Going Up (42 page)

Since no one spoke English, I matched my ancient Greek to what I was learning from my grammar and from the islanders. I had had the idea that we would spend some time in Greece and then go on to Israel. I bought a Hebrew textbook when we were in London, but I lacked the will to commit myself to its study. The alien script defeated me and the text, in translation, set no seed. I can envy those who master the mirror-reversed, vowel-free calligraphy, but Greece held and holds me captive; I have never felt any strong desire to escape. Greece became my Zion. In Athens once I had my hair cut and, since my demotic Greek was fairly good, the barber asked if I came from a Greek family. How else did I have so much black hair? I said, ‘
Ebraios eimai
’ (I am a Jew). He said, ‘
Ellenes, Ebraoi, miadzouni
’ (Greeks, Jews much the same thing). I said, ‘
Isos
’ (perhaps). Always proud, often debased, divided among themselves yet roped together by loyalties and antagonisms, ancient and modern, clever and foolish, Greeks and Jews are the enduring incarnation of Mediterranean duplicity, answering yes and no to the wide world’s invitation to abate their distinction.

Like Epirus, Ios bore traces of the centuries of the Tourkokratia; the Turkish occupation ended only in 1828. Many of the older men, like Niko’s father, wore Turkish-style baggy trousers. More than a few of them had called
their fathers ‘effendi’. They smoked hookahs in the café under the eucalyptus trees in the village square, while their tethered donkeys nodded and nodded and never quite agreed. Life was hard and hardly different from the old days. The only fresh vegetable, apart from potatoes, was broad beans. When we asked the shopkeeper on the port whether he had any eggs, he almost always rolled his eyes to the heavens, the unspoken way of saying no. Yet when Easter came, everyone had celebratory red eggs to give us,
ya
ta pethia
. In Greece, children are the best passport.

One of Heraclitus’s most frequently quoted apophthegms is ‘the road up and the road down are the same road’. The old Ephesian grouch can never have taken the steep path up to Ios village; it was nothing whatever like the same road down. The shops up there were better stocked than on the harbour. After we had been on the island for a few weeks, one of the shopkeepers asked us to his house for a meal. In his living room were the framed reproduction of two large paintings, of King Edward VII of England and Queen Alexandra. I tried to express to Yiorgos how touching it was to see such icons in a Greek house. He ducked his head forward and dropped his chin. The pictures had belonged to his parents. He had no idea who the ermined aliens were.

When we had eaten our
dolmades
, stuffed vine leaves, and our
arnaki
tou fournou
, roast lamb, and thick lumps of yoghurt, Yiorgos disclosed the reason for our invitation. My Greek struggled with his, but I gathered that he wanted me to become his partner in the chicken business. It was common knowledge we had come to Ios because we were friends of
ho plousios
, the rich man, Artemis Denaxas whose absent presence lorded it over the island. Yorgios imagined that we too must be rich.

Exorbitantly grateful for lunch, I heard myself agree to lend him several thousand drachmae, but I declined to become a poultry farmer. Yiorgos proposed to repay me,
siga, siga
, bit by bit. The first bit was a large tin of island honey. When we poured some out to sweeten our daily rice pudding,
it was thick and dark brown and appeared to contain a large number of plump raisins. Closer analysis revealed them to be candied bluebottles. Next day, we again took the road up. Yiorgos shrugged, took the tin back and gave us another. We retrieved the rest of my loan,
siga, siga
indeed, in tinned milk and corned beef.

Yellow daisies and black-eyed, blood-banded poppies were soon springing from the fertile roof of Niko’s cottage. A fig tree displayed green-nailed buds. The arthritic grapevine sprang to life and began to mount the trellis over the stone table where I was finishing my novel. On the long culminating day, I typed thirty pages in a frenzy of what I could believe was a gift from the local muse. Lindmann’s stream of consciousness seemed to converge and flood with my own. I have never been a practising believer in inspiration but, as I hammered out those climactic pages, I might have been taking dictation. At last, I was writing as a man should, with no thought of the market or of the charm of what was appearing on the page. I said what I felt had to be said. I had no rivals; I cared nothing for what any critic might think. The phantoms of Alan Maclean and Auntie Marge might shake their heads, like some bicephalic crone, but I was free of fettering discretion.

As Easter approached, Artemis Denaxas,
ho plousios
himself, arrived on the island. The yachting season was beginning and it pleased him to parade, with his dogs Dick and Rover, on the Ios dockside. He had a white carefully upturned moustache. His uniform as honorary admiral of Ios consisted of white trousers, a blue blazer with gilt buttons and a flat cap. He greeted us warmly and invited us to lunch at his residence, which stood on a green hill above the harbour. We had been eating fried eggs and
koukia
for many weeks and were happily seduced by a generous lunch, wine from Santorini (of which Kiria Denaxas was a native) and cushioned chairs.

When Sarah grew restive, Mrs Denaxas opened the doors to the stone-flagged terrace adjoining the dining room. It had a low wall, she said, so the children would be perfectly safe playing out there. As Denaxas was pouring
glasses of Metaxa cognac, Sarah climbed onto the white wall and then, suddenly, she was not there any more. Mrs Denaxas said, ‘She’s gone!’ We ran out and looked over the wall. There was a drop of three or four metres. Sarah lay on top of the only green bush. There were large stones on either side of it. She was frightened but not badly hurt. Luck, it seemed, was on our side.

London was calling: my film was going to be shot; the director who would take all the credit needed my help. There was a certain lure in the news, which came in a telegram from my mother, that
The Graduate Wife
had had very good reviews, especially from Jack Davenport in
The Observer
. The ranks of Tuscany were, it seemed, opening their arms to me. A few days later, we made an excursion to Mykonos to meet Tom Maschler and his latest lady. I saw that the woman ahead of us as we disembarked from the ferry had a copy of
The Observer
in her wicker basket. I asked if I might have a look at it and explained why. She handed it to me, saying ‘Don’t apologise. We know very well how it is.’ She was Elaine Steinbeck. The author of
The
Grapes of Wrath
gave me a bleak smile, but had no appetite for writerly comradeship. Jack Davenport said that I wrote the best dialogue he had read in many years; I should try my hand at a play.

Tom’s companion, Martha Crewe, had left her two children in London and had no wish to talk to ours. Tom and she left the hotel into which he had booked us and we scarcely saw them again, except at a distance on a trip to the island of Delos, where the statue of a slave dealer stands in for Apollo. Mykonos was famous, in those days, for the ‘king of
pantalonia
’, a tailor who promised to cut, fit and complete women’s trousers, from a choice of bright materials, in twenty-four hours. On a secluded beach, we saw Soraya, the ex-empress of Iran, who had failed to give the Shah the son he needed as his successor. Soraya was with a female companion and seemed heavy with the child she had never had.

Several weeks before we were due to leave Ios, I asked Yiorgos Galatsios, whether any of the abandoned farmhouses was for sale. He came back
with a list of properties. Nudging my heels against Phryne’s flanks, I went house-hunting. The island was much bigger than we knew and there were many abandoned, often seductive properties. There were many sellers, it seemed, and no buyers. When I asked for a price, it was often very little, at first. As soon as the owner knew of our interest, the price went up. If I winced and agreed the new one, it went up again. The dream of living in wonderland receded every time we approached it. On a visit to the post office, Michalis looked over his two pairs of glasses and handed us a letter which announced that a survey of the property at Marks Tey had shown structural defects that made it impossible for the bank to grant us a mortgage. It was a smaller disappointment to me than the prospect of leaving Ios without a small plot to call our own.

A sadly smiling young woman called Flora came down to help Beetle with the washing. Her husband, Paniotis, was Yorgios Galatsios’s rival for our chicken business. To denigrate him, Yiorgos made the traditional gesture, a thumb for the spout, his fist for the bottle, to indicate a drunkard. On the day before we were due to catch the
Despina
for Piraeus, Flora said, ‘
Thelete akrivos na agorazete ena spitaki?’
(Do you really want to buy a little house?) I said, ‘
Veveos, alla nomidzo pou then boroume
.’ (Indeed I do, but I don’t think we can.)

She led me up to the village and down the bouldered path on the other side to the uninhabited bay of Mylopota, which I had never seen before. At the far end, above the long, wide scimitar of golden sand, at the top of a quartet of terraces of olive, almond and fig trees, a green-shuttered cottage looked out over the Aegean facing the neighbouring island of Sikinos (which Solon once derided as the place for people who cared only for a quiet life). The roof of the little house was the cropped skeleton of a eucalyptus tree, with bamboo slats across the branches, not unlike Odysseus’s bedroom on Ithaca. The only well was down on the beach level.

Flora wanted money in order to be able to send her children to school
on Santorini, a place of black, once toasted beaches. The island is hooped around a great lagoon where the volcano’s crater was, and is. Early in the second millennium, its eruption split the island open and spewed lava over the Aegean and, so they say, suffocated the bright Minoan civilisation that some people think was the fabled Atlantis. On a clear day, if you stand on the heights above Mylopota, Santorini is visible, hull down, on the horizon.

Going up, I asked Flora how much she wanted for her house. She said, ‘
Dtheka pente chiliades
’. Fifteen thousand drachmae; in those days, roughly £150. I feared that she would raise the price, if I agreed; but I did; and she did not. As we walked back down to the beach, we crossed a field with a broad frontage directly onto the beach and a well in one inshore corner. Flora said, ‘
Afto einai dthikosmou, an to thelete
’ (This is mine too; if you want it). ‘
Poso einai?
’ I said: ‘How much is it? ‘
To ithio
,’ she said; the same. I said, ‘
Tha to paro
.’ (I’ll have it.)

That afternoon we went to see the
eirenodikes
, the justice of the peace (more literally the peace of justice) and the transfers were formalised, in longhand. Sarah wept as
Despina
sailed past the white church of Aghia Eirene and out of Ios harbour; but I could now promise her that we would be back. Sarah always called Ios ‘that place’. It mattered to her more than anywhere else. She painted images from it, big and small, again and again. Her ashes are scattered on the terrace below our renovated house up on the hill. Fifty years later, we and our sons and Sarah’s daughters have built three houses, directly on the beach, facing Solon’s lazy Sikinos.

Since I was now officially an American citizen, when we arrived in England I had to fill in the usual form. Having no other address, on the line labelled ‘Permanent Residence’, I wrote, ‘Ios, Cyclades, Greece’.