[Ionia]

an ongoing series by Thomas E. Kennedy and Walter Cummins

IONIAN DAYS, IONIAN NIGHTS:
Lefkas, Meganissi, Scorpios, Ithaca, Cephallonia

Essay and Photographs by Thomas E. Kennedy
Paintings by Alice Guldbrandsen

It is difficult not to think of antiquity and the brevity of one's own life amongst the islands of the Ionian, perhaps especially at night. Here on the balcony of the Posiedonio Hotel in Perigali on he island of Lefkas, the song we hear of crickets cannot have changed from that Alcaeus wrote about on the other side of the Pelopenese 2500 years ago:

In the bushes, strong and clear
Now the cricket sings,
And such music fills the air
From beneath his wings.

(C M Bowra translation)

        Their stridulatory melody falls still only momently as the occasional bat flutters low and swift over the olive trees, skimming the aqua-lit water of the little pool below.
        The moon that rises from behind the white cliffs across the bay, brighter than the Pleiades, is the same as in Sappho's time and words:

Awed by her splendor
Stars near the lovely
Moon cover their own
Bright faces

and

Tonight I've watched
The moon and then
The Pleiades
Go down
The night is now
Half-gone; youth
Goes, I am
In bed alone.

(Mary Bernard translation)

        But I am not alone. Beside me on the balcony, Alice is sketching the moon which my Nikon proved insufficient to record, and I recall another Sappho fragment, from two and a half millennia past, that literally stops the breath hard in my throat:

You may forget but
Let me tell you this:
Someone in
Some future time
Will think of us.

        Somewhere on this coast, Homer identified as an entrance to Hades, and seven kilometers south from where we sit, outside the little village of Nidri, the German archeologist Dörpfeld places Odysseus's palace, where Penelope did not get it on with Blazes Boylan even while Ulysses stood up against the harsh concentrations of Poseidon, whose son's only eye the sailor had poked out with the point of a hand-carved glowing spear.
        And with apologies to Rae Dalven's translation, I paraphrase Dionysios Solomos (1798-1857), also of these islands – born on Zakynthos, died on Corfu – as Alice rises from her work:

Around something motionless, whitening on the balcony,
Only the full moon moves
And a graceful woman rises, clothed in its light.

Ionian moon snared in the net of Poseidon, oil and
mixed media by Alice Guldbrandsen

        The moon she has sketched is caught in Poseidon's net as it rises orange over the cliffs.
        It is difficult to look at the sweeping white cliffs here without thinking of Sappho's legendary leap from Cape Lefkados after the young man she desired, Phaon, spurned her. Byron mentions it in Childe Harold (1812):

Childe Harold sail'd,
And pass'd the barren spot…
And onward viewed the mount, not yet forgot,
The lover's refuse, and the Lesbians' grave.
Dark Sappho! Cound not verse immortal save
That breast imbued with such immortal fire?
Could she not live who life eternal gave?
If life eternal may await the lyre,
That only heaven to which Earth's children may aspire.

A 1913 engraving of Sappho's legendary leap from the white cliffs at Cape Lefkados or Kavos tis Kyras (The Lady's Cape), desolate for the love of Phaon. Or was she?

        But legend and Byron and Erica Jong notwithstanding, my little Lefkada guide book tells me that the cliff in question at Cape Lefkados or Kavos tis Kyras (The Lady's Cape) – where now stands a lighthouse – was an ancient place of human sacrifice to appease the gods and the Spirit of the Storm. By the classical period around 400 BC, convicted criminals replaced innocents as sacrificial objects. Those who survived the 60 meter fall were set free; in some half-mad humanistic development, boats even waited to provide first aid. Before that, the goddess Aphrodite is supposed to have leapt from that cliff to be released from her love of the dead Adonis.
        Such are Ionian nights, draped in blue.
        Ionian days are different. The day is yellow hot, 115 degrees F, and all the elements of a scene described by Solomos of Corfu surround our pool:

…the butterfly, which makes its fragrant bed within the heart of the wild lily, sports with its small strange shadow…
        We two humans, however, hang listlessly from life rings in the otherwise abandoned pool; only our faces break the chlorinated surface. Even the two large Finnish boys, who had been bellowing with laughter as they walloped one another painfully with a melon-sized smiley-face ball, have retreated to the lethargic airconditioning within.
        As I peer up from the cooling water, my eye catches one of the inevitable idyl-goosing ironies of such places:

Contemporary Ionian ironics: The hotel Poseidonio in neon, complete with styylized neon trident, the whole absurdity flanked by a pair of rusty TV antennae Bridging the two low, white, blocky, Mediterranean-junk buildings of the hotel is an oblong neon sign proclaiming its name, Poseidonio, beneath a stylized blue neon trident, the whole absurdity flanked by a pair of rusty TV antennae.

         It is somehow sweet to be delivered from esthetics in this heat. Rather like the giggly flutter I felt when our ferry sailed into the little bay outside Frikes on Ithaca, and we were greeted by twin signs of competing tavernas in the port, one named Penelope's, the other named Ulysses': Needless to say the lettering was Roman, not Greek, strictly for the tourists and their Euros.

        In the cool of morning and an airconditioned taxi, we drive from Perigiali north through coastal mountains toward the island's capital city, Lefkada, population 7,500. The beaches we pass are narrow and stony at the feet of steep, sharply sloping hills, the sea glitters blue and green in the sunlight (wine-dark only at night, snot-green only in Dublin Bay). The narrow twisting roadway is studded with small monuments, tiny white wooden houses on meter-high poles commemorating, with candles and icons and oil, places where people died in traffic.
        “Young people,” the cab driver explains with a bitter laugh. “They should put empty bottle of liquors in them as memory. This is how they die. They drive fast after drink. Here we do not honor the DUI with lows.” This driver is back from 24 years service in Martha's Vinyard where he worked as chauffer and yachtsman to a famous personage he will not name. Now he has had enough of boats. “I go to beach. I sweem. But no boat. With boat you only work. You clean. You scrape. You paint. I stay with the business taxi.” The car is squeaky new with a functional a/c.
        “Lovely in here,” I say. “It's really hot today.”
        “What can I say you. This is summer. Tomorrow comes the strong heat.”
        Stronger than 115 F? Alice and I agree to sail tomorrow. At least on the water there is a breeze. Cool morning is already yellow 10 a.m. by the time we reach Sikelianiou Square on the top of the island, just beside the floating bridge that spans the 25 meters of Lefkada Channel. There has been some discussion over the centuries whether Lefkas is an island at all. Seventh Century BC Corinthian colonists may have dug the channel – or perhaps simply widened or de-silted it – to strengthen their defenses. The Roman historian Livy wrote about the bridge the Corinthians had built. Whether or not Lefkas was an island is a matter of interest to Homerian and other academic scholars – for if it were not, then it could not have been one of the possible island sites of the original Ithaca. Homer names three islands, most likely corresponding to the present Lefkas, Ithaki and Kefallonia, but which was which in Homer is a matter of debate. The population of ancient Lefkas was some 20,000 – nearly equal to the current population.

The white cliffs of Lefkas

        Aside from its somewhat ravaged nature, little remains of ancient Lefkas – or Leucas as it was known when it aligned itself with Sparta against Athens in the Peloponnesian War. Through the centuries that followed, it was by turns under Greece, independent, under Rome, under Byzantium, was sacked by the Vandals and the Huns. It was damaged severely by two earthquakes in the mid-6th Century and on several occasions later, was bought and sold many times, was under the Venetians, the Turks, French, Russians, and the Brits. Despite opposition by the British rulers, Lefkas participated with military and financial support in the struggle for freedom from the Turks in 1821, and in 1864 Lefkas was incorporated into Greece. In 1900, the vineyards were destroyed by a fungus, and a mass emigration to the US followed. Since 1960, the island has begun to recover from a long period of hardship, and since the late 1970s, tourism has brought new life.
        In Sikelianou Square, we study the busts of local sons: On the southern edge of the square, is Lafcadio Hearn

The bust of Lefcadio Hearn (1850-1904), a man of many nations, in Sikelaniou Square, Lefkadas. Born in Lefkados of an Irish father serving as a British army doctor and a mother from Kytheria who may have been Maltese, he was sent to Dublin at the age of six to be educated, emigrated to the US in 1969 where he wrote journalism and novels, in 1890 moved to Japan where he lived for the remainder of his life as Yakumo Kuizumi, a highly distinguished Japonophile (1850-1904), a man of many nations. Born in Lefkadas, of an Irish father who was a doctor in the British army and a mother from Kytheria, who may have been Maltese, he was sent to Dublin at the age of six to be educated, in 1869 emigrated to the US where he wrote journalism and novels, still later in 1890 became fascinated by Japan where he emigrated, married a Japanese woman, was nationalized, assumed the name Yakumo Kuizumi and became a two-way cultural interpreter: of western culture to the Japanese and of Japanese culture to the west. One of the world's most noted Japonophiles, Hearn's work was used among many others by Gordon Weaver, in his research for his great comic-tragic Japanese-American novel, The Eight Corners of the World. I had never even heard of Hearn until Walter Cummins suggested I look him up on Lefkas.

        Facing east from the square, morning sunlight square in his face, is the nobel bust of the poet Aristotelis Valoaritis (1824-79). Valoaritis was a national politician and his poems are patriotic, songs of the rugged mountain people who fought for independence from the Turks. His birthplace, on a little alley off Dörpfeld Street, is now a fruit shop, marked by a stone plaque, and he is buried behind the altar of the Church of the Almighty on Pantokrator Street, a private church whose doors are locked to us. His house, too, on the islet of Madouri in Nidri bay is privately owned and closed to the public.

The bust of Aristotelis Valaoritis (1824-79) in Sikelianiou Square in Lefkadas – a Greek politician and poet of patriotic songs

Bust of Angelios Sikelianos (1884-1951), a distinguished modern Greek poet, born and died on the islands of the Ionian         Also facing east on the square, to the northern side, is the bust of Angelos Sikelianios (1884-1951). Married for some time to an American, Eva Palmer of Bar Harbor, New York, Sikelianios and his wife successfully organized Deplhic festivals in 1927 and 1930 in which ancient Greek plays and dances were performed in the ancient theater of Delphi. His poetry is described as mystical, aiming to combine ancient Greek and Christian images and symbols into a mystical and natural unity, and he was nominated for the Nobel Prize for these efforts. His poem, “The Return” (tr Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard) captures the Ionian climate as Odysseus might have experienced it at the end of his journey, and as anyone visiting this area might:

Radiance, like a sun, fills me.
The sea's sound floods my veins,
Above me the sun grinds like a millstone,
The wind beats its full wings;
The world's axle throbs heavily.
I cannot hear my deepest breath,
And the sea grows calm to the sand's edge
And spreads deep inside me…
From far off comes a sound and suddenly beats…
It is the wind approaching…
It is the sun seting before my eyes…
I gaze around me; the Ionia sea,
And my delivered land!

        Not yet eleven as we enter the narrow, traffic-free Dörpfeld Street which threads through the little capital. Sweat runs down my neck and chest and back, plastering my shirt to me. Dry-mouthed, we exercise the good Danish custom of formiddagsbajer: a late morning beer. A pint of good local Mythos for me, a glass of chilled retsina – yellow resin wine that tastes bracingly of tree sap – for Alice. The taverna owner waves us in as we enter and serves a plate of complimentary tidbits with our drinks, which cost a pittance – shavings of spicey red onion, fried potatoes, juicy segments of sweet tomato, nuggets of roasted pork skin.
        On the sidewalk sits an African woman, begging, a child of four or five lying moveless across her lap. In the heat I am unable to comprehend the meaning of this, it seems so out of place. A Greek man drops a coin in her plate. It almost seems like blackmail to me, a woman using a child to evoke pity and coins, whether in Dublin, Lisbon, Rome, or Paris, but especially somehow here in this tiny place, where food is so cheap and plentiful – tomatoes, melons, peaches, apricots, cucumbers, onions, goat cheese, lamb – it seems out of place. But my mouth and brain cool with beer, I drop a few small coins into her plate, to be on the safe side. Safe side of what? I wonder. Eternal damnation? Bad Kharma? The possibility that I will roast for eons in purgatorial fires and be offered one drop of spiritual water for every centime I proferred to the poor?
        Most of the churches are private here, locked, but a couple are open, beautiful gilded altars and a wealth of framed icons, tiny, no more spacious than our own 40 square meter living room at home – Our Lady of the Strangers and the Church of the Presentation of the Virgin. Also open is the Public Library with its impressive collection of icons and antique maps; it also possesses – though unfortunately for me only in Greek – the work of the local 5th century poetess, Philaene, said to be of particularly unrestrained language: O Philaene, inspire the agéd wand!
        Onward, along the cemetery road, to the café of Pallas, opposite an olive grove where older men engage in t'ambali, a game played with egg-shaped balls on a concave pitch, unique to Lefkas.
        Perhaps it is the heat, but Alice's response is uncharacteristically unenthusiastic. We watch the old men pitch their oval balls while off to the side a black-garbed woman sits alone in the shade in a straight-back chair, peeling potatoes.
        “What do men know about eggs?” Alice asks in Danish, a softly rhetorical question. And then to me, “Want to know what I think?”
        “Yes, please.”
        “I think Sappho never came here to leap from a cliff. She came to compete in the Panhellenic t'ambali championship. And she won! Got them by the egg-shaped balls! What do you say about that?”
        “I am the eggman -- Kukukachoo!”

Sappho commandeers the t'ambali players' balls. (Oil by Alice Guldbrandsen)

        I cannot help but wonder if one of Alcaeus' ancient songs explains her mood:

Now is all earth at song
In the summer's fire,
And the girasole is strong.
Now does wild desire
Make the girls most amorous.
But the men won't please;
For the fire of Sirius
Withers heads and knees.”

(C M Bowra translation)
        After the evening swim and shower, I resolve to investigate the matter, but find her on the balcony hunched over a square of cotton parchment, sketching by lamplight, candlelight, star and moonlight.
        “What are you drawing?” I ask.
        She reaches for her retsina glass. “Sappho. T'ambali.” And is gone again.
        I wrap myself in a mist of Grecian aerosol to keep the mosquitoes at bay and bury my nose in Robert Stewart's essay collection, Beyond Language (Helicon Nine, 2003): “Despair is the imposition of a single truth.”

        Lefkadans are said to have mixed feelings about Aristotle Onassis. A full-bodied statue commemorates him at the harbor of Nidri where we board a triple-decked tour boat for further island adventures. When he purchased the nearby island of Skorpios for his personal amusement, he brought jobs and money to Nidri, but to protect its privacy, the Onassis family exercised its power to stop the development of tourism for many years, up until Aristotle's death.
        We sail for a pittance to Meganissi, past the Papanikolis Cave, where during the German occupation under World War II, the Greek resistance kept a submarine concealed. The other day here at Vahti Bay we had a sumptuous lunch of shellfish, sardines, and splendid dry white wine for a few euros served by a sweet-faced, black-clad, hunchbacked woman.

Papanikolis cave on Meganissi where the Greek resistance concealed a submarine under the German occupation during World War II
        Skorpios is three miles from Nidri, a forbidden island. If you land anywhere on its coast you will soon be

The little cliff-locked beach at Scorpios, the only place on Onassis's private island that is open to the public. Here where Jackie O once swam, the water is cool and lovely with strong ouzo on the tongue and Alice rolling in the surf greeted by a troop of private soldiers and whisked off to jail – anywhere, that is, but for one beach the Family Onassis has opened to the public, a small cliff-bound horseshoe of a beach. Our captain noses right into the sand, his screw protected by the quick depths behind us. We will have an hour to swim in the clear waters here. The captain is also the bartender. I request two ouzos, and he barks with laughter, pours two deep draughts from an unlabelled gallon jug, says, “Yamas! Cheers!” and refuses my money.         Perhaps it is the ouzo, perhaps it is the sun, perhaps it is the cool salt water clear as a transparent opal, perhaps it is the story of Skorpios, visions of naked Jackie O caught like a mermaid by speedboat paparazzi, whatever, I find myself saying things to Alice like “Make love to my Nikon, baby,” as I photograph her rolling in the surf – two foolish 60-year-olds out in the noonday sun.

        The heat mists the sun momentarily as we sail on toward Ithaca.
        At the bay of Friskes in Ithaca, we drop some passengers, then circle around the top of the island and over to Kefallonia where a man named Stavros Papadatos from Argostoli waits in his air-conditioned Mercedes to drive us around the perimeter of the island and back to Fiskardo in time for a late lunch before we sail back to Lefkas.
        Kefallonia is the largest of the Ionians and a few hours drive is hardly enough to view more than its outline, but Stavros is game for the task. What I really like about him is that he never even heard of Captain Corelli's Mandolin. Today the focus is on Byron.
        Once, nearly 30 years before, when I first relocated to Europe and found myself trapped in what Voltaire called “the miserable little Hamlet” of Ferney, I hovered on the rim of depression's pit, and an older colleague, a Brit named Peter, perceived my plight. “O my dear boy!” he exclaimed. “You must not crawl down into it. It takes so long to get up out again. No, you must take brisk walks and set yourself small objectives. Walk a mile with the simple aim of enjoying a bottle of Perrier at the end of it!”
        This advice has always served me well as a traveller. When confronted with overwhelming possibilities, select one, focus. The focus and objective today is Byron's Rock in Lakithra. It is clear to me from the expression on Stavros's fleshy visage that he does not know where the Rock is or even perhaps who Byron was. He suggests visiting the 150 million year old caves near Sami on the east coast of the island, breath-taking chambers of stalagtites and stalagmites where the acoustics are so splendid that concerts with up to 500 spectators are held within its chambers. But we do not want our breath taken just now, especially not underground.
        We were here two years ago and saw many things, but not the Byron Rock, and that is my objective amongst all this beauty today. It is on the southwest of the island's main body, near Lakithra and Metaxata. Our Mercedes sails south on the main road through Vasilikades, Assos Bay. The road veers right, and Stavros stops on a high cliff over Mirtos Bay, incredible aquamarine water sweeping a horseshoe beach a thousand meters below and looking much as Charybdis's sucking maelström might have looked to Ulysses and his sailors.
        We are only a third way there, and Stavros entertains us with stories of Cephalus, the mythical hero for whom the island is said to be named – the son of Hermes and Herse, an intrepid hunter and great lover about whom Ovid wrote. One myth tells how at an advanced age Cephalus, a great friend of the grape, was warned by a servant to conserve his strength until the harvest lest he not live to taste the new wine. Cephalus heeded the admonition and called the servant to him as, in triumph, he was about to taste the first of the harvest wine. The servant said, “Many things can happen before you put the cup to your lips,” just as another servant arrived to beg King Cephalus's help against a wild boar that had run amok in the town. The king put down his cup untasted and hurried to kill the boar, but was instead himself wounded and killed in the hunt. Bringing again Alcaeus to mind:

“Now is the moment, now,
to take what happiness the gods allow.”

(C M Bowra translation)
        Another hour, after a brief stop in Stavros's home in Argostoli for coffee and a delicious sweet sherry-like wine, to meet his wife Maria and son Dennis and Danish daughter-in-law, Melline from the north of Copenhagen, and the little grandson, Stavros, whom our driver gazes upon with gleaming dark eyes.

        Everywhere in Greece Byron is venerated. Two years ago in the lobby of our Cephallonia hotel in Lassi was a bust of the poet that might have been cast from the mold of the bust by the Danish sculptor Thorvaldsen, copies of which are found in abundance from Edinburgh to Athens. Lassi is on our way from Argostoli, and we ask Stavros to stop there for late morning refreshment – one of the Hotel Mediterranée bartender's marvellous Americanos: campari, sweet red vermouth, a goodly dash of vodka, a spritz of club, a mariscino cherry. We sit outside in the morning sun, cooled by a south Ionian breeze, debating whether we will have time for Ithaki on this trip as well. Now is the moment, now…

Here is a bust in the lobby of the Cephallonian hotel where we stayed two years ago – Hotel Mediterranée in Lassi

        I leaf through a book Alice has just bought as a surprise for me in the hotel bookshop, Odysseus' Ithaca: The Riddle Solved by Nikolos G. Livades (tr Constantine Bistros) which offers evidence that Odysseus' long journey home was around the coast of Cephallonia. In another guide book I find a photograph of an enchanting man-sized rock formation, 190 meters above the road from the Dexa inlet. It is the cave where Odysseus is said to have hidden the gifts from the King of the Phaeacians, the cave of the nymphs.

Some argue Cephallonia was the island Homer called Ithaca, home of Ulysses or Odysseus. Others argue that his long and trying journey home was primarily around the rocky coast here. This view from a Cephallonian cliff might well suggest Charybdis' sucking, swirling maelstrom

        Perhaps it is my current americano blood percent, but just one look at the cave has me pondering whether Alice and I have time to take a room for a late morning “nap,” for the Cave of the Nymphs is so clearly a natural model of the mystic cave from which all men come, to which all men spend their lives many times each day wishing to re-enter, the form that John Hawkes dubbed “the crooked smile” and “the little hammered face,” but here monumental, the model for the words that Kerrigan thinks he hears from the mouth of his lover in my novel, Kerrigan's Copenhagen, A Love Story. I look to Alice, recalling those words whose authorship we have since debated (did she say them, or did I think them?), the words I was gently requested not to read aloud in Ireland, Chicago and South Carolina when launching Kerrigan. Now, with Stavros out of earshot, I mouth them to my Danish woman in our autumn years in this Grecian heat: “God is a cunt.”
        Her answer is a sweetly crooked smile.

        On the road again to Metaxata, I must now become Stavros's guide – the blind enthusiast leading the knowledgeable unknowing. We stop at the house in which the great poet stayed for four months in 1824 before he joined the Greek garrison at Missalonghi where he died of swamp fever in April of that year. Outside the house is mounted yet another bust of him on a pedastal: Greece Remembers.
        My sentimental eyes fill. We pass Byron's Piazza on the way to Byron's Rock, through winding allies, a little stone church, St. Lucia's – the saint who surrendered her eyes to preserve her innocence, the Christian goddess of light who is celebrated every year in Scandinavian mid-December darkness with processions of virgins wearing crowns of lighted candles in their hair, singing in angelic voices:

In darkness light comes forth,
Upon our blazing crowns…
        But where is Byron's Rock? Stavros's Mercedes is too stout for these skinny streets. He gestures towards an alley. This quest is not of great interest to him. He leans on the fender of his Mercedes and lights a fag, encouraging me forward with a nod. In the tight dark alley a dog barks; I picture its fangs sinking into the meat of my bare calf. But at the far end I see a glimpse of cliff, a sweeping view of valley and the sea. And there it is: an insignificant-looking sandstone rock in which is embedded a small marble plaque in the poet's honor above a splendid view of Kallithea.

Just outside Metaxata, Byron's rock

        Here he is said to have sat on the rock and composed some of the verses of Don Juan shortly before his death pursuing the cause of Greek independence:

I want a hero, an uncommon want
When every year and month brings forth a new one
Till after cloying the gazettes with cant,
The age discovers he is not the true one.
        God bless your clubfoot lines, George Gordon. You are the hero.

        We round the island at high speed racing back to the tip at Fiskardo for lunch. I have a fantasy as we race along the winding dipping climbing narrow road. The fantasy is of a mad driver who asks,
        You want gamble? You want take chance?
        No.
        Heedless, he speeds around the blind curve of the mountain road without a warning honk. No car is approaching.
        Grinning teeth flash back over his hunched shoulder. Once more?
        No.
        He does it again. No honk. We swing around the cliff wall with a screech. No cars approaching.
        Those grinning teeth. Now you feel thees life in you, no? Because of you did not to die.

I thought about myself and the whole earth,
Of man the wonderful, and of the stars,
And how the hell they ever could have birth.
And then I thought of earthquakes and of wars,
How many miles the trampled moon might have in girth,
Of rocket ships, and of the many bars
To perfect knowledge of the boundless skies –
And then I thought of those sweet Alice eyes.
        Stavros leaves us in Fiskardo with a suggestion. “Eat you lunch at Captain's Taverna on harbor.”

An artistic tribute to the marvellous, fresh grilled sardines upon which we dined at the Captain's Cabin taverna in Fiskardo on Cephallonia. (Oil and mixed media by Alice Guldbrandsen)

        We do that. Large and succulent fresh-grilled sardines, a creamy mash of garlic and potato with herbs, lamb meatballs, and tatsiki with the Captain's own dry white wine from the mountains beneath us. The feet of our chairs are but inches from the stone edge above the clear water where fish swim and a British family washes the deck of a rented yacht. We are happy with the wine and with spicey pieces of a little red red onion that looks like nothing, but shares with our tongues its store of the sun and earth here, the water, the…
        “The little red onion itself,” says Alice. “Give the thing some credit of its own.”

        A small green insect spiders across the table, and the tip of my index finger comes down upon it. The finger vibrates to ensure annihilation, then cleanses itself on a paper napkin. I ask myself why and have no answer but vague regret, the fear of another eon of waterless purgatorial fire. Perhaps I should learn to honor life with love instead of fear, I think.
        I do not deserve to be so happy and order a five-star metaxa which costs nothing.
        With three hours before the last ferry back to Lefkas, we wade through boiling heat along the road towards the beach, a tiny inlet of pebbly sand, two or three olive trees, a scatter of sunbathers and swimmers. I want to nap in the olive shade, flap out my towel without much attention and lay down.

The well-fed author at Fiskardo shortly before being jabbed in the back by a filthy, used, discarded hyopdermic needle

The hypodermic needle which stuck the author in the back and the hand, giving him quite a turn, many miles of bad road from the nearest doctor and many hours from the next ferry         There are many rocks beneath me, and I begin to pluck them away without looking to make a smoother bed, lay back again and am stung! In the upper buttock. My hand leaps back to the source of the sting, and I'm stuck in the finger, too! In my palm I find a bent and broken filthy hypodermic needle, left there for me by some thoughtless addict.

        The nearest doctor is many miles away, I am told at the Taverna up the road. Thank god for cellphones. I call the Danish emergency service, five air hours north-east from where we are. “See a doctor at once, “ I am advised. I phone our travel rep on Lefkas, who gives me the number of a doctor on Lefkas, five sea hours away. I phone Jesper, a Danish physician friend who once removed stitches from my back on Malta, employing a gin-sterilized fingernail clipper for the task. He asks me to describe the needle that stuck me, tells me it is highly unlikely that anything dangerous could survive on something as old as that. The only danger is tetanus and hepatitis, not AIDS. “Clean the puncture immediately and see a doctor as soon as you can.”
        Clean it with what? Into the salt sea, I wade and drop my trunks while Alice, who has mothered and fathered three sons and a husband before me, pinches and salt-massages my wounds, and I gaze into her blue-blue eyes and recite my already recorded “Instructions Upon My Departure”:

When I die, please cry
Big tears from your blue-blue eyes.
Moan, No! And Why?
And, You are too young to die! Then sigh.
Take from the buffet a tasty cake,
Strong beer. Regret that I am not still here.
Return to the open box and peer
At my pale closed face, and smile,
Remembering some foolishness of mine.
Think, He was okay. He was okay.
And in due time, please go your happy way,
As I know you must do anyway.
        “Please stop that,” Alice suggests, her crooked smile deep in the opal sea, and I feel my existence emphasized by her unwillingness to acknowledge its frailty.

        We sail from Fiskardo on a small tour boat beneath a misted evening sun, hit heavy water halfway across. Life is suspended in the roaring seas which have not changed since the time of Alcaeus:

Sailing off from Fiskardo across the Ionian sea toward Ithaca, beneath a misted evening sun

The quarelling winds perplex me. On this side
One wave rolls up, on that a different tide,
And the black ship whereon we sail,
Shifts with the shifting of the gale.

(C M Bowra translation)
        The guide assigned to the boat, a robust sassy black-haired Greek beauty, has gone below to vomit, and fortified by Mythos beer, I stand upon the deck, a Monte Cristo robusto clamped between my teeth, declaiming loudly in the gale:

Let no soft fear lay hold of anyone!
Before us lies a great task to be done!
        A little British man, even smaller than myself, stands before me glowering and pinched: “Common courtesy!” he cries out. “Would you put out that cigar!”
        Incredulous I take the marvelous Monte Cristo from my mouth, billowing smoke up into the wind.
        “I'll not be intimidated!” the Brit shouts truculently, stepping closer for effect.
        With a shrug I toss the the stub into the drink, unable to imagine anyone on this planet being intimidated by a dying little shit like myself.

        Two hours later in our cramped Poseidonio hotel room on Lefkas, Dr Aristotelis Selentis, examines my wounds, looks at the filthy hypodermic that has stuck me and that we have packed carefully in newspaper and plastic wrap. He guffaws with evident relief. “This is so old it holds no dawnger, my friend. Let me give you a shot of the needle tetanus.”
        He has given back my life and health and hope, but will accept nothing at the door: not money, not a drink. Only a handshake and the liberty of running an appreciative gaze up and down Alice's body. With the at once formal and warm and firmly manly manner I have always envied in Mediterranean men, he bids us farewell and goes down to his tiny car for the hour-long drive back to the capital.
        Alice and I go out to climb down the steep path to the Perigali Beach Restaurant to eat plates of succulent fresh lambchops beneath the ancient olive trees. Sweet is the evening air above the flailing waters of the Ionian. It occurs to me that at best I probably have ten to twenty years left.
        I am glad to be here. With Alice.

                                                 [copyright 2003, Thomas E. Kennedy]