Sanctuary
Propelled by a hot wind, the dust swept through the streets of Sparta. Starting in doorways, rolling over the cobbles, picking up discarded wrappers, blowing around people’s feet as though it were alive. Not that there were many people on the streets. It was two o’clock, an hour at which at which most of the town was either asleep at home or drinking in a taverna. Behind the blinds, drawn against the intrusive light, they sat at tables with backgammon boards and glasses of chilled ouzo and water, accustomed to the climate, and the futility of trying to work through it. The tourists fought valiantly against the prevailing conditions, and continued sightseeing at the height of the day. They fanned themselves with street plans, sweat trickling down their faces, trying to be enthused by the ancient ruins when all they really wanted was to be in a quiet taverna. Every now and then one of them would wail as a gust of wind blew grit into their eye.
Out of a mixture of concentration and defence against the dust, the English tourist narrowed his eyes as he studied the street plan. He had spent the morning in the ruins of the ancient theatre complex, gouged out of a hillside overlooking the modern town, its former glory now reduced to a jumble of carved and chiselled marble. As with everything else that he had seen on his ‘Splendours of Ancient Greece’ package tour, it needed a large quantity of imagination to reconstruct the world of Plutarch or Xenophon, and the oppressive heat meant that imagination was in short supply. He wanted a mildly diverting way of filling up four hours without involving any classical architecture, a cold drink and a chance to sit down. The coach to Olympia wasn’t leaving until six-thirty, and his luggage was packed.
Assured that the town centre lay to his left, he set off down the street, ambling without any real purpose. The wind had dropped a little, and the narrow, cobbled road was devoid of traffic. Looking up, he could hear voices behind closed shutters, conversations in a language he didn’t understand. Occasionally a face would appear at a window and then open the remaining shutters to readmit the daylight. It was half past two. In a few minutes the day would restart.
Turning a corner, he found himself on one of the main streets. He recognised it as the one that would eventually lead up the hill to his hotel. He had no desire to return so early, and followed the street in the opposite direction, towards the town, until he came to a church that he had passed earlier that morning.
Emptying the now tepid bottle of mineral water he had bought an hour ago, he stepped over the threshold. He had no religious affiliation, and observed no rite as he entered save the removal of his baseball cap in a gesture of polite reverence.
It took time for his eyes to grow accustomed to the darkness. As he paused, a series of features gradually came together to construct the building. There was a large dome in the centre, flanked by two smaller ones. Mosaics drifted into focus; two saints were engaged in conversation; a figure of Christ sat on a cloud inside the main dome. From the far end of the building there came the glint of a gold and bejewelled iconostasis. By contrast, the rest of the interior was austere, with plain walls of cool marble to help focus the mind and small windows set close to the ceiling. As he wandered around the church he could make out plaques and memorials set into the wall; tablets filled with the alphabet that sounded so confusing to him.
He sat on one of the chairs facing the altar, with little desire to move on from the church. The dark interior was a cool contrast to the scorched town that lay outside. It was as comfortable as his hotel room would have been if the air conditioning had worked last night. From the street, he could hear the wind beginning to build up, heralding another instalment of the dust storm.
He didn’t hear the old man enter the building. Nor did he see him, but he became aware that he was not alone and turned to face the doorway. He was near-blinded by the light that streamed in, but the shape gradually became defined as it shuffled forward into the body of the church. It moved out of the daylight and was lost. He tried to find the image again, locating it by sound more than sight, listening for the shuffling of feet on the stone floor and the wheezing of an old man's breath. Finally, as the form became clearer, he heard the scraping sound of a chair being moved as the man lowered himself into a seated position.
He could see him now. The olive-skinned, wizened countenance, the eyes that looked old and tired behind the glasses, the jacket and waistcoat worn without regard to the heat (as seemed to be the case with many locals). He looked no different from any of the old men who spent their days playing draughts in the taverna or sitting outside their houses, watching others walk by. He looked as though he had been part of the town all his life, and had aged with the streets and buildings to become as inscrutable as the marble carvings on the hillsides above.
The tourist turned back towards the altar, so as not to appear rude in his continued scrutiny of the church’s only other living inhabitant.
The old man was not looking at the tourist, but was focused on some point that only he could identify in the middle distance
The tableau was no longer the same.
He no longer felt himself to be alone in this place of refuge. Someone else was there. He could feel the presence of the other man. It made the near-empty building feel crowded. His consciousness was under siege.
He turned around again, but the man had not moved. He was sitting as before. The walking cane standing on the floor in front of him with his hands resting across the top. Walking cane. Was the old man blind? Was that why he hadn’t acknowledged his presence?
There was no trace of contact between the two men. Both of them sat in their own worlds, yet one seemed totally at ease and one resembled a man under interrogation.
‘It’s not that I’m afraid of meeting the locals’, he muttered to himself.
He imagined himself to be a seasoned traveller. He had a working knowledge of French and German and a way of looking lost when addressed in any other tongue that soon had people taking enough pity on him to switch to their own faltering English. With such an approach, he had covered most of Europe. Communication, that’s what travel was really about. Being able to step outside your own world, to fail to be admitted to anyone else’s but still feel that you had achieved something, even if you didn’t know what it had been.
So why did he feel his current situation to be charged with a sense of latent menace?
Rising to his feet, pausing for a final glance up to the altar - the light was still bouncing off the iconostasis - he turned and started to walk back towards the door.
He heard the scraping sound of a chair being pulled across a stone floor. The old man was on his way to the exit.
He felt a flush of fear, not because he expected any violence but because he feared the contact between the two of them.
In the darkness closer to the doorway, a wooden stick clattered against the back of a chair.
A brief calculation told him that they would probably meet in the doorway. There was destined to be some form of contact - a smile, a few ineffectual words, some measure of acknowledgement. What could he do?
He was on a direct path to the doorway and any deviation to walk round the church again would look like an obvious act of avoidance. Whatever the situation, he was unwilling to be rude enough to stride brusquely past the old man, and yet the alternative filled him with irrational, unaccountable fear.
He looked down at the floor, counting the stone slabs that his feet passed over until they changed from dark to light grey to white as the sunlight touched them through the doorway. He could hear the wind stirring up the dust in the street outside, and then another sound - the short breaths of old age. He looked up and saw the man standing in the doorway, half in darkness, half bleached out by the light.
The two of them drew level at the threshold of the church, caught in no-man’s land like soldiers of the Great War emerging from the dark interior to be picked up in the rays of light that streamed through. Divided by everything; age, nationality, language, culture, and yet they had been drawn together on one afternoon, in one place. All differences swept aside, yet unable to meet each other. The tourist’s attempt to pronounce those ‘ineffectual words’ he felt the situation demanded died as the old man’s face became a mask of incomprehension. The eyes looked into the middle distance.
It might have been a church, but there was to be no communion.
Climbing the hill towards his hotel, he promised himself a cold beer in the air-conditioned lounge before the coach left that evening.
It was three-thirty. He was finished with Sparta.
He strode resolutely onwards, not looking back for fear of seeing the old man shuffling along the dusty road towards the centre of town, his stick tapping on the cobblestones as he went. His thoughts, however, were lagging behind him, still loitering outside the church in the blazing sunlight. He promised himself that there would come a day when, faced with a situation like this, the right words would be found.
Page(s) 34-37
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