The Sea Grass Icons
CHAPTER 1
Maroula was the only virgin Dimitri knew who would go with him to the cove in the early morning and crawl out onto the rocks below the whitewashed chapel while he observed from his station on the beach. She was his daughter and well past forty. Though he loved her as a father should, he would be the first to admit she wasn’t much to look at. She had the bold Levantine nose of his mother, but her eyes receded behind it like two brown mice headed for the same massive piece of furniture from opposite sides of the room. He had studied them and had struggled with the question of how to render them. Maroula was so uninspiring that at times he wondered why he bothered with a model at all. The Virgin of the Last Resort. At least he could be relatively sure she was the real thing. But the older he got, the further the icons he painted strayed from idealized forms to—well, Maroulas. He’d gone from painting Maroula as Saint Anastasia, increasing the distance between the eyes, pulling in the lower lip, to painting Saint Anastasia as Maroula. From Maroula as Saint Barbara to Saint Barbara as Maroula—holding, oddly enough, the traditionally beautiful head of the beheaded saint in her hand. Did he love his daughter, Maroula, more with time? The Virgin Mother less?
There was a story from the Desert Fathers of a monk who, in carrying his mother across a stream, had wrapped his hands in a piece of thick cloth in order not to feel her form and thus be reminded of the sumptuousness of other women. Maroula required no such delicacy in handling, even as he helped her up onto the rocky little outcrop with a firm palm to the behind.
Though Dimitri had become a realist, he couldn’t stop painting the icons or thinking of the stories from the Desert Fathers, the third- and fourth-century Greek ascetics who lived as hermits in the Egyptian wilderness. He’d repeated them all his life since leaving his training in the monastery at fifteen. The stories weren’t about God so much. Not anymore, not for him. They were all about the antics people performed to find God, the man with his hands wrapped in rags as he carried his own mother a case in point. Or the one who drank only the water collected from sea sponges at night in the desert, cultivating a thirst he hoped would translate to spiritual desire. As time went on, Dimitri found himself experimenting with how far he could go before the icons he painted felt like desecrations.
One of Dimitri’s favorite bits of wisdom from the Desert Fathers went like this: Abba Timothy said unto a certain brother, “How art thou?” The brother said unto him, “I destroy my days, O father.” And the old man said, “My son, my days also are destroyed, and I give thanks.”
Over time, however—and Dimitri had seen a lot of it pass—he had stopped giving thanks. His knees hurt and his hip worked like a grindstone. In Greece, people lived lives that were unnaturally long—it was painful to watch—and Dimitri was growing tired of his. The friends who remained seemed like contestants for Older Than God. At the café, he’d begun to teach Maroula how to handle things herself. Maroula was slow, and not what you’d call friendly. She spoke no English, but she could take orders for meatballs and Greek salad and could count bottles at the end of the night and figure the bill now that they had a calculator, a gift from the Germans. His wife, Penelope, who had handled the cooking until a few years before, was no more. But there were younger women in the village who could cook and would be glad to have work. It just felt like it might be time for him to go.
When he was honest with himself, he knew he’d felt the pull for the past forty years. His mother, God rest her soul, had drowned when he was a boy; his son, who’d had so much promise, was dead in a motorcycle accident at the age of thirty-one. Now Dimitri felt just plain old. That morning, his name day approaching, he’d made the awful discovery that for many years, he’d been mistaken about his own age—by a decade. He’d believed he was eighty-one, but in testing the new calculator, he had punched in the current year and subtracted the year of his birth and in vibrant green the number 90 had appeared. It was 1989. In August, his number would be up. Ninety! He had thought he knew how to do simple math and was still mentally acute, but this glaring sum brought his faculties into question. Not to mention that the island was being taken over by tourists anyhow. First it was the Germans on their extended holidays. Now his café was becoming a regular Tower of Babel: Scandinavians who’d seen the island landscape in a movie, Brits extending their empire into holiday holdings. Thank God the Americans had stayed away! Let them have Naxos instead. He was Dimitri of the Last Resort. All used up and ready for an end. His mustache couldn’t get any whiter, his beret any more drenched in sweat. But finding time to die was another matter. There was always someone asking directions or wanting an Amstel or a photograph. It was hard to give them the slip. He wanted to do what he needed to do without raising a ruckus. And when he was utterly honest with himself, he admitted he worried that it might be bad for business.
Call it grace if you are so inclined—what happened one morning in July.
Dimitri parked the donkey in the shade of the only salt pine on the beach, tying it deftly. He called out to Maroula, who was testing the water with her sandals still on. She didn’t know how to swim, and she rarely made it down to the sea from Hora, the village high up the mountain where they lived and kept the café. “Maroula, make up the palette like yesterday,” he said. “Lots of thalo and Prussian and the other blue. Cadmium and ocher over on the right. And don’t get sand in it. Do you remember how it was yesterday?”
“Prussian on the right,” she called, “but the words are all in German.”
Dimitri held his breath for five seconds. “Blues on the left, Maroula; yellows on the right. I’ll take care of the rest. The sun was climbing quickly, and Dimitri wanted an early morning sky. They’d told him down at the shop in the harbor where he sold the icons that people wanted more of the virgin saints, but also near water. It had come to that. Saints to order. On the rocks or straight up. So he was staging something he hoped might appeal. In yesterday’s version, however, the result was very clearly Maroula. Candor but little reverence—as if the virgin were disappointed to find herself in that state. Now, he stood on the far side of the donkey, assembling the easel, thinking about how if what he painted didn’t appeal it wouldn’t much matter because he would soon be gone. Finished. Maroula sat on the rocks examining the colors inside the little tubes and squeezing them onto the palette. In his mind, Dimitri orchestrated a stumble in the course of which he might dash his brains out on a rock before toppling a short distance into the sea, thereby sparing Maroula the trouble of trying to haul him in for medical help. He didn’t, however, want her to see his head bloodied. The trouble was that if he didn’t hit his head, he’d be expected to climb back out of the water. He was old and arthritic in places but still strong. Hale, people said. Stronger than some of the younger men of the village, who played video games and didn’t know how to address a stubborn donkey or slaughter a goat. What’s more, he knew how to swim. That’s where his mind was when he heard Maroula exclaim, “Holy Mother of God!”
He put his hand to his forehead, wondering if he had inadvertently executed his plan. But he felt only the first sweat of the day. Setting the easel in the sand, he hurried over to where she knelt on the rocks, peering into four feet of water. “Where’s the palette?” he said.
She pointed to the sandy bottom, the undulation of the water doppling bright spots of paint. Dimitri took off his shirt and threw it onto the beach. He rolled his pants to the knee and waded out. The water was cool. He could not remember the last time he had entered the sea, though his son, Theo, had taught him to swim when Dimitri was in his middle age. Dimitri associated the sea with necessity. It was a source of food, or it was a background for Maroula, or it was a grave. He did not go to the sea for pleasure. Now, in July, the water was warm, its surface sleek and undisturbed. He hesitated. It was deeper than it looked. Giving up on keeping his pants dry, he took a few more steps. The water lapped at his privates and then at his waist. In the end, he tossed his beret onto the sand and submerged his body awkwardly. Like a turtle groping with appendages too short to reach bottom, he hovered, keeping his head just above the surface and peering down at the channels of white sand separating fields of Neptune grass. At last, he ducked under and retrieved the palette.
Upon returning to dry land, too wet and irritated now to paint at all, Dimitri looked another destroyed day in the face. He gazed up in dismay at the sky behind the mountain, still an early vacant grey touched with mauve. He bemoaned having passed up the opportunity to drown that had so neatly presented itself. Then, thinking these ruinous thoughts, he looked at the dripping palette in his hands while Maroula sulked on the rocks. The knobs of paint glistened, blue on the left, yellow on the right. He examined them, first with amazement (maybe his day wasn’t destroyed) and then with curiosity. All thoughts of dying presently abated as he observed that the water beaded away from the paints. The oils and the water did not mix.
That was how Dimitri got the idea to go sub-marine.
It was as if his eye and his spirit had until then been misdirected ever so slightly, mistaking for their subject the human form in the foreground, when all along, the truer subject had been just behind it, and deeper.
There was a chance, of course, that if he went below, he might lose his religion altogether—what little was left of it. He might become an animist, believing that even sea grass had a soul. In any case, he found beauty in the backdrop. Dimitri gave thanks. Perhaps he wouldn’t need the saints and the Virgin at all in these new paintings. He would need weights. A compressor and an air hose. And more than ever, he would need the help of Maroula. Faithful Maroula. Maroula Full of Grace.