The Pillars of Hercules

“When I get depression in Israel,” he said. “When it feels dark to me. I take medication but the real medication is to leave. Every six months or less I feel it, and it gets bad, and I see my doctor. He prescribes medication and I come.”

“Isn’t it sunny most of the time in Israel?”

“Sometimes it is dark,” he said. “I am not speaking of the sunshine. I wanted to settle in Israel but I did not want to give up my Belgian residency. It was such a big decision and it was giving me depression. My psychiatrist said to me, ‘Don’t decide, go back and forth, as you wish. It is better.’ So I do that.”

“That’s a wise doctor,” I said.

“He is my friend.”

He hesitated.

“He knows I am a gay people,” Spillman said. He looked at me sadly. “But I have no more desires. I had a friend but now I have no friend. Are you going to eat?”

“Is it time?”

“From six-thirty to seven-thirty they serve dinner. Then it is closed. You can buy coffee or biscuits or sweets but not foods. In the morning at seven—”

After so many voyages, Spillman knew the whole routine of the ship. He knew some of the crew, and they knew him. He knew every feature of the ship, that they did not do laundry, that the coffee was good, that the food was expensive, that the deck chairs were always dirty, that the crew smoked too much. He knew the arrival and departure times. More than that, he knew the high points of each port of call—the fruit market in Limassol, specific hotels where you could get an inexpensive shower (Spillman had a seat, not a cabin, on the ship and had nowhere on board to have a bath), the best eating places en route, a particular cafe in Rhodes that sold roast chicken. Spillman said the word “chicken” with a gasping and slushy hunger.

All this I learned over dinner, spaghetti and cabbage salad, glopped onto plates by the five Burmese who served in the cafeteria. It was prison food.

The stewards, the waiters, the menials, nearly all the underlings on this Greek ship were either Burmese or Indian. They spoke no Greek. Orders were always given in English and carried out by their efficient, muttering flunkies. They swept, they painted, they mopped, they cooked and served. A Burmese made the moussaka, another Burmese shoveled it onto plates, an Indian handed it over, a Burmese rang the cash register. It was not their fault that the ship served prison food. And none of them had been on the ship long—a year at most. The Burmese were from Rangoon, the Indians from Bombay. They were desperate for employment. They were also loners on the ship, men without women.

Greece, like Israel and Italy, had high unemployment, around ten percent. It interested me that Burmese were making moussaka on this Greek ship, and Filipinos were picking oranges outside Tel Aviv, and West Africans were harvesting tomatoes near Salerno, in Italy. It was the Third World in the Mediterranean, proving that there were even poorer and needier countries than Tunisia and Egypt and Morocco. These people and others had come from halfway around the world to help these developed countries, members of the European Union, to scrub its floors and harvest its crops. The Burmese and Indians lent the ship a melancholy air and made the Greek crewmen seem like overlords, as they loudly issued orders in badly pronounced English. They made the class system explicit by giving it a color. The Mediterranean had always had an underclass of remote or provincial people, but they had never come from so far away.

“Maybe you’ll meet someone,” I said to Spillman over lunch the next day. Speaking of his marriage, he had begun to slip into another depression.

“Yes?”

He stopped eating. The thought of meeting someone seemed not to have occurred to him. He became reflective, a problem clouding his face, taking some of the pinkness from it.

“Perhaps.”

“What’s the problem with your mother?”

“My marriage, also. I made such a great scandal with my marriage. It was a big catastrophe, mamma mia. You know Jewish women? No sex before marriage! Don’t touch me!” He dabbed a balled-up hanky at the spaghetti sauce on his lips. “On our wedding night it was such a disaster.” He was silent for quite a long time. Months, perhaps years, were passing in his mind. Events, too. He was nodding, reviewing these events as great and small they passed before him. At last he winced and said, “We got a divorce.”

He followed me on deck afterwards. Having just left Israel for his health, he was in a particular mood, one of rejection, as he headed to his other home.

“Israel is no more a Jewish country,” Spillman said disgustedly. “It was special before, but now it is like all other countries. Just wanting money. Everyone talks about money.”

He was speaking into the darkness. Israel was somewhere in that darkness.

“I think there will be civil war,” he said. “Jews against Jews, the orthodox ones against the others, the settlers against the others. The Arabs will just watch us fighting.”