‘Right,’ responded the man somewhat helplessly. ‘But what would that mean?’
He did not receive a response, because after ruminating for a moment, evidently searching through the stocks of the abyss of his memory, the professor finally began to trace a series of small circles in the air with his hand, reciting:
‘Reject everything, do not look, shut your eyes and change your gaze, awaken another one that almost everyone has, but that few use.’
He was so proud of himself he actually blushed.
‘Plato.’
The captain nodded knowingly, and then raised a toast – this was their fifth shared journey:
‘To our happy little anniversary.’
It was strange, but just then Karen felt certain this would be their last shared journey.
‘May we meet again next year,’ she said.
The professor, animated now, told the captain and the ginger-haired man, who introduced himself as Ole, about his latest idea.
‘A trip that would follow in the footsteps of Odysseus,’ he said, and then waited, to give them time to be astonished by the thought. ‘Approximately, of course. We’d need to think how to organize it, logistically.’ He looked at Karen, who muttered:
‘It did take Odysseus twenty years.’
‘That doesn’t matter,’ the professor replied merrily. ‘In today’s day and age you could do it in two weeks.’
Then Karen’s and Ole’s eyes met, by accident.
It was on that night or the following one that she had an orgasm, just like that, in her sleep. It was somehow connected with the red-headed Norwegian, but it wasn’t clear how, because she didn’t remember very much of what had gone on there, in her dream. She’d simply known that golden man, profoundly. She woke up with echoes of contractions in her lower abdomen, stunned, amazed and then embarrassed. Without realizing she was doing it, she started counting them, catching the final four.
The next day, as they were moving along the coast, Karen openly admitted to herself that in many places, at this stage, there was nothing left to see.
The road to Eleusis was an asphalt highway down which cars went speeding; thirty kilometres of ugliness and banality, desiccated hard shoulders, concrete homes, ads, parking lots and land it wouldn’t have made sense to cultivate. Warehouses, loading ramps, a giant dirty port, a heating plant.
Once they were ashore, the professor led the whole group to the ruins of Demeter’s temple, which now looked rather sad. The group could not conceal its disappointment, so he called on all of them to imagine turning back time.
‘This route from Athens was barely reinforced by stones back then, and very narrow – look, swarms of people move along it towards Eleusis, walking, kicking up the dust feared by the greatest rulers of the world. The packed crowd cries out, the sound of hundreds of throats.’
The professor stood still, leaned back on his heels, wedging his cane into the ground, and said:
‘It might have sounded something like this,’ and his voice cut off for a moment, for him to gather his breath, and then he shouted out with all the strength of his old throat. And suddenly his voice loud and clear. His wailing was carried by the heated air, causing everyone to look up: surprised tourists on their own, making their way between the rocks, and ice cream vendors, and workers lining the railings because high season was about to start now, and a small child poking at a frightened beetle with a stick, and two donkeys grazing off in the distance, on the other side of the slope.
‘Iacchus, Iacchus,’ cried the professor with his eyes closed.
Even after he had fallen silent again, his shout still hung in the air, so that everything held its breath for half a minute, for a few dozen strange seconds. Jarred by this eccentric comportment, his listeners couldn’t bring themselves to even look at one another, and Karen turned bright red, as though it had been her crying out in that strange way. She moved off to the side, to cool off from her embarrassment and from the heat.
But the old man didn’t look even remotely chagrined.
‘…and perhaps it is possible,’ she heard him say, ‘to look into the past, cast our glances backwards, imagine it as a panopticon of sorts, or, dear friends, to treat the past as though it still existed, it’s just that it’s been shifted over into another dimension. Maybe all we need to do is change our way of looking, look askance at it all somehow. Because if the future and the past are infinite, then in reality there can be no ‘once upon’, no ‘back when’. Different moments in time hang in space like sheets, like screens lit up by one moment; the world is made up of these frozen moments, great meta-images, and we just hop from one to the next.’
He broke off for a moment to rest, because they were walking uphill, and then Karen heard him squeeze the next words out between his whistling breaths:
‘In reality, movement doesn’t exist. Like the turtle in Zeno’s paradox, we’re heading nowhere, if anything we’re simply wandering into the interior of a moment, and there is no end, nor any destination. And the same might apply to space – since we are all identically removed from infinity, there can also be no somewhere – nothing is truly anchored on any day, nor in any place.’
That evening Karen did a mental breakdown of the costs of that expedition: a burned nose and forehead, a foot injured to bleeding. A sharp stone had got under the strap of his sandal, and he hadn’t felt it. That must have been a serious symptom of worsening arteriosclerosis, which the professor had had for many years.
She knew this body well, too well – shrunken, sunken, the dried-out skin dappled with brown spots. The remains of grey hairs on his chest, his frail neck that barely held up his trembling head, the thin bones beneath a thin covering of skin and a skeleton that seemed made of aluminium it was so light, avian.
Sometimes he fell asleep before she had managed to undress him and prepare the bed, and then she had to carefully remove his jacket and shoes and steer him, still slumbering, towards the bed.
Every morning they had the same problem – his shoes. The professor suffered from an irritating ailment – he had ingrowing nails. His toes became inflamed, swollen, his nails got raised, boring holes into his socks, scraping painfully against the tops of his shoes. Placing a foot in such pain in its black leather slipper would be a gratuitous act of cruelty. So, for everyday things the professor wore sandals, and covered shoes they ordered from a particular shoemaker near where they lived, and for an incredible sum he would produce for the professor beautiful soft shoes, with a raised top, loose.
That evening, likely from the sun, he had a fever, so Karen gave up on dinner at the table and ordered food to their cabin.
In the morning, as the ship was sailing up to Delos, after brushing their teeth and a laborious shave, they went out together onto the deck with the pastries from the previous day’s tea. They crumbled them and threw them into the sea. It was early, everyone else was probably asleep. But the sun had already lost its redness and was shining, gathering its strength moment by moment. The water had turned a golden, honey colour, thick, the waves had died down, and the great iron of the sun pressed them without leaving even the finest line. The professor put his arm around Karen’s shoulder, and in fact that was the only gesture to be made in the face of such an obvious epiphany.
Looking around where you are once more is like looking at an image in which a million details conceal a hidden shape. Once you see it, you can never forget it’s there.
I won’t record every day of the trip, nor relay each lecture – in any case, Karen might have them published someday. The ship sailed, every evening there was dancing on the deck, the passengers with glasses of wine in their hands, leaning against the railings, having lazy conversations. Others gazed out at the night-time sea, at the cool, crystal darkness, lit up from time to time by the lights of big ships, bearing thousands of passengers, calling daily at different ports.