The professor had retired five years earlier, receiving awards and distinctions when he took his leave, inclusion in the registry of the most meritorious academics, a commemorative publication with articles by his students; several receptions were given in his honour. One of these was attended by a comedian well-known from TV, which, truth be known, was the thing that most cheered and revived the professor.
Then they settled down permanently in a modest but comfortable home in their university town; there he occupied himself with ‘putting his papers in order’. In the morning Karen would brew him tea and make a light breakfast. She’d go through his correspondence, responding to letters and invitations, a task that hinged primarily upon declining politely. In the mornings she tried to match his early rising, sleepily preparing herself some coffee as she made his oatmeal. She’d lay out clean clothing for him. At around noon the home help would come, so Karen had a few hours to herself, as he gave in to his daily nap. In the afternoon another mug of tea, this time herbal, and then she’d see him off on the walk he took in the early evenings on his own. Reading Ovid aloud, dinner, and the nightly preparations for bed. All this interspersed with the meting out of pills and drops. Each year, for these five peaceful years, there had only been one invitation to which she’d said yes – the luxury cruises every summer around the Greek islands, where the professor gave daily lectures to the passengers, not counting Saturdays and Sundays. It was ten lectures in all, on the topics that most fascinated the professor; there was no fixed list of subjects.
The ship was called Poseidon (its black Greek letters stood in stark relief against the white hulclass="underline" ΠΟΣΕΙΔΩΝ), and it contained two decks, restaurants, a billiards room, little cafés, a massage parlour, a solarium and comfortable cabins. For several years they’d occupied the same one, with a queen-sized bed, a bathroom, a table with two armchairs and a microscopic desk. On the floor a soft coffee-coloured carpet, and Karen, as she looked at it, still held out hope that in its long fibres she might still find the earring she lost here, four years before. The cabin led directly out onto the first-class deck, and in the evenings, once the professor was already asleep, Karen liked to take advantage of this amenity and stand at the railing to smoke her one daily cigarette, gazing out at the lights in the distance they had passed. The deck, heated by the sun during the day, now, too, gave off a warmth, while a dark, cool air flowed out over the water, and it seemed to Karen that her body marked the boundary between day and night.
‘For you are the saviour of ships, the tamer of war-steeds, blessed art thou, O Poseidon, wielding the earth, raven-haired and fortunate, show mercy upon the sailors,’ she’d say under her breath, and then she’d throw her barely started cigarette to the god, her daily allocation – an act of pure extravagance.
The ship’s trajectory hadn’t changed in five years.
From Piraeus it went to Eleusis, then to Corinth, and from there back south, to the island of Poros, so that the passengers could see the ruins of Poseidon’s temple and meander around the little town. Then their route took them to the Cyclades – it was all supposed to be unhurried, even lazy, so that everyone could bask in sun and sea, in the views of the towns arrayed along the islands, towns with white walls and orange roofs, scented by lemon groves. High season hadn’t started yet, so there wouldn’t be hordes of tourists – these the professor was always disparaging, unable to conceal his impatience. He felt that they looked without seeing, their gazes sliding over everything, alighting only on whatever their mass-produced guidebooks pointed out to them specifically – the print equivalent of a McDonald’s. Next they stopped on Delos, where they would study the temple of Apollo, and then finally they’d head for the Dodecanese island of Rhodes, completing their excursion there and flying home from the local airport.
Karen was fond of the afternoons when they docked at little ports, and, dressed for walking – the professor with the scarf he simply had to have around his neck – they’d go into the town. Bigger boats would also moor at these ports, and when they did the local merchants would immediately open up their little shops to offer visitors towels with the name of the island, sets of shells, sponges, mixes of dried herbs in tasteful baskets, ouzo or just ice cream.
The professor walked valiantly, indicating landmarks with his cane – gates, fountains, ruins encircled by frail barriers, and he’d tell stories his listeners would never be able to find even in the best guidebooks. These walks were not included in his contract, though. It stated just a single lecture every day.
He would begin: ‘I’m of the belief that human beings need, to live their lives, more or less the same climactic conditions as lemons.’
He’d raise his gaze to the ceiling dotted with little round lights and let it stay there for a moment longer than was strictly permissible.
Karen would clench her hands until her knuckles went white, but she thought she managed to contain the intrigued, lightly provocative smile – raised eyebrows, irony across her face.
‘This is our point of departure,’ continued her husband. ‘It is not by chance that the range of Greek civilization coincides, roughly speaking, with the incidence of citrus. Beyond this sun-drenched, life-giving realm, everything undergoes a slow, but inevitable, decline.’
It was like an unrushed, protracted take-off. Karen saw the same picture each time: the professor’s plane would stagger, its wheels dipping down into a rut, maybe even running off the runway – so he would take off from the grass. But in the end the engine would kick in, tossing from side to side, rocking, and by then it would be clear the plane would fly. And Karen would let out a discreet, relieved sigh.
She knew the topics of the lectures, knew their outlines from the index cards covered over in the professor’s miniscule handwriting, and from his notes that she would use to help him if something were indeed to happen – she could stand up from her seat in the first row and latch onto any of his sentences halfway through and just proceed, along the path he’d beaten. But it was true she wouldn’t speak with the same eloquence, nor would she permit herself the little quirks with which he held his audience’s attention, without even always being aware of them. Karen would await the moment when the professor would stand up and start pacing, which meant – returning to her picture – that his plane had reached its cruising altitude, that everything was fine, that she could now simply walk out onto the upper deck and extend her gaze in joy over the surface of the water, letting it linger on the masts of the yachts they had passed, on the just-traced mountain peaks in the light white mist.
She looked at the listeners – they were sitting in a semi-circle; those in the first row had notebooks before them on their small folded-out tables, eagerly jotting down the professor’s words. Those in the last rows, around the windows, lounging, ostentatiously indifferent, were also listening. Karen knew it was these rows that produced the most inquisitive among them, the ones who would later exhaust the professor with questions, calling her into the service of shielding her husband from all additional – now unpaid – consultations.
She was amazed by this man, her own husband. It seemed to her that he knew everything there was to know about Greece, everything that had been written, excavated, ever said. His knowledge wasn’t so much enormous as monstrous; it was made up of texts, quotes, references, citations, painstakingly deciphered words on chipped vases, drawings not entirely intelligible, dig sites, paraphrases in later writings, ashes, correspondences and concordances. There was something inhuman in all this – to be able to fit all that knowledge in himself, the professor must have needed to perform some special biological procedure, permitting it to grow into his tissues, opening his body to it and becoming a hybrid. Otherwise, it would have been impossible.