A Year in the World (35 page)

At sea, in the night, Ed dreams again of water pouring into the cabin. “Remember the old Paul Newman movie? When he’s in a cistern and the water starts to rise and someone covers the top with steel and the water keeps coming up?”

“No. Why was he in a cistern?”

“I don’t know. Anyway, the water comes almost to the top where he has only a tiny space to breathe.”

“How did he get out?”

“That’s not the point. The point is the
feeling
. I can’t take this.” I too sometimes wake in the night feeling as though I am inside an egg.

Out
on deck early, I spot people thrashing in the water. Suicides? Two at once? Crazies on speed? Just then a life preserver is thrown from our boat, and the two swim toward it. Soon two crewmen haul them out of the water into a dinghy. Later I hear that they are two Afghan or Albanian or Kurdish refugees, now recovering in the ship infirmary. Rumors buzz around the decks. A nearby sailboat picked up three men in the night when they were dumped by the person they’d paid to take them to safety. Were there seventeen originally? One refugee said so. If so, twelve have drowned and possibly we have sailed over their bodies.

This rescue is a brutal reminder of the scrappy courage of those caught in the crosshairs of world events not of their making. And also a reminder of privilege and luck. We stared down into the water where two flecks were adrift. How surreal their night, landing in the sharp water and treading until morning. Death was right there in a lungful of salt water, a passing shark, or the failure of the body to keep on moving. Suddenly they are saved. Then we necessarily move on through the day, gnawed at (for years) by the image of the two faces looking up.

My talk is late morning. I see in the daily program that it has not been listed among the day’s activities, and at eleven I face an audience of five. Unsettling, because I am on board as a guest in exchange for speaking. We have an intimate little chat, and then everyone is back to sunning and reading on this day at sea. The entertainment director says not to worry, but I feel as though I’ve slipped into a theatre without a ticket.

All afternoon in the deck chair, I try to describe to my notebook the colors of the water and sky. How to translate sunlight into words? Beneath my vision of this sea, the green waters of Angel Island wash, weekends at anchor in Alaya cove with my first husband and daughter on our sailboat,
Primavera
. Often we were the only boat. After four, when the last tourist ferry departed, the deer came out, dozens of them, to drink from the sprinklers on the caretaker’s lawns. We rowed the dinghy to shore and walked around the island for the sunset views of San Francisco, which looked like a fabled city rising white out of the ocean. The always-improbable span of the Golden Gate seemed like some link between memories rather than a practical bridge that is constantly being repainted. Those
Primavera
evenings were close to sublime. In the tiny galley I made dinner, then we watched for falling stars on clear nights or slipped early into the nifty beds below, where we were rocked all night like newborns in the treetops before the cradle fell.

I kept those evenings to hold against days when my mind felt like a kerosene-soaked rag. Now I’ll have these, too. The natural world saves me.

Everyone
heads for the buses bound for the monastery where monks had to lower themselves in baskets from the sheer mountain. I get vertigo and claustrophobia just thinking of that, and Ed refuses to board a bus so soon after the long trek to Delphi. We are docked at Volos, close to where Jason and the Argonauts set sail. Dozens of cafés and fishing boats line the harbor. One taverna displays fifty or so octopuses on a clothesline. Take your pick. At the dusty archaeological museum, we discover the grave stele with faint paintings revealing the faces of those long gone to more dust. And we see necklaces they wore, with wrought charms of inlaid sapphires, rubies, and etched-gold portraits. Back out in the heat, we decide to take a taxi to the village of Μακρινίτσα (Makrynitsa), where thousand-year-old sycamore trees cast their immense shade over the plaza. They’re as impressive as California redwoods. We visit the little Byzantine church. I’m used to lighting thin candles in churches by now, standing them up in sand. One for my aunt Mary, sick in Savannah. One, always, for my family. Protect them, please. One for all those I love, and one for the conviction I once had that red and yellow, black and white, Jesus loves all the little children of the world.

I buy a jar of pickled caper leaves, something I’ve never seen before. I’m tempted by dried foot-long stalks called “tea of the mountain,” opaque dark honeys, dried mint, and oregano. Ed nudges me on. Working donkeys with men on sidesaddle plod up the hilly streets.

At a taverna under the trees, we skip the rabbit in sauce and the boiled goat, so heavy in the heat, and order instead spiced feta to spread on delicious rough bread, savory eggplant with tomatoes, and—because the platter at the next table lured us—fried potatoes, golden and light. A man at that table has finished his lunch, and his wife chats with people at adjacent tables. He takes out his
komboloi
and seems to go into another world. The plying of his gold beads sounds soft like water over rocks. He fingers his red “god” stone, then each bead, rubs the red one all around, and starts over, looping the whole circle around in his hand before he starts again.

Leaving—we sail at five—we find no taxi. Oh no, we’re told, taxis only
come
here; try the next village, only two miles. We set off in the heat and after-lunch torpor—easy to write, but we’re walking down an oven-roasted paved road in August, temperature easily over a hundred degrees, with steam coming up off the asphalt. Hot wind in the aspens sounds like waterfalls, but the stony streams are dry. We’re winding slowly downhill, thank Zeus, to another village—where there is no taxi. My sandals rub blisters across all my toes. My heel is bleeding. Finally we get on a bus and slowly inch down to Volos again, getting off near the harbor and walking another mile to the ship.

Here,
at sea, I am breathing cooled Hellenic air again. The gossamer breeze makes me want to say the word
aeolian
. The Milky Way strews a path of grated diamonds. Off the port side the coast rises, mysterious in shadowy outlines against the sky, and on the starboard, only swells breaking against the ship, swells that almost break. Out there somewhere a shell rides the foam, bearing Aphrodite covering her breasts with a handful of seaweed. Tonight the sea resembles shiny obsidian, the calm water a mirror, the mirror into which Ed’s father looked in his last week on earth and said,
Who is that, and why isn’t he saying anything?

Inside they’re always dancing to music that goes way, way back: “Night and day, you are the one,” I sing along. “Listen to that, Eddie. You are the one.”

Since
distances are not far, the ship zigzags to fill the allotted days. At Rhodes we hit the full tourist impact. Although we skip breakfast and disembark early, the streets are a human avalanche; you could be crushed. We decide to return to the ship and come back someday to Rhodes, perhaps some rainy February. As we retrace our steps, we see one of the gentlemen hosts sitting on the curb drinking a beer and looking dejected.

We
cross to the Turkish coast and moor at Kusadasi. Back on a bus, we’re en route to Ephesus, zooming past figs along the road, peach and orange orchards, and broken columns and carved blocks scattered along the way as though unremarkable. The messy nests of storks festoon chimney tops and electrical poles. If we were driving, we would stop for a basket of peaches, park under crape myrtles, and let the juices run over our fingers. Instead, I sip bottled water and pray that the sun does not turn us into pools of butter.

We make an unexpected stop at the House of the Virgin Mary. A Jewish friend told me he was unexpectedly moved by the house and the outside wall of Kleenex ex-votos, tied on for memory. I see, also, one knee-high stocking, a few rags, and scrawled notes on paper napkins, as though we are all unprepared when we want to give thanks. Inside the little house—it is almost surely only a wish that Mary lived here—the familiar candles in sand lift the gloom. The idea of Mary in her later life living in a small house near the ruins intrigues me. Maybe she had another child, a girl who climbed the dusty trees and played on the marble streets of Ephesus. As we board the bus, I hear a British tourist say, “That was spot on.”

Ephesus—hallowed by Saint Paul and by Heraclitus. At the entrance an impish child sells thirty postcards for one American dollar. As we pass up that bargain, he says, “You break my heart.”

“Jingle jangle,” the guide says. “These stands are selling jingle jangle.”

Then we’re walking those marble streets in a stream of other people. Several guides are lecturing in front of the famous library, after Alexandria and Pergamum the greatest in the ancient world. By now adverse to our guides, I walk around the groups, listening to snatches of their guides’ spiels. The statues are protections by Wisdom, Intelligence, Destiny, and Science, although another guide omits Science and says Love.

Medusa’s blue eyes protected the Temple of Hadrian. Was this, as the guide claims, the origin of protection against the evil eye? That eye decorates the prows of boats and the doorways of houses. It is to Greece what the household shrine is to Italy.
Protect this house
.

Our guide lets us roam the amphitheatre after telling us in an accusing tone that Sting, in a high-decibel rock concert, cracked the theatre’s foundation. “Imagine, after all the centuries, the American causes this.” She grimaces and glares. We don’t bother to tell her that Sting is English.

Where is Heraclitus’ Maeander, the river you cannot step in twice? I can see only stone and tourists.
For the water is already far downstream
. But Heraclitus, it’s not the water, it’s the
river
, and I always step in the same river twice. The flow of the river is memory, just as the
mitos
, the white ball of thread Ariadne handed to Theseus as he entered the labyrinth, was the thread of memory.

The bus makes a stop at a center for rug making. A concept for tourists, but nevertheless we see that the colors of the wool are the colors of herbs and spices—saffron, bay, cinnamon, paprika, sage, turmeric. I like hearing that one cocoon yields one and a half miles of silk thread. My favorite art springs from folk tradition, and I’ve always loved the spontaneity of woven rugs—the little animal and human figures that interrupt a design, the abrupt changes of color when the thread runs out and the nomads have moved on to other locales with other colors available for dying the wool. I like the use of what’s at hand, walnut shells, rock-rose hips, oak bark, tobacco leaves, medlar. Even these bored women hired by the state to demonstrate weaving techniques must find a little magic emerging on the loom.

In the hour we have to roam in Kusadasi, we go into a couple of rug stores. One dealer says, “I can take your money.”

At
sea, tooling along the coast at night, the water looks blue, the darkest blue, a folded uniform at the bottom of a trunk. And the air in the dark—great tides of fresh sea air. The lights of fishing boats blink in the distance, and I imagine the men on board playing cards, looking up at the white apparition of our ship passing across their porthole. At sea, I get up early for the dawn colors reflected in the lovely, lovely water, bluer than thy first love’s eyes. I could not have imagined the glancing of light on these waters. All I want to do is lean over and watch the petticoat flounces of white foam and the heaven-sent blue. The impulse to jump feels strong and not destructive but rather a joyous desire to join another element.

Bodrum,
the next stop on the Turkish coast, is simply appalling. Not yet totally ruined by development, it soon will be. The streets pulse with holiday people in T-shirts, halters, and short shorts, drinking beer as they go. Ticky-tacky condos spread like a case of shingles on the hills. I wonder why at this late date the town powers would allow such a rape of their sublime coast, the old city of Halicarnassus. Isn’t it obvious that development quickly reaches the point of diminishing returns? Those previously drawn to the glorious place will go elsewhere. We trudge through the castle and have lunch in a waterside restaurant where garbage floats just under our table. “Height of summer,” Ed says.

“Let’s go back to the ship where it’s cool. We can have a frozen daiquiri and go to the string quartet concert.”

“To hell with Halicarnassus.”

As
we enter the Dardanelles, the color of the sea changes to green, and the green does not have the happiness of the blue. We’re entering the territory of Dardano, our hometown boy. He was born in Cortona, according to legend. In his wanderings he founded Troy; then Aeneas left Troy to found Rome. Because of Dardano’s circuitous history, he made Cortona the “mother of Troy, grandmother of Rome.”

We wonder if the pillboxes along the shore are “the tumbled towers of Ilium,” but no, we are passing a more recent catastrophe in these historic waters, the site of the battle of Gallipoli. All the British passengers move up to the bow and silently watch as we glide by. Their fathers, grandfathers, even great-grandfathers have perhaps breathed the word
Gallipoli
. As the captain recounts the action over the loudspeaker, the Germans stick to their novels and deck chairs and the Americans look puzzled: Gallipoli rings a bell but far away. We were not raised on stories of how the sea turned red with blood in 1915.

We
awaken just in time to see the cut-out domes and minarets against the sky as the ship glides into the Istanbul harbor at dawn. This is the bookend to the evening sail out of Venice. The memory of arriving in Istanbul as the opaline colors spread across the sky and the city comes to life will always be worth the mobs of Rhodes and Bodrum. Our bags are by the door of our “stateroom,” and we do not bother with breakfast. We disembark without a backward glance.