Chapter II - 'Sow the Wind'

Chapter II

 Work in progress - excerpt from Sow the Wind: a novel. 

Demetrios and Andreas came back a little later to find us sitting demurely on the patio, drinking tea. Iris had now donned a floral cotton skirt and a low-necked white ‘peasant’ blouse with puff sleeves. I had noted, as she dressed, that she did not bother with underwear.

“I never wear panties in summer,” she had confided. “I like to be air-conditioned. And I can’t remember ever wearing a bra in my life. I used to drive my ex to distraction. He was a real prick! He would have liked to lace me up in corsets, like his mother.”

“You’re both looking much better,” remarked Andreas approvingly, as he limped towards us. His face was flushed with the sun and the unaccustomed exercise. “I should have stayed home with you. As it was I ran a sea-urchin spine into my foot. Hurt like the devil until Demetrios pulled it out.”

Iris smiled at me, victoriously. Well, she had got that one right at least. But that did not mean she was necessarily right about everything else.

Andreas peered worriedly at his left foot, wincing as he fingered the cut gingerly, and shook his head despondently. “I hope it all came out. I’d better see a doctor when I get back.”

Iris laughed. “Andreas! You’re always fretting about something or other. Relax! You’re on timeless Aegina now, not stewing in Athens. Just lie back and cultivate kephi, like a good Greek.”

“And what is kephi?” I asked.

“The art of enjoying life,” said Demetrios. He eyed his daughter with amusement. “I can see Iris’s been working hard at lying back and cultivating kephi. She’s blossomed like a rose. She looks ten years younger than she did at lunch.”

She had the grace to blush.

I came to her rescue. “I’d been particularly looking forward to seeing the temple of Aphaia. I suppose it’s too late to see it now”.

 “Not if we hurry. We’ve got half an hour or so before they close the gates.”

He turned to Iris. “Care to join us on an outing?”

Andreas had already limped off into the cool of the house to nurse his wound.

She shook her head. “No thanks. Enjoying life has completely worn me out. Nothing is as enervating as pleasure.”

“And the greater the pleasure, the greater the enervation. Come on, Hector. Let’s head for the hills.”

Five minutes later we had driven up the steep hill-road to the temple in Demetrios’s well-worn Peugeot. The temple had stood there since around 490 BC and so was even older than that other great monument to Athena, the Parthenon. Built in the Doric style, with six columns on the eastern and western sides and twelve columns on the other sides, it was in a marvellous state of preservation. By the time we had admired the beauty and symmetry of those pink limestone columns set against a background of azure sea, salmon-coloured clouds, and pale green Attic pines, the sun, bright-haired Apollo, was already setting. I strolled back to the car to find that Demetrios was fiddling around under the bonnet, humming to himself.

“Just a spot of trouble with a spark plug. My next car will be Japanese.”

“Anything I can do?”

“Nothing at all, my dear fellow, except bear with me.”

I decided to take one last look at the temple, which was outlined sharply against the darkening sky. Then, even as I halted at the now barred gate, I saw her again, at the furthest end of the temple. Clad as always in white, eyes expressionless behind dark glasses, a slight smile on her full lips, she was standing on the crepidoma, the three-stepped platform on which the Doric columns stand, looking at me thoughtfully. I caught my breath, feeling my heart leap and race with shock. Time stood still. The sea breeze blew her long black hair about and fluttered her white skirt, but she did not stir. For an endless moment I stood staring at her across the unbridgeable abyss of those lost years. Then, as she moved away with that unmistakeable, swaying gait of hers and disappeared over the crest of the hill, I came out of my trance. Could I scramble over the gate and run after her? Impossible! By the time I had picked my way across the limestone ruins that lay between me and the temple, she would surely have disappeared. I was still trying to pull myself together when Demetrios joined me.

“You know, I’ve tried my damnedest to paint that temple a dozen times,” he said, wiping his fingers fastidiously with a large white handkerchief. “But there’s a magical quality about the play of light on the cella that eludes me. I’d need the help of Aphaia herself to do it.”

I could hardly trust myself to speak. “I think that I may have just seen her,” I said slowly, trying to sound rational and matter of fact.

He looked at me quizzically, raising his bushy eyebrows. “Who? Aphaia? Lucky fellow! She’s supposed to be invisible.”

“No. Not Aphaia. Alethea.”

Since we were conversing in Greek, he missed my meaning. “So you’ve seen Truth at last. I thought she lived at the bottom of a dried-up well.”

I was looking at him dazedly. “Did you see anyone else up here? A woman in a white dress, standing at the western end of the temple?”

He grew suddenly serious, noticing my agitation. “I’m sorry. I’d forgotten what you told me this morning. What did you see?”

He listened intently as I told him. Later, as we drove back to the house, I went on to recount what happened to me on the Acropolis, the previous day, when I had first seen Alethea.

“After I’d first checked in, I had declined to go up to my suite immediately, wanting to put off seeing those damned rooms for as long as possible, I suppose.

“I’d like to stretch my legs a little after that flight,’ I told Andreas. Would you mind if we walked down as far as the Agora? I particularly want to have a look at the Stoa Poikile. Last time I was in Athens it was still unexcavated.”

Andreas had looked surprised. “Really? When was that?”

“September 1960. I’ve been to Greece frequently since then but always managed to avoid visiting Athens. The city has changed a bit, hasn’t it?”

Andreas smiled. British understatement amused him.

“When you saw it last, Athens had under one million people. We’ve now got four million of them, smog in abundance, and twenty-four percent inflation.”

“The price of progress,” I told him. “Progress backward.”

Syntagma, which I had remembered as a pleasant oasis of greenery, was now a roaring vortex of traffic and tourists. Not that I objected; anything was better than those intolerable memories. We picked our way through the crowd until we finally emerged onto Mitropoleos Square, which surrounds the Cathedral. The guide books, unkindly but discerningly, remark of this nineteenth-century monstrosity of a church that it is such a hotchpotch of architectural styles, all of them undistinguishable, that one can only regret the seventy Byzantine churches which were pulled down to provide the raw materials for it. I was not interested in the Cathedral. What I wanted to see was the lovely Old Metropolis, a diminutive church of the thirteenth century, which nestles in its shadow.

I was suddenly overwhelmed with depression, as though a cloud had darkened the sun. The last time I had stood on this spot it had not been Andreas who stood at my side, but Alethea. I had been twenty-five then, not forty-nine, and as sure of life as I was now unsure. Yet, for all my brash confidence, I had lost her only twelve months later, on her second visit to Athens, in 1961. Engrossed in my memories, with my Sancho Panza trotting breathlessly behind me, I began to walk towards that ochre church where I had kissed her so passionately.  I never reached there. Halfway across the square I had suddenly swung round and said to Andreas, “I’ve changed my mind. Do you think we could walk up to the Acropolis?”

He looked at me in dismay. First my performance in the hotel, and now this. I was turning out to have quite a prima donna temperament. “By all means. But it’s quite a trek, I’m afraid. We shall have to catch a cab.”

I was almost as surprised by my sudden decision as he was. I had really wanted to see the Stoa. But the urge to visit the Acropolis had been too compelling to resist. It was as though something had taken over my will, forcing me to make a trip I had not intended to make until the next day. Alethea?

“I’d enjoy a walk,” I told him firmly. “I think I even remember the way.”

He must have groaned inwardly, for he was too plump to enjoy such unaccustomed exercise. Nevertheless, he gave in with good grace. Greek politeness, though often insincere, has its charms. At this stage, I relented.

“Would you care for coffee before we set out?”

He had brightened up at once. “There’s an excellent galaktozakheroplasteion just around the corner. Why don’t we see what it has to offer?”

The galaktozakheroplasteion, or “milk and sugar palace”, is a mainstay of Greek life, selling alcoholic and soft drinks, cakes, puddings, ice cream, coffee, tea, and dairy produce. They also do breakfast. Once inside, Andreas heaved a sigh of relief. He ordered coffee, and generous helpings of amigdalota, a sweetmeat that resembled marzipan scented with orange blossoms, and loukomades, fried doughnuts drenched in rosewater syrup and dredged through cinnamon sugar. These places really live up to their name of “sugar palaces”. He ate not only his share, but my own, for I have never had much of a sweet tooth.

“Life always looks rosier when one has eaten,” he said, leaning back in his chair with a satisfied look. “If I weren’t on a strict diet I’d have been tempted to order a couple of scoops of the fistikia ice-cream for which this place is famous. Would you like to try it?”

I declined his offer, wanting to ask him what he ate when he was not on a strict diet, but forbore; he was probably sensitive about his weight. Once he had satisfied his hunger, we made our way through the narrow streets of the Plaka, all that now remains of Ottoman Athens, past the forlorn ruins of the Roman Forum. Its ghostly pillars and arches were unchanged since I had last seen them in the company of Alethea, on the very route we were retracing now. That scorching summer day in 1960 we had chosen to approach the Acropolis from its northern side, following the line of the ancient Peripatos. We had set out before dawn, to avoid the heat, arriving at the Acropolis at sunrise. I recalled her white dress gleaming pallidly in the gloom, where the great walls loomed high above us, outlined against the fading splendour of the Milky Way, in a sky far purer than the one above me now. Two phantoms began holding repetitive colloquy in my mind again.

“Will you always love me?”

“Always!”

“Promise you’ll never leave me.”

“I swear it. Never!”

We reached a spot above the Herodeion and stopped for a while to rest, for Andreas was panting from the climb, before setting out for the Acropolis itself. I had expected to find that little had changed in my absence, for a third of a man’s life should mean nothing to monuments that have endured for twenty-five centuries. But I had forgotten the havoc wrought by modern civilization. The Propylaea, the Iconic Temple of Athena Nike, the Erectheion, the Parthenon itself, now cluttered with ugly scaffolding, were crumbling away, all slowly dissolving in a cloud of sulphuric acid, unable to withstand the onslaught of industrialism.

The Parthenon was charged with special poignancy for me. It was there I had asked Alethea to marry me.

“Will you always love me?”

“Always!”

But the Parthenon was now forbidden ground; for the streams of visitors that had for years lapped its walls had swollen to a babbling torrent that threaten to destroy it. A building that had survived Roman brutality, Christian iconoclasm, Turkish slovenliness, Venetian mischief, and English predatoriness was helpless against touristic trauma. The past was melting away under the pressure of the present.

“Do you remember the words of Pindar?” I asked Andreas. He was walking beside me with his jacket folded neatly over his arm, mopping his brow with his handkerchief, and looking as though he would have liked to take off this two-tone shoes and put his feet up.

“O splendid Athene, radiant, violet-crowned, worthy of song,

Bulwark of Hellas, city of the gods.”

He nodded, to show his appreciation. Greeks love to heat their great poets quoted, even by foreigners with barbarous accents.

“Pindar would have a fit if he saw the place now,” he observed. “We’ve even changed its name, from Athene to Athena.”

Just as well. There was no real historical connection between the Acropolis, in its austere, sunlit purity, and the Athens we could hear droning away far below. Had I voiced my thoughts, he could hardly have disagreed, staunch Athenian though he was. That labyrinth of steel and concrete, its raucous streets choking with noxious fumes, its sky smeared with an excremental brown smog, was not the descendant of the numinous city that had nurtured Socrates, Plato and Aristotle; Sophocles, Aeschylus and Euripides: Pericles and Themistocles, Herodotus, Thucydides and Xenophon; Phidias and Myron. Between the modern world and the world of tradition there lies a great gap. A profound discontinuity had occurred in history, somewhere around the time of the Industrial Revolution, which had sundered the modern age from its roots in the past. This rock-strewn terrace, where the setting sun was now reflecting blindingly off Pentelic marble, was the ancient heart of our civilization.

All societies, I told Andreas, had found themselves compelled to give coherent answers to four questions, namely: Where have we come from? Why are we here? Where are we bound? Who are we?

“Ancient Greek Society,” I went on, “was intensely aware of these questions, as you know. In response to these perennial riddles of the Sphinx, it formulated some of the most powerfully compelling answers the human race has ever devised. No wonder Whitehead remarked that all European philosophy was but a series of footnotes to Plato.”

 In those days, I habitually thought and talked like that, God help me. My déformation professionelle must have bored everyone stiff.

Suddenly, I became aware that the Acropolis had fallen strangely silent. Even the endless whirr of crickets had ceased. The sultry air seemed charged with electricity, as before a thunderstorm, making the ends of my fingertips prick and tingle. I had an eerie feeling that someone was standing close behind me, their gaze boring into the back of my head. Startled, I broke off my impromptu peroration, and turned sharply around.

I saw her immediately. The shock was so great that my heart missed a beat.
Alethea! It was surely Alethea! She was standing in the lengthening shadow of the Erectheion, less than thirty yards away, looking directly at me. She was wearing a short-sleeved white dress of some lacy material. Her long, black hair hung loosely around her shoulder, reaching, as I well knew, far down her exquisite back. The perfect oval of her face was expressionless, giving no sign of recognition or greeting. Her eyes – those unfathomable, lapis lazuli eyes – were hidden by dark, old-fashioned sunglasses. Across the abyss of the years she stood watching me as though waiting. Time stopped, while I stood and stared back at her, afraid to move lest I break the spell. Then she turned and walked slowly away, vanishing into the crowd that was making its way towards the gates. The Furies had found me at last.

 “Swear that you’ll never leave me!”

“Never! I swear I’ll never leave you. Never!”

I became aware that Andreas was talking to me.

“Are you all right?” he kept asking anxiously. He must have thought he was chaperoning a visionary, for I had broken off mid-sentence and was staring fixedly into space as though entranced. I found I was trembling uncontrollably, and felt cold and slightly nauseous with shock. At that time, I did not believe in the supernatural. Like the rest of my generation I had been nurtured on a diet of rationalism, behaviourism and logical positivism, mitigated somewhat by my perfunctorily held Anglican beliefs. I would have scoffed at the very idea of apparitions. Yet the impact of what I had seen was so powerful, that all my cherished rationalism was swept away, like children’s sandcastles demolished by breakers

Alethea was dead, her body long since consigned to the flames; I was sure of that much. Yet I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that the woman I had seen had been Alethea. Not some stranger who bore a fancied or coincidental resemblance to her, but Alethea herself, at twenty-one, in the height of her youth and beauty. How did I know this? Not only by her dress, her figure, her distinctive sunglasses, but also by her ankles, her legs, her arms, her face, her hair. That unforgettable hair! I knew it by her inimitable stance – poised, still, head thrown slightly back at an unmistakable characteristic angle. Above all, I knew her by her walk. A woman may superficially resemble another woman as long as she remains still; but once she moves, the illusion vanishes. Our walk is our signature: and Alethea’s gliding motion, with its tender dislocation, its sensual balancement des hanches, her feet in their high-heeled sandals treading an invisible narrow ribbon without deviating an inch, was inimitably her own. It was as idiosyncratic as her italic writing with its distinctive Prussian blue ink: I would have known it anywhere. Yet I had not seen that gliding, sinuous walk since that day in Cambridge, twenty-four long years before, when she came with me to the railway station for the last time. She had walked down the platform, thus, waving goodbye until I could see her no more. Gone forever. I sat down on a nearby slab of Parian marble and tried to get a grip on myself again. It was some considerable time before I could recover.

“I’m sorry,” I told Andreas. “I think I’m a bit jet lagged. I’d better go straight back to the hotel.”

He looked relieved. Jet lag has such a reassuringly scientific ring about it. Besides, my sudden indisposition had saved him from the long walk back. He could now catch a cab, with a clear conscience, and charge it to the society.

By the time I had finished my story, we were parked in the long, tree-lined drive that led to the house. Demetrios and I sat in silence for several minutes, listening to the endless complaint of the many-voiced sea in the cove below. The last light was waning now, and the world was dissolving around us, caught in the shadow time between day and encroaching night.

“I accept the supernatural,” he said at last. “I have to. Iris lives with it, day in, day out. So I have no problems accepting that you may have seen a ghost. But I can see this business has upset you. I only wish I’d been there to see Alethea too. That might have made things easier.”

“What you’re telling me is that I can never really know whether I was hallucinating or not, because you weren’t there to testify to the objective reality of what I’d seen. But that might have made it just a folie à deux, a shared illusion. Why should your seeing Alethea make her any less unreal?”

“Where do you draw the line between illusion and reality? Suppose three people, not just two, had seen her? Would have that have made her more real? Or three thousand people? Or three million? What about a folie à cinq billions? Is that perhaps what our worlds really is? A collective dream traversed by individual dreams? Many mystics said it is.”

“I find it almost impossible to accept the supernatural,” I told him, stubbornly. “All my life I’ve lived by reason and logic. Phantoms have no place in my world. There must be some purely natural explanation for what I’ve seen. Perhaps the woman I glimpsed in Athens was a tourist, who just happened to be visiting the temple this evening.”

He turned to me, his face now no more than a blur in the gloom under the cypress trees. In the dark, one can say things one would not say in the light.

“I gather, from the marks on your neck, that you slept with my daughter this afternoon. Can you still say, after seeing her in trance, that you can’t accept the supernatural?”

I had no reply to that. He laughed, clapped me amiably on the shoulder, and restarted the car.

“Come on, Horatio! There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy! I’ve got a couple of dozen bottles of vintage Beaujolais in my cellar that will solve the riddles of the universe for us. Let’s go and see if we can make a real dent in them.”

Iris came to my bed that night, silent as a ghost. Without saying a word, she fastened her mouth on mine and ran her hands over me, until I woke up, stiff as stone, and took her yet again. She was so slim and delicately boned, I thought she would melt away in my arms. This time, much to my relief, she eschewed trance, merely moaning softly with delight while sinking her teeth passionately into my neck. Was she apprenticed to Dracula, not Hera?

“I don’t want to emulate that amateur exhibitionist, Pomona” she told her afterwards. “Every time she comes, which is fairly often these days, you can hear her histrionic screams and bucolic groans way down in Aghia Marina. I think Daddy eggs her on, just to show off.”

We chatted together in the dark, like old friends, for hours after that. She lay drowsily in my arms, her head on my shoulder, and told me the story of her life, while I listened with unaffected attention. Historians should be interested in people; for people make history. On an impulse, I asked her if she would care to join me on a trip around Greece, after I’d finished my lectures.

She sighed. “Hector, it’s sweet of you to ask me. But if I go with you I might fall for you like a schoolgirl with a crush. And I don’t want to do that because I’m afraid of you.”

“Afraid? Of me? Why?”

“Because of what I’ve seen. I’m frightened. You’re a vortex, Hector. You sweep everyone into the whirlpool of your destiny and drown them. God knows who you’ve been in your past lives! Hector himself, dragged dead around Troy? Or Orestes perhaps?  Part of me wants to give myself to you completely. And part of me wishes I had never set eyes on you. You’re haunted! All the time I’m with you I can sense a woman’s presence. This evening I even thought I saw her out of the corner of my eye.”
”Where?” I asked tensely.  This was disturbing.

“Under the cypress trees along the drive, at dusk.” She paused and nuzzled my neck again. “Do you read Lucretius?”

Once again she had surprised me. What had this fauve, tawny dryad, to do with that super-rationalist admirer of Epicurus?

“As a matter of fact I do. He’s one of my favourite poets. His materialism appeals to me. And his compassion.”

“Well, Daddy insisted I had a good classical education. He had the professor of classics from the university come and tutor me for years, in exchange for paintings. Professor Zoitakis is a very rich man now. We read all the Greek and Latin poets together. Lucretius was one of them. Two lines from De Rerum Natura somehow stuck in my mind. I discovered that by repeating them over and over, I could send myself into trance. Even now, I feel giddy when I recite them. Listen!”

Lying beside me in the dark she began to recite the Latin verses in a low, musical voice:

Haud igitur lēti praeclūsa est iānua caelō

Sed patet immāni et vasto respectat hiātu

‘For the door of death is not shut tight on the sky

But stands open, facing us, with frightful gaping maw.’

I construed the lines slowly, as though I were back at Winchester, listening to Dr. Danson, county cricketer, reading the text to the classical Sixth.

Moved by her words, I took her in my arms until she fell asleep, with a slight smile on her lips, snuggling up against me like a contented child. It was a long time, however, before I could get to sleep. When I eventually did so, it was with Alethea’s name on my lips, as though my whispering could summon her back from the dead.

I may have succeeded. That night a summer storm swept the island, which seemed to shudder in the dark under its weight of memories. Woken by the thunder, I got up to close the window, where the curtains were already billowing out eerily in the wind. Lightning flashes lit up the tempestuous sea and sky as I stumbled across the unfamiliar room. Still half-dazed, I fancied I heard a voice call my name. The moon was almost full, its cold brilliance fitfully obscured by scudding, black clouds. Then, instantly, I was wide-awake. Alethea! She was standing below under the wildly tossing cypress trees, her white summer dress blown about her by the gale, her black hair streaming around her shoulders. Yet her dress was dry, in spite of that furious downpour; and the face turned whitely towards me, but a few years from our window, bore traces of tears, perhaps, but not rain. She was, and she was not, of this world. For an endless time we stood and gazed at each other wordlessly, sundered by death, while the storm howled around us. Then she stretched out her slender hands, as though to imprecate a curse, and faded away into that immense darkness, gliding towards the phosphorescent glimmer of the thundering surf, leaving me racked with the anguish of guilt, like Orestes.  “Haud igitur lēti praeclūsa est iānua caelō,” I found myself muttering.

I was shaking now like the storm-swept trees themselves, ice-cold, my teeth chattering uncontrollably with shock. Behind me, a woman was writhing in some black nightmare, griding her teeth, unable to awake. So the door of death was not shut tight on the sky. Lucretius, that old master, had been right, in a way he had never intended. But it was only when I was back in bed, vainly trying to comfort a weeping Iris, awake now and trembling with terror, that I remembered that other ominous line.

Sed patet immāni et vasto respectat hiātu.

The door of death was indeed open and facing us, with gaping maw.

The Erinyes! You cannot see them but I can…

That night, for the first time, I knew the sour taste of fear.                  

COPYRIGHT (C) 2010 J D FRODSHAM