Haggopian and Other Stories (5 page)

At three I was ready, dressed in sandals, cool grey slacks and a white T-shirt—the recommended civilised attire for a sunny afternoon in the Aegean—and when the sleek motorboat came back for me I was waiting for it at the natural rock wharf. On the way out to Haggopiana, as I gazed over the prow of the craft down through the crystal-clear water at the gliding, shadowy groupers and the clusters of black sea-urchins (the Armenian had named his hydrofoil after the latter), I did a mental check-up on what I knew of the elusive owner of the island ahead:

Richard Hemeral Angelos Haggopian, born in 1919 of an illicit union between his penniless but beautiful half-breed Polynesian mother and millionaire Armenian-Cypriot father—author of three of the most fascinating books I had ever read, books for the layman, telling of the world’s seas and all their multiform denizens in simple, uncomplicated language—discoverer of the Taumotu Trench, a previously unsuspected hole in the bed of the South Pacific almost seven thousand fathoms deep; into which, with the celebrated Hans Geisler, he descended in 1955 to a depth of twenty-four thousand feet—benefactor of the world’s greatest aquariums and museums in that he had presented at least two hundred and forty rare, often freshly discovered specimens to such authorities in the last fifteen years, etc., etc….

Haggopian the much married—three times, in fact, and all since the age of thirty—apparently an unfortunate man where brides were concerned. His first wife (British) died at sea after nine years’ wedded life, mysteriously disappearing overboard from her husband’s yacht in calm seas on the shark-ridden Barrier Reef in 1958; number two (Greek-Cypriot) died in 1964 of some exotic wasting disease and was buried at sea; and number three—one Cleanthis Leonides, an Athenian model of note, wed on her eighteenth birthday—had apparently turned recluse in that she had not been seen publicly since her union with Haggopian two years previously.

Cleanthis Haggopian—yes! Expecting to meet her, should I ever be lucky enough to get to see her husband, I had checked through dozens of old fashion magazines for photographs of her. That had been a few days ago in Athens, and now I recalled her face as I had seen it in those pictures—young, naturally, and beautiful in the Classic Greek tradition. She had been a “honey”; would, of course, still be; and again, despite rumours that she was no longer living with her husband, I found myself anticipating our meeting.

In no time at all the flat white rocky ramparts of the island loomed to some thirty feet out of the sea, and my navigator swung his fast craft over to the left, passing between two jagged points of salt-incrusted rock standing twenty yards or so out from Haggopiana’s most northern point. As we rounded the point I saw that the east face of the island looked far less inhospitable; there was a white sand beach, with a pier at which the
Echinoidea
was moored, and, set back from the beach in a cluster of pomegranate, almond, locust and olive trees, an immensely vast and sprawling flat-roofed bungalow.

So this was Haggopiana! Hardly, I thought, the “island paradise” of Weber’s article in
Neu Welt
! It looked as though Weber’s story, seven years old now, had been written no closer to Haggopiana than Kletnos; I had always been dubious about the German’s exotic superlatives.

At the dry end of the pier my quarry waited. I saw him as, with the slightest of bumps, the motorboat pulled in to mooring. He wore grey flannels and a white shirt with the sleeves rolled down. His thin nose supported heavy, opaquely-lensed sunglasses. This was Haggopian—tall, bald, extremely intelligent and very, very rich—his hand already outstretched in greeting.

• • •

Haggopian was a shock. I had seen photographs of him of course, quite a few, and had often wondered at the odd sheen such pictures had seemed to give his features. In fact the only decent pictures I had seen of him had been pre-1958 and I had taken later shots as being simply the result of poor photography; his rare appearances in public had always been very short ones and unannounced, so that by the time cameras were clicking he was usually making an exit. Now, however, I could see that I had short-changed the photographers. He did have a sheen to his skin—a peculiar phosphorescence almost—that highlighted his features and even partially reflected something of the glare of the sun. There must, too, be something wrong with the man’s eyes. Tears glistened on his cheeks, rolling thinly down from behind the dark lenses. He carried in his left hand a square of silk with which, every now and then, he would dab at this telltale dampness; all this I saw as I approached him along the pier, and right from the start I found him strangely—yes, repulsive.

“How do you do, Mr. Belton?” his voice was a thick, heavily accented rasp that jarred with his polite inquiry and manner of expression. “I am sorry you have had to wait so long. I got your message in Famagusta, right at the start of my trip, but I am afraid I could not put my work off.”

“Not at all, sir, I’m sure that this meeting will more than amply repay my patience.”

His handshake was no less a shock, though I tried my best to keep him from seeing it, and after he turned to lead me up to the house I unobtrusively wiped my hand on the side of my T-shirt. It was not that Haggopian’s hand had been damp with sweat, which might be expected—rather, or so it seemed to me, I felt as though I had taken hold of a handful of garden snails!

I had noticed from the boat a complex of pipes and valves between the sea and the house, and now, approaching that sprawling yellow building in Haggopian’s wake (his stride was clumsy, lolling), I could hear the muffled throb of pumps and the gush of water. Once inside the huge, refreshingly cool bungalow, it became apparent just what the sounds meant. I might have known that this man, so in love with the sea, would surround himself with his life’s work. The place was nothing less than a gigantic aquarium!

Massive glass tanks, in some cases room length and ceiling high, made up the walls, so that the sunlight filtering through from exterior, porthole-like windows entered the room in greenish shades that dappled the marble floor and gave the place an eerie, submarine aspect.

There were no printed cards or boards to describe the finny dwellers in the huge tanks, and as he led me from room to room it became clear why such labels were unnecessary. Haggopian knew each specimen intimately, his rasplike voice making a running commentary as we visited in turn the bungalow’s many wings:

“An unusual coelenterate, this one, from three thousand feet. Difficult to keep alive—pressure and all that. I call it
Physalia haggopia
—quite deadly. If one of those tentacles should even brush you…
phttt
! Makes a water-baby of the Portuguese Man-o’-War” (this of a great purplish mass with trailing, wispy-green tentacles, undulating horribly through the water of a tank of huge proportions). Haggopian, as he spoke, deftly plucked a small fish from an open tank on a nearby table, throwing it up over the lip of the greater tank to his “unusual coelenterate”. The fish hit the water with a splash, swam down and straight into one of the green wisps—and instantly stiffened! In a matter of seconds the hideous jelly-fish had settled on its prey to commence a languid ingestion.

“Given time,” Haggopian gratingly commented, “it would do the same to you!”

• • •

In the largest room of all—more a hall than a room proper—I paused, literally astonished at the size of the tanks and the expertise which had obviously gone into their construction. Here, where sharks swam through brain and other coral formations, the glass of these miniature oceans must have been tremendously thick, and backdrops had been arranged to give the impression of vast distances and sprawling submarine vistas.

In one of these tanks hammerheads of over two metres in length were cruising slowly from side to side, ugly as hell and looking twice as dangerous. Metal steps led up to this tank’s rim, down the other side and into the water itself. Haggopian must have seen the puzzled expression on my face for he said: “This is where I used to feed my lampreys—they had to be handled carefully. I have none now; I returned the last of my specimens to the sea three years ago.”

Three years ago? I peered closer into the tank as one of the hammerheads slid his belly along the glass. There on the white and silver underside of the fish, between the gill-slits and down the belly, numerous patches of raw red showed, many of them forming clearly defined circles where the close-packed scales had been removed and the suckerlike mouths of the lampreys had been at work. No, Haggopian’s “three years” had no doubt been a slip of the tongue—three days, more like it! Many of the wounds were clearly of recent origin, and before the Armenian ushered me on I was able to see that at least another two of the hammerheads were similarly marked.

I stopped pondering mine host’s mistake when we passed into yet another room whose specimens must surely have caused any conchologist to cry out in delight. Again tanks lined the walls, smaller than many of the others I had so far seen, but marvellously laid out to duplicate perfectly the natural environs of their inhabitants. These inhabitants were the living gems of almost every ocean on earth; great conches and clams from the South Pacific; the small, beautiful
Haliotis excavata
and
Murex monodon
from the Great Barrier Reef; the amphora-like
Delphinula formosa
from China, and weird uni- and bivalves of every shape and size in their hundreds. Even the windows were of shell—great, translucent, pinkly glowing fan-shells, porcelain thin yet immensely strong, from very deep waters—suffusing the room in blood tints as weird as the submarine dappling of the previous rooms. The aisles, too, were crammed with trays and showcases full of dry shells, none of them indexed in any way; and again Haggopian showed off his expertise by casually naming any specimens I paused to study and by briefly describing their habits and the foreign deeps in which they were indigenous.

My tour was interrupted here when Costas, the Greek who had brought me from Kletnos, entered this fascinating room of shells to murmur something of obvious importance to his employer. Haggopian nodded his head in agreement and Costas left, returning a few moments later with half-a-dozen other Greeks who each, in their turn, had a few words with Haggopian before departing. Eventually we were alone again.

“They were my men,” he told me, “some of them for almost twenty years, but now I have no further need of them. I have paid them their last wages, they have said their farewells, and now they are going away. Costas will take them to Kletnos and return later for you. By then I should have finished my story.”

“I don’t quite follow you, Mr. Haggopian. You mean you’re going into seclusion here? What you said just then sounded ominously final.”

“Seclusion? Here? No, Mr. Belton—but final, yes! I have learned as much of the sea as I can from here, and in any case only one phase in my education remains. For that phase I need no…
tuition
! You will see.”

He saw the puzzled look on my face and smiled a wry smile. “You find difficulty in understanding me, and that is hardly surprising. Few men, if any, have known my circumstances before, of that I am reasonably certain; and that is why I have chosen to speak now. You are fortunate in that you caught me at the right time; I would never have taken it upon myself to tell my story had I not been so persistently pursued—there are horrors best unknown—but perhaps the telling will serve as a warning. It gives me pause, the number of students devoted to the lore of the sea that would emulate my works and discoveries. But in any case, what you no doubt believed would be a simple interview will in fact be my swan song. Tomorrow, when the island is deserted, Costas will return and set all the living specimens loose. There are means here by which even the largest fishes might be returned to the sea. Then Haggopiana will be truly empty.”

“But why? To what end—and where do you intend to go?” I asked. “Surely this island is your base, your home and stronghold? It was here that you wrote your wonderful books, and—”

“My base and stronghold, as you put it, yes!” he harshly cut me off. “The island has been these things to me, Mr. Belton, but my home? No more! That—is my home!” He shot a slightly trembling hand abruptly out in the general direction of the Cretean Sea and the Mediterranean beyond. “When your interview is over, I shall walk to the top of the rocks and look once more at Kletnos, the closest landmass of any reasonable size. Then I will take my
Echinoidea
and guide her out through the Kasos Straits on a direct and deliberate course until her fuel runs out. There can be no turning back. There is a place unsuspected in the Mediterranean—where the sea is so deep and cool, and where—”

He broke off and turned his strangely shining face to me: “But there—at this rate the tale will never be told. Suffice to say, that the last trip of the
Echanoidea
will be to the bottom—and that I shall be with her!”

“Suicide?” I gasped, barely able to keep up with Haggopian’s rapid revelations. “You intend to—drown yourself?”

At that Haggopian laughed, a rasping cough of a laugh that somehow reminded me of a seal’s bark. “Drown myself? Can you drown these?” he opened his arms to encompass a miniature ocean of strange conches; “or these?” he waved through a door at a crystal tank of exotic fish.

For a few moments I stared at him in dumb amazement and concern, uncertain as to whether I stood in the presence of a sane man or—?

He gazed at me intently through the dark lenses of his glasses, and under the scrutiny of those unseen eyes I slowly shook my head, backing off a step.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Haggopian—I just…”

“Unpardonable,” he rasped as I struggled for words, “my behaviour is unpardonable! Come, Mr. Belton, perhaps we can be comfortable out here.” He led me through a doorway and out onto a patio surrounded by lemon and pomegranate trees. A white garden table and two cane chairs stood in the shade. Haggopian clapped his hands together once, sharply, then offered me a chair before clumsily seating himself opposite. Once again I noticed how all the man’s movements seemed oddly awkward.