We take a taxi to Cape Sounion, the driver waits for us at the parking lot. On the reserve that is the hotel on the Lagonissi peninsula it’s easy to forget that you are in a country with an arid climate, that the sun here splits rock. In the pale blue haze over the sea, sailboats and islands are of equal weight.
At the temple of Poseidon, perched gloriously at the tip of the cape, Lotte shows me where Byron carved his name in the pillar, in graceful letters. She is wearing a sleeveless blouse embroidered with gold thread and a skirt that does not quite reach her knees, everything white, just like the espadrilles on her feet. Her nipples, the bumps they make, press themselves on me. She bends over to read other names scratched in the pillar, and slides her sunglasses with the monogrammed C’s up onto her forehead in order to see better. Her breasts sway heavily under the textile. I feel an erection coming up.
At the edge of the cape a guide wearing sandals announces in a loud voice that it was on this rock that King Aegeus waited for the return of his son Theseus, who had gone to Crete to slay the Minotaur. Theseus had left with black sails and, if he survived his mission, would return with white in the riggings. But because of the tragic end of his love for Ariadne, whom he was forced to leave behind on Naxos, Theseus forgot his promise and sailed back to Athens with black sails. From Cape Sounion, his father saw the black sails approaching in the distance. Overcome by sorrow, he threw himself into the sea.
I recall the contours of the legend, it had been impressive even when I’d heard it in a Suffolk classroom. A few tourists leave the group and walk over to the edge, one of them says, ‘It’s not really all that steep. It would be more like rolling instead of falling.’
Lotte comes over and stands beside me. I know the kind of mood she’s in.
‘In Germany you sometimes forget how lovely the world is,’ she says.
I tell her the story I just heard. We look out over the mythical sea, the line between water and sky has been dispelled, white sails float on the horizon, sons who have slain the beast and are now returning home.
The plane lands early in the morning. The passengers leave the aircraft and descend the stairs to the bus on the landing strip. It is cold, a purple veil lies over the desert. Between the layers of cold air drift the pungent, titillating odors of another world.
In the arrivals hall the flash of recognition — even far away and amid the crowd, I see from the way she moves, her silhouette among the others, that it’s her. Imprint. Lorenz. And desperate love as well. That tremor, risen from the depths where the child lies sleeping, opens its eyes now and sees its mother.
My smile is untainted, nothing grinds between my teeth.
She has a cobalt-blue mantilla draped over her shoulders. She is crying a little. She throws her arms around me, I feel her belly against my body, her breasts. The repulsion, sharp as a toothache. I will never have a normal relationship with that body. Not even now that we have arrived at the end, now that her days are numbered.
‘I’ve got a cab for us,’ she says. ‘Come on.’
We had telephoned occasionally. At long last she had bought a cell phone, something she had always avoided out of an unspecified fear of radiation.
‘Tunisia,’ she said when I asked where in the world she was.
‘Jesus.’
‘This is an island, I think. I’ve barely been out of the hotel.’
‘And what is the island called?’ I ask, as though trying to help her after she has lost her way.
‘Djerba.’
I was holding a shell to my ear, listening to the hissing of the ocean.
‘Hello, are you there?’
‘Yes, I’m still here. What are you doing out there?’
‘Where?’
‘On Djerba.’
‘Oh. Taking it easy. Reading a lot.’
‘I mean, why are you there?’
‘Oh, well, they didn’t want me anymore. That’s what it really boils down to.’
‘Who?’
‘There was a spot on my breast. You couldn’t see it at all, with a little makeup, but by then they weren’t interested anymore. They said the actors wouldn’t be able to handle it. Just a little spot.’
My head spun. The moment you knew would come, for which in your blackest hours you had longed. Which you had feared more than anything else. My voice was flat, toneless, when I asked, ‘What kind of spot?’
‘A kind of cancer. An early stage. On the nipple, the right one.’
From the sacred spaces of the past came the requiems I had sung for her. The moment had come. I cursed quietly.
‘Yeah, you can say that again.’
‘What now?’ I asked.
‘Don’t worry your head about it, love. It’s only a little spot. Sometimes it even heals over for a while.’
‘It’s a open wound?’
‘That’s how it started. An infection. A sort of flaky little wound that bled a little sometimes. Sometimes a little pus came out of it. That healed over again but now it’s been open again for a while. I don’t understand it. I eat so many good things, lots of vitamin C, wheat germ. I have this really good salve that I rub on it. I’ve got it pretty well under control.’
‘Vitamin C? Against cancer?’
‘It’s so good, a lot more people. .’
‘And the doctor? Where are you going for treatment?’
‘I’ve heard about this wonderful orthomolecular physician, I want to make an appointment with him. And in Cologne there’s a doctor who has developed a special method. .’
And so it dawned on me that she was not planning to go to a hospital for treatment at all, that she didn’t even want to think about an operation. She was placing her fate in the hands of people who called themselves healers. The greatest act one could perform on this earth was to heal another. To be Jesus.
She was on the far shore of the same sea I was looking at. I left Lagonissi as quickly as I could.
In the backseat of the taxi, with the desert awakening all around, it was as though we were racing back through time, back to Alexandria.
The subject lay silently between us, black water.
‘Where did you come from now?’ she asked.
I pointed at the windshield, down the long asphalt road, towards the still-invisible sea beyond.
‘The other side. Athens.’
‘When you got off the plane I saw that you have the same stately posture as my father. You inherited that from him. So straight and tall. Not that hulking frame that your father had.’
I saw oleanders and crooked olive trees with bluish-green leaves and occasionally, along the road, women in long, heavy skirts and broad-rimmed straw hats.
‘This is where it is,’ my mother said. ‘It’s not far now.’
Midoun was the name of the village. Then the houses of Midoun segued into more olive orchards, with here and there a house the color of dust, sometimes a few of them huddled together.
Parallel to the coastline the hotels loomed up, one after the other, countless charter flights poured into them constantly. Bougainvillea bloomed beside the entrance. A man in an emerald-green waistcoat took my suitcase. On the reception desk was a sign. Honored guest, the algae on the beach is a natural phenomenon, we are unable to remove it completely. The algae is a part of the ecosystem. The sea will remove it by itself. The management thanks you for being understanding.
We went down to the breakfast room. A low mist hung in the room, coming from the fried eggs, bacon, the steam from chafing dishes. We found a little table by the window. The food was spread out over a few islands, between them people swarmed with plates in hand. The conveyor toaster was of particular interest to me. You put a slice of bread on a conveyor belt and it was roasted top and bottom by glowing spirals — when it reached the end of the belt the bread fell onto a little slide and was ejected from the machine, toasted and all. An industrial, efficient process, in keeping with the mass tourism along this stretch of coast.