by Arnold Zable
‘“Bah, that is impossible,” argues another. “The palace stood on the slopes overlooking Polis Bay. The sheltered port corresponds to Homer’s Reithron anchorage. And the little island of Dhascalio, off the Kefallonian coast, barely visible two miles away, is certainly Asteris, where the suitors lay beside their beached ship in wait for Telemachus, determined to kill him before he reached Ithaca.”
‘“No, you have missed the point,” argues yet another. “The site of the palace is Pilikata Hill where, as it is written, there are distinct views of three bays,” and Niko swivels his arms to take in Afales, Polis and Frikes to underline their case. ‘I must give them their due,’ he says. ‘They know their ancient Greek. They quote chapter and verse, and recite whole passages by heart. They slog manfully on steep terrain in the heat to fulfil their quest.
‘Perhaps we envy them. They are wealthy and have time to potter around. We bend our backs to work our fields when we would rather look to the skies. They bend their backs willingly and crawl on all fours to sift the earth. We envy them the luxurious boats that await them. They seek their meaning under the ground, and that is where I will be soon enough.’
Years later, in Melbourne, in the State Library, I came upon a copy of the same volume The Geography and Antiquities of Ithaca, written by William Gell, esquire, member of the Society of Dilettantes— shelved among its rare books.
On the dedication page the author had composed a hymn to his ‘King’s Most Excellent Majesty’. He lays his humble manuscript at ‘Your Majesty’s feet’, and is ‘encouraged by the hope’ that his description of Ithaca ‘may not be entirely uninteresting to a Monarch who, by the success of His arms, and the wisdom of His counsels, has extended the influence of Britain to every quarter of the globe’. He remains his ‘Majesty’s most dutiful servant, and faithful subject’.
I arranged for the prints in Gell’s book to be photographed, and have glued them to one of the walls of my shed. I look up from my manuscript through the window and catch sight of my bantams foraging. In an open cage above my work desk sits a cockatiel. He flies down to perch on my shoulder, screeches in my ear, and remains quiet for hours. I would not know he is there except for the occasional brush of feathers against my cheek.
The walls are lined with books on aerodynamics, the art of hypnosis, travellers’ accounts of Ithacan journeys, and field guides to birds. On the rafters hang kites and violins. My worktable is littered with materials and tools: tins of lacquer, saws and planes, dowelling, sheets of paper, reels of string, files and pliers, hammers, chisels; and a cage housing my grand daughter’s mouse.
What more is there to do now that Fotini is gone, succumbed to illness, and my daughter Sophia married to crazed Manoli? I look down at the magician’s skull I now use as a weight on the manuscript. For whom am I writing this tale? Who knows? My grand daughter, Xanthe? She too is cursed with the thirst for knowledge. I see it in her eyes. The ancient Greeks believed it takes three generations for a family curse to wear off.
Xanthe is wary of this shed, but also drawn. She brought me her mouse when she last visited. I promised her I would transform it into a rat. I feed it a mixture of cereals and grains and it is well on the way. In return I showed her the copies I have made of lithographs in Gell’s book, etched almost a century before I was born.
Most of the prints are without people. Where Ithacans do appear they are dwarfed by the landscape. The artist’s eye is focused on ruins and sites that resemble Homer’s descriptions. The sketches are impressive in their detail, neat and polite. There are no sharp edges, nor the stench of shit or the odour of panic rising from a lamb about to be killed. There are no junipers and prickly oak wedged between the stones. There is no sign of the placenta shredded by a ravenous hawk, nor the pulp of overripe figs bulging through blackened skins.
There is no sign of a violent sun setting fire to a violet sea, nor scenes of the parched soil cracked open, crops wilting, heralding another winter of distress. There is no hint of voices rising from the fields on harvest days, and no sight of celebration, our fingers tearing strips of roasted flesh, nor of the dancing stoked by wine and the strains of Mikhalis’ violin. No sense of the raw labour, the bloodied fingers liberating patches of barren earth.
And not even the faintest echo of my mother’s savage cry when she received the news of her husband’s death, and the cry of the women who mourned with her, as they had mourned their own. I still hear it. A frantic keening, alternating with quiet sobbing. Ending hours, or days or weeks later, in a shrug. I see them, now, as if spying through the window: my mother, and a chorus of black widows huddled together, their youth contracted into a premature lament.
It was their fate to wait: for the boats, for the letters, for the flow of money from foreign lands, for the return of men who had become strangers demanding their conjugal rights. This is the virtue thrust upon us: the capacity to wait, to endure the storm, to perch on the summit, bodies alert, ever vigilant for an enemy attack.
None of this is in the lithographs. They are not my Ithaca, but a fantasy. Now that I have not been back for fifty years, perhaps Ithaca has become my fantasy. Perhaps what I write is a confusion of dreams and nostalgia, yet I return to the shed, light my desk lamp, and take up my manuscript. Let the fairytale begin. Good evening to you.
‘Perhaps we are the Ithaca of old. Perhaps not,’ Niko had said. ‘It does not matter. It is enough to believe it. Whatever the truth about the past, we remain seafarers to this day. To survive we are condemned to leave this rocky island and travel to the ends of the earth.’
We are gathered in the village square, in the spring of 1912, seated at tables beneath the plane tree. Couples are dancing tangos, dressed in their European best. The musicians are playing: Makis on accordion, Vassili on clarino, Mikhalis on violin. Basted lambs are turning on the spit. Children are running between tables, darting from shadow to light.
I leave the wedding party with Stratis and climb above Exogi. The music evaporates; the square is a diminishing circle of light. We leap over the chapel wall, crest the summit and scan the sea. Stratis picks up a handful of stones and flings them into the unknown. ‘I am leaving,’ he says. ‘Joining my godfather Thomas, in Australia.’
We balance on rocks that have retained their warmth after a day in the sun. I shrug my shoulders. It is a familiar shrug that says: ‘Well, you are leaving. So what? That is how it is. Sto kalo. Go on your good way.’ I am seventeen years old and I have inherited the fatalist gesture. And Stratis is twenty-two. He is married to Melita, a girl from the mainland town of Zaverda. He is a father with a son, eighteen months old, and a second, soon to be born. He has crossed the boundary into adulthood, but the bond between us remains strong.
‘There is nothing here,’ he says. ‘Thomas has been away ten years. He manages an oyster bar in Kalgoorlie, a city built on gold. He says it’s still possible to find nuggets scattered on the desert sands. In five years I’ll return with enough money to buy a caique and double the size of my groves. What can I do with just a few hectares of land?’
We remain locked in our thoughts. Far below us a ship crawls by en route to the Adriatic or some foreign port. From this distance it is a ship of phantoms, and its lights are fireflies that have come aboard for the ride. I detect the contradictions within Stratis, his yearning for adventure. I know it well.
I pick up a rock and hurl it as far as I can. In this moment I hate my father. I hate Stratis. I hate the sea and distant lands. I want to expunge myself, to erase all hope. The rock hurtles into the darkness clear of the slopes. I turn my back on the summit and begin my descent.
Mikhalis calls me over when I return. The celebration is at its height. Couples are dancing closer, moving in the shadows. ‘I learnt this tango in Bucharest when I went there with your father,’ he says. He rests the violin on his knees. “Play the wind. Play the wind,” the Tzigany would say. To know an instrument is a great gift. Better to be a musician than one of the guests. We are present b
ut also apart, a step away from trouble,’ he winks.
Mikhalis lifts the violin in preparation: ‘A good musician is an unobtrusive presence,’ he says. ‘We see the budding romances, the flirtations, the winks and caresses. We know couples that can no longer bear to touch each other and sleep well apart. We observe the widows and wives with absent husbands, and know those who are resigned to their fate, from those who steal away to regain a man’s touch.’
The musicians resume. A circle is forming. Mikhalis hands over his fiddle and breaks in. The men squat and clap to Mikhalis’ solo dance. He weaves and feints, and lowers his body to sweep the dirt with his palms. His steps are emboldened by the circling men urging him on with their quickening beat.
Days later, when he teaches me the melody on the violin, Mikhalis will tell me that dancing the zebekiko in a circle is the Turkish way, while those who perform solo are dancing Greek style. He will tell me this is our eternal tension, the conflict between individual and group. He will tell me that within our men there is an urge to break away, to travel alone. Even so, the lone dancer is encircled, supported by the group.
He will tell me that the zebekiko is played in 9/8 time and he will teach me the complex rhythm, how to capture it in the sliding pressure of the fingers, the movements of the bow. It is a rhythm that turns against itself, a rhythm that wants to defy rhythm and impel the dancer to hurl himself beyond all bounds. The nine in the equation is our defiance and anarchic spirit, the eight, our need for each other. Keep them in harness and all will be well.
Old Niko spent too much time alone, Mikhalis will say. He jumped ship once too often and disappeared for years on end; and when he returned he could no longer look us in the eye. He harboured secrets, and his hands trembled. He could talk only when fuelled by wine.
Mikhalis is dancing the zebekiko. His upper body remains poised, the steps are improvised yet contained. Around him, each man is dancing alone, but held within the orb. Above them, the mountain performs its own silent dance dictated by millennia of hail, wind and storm. Within two years every man in the circle will be gone: to war or sea, or alien lands.
Mikhalis accompanies me as I walk home and places an arm around my shoulders. ‘A true Ionian musician returns to the first sounds: wind, sea and earth. He understands that the winds rise from and return to stillness. He knows that the earth shifts, however subtly, with the tread of his feet. He discerns the faint pulse of undertows in the sea-depths. And he detects the silence at the core of all sound. He cleans his mind of thoughts and does not forget what he hears and the moment he first heard it.
‘Some day, while standing watch late at night aboard ship, or stranded on some alien shore, the memory of what you hear now will keep you company. How many sounds can you discern? Put them together and allow them to harmonise, and you have a cantatha, a serenade. Take them apart, but keep yourself together, and you have the zebekiko. And take away the musicians and you will return to the heart of all music: natural sound.’
Mikhalis puts a finger to his lips. ‘Listen,’ he says. We are standing on the path beside the uppermost house. I hear a rustling of undergrowth, the sound of laughter cascading, fading and, even at this height, a mere decibel above the silence, the breath of the sea. We are enveloped in it, above it, yet a part of it.
I open my eyes and Mikhalis is laughing. His mouth is open. I see a flash of gold filling. His face is a paradox of lines without care. He places his arms around my shoulders. ‘That sound is in me, as in you, as it once was in your mother’s womb.’
That night I dream I am surrounded by water, floating on a sliver of firm earth. Terra firma, yet nothing remains still. Islands collide and drift apart. I try to pin them down, but they are gone. My father is gone. Stratis is gone. Mother is dressed in widow’s black, and Old Niko’s hovel door is locked, the windows barred. The women are scaling the paths back to their groves, walking their slow, damned walk.
And I am running past them, enraged, scaling the heights. I am above the island and Old Niko is below, hopping and spitting and speaking in tongues, and Mikhalis is laughing. It is the laugh of the devil. I am dazzled by the gold in his mouth. I peer inside and see oceans churning, armies clashing, seamen drowning, predatory birds circling on wild winds. His enlarged tongue expels baying mobs like pieces of dirt, draws back everything it has expelled and, moments later, spits it all back out.
Stratis left for Australia in the summer of 1912. As he voyaged south, others were sailing back. The call had gone out. It resounded in the coffee houses and workplaces. It was heard in waterfront taverns and shipping offices. It sought out the crews of far-flung freighters and ocean liners. It ascended flights of wooden stairs into the smoke-filled rooms of Ithacan brotherhoods dispersed over many lands.
‘Come back,’ the voices whispered. ‘Return and fight for your country, your God. We will regain our stolen lands from the enemy Turk and grab some more while we can. After all, to the victors belong the spoils.’
The young men downed tools, packed their bags, drew the curtains, locked their doors and made their way to the wharves. They journeyed back from sojourns in Australia, the Americas, Africa and Asia. When they arrived, they set out with their countrymen for the battlefields of the Balkans. Each village possessed at least one or two men who left for the front.
I yearned to go with them. The impulse to respond to the call to battle flows deep in the blood. My mother argued I was too young, and that father was no longer alive. I pleaded, but I had no choice. My father’s death was a scar that kept me tethered to the house like a captive goat. I was needed for the sowing and harvest, to burn the pruned olive branches clogging the groves.
I stood on the slopes and heaped the branches on the fire. Through the flames, the waters of the Ionian looked like tattered sheets of green. I herded the blaze from wind shifts by pouring water on its flanks. I cursed as I dodged the embers and revelled in the heat.
Soon the photographs began to appear. Boys I had grown up with had sprouted beards. They stood with their comrades on the battlefields of Ipeiros, Macedonia, Western Thrace, the new theatres of war. Or they stood alone, rifles by their sides, cartridge belts strapped from shoulder to waist. Even in the photos we saw that their boots were cracked, their uniforms baggy, coats stiff with dirt. They held their bodies at attention and did their best to look proud. Their mothers and wives framed the photos, hung them on walls, placed them on chests of drawers beside icons of favoured saints, and lit candles in homage to their warring boys.
And there were photos that were not allowed into children’s hands, images of men brandishing the severed heads of the enemy, of burnt out villages and charred homes, and of the enemy put to flight. Photos of triumphs and cruelties and fields splattered with the entrails of the dead.
By year’s end the men began reappearing. They returned to the island as victors. They acknowledged our cheers and garlands, listened obediently to patriotic speeches, but something had changed. Some were limping, or nursing more subtle wounds: a nervous tick, a haunted look that suddenly overcame them mid conversation, mid step.
Half a century later I cannot name the individuals. Perhaps I did not want to dwell on them, even though they were feted by those who had stayed at home. Perhaps we did not allow ourselves to listen when we heard the screams with which they awoke, or the flaring of their rage.
When they did speak of their deeds they did not boast, but muttered, ‘We did what we had to do.’ They had caught the fatalist’s curse. They had left for battle with an elelef, the ancient cry of joy uttered by Greek soldiers at the start of battle, and had returned subdued. Their tales seeped out in fragments, little confidences, remarks dropped in coffee houses as they dealt the cards. I hung about, still young enough to be regarded as a neutral listener, yet old enough not to be shooed away.
They spoke of the odour of iodine in the corridors of military hospitals, and of sitting by the beds of comrades who lay with the glazed eyes of gutted fish. They spoke of w
ounded soldiers in crowded wards extracting maggots from their gangrenous wounds, and of men flopping about like deranged beasts as they drew their last breath. They whispered tales of battles that left bodies decaying, and of marching for so far and so long that day and night became one.
They lit up with talk of nights on leave spent in the brothels and cabarets of Salonika, and their bravado returned. They spoke of the busloads of women one sympathetic lieutenant had sent to ease their hunger. Their eyes glowed at the memory. Their lust stirred at the thought, and flickered back to life. They licked their lips and returned to work with renewed relish.
We could not foresee that the first victories were the prelude to a prolonged and bloody battle. Except for Old Niko. ‘Ah, the fairytale truly begins,’ he said, after we had drunk our usual toasts in his hovel one night. ‘It is an old tale. One that never ends, but merely lies dormant while soldiers limp home to lick their wounds.’
I see him now, his mottled skin, and bloodshot eyes, a small man, wasted by drink and self-neglect. His restless gaze darted with the rapidity of a man on edge. ‘It has all been written,’ he said. ‘The Iliad is a book of prophesies. Read the opening stanzas and you will be overcome by Achilles’ rage, his lust for vengeance. War is a chain of rage begetting rage. Every era has its Trojan wars. Every generation finds ways of devouring its young.
‘In my years on the world’s oceans I learnt of the deeds that men must commit to retake their piece of dirt. One act of terror unleashes a chain of vendettas and, in time, no one even knows when the first took place.’ The Balkan Wars, he insisted, marked the beginning of a long and treacherous night. He could see it as clearly as the sun declining on an inglorious day, a period of unabated turmoil and pillage, and hillsides littered with unmarked graves.