The Fig Tree (10 page)

But Alexander is not so taken with the view as by the telecommunications tower that rises five minutes' walk from the chapel. In his eyes it is a miraculous giant standing astride the mountain's peak. He gazes at the pylons, the antennae and satellite dishes, and imagines messages humming between the isles.

In the evening we gather in the kitchen of the
patriko
and talk of the day's walk. Grand-aunt Georghia fills in the details about journeys between Ithaca and lands of migration. So many men left for new lives in countries scattered about the globe. Others returned many years later, and seemed like strangers to their own families. Her own father had left for Melbourne at the turn of the century. He sailed back in 1912 to fight for his native country in the Balkan wars. When he was wounded he retreated to Ithaca, and married a village girl.

Georghia was the first-born child. Within a year her father had left for Australia again. He returned to Ithaca a decade later and stayed long enough for a second daughter to be conceived and born. Again he made his way to the great southern land. The island was too poor for him to make a living, he claimed.

When World War II broke out, he decided it was time to return. He sent a letter informing his family of his plans. Soon after another letter was sent by a close friend. Georghia's father was dead, in Melbourne, of a sudden heart attack. He was fifty-six years old. Because of delays in the mail, the letters arrived in the village at the same time. ‘I don't know which letter my mother read first,' says Georghia with a chuckle, and not the slightest sign of regret.

And what of the women who stayed behind? To understand the women, we must come to know the rock-strewn terrain. To know the women of the island, we must know the mountain. It looms above the village, black against the pre-dawn light.

It was then that they would awake, and stir about the house. At least, this is how I have conceived it from our rambling conversations with Georghia. They assembled their ground sheets, picking tools, flagons of wine, jars of olives, tomatoes, goats' cheese, and the bread they had baked the night before. They harnessed the donkeys, bent their backs and, with their children in tow, began the steep ascent.

Georghia was a child at the time, but old enough to carry a heavy load. The path curved by the cliffs of Afales Bay. Just two kilometres of sea separate Ithaca from Lefkada, a neighbouring isle. In the darkness the flickering pinpoints of light plotted the course of other villagers across the strait, on their dawn treks.

Georghia was still young enough to imagine and dream. She envisaged parallel treks throughout the islands, like mirror-image companions, divided by strips of sea. She pictured processions of ants, scrambling to their groves and fields in search of livelihood and sustenance, and the rhythm that would sustain them.

It was on the mountain that they found that rhythm. They walked with measured steps. They walked to the beat of their laboured breath. They walked beyond the final house of the village, flanked by sea and cliff. They climbed the stony path until it crested, by Thanio's mill. Its hand-woven sails lay dormant at this hour; its lime-washed walls radiated a phosphorous glow. It stood on the upper ridge, a silent sentinel awaiting the break of day.

Just beyond the mill they would pause, in a clearing before a church. By now the sun was beginning its ascent. It was on the crest of the hill, at certain times of the year, that the two processions would meet, the women and the ascending light, like lovers at a prearranged rendezvous.

This is when they fully awoke. And felt refreshed. It could not fail to touch even the weariest among them, this interplay of light and silence. They ate a hasty breakfast of bread and cheese soaked in oil, before resuming the journey towards the lee-side of the mountain.

The land was choked with stones and shrubs. Generations past had little choice but to reshape the mountains to their needs. They carved terraces into the slopes. They released the jagged terrain. On these artificial flats they planted olive and almond trees, crops of flax and wheat, low-slung vines and vegetable plots. The island breathed with the collective toil of ancestors.

The women descended step by measured step with the rising sun. Their voices rose, as if from a trance. They walked and talked until they parted company, and moved on to their family groves. They had no need of fences to mark the boundaries. They knew their trees as intimately as they knew their kin, and far better than their absentee spouses. When they reached their patch they paused for a sip of coffee, laid down the ground sheets, placed their wooden ladders against the tree, tied picking aprons around their waists, and set to work.

Georghia ascended into the upper branches. She secured the ladder by ropes to prevent it falling in the breeze. The others remained below, to pick up the olives as they fell onto the ground sheets, and to rake the fruit off the branches Georghia had pruned from the tree.

Their gaze was fixed upon the earth. And those who stood on the ladders had eyes only for the black jewels dangling from the twigs. But from time to time, in a fleeting glimpse, they saw a fishing boat at anchor, offshore, enclosed within the silver pleats of the sea. Or a passenger ship, en route from the west. And, for a moment, they thought of loved ones long gone, or imagined journeying themselves beyond this unforgiving terrain.

They were disturbing, these errant thoughts of absent spouses in unknown lands. They destroyed the rhythm of work. They were a waste of precious time. The women returned to the olives and to calculations about evening meals and dowries, village scandals, wayward goats. Each voice added to the growing chorus. The talk took hold, and the rhythm returned.

And this is how it is now, seven decades later, every morning, since the picking season began. We leave the house at dawn, and move over the village streets, sometimes on foot, or on the back of cousin Rigo's utility. We ascend the same paths that Georghia climbed as a girl. We pass the final house, which stands several hundred metres beyond the village. We move onto the unpaved road that overlooks Afales Bay, and come to a halt at the family grove.

Even though the task is not as urgent as it once was, the work remains harsh. The face is turned to the earth, away from the sea, and again the eyes are focused on the black fruit that glint in the autumn sun. We pick from ladders, or on the ground, from branches that Rigo, armed with a chainsaw, has cut down in advance. And there are exhilarating moments. There is the daily sight of crimson shadows lifting from the sea, the bleating of newborn kids, the glide of a watchful hawk. There is the midday meal of hollowed-out bread filled with onions, feta cheese, and tomatoes soaked in olive oil.

And there is Alexander. He joins us mid-morning, every day. He runs amok among the discarded olive branches. He jumps on aunt Georghia, the old workhorse, when she sits down for a cigarette and a moment of respite.

‘There are too many rocks here, they are making my feet sore,' he complains on the first day. ‘We should collect all the rocks of Ithaca, and throw them into Melbourne,' he says on the second. By the end of the week he is moving with greater ease. He darts off to play in the stone goat-house that stands on the edge of the grove. The goat-house is an extension of the rocks; and the goats are stones in motion. Alexander hides in the shadows and charges out with his fingers pointing from his temples in lieu of horns.

With each passing day the land reveals something more of itself. It takes time to absorb the details, to see the order emerging out of apparent chaos. It takes time to come to know, through the daily encounter with the one particular grove, the subtle variations, the individual shapes of each tree.

A well-tended olive tree radiates power and tenacity. It grips the soil with gnarled roots, and holds fast to the steepest of inclines. These are the sentinels of the mountains. For centuries on end, the same tree can yield its black harvest. Its spent branches are recycled as winter fuel, the leaves become fodder for the goats, while the pruned branches are burnt and their nutrients released back into the earth.

Georghia knows each tree in the grove. There are ancient giants, first nurtured by remote forebears, and ‘young' trees, merely seventy years old, planted by her late husband, Uncle Dimitri, Athanassios's older brother. And in planting them he created the possibility that descendants, such as his niece Dora from distant Australia, would one day return to pick the fruit of his foresight.

But the picking seasons are coming to an end, says Georghia. She walks the grove and sighs. She knows the families who once lived in the ruins that litter the way. She points to the house being restored by the icon painter from Athens, and the boarded-up home now owned by an English traveller.

Georghia is the keeper of village tales. All is
eramia
, she says. Desolation. Our children are leaving. There is no work on the island. They return only in the summer. Many of the olives have been abandoned and left to run wild. Each year their fruit shrinks further. Each year another tree becomes barren through neglect.

To know the women of the village, come to the kitchen window of the
patriko
. Observe the two-storey house on the opposite side of the road. The house exudes warmth since it faces the rising sun. It is a well-kept home. The shutters are newly painted, the garden trimmed, the balcony recently washed. White ceramic vases line the fence. And every morning, throughout the picking season, Mena, our neighbour, leaves for work.

She carries a ground sheet, a bucket, a chainsaw, picking combs, pruning saws, and an apron woven upon her own loom decades ago. She is fierce in her aloneness. And determined. She walks with sure-footed steps over the uneven ground. Her skin is the colour of ripe olives. She exudes a quiet certainty. Her husband, the village postman, died just months ago. Her grownup children have moved to Athens. She has had her share of ups and downs, but she is far from broken.

Mena disappears from sight and we see her again, hours later, as we return from the groves. She is on her ladder, still picking, alone. She has filled a dozen hessian sacks with the fruit. One magnificent tree, centuries old, is fully shorn. Soon she will gather her tools and make her way back home. With black eyes, and clad in widow's black, she hauls sacks of black olives against a darkening sky.

Mena is fully at one with the Ithacan earth. Yet, with a mere change of clothes, she would not be out of place in the middle-class homes of the city. She is an avid reader, a lover of literature, a refined presence. We have seen her, Dora and I, in the Athenian flat where her daughters now live. There was not enough work, or company, to keep them here in the village.

At night Mena brings us her latest batch of halvah. She talks with Alexander about the stray kittens that they jointly care for. They shelter in a cracked ceramic vase that stands against the front wall of Mena's house. In her presence Alexander feels secure. She is self-possessed, and strong, yet still able to nurture with love.

To know the women of the village, listen now. It is siesta time. The wind hisses. The shutters rattle. And grand-aunt Agelo walks the same unhurried steps, regardless. She makes her way to the
katoi
, the large cellar beneath our room, the underbelly of the house.

She unlocks the wooden entrance, uncovers the loom, sits herself upon the wicker chair, and continues where she has left off. She threads the yarn, adjusts the loom, and sets to work. She weaves bedspreads, towels, kerchiefs and tablecloths. We can hear the weave and weft from our room. It lulls Alexander to sleep.

The moments become hours, become weeks, become years. The storms erupt and recede. The seasons turn and return. And still she weaves. The menfolk have come and gone, lured by dreams of great riches. The children have grown up, and have their own offspring. Agelo is on the eve of her seventy-fifth winter, and still she weaves.

She is beyond hope, beyond expectation; a moon-faced
nonna
whose stout legs convey her through the familiar streets of the village. She can walk them blindfold: from the house to the all-purpose store, from the store to the olive grove, from the grove back home to prepare the midday meal. She rocks the cradles of grandchildren, knits their sweaters, milks goats, fries her son's latest catch of fish, listens to domestic squabbles with a detached ear, returns to the
katoi
. And weaves.

Always the same rhythmic pace, the same bemused smile, the same paths that stray only as far as the mountain slopes to round up the animals, to collect herbs and wild
horta
, mushrooms and berries. She carries them back to the house she has lived in since the day she arrived as a bride from the adjoining island to be married to a man many years older, a member of the Varvarigos clan. Now she is clad in widow's black. As too is aunt Georghia. They are bosom friends; two rotund widows living out their years in the village.

Alexander was overwhelmed by their appearance when he first met them. We had arrived in the main port of Vathi just hours before. We ascended from the boat by taxi, towards the mountainous north. For thirty minutes we drove on the cliff-side road. The island of Kefalonia rose like a giant over the narrow straits. We drove through the village of Lefki, and curved around the final sweep into Stavros as the sun dipped into the sea. This is the demarcation point, where the north truly begins. We drove the final stretch in silence and arrived in the village on the cusp of night.

As the taxi pulled up they were there to greet us, Georghia and Agelo, Alexander's two remaining great-aunts. They stood side by side, dressed in black upon black, from head kerchief to worn shoes. They opened out their arms, stretched them towards Alexander, and shrieked, in unison, ‘
Agapimou
! My love.'

‘No
agapimou
,' Alexander replied.

And ran away, in tears, from the black witches. But they knew the ways of children well. They let him be. And within half an hour they had him in their arms, their great-nephew, the latest born, the most recent addition to a world-strewn clan.