The Pillars of Hercules

She was another loner on this ship of loners, a solitary traveler, and she was as pleasant and as odd as the others. Tall, calm, observant, she shared a cabin with two other women, strangers to her. She had been cheated in Turkey and ill with suspected pneumonia in Egypt and spent two days in an Israeli hospital. “They threw me out. I had a temperature of a hundred and two and they said, ‘You must go now.’ I went to one of those grotty hotels and nearly died.” But she was game. I asked how she was now. “I’m coming good!”

“Want to play cards?” she asked.

She taught me an Australian card game called “Crappy Joe,” which was a version of two-handed whist that had interminable variations. Each successive game became more complicated in terms of the combinations needed to win. Her parents had played it almost every night for years in the western Sydney suburb of Emu Plains.

“Aw, I was married for twenty-six years myself, but my husband and I just went in different directions. I had to get away.”

She was dealing the cards for another hand of Crappy Joe.

“You make it sound urgent,” I said.

“He was stalking me,” she said. “At night I’d look out the window and there he’d be, staring in, his face so frightening. I’d be driving somewhere and look in the rearview mirror and he’d be behind me. I went out with a chap—a very nice man. My ex-husband went to his office and threatened him. ‘Don’t you dare go out with my wife.’ ”

“He sounds dangerous,” I said.

“That’s what I told the police. That he was obsessed. He’s got three rifles. But they said, ‘He hasn’t done anything, has he?’ ‘He keeps stalking me and staring at me through the window,’ I said. But that wasn’t enough. I couldn’t prove anything. He hadn’t done anything physical, see.”

In the rain and wind the ship pulled out of Limassol harbor, and I was glad I was here and not there.

“I got so worried I decided to leave,” she said. “I went to India, to Egypt, to Greece. Maybe he’ll leave me alone when I get back.”

She won the hand, gathered the cards, let me cut them, shuffled them and leaned over.

“Maybe I’ll never go back,” she said.

The ship was rolling as it sailed around the coast of western Cyprus, past Aphrodite’s birthplace and Cape Drepanon and the last horned cape on this island of hornlike capes, Arnaoutis, and then into the darkness towards Rhodes.

Rhodes—Colossus of Rhodes, one of the Seven Wonders of the World, a giant bronze figure: was this my compelling interest on this island? No, it was not. How could it be? It was just an old story. The thing had been erected twenty-three hundred years ago, it had been knocked down sixty-five years later and sold off as scrap. So much for the Colossus of Rhodes.

But not far from where this monstrous statue once stood, Spillman the Belgian was saying to me, “I will buy a chicken. I will drink some water. I will play music for the people in the town square. After one cup of tea I will return to the ship. At six o’clock I will take food. Some fruit. Some cheese.”

“You are very well organized, Mr. Spillman.”

“I do make planations of my daily life,” he said, his English faltering, “so I do not make a depression.”

As he walked along, distracted—perhaps hungry—his English became a sort of homage to Hercule Poirot.

“You can tell by my visage that I am a Jewish? Attention, I buy some parfum for my muzzah!”

This and more was my experience of Rhodes. The old walled city of Rhodes was one of the most beautiful I had seen in the Mediterranean, the Palace and Hospital of the Crusader Knights were graceful as well as powerful. The water was brilliantly blue, and mainland Turkey was visible just across the channel. But all this was a backdrop for my walk with pigeon-toed Spillman. I admired him for having ingeniously compensated for his spells of depression. He liked his life, and providing he did not deviate from this route through the Mediterranean in which fruit markets and cheese stalls loomed larger than ruins, his life was happy. I began to reflect on how in the way I was traveling there was an unusual and apparently disjointed process at work. There was something immensely more interesting to me in hearing about Melva and Ted’s divorce, and the spooky behavior of her crazed ex-husband, than in hearing a story of—well, as we had just left Limassol, let us say the tale of Richard the Lionhearted’s marriage to Berengaria of Navarre in 1191, at Limassol Castle, a building which had been practically demolished.