Anna Fienburg - Kalymnos Reflections
This morning rain clouds burst in soft plump drops that ran down our faces like smashed fruit. A wind swept up, purpling the sky, shivering the salt trees lining the slope up to the Monastery. From the bus I’d watched the zig zagging coast cut heartless triangles into the sea, beating out the rhythm of centuries. Everything felt monumental, inevitable, wondrous, and there was sadness and relief to be just the small creature I was, burrowing inside the first and best functional raincoat I’d ever bought, stepping into the church of Saint Savvas on the island of Kalymnos.
The walls were covered in miracles and floating clouds of saints, horses and dogs, and at the front was the ‘stage’, the iconostasis, where a painted panel of the Panaghia (Virgin Mary) to the left of the arch was flanked by Jesus on the right.
It was the Panaghia that held me…the eyes, the stoic line of the mouth that bit down on tragedy. A hard flat stare out at the world and yet such gentleness in the hand held up for her child to hold.
In the Kalymnian House, I began to understand more about the depth of loss and yearning that the sponge diving separation brought men and women. Death in life, the shadow in the sun, the stark poles of existence that most of us ward off for as long as we can.
It was there in the face of the Panaghia. Her eyes stared at you, both inward focussed and outward looking, hiding nothing, accepting everything, knowing pain and endurance.
The need to write, to catch the tail of the comet that lit up and died above you, or the ghost round the next corner – it’s like a puzzle that’s never solved, a question asked over and over, chasing someone in a mirror, a fragment, a whiff of smoke, a thought.
When you write, there’s the illusion you’ll solve the mystery, find the missing piece, see yourself and your intimate relation to the earth. There’s the promise that you won’t always be dangling out alone on the end of a rope in an astronaut suit, trudging the sea bed amongst alien creatures with gills and stardust.
Today, the climb up to the castle, through waves of wild oregano. I picked a stem and crushed it in my hand and the smell opened up inside me. I was flooded with the wild aroma of being alive – this was what a walk in Kalymnos smelled like. A cool breeze carried it gently, this secret self, letting the scent still and ferment in lemon patches of sun. Red poppies were pinned like jewels to the limestone, impossible but true.
We climbed slowly, absorbing, swallowing the blue air and I filled my lungs to the brim. I thought of Charmian’s Kathy, of her struggle for breath and vivid yearning, and the screaming inside her. And it occurred to me that the sun shone today and shadows appeared and disappeared just as they had then, and just as they had ten centuries ago when 2000 people lived here amongst those camomile flowers and wild asparagus, and I was no longer alone but wafting in the company of Kathy and Fotis who drank the air and mourned and made love in the caves and softer tufts of grass, then and now.
Yesterday Nadia mentioned the pressing sense of place here — always the mountains, always the sea, whichever way you turn, and I thought the landscape can’t help but frame you, and you’re caught like a piece of fruit in a still life.
Trapped. Strange, in all this endless beauty and open blue of the sea and sky and mountains. Such a paradox, such a puzzle, this landscape endangering the lives of men, causing enduring hardship for women, generation after generation.
But what can any of us do with the beginning and end inside of us? We keep walking the maze, taking our time on the journey, as Cavafy writes, amongst the poppies and pansies and curling cats, and leave for later the mulling of an answer, or the illusion of why we do it at all. Is it for those moments of recognition, of wild certainty, is that happiness? Naming a scent, feeling love, being connected to a past that’s human, full of hope and yearning and the sharp knife of loss.
