The Bestiary (31 page)

P
REVIOUSLY
I had only seen the Rock of Gibraltar in photographs.

Through binoculars I spied two of the famous Barbary apes (actually tailless monkeys, Lena informed me) perched on a ledge. There are four colonies on the Rock, comprised of the last free-ranging monkeys in Europe, two hundred of them. I remembered that it is also home to the peryton, but try as I might, I didn’t see a single one.

Gibraltar is one of the Pillars of Hercules that intrigued the ancient Greeks. The pillars held up their sky. The other six pillars, notably Mount Acha and Jebel Musa, lie fourteen miles across the strait, at Ceuta in Morocco. The pillars are the gateway to the Atlantic—the end of the Greek world. Their mariners feared that if they ventured beyond the pillars they would slide into the void.
Ultima Thule,
they called it, represented on their maps by the blank spaces beyond Ocean (the self-devouring, world-encircling serpent Nathalie had worn on her jacket) and populated by monsters that preyed on unsuspecting travelers. Eventually they passed through the pillars and made their way into bestiaries—the most elusive and frightening into the
Caravan Bestiary:
the manticore, the gorgons, the monoceros (a horned stallion with razor teeth), and fiercest of all, Echidna, who had a beautiful nymph’s head on a serpent’s body. Her teardrops were venom, her blood lava. With her husband, hundred-headed Typhon, she produced the most grotesque monsters in Greek mythology.
^*6

At dusk we slipped into Ultima Thule, survived intact, and steered southward, leaving behind the last straggling gulls from the coasts of both continents.

Marczek prowled the ship in his slippers, his yellow scarf fluttering. Curious, as always, he engaged passengers and crew: Mr. Lucapa (who discoursed on river diversion and animal famine) and Hasan (whose prosthetic parts fascinated him) and, most of all, Lena, who discussed this rescue mission. Prone to seasickness, Oso kept to their cabin unless the sea was exceptionally calm.

Sixty miles off the coast of Morocco, on this, his last night aboard, Marczek regaled Lena with tales of his ill-fated years as a beer importer in Hungary. We were all exhausted and after dinner we uncorked several bottles of wine and sat on deck. Lena was curious about the life I had led abroad, and Marzcek was the first of my friends she met. She took to him at once. He had that effect on women. We both missed him when he was gone.

When we returned to our cabin, Lena pulled me close, her lips glued to mine. We slipped out of our clothes and she took my hand and led me to the bathroom. The shower stall was small, but there was just enough room for us, the water pouring down our backs.

Later, she fell asleep in my arms. Around midnight, I got up and checked in again with the radioman, but he just shook his head. I drifted to sleep imagining the immensity of the sea beneath us, its myriad currents, the creatures gliding in the deep darkness known only to them.

D
AKAR
. Through a driving rain, its jagged skyline was a blur of pink and brown. Fetid winds and thunderclaps greeted us as we entered the harbor.

Nearly everyone went ashore. Captain Salice and I escorted two Senegalese customs officers on their inspection of the ship. After they left, the captain and I remained in the pilothouse. Rain streamed down the windows. The captain rolled a cigarette, picking the stringy tobacco from a pouch with his thick fingers. “I have never had a live cargo,” he said matter-of-factly. “They will be loud at night, you know.”

The big cats had been driven to the city from the game preserve, eighty miles to the north, in a caravan of trailer trucks.

7 cheetahs (including two cubs)

11 lions (including 6 cubs)

4 caracals

5 leopards

One by one their cages were lifted high into the air by cranes and lowered into the bowels of the ship. The cats crouched low, anxiously staring down at the uplifted faces of stevedores, policemen, and sailors on the dock. Among the International Refuge contingent, in yellow slickers, Lena was cross-checking her manifest with the one provided by the authorities.

By seven o’clock we had refueled, taken on stores, and set sail.

That first night, the cats were even louder than I expected, the mournful yowls of the leopards and the lions’ roars. Some of the seamen were spooked, but I found these sounds comforting. They brought back memories of the animals my grandmother used to mimic in the dark, reminding me that they were all around us: they in our dreams and we in theirs.

The hold was now a world unto itself, and for the next couple of days Lena was down there constantly.

Two nights out of Dakar, when she was asleep, I went there alone for the first time. It was 4
A.M
., and after a long nightmare, I couldn’t get back to sleep. The smell was overwhelming: shit, piss, raw meat. And the body heat of the cats, confined at such close quarters. We had erected a labyrinth of partitions, but couldn’t filter the crosscurrents of scents that excited some and paralyzed others. A week after being rounded up, netted, and tranquilized, they found themselves caged for the first time in their lives—in a rocking ship, no less, with human beings in alarming proximity.

I was amazed to be that close to them: gazing at the lions’ golden eyes and the cheetahs’ whiskers, delicate as Japanese fans, and the leopards’ bared fangs, sharper than any dagger. Many of the cats were asleep. In that suffocating air I thought I could hear their hearts beating. My grandmother would have been able to distinguish those heartbeats according to the species—maybe even the individual cat.

In a corner, away from the other cages, I found a solitary cat Lena had never mentioned. Nor had I seen him listed in the manifest. A panther. Black, with topaz eyes and silver whiskers. He circled his cage, clockwise, then counterclockwise…

He showed no interest in me. I half expected him to rise up on his hind legs, with a human smile, and break into speech, like the panther who stood at my hospital bedside in Honolulu, and before that visited my grandmother’s deathbed, speaking to her in his strange language about “the lost animals” turned away from the ark—the first mention I ever heard of them. But this panther remained a creature of the jungle, silent, self-contained, gliding on all fours; if he had something to communicate, it wasn’t going to be through speech.

Suddenly I didn’t want to be alone with him anymore.

I returned to my cabin and poured myself a raki. Careful not to wake Lena, I searched for some entries in my notebooks. The first, from one of my oldest notebooks, was based on a passage in the Hereford bestiary in which the panther was identified, not as a carnivorous cat, but as Jesus himself: gentle, gracious, with breath so sweet it drew other creatures to him. In the archives on San Lazzaro I had discovered an alternative biography that went to the other extreme, which I recorded in detail in my final Venetian notebook:

T
HE
P
ANTHER

He is Satan, who in the guise of a panther stowed away on Noah’s ark to ensure that all of man’s innate sins and vices survived the Flood, as they must. The only animal onboard without a mate, the panther lurked in shadows, scavenged food, never slept.

The Armenian chroniclers praised Noah as a skilled mariner. Only later did he devolve into the mean-spirited farmer who scapegoated his son Ham for stumbling upon him naked and drunk and then the ambassador for a god who coldly declared after the Flood that every beast of the earth, sea, and sky should live in fear of man, and that every moving thing that lives shall be meat for him.

Every civilization has a flood myth and a Noah, though he is usually more benign and heroic: in India, he is Manu, guided by the god Vishnu in the form of a whale; in Babylon, Ea, a merman who built the human race a colossal ark and calmed the waters; in Greece, Deucalion; in Chaldea, Xisuthros, whose story matched the Hebrew Noah’s: after forty days of rain, he set sail on the floodwaters with his family and a pair of every known animal (16,000 in all).

Noah only provided sanctuary to those creatures sanctioned by his god. All others that were refused entry to his ark (the animals of the Caravan Bestiary) resurfaced later; because no one could determine how or where they had survived the Flood on their own, they were feared all the more.

In that same notebook I had described Ani, the city Noah founded near Mount Ararat where a thousand churches sprang up, including one (unknown to anyone) that had an altar constructed with beams from the ark. The man who discovered it would gain immediate entry to paradise. Similarly on the island of Paros there is a Church of One Hundred Doors, built by the Emperor Justinian, of which ninety-nine are known. The man who finds the one hundredth door will supposedly step through it into the Kingdom of Heaven.

In the back of that notebook I had pasted two photographs taken by a Russian explorer in 1921: one was of the enormous, decayed ship preserved in a ridge of dark ice atop Ararat; the other was of a black marble statue at the foot of the mountain. No one knew who erected this ancient statue: a panther on his hind legs, his eyes glittering, and—apparent to all—the trace of a smile on his face.

When we were back in the Mediterranean after a long night of rain, the air smelled clean and metallic. Lena and I leaned against the railing on the starboard side.

“This voyage will lead to more interventions,” she said, “with other organizations lending support. Locana is already hearing from people—a guy from the Swedish Naval Ministry and some UN honcho who didn’t return his calls in the spring.” She patted the railing. “We can thank the
Makara
for that. And you.”

Stars were filling the sky, brighter than I’d ever seen them—in Maine, or even Vietnam. Scorpio was directly overhead. Libra beside it. The wind picked up. We watched flying fish skim the waves. Lena rested her head against my shoulder.

“If this wind carried us off,” I said, “it could set us down anywhere in the world and we’d be all right.”

“Yes, we would,” she smiled.

When we fell asleep later, she was breathing softly. At four-thirty I was awakened by a knock at the door. I slipped on my robe. It was the radioman.

He handed me a piece of paper. “It just came in, sir.”

I read and reread it, pacing the corridor.

For months I had been thinking that where Adolphus Sarkas’s journey ended, a part of my journey must also end. Now I would find out if that was true.

9

W
E WERE IN
a square in Xaniá, studying a map of the town. The heat was stifling. The cafés were busy. Shoppers drifted by, buying loaves hot from the oven, examining the fruit. The old quarter had barely changed over four centuries. The Venetian lion was everywhere: statues, coats of arms, door knockers. There were a few benches under the trees and a flower bed that needed watering. The sea shone at the end of a long street. The wind was kicking up yellow dust. The buildings, too, were ocher, not white. With their ornate balustrades, stately windows, and arched gates, they made me feel as if we were in Venice, not Crete. Lena, who had not been anywhere in Europe except France, had awoken early and wandered the narrow streets, their names a jumble of Italian, Greek, and Turkish.

The
Makara
was on its way to Piraeus. As planned, I had disembarked in Irakleion. After remaining in Kenya with her colleagues for two days, resettling the animals, Lena flew to Irakleion via Cairo. I rented a car and met her at the airport. We drove to the northwest shore of the island. The highway was lined with oleander bushes in full flower. We opened the windows and turned up the bouzouki music on the radio. It was a relief to be on land, on an open road. I had finally come to my father’s island, but I didn’t plan on visiting Asprophotes, his ancestral village. I felt no tugs in that direction.

My destination was Skalos, a small island twelve miles off the coast. I’d learned that it was four miles in diameter, rugged and dry, and practically uninhabited. Fishermen stayed in beach shacks for short stretches, and there were a few reclusive goatherds, but no houses or electricity, and only one scheduled launch a month from Xaniá. Once there had been a small village, but it was abandoned early in the nineteenth century when the island’s largest spring dried up.

I got the break I had been waiting for with regard to Adolphus Sarkas when the librarians at the Villa Ziane informed me that he died in Xaniá on February 2, 1822. The cause of death was “fever” (which could mean anything). Three days later, he was buried on Skalos in the cemetery behind the church. I wondered if this was the church Giorgio Zetto mentioned in his diary. The librarians didn’t know why Sarkas’s grave was on Skalos, but they did provide a piece of unexpected information: the name of the witness on the death certificate. Nicanor Simonides. It would have been easy to assume he was a municipal clerk or casual acquaintance if not for the fact the certificate noted (as the law required) that Simonides was also the person arranging Sarkas’s funeral and settling his affairs. Simonides had taken on the role of an executor or next of kin, which suggested he was far more intimate with Sarkas than Zetto. But who was he?

After breakfast, Lena and I had split up: she went to the harbor to hire a launch and buy supplies, and I visited the public records office. There was a single clerk. After a long wait in which he sifted through several file cabinets and disappeared into a back room, he told me that Nicanor Simonides was born in Xaniá in December 1779. There was no record of his death.

“If he died anywhere in Crete,” the clerk sighed, “it would be noted.”

“So he was abroad.”

“He could have been in Athens—or Moscow. Anywhere but here.” He shrugged. “Unless the record was lost.”

“Do records get lost?”

“Some were, after the First World War.” He looked at his watch. “I must go for lunch now.”

This meant the office would be closed. He put on a beige jacket and straw hat and walked out with me, locking the door. On the street, in sunlight, I looked at him more closely: a man in his thirties, prematurely bald, stooped. But he assumed a different persona once he was out of the office; low-key and conversational, he was suddenly offering up useful information.

“The Simonides family is one of the oldest in Xaniá. They may be able to help, if you call on them.” He stroked his chin. “The family has several branches. I would try Petros Simonides first. I’ll walk you a bit—it’s on my way—and then give you directions to his house.”

I thanked him, and a few minutes later we separated in a warren of streets shaded by eucalyptus trees. Petros Simonides’s house was on a dead end that looked as if it had once been fashionable. The house was white, three stories high, and typically Venetian, with tall shuttered windows and irregular balconies. The paint was peeling in the eaves. Potted geraniums flanked the front door. A young woman answered my knock. Her black dress told me someone had died. It could have happened a week ago, or a year. Depending on who it was, she might be wearing black for the rest of her life.

“I would like to see Petros Simonides, please.”

She looked closely at me. She wasn’t friendly. She had short black hair and pencil-thin eyebrows. Her eyes were a pale gray that was like no color at all. For a moment, from her silence, I thought he was the one who had died.

“Who should I say is here?”

I told her, and shutting the door, she disappeared. I heard a dog bark within, many rooms away.

I never saw her again. An old man in a black cardigan and wire-rimmed spectacles opened the door and looked at me inquiringly.

“Excuse my intrusion. I’d like to ask you about an ancestor of yours named Nicanor Simonides.”

He studied me more closely, but said nothing before ushering me in. In Crete it was considered rude to turn away a respectable stranger, whether he needed a bed for the night, a meal, or a glass of water. But that didn’t mean you had to answer his questions.

Simonides led me to a sitting room off the parlor. It was stuffy. The furnishings were drab, the drapes faded by sunlight. The rug was worn in front of the sofa and easy chairs. He offered me coffee. “Or perhaps you would like brandy?”

“Coffee is fine.”

“And a sweet,” he said, and it wasn’t a question.

A few minutes later, another woman in black, heavyset, middle-aged, brought in a tray with two demitasse cups and a dish of candied fruit. Looking me over impassively, she handed me one of the cups with a napkin.

I told Simonides I was a scholar trying to learn the fate of a man named Sarkas. I explained to him about the death certificate. I gave him the dates. He listened carefully.

“Your Greek is good,” he said, “for an American.”

“My father was Cretan.”

He nodded approvingly. “Where from?”

“A small village. Asprophotes.”

“In the mountains. I know it.” This information seemed to reassure him. “Getting back to your question. Yes, I know who Nicanor Simonides was. Actually, there have been several of them over the years. The one you’re talking about was a priest, you know.”

“I didn’t know,” I said, concealing my excitement. “An Orthodox priest?”

“What else? My brother can tell you about these things better than I can.”

I had a sinking feeling. “Oh. Where does your brother live?”

“Why, here in this house,” he replied, as if it were an absurd question. “I can get him if you like.”

“I would be grateful.”

He shuffled out, and I finished my coffee, thick as mud. A few minutes later, the dog trotted in, a boxer who stopped short when he saw me, then sniffed my shoes. He must be old, I thought, not to have smelled me from the parlor. A man followed, who was quite old, older than Petros. He too wore black, a jacket and a wide tie. His moustache was white and he had liver spots on his hands. His gaze was steady, though. He sat down in an easy chair, the dog at his feet, and introduced himself as Alexander Simonides. I realized his brother wasn’t going to return.

I apologized again for intruding. He offered me the fruit, and I took a date. Then he picked out an orange slice for himself.

“Petros told me your people are from Crete.”

“My father’s people, yes. This is my first time on Crete.”

He was surprised. “You never visited with your father?”

“No.”

“So he never came back from America.”

“Oh, no, he came back. But he didn’t bring me.”

He thought about this, then put his hands on his knees and shifted his weight slightly. “You wanted to ask me about my great-grandfather.”

I repeated what I had told Petros about Sarkas and his death.

He looked at me with renewed curiosity. “No one outside our family has ever asked about Nicanor Simonides. Sometimes I wonder why,” he added cryptically. “Why are you so interested in this man Sarkas?”

“I’m doing research on a book compiled in the Middle Ages. For a while, it was in his possession.”

“What kind of book?”

“A bestiary.” I saw he had no idea what that was. I used the original Greek word,
physiologos,
and he shook his head. “It’s a book about animals,” I said. “With beautiful pictures.”

“Ah.”

I remembered how in the fourteenth century the bestiary had lain unrecognized in the widow Bendetto’s closet in Ravenna and then been passed through many generations of Doge Dandolo’s family. It had become an heirloom, a packet in a trunk. If Sarkas had passed the bestiary on to Nicanor Simonides, or if Simonides had simply taken it, I wondered if that could have happened again, with this family.

“Have you ever seen such a book?” I said.

“No.”

“Or heard of it in your family?”

His eyes narrowed. “No. Why should I?”

“I thought perhaps if it came into Nicanor Simonides’ hands, he might have passed it on to his descendants.”

“That’s not possible,” he said with surprising vehemence.

“Why not?” I thought I had offended him.

He leaned forward. “Will you be putting any of this in a book of your own?”

“No, I’m not writing a book. Whatever you tell me is just between us.”

He seemed satisfied, but paused to formulate his words. “Nicanor Simonides was a scoundrel,” he said. “Through generations of Simonides, there’s been no one like him.”

I was stunned. “What did he do?”

“He deserted his family. His wife and two sons. He disappeared the same year you say this man Sarkas died, 1822.”

“Why?” I imagined some scandal—embezzling church funds, an illicit affair.

“Nobody knows. He was the priest at the Church of Saint Stephen, by the harbor, and thus responsible, too, in those days, for the Church of Saint George on Skalos, which was part of the parish. His eldest son was my grandfather. All Grandfather remembered was that his father told the family he had to undertake a holy mission and would be gone for several months. He wouldn’t tell his wife what this mission was or where he was going. Then he didn’t come back. And she didn’t hear from him again. Not a single letter, nothing.” He grimaced. “Some people said maybe he was in an accident or fell ill. Others that he got the call again—from God, you know—as he had for the priesthood, but that this time he became a monk or a hermit. My great-grandmother scoured his papers. She found only one thing out of the ordinary, tucked away in a trunk: an Armenian grammar.”

Now it was my turn to lean forward. “Did he speak the language?”

“Not that anyone knew. She was convinced he went there.”

“To Armenia.”

“But it made no sense. My grandfather always said she had nothing else to grab on to. He didn’t think the grammar meant anything.” Simonides shook his head. “Grandfather never forgave him.”

“And you never heard of Adolphus Sarkas, Mr. Simonides?”

“Not until today.”

So there were two churches which might have been “Sarkas’s church,” both connected to Nicanor Simonides, to whom Sarkas had entrusted his remains, his final affairs—and what else? For a moment, I thought of telling Simonides’ great-grandson that Sarkas was Armenian, that he had been a monk in the Orthodox Church, that he too had once set out on a mission to Armenia. But what would this have accomplished? Alexander Simonides was an old man, and the history that had been passed down to him was bitter and confused enough without my injecting further confusion at this late date.

Instead, I said, “So Nicanor Simonides conducted the services at the church on Skalos as well?”

“Correct. Sundays he conducted the morning service in town, and in the afternoon went to Skalos. When the village on Skalos was abandoned, he maintained the Church of Saint George for a while.”

“It hasn’t been used in a long time, then.”

“Not since he disappeared. It was locked up soon afterward.”

The heavyset woman appeared in the doorway and nodded to him. Her sharp black eyes stood out in a face that was otherwise tired, pasty.

“I must go now,” he said, standing up.

We shook hands. I thanked him for his hospitality. At the front door, the dog by his side, he said, “Mr. Atlas, I’ve told you a few things—would you tell me something?”

“Of course.”

“Why didn’t your father bring you to Crete with him?”

I looked him in the eye. “I’m afraid my father was a bit of a scoundrel, too.”