by Arnold Zable
A group of women stands beside a caique. They pick over the catch of the day. Cats linger nearby, awaiting unwanted morsels. Fishing nets lie in waterlogged heaps on the concrete walk. Inside the cabin the captain is tense, the crew fully focused. And Alexander is focused upon them
He senses the drama. He is attuned to the seaman’s art. One error of judgment could cause severe damage to their massive craft. Alexander’s eyes are fixed on the navigator’s hands as they grip the wheel. He watches as the chain is released and the anchor reeled into the sea. He follows the flight of the ropes as they are flung onto the shore.
Slowly the sea gives way. The Ionian Star turns upon its own axis, and is guided towards the quay. The ropes are secured, and Alexander understands.
‘What is the anchor for?’ I ask him.
‘To lock the boat.’
‘And why do we need ropes?’
‘Because without them the boat will float away.’
To know the men of the village observe cousin Eftimios. He sits in the courtyard mending his nets. ‘The wind is boss,’ he says. The thing is not so much to fix the nets, although that is necessary, but just to sit and sift and allow things to sort themselves out. Perhaps this is why some villagers appear to leave so much half finished, undone. It is as if someone has decided, abruptly, to let go, mid-task, and take time out to brood.
Later that day the wind lifts and we see Eftimios on his motorcycle. He is a different creature now, his excitement barely contained. ‘The weather is right,’ he says. ‘A perfect night for fishing.’ He races to and from his boat. His motorcycle sags with bait, food and flasks of coffee, a change of clothing and bundles of nets picked clean.
He is going out alone. ‘This is the best way,’ he says. ‘On the bay I am vasilias. My own king.’ Dora recognises his excitement. This is how it was with her father, Athanassios. By nature, it seems, he was a brooder, but unlike cousin Eftimios he possessed a harder edge. He was given to sullen silences, angry outbursts and withdrawals. Athanassios was a troubled man. Except when the weather was right, the forecast good, and a night at sea lay ahead.
O keros. The weather. It governed his life as it governs cousin Eftimios’s now. He is motoring out, lured by the thrill of the hunt. His boat is his kingdom and he is in sole command. Later that night we think of him on his caique beneath the stars. The winter chill is descending. The nets have been laid out. He knows solitude. He knows patience. He is the king of his childhood seas. What more could an Ithacan want?
We descend in the evening, Dora, Alexander and I, from Ayia Saranta, to the village of Laxos. We make our way to Kaliope’s house. She is Eftimios’s sister, another member of the Varvarigos clan. The table is laden with food. It is both a house-warming party and a farewell. Her husband, Makis, has accepted the most dangerous assignment for a seaman, as an engineer on an oil tanker. He is leaving tomorrow. He may be away from his wife and two children, a boy of six, and a teenage girl, for ten months. ‘I have no choice,’ he tells me. ‘You take the work when it comes. I have to support my family. This is the seaman’s life.’
On the walls of his newly built house hang objects from foreign ports: wooden carved elephants, Chinese wall paintings, trophies from voyages past. I have seen them in the houses of other seamen on the island—ceremonial daggers from Turkey, porcelain dolls from Japan, statuettes of laughing Buddhas, Mexican sombreros suspended from the rafters, ebony sculptures of women with pointed breasts.
The romance has long gone. ‘The first voyage is the great adventure,’ says Eftimios. ‘We are virgins exploring new worlds. But there comes a time when we have seen enough ports. The adventure is replaced by grim routine. The days seem longer. The voyage never ending. And we think of those we left behind.’
Eftimios. Makis. Yanni, who lives now in Athens. Dora’s cousins. Alexander’s uncles. Trained seamen, engineers, captains and first mates. They have served on cargo boats and tankers, in fuel-choked engine rooms and on windswept decks. They have loaded freight in remote harbours, and repaired motors in the bellies of rusting beasts. They would rather be fishermen in familiar waters, but the surrounding seas cannot yield the incomes they need. Only Eftimios has been able to escape the fatal circle. Although he sees himself as a fisherman, he works as the secretary of northern Ithaca. He records births and deaths, listens to complaints, keeps the books, and closes his office in time to spend the occasional night at sea.
We eat, drink, watch a European Cup soccer game, and while away the evening. Emotions are suppressed. As they must be. When we leave, there are no tears. By dawn Makis is gone. Kaliope arrives at our house mid-morning. Her children are at school. It is her first day alone. She sits at the kitchen table with Dora and Georghia. There is no outward show of pity or commiseration. Just a subtle invitation back into the company of women, a provision of continuity to soften the loss. The waiting has begun. The women know how to handle it. After all, Kaliope is a seaman’s wife.
Yet at night, it will hurt. By day there is company, and children to look after. The olive-picking season is at its height. Kaliope has more than enough work to keep her occupied. But at night, in bed, she will feel her man’s absence. The infernal stillness will be broken by the sigh of the wind and the dirge of a wretched sea. Days after her husband’s departure, back at Georghia’s kitchen table, she finally confides, ‘Whenever he leaves, I feel dead.’
To know the women we must leave the northern heights and journey back to the main port of Vathi. Poulimia’s town. The birthplace of Dora’s maternal grandmother, who left for Melbourne as a proxy bride.
We descend from Ayia Saranta by taxi. The winter rains are approaching. Sun and cloud alternate in quick succession. The road to Vathi is, in turn, a glistening ribbon and black serpent. Sunrays spotlight patches of sea. The rays move like searchlights over the ridges, revealing, and then concealing, a whitewashed chapel, the dome of a church, a flock of sheep being herded on a mountain road. Across the straits Kefalonia seems so close we feel we can reach out and touch it; but the next moment the clouds reclaim it.
The taxi descends onto the road that links the north of the island to the south. On the map, Ithaca is two elongated halves, joined by a narrow isthmus, six hundred metres wide. From desolate cape to cape, from Ayias Ioannis in the north, to the Bay of Andri in the south, the island measures twenty-nine kilometres. And east of the isthmus, hidden deep within the inner harbour, lies the town of Vathi.
We book into the Mentor Hotel. Our room opens out onto a balcony that overlooks the bay. The hotel is deserted. Most of its rooms are empty. Clouds hang permanently over the peaks of Mount Neriton. A mist rises from the bay and collides with clouds billowing down from the heights. A veil has descended upon the north. In the evenings the ferry steals in as dark falls. And steals out again at dawn.
Directly below us, on the waterfront, a family of gypsies is camped in two vans. They are huddled within their own lives. They journey from island to island, in portable ‘supermarkets’ selling carpets, tablecloths, mops and prams, detergents, trinkets, pot scourers and frying pans.
The townsfolk go about their daily tasks, unhurried. Women gather on the strada to buy fish from the crew of caiques that have returned with the night’s catch. Their nets glisten in tangled piles; and exude the stench of stale fish and brine. It is the hiatus, a time of enforced quietude. A time when the town recovers and dreams the perfect dream of itself. And a time when Poulimia’s presence hovers about.
There are vague stories. Somewhere in Vathi, on the waterfront, there is a house where Poulimia once lived; but her descendants seem remote. On an earlier visit to the island, Dora had met second cousins related to Poulimia’s siblings, those who had stayed behind on the island and looked after their mother. There are misgivings. Traces of regret. ‘Why didn’t Poulimia write more often? Why did she forget her mother?’ they had asked. They do not know the other side of the equation— Poulimia’s struggles to bring up four children in an alien land. Everyon
e sees it their way. This is how it is. Perhaps this is the unbridgeable divide, between those who leave and those who stay behind.
In the evening, we make our way through the streets to the town square. A brass band rehearses for the new year festivities in an upper room on a side lane. The smell of frying fish drifts through open doors. We can still make out courtyards embraced by oleanders, jasmine, geraniums and palms. Emaciated cats scavenge in rubbish bins. Stone steps spiral from the lower streets and vanish into the dark.
In the kafeneion conversations drift between tables. A couple and their two teenage daughters eat a lavish meal. Retired sea captains, hibernating fishermen and local youths lean over games of cards. A drunk lurches by, with a cocker spaniel in tow. A man sleeps at a corner table; his komboloi dangles from a limp arm.
There are no descendants of Poulimia here. Instead there is Omeros, a retired seaman-cum-farmhand. ‘Ola ine gramena,’ he tells us. ‘It has all been written.’ ‘Ola ine tikhi.’ ‘All is luck.’ He orders another brandy. Omeros is wiry, his face charcoal after many years of sun blazing upon sea and earth.
‘Seventy years of life we are entitled to,’ he says. ‘After that, all is a gift.’ Omeros has a ‘hierarchy of principles’. At the apex is the family. ‘Have more children,’ he all but begs us. ‘Make her pregnant again and again,’ he tells me, pointing at Dora.
‘One is not enough. Have at least three of them.’ Alexander sits beside us and draws. He is oblivious to our adult talk.
‘Second, treat people well,’ says Omeros. ‘Forgive them their transgressions. We all make mistakes.’ He pauses for a sip of brandy and continues: ‘But only the first three times. If they continue to give you a hard time, enough. It’s time to break the friendship. Finally, remember, one cannot understand without having been burnt. And beyond all that, ola ine tikhi,’ he concludes.
Omeros orders another brandy. His mood shifts. ‘I have two daughters in Melbourne,’ he says. ‘And eight grandchildren. I never see them. They are far away. This is my greatest regret.’ He looks suddenly older. His philosophising has ground to a halt. Outside the ferry is arriving. It moves in stealthily. Its horn is the stroke of a clock marking the turning of another day. Vathi is enclosed by winter. Contained. Framed by cloud and rain.
And we see it clearly, the broken lives, the countless variations of the same tale; the drama of migration replayed over and again. ‘Make sure to contact my daughters,’ Omeros reminds us as we leave. ‘And tell them to write me a letter.’
Waiting for letters. So many have waited. So many have left for a new life, and disappeared. We walk back to our hotel on a starless night. Alexander has fallen asleep. I carry him in my arms. His head droops against my chest. The lights in the gypsies’ trucks are off. The blue globe on the small island of Dexia blinks at the entrance of the bay. The mainland ferry is at anchor. Its lights are an opaque glow. All our talk has been reduced to just one curt sentence of a lonely man. ‘Be sure to contact my daughters.’ Omeros’s regret is a familiar lament. To live in Vathi is to be reminded of absences. The port is both a haven and a site of countless farewells. We have found an echo of Poulimia after all.
We have been on the island for three months. Alexander knows the roads of the northern heights, the contours of the land. He knows the call of the bells, which herald the pre-dawn procession of sheep and goats. He knows Andreas the bread-man, who arrives every morning at ten.
Andreas signals his approach from the lower village with the high-pitched hoots of the horn. Alexander runs to greet him, as Andreas’s utility slows to a halt.
‘Kali mera, Alexandros.’
‘Kali mera,’ replies Alexander, and clutches the freshly baked bread to his chest. He tears out chunks as if gutting a fish.
Grand-aunt Agelo is leading her one goat to pasture. Alexander pauses to greet Coutsouvelis the shepherd. He has been up since the waning dark. He has set his goats free to roam the mountain slopes, and led his sheep to pasture. He has driven his wife and daughter to the olive groves and ferried yesterday’s haul to the oil mill.
Coutsouvelis exudes strength. His fingers sprout bushes of black hair. The skin is strangely smooth, as if varnished by mountain winds. He possesses the calm of the shepherd, yet brims with brute power. He strides the mountain slopes on the heels of his goats, with a shepherd’s stick upon his shoulders. Or he stands inert, a still life, while the flock quietly grazes. He rounds them up with the cunning of a dog, a simple gesture, a single call. And always, he has time to stop, to tell us where the mushrooms are growing, or where the snake burrows can be found.
Alexander climbs the stone steps to the one-hundred-year-old house with cracks in it. He walks through the house with confidence. He greets Georghia in the kitchen, where she is seated by her morning coffee. They play their familiar game. ‘Agapimou,’ she says. ‘No agapimou,’ he replies, laughing. And he runs into the parlour, en route to our bedroom.
On a chest of drawers there stands a gold-framed mirror, and portraits of Dimitri and Athanassios, the two brothers, separate but side by side. On the wall there hangs a photograph of Alexander’s great-grandfather Yanni. Beside him sit his wife and four children.
We know this image well. A copy hangs in our Melbourne home. Yet here it takes on a different feel. The family is arranged in three tiers. In the middle tier, on the extreme left, in a horizontally striped skivvy, stands Dimitri. He is perhaps ten years old. By his side sits his mother Sevasti. She is wearing a dark dress and jacket, which appear to be her Sunday best.
On Sevasti’s right is Thalia, the older daughter. She is in her teenage years. And on the far right stands the younger daughter Dora. Her right hand rests on her sister’s shoulders. This is the only image we have of my wife’s namesake. She died of an illness soon after the photograph was taken. She was thirteen years old.
On the bottom tier, in front of his mother and siblings, stands little Athanassios, while above them all are the head and shoulders of Nonno Yanni. Everything about him exudes patriarchy. His handlebar moustache, which extends beyond the cheeks, is white, as too is his thinning hair. The hair is well receded from the forehead. He is wearing a formal jacket and a white shirt; a raised collar accommodates a tie. His gaze is slightly averted, indirect, as if fixed on unknown worlds.
This is no mere snap, but poised, carefully posed. The family members seem conscious of the significance of the occasion. Their expressions are solemn. A grey patina adds to the sense of fading time. But there is an illusion at work here. If you look closely, it is possible to see that Yanni is not truly present. He has been brushed in with great skill.
At the time the photo was taken he was absent abroad. He was in Melbourne, at work, restoring the family wealth. It was his third and final voyage to the southern land; he had first journeyed there in the 1890s upon a sailing boat. The knowledge of his absence adds another dimension to the scene. Yanni exudes a stoic pride. He was doing his duty in the age-old Ithacan style. He seems disconnected from his brood. He looks more like a remote ancestor than a father.
Alexander wanders out of the parlour onto the balcony. On mild nights we sit here, beside the wrought-iron balustrade, sip wine and coffee, and talk. This is where Uncle Dimitri, the older brother, often sat in his final years. Dimitri died before Alexander could meet him, but lived long enough to hear of his birth. He was overjoyed at the news, Georghia has told us.
From this balcony it is possible to glimpse the sea. The view extends over Afales Bay, and to the island of Lefkada. On clearer days it is possible to see the white cliffs from which the poet Sappho is said to have jumped to her death. She died of unrequited love, so the story goes. She is a part of the mythology of the surrounding seas.
As for Alexander there is no boundary between mythology and story, between mystery and the mundane. He lives in the eternal moment. He leans upon the balustrade and gazes at the heights.
The journey has extended his vision. He has glimpsed the fragility of life, the f
ierce power of the elements. He knows of earthquakes and abandoned ruins. He has sensed the frightening infinity of time, the enormity of space.
‘What did you dream about last night?’ I ask him.
‘I dreamt of a one-million-year-old house, without a roof. The earthquake came. All the houses fell down, and the people went to Australia. Nature pushed the earthquake button and that was it.’
The women are the keepers of the cemetery grounds. It is the women who light the oil lamps and tend the graves; the women who clear away the weeds, polish the marble, dust the headstones and place offerings upon the tombs.
The village graveyard stands on the peak of a hill beside the church of Taxiarchis. Georghia bends over, lost in her task. We carry stones to the Varvarigos grave and clean the surrounds. Alexander runs about like a goat. He dodges between the firs and cypress. It is all a game. Suddenly he stops. ‘What happens when someone dies?’ he asks. ‘Where does he go?’ And in answer to his own question he says, ‘He goes to nature. And comes back, new again.’
On a nearby grave we see the name of aunt Mantina who had been one of Dora’s mother’s closest Melbourne friends. Born in the village of Ayia Saranta, she had emigrated to Australia where she raised a family of five children. In her later years she would return to Athens to visit the daughter who had settled there. And she would take the ferry to Ithaca to spend time back in her village home.
She insisted on one last journey, even though the doctors had advised her against it. She arrived in Athens, met her daughter at the airport, was driven home, complained of not feeling well. She climbed upstairs, lay down for a rest. And passed away. Her body was ferried back to Ithaca to be laid to rest in the village of her birth.