Slow Boats to China Page 3

  We sailed while I was learning from the young assistant purser some of the facts about the Alcheon.

  ‘She’s old,’ he said. ‘Thirty years old. But so strong.’ He punched the bulkhead like a groom slapping a favourite horse. ‘Eighteen miles an hour. Four-eight-zero-zero tons. Built Copenhagen. Named for a king – no, a queen. Maybe Queen Ingrid.’

  Vibrations shook the deck, and I felt the ship sway. Steadily shrinking, the Greek customs officers on shore, immaculate in white shirts, belts and trousers, white shoes and caps, talking quietly together, watched us swinging out from the quay.

  The captain, the four gold rings on his shoulder very bright, looked at the shore from the wing of the bridge; impassive, half Onassis, half Niarchos; white hair crinkled around a bald skull, tight curls at the back. The mirror surfaces of his dark glasses would now be reflecting a moving view of half-finished blocks of flats.

  ‘Greek captains never will use a chart,’ Ε. Μ. Forster wrote on a Mediterranean cruise eighty years ago. ‘Although they sometimes do have one aboard, it is always locked up in a drawer; for as they truly say, it is nothing but paper and lines, which are not the least like the sea, and it’s far better to trust to yourself, especially in parts where you have never been before.’ As the Greeks combine instinct with caution, said Forster, progress is sometimes slow.

  Such mockery was inappropriate to the hefty back of our captain, who now turned his curving nose and thick, firm lips toward the bay of Salamis. His drawer, one knew, was unlocked; his charts, with their beautifully engraved whirls of height and depth, intricate lines depicting bays and inlets, islands and headlands, were spread out on the chart-room table like works of art in an exhibition. Every line of them, it went without saying, was etched in his mind alongside all the instinct and caution we needed to get us to Patmos without bumping into something.

  I lugged my bags below and found the cabin I was to share. Two lots of baggage stood just outside the door, but the cabin was empty. I pushed my suitcase under a lower berth and put my anorak across it. The cabin had two washbasins and four metal bunks, two up, two down. It was hot.

  I headed upstairs again, passing two middle-aged British couples wrestling with their bags at the open door of another four-berther. ‘It’s only for one night,’ a man was saying. ‘Quite hunky dory, really, don’t you think, boys and girls?’

  Later I saw the husbands carefully balancing cans of beer into the first-class lounge, where suffocating heat seemed to radiate from inappropriate deep armchairs covered with olive-drab material. The bar was cooler; fresh air came in through two large windows. Perhaps the heat in the lounge stifled holiday jollity in the British passengers. The British husbands came back at regular intervals to the bar, where I sat with my ouzo and Ford Madox Ford’s Memories and Impressions. Recognizing me as a fellow Briton, they treated me to the nod and twist of the lips that passes for a wry little smile north of the English Channel. ‘Bit of a carry-on this, eh, old chap?’ their silent message said. Perhaps my own absurd little smile spoke in the same idiom: ‘Rather!’

  *

  As I saw when I went on deck, the Alcheon was probably doing her eighteen knots. The black-clad Greek ladies with varicose veins and elderly Greek men in straw hats and baggy grey trousers, shirt sleeves and braces had settled on the deck space like an occupying army. A solid youngish woman was shrieking with unbelievable volume at her husband, ‘Ee? … Ee? … Ee?’ It was as if someone were opening a rusty hinge an inch at a time.

  We passed through the Cyclades, and my Kümmerly and Frey map showed me a spattering of islands I’d never heard of: Sifnos; Sikinos and Folegandros (a nice name); Tinos, Siros and Anafi. Are they all tourist traps in the summer? I peered at some of them through my old Leitz binoculars. At least I couldn’t see any plastic beach huts. (The French export these vulgarities as cavalierly as Captain Cook transported smallpox to the South Seas. I’d even seen them in the remote mountain resorts of Iraqi Kurdistan.) Perhaps there are still a few Greek islands unviolated.

  The islands sat in the sun, soaking heat into rock surfaces that were only occasionally marked by the white blobs of islanders’ houses. This landscape is what you see from Spain to the immense knife-edge passes of Afghanistan, from Yugoslavia to Aden; in spring it is beautiful with small flowers, and at all times of the year the colours in the rock change as the light shifts. Moonlight can give the rock surfaces an illusion of snow. I wish I weren’t conditioned to associate this kind of landscape with other memories: jet planes banking around headlands, skimming through valleys, bombing or rocketing, leaving behind them the roar of engines, plumes of smoke and mourning columns of refugees.

  In the hot afternoon I went down to the empty cabin and slept. When I awoke, the cabin was no longer empty: two men, both Greeks, were dozing. A large, oldish man lay in the berth above mine, fully clothed. From his throat issued a loud rattling and gargling. On the lower bunk opposite, a plump body sprawled on its back, corpse-white where it was not covered with thick black hair. It was nude except for a black jockstrap, over which a hand began to move restlessly. The cabin was as humid as a Turkish bath, and there was a bittersweet smell of underarms and feet. I wiped a trickle of sweat from my neck and hurried out to the upper air.

  On the deck, passengers levelled their glasses shorewards. My Leitz binoculars were small, light and powerful, and they would fold into a pocket. I swung them about and found a seagull playing a game near the Alcheon’s bows. It was a plump gull, and its head, back and the upper side of its wings were a muddy brown. Its game went like this. First, rise to twenty feet, moving parallel with and close to the ship. Next, hurl yourself down to within millimetres of the skin of the sea, and stay there, gently swaying on rigid wings, contouring the surface.

  The gull seemed to be consciously challenging the bow wave, which only had to rise two centimetres to turn it into a lump of feathers cartwheeling to destruction, just as Second World War Japanese kamikaze planes, shot down by American ships, cartwheeled and broke up in clouds of spray. Of course, the gull knew what it was doing. Whoever heard of a gull smashed by a wave? Gulls and dolphins like playing games with ships, and both seem to prefer an audience.

  We passed barren island hillsides, Greek trawlers under power with sail-less masts, and the odd white island steamer.

  In the evening darkness, the Alcheon dropped anchor off Mikonos three hundred yards from a stone jetty. Passengers who wanted to disembark gathered at the gangway to walk down to the small boats that would take them ashore. Among them were the Englishman with the shooting stick and the woman with the neck like a camel.

  The rest of us went to the dining room. Over the lamb and salad, my dinner companion, a black-chinned, chubby man, told me cheerfully that he was a ship’s barman on leave. His home, he said, was Kefallinia, an island off Greece’s west coast, south of Corfu. He had been about quite a bit in different ships, and now was off to join one at the island of Cos, beyond Patmos, almost touching Turkey. When I told him I was heading for southern Turkey, he waved his fork, scattering drops of olive oil. ‘I tell you. Izmir [Smyrna] no good, dirty. Mersin the same. Very dirty. From there, where you go?’

  ‘Perhaps Haifa. Perhaps Beirut. Perhaps Alexandria.’

  ‘Haifa dirty.’ He dismissed Haifa with his fork. ‘Only good place Jerusalem.’ He slopped retsina into both our glasses and beckoned to our waiter for more. ‘But Haifa better than Alexandria. In Alexandria, ha, they want to kill you.’ He leaned toward me earnestly. ‘Ye-e-s. I mean it. They kill sailors for their money. In Alex, I tell you, big crowds of bad peoples come to the ships. Why? Because they have nothing to eat, they are always starving. And they smell so bad in Alexandria.’

  He sat back as the retsina came and poured more of it into our glasses. ‘But, most important, they kill for money.’ He looked at me, smiling sadly. ‘You don’t believe me.’

  I had been in Alexandria several times without noticing exceptional smells. Nor had I noticed the inhab
itants of that ancient and balmy city engaged in killing for money, although they can manage a spectacular riot. Still, the Greek barman was a happy companion. I wondered if he knew that three decades ago Alexandria was practically a Greek city, and I didn’t mention the Greek poet of Alexandria, Constantine Cavafy. Later I looked up Cavafy’s poem ‘On Board Ship’; aboard the Alcheon it seemed appropriate:

  Of course it is like him, this little

  Drawing of him in pencil.

  Quickly done, on the deck of the ship;

  An enchanting afternoon.

  The Ionian ocean all around us….

  Out of Time. All these things are very old –

  The sketch, and the ship, and the afternoon.

  After dinner we went to the ship’s little bar; he’d be at home there. ‘Screwdriver,’ he cried joyfully, and in five minutes threw back two double vodkas mixed with fizzy Sunripe Orange, wincing at the bitterness of the orange taste.

  ‘I make first-class screwdriver.’ A professional was speaking. ‘These are not screwdrivers, but nearly.’ He jerked his chin at the barman, who responded with a thumb’s-up sign and brought the same again: a screwdriver for him and for me a Metaxa brandy. We kept each other company until we reached Patmos, and I was sorry to say goodbye.

  *

  The Alcheon crept into the waters of Patmos at about midnight, and tied up at the stone quay of the small and only port, Skala, a crescent of low white buildings, cafés, a police station, one or two small hotels, tourist shops and tavernas. A hill rises steeply behind the town and stops in a spread of lights against the stars; the following morning I saw above me a monastery walled like a fortress and more white houses. From there, I discovered later, you can see almost the entire island of Patmos.

  On the quay a company of grey-haired Greek women in black who had been eagerly awaiting the Alcheon’s arrival now advanced like gendarmes to the foot of the gangway. The barman had told me to expect them. They were the landladies of Skala, come, like buyers in a slave market, to fill their empty rooms from the pool of arrivals. About thirty of us spilled awkwardly down the ramp into their arms.

  I dropped my metal suitcase on the quayside with a thump and waited to be gathered up. At once a small but stocky lady in black appeared at my elbow.

  ‘Room? Room?’ she screamed into my face.

  ‘Yes, room. Big room.’

  ‘Come,’ she ordered. I took up my suitcase and prepared to follow her. That had been simple, I thought. But she didn’t move.

  ‘How many friends?’ She peered around me as if she expected to find several people roped behind me like Alpine climbers.

  ‘I have no friends.’ The pathos of the remark struck me as I uttered it, but there was no corresponding pity in her voice, only disbelief.

  ‘No friends?’ She had never heard of such a thing. Everyone arrives in Patmos with friends. Suddenly her face was rigid with disappointment or suspicion. A single long hair thrust out quivering toward me from a mole on her cheek like a locust’s antenna sensing trouble. Just then a party of young Germans came toward us, round-shouldered under huge knapsacks.

  The hair from the mole excitedly tested the air near four straw-coloured beards. ‘Four persons?’ She smiled at them.

  ‘Ja, ja.’ They smiled back. Four men to fill her rooms; that was more like it. She was radiant. All history might have conspired to deliver this quartet into her hands. Her back was turned to me by now like a slammed door. ‘Come,’ she said, and the little group moved away into the darkness.

  All over the quay the same thing was happening. Groups of passengers in shorts were humping baggage single file after the triumphant landladies, like African porters behind white hunters on safari. Soon I was left alone under the puzzled gaze of those who had stayed on board, and who were now leaning on the Alcheon’s rail staring curiously down at a man standing by a metal suitcase. A man who wore trousers, not shorts. A man alone in the middle of the night. A man, evidently, without friends.

  Allez! This would not do. I gathered up my luggage and with feigned jauntiness followed the disappearing throng. I could see ‘Police’ written on a board near a cluster of lights. Perhaps I could rent a police cell for the night. But when I got there the police station was closed and its windows dark.

  At that moment a voice fluted behind me. ‘Nice room? Here wait,’ and I turned to see a small boy cycling away around the side of the building. Presently a woman appeared in the circle of lights, a white-coloured woman of the kind you read about in improbable books of travel – the good-hearted local woman who keeps the ideal pension, bright, clean, well aired and not too expensive; the woman with a face as bright and clean as her house, which is an old, white-painted house with blue shutters; a house ideally situated near the post office, the shipping agent’s office, a taverna and the sea.

  She stood in the light with the boy on the bicycle who had summoned her, and smiled and beckoned me to follow her. When we turned the corner of the Ionian Popular Bank of Greece, she led me through a gate in a low wall, and I looked up and saw the pension of my dreams: an old, newly painted white house with tall shutters the colour of the blue in the Greek flag.

  Two

  Next morning the sun shone cheerfully on the empty quay, where at midnight I had left m.v. Alcheon (née Queen Ingrid), my first ship. I strolled around the little port and bought a guidebook to Patmos. Then I found a tree outside a café and sat under it.

  ‘The name Patmos,’ I read in the guidebook, ‘as it is generally believed, derives from the word Latmos, which is the name of a mountain of Caria, a country situated across the island in Asia Minor where the Goddess Diana was particularly adored…. It is said that the mythological hero Oreste pursued by the Erinnyes [the Furies] because he killed his mother Clytemnestra, took shelter in Patmos.’

  Apparently there had once been a temple to Apollo here, and another to Bacchus. ‘Under the domination of the Romans, the island of Patmos failed [sic] to decline. It was abandoned and used as an exile place.’

  I flapped the guidebook at the wasps that competed for my breakfast jam.

  Skala, fresh and newly whitewashed in the sun, was peaceful except in the café behind me, where some youths had already begun to take turns playing the jukebox. Along the waterfront: Orion Hotel, tourist shops, cafés, fishermen unravelling acres of netting from boats tied up along the quay. At the dying of August, the bustle of tourists, mainly German and French, was beginning to die too. But, in twos and fours, pink-faced young men and girls in shorts and T-shirts, with bouncing long hair, still hurried back and forth, although in Patmos there’s nothing to hurry for, except perhaps a love affair or an illness. The girls’ braless breasts wobbled about under their T-shirts like hot-water bottles under a sheet.

  I bashed a couple of wasps with the guidebook. They fell to the ground, buzzed about on their backs for a while, and then flew back to the jam. Aegean wasps must be bred for endurance. I propped the guidebook against my coffee cup and read, ‘In the year 96 of the new christian age the Evangelist St Jean the Theologue was banished in Patmos. This is the reason that the island of Patmos became the centre of the Orthodox Religion and moreover it got famous.’ St John’s Monastery was the walled fortress-like building I had seen rearing up against the skyline behind the port, built in 1088 and daringly sited on the very spot where un-Christian rites had once enlivened the worship of Diana. It must have had quite a reputation then. In its own way, it had no doubt ‘got famous’ long before the Christian era.

  I might not see much of Patmos, for I wanted to move on to Turkey with a minimum of delay. Beautiful and peaceful though the island obviously was, a day or two here would be more than enough for someone bound for China.

  Abandoning the jam to the wasps, I strolled past MIDAS – FINE JEWELLERS to the shipping agent’s office on the waterfront. A number of young tourists were sitting or standing there asking about ways to go home; holidays were nearly over. Some of them were clearly anxious, because
a noticeboard propped against a wall of the office said, ‘The ship to Cos today is cancelled’.

  First things first: I needed another ship. I had to take into account the delays I anticipated between Turkey and Cyprus, or Turkey and the Suez Canal – particularly at the Suez Canal.

  I asked the photogenic Greek whom I took to be the manager of the agency about boats to Samos.

  ‘Wednesday and Friday to Samos and Turkey,’ he said. ‘The ship is named the Samos Express.’ This would mean three days on Patmos; bad for my patience, but it couldn’t be helped. I couldn’t swim to Samos and I was meant to be travelling on water.

  ‘I’d like to book a passage for Wednesday,’ I said.

  ‘It is not allowed to reserve today. The harbour authorities are very strict. Perhaps the ship will be too full.’

  ‘That’s why I want to book now.’

  ‘Sorry. The authorities will not allow it. Come Wednesday at eleven o’clock.’

  At least I had the perfect place to stay. The Greek landlady who had temporarily adopted me at midnight had led me up some steps to the first floor of her white house with blue shutters, through a small hallway, through another door and into a large room with a high beamed ceiling. It had two big old-fashioned wooden beds, a scrubbed wooden floor and white walls. A framed studio photograph of a young man in naval uniform on a chest of drawers matched another of a young soldier with much the same cast of features. They had been taken a long time ago; the uniforms were of the Second World War. ‘Adelphoi?’ – I wasn’t sure how close that was to ‘brothers’ or to the Greek pronunciation. Close enough, evidently: the old woman nodded and smiled at me.

  She showed me a bathroom at the top of the stairs and a notice behind the door that said, ‘350 drachmas a day. To include water and soap.’ Just over four pounds. It was my turn to nod and smile at her.