by Arnold Zable
I did not share Stratis’ burden. In those early years I was a single man, free to roam the city. I walked to and from the library, as if weightless. I was addicted to the dome and to the Griffins, and elated whenever I saw them. Lekatsas allowed me to sit with them when most of the diners had gone. I rose through the ranks to chef and, as my English improved, doubled as a waiter when the dining halls were full.
The Griffins increasingly spoke of their disillusion with the Canberra project. While Mr Griffin retained his calm manner, and his wife, seethed with anger, the couple still spoke as one. Their battle with politicians and the bureaucrats of the public works office had reached boiling point. Her husband had been pushed aside, said Mrs Griffin, and his plans had been ignored in favour of jealous rivals, mediocre men.
As their frustration grew the couple turned their attention to a new project, to be financed by Lekatsas and his business partners. A theatre would be built on the site of Lucas’ Town Hall Cafe, and housed in a ten-storey office building. They would name the building and theatre, the Capitol, as an act of revenge on those who had dismissed Griffin’s centrepiece in his design for Canberra. It would be, as the Capitol was intended to be, a place of popular assembly in the heart of the city.
On a spring afternoon in 1921, the Griffins swept into the Banquet Hall bearing the first plans for the new venture. Lekatsas directed me to polish one of the tables and when I was done, Mrs Griffin unfurled the drawings with a flourish that brought to mind Old Niko unfurling maps on the rickety table in his hovel.
That first afternoon established the ritual, and over the following three years it was repeated many times: the couple striding into the hall, Mrs Griffin, eyes intent, leaning forward, in her gangly walk. Mr Griffin outwardly calm, containing his elation in his purposeful steps. The drawings unfurling over the glowing blackwood, Lekatsas and his partners surveying the latest plans.
Like sea hawks zeroing in on their prey, the designs targeted ever-smaller details: foyers, balconies, ladies boudoirs and men’s smoking rooms, the proscenium arch and orchestra pit, fire escapes, mezzanines. And smaller objects: lamps of crystal, curtains and pelmets, glass insets, window frames and brackets. Each element, stressed the Griffins, was of equal value, an integral part of the whole.
I hovered on the edge of the inner circle, never quite of it, but an accepted presence, infected by the madness. The Griffins and their business partners were moulding a city, a cosmos. And I was journeying with them, shadowing their moves, absorbing their vision. My understanding of architectural terms expanded as my lists of vocabulary grew. I committed drawings to memory and sketched them at the oak desks of the reading room. It seemed to me that the plans were founded on pure geometries: triangle, circle, square and hexagon, arc and rectangle.
The drawings were a conduit between dream and reality, between the vision and its execution, and, a mere five-minute walk from the Banquet Hall they were being shaped into certainties. I walked past the site, to and from work, and saw the mystery unfolding. First the foundations and ground floor, then six massive piers rising day by day, the full ten storeys, terminating at the roof in elongated balconies capped by a cornice.
The concrete structure completed, the work continued within, spiralling back as I pictured it, through a maze of staircases, and foyers, corridors, lift wells and alcoves, to lounges and boudoirs, dressing rooms and box offices, and the many smaller spaces I had seen in the drawings. All this was the frame to the centrepiece, the outer garment to the building’s inner climax—the grand auditorium.
The plans continued to unfurl in more minute detail: drawings of floor coverings, decorative doors, ornamented piers and column necking, with pencilled instructions prescribing colours and materials: copper strips, frosted glass, sheet metal, leadlight, plaster of Paris.
One design in particular caught my attention, a balcony escape to Swanston Street. At first I was drawn to the fine black lines of the illustration. Each step was numbered, and each flight curved from landing to landing. I sat at the oak desks and sketched them many times over, along with drawings of other stairways designed by the Griffins: rising from the foyer to the balcony, from street to foyer, from auditorium aisle to landing.
Then, as if superimposed on the architectural drawings, there emerged the outline of a flight of steps I had once known. It rose from the earth to the edge of a precipice. As I drew, the memory returned, and with it the fine detail. The stairway gave way, on one side, to the slopes of the mountain, and on the other, to a rock face.
I lay in bed that night and recalled the indentations, the slight twist in the steps, and the abrasive rock surface. I cannot remember at what point my waking state gave way to reverie, but years later, in the depths of my crisis, I would come to know what I experienced that night as lucid dreaming. I would understand that within us there exist labyrinths, inversions of staircases spiralling within, drawing us back to buried memories, and lost homelands.
I clambered over the steps and rediscovered their textures: the film of moss on the stone, an orchid breaking through the soil, mauve cyclamens sprouting from cracks in rock faces. The earth was ripe with the pulp of figs and the shrivelled skins of fallen olives. A lizard basked in the sun, tongue flicking, green scales throbbing. I slid down to the lower slopes and took in the entire site, the remnants of walled courtyards and ancient rock formations; the corroded remains of extinct civilisations.
On the detritus of the older city stood a church, recently abandoned. The roof was on the verge of collapsing, and the doorsteps sprouted a profusion of wild grasses. In the surrounds, jutting through the undergrowth, lay the moss-stained remains of three gravestones, and, within the dream itself, there returned my father’s tale of the priest who was buried here beside his wife and son.
The priest, it was said, had unearthed many treasures buried beneath the church grounds, and had sold them on the antiquities market in Paris and London. Due to his illicit dealings he had damned himself, some villagers claimed, and was made to endure the death of his son. In telling the tale my father had instilled in me a fear of the price I would pay for acts of desecration.
I was now aware I was dreaming, and sensed that if I maintained the fragile balance between sleep and wakefulness, I would continue walking about the island at will, see what I wished to see, and encounter whomever I wanted to encounter. I knew also that with one lapse in concentration, one moment of overreaction or excitement, I would lose the fragile balance.
I willed myself to return to the stone steps and saw them anew, saw they were a continuation of steps buried. I willed myself to see the night falling, the crescent moon rising, until beside me, on one of the steps, stood Stratis. In one hand he held the Circassian dagger my father had brought back from his Black Sea voyages and, in the other, a bottle of wine he had syphoned from the barrel in the katoi.
With a lucidity that was clearer than memory, I saw the blade slice our thumbs, our blood oozing; and Stratis was ascending, pausing on the highest step, leaning over and daring himself to fall over the precipice, and I was dragging him back, drunk and doubled up with laughter.
We chased each other through the ruins, cut through the undergrowth to the mule path, climbed to the village, and dashed up the steps between the houses. We scaled them in search of our homes, the concealed valley, and the windmills near the summit. Yet with each step upwards the stairway extended further, and just as I thought I had sighted their ending, another flight appeared in a never-ending escalation. In my frustration I lost concentration, and awoke to a sense of longing.
And decades later as I recall these events, the months and years are collapsing, and I am approaching the Capitol Theatre with Stratis, on 8 November 1924, the night of the grand opening. The city is alive with weekend revelry, the crowd thronging between the Melbourne Town Hall and the new building. Stratis and I are stepping in from the pavement, climbing the stairway beneath a glowing ceiling to the entrance foyer.
Each space flow
ed from one to the other, from the ground floor up a flight of steps through an archway into the stalls-lobby, from a gilt dome flanked by columns up a second flight of stairs into the dress circle foyer. For a moment, I was detached from the crowd, diverted by the gilded grand piano and bas-relief sculptures, the ornate fireplace and sofas. I was drawn back into the drift of collective chatter, and moved with the crowd up a final flight of stairs from the dress circle to the upper stall’s foyer, and through one last entrance into the auditorium.
I will never forget the collective sigh of astonishment at the sight before us. The ceiling was bursting with coloured lights on the inverted steps of a ziggurat, inspired, as the Griffins had pointed out, by the hall of the two sisters, in twelfth-century Alhambra of the Moors, in the city of Granada. The upper walls erupted from the balcony piers in crystalline shapes; and the ceiling lights within recesses radiated the full colour spectrum. The lights finally dimmed to darkness, drawing our attention to the proscenium arch and rising curtain.
The Wurlitzer organ gave way to an overture performed by a live orchestra. The score rose from the pit to a screen bearing Cecil B De Mille vistas of the pyramids. The waters of the Red Sea were parting for the fleeing Israelites, before crashing down on the pursuing army.
Looking back on the night of the opening many years later, I see a continuous movement through civilisations, a contraction of time and space, from dreams of Ithaca and its buried cities, to the brilliantly lit foyers of the newly built theatre, from the auditorium and its pulsating ceilings, to panoramas of biblical Egypt and the austere mountains of the Sinai Desert.
And I see that the opening night marked the end of a time that had begun on the day of my arrival, when I stood with Stratis on the steps beneath the clocks of Flinders Street Station. Just days after we stepped out of the Capitol Theatre from the premiere screening of De Mille’s Ten Commandments, Stratis received the cable that informed him of the sudden death of his wife, Melita.
I walked the streets that night with Stratis. The city was now cast in a darker light. The theatres and cinemas were long closed, the dance halls and tearooms barred and padlocked. Ghostly faces lurched in and out of the shadows. We had stumbled upon a netherworld of nightwalkers, a veiled city within a city peopled by a generation of lost souls: soldiers returned from the Great War, men old before their time, defeated.
Even as I write, years later, the anger returns, an anger first awakened by the death of my father and the ranting of Old Niko, anger at what is consigned to the margins, to fringe worlds peopled by the warped and wounded. Young men deformed by the dictates of war and the fateful decisions made by others. For hours Stratis and I walked with them, kindred spirits in a battalion of the sleepless, men on crutches, men trembling with the enduring agony of shellshock and gas poisoning. We moved through the streets of the inner city, back to the epicentre, the steps of Flinders Street Station where, sitting beneath the clocks, Stratis finally wept.
Stratis’ grief was the prelude to a greater crisis years later. In the meantime I held on to the fringes of the brotherhood, sat in on card games in the clubrooms, played the fiddle at Ithacan weddings, and rose through the ranks to become a leading chef in Lekatsas’ coffee palaces; while late at night I continued to walk the streets of the city with Stratis to keep him company in his time of mourning.
We came to know individual faces, regulars who clung to their haunts: a particular arcade, a wooden bench outside St Paul’s Cathedral, a sheltered recess in a laneway, a stretch of lawn beneath Princes Bridge on the riverbank. And they came to know us, and responded with quiet acknowledgment or brief conversation, as we passed by on our way to our haunt, beneath the clocks on the steps of the station.
After one last year of labour, one last tilt at raising his savings, Stratis made preparations for his return. I have neglected my boys long enough, he announced. I helped him pack three wooden trunks with the books he had collected in his fifteen-year sojourn: encyclopaedias, almanacs, guides to animal husbandry, medical dictionaries, books that we had discussed and argued over, volumes that would, claimed Stratis, reform the ways of the village.
I accompanied him from the boarding house to the port, and stood beside the customs sheds on Station Pier as the ship departed. In the clarity that comes at moments of departure, I saw how much he had aged, his premature greyness, his resigned steps as he climbed the gangway. I also observed his proud bearing, hard-won from his journeys, and the sigh of relief that seemed to envelop him now that the ropes were being hurled from their moorings. He was regaining the oceans. Returning to Ithaca.
I returned months later, to the same pier, and stood with the crowd, waiting to greet new arrivals. Men paced the timber boards as the ship drew closer. They scanned the decks for the wives and children they had not seen for years, and for the first sight of brides they had never met. Among them, Fotini, the stranger I had, at the urging of a cousin, agreed to marry.
And despite the strangeness of our union, our unexpected passion and hunger for company deflected me into a new orbit. I abandoned the reading room, the book-lined galleries of the inverted mountain, and my single-minded pursuit of knowledge, in exchange for the euphoria that accompanied the births of my son, Demos, and daughter, Sophia.
Life was moving ahead of me and I hurried to keep up, to and from the cafe and the club, to and from baptisms, marriages and community gatherings, to the post office to receive letters from Stratis bearing news of his remarriage, and of his boys, Andreas and Manoli. And the rare letter from the Gambler.
He was still following his immigrant brothers, from Port Augusta to the opal mines of Coober Pedy, from the cane fields of Northern Queensland to the abattoirs of Darwin. From the eating-houses of Broome frequented by pearl divers, to gangs of itinerant farmhands moving from station to station. Wherever he journeyed he set up card tables tempting men to overnight fortunes or instant ruin. And he returned, every year or so to the gambling houses of Sydney and Melbourne, and to the rooms of the Ithacan Club where I saw him holding court, spinning the latest instalment of his journeys, filling in time between his seasonal wanderings.
To curb my restlessness, I built a workshop in the backyard and in my spare hours constructed violins. Every year, on their birthdays, I took my son and daughter to a photographer’s studio, where they posed, violins raised to their collars, in front of a stream flanked by willows and eucalypts. And in the endless recycling of days I did not perceive the gravity of my five-year-old son’s illness. I relied, instead on the reassuring words of the physician. He was suffering from one of the usual ailments, he claimed, a common cold, a touch of fever. He did not see that Demos’ brain was on fire, his life ebbing.
Ti na kanoume? Ti na kanoume? the black-clad women chanted. What can we do? What can we do? And they drew Fotini to them to keep her from falling, and restrained her as she tore at her hair and howled over the coffin. And they returned night after night along with workers from the cafe, men from the club, compatriots from Ithaca and the Seven Islands of the Ionian, and from towns and villages scattered throughout the mainland. They commandeered the kitchen and living room, and filled the house with food and talk, and their constant presence. They sought to obliterate the dangers posed to distressed souls by prowling demons, the threat of solitude and melancholia.
Fotini and I moved about the crowded house as strangers. We could not look each other in the eye. We interrogated ourselves with the eternal question: why? Why? Why didn’t we do more, why were we not alert? Why had we forsaken the island only to lose our first-born child? We were gripped by grief, unable to breathe, unable to sleep, barely able to ride out the night and withstand the mocking daylight. I saw Demos in a dream, and for a moment believed he was alive. I awoke to the sight of Fotini, burning incense at her makeshift altar, rocking back and forth in violent prayer, and did not know how to console her.
I left our Brunswick house and walked towards the inner city, by way of Sydney Road, through the darkened
grounds of the University. The sandstone buildings were enveloped in silence, the residence halls concealed in shadow. I continued on Swanston Street, past the bluestone brewery where the smokestacks were still belching. The all night inferno marked the edge of the inner city, one block removed from my destination, and like a homing pigeon I found myself, pre-dawn, climbing the steps to the library forecourt.
I sat back on the cold stone against one of the columns, and gave way to a fitful dozing, interrupted by the sounds of the city awakening. Hours later, after the sun had risen and the doors opened to the public, I climbed the marble stairway to the upper landing, and, for the first time in years, stepped into the reading room.
Following a familiar script I picked out books at random, and leafed through the pages, but I could not bear to read them. Bent over the books I fell into a deep sleep for the first time in many weeks, and woke, hours later, disoriented. The dome was whirling, the book galleries spinning. On the podium in the rotunda sat an attendant, keeping an eye on the readers. I was back in the inverted mountain, free to silently weep and dream, propelled by an aching longing to retrieve Demos.
I resumed my search with greater deliberation. The books were an excuse, a cover for my real purpose. I kept them before me so as not to be ejected from the library as a vagrant. I looked at them as if reading, closed my eyes and took in the sounds: a door closing, the echo of laughter, the collective hum that graces public places. Soon I was descending, spiralling from wakefulness to dreaming, returning to the ruins of Homer’s School. I surveyed the weathered walls, the stone stairway and the three tombstones jutting through the undergrowth. I had regained the state of lucid dreaming, that fragile balance between awareness and sleep, consciousness and reverie.