Corfu

by Robert Dessaix

  ‘We’re just too different, William,’ I said eventually, dry-throated.

  ‘That’s what I like.’

  ‘You like fun.’

  ‘Sometimes. What’s wrong with that?’

  ‘I’d like to be friends, you know,’ I said, flashing him an impromptu smile.

  ‘I wouldn’t,’ he said. ‘I’ve got friends.’

  ‘What would you like us to be?’ I fervently hoped he wasn’t going to come out with another embarrassing word.

  He cocked an eye at me. ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ he said. ‘You’re the clever one, you think of the right word.’

  ‘We’d better go back and have our fish.’

  At some point between the fish and the promised rose-petal glikó – ‘a favourite of Kester’s, actually, he always has a second helping’ – a line of Emerson’s came into my dry-as-dust, analytical mind, an expression I’d found puzzling when I’d first read it: ‘beautiful enemies’. That is what Emerson said friends (in the most life-enhancing sense) should be to each other. All of a sudden it made some sort of cockeyed sense: friend as admired invader, desired (for the sweetness of capitulation) yet resisted, endlessly withstood. It was so much less syrupy, so much more dynamic, than ‘soul-mates’, ‘close friends’ and all the other words I’d been trying to choose between.

  I was about to try ‘beautiful enemies’ out on William while Greta was inside getting the glikó, when there was a dull thud, then the crash of glass on stone and a curious cracking sound, like a large flower-pot rolling over.

  ‘What in God’s name was that?’ I said.

  William cocked an ear. ‘I’ll duck round and have a look,’ he said.

  In the kitchen Greta was singing along to ‘Kiss Me, Kate’ on the record-player. ‘Why caaan’t you behave?’ There was a clatter of cutlery and dishes. ‘Oh, bugger!’ I heard her say brightly to herself. Perhaps she’d dropped a fork on the floor.

  I sat, thrumming on the table for a while, then went inside to see if Greta needed any help. The kitchen was empty. The rose-petal glikó was gathering flies on the sideboard. ‘So in love with you am I …’

  When William came into the kitchen a few minutes later to use the phone, I already knew. Some silences – well, after two Chekhov plays, I’d know – are much richer in meaning than mere words.

  After the funeral (the usual non-believer’s sort of affair: a few well-meaning speeches in the Reading Society rooms, Strauss’s Four Last Songs, finger food) Greta said: ‘It’s funny, isn’t it. Now the old bastard’s dead, I feel a silence has been broken. Dreadful way to go, though … across the flower-pot like that. Can’t bear to think about it. If he’d only waited another six months, he’d have died of cirrhosis of the liver anyway.’ Everyone remarked on what a brave face she was putting on it. There was a strong smell of furniture polish, dead flowers and dust.

  ‘Now perhaps you’ll find some peace, dear,’ Celia said to her gently, the remains of a mushroom volau-vent nestling on the pearls on her bosom.

  ‘Peace? That’s the last thing I want,’ Greta snapped. ‘Come on, William, let’s go home. I’m going to put on some very loud music and get drunk.’

  While Celia was talking to me about reincarnation, and the sound of Greta’s puttering Volkswagen faded into the larger cacophony of Corfu’s midday scramble, I suddenly had an idea. A distant Chekhovian beacon lit up. ‘Peace. Now you’ll find some peace.’ Sonya at the end of Uncle Vanya.

  ‘What Rudolf Steiner used to say whenever anyone brought up reincarnation – and my dear husband once wrote the most inspiring poem, which captured the essence of it… I could show it to you one day, if you’d care to see it…’

  ‘Celia, have you got any of Chekhov’s plays amongst your books?’

  ‘Chekhov? All of them, I’m sure. My husband knew Michael Chekhov, you know, when he was teaching down in Devon before the war. Very close, they were. Michael Chekhov was a follower of Steiner’s, of course – I expect you knew that. Had to keep it a bit hush-hush, naturally, when he went to America, but the fact is –’

  ‘I need to get hold of Uncle Vanya, Celia. Straight away.’

  ‘Well, let’s tootle on up to the house now, if you like, and I’ll see if I can lay my hands on it.’

  While Celia was looking for her husband’s poem, I rang William at Greta’s, Uncle Vanya in my hand.

  ‘How’s Greta?’

  ‘Not good. She’s gone to pieces.’

  ‘I suppose it’s suddenly hit home – she’s alone now. All those things left unsaid.’

  ‘No, it’s got nothing to do with that. It’s just that the cat’s been missing ever since that afternoon, no sign of him anywhere, and we thought he must’ve, you know, got the vibes and skedaddled. But when we got back, I started clearing away the broken pot and, well, found the cat squashed underneath it. He killed the cat. She’s inconsolable.’

  It didn’t seem like the right time to tell him about my idea for Uncle Vanya. It was a brilliant idea, and I had the feeling he’d take to it like a flash.

  ‘I’ll call you tomorrow. Love to Greta.’ Replacing the receiver, I glanced down and saw a bedraggled terrier sitting at my feet, black eyes locked wistfully onto mine. ‘Hullo, Terpsi,’ I said, kneeling to give her a pat. She swished her tail on the tiles, hoping for an intimate moment, but Celia was already advancing on me from the library, waving a small sheaf of typed pages in triumph. ‘Beyond time and space, in some everlasting Now, Through the Gateway of the Sun

  ‘Perhaps I could take it with me, Celia?’ It was entitled, I noticed, ‘The Divine Dovetailing’.

  ‘Absolutely. You need peace and quiet to drink it in.’

  In the event, I left it in the taxi – I was in a hurry to get inside and divinely dovetail with Uncle Vanya. There was that feeling again, the feeling I’d had on the first morning in Kester’s house: the white wax coating the writing-tablet, smooth, newly virginal, on my knees, and my stylus, needle-sharp, poised just above it, ready to write.

  PART THREE

  You said: ‘I’ll go to another country, go to another shore,

  find another city better than this one.

  Whatever I try to do is fated to turn out wrong

  and my heart lies buried as though it were something dead.

  How long can I let my mind moulder in this place?

  Wherever I turn, wherever I look,

  I see the black ruins of my life, here,

  where I’ve spent so many years, wasted them, destroyed them totally.’

  You won’t find a new country, won’t find another shore.

  This city will always pursue you.

  You’ll walk the same streets, grow old

  in the same neighbourhoods, turn grey in these same houses.

  You’ll always end up in this city. Don’t hope for things elsewhere:

  there’s no ship for you, there’s no road.

  Now that you’ve wasted your life here, in this small corner,

  you’ve destroyed it everywhere in the world.

  C.P. Cavafy, ‘The City’

  1

  ‘Why do we do it?’ It was one of those late night questions – not even a question. Scooping up another handful of sunflower seeds from the saucer on the grass, William lay back, hands under his head, and began to munch thoughtfully in the darkness. Snatches of Gershwin wafted round the corner from the kitchen where Greta was on the telephone to somebody or other. Bursts of laughter, whole sentences in throaty Greek. A tiny owl streaked out of the myrtles, bent on murder.

  It had been an exhausting evening – the first run-through of the whole play without a script, a dog’s breakfast of a performance, with everyone getting very snappish. ‘Why we did it’, however, I knew perfectly well. I’d known since I was eleven or twelve.

  One summer in the early 1960s, down the side of our house in Largs Bay, under the magnolia-tree by the fence, my father took it into his head to put up a car-port. In those days everyone was doing it: alongsid
e gracious old sandstone bungalows all over Adelaide – those showily prim but faintly sinister houses that bring to mind fine china, vicars and arcane perversions – men started erecting car-ports, often with a little shed at the back. They looked hideous, like gumboots on a debutante, but my brother and I were ecstatic. It meant we were modern. And having just been to a matinée performance of The Pirates of Penzance, I knew instantly what our car-port’s higher purpose was: a backyard theatre.

  It’s all in the curtain. Everything else – writing the play, the raids for props and costumes, the daily betrayals and clashes with puffed-up egos – is tumultuous fun, but it is that final moment, when the neighbours are sitting on cushions and chairs on one side of the curtain and we are poised with cardboard swords and a trunk of pebbles wrapped in silver foil on the other, that is alchemical. This is the moment, as my brother jerks the bed-sheets apart, when the mystery descends, and in the blink of an eye we are both ourselves (our tiny, backyard, childish selves) and not ourselves (miraculously beautiful, even good). The parting curtain has wrought a miracle, a collision of worlds, and this miracle is witnessed with rapt attention. Everything now matters – every trivial word, every crooked finger, every raised eyebrow – everything.

  Kester Berwick, as he’d told William, signalled this transfiguring moment with ‘a sweet gong’, at least in the early days at his studio performances in Adelaide when a curtain would have struck him as too bourgeois (as well as too expensive). Darkness and a gong did the trick for Kester with much more power.

  When my brother yanked the curtain closed on the final scene of mass slaughter that first Saturday afternoon (every child in the street lying stone dead amongst the grease-spots), I knew what wonder was. Needless to say, it wasn’t the kind of thing I could ever explain to my father, who in any case had spent the afternoon at the cricket.

  ‘We do it,’ I said to William now, ‘because it’s our way of making up for the utter ordinariness of our lives.’ It didn’t sound particularly pompous, because the impossible final words of Uncle Vanya were still ringing in our ears (‘We shall hear angels, we shall see all the heavens ablaze in diamonds, we shall see all earthly evil, and all our suffering, drowned in mercy which will flood the whole world’ … only the vicar had seemed unembarrassed by this gush of turgid claptrap).

  William said nothing. At this moment – lying at midnight on a lawn in the hills behind Corfu Town, his mind half in Russia and his whole young life a choppy sea of surprises – he probably wondered what on earth I meant.

  Who’d have thought that Uncle Vanya could ‘make up’ for anything? Of all plays, this gloomy little clutch of ‘scenes from country life’ might seem the least likely to make our everyday lives glow with significance, echo with meanings. Our little rounds of tea-drinking, crossword-solving, pruning, banal infatuations and visits to the hairdresser were surely beyond redemption. They hardly justified getting up in the morning. What light could. Chekhov’s cast of whining mopers throw on any of it?

  ‘Frankly, I think we should do a Coward or An Ideal Husband – something uplifting,’ Greta had said at our first meeting, once I’d explained what Uncle Vanya was all about. ‘This sounds about as interesting as cleaning the silver.’ Arthur’s Chilean friend, Alberto, who’d been a member of some university drama club in Santiago, thought we should ‘jazz it up a bit’, call it Vanya on Corfu and turn it into a series of satirical sketches on the lives of the island’s ex-patriate community. ‘It’d be a hit. You could even have a TV on in the corner showing Greek soaps – not too loud, of course, just as a sort of symbol.’ Yes, but of what? The vicar, to my dismay, thought this a splendid idea – he was thrilled by anything that was relevant to the community. Even William, who was stage manager as well as designer this time, seemed infected. ‘And instead of typhoid fever,’ he said, ‘it could be AIDS, say, that’s killing the peasants off like flies and in the end the professor could go off to London instead of Kharkov.’ And get himself a little flat in Putney? I began to droop.

  But this is the mystery of it: as this rag-bag collection of amateurs listened day after day to what Chekhov had written, and their lives seeped into Chekhov and Chekhov washed back over their lives, all talk of Greek soaps, bouzouki music and Noël Coward faded. It’s hard to explain it in words that don’t sound sentimental … but they made friends with their characters: Prue (she told me) waited all day for the moment to arrive when we would gather on Greta’s terrace and she could slip through the looking-glass into her Helen self, that languid, simmering, brooding, fretful self – a cat, not a woman, that eats and sleeps and stretches in the sun, drawing every man to stroke her … only to cuff him, claws at the ready. Even Bernie, I sensed, tearing over to Greta’s when her bookshop closed at six, dumpy Bernie, alive (it seemed to me sometimes) to nothing but migrating woodsnipe, was hungry every afternoon to be Sonya-Bernie – good, ugly Sonya-Bernie, pointlessly in love with Dr Astrov (Arthur’s Chilean), who in his turn is pointlessly in love with Helen-Prue, who loves no one and nothing except her own beauty, least of all her squeezed lemon of an academic husband (played by the vicar with devastating truthfulness). The excitement for Bernie was being allowed to stand up every evening in front of her friends and neighbours and say without blushing, ‘I am ugly, ‘I slave every day for nothing’ and ‘there is no reward for my goodness – except, of course, in heaven’. It desperately needed to be said – Bernie knows she’s just a frog in a puddle nobody even knows is there, but who could she ever say it to without losing every last shred of self-respect?

  Even Arthur’s glossy Alberto, I have to say, who spent Monday to Friday behind a desk in one of the consulates down in the town centre, seemed to enjoy paying hopeless court to Prue, hitting the bottle and complaining out loud to Vanya that they were the only two decent, cultivated men in the district, although they too had been ‘dragged down’ by the narrow-minded, philistine life around them and become as petty and vulgar as everybody else. There was a passion in his voice – in his whole body – when he talked about his failed hopes to stem the tide of ecological degradation in the district, or to find anything at all to do that wasn’t ultimately meaningless and a waste of time. It was the kind of passion that rarely animated the clerk from the consulate, although you could guess at it sometimes when he talked about Chile during his student days.

  It’s not the pointlessness of these provincial lives which makes the play dark, though, I’ve decided. In truth, they’re no more pointless, or petty and vulgar, than ours are. After all, most of the men and women in Greta’s living-room fill their days with sweeping the steps, filling the cat’s saucer, working to make others rich and aimlessly narrating the loose ends of their lives to people who can hardly wait for them to finish their sentence before launching into tales of their own. No, Chekhov’s characters don’t strike me as especially vulgar or shallow. What they are, surely, is utterly unremarkable, worn thin by the unrelieved ordinariness of their lives. Any fool, as Chekhov himself said somewhere, can deal with a crisis – it’s day-to-day living that wears us out.

  What makes this play seem so much darker, so much more stifling, than Three Sisters or The Cherry Orchard (almost a gay romp by comparison) is the complete failure of eros to light a spark of meaning in the gloom. Unable to conceive of any other kind of transfiguring experience (except, dimly, by God’s mercy, in the afterlife), eros is these characters’ only hope. They call it ‘love’, naturally, as they would, but in Uncle Vanya what else does ‘love’ mean but eros? There’s barely a glimmer of any other kind of affection, as far as I can see, from the first line to the last.

  Erotically, these characters’ lives come across as an empty plate. And Dr Astrov knows why. He could almost have been an ancient Greek!

  Living here on Corfu at the moment, how could I have any doubt that eros strikes us first through the eyes? We look – and are harpooned by beauty. (It would be fascinating to know how it works for the blind, but for the rest of us the eyes do their work f
irst.) Watching Helen idling on the swing and drifting like a sleep-walker through the house, Vanya and Dr Astrov lose their breath at her sheer beauty.

  Having looked, we then open our mouths and start spouting the most abject nonsense – about films we’ve seen, the weather, all the things clogging our souls and our minds. We join yoga classes and listen for hours to old Bob Dylan records with the object of our desire; we talk, we stroll, we go for drives, convincing ourselves that this beauty we wish to possess (and penetrate to its quick) is also lovable, brimming over with kindness, say, or wit or sensitivity. This is the playground love and desire tussle in – for a season. It quickly empties, as we all know, once grim-faced marriage marches in – especially in Chekhov.

  Dr Astrov has Helen’s measure, however. Everything about a person should be beautiful?,’ he tells Sonya (herself half-crazed for love of him). ‘The face, the clothes, the soul, the mind Helen is beautiful, there’s no argument about that, but… all she ever does is eat, sleep, wander about and bewitch us all with her beauty – she doesn’t do anything else. There’s nothing she has to do, others do all the work for her… isn’t that so? And an idle life is already a blemished one.’ Beautiful, but too obviously empty. Beautiful, but inwardly lifeless. Eros has nothing here to play with, and Eros (just a boy, let’s remember, according to the Greeks, and mischievous) likes to play. Alberto, with his own particular kind of knowing beauty, carries this scene off brilliantly.

  Sonya and her uncle, Vanya, are so unprepossessing that Eros hardly bothers to slide an arrow from his quiver. Their longings are pathetically unrequited. In desperation, poor Vanya claims to have leapt right over the top of eros and landed straight in the lap of friendship. ‘She’s my friend,’ he says to Dr Astrov, his rival for Helen’s affections. ‘What? Has it come to that already?’ Astrov sneers.