The Fig Tree (14 page)

Occasionally someone joins us for a drink. A chat. Before meandering on to the next table. This is how it is every night. As Uncle Dimitri would say: ‘A man dies poor if he has not made time to sit and talk with friends.'

We feel his presence here. This is where Dimitri spent many hours in his final years. They called him
Kouvendas
, the talker. He loved nothing more than to sit and chat. I can see him now, bow-legged, in his worn flannel suit, loosely hanging on a wasting frame, walking-stick in hand, a retired seaman making his way through the streets of Stavros. It would take him hours to move from one end of town to the next. There was always another friend to talk to, yet another detour on a winter's day.

On the return walk we glance at the dark shapes of Kefalonia. We can see the lights of mountain villages across the straits. Over Polis Bay a crescent moon glides between clouds with Venus in tow. Above us the lights of Exogi glitter like a scattering of stars. We approach Ayia Saranta, and acknowledge familiar cypress on the way. The cypress is a tree of the dark, a reflector of the passing phases of the moon. We move past silent donkeys asleep on their feet, and homes that stand like petrified ghosts on the lower slopes.

And it comes upon us, unexpectedly, an intense longing, coupled with a sense of belonging. As the date for our departure nears, it hits with great force. The thought of leaving, at this moment, is unbearable. Is this what Alexander's grandparents and great-grandparents felt on the eve of departure? Is this why Athanassios was forever restless, ill at ease? Is this the curse of Ithaca, to remain in limbo, forever wedded to an island of seafarers and scattered clans? Is this why some emigrants would never cease thinking of their new homes as
mavri xenitia
, the black exile, and long for their return?

The
Ionian Star
arrives one hour late. It pirouettes with grace and precision, and drifts to the shore. The mobile ramp descends upon the quay. It is always the same, this instant of touching down; a halting of time, before the momentum resumes in a frantic rush of cars and trucks, passengers and hurried farewells. And, as if the past few months were an illusion, I am standing on the deck of the ferry with Alexander.

We bend back through the labyrinth, and spiral out onto the Ionian Sea. The boat trails an amber wake, glazed by the rising sun. For an hour I watch the island recede. The first to wane are the sharper colours, the mountain greens falling upon isolated coasts. The peaks sink under the horizon like an ocean liner capsized. I am still looking long after they are gone. The island is enshrouded within itself. It takes a while to accept the finality. This is the point when reality pales, and the myths creep in.

Then I glance at Alexander. His eyes are focused elsewhere. He is running upon the deck. Playing games of his own. Ithaca is an old chapter. Past tense. He has no time for nostalgia.

One month after our return to Melbourne, we are walking by the Carrum foreshore. We follow the shoreline as it curves from the river mouth towards the peninsula to the east. We have returned to the scene of the crime. And it is only now that we can see why Athanassios chose this stretch of coastline for his most enduring home.

As we look towards the peninsula it is as if we are standing upon the balcony of the Ayia Saranta house. The two separate views, so far apart, on opposite sides of the earth, coalesce into one. The peninsula could be the neighbouring island of Lefkada, the distant cliffs, Sappho's leap, and the bay, the Ionian Sea. This is why Athanassios lived here, despite the isolation. This was the closest he could come to the ancestral isle. This is where he was able to hear, with greatest clarity, the alluring call of the sea. It was both his blessing and curse. It was his homecoming.

The Ballad of Mauthausen

How beautiful my love is

in her plain dress

with a fine comb in her hair.

Nobody knew how beautiful she really was.

This is the tale of a song, the man who wrote it and the object found in hell that inspired it. I first heard the song in Melbourne in the mid-1960s, on a record I received as a gift from a close friend. She was born in Greece; I am of Polish-Jewish origin. We were classmates at a high school in Carlton. We were close— drawn to each other, perhaps, by our common status as children of immigrants.

I attended parties in her house; parties that flowed late into the night with dance and drink, and food cooked by her mother, a village woman; parties that revolved around the kitchen table with conversation and argument, a sense of kinship and warmth. But the friendship between the two of us was contained within boundaries. It was clandestine. Anything more would have met with disapproval from her family. And from mine. That is the way it was back then.

As for the song, I was drawn to it from the moment I heard the opening bars, the deep-toned voice of the singer, Maria Farantouri, and the depth of feeling with which she sang. Over the years I have heard it many times, and I have always been impressed by its perfect marriage of melody and lyrics, and the sense of longing that permeates it.

The details I gleaned from the cover notes were scant. The ‘Mauthausen Cantata' was written by the Greek composer Mikis Theodorakis, the lyrics were penned by one Iakovos Kambanellis. The first of the four pieces that make up the cantata, ‘The Song of Songs', depicts the love of a Greek inmate of the Mauthausen concentration camp for a Jewish woman, ‘beautiful in her plain dress and with a fine comb in her hair'. The poet searches for any news of her, for the merest hint of her presence:

Girls of Auschwitz.

Dachau girls

Has anybody seen my love?

His searching renders a fleeting glimpse:

We saw her in a chilly square

With a number on her white arm

and a yellow star on her heart.

The poet imagines her journey, ‘beyond the bleak and frozen square':

Oh come tell me what became of love

it journeyed past the land of no returning

where no one could imagine or endure

and where love begged of God to sleep no more.

In the final song of the cantata, ‘When the War Is Over', she appears again, as ‘the girl with the fearful eyes' and the girl ‘with the frozen hands'. He yearns for the moment when love can flourish at ‘noon tide', in the fullness of day, and he dreams of a time when ‘We could embrace with abandon, in open streets and in the town square'.

It was during Theodorakis's Australian tour in 1995 that I first saw, in the program notes, the full text of the songs, and learned a little of the man who wrote them. By that time I was aware of the extent to which the Annihilation had torn apart my own family. I had journeyed to my ancestral villages in Poland, driven by an impulse to confront an irretrievable past. I had retraced my forebears' final footsteps into a clearing in a forest, and through a brick archway known as the gate of death: ghosts of Treblinka and Auschwitz, have you seen my loved ones? This was the question that had fuelled my obsessive quest.

From the program notes I learned that Iakovos Kambanellis had been an inmate of Mauthausen, a concentration camp in Austria, from the summer of 1943 until the end of the war. In 1965 he published his book-length memoir of that time,
Mauthausen
. Kambanellis also wrote four poems on the theme which his friend Mikis Theodorakis set to music. Both the book and the cantata were launched in December 1965 at a concert in the Gloria Theatre in Athens, with the sixteen-year-old Maria Farantouri as the singer.

The program notes reawoke my curiosity. I wanted to know more about Kambanellis. I searched through anthologies of Greek poetry for his name. It was nowhere to be found. Then, in December 1997, during a stay in Athens, and through a series of chance encounters, I found myself sitting face to face with the writer in a coffee shop in central Athens, five minutes' walk from Syntagma Square.

We had arranged to meet in Cafe Zonar, the haunt of bohemians and activists who had played various roles in Greece's turbulent postwar past. The decor had remained frozen in time. The interior was of wrought iron and wood, burgundies and leather browns. We sat at mahogany tables, on upholstered chairs, in a cavernous room cooled by ceiling fans. Waiters in green blazers and bow ties hovered about us. Ageing revolutionaries lounged beside armchair travellers. Caffeine stirred up an ebbing past.

Iakovos Kambanellis was seventy-five years old, small in stature, receding into himself. He seemed frail, but strong in spirit. His words burst from his hands as he struggled, in English, to find the phrases that could give shape to the intensity of his thoughts.

He was not a poet, but one of the leading playwrights of postwar Greece, the author of over thirty plays and film scripts. Kambanellis never intended to be a writer. His forebears were seamen from the island of Chios, wedded to the waters that encircled them. Tragedy lurks close at hand whenever one recounts ancestral tales in contemporary Greece.

In 1822, 25,000 Chios civilians were massacred by their Ottoman overlords. Among those who fled by boat and made good their escape was the one surviving member of the Kambanellis family, a fifteen-year-old boy. He made his way to the island of Naxos where the family took root and flourished anew.

The Kambanellis clan returned to the sea. They worked caiques around the Cycladic islands. Iakovos was born on Naxos, the sixth of nine children. His father broke from the seafaring tradition and apprenticed himself to a chemist. He was granted a diploma in pharmacy, based on his first ten years of experience, but was forced to move to Athens in search of work when his employer passed on the business to his own son.

The family settled in the inner-city suburb of Thission. The move from the idyllic island of Naxos to an Athenian neighbourhood was a quantum leap for twelve-year-old Iakovos. His life now revolved around suburban squares and the nearby Keramikos cemetery, which contained tombs that dated back over two millennia. Steles rose from the graves of prominent citizens who once walked the streets of classical Greece. Archaic ghosts hovered on the fringe of Iakovos's vision.

Prewar Athens was an expanding metropolis, an amalgam of peasants, freshly arrived from their villages in search of new lives, and an emerging bourgeoisie. Iakovos's neighbourhood was a typical Athenian blend of traditional past and nascent modernity.

Yet little in his upbringing could prepare the young Kambanellis for the chaos and terror that ensued after the Nazi invasion in April 1941. The nineteen-year-old youth quit his job as a draftsman and set out on a perilous journey. His aim was simple—to get out of occupied Greece and make a run for the longed-for ‘free world'. Accompanied by an older friend, he stole across the border, only to be arrested on a train en route to Switzerland.

Kambanellis was sent to Mauthausen. He arrived with a group of forty-three Greek prisoners; and was thrust into another universe in which the nations of Europe were congregated in the same living hell: Poles, Russians, Jews, Italians, Czechs, Spaniards, Serbs and Bulgarians. Among them were former ministers and businessmen, tradesmen and professors, all reduced to striped prison garb and a frantic struggle to survive. Of every nine who went in, only one made it out alive.

This is where he discovered the world, Kambanellis says. This is where he came to know the complexity of human behaviour. What he lived through in those two years was to haunt him for decades.

On his return to Athens at war's end, Kambanellis's friends plagued him with the same question: how was he able to endure such a place? Sick of recounting his stories, he decided to put them down on paper. The manuscript burst forth ‘like a river, swimming with detail'. It was not well-crafted, says Kambanellis, but fragmented, confused. Yet it was out in the open. He set his memories aside, and tried to get on with his life.

As to how he became a writer, therein lies a remarkable tale of chance or fate—interpret it whichever way you will. Kambanellis tells the story with a sense of irony and humour, and an obvious skill in the art of weaving a tale.

It was the winter of 1945–46. He was on his first date since war's end. They were to meet in central Athens, but the woman did not turn up. Iakovos did not want to go back to his friends and tell them he had been stood up. He feared the embarrassment. He decided to return late to the neighbourhood, boast about his conquest, and make out he had seduced the girl.

Casting around for a way to pass the time out of the cold, he saw a theatre door and walked in. It was no ordinary performance he watched that night. Kambanellis had stumbled upon a play produced by Karolis Koun's Athens Art Theatre. Founded in 1942 during the German occupation, the Athens Art Theatre was to elevate Greek drama onto the international stage with its avant-garde productions of both ancient and contemporary plays.

After having lived through the horror of a concentration camp, Kambanellis was mesmerised by the performance. It was a contrived piece of theatre, yet it simmered with truth. For the first time he understood the power of art and its capacity to reproduce life, to capture the nuances of human behaviour.

Kambanellis emerged from that evening with an obsessive desire to become an actor. But, despite his many applications, no drama school would take on someone who did not have a high school certificate. He figured that if he could not get onto the stage as an actor he would get there through writing. His first play was performed in 1950 by an avant-garde theatre company called Dionyssia. He had discovered his vocation.

It was in the early 1950s that Kambanellis first met the composer Mikis Theodorakis. The fledgling artists collaborated on radio plays, with Kambanellis producing the text and Theodorakis the music. They were both drawn towards the left in politics—driven, in the immediate postwar years, to create a more equitable society. Yet their approach was quite different. ‘I never formally joined any party,' says Kambanellis. ‘I wanted to maintain my independent vision. I never had Theodorakis's mania for politics.'