Yes. They've decided to emigrate.
What? All of them?
Yes, all of them.
Extraordinary. Where to?
A few to Canada and Australia and the United States. Most of them to South America.
Sivi sighed.
A new Diaspora, they seem never to end. Yes, well, I guess it isn't all that extraordinary. The banks are finished, I take it? The war has been that hard on them?
Yes.
Sivi nodded gently.
It happens, of course. The Old World becomes too old for some. I have cousins in Argentina whom I've never met. And what of the men in the family? Will there now be all-male Szondi baroque ensembles in various corners of the New World, mostly South America?
Not for a while, I would think. They'll have to give up music and go back to running discount dry goods stores to support the Sarahs. Petty local trade again, only this time in Sao Paulo and Sydney and New York.
But surely only for a time, Munk. The Sarahs are too clever not to get something going again before long.
I imagine.
Oh yes, they'll fare well, we know that. It's you I'm concerned about. Dare I be frank?
Munk smiled.
You old sinner. Have you ever been anything else?
Sivi wagged his head appreciatively and examined the flow of his dressing gown, straightening a fold here and there.
Well not for the last four or five decades, in any case. Not since I decided at an early age to recognize the creature I saw leering at me every morning in the mirror. But then too, I had the advantage of growing up in beautiful Smyrna where the light is so pure and the sea so sparkling, well, all things seem natural, even me. So it wasn't that difficult to admit that the lascivious beast I saw in the mirror wasn't a beast at all, just me, basically harmless and in love with love, merely insatiable when it comes to the pleasures to be found on a secluded stretch of beach when the sun is high and the white sand softly burns your skin, and the brilliant blue sea whispers now and later, now and always, love and life and the all-healing sea.
Munk smiled. He held his left hand out to the side and strummed with his right in front of him, reciting a verse.
Gaily the troubadour touched his guitar,
as he was wandering home from the wars.
Singing from Palestine, hither I come.
Lady love, lady love, welcome me home.
Sivi laughed.
Quite, he said. The aging troubadour forever wanders, forever singing that sins aren't sins when seen naked in the sun, singing that only darkness and despair can twist an act of love into regret. But we were talking about you, young Munk, and I was going to be frank. Well it's simply this. It's obvious you want something and don't know what it is. I mean something more than an occupation, a home and a family and friends or whatever. That's so, isn't it.
Of course.
Yes, blood tells. Mine is that of the ancient Greeks who reveled in their lucid sunlight, yours is that of your remarkable great-grandfather, Johann Luigi Szondi, his very name suggesting contradictory antecedents, a mysterious explorer whose tireless journeys you've never been quite able to comprehend.
All that in only eight short years? Penetrating Medina and Mecca and measuring Rameses' ear? Eating dates in Nubia while covering nine hundred miles a month? Gazing upon the stones of a deserted rose-red city half as old as time? Yes, astonishing exploits.
I don't want to leave, announced Munk abruptly, the words said with such force they startled Sivi.
Leave? Indeed, nor do I. But what are we referring to? Life? Smyrna? This garden with its spring flowers in bloom?
This part of the world, added Munk.
Sivi relaxed in his chair.
Ah, of course, the Eastern Mediterranean. No one in his right mind would want to leave it. But who ever suggested such a preposterous notion?
You did.
Me? said Sivi, even more startled than before. Me? Impossible. Out of the question.
Yes you did. You were talking earlier about spring and the sea and a distant shore, but I have no intention of going to America or anyplace like that.
Sivi tipped his head and laughed happily.
Oh, is that all. It seems you missed my meaning completely, young Munk. Come along and I'll point it out to you. As it happens it's only a few yards away.
Munk followed Sivi across the garden and into his villa. They walked to the second floor where Sivi threw open the doors to the balcony. The sun was slipping toward the harbor, which was still busy with boats. Strolling crowds thronged the quays in the evening promenade.
There, young Munk, that's the sea I had in mind. The Aegean. And you're already on its distant shore, cold damp Europe is far away to the north. So you see you've already set sail, here and now in sun and light, that's all I was suggesting. It's true, isn't it?
Sivi smiled. Munk smiled too.
Yes it's true.
Good. Now I'm told you're very successful at a special kind of trading, commodity futures are they called? Well then, if you're already trading in futures, why not trade in your own?
Trading doesn't mean anything to me, said Munk. You have your dream of a greater Greece. But as you've said, I don't know what I want.
Sivi laughed. He spread his arms as if to embrace the sea.
What you want? Of course you know what you want. You want a dream like anyone else. But a dream, is that all? Just look out there at what lies at your feet, look and be reassured. For was there ever a man who stood on these shores and didn't dream? This is the Eastern Mediterranean, young Munk, the birthplace of dreams. The men who gave our Western world its gods and civilizations came from here, and with good reason.
What is the reason?
I thought you'd never ask. Odd how the young disregard the wisdom of age in order to discover things for themselves. It's almost as if matters of the spirit could never be transmitted, only experienced. The reason, Munk? Light. The purity of the light here. In this light a man senses there are no limits for him in the world. He can see forever, and that vision intoxicates him. It fires his heart and makes him want to go and do, never to stop but to go farther, to go deeper, more. Thus the curiosity of the Greeks of old and their fearless explorations of the soul. Never has man surpassed the dramas enacted on these shores twenty-five hundred years ago, three thousand years ago. That was laughter, that was tragedy, and it is what we know of life. Even today we know no more. And strangely, modestly, they attributed their laughter and their tragedy to the intervention of the gods. But it just wasn't so. The miracle of it all was theirs. It was them. They stood on these shores and wept and laughed and lived those lives.
The old man smiled and stroked his moustache.
Well now, what do you think of that?
You're shamelessly romantic, Sivi, that's what I think.
It may be so. Yet all the same the light here is different. It's a palpable thing and its effect is inescapable, which is why Greece has always been more of an idea than a place. When the modern nation was founded in the last century, Alexandria and Constantinople were the great Greek cities in this world, and Athens was but a lonely plain where a few shepherds grazed their flocks at the foot of the Acropolis. But no matter. An idea doesn't die. It only slumbers and it can always be resurrected. Tell me, would anyone have ever heard of the Dorians if they'd stayed up there in the north puttering around the Danube? Just one more minor central European tribe three thousand years ago, passing the time with their crops and domestic animals and setting out for an occasional foray a few miles downstream? Exactly, and enough to put anyone to sleep. But the Dorians didn't stay up there. They had the luck or good sense to come trotting down here where they could learn to dream, and dream they did, and the result was ancient Greece in all its splendor. Ah yes, Munk, the Dorians should be a lesson to you. By the way, when you were on your mission for the Sarahs, how far were you able to trace Strongbow?