The Island

A DIARY

The island is shy and exuberant, savage and fair, bold yet self-effacing. It is a woman in heat, a man in despair, a blonde horse at sunset, a riot of fig trees, a flaking white salt bed, an arid garden of thyme and oregano, a hundred clotheslines full of octopi hung up to dry, a warm night of fireflies and tiny shrimps with burning eyes.

You know you are almost there when you can see the two huge rocks they call ‘the doors’ rising from the sea ahead of you. The ship stops at a large island; from there, a motorboat takes you across the transparent green water to a smaller sister island. At the dock, the fishermen are spreading out their saffron yellow nets to dry, and women carrying large loaves of bread and plastic bags full of tomatoes and eggplants are laughing at some impossibly funny joke. Bare-footed boys with nutbrown bodies run along the beach chasing something only they can see, and in the café, the old men sip their afternoon coffee, play tavali, or simply smoke their pipes and watch the sea.

Suddenly you know that you have been here forever.

Entry One: We are staying in the tiny house where Nikos was born. It is really one room, with a stone floor and white stucco walls; it is very, very old, and it is joined to the row of similar houses which line the ‘main street’ of the village. It is lit by kerosene lamps — (electricity is still a relatively new convenience on the island) — and we fetch our water from an outdoor tap down the road, in the same kind of redbrown earthenware jugs that have been used for centuries in the East. They look strange, sitting on the windowsill along with the modern blue and yellow plastic ones. Stranger still are the faded family portraits of men with sailor’s caps and large mustaches and women with their hair pulled back tightly into buns, who may have had their pictures taken only once in their lifetimes, and who stare in shy bewilderment from the dusty oval frames. Beside them on the wall are snappy colour photos of the younger generation all dressed up in miniskirts and tight pants smiling for the photographers in the cafés or nightclubs of Athens.

An incredibly old woman who used to be the village midwife has greeted us four times today, and asked us each time who we are and where we come from. She is more and more delighted each time we tell her, as though she can’t get enough of the novelty of it all. She has an enormous wart on her chin, and she sits outside her door on a rickety old chair, her ancient body doubled over in an almost foetal position, chuckling softly to herself. ‘Welcome, welcome!’ she cries, each time she sees us. Perhaps tomorrow she’ll remember our names, perhaps not. Her failing memory must mean that every day is utterly new to her — almost like being born again each morning.

About an hour ago she drew me close to her and said, ‘If you go for bagnio (swim) in the sea, it is very good for your skin. It heals all your wounds. But you must take off your rings, or the sea will take them away. Yes, didn’t you know? The sea steals your gold…! I don’t know why, but this is true.’

Entry Two: I have met the mayor, the doctor, the school teacher, the man in charge of the post-office, telephone and telegraph system, and the chief of police of the island. I must try to remember their names and faces — (the mayor, I learned, was insulted when I failed to recognize and greet him an hour after we were introduced). The man in charge of the post-office, telephone and telegraph system, sits all day at his desk with earphones, scowling and listening to garbled messages coming from Athens or the surrounding islands, to which he responds with screams of ever-increasing frustration and even anger. He is intensely overworked. The chief of police, on the other hand, is a study in boredom. He has nothing whatever to do, due to the delightful fact that there is virtually no crime on the island, so he spends much of his time sitting in the café clicking his worry-beads, playing cards and waiting, helplessly, for something to happen. We have toyed with the idea of creating a crime for him to solve — something very Sherlockian, perhaps some sort of baffling theft. We would slip cryptic notes under his door, and plant outrageously meaningless clues all over the village. It would become know as The Case of the Six-Legged Octopus, although we still haven’t figured out where the octopus comes in.

I also met a sad chap called Christos, whose melancholy, I learned, is due to the fact that he had refused to put his life savings in a bank; he kept the money, in paper, in a hole in the wall. When he went to look at it one day, it was all chewed up by mice. When he took the shreds to the banks, they refused him.

But most important of all, I have met Odysseus.

Odysseus has one leg, and baffling skyblue eyes, and when he smiles his shy wide smile, you can see that some of his back teeth are pure gold. He lives in a small room across the street from the church of Saint Nikolaus, and he doesn’t like people very much, and that includes larger People like God and the Virgin Mary. He is the butt of a thousand jokes and rather cruel tricks, because he believes absolutely everything anyone tells him. Once someone told him that a beautiful young woman had come all the way from Tripoli to be his bride; he immediately made a journey to another island to buy fancy underwear for his betrothed. But there was no bride. Another time someone told him a queen was coming to see him; she was going to land on the northern side of the island in a helicopter. Odysseus got dressed up and waited, but there was no queen.

Sometimes he goes to the famous spilio — the great cave where, some say, the fabled Odysseus met the Cyclops. And there, he sells gazoza and orange drinks to the thirsty tourists who pour in to see the gigantic stalactites and marvel at the fabulous caverns. ‘Look !’ he exclaims, pointing to the boxes and boxes of empty pop bottles outside the cave. ‘Look at all that work; I opened them all myself!’

His face, although lined now and weatherbeaten, still wears the clear, alarming expression of the eternal child. Someone once tried to warn him that the people were making a fool of him, but he smiled and shook his head and said that wasn’t true, men couldn’t be that cruel. Men were good, men didn’t hurt each other. They only tried to have fun. He also tried to have fun, but he did it better alone. Sometime later he tried to hang himself on the bell-rope of the church for love of a village girl who could never be his.

‘Why does he smile so much ?’ I asked Nikos. ‘He can’t have much to smile about.’

‘He’s just showing off his gold teeth,’ Nikos said. ‘He went to a dentist a few years ago and had some of his perfectly good teeth extracted so he could have them replaced with gold. The ancient Greeks, you know, used to carry coins in their mouths if they didn’t have wallets, but that’s beside the point. I just mean that he’s literally got his life savings in his mouth. He’s smarter than poor old Christos, when you come to think of it. The mice can’t get at that!’

Odysseus, I love you.

Entry Three: The island is full of churches and shrines — some of them in the village and others nestled in the hills or higher up in the mountains, their domes like the perfect white breasts of the Mother. Each is devoted to a particular saint and the women leave tama — votive offerings — in the form of little metal plaques engraved with pictures of eyes or hands or feet, in the hope that the holy powers will intervene in the daily matters of health and safety. Sometimes there are sprigs of wild thyme or sweet basil hung by string or pink ribbon around the ikons. Sometimes there are lonely, dried-up flowers. Authentic Byzantine ikons hang side by side with modern plastic atrocities, and somehow it doesn’t matter; holiness is holiness. When I came across boxes of detergents and dustcloths tucked in behind an ikon of the Virgin Mary, I remembered that the Greek word katharos means ‘clean’ or ‘pure’ both on the physical and spiritual level. Catharsis is a purification of the emotions, according to Webster, and that is holy. Every simple daily act performed with love is holy. I thought of all the women who tended these chapels through the centuries, down on their knees scrubbing the floors, the work itself an act of worship.

Today I went into the smallest and oldest chapel in the village, which dates back to the Thirteenth Century at least. It was pure white and empty, save for two ikons. Only a wooden partition, the ikonostasis, flanked by faded embroidered curtains separated me from the area of the Holy Altar, which is out of bounds to members of my sex. God can get me if He wants, I thought. I’m going in anyway. I proceeded to commit my act of hubris.

Behind the partition, in the sanctuary, the small altar was covered with a white cotton cloth. There was nothing else there — except, to my amazement, a flat wooden carving of Christ on the cross, propped up against one wall. It was so roughly done it might have been the work of a child. Curious, I turned it over. There were some letters stamped on the back. It was a piece of wood from a Coca-Cola crate.

I wanted to cry, which is nothing new because I do it all the time, and when I stepped out from the sanctuary my eyes were so watery that I didn’t see the little lamp of holy oil which was hanging in front of me. I walked right into it, bashing my head against it, and winced with pain as the burning oil trickled into my hair. I thought I was dying; my scalp was seared with the heat, and I ran outside to find water, anything, to ease the agony.

My hair is still quite oily, even after several shampoos. But it’s all right. God was not displeased because I invaded the Holy of Holies. On the contrary — I have been anointed.

Entry Four: The soft porous stone at one of the beaches is like a lung. When you lie on it, you can hear the sea breathing and wheezing as the waves enter the little sea-caves and force the air up through the holes in the stone. The beach is strewn with dry seaweed like shredded paper. We dove for little black sea-urchins, and ate about a dozen of them, prying them open with a knife, squirting them with lemon juice, and scooping them out of their shells. Then Nikos went down again and came back with an incredible shell creature called a pina. This has to be seen to be believed. It is about ten inches long and shaped rather like a thin fan tapering to a sharp point. It never goes anywhere; that is, it gets itself firmly embedded by its tip in the sand on the seafloor and simply stays there forever, waiting for various edible creatures to pass by. It is an incredibly silly and ignorant thing and has, literally, no mind of its own. In fact it can survive only with the aid of one or two tiny shrimps which live inside its shell and act as its brain. When anything that might be food for the pina comes floating or swimming by, the shrimp (or shrimps) go down to the tip of the shell where the meaty blob is situated, and tickle it. The blob is thus stimulated to action; the top of the shell opens and the food is trapped inside. Thus, a pina without a shrimp is a dead pina. It will simply sit there in the sand and starve to death, having nothing that can pass for a brain to inform it to open its shell from time to time. Nikos and I have thought up a new term to describe a witless person — a pina without a shrimp. That’s a very in joke; it sounds better in Greek. But in all fairness to this odd creature, I should add that it’s very beautiful when pried open; the inside of the shell is a dazzling world of phosphorescence, almost like mother-of-pearl. The blob tastes good too, with a dash of lemon juice and a little ouzo.

I was suffering from that bane which travellers the world over know by different names; here in Greece I suppose it would be ‘Agamemnon’s Revenge’. I looked around for a suitable place to squat; the landscape was utterly bare, and my only hope was a small prickly shrub at the top of a hill. I headed for it with the glazed stare of a person with one mission, and one mission only. A donkey, chewing thoughtfully on something in a field nearby, turned and stared at me as I relieved myself with a sigh. Indignant, I tried to outstare him; it was no use. There was only me and him, the sea and the urgent sun in all the universe.

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 any 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

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.

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 coming — 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.

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.