The rain wakes us up from our shared shallow doze, drumming its anxious
fingertips across the awning. The town cats scatter for shelter into the flower
beds, their kittens dripping wet behind the plant pots, softly mewling for milk
and mother. From the veranda, the town appears to be built on top of itself,
building upon building, all facing west, facing the sea. The town is hidden
from the harshness of the Greek sun at this time of the morning by the ridge of
limestone mountains behind, green with olive groves and tall with cypress
trees. This indirect morning light picks everything out in momentary clarity
before the day's stifling heat hides headlands, mountains beyond mountains,
islands and churches that don't reappear until the setting sun cuts through the
haze, restores the landscape and honey-coloured cliffs appear as if by magic.
We take the narrow side streets to the harbour, between brightly
coloured walls flaking paint and shuttered windows flung open to reveal the outside
world to the canaries singing in their cages. Taking the table nearest to the
water we drink espresso and chocolate milk, surrounded by fisherman from the
harbour wall, watching the shallows flickering with light and silvered with
seabream, while cats stick their heads into buckets of bait and chew. We
get to try the delicacy of new words on the tip of our tongues, the fresh meat
of kalimera, kalispera, kalinichta. We get to luxuriate in the differences of
culture.
The Greek rain, at least not here, not now, doesn't last long.
Another shower drums into the pavement and people flee to the cafes for the few
minutes until it passes. And after it does, it leaves a gift. Swallows. Fifteen
or so, flitting above the harbour, blue on dazzling blue. They flicker,
sweeping low over the rippling sea, collecting insects, moving south in one
flock minutes later, nothing more than a fleeting, weather-deposited glimpse of
the world's workings.
The world is - has always been - more connected then we've recognised,
or perhaps accepted. The swallows are not Greek swallows or European swallows
or the northern hemisphere's. They are the world's swallows. Birds of summer
wherever they go, whether they're breeding or not. And the problems they face
are not local either. They face being shot in Malta, trapped in Cyprus, washed
by a Mediterranean storm into the sea, held up by the wrong winds in the
Sahara, starving if it's an arid year in the Sahel, while trusting with
their tiny battered bodies to bear themselves south, to Southern Africa. And
when they get there their reedbed roosts might not have survived another season
or global warming might have dangerously changed their food source. Any loss
isn't just felt by their species or us or any one of those places - but all of
them. And this journey is taken in reverse by other migrants - people from
Syria, Libya, further south beyond the belts of desert, trusting their bodies,
or placing their lives at the mercy of ramshackle boats or bastard criminal
traffickers who will abandon them to whatever fate befalls them. After
payment, of course.
And on Valtos beach WG Sebald whispers The Emigrants into
my ear, his own indirect reckoning with the holocaust and the natures of evil
and grief through the lives and deaths of four Jewish emigres, while I sit on
the sand, trying to change the colour of my skin, staring out on a placid sea
that is nothing of the sort.
