Free The Fig Tree by Arnold Zable Page A

party. We kept an open house. Yes, here it was better,’ she says.
    Yet a moment later she is lamenting lost opportunities. She retreats to her memories of a childhood lived on the opposite edge of the earth. She cannot appease her yearning for what could have been. She cannot help but grieve for the life that was stolen from her in her youth. And she longs for a sense of self that she believes will never be realised here, at the nether ends of the village.
    â€˜I am restless,’ says Cassie. ‘By day I wait for night, and at night I wait for the day.’ She counts the hours. She is taking stock. She confronts the phantoms of her past with an exacting interrogation. And always she returns to that defining moment. It can be seen in a life-size photograph. It occupies pride of place on the living-room wall. It is the one image that remains of a mother and daughter, taken on the eve of Cassie’s abandonment.
    The mother sits in front. Her eyes are alight with promise. They seem to gaze at a more hopeful, distant world. The daughter stands behind her, in a white pinafore with a matching bow in her hair. The girl’s eyes are stoic, accepting, with just a hint of fear. The left hand hangs limply by her side. It is the right hand that gives her away. It clutches at her mother’s right shoulder. It grasps at one last chance. It tightens at the thought of impending separation; it is the gesture of a young girl who must accept her fate.
    â€˜Sometimes I still feel like a stranger here. I have to keep my deepest feelings to myself. In Sydney I felt free. In the village it is stenos kiklos ,’ Cassie says. ‘A narrow circle. A small community. Tight-knit. Everyone knows everyone, but no one knows who you really are. I have never felt fully at home here. Both my parents are buried in another land.’
    This is how the pendulum swings. While some do not feel fully at home back on the island, there are others who have never felt a true sense of belonging in the new world, in far-off Australia. This is, after all, Ithaca, the island of ancient voyagers. Nostalgia is the key sentiment that threads through blind Homer’s account of the travails of Odysseus as he makes his long way home to his beloved island. For ten years he fought in the Trojan wars, and for another ten long years he roamed the seas, stalked by adverse winds, driven from one disaster to the next, until at last the gods allowed him to return to the island that had nurtured him, and the kingdom over which he once ruled.
    The archetype persists. Nostalgia, ‘the pain of longing for the return’, is what draws many Ithacans back to the island of their birth. They are lured by the remembered scent of mountain thyme, the tinkle of goat bells, and the image of that sunlit ribbon of road which curves back to childhood.
    It was nostalgia that drew Andreas Anagnostatos back home after ten years in Melbourne. Andreas was the youngest of three brothers. His eldest brother Hector migrated to Australia in 1924. A second brother, George, left in 1937. Andreas resisted the call. ‘You should come and know another country,’ Hector urged him. Finally, Andreas relented. He worked as a barber, first with his brother George in a beachside suburb, and later in a booth opposite the city’s largest department store.
    Andreas’ nostalgia cuts both ways. When he first returned to Ithaca, he longed for Australia. He was surprised at how strongly he felt. So he re-migrated, felt happy for a while, but was again overcome by longing for the island. Four years later, he returned for good to the family cottage in the village of Platrythias, and rediscovered his childhood love of writing. Andreas began to record the traditions of Ithaca. He scoured the bookshops of Athens for rare prints, sepia-toned photographs, and travellers’ accounts of journeys in the Ionian islands. He assembled albums of his own photos that depict Ithaca in its