The Drifters (62 page)

When I’m in Geneva and one of my associates is heading for Portugal and he says, ‘I’ll get along because I speak Spanish,’ I no longer argue with him. I simply hand him the name of that bleak headland where Prince Henry the Navigator trained his captains for their conquest of Africa and ask him how he would pronounce it:
Sagres.
After he has made his guess, I say ‘That’s how a Spaniard would say it, but the Portuguese say
Shagrzh
in one compressed syllable. The rule,’ I advise him, ‘is to drop as many vowels as possible and insert as many h’s.’

So when Gretchen told me one morning, with some excitement, ‘Join us! We’re going on an expedition to Silyes,’ I told her, ‘If you want to find your way, better pronounce it
Shilvzh.
’

Her excitement was caused by the discovery that Silves, the ancient capital of Algarve, contained a Crusader castle in good repair. It had been built, she told me, by Muslims in the tenth century. When I asked her how it had become a Crusader fortress, and in Portugal, her eyes lit up with the old enthusiasm I had noted when I first met her in Boston.

I was pleased to see this. When the Hundred Years’ War had proved disappointing she was left without any central intellectual interest, and I had hoped that some new subject in Spain would enlist her attention, but none did. Now,
hearing of Silves and the Crusades, her enthusiasm was rekindled and there was a possibility that this might prove to be the subject on which she would concentrate.

It was a strange bit of history she told me. In one of the early Crusades a group of knights from England and Germany, more devout than brave, discovered to their relief that they did not have to sail all the way to the Holy Land to battle the infidel. There happened to be some Moors in Portugal, ensconced ‘in castles which could be easily reached from the sea, and which, if captured, would control farmlands that might prove productive.

So this band of reluctant conquerors hove their fleet to just south of Lisboa, where some castles showed on the horizon, and it was not until they had burned the buildings and slaughtered the inhabitants that they found the latter were Christians. The Moors, one of the survivors gasped, lived farther south.

Accordingly, the mob dropped down the coast to burn some more castles, finding that these belonged to Norsemen who had conquered the Moors a good hundred years earlier. ‘The enemy,’ their survivors explained, ‘live beyond the turn of Portugal, on the southern coast.’

So the gallant brawlers sailed even farther south, turned Cabo de São Vicente and arrived at a shore from which they could see the real enemy in the Moorish castle of Silves. With fire in their hearts, they stormed ashore, devastated the land lying between the beach and the castle, and laid siege to the infidel stronghold. It was a bloody, protracted affair and after many weeks the Christians won. For them that was the end of the Crusade. They dug themselves in, appropriated surrounding lands, and terrified the seacoast for a hundred miles.

‘They were,’ the locals said, ‘the first Englishmen to settle in Algarve, great robbers who set the pattern for all who followed.’ The shield of Silves shows the ancient castle guarded by two bearded Crusaders and two murderous Moors in headcloths. Residents argue as to which are the more fearsome.

We drove to Silves on the high inland road, catching glimpses of the ocean on our left, and I was impressed with the manner in which Gretchen turned her whole attention to what she was seeing: ‘If we were in a Crusader ship out there … right now … we’d see this road
and know it led to some settlement.’ Once she asked Joe to halt the pop-top so she could inspect the land. ‘If you were an English countryman, would you try to grow things here?’ Nothing was too trivial for her inspection; she wanted to remember what flowers grew along the road and what birds accompanied them. She became an English Crusader captain eight hundred years ago.

From the high road the first glimpse of Silves was a summary of history, for at the northern edge of the city rose the dark brown walls of a many-turreted Moorish castle, from whose eastern end, without a break in architecture, sprang a Gothic cathedral, each building leaning upon the other. The city itself, perched beside a mountain stream, looked clean, with nineteenth-century buildings in pastel colors interlocking with stone edifices seven and eight hundred years old. It was, like other cities in Algarve, still small enough to be encompassed in a single glance.

Gretchen launched an imaginative debate as to what the Christians and Moors must have thought in those centuries when warfare preoccupied them. Cato grumbled, ‘Just like the Russians and the Americans … irrelevant.’ But Britta corrected him. ‘If you think communism is irrelevant, you haven’t lived on its flank.’ What she meant by this we did not stop to inquire.

Joe said, ‘It’s hard to imagine religion as such a force … one whole civilization at war with another,’ but Yigal said, ‘You haven’t been following Ireland … and they’re all Christians.’ Gretchen asked, ‘Are the Muslims today as much preoccupied with the Jews as they were with the Crusaders in this period?’ She indicated the distant castle, and Yigal replied, ‘When you live in Israel today, you hear the word “Crusades” every day.’

‘How?’

‘The Arabs are convinced that since they were once able to resist the Crusaders for two hundred years and push them into the sea, they’ll do the same with us. For an Arab in Syria, a Crusader castle is a very hopeful image.’

When we reached the castle we found a complete structure—with gardens, orchards, water supply and huge roadways—atop the ramparts. The fortress looked much as it must have when the Moors occupied it, and all of us gained from it a sense of history. I remember Cato standing with me at the foot of a tower which the Crusaders
had destroyed in their siege and then rebuilt. ‘You know,’ he said reflectively, ‘I’m beginning to suspect my old man was right. Maybe religion is a lot more important than I thought.’ I was about to reply, but he had quickly moved away to study another tower; he had made a remark on which he wished no interrogation.

When we had finished with the castle, and the strange cathedral which grew out of it, we drove southward about seven miles to the beach, where Gretchen got out and waded into the Atlantic, trying to imagine what it must have been like to be a Crusader storming ashore to attack an unknown land.

‘Who’ll march with me back to the castle?’ she asked, and Cato volunteered, for he, too, was much taken with this castle and wanted to see it as it emerged into sight. So the two set forth and hiked the seven miles, studying each aspect of the landscape as they went, seeing it as a marauder would. The rest of us stopped in bars, bought European papers, and listened to what music was available; occasionally we overtook the hikers, and I thought that if Gretchen ever did write about the Crusaders in Portugal, she would at least know the terrain.

We rejoined them at the castle and walked once more about the spacious ramparts; now we were Christians who had successfully stormed the fortress, and as we walked Cato said, ‘You know, that’s just what a bunch of Englishmen and Germans would do. Build a cathedral over there.’ He was much taken, I remember, with the subtle manner in which the cathedral had been made a part of the castle.

On our way home in the late afternoon Gretchen asked again that we halt for a final look at Silves, nestling on its hill, and as we sat beneath old almond trees Britta suggested that Gretchen sing, and the guitar was hauled out and we joined in some of the ballads we had learned. At one pause I said, ‘It’s strange that you don’t know the best folk song ever written.’ Gretchen turned inquisitively and asked, ‘What?’ and I said, ‘ “Eriskay Love Lilt.” ’

‘Never heard of it,’ she said, so I sang the song from the Outer Islands of Scotland; it must have been current when the Crusaders gathered to storm the castle at Silves, a plaintive sea-song of extreme simplicity:

There was no bombast in the song, no wayside murders or betrayals; there was simply the timeless complaint of an island woman whose lover has gone to sea. The melody had been judged by experts to be one of the purest ever devised, a sequence of plain full notes. Certainly it was one of the gentlest and longest-remembered.

‘Where did you learn it?’ Gretchen asked.

‘In World War II. I was stationed for a while on a Scottish island called Barra … so small, a ship could hardly land there. Nearby was another island called Eriskay. One tenth as large. The song was found on that island many years ago.’

Gretchen tried to pick out the melody, then the accompaniment, and as dusk began to gather about the castle, for it was now nearly nine at night, we tried the old song:

As we sang we could visualize Moors and Christians inhabiting this valley, sending their fishing boats out to sea and returning at dusk.

The expedition to Silves had an unhappy ending. When we reached Alte, and were about to drive down the mountainside, Britta gave a cry—and we turned to see what had happened.

One of the papers we had bought was from Sweden, the first Britta had seen in a long time, and on an inside page she found this cryptic notice:

And, suddenly, all of us were involved with a remote city we had never seen, and as Britta tried to deduce paragraphs from words, imagining a conflagration even worse than the real one, we caught glimpses of what had been lost.

‘Mr. Mogstad had his business in one of the old buildings. Poor man.’

‘The other day you said he was a jerk,’ Cato remembered.

‘He was, and now he’s a poor jerk.’

We tried to think of ways that Britta could acquire specific information, and Gretchen had a good idea: ‘Tomorrow we’ll find an SAS office. They’ll have the back Scandinavian papers.’

‘What could we do tonight?’ Joe asked. He was hovering over Britta, trying to assure her that things could not be as bad as she was supposing, but she pointed to a Swedish word and said, ‘Devastated. That’s what it says.’

Monica said, ‘Why not telephone?’ and we hurried down to Albufeira, where the operator at the principal hotel tried to call Tromsø but could get only the airfield at Bardufoss, not far away. We listened as Britta spoke in a language that none of us understood. She indicated to us that the man at the airport was putting a call through on the bullhorn, asking if there was anyone in the waiting room from Tromsø, and we heard Britta pronouncing names: ‘Britta Bjørndahl. Holger Mogstad. Gunnar Lindblad. Britta Bjørndahl.’ There was a long pause, during which she began to cry, and in her tears we could see Tromsø quite clearly. She said thank you and put the receiver back on the hook. She had fought to escape Tromsø, and it had followed her to Portugal.

We went to the bar patronized by Churchill and were gratified to see that he was absent. Gloomily we drank our beer as Britta told us what had happened. A fire along the waterfront had leaped from one building to the next, until half the commercial section of the town was ablaze. Historic buildings from which Amundsen had departed for the North and South Poles were lost. The ship
chandlers who had outfitted Fridtjof Nansen’s
From
were burned out, and Otto Sverdrup’s old firm was gone. Mr. Mogstad’s boatyard was a total loss, and Tromsø was devastated.

‘How much is left?’ Joe asked.

‘Most of the residential sections,’ Britta said. ‘I suppose our place escaped.’

When she said ‘our place,’ she bit her lip, for she had told us repeatedly that it was hers no longer, and this led us to a midnight discussion of what the values of life were, and it was Britta who said, ‘I suppose I’m stuck with the damned place. I didn’t know I loved my parents so much.’

They ask me what I thought, and I said, ‘I’ve been much impressed with how sensible you people are in your relations with one another. You’re way ahead of where my generation was at twenty. You wouldn’t believe how stupid we were about sex and jobs. Your way is better.

‘But the neat trick in life is not to negotiate the years from seventeen to twenty-five. Anyone can do that, and apparently it’s a lot easier than I once thought. The problem is to build something that will sustain you from thirty-five to sixty. Finding some kind of work that gives you pleasure. Finding someone of the opposite sex you can live with through the tough years. Finding a way to rear children. Most of all, keeping your sanity and your dedication.’

Gretchen wanted to know what I considered the criteria, and I said, ‘About fifteen years ago, when I looked at the rat race, I opted out. I’ll never be president of World Mutual, because I wanted to travel … do things my way. I decided then that if a man can live to sixty without being in jail or the booby hatch, he’s got it licked. Everything else is inconsequential.’

‘You mean that?’ Joe asked.

‘I do.’ No one said anything, so after a while I added, ‘I think it’s great the way you young people can live together … the freedom you have. But I see no evidence yet that you are even one step closer to solving the big problems. Like what work? What girl? What town? What commitment? You’re not ahead of where I was at your age. Maybe you’re behind, because I was sustained by certain illusions.’

Cato said, ‘I don’t like to bring this up, but aren’t you divorced? Isn’t your son in jail somewhere?’