There are things in this place that I cannot grasp. Like the water, the air, and the sand that falls between the gaps in my fingers, I cannot hold them all in my palm for long enough to know how they have lived. Where they have been. What they have seen. Who they have touched.
But those brief moments before they escape, those thin snapshots in time have carved their shapes into me. The droplets and grains left behind form the blemishes on my skin – memories of weekend visits, stories passed on tongue, late nights sprawled over newspaper trimmings.
~
My very first recollections are coated in salt. I weave my fingers through the necklace weeds and place my palms flat, softly, on the algae painted on the rocks, as if the air we exchange can only travel between us if it can drink directly from my veins. The water is lukewarm in the sun, and I wish for nothing more than to shrivel up into a tiny shell and take my place among the black beads submerged inside. When I drag my heel over an oyster, the blood gushes out and turns the little pool incarnadine. I weep, shoulders shaking, crying for Yiayia.
At home, Yiayia spoils me with a tough, Mediterranean sort of love. First, there is a stern look, a click of the tongue, and a sigh. How do you always get yourself into this kind of thing, Iosefini-morí? But then I am on her lap, and she is dabbing my foot with honeyed cotton, telling me about her childhood in Mitilini. She recalls the origins of her own cuts and scrapes, showing me the scars on her legs, guiding my fingers along them.
This one from when I stepped on a bottle. This one from rollerblading. This one from my father. This one from the cat.
The sun is setting over the headlands, narrowing my shadow where I sit. My legs swing over the kitchen bench. I watch as the dangling silhouettes of my sister and Yiayia join together, swaying gently to a dimotiki song I don’t recognise. They move awkwardly in time and I feel the giggles swell up in my belly. As the minutes pass like this, the heavy smell of oiled lamb on a spit, Pappou’s speciality, permeates through the walls, turning giggles into grumbles and dimotiki into jazz. By the time we sit to eat, the sky has been wrapped in a thick black blanket and my pain is all but forgotten.
Poseidon adorns my beaches,
On my coast he quiets his roar
He bows his head to my tired cliffs
And serenades my sleeping shore.
The boulders on which you climb,
Hold sounds of my lovers before,
Whom I cherished with the heart of a human
And whose secrets I keep evermore.
~
I want to see The Flowers Ward, the name warm and delicious in my six-year-old cheeks. It is tired and aching and always the same, but I beg and I beg. Yiayia is kind, for she too, as a young girl freshly landed on the shore, wanted to explore and to know.
We move into the rooms, arm in arm as the light becomes dimmer. There is a thin skin of dust that engulfs the hospital organs, preserving every fingerprint in the windowpanes and chairs. Injured things supporting injured people, the soldiers returned from war, and the nurses who took care of them.
The Sanatorium stands a little further East and the floorboards croak underfoot, as if the hallways are its limbs, stretching out after a long winter slumber. Here, however, the scratches are on the walls, where the wallpaper is torn up in lightning bolt shapes, giving glimpses of lost stories about lost minds. Every so often, my grandparents would have dinner with policemen from further North, great bulking rectangles of men, who I discovered became friends of the family during the weekly discovery of patients who had taken their own lives on the cliffs. Even now, everyone lowers their voices and heads to speak about it. Their stories are quiet now.
And the Catholic Cathedral where the dead once were mourned, is now a haven for the living. Black has become white, with brides and babies colonising the church and its photogenic quality. In and out of Little Bay, every tear is celebrated. Only the cemetery remembers the secrets of the dead, gravestones whispering their names under moss and vine. Bursts of blushing valerians form constellations across the landscape, their life masking the scent of death. I wait for the moment Yiayia’s eyes close in a private prayer, and then pluck one out with chubby fingers, my cheeks matching the hue. I will take it home and keep it beside my bed, even after it has begun to wither and lose its flush.
Kronus passes through my gardens,
Ripening the clay fruit that has grown.
My skins of white and yellow brick
Become brown as the day becomes known,
And for every mortal passing through
It’s impossible to be or feel alone,
For all the passers that came before
Speak their gospels under my stone.
~
Pappou is a silent carer, not comfortable enough in his English to make up for what I lack in Greek. He confesses his love instead in trips, hugs, expensive cheeses, and my first sip of wine at eleven years old. Eager to impress, I keep it in my mouth for three or four seconds, before spitting it all out onto the picnic blanket, eyes watery and scrunched up in disgust. But when Pappou laughs, that rare, rumbling laugh, it is all worth it, and the bitter, red aftertaste becomes sweet on my tongue.
It is now that Pappou gifts it to me; a ruby of a story, stringing the broken language together with oddly accentuated Greek alternatives, accompanied by charade-like gestures. I think he talks about his mother, and maybe his sister, and maybe his house back in Kalamata. Something sombre emerges from behind his eyes the longer he speaks, the cold Aegean blue I always wish I inherited. I hold his hand and purse my lips tightly, a tug on my heartstrings pulling my chin downwards only slightly when he asks me how do you say it? and I do not know what he wants to say.
Eating cheese and dolmades on the grass outside, we can see the heads of the Yarra community bobbing in windows and doors. My vision sways, oscillating between their long legs and arms, hanging clothes in the sun, and the leathery tan on my Pappou’s face stretched into a grin. I copy him, gap toothed and chattering, and we receive waving in return. I follow their movements through their home and long to know their names. Their darkness is deeper and less yellow than ours, but their histories are obscured just the same. This much I do understand.
Dionysus makes himself comfortable
Feasting on each fertile hill
And he gives his blessing on the house
Where no one but time can stand still.
As you raise your glasses up to my sky,
Making sure you get your fill,
I hear you; I rain, I will colour your glass red,
Pour the wine you’re waiting to spill.
~
In my later years, I have come to appreciate the bay more than I was ever able to before. Shoulders caught in a white linen shirt, I walk beside Yiayia through the shallow waters on the coast, sun low and footsteps heavy. Over the waves we can hear yelling in the distance, a bird call, and, very faintly, a piano. I look to Yiayia as we amble down, almost anticipating a tear or a look of longing for her hometown, but when I meet her gaze, her face is beaming back at me.
Her teeth are a little crooked, yellow, and broken in places, but her joy is contagious, and my own cheeks lift uncontrollably at the sight. She is so beautiful, here by the water, with the cadmium sun sinking into her spots and lines like silken embroidery, her complexion a tapestry telling of a time gone by. We stand still and say nothing, but in the silence echoes a thousand conversations.
When we do speak, she calls the bay her Ithaca, as if she were always destined to end up here. Now, as the same waves that have lapped at the shores of Mitilini flow between the headlands like liquid gold, I can feel my memories rising to the surface. Foaming white and kissing our ankles, the spectral histories that have been buried in the sand merge with the present. Each grain of sand carries its own detail. Salt. Blood. War. Death. Wine. Love. Life.
The ocean watches us and we watch back, a silent exchange passing between the three of us that acknowledges each of these things. This is where I stand now, having witnessed so many stories here and having missed many more. But in this moment, as the breeze grazes against my skin and my toes are buried in sun-toasted sand, I can see with a new clarity, and I have never been more sure of anything, and that I do not need to know it all.
Hestia calls from over the water
Each time we are pulled apart,
She weeps as she sings for your homecoming,
Hoping that you might hear her art.
And I am setting her hearth for you,
I know that bitter chorus by heart,
Waiting for you to return back to me
And then, even in death, we’ll not part.
~