1001 Nights Cast

I got off the bus at Antissa, having already seen two other signs that said Antissa: Antissa Campo and Ancient Antissa.

‘Which is the right Antissa?’ I asked the driver in broken Greek. He gestured to the donkey track to the left and said, ‘Yes Antissa,’ then spoke in Greek to an old black-shawled woman leading a donkey along the track to who-knows-where.

Still confused, I walked the ancient road ahead of the toothless woman who looked a hundred, until I came to the Plateia (plaza). I hesitated, surveyed the scene with tired eyes, and slowed my pace to a plod. Dressed in pedal pushers and a blue t-shirt, it was instantly evident I was not from here, my un-belongingness etched into my gait, my wonder. The eyes of the men fell heavily upon me. There were few women in the Plateia. They were probably somewhere else waiting for the woman with the donkey to turn up to take the goats milk to the neighbours. This was a traditional village—women do everything. I walked into the taverna I’d been told to look for, and the proprietor greeted me, his face already pale with concern.

‘Why you come here?’

‘Actually, I’m not sure if this is the right Antissa. The road signs point to two other Antissas. I’m looking for the resting place of Orpheus.’

‘Why you want to find Orpheus? Not good for Australian girl.’

I explained my mission, that Orpheus held the clues for the quest in a book I was writing, the quest for tenderness; he sang about it, was revered for it. I wanted to find the place where he was ministered to by those gentle Lesvian women before Apollo ordered his lips to silence. He wasn’t keen. I was meddling with the sacred Dionysian Mysteries, an outsider, uninitiated, profane.

I’d been commissioned to write a book about people who’d been written out of Greek myth (and who had written them out) and Orpheus held the clues in his tender theogony. If his head were here on Lesvos with accompanying epitaph, what else might there be? There were different truths, deeper more obscure truths veiled by the contemporaneous twaddle that often sells as airport fiction.

He ordered a taxi and I was relieved it had four wheels, and not four legs led by the old all-knowing looking woman who came past again. She shot me an odd un-smiling glance. I felt uneasy.

The driver pulled up at a taverna with two signs pointing in opposite directions to different Antissas. He called out, loosely translated, ‘Who I can give crazy Australian woman looking for Orpheus to?’

‘G’day mate, “ came the reply in a thick Greek accent, ‘I’m Spiro from Marrickville, in Sydney. Where you from?’

‘Collaroy,’ I said. ‘I’m writing a book about Orpheus. I need a guide and a translator.’

‘Yes I am your guide. Come, we talk at my home, you meet my wife, have lunch and snooze before we work.’

I hesitated but he was the only person I’d met with enough English to translate and navigate properly.

Anna was Armenian he explained, as we ate salted anchovy and Greek salad with home made fetta cheese from the neighbour’s goat. She was an older immigrant woman long separated from her children, who had taken menial work in Mitilini to eek a meagre living so that she might one day be reunited with her grown-up children.

Lesvos, located at the top end of the Aegean has been home to many refugees and immigrants over many generations. The Turkish situation is ever present in the minds of these people. Even on an unclear day you can see Turkey to the northeast and the storytellers of the tavernas bring the onslaughts of the past into the present with their utterings. So much bloodletting, and blurring of borderlines all the way back to the beginning of time. There is peace enough but the psycho-mythic, geo-political chaos is not forgotten. Before the Turks there was the wrath of the gods. Nobody agrees on the original story anymore and the story changes depending on the narrator. Nothing is reliable.

I get the Armenian story from Anna, one woman, displaced but graced with a new homeland. I get the Greek story from Spiro, the returned expatriate man who says the next door neighbour with the broken brain should have come home sooner. I get the Albanian labourers’ story from a twenty-two year old who sends money home to his mother. But I don’t get the story of Orpheus. Nobody wants to discuss him. Orpheus’ head is not resting in Antissa, it is not in Campo Antissa either and Ancient Antissa is buried beneath the sea, I can’t even go there. Orpheus is not here. I am disappointed.

As I wait for the bus to take me away from all the Antissas, defeated by my lack of result and anticipating the wrath of my editor back home, the old woman with the donkey comes by again. I nod and smile. She doesn’t smile back but shocks me with well-spoken English, ‘Orpheus is not here. It’s just a story. If he is not alive in your mind he is not anywhere.’

Greek myths are full of tripartite narration, misplaced signposts and multiple identities. This trifurcation of location and telling was used intentionally by the Greeks to protect the sacred from the profanity of the outside world and more latterly to protect the people from death by invaders. The three Antissas were a trick to confuse my wandering self. Orpheus’ head was not in Antissa at all. What will my editor make of this? My writerly head could be on the chopping block and the outside world might never know I was here at all.