Tomorrow Brindisi. I wonder what time the first train leaves for Rome?
EPILOGUE
‘Farewell, my friend! And when you are at home,
home in your own land, remember me at times.
Mainly to me you owe the gift of life.’
(Nausicaa to Odysseus)
Adelaide, June, 1999
Five years to the day after that momentary crossing of our paths at the ferry-wharf, Kester Berwick died. At the bottom of Greta’s Christmas card that year, there was a brief postscript. ‘PS: Kester Berwick died in June,’ she scribbled. ‘A shame you never met him.’
Not so long ago, on my way back from a trip to Albania, where I’d been exploring Roman ruins on a bay just across from Princess Margaret’s helipad near Kassiopi, I took a room at the Hotel Cavalieri for a few days, thinking I might look up one or two old friends. Nothing had changed at the Hotel Cavalieri since that first Easter visit so many years before. There was even a vase of asphodels by the telephone at the front desk. In fact, after the surreal chaos of Albania, Corfu felt a trifle dull.
Under the arcades on the Listón, where I went to have a coffee for old times’ sake, I remembered the first time I’d sat there, trying to write that postcard to William – the one of the dying Achilles with the amazing buttocks. Since that moment in the olive-grove at the Big House, when he’d disappeared piece by blue-and-russet piece amongst the tree-trunks, there had been no sign of his existence. Not even two lines on a Christmas card from London or (a city plucked out of the air at random) Santiago. Sometimes, when I recalled that moment, it seemed as if the tree-trunks had dismembered him before my eyes. To scatter my thoughts I tried to read the newspaper someone had left lying on my table, but it was in Dutch.
I went back to my room and rang Greta.
‘Tell you what,’ she said when she came to pick me up the next morning, looking as chic as ever, although a little stiffer in the joints. ‘I’ll whizz you up to the British cemetery on the way out to Gastouri – you can pay your respects at Kester’s grave.’ I loathe cemeteries, never setting foot in one if I can help it, but Greta seemed so pleased to see me when she came through the doors of the hotel, so eager to make the morning special, that I hadn’t the heart to say I’d just as soon go straight to Gastouri.
It’s an almost gay profusion of tangled wildflowers and shady, deep-green copses, the British cemetery. It’s a delight to stroll in, bending in the strong summer light to read the terse reports of failure to make it safely home. Sailors killed in a naval accident, whole merchant families carried off in epidemics, diplomats, eccentric exiles, children’s nannies, and children, too, with names like Fanny and Hilda – hundreds upon hundreds of graves of Britons, going back almost two hundred years, who did not in the end take ship for home.
We scraped purple pansies back to read one gravestone (EDITH HESTER SMYTHE 1866-1924 BELOVED WIFE AND FRIEND) and then trampled through freesias and nasturtiums to peer at another (Maxwell’s, quite by chance – I hadn’t even known he’d died).
‘I’m sure I told you in a letter,’ Greta said, looking around for somewhere to sit with our thermos of tea and shortbread biscuits. ‘We all thought he’d gone back to Tunisia, you see, so nobody really noticed for weeks. It was Ashley, the vicar’s son (do you remember?), who found him in the end – terribly unpleasant business, the whole thing, what with the heatwave we’d been having and the awkward question of why Ashley had a key to the house. Awfully distressing for everyone concerned, especially Ashley. Sent home to England on the next plane, naturally.’ We sat back on our park bench in the shade, relishing the tea and buttery shortbreads. ‘Left him everything, though, so that was some compensation.’
‘Maxwell left Ashley everything?’
‘House, paintings, money – the lot.’ It was clear from the way she drank her tea that Greta thought this a rather civilized arrangement.
We talked for a while, as you do in cemeteries, about other people who had died or gone back to England in recent years – Martha, for example, not unexpectedly, during Christmas dinner up at the Big House, and Celia, quietly in her sleep not long after Kester. We moved on, as one does, from death to malaise of a more general kind – serious illness, divorce and financial ruin (the consul’s wife’s attempted suicide, Prue’s breakdown – she’d taken to walking the streets in her silk pyjamas – and George’s brush with bankruptcy) – and then, although both aware that something was being left unsaid (something shaped like a Horus-eye in my mind), we set off towards the back of the cemetery to look for Kester’s grave.
We found it eventually in a small clearing amongst the towering cypresses and holm-oaks near the back fence. On a mound overgrown with wild geraniums and a sprinkling of purple honesty stood a frail white wooden cross, barely knee-high. Painted on the cross in crooked black lettering was KESTER BERWICK 3.10.1903–29.6.92. No marble headstone, no gravel grave, just a small, green mound and a crooked cross. However, if, theosophically, his shade has taken note of his body’s last resting place, I don’t imagine it’s deeply offended. A little more dignity for his mortal remains would not have gone astray, obviously, but in life Kester Berwick made so little fuss over arrangements for the body that I can’t believe he’s much exercised now over the décor for his corpse. After death a Theosophist, particularly one with a Buddhist bent, has much more interesting things to be getting on with.
‘Do you think he had a happy life, Greta?’ I asked. It was a mindless thing to say but, after all, we were in a cemetery and at a bit of a loss for something to say.
‘No, I don’t think so,’ Greta said after a pause. ‘But I do think he had a very good one.’ We both stood quietly for a moment in the grey-blue shadows, thinking our own graveside thoughts, then set off without another word through the trees towards the gate.
In Gastouri everything had been freshly whitewashed for Easter, the black-clad old men were still sitting smoking on the street outside the general store, the smell of fresh bread still wafted on the air, and my house still stood in its unkempt garden at the bend of the road, empty-looking and a little gloomy, staring back up the hill at Sisi’s palace. We didn’t linger.
Kester’s third house, the one in which he actually died (at least, according to Agape, who lives opposite), is lost in a maze of old laneways behind the abandoned chapel. Brilliantly striped rugs were hanging out to sun on all the balconies along the street. The house itself, ramshackled and drowning in a sea of wildflowers and scraggly fruit-trees, looked just as melancholy as mine did. On the wall upstairs we could just make out where someone had painted over the words Om mani padme hum. Here, Greta told me, Kester had spent his last years, practically a hermit. Like old monks everywhere, he fastened onto rituals to get him through his days: the BBC news at nine, a stroll to the shop for some lentils or fruit before lunch on the dot of one, a short siesta, and then an hour or two of tinkering with the klavichord he’d built for himself out of old guitar strings and stray bottle tops. Late afternoon was reserved for conversation, while in the evening he might sit reading for a while with his cat (Celia had had Terpsi put down for him) or fiddle with his manuscripts, adding an adverb here in ink, pasting in a new paragraph there. Where was this life on paper now, I wondered? In a cardboard box at the back of somebody’s cupboard? Burnt?
‘Er ist in meinen Armen gestorben,’ Agape whispered hoarsely, as she handed me a tiny saucer of fig glikó. She’d seen Greta and me wandering around the abandoned house and hobbled across the laneway to ask us in for a glass of water and a taste of jam. Died in her arms? Really? Yes, she said, at lunchtime on a Monday. She’d gone over with a loaf of fresh bread for his lunch, found him lying on his divan, paper-white, he’d smiled at her, looked heavenwards – or at least towards the ceiling – and, as she bent to touch him, simply failed to be still there. She’d felt his spirit, she said, brush past her, ‘wie ein leichter Wind’.
‘Well, that’s one version, anyway,’ Greta said as we walked back down the
hill to the car, stepping around thin dogs blissfully stretched out in the sunshine.
‘There are others?’
‘Several. People see what they want to see, don’t they. An actor friend of Kester’s from Sydney told me he’d died in his arms in the hospital in town. Tied into his bed with strips of bed-sheet, smelling of urine and … well, it can be a smelly business, can’t it. The whole house smelt of pee for years, to tell you the truth,’ she said, offering me a little bag of dried apricots. ‘That’s partly why I never fancied, at any given moment, going to see him. Dreadful, isn’t it? Such a small thing, but so off-putting.’
After a couple of days in the hospital, Kester had made it clear to his friend that he saw no point in waiting around any longer, sighed twice, said ‘How beautiful!’ with the precision he’d been known for all his life and ‘went’.
‘He said it was a “warm death”, I remember,’ Greta said as we got into the car again. ‘I’m not sure exactly what he meant by that, but hearing him say it was a comfort.’
At the memorial service the vicar arranged some days later – rather bland because the vicar was not about to bring Madame Blavatsky or Gautama Buddha into the proceedings – several people spoke of vivid dreams of Kester the night he died. ‘Like Father Christmas,’ Greta said, as we bumped along the back roads through the hills towards her house, ‘he seems to have been busy for the first few hours popping down people’s chimneys all over Corfu to say goodbye.
‘And not only on Corfu, either. One old friend of his I met at the service, an old lover, I suspect – someone he’d, been very close to, anyway – had been sitting up in a train in Italy, somewhere between Milan and Bologna. All of a sudden, at the exact moment Kester died, he looked around and, instead of the usual stuffy railway compartment full of cigarette smoke and snoring Italians, he was inside a vast dome, he said, covered in sumptuous images of God and His angels, and whoosh! right past his nose, Kester was sucked up out of nowhere straight through a hole in the middle.’
‘Did you believe him?’
‘Why not? Compared to the sort of thing the vicar rabbits on about every Sunday, getting sucked up through a dome outside Bologna seems quite unremarkable.’
We swept into her driveway. Ahead I glimpsed the dappled pink walls of her house through the oaks and myrtles. And the lush lawn, dotted once more with anemones. And the walled terrace. As empty, and as full of ghosts, as the stage of a seaside theatre between seasons.
‘Let’s have a spot of lunch,’ Greta said, throwing open the french windows, ‘and you can tell me all about Albania.’
‘Grey of body and grey of soul.’ That’s what an Englishman I met that time in Molyvos said when I mentioned Kester’s name to him. I’ve never forgotten it. He’d known Kester years before in Molyvos while researching a book on magic in the ancient world. It was a cruel, dismissive thing to say, but I was already growing accustomed by then to a certain male distaste for Kester Berwick. The more I think about this man I never knew, the more convinced I am that men like that Englishman are looking at Kester through the wrong lens.
Tacked to the wall of our bedroom in North Adelaide, for instance, right beside the window with its peaceful, unspectacular view over limestone cottages and the cathedral spires to the hills beyond, is a black-and-white photograph of a double-bass riding a bicycle. It’s quite famous, I think – at least, I’m sure I’d already come across it somewhere before I found it in an album in a second-hand shop. I bought the album just for this picture. It’s one of Henri Cartier-Bresson’s, taken in Serbia in 1965. In the middle of a bare landscape (just a scruffy tree or two, some dusty bushes and a few unremarkable hills in the distance) a comically enormous double-bass, slewed across the back of a man in a suit, is riding off down an empty, stony track away from the camera. It’s all in subtle shades of grey, but it always strikes me, when I first open my eyes and see it there on the wall each morning, like an abrupt burst of laughter at a funeral. The crafted beauty of this instrument suspended against a desolate background, the reasoned rigour of this erotic shape in that bleak wilderness, the dandyism of this lone man in a suit on a plain country road, the clownishness in an unsmiling landscape, the gendeness against the stones, the tottering ride into oblivion, the triviality made unforgettable … in a word: a delicate instrument in a stony place. Yet on that dusty road in Serbia that day in 1965 nothing was actually happening. Now there’s an eye! What wizardry!
Up goes the blind beside the double-bass each morning – snap! – and, blinking in the glare, I lean out across the geraniums to see what I might see.
Robert Dessaix
Night Letters
Every night for twenty nights in a hotel room in Venice, an Australian man recently diagnosed with an incurable disease writes a letter home to a friend. In these letters he reflects on questions of mortality, seduction and the search for paradise in deeply life-enhancing ways.
‘Night Letters is a wonderful adventure, crafted with imagination and wit. It is a privilege to have been invited along’
CANBERRA TIMES
‘Night Letters is exhilarating. The goads, the teasing, the question marks fired up into the atmosphere make any passive reading of [it] quite impossible’
SYDNEY MORNING HERALD
‘To come across a genuine literary masterpiece is rare but Night Letters is the real thing’
VOGUE AUSTRALIA
‘Dessaix captivates from the very first sentence’
WEEKEND AUSTRALIAN
‘It’s a journey more exalting than a trip to Venice. This is your ticket’
AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW
Robert Dessaix
(and so forth)
In this award-winning selection of his short fiction, essays and journalism from the last decade, Robert Dessaix offers insights into the many selves at play behind the mask of well-known broadcaster and author of Night Letters.
Dessaix the traveller, thinker, linguist and self-confessed dilettante muses in these pieces on an astonishing array of subjects from Orientalism to Aboriginal spirituality, from the art of translation to the nature of creativity, from covetousness to gay fiction, from Albanian tourism to adoption and the suburban family; and in so doing reveals the workings of a brilliant, if unorthodox, mind.
Winner of the 1998 Colin Roderick Award
‘Robert Dessaix is the kind of thinker who likes to chase an idea around the room and see where it lands. In this selection we find Dessaix at his most playful and thoughtful’
Michelle Griffin, Age
‘The literary achievement is breathtaking. It is comparable to Nabokov’s Speak Memory or to the iridescent memoirs of Cocteau’
Peter Craven, Sydney Morning Herald
‘It is, quite simply, grand’
Morag Fraser, Australian Book Review
Corfu Page 24