WITH SYRMOS IN AGIOI SARANTA

 The sun, bruised and swollen as if ripe to burst from the repeated blows and ravages of the centuries, leaned exhausted over the sea, shining upon it a phosphorescent path in all the brilliant hues of blood, leading absolutely nowhere. Our eyes were fixed upon it and not once did we turn to gaze at the mountains that loomed spitefully behind us. We had completely turned our backs upon them.

 

Beyond, a group of dishevelled seagulls fluttered nervously. They circled us two or three times desultorily and then, by way of unspoken consensus, they disappeared into the sea of ​​sky, as if they could not wait to escape the asphyxiating embrace of the port. A breeze had suddenly picked up and all the dust of the city was hurtling down towards the harbour desperately seeking a means of escape and of anabaptism at the same time.

“The solar equivalent of γιακαμός, (sea phosphorescence) should be  λιακαμός,” I said finally.

“Do you know how many times during those years, we stood at this exact spot and cast our gaze far, desperate to discern a sign, a trace, even a blot on the horizon, anything to signal salvation?” he sighed wearily. “Even the sun deceived us.”

 

Dimly on the horizon, the brooding mass of the island of the Phaeacians was silhouetted, slumbering indifferently and still, more of an introverted idea that still resented the god-abandoned deserters of Troy rather than a place of refuge and asylum.

 

‘The truth is,’ he continued, “During those times we were insanely jealous of the fish.”

He had already deboned the fish on his plate with the delicate, subtle movements of a virtuoso surgeon and was now applying himself to the task of sucking the juices from its bones with gusto.

 

“You know,” he related, a fish tail protruding from his thin lips, “there was once a Russian ascetic on Mount Athos who had a fish bone hanging in his cell. Three times a year, at Christmas, Easter and on August the fifteenth, he would take it down from its allotted place, boil it in an old soup tin and call that a feast. As for me, the first thing I ate that very first night after I was released from Spaç Prison Camp after seventeen years, was fish soup. And my Lord, was that a feast.”

 

‘They say that when Lazarus was raised, he asked to be given something sweet to eat,” I reflected.

“Quite possibly, but he came back from Hades, not from Hell,” he grimaced bitterly, grimly slurping upon his fish bone once again.

 

Iraklis Syrmos’ youth was torn away from him in brutal increments, in the torture chambers and in the gulags of the Hoxha regime in Albania, as a consequence of an inopportune conversation. While performing his military service, he was overheard criticising the efficiency of the collective farms imposed by the communist regime as well as the savage way in which collectivisation was imposed. He lamented the poverty of his homeland, of a country created entirely from stone, possessed of a petrified heart that has aught else to do but to chase away its children, for what else is left to bile and to tears, if they cannot overflow and escape: they thicken, they congeal and petrify, they lurk in the soil like the concrete bunkers constructed by the tyrant in their hundreds of thousands, waiting for you to try to leave so that they can rise up and cast themselves at you. Because misery, hardship, terror; all these things you must tie up in a knot tightly inside you and carry them together like the ballast of a ship that will never make sail, no matter how much you are choked by injustice, disgusted by cruelty and permeated by the longing for escape. “Our country is closed,” a particular poet once wrote in his abject boredom, for he too could not wait to escape the suffocating tedium of another closed, neighbouring metropolis. “Τwo black Symplegades
are closing it in.” It is the destiny of the stone-born never to escape the monolithic fury of the rocks that engendered them.

 

He was disinclined to refer to his suffering in the sadistic labour camps of the Regime, his punishment for identifying Greece as a place of possible refuge. When he mentioned his father, however, tears came to his eyes and welled up in mine too, the salty tears of fish out of water, because at this pivotal point, the narratives of the stone-born and the alien born under foreign skies converged. In 1947, the Military Court of Argyrokastro sentenced Giorgis Syrmos to a suspended prison term, for aiding and abetting a fugitive and concealing a crime. One of these fugitives was his relative "pappou” Nikos Syrmos, an ardent patriot and fighter for the liberation of Northern Epirus, who fled imminent and execution in Albania for Australia and settled in Brunswick, where he was left alone with his ennui, abandoning to the fury of the dictator, his wife and children, whom he never saw again, conversing with them only through notes in his diary, a diary that was only discovered when Nikos Syrmos passed away desolate, wracked by loneliness, despair and guilt, a despondency the regime must have been feeding upon, for it having been spent, it collapsed shortly after.

 

“Poisonous xenitia, you have poisoned me.” That is the traditional song your uncle used to sing when he missed you all,” I told him. “He would sit and say the names of all his relatives, as if they were the thirty-three prayers of the komoskoini. All of them far away, all of them fleeting but none of them unremembered.”

 

I told him more, about his prominent fellow villagers from Dervitsiani who had made a name for themselves in Australia. About the Lillis brothers, one of whom lay the foundations of the literary activity of our community but died too young and the other, who kept alive the flame of the struggle for the object of our most ardent desire and passed it on to us. About Stamoulis, the great benefactor who mobilized the entire community when he learned that Iraklis had once again been imprisoned by the new regime that had inherited the same hatreds, the same paranoias from the old one. Iraklis, in the euphoria that only the delusion of new beginnings can bring was arrested because he was one of the infamous OMONOIA Five, daring to dream that our people could take participate in the political process of a truly democratic Albania, only to have this called treason. “We tried to help,” I pleaded. “But what could we do? We are too far away, it is not easy, this damnably toxic xenitia gets in the way.”

 

He listened to me thoughtfully, chewing on his fish bone all the while. Finally he blurted out:

“Of all the poisons, Xenitia is the most poisonous of all. Why don't all our people come back? Fish do not live on land. Our suffering has taught us this.”

“Because between us now lies a vast ocean of pain that is no longer navigable. Because it is expressed in vocabularies and idioms that are now not mutually intelligible,” I responded and he shook his head with understanding and sorrow,  turning to listening to the sound of the waves. It was getting dark now and some lunar gravitational force was gathering the waters and pulling them towards the Adriatic. Everything that could leave, was leaving.

 

When I took my leave of him that Summer night in Agioi Saranda, I wanted to tell Iraklis that by his suffering, by his uncompromising stance as a staunch defender of the rights of the Greeks of Northern Epirus, by his refusal to be cowed during his show trial in 1994, by the physical and psychological pressure, the beatings, the sleep deprivation, and the threats of torture he endured,  he had set an example for all of us, especially in the Antipodes, as to exactly how one should guard the Pass at Thermopylae and mean it. But as he turned and looked at me sharply with his twinkling eyes, all I managed to gush was:

“You are a hero. This is what I will tell our people down under. That you are a hero.”

“I'm not a hero,” he interjected. “Don’t tell them that. Tell them that I am Iraklis Syrmos and I send my respects.”

 

When I learned last Thursday that Iraklis had died, I went to the kitchen and prepared a dish of fish stuffed with rice. I chose a snapper with venerable bones, full of history. And as I sucked upon its bones, reserving the head for psarosoupa, at the precise moment I finally understood the relationship between Kakavia, as fish soup and Kakavia, the border crossing into Albania, I recalled his final words to me:

“Kiss all our people down there, for me.”

“Do you have people in Australia?”

“You are all my people.”

 

DEAN KALIMNIOU

kalymnios@hotmail.com

First published in NKEE on Saturday 10 August 2024