Mermaids and Ikons Read online

  ‘Giants built this place,’ I whispered, as we approached the Lion’s Gate. Nikos just smiled, and ran his hand along one of the great blonde stones.

  I looked up and there they were — the two splendid equivocal lions gracing the gate of the fabulous city, gazing at one another as they had gazed for more than three and a half thousand years. The double beast which, like the two-headed eagle of the Byzantines, I had always imagined to symbolize the dual nature of human existence — free will, and Fate. For a moment I could see the tragic Orestes standing where we stood, contemplating a horrendous matricide, struggling to rationalize his actions in terms of the dictates of his own mind rather than those of divine law. A few lines from a long poem, Orestes, by the Greek poet Yannis Ritsos came to my mind.

  And now,

  in front of this gate I feel totally unready; —

  the two marble lions — see them? — they’ve grown tame,

  they, who started out so dauntless when we were children,

  half wild, their manes bristling for some foolhardy leap,

  now finally settled down agreeably on the top corners of the gate

  with dead hair, vacant eyes, — terrifying nobody, — wearing an expression

  of punished dogs, bearing no resentment,

  their tongues licking from time to time the warm soles of night.

  We passed through the gate and entered the ruins of the city of Agamemnon, a city once stuffed with gold from the spoils of war, from the conquest of Troy, a city which now exists only in the mind and in the mute stones where snails and snakes and lizards go about their furtive business. Nothing is left except golden coins and ornaments in the museum in Athens, and the famous masks, all flattened out and funny in the daze of death, to tell us what really happened here. A great city rose and fell; it’s an old, old story.

  We need our giants, I thought bleakly as I stood over the royal graveyard. Mighty kings with glittering plans and abysmally cunning minds were buried here, in this snaillike, circular Necropolis. They are gone, poof, vanished. History is merely history; it is only glorified through myth.

  I joined Nikos, who had gone on ahead of me and was standing at the far side of the ruins, looking over the sheer drop down the mountainside. Beyond, a sister mountain glowing with gold and mauve seemed so close we might have reached out and touched it. The mighty sky was also a tangible thing — a dome of glass. Dizziness made us draw back and continue our wanderings among the stones.

  We came across the entrance to an enormous underground cistern which must have been one of the reservoirs of water for the city in times of siege. We descended, daring each other at every step, for the ancient slippery stairs were worn down by centuries of feet making their way deeper and deeper into the bowels of the mountain. It was pitch black and dreadfully chill. It was terrifying. Somehow it seemed to me to be a place of death, although I could not think why. It was a place of water, and water is life ... and yet somewhere at the very bottom of that reservoir a single drop of water was going tinkle tinkle, and sending up black, distorted rings of sound which were almost visible. I remembered Rider Haggard’s She, and the nightmare of immortality. The worn-down stairs, the sad passageways in the caves of Kôr. I brooded over the evils of Time.

  Later we took pictures of one another standing in the cone-shaped archway at the far end of the city. It was constructed with the same unbelievably huge blocks of stone as the Lion’s Gate. We wondered if it might have been a sort of back door to the city, an emergency exit in times of siege. Whatever it was, it made us look like pygmies. Mycenae really cuts you down to size.

  Finally we went to the place alternately known as the Treasury of Atreus or the grave of Agamemnon, a curious, beehive-shaped structure cut into a hillside. Once inside, a strange trick of acoustics distorted human voices, so that they seemed to be coming from within the very walls. People stood around in small groups, speaking in hushed whispers, giggling nervously now and again as the walls giggled back. We didn’t stay long.

  As we drove away from Mycenae the afternoon light was turning from gold to copper, and the city looked serene and mysterious, as though it held some brilliant secret — perhaps at the bottom of that dark cistern -- which would never be brought to light.

  Nikos was laughing silently as we turned a bend in the

  road and the city was lost from view.

  ‘What’s funny?’ I asked.

  ‘Giants,’ he replied. ‘Giants are funny.’

  ‘They are not. They’re serious. And anyway, I like them; I said.

  It was dusk when we returned to Naphlion.

  The next day we went to Epidaurus to see the ancient theatre which once seated fifteen thousand people who chattered and munched cheese and olives, scolded their children, laughed at the plays of Aristophanes, wept at the tragedies of Euripides and generally, no doubt, had a fabulous time. It is situated in a marvellous grove of pines and red leafy vines which give off burning, pungent aromas. We walked through the ruins of the temple of Aesculapius and the surrounding ruins which were all part of a great medical centre of the ancient world. People came here for cures for every conceivable disease of the body or the mind. I shuddered when we came to a structure known as the tholos of Polycleites — a sort of circular labyrinth whose function is still not entirely clear. Some say it was used for secret religious initiations; others say it may have been a prison (or even a bank!). But the most probable theory is that it was used for curing certain types of insanity, the idea being that the patient underwent some sort of experience in the labyrinth so fearful that it snapped him back to reality. It is always associated with snakes, and one wonders if the idea was to cure mental disease by employing the very symbol of all that is loathsome and fearful in the human unconscious, to lead the patient through, as it were, the labyrinth of his own mind. The symbol of medicine is still a serpent coiled around a staff. In any case, we did not like the tholos, and we moved on.

  The air was wild with the smell of mustard and pines. We sat in the top row of the ancient theatre and listened while a man far down below us dropped a single drachma onto the dot that indicated centre stage. Like a pebble dropped into a still pool, the coin made tinkling rings of pure sound which rose to greet us through the hot blonde air.

  ‘Nikos,’ I said. ‘I just had a thought. What if they weren’t giants? I mean the builders of Mycenae. What if they were just like us, you know, hopelessly mortal and all that, clipping their fingernails, worrying about their grey hairs, troubled by their nightmares…’

  Nikos laughed. ‘You build big when you’re scared,’ he said. ‘And they built big!’

  I thought about that for a while, and gradually it all made sense. ‘So; I whispered sadly, ‘They weren’t giants after all, were they? They were just plain scared.’

  ‘Scared silly, I would say,’ he said.

  God, the price we pay for our illusions. Someone dropped another coin onto centre stage and the air turned silver.

  Mystras

  THE SEARCH FOR THE GREAT WHITE HORSE

  We streamed down the mountain from Tripoli in cold driving rain, on the trail of Constantine Palaeologus, last of the Byzantine emperors. We had heard (read?) (dreamed?) that his spirit still hovered over the city of Mystras, and that it had been known to appear in the guise of a great white horse on the deserted mountain stronghold. It seemed so important to us to discover the great lords, the dead ones — for they dwell in us still; their voices clamour in the night, they charge through our sleep like stallions.

  So we went after the phantom beast, or the Emperor himself, whichever we would find.

  To be as blindly specific as possible — we streamed down the mountain from Tripoli, and our cab driver who loved us more than life itself demonstrated the fact by taking the hairpin turns with a smiling nonchalance which chilled our blood. He informed us meanwhile that of all the people he had
taken to Mystras, we were the first who wanted to go there to find a horse.

  His name was George — the George, as they say in Greek, since all names in Greek are preceded by the definite article to make one feel like a being rather than a word — and we had discovered him in Naphlion drinking gazoza beside his cab stand and more than willing to take us to some of the more inaccessible parts of the Peloponnese.

  Horrors of mist, sheer drops into raining nothingness awaited us at each bend in the mountain road. The mind gets used to such things, though the body curls up into a tight knot of terror and stays that way all down to the Acadian plain of sheep and goats and apples and tons of red, red earth. And from there even lower into Sparta, through narrow foggy valleys and passes, which, in the dark unreal rain, gave me a ghastly déjà vu.

  You can’t really begin to think in Greece until things get dark. It’s the rain, or the dusk, or perhaps even a cloud or two which brings things into a reasonable perspective. All those tons of sunlight hammering away at the pillars of the Acropolis make history too lucid to be real, and you begin to wonder if light itself is a lie, a bright guise of God, not an illumination. And maybe darkness is better, the darkness in which Constantine died, the dark end of the Byzantine Empire…

  He was crowned on the 6th of January, 1449, in Mystras, provincial stronghold of the Empire, capital city of the Despotate of the Peloponnese. Then he went to Constantinople and died. In his life he defended what was left of the Empire, which was not much, for when he took the throne the Empire had to all intents and purposes fallen.

  Through the Spartan plain, the rain still freezing, and ahead of us at last the abandoned phantom city.

  ‘Panagea mou!’ whispered the George. ‘Isn’t it beautiful!’ and put his foot on the accelerator to bring us closer. The Greeks do not linger over beauty; they devour it.

  Nikos said nothing and I merely murmured an ineffectual ‘Wow’, for I had had a glimpse of Mystras and it seemed to me to be some incredible thing, beast or plant, all in fragments and clinging to the mountainside the way a nightmare clings to the mind of a sleeper. It was ghastly, green with rain, tragic with history, unspeakably Byzantine.

  We had to pass through the modern village at the foot of the mountain. Here were the descendants of the people who had gradually abandoned the ancient stronghold to live in relative peace in the Spartan plain, having had their fill of Franks and Turks and who knows what else history had served them up both before and after Constantine. I was tempted to stop and ask one of them if they knew anything of the legend of the great white horse, but a shyness held me back. We slowed down, though, at a statue in the town square.

  ‘Who’s that?’ the George asked one of the passersby, a small boy carrying a white goat on his shoulders.

  ‘Oh him,’ the boy smiled. ‘That’s Constantine.’

  As we pulled away I tried to get a good look at the features of the statue, but I saw only an over-large metallic king with an amazingly determined face. He was dressed for war. I had expected him to be wearing a thin tubular Byzantine costume with little pointed slippers — like the ones you see on playing cards — but I suppose he only wore such things for religious ceremonies and public festivals. He had a beard, I think. And a helmet. I thought that since he had been crowned in January it would have been raining then too…

  Most of the older men of the village were in the café — or café-neon as they say — drinking coffee or ouzo at that hour of the day, and as we passed through the narrow streets we heard their coaxing, argumentative voices, and the occasional clicking of the dice on the tavali boards.

  The entrance to the phantom city was freezing stone. The trees wailed with cold, and I feared that the entire stronghold would somehow lose its grip on the mountainside and slide down into oblivion in a gush of mud and agony. But we paid our ten drachmas to the guard at the gate — a sullen fellow who was fortified on that particular day with a hefty bottle of Metaxa brandy — bought two guide-books which got immediately soaked, covered our heads with the latest newspapers from Athens, and passed out from under the arch.

  Nikos uttered an exclamation of alarm. We had expected a ghost town, but this was ridiculous. It took us a while to comprehend what was confronting us — not a smallish wreck of a Byzantine stronghold, but an entire city, absolutely abandoned and broken. A city which wound up and up the mountainside in a steep maze which mocked our wildest dreams. The rain assaulted the cobblestones, the skeletons of mansions, the countless arches, the monasteries and chapels, the granaries, the palace of the Palaeologoi. And finally, on the very top, the castle which we had to bend over backwards to see. It dawned on me — (strange how the obvious dawns on you at times like these) — that they built castles on the tops of mountains so nobody could reach them.

  In a limp attempt to bring things down to earth, I muttered ‘Where’s the George?’ and imagined to my horror that our mad friend had driven up the highway to await us at the castle gate, the last exit of Mystras, the absolute top, from which, for some obscure reason, he figured we would triumphantly emerge.

  Our guide-books had turned to soup in our hands, and we flung them away, enraged. I noticed on the pavement one half-readable page — a diagram, a map of Mystras of such complex character that it would require two weeks of intensive study to comprehend. Where were we? The place needed a month, a year, ten years to understand, and we had a couple of hours. In dark rain. Newspapers on our heads. Frozen to the bone. The latest news from Athens slowly dripping into my hair — who got out of jail, who got put in, reasons for same, ecstatic anticipations of the forthcoming visit of Spiro Agnew, and ads for Vim detergent.

  We became depressed; the city overpowered us. We slid accidentally into the courtyard of a church, having lost all hope of ever finding the great white horse.

  But then I saw him.

  Not the horse, but him, Constantine, dressed in a long red tubular robe with pointed slippers. I saw his crown, his face, everything. The rain was a million bullets on the mosaic floor. I saw the drinking-place for the horses, I saw his retinue entering the chapel with heavy soaked velvet clothes, I saw the gilded priests crowning the last of the Palaeologoi, at the close of an empire.

  And the ghastly rain kept falling, falling, and the ikons in the chapel were purple with cold. A purple mountain rose up behind us and the last Lord of the Byzantines was falling, falling to his knees before the golden faces of the Virgin and the Child, accepting the crown of a hopeless empire upon his head.

  I stood in the doorway of the chapel, gazing first into the cold sanctuary of Christ, and then out into the pounding courtyard where the emperor trod in his little golden slippers, where the hooves of his horses trod, and the heavy boots of his endless guards.

  All this is history, but it was only much later that I learned that out of all the countless churches and chapels in Mystras, it was this one, Saint Demetrius, which had been chosen for the coronation. This is accident, or miracle. I merely record what I saw.

  Back out, then, into the everlasting deluge, coldest day of our lives, cursing the George who had abandoned us for the impossible heights of Mystras, the summit, the last refuge in times of siege. Sliding through arched avenues, peering despondently into abandoned homes. On a green patch of field a monstrous jungle-plant clung to the earth dripping rain like sweat. Barbaric greenery, and beneath, in the grass and rocks, the hugest snails in the world, closed now in their armoured shells, little fortresses of horror threatening at any moment to open.

  Soaked to the soul, still we searched for the great white horse, but all we could see through the insane rain was the little playing-card king slipping and sliding ahead of us, flanked by guards and aides, all of them like us cursing the cold and the cobblestones. Constantine (perhaps?) cursing his own coronation and the empire he had to uphold, a thing which had crumbled before he was even born.

  We had only covered about one one-hundr
edth of the city before we knew we would have to give up and go back to the main gate. The chill in our bones was the chill of history, the endless sieges of Mystras, assassinations, slaughters. I began to see children’s eyes staring out from vaulted doorways, and black-robed women clutching ikons of the Virgin to their breasts, praying for the relief of the city. I imagined the aristocracy up on the higher, safer slopes, perhaps under the protection of the palace or the castle, while the poor got butchered in their flimsy homes or in the streets by invading armies. I kept seeing the rain of war falling, falling. History like a great mud-slide; human beings, snails, donkeys, plants all clutching the mountainside for dear life.

  Where the hell was the George? He could save us from these thoughts if only he’d realize that we would emerge from the main gate, and not the top. We tried to get help from the guard, who had sadly slipped more or less under his desk from the effects of the Metaxa, but who managed, nevertheless, to put through a call to the summit gate. Whoever was in charge up there, though, had seen neither a car nor a George and had no idea what we were talking about.

  ‘George, you, you jest of God!’ I cried — (when I get mad I am very literary) — and madly flailed the air with what was left of the newspaper from Athens until it dropped in a pulp to the ground.

  The guard smiled at us and shrugged his shoulders and gradually slid away from view Mystras was slowly beginning to slide down the mountain — or so it looked to our feverish eyes. I peered out through the gate, down to the Spartan plain, and tried to imagine the ancient warriors taking winter baths in the Eurotas river. The thought warmed me a little.