Sea of Many Returns

by Arnold Zable

  PRAISE FOR ARNOLD ZABLE AND

  Sea of Many Returns

  ‘Zable elevates history into near-mythical tales of wonder.’

  Australian

  ‘An extraordinary book.’ Australian Jewish News

  ‘More a classical fabulist than a contemporary novelist, his books have an ethereal, myth-like quality, complete with beautifully lilting prose and near-tangible warmth.’ Big Issue

  ‘A strain of romantic yearning finds expression in lyrical landscapes and in reverence for the capacity of the human spirit.’

  Age

  ‘A story of wanderlust and the longing for home, with Zable’s poetic prose a tribute to Homer’s Odyssey.’ Sun Herald

  ‘Arnold Zable is a writer who turns the unnoticed and the overlooked into something fine and lustrous.’ Courier-Mail

  ‘Like a skilled tightrope walker, Zable teeters over the abyss and walks into literature. The prose has a lush simplicity that can attain a kind of grandeur.’ Australian Book Review

  ‘Zable’s vision is ultimately optimistic and affirming.’

  Sydney Morning Herald

  ‘Few writers give us such a sensitive and evocative portrait of ourselves as Arnold Zable.’ Good Reading

  ‘Like all highly skilled storytellers, Zable makes the process of his own invention seem natural and right. Part of his talent lies in remaining unobtrusive, working away quietly in the background.’

  Canberra Times

  Arnold Zable is a highly acclaimed novelist, storyteller and educator. His books include Jewels and Ashes, The Fig Tree, Cafe Scheherazade and Scraps of Heaven. Zable was born in Wellington, New Zealand, in 1947. He lives in Melbourne with his wife and son.

  SEA of

  MANY

  RETURNS

  Arnold Zable

  The paper in this book is manufactured only from wood grown in sustainable regrowth forests.

  The Text Publishing Company

  Swann House

  22 William St

  Melbourne Victoria 3000

  Australia

  textpublishing.com.au

  Copyright © Arnold Zable 2008

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright above, no part of this publication shall be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

  First published by The Text Publishing Company, 2008

  This edition printed in 2010

  Cover and page design by Susan Miller

  Typeset by J&M Typesetters

  Printed and bound in Australia by Griffin Press

  National Library of Australia

  Cataloguing-in-Publication data:

  Zable, Arnold.

  Sea of many returns / author, Arnold Zable.

  Melbourne : The Text Publishing Company, 2008.

  ISBN 9781921520389 (pbk.)

  A823.3

  This project has been assisted by the

  Commonwealth Government through the

  Australia Council, its arts and advisory body.

  To the people of Ithaca, and my travelling

  companions, Dora and Alexander.

  And now, speak and tell us truly: where have you been in your wanderings? Which parts of the inhabited world have you visited? What lovely cities did you see, what people in them? Did you meet hostile tribes with no sense of right and wrong, or did you fall in with hospitable and god fearing people?

  THE ODYSSEY, BOOK VIII

  CHORUS

  Ti na kanoume

  Ti na kanoume

  What can we do?

  What can we do?

  Ola ine tikhe

  Ola ine tikhe

  All is luck

  All is fate.

  FAMILY TREE

  CONTENTS

  BOOK I: PROLOGUE

  BOOK II

  BOOK III

  BOOK IV

  BOOK V

  BOOK VI

  BOOK VII

  BOOK VIII

  BOOK IX: EPILOGUE

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  BOOK I

  PROLOGUE

  A boat called Brotherly Love

  ITHACA 1928–1939

  BEWARE dear reader. The story you are about to be told is a fairytale, a romance. There will be time enough later to tear it to shreds. In the meantime sit back and become a child again. Is there not enough darkness in the world? Come. Sit by the fire. Allow the voice of the storyteller to soothe you while you gaze at the flames. Perhaps it is an uncle, a grandmother, perhaps a lifelong friend. The day has drawn to an end. Your work is done. Outside, a storm is brewing. The wind is rising. It mocks the seas and rattles the shutters, but inside, the fire is burning. And the fire loves you. Arkhe tou paramythiou. The fairytale begins. Kalispera sas. Good evening to you.

  On the day they launched Brotherly Love, the whole village accompanied them on the long descent to the bay. At the head of the procession, a step ahead of his two sons walked Stratis. Behind them swayed the boat, balanced on a horse-drawn cart. Roosters crowed, goats stared from the mountainsides, a band of children tagged along, and villagers waved from the balconies of homes that lined the way.

  The brothers had built the boat in the katoi, the storeroom beneath the house. Andreas was seventeen years old, Manoli fifteen. They cut the cypress on full-moon nights, for this, according to their mentors, was when the sap was most alive. They watched the boat-builders of Vathy and returned to the katoi to emulate what they had seen.

  They sawed the logs into submission and laid the keel the length of the katoi. They carved the ribs and beams with tools that had been used by generations past, crafted the masts from cypress beams, and cut the sails from hand-woven cloth. They clad the hull and deck with planks of pine and caulked the gaps between them. And when the work was done, as if awakening from a dream, they saw that the boat was wider than the entrance to the katoi.

  The men of the village laughed at their folly. The brothers gritted their teeth and cut the entrance until it was wide enough to release their prize. So it was a caesarean birth that enabled the boat to emerge into the light of day, and it was the priest who named it Brotherly Love for he had observed the close bond between the two boys. Andreas and Manoli were inseparable. While the villagers tended their fields and groves, the boys hovered on the periphery among the cypresses on the rocky heights, locked in conversation. ‘How can two boys have so much to say to each other?’ the villagers asked.

  The men of the island were leaving, lured by tales of distant riches. They dreamt of returning to their impoverished villages, their trunks laden with spoils. As it turned out, many did not return and some disappeared without trace. But Stratis had returned, at long last, from the Great Southern Land. He reappeared suddenly, as if cast back by the same sea that had claimed him fifteen years earlier, but too late to see his wife Melita, who had died in his absence.

  He unloaded trunks crowded with books: encyclopaedias of animal husbandry, dictionaries of medicine, illustrated discourses on the maritime arts, a seven-year collection of National Geographic, navigators’ manuals charting the currents of the seven oceans, and the memoirs of mariners’ journeys long past.

  ‘These volumes are worth more than gold,’ he declared, as he ran his fingers over the pages. ‘Just to smell them is an education.’ He studied them late at night at the living room table while his boys lay asleep in the adjoining room. But he had grown remote. His hair was a premature grey, and his face knitted into the permanent frown of a preoccupied man. He walked the village paths with an abstract air. He held secrets, so it seemed, and k
nowledge that had been gained at the expense of nights in the bare-boned rooms of boarding houses in distant lands.

  Within months of his return he became the most sought-after man in the village. Whenever a problem arose, medical, domestic or maritime, it was Stratis who was consulted. He would turn to his books and from them draw remedies for common ailments, plans for more effective cisterns, designs for better goat houses and diagrams pinpointing the location of dwellings buried deep in the earth. He became part physician, part counsellor, part master mariner and world-weary sage.

  Or was he merely a dilettante? This is what plagued him. This is why a frown remained creased on his brow. He saw himself as a fraud. He lay awake for hours tormented by the thought that he had wasted his life. He had never fully applied himself, and abandoned too many ventures. He had become a shadow of his youthful self and his sons had been raised in his absence. He saw that instead of love, he seemed to inspire wariness. He saw how free-spirited they had become except when they were in his presence.

  Nevertheless, he walked proudly at the head of the procession that autumn morning. The path curved beneath the Marmakas Range or, it seemed, the range curved above the path, so that at one point it rose behind them and at another, reappeared in front. This is how it is on the island. Mountain, valley and sea stand in close proximity, so that by the time the procession unwound itself on the cusp of the bay, the hills were behind them, and all that could be seen were the boats lining the waterfront.

  The crowd toasted the fledgling seamen, the priest raised his arms in blessing, and Brotherly Love was away, accompanied by a fleet of fishing caiques. Stratis watched until it was out of sight, and at that moment he knew that his sons would forsake him, as he had forsaken them. The sea coursed through their veins. Thalassa. Thalassa, it whispered. This was their ancestral calling. Thalassa. Thalassa, it hummed. It was their Sirens’ song. Thalassa. Thalassa, it demanded, for this was their reality and living myth, inscribed in the verses of blind Homer, and embedded in the tales of Ithacan seamen long past.

  Stratis was an Ithacan, a stoic, able to ride out any storm, and able to conceal his feelings. He turned, proud in bearing, in his wide-lapelled jacket and matching trousers, to trudge back to the white-stone house in the Village of the Forty Saints.

  As for Andreas and Manoli, their journeying had just begun. As they moved beyond the causeway, they knew why they had laboured to build the boat. It was the moment of their liberation and their imprisonment. They were cursed with a craving for departures and arrivals, condemned to live for the sight of islands receding and horizons beckoning.

  It was the night-sea that sealed the brothers’ addiction. At night they sensed the solitude that would outlive them, the sounds not known by day: the groan of pressured beams, the dialects of lapping waters, the murmur of restrained talk. Andreas and Manoli courted this solitude. They would leave the house at night and set out for the bay. They walked the familiar route beyond the last shadows of the village, past the shelter that housed the olive press, and homes that stood like petrified ghosts in the lower hamlets.

  They knew each cypress on the way. The cypress was a tree of the night, a reflector of the moon. They approached the outskirts of Frikes and looked up at balconies that cast forlorn shadows over their path. The final windmill, perched on an outcrop of rock, marked the way, and beyond it, past one last row of darkened homes, the path petered out by the wharf.

  The boat awaited them like a faithful mule straining at the ropes. They loaded their supplies and readied the nets. They untied the ropes, lifted anchor, and moved past the breakwater to the open sea. As soon as the winds allowed it, they cut the engine and hoisted sail. At the fishing grounds they lowered the anchor and spread the nets. The Marmakas Range disturbed the sky with the black outlines of its peaks.

  As the nets settled, the brothers lay back on the boards and rested their heads on their arms. Only the bare planks separated them from water. Remove those planks and all that remained was sky and sea, and two brothers in between. Andreas and Manoli drifted towards manhood in silence. To talk now was a desecration, a scar upon the night. They returned before dawn, left the nets to dry, and began the long walk home with their catch.

  As they ascended the sea ascended with them; they retained its presence in their skin and clothes. The air exhaled the scent of pruned olive branches burnt during the day. It was an unspoken secret, this love of movement through the dark. It was their joint venture, a passion that bound them together. They loved both the casting off and the return, the sight of the village receding and reappearing still covered in night. And years later, when out at sea at opposite ends of the earth, each brother would feel the absence of the other as acutely as a missing limb.

  Though self-proclaimed atheists, Andreas and Manoli could not completely abandon the old ways. They nailed an icon of Saint Nicholas, patron of harbours and fishermen, to the wheelhouse wall. Whether Nicholas, wild Poseidon, or Aeolus, lord of the winds, the impulse to call on a higher power would rear with the first intimations of a gale.

  The brothers came to know the winds because their lives depended on them. They had been taught to know them by an uncle, a fisherman, an Ionian seaman, a family friend. Each wind was a living force, identifiable, capable of being understood. There was a west wind that brought rain, and a west wind that thrived under clear skies. There were hot winds that brought storms and winds that trailed rainbows in their wakes.

  Every point of the compass was accounted for, and each wind possessed a personal name. Pounentes was a summer wind that blew from the west. Levantes, the east wind, bore the echoes of an Ottoman past. From the northwest, the winter Maistros stirred savage seas on its flanks. The Sirocco conveyed the sands of African deserts and scalded the eyes. Garbi was a southwesterly that spawned sudden squalls. While below them surged the Ionian, besieged by swells and currents, and pacified by deceptive calms.

  For days on end the calms persisted, until broken by a outbreak of chaos. White squalls, the seamen called them. They swooped down from the summits spurred on by winds that had swept away the sun. Within minutes, clouds blanketed mountain and sea. The brothers would return to the deep to ride out the storm, or if close enough to land, they would lower the sails, start the motor, and head for the safety of the nearest cove.

  Ithaca was the epicentre of their world. A map of the island was glued to the cabin wall. From Agios Ioannis in the north, to Andri in the south, the island measures twenty-nine kilometres. The two halves, north and south, are joined by an isthmus, barely eight hundred metres wide at its narrowest. The boys did not need the map to navigate its shores. They knew each pebbled beach and treacherous rock, each inlet and harbour.

  The brothers graduated to bigger boats, and ferried passengers and freight to ever-distant ports. They voyaged where ships confined by timetables could not. They crossed the narrow strait to neighbouring Kefallonia where prized robola wines were lowered to them by rope down steep slopes. They journeyed east to the coastal town of Zaverda and returned with contraband tobacco and brides for Ithacan men. They crowded the decks with potatoes and wild horta, gathered from the uninhabited hills of smaller isles.

  They voyaged east to the mainland port of Patras and berthed between ships from all corners of the globe. Ocean liners lounged against the wharves like stranded whales. Freighters strained at their leashes, their bulwarks almost touching. The brothers walked the esplanade lined with warehouses and the offices of shipping lines. They sat in coffee houses with seamen who spent hours eyeing the heavens while dealing cards to pass the time.

  It was always the first approach, the virgin voyage on an unknown stretch of sea that quickened the heart. It was late afternoon when they first approached Zakynthos. Andreas and Manoli made out the full sweep of the bay, the outlines of baroque mansions and shaded arcades. They walked the streets at night, crossed the cobbled square of St Mark, and paused at the doors of the opera house while the perfumed audience filed out.


  They sailed north within a breath of the mountains of Albania. Corfu appeared on the horizon beneath a halo of subdued light. They rounded the old citadel into the main harbour and eased the caique towards the waterfront. The stucco-clad buildings were fading to ochre facades. Above the city an anvil-shaped cloud billowed into a darkening sky: the moment of perfection before the onset of a squall.

  Twice a year, in October and August, on the feast days of Gerasimos, patron saint of Kefallonia, the brothers were called on to ferry the insane and their desperate kin. The caique set out in the darkness with its cargo of the distressed. It sailed the length of the east coast, rounded the southern cape and continued west, across the strait to the port of Sami. The insane, restrained in straitjackets, howled like lost spirits in search of a way home. The brothers watched as they were led off the boat like tethered goats.

  For want of something better to do they accompanied them to the Omala Valley, home of the saint. Cypress and firs glittered in the sun as they descended the path from the road. Pilgrims lined the avenue that ran from the church of Gerasimos to the plane tree the saint was said to have planted four centuries ago. The procession moved from the church led by three boys dressed in white. A file of priests accompanied the bier bearing the mummified remains. Mothers clutched sick babies, and teenage daughters supported their crippled elders. Children stared at the shrivelled corpse and wondered what the fuss was about.

  The possessed and the pious, the lame and the troubled, flung themselves on the road so that Gerasimos would cure them by passing over. And as if in defiance of the brothers’ scepticism, when the boat cast off for the return the change was palpable. Madness had been subdued into tranquillity. The insane stood on the deck and gazed at the sea with the awe of infants. It rarely lasted, of course. Within days, perhaps hours, the burden returned, but this interlude of quiet homecoming was ample reward for the journey to the saint.