Corfu

by Robert Dessaix

  When Helen and the professor finally gallop off to Kharkov and Dr Astrov goes back to his country surgery, leaving Vanya and Sonya to rattle their abacus over their accounts in the half-dark, the greatest failure is not to have made no sense of their hum-drum, home-spun, woebegone lives, but to have seen beauty, wanted it and then found it lifeless, just a corpse.

  Needless to say, there’s a failure of the imagination in Uncle Vanya, as there usually is in Chekhov’s plays: nobody seems able to think beyond the family – or at least a mock-up of a family: two lovers or two loving friends. When this sort of set-up proves impossible, they all just fold their tents and vanish into the darkness.

  Is the darkness in Uncle Vanya unrelieved? Well, no it’s not, surely. Like our own lives, the play never reaches the purifying heights of tragedy. Nor, like our own lives, does it quite descend into soap opera or farce. It hovers irritatingly in between. We all know the feeling. What we can hold onto in it, however, is Chekhov’s astonishing ability to make small things greater and big things … not smaller exactly, but big for smaller, more human reasons. Drinking tea, loving a woman, saving the forests, playing the guitar, a botched operation, a thunderstorm, the pointlessness of everything … somehow or other (it’s a mystery to me, I can’t fathom it) all these things make space for each other, allow each other their own particular value, refuse to shout each other down. In life things may not work out like this, but they do in the play. Life, so to speak, may not be beautiful, but its translation can be.

  I tried to work some of these ideas into our discussions of the play, but I don’t think they made much impression. Alberto in particular was adamant that some things in life are utterly trivial and some things worth dying for, especially in Chile, and the vicar, for completely different reasons, agreed with him. In the end, my players came most alive when they were playing their version of Vanya in Corfu, with only the names sounding Russian, like a courtesy to protect the guilty.

  2

  I’m getting to the bottom of it (sort of) bit by bit. To the bottom of Kester Berwick, I mean. And therefore (and this is mystifying) to the bottom of something else.

  As soon as the sun hits the tiny terrace in front of Kester’s front door, I’ve taken to setting myself up there in a comfortable chair to skim through some of Kester’s manuscripts and cuttings. Up on the hill in front of me, half hidden by the cypresses, I can see that monument to failure, Sisi’s palace, while to my left the road winds down into the somnolent, white-washed village. Occasionally I fancy I can smell fresh bread on the breeze.

  Leafing, for instance, through the bound manuscript of yet another of his novels set on Lesbos, Harps in the Wind, I’ve found myself strangely drawn into his tale of a young Australian’s arrival in Molyvos and the upheaval it causes over the year that follows. (This is one of those manuscripts he’s produced by ‘tap-tap-tapping away’, as Arthur put it, ‘page after dreary page’.) He arrives in Molyvos on a whim, but not unheralded – half the village receives a letter from an admirer of his in London, urging a warm welcome for him: ‘I am sure that you will find him … unusually charming … Although an Australian, he … has various cultural interests (a little gauche perhaps, but so good-looking!).’ (This from a minor British diplomat whose cultural interests’ extend little beyond collecting Regency candlesticks.) To tell the truth, although absolutely nothing happens from the first page to the last – our hero comes, creates havoc and goes, he’s really a mockery of a hero – I feel more drawn in by this book than Head of Orpheus Singing.

  Some things do happen – a year can’t go by in a Greek village without something happening – but nothing that happens matters very much. There are in point of fact two murders, a suicide in imitation of Sappho’s, thefts, adultery, sundry disappearances, one stroke, several spells in prisons (both Greek and Turkish) and a spate of final farewells. (As usual in Kester Berwick’s books, everyone either leaves or dies. Quite Chekhovian in that regard.) It’s just that, related as it is in that rather prim, parson’s voice that seems to come naturally to my landlord, it’s all much of a muchness – rape, rheumatism, backgammon in Nick’s taverna, the rounds of the rubbish collector with his donkey cart, a saucer of syrupy jam and a cup of coffee with a neighbour, film night in the old mosque, stealing icons, hopeless love, madness, the priest’s frantic crocheting of cyclamen-pink doyleys – it all just goes into the mix. Nobody learns anything. Nobody changes. This Australian drifter whose beauty transfixes the village and then shatters it, just bobs along like a bottle on the tide, feckless, rootless, unanswerable for the commotion he’s caused in women’s hearts (and one or two men’s, too, with names like Julian and Mat) or for the little rents he’s opened up in the fabric of village life. Eventually he just heads off back to Australia to marry a shadowy figure called Rosemary whose only role in the novel up to this point has been to send him a packet of preserved apricots. Nice boy, no doubt about it – and quite an eyeful, according to the locals, when he sunbakes in the raw – but, like Helen in Uncle Vanya, lacking something a good life grows out of.

  What is so seductive about this chronicle of a year in Molyvos – especially for a reader sitting out in the sun, as I was, on a bend in the road in Gastouri, just the odd cat stirring, old Spiros with his walking-cane grunting a greeting as he hobbles past – is that it dawns on you as you read why whiling away your life in an insignificant Greek village is so life-enhancing for many foreigners – at least at first: here, magically, everything matters all of a sudden – a broken flower-pot, the priest’s wife’s gossip, your neighbour’s sprained ankle, the beauty of the mountains against the molten evening sky, a funeral, a drowning, fried sardines with friends down by the water … and also doesn’t matter. What matters most now, in a way that’s almost impossible in our great metropolises, is the quality of your relationship with others – your ‘friendships’, in other words, those moments you have every day in villages like Molyvos or Gastouri which are filled with affection, longing, kinship, good-humored care and conversation. It’s time-travel, really. It can’t exist at home, where your failure to live a significant life is advertised on the side of every passing bus. And no one in the little circle of foreigners in Molyvos will give it up without a fight.

  There’s sex, too, naturally. Foreigners, with their marvellous lack of serious family ties or obligations to anyone in the village, live in an enchanted space as far as the local fishermen and their sons are concerned. Sex with no consequences is miraculously just there for the asking. Indeed, one of the characters in Ester’s novel, Belinda (a married woman, but her husband is understanding) doesn’t even ask – she just snaffles it up: soldiers, fisher boys, the town crier – it’s immaterial to Belinda. She comes to a sticky end.

  Why is at first unclear. Why does Berwick punish Belinda so brutally? (She’s raped and drowned. No salacious details, no dramatic consequences – she’s just put a stop to.) After all, there’s no secret about it now – Kester Berwick, despite his penchant for psychic experiences and tidy marriages at the end of his books to women called Claire and Rosemary, obviously enjoys a romp with any muscled baker’s boy who happens to be passing as much as his Belinda did. What is his point?

  Little by little, delving into his stories and diaries (all shame has fled), I think I’m getting the picture. ‘Intimacy’ is a word I find my mind homing in on more and more often when I think about Kester Berwick. And I think he’s onto something. His point, I believe, is intimacy.

  In those three great loves of his, which Leila seemed to know so much about, as well as in the stories he’s spun and his chance erotic encounters – all those Nicks and Georges in his diaries, all those bare-chested sailors in his stack of snapshots – it seems to me more and more that what he’s been seeking is utter intimacy. It’s not a matter of the flesh or the spirit, as I see it now, or of moving between a night-time and a daytime self – not for Kester – it’s a matter of striving for intimacy where he is, and as he is, now, even as a rather scraw
ny old man in his eighties.

  I sense it, for instance, in the way his heroes stand apart from the crowd. It’s never people they shun, but the tribe. What they yearn for is a sudden blaze of recognition between two people (something the herd, as we know, instinctively distrusts). On several occasions in Molyvos, I now recalled, men who’d known Ester in his early years in Greece had remarked on how he himself had shied away from joining the gaggle of bright young things in the taverna down by the water of an evening to argue about the colonels’ coup or the latest issues of the Partisan Review. And just one bar of Theodorakis, who was strictly banned, of course, after the coup, ‘and he was out the door and scuttling back up the hill to his room like a frightened rabbit,’ according to an American painter I met out on the breakwater one blustery morning. ‘Tucked himself up in bed with Madame Blavatsky, I guess,’ he snorted. ‘Or a soldier boy from the barracks.’ He sneered into the wind. ‘Or both.’ Well, possibly – did it matter? In any case, I doubted that he’d fled up the hill to his room below the castle simply because somebody had played a few bars of Theodorakis.

  Intimacy is more, though, than just a burst of loving recognition between two people. I know it is. But what is it? Is it perhaps the experience we have sometimes – rarely, but we do have it – of growing transparent, softly penetrated to every corner by another’s knowing gaze? And of his or her being pierced and known in turn by our inner eye? (Yet we start with the outer). You can’t even think about intimacy without starting to muse on rawness, a kind of loving wounding of each other. So invulnerability (such as Belinda’s, in this manuscript I’ve been reading) is a sin.

  The narrator in Kester’s writing is so transparent he’s hardly there at all. He’s like a translucent membrane, filtering for our delectation others’ thoughts and actions. And as for Kester Berwick himself – well, in the diaries I’ve found stacked in cardboard boxes upstairs, he to all intents and purposes simply fails to exist. ‘Notis, 8 p.m.’ might be one entry. ‘Went to Cos.’ ‘Maxwell arrived.’ ‘Posted letter to JT.’ ‘Severe earthquake around midnight.’ ‘Krishnamurti died this day.’ It’s almost uncanny.

  ‘There’s no such thing as friends,’ one rather sour, although witty, French writer once declared, ‘there are only moments of friendship.’ I can now imagine Kester, after a thoughtful pause, nodding in reluctant agreement. The way he writes his stories and the way he seems to have lived his life both remind me of a deep-sea diver, stabbing at the enveloping darkness with his searchlight, marvelling at what he sees, drawing closer, striving to make sense of some freakish eel or squid, and then moving on. There is no great scheme of things (except, in Kester’s case, for a moment or two at a Theosophical Society lecture), just a roving illumination. The rest is darkness, and it doesn’t matter.

  Kester dreams of something more lasting than this – of ‘friends’, in other words, not just ‘moments of friendship’ – of course he does. So do his characters: this one dreams of a life in Sweden with a visiting Swedish yachtsman (and drifts off-stage, north-wards), this one of marriage to a wispy, apricot-chewing figure called Rosemary half a world away, this one of going ‘home’ to the bosom of the family. But these dramatic twists are no more believable than Ranyevskaya’s lover in Paris or Vera’s monastery – they’re plot solutions, not the stuff of life.

  After a scratch lunch, my mind will slowly start to fill with Helen-Prue, Alberto-Astrov, Bernie-Sonya, the vicar’s professor and all the others. As the sun inches westwards towards Italy, and the time for our rehearsal looms, Molyvos and Gastouri, with the barest of kaleidoscopic shakes, will merge into a mouldering estate in Russia, a weirdly Freudless, Jungless, Marxless world – with Einstein not even on the horizon. Yet word for word it’s this world now. By what sleight of hand? I begin to smell tea and thunderstorms, and my head is already echoing with smatterings of conversation, the vapid, meandering monitorings of undramatically failed lives. It’s a bog, not a play. I feel a rage to get to Greta’s and plunge into it. At any moment, I know, I’ll hear the putt-putt of Greta’s Volkswagen winding up the hill from the village to fetch me. Will it be Greta at the wheel or William? Given the events of a few nights ago, quite possibly William.

  3

  The vicar didn’t care for Maxwell Coop and (let’s be frank) Maxwell openly loathed the vicar. This gave a certain useful edge to our rehearsals.

  One sultry evening soon after Greta’s husband’s funeral, William and I had been walking up the hill from a restaurant down by the docks towards the stretch of cafés by the park where I’d once sat writing him that postcard featuring Achilles’ buttocks. Through the muggy drizzle you could just make out occasional yellowish shudders of lightning over Albania – you get a sweeping view across the straits deep into its menacing blackness as you trudge up that hill – and William and I were pretending to be talking about Uncle Vanya. In reality, of course, we were locked in battle – nothing rowdy, not a free-for-all – just a kind of scrimmage over love, over what was possible and what wasn’t. It’s exhilarating, this sort of sparring, a wonderful mixture of fierce sentiment and hostility, great gusts of recognition and jabs of pain. You love the way he talks to the waiter, eats his soup and uses words, you hate the way he’s never heard of Nietzsche and isn’t bored to death by cricket.

  All of a sudden, the woman walking up the hill ahead of us stumbled and fell sprawling face down on the pavement. Portly, and dressed in a not altogether suitable floral print, she was flapping feebly by the time we got to her, trying to hoist herself into a sitting position. Eventually we managed to prop her against the wall, murmuring the usual comforting things in English – ‘Are you alright?’ ‘How can we help?’ After a moment or two of silent heaving, she lifted a lightly powdered hand to her nose, felt the blood and groaned. Then, patting gingerly at her hair – a towering tangle of auburn curls, which looked strangely lopsided in the streetlight – she opened one heavily made-up eye, squinted at us, then said in a throaty baritone: ‘I’ll sue the sodding council if I’ve broken anything. This footpath’s a bloody disgrace!’ She winced and shifted onto her other hip. ‘How do you do?’ she went on, opening the other eye and offering us a limp hand. ‘I’m Maxwell Coop.’

  Maxwell, as it happened, lived just a few doors along the street in a lovely old four-storeyed house with blotched façade and green shutters looking out across the water to Albania. We each took an elbow and, staggering slightly, slowly walked the limping Maxwell to his door. William carried his handbag, which had a brilliantly coloured silk scarf wound around the strap. Two youths on a motor-bike jeered as they flew by.

  ‘Won’t you come in for moment?’ Maxwell turned to us with a smeared smile. For all the world you’d have thought we’d just driven an elderly fellow parishioner home from a coffee morning at our local church. ‘I’m sure I can rustle something up.’ A large brandy, probably, or a strong port.

  In fact it was Earl Grey tea with a slice of lemon and a little pile of Scottish shortbreads. ‘I’m just back from Tunisia, you see,’ he said, tossing his wig onto the dining-room table, where it sat glaring at us like a dishevelled cat, ‘and, needless to say, you can’t get decent English tea anywhere in Tunisia for love or money – and, believe me, I’ve tried both. Wherever you go over there it’s the same mint muck, don’t know how they get it down their throats.’

  Tunisia, it transpired, was where Maxwell Coop spent most of his time nowadays. ‘Used to work at the BBC, you know,’ he said over his shoulder, easing a gemstone necklace up over his head (short back and sides now) while he boiled the kettle in the kitchen at the back. ‘Radio drama, mostly. God knows who was listening – just the terminally ill, I should think, or pensioners who hadn’t the strength to reach over and turn it off.’

  ’How did you end up in Corfu?’ I asked, more polite than curious.

  ’One visits, one makes friends, fits in, comes again, and then suddenly one belongs. These days I prefer Tunisia, I must say – one has certain freedoms in Tunisia,
so to speak, that are disappearing here in Corfu – too many damned foreigners here these days, might as well be living in Berlin – but I still feel a great attachment to Corfu. Or at least to certain people here.’

  ‘Your friends.’

  ’Well, what else is there for someone like me to feel attached to?’

  I wondered briefly about the bazaars of Tunis and the sorts of jellaba-clad satisfactions they might provide from time to time, but looking at him as he turned, tray in hand, a stocky, middle-aged man in crushed frock and torn stockings, I could see what he meant.

  ’One has one’s music, of course, and one’s books, and I’m learning Arabic, and I write a little from time to time … just doodling, really … Have a biscuit, Fortnum and Mason’s, got them at yesterday with the tea. Subtle in a way the Greeks would never understand.’

  While we took our first sips of tea, Maxwell went upstairs to change. Not out of any obvious embarrassment, I should make clear, but more out of a sense that tea with two gentlemen callers required attire of a more understated kind. When he reappeared, now limping only very slightly but still casting aspersions on the Greek cuisine, he was transformed. Into the expensively upholstered armchair opposite us sank an utterly ordinary man in slacks and ironed shirt – not even portly, to tell the truth, just … a man like any other. I hardly recognized him. Neither fat nor thin, nor old nor young, just a square-jawed man with a sore-looking nose and a friendly, non-committal smile.

  ‘So tell me about you,’ he said, abruptly dropping the subject of stuffed calamari and swivelling, ever so slightly, to study William.