The Blue Aegean Sea by JoAnne Soper-Cook Where I am living now, I can look out over the roofs of houses, all jumbled together, one on top of the other. It looks like something I dimly remember, a Mediterranean country, where the roofs are all red-tiled, close together. Early in the morning, before the sun comes up, you can walk down the sloping narrow streets to the ocean. Always, the ocean. It s Greece. It s where I ve never been, although I remember it. Walking through the early morning fog down to the ocean, where the boats are tied. It s kind of chilly, but not really, it s like Greece in a picture postcard. The light is perfect and it s quiet. Once the sun comes up, it s completely different, it s a different place. You can sit at the water s edge, just on the cusp of dawn, and listen to the water soughing in and out, listen to your soul being sucked out and back, out and back. A bell clanging somewhere, dimly over the dusty white hills. And you sit and listen for the longest time. I am wearing jeans and a fisherman sweater, because the fog is cold, and my hair is damp with moisture. I am listening. It starts to get light, the sun is coming up, and it s time to go up the hill. Go back to the lodgings and get breakfast. My landlady is vigourous and middle-aged, and speaks not a word of English. She serves me wonderful breakfasts of bread and fruits and oil. She gives me strong hot coffee, coffee that would sear your soul. She wears black, like a Spanish duenna, because her husband is dead. Truly a widow of the old world. In her wrinkled face, I see all the kindness and all the wisdom. A perfect crone, the wise one. Every morning while I eat breakfast she goes upstairs and puts fresh white sheets on my bed. Every morning. And a fresh pillowcase, and she fills the water pitcher. The upstairs room is thickwalled and stout; mortared stone, as smooth as skin. A dusky grey, like the skin of corpses, a perfect hidey -hole, slip inside and shut the door with its curving top. I can wander in this place, and write. I haven t sold anything for months. Almost a year. I get frequent missives from my agent, forwarded here by the Canadian post, bearing various post-marks: souvenirs of its stop at every postal waystation along its dark and curving path. My agent lists the publishers, where my books have been, who s looking at them. My agent lists how long the manuscripts have languished in their laps. I wonder what they are doing with them. I imagine that my manuscripts are gathering dust in some large room, stacked against a wall that is ceiling-high with words. Years ago, when Lori and I were friends, she d say that my manuscript had found its way onto the top of a taxi, was left lying open in a briefcase when the taxi drove off, scattering papers to the winds. Bits of it, all over Upper Manhattan, she said; sheets of my novel would find their way into the most unsuspecting hands. The bag lady, pushing a shopping cart full of old shoes, discarded rinds of vegetables, a ball of string. A page would flutter into her hands and she d grasp of it and read. A man coming out of the barber s would find a piece of it, lying at his feet. A Korean in a shop would get his page through the window. A blizzard of paper, raining down on Upper Manhattan, a tsunami of words. She knows I write, my landlady. There is a Greek word for it, something eloquent and dark. She knows because I have heard her telling it to the other women when they come for coffee in the afternoons. She has seen me sitting, empty-eyed over the Aegean, watching the fishing boats come and go, and listening, always listening, for the whisper of the fickle muse. She has given me a key and she doesn t mind that I rise early in the morning and make my way to the ocean. She considers an early rise the sign of an industrious mind. But I haven t written anything for months. I may never write again. Where there used to be that reflex there is now only emptiness in me. I am as hollow as an empty pot; words clang meaningless about the insides of my skull. My footsteps echo off the buildings, flat slap of shoe leather. I try to walk quietly but the sloping street forces me to judder forward, a juggernaut on its cobbled face. A mis-step would send me flying, tumbling in an arc out over the blue Aegean sea. I would sink forever in those hard blue depths. I would be forgotten. I used to say she had no imagination. She used to say I was overpowering. Others said that she did not accompany me, or that she could not. Rather than moving by my side, she was sucked along in my wake. It appeared as if we were together, but really it was like dancing underwater. Synchronicity isn t possible like that. You hold out your opened arms and hope the beloved will drift towards you on the tide. You hold our your opened arms, drifting underneath the blue Aegean sea. I have always been here, I think. It s just my body that has been elsewhere. It s just my body that has sat transfixed for hours before the window, staring at the cold Canadian sky, watching the snow in April. It s just my body, it s not me. I am writing because I am listening for something the ocean says. I have been listening for a thousand years. I see the priests come and go, the stately procession. I do not go to them to confess; I have no sins, I am merely listening. I sit in my room and listen, in the afternoons when it is hot. I go to the ocean in the morning and I listen. I wander around at night, past the outdoor cafes where the happy young ones and the joyous old ones drink ouzo. I wander and I listen. I am always listening. I had a dream once that I was married to Elton John. We lived in a black apartment on a jazzy neon street, a street of woes, a street whose brooding length was slashed across with alleys. He was always writing songs, and he was happy. I would be writing in our apartment at night while he would walk the streets, composing in his head. There was no piano. He would come home at night, cold and soaked with rain, and I would embrace him, hope to pull some of what he had into me. His body was chilly in my arms, cold and heavy like a corpse. It was strange, the tortured images of dreams. Once there was a polar bear stranded on the ice. It was on the beach, on the beach near our house. It came down on the ice packs, when the ice broke up in the spring. A polar bear, floating in the harbour , come from some other place, going nowhere. White bear, floating out of sync. I can see the ocean from my window, the blue Aegean sea. I sit on my fresh clean bed and watch the sun as it rises, watch the colours of the island change from muted grey to dazzling white. If there is not too much heat I will take my notebook and a pen and go down to the beach, spread myself on the dazzling sands underneath the sun. I will watch the strong young men as they go by, I will watch the tanned young women. I will think of Canada, and remember. I have no money. I have no money for drinking in the taverna , I have no cash for ouzo or retsina. I have no money for erstwhile assignations. Everything I have is folded safely in my landlady s hand, and from this handful of bills she extracts a discrete amount each month. She is honest, and does not take more than is her share. I came away with nothing, I packed one case. I wanted to be somewhere else, to hope that the Aegean would inspire me. I hoped to draw myself from the kindness of my warm surroundings. But I may never write again, and I may never go home. It doesn t matter what one does in Greece, as long as one is listening. And I am always listening. There is no one on the beach, and I remember: it is Sunday. A parade of priests before noon, resplendent in soft black, discrete and Orthodox. I spread my towel and I take out my notebook and I lean towards the blue Aegean and I listen. Snow: falling from a cold Canadian sky. The End.
