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  “No, pig is pig. Pork is pork,”

  “You’re right,” Bernard said. “Let’s enjoy.”

  When I order a souvlaki in downtown Montreal, I think about Ilana, and I wonder if she ever gave up souvlakis after Bernard tried to burst their bubble. Memory is fickle. It’s impossible to predict what will remain with us and what disappears. I’ve had catastrophic incidents, or so I thought, that are vague today. But small moments, such as eating at a stall with Ilana, reappear; though at the time they seemed to have had little significance.

  The French writer Marcel Proust in his novel Remembrance of Things Past expounds on the power of involuntary memory and its relationship to the senses. He felt it to be far more powerful than intellectual memory as it is complete immersion rather than recalling a linear series of events. Involuntary memory always comes up spontaneously induced by some outside stimulus to the senses whether through the taste of a certain dish, or the sound of a certain piece of music, or an object we’ve held from an earlier time, or the aroma of something wafting through the air. This is the only explanation I have for why Ilana and souvlaki are irrevocably tied forever inside my head.

  Johnny Baumann was another frequent visitor on the Santa Rita. We had last seen Johnny in Puerto Galera in the Philippines. Back then, he was a fairly prosperous middle-aged ex-pat from Germany. He had married a Filipina and started a small business hiring local crew for German ships. Since we last saw him, his wife had taken over the business and had him thrown out of the country. He was still middle-aged, but no longer prosperous.

  Wine flowed freely aboard our yacht, and Johnny was always there to imbibe. One evening, while under the influence, he told us he had been part of Hitler youth, though thrown out as not good material. “My father,” he told us, “made his fortune by denouncing a rich Jewish neighbour, a friend. He stole his property.” There was a long pause while Johnny poured himself another drink. “My mother couldn’t deal with what he did. She went crazy and was committed to an asylum.”

  He went on to say that, while he was still a teenager, Germany fell to the Allies, leaving his generation caught between Nazi ideology and that of the newly-formed democratic state. The government put into practice regulations designed to find and debrief his generation. “Anyone picked up three times for drunk driving was considered to have confusion about what to believe and sent for therapy,” he said.

  Before this was put into practice, Johnny left Germany and was never properly rehabilitated. He renounced his country, and buried his pain in alcohol. He was one of those wounded souls we sometimes met on our journey, who chose to live without social constraints and took to the sea as refuge. Some were ex-Viet Nam vets, and I already knew their stories without having to probe. There were others, who I’m sure had stories, but we didn’t ask and they didn’t say.

  Bernard was now only communicative during “happy hour” which started to invade more and more of the day. When not socializing with his drinking buddies, he was distant and silent, focusing all his attention on the boat. In the midst of Bernard’s withdrawal from me, my cousin Shirley wrote and asked if she could come and stay with us for a week’s vacation. I jumped at the chance to have lighter company. I also thought it might help draw out Bernard to have someone other than me or his yachtie gang to talk to. The day Shirley arrived, we decided to go to a nice restaurant for dinner. It would be a treat for me not to eat my own cooking and a welcome change from the local stalls. When we were ready to leave, Bernard decided he had work to do on the engine.

  “Go on,” he said. “I don’t mind. Bring me back something.”

  I hadn’t eaten in a fancy restaurant in Larnaca before Shirley’s arrival and had no idea I had to reserve a table. We waited forever in line before we got seated and served. During the meal, I felt a gnawing in my stomach. I couldn’t trust Bernard’s moods. He was becoming edgier and more paranoid by the day. The emotional warmth and goodwill we shared in Israel had become a wishful memory. I sensed that my ploy to bring Bernard back to civility by having someone from the outside visit wasn’t going to work. I regretted my decision to let Shirley come.

  Shirley noticed my nervousness while we waited for Bernard’s dinner to be prepared.

  “What’s wrong with you?” she asked.

  “Nothing,” I said. “They’re taking forever to wrap that take-out.” I didn’t want to get into a conversation about my personal life.

  We’d hardly stepped on deck when Bernard came up from below. “You bitch,” he shouted. “You took long enough with that dinner. I knew you’d try to get even if I didn’t go with you.”

  Shirley tried to intervene. “It wasn’t her fault. We had to wait for a table, and then it took even longer to get your meal.”

  “I know her. You don’t. This was deliberate.”

  He wouldn’t stop shouting. I couldn’t get a word in. And even if I had, I knew he wouldn’t have heard.

  Robert, an Australian three yachts farther down the pier, came out on his deck. “Will you shut the hell up,” he shouted. “We don’t have to hear you all through the harbour.”

  I was utterly humiliated. Every cell in my body felt on fire. I ran below deck and threw myself onto the berth in the aft cabin. Shirley came in after me and stood beside the berth saying nothing for a long while. “He needs you,” she finally said.

  I couldn’t believe what I heard. At that moment, I hated her. “I certainly don’t need him,” I replied. I turned away from her to make it clear that there was no more conversation to be had on the subject.

  I lay on the berth without moving until morning hoping she’d leave during the night and find herself a hotel room. She didn’t. When I left the berth the next day, I found her and Bernard having coffee at the salon table. I got my own cup of coffee and forced myself to sit, making sure to have eye contact with neither of them.

  Shirley turned to me and chirped in an irritatingly pleasant voice: “I spoke to Bernard about the idea of sailing to Paphos, and he agreed. Some of the oldest mosaics in the West are there. And I don’t know if you know, but it’s the birthplace of Aphrodite — the very place where she rose from the sea.”

  Who gives a damn, I thought.

  “Yeah, great. It sounds interesting,” I said.

  In truth, I was intrigued. As much as I’d have liked to spend the day on my own processing what had happened the night before, I was aware that if I didn’t visit this site, I might regret it later on. I had troubling feelings about my marriage, but I wasn’t going to let it destroy this once-in-a-lifetime adventure. I had invested too much. Maybe Bernard would shift back to his old self, I told myself, once we had less stress on the sea. I was still willing to give our relationship a chance. I was caught by good memories of our past life and his seductive charisma when he reverted to his old self.

  The sail along the coast of Cyprus to Paphos was pleasant. Bernard displayed none of the animosity towards me that he had shown the night before. I discovered years later that his emotional distance, anger, argumentativeness and paranoia were all indicators of alcoholism — as was his sudden reversal to good will.

  Once in Paphos, the three of us visited the ruins of Roman villas dating back to the third and fifth century. I saw mosaics of such fine quality and exquisite detail that I doubted I’d ever see work of that calibre again. I was astonished at how much history passed through here. Remains from both the Hellenistic and Roman periods were in evidence as well as ruins going back to the twelfth century BCE. The cult of Aphrodite had its origins here, the foundation of her enormous temple still discernible.

  Paphos, I learned, was the site where Saul of Tarsus became Paul after converting the Roman governor, Sergius Paulus, to Christianity, and also where the oracle spoke wise words to seekers of the truth. Where was the oracle now, I thought, when I needed her?

  So much early history that I believed had taken place on mainland Greece and in the Middle East had actually happened on this tiny island of Cyprus. What had once s
eemed beyond the veil of time when I studied history in school no longer felt distant. I walked on the foundation of Aphrodite’s temple, and linear time collapsed. The old goddesses from Ishtar to Astarte along with the titan, Hekate, and now Aphrodite came alive here.

  I felt them under my feet and wondered that I hadn’t picked up that early, rooted connection in Israel, home of our three great western religions. It then struck me that all three were male religions. In Paphos I felt the power of the goddess, and I identified with that energy. It awakened a fire in my belly, and gave me a heightened sense of personal power.

  On Shirley’s final day in Cyprus, the three of us took a bus trip to Choirokoitia, an archaeological site with ruins dating back to 2300 BCE, and then continued on to Kourion, to see the performance of a Greek tragedy in a second century Roman amphitheatre. So many layers of history on this small island, I thought, but I wasn’t fully engaged with that insight. I was too focused on Aphrodite and intrigued by the hold she had on me.

  As soon as Shirley left, I felt my limbs loosen. Only then did I realize how tense I had been during her stay. All through her visit I had braced myself against another of Bernard’s outbursts knowing I couldn’t bear to go through another one of those episodes while she was visiting. The irony was how civil he had become after that attack and how well she and Bernard got along. I hardly joined their conversations and was glad they didn’t notice. At one point, I tried to engage Shirley in a discussion about the goddess.

  “God is male,” she countered.

  So I pondered my discovery on my own and left them to their chitchat, finding it a blessing to have time to myself.

  After Shirley left, we trekked to the Stavrovouni Monastery located on one of the peaks of the Troodos Mountains, formally Mt. Olympus until it lost its name to a higher peak. The monastery was said to have been built over an ancient temple by St. Helena, the mother of Constantine, to house a fragment of the holy cross. I found it ironic that the mother of Constantine had the monastery built but no woman could enter. I had to content myself with the bookstore and a superb view of Larnaca spread out below. I thought again about Paphos and wondered what happened to that vibrant feminine core that raised the island from obscurity to a centre of worship in pre-Christian times. And I wondered what brought about her demise.

  Our one-month stay in Larnaca slipped into two. By the end of the second month, I was feeling antsy. I was bored with our drinking buddies, and didn’t have the temperament to lose myself in drifting time and small talk. I wanted to work, and I wanted Bernard to look for work, and there was no chance of finding employment in Cyprus. I was tired of provisioning and cooking and cleaning while Bernard sat around with his pals and drank. I was also tired of walking on eggs never knowing what I might say that could suddenly anger him.

  I needed to take some physical distance from this relationship, not that it would be noticed. But I thought it might make a difference in our rapport if we weren’t together every day, twenty-four hours a day. If we both had a commitment off the Santa Rita, that could improve the relationship.

  “Isn’t it time for us to move on?” I asked.

  “Maybe,” Bernard answered.

  “I think we should move on,” I said a week later.

  Bernard simply shrugged his shoulders.

  A number of our fellow travellers had already left for other ports. “When are we going?” I insisted on knowing.

  No answer.

  One day, without any discussion and for no apparent reason, Bernard took out a couple of nautical charts stored in one of the lockers behind a settee. It meant we were about to sail, though I had no idea where we were going. Perhaps this should have upset me, but it didn’t. I was happy we were finally on our way. It wasn’t in my nature to sit around going nowhere. It’s not how I envisioned life at sea.

  Chapter 26

  CROSSING THE GREAT EAST/WEST DIVIDE

  Autumn 1984: Turkey/Greece

  Though we travel the world to find the beautiful,

  we must carry it with us or we find it not.

  — RALPH WALDO EMERSON

  Bernard sat at the chart table, hunched over a spread-out nautical chart, carefully studying the Turkish coastline, his ever-present hand-rolled Gitane dangling from his lips and dripping bits of black ash onto the chart. God, that annoys me, I thought. At one time I overlooked his messy habits and found them endearing. Something was shifting inside me. I felt on edge, but wasn’t ready to face my growing resentment. I had thought of us as soul mates. I couldn’t admit I might have been wrong.

  “Why don’t we do some of the islands first?” I suggested, trying to refocus my mind. “There are a number of them on our way to Turkey.”

  I had an atlas open in front of me and was eyeing some of the Greek islands known as the Cyclades. I visualized our Mediterranean journey as pleasant island hopping with no worries about pirates or unpredictable squalls, but Bernard reminded me that the winds are never predictable, nor is the sea.

  “Not a good idea,” he said. “The sea is too rough this time of year.” He reminded me how seasick my cousin Shirley had become just sailing down to Paphos. “It’s better to take a coastal route along Turkey’s edge and take shelter in Marmaris. There’s a good protected harbour there. We can wait out the winds.”

  He was concerned about the Meltemi, a summer wind off the Aegean Sea that could reach gale force and trigger waves up to ten feet high. We were leaving Cyprus mid-summer, at the height of the Meltemi season. It wasn’t a good time to explore the Cyclades.

  I knew nothing about Turkey, but I’d always felt excitement entering places I didn’t know. Even eating in restaurants for the first time gave me a rush. I wondered if this thirst for experience wasn’t triggered by an off-hand remark my mother made when I was ten.

  “The only things,” she had said, “that belong to you are your life experiences. No one can take memories from you.”

  Today I wonder about what had brought her to that view. She was a private person, and I knew little about her.

  With a steady five-knot wind, the sail holding at its set angle, and the Santa Rita under the guidance of the autopilot, we sat back and took in Turkey’s powerfully rugged coastline and pine-clad mountains. The Santa Rita cut through a sea that shimmered turquoise in the sun, and I felt completely at one with the yacht’s movement and the water around us. Towards the end of July we entered the bay of Marmaris, the point where the Aegean Sea meets the Mediterranean, and tied the Santa Rita to a pier.

  In 1984, Marmaris was a quiet fishing village, and we were one of few yachts in the harbour. Later, it became hyped as part of the Turkish Riviera and was transformed overnight into a bustling tourist mecca, but at that time we had this quiet paradise to ourselves. Looking back I think how fortunate we were. We stumbled on many picturesque harbours by chance, having no idea they were there. Today many of these quiet out-of-the-way places are major tourist centres, complete with scuba diving clubs, discos, and group charters with, I feel, something precious lost.

  Bernard followed his usual pattern of hibernating aboard. After a small foray to a castle re-built by Sulieman the Magnificent in the 1500s, he was content to stay ensconced on the yacht. He spent hours fiddling with the hardware but neglected the upkeep. Ropes were strewn all over the deck. Odd pieces of acquired junk lay about. It depressed me to see the elegant, clean lines of the Santa Rita hidden under so much rubbish.

  A young American couple strolling along the pier stopped and called to Bernard who was on deck. “That’s a beautiful ‘character’ boat you have.”

  Bernard didn’t acknowledge their presence, and they walked on.

  “Idiots,” he spat out. “They can’t tell the difference between a Peterson-designed ketch and a character boat.”

  No they can’t, I thought. You’ve sufficiently trashed this boat.

  “Think so?” I said.

  There was no point in suggesting he clean up the deck or throw away the junk he’d
acquired. I had already tried. It only irritated him and didn’t change the situation.

  Since Cyprus, wine had become ubiquitous and cheap. Bernard was now drinking all the time, but I still wasn’t putting all the pieces together. I only noticed he became more sociable if I drank with him. The wine is good and he’s French, I thought. Of course, he’s drinking more. It’s cultural. I was flip-flopping about the extent of his problem.

  I had hoped his moodiness would abate when the stress in our travels lessened. I missed the companionship — the pleasure of sharing the uniqueness of our adventure. He didn’t talk about where we’d been. He didn’t discuss future plans. He charted our course, announced our next port of call, set the sails, and ate the meals I prepared, mostly in silence. He wasn’t aggressive. He just wasn’t there. When we were crossing the Indian Ocean, he had once again informed me he didn’t want to share the aft cabin.

  “It’s better I sleep in the salon,” he had said. “That way I’m alert for any danger.”

  Now we were no longer in danger and he still hadn’t returned to the aft cabin.

  Then suddenly one night I opened my eyes found him standing beside the berth. “Do you mind if I sleep with you?” he asked, as he had on other occasions. Each time he made it seem as though I’d been the one who arranged our living conditions.

  That night the memory of all his transgressions diminished to what I decided was over-reaction on my part — their impact lessened by hope. But the next day, there was no morning glow, just morning coffee. Bernard was already on deck fussing over a broken shackle, and that night he was back in the salon.

  I took pleasure in the small trips I made into the heart of Marmaris, buying provisions and talking to the local people. I found them interesting both physically and in temperament. The mix of Slavic-looking Turks with light hair and blue eyes, and darker more Semitic-looking Turks was fascinating. Their openness was more European than Middle Eastern. Yet, there was a graciousness about them that struck me as more Middle Eastern. As a whole they were the most hospitable, accepting, and generous people I’d met anywhere on our voyage.