Marianne asked, looking at her strange companion. 'What do you hope to gain by this weird life?'

  Melina Koriatis shrugged and smiled in a way that made her seem suddenly much younger.

  'I act as an agent and a clearing house for information between the Archipelago, Crete, Rhodes and the ancient cities of Asia Minor. The news comes here and is passed on. Others come here, also, who need help and can be comparatively safe. Have you noticed the girls who live with me? No, of course, you were too exhausted and you had too much to worry about on your own account. Well, if you look at them more closely, you will see that, except for the four or five girls who came here out of loyalty to me, all the rest are boys.'