Like Odysseus

Reed Stirling

December, 1980.

On deck in the early morning, I watched precarious mooring operations being carried out amidst shouting and confusion by two men in a small fishing boat: the Elhi, that curious little ship which brought Montgomery and me together, was finally secured by several lines to a large buoy afloat in water fathoms deep. For the duration of the storm, Crete would lie beyond the horizon.

The canteen in the tourist lounge had not yet opened, so with an empty, crumpled cigarette pack in my pocket, I made for the cafeteria. Craving made my notice acute. Four truck drivers were dramatizing opinions as to our present fate on board the Elhi, their collective expression portentous. By the window alone with his books and cahier, his cup and his little yellow pack, Montgomery sat sucking back on hard core Papastratos.

I wanted one. I walked over and asked if I might join him.

He peered up at me over the top of horn-rimmed glasses, inadvertently allowing a long ash to fall into a book filled with marginalia. His eyes studied me briefly with an ambiguous sort of detachment, as if he were passing judgement. He said nothing, so I sat down. He returned with long slim fingers to his text and his cigarettes.

I watched.

He wore a beard, silver sabled and neatly trimmed, but his wiry, greying hair had a will of its own. He presented the picture of circumspection, however, in his black turtle neck and his duffle coat, which was beige and fitted with a hood.

I began ever so softly to whistle-hiss the opening bars to The Third Man theme—Vienna through the cross hairs of a telescopic sight, Prague maybe. He looked up. I ceased whistling. When I mentioned the weather and our predicament, a doubtful weariness showed through the searching greenness of his eyes. He recovered quickly, then butted out his cigarette.

First impressions! I would read many things in that face, but at that particular time, a vague kind of nicotine satisfaction.

Montgomery closed his book, Advances on Crete by Graham King. He placed it on a hardbound copy of Eloise And Abelard, his cahier on top of that.

"Very subtle," he said in a deep voice. I could not place the accent.

When the waiter arrived, I ordered tost, a bland, prefabricated ham and cheese sandwich fixed quickly on a grill, and a light Greek coffee. I would wait to ask for the cigarette. Montgomery peered out the window against which the rain had begun to pelt with violence. Santorini had become a blur. I wondered about his nationality.

"Beautiful nonetheless, Thira," I said.

"Fortunately, the archaeological site at Akrotiri was open. Absolutely enthralling."

"Sites are open in Crete as well."

"You know something of Crete, is it now?"

"Not much. I've spent a little time there, mostly in the west."

"Chania, no doubt."

"Yeah right."

"Enchanting city, I understand. Vicious fighting there during the war. All sorts of action in the mountains."

"Yeah, you keep hearing about the underground resistance, what they call the andartes."

He lit another cigarette, watching the waiter approach with my tost.

"Lots of ruins in Chania," I said, to keep him on the hook.

"Ah, yes, the legacy of war and other disasters. Been around the islands, have you?"

"A few."

"You like to travel about, then?"

"As much as possible. Just spent some time in Istanbul.”

“Ah, yes. A student, are you?"

"Haven't been a student for some time now."

"Not your thing. But still a student at heart, a student of life. Tell me then, since you mention Chania, have you ever come across a young woman named Meg Maguire?"

"Name's not familiar."

"An Australian. She would come to about your shoulder. Early twenties, or so. Interested in more recent archaeological digs, particularly in and around Chania. Flaming red hair. A bit of a goer, if you catch my drift."

"Can't say that I've met this Meg Maguire. Lots of transients in Chania, especially with the Common Market thing happening. Many in the summer months, and many with red hair, to say nothing of red flesh. When?"

"Let us say last August, September."

I shook my head.

"In the south, Matala, possibly?" He quickly produced a photograph of the girl named Meg Maguire.

"Beautiful. But no. I was travelling with a companion at the time."

"Ah, yes,” he said, retrieving the photograph. “And now, young man, I must excuse myself. Some correspondence requires my attention. Nevertheless, I cannot say this interlude has been unrewarding."

Glasses and pen packed quickly into the pockets of his coat, he grabbed his books and cahier, and was up straddling the aisle, his centre of gravity just forward of the vertical. He looked down one last time at me, but I knew from his inquisitive glance that I was not in his scheme of things totally beneath his scorn.

My impressions of him ranged quickly, from Don Quixote to James Bond, both trapped on a less than luxury Greek ship. I could not imagine to whom he would be writing letters. Some little bespectacled Eloise he abandoned in the testy issues of life? Meg Maguire's mother? An ex-wife? The hood of his duffle coat set my mind to wandering over the waves and across the plains and up the annals of foreign intrigue. The Venetian haze, the Bridge of Sighs. A dark lady in the shadows. A character from a spy romance with international anonymity, a fan of passports in an attaché case locked in his berth, this guise being merely the preoccupied piper of bookish dreams.

I cut into my tost, now cool enough to cut into.

"Montgomery. David Montgomery. Pleased to have made your acquaintance," he said, and smiled.

"Steven Spire." I took his extended hand. He began to walk up the aisle again, like a cat with wet paws.

I ate the tost and sipped the thick, black coffee looking out at our bleak and relentless surroundings. I got my first cigarette from the waiter, the next one from a trucker, a pack of filtered Papastratos not much later from the canteen. Although I would meet him a number of times on the storm hounded Elhi before we parted ways, the empty yellow packet Montgomery had left neatly between the pepper and the salt I took for one of life's little ironic forget-me-knots.

"I will arise and take me down to Greece," he said that first night in reference to the leave he had taken. We talked at great length moving through archaeology into myth, then history, language and literature, art, and the development of the minivan. He would make me commit myself, especially when on familiar ground, then undermine my thinking. The discussion developed like a chess game.

I soon learned how ignorant I was of the Greece I claimed to love, the revolution, for example, the founding of the modern state, life under the colonels, and especially Cold War politics as it affected this tiny nation. Montgomery told me a great deal about the Nazi occupation.

I might have doubted things about Montgomery, but I wondered at his vast knowledge and the ease with which he drew upon it to comment and illustrate. What he alluded to interested me greatly; and he was a man of many allusions. In a single utterance he could range from a point about Minoan society, inspired by a line from Yeats, to a fact about Byzantine architecture, to interpretations of vase painting based on theories developed by Jung, and then describe a beautiful dream. My marvelling at this brought the simple reply: "Ah, the romance of learning." He seemed to be enjoying himself and refused to let me by any ouzo.

I saw him talking to other travellers on board the Elhi. He appeared at one point to be arguing seriously with a backpacking Frenchman, though this seemed a little out of character. Normally he was gracious.

Our next session together occurred the following evening when I came upon him head bent over his cahier. "Ne quid nimis: nothing in excess," he said, tapping his pen on the open page. "So postulates the Delphic oracle, yet the ruins at Delphi, about which I have been reminiscing, suggest every kind of excess.”

"How true," I said.

"How convenient!"

"Fake, you mean?"

"Ambiguous."

Enthusiastic German students sat down to dinner two tables away from us. They enjoyed Spaghetti Bolognaise, the sole item on the menu that night. They also enjoyed Fixx bottled beer and boisterous debate.

When Montgomery and I finished our Spaghetti Bolognaise, he ordered another bottle of retsina. Education became the topic of our conversation for all of that bottle and most of the next. Once I got started, Montgomery let me rant.

"I graduated with top grades," I declared, summing up my high school experience, "having made absolutely no effort. The whole thing was a joke. A bigger joke, the scholarship I received but did not really earn."

"Of no use, was it?"

"It was deferred indefinitely. I did get around to using it for real educational purposes later. The only thing of worth I took with me from high school was Kerouac's On the Road, which my art teacher of all people gave me."

Montgomery did not take the point of view on the subject I expected. All through my harangue he nodded agreeably, and topping up our glasses with retsina, interjected smiling votes of confidence. "Indeed, I could not agree more, " he would say, or "I understand completely, Steven," or "I know precisely what you mean." I expected argument, as with topics touched on the night before, but received only encouragement. "University improved matters, did it?"

"Not for long. I became disillusioned with that whole process too. Automatic A's in some courses as long as you attended. I am neither a genius nor a paragon of virtue, but I knew I did not deserve those grades. I was surrounded by cons and plagiarists. Pomposity paraded down every corridor. Soon I began questioning the worth of these years. And my own honesty. Kind of corrupt, what was going on. So I cut out and joined the tour."

"You feel you were cheated, not appreciated, is it? Systems tend to deny individuality, excuse and cover up inadequacies."

"Yeah, right on!"

"Intelligent of you to question, Steven, intelligent of you to question."

"The truest thing I discovered at university was a piece of graffiti written next to the telephone in the john of the Student Union Centre. 'It behoves me to inform you that there is a remote control bomb strategically placed in the administration building. All I want is my tuition fees refunded!'"

"You are very passionate about this I see."

I thought for a moment he was merely humouring me, but no, he really did seem to understand.

"Brave of you to be your own man, Steven. 'To thine own self be true, and it must follow...' So reads another injunction of the Delphic Oracle." What Montgomery said sounded so true, so fatherly, so familiar. I, too, had visited Delphi. He saw me puzzling over what he had quoted, smiled, and said,

“Indeed, your man Socrates proclaimed something like that, did he not?"

"Probably."

"I envy you your youth, young man. For most of my life I have felt like Odysseus, floating from refuge to refuge, seeking understanding and a place to call home."

For the rest of the bottle, and the one after it, our conversation centered on travel and historical landmarks. Then Montgomery introduced darker themes: war and its causes, the approach of 1984, Orwellian warnings, the millennium, and the future of a species capable of gross sentimentality on the one hand and gross horror on the other. Such things he talked about ominously but eloquently.

I was prey to his persuasion. I could never pin him down. He could bend his voice into any shape and around any idea, and do so with incredible conviction that deception itself might resonate with truth, and absurdity shine with Apollonian light. But then there would be the irony, as if on another level he were saying to me: "This romance of learning can be romance on the spur of the moment. Are you with me, Steven?"

Such ambiguous giving out intrigued me. Any traces of doubt disappeared on the occasion of our last encounter out on the deck as the Elhi approached Crete. We did not talk for long because he seemed preoccupied. Yet, at that time, I found him sufficiently sympathetic for a stranger I had just met to suggest he visit my beloved Chania. He seemed touched, receptive to the idea, but I did not really expect to see him again.

Travel frequently introduces you to those peculiar individuals who make a life of wandering over the face of the earth, well-educated odd balls, eccentrics full of fabulous tales with which they bend your ear. You welcome them, drink with them, laugh with them, then say good bye to them. For all I knew when we parted, Montgomery was one of them.

*

In Montgomery’s cahier I come across three sketches dated the Elhi: one of a small freighter with a large wave in the background, another depicting the zigzag donkey track leading up to high Thira, and a third in which a small boat, loaded to the gunwales with loaves of bread and other foodstuffs, is circumscribed by a porthole.

Entries are straightforward.

Elhi, 12.3.80

The storm continues its battery of wind and rain and wave, making us captives of circumstances with doubt the warden of our minds. All remains the same: uncertainty. Rarely can one get a straight answer from a Greek. Bits and pieces of information are cooked together as palatable lies, which makes for interesting menus. Habits become rituals out of necessity.

Television in the lounge is most bizarre, the presumption being, according to young Steven Spire with a jigger of ouzo in his hand, the louder the audio the clearer the video. An intelligent and observant enough diversion he, but what a gadfly, what a presumptuous young rascal with busy-bee eyes and a mincing mind racing to catch up with his tongue! He makes virtues of prevarication and hyperbole. He is potentially trustworthy despite the intellectual vanity he so generously displays. Good luck to him in his search for truth. May he understand the meaning of solitude.

Elhi, 12.4.80

Earlier I took to the deck and the sun. That disgruntled young Frenchman in the sheepskin coat! He had talked with Meg Maguire last August in a Delphi hotel. Well and good, but I could not abide his strange attitude. I moved away to enjoy in private my growing sense of odyssey rejoined.

Now the purple silhouette of Crete has become rock and ruin and fortress and town, creating the illusion that all is but a dream.

Visit Chania, young Spire tells me, his pea jacket bulging with energy. “Modern midway to the exotic past!” Indeed.