‘And when I first saw it – I remember the morning, I remember the exact smell on the breeze – Corfu just looked like what I’d been waiting for all my life. It wasn’t, of course, but that’s another story.’ She laughed, had a coughing fit and subsided. ‘Does that make sense?’
‘What was it you’d been waiting for?’
‘Are you too young to remember what we waited for then? What I was waiting for in Sydney after the war for years was for something to happen – well, it was never going to happen in Australia, was it? So, like everyone else, I eventually got fed up and went to where it was already happening – London.
‘And it was thrilling, of course, you can’t imagine – filthy bed-sits, men who could actually talk and went to the theatre, plays with buggery in them – or perhaps that came later, it’s hard to recall exactly. There’d been none of that where I came from. Books, of course, we’d had books, but that was the other magical thing about London: it was all the books I’d read come to life. It was like dreaming of ancient Babylon and waking up next morning to find you were really there.’ She seemed to drift off for a moment, trying to recapture the sensation.
‘Then I decided to go home on a visit – you know, remind myself of why I’d left, see people before they died, the usual sort of thing. But I never got there. Got off the plane in Athens – in those days it still had a certain charm – and I thought: I needn’t take another step – I’m home. And then I met – But here we are.’
And we swung off the road up the gravel drive towards the house – big, pink splashes through the trees. Over to one side of the house I could see the terrace and a dozen people I didn’t know standing about.
‘Look, most of us are here, when it all boils down, because we were bewitched,’ Greta said, wrenching at the handbrake. ‘By someone or something. And now it’s too late to move on. And anyway, where would we move on to? Where most of us came from no longer exists … But come and meet the gang.’
It was certainly a long time, I’d have thought, since the gang on the terrace had been under any kind of spell. They were mostly just beached there, waiting again. Comfortably enough, of course, Corfu being a comfortable place to wait, even faintly glamorous if you had a part in the local pageant.
There’s no glamour without a pageant – I’d seen that in London. Wealth, a smart address, designer outfits, even fame – none of that is glamorous without a part in some pageant or other. To be glamorous you must be playing at kings and queens, you must come out of the palace and wave at the crowd. You must be a sovereign or in the sovereign’s entourage. Everyone knows you’re just a hairdresser from Hamburg, but if you can mark yourself off from the ordinary folk in some way – through outrageous immorality, for instance (although it must go unpunished, naturally), eccentricity of an entertaining kind or even just a soigné kind of beauty – and join some cortège, some colourful charade, then the ordinary folk will think of you as glamorous. Or act as if they did – it’s all a game. In Hamburg you just cut hair, but here you become extraordinary. Where I come from, even racehorse-owners pass themselves off as glamorous – inside every racehorse-owner we presumably discern the outline of the Queen.
Whether or not that lunch was a pageant of kinds was difficult to tell. And if it was, it wasn’t clear if I was one of the minor retainers or really just part of the cheering crowd.
After the soup of tripe and sweetbreads, which was eggy but tart, and before the lamb was sliced, I thought I might explore Greta’s garden. Exploring people’s gardens allows you to escape without being rude – not, I thought, that anyone much would notice my disappearance. Crossing from the halfwalled terrace towards the myrtles, I mooched about for several minutes, examining the peonies by the fence, breathing in the juicy smell of rank grass sprouting anemones – just aimlessly peering about, really, taking refuge for a moment from the babble at the table. I said hullo to a ginger cat snoozing in a flower-pot.
Suddenly I heard a cough from above. Glancing up, I saw a figure in a crimson dressing-gown staring down at me from a second-floor window of the house.
I nodded, smiled and waited. The figure in crimson just kept staring.
‘Not joining us, then?’ I said finally, waving vaguely back towards the terrace.
‘Fuck off!’ it said.
A little taken aback, I did. I turned and walked round behind the house.
I was just wondering how to avoid passing the upstairs window on the way back to the terrace, when I heard a voice behind me say: ‘Greta tells me you’re living in Kester’s house.’
Wheeling around, I found Arthur, the Irishman, standing grinning at me, hands in trouser pockets. He hadn’t said much during the soup, rather drowned out by his sister, Bernie, who ran a second-hand bookshop in town and was a bird-fancier. She winced every time there was a gun-shot. Arthur was a bit biscuity for my taste – biscuity pullover, biscuity trousers, biscuity hair – but pleasant enough with an engaging smile.
‘That’s right. Do you know Kester?’
‘Indeed I do.’
‘Tell me about him.’
‘You’ve never met him?’
I explained how it was I’d ended up in the strange white house down the road from the palace in Gastouri and how I was finding it hard to work out who my landlord was. A voice on the telephone, some books, a few photographs, Krishnamurti, cups and saucers that didn’t match, sparse furniture, a doggy smell … Who was he? Where was he? And where was the dog? No one except Greta had come to the door and said his name, but sometimes it felt as if he were still living there and I were the ghost. It was a house I seemed to have made no real impression on at all.
‘Tell you what,’ Arthur said, slouching back against the wall in the sun. ‘I’ll come over tomorrow afternoon, if you’re going to be home, and give you all the guff on the locals. Including Kester. Around fourish, say?’ Why not? I was curious.
‘Do, yes, four’s fine.’ The dull popping of hunters out slaughtering wildlife peppered the momentary silence.
‘They’re a wonderful colour, aren’t they, those anemones,’ he said, nodding at the overgrown lawn.
‘Beautiful,’ I said, knowing that anemones were not the point. ‘What do you do?’
‘I teach.’
‘What do you teach?’
‘English, of course,’ he said, and laughed. ‘To private students.’
‘Why do you laugh?’
‘Well, I started doing it just to fill in time, really, and here I am, fifteen years later, still doing it. It’s not quite how I thought I’d end up spending my life, I suppose.’ And he laughed again.
Before we could pursue the subject, we found ourselves back on the terrace and were made to sit down and contemplate platters piled with steaming Paschal lamb and sausages. Oregano was in the air.
So untethered to anything was the table conversation that afternoon that I wouldn’t have been in the least surprised if we’d all floated up off our chairs into the sky and vanished. The consul’s wife embarked on a long story about Abu Dhabi, where they’d spent eight years, but it petered out in a spattering of interjections about other things entirely – the correct pronunciation of Arabic words (her husband was a stickler for the glottal stop), Arab terrorists, bats, Scientology, AIDS, Andy Warhol (who’d just died) … this and that. Someone eventually asked me where I came from, and I said Australia. The Dutch said they’d once lived in Indonesia. A Greek man said he had a cousin in Adelaide.
The Resurrection, needless to say, never came up. Should it have, I wonder? Was anyone there having a new life in Christ? If someone was – and that’s what the red-painted eggs on the Easter loaves were hinting we should be having, it says so in my Treasury of Authentic Greek Cooking – wasn’t it at least worth mentioning? Should I have asked the consul’s wife as I passed her the sauce if she believed in the bodily resurrection of the Nazarene?
In fact what I asked her, while Greta was inside making coffee, was if she knew who the man in the upstair
s window was.
‘What man?’
‘There was a man in a red dressing-gown staring down at me from the upstairs window.’
‘Really? How very odd. Did he say anything?’
‘Not really, no.’
‘No idea. Arthur might know. Or the van der Weels.’ But she was already nibbling at the halva, dropping tiny oily crumbs of it all down her raw silk blouse.
When I was getting into my taxi, not so long afterwards, I looked back up at the window where I thought I’d seen him, but all I could see was an empty black square with a long, crimson curtain hanging out across the sill.
11
Unlike Sisi, I had no fragrant, hunchbacked companion to talk about Homer with on my walk next morning, but I didn’t feel solitary in the least. Less invisible, really, than I’d felt for days.
It was a poking-about sort of expedition. As I wound my way down the hill through the village – and it’s a snake’s nest, Gastouri, with lanes and stepped passageways wriggling off in every direction, slithering down the hillside to a shaded stream – I couldn’t help thinking of Sisi, Empress of Austria, wending her way through these very streets and alleyways a hundred years before. She’d have smelt the same fresh-bread smells, seen the great-grandfathers of the very men I nodded to, sitting on their wooden chairs in the sun outside the village store. And when she got to the stream at the bottom, she’d have looked across the valley as I did at the town of Ten Saints (Ayii Deka), huddled like a herd of goats high on the mountainside to the south. And then she’d have made her way along the path above the stream to the stone well, still called Elisabeth’s Well, standing to this day by the roadside, a grey, domed affair, surrounded by figs and olive-trees.
Nowadays, of course, carloads of Germans and families from Leeds sweep by, cameras at the ready, but in Sisi’s day, presumably, there would have been just the odd passing donkey, laden with firewood, with a boy behind it, urging it on with a stick. You can still see these donkeys on the paths amongst the olive-groves further up the hill.
I stared at the well, trying to imagine what it would have been like to stumble upon the Empress of Austria sitting here, dressed in black, drinking a glass of water, alone except for Christomanos with his hump. Just the two of them. Thinking of what? Poor Sisi, homesick for somewhere she’d never been.
At least Odysseus knew where he belonged, at least he had Penelope waiting for him back in Ithaca, weaving her sea-blue web by day and unravelling it by torchlight every night to keep her swaggering suitors at bay. At least in Telemachus he had a wise and spirited son who loved him in his palace back at home, not some spoilt, spineless, jaded, morphia-addicted wastrel like Rudolf – although he had been Sisi’s son and she’d loved him. And when Odysseus was wined and dined by kings in palaces, he knew he was on his way home, a hero. His heart was somewhere.
Sisi, sitting by this well, was nobody dressed up as somebody, going nowhere. Lovely, of course, with her auburn hair and amber eyes, but even that loveliness was now a touch parched, on the verge of sinewy.
Back up at the top of the hill, not so far from her palace, I came upon a small white chapel. In the green dankness behind it were a few gravestones, but on the southern side, in the sun, dribbles of white and pink spattered the stones – daisies and wild garlic dotted with honesty. Can there be a better place to sit and think than on the whitewashed steps of an abandoned chapel? At least, it certainly looked abandoned: its dark wooden doors, emblazoned with white crosses, hung heavily on their rusted hinges, closed against the world, and high above me its two big bells in their peeling double-arched belltower looked somehow timelessly stilled.
Perhaps, though, this sense of bittersweet desolation wafted over me less because of my awareness of the sealed gloom behind me (in the chapel itself as well as the mossy garden of death just round the corner) than because I had begun to remember another dilapidated chapel surrounded by old tombstones, designed and painted by William for Act II of The Cherry Orchard. Lopsided, it was, as if it had sunk down into the earth with its forgotten dead.
What a nightmare Act II was for the actors. All those regrets over misspent opportunities, all that tedious yearning – for love, for something meaningful to happen, for life to stop being grey. All that shilly-shallying about how to rescue the estate from debt, all that frittering away of time and emotion on the thinnest of memories and hopes. We floated on and then floated off again, snivelling about our futile lives, sluggishly sniping at each other, talking, talking, waiting, waiting … and I was the worst of the lot of them, in some ways. Droning on at one moment about the appallingly undernourished workers and peasants, their stinking housing, the bedbugs and the vodka binges, and the next moment declaiming to Anya (who was infatuated with me for some unfathomable reason) about the need to ‘rise above all the petty, illusory things that stop us being free and happy’ and ‘reach for the bright star shining in the distance’. But what is ‘petty’ and what is grand? And if reaching for the stars means trampling all the beautiful little things in life into the mud, is it worth it? Not one of us – and I least of all, although I’m supposed to be the ‘revolutionary’ in this play – could get a fix on what really matters in life, what is good and what isn’t … what, in other words, to do with our time here. Peasants, pickled gherkins, sunsets, love, billiards, money, work, the shining star … all much of a muchness, really, a bland, lumpy pudding of no significance. Not one of us, needless to say, turns to look at the toppling gravestones around the chapel.
When I started holding forth like this, if he was there, William would smile. Not exactly cheekily, but knowingly. I asked him why once, a little tersely, during a coffee break, and he thought for a moment and said he just couldn’t help it – I was so good, he said, and yet such an idiot. I never knew whether he’d meant me or Peter Trofimov.
Like Trofimov, I, too, have never quite figured out the way to work in the gherkins and billiards with the shining star. How do you irradiate the humbly trivial – the sneezes and waiting in bus-queues – with the lofty, and at the same time cherish above all in the lofty those things that nourish you here, today, in all your ordinariness? I cannot understand, in other words, what sort of God would bother to count every hair on my head.
Miraculously, in The Cherry Orchard, Chekhov has managed to create a wholeness out of all these lost galoshes and great loves. Not his characters, but Chekhov himself. In 1904, the first-night audience in Moscow was seized with a kind of crazed joy at this spectacle of blithe desolation, the applause was tumultuous, at the end of Act III there was practically a riot.
But my life is not a play. Down in the village beneath me, lost amongst the dozing pink tiles, the fig-trees and broom, a dog began yapping, a door slammed, and, jolted back to the present, I hoisted myself to my feet. A cheese sandwich wouldn’t go amiss. A sit with a book, one of Kester’s, in a comfortable chair. And at afternoon’s end an hour or two of playing with the jigsaw-puzzle of Kester Berwick’s life. With Arthur.
12
In the event, I couldn’t settle on any of the books on Kester’s shelves. They were either unappetizing (The Analects of Confucius) or dotty (The Astral Plane, for example, and Occult Chemistry). And then there were the books one feels like reading in general, but not at any given moment – Clive James, The Bhagavad-Gita and so on.
So in the end I did what I knew I’d do: I went upstairs, opened the drawer in the writing-desk and contemplated the snap of Kester and William. The whiteness of the wet limbs, the slightly awkward smiles, William’s delicate musician’s fingers splayed on the rock. And the Horus-eye tattoo, of course, the sky-god’s moon-eye inked in just below his right collar-bone. It made me feel as brittle as a wine-glass.
Everyone knows the Horus-eye, it’s magic: humped eyebrow, moon-eye ending in a dash, and underneath a curl and a vertical wedge. Seth (god of chaos and confusion) gouged it out in a fight with Horus, his sky-god nephew, while trying to rape him. But Hathor made it wax again, just like the
moon, so now – and you really feel this when you stare right into it – it stands for healing, for violation salved and soothed into wise wholeness.
I once asked William why he’d chosen this particular symbol for a tattoo. ‘No reason,’ he said lightly, ‘I just liked it.’ Could something so permanent, so rooted in dark myth, really be there for no reason? ‘None at all. Always looking for a meaning, aren’t you. It’s just a cute tattoo.’
But that was long after The Cherry Orchard and Clive’s Christmas party, nearly a year later, in fact, at a time when I felt free to comment on the skin beneath his collar-bone and he to joust with me a little.
It was bizarre: looking at this photograph, I felt as if I’d been followed here before I’d even set out. Stalked in advance. I put the photograph back in its envelope, slid out a sheet of paper and took up my pen. Something had to be said.
Rome. Nothing could be said without mentioning Rome. But what could I say? Which lies should I tell?
It was in fact our taxi-driver who had found the hotel. I’d only arrived from Perugia an hour or two before William’s train pulled in, so I’d arranged nothing, and with Easter just around the corner rooms were scarce. Eventually we found one in a sort of albergo on one of the upper floors of a dingy apartment block. Yellow and purple, with a window onto an echoing light-well.
William sank onto the bed and sighed. Time yawned. I knew it would, ever since that moment at the station, but I’d hoped to stop its mouth. At root, wasn’t that why we were in Italy? Wasn’t that what Italy was for? It was for dazing time so it wouldn’t notice us, for stopping it in its tracks with all the usual feints and ruses – mooching about Rome, popping over to Sicily, perhaps, where William had friends, time-travelling in art galleries and ruins, talking about the future, about Australia (but never arriving there) … It wasn’t supposed to be about filling in time, but about living as if there were none. That’s the kind of enchantment wooing weaves its web out of.
Corfu Page 5