Mermaids and Ikons Read online

  ‘I’d rather see the temple of Diana; said Nikos.

  ‘I don’t want to see Diana — I want to see Phidias !’ I cried. ‘Well I want to do Diana!’

  ‘OK. You do Diana and I’ll do Phidias, and we’ll meet in twenty minutes at Zeus.’

  ‘All right, as long as you don’t get into a long conversation with the guard, or start collecting hundreds of pine cones, like you did at Sparta.’

  ‘OK. Entaxi.’

  Strolling down the arena, we almost collided with the two German runners who were on their way back to the starting line. It was as though they had moved back in Time, and were now returning to the present. We didn’t wait to find out who won. We left the arena and passed by the temple of Zeus again. How awful to be Lord of the World, I thought, and to have all the columns in your temples fall down. Then we went our separate ways — Nikos for Diana and me for Phidias. I don’t know why I felt quite so strongly about seeing the ruins of the famous sculptor’s house and studio. I felt a little silly about my stubbornness, silly and very, very drowsy. That’s when I leaned against the gate, and slid down to a comfortable sitting position. The air was on fire, and the cicadas went on and on and on…

  ‘Did Phidias ever sculpt Diana?’ I heard myself asking out loud.

  A voice very nearby promptly answered No. I turned around lazily, and saw the guard who was consulting a guidebook, and leaning against an olive tree. He looked like a cross between Jeff Chandler and Jack Palance. (This is because Chandler and Palance appeared in a film called Sign of the Pagan, back in the Fifties.)

  ‘How do you know?’ I asked.

  ‘Know what?’

  ‘That Phidias never sculpted Diana.’

  ‘Because it is not written. Not written here,’ he said, showing me the guide-book.

  ‘Guide-books are not always right,’ I said.

  ‘So? Neither is the Bible.’

  We gazed at the sun, which is not a wise thing to do in Olympia. Eventually, rubbing my eyes, I mentioned that I had a rendezvous shortly at the temple of Zeus.

  ‘Forget Zeus!’ said the guard. ‘Come with me to Athens. The lights, the people, the cafés!’

  ‘I’ve just come from Athens. All those tourists jumping into the fountain in Omonia Square. All those washrooms, which must date back to the early Byzantine period, where you stare at a hole in the floor and wonder what to do with it. All those steep streets where you take you life into your hands, especially if you’re wearing slippery sandals. All those gorgeous dark-eyed men who strip you naked with a single glance. All that ice cream!’

  ‘I like ice cream; said the guard, somewhat defensively.

  ‘So do I. But right now I want to find out what happened to the famous work of Phidias, the great statue of Zeus, stolen in times of yore and taken to God knows where.’

  The guard consulted his guide-book. Trees swayed in the breeze. The fallen columns of the temple of Zeus just lay there. The amorphous interior of the house of Phidias grew more golden and hazy in the afternoon light. I began to wonder what it must have looked like when the great sculptor lived there. It was a smallish place, not much bigger than a bachelor apartment. There must have been many large jars full of olive oil and grain, and wine the colour of sunlight. He might have had concubines, maybe even a wife. Everything was becoming gold. My hands, when I held them up to my eyes, were gold. The face of the guard was gold.

  ‘How did Phidias sculpt the great statue of Zeus in gold?’ I asked. ‘It was gold, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Probably. At least partly. Anyway, you don’t sculpt in metal, Miss. You make a model, you make a mould, then you cast in metal.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘And when is your rendezvous at the temple of Zeus?’ asked the guard.

  ‘Well…as soon as I’ve finished here,’ I said vaguely.

  ‘Oh, and when do you think that will be? Do you think you’ll ever be finished here?’ he asked. His black eyes sparkled like pieces of onyx.

  I began to realize that something was dreadfully wrong. For one thing, when I tried to get up, my limbs felt as though they were swimming in a sea of honey.

  ‘Where… where do you think the ancient thieves took the great statue…?’ I asked dreamily.

  The guard started to laugh. He laughed and laughed and laughed. ‘Where do you think?’ he said. ‘To that other nameless dimension of reality, of course! How did you put it? That “space/time warp” where art reaches out to greet the Infinite. Where beauty exists on its own terms, and is intended to strike the beholder dead…’

  ‘…or force him to re-think what reality is all about,’ I murmured. ‘Or at the very least — to make him weep…’ ‘Precisely. And that’s where they took the Zeus.’

  ‘Do you really think so?’ I asked, managing to look the guard in the eye.

  ‘I know so,’ he said. Then he leaned back again against the olive trees and listened to the cicadas.

  I watched him for a long, long time. He was very beautiful, and he too belonged to another dimension of reality. Praxiteles and Phidias had laboured over just such beauty as this, wrenching it out of the neutral clay of the Now, the Present, and preparing it for its proper place in the eternal order of things. But their beauty had been static; his, I knew, would be defined in motion.

  ‘Have you spent much time in the arena?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes,’ he answered, with an odd sort of crooked smile. ‘I never was an athlete, a runner… but I’ve spent a lot of time there...’

  ‘You’ve been to a lot of places…’ I said.

  ‘Yes, I’ve spent a lot of time in a lot of places.’

  When he turned to me, his face started to dissolve into pools of light. I noticed the clay on his hands. Now I knew what was happening.

  ‘I fell asleep,’ I explained when I got back to the temple of Zeus. ‘I wasn’t collecting pine cones or anything. I just fell asleep.’

  A familiar red polka-dotted kerchief was bobbing along through the pine trees; the American couple were on their way to the house of Phidias. The German runners, having returned to the starting point, had gotten dressed again and were now doing Diana. The Gypsies were nowhere and everywhere.

  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.