Crumbling Moon

By J.D. Frodsham

Hector Terries, Distinguished Professor of History and a world famous, if controversial, figure in his field, arrives in Athens from Australia in 1985 hoping to discover what had happened to his former fiance, Alathea, who had inexplicably disappeared without a trace from the city twenty-four years earlier. Though a convinced rationalist and materialist, he comes to feel that he is being haunted by the ghost of the missing woman, whose phantom he encounters on several occasions. Researching Alatheas disappearance, Hector becomes unwittingly involved in terrorist violence, official corruption, multiple murders, and romantic entanglements, as well as highly disquieting psychic phenomena, eventually uncovering hidden truths so devastating that his hitherto dogmatic scientism is shaken, leaving him transformed by the experience. He finally realises that though his misfortunes seem to stem from the chaotic and vicious era in which he is living, he has in fact been condemned from birth to play a fated role in a contemporary Greek tragedy, with its roots stretching back into a far-distant past.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse UK
• Release date: Apr 17, 2014
• ISBN: 9781496976789

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© 2014 J.D. Frodsham. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 04/15/2014

ISBN: 978-1-4969-7676-5 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4969-7677-2 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4969-7678-9 (e)

Library of Congress Congrol Number: 2014906404

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Cover by permission of the photographer, Egisto Sani, featuring the dying Trojan King, Laomedon, wounded by Herakles’ arrow. Originally located on the East pediment of the Temple of Aphaia on Aegina, Greece.

The right of J.D. Frodsham to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyrights, Design and Patents Act, 1988

All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

CONTENTS

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CHAPTER I

CHAPTER II

CHAPTER III

CHAPTER IV

CHAPTER V

CHAPTER VI

CHAPTER VII

CHAPTER VIII

CHAPTER IX

CHAPTER X

CHAPTER XI

CHAPTER XII

CHAPTER XIII

CHAPTER XIV

CHAPTER XV

CHAPTER XVI

CHAPTER XVII

CHAPTER XVIII

NOTES

To my family,

Choo, Julia, Rafe, Gabriel, Jonathan,

Prema, Lila and Spwkiepusskat.

And after that, the crumbling of the moon;

The soul, remembering its loneliness,

Shudders in many cradles; all is changed…

(W.B. Yeats, The Phases of the Moon)

For they have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind.

(Hosea 8.7)

CHAPTER I

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Non servata fides cineri promessa Sychaeao.

(Aeneid IV, 451)

In a way, I murdered Alathea. To requite me, she pursued me as the Furies did the blood-boltered Orestes until I became the Oedipus I am today. Allow me to explain. The above quotation from Virgil’s Aeneid is spoken by Dido, Queen of Carthage, just before she immolates herself on her funeral pyre. I have been unfaithful to the promise I made to the ashes of Sychaeus, he being her late husband. A little later, she is ashes herself. Now I was unfaithful both to the living Alathea and to her ashes, and also responsible for reducing to ashes about a dozen others, but the analogy ends there. Dido is enacting a melodrama, a sonorous, declamatory Roman epic meant for the ears of a newly installed Emperor, and intent on instilling patriotic virtues into its readers, whereas I was sucked into the vortex of an ancient Greek tragedy, a metaphysical Void cathartically evoking not just Aristotelian pity and terror, with the latter predominating, but also a glimpse into the way the universe is ordered which has left me permanently traumatized. Greek tragedies spring from Greek religion. The Greeks could not have been comforted by their religion, for the ultimate truth revealed by all religions is hideous, black and terrifying. Hence the ‘dark night of the soul’ known to the saints. The rest of us, luckily, are not saints, and can go pretending that life is beautiful, even when the grinning skull stares in on our banquet. Alathea, however, was in my present opinion quite close to sainthood, and hence fully aware of what the rest of us are too stupid or too cowardly to confront. As she once remarked to me about Buddhism, What it reveals is so ghastly, it just has to be true. Typically, she went on to embrace it; I went out for a beer.

When I say I murdered her, this is not to imply that I did anything as crude as actually dispatch my lover with an Orestean sword or a modern firearm. Nor did she resort to pestering me later with wailing and chain-rattling, prowling the stairs and corridors of my country house like some ghostly White Lady of Raynham Hall, and making a psychic nuisance of herself. This is a Greek story, not a Gothic tale. Perhaps that explains why Alathea—I refuse to call her by any other name—didn’t haunt me openly in Cambridge, where it all started, but waited until I revisited our old haunt, Athens (do forgive the pun), twenty-four years after she disappeared from there. Were we such a stuffy crowd, that even our ghosts were too well bred to flaunt themselves at home? Not the done thing and all that, as my generation used to say, Damned bad form! Now we’d say we had more hang-ups than you could poke a fucking stick at. Such vulgarisms reign supreme today, amid this general coarsening of society, where the hoi polloi has come to power. "Odi profanum vulgus . . ."¹ Not a PC tag, I’m afraid; but then for me that brainless acronym still stands for parsec, or 3.26 light years, roughly the astronomical gulf between the human race and reality.

Writing this, I am confronting another ghost—that of my dead self. Though none too keen on the man I am now, at least I’m no longer the academic dweeb I used to be—an expression I learnt from poor Cassandra, with her street-wise vocabulary. I suppose one could say I sacrificed her too, as I did Alathea, through crass stupidity and thoughtlessness. And I am still tormented by dreams of hapless Chloe, her beautiful, broken body contorting and blackening as it writhed in the flames. That brings the count to three, to say nothing of my four friends, whom I might have saved had I been quicker. One might say I was instrumental in slaying all seven of them. I do not count the others, for I killed them in self-defence.

When that phantom came floating towards me that unforgettable night in Aegina, over two decades ago, gliding just above the polished floor; hair, face, body and robe all modelled from the same deathly-white ectoplasm, I felt like an ancient Athenian watching a tragedy by Aeschylus. Strangely, I cannot recall feeling afraid, though that would have been an understandable reaction, perhaps because since I had not feared her in life I could not fear her in death. So I was overcome, not with cathartic pity and terror, but rather with pity and horror, along with a sickening sense of irreparable loss and grief. Disconcertingly, her eyes had retained their lustrous emerald green, shining terrifyingly from that otherwise colourless death mask. I remembered only too well how during our lovemaking she would roll her eyeballs upwards in ecstasy, until only the whites were showing, scream, and rake my back with her painted nails. Her phantom hands were so meticulously sculpted that I could clearly discern those nails, as well as joints, veins, sinews, and even the fate-line and life-line on the palms. Only her feet were missing, for the swirling drapery that covered her body formed a full-length skirt that rippled and billowed in the icy draught blowing through that sealed and shuttered room. She would certainly have laughed at that classical apparel. I wouldn’t be like seen dead in that gear, she would say, referring to the clothes she disliked. Most of the short time she was with me, she wore very little. I’m like a natural nudist, she used to say, in that flat, nasal Valspeak I found intriguingly amusing, It’s so totally awesome!

I recalled her words as she floated towards us that balmy September night. In life, she might well have been amused by our stricken faces, for she had a strong sense of humour. But her likeness as it floated towards us was as serenely impassive as that of a corpse. Who or what is she now? I kept thinking, as I stared at that pallid mask. A gaping gash in her slender throat had severed larynx, trachea and jugular, running in a jagged, bloodless rent up to the stump of her mutilated right ear. Yet her body, clearly discernible through those filmy robes, was as voluptuous as ever in its perfect curves and hollows. Even in death, it still had the power to stir me. Had I been able to weep, I would have done so later, out of pity, but such solace had long been denied me. I recalled her words to me when we first met: When you’re dead you’re like long gone and totally nowhere. Who are the dead? Or rather, what are the dead when they return like this? Are they merely the emanations of our minds? Or do they really have an existence of their own? Ganz anders. As Cassandra would have said, Like totally awesome, man! Awesome!

None of the others has returned, except in my dreams, where the men I killed relive their deaths over again. I regret nothing; they deserved to die and I would kill them all again, as I do night after night, without hesitation, felling there even the one who put me where I am today, the one I would have slain like the Thracian king, slain as I had slain him before. I have sat in this house, day after endless day, for almost twenty-five years now, listening to Poseidon, Earthshaker, his huge combers pounding endlessly upon the glistening, black rocks below, while first my wife, and then, later, my daughter, soft-voiced and comforting as John Milton’s girls, read or talked to me patiently. When I consider how my light is spent…

It all began and ended at an airport. Airports, those gateways to the void! The lesson I learnt there: Nothing is coincidence; everything is ordained, fated. The Greek goddess, Heimarmene—inexorable Fate—rules, as the Stoics and Gnostics averred. I should have guessed that from the moment that I first stood in the doorway of the Olympic Airways 727, shielding my eyes against the dazzling Athenian sunlight of that afternoon in early September 1985. Each downward step on that metal stairway led me deeper into that labyrinth in which I had lost Alathea. I had unwittingly become Theseus setting off to encounter the Minotaur, with only the slender Ariadne’s thread of my reason to guide me out again. Though I had every reason to stay away from Athens, Heimarmene took me back there, like a pawn on a chessboard, to be met by another of her sacrificial victims, a fussy little man with a rubicund, smiling face, whose stomach appeared to be about to start a successful career of its own.

Dr Andreas Yiannouri, Secretary-General of the Royal Historical Society of Athens, was an authority on late Byzantine history and author of a first-class monograph on Constantine X (reg. 1059-1067). Everything about him was so neat, meticulous and dated that he could have stepped out of the pages of Paris Match in the fifties. He was wearing a well-tailored, summer suit of cream sharkskin that could have come from Xannis Tseklenis, Athens’ foremost men’s fashion designer, had the lapels not been so unfashionably narrow. Teaming this with a white shirt, blue, polka-dot tie and matching handkerchief gave him that fifties look, accentuated by his two-tone, brown and white co-respondent shoes, fashionable in the thirties. Not a strand of his brilliantined, grey hair or his pencil-line moustache was out of place. He could almost have passed for the Hellenic counterpart of Achille Poirot. As he shook my hand with a flaccid grip, the smell of his 4711 Cologne reminded me of my great-aunt Melissa.

I recognised you from your photographs, he told me, as his car, a funereal, black Mercedes 190C that complemented his ‘retro’ appearance and smelt of old leather and fly-spray, was trundling us sedately into Athens along the new highway. But I must confess you’re rather taller than I had expected.

I didn’t mean to be, I told him.

He looked puzzled; clearly, he didn’t read Raymond Chandler. Or Cervantes for that matter, for we must have looked like Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, he the patient, puzzled squire, I the fanatical, wild tilter at historic windmills.

Athens has changed a lot since I was here last, I remarked as we drove out of the airport car-park and encountered endless rows of neat, suburban houses and shops where I remembered only fields and trees. My London agent, who had arranged this lecture booking, disliked Athens.

It’s become a polluted concrete jungle, one might call it the Calcutta of the West, he remarked, as I signed the contract. I must say, Greece is not my idea of a holiday. It’s all tourists and terrorists now.

Tourists and terrorists! A symbiotic relationship, like sheep and wolves. Terrorism was a hydra, a monster with anarchist, nationalist, communist, conservative and religious heads. Cut off one head and it promptly grew two more. Greece favoured the communist and Islamic varieties, and seemed unable to produce another Herakles to kill the beast. A recent incident had been particularly sickening, involving a bomb thrown into an Athenian hotel swimming pool crowded with deaf-mute children on holiday from the Midlands. The heroes of this punitive action, as the Greek left-wing press called it, had escaped on motor bikes, to write semi-literate letters to the cowed papers threatening further outrages. When the editor of a local newspaper had expressed his disgust at these murders, he had been gunned down in his office by young thugs brought up in the rat-holes of refugee camps and trained for murder in Libya or the USSR.

Greece was rapidly becoming the sick man of Europe I reflected, as we drove through ill-kept, crowded streets towards the city centre. True, the shops were crammed with luxuries and the tourist trade was booming, but appearances were deceptive, for the Greek economy was crumbling away, with twenty-four per cent inflation, nearly twenty per cent unemployment, and the lowest per capita income of all the EEC countries. I recalled the joke about a Soviet leader visiting Paris and remarking with satisfaction that capitalism was doomed, for the shops were empty. How did he know that? Because he had not seen a single queue. Given a few more years of governmental overspending, coupled with the inevitable further devaluation of the exsanguinated drachma, and the bright shop windows would be as bare, the milling crowds as shabby and demoralised, the tourists as scarce, as in the rotting communist bloc.

Terrorism and a crumbling economy, however, were not topics I was willing to discuss with my host, since I did not know as yet where his political sympathies lay. A lighter approach was called for.

I do admire your car, I told him, partly to make conversation, partly because I was impressed to see this venerable model still on the road and in almost Concours d’Elégance condition. It’s the renowned 190 DC W110 isn’t it? I had one myself back in the late sixties. I remember the scepticism voiced about putting a diesel engine in a luxury vehicle. Then the car turned out to be the favourite of taxi-drivers worldwide. I must say, you’ve kept it in remarkably good shape.

He smiled with pleasure. I see you know a lot about Mercedes. Yes, I’ve had this old lady since she was sparkling new, back in sixty-two. She’s given me splendid service. Mind you, I only take her out on special occasions, to go to church or to meet such distinguished guests as you. Normally, I drive my trusty family car, a 1961 Fiat 500.

1961! Twenty-four years ago! The last time I had been in Athens. Andreas certainly looked after his cars, though how he managed to squeeze his abdominous self and his family into such a Lilliputian conveyance as that time-honoured Fiat was a puzzle.

The only problem with this Mercedes is the air-conditioning. It really can’t cope very well with our summer weather. Athens has been absolutely sweltering this year, he complained, mopping his brow with his polka-dot handkerchief. But your hotel has excellent air-conditioning; I’ve booked you in at the King Paul.

In spite of the heat in the car, I felt a sudden chill. That renowned establishment, luxurious as it was, was a hotel I did not want to patronise. No use my trying to find somewhere else, for at the height of the tourist season all hotels were fully booked. Worse was to come.

You’re in the Apollo suite, Professor, said the pretty receptionist, as she handed the key to the bellboy. That’s on the fourth floor. Room 363.

I must have blanched. Room 363? Damn it! Heimarmene again? Oppressive cosmic fate! The very suite in which perfidious Alathea had been lodged by her newly-acquired lover, my replacement.

I’d much prefer another room, I told her, giving her a winning smile. Could you possibly arrange it for me? Anywhere at all will do.

I had addressed her in modern Greek. She looked at me, smiling yet startled, for the Apollo was their finest suite. She had beautiful, dark eyes, a classically Greek nose, and bold black eyebrows, raised slightly now in surprise at my request and mild amusement at the somewhat stilted demotiki² in which it was couched, for my speciality was ancient Greek (Homeric, Attic, Ionic and Koine). Her silver tag read Aphrodite. She was well-named.

I’m sorry, Sir Hector. We’re really absolutely booked out.

Normally, I had no objection to my being confused with my doppelgänger, Sir Hector Teries, our bumbling Foreign Minister. But today I thought it best to put matters right.

I’m not Sir Hector Teries, I’m afraid, but mere Professor Hector Terries. So any room will do.

She was momentarily flustered. I’m sorry. I’d forgotten that Sir Hector wasn’t due until later this month. But I see now the suite is booked for a Professor Terries. So confusing! My mistake!

Andreas now thought I had forgotten the terms of my contract and was objecting to the cost of the accommodation. The Society is graciously bearing all the costs of your visit, he reminded me. It’s the best suite we could find, in the finest hotel in Athens.

I was suitably apologetic. Of course! I’m most grateful. But I really would have been more at ease with just a single room.

We were now speaking Andreas’s katharevousa-tinted Greek, with Aphrodite listening with interest. Greek-speaking foreigners are always accorded respect, especially if they sound like disciples of Adamantio Korais, propounder of the purified form of Greek known as katharevousa.³ Katharevousa had been the official written language of Greece until it was abolished in 1976 by governmental decree. Andreas was clearly a reader of Estia, a paper of strongly Royalist leanings and deeply conservative views on everything, typified by the katharevousa in which it was written.

A distinguished Greek scholar and historian, a polymath of your eminence and international reputation should surely be suitably, and one might say even luxuriously accommodated, said Andreas, with katharevousa elegance.

To resist would have been churlish. I gave in, as gracefully as I could linguistically manage. My being allotted these stately rooms of neo-classical grandeur was surely not coincidence. Heimarmene? Andreas would have also known the goddess as Aesa, Ananke, Adrasteia, Moira or Pepromene, all names denoting that relentless Order that haunted ancient Greece. Later, I would have termed it Moros, the Doom-Bringer, brother of the Moirai and son of Night. As I filled in the registration, I fancied it was the tauricornous Minotaur I heard growling in the distance, not the hotel air-conditioning. I was so dismayed at having been allotted Alathea’s sumptuous suite that I declined to follow the bellboy upstairs; I needed time to nerve myself to face the rooms she had once occupied. Instead, I told Andreas I should like to go sightseeing, a decision I soon came to regret. Yet I suppose that even if I had never gone near the Acropolis I should have encountered my dead lover. Like the Minotaur, she was not to be denied, having waited for me for so long.

When I did come back from my outing, badly shaken by what I had seen, that suite seemed doubly sinister. But more of that later. Suffice it to stay that, when Andreas had finally taken his leave, I had made my way into the ornate dining room, where I had spent an hour toying with my food under the pretence of eating, without having summoned up the courage to enter my suite, as though apprehensive that I would find her waiting for me, unchanged by the years. When at last I opened the door and stepped inside, I caught my breath as, for a moment, the air seemed tinged with the lavender and citrus, metallic orris and rose, amber and musk of Guerlaine’s classic, Jicky. Then the imagined sillage of Alathea’s antique perfume faded away, evanescent as its memory, and the old anger, bitterness and sorrow, repressed for so long but still seething deep within me, erupted once more, as it always did when her insistent ghost walked though my troubled dreams. Passionate lies, as evanescent as her haunting scent!

Tell me you’ll never leave me.

Leave you, Thea? Never!

And I shall never leave you. Never! Not even death shall part us.

Not even death.

In the ruined amphitheatre of sleep, hemmed in by ancient stones, the intolerable whispering endured throughout that restless night.

Though morning brought sunlight and sanity, I was still tired and had a dull migraine. I had been suffering from severe headaches lately, due, so I thought, to eyestrain and general overwork. I had slept badly, tossing and turning on that adulterous bed, in that long-imagined room where I had lost Alathea, unable to rid my mind of one persistent, haunting image: a woman in a white lacy dress, eyes enigmatic behind dark glasses, long black hair hanging far down her back, watching me appraisingly, motionless, before turning to move away with that undulating walk that was unmistakably that of someone I knew had been dead for years. Nevertheless, by the time light crept in between the shutters I had managed to convince myself that my imagination, overheated by my return to Athens after so many years, had been playing tricks on me. The woman I had seen, I told myself as I was shaving, had been no more than another visitor to the Acropolis. I was willing to bet that had I had the presence of mind to sprint after her, she would have turned out to bear only a superficial resemblance to my lost lover.

Always a compulsive exerciser, avid for a dopamine high, I went for a jog around Syntagma Square before breakfast, but had to cut it short. Even at that early hour the smog was so thick it made my eyes burn and worsened my headache. I was used to the smog-free, Fen air of Cambridge, and the pure mountain air of Canberra; Athens was not for me. Its pollution reminded me of downtown LA on a particularly foul day. This was emphatically not the bucolic Athens of 1960. When I went into the bathroom on my return, I found a notice asking guests not to flush toilet paper down the loo, but to drop it in the basket provided. And this in a five-star hotel! The city’s antiquated sewerage system simply could not cope with the load imposed on it by its urban population, which had increased by over a million since my last visit, in spite of massive emigration. The hotel’s injunction so turned my stomach I decided I would not linger in that city a day longer than necessary.

I had just finished breakfast when the phone rang; Andreas, asking if I would care to take a trip to the nearby island of Aegina.

I’m sorry about giving you such short notice. There’s a friend of mine who’s dying to meet you. He’s a great admirer of yours who’s read everything you’ve written.

He must be a glutton for punishment then. What’s his name?

Demetrios Theodorakis. Perhaps you’ve heard of him?

I was impressed; Theodorakis was the finest painter in Greece.

Theodorakis? Of course! I’ve not only heard of him, I own one of his paintings. I’d consider it a privilege to meet him.

He’ll be delighted to hear that. Suppose I call for you at nine? We should be in Aegina well before eleven. Please bring a few things with you. We’ll be staying the night.

Andreas turned up precisely on time. He was in the lobby when I came downstairs, peering at his old-fashioned fob watch with a disapproving look, presumably because I was almost three minutes late. He reminded me, in his fussy solemnity, of the White Rabbit in Alice. As we trundled down to Piraeus in his shining, old Benz, in third gear most of the way, he warned me solemnly that the Theodorakis were to say the least, somewhat unconventional.

Demetrios lives with his only daughter, Iris, he informed me. She’s inherited both his artistic gifts and his artistic temperament. She throws pots while he paints. He wagged an admonitory finger at me. Quite often, so I hear, she throws them at him. She’s even odder than he is, and that’s saying something, believe me. She’s a divorcee. Her husband left her, so people say, because she’s more than a little mad. To make matters worse, she claims to have psychic powers, and has quite a reputation among the credulous as a medium. She sits in darkened rooms and conjures up the dead. So I hear. So I suppose you can’t really expect her to behave like the rest of us. He paused, and added sotto voce, as though fearful of being overheard: Mind you, she does go a bit too far at times. Sexually, I mean. She has quite a reputation. A little loose, if you take my meaning, like so many women of her generation. Not that her father appears to mind. He’s quite a ladies’ man himself. And the mother was every bit as wild as the daughter. She ran off with a young flamenco dancer fifteen years ago, when Iris was only in her early teens, and is now living in Seville.

How did you come to know them?

They appeared to be unlikely companions for Andreas, who was the epitome of all the staider, nineteenth-century bourgeois virtues, except for a propensity to gossip.

Through the Society. We’ve promoted several exhibitions of Demetrios’s work. I can’t say I really like his paintings or his sculptures. Frankly, they’re beyond me.

His expressive shrug implied that if he, Andreas Yiannouri, could not understand them, then the rest of the world was merely pretending to do so.

Shortly afterwards, I found myself on Demetrios’s powerful motor-cruiser, the Aghia Paraskevi (Saint Friday), heading for the island of Aegina in the Saronic Gulf, some fifteen miles south of Piraeus. Andreas had confessed he was a poor sailor, even on a sea as calm as today’s.

Seasickness has two distinct stages, he told me. The first, when you think you’re going to die. The second, when you wish you would.

And with that he retreated, whey-faced, to lie groaning down in the cabin, leaving me free to climb up to the wheelhouse and chat to my host.

Demetrios turned out to be a genial, suntanned Cretan in his early fifties, tall, dark, wiry and heavily moustached, with a thin, mobile face that bespoke both intelligence and sensitivity. He had made a name for himself both as a painter and a sculptor, his works fetching high prices in the best galleries in Europe and the USA.

"I bought your marvellously chilling La Lune qui s’efftite, some ten years ago," I told him.

We were standing in the wheelhouse, watching the polluted haze that hung over Athens recede into the distance behind our foaming wake. It was refreshingly cool out on the water, with a gentle south-easterly breeze flecking the waves with white. I wondered idly why Homer had called the sea wine-dark. Did the ancient Greeks lack the ability to discern colours that we now possess? This water was a rich Prussian blue, like the ink Alathea had used to write those rebarbative letters.

"You did? Well, thank you! Where would I be without my buyers? My Crumbling Moon! I painted it in homage to my favourite Irish poet, Yeats. You have excellent taste. That picture is among the very best things I’ve ever done, he told me, in his strongly accented Cretan Greek. I’m glad it’s in good hands. I was trying to express the ideas that motivated Yeats, those given to him by the spirits who spoke through his wife. You know the poem, I’m sure. Yeats believed in reincarnation, as I myself do. He was certain that behind the face of what we call reality, lies something entirely other."

"Like Śunyatā?" I used the Sanskrit term here, uncertain of how to translate it.

The Void? The Nothing which contains Everything? Precisely. Metaphysics has played an important part in my art. Sometimes I think I’ve spent my time trying to paint or sculpt the Invisible. He paused, and looked at me intently. His eyes, tawny-brown flecked with gold, reminded me of a cat’s. You and I have a lot in common. We’re both ‘much possessed by death and see the skull beneath the skin,’ as Eliot says. Your work fascinates me, because you’re the only historian I know who sees all our civilisations as attempts to come to terms with the unending battle within us between death and immortality.

I can take no credit for that. Borkenau pointed out the way.⁴

He dismissed Borkenau with an impatient wave of his hand That may be, but you were the first to build your entire theory of history on the struggle between Eros and Thanatos. You argue that if the struggle between death and immortality is at the core of every human being, then it must also be at the core of every culture. So you classify civilisations on the basis of their attitudes to death—death-transcending, death-accepting, death-embracing. We Greeks have always loathed Thanatos, the daemon personification of death. Now Euripides depicts Herakles overcoming Thanatos with his bare hands beside the tomb of Alkestis and bringing her back from Hades. Does this mean that ancient Greece was a death-transcending civilisation?

I think ancient Greece was death-accepting. The Greeks were realists, hating and fearing death, but knowing they could not overcome it. Later, they took refuge in fairy tales about Elysium, and then in even wilder fairy tales concocted by Christianity.

And today?

Since you’re interested, why not come and listen to my lectures?

He smiled. Indeed I shall. Andreas has promised us front-row seats. But I’d like to know the answer to my query beforehand.

You’ve answered it yourself. Answered it over and over again in your art. We’re death-accepting, teetering on the edge of becoming death-embracing. I don’t accept pseudo-scientific fairy tales about ‘salience biases’ and ‘risk calculations.’ They don’t explain the way human beings behave.

I agree. Remember, I’m a Cretan. In fact, I sometimes think I must be an Eteocretan by descent, one of the last remnants of Minoan civilisation. The Doric invaders didn’t wipe us all out. I spring from a culture long antedating the Mycenaean and almost as old as Egypt. And we too were a death-embracing culture, though it’s not fashionable to believe that. I recall the furore when you said as much.

You seem to know my work very well.

"I’ve bought and read all eight volumes of your great History. I devoured them as they appeared. Right down to those lengthy footnotes, the best taking up most of the page."

I winced. The best? I once had footnote and mouth disease. I’ve got over it now.

I looked at him curiously. He reminded me of the ancient Cretans on the frescoes from Thera. Not from Knossos, of course; they were merely Evans’s art nouveau reconstructions. He had the same tawny eyes, wavy, black hair, and slender build. Yet his dark slimness, and his sensitive face, set off by a grizzled Van Dyke, a sable silvered, reminded me more of—what? Suddenly, it came to me.

You may be a descendant of the Keftiu,⁵ I told him, but you remind me of someone much more recent, though equally civilised.

You intrigue me. Who?

Not so much who, but what. You bring to mind a portrait of a seventeenth-century Venetian nobleman I saw in the Venetian Palazzo Ducale, while exploring that remarkable example of Venetian Gothic.

He started with astonishment. Then his face broke into a delighted grin. Impulsively, he took one hand off the wheel and laid it on my shoulder.

I knew you were psychic! No wonder we’re so alike. That’s exactly who I am, or rather was—a seventeenth-century Venetian nobleman! I’m fascinated by Venice. I’ve visited it over thirty times in the last thirty-six years and am planning to go there again next month. The first time I went there, I was only a student. I knew virtually nothing about the city, yet I was stupefied to find that I knew my way around the place as well as if I’d been living there for decades.

I didn’t want to blight our budding friendship by pointing out that, far from being psychic, I was a complete sceptic. When it came to Yeats, for instance, I was far from sharing Demetrios’s view of him, for I thought his metaphysics was mere mumbo-jumbo though his poetry was magnificent. I was a hyper-rationalist in those days, a disciple of Wittgenstein and A.J. Ayre, nurtured on Cambridge logical positivism in the fifties. Still, I saw no harm in humouring him.

You’ve been regressed, I suppose?

He nodded. "By the best in the business. Not that I needed it. I knew who I was long before they told me. I met my end in Candia, as the Venetians called it, during the twenty-one year Turkish siege, somewhere between 1648 and 1669. It was a painful and unpleasant death. But, as Stevenson has demonstrated, those who die violently recall their previous lives most vividly.⁶ I’ve dreamt about my former life, many times. The house where I lived is still there in Heraklion today, and bears my former coat of arms over its door. I was captured by the Turks during a sally, tortured for days, then vertically impaled on a stake in front of the main gate. I can’t pass that place today without feeling ill. And I was even born with a birthmark on my shoulder, which marked the place where the stake came out, after they’d finished hammering it through me. Look!"

He pulled back the collar of his t-shirt to display a livid, red birthmark, the size of a large coin, at the nape of his neck.

The Turks were experts at impalement. They could thread a man onto a sharpened stake without killing him, by keeping it close to the spine and so not damaging any vital organs. In this way, they could ensure he lived for days, if he was young and strong as I was. On the stake, every second seems an hour, every hour an eternity of pain. I screamed for days, imploring them to kill me. Towards the end, I went completely insane. I thought I was in hell fire, spitted and roasted by jeering devils. I screamed out for death, but it would not come.

His forehead, I noted with concern, was beaded with sweat. His face was pallid; his knuckles, gripping the wheel, had turned white with pressure. His fantasy had him completely in its grip, like his passion for that crumbling city, slowly sinking beneath the brackish, grey waves of the Adriatic.

A ghastly business! Longitudinal impalement was a Turkish speciality, I remarked. "You’ll doubtless recall that it was frequent here in Greece, especially during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, when the guerrilla insurgents were becoming a real threat to Ottoman rule. The Turks not only impaled hundreds of these klephts, but also any villagers who harboured or assisted them. In return, the Greeks began to impale and often roast their enemies. The infamous massacre at Tripolitsa, for instance, where thousands of Turks were impaled and roasted alive, was only the worst of these atrocities. Homo homini lupus, as Terence observed. Given the way things are, I would not be too surprised to see these practices return."

Why not? Aurora Mardiganian alleged that the Turks impaled the Armenians during the genocide. The women were given special treatment. They were raped and then impaled through the vagina.

I had read her Ravished Armenia. Are you sure? In her book she says they were crucified.

Quite sure. Years later she confessed that she was not allowed to describe what really happened. It would have offended contemporary American sensibilities.

We were now quite close to Aegina. We had rounded a thickly wooded cape and were sailing past the small resort of Aghia Marina, a favourite haunt of German and Scandinavian sun-worshippers. Through the binoculars, I could see that the rocks around the village were strewn with supine, bare-breasted women. With tourism, a mindless paganism had invaded Greece. Once again, homage was being paid to Helios, though somatically, not spiritually. Above us, the hills rose sharply from the water, their slopes green with pines. On a distant summit, I could descry a temple of pink limestone reflecting the sun; that of Athena Tritogenia, my favourite among the Greek pantheon because she managed, improbably, to combine beauty with virginity and industry with wisdom. Originally, the temple had been dedicated to Aphaia the Invisible, a Creto-Mycenean goddess. Assuming Demetrios would approve of her Cretan origins, I made up my mind to ask him to take me there.

I didn’t just learn of my past life from my nightmares, he went on. I made a trip to the States to see a Jungian psychiatrist who specialises in past-life therapy. I spent several weeks going through regression with him. I also had the privilege of dining with Ian Stevenson himself and discussing my memories with him. Since then, I’ve come to accept what happened. I no longer have nightmares about it.

I was conscious of a dull anger, which I thought I had outgrown. Jungians!

I said, I once had a friend who underwent regression therapy. Unfortunately, it only made things worse. Her name was Alathea.

Regression had not helped our deteriorating relationship; we had had several quarrels about it after I had told her she was living out a sick fantasy, abetted by an unscrupulous psychiatrist probably as much in need of treatment as she was. I had met Dr Carruthers, a black-bearded Jungian of uncertain extraction, at a Cambridge dinner party, and taken an immediate dislike to him. He had sauntered in wearing a green corduroy jacket, a checked shirt and a red tie, though the rest of us were formally dressed. I thought him as crude as his Birmingham accent, though Alathea, to my disgust, hung on every word he uttered. I can see now that I was jealous of her, though at the time I told myself I was simply concerned about her welfare. Self-knowledge was not my strong point in those days; I suppose I had an emotional age of around fifteen.

Demetrios raised his grizzled eyebrows at the name. Alathea? Greek for ‘truth.’ With a name like that she surely must have come to know herself. Was she Greek?

No. English. But I lost her here in Greece.

He looked at me sympathetically. I’m sorry. Was it an accident?

In a way, yes. But I’d rather not talk about it. It all happened years ago.

In a distant country. And besides, the wench is dead.

We dropped anchor at last in a small, rocky cove where pale green pines, white oleanders, and yellow alamanders grew down to the verge of a beach of dark sand. The sea here was no longer Prussian blue, but a translucent viridian, so clear one could see the rocky bottom, some five fathoms below. There were still fish around in those days; I watched a large school of whiting nosing around the boat, something one would never see today, now the Mediterranean is largely fished out.

Andreas had reappeared on deck, looking rather drawn. He had been sick three times, he told us, but was now feeling much better. He peered cautiously over the side, as though expecting to fall in.

Watch out for those sea-urchins if you go swimming, he warned. They’re all over the place here. I once got some of their spines in my foot. My god! How they hurt!

Iris was waiting on their private jetty when we landed. She was in her late twenties, so Andreas had told me, but looked much younger. She was of medium height, slimly built and bronzed to the colour of honey. Her heart-shaped face, framed by dark blonde curls, wore a ready smile. Pretty, rather than beautiful, she was wearing a diminutive, topless, red bikini, her shapely breasts accentuated by the jade abraxas nestling between them, and quite unselfconscious as she greeted us. In the summer, Greek beaches are littered with topless women; but it was unusual—to say the least—for a hostess to welcome her guests so scantily attired. Andreas stammered and blushed scarlet as he tried to look anywhere but her bosom; obviously, he hadn’t been near a beach for decades. As I kissed her hand, she touched me lightly on the cheek, and shivered.

You have a very strange aura, she whispered. Let us talk about it later.

Andreas gave me an outraged look as we walked up to the house. Watch out for that one, it said. She’s a man-eater.

The house, standing on a cliff, some twenty metres above the beach, was a white, two-storey building, designed by Demetrios himself, with balconies attached to every room. Inside, it was airy and spacious, with a large, cathedral-ceilinged sitting room, whose floor of cream and brown Roman tiles was covered with bright, Greek rugs. The rough walls were vivid with colour, for Demetrios’s paintings were everywhere; there must have been several million dollars’ worth of art in the sitting room alone.⁷ I wondered if these masterpieces were insured, for the house appeared to have no security. French windows gave onto a veranda overlooking the sea, now lapping quietly on the sand below. At the far end of the room, double doors opened onto a vine-covered patio, where oleanders clustered thickly around gnarled, Attic pines.

Iris confessed that she could not cook. She had married into a wealthy Athenian family and had never had occasion to learn. Luncheon, served on the patio, and prepared by Demetrios’s current housekeeper, Pomona, was simple but satisfying. We ate peppers and tomatoes stuffed with rice, pine nuts and currants; fried calamari; and a traditional Greek salad (horiatiki) of tomatoes, cucumbers, onions, green peppers, feta cheese and black olives, all dressed with wine vinegar and olive oil, served with hot, crusty rolls, which we dipped in salad dressing. The chilled white wine, fortunately, was French; Greek vintages leave a lot to be desired.

"We should really have had some boiled dandelions and a little taramasalata to begin with, said Iris. But poor Pomona found that quite beyond her."

If you’d only learn to cook we might all eat even better, Demetrios grumbled. Any time I want a real meal I have to drive into the Aghaia Marina.

He turned to me with a smile. Are you married?

I’m afraid not. I’ve never found anyone willing to put up with me.

Then you might care to take on my beloved daughter. If she can put up with me, she can put up with anyone. Then I can send Pomona back to her rustic island and get a competent cook.

Iris laughed. Come off it, Papa! You’d never send her back, since her other talents more than compensate for her lack of expertise in the kitchen.

I found the meal delicious, I said gallantly, in an attempt to steer the conversation onto safer ground. I had noticed the oeillades and most speaking looks that high-bosomed, slim-waisted, sloe-eyed, Pomona had been giving Demetrios while serving us. It’s a great improvement on British or Australian cuisine.

That’s called ‘damning with faint praise,’ isn’t it? said Iris. Her English, though lightly accented, was excellent. Her smouldering green eyes met mine and held them for a long moment. If she really were a man-eater, she would find no shortage of willing victims.

The subsequent conversation was more interesting than the food. Demetrios did most of the talking, discussing his hermetic paintings with a surprising depth of insight; painters are not normally so articulate about their art. All his work, he averred, was an attempt to make us see that the categories and values of Western thought were grossly misleading. His art was based primarily on what he had learned from Hindu and Buddhist philosophy, primarily from Zen.

My work, like Van Gogh’s, is essentially a series of spiritual sigils, he concluded. If I knew what they mean, I would stop painting. I paint to find out what I am trying to say.

Iris was in high spirits, laughing and joking throughout the meal. She intrigued and amused me. In deference to Andreas, she had donned a scarlet tee shirt, which did nothing to subdue her overpowering sexuality. A real fauve! Throughout the meal, I was conscious of her eyes fixed on me, as though I were one of her father’s paintings, a sigil she was trying to decipher.

After the meal, Demetrios took me on a tour of the house, pausing before each of his paintings while he explained them to me. Eventually we ended up in the studio itself, a whitewashed building set in a clearing among the pines. I found his work reminded me of Nietzsche’s dictum: The essence of all beautiful art is gratitude, and told him so.

He nodded enthusiastically. That’s because my work is essentially traditional. It expresses understanding, not emotion. To give thanks you must first understand. But modern and postmodern art don’t give thanks for the world, for there’s no one to thank since God is dead. Instead, they annihilate the world, by destroying all logic and emotional order. Remember Picasso’s dictum: ‘For me, painting is the sum of destructions.’ Destruction of consensus reality, admittedly, but still destruction! And postmodernism has gone far beyond Picasso. It’s Yeats’s rough beast, the stony Sphinx that will tear our culture apart. You cannot have civilisation without an assured reality, whether consensual, discursive or realist and postmodernism denies us that reality. So, as Yeats forecast: ‘The Centre cannot hold.’ For with Deconstructionism there can be no Centre.