Mermaids and Ikons

by Gwendolyn MacEwen

  He’s got it now; he’s one with the dance; he is the dance. He’s animal and bird, water and fire — he is a man free of the earth yet one with the earth, his body exploring the frightening dual nature of freedom.

  ‘Ellah, Yannaki, ellah!’ we cry. ‘Come on !’

  He conducts the invisible orchestra in the juke-box. He does a forward somersault, landing at the bottom of a chair which he then proceeds to pick up in his teeth, balancing the weight against his chest. His feet have not once lost the rhythm of the dance. He puts the chair down, and with a few more leaps and controlled, crashing falls, concludes the performance. We clap and pound the tables in appreciation, sending a few black olives rolling onto the floor. From here on in, the evening is made. We eat enormous amounts of fish and cheese, drink amber retsina, and feed the insatiable juke-box until we’re down to our last few drachmas.

  Spiros is almost in tears when we decide we must go. It has been a wonderful summer for him; it’s over now. The gay young Frenchman who shyly shared our table and said little, slips out into the garden. Just as we are leaving, we see him by the palm tree with an invisible partner in his arms, waltzing to the strains of O how we danced on the night we were wed…

  The music follows us all the way down the dark path back to the village.

  Entry Fifteen: I pack up the odd assortment of things that we will take away with us: a giant sponge, a crucifix made of tiny shells, eleven small beige starfish, a piece of wood which the sea caressed and then rejected, a tea-towel from Maria embroidered with Byzantine crosses, a bunch of wild mountain thyme, a rusty goat’s bell, a beeswax candle from the church of Saint Nikolaus ...

  Odysseus is standing by the old gnarled eucalyptus tree in the village square, his cap tilted at a cocky angle, his blue eyes watching us. He smiles, and his smile is shot with gold. ‘Good weather for sailing!’ he says, ‘But of course, one never knows…How far is Canada? Maybe I’ll come one day. Is it farther than Gibraltar? I’ve been to Gibraltar. Goodbye, goodbye…’ We shake hands, and make our way down to the harbour.

  Papa Stephanos is sitting in his usual chair outside the café — an eternal figure in black against the dazzling white wall. I think: he will be here forever, he will never die. We lean over to kiss him; there are tears in his eyes. ‘Come in the spring!’ he says. ‘We will go to the mountains to celebrate Paskha…we will all go together …’ We leave him sipping his bitter coffee, his hands trembling a little as he raises the cup to his lips. ‘Goodbye, children, goodbye…’

  Farther on down the road, Nikos’ aunt emerges from her house, carrying a large pink plastic bag. ‘Here, take this. Food. It’s a long trip to Athens. There’s some boiled eggs and tomatoes and cheese and bread…’ She bursts into tears and crushes us in her ample arms. ‘Kalo taxidhi! Have a good journey!’

  By the time we reach the harbour, many laughing children have gathered behind us, their voices like little bells in the clear vibrant air. The motorboat is waiting; we jump in and wave to everyone on the dock as we speed away. The island gets smaller and smaller. It is as though we are not leaving it at all — it is leaving us.

  Later we board the big boat for the six hour trip north to Piraeus. I sit in a deck chair and watch the waves churning as we pull away towards the open sea. I remember the old sailor’s warning: ‘If you see a gorgeous mermaid rising out of the water, a gorgeous mermaid seeking news of her dead brother, say to her that the Great One lives yet, lives and rules. Say this if you want fair weather. She is the sister of Alexander.’

  I want to write a letter to Odysseus, a letter which I will send from Canada, which is farther than Gibraltar, a letter which goes:

  Dear Odysseus:

  I will send you a golden toothbrush and a real live mermaid, if you will send me a box of fireflies and tiny shrimps with burning eyes.

  Yours truly, Gwendolyn.

  Stones and Angels

  A RETURN TO ATHENS

  I am back again in Christina’s living room amid the mad clicking of the knitting needles. Five years have passed since I was last here, and only a very few things have changed. The kitchen and bathroom are full of birds in brightly decorated cages; the children have grown up and are listening to Cat Stevens and Pink Floyd in the bedroom. Irini has changed her hair colour, and Sophia has lost some weight. Someone has embroidered the Acropolis in green and yellow on a cushion cover. A new electric kettle screams for help in the kitchen.

  Dina is one of those Athenians who has never been up to the Acropolis. (‘You can see it from the window every day; it’s just there.’) With a fiendish gleam in her eye, she hands me two huge needles and a hefty ball of bright red wool. ‘Knit,’ she commands as I look at her helplessly. ‘Knit, knit!’ she cries, and I wither under her gaze. I begin the first line. The first line is always the hardest. I decide I will knit an epilogue of sorts, an afterword, a random pattern of thought since my return to Athens.

  The city is getting tired; it is running on centuries of accumulated nervous energy and refuses to relax. And the city is scared as well. A few short years ago it tasted blood again in the nightmarish episode at the Polytechnical School when army tanks bore down upon the ranks of protesting students, killing and wounding in hideous numbers. The city is shaky, like someone recovering from a severe bout of flu, spending its energy in fitful bursts of activitiy, then lapsing into exhaustion. If anything, the pace of life is even more frenetic than I remember; the people seem to be unbearably impatient with the awkward, twitching realities of the times. They drum their fingernails, so to speak, in despair over the inadequacy of the present moment, tensely waiting for something, anything to happen which will provide a temporary escape from that moment.

  Reality is not of the here and now, nor is it to be found in the past. Reality is the ever-elusive Something which is always one step ahead of you in time. It is one minute from now, one hour from now, and you must chase it; you must speed up time in an attempt to catch up with it. The slightest incident can send people into a flurry of talk or activity which quickly reaches a peak, then painfully ebbs as the waiting begins again. The waiting is a study in tension; it is almost the opposite of boredom. It is a kind of exhausting alertness, a spiritual insomnia which allows nothing to slip by the attention.

  In Christina’s living room, the women’s voices rise and fall in theatrical cadences. Everyone butts in on everyone else, each trying to outdo the other in intensity of expression or sheer wordiness. Greek is a polysyllabic language; thus it takes longer to get something said, to make a point. North Americans are often convinced that because of all the dramatic facial expressions, gesticulations, and near-hysterical tones of voice, something of earth-shattering significance must be under discussion. Not always so, of course. It just looks and sounds that way to us Westerners with our language of monosyllables and monotones. When we want to stress or punctuate a point while speaking, often the best we can do is to wave a hand limply or raise a forefinger. Whenever possible, we understate, we ‘play down’, since it is of the essence for us in our society to keep our cool (whatever that is). The Greeks on the whole, and Athenians in particular, are not terribly interested in cool. Small wonder. Wagons of war, knights in dusty armour, horses, chariots,and now, tanks, have kept the fires of anger and passion raging.

  Five years ago it was difficult to get from point A to point B in the city. Now, it is often impossible. The buses are slow, bulging caterpillars, and once one has squeezed, pushed and elbowed one’s way inside, there is the awful prospect of having to get off. Most of the streets are too narrow to comfortably accommodate cars — (Athens was not built with the Twentieth Century in mind) — and taxi drivers all seem to be in varying stages of nervous breakdowns. The paraphernalia of worry-beads, small plastic pictures of saints, crucifixes and family photos which decorate the dashboards is powerless in working any kind of magic in traffic. The language of taxi drivers is their most eloquent defense,
— a series of rapidly-fired curses, insults and soul-destroying anathemas hurled at pedestrians and other drivers alike, carefully constructed to deflate the bravest of the brave.

  A few days ago I watched a film starring Greece’s finest comedian, Thanassis Vengos. He is a genius of the comic art, and watching him, one is torn — as with all fine comedy — between laughter and tears. He is so utterly human, it is almost heartbreaking. He charges and surges across the stage or screen with blinding speed. He seems to be moving in all directions at once, and like a prism throws off beams of light and energy. He never walks; he jumps, runs and darts around continually, his face registering a kaleidoscope of emotions. The frenzy of movement never lets up, and if there is a gap in the action, he grabs anything within reach which is edible or drinkable and chews or gulps it down. He seems to be crashing through time in pursuit of some obscure and ever-changing goal, and he’s a winner even when he loses. The Greeks adore him. In some ways he is the quintessence of the modern Athenian.

  Christina brings in some tea, and the sound of Bob Dylan’s The Times They Are A’Changin’ comes pouring in from the bedroom.

  ‘What kind of music is that?’ exclaims Sophia.

  A heated discussion follows, all about The Young People Of Today. I have the definite and uncomfortable feeling that I’ve been here before. One woman begins passionately to complain that her son is thinking of leaving Greece to go and study in some foreign land. Everyone is horrified; this is the most unthinkable of all the unthinkables. The Greek family is an extremely tightly-knit unit; the women are highly possessive with their children, and ‘leaving home’ is just not part of the established order of things. Even when young people go out to work and get married, the new family thus created becomes an appendage of the old one, and there is no transitional stage wherein one might get one’s bearings, explore independence, examine the self.

  ‘Why does he want to go?’ she cries. ‘Why?’

  ‘He probably doesn’t want to go into the army,’ I say. ‘He probably doesn’t want to learn how to kill.’

  ‘So he’ll go and join those long-haired students who shout and carry signs through the streets!’ she exclaims, almost on the verge of tears. ‘Look what happened to them! Look what they did to them!’

  The women fall silent. Everyone is remembering. It was the 17th of November, 1973…

  Students of the Polytechnical School in the centre of Athens staged a demonstration to protest the fascist activities of the Greek government. The colonels responsible for the military coup of 1967 were still in power. The Junta government had sent thousands of Greece’s finest artists, writers, and revolutionaries into exile and imprisonment — along with countless numbers of people who were simply known to have left-wing tendencies. The composer Mikis Theodrakis, whose music was used in the film ‘Z’, was one of the names at the top of the Junta’s black list. While in prison, he continued to write music, tapping out the rhythms on the bars of his cell and smuggling the work to someone on the outside. I met him once in Toronto; he’s a great mountain of a man with wild hair and piercing eyes. He is gentle and soft spoken, but when he is conducting an orchestra he is a human dynamo; his arms become wings, and he looks as though he is taking part in the creation of the world.

  Another name at the top of the list was that of the great poet Yannis Ritsos. The best, the very best of men were the first to be seized in that ugly year of 1967.

  Then, six years later, the students of the Polytechnical School demanded that their voice be heard. It was the voice of the Greek people too long committed to silence. They gathered in the school and began broadcasting appeals to the people to rise up against their oppressors, through loudspeakers and over the radio. Military units gathered on top of the Hotel Acropolis across the street; guns were trained on the school day and night, but the students held their ground. Then, on November 17, the tanks moved in, crushing the iron gates of the school into grotesque, tortuous shapes. ‘Stop ! We are your brothers!’ some of the students cried, waving their arms in front of the tanks. Then the shots rang out, and the bodies began to fall. Many were killed, many more wounded. It was a triumph of pure evil.

  Now the years of the Junta are over, and the climate of Greece, though somewhat safer, is still uncertain. The Poly-technical School stands as a grim reminder of the nightmare of November 17th, 1973. The walls of the building are covered with revolutionary symbols, slogans, the names of the dead, in many colours, the brightest of which is black. When I passed the school a few days ago, the very air seemed to change, become electrically charged. It is impossible, I think, to pass by the place without having the feeling that something has happened there, even if one is unaware of the actual story. Now the school has become a central meeting place for the young, the politically conscious generation of Greece. Talks, concerts and films are frequently held there, and the day I passed, a new work by Theodrakis came through the loudspeaker, filling the streets for blocks around with the stunning music of human freedom.

  That same night, Nikos and I went to visit the poet Yannis Ritsos. We had done some translations of his poetry and, needless to say, we were excited and somewhat nervous at the prospect of meeting the man whom Louis Aragon once called ‘the greatest living European poet’. As we stood waiting for the door to open, I remembered Ritsos’ short poem, Obligation:

  A star shines in late evening like a lighted

  keyhole;

  you press your eye to it —you peer inside —you see everything. The world is shot full of light behind the closed door.

  You’ve got to open it.

  Yannis Ritsos greeted us at the door with open arms. ‘You’ve come! Welcome, welcome!’ he said, planting neat kisses on our cheeks and leading us into his tiny, crowded apartment. It took me a moment to get my bearings. I knew, of course, that itsos is well-known for the drawings he creates on the natural surfaces of stones, bones and roots, and I had seen some photographs of these works, but nothing had prepared me for the sight which met my eyes.

  Floors, tables, shelves and mantelpieces were covered with an astonishing number of creations. Human figures sang

  from the stones, leapt from the tangled roots, crept out of the bits of bone in a stunning and bewildering variety of postures and expressions.

  He smiled at our amazement and gave us a short guided tour of the rooms, stopping now and then to pick up a piece

  and comment on its origin, turning it over fondly in his hands. In every case, the face or figure was something which had been discovered within the natural contours of the material, never imposed upon it.

  We sat in the living room and he brought some wine and candied fruit in tiny glass dishes. His movements had the slow and studied grace of one who has learned to respect time. Although he was sixty-seven, nothing about him would suggest he was much over fifty. His face, with its wonderfully regular, handsome features, bespoke great kindness and patience; his hazel eyes were keenly attentive, reflecting the gentle humour that only comes after much suffering. When he spoke, it was as though each word was a gift, a discovery, something to be handled with care.

  ‘My work keeps me alive,’ he told us. ‘In creating, I am affirming my place in the universe, I am making a statement against death…’

  Again and again in our conversation that evening, the subject of death arose. For Ritsos, it is not a morbid preoccupation but an ever-present reminder of the conditions of our mortality, a perpetual why that spurs us on to noble and beautiful endeavours, to a magnificent defiance. He was putting the finishing touches on a long poem written some years ago, a poem for Pablo Neruda, whose death saddened him deeply, whose life and work had so much in common with his own. He showed us the manuscript, painstakingly executed — as is everything he writes — in a beautiful calligraphy. He spoke of Pablo’s struggles, and of his own; when he came to speak of his last ‘detention’ in the political prison on the island of Leros, it wa
s without bitterness, only weariness and great sorrow.

  He wrote his poem, News Report, in 1969:

  Evening clouds; the lighted clock in the church in the square;

  bald trees; cold; garbage. From the hilltops

  gunfire could still be heard. A while later

  George arrived on a bicycle. He laid down

  a guitar with broken strings. He said

  ‘We hauled the dead into a storeroom. No time for prayers or flags.

  But hide this list at least, so in future we’ll remember

  their names, their ages —I’ve even got the measurements

  of their legs.

  The three marble-workers were killed too. All that’s left

  is that stone angel, without a head —you can put any head

  you like on it.’ With that he left. He didn’t take the guitar.

  But despite the bleakness of these lines, his work is essentially affirmative; it bends the mind, tears the soul.

  We had brought him two stones from the island, and rather shyly we handed them to him. We wondered if he would see anything in them; all we had been able to make out were the shapes of a turtle and possibly a ram. He simply glanced at them very briefly, muttered a pleased ‘Nai, nai,’ yes, — and dipped a pen into a bottle of sepia-coloured India Ink. Then, as we continued talking about the snow in Canada, the octopi we caught, the brilliant young composers in Greece who were setting some of his poems to music, his nominations for the Nobel Prize, the recent translations of his works into several languages and his own translations of the Turkish poet Nazim Hikmet, the importance of cats in one’s life and the deplorable fact that some people treat their animals with more affection then they do one another, he slowly and carefully drew lines on the stones, stopping now and again to smile at his work.