The Bestiary (25 page)

I frowned. “Mr. Arvanos, it was never money that my father withheld from me. And you don’t owe me any explanations.”

I left his office soon afterward with a sheaf of documents pertaining to the
Makara,
a copy of the will, and two addresses I requested.

I visited the first address early the next morning, a nondescript apartment building on an anonymous street in the Vathi district. It was midway between the Archaeological Museum and the military cemetery. The exterior was white concrete. The lobby was bare, the elevator cramped. The handyman let me look into Apartment 405, so long as I remained at the threshold while he held the door open. The rooms were already empty. Walls had been patched and plastered. The painters were about to begin their work. Their cans and rollers were piled beside a stepladder.

I noted that, like every apartment my father rented in my childhood, this one had terrible light, slanting in off a cramped courtyard. He had died in the sort of dark room he preferred.

Later that morning I took a taxi to Piraeus and boarded the hydrofoil to Hydra. As we left the harbor, we passed near the
Makara.
It towered over us. Reading its dimensions was nothing like seeing them firsthand. I was still amazed that I owned it. The largest thing I had ever owned was a car; I didn’t even own a house. A ship like this seemed far too huge to be the property of anything but a corporation or government, not a single person. It looked well maintained, just as Arvanos had said. Freshly painted, the hull was white with a yellow border, the upper decks blue, the stacks yellow. Two seamen were hosing down the deck. An officer was standing by the pilothouse. Above the bridge the radar antenna was revolving. The
Makara
was registered in Ecuador, and the flag of that country was flapping on the mast: a tricolor centered by a snowcapped mountain and a steamship on a river, over which a condor hovered.

The town of Hydra is like an amphitheater in which the rows of houses, gray or white with terra-cotta roofs, rise steeply, curving around the harbor. It was a warm day. The outdoor cafés were filled, and many boats were anchored at the docks, but still the waterfront felt calm. I was struck at once by the quiet of a place with no motor vehicles. Not even bicycles were allowed on the island. People carrying baggage who disembarked with me hired mules to take it up the hills.

I asked a mule driver about the address Arvanos had given me. He directed me up a series of twisting alleys. As I climbed, the alleys narrowed. The harbor’s marble pavement gave onto whitewashed granite. The silence deepened. Distant sounds carried: a donkey braying, a dog’s bark. I entered an old neighborhood with large houses. Potted geraniums lined the verandas. Cats sunned themselves on the walls. I passed a widow hanging her laundry and a girl with a basket of eggs. Then there was no one.

I reached a plateau from which the boats below looked like toys. My heart was beating fast from the climb. But also because I knew this was the place Arvanos had described: the last of three houses off a sunbaked square. I understood why someone with an arthritic spine would have had trouble climbing that hill, or even riding up on a mule. The house was old, but well kept: two stories, white with blue shutters, a garden in back, lemon trees in front. Bougainvillea covered the façade. Grape clusters hung from a trellis. There was a weather-worn coat of arms above the door, from the island’s Venetian days: a full-masted galley with a lion in the prow. The front gate was locked. The windows shuttered. The air hummed with insects, and cicadas were clicking in the grass. Far out on the water the boats trailed ribbons of foam. The panoramic view surprised me, the fact he had given himself something so grand. More likely that was his wife’s doing.

I sat down on the steps before the gate, shaded by one of the lemon trees. According to Arvanos, my father had occupied this house on and off for eight years. But it was hard for me to place him there: except for the time he took me to school in Maine, I had never seen him outside of New York or Boston. I had so narrow a context in which to situate him that my imagination was stymied: I always pictured him in a vacuum, like a cutout figure without a background. I had never even seen him on a ship, his true home, or at the seashore. Neither those bare rooms in Athens nor this other place he called home were going to provide any more closure than a gravesite. And what exactly had come to an end, after all?

Back at the harbor, I waited for the last hydrofoil to Piraeus. Dusk was falling. The fishing boats went out, churning slowly. I wandered into the marble church with the bell tower that was the largest building in town. All afternoon, I’d heard those bells ringing on the hour. Candles were burning beside the icons. The church had been built by shipowners. The nave was adorned with the busts of sea captains. There was a mural of Christ, cold-eyed and muscular, walking on the waves swinging a lantern. From the chandeliers, tiny silver ships hung on fine chains. And, behind the altar, on the rounded door to the sacristy, Saint George in blue armor was impaling a mottled dragon with his lance. Like all Saint Georges, he was on horseback, but his was a seahorse, with glowing eyes and a mane that was not hair, but sea foam. The saint’s helmet was a gold triton and his saddle was studded with nautilus shells. In the vestibule there was a brass plaque that listed the names of drowned sailors and their ships, dating back to 1701; at the bottom were engraved the names of those who had paid to erect the plaque. One of the names was my father’s, looking as permanent as the inscription on a tombstone. He might as well have been one of the drowned, not one of the donors—it was all the same now.

Before I left the church, I stuffed a wad of drachmas into the poor box. But I didn’t light a candle, not for my father, not for myself.

A
FEW DAYS LATER
, Arvanos arranged for me to take a tour of the
Makara.
“It’s your property, it’s an investment, you ought to see it,” he said, sounding like my own lawyer, rather than my father’s executor. In fact, I had formally retained him now that I had real need of counsel.

A launch from the ship picked me up in Piraeus, piloted by the first mate. His name was Carmine. He was a wiry young man with a shaved head, polite but reserved. It was a humid, overcast day. I had never been on a ship larger than a ferry and never boarded one by scaling a ladder with the sea swirling below. The captain, a man twice my age, welcomed me on deck with a strong handshake and addressed me as “sir.” He introduced himself as Marco Salice. He was a Sardinian, shorter and slighter than the first mate, but—to my eye—even tougher. His gray hair was curly, his salt-and-pepper beard neatly trimmed. His eyes were intelligent. The furrows in his brow looked as if they had been carved with a penknife. With a sailor’s rolling gait, he took me around: the quarterdeck, pilothouse, radar room, engine room, galley, mess hall, crew’s quarters, and the catwalks atop the tremendous three-story holds from which sixty tons of fabric from Singapore and Malaysia had recently been unloaded. It was a complex, orderly world, alien to me in every way. The seamen going about their tasks either stared at me openly or cast furtive glances. Captain Salice kept up a running commentary, detailing the ship’s specifications (300 feet long, 80 feet wide, with 220,000 square feet of deck space); engine type (20,000-horsepower Daimler-Hamburg); top speed (17 knots); tonnage (29,000); fuel capacity (2,000 gallons); size of crew (14); guest quarters (for 7); cargo capacity (91,000 cubic feet); date of construction (1953). He had arranged for our lunch to be served in his cabin, the last stop on my tour. But first he wanted to show me what he called “the owner’s cabin.”

“Just as it was your father’s,” he said, “it will be yours now whenever you’re aboard.”

Arvanos had mentioned it in the most perfunctory way, so I was surprised to enter a stateroom-sized cabin with a gleaming mahogany bed and chest, a large pigeonhole desk, a Persian carpet, and a well-appointed bathroom. For my father, austere in all things, this was opulent.

“Everything looks so new,” I said.

“It is new. Your father’s health had been declining. He had not sailed with us in two years. He told me he would never go to sea again. Last year he had the cabin refurbished. No one has stayed in it since then.”

Amazing as it seemed, he had evidently had it refurbished for me. What other conclusion could I draw?

“Let me know if there is anything you would like modified,” the captain said tactfully.

I shook my head. “It’s fine.”

“There is also an envelope for you, in the desk.” He hesitated. “Perhaps you would like a moment here alone.”

“Thank you.”

I walked around the cabin. I peered out the two portholes. I opened the closets and drawers, which were empty. As was the medicine cabinet. In his will my father had ordered that his material possessions be auctioned off or destroyed. Obviously that had included the contents of this cabin. I sat down on the bed. It was a hard mattress, the kind he liked. Beneath my feet I felt the humming of the ship’s pumps and engines and its powerful generators.

I sat at the desk. It felt massive, immovable, like an upright piano. Two oversized books were shelved beside it: a volume of nautical maps and a world atlas. I rolled the desktop back and found a five-by-seven manila envelope on which my name was printed in my father’s hand.

I should have known that he would have considered this ship, not the houses ashore, to be his true home. If he left a trace of himself anywhere, it would be here.

Inside the envelope was a single photograph of my mother and father, the first I had ever seen of them together, taken the day they were married. They were standing in front of the Bronx County Courthouse, near Yankee Stadium. The sunlight was bright. Their shadows loomed on the broad steps. Patches of ice shone on the sidewalk. Some pigeons had just taken flight. My father was wearing a black suit and a wide checked tie. His overcoat was folded over his arm. His hair was slicked back. He had his other arm around my mother. Standing beside him, she was not as small as I would have thought. But she did look so much younger than him. She wore a double-breasted coat over a white dress. The wind was ruffling her long hair. The two of them were smiling, squinting into the light. I had never seen my father look that happy.

He had left me something he had never been able to give me in life: an image of himself happy. As to why this girl had made him so happy, even at this late date he was not willing to share that information. Nor to tell me that he loved me: just that he had loved her, to the end.

I
T WAS
V
ARTAN
M
ARZCEK
who had said to me, “You’re from the most hard-assed people in Europe: Cretans and Sicilians. A couple of islands too big to be islands. And too tough. No hammer breaks their stones. They make the rest of Greece and Italy look soft by comparison.”

I was in Sicily, a town called Fornace in the mountains fifty miles southwest of Messina. It lived up to its name, for even in October it was hot as a furnace. On top of which there was a severe drought. Dust coated the one road in like snow. The pine forests were dry as tinder. The stream that skirted the forest was reduced to a trickle.

The residents were suspicious of visitors. Fornace was my grandmother’s birthplace, so I had hoped to feel at home. Maybe if I had mentioned my lineage sooner, people would have been more welcoming. But even when I did identify myself as the great-grandson of Emmanuel Azzaro and the grandson of Rose Azzaro, it barely registered. All the Azzaros had either died off or moved to Catania and Messina to find work.

I did get a response finally on my third day in town when I struck up a conversation with an old man. I was renting one of the four rooms at the only pension in town, and he was at a café next door. He had a brown, lined face and a wild thatch of white hair. He was wearing a blue work shirt, with old wine stains washed in, and frayed suspenders. I bought him a grappa and smoked one of his Corso cigarettes, the harshest tobacco I ever tasted.