Reaching Mithymna by Steven Heighton

Author:Steven Heighton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Biblioasis
Published: 2020-08-21T03:28:53+00:00

By means of the sea

Efthalou Beach, the morning watch. A dismal lid of cloud slides low overhead, north to south. The shale-dark sea is churning and fractious; among the whitecaps an ice floe or two would not look out of place.

I’ve built a fire using straw clawed out of a bogus life vest, splinters from the floorboard of a raft, and a (highly flammable) authentic life vest. Then a split of olive wood from the Housman atelier. Across the channel, against a backdrop of snow-powdered mountains, Turkish ships are prowling up and down the coast. Thousands are said to be sleeping rough over there, in olive groves or scrubby woods, waiting for a chance to cross over. I’m wearing a black wool scarf, wool toque, and several layers under my leather jacket. A few others are up at the atelier for tea and food.

On this third day of inactivity I’m trying to coax myself out of a deepening ennui of inertia. Part of the job, I tell myself, is simply being here at my post in case something does happen. They also serve who only stand and wait, etcetera.

This morning when I arrived at the atelier, a few volunteers, bustling and bright-eyed, were tearing through the wetsuits racked outside the storehouse, trying to find their size. Delilah, a tall and volubly confident dramaturge from Chicago, announced that they would be leaving on the 9 a.m. ferry with a Norwegian outfit called Drapen i Havet (Drop in the Ocean). Refugees were now arriving on Xios, an island to the south, and the situation was urgent. Gripping the loose pelt of a wetsuit she ducked into a washroom the size of a phone booth and burst out transformed: an action figure, an aquatic superheroine. Her excitement, her impetuous storm-chasing, might have struck me as indecent and flighty, but in fact I felt envious and for some moments considered finding a wetsuit and shipping out for Xios myself.

Hunched on the beach with my back to the wind, I open my notebook, wishing for fingerless gloves. Eastward I can make out the first of the lookout posts between here and Skala: the flickering of fire on a high sea-cliff. Signal fires, lookout towers—the logistical means here are decidedly analogue. In 1922–23, when my distant relations along with a million other Asian Greeks fled across these straits, they too would have steered toward fires on these beaches and cliffs. (So too, perhaps, the fugitive survivors of Troy, millennia away in time but just thirty miles north up the Asian coast.)

I’m thinking of the ’22 crossings because as I sit—face braising, back freezing—I’m trying to read and translate a prose passage by the Greek poet Kostas Karyotakis. In the mid-1920s Karyotakis was working, miserably, as a legal clerk in Preveza, a small city in western Greece. One of his duties was registering refugees from Asia Minor, mainly Greek but also Armenian, and seeing that they were housed in “temporary” camps.

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