by Arnold Zable
And this is how it is now, seven decades later, every morning, since the picking season began. We leave the house at dawn, and move over the village streets, sometimes on foot, or on the back of cousin Rigo’s utility. We ascend the same paths that Georghia climbed as a girl. We pass the final house, which stands several hundred metres beyond the village. We move onto the unpaved road that overlooks Afales Bay, and come to a halt at the family grove.
Even though the task is not as urgent as it once was, the work remains harsh. The face is turned to the earth, away from the sea, and again the eyes are focused on the black fruit that glint in the autumn sun. We pick from ladders, or on the ground, from branches that Rigo, armed with a chainsaw, has cut down in advance. And there are exhilarating moments. There is the daily sight of crimson shadows lifting from the sea, the bleating of newborn kids, the glide of a watchful hawk. There is the midday meal of hollowed-out bread filled with onions, feta cheese, and tomatoes soaked in olive oil.
And there is Alexander. He joins us mid-morning, every day. He runs amok among the discarded olive branches. He jumps on aunt Georghia, the old workhorse, when she sits down for a cigarette and a moment of respite.
‘There are too many rocks here, they are making my feet sore,’ he complains on the first day. ‘We should collect all the rocks of Ithaca, and throw them into Melbourne,’ he says on the second. By the end of the week he is moving with greater ease. He darts off to play in the stone goat-house that stands on the edge of the grove. The goat-house is an extension of the rocks; and the goats are stones in motion. Alexander hides in the shadows and charges out with his fingers pointing from his temples in lieu of horns.
With each passing day the land reveals something more of itself. It takes time to absorb the details, to see the order emerging out of apparent chaos. It takes time to come to know, through the daily encounter with the one particular grove, the subtle variations, the individual shapes of each tree.
A well-tended olive tree radiates power and tenacity. It grips the soil with gnarled roots, and holds fast to the steepest of inclines. These are the sentinels of the mountains. For centuries on end, the same tree can yield its black harvest. Its spent branches are recycled as winter fuel, the leaves become fodder for the goats, while the pruned branches are burnt and their nutrients released back into the earth.
Georghia knows each tree in the grove. There are ancient giants, first nurtured by remote forebears, and ‘young’ trees, merely seventy years old, planted by her late husband, Uncle Dimitri, Athanassios’s older brother. And in planting them he created the possibility that descendants, such as his niece Dora from distant Australia, would one day return to pick the fruit of his foresight.
But the picking seasons are coming to an end, says Georghia. She walks the grove and sighs. She knows the families who once lived in the ruins that litter the way. She points to the house being restored by the icon painter from Athens, and the boarded-up home now owned by an English traveller.
Georghia is the keeper of village tales. All is eramia, she says. Desolation. Our children are leaving. There is no work on the island. They return only in the summer. Many of the olives have been abandoned and left to run wild. Each year their fruit shrinks further. Each year another tree becomes barren through neglect.
To know the women of the village, come to the kitchen window of the patriko. Observe the two-storey house on the opposite side of the road. The house exudes warmth since it faces the rising sun. It is a well-kept home. The shutters are newly painted, the garden trimmed, the balcony recently washed. White ceramic vases line the fence. And every morning, throughout the picking season, Mena, our neighbour, leaves for work.
She carries a ground sheet, a bucket, a chainsaw, picking combs, pruning saws, and an apron woven upon her own loom decades ago. She is fierce in her aloneness. And determined. She walks with sure-footed steps over the uneven ground. Her skin is the colour of ripe olives. She exudes a quiet certainty. Her husband, the village postman, died just months ago. Her grownup children have moved to Athens. She has had her share of ups and downs, but she is far from broken.
Mena disappears from sight and we see her again, hours later, as we return from the groves. She is on her ladder, still picking, alone. She has filled a dozen hessian sacks with the fruit. One magnificent tree, centuries old, is fully shorn. Soon she will gather her tools and make her way back home. With black eyes, and clad in widow’s black, she hauls sacks of black olives against a darkening sky.
Mena is fully at one with the Ithacan earth. Yet, with a mere change of clothes, she would not be out of place in the middle-class homes of the city. She is an avid reader, a lover of literature, a refined presence. We have seen her, Dora and I, in the Athenian flat where her daughters now live. There was not enough work, or company, to keep them here in the village.
At night Mena brings us her latest batch of halvah. She talks with Alexander about the stray kittens that they jointly care for. They shelter in a cracked ceramic vase that stands against the front wall of Mena’s house. In her presence Alexander feels secure. She is self-possessed, and strong, yet still able to nurture with love.
To know the women of the village, listen now. It is siesta time. The wind hisses. The shutters rattle. And grand-aunt Agelo walks the same unhurried steps, regardless. She makes her way to the katoi, the large cellar beneath our room, the underbelly of the house.
She unlocks the wooden entrance, uncovers the loom, sits herself upon the wicker chair, and continues where she has left off. She threads the yarn, adjusts the loom, and sets to work. She weaves bedspreads, towels, kerchiefs and tablecloths. We can hear the weave and weft from our room. It lulls Alexander to sleep.
The moments become hours, become weeks, become years. The storms erupt and recede. The seasons turn and return. And still she weaves. The menfolk have come and gone, lured by dreams of great riches. The children have grown up, and have their own offspring. Agelo is on the eve of her seventy-fifth winter, and still she weaves.
She is beyond hope, beyond expectation; a moon-faced nonna whose stout legs convey her through the familiar streets of the village. She can walk them blindfold: from the house to the all-purpose store, from the store to the olive grove, from the grove back home to prepare the midday meal. She rocks the cradles of grandchildren, knits their sweaters, milks goats, fries her son’s latest catch of fish, listens to domestic squabbles with a detached ear, returns to the katoi. And weaves.
Always the same rhythmic pace, the same bemused smile, the same paths that stray only as far as the mountain slopes to round up the animals, to collect herbs and wild horta, mushrooms and berries. She carries them back to the house she has lived in since the day she arrived as a bride from the adjoining island to be married to a man many years older, a member of the Varvarigos clan. Now she is clad in widow’s black. As too is aunt Georghia. They are bosom friends; two rotund widows living out their years in the village.
Alexander was overwhelmed by their appearance when he first met them. We had arrived in the main port of Vathi just hours before. We ascended from the boat by taxi, towards the mountainous north. For thirty minutes we drove on the cliff-side road. The island of Kefalonia rose like a giant over the narrow straits. We drove through the village of Lefki, and curved around the final sweep into Stavros as the sun dipped into the sea. This is the demarcation point, where the north truly begins. We drove the final stretch in silence and arrived in the village on the cusp of night.
As the taxi pulled up they were there to greet us, Georghia and Agelo, Alexander’s two remaining great-aunts. They stood side by side, dressed in black upon black, from head kerchief to worn shoes. They opened out their arms, stretched them towards Alexander, and shrieked, in unison, ‘Agapimou! My love.’
‘No agapimou,’ Alexander replied.
And ran away, in tears, from the black witches. But they knew the ways of children well. They let him be. And within half an hour they had him in their arms, their great-neph
ew, the latest born, the most recent addition to a world-strewn clan.
Now, months later, he stirs from his sleep, opens his eyes, and hears the same rhythmic sound that had lulled him asleep.
And still aunt Agelo sits by the loom, in the katoi, and weaves.
We descend into the katoi for a long overdue clean-up. Georghia leads the way. She is on a mission. The katoi smells of rancid oil and dust. We cart out cypress beams and cobwebbed lanterns, rotting olive sacks and picking aprons, coils of wire, stale fishing nets, the abandoned toys of three generations, boxes of hand-woven rugs and blankets, and the wooden loom.
The objects blink in the morning sun. Alexander runs about them. He is ecstatic. The katoi is a heaven of forgotten days. The procession continues for hours. We transfer hand-dyed yarns and cloths, a dormant motorbike, framed pictures of saints obscured by dirt and cracked glass, and trunks girdled by steel hoops. The trunks are lined with Melbourne newspapers dating from the turn of the century and beyond. The katoi is being cleansed of ghosts, unfinished business; we unravel piles of decaying correspondence that had winged between distant worlds.
Against one wall there stands a row of plitharia, ceramic vases glistening with olive oil. We leave those in which the oil is clear, and we transfer the rancid oil to smaller drums. In the bottom of one vase there are drowned rats, perfectly preserved in the lower depths. They had eluded the rat poisons and traps, only to meet a more horrific death. Alexander stares at the rats. He follows me across the road and watches as I bury them.
By the third day the katoi is clear. We haul back the loom, the plitharia, the trunks, and grape-threshing bin and trunks. The katoi is now a museum. And we can see how large it is, spacious enough to substantiate a family tale that Dora first heard as a child in the various houses she lived in by Melbourne’s Port Phillip Bay. It is a story that longs to be retold. It has about it the feel of legends.
Once upon a time, on the island of Ithaca, there lived two brothers, Dimitri and Athanassios. The boys were inseparable. They would descend from their hamlet of white-stone homes on the northern heights, to the port of Frikes, where they spent their days on the waterfront, among the fishing caiques that lined the quay.
In time they began to accompany the fishermen on their daily forays beyond the bay. The sea was their grand romance, their siren’s call. When Dimitri was seventeen years old and the younger brother fifteen, they cleared a space in the katoi and set to work.
They cut the cypress beams under a waning moon, as this, they were told, was the time when the sap began to dry. They emulated the boat builders of Lefkada and Vathi, and used the tools fashioned by generations past. They sawed the logs into submission and laid the keel eight metres in length. They clad the hull and deck with planks of pine and caulked the gaps between them. They crafted the masts from cypress and cut the sails from cotton woven in the katoi. They built it in the shape of a trehadiri, the most revered of Ionian caiques.
And when the boat was complete, as if awakening from their dream, they realised that it was too large for the entrance to the katoi. The boys gritted their teeth, withstood the laughter of friends, and cut open the entrance until it was large enough to release their prize. So it was a caesarean birth which saw the boat emerge into the light of day. And it was the priest who christened it Brotherly Love, for he had seen how inseparable the boys were and had observed their love of the sea.
On the day the boat was launched the whole village accompanied them to Frikes Bay. Brotherly Love balanced precariously on a horse-drawn cart. Roosters crowed, donkeys bleated, children tagged along, and villagers waved from the balconies of homes that lined the way.
It was the first of several boats the brothers sailed to convey freight and passengers between islands upon the Ionian Sea. They ranged as far south as the island of Zakynthos, and north to Corfu. They passed within a breath of Albania and the Adriatic coast. They sailed east to mainland Patras and Piraeus, where they berthed between freighters loading cargoes destined for distant ports. And they came to understand the Ionian as an intimate friend. They knew its winds and currents, fishing grounds and remote coves. They knew the locations of its treacherous rocks and the warning signs of imminent storms.
‘White squalls’, Ionian seamen called them. They could erupt out of the clearest of skies. They would swoop down from the mountain peaks, spurred on by sudden winds that swept away the sun and replaced it with a dark foreboding. All that the brothers could do was lower the sails, spark the engine, and run before the squall for the safety of the nearest cove. Or turn back and motor out to the deep, to ride out the storm.
It was the younger brother, Athanassios, who began to long for more distant horizons. Ithacans had returned from remote parts of the world with tales of riches and consummated dreams. At the turn of the century Ithacans had captained ships which plied the Mediterranean, the Danube River and the Black Sea. Others settled in Africa, Asia and the Americas, and the great southern land on the edge of the world they called Afstralia.
Ithacans possessed a hunger for adventure, and were skilled in the maritime arts. Like their symbolic forebear Odysseus, they were prepared to venture out upon unknown seas.
When Athanassios left the island, he was twenty-five years old. He followed those who had gone before him to Afstralia and in Melbourne he found work in shops and cafes. He extended his carpentry skills and built houses and shops. And as the war was coming to an end, he married Lily Kecatos, the daughter of Ithacan immigrants who shared his love for the ancestral isle.
Yet he was restless, frenetic, forever building boats in the backyards of his various homes by the sea. He was only content, as his youngest daughter Dora recalls it, when he was out at night upon Port Phillip Bay. As a child she would watch Athanassios descending from the house to his riverside moorings, carrying his nets. He would throw the nets onto the deck, clamber on board, untie the ropes, and motor out in the dying light.
Dora watched until the solitary lamp receded into the dark. She would lie in bed, and imagine him, steering the boat, casting his net, a man adrift in an alien sea. And she would see him return at dawn, from the bay to the river mouth. He would throw his nets onto the shore, sort out the night’s catch, his body at ease, his mind at rest.
Upon the bay he was master of his own fate, whilst on shore he was on less certain ground, a man with a strange accent, battling to establish himself, to be accepted. His one constant was the sea. It was his calling, and the source of both his elation and regret.
Athanassios died in 1970. He was fifty-eight years old. And no matter how much he had longed for it, he never returned to the Ionian Sea. Thalassa is the Greek word for sea. It is a word that evokes epic voyages and ancient yearnings. And it is the word that inspired our own journey, with Alexander, a grandchild Athanassios was fated never to know.
This is how our own voyage was conceived. I was walking with Alexander on my shoulders beside the Patterson River, in Carrum, at the river mouth, where it flows into Port Phillip Bay. Carrum was the suburb in which restless Athanassios set up his most enduring home. We walked past the banks where Athanassios once kept his boats moored against makeshift jetties. Alexander, who was then three, pointed at objects on one of the vessels moored by the banks.
‘What are they?’ he asked.
‘Ropes.’
‘What are they doing?’
‘They are keeping the boats by the banks.’
‘Why are they doing that?’
‘Without them the boats will float away.’
‘And what are the chains for?’
‘They are attached to the anchors.’
‘Where are the anchors?’
‘Under the water.’
‘What are they doing there?’
‘Without them the boats will float away.’
Blue skies. Boats bobbing. The scent of diesel fuel and brine. A mild sun. A river flowing out to sea. And a sudden recognition of what is so easily forgotten. This is a part o
f Alexander’s ancestry. His maternal grandfather was an Ithacan.
A sailor. A builder of boats. A man adrift. A lover of the sea.
‘Thalassa. Thalassa,’ I say.
‘Thafala. Thasasa,’ Alexander repeats.
‘Thalassa. Thalassa. What a beautiful word.’
‘Thafasa. Thalala.’
‘Thalassa. Thalassa. Your grandfather loved the sea.’
‘Where is he?’ Alexander asks.
He does not understand. Athanassios has been long gone.
Dead many years before Alexander was born. Such things are mysteries, impossible to grasp. He loves the new. He thirsts after what he sees; and today it is anchors, ropes, boats, a glowing sea. And as we walked it became clear. We would journey to Ithaca. We would stand side by side on the deck of the ferry, and watch the mythical island appear.
Six months later we cast off from the port of Patras, and move out upon the Ionian in search of the dream. Within four hours we are standing in the bridge of the Ionian Star. We are approaching the island. The captain lifts Alexander onto his stool and he grips the wheel. He surveys the panel of levers and buttons. He gazes at the navigation charts. Above us hangs a picture of St Nicholas, patron saint of seafarers, the Byzantine reincarnation of Poseidon, the unruly god of the sea.
From a distance the two islands, Ithaca and Kefalonia, appear as one. As we draw closer Kefalonia withdraws into the background. Mount Neriton rises steep and close. We bend into a fjord, towards Aetos, the Eagle mount. We pierce the vortex that spirals into the narrow entrance to the hidden harbour.
We are fully enclosed now, locked in. The circle is complete. We are drifting towards the town of Vathi, built upon a horseshoe bay. Houses rise like vines on a trellis over the lower slopes of a towering hill. Above the houses we glimpse isolated chapels tucked in the mountain’s ribs. There are limestone ridges on the upper reaches, and groves of cypress standing tall between stately homes. We see swaying palms, and a row of lamps on the waterfront. Figures are emerging onto balconies. Shutters open out to the hoot of the horn.