Well, it was true, Kallonia was not very beautiful, but she was extremely kind, and in no time at all she had fixed up a lunch for me — ‘just to meet a few of our people, you must get the truth about us in your writing’. But first she detailed her daughter Arianna, eleven years old, to show me round the island. This was not difficult. It is only about a mile round, and is speckled all over, as by pimples, with small stone houses like Kallonia’s own, each with its pergola and its garden. The only village is the little ferry-port, and the church (St Spiridon’s, naturally) stands all alone on an islet at the southern tip, approached by a stone causeway. There is not much else — a couple of taverns, a shop or two, a disused cinema (every house has its TV aerial). The fishing-boats were nearly all at sea just then, but when they came back, so Arianna said, each would be moored directly outside the owner’s home, some at little wooden landing-stages, some in docks cut alongside the houses.
By the time we got back to the house the luncheon party was already assembled and the food was on the table beneath the pergola — smoked mullet, shrimps, tomato with fetta cheese, lots of celery, ouzo. The company, six or seven men, rather more women, greeted me courteously; the priest I had seen on the boat, the chairman of the fishing cooperative, some miscellaneous elders and their wives. Once we were settled, they tucked into their victuals in vigorous silence. They seemed to have huge appetites. ‘Now you see’, said the priest, ‘what the Hav Greeks are really like.’ In the city, he said, they had been oppressed for so long that they had lost their national characteristics, and had become subdued and inhibited. Evasive too, somebody said between mouthfuls. One would not know, seeing them in their poky shops and offices, that they were of a great seagoing race, a martial race — it was here after all that Achilles built his fortress, here that the Spartans created the Iron Dog! They had lost their gaiety, too, and their sense of comradeship — yes, and even their ancient culture, which flourished now only on San Spiridon, whereas once, all the old historians said, Hav had been a very cradle of Hellenism. Now the city Greeks had been forced into subterfuge and secrecy. ‘What you see now’, said the priest, waving his arms around the assembled company, who had fallen into rapt and solemn attention, ‘is the Greekness of Hav as it always was — here alone, on our beloved island.’
After the meal they sang songs to me. Somebody fetched a mandolin, and some younger people began to dance on the terrace beneath the pergola, weaving an intricate, fairy-footed step. But happy and grateful though I was, well fed, well ouzo’d too, the more I watched and listened to them, somehow the less Greek those Greeks really seemed to be. There was something odd about them. Were they really Greeks at all? All the externals were there, of course, clerical beard to fetta cheese, but something else, something more profound, seemed to be wrong. Their faces did not look quite like Greek faces, ancient or modern: there was a hint of something oriental to them, just the faintest suggestion of eye and cheekbone, as in the faces pictured by the old Hav portraitists. Then their bodily shape was not quite Greek either, being stringier, or tauter, or more sinewy. Their earnest ethnic loyalties seemed to me more Arab in style than Hellenic. Their ravenous appetites surprised me. Their music sounded less like melodies of Crete or Athens than of places well to the east of us, while the performance of the dancers on the terrace began to remind me uncomfortably, in its silent, deft and expressionless zeal, of tranced dervishes!
Perhaps it was the ouzo. But when they took me down to the port to catch the ferry home I happened to mention the graffiti on the hide of the Iron Dog. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Kallonia, the bishop’s sister, crossing herself like the women on the ferry.
Today I mentioned these peculiar sensations to Dr Borge, as we lunched together at the Al-Asima, in the Great Bazaar. He looked at me in a penetrating way. ‘You are walking on quicksands,’ he said. ‘I will say no more. We cannot rewrite history. Nevertheless, when you have a moment take a look at a picture of the dragons on the Ishtar Gate at Babylon — not the lions, the dragons. See what you make of them.’
I went to the Athenaeum the moment we parted, and found a photograph of the dragons, proud but not vicious beasts, made of glazed brick, with jaunty serpents’ tails and heads held high. I was none the wiser, though. I could see the resemblance, of course, to the Iron Dog, but so what? What could he mean? Magda says she has not the faintest idea. ‘He’s an old fraud anyway.’ But the mystery of it, the strangeness of those Greeks, the presence of the Dog there, graffiti-scarred upon his headland, haunt me rather.
JUNE
13
I have been into the Palace, and met the Governor. A month after the Roof-Race the winner, by then assumed to have recovered from the ordeal, is honoured at a gubernatorial garden party, the Victor’s Party, which is one of the great public occasions of the Hav year. It takes no great social clout to be invited, though Signora Vattani did look rather miffed when the big official envelope, stamped rather than embossed with the Governor’s emblem (a Hav bear, rampant, holding a maze-mallet) plopped through our letter-box for me. Before the war, she said, she always used to go with her husband, but of course (with a sniff) everything was so different now…
Long before I reached the Palace gates I could hear the thump of military music over the traffic of Pendeh Square, and the party was evidently in full swing by the time I presented my invitation to the smiling sentries, and had been stentoriously announced by the footman at the door of the central salon. The Governor was there to receive his guests. ‘Dirleddy, I have heard so much of your presence here. You are welcome to Hav! Allow me to introduce our guest of honour and our hero, Irfan Izmic.’ Izmic looked very unlike that heap of blotched, greased and bloody flesh which had dropped from the Castle Gate four weeks before. He was in a smart tropical suit now, his hair slicked, his moustache urbanely trimmed, in his lapel the red ribbon which winners of the great contest wear until the end of their days. ‘Delighted, dirleddy,’ said he. ‘Honoured to meet you,’ said I, and so I was left, as one is left at garden parties the world over, hopefully to circulate.
I was happy enough to do so. It was a grand festivity to watch. Partly in the garden, partly in the salon beneath the chandeliers, the confused society of the peninsula milled, ambled or was clotted, offering for my contemplation a splendid cross-section of Homo hav. The noise was considerable. Not just the military band played, resplendent in white and scarlet in the little garden bandstand, but two other musical ensembles worked away indoors. In the blue drawing-room a piano quartet, three ladies and the urbane Chinese pianist I had last seen thumping jazz in Bar 1924, played café music with much careful turnings of pages and rhythmic noddings of heads. In the pink drawing-room a folk group of six girls and six men, dressed alike in straw hats and gallabiyehs, performed in penetrating quarter-tones upon flutes, lutes and tambourines.