The Fig Tree

by Arnold Zable

  Emerging from St Vincent’s for the last time, late on a Thursday morning, on 20 October 1994, just hours after Lily passed away, I am struck by the contrast between the stillness that has been induced in us after three weeks of vigil, sitting alongside a dying woman, and the hurried steps of passers-by, the drone of traffic careering along a busy road.

  And the thought rears up: what is the destination of all this movement? Where are we headed for in this dash through life? Why is it that it takes a brush with illness and death to make us think about deeper values, about fig trees and ancestral roads, about loved ones and the fragility of life?

  Time becomes more significant when someone is dying. It slows to a more tranquil pace. Imminent death is a reminder. Each day may be the last, so we live it as if it were the first. We become aware of our breath. We see the shadows fall across the wall. We follow the subtle movement of the light. We hear the ticking of the clock. We are aware of sound: the breathing of the patient in the next bed, the rush of the traffic on the street below. We register the cough that reverberates through the ward. We follow the movement of a fly upon the wall. We notice that the wall needs a new coat of paint. We note the leftover crumbs on a plate.

  And when we descend into the street between visits, we see the world with new eyes. We glimpse the driver clutching the wheel, obsessed with time, focused upon the destination, and not the moment. A passer-by glances at his watch. Ten metres later, he raises his wrist again. And he reminds me how often I glance at my own watch. We note the dramas of the night, the ambulances slowing to a halt, the bandaged man helped into casualty, the middle-aged woman with the blackened eye.

  We come to savour the ritual of the walk, from the street to the hospital entrance, from the worn carpeted foyer with the statuette of St Vincent de Paul, surrounded by a clutch of children. We move from the foyer onto the linoleum floor. We come to know its patterns, the alternate squares of black and grey. As we wait for the lift, we are conscious of other visitors, and are drawn into a common concern.

  When we re-emerge into the night, we see a younger brother of Lily’s arrive; and we are reminded we have not seen him for so long. We stop to greet each other. We sit down on the wooden bench beneath a fluorescent light. And we talk.

  ‘Lily was a good woman,’ he says. ‘She always served the family. She was ten years older than I. She looked after me when I was a child. She always looked after people.’ There is space to receive his words. And time to touch his hand.

  ‘Yes, she was a good woman,’ I say. She could put anyone at ease. Yes, it was Lily’s special quality. And the quality of her house and garden. They cast their spell, even on my mother. In her ageing Hadassah rarely ventured out of the house. Dora and I once persuaded her to drive with us to Parkdale. Hadassah was then eighty years old. We drove via Beach Road. Hadassah had not glimpsed the sea for many years.

  As soon as she entered Lily’s house, Hadassah was at home. The front garden did not have a fence. Plants grew to the edge of the footpath. The small drive was covered in shade. The weatherboard made her feel she was treading on common ground. The rooms smelt of old curtains and well-trodden carpet, of comfort and vintage years.

  We sat in the kitchen, of course. Lily by her cup of coffee, Hadassah by her black tea. I recall them sitting side by side. They looked like sisters. On both, a hunch in the shoulders, and the same resigned smile. And on both the look of women whose lives encompassed oceans, yet who were still in touch with a village past. Working women, who were once factory girls. Women who had both lived serving others.

  Roza passed away on 18 October. Just four days later, on Saturday 22 October, her body was on a plane, accompanied by loved ones. Her final wish was being granted. Roza was headed for Greece to be buried in the village where she was born.

  Lily was cremated. At her wake Dora recalled her first visit to Ithaca. She was twenty-four at the time. She arrived in autumn. The figs were ripening. They seemed to be everywhere— beside island roads. On mountain slopes. On the foreshore. In village squares. She had never seen figs like these in Australia. They were fatter. Sweeter. A deeper purple. Black almost. Ripened by the Ionian sun. There was no need to make fig jam. All she had to do was reach up, pick the fig, split it open and spread it directly onto buttered bread.

  Ithaca. It was there, throughout the ceremony. In the eulogies. In our remembrances. In the Cavafy poem that we recited as the coffin was lowered: ‘When you set out on the voyage to Ithaca, pray that your journey will be long, full of adventure, full of knowledge.’

  It was obvious. Lily’s ashes were buried in Melbourne, but to find her we knew that we had to return, once again, to the ancestral isle.

  Dancing towards the End

  Zachariah Moraites aka Jack Morris aka Sugar lives in a dream. At the age of ninety-four he follows the same route, twice a day, seven days a week—come hail, wind, winter frost, or sun. At ten in the morning and four in the afternoon he makes his way down the steps of his two-storey house to the green Skoda he has driven for twenty years. He hoists himself into the driver’s seat, backs away from the wall, and begins the long descent from Ayia Saranta, on the northern heights of Ithaca.

  For three kilometres he meanders past olive groves, forests of cypress, white-stone cottages, and abandoned homes crumbling into rubble. Above him, on the highest ridge, can be seen Exogi, the village that Lily’s father last saw as a sixteen-year-old boy, on the morning he set out on his journey to Australia. And disappearing behind him is Ayia Saranta, the village that Lily’s husband Athanassios was raised in.

  The Skoda lurches around the sharper bends, occasionally nudges a perimeter wall, miraculously dodges stray goats and passers-by, and rolls down the final descent into the village of Stavros. Sugar brings the car to a halt beside the kafeneion. With determined little steps, arms akimbo, his body bent forward in a walk that is but a fraction short of a stagger, he enters, orders a coffee, and loses himself in a game of patience. His cards are worn, the numbers and suits barely visible, but he will not play with any other pack.

  Sugar is small and getting smaller. He wears a baseball cap with the word ‘Australia’ embroidered across the visor. He set sail for the great southern land in 1924, and returned to Ithaca fifty-two years later. All this now appears to have been a mere wink in a passing dream. Yet he can enumerate all that he created and left behind: the five houses he built, the ten shops he bought, ran, and sold; the various coffee shops scattered across the city, the milk bar, the fish shop, the restaurant near the beach. ‘I left my mark,’ he says with pride.

  Yet never once did his yearning for his native island cease. So he returned—‘because it was my home, my history, my birthplace’. In his ageing, Sugar’s life has been reduced to pithy comments and an ironclad routine. For an hour he sits in the kafeneion, hunched over the cards, reshuffling the pack, weaving in and out of conversations with ancient friends, before wending his way back home where his wife Maria awaits—as she has, day after day, for many years.

  Maria is a gentle soul who keeps her feelings to herself, except for an occasional glimpse. ‘I carry Australia in my heart,’ she tells me, as she taps her chest. Unlike Sugar, she lives with regrets, surrounded by mementos of the country she had come to love. On the wall hangs a photo of Uluru struck by lightning. Jagged streaks of silver blaze over a monolith glowing red. On the mantelpiece, a boomerang occupies centre-stage. Maria serves coffee on a tray bearing photos of the city she had once lived in for so long. In the middle of the tray there is an image of a tram.

  ‘This is the tram that would take me home, every night, from work,’ she says. In fact, it is one of many trams that conveyed her to the various houses she shared with Sugar in suburbs scattered throughout their adopted city.

  Maria recalls the exhilaration she felt when she first set foot in Melbourne, some time in 1947. In contrast to Ithaca, which had been impoverished by years of war and civil conflict, and by the demands of village life, Australia was a lan
d of space and infinite horizons. In the months after her arrival, she walked the streets, elated. She had been elevated, overnight, from a village girl to a lady of the city. It was an affair of the heart that was to persist for the twenty-eight years she lived in the promised land.

  Maria’s dream ended abruptly in 1975 when she returned to Ithaca with homesick Sugar. And, for over two decades now, she has lived in the house in which she was raised, surrounded by ancestral presences she has never been able to escape.

  This is the fate of many first-generation migrants. It is the curse of being torn between coming and going, between new worlds and ancient longings. It is the state of mind in which one ponders, ‘Where do I belong? Where is my true home?’ It is the state of spirit in which one oscillates between confusing dreams and an uncertain reality. There are many variations upon this theme, countless tales that are aching to be told here, on this island in the Ionian Sea.

  Take, for instance, eighty-five-year-old Cassie Kostopoulos. She lives alone in the lower end of Ayia Saranta. Her house sits opposite mountain slopes that were once alive with toil and laughter. On clear days the neighbouring island of Lefkada glistens like a stage backdrop, while the crumbling windmills on the higher ridges of Mount Marmaka flash fleeting reminders of the pre-war past.

  Cassie’s husband died a decade ago. Her three sons have long departed for lives of their own. She has done her duty. But at night she lies in bed, sleepless, counting the hours, taking accounts. She interrogates the past with a stubborn regret. Again she returns to that defining moment, in 1926, when her parents took her back to the island, from Sydney, to be brought up by an aunt, while they returned to Australia to lead their own lives. She never saw her father again. He died in 1945. And when her mother returned, in 1961, she was a stranger. To this day Cassie cannot understand why her mother left her on the island. To this day she feels stranded.

  Cassie was thirteen years old at the time. Over seven decades later she can recall in photographic detail those early years in Newcastle, where she was born, and in Sydney, where her parents managed a fish shop. She describes the epic grandeur of the harbour, the neighbourhood streets, the rooms of her childhood home. She recalls the countless penny’s worth of chips she wrapped in newspaper. ‘I gave my customers lead poisoning,’ she laughs. She talks of her kindergarten and primary school years as if they took place yesterday.

  And she continues to oscillate in her allegiances. Her teenage years on the island were good ones, she insists. She recalls the celebrations, name-days, and picnics accompanied by the village band. There was Christos on violin, Mikhalis on lute and Vasillis on the clarinet. They would dance from sunset to sunrise: waltzes and mazurkas, tangos and polkas; and the graceful tsamikos and the sirtos—circular dances in which the villagers were enclosed in a communal womb.

  There was La Romanza cafe on the road to Stavros, the place to go on a Sunday afternoon, the men and women dressed in their elegant best. And the boat excursions to neighbouring islands, with flagons of homemade wine emptying under turquoise skies; and there were each other’s homes, with the doors always open.

  ‘The old ways were good ways,’ says Cassie. ‘We carried our best shoes on celebration days, and left our walking shoes at the door. At weddings, the bride would be led from her house through the village streets. The musicians headed the procession. After the church service the procession continued to the groom’s house. The groom’s mother stood at the door to welcome the bride and guests. Again we danced until dawn, and well into the next day. We knew how to party. We kept an open house. Yes, here it was better,’ she says.

  Yet a moment later she is lamenting lost opportunities. She retreats to her memories of a childhood lived on the opposite edge of the earth. She cannot appease her yearning for what could have been. She cannot help but grieve for the life that was stolen from her in her youth. And she longs for a sense of self that she believes will never be realised here, at the nether ends of the village.

  ‘I am restless,’ says Cassie. ‘By day I wait for night, and at night I wait for the day.’ She counts the hours. She is taking stock. She confronts the phantoms of her past with an exacting interrogation. And always she returns to that defining moment. It can be seen in a life-size photograph. It occupies pride of place on the living-room wall. It is the one image that remains of a mother and daughter, taken on the eve of Cassie’s abandonment.

  The mother sits in front. Her eyes are alight with promise. They seem to gaze at a more hopeful, distant world. The daughter stands behind her, in a white pinafore with a matching bow in her hair. The girl’s eyes are stoic, accepting, with just a hint of fear. The left hand hangs limply by her side. It is the right hand that gives her away. It clutches at her mother’s right shoulder. It grasps at one last chance. It tightens at the thought of impending separation; it is the gesture of a young girl who must accept her fate.

  ‘Sometimes I still feel like a stranger here. I have to keep my deepest feelings to myself. In Sydney I felt free. In the village it is stenos kiklos,’ Cassie says. ‘A narrow circle. A small community. Tight-knit. Everyone knows everyone, but no one knows who you really are. I have never felt fully at home here. Both my parents are buried in another land.’

  This is how the pendulum swings. While some do not feel fully at home back on the island, there are others who have never felt a true sense of belonging in the new world, in far-off Australia. This is, after all, Ithaca, the island of ancient voyagers. Nostalgia is the key sentiment that threads through blind Homer’s account of the travails of Odysseus as he makes his long way home to his beloved island. For ten years he fought in the Trojan wars, and for another ten long years he roamed the seas, stalked by adverse winds, driven from one disaster to the next, until at last the gods allowed him to return to the island that had nurtured him, and the kingdom over which he once ruled.

  The archetype persists. Nostalgia, ‘the pain of longing for the return’, is what draws many Ithacans back to the island of their birth. They are lured by the remembered scent of mountain thyme, the tinkle of goat bells, and the image of that sunlit ribbon of road which curves back to childhood.

  It was nostalgia that drew Andreas Anagnostatos back home after ten years in Melbourne. Andreas was the youngest of three brothers. His eldest brother Hector migrated to Australia in 1924. A second brother, George, left in 1937. Andreas resisted the call. ‘You should come and know another country,’ Hector urged him. Finally, Andreas relented. He worked as a barber, first with his brother George in a beachside suburb, and later in a booth opposite the city’s largest department store.

  Andreas’ nostalgia cuts both ways. When he first returned to Ithaca, he longed for Australia. He was surprised at how strongly he felt. So he re-migrated, felt happy for a while, but was again overcome by longing for the island. Four years later, he returned for good to the family cottage in the village of Platrythias, and rediscovered his childhood love of writing. Andreas began to record the traditions of Ithaca. He scoured the bookshops of Athens for rare prints, sepia-toned photographs, and travellers’ accounts of journeys in the Ionian islands. He assembled albums of his own photos that depict Ithaca in its many guises, and he published two books.

  The books are the culmination of a life-long romance. There are descriptions of wedding rituals and burial rites, the lyrics of funeral dirges and travellers’ laments. There are songs of the sea and Ionian ballads, lovers’ serenades and peasant chants. There are lists of proverbs and sayings, home remedies for ailments, and recipes for festival days. The pages are illustrated with photos of wine and olive presses, grinding stones, wooden cartwheels, and countless other artefacts of the Ionian past.

  Andreas lives off the main road that runs through the northern villages. An unpaved path descends to his stone cottage. It squats in a hollow, a cool grove beneath the heights. Outside, sheep graze in darkened paddocks, while dogs howl at the approach of an inquisitive stranger.

  This is when I love to visit him, l
ate at night. He can always be found then, bent over a book, or listening to a Schubert sonata, a Mozart concerto. He serves me tea and Metaxa brandy, and shows me his latest photograph, or yet another rare book. Or he imparts another piece of information: ‘Do you know that the first taxi on Ithaca, a model-T Ford, appeared in 1926? Do you know there have been snowstorms on Ithaca? I have photos of them. Have I told you that the windmills of the Ionian Islands have eight sails, while elsewhere they may have ten?’

  Andreas has transformed his nostalgia into knowledge, and his house into a museum. The rooms are filled with period furniture, and the shelves are stacked with books. He sees Odysseus as his first ancestor and Homer as his mentor. He attends conferences on the works of the poet, and keeps a zealous eye on the excavations that continue to sift the Ithacan earth for evidence of its Mycenaean past.

  As for Melbourne, it remains on the wall, in the form of framed photos and lithographs, and in an extensive collection of shells. The shells remind him of the bayside beaches along which he once strolled. ‘It will always be a part of me. But finally I had to choose. And I chose home.’

  There are countless reasons why people migrate, and why they return. On the island of Ithaca, there are many ageing voyagers who once lived in Australian cities or outback towns for a year, a decade, a half-century or more. Ithaca was one of three islands, with Kythera and Kastellorizo, from which many of the earliest Greek immigrants made their way to Australian shores. They left to escape their impoverished villages, or the lingering effects of war.

  On Ithaca, Cassie’s mother worked as a young girl in lime kilns. She sweated in room-size ovens fuelled by wood fires. Perhaps this is why she felt an aversion towards the island. Others were driven by a sense of adventure, or a desire for independence. Some were obliged to fulfil their family duty and to join relatives in far-flung lands.