Part 3 — II

"I COME from L—— one of the northern Sporades. No, it is too small, you will only find it on German maps. I've got a marble cottage there. Don't be alarmed. It is deserted. Nobody will call on us."

They had embarked at the Galata bridge the day before, on leaving the train. A forbidding rain-swept landscape. The cupolas of the mosques were like big water-logged balloons which were unable to rise; every year the Pera sky-scrapers increase in number and add to the general depression; the river steamboats belch out clouds of Heraklian coal which grits between one's teeth, and dreary Scythian mists creep up from the Black Sea along the leaden Bosphorous. The driving rain soaked the houses of Scutari, turning their silver grey wood black.

"In Turkey," said Irene, "it always rains."

"I suppose if the Greeks had come back to Constantinople the weather would have changed completely."

Lewis tried to tease her, but she refused to see any humour in it, concentrating in herself the undying hatred of Greek for Turk.

"You French people, with your literary flirtations with Turkey and your blindness to her infidelities, are quite intolerable. Haven't you understood the lesson of the war?" And Irene pointed with her finger to the Goeben, a worn-out, unkempt hulk, but alive once more in front of the Old Seraglio.

"But I'm not standing up for the Turks."

"Yes, you are."

"I'm not."

Irene heaved "one of those Greek sighs that make the Bosphorous tremble," as Byron says.

Their boat did not leave till after breakfast. They went up to Saint Sophia; at the gate of the mosque a sentry, before letting them in, asked them whether they were Greeks or Armenians.

"I am a Greek subject," answered Irene proudly.

The Turk barred the way ferociously, and Lewis had to produce Irene's new French passport.

"To think that we so nearly came back, we who are the guardians of Christianity in the East, and that these fanatical, besotted, dishonest Turks, who never knew how to do anything but massacre, are still here. They want to get rid of all Greeks from Constantinople! They want to have Turkish commercial houses and Turkish banks! It's too funny!"[1]

Lewis followed Irene across the prayer rugs and Byzantine paving of Saint Sophia, dragging his feet shod in immense Turkish slippers like a man on skis, and trying to keep Irene quiet. He had never seen such an exhibition of contempt in the West; it was quite different to the aversion of French and Germans, who even in their most terrible moments remained human. Five centuries of the fiercest hatred shone in Irene's eyes. She who was usually so calm could not control her fury. How could a being so closely connected with him allow herself in a single instant to be ravaged by feelings which he could not himself imagine? For the first time Lewis felt that he had bound his life to a woman of an unknown race. In the courtyard near a rococo fountain in marble and gold which ran with gleaming water, peaceable ogres wearing the new astrakhan fezes were smoking, sucking at the hookah tubes sheathed in blue velvet, amongst the circling pigeons.

After leaving Constantinople, the ship put in towards evening at Mudania, on the coast of Asia. They went on shore for a short time. Hardly had they disembarked when they came across a lorry park abandoned in an olive grove by the Greeks during their flight in the summer of 1922. Half smothered by mallows, saffron, asphodel and tobacco plants, lay the skeleton of lorries supplied by the English, their wheels in the air. Inscriptions and the number of their army corps could still be deciphered on their sides.

"A whole Greek division surrendered here," explained the guide.

"Let's go. I'm going back on board," said Irene.

Her eyes were full of tears.

When Lewis woke the next morning, the steamer was leaving the Dardanelles. It was hot. The sky had become vertical; seagulls were floating on the waves as though on treetops in a waving forest, beneath a sun unthreatened by any cloud. To the left Kum Kale protected by Turkish batteries, Troy with its lizards and the coast of Asia; to the right Sedd-el-Bahr so rich in human remains. Above the surface rose the masts and funnels of sunken British troopships; a French cruiser was just finally breaking up. Vegetation had suddenly disappeared, destroyed by the extreme heat. There was nothing to keep the sky and the earth apart. The clean line of the coast and the sea like woven metal lost themselves in the distance. It was a fitting approach to the world of heroes and of gods who make love in the hollows of the sycamores. Lewis went below and entered Irene's cabin.

"Come up quickly," he said. "Here is the Mediterranean, your mother sea."

When they reached the bridge Mytilene was already in view, scooped out in the middle like a woman lying on her side.