And they've recovered; they're leading normal lives. No one knows unless they tell. I used to show these to my friends and laugh and fill another glass.
I haven't had occasion to display the clippings in some time, but I'm sure they're still aboard, somewhere.
Spray is beginning to wet the decks. I can taste the salt on my lips. The crests are starting to thunder, an ugly sound. I still think this is just a little crippled sirocco, blowing dust and ghosts up from North Africa.
I don't know why I'm always nattering on about ghosts. I don't believe in the poor, sad creatures at all… but I can't help thinking about them. This is such a haunted part of the world. So many generations have struggled to die here, but I don't think that's the cause. Not the antiquity alone, not just the unimaginable quantities of bones that layer the islands and the sea bottom. No, there've been so many atrocities, massacres, betrayals. So much agony— the sort of thing that breeds ghosts from the ordinarily serene release of death. Or so believers tell me.
For some reason, lurching through the noisy darkness, I remember a little story told me by a Greek caique captain, some years ago. I was waiting in Corfu for a party of young German charterers — the worst possible fate for a Med charter yacht, short of shipwreck or seizure, let me assure you — and struck up an acquaintance with Demetrios, who was a Cretan smuggler.
We were sitting in the waist of his caique, over the remnants of his lamb and my ouzo. He was cleaning his revolver, a huge, ancient Webley. He smuggled whatever was profitable: hashish, antiquities. White slaves, for all I knew. I can't imagine what he was doing in Corfu. It never occurred to me to ask, though I was curious.
«So you don't believe in ghosts, eh?» Demetrios squinted through the barrel of the Webley, holding it aloft to catch the light of the westering sun. The Greeks all look as though they've been hired by a brilliant casting director. Demetrios was no exception. Bearded black curls under a black cap, white teeth, weather-darkened skin, a barrel chest, surprisingly beautiful eyes.
«No,» I said.
«Perhaps it is as well, so,» he said. «Perhaps your skepticism protects you. Who can say?» But I thought I heard a tincture of pity in his words, which annoyed me a little.
«And you? Do you believer?»
He laughed. «I am Greek.»
«Is there a better reason?» My annoyance caused me to speak in a slightly jeering tone, which I instantly regretted, for Demetrios scowled and snapped the Webley closed.
«Many reasons, yes,» he said darkly, giving me a suddenly unfriendly glance.
I was more than a little afraid; to cover my confusion, I refilled our glasses with the last of the ouzo. It's surprising how many of life's difficulties, small and large, can be managed in this fashion.
It worked yet again. In Greece, you must toast the man who gives you a drink. To do otherwise would be unforgiveably rude, and though Demetrios was a bloody-handed criminal, his manners were flawless. He raised his glass to me, and said, «Would you like to hear about the time I met the sea nymph?»
«Yes, please,» I said, with no trace of condescension now. Writers should never miss an opportunity to gather material, and so I never do, though it hasn't brought me any notable success.
«All right, then.» He settled back against the bulwark and put his revolver aside.
«A FEW YEARS ago it was,» he said. «Where I had been, what I had done. . these things don't matter. This much I tell you: blood still stained my boat's hull. She looked as rusty as your old tub — but it was the blood of men, not the blood of steel.»
I was somewhat offended by this criticism of Olympias, but he went on, already lost in vivid memory, beyond paying any attention to me.
«I was alone, the only survivor. Unfitting, unfitting; a capain who loses his men and keeps his own life must have great shame. Great shame. It was night, and the mistral screamed in my ears, a killing wind. It wrenched at my boat's bones, so that she was never the same again, and I had to give her to the shipbreakers.» He looked sad, perhaps more genuinely so than at the memory of his lost crew.
«My despair then was as deep as the sea. I think that's important; I think that she comes only to men who feel no hope; I think that she offers a kind of redemption, a final grace.»
«'She?»
«The ghost, the sea nymph. Or goddess. Or demon. Who knows? Still, this is my theory: she comes only to those who despair. Other men have seen her, men who claim not to have despaired, but men lie. Who knows what cankers can lie in the stranger's heart?
I was a mad man, for the space of a few hours. I cried; I screamed; I raved — I called out the names of my friends, as if they could hear, rotting in the ditch where the Turk dumped them.
She came when I was almost blind with tears and the salty knives of the spray, when the boat had become almost unmanageable, when we were a heartbeat away from broaching and rolling under.»
«I was as good as dead.»
«But in the blackness came a light, a soft golden light, as strange as sunlight at midnight. And the waves slowed. . and then grew still. The sea looked like one of those bad paintings the English tourists love to buy, The Tempest or The Shipwreck, with the waves rearing up like frozen taffy, soaked through with a green glow.»
He looked at me angrily, as if he expected me to be insultingly skeptical, but I wore my Observer face, a bland, attentive mask. «I thought I was mad for certain then; I thought perhaps we had already gone deep, and th is was some death dream, filling my brain in the crevice between living and dying. Maybe we were drifting downward through the quiet, all done.
„Then she came, as though she had stepped from a door in the sea. She stood there on one of those frozen waves, as close to me as I am to you.“