The Greek in me - Page 5
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 6: Our Global Face
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Tony Maniaty
TWO WEEKS AGO, I RECEIVED A CALL ON MY MOBILE. A colleague, pushing a four-wheel-drive Toyota across the Kimberley; headed for an indigenous arts festival. "Do you know the ABC is playing Smyrna on Radio National? Alex Dimitriades is reading it every day." She's churning up Outback dust and listening to the words I wrote about George and displacement 15 years ago. On the ABC, where I started work 37 years before. They sound like, and are, words from another century.
I'm writing secretly, in my head: "Now I must finish my lunch and coffee and gather more bits and pieces for my nest of words." But I am not a writer, he told himself. I am a reporter. I deal in undeniable facts. And high overhead, I look up and see a jet streaking miles above the city of learning. A golden dome was built here by the gods, a library of truths. And now the twin white jet trails appear to be splitting the dome above Athens in half.
And she's hearing this broadcast off a satellite and telling me by mobile phone, while embracing a culture that makes the Ancient Greeks look like newcomers. None of this seems out of place. It's 2004. Even Greece has joined the digitally-enhanced world. I look outside, see my boys chasing each other around the yard. Their mother has Latvian blood on her mother's side and Irish-Australian on her father's. We've given them Greek names. One looks Balkan, with brown eyes and olive skin. The other is pure Baltic, blue eyes and blond. I've done a George, of course, marrying out to the edge.
"Thanks," I say. "I'll listen in."
After two episodes I stop listening. Instead, I pick up a pristine, slightly yellowing copy of the novel, written by Tony Maniaty, not the person I've since become, and read it for the first time in 15 years.
The beauty of this place isn't really mine, he thought. Whatever's shaped me so far can be traced to another land, and not Greece. Rough and stony too; but the windy exhilaration of Greece was replaced there by a silence. You could even hear it, standing and watching a thousand sheep in a clay pan. And every hundred miles or so in Australia was a deserted outpost, rocks gathered into walls, decayed by time, and falling down again in rough pyramids. Strange piles of rocks you came across, like totems. It was a horrific and engaging landscape that could quickly kill you. People were drowned or burned alive, despite heroic attempts to save them; they went out walking and never came back. Floods and fires: sheep were roasted on the spot.
When things got rough in Australia, it was like something out of Dante's hell. All roads led nowhere, only further and further out, under a paper-thin sky.
I receive a parcel in the mail. A copy of Smryna, but not quite the one I wrote. It's a Greek translation. I flip through the crisp pages, seeing in the text the occasional word I know, but the rest is meaningless. It's all in here, of course, George's story and my efforts to untangle it, but locked inside that language I still can't read or understand. For a moment I laugh.
What if it becomes a bestseller in Greece? They'll fly me over to speak to the media. So I'll be Tony Maniaty – not Andonis Maniatis – speaking to the Greeks, in English, which someone will translate back into Greek, about a novel I wrote about Greece, in English, which someone has translated into Greek, which I can't read because it's not in the English I wrote it in.
All the time my head is like this. Bound, unbound. Learning.
NOW I'M BACK IN BRISBANE, VISITING GEORGE AND PHOEBE. For a man with a broken past, George has managed to assemble quite a present: he's nearly 85, still has his wits, drives his old car, reads a book a day, toils in his garden, still watches everything on television. Phoebe, frail now, is still observing his every move, wise to his Greekness yet as mystified about George as she was 60 years ago; sharing his longevity.
"Hey, Tony," he calls, "see how well Greece is doing in the Olympics?"
"I haven't been watching, Dad. Too busy. Tell me, they doing all right?"
He beams. "Best thing for bloody Greece that ever happened!"
I sip my wine, watching pumped-up colour. More winners, more medals. What if they decided to show only the last placegetters? That would really interest me. Maybe I'm tired. Maybe cynicism has finally got me. Maybe I'm sick of Greece. Maybe Greece is sick of me. Maybe it's finally over.
With or without a village, George is a Greek at heart. No lack of official papers can dent that Greekness. George hasn't changed one iota.
What's changed is the Greek in me. ♦