Mermaids and Ikons

by Gwendolyn MacEwen

  Nikos and I went fishing off the rocks at the northwest tip of the island. The very best baits are the tiny shrimps which are found in the small pools in the hollows of the rocks, and to catch them you have to cup your hands in the water, remain perfectly still, and wait for them to come. It seems they are somehow fascinated with the colour of the human hand, and when you feel the first funny little tickle of their feet on your fingers you close your hands as quickly as possible and trap them.

  Nikos caught interesting fish, but I got nothing except a large red particularly hideous sea-caterpillar. In fact I caught it three times; I kept throwing the abominable thing back into the sea and it kept taking the bait. By the third time, I think it was too exhausted to try again.

  We dove again with masks and snorkels off the rocks. Underwater is a silent, magnified world of rippling light, and waving plants with feathery tentacles, and schools of white fish which gaze at you sideways with frightened eyes, then dart away like magic. I swam out once deeper than I should have; the rocks fell away, and before me was a chasm of terrifying electric blue. I am a good swimmer and I’m not afraid of deep water, but this was another kind of depth. It was utter mystery, timeless, bottomless as the soul itself. I hovered over it for a few moments — then, trembling, turned back towards the rocks. To the left of me something silver and triangular was undulating its way towards me. I clambered up onto the rocks screaming ‘Shark! Shark!’ Nikos immediately dove in, and came up a moment or two later, laughing, and holding up a small bag made of aluminum foil. Maybe poets should stay away from the sea, and —

  Perhaps we are only dim figures underwater

  meeting for a moment

  the perfect eyes of fishes

  which encounter us sideways

  in luminous surprise

  And perhaps on land we hang on

  to our illnesses which protect us

  from the full responsibility of health

  And perhaps on land we do not have

  to answer for our crimes

  while undersea we answer

  and the sea will answer for itself

  I had a conversation once with the underwater photographer, Ley Kenyon, who intrigued me when he said that there is really nothing to fear in the sea but oneself. Maybe then it was the self which confronted me in that bottomless blue chasm — (no other beast was lurking there). He had laughed when I suggested that we might all meet one day at Santorini — more properly called Thera — where archaeologists are carrying on underwater excavations and recovering relics of a civilization which, according to the Greek scholar Marinatos, was the fabled Atlantis. ‘Don’t you know how deep you have to go to find a single thing?’ he exclaimed. And I wrote sometime later:

  Drop the sails and be silent

  There is something here we do not understand

  As dark as the receding tides

  As delicate as the tiny shrimps who

  Tickle their way across my hands

  There is nothing to fear in the sea

  But ourselves

  There is nothing to fear but man

  A beautiful shell which I’d placed on a rock heaved itself over the edge in a kind of crazy suicide attempt, then began making its way back to the sea. I had forgotten that shells had live things inside of them; I had forgotten a lot of things. I was gaily swimming along close to the beach, imagining that I was Cousteau, when a shimmery, transparent jellyfish came floating along towards me. It was a bubble of living light; I had to have it. Nikos was jumping up and down and crying ‘No, no !’ just as I cupped my hand around the creature and received a devastating sting as it went poof and died on me, a deflated pool of slime. My hand burned for hours afterwards.

  On the beach, Nikos was wrestling with the small octopus he’d just harpooned. It was coiled around his hand and wrist and halfway up his arm, hanging on for dear life. He pried it off and then proceeded to dash it many times against a flat rock. To anyone who hasn’t seen this procedure it seems at first to be rather gruesome. On my first day on the island I’d seen a man far out on the rocks raising something in his hand and repeatedly smashing it on the ground; it looked almost like some sort of horrible murder. Actually, it’s a very common sight on the island, and octopi are caught by the hundreds every day. The first smash against the stone ensures that the creature is dead, after which, repeated smashings force a grey-white soapy substance out of its body, in order that the meat will be tender enough to eat. If this is not done, octopus meat can be very tough indeed. After the octopi have turned from red to pale grey, they are hung up on lines to dry, and are barbecued or boiled later on. One of the things that bewilders visitors to the island is the sight of clotheslines full of dangling tentacles; it’s a little disarming at first, and many people make faces and say Ugh. But I’ve come to regard it as an awfully beautiful sight.

  By accident Nikos later harpooned a huge red starfish. We brought it up onto the beach, and when we removed the harpoon, one leg came off with it. I wanted to cry (which, as I have mentioned before, is nothing new) until Nikos assured me it would be all right. ‘They grow new parts,’ he said. ‘Don’t worry’ And then, to my utter amazement, the lovely creature slowly began to make its way back into the sea, leaving its leg behind it.

  Just before we were packing up to leave for the day, I noticed what looked like an unusual brown speckled stone in the shallows. When I moved to touch it, it literally burst into life. It opened up two large frilled flaps, revealing tiny organs with an almost human shape, and began to swirl these flaps and rapidly propel itself away. It looked for all the world like a funny little dancer swirling her skirts around her. It left a trail of brilliant purple ink behind it, then, finding a safer place, wrapped itself up and pretended again to be a brown speckled stone. We still haven’t figured out what it was, although an old sailor in the village said he thinks it might be one of the strange creatures that now and again the sea brings in from the northern coasts of Africa.

  Entry Five: There’s a legend among Greek seamen that if ever you see a gorgeous mermaid rising out of the water at the bow of your boat, you must take care as to how you address her, for she is the sister of Alexander the Great. She will be seeking news of her dead brother, and if you want to have fair weather, you must tell her that the great Alexander still lives and rules.

  Our friend Odysseus wants above all to find himself a mermaid. Every day when we return to the village after swimming and fishing he asks us if we’ve found for him a real live gorgona. ‘No; we say, ‘But maybe tomorrow’ ‘Promises, promises; he laughs, and hobbles away across the town square.

  Entry Six: Today we spotted Nikos’ uncle out in a rowboat looking for lobster, peering into a glass-bottomed barrel and scanning every inch of the seafloor. Behind him, manning the oars, was an extraordinary looking fellow who kept dropping the oars and flailing his arms around and talking to himself.

  ‘It’s Dionysus,’ Nikos informed me. ‘They call him O Trellos — the crazy one. He’s all right, really. He just talks to invisible people a lot of the time.’

  I learned that when Dionysus was a boy in school he was good in everything except mathematics. He had the delightful habit of carrying a non-existent ‘one’ over into the second line of addition. For example, if he had to add 10 and 10 and 10, he’d say: ‘Zero plus zero plus zero equals zero. Carry One.’ The answer would then be 40. That’s how he dealt with the mathematics of his early years. No matter how many Nothings he added up, he always carried that positive digit into the second line of figures.

  It was clear from the beginning that Dionysus had an alarming mind. His teachers tore their hair like characters in a Greek tragedy. They told him that if he didn’t learn to count right, he’d end up as a lowly fisherman, et cetera. He said that his greatest aspiration in life was to end up as a lowly fisherman, et cetera, and besides, you just couldn’t throw two Nothings together without ending up with a Something, and an
y fool could see that.

  Every day when school got out, he’d go down to the pier and watch his father unravelling the tangled saffron net that were his world, and listen to salty stories of the sea. No one is quite sure exactly when he went mad and started talking to his invisible people. But now he drinks a lot of ouzo, and sometimes dances in the street, but most of the time he rows the boat when Nikos’ uncle goes lobster fishing.

  As I watched them, the uncle, who had his head so far down in the barrel that he couldn’t hear Dionysus’ monologue, suddenly began pointing with one hand to a particular spot in the water. He’d obviously spotted a lobstèr, and didn’t want to lose sight of it. Dionysus, misinterpreting the gesture somehow, began rowing around in a series of erratic circles, then for some reason, shot off in a straight southerly direction.

  ‘Jesus Christ,’ I said. ‘If your uncle doesn’t take his head out of that barrel, they’re going to end up in Crete!’

  At any rate, the lobster was lost, and Dionysus and the uncle screamed at each other all the way back to the village.

  Entry Seven: There is so much to record. Places overpower me, especially places electric with history, or myth. There have been times in the past when I’ve stood in front of, say, the Great Pyramid at Giza, or in the (so-called) Room of the Last Supper in Jerusalem, feeling so stunned that my mind at the time was able only to record trivia, or worry over immediate physical concerns. Did I bring enough cigarettes, I’ve lost my comb, my sandal strap’s broken, and so on.

  But yesterday, a trip to the island of Delos, a kind of dream journey. I walked down the avenue of the marble lions which line the Sacred Way leading to the main temples. Delos, where Zeus came in the form of a swan to seduce Leda. Delos, where Apollo was born, where Light was born. I moved through the ruins in an eerie fluid state of suspension in time and space. There was a time when no one was allowed to get born or die here; pregnant women and very old people could not set foot on the holy ground.

  The heat and the light were dizzifying, and I thought I must not faint, I must not stop here. This is Delos, an island outside of human time. Record the lions, record the stones, keep walking. This is Delos, where you’re not allowed to get born, or die…

  Entry Eight: Every afternoon we drink coffee with the old priest of the village. Papa Stephanos is well over eighty, and totally blind. His son, who is the official papas of the island, intones the morning and evening prayers in the church of Saint Nikolaus — a duty he performs with a certain lack of flair — and Papa Stephanos only presides over the ceremonies on very special holy days, two or three times a year. When he was younger, Nikos remembers, he had a voice that sent chills down your spine when he performed the ancient litanies. Nikos reminds him of this, and he smiles and sighs and says, ‘Ah, I was a voice in the wilderness…’ and goes on sipping his bitter coffee, his black-robed form casting a great shadow on the white wall of the café.

  When he was young, the villagers say, he was uncommonly strong. On the joyous eve of Easter, it is customary in many Greek villages for the papas to pretend to hold the doors of the church closed at midnight, against the throngs of worshippers. The people then cry ‘Open up, open up !’ and heave their weight against the doors, which of course promptly give way. But apparently Papa Stephanos was so strong he must have had the very might of God on his side, for when he put his back to the doors, barricading them with his shoulders, the villagers had a devil of a time trying to get in!

  This is no doubt a slight exaggeration, but in any case, everyone remembers that the doors always took rather longer than necessary to get opened when Papa Stephanos’ weight was behind them. I find myself remembering a very pale and lacklustre young priest in Athens who had so little feeling for his calling that we once caught him trying to change a lightbulb in the middle of a particularly difficult Byzantine chant. I wonder what happens to him on the eve of Paskha? I have a vision of him spreadeagled on the floor of the church, face downward, the people gleefully marching into the church over the door, which has fallen on his back.

  This afternoon Papa Stephanos’ daughter Maria called to us from the porch of the little house where she lives and looks after him. She was ironing tea-towels with an enormous black iron full of red-hot coals. ‘You’re coming to eat with us tonight!’ she cried, and the tone of her voice informed us that this was a command, not merely an invitation.

  The house is situated in what is knows as the Castro, the circular core of the village, which dates back to the Thirteenth Century and perhaps even earlier. Everything is spotlessly white, for the women paint the stairs with white lime, and even draw white lines around the stones which pave the narrow streets, as they have done for centuries in the Cyclades. The Castro is unbelievably small, neat, and somehow unreal — like a stage setting or a miniature model for a village, rather than, as it once was, an actual fortress.

  We went to visit at nightfall. The beams on the ceiling of Papa Stephanos’ house were painted a weird shade of watermelon pink, and the walls were covered with sheets of plastic with wild floral patterns. Maria cooked dinner in a kitchen the size of a cupboard, and afterwards we sat outside on the porch and listened as the sea heaved long weary sighs in the distance. We barbecued some octopi over burning coals, and some little blue crabs that we’d pried out of their crevices in the rocks by the shore, using flashlights and penknives. I was sorry, afterwards, for the way we’d blinded them and trapped them in their homes. Being a delicacy is an awful fate, really, and these creatures were very beautiful, some of them tiny as spiders in our hands. The salty smell of the smoke, combined with the scent of the countless flowers which grew all around the house, sent us all into a state of utter euphoria. When Maria passed around glasses of the local ouzo — which tastes rather like a combination of pernod and molten lava — we became witty, profound, joyful and downright silly. Papa Stephanos, the lamplight dancing in his sightless eyes, began to sing old village love songs, the kind the young men used to serenade their sweethearts with. His voice, although a little shaky, was wonderfully resonant, and he made even those sentimental old tunes sound like hymns.

  Later, he started telling us hilarious stories from the old days about some of the people on the island, chuckling gleefully each time he thought of another one. It seems that Christos — the man who had his life savings chewed up by mice — had once, many years ago, borrowed a flashlight from a friend. It was the first time Christos had ever used a flashlight, the friend turned it on for him, and Christos used it for a few hours, then decided it was time to turn it out. After blowing on it a few times, he realized that was not the way to extinguish the thing. So he dunked it in water, took it out, and discovered that the hellish thing was still lit. He dunked again; still no luck. When he finally got up the courage to return the flashlight to his friend, it was two days later. It was still lit.

  Maria was hanging over the side of the porch, limp with laughter, when he started telling us the story about Dionysus and the red eggs. At Easter, which is the holiest day of the year in the Greek Orthodox faith, the people bring out baskets of eggs dyed red, crack them and eat them as one of the traditional ceremonies of Paskha. ‘Christos anesti,’ they say to one another. ‘Christ is risen.’ Well one year, the day before Paskha, Dionysus was seen standing outside the church of Saint Nikolaus defiantly holding up two red eggs in either hand. He gave them a resounding crack, peeled off the red shells, and solemnly ate the eggs. Then he stepped forward and shouted into the open door of the church ‘You see? It doesn’t mean anything! This Paskha, it’s nothing! It’s all satanic propaganda!’

  Then he did a little jig in the town square, and went home, talking to his invisible people all the way.

  By the time Papa Stephanos got to the story of how the mother of Odysseus once tried to do away with herself, Nikos was choking with laughter, and I joined Maria and

  hung over the side of the porch, weakly trying to keep

&nbs
p; myself from collapsing in a heap on the ground. Odysseus’ mother, a proud and rather handsome woman, had at one time been slighted or insulted by a young man in the village.

  She vowed in a loud voice so that all could hear, that she would do away with herself that same day. She chose death by drowning, since the sea was so close by, and she intended to walk straight into the water, never to return. Followed by a few of the village women, who screamed and moaned and tried to make her change her mind, she staunchly walked down to the beach. The women tore their hair and wept, until she did a rather strange thing. She sat down on the sand and slowly began to take off her shoes and stockings. That did it; the women broke up with laughter. ‘You don’t want to get your stockings wet!’ they cried. ‘You want to die, but you don’t want to ruin your shoes!’ Burning with shame, but no doubt inwardly pleased and relieved, she gathered up her things and ran back to the village, convinced that life was the best thing after all.

  Papa Stephanos wiped a tear from his eye, and I realized that it wasn’t there from all the laughter, but rather from a great and boundless love for the people of his island. And I suspect that he was beginning to feel — as we all did — a little ashamed of ourselves for laughing so heartily at the foibles of others. If anyone could have seen us as we were that night, it would have been evident that we were the village fools.

  It was getting late. We’d finished the last of the octopus and the ouzo, and Papa Stephanos looked suddenly very weary. We said goodnight. A shy, uncertain wind was feeling its way through the dry shrubs and crumbling stones of the Castro, as though in search of something lost centuries ago. Fireflies flitted here and there like bright particles of laughter. We went down to the harbour and leaned over the dock, shining a flashlight into the water to see the hundreds of tiny shrimps with burning golden eyes gazing up at us from the black depths.