Silence.
‘No, I’m sorry, someone is holding us back.’ Seb was sounding brisk all of a sudden. ‘I can feel it in my body. Someone here is refusing to come down out of his head.’
Silence, then a cough or two.
‘Sorry, I didn’t catch your name.’ I opened my eyes. Seb was staring straight at me. I didn’t speak. ‘I truly regret this, but I must ask you to leave. We can’t merge while you’re amongst us. I’m sorry, but you’ll have to go.’
I clambered to my feet in a lightning-strike of anger, knocking William and the gypsy sideways. Without looking at William, I headed for the passageway. Alex was staring at her feet with what I’m convinced was a distinctly unspiritual smirk at the corners of her lips.
Striding off down the front path, I kicked the tricycle savagely into the pansy-patch, stumbled over a plastic duck by the front gate and fled into the fog. As usual after any encounter with the self-consciously spiritual, I felt an immediate desire to behave very badly indeed.
12
Quivering just above my toes one morning, as I floated, shivering, in the sea at Molyvos, was a quick, white butterfly. So painfully small in that vast arena, so startlingly fragile, so momentary in the face of that sea’s timelessness. A flicker of silvery white against the blue and it was gone. Back to its quinces, probably. A fluttering, summery note from nature’s orchestra tuning up.
Molyvos, as summer wakes, puts on new clothes. It’s not just a matter of figs ripening, or hornets buzzing at the thistle-heads, swifts shrieking, blue-grey flax flowers and delphiniums dotting the roadsides. The light changes, becoming burnished, doors and shutters are thrown wide open, the sound of bouzouki bands practising for the season peppers the night, restaurant courtyards are swept, painted and dotted about with geraniums. Everyone is sprucing up. The boys on their motorcycles, revving their engines, are getting that look in their eyes. The hordes are coming – the Dutch, the Swedes, the Finns, the Germans – they’re all packing their shorts and suntan oils up there in the fog and rain, and dreaming of Molyvos. Time for me to go.
Bit by bit my friends were already dribbling away. Elvira and Andy left soon after their encounter with Aphrodite, making for some ceremonial site in the Andes of Peru – ‘spiritually very dynamic’, Elviraclaimed – to take part in a midsummer get-together of goddess theologians from all over the planet. Then Leila and Yanni went back to London – they disappeared without saying goodbye, leaving me wondering if the phone-booth romance had suddenly lost its zing.
One afternoon while I was walking out near the Delphinia (the first hotel to be built in Michael Goutos’s reinvention of ancient Methymna), I was startled to see strolling (just as aimlessly) towards me down the road my Sapphic abductor of nearly two weeks before, in a sun-hat, twirling a yellow poppy. She too was about to leave.
The conference itself, she said, had been infinitely boring – ‘I can’t remember a single thing anybody said’ – but highly productive in terms of invitations to give guest-lectures, publishing opportunities and new alliances against deadly enemies. ‘Networking – it was great for networking,’ she said with an American smile (genuinely warm, but calculated).
‘And what did you speak about?’ I asked, as we stood by the roadside in the humming silence.
‘Well, my paper was on just one of Sappho’s poems, possibly her last, we can’t be sure. It’s one of the most beautiful poems ever written. Almost Chinese!’ And she laughed.
’Would I know it?’
‘Do you know Greek?’
‘No.’
‘Then you don’t know it!’ It was n’t said mockingly, but was deeply meant.
‘Well, tell me about it.’ I felt quite enlivened.
She glanced at the watch on her slim, brown arm. ‘Tell you what: let’s sit on the beach for half an hour and look at the sea. Does that sound good to you? I have to leave at four, and I can’t think of a nicer way to end my stay. The sea and Sappho.’
So, while I stared at the red and blue caïques bobbing on the horizon – a scene Sappho herself would have found utterly familiar – my still nameless friend from Massachusetts, after collecting her thoughts, began to tell me about Sappho’s perfect poem.
‘Déduke mán a selána,’ she began softly, sifting pebbles through her fingers,
‘kái Pleiiádes mesáide
núktes pará derket óra
égo de móna katévdo.’
‘It sounds beautiful,’ I said.
‘Do you think so? What do you hear?’
I was stumped. Was this a test? ‘Perhaps you should let me hear it again.’ So again I listened to the trickle of simple syllables. Déduke mén a selána …
‘Well,’ I said, wishing I’d said nothing, ‘it sounds liquid, like water trickling over stones. What does it mean?’
‘That’s the problem, isn’t it. That’s what I meant when I said that, if you don’t speak Greek, you don’t know the poem. And that’s what I was talking about at the conference. Oh, I can give you a version of it in English, if you’d like me to, but it partly means what you just said: it’s partly about trickling away. All those vowels, so few consonants. Yet, as soon as I try to tell you what the poem says, you’ll hear my mouth fill up with lumpy English consonants, you’ll lose the sense of something flowing.’
‘I wish you’d have a go.’
‘Gone is the moon, gone
the Pleiades, it’s past midnight,
and time’s flashing by, yet
I lie alone here.’
Was that all? It sounded so ordinary. Moon, stars, midnight, time passing – hadn’t I heard it all before?
‘You’re disappointed, aren’t you?’
‘A little.’
She laughed. ‘I’m not surprised. You see, what’s miraculous about these lines in Greek is that they’re at once so limpid – even you could hear it – yet so tightly, so seamlessly knit. Let me put it differently: they’re like a drop of water on a leaf. Now, that’s something you’ve seen many thousands of times, and, if you paid attention in your physics class, you know that a droplet on a leaf has the shape and colour it has for a myriad of complex reasons – all sorts of tensions are at play on the waxy surface, and there are angles to the sun to consider as well. Yet what could be simpler, more familiar than a drop of water on a leaf? Well, when you speak Greek, and read this poem of Sappho’s, it’s like becoming instantly aware of all those angles and tensions, as well as of the everyday beauty of the droplet on the leaf – simultaneously. So it’s a wonder – there’s no other word.’
We sat in silence for a moment or two. I felt touched by an unexpected melancholy.
‘There’s more to it than that, of course. Somehow, in just sixteen words and thirty-two syllables (eight a line), Sappho has been able to make a distillation of sadness sound almost like the jaunty plucking of a lyre. It’s about stillness – lying alone in contemplation – as well as about movement – towards old age and death, presumably, but also, from the wider world’s perspective, a new day. It’s about desire, clearly, and waiting – it’s drenched with the anguish of hopeless waiting – yet only one tiny, insignificant word, móna, ‘alone’, hints at this. Sappho has taken plain, worn-out old móna, and somehow, by uttering it at just the right instant, perfectly angled to the poem, she’s turned it into a knife in the heart.
‘It’s pitiless and tender at the same time, this poem. As is the sea we’re looking at now, I suppose. Or those swallows up there – are they swallows? Swooping about above the old olive-press, killing things. So, when I recited those lines to you in English … Gone is the moon, gone the Pleiades, it’s past midnight … and so on, I knew I wasn’t reciting Sappho’s poem for you.’
‘Still, it was worth doing.’
‘Oh, yes. Absolutely. An impossible task, but none the less worth doing.’
‘I really have to speak Greek.’
‘Yes, I’m afraid you do.’
‘I still don’t know your name,’ I
said awkwardly, as she stood up to go.
‘And I don’t know yours, for that matter. Shall we leave it that way? We don’t really need to know, do we?’ It was said with a kind of knowing warmth I found touching.
The deserted beach, as the sun dropped behind the hills, was the perfect place to sit and think about setting off for home myself. Or, at least, Corfu. Sometimes you just know that everything has been said, the conversation is at an end and it’s time to move on. In the morning I’d be packing my bags.
13
Chugging up over the rise to Sisi’s palace two days later, I really did feel as if I were coming home. There was Gastouri, tumbling away down the hillside into the valley below, and, as I walked down to Kester’s house from the bus-stop outside the palace, the postcard sellers and waiters in the kiosks around the entrance greeted me, old Spiros, edging his way up the hill on his walking-stick, called out Kaliméra (and a few other things I couldn’t understand), the neighbours cat rolled over to have his tummy scratched – I was home. It’s so comforting, in a small village like Gastouri, to have all the little things you do remarked upon. Even Kester’s disarmingly ugly little house on the bend of the road seemed to be watching me approach with a kind of benign somnolence. And how much greener everything was since I’d left! The trees and bushes all seemed to have thickened and grown lusher, while the roadside was a mass of white daisies.
I pushed open the door and surveyed the kitchen. Nothing seemed to have been touched. No unfamiliar odours, no half-drunk cups of coffee. William seemed to have left no trace. Even in the bedroom upstairs nothing at first betrayed his visit. Krishnamurti still lay face-down on the bookshelf, The Iliad and a couple of Kester’s unpublished novels were still on the bedside table just as I’d left them. It was only when I went over to the desk by the window, where I’d left an unfinished letter or two and a shopping-list that my eye fell on the sheet of paper covered in William’s unmistakable looping scrawl.
It was cheeky. If it didn’t make me sound like a school-master, I’d say it was even impertinent:
Φíλε μου [Phíle mou – ‘Dear Friend’ – even I knew that – cute.]
I’ve missed you. Its all my own stupid fault, I suppose. I didn’t really know what I was doing. Still, your habit of disappearing into thin air at the drop of a hat can make things a bit awkward at times.
Are you OK? I’ve spent a few days here (Agape let me in), but didn’t feel quite right about it, with you not even knowing I was here.
All the same, seeing your things around the house – books we’d talked about, clothes I’d borrowed, notes you’d written to yourself – memories came flooding back. And that was good, really. Made me a bit sad as well.
I’ll hang around for a few more days, just in case you come back and we can meet again. It would mean a lot to me.I’ll be at your friend Greta’s. She’s amazing.
Love,
William.
So Greta, must have told him I was there. There’s another Australian staying here at the moment – he’s theatrical as well, not a cobber of yours, I suppose? No, I’m sure he won’t mind if you move in for a few days, he’s gone to Lesbos, I could just see her at the door, reassuring him. Probably then whisked him away to show him off to the gang.
So what was I expected to do? Ring him at Greta’s? Have it out? Perhaps he’d just show up. I was trapped.
In every corner of Kester’s house that first day back I seemed to see a ghost. The dank, bare rooms of my early days there were filling up with presences I could now put names to. The very air in the rooms was softening, taking on a kind of melancholy warmth. It wasn’t just Kester Berwick who was becoming flesh, although, needless to say, his home-made bookshelves were now a babble of recognizable voices: E.M. Forster’s novels, Clive James’ memoirs of an Australian childhood, Annie Besant and the host of Theosophical pamphlets, slim paperbacks on Buddhism and the Tao, The Odyssey, Michael Chekhov’s guides to actors – they all now fitted in. Not just tattered spines on unvarnished planks, these books were Kester’s companions on his journey from flat, suburban Adelaide – I could picture its stony, low-roofed dullness, baking in the sun, so clearly I was almost there – to this house among the straggly oaks and olive-trees of Corfu.
That portrait on the wall beside the window – nothing out of the ordinary, just a yellow and brownish picture of a rather gawky young man in an open-necked shirt – must be of Alan Harkness. The photograph in the drawer of the young man in shorts sitting on a stone wall with his arm around a blonde young woman in long trousers must be Alan, too, somewhere in America. Too painful to frame, but too precious to throw out.
Was the smooth-faced angel in the suit – with, incredibly, a lace handkerchief peeping out of his top pocket – perhaps the Austrian boy Kester had so taken to just before the war when, leaving Alan to his wife-to-be (and the overpowering presence of Michael Chekhov), he’d found a niche for himself in the Tyrol? Was this Raymond?
Werter Herr Kester Berwick! the letter began – I’d seen it that first day, rifling through his desk drawer, but had paid it no heed. But here it was, typed on a failing typewriter on a single, thin sheet:
Ihren überaus lieben Brief haben wir vor einigen Tagen erhalten …
We received your extremely kind letter a few days ago and are happy to know that you still think of our dear Raymond. How sad you will feel, however, to learn that Raymond is no longer living. He fell in 1944, on 3rd August, in Lithuania. His commander wrote that Raymond had received a bullet-wound to the head …
He often spoke to us about you and said how well you were getting on. We often had the impression that he was very much attached to you. How happy he would be to be able to read your letter, but fate decreed otherwise …
I skipped the next bit about how difficult life was in Austria – although there was not a shadow of complaint.
Lieber Herr Kester, wir schicken Ihnen ein Photo von Raymond …
Dear Herr Kester, we’re sending you a photo of Raymond, which he had taken on his last leave. In this way you too will have a last memory of our dear Raymond. Should your path bring you once again to our beautiful Tyrol, be assured that you will find here a heart-felt welcome.
It would give us pleasure if one day we might receive an answer to this letter.
Here we close, wishing you with our whole hearts all the best for the future.
The Muigg family.
The letter was written from Innsbruck on 26 April 1946. It was, I thought, an astonishing letter for its time and place. Perhaps I had misread it.
A curious letter too: it was not at all clear who had fired the bullet into Raymond’s head. Could it have been Raymond?
It was just a few years after this frail message reached Kester that John Tasker had wandered into the light of those hurricane-lamps in post-war New-castle. The snapshots in the deskdrawer of yet another lanky young man on the steps of a weather-board house, on a bed in a room hung with tribal masks, on a motorbike under a clothes-line in a suburban backyard – these must be of John. I was beginning to recognize the coltish features.
This was no old man’s cabinet of curiosities, not any more. Whatever it was, it was alive, its tendrils snaking out to pull me in.
That night I dreamt I’d gone downstairs to the kitchen to make a make a cup of tea. But when I opened the door and stepped inside, I was in Java. The kitchen, which appeared to open out onto night-shrouded gardens choked with vines and palm-trees, was seething with brown bodies – children, old women in sarongs, sharp-eyed men in cotton shirts with knives at their waists, some cross-legged on the floor, some huddled by the open windows, talking in low voices, some smoking, some slipping in and out of the garden. Gusts of laughter swept across the crowd.
Suddenly I saw why: where the sink had been there was now a huge glowing screen, across which flew the hard, black shapes of shadow -puppets. Voices shrilled from behind the screen in jagged, foreign syllables. Everyone rocked with laughter. A gamelan crashed. M
adly, although the words were incomprehensible, I understood every one. It was Three Sisters. And word for word it was my life. And every time I spoke, there were hoots of laughter, gales of it. Almost swooning from the heat and press of bodies, I seized a knife, strode across the squirming bodies to the screen and slashed it from top to bottom. The gamelan fell silent. The voices vanished. In the torchlight behind the screen, lifeless cut-outs in their hands, sat Kester in his overcoat, as prim as a princess, Sisi, Leila, the Austrian soldier, Krishnamurti, Alex, my wife, John Tasker, my witch and William … eyes fixed on me, a flicker of evil on their lips.
‘Get out of my house!’ I roared in the silence.
But there was no house. Just a dark garden, with white-clad figures slipping away into the blackness. And it wasn’t Java after all. It was Adelaide. And Kester wasn’t Kester, he was my mother, dressed in the beige pants-suit she always wore when I was a boy, although even then she was far too old for it. ‘Happy birthday, darling!’ she said. ‘It’s so good to have you home at last.’ She was smoking one of the du Mauriers that killed her.
14
Next morning, finding my cupboards bare, I caught the bus down to Corfu Town to browse in the market. Markets, like fairs, parades and possibly theatre foyers after the performance, allow us to loiter deliciously with intent, staving off the need to trudge on into the future, stiff-backed with purpose. Intent is not purpose – a purpose can be satisfied. In a market, time starts to move in circles, losing its thrust, although Corfu’s vegetable and fish market, ranged along either side of the dry moat of the New Fort, soon pushes you back out into the new town and the business of life.
Under striped awnings near the bottom end of the market lay trays of cockles, crabs, octopus and shrimp, which I was engrossed in inspecting when I suddenly heard a familiar voice.
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