Hello,
I once wrote ‘The best part of going away is coming back’.
But I’d never been to Greece before.
Do you think everyone romanticises Greece? It’s not hard to do. What’s hard is to not romanticise it. It’s not just that the water and sky challenge the limits of the vocabularies for ‘blue’. It’s not the geography and landscape, which surprised me with its familiarity. It’s the people. You can’t know an entire people from two weeks in their country, but it surely says something that every single one of our interactions with Greek people was pleasant, full of humour and good feeling, even when you and I were hopeless with the language, and they were only slightly less so in ours.
It was so hot in Athens that I didn’t care about the museums and the marble and the miracle of millennia of history thrusting skywards in pillars that no longer held up roofs, or littering the ground with the broken ends of enormous, fallen limestone building blocks.
I wanted to be in water.
You chose the beach called Paralia Edem. I loved leaving you to make every decision about our movements. It’s a weird thing when your children get older and you’re still in the prime of your life and they’re taking your hand and leading you through a foreign country. It’s weird, but not un-wonderful and I decided that I would not fight the natural morphing of the parent-child relationship.
The back of the beach was blessed with a few small palms and other scraggly trees and, with the sun behind us, and it being early, we managed to get a spot in the shade. As the shade shrunk, so did I, inching my back up against the stump and pulling my legs in.
Then Sophia arrived. She ‘asked’ (hands and body movements) to share ‘our’ shade. ‘Our’ shade was the size of a large dinner plate. Her presence in it required me to give up my personal space. With less difficulty than I usually have to overcome when a stranger has to be close enough for me to smell their breath or armpits, I nodded with friendliness, hoping that the language would serve as a kind of boundary in which I could make as though I wasn’t squashed up against the trunk of a stunted palm tree in a puddle of shade on the hottest beach I’ve ever been on with a woman I didn’t know.
Sophia was having none of my sensitive boundary bullshit. She lay on her stomach with her head a ruler length away from my right shoulder, on her elbows with her face turned to me and proceeded to establish friendly comms. From my vantage point, I kind of looked down into her mouth. Her teeth were small and widely spaced and flared slightly outward from her gums and I had this strong impression that she’d shortened and displaced them by eating rocks. This is a very messed up image. Don’t ask me to explain it.
Before she lay down, she’d pointed at herself and said ‘Sophia’. We gave our names; said them several times, as she tried to get them right. The interview continued from her new position. She was undaunted by our lack of a mutual language. ‘American?’ No, South African. She didn’t understand. ‘Nelson Mandela?’ Ahh! Mandela! Daughter? Yes. That’s my daughter. Other children?
On and on it went. I employed Google Translate to help. With the sun on the screen making it hard to see anything, I typed things for it to translate. She couldn’t read the results, reaching to her head for glasses and then realising her readers weren’t there. I gave her mine. She nodded but struggled. I tried the recorder. I said I had two children, you, who were 19, and Oliver who was 22. Google turned my words into Greek, and I played them to her. She nodded thoughtfully. She started saying nine … nine … and then wrote the number 19 with her finger in the sand. Only later did I see that Google Translate had reported you were 90.
This is what I was able to find out about Sophia: she is a 60-year-old teacher, originally from Albania, but she’s been living in Greece for 24 years. She teaches 11-year-olds. She has four children: Artur, Ari, Irini and Aurora. All this information came slowly and comically to light. We often laughed at ourselves and one another. When we started to make moves to leave, it had become evident that photographs would be required to memorialise this day’s friendship. Something had been made. Something very small and fleeting. For me it was a tiny monument though. To letting go of uptightness. To being undeterred by barriers to communication and friendship.
In the photographs, I see Sophia as I wasn’t seeing her while I was sitting. She is shorter than me. She is fatter than me (I use the word ‘fat’ pointedly. I’m trying it out. It’s a post-Greece investigation and, possibly, a reclamation). Her blue bikini top contains only one breast. Her seven-years’ seniority over me shows in the curtain of skin that obscures her neck from her chin to the hollow of her throat. She has a steady smile.
She’d be surprised to know, no doubt, that she’s become mythical in memory. Unassuming beauty. Casual divinity.
‘And another meaning, I predict / there is in memory, / so let there be outburst; / and another, immeasurable, / in love, so let there be surrender’.
This is from a poem I read on the bus back to Kolokynthous Street. It’s called ‘A Meaning’ and it is written by António Osório. So: I allow this outburst over Sophia, both for the memory, and for my surrender to the heat that scorched the sand and burned my soles, and the gifts of that day’s shade.
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I had to let go of Greece very reluctantly. I am always excited to be home again, but I was not this time. I want to be able to swim, forever, in that mild water, with its human-sized wavelets and its dearth of dangerous sharks. I had to let go of sweet apricots, of cherries and donut peaches, and the souvlakis that became our staple. I want to not just become the kind of person who goes to Greece, as Mia urged me last month, but become the kind of person who lives there.
I feel like by saying that, I’m succumbing to cliché.
It wasn’t just the water and people that made the holiday special though. It was that I was with you. And that you and Oliver (and a squadron of colluders) engineered a surprise visit from him to celebrate my birthday. It was that two of the three people for whom I would literally give up my life were there to witness my supreme astonishment and joy at the various lucks that made this holiday possible.
I won’t ever fully be able to express my gratitude to you for being the driver of this Major Event In My Life.
I am back in my life now, muddling through the fog of my first ever, real, extended not-thinking-about-anything-except-this-moment holiday. Despite quite a lot of repetition, the song that Ollie put on a playlist for us still dances me through the days. I’ve known the song for a long time and it’s on my Hill Road playlist, but you’d never heard it and your new love for it reignited mine. If I ever, God forbid, become a non-communicative shell of an old lady who gets pushed in her wheelchair to a spot of sun on the stoep of an old age home on a winter’s morning in the future, will you find a way to make sure that someone plays me ‘Colors’ by Black Pumas to transport me back to Athens and Paros and Naxos, and into all their shimmering wheat and blue and white and olive-leaf hues?
Thank you in advance.
Mpush wrote me after the last letter and, referring to my reference to Pádraig Ó Tuama, called him a ‘modern poetry god’.
‘Him and Illya Kaminsky,’ he wrote. ‘You can imagine my excitement when on one of the episodes Ó Tuama read ‘We lived happily during the war’ from Deaf Republic [by Kaminsky].’
I knew the poem, but listened to it again on the day we sweated our way back on public transport from Lake Vouliagmeni (whose praises I have no space to sing, but whose benevolence I must experience again), so that now it is tied up in images of well-kept suburban residential blocks near the coast of a country that has seen many wars and terrible hardships over thousands of years.
Mpush also urged me to read Margaret Atwood’s poem ‘All Bread’, which I did not know, even though I have so much of her poetry on my shelves. The last two lines easily slip into memory.
He wasn’t the only one who sent me a letter. My life has been markedly improved by this Love Letter undertaking. It feels like people are enjoying remembering, or discovering, the very particular kind of thinking exercise a letter is. And the kind of relationship it can nurture between writer and recipient.
I had notes back from many, and fat letters back from Malika (whose letters are delicious), K8 (who made me laugh out loud), Ann, and from our very own Ollie, who wrote to me about the challenges of spending so much time alone while travelling.
‘I have never, in my life – despite preaching at nauseum the positive effects of meditation – had to sit for that fucking long with my own thoughts. My brain felt like a visual map of neurons not even firing, but misfiring; lumo-colour scheme and untraceable start and end points.’
He spoke about inspiration and despondency and said that he was using the letter as a starting point to give expression to his creative drives, which he has neglected due to studying.
I hope he does start drawing and writing creatively again. And I can’t wait to hear you making new songs when you get back and have access to your instruments again. I’ve been thinking lately about whether life would have any meaning at all if I could not make things. If you can’t make a garden, make a picture, make a song or make some sort of difference to something that was stagnant or non-existent before, can you be happy at all? Have you lived fully? Those of my friends that at different times are struggling out of a pit of depression, often find purchase on the world again through a thing they make. Through a piano keyboard, or a paintbrush, or a transplanted seedling, or a granny square, or a made-from-scratch curry.
Years ago, I saw this movie about a plane that crashes in the desert. I don’t remember much about the movie, but I remember a line one of the characters said just after starting what seemed like an impossible job (was he trying to dig the plane out of the sand? I can’t remember anything, not even the movie’s name). The line was something like: ‘People only need one thing in life, and that’s someone to love. And if they can’t have that, give them hope. And if there’s no hope, give them something to do.’
I might be misremembering. But doing something – and specifically making something – is an antidote to a lot of bad things, not least of which is the hopelessness that sometimes washes over you about the state of the world.
We walked down a very dirty street in Athens one day. You said, ‘I’ve come to the cynical conclusion that the one thing that all of humanity shares, that binds every country, that we all have in common, is litter.’
The Sunday after I got back it was raining hard in Cape Town and someone on our street’s WhatsApp group said that there were torn-open rubbish bags with their contents strewn over the pavement at the bottom of the street. Could anyone help her pick it up, she wanted to know. My immediate reaction was ‘ew, nooo’, but I didn’t want her to do it alone, because that just seemed rude. So I took the plastic gloves the airline gave me, and a black bag, and went down the street, and made a new friend and we chatted so much, I had no time to shudder and freak out.
I’m not going to tell you it was nothing. I really had to overcome a thing inside me to do it. And I’m mildly proud of myself for it. This poem by ee cummings always reminds me that you don’t discover beauty by ignoring what’s ugly, and that the right thing is hard to do.
Don’t try to force meaning from what seems hard here. Just let the poem do its work gently in your receptive, creative mind.
a man who had fallen among thieves
a man who had fallen among thieves
lay by the roadside on his back
dressed in fifteenthrate ideas
wearing a round jeer for a hat
fate per a somewhat more than less
emancipated evening
had in return for consciousness
endowed him with a changeless grin
whereon a dozen staunch and leal
citizens did graze at pause
then fired by hypercivic zeal
sought newer pastures or because
swaddled with a frozen brook
of pinkest vomit out of eyes
which noticed nobody he looked
as if he did not care to rise
one hand did nothing on the vest
its wideflung friend clenched weakly dirt
while the mute trouserfly
confessed a button solemnly inert.
Brushing from whom the stiffened puke
i put him all into my arms
and staggered banged with terror through
a million billion trillion stars.
All love,
Always,
Kowski.