I’ll mention only one lecture, which happened also to be my favourite. Karen had come up with the idea, to talk about those gods who didn’t make it into the pages of the famous, popular books, those not mentioned by Homer, then ignored by Ovid; those who didn’t make names for themselves with drama or romance; who weren’t terrifying enough, cunning enough, elusive enough, who are known only from fragments of rock, from mentions, from the little extant from burned-down libraries. But thanks to that they’ve preserved something the well-known gods have lost forever – a divine volatility and ungraspability, a fluidity of form, an uncertainty of genealogy. They emerge from the shadows, from formlessness, then succumb once more to looming darkness. Just take Kairos, who always operates at the intersection of linear, human time and divine time – circular time. And at the intersection between place and time, at that moment that opens up for just a little while, to situate that single, right, unrepeatable possibility. The point where the straight line that runs from nowhere to nowhere makes – for one moment – contact with the circle.
He entered the room with a brisk step, dragging his feet and panting, and stood at his podium – the ordinary little restaurant table – and took a bundle out from under his arm. She knew his methods. The bundle was a towel, right out of their cabin. He knew perfectly well that as soon as he began to unroll it the room would fall silent, and the heads in the last row would incline towards him. People are children. Under the towel there was, first, her red scarf, and then, finally, there shone something white, a piece of marble, which may have looked like some shard of rock. The tension in the room had reached its pinnacle, and he, aware of the interest he was arousing, celebrated it with a slight sly smile, drawing out his gestures like he was acting in a movie. Then he lifted that light, flat piece almost to eye level, extending his arm, parodying Hamlet, and began:
Who is the sculptor, and where does he come from?
From Sicyon.
And his name?
Lysippus.
And who are you?
Kairos the All-Mastering.
Why do you tread on tiptoes?
I ceaselessly circumnavigate the world.
Why do you have wings on both feet?
Because I fly by with the wind.
And in your right hand, why do you carry a razor?
It is a sign to people that I am sharper than any blade.
Why does your hair fall over your eyes?
So that anyone who confronts me head-on can still catch me.
But, by Zeus, why is the back of your head bald?
So that no one I’ve run over with my winged feet,
Might seize me from behind, for much as he desired to do so.
Why did the sculptor create you?
On account of you, foreigners, and he set me at the entrance as a lesson.
He began with this lovely epigram by Posidippus – he ought to have used it as an epitaph. The professor went up to the first seats and handed the proof of the god’s existence over to his audience. The girl with the swollen, contemptuous lips reached out for the relief with exaggerated caution, sticking out her tongue slightly from the exertion. She passed it on, while the professor waited in silence, until the small god had made it halfway around the room, and then, with a stony expression on his face, he said:
‘Please don’t worry, it’s a plaster cast from a museum gift shop. Fifteen euros.’
Karen heard a murmur of laughter, the shifting of the listeners’ bodies, the scraping of someone’s chair – a clear sign that the tension had been broken. He’d started well. He must be having a good day today.
She quietly slipped out onto the deck and lit a cigarette, looking at the island of Rhodes as it got nearer, and the big ferries, the beaches still mostly empty at this time of year, and the city, which like some colony of insects climbed up the steep slope towards the bright sun. She stood there, enveloped in a peace that suddenly flowered over her, who knew from where.
She saw the island’s shores, and its caves. Cloisters and the naves carved into the rock by the water brought strange temples to her mind. Something had carefully built them over millions of years, that same force that now bore their small ship, rocked them. A thick transparent power, that had its workshops on land, as well.
Here were the prototypes of cathedrals, the slender towers and the catacombs, thought Karen. Those evenly stacked layers of rock on the shore, perfectly rounded stones, carefully elaborated over the ages, and grains of sand, and the ovals of caves. The veins of granite in sandstone, their asymmetrical, intriguing pattern, the regular line of the island’s shore, the shades of sand on the beaches. Monumental buildings and fine jewellery. What, in the face of this, could those little strings of houses lining the shores ever hope to be? Those little ports, those little ships, those little human shops, where with excessive confidence old ideas – simplified and in miniature – were sold.
Now she recalled the water grotto they’d seen somewhere on the Adriatic. Poseidon’s Grotto, where once a day the sun burst through an opening in the top. She remembered she herself had been next to the column of light as it pierced – sharp as a needle – the green water, and for just an instant revealed the sandy bed below. It lasted just a moment before the sun continued on its way.
The cigarette disappeared with a hiss into the great mouth of the sea.
He was sleeping on his side, with a hand under his cheek, his lips parted. His trouser leg had rolled up and now showed his grey cotton sock. She lay down beside him gently, put her arm around his waist and kissed his back in its woollen vest. It occurred to her that after he was gone she’d have to stay a little longer, even just to tidy all their things up and make room for others. She’d gather all his notes, go through them, probably publish them. She’d arrange things with the publishers – several of his books had already been made into textbooks. And in reality there was no reason not to continue his lectures, although she wasn’t sure the university would invite her to do so. But she would definitely want to take over these mobile Poseidon-like seminars on this meandering ship (if they asked her). Then she’d be able to add a lot of her own things. She thought about how no one had taught us to grow old, how we didn’t know what it would be like. When we were young we thought of old age as an ailment that affected only other people. While we, for reasons never entirely clear, would remain young. We treated the old as though they were responsible for their condition somehow, as though they’d done something to earn it, like some types of diabetes or arteriosclerosis. And yet this was an ailment that affected the absolute most innocent. And, her eyes closed now, she thought of something else: the fact that her back remained uncovered. Who would hold her?
In the morning the sea was so calm, the weather so pretty, that everyone went out onto the deck. Someone was insisting that with such great weather they ought to be able to see in the distance the Turkish coast of Mount Ararat. But all they saw was a high rocky shore. From the sea the massif looked so powerful, dappled with bright splotches of bare rock resembling bones. The professor stood hunched over with his neck wrapped up in her red scarf, squinting. An image came to Karen’s mind: they were sailing underwater, because in reality the water level was high, like in times of flood; they were moving in an illuminated greenish space that slowed their motion and drowned out their words. Her scarf no longer flapped obnoxiously, but rippled, silent, and her husband’s dark eyes looked at her so softly, gently, rinsed by omnipresent salty tears. Glistening even more was Ole’s red-gold hair, his whole body like a drop of resin in the water that would harden into amber soon. And high above their heads someone’s hands were just releasing a bird to scout out the mainland, and soon they’d realize it was known where we were sailing, and just then that same hand was pointing out a mountaintop, a safe spot for a new beginning.