Corfu

by Robert Dessaix

  It was an utterly untransforming experience. You could have been in Bournemouth on a wet bank holiday weekend.

  7

  Holy Saint Spiridon, pray to God for us!

  Many centuries ago (almost seventeen, in fact, before Constantine founded Constantinople) some Cypriot peasants returning from their fields were trudging past a church as evening fell and heard the chanting of a choir – exalting, kindling in them an awe they’d never felt before – and, peering through the windows of the church, they saw a vast congregation gathered in the candle-lit gloom for vespers. Drawn to join it by the overwhelming beauty of the singing, they entered the church to find … no one there, except for the bishop, Spiridon, the deacon and their handful of assistants. They were transformed by what they’d seen, of course, these peasants, and they believed and were taken up into the bosom of the church.

  Born the son of a simple shepherd, like one or two patriarchs before him, Spiridon specialized in startling transformations of this kind. He cast out demons and healed the sick from an early age – a word from Spiridon was like a lightning bolt, scouring out evil. He converted sceptics and divined where lost valuables were hidden. When a man lay dying of hunger by the roadside, Spiridon seized a snake from amongst the stones and, turning it into a chain of gold pieces, he gave it to the starving man who rose and ran to the town to buy food for himself and his family. An even greater miracle, some might say, occurred when the shepherd’s lad convinced a venerable philosopher at Nicaea of the reality of the Trinity.

  Some fourteen centuries later, in 1716, when the Turks were besieging Corfu, the saint appeared in the night skies with flaming sword and routed the unbelievers. The Turks, for their part, reported nothing more than a stiff south-westerly squall blowing up at just the wrong, or right, moment, but then, in their unbelief, they would. Still, I can understand the Corfiotes’ ecstasy at their deliverance: in this part of the world, when a city fell to them, the Turks had a nasty habit of sending back salted barrels of heads and lopped ears to the Sultan in Constantinople – Turkish, apparently, for ‘all’s well, wish you were here’.

  Miraculously, just a few yards from where I’d stood that Good Friday afternoon, St Spiridon the Wonderworker of Trimythounta is still to be seen in remarkable health. After many posthumous adventures it was in Corfu that his body finally came to rest and it can now be viewed in a tiny candle-lit room beside the iconostasis in the church named after him near the main square. In fact, you can still line up there with thousands of others in the incense-laden gloom to kiss his miraculous feet. For reasons no one can clarify, not even Gerald Durrell, although Spiridon never steps from his silvered casket, his dainty embroidered slippers wear out each year and have to be replaced. Every August tiny pieces of worn silk cut from his old slippers are given to the faithful, talismans against disaster and disease. And several times a year he’s paraded upright through the streets of Corfu Town. The day before Easter is one of those days.

  So, next morning, back I went in the bus to the park in front of the Old Fort to see what I might see. More bands in the patchy drizzle, white-gloved, some wearing splendid red-plumed helmets this time, and altogether more showily solemn than the day before. Resurrection is in the air, though, and everyone’s beginning to feel quite keyed up.

  The sun comes out to dazzle us, red and gold icons glitter, gilt Venetian lanterns sway on tall, encrusted poles, flowers are scattered on the gleaming roadway, two long lines of black-capped priests appear, their silken robes afire in the sunlight, deep purple, gold, sky-blue and ivory … and then the saint floats by, a minute lolling head in a canopied casket, and all the Dutch and English tourists follow it in their viewfinders, flashes flash, women cross themselves, murmuring softly, and it’s all over.

  Nothing, again I feel nothing. Most of those around me seem enlivened by something they’ve glimpsed, but I don’t. Even the Durrells, both the brothers, who dog your footsteps everywhere you go in Corfu, reminding you of what’s been lost – and not just woollen-vested sailors, either, with their moustaches curling back around their ears, or kilted Albanians, or ginger-beer stalls, or wetlands teeming with wildfowl – even the Durrells, who seem to have believed in nothing except their own enchanted, brightly coloured lives – and certainly not in silk-slippered mummies and their tricks – even they appear to have been touched by something.

  Vaguely hoodwinked, that’s how I felt, the way you often feel at Christmas, when you come to the end of the day and nothing much has changed.

  For a while I just stood around in the park, as you can in a place where you don’t belong, waiting for the pots to be thrown. The locals milled around me, the older men in suits, their wives dressed up as if for some distant cousin’s wedding, all looking comforted, at ease again, happily resigned to buying silly gewgaws, ice-creams or balloons. A man carrying a gigantic, gaudy banner of St Spiridon came lumbering along towards me, headed for the carpark – time to stow the stage-props away for another year. Suddenly a gust of wind lifted the banner, he stumbled against me and I found myself smack up against his glowering Spiridon. For just a second or two we were eyeball to eyeball. I stepped back and Spiridon soared away above me, sky-borne, unforgiving.

  On the dot of eleven o’clock they threw their pots. Small, doll-like torsos appeared in windows all along the esplanade, hundreds of them, clutching pots – huge amphorae, tiny bowls, clay vessels of every shape and size. The clock struck eleven and they tossed them into the street below. The crowd cheered. It had taken less than ten seconds.

  Why they tossed them I never discovered. I doubt they knew themselves. To taunt Judas, according to Greta, but I doubt many in the crowd had Judas on their minds.

  I picked my way through the terra-cotta shards, heading for the bus-terminal, utterly bamboozled. I’d caught a whiff of old Byzantium and hadn’t much liked the aroma.

  8

  The most dispiriting thing about failing to be moved by others’ rituals is that it brings you face to face with your own ordinariness. And, if you’re feeling even slightly oceanic, that ordinariness swamps everything in sight. Who doesn’t long at times, in the midst of piles of washing or slumped in front of the television set, for something utterly unnatural to happen?

  Wanting to take a breather, as my father would have said, before the evening’s Resurrection celebrations, I went to Kassiopi – that was where the first bus at the bus-terminal was going. Unnatural things had no doubt taken place at Kassiopi over the centuries – well, for a start, Nero had once dropped in on his way to play his lute at the games in Corinth – but that afternoon, when, the only passenger, I got out of the bus in the ugly little town square and looked about, I had the feeling that nothing unexpected had happened here for years. A dog or two came ambling by; a group of youths sat listlessly outside a bar across the street, hailing a passing friend from time to time, then lapsing into moody silence; and a busful of blank-faced Danes drove by, thinking of beer, by the look of it, rather than the Crucifixion.

  Idyllic from a distance, of course, Kassiopi: two tiny, turquoise bays, with a wooded promontory wedged in between, and just across the water, so close you could almost shout a greeting, the fabulous, forbidden fastnesses of Albania’s mountain ranges. Down on the palm-fringed bay beneath this wall of mountains, I could see the windows of Sarandë (Forty Saints) glinting in the sun, and tiny, indecipherable movements, like shifting grains of sand, along the waterline – people, donkeys, buses, who could tell? It was eerie, almost spectral, like watching a dead man walk silently by in broad daylight.

  Romans came to Kassiopi two thousand years ago to lie about and think and read – great vacationers, the Romans, unlike the Greeks – so no doubt somewhere here beneath my feet were the remains of their baths and vomitoria. In fact, Cicero once spent a week here. Cervantes came as well, before or after the Battle of Lepanto, I don’t recall, so with or without his left arm, depending. And so did Casanova. And Princess Margaret – it had been her ‘holiday choice�
�, according to the Corfu Sun, for several seasons now. And so, needless to say, did the Durrells. Their White House was only a few bays to the south, so they’d have boated up here quite often, I’m sure. No doubt a Durrell had stood right where I now stood, knowing infinitely more about what his eyes took in than I did and chancing, as he clambered about, on a colourful band of Albanian smugglers or some type of prunus prostrata previously thought extinct – something extraordinary, anyway. All my eyes saw when I looked around, apart from Albania, was a sprinkling of pretty white flowers.

  And the sea, Homer’s sea. Ithaca, where Penelope waited for Odysseus, lies just over the horizon to the south. In fact, according to the Durrells, it was almost certainly here, in one of the bays of Kassiopi, rather than in the middle of the island around the airport, that Odysseus was cast ashore for the last time before reaching home. It was a quickening thought, so imaginable.

  From Nausicaa’s point of view it was a day much like any other. She’d trundled off in her painted wagon at first light to do some washing in a pool some way from the palace. (The stream at Kassiopi seems a long way to go with a load of dirty shirts and blouses, but once Fate has taken a hand in things, as we know, reason counts for little.) Around noon, the washing done and out to dry, Nausicaa and her maids were whiling away the morning tossing a ball around. When it fell into the water, as it was bound to do sooner or later, there was a chorus of girlish shrieks. And that’s when the day like any other became enchanted, prose turned to poetry and Nausicaa, the unremarkable daughter of an obscure king on an island so remote that no stranger ever came ashore, soared (as it were) into the empyrean.

  Roused by the hullabaloo from his slumbers under some bushes, Odysseus, stark naked, his skin all crusted with brine and his tangled hair caked with scurf, came lumbering out of the undergrowth to accost the white-limbed creatures gambolling in the glade nearby. For seventeen days and nights, ever since leaving Calypso’s isle, he’d sailed, all alone, across the seas towards Ithaca – towards home. Just as the mighty mountains of the Phaeacians’ isle rose up out of the sea like a vast bronze shield, Poseidon, who bore a grudge against him, piled up wild clouds above him, sent savage storms to pound him, smashed his craft and left him, in the hush that followed, to drift to shore on a single beam. From the gently shelving beach Odysseus set off through the reeds at the mouth of a nearby stream to take shelter in the woods beyond, where ‘Athena showered sleep upon his eyes’.

  Her maids now scattered at the sight of this naked brute, but Nausicaa was made of stauncher stuff. Sensing, perhaps, some goddess’s hand in this encounter, she helped him bathe, gave him suppling oil to soothe his briny skin and, having at hand her brothers’ shirts and hose all crisp and freshly washed, she clothed him in princely garments. As we have seen, Odysseus then set off, shrouded in ‘an enchanted mist’, for the city on the hill behind her painted wagon. His face now, we’re told, was like beaten silver washed with gold.

  Of course, I do not believe any of this – I don’t believe in Nausicaa’s washing or the ball or the enchanted, mist or the ‘circling frieze glazed blue as lapis’, at least not in the way I believe in the Nausicaa Restaurant near the Hilton, which rises right where King Alcinous is said to have once had his court. I don’t believe these are the facts about that particular morning in the aftermath of the Trojan War. But I do believe it’s true.

  Homer was telling the truth, I think, about going home, about that ‘pining, all my days, to travel home and see the dawn of my return’. Odysseus was not a great traveller or restless explorer, despite what Dante had to say about him – all Odysseus wanted to do was to go home. Not even lustrous Calypso, with her promise of immortality and ageless beauty, not all the nectar and ambrosia and ardent love-making in the world, could stanch his pining for home. Not that every traveller wants to go home in a literal sense – some are marooned for so long they think they are at home – but every traveller, even the kind that never leaves his armchair in front of the fire, wants to find the place where being what he is will matter. That place is home.

  I think Homer told the truth about washing-days, too, on which, if you’ve got your wits about you, you’ll see goddesses streaking up out of the waves like shearwaters. On occasion, anyway, in a manner of speaking.

  The bus-driver had told me the last bus back to town would leave at four o’clock. The timetable stuck to the lampost said 4.15. The young man selling nobody ice-creams in the empty square said 4.30 at the very latest. We actually set off for Corfu Town just on a quarter to five. By this time in the afternoon the very thought of the Resurrection was fatiguing.

  9

  Before Byzantium, before even the Mycenaeans beat their gold or the Minoans leapt over their bulls, long, long ago up in the very mountains on the mainland I’d been staring at for half the day, the heartland of the Hellenes, the birthplace of the tall, blond Dorians, fires were lit in temples on the mountain-tops to the Sun God to pray for a bountiful spring, for good weather and abundant crops. One can imagine that even then as the flames leapt heavenwards, in imitation of the fiery charioteer, the sound of goat-skin bagpipes, lutes and muffled dulcimers would have echoed round the crude stone walls.

  This kind of pagan cult is what came to mind at midnight when the glowing purple cross on top of the citadel suddenly burst into dazzling brilliance, blindingly white, great tents of fireworks canopied the sky, and all around me in the park below the citadel tens of thousands of candles blazed in the dark, cupped against the wind, while the bandstand was lit up with strings of fairy lights, choirs began their jubilant singing, bands struck up and Christ was risen. ‘Christós anésti,’ everyone shouts at everyone else – a little early from a Presbyterian point of view, but why be pedantic? ‘Allthos anésti,’ everyone shouts back – In truth He is risen – and then their minds seem to drift off in the direction of Easter soup and sausages and roast lamb. It had been quite a spectacle. Virtue on a panoramic scale.

  Over in Albania in the darkness, where it was just an ordinary Saturday night, I can imagine the inhabitants must have watched this orgy of fire and light with … but no, I can’t imagine what they must have thought. To them it might as well have been a bonfire on the moon.

  Later, in the early morning hours back home in Gastouri, I could hear small sounds of joy that the tomb had been empty after all. Ancient sounds they were, to my ears, accompanied by a kind of distant shrilling – reedy piping, melodious plucking – something very old, almost at one with the wind itself. Still, by that time, to be frank, Athena was busy showering sleep upon my tired eyes as well and nothing I say is to be trusted.

  10

  Greta, it turned out, lived in a two-storeyed house, all pinks and greens, on the lip of a hill not so far from Gastouri. A suburban villa, I expect you’d call it, with Italian touches and lovely, untidy grounds disappearing on all sides into stands of oak and myrtle.

  In the fug of roasting lamb – it was turning on an electric spit in one corner of the walled terrace – I smiled, shook hands and nodded as I was led around the terrace, then through the french doors and into the kitchen. A few yachtsmen and their wives, a consul and his wife, a Dutch couple, an Irishman and his sister, a Greek from Athens (banks or something), someone’s grandmother stirring soup. ‘Hullo, hullo … Pleased to meet you … Hullo …’ Even here, on a day such as this, I noticed that frisson of apprehension that always runs from face to face when someone new appears in a room. Oh, yes, they smile, but you sense a sudden wariness: this outsider might catch them out at something – at not being themselves, perhaps, or at being themselves, whichever is worse. Apart from the young woman chopping up shallots and anise, the guests all seemed to be in their middle years, that not uninteresting in-between age when you know at last what it is you want and also know you’ll never have it. It shows on the face.

  ‘Didn’t you give those up, Bernie?’ Greta said as the Irishman’s sister shook another cigarette from the packet on the table.

  ‘I w
as more in the throes of giving them up, Greta,’ Bernie said with just a touch of peevishness. ‘Then I lost my fear of giving them up, so I’m smoking again.’

  ‘I see,’ Greta said, half her mind on counting plates. ‘How’s your Chilean, by the way, dear? And why isn’t he here?’

  There was a distinct pause. ‘Is he my Chilean, Greta? I think you’d better ask Arthur whose Chilean he is.’

  ‘Ah, yes. How silly of me. But he was yours, wasn’t he? I mean, at the beginning.’

  In the hush that followed, I wandered unnoticed out onto the terrace and tried to take an interest in the revolving lamb, which still had its eyes and teeth. A couple of the sea-captains and one or two other smartly turned-out northerners were gathered around the spit making desultory conversation about summer charter flights back to civilization. Everyone was speaking English, even the Dutch couple to each other.

  Greta had been living up there in the hills behind the town for fifteen years or more, it turned out. This was her bailiwick. As we’d darted along the winding roads, in and out of the shadows of overhanging trees, up village streets, past lush gardens, she’d waved to the right and waved to the left, pointing out where this couple or that friend lived – a doctor here, a professor there, a retired publisher, a German businessman and his wife. And why was Greta here? Why had she washed up here amongst the cypresses and retired sea-captains?

  ‘Ah, well, you see, it was the sixties,’ she’d said with a knowing smile. Expressions like ‘the sixties’ always stump me. I remember things that happened in the sixties – Cliff Richard, a dog dying, learning Latin at school and so on – but I have no memory at all of ‘the sixties’ as such. I never woke up in the morning and registered that I was in them.