Chapter I - 'Sow the Wind'

Chapter I

Work in progress - excerpt from Sow the Wind: A Novel.

In a way, I murdered Alethea. To requite me, she haunted me for the rest of my life. We were principal actors in a Greek tragedy, cathartically evoking the proper Aristotelian pity and terror. This is not to imply that I did anything as crude as actually dispatch her with my own hands. Nor did she resort to pestering me with moppings and mowings, prowling the corridors of my old house, making a psychic nuisance of herself. This is a Greek story, not a gothic tale. Perhaps that explains why she didn’t haunt me openly in Cambridge, where it all started, but waited until I revisited Athens, twenty-four years after she disappeared. Were we such a stuffy crowd, that even our ghosts were too well bred to flaunt themselves at home? ‘Not the done thing and all that,’ as my generation used to say. ‘Damned bad form!’ Now I’d say we had ‘more hang-ups than you could poke a stick at.’

Writing this, I am confronting another ghost – that of my dead self. Though none too keen on the man I am now, at least I’m no longer the academic ‘dweeb’ I used to be. That’s an expression I learnt from poor Cassandra, with her street-wise vocabulary. I suppose one could say I sacrificed her too, as I did Alethea, through crass stupidity and selfishness. And there was Chloe, broken body all wreathed in flames. Another of my hapless victims.  And the others I might have saved had I returned sooner.

When that phantom came floating towards me that unforgettable night in Aegina, over twenty-five years ago, gliding just above the polished floor; hair, face, body and robe all modelled from the same deathly-white ectoplasm, I felt like an ancient Athenian watching a tragedy by Aeschylus. Strangely, I cannot recall feeling afraid, though that would have been an understandable reaction, perhaps because since I had not feared her in life I could not fear her in death. So I was overcome, not with Aristotelian pity and terror, but rather with pity and horror, along with a sickening sense of irreparable loss and grief. Disconcertingly, her eyes had retained their emerald green, shining startlingly from that otherwise colourless death mask. I remembered how she would roll her eyeballs upwards in ecstasy, until only the whites were showing, scream, and rake my back with her painted nails. Her phantom hands were so meticulously sculpted that I could clearly discern those nails, as well as joints, veins, sinews, and even the fate-line and life-line on the palms. Only her feet were missing, for the swirling drapery that covered her body formed a full-length skirt that rippled and billowed in the icy draught blowing through that sealed and shuttered room. She would certainly have laughed at that classical apparel. “I wouldn’t be seen dead in that gear,” she would say, referring to the clothes she disliked. Most of the short time she was with me, she wore very little. “I’m a natural nudist,” she used to say. “It’s really something else!”

I recalled her words as she floated towards us that balmy September night. She herself was now both dead and something else, something totally other, ganz anders, as the theologians say. In life, she might well have been amused by our horrified faces, for she always had a strong sense of humour.  But her likeness as it floated towards us was as serenely impassive as that of a corpse. ‘Who or what is she now?’ I kept thinking, as I stared at that pallid mask.  A gaping gash in her slender throat had severed larynx, trachea and jugular, running in a jagged, bloodless rent up to the stump of her mutilated right ear. Yet her body, clearly discernable through those filmy robes, was as voluptuous as ever in its perfect curves and hollows. Even in death, it still had the power to stir me. Had I been able to weep, I would have done so later, out of pity, but such solace had long been denied me.‘ I recalled her words to me when we first met; When you’re dead you’re like, long gone and nowhere.’ Who are the dead?  Or rather, what are the dead when they return like this? Are they merely the emanations of our minds? Or do they really have an existence of their own? Ganz anders.

None of the others has returned, except in my dreams, where the men I killed relive their deaths over again. I regret nothing; they deserved to die and I would kill them all again, as I do night after night, without hesitation, felling even the one who put me where I am today, the one I would have slain like the Thracian king, slain as I had slain him before. Blind as Oedipus himself, I have sat in this house, day after endless day, for almost twenty-five years, listening to the pounding of huge combers upon the glistening, black rocks below, while first my wife, and then, later, my daughter, soft-voiced and comforting, read or talked to me patiently. ‘When I consider how my light is spent…’

 It all began and ended at an airport. Airports, those gateways to the void! Nothing is coincidence; everything is ordained, fated. Heimarmene – inexorable Fate – rules, as the Gnostics averred. I should have guessed that from the moment that I first stood in the doorway of the Olympic Airways 727, shielding my eyes against the dazzling Athenian sunlight of that afternoon in early September 1985. Each downward step on that metal stairway led me deeper into that labyrinth in which I had lost Alethea. I had unwittingly become Theseus setting off to encounter the Minotaur, with only the slender Ariadnes’s thread of my reason to guide me out again. Warned to stay away from Athens, heimarmene took me back there to be met by another of her sacrificial victims, a fussy little man with a rubicund, smiling face.

Dr Andreas Yiannouri, Secretary General of the Royal Society of Athens, was an authority on late Byzantine history and author of a first-class monograph on Constantine X (reg. 1059-1067). Everything about Andreas was so neat, meticulous and dated that he could have stepped out of the pages of Paris Match in the fifties. He was wearing a well-tailored, summer suit of cream sharkskin that could have come from Xannis Tseklenis, Athens foremost men’s fashion designer, had the lapels not been so unfashionably narrow. Teaming this with a blue, polka-dot tie and matching handkerchief gave him a dated look, accentuated by his two-tone, brown and white shoes, which were genuine museum pieces. Not a strand of his brilliantined, grey hair or his pencil-line moustache was out of place. Ash he shook my hand with a flaccid grip, the smell of his 4711 cologne reminded me of my great-aunt Melissa.

“I recognised you from your photographs,” he told me, as the official car, an old, Mercedes 190 that had seen better days, was trundling us into Athens along the new highway. “But I must confess you’re rather taller than I had expected.”

We were Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, he the patient follower, I the wild tilter at windmills.

“Athens has been absolutely sweltering,” he complained, mopping his brow with his polka-dot handkerchief. “But your hotel has excellent air-conditioning; I’ve booked you in at the Thebes.”

In spite of the heat, I felt a sudden chill. That was a hotel I did not want to patronise. No use my trying to find somewhere else, for at the height of the tourist season all hotels were fully booked.

Worse was to come.

“You’re in the Apollo suite, professor,” said the receptionist, as she handed the key to the bellboy. “That’s on the fourth floor.  Room 407.”

I blanched. Heimarmene again?  This was the suite in which Michael had lodged Alethea.

“I’d much prefer another room,” I told her, giving her a winning smile. “Could you possibly arrange it for me? Anywhere at all will do.”

I addressed her in Greek. She looked at me in surprise, for the Apollo was one of their most sumptuous suites. She had beautiful dark eyes, a classically Greek nose, and bold eyebrows, raised now in bewilderment at my request and amusement at the somewhat old-fashioned demotic in which it was couched. Her badge read ‘Aphrodite.’ She was well-named.

“I’m sorry, Professor Terries. We’re really absolutely booked out.”

Andreas thought I had forgotten the terms of my contract and was objecting to the cost of the accommodation.

“The Society’s picking up the tab,” he reminded me. “It’s the best suite we could find.’’
I was suitably apologetic. “Of course! I’m most grateful. But I really would have been more at ease with just a single room.”

We were now speaking Greek. “A scholar of your eminence should be suitably accommodated,” said Andreas, with Attic elegance.

I gave in, none too gracefully. My being allotted these rooms of neo-classical grandeur was surely not coincidence.  Heimarmene?  Andreas would have called it moira, that relentless fate that haunted ancient Greece. As I filled in the registration, I fancied I heard the Minotaur growling in the distance, not the antiquated air-conditioning.

I was so dismayed at having been allotted Alethea’s suite that I declined to follow the bellboy upstairs with my luggage, telling Andreas I should like to go sightseeing, a decision I came to regret. In retrospect, I suppose that even if I had never gone near the Acropolis I should have encountered my dead lover. She was not to be denied, having waited for me for so long.

Three hours later, when I came back from my outing, shaken by what I had seen, my world had been shattered. But more of that later. When Andreas had finally taken his leave, I made my way into the ornate dining room, where I spend an hour toying with my food under the pretence of eating. I still hadn’t summoned up the courage to enter my room, perhaps being subconsciously apprehensive that I would find her waiting for me, unchanged by the years. When I did open the door and step inside, I caught my breath. For a moment, the air seemed heavy with Guerlaine’s Jicky. Then her perfume faded away, evanescent as its memory.  And the old anger, bitterness and hatred, repressed for so long but still seething within me, just below the surface of my mind, erupted once more, as it always did when her insistent ghost walked though my troubled dreams. Passionate lies!

“Tell me you’ll never leave me.”

“Leave you, Thea? Never!”

“And I shall never leave you. Not even death shall part us.”

In the ruined amphitheatre of sleep, magnified by these ancient Athenian stones, the endless, intolerable whispering endured throughout the night.

Morning brought sunlight and sanity. I was still tired and had a dull headache. I had been suffering from headaches lately, due, so I thought, to eyestrain and general overwork. I had slept badly, tossing and turning on that treacherous bed, in that long-imagined room where I had lost Alethea, unable to rid my mind of one persistent, haunting image: a woman in a white lacy dress, eyes enigmatic behind dark glasses, long black hair hanging far down her back, watching me appraisingly, motionless, before turning to move away with that undulating walk that was unmistakably that of someone I knew had been dead for years. Still, in those days I was a super-rationalist; by the time light crept in between the shutters I had managed to convince myself that my imagination had been playing tricks on me, over-heated by my return to Athens after so many years. The woman I had seen, I told myself as I was shaving, had been no more than yet another visitor to the Acropolis. I was now willing to bet that had I had the presence of mind to sprint after her, she would have turned out to bear only a resemblance to my lost lover.

Always a compulsive exerciser, avid for a dopamine high, I went for a jog around Syntagma before breakfast, but had to cut it short. Even at that early hour the smog was so thick it made my eyes stream and worsened my headache. I was used to the pure air of Cambridge, and the even purer air of Canberra; Athens was not for me. Its smog reminded me of downtown LA on a particularly foul day. When I went to the bathroom on my return, I discovered a notice asking guests not to flush toilet paper down the loo, but to drop it in the basket provided. And this in a five-star hotel!  The city’s antiquated sewerage system simply could not cope with the load imposed on it by its expanding population. That injunction so turned my stomach I decided I would not linger in Athens a day longer than necessary.

I had just finished breakfast when the phone rang; Andreas, asking if I would care to take a trip to the island of Aegina.

“I’m sorry about giving you such short notice. There’s a friend of mine who’s dying to meet you. He’s a great admirer of yours. He’s read everything you’ve written.”

“He must be a glutton for punishment then. What’s his name?”

“Demetrios Theodorakis. Perhaps you’ve heard of him?”

I was impressed; Theodorakis was the finest painter in Greece.

“I’ve not only heard of him, I own one of his paintings. I’d love to meet him.”

“He’ll be delighted to hear that. Suppose I call for you at nine? We should be in Aegina well before eleven. Please bring a few things with you. You’ll be staying the night.”

Andreas turned up precisely on time. He was in the lobby when I came downstairs, peering at his old-fashioned fob watch with a disapproving look, presumably because I was almost two minutes late. He reminded me, in his fussy solemnity, of the White Rabbit in Alice. As we trundled down to Piraeus in the Society’s shabby Benz, he warned me solemnly that the Theodorakis were unconventional.

“Demetrios lives with his youngest daughter, Iris,” he informed me. “She’s inherited his artistic gifts, and his artistic temperament. She throws pots while he paints.”

He wagged an admonitory finger at me. “Sometimes she even throws them at him. She’s even odder than he is, and that’s saying something, believe me. She’s a divorcee. Her husband left her, so people say, because she’s more than a little mad. To make matters worse, she claims to have psychic powers, and has quite a reputation among the credulous as a medium. She sits in darkened rooms and conjures up the dead. So I hear. So I suppose you can’t really expect her to behave like the rest of us.” He paused, glanced at our chauffeur, and added in a low voice: “Mind you, she does go a bit too far at times. Sexually, I mean. She has quite a reputation. No morals at all, if you know what I mean, like so many women of her age. Not that her father appears to mind. He’s quite a ladies’ man himself. And her mother was every bit as wild as Iris. She ran off with a young flamenco dancer fifteen years ago, when Iris was only in her early teens, and is now living in Seville.”

“How did you come to know them?”

They appeared to be unlikely companions for Andreas, who was the epitome of all the staider nineteenth century bourgeois virtues, except for a propensity to gossip.

“Through the Society. We’ve promoted several exhibitions of Demetrios’s work. I can’t say I really like his paintings or his sculptures. Frankly, they’re beyond me.”

His expressive shrug implied that if he, Andreas Yiannouri, could not understand them, then the rest of the world was merely pretending to do so.

Shortly afterwards, I found myself on Theodorakis’s powerful motor-cruiser, the Aghia Paraskevi (Saint Friday), heading for the island of Aegina in the Saronic Gulf, some fifteen miles south of Piraeus. Andreas had confessed he was a poor sailor.

“Seasickness has two distinct stages,” he told me. “The first, when you think you’re going to die. The second, when you wish you would.”

And with that he retreated, whey-faced, to lie down in the cabin, leaving me free to go up to the wheelhouse and chat to my host.

Demetrios turned out to be a genial Cretan in his early fifties, tall, dark and wiry, with a thin, mobile face that bespoke both intelligence and sensitivity. He had made a name for himself both as a painter and a sculptor, his works fetching high prices in the best galleries in Europe and the USA.

“I bought your Cercle sur Bleu some ten years ago,” I told him,

We were standing in the wheelhouse, watching the polluted haze that hung over Athens recede into the distance behind our foaming wake. It was refreshingly cool out on the water, with a moderate south-easterly breeze flecking the seas with white. I wondered idly why Homer had called the sea “wine-dark”. Did the ancient Greeks lack the ability to discern colours that we all posses? This water was a rich Prussian blue, like the ink Alethea had used to write those rebarbative letters.

 “You have excellent taste. That picture is among the very best things I’ve ever painted,” he told me, in his strongly accented Greek. “I’m glad it’s in good hands. I was trying to express the idea that behind the face of what we call reality, lies something entirely other.”

“Like the Void?” Śunyata.  I used the English term here, uncertain of how to translate it. Luckily he understood me at once.

“Precisely. Philosophy has played an important part in my art. Sometimes I think I’ve spent my time trying to paint or sculpt the Invisible.”

He paused, and looked at me intently. His eyes, tawny-brown flecked with gold, reminded me of a cat’s. “You and I have a lot in common. We’re both much possessed by death. Your work fascinates me, because you’re the only historian I know who sees all our civilizations as attempts to come to terms with the unending battle within us between death and immortality.”

“I can take no credit for that. Borkenau pointed out the way.”

He dismissed Borkenau with an impatient wave of his hand “That may be, but you were the first to build your entire theory of history on the struggle between eros and thanatos. You argue that if the struggle between death and immortality is at the core of every human being, then it must also be at the core of every culture. So you classify civilizations on the basis of their attitudes to death – death-transcending, death-accepting, death-embracing. Now let me ask you, where do you place our own?”

“Come and listen to my lectures.”

He laughed. “Andreas has promised us front-row seats. But I’d like to know the answer to my query beforehand.”

“You’ve answered it yourself,” I told him. “Answered it over and over again in your art.  We’re death-accepting, teetering on the edge of becoming death-embracing.”

“I agree. Remember, I’m a Cretan. In fact, I sometimes think I must be an Eocretan by descent, one of the last remnants of Minoan civilization. The Doric invaders didn’t wipe us all out. I spring from a culture antedating the Mycenean and almost as old as Egypt. And we too were a death-embracing culture, though it’s not fashionable to believe that. I recall the furor when you said as much.”

“You seem to know my work very well.”

“I’ve bought and read all eight volumes of your History. I devoured them as they appeared. Right down to those lengthy footnotes, the best taking up most of the page.”

I winced. “I once had footnote and mouth disease. I’ve got over it now.”

I looked at him curiously. He reminded me of the ancient Cretans on the frescoes from Thera. Not from Knossos, of course; they were merely art nouveau reconstructions. He had the same tawny eyes, wavy, black hair, and slender build. Yet his dark slimness, and his sensitive face, set off by a grizzled Van Dyke, a sable silvered, reminded me more of – what? Suddenly, it came to me.

“You may be a descendant of the Keftiu,” I told him, “but you remind me of someone much more recent, though equally civilized.”

“You intrigue me. Who?”

“Not so much who, but what. You bring to mind a portrait of a seventeenth-century Venetian nobleman I saw in the place of the Doge.”

He actually started with astonishment. Then his face broke into a delighted grin. Impulsively, he took one hand off the wheel and laid it on my shoulder.

“I knew you were psychic! No wonder we’re so alike. That’s exactly who I am, or rather was – a seventeenth century Venetian nobleman! I’m fascinated by Venice. I’ve visited it over seventy times in the last thirty-six years and am planning to go there again next month. The first time I went there, I was only a student. I knew virtually nothing about the city, yet I was stupefied to find that I knew my way around the place as well as if I’d been living there for years.”

I didn’t want to blight our budding friendship by pointing out that, far from being psychic, I was a complete sceptic. As I said earlier, I was a hyper-rationalist in those days. Still, I saw no harm in humouring him.

“You’ve been regressed, I suppose?”

He nodded. “By the best in the business. Not that I needed it. I knew who I was long before they told me. I met my end in Candia during the Turkish siege, somewhere between 1645 and 1669. It was a painful and unpleasant death. But, as you know, those who die violently recall their precious lives most vividly. I’ve dreamt about my previous life, many times. The house where I lived is still there in Iraklion today. I was captured by the Turks during a sally, tortured for days, then impaled on a stake in front of the main gate. I can’t pass that place today without feeling ill. And I was even born with a birthmark on my shoulder, which marked the place where the stake came out, after they’d finished hammering it through me. Look!”

He pulled back the collar of his Lacoste tee shirt, to display a livid red, birthmark, the size of a large coin, above his right collarbone.

“The Turks were experts at impalement. They could thread a man slowly onto a sharpened stake without killing him, and keep him alive for days, if he was young and strong, as I was. On the stake, every second seems an hour, every hour an eternity of pain. I screamed for days. Towards the end, I went completely insane. I thought I was in hell fire, spitted and roasted by jeering devils. I screamed out for death, but he would not come.”

His forehead, I noted with concern, was beaded with sweat. His face was pallid; his knuckles, gripping the wheel, had turned white with pressure. His fantasy had him completely in its grip, like his passion for that sinister, crumbling city, slowly sinking beneath the brackish, grey waves of the Adriatic.

We were now quite close to Aegina. We had rounded a thickly wooded cape and were sailing past the small resort of Aghia Marina, a favourite haunt of German and Scandinavian sun-worshippers. Through the binoculars, I could see that the rocks around the village were strewn with bare-breasted women. With tourism, a mindless paganism had invaded Greece. Once again, homage was being paid to Helios, though somatically, not spiritually. Above us, the hills rose sharply from the water, their slopes green with pines. On a distant summit, I could descry a temple of pink limestone reflecting the sun; that of Athena Tritogenia, my favourite among the Greek pantheon because she managed, improbably, to combine beauty with virginity and industry with wisdom. Originally, the temple had been dedicated to Aphaea the Invisible, a Creto-Mycenean goddess. Assuming Demetrios would approve of her Cretan origins. I made up my mind to ask him to take me there.

“I didn’t just learn of my past life from my nightmares,” he went on. “I made a trip to the States to see a Jungian psychiatrist who specialises in past-life therapy. I spent several weeks going through regression with him. Since then, I’ve come to accept what happened. I no longer have nightmares about it.”

I was conscious of a dull anger, which I thought I had outgrown.

I said, “I once had a friend who underwent regression therapy. Unfortunately, it only made things worse. Her name was Alethea.”

Regression had not helped our deteriorating relationship; we had had several quarrels about it after I had told her she was living out a sick fantasy, abetted by an unscrupulous psychiatrist probably as much in need of treatment as she was. I had met Dr Swanbourne, a black-bearded Jungian, at a Cambridge dinner-party, and taken an immediate dislike to him. He came in a green corduroy jacket and a red tie, though the rest of us were formally dressed. I thought him as crude as his Birmingham accent, though Alethea, to my disgust, hung on every word he uttered. I can see now that I was jealous of her, though at the time I told myself I was simply concerned with her welfare. Self-knowledge was not my strong point in those days. I suppose I had an emotional age of around fifteen.

Demetrios realised his grizzled eyebrows at the name. “Alethea? Greek for ‘truth’. With a name like that she surely must have come to know herself. Was she Greek?”

“No. English. But I lost her here in Greece.”

He looked at me sympathetically. “I’m sorry. Was it an accident?”

“In a way, yes. But I’d rather not talk about it. It all happened years ago.”

In a distant country. And besides, the wench is dead.

We dropped anchor at last in a small, rocky cove where pale green pines, white oleanders, and yellow alamanders grew down to the verge of a beach of dark sand. The sea here was no longer Prussian blue, but a translucent viridian, so clear one could see the rocky bottom, some five fathoms below.

Andreas had reappeared on deck, looking rather drawn. He had been sick three times, he told us, but was now feeling much better. He peered cautiously over the side, as though expecting to fall in.

“Watch out for those sea-urchins if you go swimming,” he warned. “They’re all over the place here. I once got some of their spines in my foot. My god! How they hurt!”

Iris was waiting on their private jetty when we landed. She was in her late twenties, so Andreas had told me, but looked much younger. She was of medium height, slimly built and bronzed to the colour of honey. Her heart-shaped face, framed by dark blonde curls, wore a ready smile. Pretty, rather than beautiful, she was wearing a diminutive topless, red bikini, and quite unselfconscious about her bare breasts as she greeted us. Greek beaches are aswarm with topless women; but it was unusual – to say the least – for a hostess to welcome her guests so scantily attired. Andreas stammered and blushed scarlet as he tried to look anywhere but her breasts; obviously, he hadn’t been near a beach for decades. As I kissed her hand, she touched me lightly on the cheek, and shivered.

“You have a very strange aura,” she whispered. “Let us talk about it later.”

Andreas gave me an outraged look as we walked up to the house. “Watch out for that one,” it said. “She’s a man-eater.”

The house, standing on a cliff, some twenty metres above the beach, was a white, two-storey building, designed by Demetrios himself, with balconies attached to every room. Inside, it was airy and spacious, with a large, cathedral-ceilinged sitting room, whose floor of cream and brown Roman tiles was covered with bright, Greek rugs. The rough walls were vivid with colour, for Demetrios’s paintings were everywhere; there must have been several million dollars worth of art in the sitting room alone. I wondered if these masterpieces were insured, for the house appeared to have no security. French windows gave onto a veranda overlooking the sea, now lapping quietly on the sand below. At the far end of the room, double doors opened onto a vine-covered patio oleanders clustered thickly around gnarled, Attic pines.

Iris confessed that she could not cook. She had married into a wealthy Athenian family and had never had occasion to learn. Luncheon, served on the patio, was a simple affair prepared by their young maid, Pomona, who waited on us at table. We ate peppers and tomatoes stuffed with rice, pine-nuts and currants; fried kalamari; and a traditional Greek salad (horiatiki) of tomatoes, cucumbers, onions, green peppers, feta cheese and black olives, all dressed with wine vinegar and olive oil, served with hot, crusty rolls, which we dipped in salad dressing. The chilled white wine, fortunately, was French; Greek vintages leave a lot to be desired.

“We should really have had some boiled dandelions and a little taramasalata to begin with,” said Iris. “But Pomona found that quite beyond her.”

“If you’d only learn to cook we might all eat better,” Demetrios grumbled. “Any time I want a real meal I have to drive into the Aghaia Marina.”

He turned to me with a smile. “Are you married?”

“I’m afraid not. I’ve never found anyone who would be willing to put up with me.”

“Then you might care to take on my beloved daughter. If she can put up with me, she can put up with anyone. Then I can send Pomona back to her rustic island and get a competent cook.”

Iris laughed. “Come off it, papa! You’d never send her back, since her other talents more than compensate for her lack of expertise in the kitchen.”

“I enjoy Greek food,” I said gallantly, in an attempt to steer the conversation onto safer ground. I had noticed the oeillades and most speaking looks that high-bosomed, slim-waisted, sloe-eyed, Pomona had been giving Demetrios while serving us. “It’s a great improvement on British or Australian cuisine.”

“That’s called “damning with faint praise”, isn’t it?” said Iris. Her English, though lightly accented, was excellent. Her smouldering green eyes met mine and held them for a long moment. If she really were a man-eater, she would find no shortage of willing victims.

The subsequent conversation was better than the food. Demetrios did most of the talking, discussing his hermetic paintings with a surprising depth of insight; painters are not normally so articulate about their art. All his work, he averred, was an attempt to make us see that the categories and values of Western thought were grossly misleading. His art was based primarily on what he had learned from Hindu and Buddhist philosophy, primarily from Zen.

“My work is essentially a series of spiritual sigils,” he concluded. “If I knew what they mean, I would stop painting. I paint to find out what I am trying to say.”

Iris was in high spirits, laughing and joking throughout the meal. She intrigued and amused me. In deference to Andreas, she had donned a tee shirt, which did nothing to subdue her overpowering sexuality. A real fauve! Throughout the meal, I was conscious of her eyes fixed on me, as though I were one of her father’s paintings, a sigil she was trying to decipher.

After the meal, Demetrios took me for a tour of the house, pausing before each of his paintings while he explained them to me. Eventually we ended up in the studio itself, a whitewashed building set in a clearing among the pines. I found his work reminded me of Nietzsche’s dictum: “The essence of all beautiful art is gratitude,” and told him so. He nodded enthusiastically. “That’s because my work is essentially traditional. It expresses understanding, not emotion. To give thanks you must first understand. Modern and post-modern art is quite different. It doesn’t give thanks for the world, for there’s no one to thank since God is dead. Instead, it annihilates the world, by destroying all logic and emotional order. Remember Picasso’s dictum: “For me, painting is the sum of destructions.” Destructions! And postmodernism has gone far beyond Picasso. It’s Yeats’s rough beast, the stony Sphinx that will tear our culture apart. You cannot have civilization without an assured reality, whether consensual, discursive or realist and postmodernism denies us that reality. So, as Yeats forecast: ‘The centre cannot hold.’ For with Deconstructionism there can be no Centre.”

I agreed with him completely. “Postmodernism does for philosophy what art has already done to Intellect, that faculty in us which is uncreated, as Meister Eckhart pointed out.”

“Precisely! But the destructive process began long before Postmodernism. For nearly a century now, art has been contemptuous of the world. My art celebrates it. But you and I evidently see eye to eye in this respect, I recall your remarking somewhere that ‘since the renaissance, art has been one long degeneration.’ I have spent my life trying to regenerate our art through a lost science. As a medieval Pope once remarked: ‘Ars sine scientia nihil.’ And ‘Art without science is nothing’, has been my motto too.”

“There’s an Australian Pope who believes that,” I told him. “Robert Pope. One of our best artists.”

When we finally returned to the sitting room, Iris gazed at me with concern. “Daddy’s been lecturing you, you poor thing! No wonder you look absolutely exhausted. He wears all his guests to a frazzle. It’s time you had your siesta.”

I was grateful to her. “I must confess I’ve hardly slept for the last thirty-six hours. Is there perhaps somewhere I could lie down for a while?”

“Of course! Let me show you to the most comfortable bed in the house. It has a mattress I bought in the states, last year, the very latest, designed especially for insomniacs. I guarantee you’ll sleep like a baby.”

She was right. The heat, the wine and my persistent headache had brought me so close to exhaustion that I was virtually falling asleep on my feet. “Age is catching up with you at last, Terries.” I told myself, catching sight of my features in the mirror of the antique dressing table. My eyes were bloodshot, and my face had a glazed, brittle quality about it, as though it were going to crack open. I almost fell into bed, and must have been asleep ten seconds after my head touched that feather pillow. And for once, to my relief, I did not have what I had come to call the Dream.

Waking was like coming out of an anaesthetic. I lay there for a while in a contented, warm daze, neither asleep, nor properly awake, listening to the rustle of the sea-wind in the trees and the rhythmic murmur of waves in the cove. To my relief, my headache had finally abated.

“I’ve come down from my rainbow to watch you sleep, dear Hector.”

I opened my eyes with a start. Iris was sitting at the end of the double bed, clad only in her red bikini bottom. Her breasts, honey-coloured in the sun, were firm and high, with pale pink areolas and erect nipples. She leant forward, swung her feet up on the bed, and lay down beside me, resting on her elbows so she could look at me. Her imperiousness put me in mind of her namesake, the Byzantine empress Iris, whom Charlemagne himself had wooed in vain.

“Who’s been sleeping in my bed? Isn’t that what the Bear said to Goldilocks? Well, this is Goldilocks saying it to the bear. Didn’t I tell you that mattress would put you to sleep? I chanted an oneiric spell over it myself.”

I was faintly alarmed at the presence of this radiant rainbow goddess. What if Demetrios were to walk in?

She read my thoughts. “Don’t worry. I sent them off fishing. I’ve got you all to myself for a couple of hours. I thought we might have our little talk now.”

I was acutely conscious of her perfumed nakedness. Jolie Madame – long one of my favourites. I remember scents as some people recall melodies. “Is this really your bedroom?”

“It is indeed! We have three spare rooms for ordinary guests, but you’re very special. I wanted you tucked up in my own little bed.”

I decided to try to treat this conversation lightly. If she wanted me to play blarney, I would oblige her.

“I’m deeply flattered. But I really would have preferred you were tucked into mine.”

She looked suddenly serious. “Not if it meant sharing your nightmares.”

I felt the goose flesh rise along my back and arms. How could she have known?

“I knew it as soon as you kissed my hand,” she said, as though in answer to my unspoken question. “Your strange aura enveloped me, and I felt faint. You’re possessed, I’m afraid. By a woman. A woman with dark hair who died in fire.”

I stared at her, stunned. “Died in a fire? How in God’s name do you know this?”

She had closed her eyes and was breathing deeply. Suddenly, she twisted her body around, and lay supine beside me, panting. The deep voice that issued from her lips was not her own.

“It is the Feast of St Michael and the angel Gabriel. We stand in the presence of God. Understand, O man! Understand!”

The words of my persistent dream!

I sat up, grabbed her by the arms, and shook her, trying to bring her to her senses. She woke up, stared at me with startled eyes, and then, quite unexpectedly, burst into tears and clung to me, weeping. When I put my arms around her to comfort her, she fastened her lips on mine avidly.

“Don’t say a word!” she whispered. “Just take me! If you want me to help you, then take me. Now!”

In a moment she had wriggled out of her bikini bottom, and was lying prone on my belly. I was so disconcerted by her revelations that, for once, I threw aside my Wiccamical scruples. She gasped, closed her eyes and sank her teeth into my neck like a vampire.

“Strike me if I shriek,” she murmured, breathlessly. “I don’t want that bitch, Pomona, to hear me.”

Later, I lowered her gently to the bed and lay down beside her. Her eyes were closed and she was breathing heavily, her breasts rising and falling rhythmically. After a while, she began to mutter something herself, gutturally. In Arabic? The only word I could make out clearly was aqrab. She repeated this several times, with increasing hysteria, and then suddenly snapped out of her trance. She was trembling violently, and clammily pale with shock.

“Are you all right?” I asked, helplessly, not knowing what to do to help her. I had never found myself in bed with my host’s daughter before, let alone with one who went into trance – a double first I would have preferred to avoid.

She nodded mutely, unable to speak. I got up and brought her a glass of water from the bathroom. She sipped it slowly and gradually gained control of herself.

“We’re all in danger,” she told me, in a low, urgent voice. “All of us. I saw blood everywhere. And scorpions. Huge scorpions scuttling around a black pyramid.”

“Meaning?”

She shook her head. “I think they’re what Daddy calls “sigils”. But I could feel the evil emanating from them. A voice kept saying: ‘Children of Silkit’, or something like that. I don’t know what Silkit means.”

I did. Selkhet was the scorpion goddess of ancient Egypt, ordainer of both life and death. Had she subconsciously remembered the name from something she’d read? She had mentioned the pyramids.

She threw her arms around my neck and held me tightly. “I’m afraid, Hector. Terrified.  I think I’m going to die.”

She was like a frightened child, alarmed by her own imagination. I stroked her hair and murmured something reassuring. A few minutes later, her ever-volatile mood had changed completely.

“When I first saw you on the jetty, I thought you looked like a blonde Viking coming ashore to rape and plunder.”

“I can’t recall plundering anyone.”

She laughed and nipped my neck, playfully.

“Or raping anyone either. Not today anyway. Did you know I was once a temple prostitute?”

“Really?  Before you were married?”

“In a previous life, I mean, silly. In Sumer, I would make love with a hundred men a day when the god commanded me. No one could resist me.”

I could well believe this, though ninety-nine more after this afternoon’s performance did seem a bit over the top.

“I don’t normally leap on Daddy’s guests like this, you know. If I did, we’d soon lose all our friends.”

“Don’t you believe it. You’d find you’d suddenly acquired hundreds of new ones.”

She smiled, displaying pearly white teeth, “I like men who make me laugh. Anyway, these were special circumstances. I just had to make love to you. If I hadn’t done so, I would never have been able to see what I saw. It’s always just after my orgasm that I get my deepest visions. And the more powerful the orgasm, the further I see.”

“So how far did you see this time?”  A little concerned with my own performance?

“A long, long way into the past. And some way into the future. It’s easier to go into the past. It’s like coasting downhill. But the future stretches uphill in a dark maze of a million, million torturous corridors. Yet there are some futures that are more probable than others, and some that are impossible to escape.”

“And which future did you see this time?”

She hesitated. “I’m not sure. But I think this one is impossible to avoid. It’s been too long in the making. All the corridors lead to it. That’s why I was so upset.”

“You said…”

“Something about St Michael.  I saw a church with red candles burning before an altar. Then a voice began speaking through me.” She shuddered. “Oh, just feel my body! I’ve gone cold all over.”

And so she had. She was covered with goose flesh from head to foot. I was feeling the chill myself. What she had just described, I had been enduring about once a week for nearly twenty years.

I kept my calm. Good old English stiff upper lip sang-froid and all that rot.  “Fascinating!  You actually glimpsed a recurrent dream of mine. What do you think it means – if anything?”

I had been asking myself that for two decades and never found the answer. The psychiatrists I had consulted had been no help. ‘I’m afraid you’ll just have to learn to live with it, old boy,’ was the gist of their unhelpful and expensive message.

She shook her blonde head. “I don’t know. But I was frightened. That’s why I decided I had to make love to you, there and then. I just had to see what the vision meant.”

I could only hope she was going to have more of such visions.  Tribulations had their consolations.

“But you didn’t unravel it, did you?”

“I think I did. The scorpions and the pyramids are connected with the church.”

“What about the coffins?”

She caught her breath, in a swift hissing intake. “Dear God! Yes! I’d forgotten the coffins. No wonder I was frightened. Here! Just feel how my heart is racing!”

She seized my hand, and clasped it to her bare breast. I held it there for a moment, feeling her heart leaping like a living thing within her.

Things took their course again.

“Delicious!” she murmured, later. “That was even worth the horrible things I saw.”

“Such as?”

She was silent for a moment. “A swimming-pool. Deep, black water, cold as ice.  Three bodies.”

“Sounds invigoratingly healthy.  As long as the bodies were alive, of course.”

She shuddered and opened her eyes. “It wasn’t and they weren’t. You English! Why are you so determinedly flippant?

She put her hand on my cheek and stroked it softly. “You’re always pretending to be what you’re not. Perhaps you’re a reincarnation of Heracles, who also liked disguises. He, too, must have been quite sexy.”

“He was certainly quite violent.”

“That was self-defence. Anyway, that doesn’t invalidate my argument. You’re violent too.”

I laughed. “Violent? I detest violence! I can’t even bring myself to shoot a rabbit or a game-bird.”

This was true. I had been my grandfather’s despair every twelfth of August.

She shook her head. “You’ve violent all right, o son of Alcmene.”

She sat up in bed, took my hands in her own, and scrutinized their palms carefully, frowning, and muttering to herself. Then she nodded, as though confirming her own diagnoses.

“You’re a killer. A dangerous man. I see Megara’s blood on your hands. And her children’s. Perhaps Deianira’s too. You could end on Mount Oeta, in a shirt of flame”.

“Then do remind me never to go there. I prefer to buy my shirts from Geoffrey Beane.”

More melodrama! A middle-aged academic transformed into the Heracles of Sophocles Trachiniai! Megara and Deianira? Nessus and Hyllus? A funeral pyre on Mount Oeta? What mythological fantasies had wrapped her in their toils? Had the Greeks had never succeeded in freeing themselves from their mythical past? In spite of our recent intimacy, I still felt uncomfortable with her. Her personality seemed like a mask that she donned from time to time. Genetic inheritance? I suspected that classical sibyls and pythonesses had been like Iris. And about as accurate.  Though, admittedly, she had guessed my dream. And the woman who died in a fire. Now that was definitely unsettling.

 She came to with a start, giving her head a little shake, as though to clear it.

“Where was I? Oh yes, violence. There’s so much violence in this world. So much slaughter. Always this crazed lust for blood. That’s why Daddy and I chose to live on this island. It’s very peaceful here.”

“There’s been a lot of killing here too over the centuries,” I reminded her. “Persians, Athenians, Macedonians, Romans, Arab pirates, Franks, Catalans, Venetians, Turks, Nazis. Conqueror after conqueror, coming and going, looting, burning, raping and slaughtering. History is written by stupidity in blood. And there’s no stopping it. Don’t forget that.”

I was at it again. My favourite theme.

“Forget it? I never do. Sometimes I get glimpses of scenes of horror, atrocities that took place near this very house, centuries ago. But don’t let’s talk about it! I’m happy at the moment and don’t want my happiness spoilt. I’m still tingling all over. I feel like a cat drowning in feline ecstasy in a cask of whipped cream.”

She caught my hands in hers and squeezed them earnestly. Then a sudden change of register. Greek Galilean Orthodoxy. No wonder Emperor Julian had sought refuge in healthy paganism.

“I shall pray to the Panaghia for you. And I want you to pray for me. I always feel we can’t pray for ourselves but we’re permitted to pray for others. Don’t you?”

Such kitsch! And muddled logic. If one couldn’t look after oneself one was surely unlikely to survive to look after others.

“I really can’t say. I never pray for anything except good weather for the cricket. And seldom get it.”

She ignored my persistent English flippancy, which I had hoped would serve to lighten the situation somewhat.

 “Yours is a very strange karma. And somehow, in a way I don’t understand, I’ve become part of it. I keep seeing images I don’t understand, like film clips flashed on a screen. A dead woman in a car or perhaps a plane. Fire!  Smoke rising among trees. In another country, a long way from here. What does it all mean? Who? Where? When? Why? I was not permitted to see.”

She buried her face in her hands, and rocked to and fro, cross-legged on the bed. whilst I lay there, sullenly, shocked into silence by her words. Andreas had not prepared me for this. Then to my relief, her mood changed again, as abruptly as before. She stood up suddenly, eyes closed, head poised, like a dog sniffing the air, with her shapely bare back to the curtained window.

“Let’s have a shower and make ourselves presentable. Daddy and Andreas will be coming home very soon. I can see them trudging along the beach, about a kilometre from here. A pity they haven’t caught anything. And poor old Andreas is limping. Like Oedipus, he’s hurt his left foot.”

“Then let’s hope he’s not going to marry his dear old mum.”

As I dressed, I recalled that Iris, the servant of Hera, (Hera! That inveterate enemy of Heracles, whose name ironically meant ‘blessed by Hera’.  One could do without such blessings.) was not only goddess of the rainbow but messenger of the gods, who, as Sophocles declared through the mouth of Hyllus, ‘Without pity, unmoved, look down on the sufferings of men.’  The best one could hope for from the gods was that they should not notice you. The sacred, after all, contained evil as well as good. Ask Job, another unfortunate recipient of divine blessing.

 In the meantime, where the hell were my socks?

COPYRIGHT (C) 2010 J D FRODSHAM