by Arnold Zable
We round the headland, past the breakwater into the bay of Frikes. Within minutes of berthing, the gypsies are on the road to Kioni, speakers blaring, announcing the arrival of the carpet vendors. Platon has disappeared with his van on the road to Stavros. The ferry quickly reloads, the crowd disperses.
Only Omeros remains. He limps towards us, empty fish trap in hand, as we begin the ascent to the village. ‘What is the sea thinking today?’ he asks. And, for the first time I sense, beyond the madness, the infernal logic of his question.
BOOK IX
EPILOGUE
The resident tiller of the soil
XANTHE: ITHACA 2002
I LAY down my pen as the first sign of day seeps through the shutters. The walnut table, chest of drawers, the divan and glass-panelled cupboard are intimate companions. I look up at the photo of Stratis and Melita, and the two boys, Andreas and Manoli. Again I am taken by Stratis’ disembodied presence. Melita died within months of the photo being taken, and her place was assumed by Irini. The family Stratis presides over is on the verge of disintegration. Only the frame and skilled manipulation hold it together.
I step out on the balcony and look over the strait towards Lefkada. An overnight ferry is moving between the two islands. Afales Bay is a skin of crimson, and the cliffs of Sappho’s Leap are tinged with silver. The mountain remains a black presence awaiting the sun’s ascent to the heavens. The bus from Kioni can be heard approaching from the lower village. Outside the all-purpose store students are waiting. On an impulse I hurry to the bedroom, wake up Martina, and quickly pack an overnight bag with a change of clothing.
Martina is up and ready to move within minutes. She has become a hardened traveller. We hurry to the road as the bus turns into the village. Martina is taken in hand by girls on their way to high school, and disappears to the rear of the bus. A song blares from the speakers: Yes, I will wait for you. We get off in Vathy and eat breakfast by the waterfront before setting out on the steep trek to Perahori, the Far Village.
Within twenty minutes the skies are black, the winds gusting. We unfurl our umbrellas, but they are instantly shredded. We focus our eyes on our feet and follow each step forward. I am Me ta podia, the mad one who walks, and Martina is my accomplice.
For an hour the rains continue, until, as abruptly as it had broken, the squall is over, and we are entering the outskirts of Perahori. Paved paths wind towards the thresholds of stone houses, one of which belongs to Irini. She is well into her nineties. No one knows exactly how old. She is one of the last of a dwindling species, women who endured long lives in the mountain villages of the Ionian.
Once upon a time there lived two sisters, Melita and Irini. The younger has outlived the older by more than seven decades. She stands on a ladder in the front garden, pruning an almond tree, unaware of our approach. Her feet are planted on an upper rung, and her thin limbs could be mistaken for an extension of the branches.
When she climbs down Martina gazes at her, fearful and astonished. She has never laid eyes on someone so ancient. Her fears vanish as Irini becomes aware of our presence. Her entire being is alight with recognition. Martina is enfolded in her arms in one seamless movement. I stand back and observe their union.
Irini brushes aside our attempts to assist her and moves with astonishing agility through the front door and into the kitchen. The television is on, the volume loud, tuned to The Bold and the Beautiful. She switches it off, and for our seven-day stay it will remain forgotten.
She brings bread to the table, and bean soup that had been on the stove, simmering. She runs her hands over my face as if feeling for its secrets. She embraces Martina and calls her ‘my golden one’. Terms of endearment lie at the core of the Greek language. Perhaps they derive from the deep knowing that the threat of separation is always present.
Martina and Irini are inseparable. Martina trails beside her and I walk in their shadow, drawn by the stubborn will that propels Irini like a wind-driven eddy. Her sight is dimming, but she need only focus on the few metres before her. She moves with ease about her defined sphere, as if enclosed within the arc of a lantern. She has neighbours who help her, but clings fiercely to her independence.
She flits from the kitchen down a flight of steps to the garden and sets to work, pruning, planting. Always moving, from the house to the terraced garden, from the gate through the winding streets of the village, within the territory that sustains her. And Martina moves with her, works beside her, emulates her actions, her slow, steady tending.
Irini knows each tree planted over the years, and names them for Martina: the four almond trees, five orange trees, the three fig trees, the six apple trees, the vines on the trellis, the eleven olive trees beside the house and in the garden. The house is sprouting with potted flowers, geraniums and begonias, hibiscus, frangipani. They line the terrace and stairway, crowd the balcony, and sit on tables by the windows.
On the third day Irini descends to the katoi. She has the unexpected gift of two able-bodied assistants and will use them to restore order. Under Irini’s directions we drag out termite-ridden trunks filled with blankets, picking bags, rotting sacks, rugs and tablecloths. There are chests lined with Chicago newspapers of the 1920s, and stickers marking journeys through the customs houses of Port Said and Alexandria. New York. London.
We advance deeper into the cobwebbed darkness and extract grape-thrashing tubs, grinding stones, lanterns, bread cauldrons, coils of wire, rotting tables and dressers. We take care in carrying out the loom, and spools of thread packed in wooden boxes. We pause to dust the icons of saints, and photos of Irini’s husband with Ithacan compatriots in Chicago.
Our final task is to transfer the rancid olive oil from the ceramic plithari. We ladle the oil into smaller containers and find rats preserved in the lower depths. They had eluded poisons and traps only to drown in the thick liquid. I am assigned the task of burying them.
We return to the pile of objects outside the katoi in the morning, separate that which Irini wishes to keep, and set fire to the rest. Black smoke billows with the stench of forgotten ancestors. We are three generations entwined, sorting out the accumulated confusion of our forebears. And at the helm of our operation, firmly grasping the tiller, stands Grand Aunt Irini.
She navigates her territory with a steady hand, and spends her days in perpetual motion; but at the core there is an abiding tranquillity. She speaks sparingly, conserving her dwindling energy, but we have begun to comprehend her subtle language.
The rhythm of work is her lyre, and the tales she weaves reside in her silences and tending. They convey nuances that lie beyond the literal telling, wisdom gained in the being and doing. They recall the solace of my childhood walks by the Carrum foreshore and wetlands. They evoke memories of my mother, Sophia, her steadfast tending to my wellbeing, her resolution, despite the incessant rage of Manoli.
And they bring to mind the dignified silences of Fotini; but Irini does not possess the fatalist’s shrug, Fotini’s sense of resignation. She is fully in command of her confined realm, propelled by the fierce life force in her tiny body. Her entire being has been pared to its essence. She is a tough nurturer and protector of the earth that sustains her. She is a resident tiller of the soil, a mistress of orchards and gardens.
By the fourth day Irini’s work rituals have claimed us. We have been absorbed into her realm and voyage beside her. Only when the time of separation is upon us is the spell broken. Irini accompanies us the first fifty metres to the lower edge of the Far Village. Martina is distraught as she recedes behind us. Irini stands on the path, and waves even after she can no longer see us.
Like Fotini, she is a tiny figure growing smaller against the vastness of the mountain. She fades into the landscape like a lizard camouflaged by its scales and stillness. On the slopes above her, the remains of earthquake ruins are crumbling into oblivion between homes that have risen from the debris.
Only as the Far Village disappears do I recognise that, for the f
irst time, I had not interrogated the past with a barrage of questions. Yet I understand that even though she has not once left the island in the ninety years since she set foot on Ithaca, Irini is both voyager and teller, Odysseus and Homer. She is a weaver of work rhythms and silences. So scoured by a lifetime of tending that her tales are embedded in her being.
The thought takes root in my final weeks on the island. Now that the end of our stay is approaching, I am obsessed, as on previous sojourns, with tattooing the landscape on my memory. I have inherited the Ithacan phobia, the fear that I may never return. I am Me ta podia, the mad one who walks, and Martina remains my willing accomplice.
We walk the ports of Kioni and Frikes, Polis Bay and Afales. Nets are sprawled in heaps on seawalls and jetties. On the Vathy foreshore, there are Alfa Romeos, Mercedes, BMWs and Volvos, the imported cars of the nouveau riche, waiting like the bare-masted ships that once filled the harbour in winter.
We walk familiar ground and perceive new meanings. The mill that Andreas once tended traps the winds within its hollows. We stray into the lowlands and are lost in gullies thick with wild olives. Dogs burst from timber shacks and stop abruptly, confined by their leashes to ferocious barking. We find our way back onto an overgrown path, and come upon the ruins of churches with cracked walls of faded frescoes.
We stumble towards the heights like drunkards over fields of limestone. In the sea below us, rocks skew the ripples of eddies and currents. The scent of the sea rises to meet the scent of the mountain. The skies are whirling, the earth turning and returning, the sea vanishing, reappearing.
This is not an Ithaca in waiting, an idealised figment of memory, but a living presence. An island that bends labouring breath and muscle to its brute power. The summer is long over, the harvest ended. With each passing day the island is ebbing further into stillness, and with it the old Ithaca returns, that which has outlived the departures of millennia.
We wander hamlets we have rarely set foot in. Goats scatter into the undergrowth. A washing line strung between two pines tilts trousers and vests towards the heavens. A fishing net is spread on the side of the road, like the tentacles of a giant squid. A fisherman disentangles and spreads it further. A spaniel lies in the shade beside him. An elderly woman in widow’s black scales the leeside of the mountain.
‘This year tipota’ she says, ‘Nothing.’
‘And last year?’
‘Last year the trees were dripping with olives, but the oil was putrid.’
She screws up her face.
‘Next year will be better,’ I suggest.
‘Why?’ she replies with contempt. ‘Flies burrow into the fruit to lay their eggs. The eggs hatch, the worms feast, and the olives drop from the trees, sucked dry by parasites.’ She spits on the ground.
‘And if the olives are good, so what? The middle men will siphon off the profits.’ She looks at us for a long time and says: ‘Ah, it gives you an appetite being up here, doesn’t it?’ And in a voice barely stronger than a whisper, she sings:
Life has two doors
I opened one,
And came in one morning
And by the time evening arrived
I had left by the other.
‘The last door is open and waiting,’ she cackles. We continue up the mountain to a plateau. Again the island is turning on its axis. The path conveys us to a remote enclave where goats graze under the watchful eyes of an elderly couple. A saddled donkey stands beside them. The Ionian eddies below us. And as we walk I know that Martina’s is one story that will remain untold. She will be free, soon enough, to come and go as she pleases, free to weave her life as she wishes.
Like Irini she is in command of the moment. She has no time for nostalgia. She is diverted by a praying mantis and jewelled beetles, and startled by red domed mushrooms rising on white stems from rock crevices. She bends down to follow the trek of an ant dragging a fragment of olive skin, many times its size. She stares at a cypress tree split apart by lightning, sending out new growth, and squats to inspect a scattering of minute black orchids and crocuses. She is coming to know the skin of the island, the living fabric. She hums and sings when the mood takes her, and is content to be silent.
On the eve of our departure, we return to the ruins of Homer’s School, Mentor’s site of healing, and the landscape of his lucid dreaming. We climb the stone steps to the upper rung and sit where he sealed his pact with Stratis. The cliff path to the Marmakas, overlooking the Bay of Afales is a track of silver, the Ionian a rippling skin of crimson. Upon its waters a single caique is returning to the port of Frikes. It is the hour of the homecoming. The crew is within sight of the shepherds’ huts on the Marmakas. Somewhere on the island, a hearth is waiting.
I remain seated beside Martina long after the caique has berthed. A breeze flares and leaps like an invisible flame through the ruins. The lights of the villages are appearing. The lighthouse of Lefkada is issuing warnings to strangers. The church on the lower hill tolls the passing of the hours. It is time to resume the weaving. Arkhe tou paramythiou. The fairytale begins. Kalispera sas. Good evening to you.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Sea of Many Returns is a work of fiction that has drawn on many personal and historical sources. I owe much to the people of Ithaca for sharing their stories. I am grateful to Andreas Anagnostatis, generous keeper of Ithacan lore, and Dennis Sikiotis, for his knowledge of Ithaca. I thank my partner Dora’s extended family in Athens and on the island: Efthimios and Aleka, Yiannis and Dionysia, Makis and Kalliopi, Sevasti and Athanassios, Aunt Agelo, cousin Rigo, Aunt Georghia and the late Dimitri Varvarigos.
I thank Lula Black, Loula Coutsouvelis, Konstandina Dounis, Tony Knight and Helen Nickas for reading the manuscript, and Jim and Melita Vlassopoulos, Tasia Couvara, and Spyridoula Maroulis, generous hosts of many Ithacan gatherings in Melbourne. For their support, I thank George Coutsouvelis, Olga Black, Peter Paxinos, Eustratia and Demetri Pimenides, Effie Detsimas, the late Stathis Raftopoulos, the Ithacan Philanthropic Society, and the editorial board of Odysseus.
Michael Heyward is a publisher and editor with an uncanny ability to see the big picture. Jane Pearson edited the book with great skill, care and enthusiasm.
I owe much to Dora: for our many journeys to Ithaca over the past two decades, for family stories, interpreting conversations, advice on the text, and ongoing discussions of its themes. In many ways, it is Dora’s book, and Alexander’s, our son and travel companion.
While this is a work of fiction, historical events have been carefully researched. In reconstructing the Black Sea voyages, I drew on resources at the Maritime Museum in Vathy, travellers’ accounts, and conversations with descendents of Ithacans who traded along the Danube River.
The anti-Greek riots in Perth and Kalgoorlie are based on contemporary reports in The Kalgoorlie Miner. I also drew on Reginald Appleyard and John N. Yiannakis, Greek Pioneers in Western Australia, University of WA Press, 2002; and Hugh Gilchrist Australians and Greeks, Vols I & II, Halstead Press, Rushcutter’s Bay, 1992 & 1997. The lyrics for If I die on the boat are from Gail Holst’s book, Road to Rembetika, Anglo-Hellenic Publishing, Athens, 1975. The Gambler is a fictional character inspired by Nikos Kallinikos whose brief biography appears in George Kanarakis, Greek Voices in Australia, Australian National University Press, Sydney, 1987.
A State Library of Victoria fellowship provided time and access to the W. G. Alma Conjuring Collection, and to Marion Mahoney Griffin and Walter Burley Griffin’s original drawings for the Capitol Theatre. Historian, Donald Leslie Johnson asserts, ‘it would be safe to say that modern architecture in Australia began with the Cafe Australia.’ I am grateful to Dianne Reilly who administered the fellowship, and to the library staff.
Other books I drew on include: Neal Ascherson’s seminal work, Black Sea, Hill and Wang, New York, 1995; Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, Harcourt, Brace & World, New York, 1995; Bill Bunbury, Timber for Gold, Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 1997; Donald Leslie Johnson
, The Architecture of Walter Burley Griffin, MacMillan, South Melbourne, 1977; Clive Turnbull, Frontier, the Story of Paddy Hannan, Hawthorn Press, Melbourne, 1949; Jeff Turnbull and Peter Y. Navaretti, editors, The Griffins in Australia and India, Miegunyah Press, Melbourne, 1998; and Melbourne-based Owl Publishing’s Greek Diaspora Literature series.
In memory of Lily Varvarigos, whose house was filled with stories, food and good company, and Babis Varvarigos, a true levendi and lover of the sea.