A boat called Brotherly Love
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 6: Our Global Face
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Arnold Zable
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On the day they launched Brotherly Love, the whole village accompanied them on the long descent to the bay. At the head of the procession, a step ahead of his two sons, walked Andonis. Behind them swayed Brotherly Love, balanced on a horse drawn cart. Roosters crowed, donkeys bleated, goats watched from the mountain sides, a band of children tagged along, and villagers waved from the balconies of homes that lined the way.
The brothers had built the boat in the katoi, the cellar beneath the patriarchal house. Manoli was 17 years old, Andreas 15. They cut the cypress on full-moon nights, for this, according to their mentors, was when the sap was most alive. They watched the boat builders of Vathy and Lefkada, and returned to the katoi to emulate what they had seen.
They sawed and planed the logs into submission, and laid the keel, six metres in length, for they harboured visions of freighting cargo to distant ports. They carved the ribs and beams with tools that had been used by generations past. They crafted the masts from cypress beams and cut the sails from handwoven cloth. They clad the hull and deck with planks of pine and caulked the gaps between them. And when the work was done, as if awakening from a dream, they saw that the boat was wider than the entrance to the katoi.
The men of the village laughed at their folly. The boys gritted their teeth and cut the entrance until it was wide enough to release their prize. So it was a caesarean birth that enabled the boat to emerge into the light of day; and it was the priest who christened it Brotherly Love, for he had observed the close bond between the two boys and the ease with which they worked together.
The brothers were inseparable. While the villagers tended their vines and olive groves and went about their daily work, the two boys hovered on the periphery, among the cypresses or on the rock-strewn heights, locked in conversation.
"What are they talking about?" the villagers asked.
"What schemes are they hatching?"
"How can two boys have so much to say to each other?"
"How can brothers remain so close?"
THE YEAR WAS 1930. THE MEN OF THE ISLAND WERE DISAPPEARING, lured by tales of riches in distant lands. They dreamt of returning to their impoverished villages, their trunks laden with spoils. As it turned out, many did not return and many disappeared without trace.
But Andonis had returned, at long last, from the great Southern Land. He reappeared suddenly, six months earlier, as if cast back onto dry land by the same sea that had claimed him one long decade before. He unloaded trunks crowded with books: encyclopedias of animal husbandry, dictionaries of medicine, illustrated discourses on the maritime arts, a seven-year collection of National Geographic, navigators' manuals charting the currents of the seven oceans and the memoirs of mariners recounting epic journeys long past.
"These volumes are worth more than gold," he declared, as he ran his fingers lovingly over the pages. "Just to smell them is an education." He studied them late at night at the living-room table under the light of oil-fuelled wicks, while his boys lay asleep in the next room, content, at long last, now that their patera had finally returned.
But he had grown remote. His hair was a thinning white. His ample moustache bristled with age and his eyebrows had knitted into the permanent frown of a preoccupied man. He walked the village paths with an abstract air. There were secrets he withheld, so it seemed; and knowledge that had been gained at the expense of lonely nights in bare-boned rooms in the boarding houses of far-flung lands.
Within months of his return he became the most sought-after man in the village. Whenever a problem arose, medical, domestic or maritime, it was Andonis who was consulted. He, in turn, would consult his precious books, and from them he drew remedies for common ailments, plans for more effective cisterns, designs for better goat houses and diagrams pinpointing the location of ancient dwellings buried deep in the earth. He became part physician, part counsellor, part master mariner and world-weary sage.
Or was he merely a dilettante? This is what plagued him. This is why a frown remained permanently creased upon his brow. He saw himself as a fraud. He lay awake for hours, tormented by the thought that he had, after all, wasted his life. He had never fully applied himself; he had abandoned too many ventures on the verge of success. He had become a shadow of his youthful self, and his sons had been raised in his absence. And this pained him. He saw how free-spirited they had grown, except when they were in his presence. He saw that instead of love, he seemed to inspire in them a wariness. They kept their distance. Or regarded him, at best, with grudging respect.
Nevertheless, he walked proudly at the head of the procession that autumn morning. The path curved beneath the Marmakas range. Or, it seemed, the ranges curved above the path, so that at one point they rose behind them, and at another, reappeared in front. This is how it is on the island. Mountain, valley and sea stand in close proximity, so that by the time the procession unwound itself on the cusp of the bay, the hills were behind them and all that could be seen was the waterfront and the caiques that lined the quay.
The crowd toasted the fledgling seamen, the priest raised his arms in blessing and Brotherly Love was away, accompanied by a fleet of caiques. Andonis watched until the boat was out of sight; and at that moment he knew that his sons would forsake him, as he had forsaken them. The sea coursed through their veins. Thalassa. Thalassa, it whispered. This was their ancestral calling. Thalassa. Thalassa, it hummed. This was their siren's song. Thalassa. Thalassa, it demanded, for this was their reality, and their living myth, inscribed in the verses of blind Homer and embedded in the tales of seamen long past. This was, after all, Ithaca, the island of seamen and absences, home to wayfarers and abandoned wives.
Andonis was an Ithacan, skilled in the arts of the sea, a stoic, able to ride out any storm. And able now to conceal his feelings as he turned, proud in bearing in his wide-lapelled jacket and matching trousers, and trudged back to the white stone house in the Village of the Forty Saints.
As for the boys, their journeying had just begun. The boat had been blessed and launched. They had been let loose upon the sea. At that moment, as they moved beyond the causeway, they knew why they had laboured so hard to make the boat. And they knew why they were making the journey, and why it was to be the first of many. It was the moment of both their liberation and imprisonment. They were now condemned to live for such moments: of casting off and moving out. They were cursed with a craving for departures and arrivals, for the sight of islands receding, of horizons beckoning. It was an affliction, a form of madness. Or, as the older brother came to call it in his ageing, an incurable addiction.
IT WAS THE NIGHT-SEA THAT SEALED THE BROTHERS' ADDICTION. At night they could sense a solitude that would outlive them. From this solitude there drifted sounds not known by day: the sigh of driftwood, the groan of pressured beams, the whispered dialects of lapping waters, the murmur of restrained talk.
The brothers would court this solitude. They would leave the house at night and set out for the bay. They walked the familiar route, beyond the last shadows of the village, past the cottage that housed the olive press, past silent donkeys asleep on their feet and homes that stood like petrified ghosts on the lower slopes.
They knew each cypress on the way. The cypress was a tree of the night, a reflector of the phases of the moon. They knew each occupant of each village home, and envisioned them stirring in their sleep. They approached the outskirts of a hamlet and looked up at the emptied balconies that cast forlorn shadows over their path. The ground resounded with the crunch of their boots. The final windmill, perched on an outcrop of rock, pointed the way, and just beyond it, past one last gauntlet of silent homes, the road petered out at the bay.
The boat awaited them like a faithful mule straining at its ropes. Manoli and Andreas loaded their supplies and readied the nets. They untied the ropes, lifted anchor, cast off and moved out past the breakwater onto the open sea. As soon as the winds allowed it, they cut the engine and hoisted sail. They drifted with the prevailing winds. At the fishing grounds, they dropped anchor and laid the nets. The contours of the island remained within sight. The Marmakas pierced the skies with the black outlines of their serrated peaks.
As the nets settled, Manoli and Andreas lay back, flat on the boards, their heads tilted against their arms, and looked up at a whirling sky. Just the bare planks separated them from the water. Take away those planks and all that remained was sea and sky, and two brothers in between. Here and there they glimpsed the lamps of other caiques bobbing in the darkness. The boats were joined together as if in a circular dance. They drifted towards manhood in silence. To talk now was a desecration, a scar upon the night.
The brothers returned before dawn. They left the nets to dry and set out with their catch on the path back home. As they ascended, the sea ascended with them. They retained its presence in their skin and clothes. The air around them smelt faintly of smoke, the residue of discarded olive branches fired in the heat of day. The mountains remained cast in black against an eastern sky. Solitary windmills stood mute upon the heights.
It was their unspoken secret, this love of the night, of movement through the dark. It was their joint venture, a passion that bound them together and sealed their fate. They loved both the casting off and the return, the sight of the village receding and reappearing hours later still covered in night. And decades later, when out at sea, alone, at opposite ends of the earth, each brother would feel the absence of his silent partner as acutely as a missing limb.