Mermaids and Ikons

by Gwendolyn MacEwen

  In great laughter there is great love, I thought. And maybe being holy means being almost unbearably human. Papa Stephanos, I concluded, is a holy man.

  The moon, the blind eye of night, cast silver benedictions on the water.

  Entry Nine: We spent a post-rain morning climbing the drenched mountain-slopes in search of food for dinner. The electric storm of the night before had turned the village into a network of fabulous multi-coloured rivers, and the first light of dawn revealed dozens of fat grey-green snails. I had overcome my horror of these tender creatures since I first encountered them at Mystras. They were everywhere, sauntering forth from their crevices in the rocks in search of their moist and mysterious petits déjeuners.

  The mountains were rampant with goats all sharing some secret joke, the way goats do — and we plunged upwards (if that is possible) into another world. We caught fifteen giant snails in ten minutes, and stuffed them into our knapsacks with some wild mint and thyme to keep them occupied. Then we lunched on boiled eggs and orange juice in the shadow of a small church, and tried to read an inscription in ancient Greek on a marble stone. It’s terrible trying to read ancient Greek, especially when there’s no space between the words. I mean: itsterribletryingtoreadancientgreekespeciallywhentheresnospacebetweenthewords.

  Noon came darkly; more rain was afoot. We slid back down to the village and proceeded to set things up in order to cook what be believed would be a fantastic feast. So far so good. We lit the two oil-lamps in our tiny medieval home, and discussed our menu. Escargots, of course — (everything sounds delicious in French) — with a salad. Hollandaise sauce ? Certainly ! No problem — we’d whip it all up in a flash.

  We had all the necessary ingredients: lettuce, tomatoes, mayonnaise, olive oil, lemons, and Whatever, all stuffed in multi-coloured plastic bags, which were lined up, row on row, in the storm-dark kitchen.

  I said:

  —Okay, you do the snails, and I’ll do the salad, right?

  —Right!

  Shivering with excitement, we set about our task. It was about one-thirty in the afternoon. The village was asleep, because the villagers were wise. We were not wise; we were trapped in the strange ecstacy of French gourmet cooking on a Greek island in the Aegean sea in the middle of what might be a typhoon.

  We put one lamp in the kitchen area, and one in the centre of the room where there was a table to work on the salad.

  —Oh no, there’s no water, said Nikos.

  —Damn, I said, I forgot to got down to the well. I’ll go now.

  So I took three plastic buckets — a red one, a blue one and a yellow one, and charged through the streets in my green plastic sandals to get water. Three different kinds of water - one for drinking, one for cooking, and one for Whatever. Five minutes later I was back, and Nikos had emptied our knapsacks of snails into a large iron pot. They squirmed and protested a little, but it was hard to tell because the light was so dim. We lit the gas stove, poured in water from bucket A, added salt and wild thyme, and waited.

  —I think I’ll start on the salad now, I said, gathering up tomatoes, mayonnaise, lemons, etc. into a white plastic bowl. I took them to the table and realized I had no knife.

  —Bring me a knife, please…

  —I can’t. I’m using it for the garlic for the butter sauce…

  —Well clean the other knife from the cupboard with the water in the yellow bucket…

  —I can’t see the yellow bucket. Bring me an extra lamp.

  —I can’t bring an extra lamp, or I can’t see anything here.

  —Well there’s a hunting knife in my jacket pocket.

  —I can’t see your jacket pocket unless I have more light.

  The snails were boiling happily in the dark pot. I thought that if I could find my way to Bucket B, the blue one, I could use the fresh water from there to clean the extra knife which was in the cupboard. Of course, this meant that the water in Bucket B would become cleaning water instead of Drinking or Cooking Water. But that was OK, because then the contents of Buckets B and C would be used for Whatever, while the contents of Bucket A would still be cookable. On the other hand, it was rather difficult to make out the colours in the darkness.

  —If you give me a spare candle, I said, I can find the other knife and clean it. Nikos handed me a candle from the gloom of the kitchen.

  —Take care, he said. I accidentally used Bucket B to clean my hands, and that means that it smells of garlic.

  I thought that would be all right, because there’s nothing wrong with a bit of garlic in a normal Hollandaise sauce. However, after I had found the extra knife, I realized that the lamp in the other room needed extra fuel, and I had to return to my salad with a dripping candle in one hand and a plastic container of oil in the other. I stood there, staring at the tomatoes and mayonnaise, paralyzed.

  —Nikos, I asked feebly, how are the escargots coming along?

  —Great! Just smell that fresh thyme!

  By now, the atmosphere was a grey-green cloud of lamp oil, cigarette fumes, steam, boiling spices, all lit up now and again by a dramatic flash of lightning.

  —Do you have a spoon? I cried, in mounting despair. I don’t think I can stir the Hollandaise sauce without one.

  —Yes, I’ve got a spoon, but I used it for mixing the garlic and butter, so I put it in the blue bucket. Then I realized that I had to use the red bucket because that was cleaner.

  —What about dishes? I cried, casually tossing the salad with a penknife and my naked forefinger.

  —Over with the salt, in the corner.

  —If I can borrow your lamp I can get to the corner.

  —You can’t borrow my lamp, or I can’t watch the snails! I thought that if I could find my way to where the napkins were, everything would be solved, because then I could clean everything with napkins, even in the dark.

  —I’m sorry, Nikos said. I had to use the napkins to dry the spoon which was in the red bucket so you could stir the sauce for the salad. But now that you’ve already done it with the penknife, I used the spoon to stuff the cooked snails in their shells with the garlic and butter. Oh, do you have a light? The stove’s gone off again.

  Lightning struck, and the rain poured down. It was Eden all over again. It was funny, it was Friday, it was everything. We dined on escargots and salade à la Hollandaise, and as we spoke, all the other snails in the mountains wagged their damned silly silent tongues. The goats held onto their hilarious secrets. It was the end of summer.

  Entry Ten: The pine groves buzz with hornets. A slim white horse stands motionless in a field fuzzy with sunlight, like a creature out of Eden. A newborn calf, all wet and scared and funny, begins to examine the world on its shaky, spindly legs. Faces of little cats peer out from among the flowers. A magnificent young bull, pure white, is being run through the village to the slaughterhouse, followed by a tractor and half of the village kids who scream and laugh. Its eyes are wild as it crashes through the narrow streets. The eyes of ancient beasts must have looked like this when they were led to the sacrificial altars of the gods. A naked, bloody young lamb hangs upside down in the window of the meat store, a sprig of parsley in its mouth.

  Laughing boys race through the village square on mules; they urge them on by striking them with chains around their cheeks and eyes. I do not like this. Down the road, the man who raises rabbits chooses one for some family’s dinner. The red-eyed bunny stares, the cold steel of the knife at its throat, its whole body suspended by the ears.

  We take two donkeys and go out for the day into the mountains and down into a beautiful plain at the southern part of the island. We find purple grapes and give some to the donkeys who chew them thoughtfully, the sweet juice dribbling down their chins. We visit many small churches, and then head down again to the coast. The wind is rising and the waves are frilled with white froth; there was talk yesterday of a fortuna comi
ng — a great storm. But it will not hit full force until evening. Meanwhile nothing is happening, everything is happening. The donkeys know their way back home.

  Entry Eleven: During the war, Nikos tells me, when the Fascists occupied the island, the kids used to steal potato peels from the garbage cans behind the houses where the German soldiers stayed, and roast them over little fires by night. Nothing was real in those terrible times except death, and hunger. Papa Stephanos used to scrounge up food, moving, like God, in mysterious ways, and distribute it among the poorest families in the village. No one is quite sure how he managed this — (I must remember to ask him some time) — but he probably went around to the larger farms which would have had some extra produce, even in wartime, and convinced the farmers to consider their own immortal souls and their fellow man.

  After the war, someone opened a washroom in a small café which had been closed for years, and found it full of cockroaches and useless German marks. In the end, then, the paper money of the Third Reich had served only one, fitting, scatalogical purpose.

  Entry Twelve: This morning, three black-robed sisters, girls in their early teens, walked arm in arm down the road to the church of Saint Nikolaus to attend the funeral of their father. It seemed that half of the village was assembled in the square outside of the church. As the girls approached, the crowd parted to let them through, and all the women began to sway and moan, their voices rising and falling in eerie cadences, in the ancient, timeless music of mourning. The girls themselves looked like figures from a chorus in a Greek tragedy; their sobbing and wailing was totally unrestrained, and for a moment I felt that the scene was so pure, so perfect, it might have been rehearsed. That was my Western mind at work again; I was reared in a society which teaches children to hide their emotions, to keep a stiff upper lip, even if it means a lifetime of repressions and neuroses as a result. In the East there is no such thing as purely private sorrow You let it all hang out — birth, life, death, everything. If necessary, you overplay emotions; you do not understate, you do not conceal. It is the only way.

  In Greece, the dead are buried in the ground…but after a number of years, there is a ceremony in which the bones of the dead are dug up and removed to the local church, where they are placed in enclosures in the walls, and marked by stone plaques. When Nikos told me that as a young child, he was present when they took his father’s bones from the ground, I was stunned to think that children were allowed to witness such a (to my mind) gruesome procedure. ‘But why not?’ he exclaimed. ‘Death is death, bones are bones. It serves no purpose to pretend otherwise.’

  What I shall always remember about this place is its purity, its innocence, its open-eyed acceptance of the absolutes of life and death, darkness and light. And in some inexplicable way, here on this tiny Aegean island, I am coming to understand that light itself is the final mystery.

  Entry Thirteen: Last night two of the villagers got into an unpleasant argument in the café. One of them spoke loosely of the other’s sister, and, this being tantamount to a declaration of war, the insulted party called in the mayor as witness to the slander. Plans were immediately made for court proceedings. This morning, despite very treacherous weather, the two men left the island in separate boats, keeping a wide and angry distance between one another. The mayor and his secretary accompanied the insulted party. This would be a simple story except for one thing: the island where they must take their case to court is relatively close to here. But because no boats go there directly from this island, they have to go to a neighbouring island where they’ll board a large boat for Piraeus on the mainland — (a journey of some six hours) — and from there make their way back to where they’ll appear in court. If they had a helicopter, they could be there in twenty minutes; it’s a shame. But on the other hand, as someone said a short while ago, going by this huge and ridiculous circular route, any one of three things might befall them. They could die of boredom; they could make amends and play tavali all the way back, or they could be shipwrecked, because another big storm is on the way. In any case, a principle is a principle.

  Entry Fourteen: It’s ouzo-making time on the island. Every October, some time after the grapes have been harvested and shipped off to outside markets, and after the island has made its own wine, it’s time to distill the quintessential brew which I earlier described as a combination of pernod and molten lava.

  Whatever’s left over from the grapes which were pressed for wine — skins, seeds, leaves and twigs — is stored underground for a few weeks. Then it becomes a fermented purple mass which is dug up and shovelled into huge cauldrons heated by wood fires. Through a series of ducts and pipes the potent vapour travels, is distilled, until finally the fire-water emerges, drop by drop from a faucet, and is collected in buckets. The work goes on day and night; there must be a least two men doing shifts to keep everything moving. I don’t know how much ouzo is produced at the end of all this, but it’s probably quite enough to supply the island for a year.

  Tonight Nikos and I went to the little shed which is the local distillery to watch the proceedings. As we approached, the air was burning with the pungent aromas of what seemed to be the product of some medieval alchemy. Inside, the heat was overpowering, and in the glow from the fire, the faces of the workers were red and gold. The chap who was changing the buckets laughed at our bewilderment, and he handed us a small sample of the ouzo to taste. He is one of the few older men on the island who is minus one arm (there was a time when the fisherman used dynamite for fishing, and there were some unfortunate accidents as a result). He laughed even harder when he saw the expressions on our faces after we’d tasted the brew ‘A little strong, eh?’ he shouted over the roar of the fire. ‘That’s because it’s the first bit to come from the tap. It’s always like that.’

  We learned that they do of course gauge the alcoholic content of the ouzo, and it’s not bottled for consumption unless it is at an acceptable level. We left soon, laughing and gasping a little, our throats on fire.

  We finally ended up at Spiros’ Club which is close to the sea on the western side of the island, just behind the village. Mercifully, it being October, all but a handful of the summer tourists have left. There is a young gay Frenchman who’s rented a room in the village and who’s been here since June, an elderly German couple, two globe-trotting girls from South Africa, and ourselves, as the only xeni on the island. Spiros has made himself a mint this summer serving retsina, salads and fish and octopi to the tourists, and now he’s a very happy man. The club is small; the tables are covered with plastic cloths in garish colours; the walls are adorned with faded reproductions of El Greco paintings; in the corner there is a huge, ancient juke-box with a repertoire which includes everything from Tom Jones to the latest Greek hits from Athens. Outside there is a garden where people can dance; it is enclosed by walls of tall swaying reeds and there is a large palm tree in the middle.

  Spiros is going to close the place tomorrow, because we will be leaving. This makes him sad. He puts some coins into the juke-box, and we hear O Sole Mio, followed by Lay Lady Lay. ‘Where is everybody!’ he cries, and at that moment the police chief walks in with his friend Yannis. Yannis can dive deeper than anyone on the island and claims he can hold his breath underwater almost as long as a dolphin or a whale. He is also the best dancer on the island, and superb show-off. He was always dancing, I hear, — even as a child.

  The Greeks have a dance called the zembekiko. It is normally performed by a male dancer who is either at the end or the beginning of his wits. Although one must adhere at all times to the strict and complex rhythm of the music, one is allowed all sorts of intricate variations, depending on one’s ability and state of mind. The wisest time to attempt a zembekiko is when you are either totally sober or superbly drunk. Otherwise, the results may be disastrous, since you are likely to whirl like a dervish off the stage or swoon like a dying eagle in free fall. The dance is both a fight against gravity and a kind of
flirtation with the earth. This should explain the following poem. Or perhaps the poem will explain the explanation, I’m not sure.

  Greeks have two ways of talking

  — face to face or side to side —

  One speaks and the other watches

  The nearest wall

  Where the birth of other worlds

  Takes place before his eyes.

  The imperial and impermanent eagle

  of the Byzantines

  Had two heads that looked East and West

  And tried to gather God

  Into a single body

  — the body of a bird —

  I spoke before of a will that flirts

  With eagles, and now I speak

  Of eagles who flirt with earth

  In their wide slow turning,

  Their descent, their dialogue with death.

  Then poised on some craggy cliff

  Of mountain or of mind, they wait

  For the updraft, breath of God, pure wind

  To hoist them into heaven once again.

  Whether with broken or unfailing wings

  They fly, they rise, they fall

  So with these dancers on the broken edge of midnight

  Born with the sign of the double-headed eagle,

  Dancing still.

  After some unnecessary prompting, Yannis gets up to dance. He puts a sprig of basil behind his ear and waits to hear the first hypnotic notes of the bouzouki playing the long, maddeningly seductive prologue to the zembekiko. He concentrates, spreads out his arms, walks around in slow figure eights, deliberately tantalizing us. He drops his cigarette on the floor, grinds it out with his foot — (never losing a single beat of the music) — and then, using the cigarette as a focal point, staring at it scornfully, he begins to dance complex, provocative circles around it.

  The music quickens; Yannis crouches down and gives the floor a resounding spank with his open palm. Then suddenly he leaps up into the air, an uncoiled spring, demanding the right to fly. He drops again, touching the floor reverently with the back of his hand, brushing it, caressing it. He swivels on his heels back and forth, his head turning, addressing the four corners of the earth. His face has taken on the radiance of a child. He laughs and snaps his fingers, he whistles wildly and hisses between his teeth. His expression tells us that the world begins and ends here, that there is nothing on earth right now to compete in importance with this joyous celebration of the body, this study in fury, this mind-bending, defiant dance.