The Fig Tree by Arnold Zable

Author:Arnold Zable
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: FIC000000, BIO000000, FIC029000
ISBN: 9781921799464
Publisher: The Text Publishing Company
Published: 2004-09-06T04:00:00+00:00

The women are the keepers of the cemetery grounds. It is the women who light the oil lamps and tend the graves; the women who clear away the weeds, polish the marble, dust the headstones and place offerings upon the tombs.

The village graveyard stands on the peak of a hill beside the church of Taxiarchis. Georghia bends over, lost in her task. We carry stones to the Varvarigos grave and clean the surrounds. Alexander runs about like a goat. He dodges between the firs and cypress. It is all a game. Suddenly he stops. ‘What happens when someone dies?’ he asks. ‘Where does he go?’ And in answer to his own question he says, ‘He goes to nature. And comes back, new again.’

On a nearby grave we see the name of aunt Mantina who had been one of Dora’s mother’s closest Melbourne friends. Born in the village of Ayia Saranta, she had emigrated to Australia where she raised a family of five children. In her later years she would return to Athens to visit the daughter who had settled there. And she would take the ferry to Ithaca to spend time back in her village home.

She insisted on one last journey, even though the doctors had advised her against it. She arrived in Athens, met her daughter at the airport, was driven home, complained of not feeling well. She climbed upstairs, lay down for a rest. And passed away. Her body was ferried back to Ithaca to be laid to rest in the village of her birth.

Dora’s father, Athanassios, could return in name only. It is inscribed on the family tomb, beneath the name of his father, Yanni. Buried here too are Dora, the sister who died in childhood; and Athanassios’s mother, Sevasti, whose sudden death would always haunt him. We see the name of Dimitri, the brother who had remained. We last saw him on Ithaca in 1990. He died two years ago.

Athanassios and Dimitri, brothers who once sailed the Ionian Sea. One left, the other stayed. They lived much of their lives apart. Dimitri, who stayed, endured war and Nazi occupation. He joined the resistance and ferried partisans on dangerous missions in the dead of night. At war’s end, he lived through civil war, fratricidal disputes. Still, he sailed his boats, until he was forced to move to Athens to look after his sister who had fallen on hard times.

Yet he endured, and lived a longer and more contented life than the restless brother who left for more distant shores. Even when based in Athens Dimitri could return every year to Ithaca. He was within distance. He stayed in touch. He ventured back out into the Ionian Sea. Maybe this is why he survived. These are the enigmas, the subtleties of the immigrants’ song. And these are the mysteries we reflect upon, as we polish the ancestral grave.

Perhaps we should inscribe an epitaph. ‘Here lie two Ionian seamen who built a boat called Brotherly Love. They sailed the waters that stretch before us.

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