Patrick White - The Vivisector

That night she didn’t speak. He suspected her of praying, and because he had begun to love her again he would have liked to add his petitions to hers; as this wasn’t possible, he filled the darkened cabin of his mind with an involved white calligraphy, which he saw as a correspondence of sorts.

Very early the swell subsided, and they entered a blue morning in which veiled islands were swimming, or in some cases, hedgehogs of brown rock. The steamer functioned at two speeds: one for the immediate foreground; the other for the passive distance on which they might never make an impression. Kerchiefed women continued calling to their Lady for protection, and a theological student spouted like a whale over a consignment of peasant cheeses spread on a covered hold for the passage between islands.

Later in the morning the two foreigners were standing on the sheltered side of the wheelhouse. Since her association and her fur coat had removed Hero Pavloussi to a plane from which Christian voices and glances fell away incredulously, she had been clinging desperately to her companion’s arm for support. They didn’t stop looking ahead: both, he felt, weak at the knees, like discharged hospital cases, or a not yet consummated couple.

Hero finally managed to free her voice from her throat; it allowed her a gummy whisper: ‘Perialos!’ Then the wind had fallen: they had slid the right side of the stone arm of a protective mole.

As soon as it was possible, all the initiates began pouring down on the stone paving, pushing and shrieking; there was a bleating from some quarters, from others a flapping of wings: an inverted cock raised his head, gasping, glaring, wattles quivering. Those who had been waiting for them seized the asperged cheeses and carried them away. A white glare embraced the whole cosmos, excepting those for whom the ceremony had been arranged. It made their arrival more alarmingly significant; they moistened their lips, and looked at each other lovingly, appealing for sympathy in what they were about to undergo.

He said: ‘We were stupid not to have booked a room. Or do you think everyone else belongs?’

‘I do not know where is there to book.’ Hero was struggling with the stones of words.

A great personage of the Church made his exit from the little steamer: his staff of office, his veils proclaimed him. Several monks ran forward. Like hens expecting to be trodden, they hunched over the hand they kissed, before the single bucking taxi drove him up the mountain to the monastery.

‘It is not necessary to book. There is always somewhere.’ Hero smiled, but looked as though she had never been on an island before.

Her coat, which she had taken off when the wind died, was trailing from the crook of her arm. Coming down the gangway she had torn a hole in the fur, but it seemed of no importance to her. The landscape had begun falling into place: which he divided automatically, for the moment feeling more informed than exalted.

Alongside the water a short distance from the mole stood an ochre stucco cube which passed for an inn. Hero came to an agreement with the pirate-landlord for two narrow rooms, each with an iron bedstead and crocheted cotton quilt.

‘Isn’t there a double room in the place?’

‘It is better like this,’ she whispered quickly, though it was doubtful whether the innkeeper would have understood.

So they had reached Perialos. At the now deserted quay two lambs were being dragged from a dinghy, tails flumping, cries rasping and reverberating; a horn from one of them broke off in somebody’s hand.

Their landlord suddenly excused himself.

Hero explained. ‘There is a funeral today, which he has to go to. He is better than he looks.’

They exchanged the smell of damp sheets in the rooms for that of urine in the corridor. They went down to look for food, which they found farther along the quay.

They ate a few sea-scented prawns and lengths of naked cucumber: then a dish of something.

Hero smiled across at him as she masticated. ‘It is good, isn’t it? Primitive, but good. The soodzookakia! ’ The tepid brown ‘sausages’ aroused all the reverence in her.

Because he wanted to love her particularly on this day of their union through atonement, he smiled back, while hoping to disguise the gristle collected between his teeth: as in hers, he noticed.

‘I don’t want to waste any time, Hurtle. I will tell you what I am planning.’ Hero looked down at her plate, into the tomato dregs with their outer edge of oil. ‘We will go first to the Convent of the Assumption — which we — my husband and I — have visited once before. Then to Theodosios. This is a hermit who is living not so very far away from the convent, beside the chapel of St John of the Apocalypse.’

‘But was this the island?’

‘No. That is Patmos — which is given to the Italians. John only passed through Perialos; but he performed miracles here,’ she added with grave authority.

Pushing back the cutlery through the oily dregs, he felt deeply in love with Hero his hushed bride and fellow neophyte.

They started as soon as she had changed into a very simple, expensively cut, cotton frock, and headed in what she remembered as the direction of the convent. They had only gone a short distance through the village when a procession burst on them out of a narrow side street. What must have been practically the whole population of the port chattered and jostled like the steamer passengers at the beginning and ending of the voyage. Greeks, the peasants at least, all seemed to understand whatever there is to know in their sphere of life, as well as in the greater sphere described with geometrical precision behind it. Only the rich and the foreigners didn’t know: so the peasants were sorry for them, the confident black glances and glistening smiles seemed to imply.

The procession parted slightly, and he realized this was not only a matter of life.

‘It is the funeral we were warned about!’ Hero stood clutching the upper part of his arm, like a woman furtively estimating a prospective lover’s strength.

The procession flowed towards them. They were caught up in the forked stream of kerchiefed women, and men walking on a curve which criticized the two foreigners. Then came the Church, bearing banners, and emblems in gilded wood. The tattered priests and their tallow-faced acolytes obviously intended the two lost souls to participate in the mystery of which they were the guardians. The object from which this emanated was even halted for an instant: when the strangers caught sight of a very old woman on a bier, head lolling on a lace pillow. Though still convincingly a partner to life, she was at the same time removed from the living herd trampling around her, for the corpse, with the yellow, pleated mouth, and hair dressed in a kerchief identical with those of the live women, was wearing those geometrically described arcs of eyelids which everybody revered, and some looked as though they aspired to.

A middle-aged woman with a beard spoke to the foreign lady, whose mouth couldn’t cope with the reply. Soon afterwards the procession wobbled on, with laughter and prayers.

‘What did she say?’

‘When we have come for such other reasons, she wanted me to kiss the corpse!’ Hero could have been spitting out the sensation.

They continued through the now empty streets, and came out at the foot of a mountain which she said they must climb. He recognized the blocks of marble melting as they ought in the direction of miracles and martyrdom. On the summit stood the great monastery, manned against assault. An old man came down from drinking on a terrace, and began pissing in the wrong quarter; the wind blew it back at him. Troglodytes, variously bearded, scampered out of their caves and off amongst the olives, scattering dung.