Macedonian Moonlight

The train station was deserted; it was past midnight. In fact, it was now 4AM. Flowering cactus and the clicking of grasshoppers. I sat down to a bowl of chickenhead soup with Voula and Costos. Lungs, kidneys, livers, mangled heads, organs, a great deal of spew in this soup and nothing else. The stars hung like the illuminated organs of this poor chicken, strung out I, too, on a mixture of pills, cigarettes and ouzo, having talked to a plethora of nomadic Greek young males, on the train all in search of the eternal She.

"Don't give her your number," they told me.

"Always lie..."

The eternal and infinite basin of soup reflected the starlight, starlight wrapped around the finite darkness of the railway station. My employers took this appropriate moment to show me my flat. We went there by car, and they insisted, even though I was dog tired, in showing me how everything worked. They kindly left me some food and a little wine in the freezer.

I went to bed and woke in the morning to the din of a scooter making its fart-fart noise in my street. Later, possibly three weeks after my arrival, I found out that the street was called Markopolous Street. At first I imagined that this was a reference to the Venetian explorer, Marco Polo, but later learned from one of my students that it was the name of a fireman who had died fighting a blaze. There seemed to be some crisis in Drama's social services, with suicides among firemen being particularly high. Perhaps they were driven mad by the sheer boredom of the place. This may have been their perception; it was hardly mine. Beside my flat was the bakery and confectioners, Apostolos, which served up magnificent and cheap helpings of baklava, a famous Greek cake composed of filo pastry and honey. Apostolos also did variations on the standard baklava recipe, all greedily gorged down on a Friday evening after college, a day I left for pigging out. At this stage my Greek was non-existent, and I relied on guides for everything. Later, I could make out names and words quite easily.

The town was full of little tavernas, cafes, and interesting shops, the usual shops that are found in any town. At my corner were two confectioners. The first stocked a wide range of goods and was always packed with items and customers. Next door, a little man sat in a dingier shop with his few items on display. I learned that many Greeks have an independent spirit and would rather own their own little shop, even if it was stocked with poor quality items, or not packed at all as was this gentleman's. The town exhibited this schizophrenia -- success contrasted with failure.

One dingy old antiques' shop had a fox's head on display, I noticed it everyday as I walked to college. I bought it and propped it up in my room as a cure for insomnia, sitting upright in bed every night to see Macedonian moonlight glinting off its beady eyes, or waking in the morning to see its loving nose gently rubbing my shins. Until the ghastly occurrence of remembering that it was, after all, dead, and entertaining that instantaneous panic attack which I can only regard as the first pangs of that thing, what is it...er...well...love. O my Midnight Thought Fox, I love you a bit more than the girls in the taverna, because your affections never change, your relationship to me is as constant as the Macedonian moonlight itself. Some day you may make yourself useful about the flat, too, as an ashtray, until your fur and even your beady eyes are immolated in a smoky haze.

That Sunday afternoon I set out to Kavala to do some swimming. It was October, but because of the effects of global warming, it felt like a lovely, loveable, June day. I left my fox behind to guard the flat, hired a taxi for the afternoon, and set off. The driver spoke a little German and English, although he was convinced that his fragmentary grasp of both languages was fluency. He looked a little like, in fact very like, the French movie star Jean Paul Belmondo. The likeness was stunning, but I decided not to mention it. He might have thought that I meant he wasn't as good looking as X, or that Y certainly had a big nose and didn't suit French style period suits, leaning out of taxis with mangled fag peering out of the corner of his mouth, dark sunglasses and pistol stringing his waist.

We drove out of Drama, past the villages of Doxata and Phillipi and into the coastal resort, Kavalla. The island Thassos glimmered in the sunlight; a ferry was just setting off with its cargo of locals. There were no holiday-makers at this time of year. Overlooking the town was a Byzantine castro (castle). I wandered up the maze of streets and climbed up to its battlements one pissing-it-down Saturday afternoon. On the way I was almost savaged by a little dog (I noticed the exponential tendency in dogs, their size, and their potential to produce noisy and ferocious barking.).

Beside the castle is the house of Mehmet Ali, sometime Pasha of Egypt under the Ottoman Empire. Today it looks rather like the house of a wizard. For some time I wondered whether this was a set for some Hollywood sword and sorcery fable, but then I realised that it was a museum. There is also a statue of Ali beside the house wielding his scimitar and striking out at those long dead rebels who fought the Ottoman Empire for Greek Independence. Oddly, some Greeks I spoke to still blamed their long subjugation by the Turks as the explanation for the amazing decline in the Renaissance that gripped Greece from the time of Omeros (Homer) to the eventual conquest of the Successor States (the Macedonian successors to Alexander the Great, the Ptolomies, the Seleucids and the various Leagues of Greek City States that controlled the rest of Greece) - by the Romans - mainly engineered by cunning flank charges on Macedonian pike phalanxes by cohorts of Roman legionaries.

The taxi skeltered on through beachside villages, tavernas, and amusement arcades, all shut now in the off season. An age later, my driver stopped at a massive expanse of beach. Amazingly, he waited for over two hours for just 5000 Drachma (about £2.50) as I lay on the beach. An empty beach in Greece in 'Winter.' Then I went swimming, playing among the mutant, radioactive fishes in the bay. I remembered well W. B. Yeats' poem "Byzantium" and the magnificent lines: 'that dolphin torn, that gong tormented sea...'

What could Yeats have made of Greece today? Might he not have written, 'that mutant dolphin no longer crossing a gong tormented sea, but floating to the bottom of it with a bellyful of antacid'? What's a mutant dolphin between friends, I mused. Yeat's view of Greece (or Byzantium, as he styled it -- the Greek-speaking and Eastern part of the Roman Empire which survived after the fall of Rome and the Western part to Attila the Hun and his minions.) was idealised long before all the Chemical Inc & Subsidiaries got to work with their noxious odours and gases wafting (my way, of course).

Not so much gilded cockerels, Emperor's Thrones, peacocks and the like. But having one's eyes gouged out by a big, hairy Byzantine trooper. Not even clad in regulation white gear, but with bravura boots, thongs, skintight mail, and a magnificent, smelly codpiece dangling before one's nose, as swords lanced one's head, neck, severed one's eyeballs, ears. The brutes, I thought, but how they must have loved it. Better than Hollywood, better than warm Madras curry slithering down into bellybutton and scalding genitals, better than tables and chairs, better even than the Cambridge Pocket Wittgenstein (the book I had beside my towel at the time). So much for the modern world, all the greatness has passed, passing. Passing as the oilslick, the poisoned seagull, the herds of bacterium-coated trout fished out of lonely synthetic lakes on the Isle of Skye. Dancing, dancing fish, their silvered skins and fins flipping out of the water, greedily grabbed by earnest extras from former retarded Scottish Tourist Board depictions of the Highlands & Islands a la Rob Roy.

STARSHIP TROOPER

"Lt. Seblon, can you hear me? We have real problems in Loading Bay 1, repeat, real problems; get your ass down here at once!"

I realised I had fallen through a parallel universe and into Michael McMerely's story. Shit, I mused, it must have been the antacid on one of those platinum fishes, too much by my understanding of Quantum Physics. Yes, a trail of slime on my fingers confirmed my belief.

Lt. Seblon appeared, not embodied, as I had believed. It was merely a plasmogram issued by credit card in some galaxy 75 million light years away, at the credit holding firm he had taken over from a defaulter who had re-mortgaged a minor Universe and then found that it had only another two million light years before its Big Bang came to an end.

"Can't you see I'm busy? What is it?"

I opened my eyes and incredulous light gaped into the gap between my eyelid and retina.

"Come, Mr. Paul, we must return to Drama; it is evening."

(I hated the way Mediterranean people called me 'Mr. Paul;' they must have thought that I was English. This is the way one must address a young English gentleman, they must have thought, for to their minds I was English and not Irish or Northern Irish.)

Another car chase through the streets of Kavala later, we arrived at Markopoulous Street. I realised that something was wrong because, even though my bedroom window was hanging off its hinges, nothing whatsoever had been stolen, nor was a thief waiting for me in my kitchen to beg dinner. In truth, Drama was crime free because there was nothing in Drama worth stealing.

In a very short time, I had set my rucksack down in the flat and walked over the road to make a telephone call. Thousands of little fart-fart motorbikes and mopeds sped past. A little man was sitting over in the adjoining tenement block playing on a peculiar Greek stringed instrument. On the wall in front of me was a beautiful graffiti of a Greek hoplite replete with helmet, black crest and the word Ellas (Greece) in white lettering on a black shield.

ATHENS AIRPORT

He walked out of the airport terminal and over to a desk where a clerk was sitting and seemingly attempting to prise his hands apart with a ruler.

"Can I have a medium priced hotel in a reasonable area?"

"Yes, of course, Sir, we have one right in the centre; here it is."

He pointed at an area which he could only remember as Omeron. It was very central, and, since he didn't have a clue about Athens, he decided to chance it.

"I'll take it, can you give me directions to the taxi rank?" The airport clerk motioned at a rank of taxis drawn up outside the main building.

He could only describe the ensuing journey as an alphabetical maze, as he sped through Athens and through an entirely new alphabet. He recognised the symbols, of course, from the mathematics he had been taught at school -- there was Pi, there Omega, there Epsilon and so on. More matheme than language, or somewhere between matheme and language. When he arrived at his hotel, he realised that he had been conned. This was not a reasonable area. As he walked around the square, there were sex shows everywhere, blue movies, prostitutes on each corner. At one point he stepped over an unfortunate who was lying in a pool of his own blood. This was not a reasonable area, this was Athen's red light district.

MURPHY 1 BRITISH MUSEUM 0

The next day he stood upon the Parthenon and in an instant solved a problem which has been dominating Anglo-Greek relations for some time. The Elgin Marbles, re-named as the Acropolis Marbles, were, in fact, the Parthenon Marbles. This is important because the British Museum now calls them The Acropolis Marbles. But Acropolis is just the Greek word for any defended hilltop fort; only the Parthenon is specific to Athens.

VRIL

The whirr and thud of engines. He was aware that he was alone. In the room a thousand wax mannequins. A black spot is receding and dimming, now growing, on a white backdrop. On the wall, a mirror. Behind it, the figure death and the last sylph in Belinda's hair.

POSTSCRIPT

WHAT THE SEARCH ENGINE SAID

He walked into the internet café and inserted 'my obituary' into the google directory. After the flash of a button: 'Abducted by a group of aliens (who had been cleverly infesting literature since the time of Dryden, Addison, Steele and Pope) in their alien spacecraft; for three days and three nights they (had sex with him) as a route to their bio-cybernetic-synthetic observations on the human race (now published by the University of Delaware Press, $90 - add to your shopping basket?); they seemed to be an extremist sect of would-be Neo-Rosicrucianism-Seventh-Day-Adventist-Jehovahs-Witnesses, (in reality a knitting circle enagaged in the production of sylph's wings). He begged to be taken back but was rejected at that time because of flatfeet/hunchedback/handless/armless/nameless/headless.'
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