by Arnold Zable
Yet little seems to be known about the phenomenon of return migration. Each period of economic downturn—the 1890s recession, the Great Depression of the 1930s, the recession of the 1990s—has seen more migrants come home to Ithaca than leave. Others were driven by nationalist sentiment, and sailed back to Greece to fight in the Balkan wars of 1912–13. In recent years, many Ithacans have been drawn back by a desire to live out their twilight years in their childhood homes. And some have returned hoping to re-establish a sense of community, only to find they are condemned to remain in permanent limbo.
But not so Sugar. He continues to live in the moment, to revel in his fading dream. I catch sight of him at the village dance on Christmas Eve. He is one of the first to arrive, and cannot wait for the live music to begin. He sways about the dance floor, rehearsing his moves, until, finally, the band strikes up the first number, a tango, and he moves off over the floorboards with Maria.
He is of the old school, firmly in control. He guides his partners, many of whom tower above him, with a firm hand. He dances with the young, the middle-aged and the old, although it is the younger women he prefers. And if there are no partners, he dances alone.
‘We come, we see, and we disappear,’ he tells me between dances. This is the sum total of his wisdom, gleaned from a life that has straddled two worlds and an entire century.
Sugar is dancing towards the end. He weaves about the hall in a self-contained reverie. He sways from side to side but keeps himself afloat. His eyes are mute, his body propelled by a lingering will. There is no past, no future, no Australia, no Greece, nor oceans in between. There is merely the blessed present, a village band, and Sugar dancing on and on, towards the one common destination that transcends all times and places.
Ancestral Roads
The new year is approaching, and we are walking the ancestral road for the final time. It is three years since Lily died. Alexander, now four years old, is perched upon my shoulders, surveying the familiar route between the villages of Ayia Saranta and Stavros. After a few days of winter sun, the rain has returned. It catches us suddenly, mid-journey, and beats upon our umbrellas, interspersed by bursts of thunder. Yet he is not afraid and strains to get a better view of the lightning.
The road from Ayia Saranta to Stavros, a three-kilometre stretch, is the road which Alexander’s maternal grandfather, Athanassios, took in August 1938, when he set out for the port of Vathi, to embark on the voyage to Australia. We have walked it many times during our stay on Ithaca.
And Alexander sees it his way. He sits on my shoulders and surveys the world from the heights. He descends to speak to flocks of turkeys and goats, to greet a donkey who stands alone, tethered to the same spot every day; and to chase an emaciated cat over a white-stone perimeter wall while his parents converse with passers-by.
‘I knew your father,’ a black-clad widow tells Dora, Alexander’s mother. The old woman speaks about him with a gleam in her eye. ‘He was beautiful. A true levendi. His hair was combed back in waves. Like the sea under a light breeze. But he was a restless soul. And nervous. Always wanting to move on. We were not surprised to see him go.’
Stavros is the largest village in northern Ithaca. As the road curves into the main thoroughfare, we glance at Polis Bay. An ancient city, it is said, lies buried beneath its waters. Across the channel the mountains of Kefalonia evaporate into the clouds.
We stop for a drink, buy supplies, and return to Ayia Saranta, to the stone dwelling that great-grandfather Yanni built before the turn of the century. ‘The one-hundred-year-old house with cracks in it,’ Alexander calls it. The cracks disturbed him when we first entered the bedroom, the room where Athanassios was born. Perhaps he sensed the weight of ancestry, the encroaching decay. Or perhaps it was simply the cracks. We papered up the most glaring ones on the wall by his bed, and he slept soundly that first night.
Within this room we hear what the ancestors would have heard: the crowing of roosters, the braying of donkeys, the bells of sheep grazing upon the mountain slopes. And in this bedroom we see what the ancestors would have seen: the whitewashed walls, the wooden shutters, the four cypress beams supporting the ceiling, and the view through the two windows.
One faces the eastern hills, clad in olive groves and forests of cypress and pine. The trees give way to stunted shrubs and limestone ridges. A white-stone chapel glows on the heights in the late afternoon sun. It is aspro mati, the white eye, the guardian of the mountain, I tell Alexander. This is how it appears from a distance. On the higher ridge stand windmills that once ground the grain into flour. Their sails are long gone; the stones walls are giving way to the earth.
The second window looks out upon Mount Neriton, the highest peak on the island. It stands black against an amber sky. Hidden behind it, on the upper reaches, stands the monastery of Kathara; and beyond it, behind the mountain, the bay of Vathi. The entire northern island can be sensed from this window, while directly below it are rows of washing fluttering upon makeshift lines.
This is the room in which Athanassios’s mother passed away when he was ten years old. He awoke to find her dead by his side on Easter Sunday, and would forever associate her death with the chiming of church bells, the smell of incense, and the chanting of the village priest.
Her husband, Yanni, was in Melbourne at the time, absent from his three children. He returned two years after his wife’s death, and eventually remarried. Perhaps Athanassios never forgave him. Perhaps this is why he ceased to write to him for many years. Perhaps this was one of the reasons he left for Melbourne, never to return.
Or maybe it was the desire of a young man to create his own life, outside the confines of village life that lured him away. Or was it the stories he had heard from those who had gone before him, tales of villagers who returned from the great southern land with an air of worldliness and a knowing eye?
Or perhaps it has something to do with a tale about love denied; a rumour about a woman of Corfu, the sister of the village school teacher, whom Nonno Yanni forbade his son to marry. The island abounds in such tales. We will never know, because Athanassios died long ago. All we can do is speculate, piece together the fragments. And make the journey.
As for Alexander, the grandchild he never knew, he now revels in this room. After two months it is a familiar presence, a second home. He jumps on the patriarchal bed. He swings on the wrought-iron frames. He rolls over the blankets woven by his great-grandmother in intricate harmonies of ochres and blacks, crimsons and reds. He reaches up for the supporting beams plagued with wood-ant. And he becomes obsessed with abandoned homes collapsing in upon themselves.
There are many such dwellings on Ithaca, forsaken by families who made the voyage to new lives, or which were destroyed by the massive earthquake of 1953. As we walk the road to Stavros, Alexander stops at each one; and occasionally he leads us to a treasure. We enter an isolated cottage on the rim of a cliff. The tiled roof has fallen in. The broken windows are gouged-out eyes. The cypress beams that once framed it lie splintered on the earthen floor.
We pick our way through the ruins and come across a trunk, lined with Melbourne newspapers, dated January 1935. Within it there are photos of a husband and wife; and a framed photo of two brothers, in wide-lapelled suits, taken, according to the inscription on the back, in a studio in Melbourne.
There are ghosts on the ancestral road, and scattered clues to a veiled past. And there are many detours. One path rises towards Exogi, a village perched on a ridge overlooking the Ionian Sea. In the first decade of this century, Alexander’s great-grandfather, Dora’s maternal grandfather, Constandinou Kecatos, farewelled his loved ones and made his way from Exogi down this path. He descended along a well-worn route that threaded past a string of hamlets, vineyards and olive groves to the port of Frikes. On his back he carried a knapsack and a violin.
I have often imagined Constandinou’s journey. He left as the first droplet of sun flooded the roofs. He left at the first cry of a newborn lamb. He
left while the villagers were stirring, moving about their kitchens like sleepwalkers in search of light. He left with his face set, like a sail waiting for wind. And he left alone, to avoid the irritation of tearful farewells.
He glanced back at the steep lanes of stone steps that divided the village homes. For the final time he scanned the valley, the lower hamlets, the windmills upon the heights. The eight sails on each mill lay dormant against the rising light.
He moved between olive trees and vineyards, and solitary chapels shadowed by cypress groves. The village vanished into the mist, and for a moment his heart tightened. He felt a faint twinge of distress. Then he quickened his steps, and hurried down the steep descent towards Frikes Bay.
A rowboat conveyed him to a larger caique. He clambered aboard the vessel, and gazed at the caique’s wake as it moved out to sea. He was mesmerised by the wake. It churned with infinite possibilities. It hummed with the melody of movement and change. A journey that had begun with a descent was now moving on an even keel. He walked to the foredeck and watched the bow part the water before him. He returned to the wake that streamed from the stern like the aftermath of a difficult birth.
Constandinou was sixteen years old when he left. He never returned. And, it is said, he rarely talked about the island of his birth, the island that had nurtured him. But there is a small object that gives us a glimpse into the depths of his longing. A gold brooch. It is dated 1917, the year Constandinou commissioned a Melbourne jeweller to make it. We rediscovered it, three years ago, after Alexander’s grandmother, Constandinou’s daughter, Lily Varvarigos, passed away.
The brooch is carved in the shape of the island. It undulates with the contours of its rugged terrain. The roads are of silver, a mere millimetre in width. They swerve like snails’ trails between the principal towns and villages. The larger hamlets and towns are marked by rubies, the smaller ones by minute pearls. The main port of Vathi is a stone of turquoise. As for the mountain village of Exogi, it takes pride of place as a transparent diamond glowing on the northern heights.
We catch glimpses of the diamond as we ascend between moss-encrusted perimeter walls. The path is rarely used these days except by goats and sheep. Sometimes it almost disappears into undergrowth and desolate groves. We pass an abandoned bus. Alexander is mesmerised by the rusting carcass, the rotting tyres, and broken windows sprouting plants. The ascent steepens as we near Exogi. The blue dome of Saint Marina rises above a cluster of homes. We ascend a narrow flight of stone steps and we are there, wandering through the streets of the village.
Exogi was founded in the fifteenth century, a villager tells us. Ithacans gathered here in retreat from pirates. The ridge was a natural citadel. The first houses were fortresses, with small windows and thick walls. A maze of paths led to lookouts and lone chapels, or descended into wooded ravines. The lookouts were built to confuse attackers and provide a means of quick escape. This was an interim measure, the villagers thought. They longed to return to the lowlands and fish the Ionian Sea.
In time the heights claimed them. Out of its silences was born a love of mists and the clarity of cloudless days. Out of its remoteness was spawned a passion for music and wines fermented from home-grown vines. From its hand-hewn terraces there grew an abundance of crops.
Now there is not even a kafeneion here, but merely a village beginning to crumble into stone and rock. The wind hums through the trees. Far below us we see Ayia Saranta, a circle of stone houses cramped below the crest of a ridge. The church of Taxiarchis, ringed by the cemetery grounds, rises on the peak of the ridge. Its white bell tower is a beacon in the afternoon sun, while here, on the heights, there is a sense of desolation in a once vibrant settlement now in decline.
Yet there are signs of new growth. The dome of Saint Marina has been repainted and draws the passing stranger into its cool folds. We move by houses that have been restored, or recently built in the Venetian style. They will reopen in the summer when their owners return from distant lands for the hot season.
We ascend beyond the village, towards the higher peak. Exogi retreats below us, a scattering of houses that cling like vertebrae upon a spine. On the summit stands a chapel encircled by a grove of pines; and from the heights we can imagine what inspired Constandinou to design the brooch. We see the island from a bird’s-eye view, burning with late afternoon ambers and golds. The scattering of lower villages are intimate companions. The sea smoulders with a turquoise glow. The roads are tracks of light lit by a falling sun.
But Alexander is not so taken with the view as by the telecommunications tower that rises five minutes’ walk from the chapel. In his eyes it is a miraculous giant standing astride the mountain’s peak. He gazes at the pylons, the antennae and satellite dishes, and imagines messages humming between the isles.
In the evening we gather in the kitchen of the patriko and talk of the day’s walk. Grand-aunt Georghia fills in the details about journeys between Ithaca and lands of migration. So many men left for new lives in countries scattered about the globe. Others returned many years later, and seemed like strangers to their own families. Her own father had left for Melbourne at the turn of the century. He sailed back in 1912 to fight for his native country in the Balkan wars. When he was wounded he retreated to Ithaca, and married a village girl.
Georghia was the first-born child. Within a year her father had left for Australia again. He returned to Ithaca a decade later and stayed long enough for a second daughter to be conceived and born. Again he made his way to the great southern land. The island was too poor for him to make a living, he claimed.
When World War II broke out, he decided it was time to return. He sent a letter informing his family of his plans. Soon after another letter was sent by a close friend. Georghia’s father was dead, in Melbourne, of a sudden heart attack. He was fifty-six years old. Because of delays in the mail, the letters arrived in the village at the same time. ‘I don’t know which letter my mother read first,’ says Georghia with a chuckle, and not the slightest sign of regret.
And what of the women who stayed behind? To understand the women, we must come to know the rock-strewn terrain. To know the women of the island, we must know the mountain. It looms above the village, black against the pre-dawn light.
It was then that they would awake, and stir about the house. At least, this is how I have conceived it from our rambling conversations with Georghia. They assembled their ground sheets, picking tools, flagons of wine, jars of olives, tomatoes, goats’ cheese, and the bread they had baked the night before. They harnessed the donkeys, bent their backs and, with their children in tow, began the steep ascent.
Georghia was a child at the time, but old enough to carry a heavy load. The path curved by the cliffs of Afales Bay. Just two kilometres of sea separate Ithaca from Lefkada, a neighbouring isle. In the darkness the flickering pinpoints of light plotted the course of other villagers across the strait, on their dawn treks.
Georghia was still young enough to imagine and dream. She envisaged parallel treks throughout the islands, like mirror-image companions, divided by strips of sea. She pictured processions of ants, scrambling to their groves and fields in search of livelihood and sustenance, and the rhythm that would sustain them.
It was on the mountain that they found that rhythm. They walked with measured steps. They walked to the beat of their laboured breath. They walked beyond the final house of the village, flanked by sea and cliff. They climbed the stony path until it crested, by Thanio’s mill. Its hand-woven sails lay dormant at this hour; its lime-washed walls radiated a phosphorous glow. It stood on the upper ridge, a silent sentinel awaiting the break of day.
Just beyond the mill they would pause, in a clearing before a church. By now the sun was beginning its ascent. It was on the crest of the hill, at certain times of the year, that the two processions would meet, the women and the ascending light, like lovers at a prearranged rendezvous.
This is when they fully awoke. And felt refreshed. It could n
ot fail to touch even the weariest among them, this interplay of light and silence. They ate a hasty breakfast of bread and cheese soaked in oil, before resuming the journey towards the lee-side of the mountain.
The land was choked with stones and shrubs. Generations past had little choice but to reshape the mountains to their needs. They carved terraces into the slopes. They released the jagged terrain. On these artificial flats they planted olive and almond trees, crops of flax and wheat, low-slung vines and vegetable plots. The island breathed with the collective toil of ancestors.
The women descended step by measured step with the rising sun. Their voices rose, as if from a trance. They walked and talked until they parted company, and moved on to their family groves. They had no need of fences to mark the boundaries. They knew their trees as intimately as they knew their kin, and far better than their absentee spouses. When they reached their patch they paused for a sip of coffee, laid down the ground sheets, placed their wooden ladders against the tree, tied picking aprons around their waists, and set to work.
Georghia ascended into the upper branches. She secured the ladder by ropes to prevent it falling in the breeze. The others remained below, to pick up the olives as they fell onto the ground sheets, and to rake the fruit off the branches Georghia had pruned from the tree.
Their gaze was fixed upon the earth. And those who stood on the ladders had eyes only for the black jewels dangling from the twigs. But from time to time, in a fleeting glimpse, they saw a fishing boat at anchor, offshore, enclosed within the silver pleats of the sea. Or a passenger ship, en route from the west. And, for a moment, they thought of loved ones long gone, or imagined journeying themselves beyond this unforgiving terrain.
They were disturbing, these errant thoughts of absent spouses in unknown lands. They destroyed the rhythm of work. They were a waste of precious time. The women returned to the olives and to calculations about evening meals and dowries, village scandals, wayward goats. Each voice added to the growing chorus. The talk took hold, and the rhythm returned.