At this a big old man, heavily bearded, interrupted us. ‘Of course they looked after us. They needed us. Now they want to show the world how civilized they are. Why d’you think this lady is here now? Because they’ve sent her here to see how well they treat us. Do you think this is any way of life for a Kretev? Don’t you care about the bears, you silly women? Don’t you care about anything? I’ll tell you, lady, what they’re doing to us is ethnic engineering. We’re like snow raspberries to them. They’re mutating us. GM folk, that’s what we are. Human snow raspberries.’
He stumped off, leaving the women giggling and the children looking goggle-eyed at me, and suddenly I remembered what the place reminded me of. It was like that huge healthy construction the Nazis built on the island of Rugen in the Baltic, to provide holiday indoctrination for the Hitler Youth.
It was still only late afternoon, so I turned in my tracks and drove south by the old rough roads, skirting the city, leaving the harbour away to my left, until I struck the old highway to the ferry station for San Spiridon, on the east coast of the peninsula. I remembered the unassuming little island community as being, in a curiously suggestive way, the heart or fulcrum of Greekness in Hav, and Fatima Yeğen had told me that it was left unscathed by the Intervention. There used to be only one steamboat a day to the island, but I guessed that things might have changed by now, and I was right.
I left the car in a car park and walked down to the little dock. No steamboat lay gently hissing there, but a gleaming streamlined hydrofoil was revving its engines. ‘Just in time,’ said a cheerful dockhand in sailor’s gear, ‘and there isn’t another for an hour.’ The passengers already on board had changed, too. They were certainly Greek, but they no longer looked like peasants from the Dodecanese, but more like well-dressed office-workers on a daily commute. Their string-tied suitcases and straw hampers had become briefcases and plastic shopping-bags. Their children were demure. There was not a dog or a mule or a motorbike on board the spanking little vessel, and nobody smoked a pipe. Only the inevitable tall-hatted Orthodox priest sat there with an air of authority, reading his Bible.
Except for the priest everybody looked up at me as I found myself a seat, but nobody spoke. Only when we had crossed the sound, fifteen minutes later, and were about to dock at the island, did an elderly woman sit down beside me and say: ‘Haven’t we met before? Didn’t you come to San Spiridon long ago? Jan Morris, isn’t it? I am Kallonia Laskaris.’
‘Kallonia Laskaris — of course! I’d have known you anywhere’ — and we both laughed. ‘And how is your dear little daughter, who was so kind to me that day?’
‘This is “my dear little daughter” — Arianna, come over here and meet an old friend’ — and there she was, an elegant young woman in her early thirties, in T-shirt and designer jeans, assuring me that she remembered very well my visit to the island all those years ago, but not very convincingly.
‘I’m told you wrote about us that time,’ said Kallonia. ‘I won’t ask if you’re going to write something again, my dear — although I hope you do have a blue pass, don’t you? — but you must come home with us anyway and see what’s happened to our lovely San Spiridon — thanks be to God.’
I told her I only had an hour, before I must catch the hydrofoil back.
‘Never mind, dear Jan. We shall do it just like we did last time. Arianna will quickly show you round the place again, and I will get in a few dear friends to meet you. You will see some changes! But our good shepherd-saint and the Holy Mother of God has protected us.’
I didn’t remember Kallonia ever talking like this, and as Arianna led me up the hill, I mentioned it to her.
‘You’re right,’ she said. My mother is born again. St Spiridon is very big in her life these days — he was the shepherd-saint, you know — but then he’s very big to nearly everyone on the island now. You say you noticed a difference in her conversation. Don’t you notice any difference in the place?’
Holy Mother of God I did. Nothing had basically changed, but everything seemed rejuvenated. The fishermen’s shacks were all repainted, the taverns were smart, one of the shops had become a small supermarket, the other was a cyber-café. The church, at the end of its causeway, was a brilliant white, and the celery fields were meticulously maintained.
‘Not GM celery, I hope,’ I said, but Arianna scoffed.
‘Monsanto on San Spiridon? The saint would never allow it. And who would be fool enough to mutate Spiridon celery?’
I asked her what had happened, to recharge the island in this way, but she told me to ask the people when we got home. ‘They can explain it better than I can.’
And sure enough, when we reached Kallonia’s house on the top of the hill, the company assembled there beneath the pergola was only too ready to oblige. There were four or five bourgeois-looking gentlemen and their wives, and the sideburned young owner of the cyber-café, and Kallonia herself of course, and the priest I had seen on the hydro-ferry, and except for the priest they all talked at once, while Kallonia and Arianna moved among us with tumblers of Hav retsina and vine-leaf rice rolls — ‘We would give you a proper meal, dear Jan, but I know you haven’t got the time.’
It was the priest, of course, still wearing his hat, who prevailed over the hubbub, and emerged as spokesman for them all — spokesman for the island itself, as Kallonia whispered in my ear.
‘We are grateful to our patron saint, of course, and to the Holy Mother of God’ — all crossed themselves here — ‘for what has happened to our beloved island and our community, but we must also be properly grateful to our Perfects and the Holy Cathar Government. For it is they who, assiduously exploring the byways of Hav’s ancient history, realized that at the root of it, the core and the root, the foundation — at the bottom of it was Greekness’ (murmurs of approval).
‘Our forebear Achilles, it is now recognized, was the true Father of Hav. Our Myrmidonic ancestors, we now understand, were the original Cathars, and although our religious practices have diverged somewhat down the centuries, nevertheless we gratefully acknowledge that our theologies are in profoundest essences identical.’ (‘Identical,’ confirmed one of the bourgeois gents. ‘Almost identical,’ murmured the owner of the cyber-café.) ‘Identical,’ firmly concluded the priest.)
So it was, he went on, that the Myrmidonic Republic recognized the island as — well, say the Runnymede of Hav, where Magna Carta was signed, or that field by the lake, he forgot the name, where the Swiss Confederation was established. ‘It is the cradle of our Republic, and as such is generously favoured by the Perfects and the State. There was a time, we must explain to our visitor from across the seas, when to be Greek in Hav was something to be ashamed of. Our people were forced to be furtive in our Greekness. We were subdued, we lost our old Hellenic pride — our epic pride, one might say — or as one writer across the seas has written, I am told, our pride in our bright heroic past.
‘But now — well, dirleddy, look around you Do we seem furtive? Are we not the Greeks of old once more?’ (Cries of yes, yes, praise to the saint, praise to the Holy Mother, etc.) ‘That is because we know ourselves now to be the original Havians, and the Republic knows it too!’