The Pillars of Hercules

At dinner, the Seabourn was sailing north to Lesbos, and Jack Greenwald was in unusually high spirits in anticipation of dessert—one of his own recipes, Fraises au poivre, Strawberries with Black Pepper. Greenwald’s high spirits took the form of teasing, and as we were at a larger than usual table, he was able to range over it, poking fun. To the Panamanian, he said: “Noriega was a very patriotic man, above all, don’t you think?” To a woman wrinkling her nose: “That is how Eskimos say no. They say yes by lifting their eyebrows—here, do you think you can manage that, too?” To a rationalist at the head of the table: “Of course I believe in ghosts, and our prime minister, Mackenzie King, believed in ghosts, too.”

This chatter was no more absurd than that of the other passengers.

“—Harry and I were at the Barbara Sinatra benefit for abused children,” a woman was saying. “Tom Arnold was one of the speakers. He talked about the man who had abused him—”

“—figured, if you’re in Turkey you’ve got to get a Turkish carpet. I measured the spot in the house and I’ve got the measurements with me. We’re looking for something floral—my wife loves flowers. We don’t want anything geometric—”

“—a couple of icons. They swore they were genuine—”

“—stayed for a whole week in the Sea Shells—they’re islands in the Indian Ocean.”

“—next time up the Amazon.”

“—get to Rio J. DeNiro, during Carnaval.”

At last, the waiter rolled a trolley towards Jack Greenwald with several bowls, and the strawberries, and in bottles and saucers various other ingredients for his dessert. Jack supervised and narrated the preparation.

“Nine plump fresh strawberries—good,” he said. “Now, take that pepper mill and grind twelve twists of pepper,” and he counted as the black pepper fell upon the crimson strawberries. “Take a tablespoon of Pernod and macerate them, yes, like that. And a tablespoon of Cointreau. Macerate. Lift them, let it reach all the berries. Now a tablespoon of Armagnac. Macerate, macerate.”

“Yes?” The waiter showed Jack the bowl of slick speckled berries.

“A few pinches of sugar and three-quarters of a tablespoon of fresh crème,” Jack said. “Mix carefully, just coat them with the crème. You notice how I pronounce that word ‘clem’—that’s because I’m from Montreal.”

There was a bit more business with the Fraises au poivre. The plates were wrong. No, not soup bowls—but flat plates were needed for the serving, and the sauce had to be dripped just so.

“What do you think?” he asked, after I had sampled some.

It was hard to describe the taste, which was both a slow sweet burn, and peppery and syrupy and alcoholic and fruity; and I did not want to tell him that no taste could compete with the pleasure of watching this dessert being concocted by him and the deferential waiter.

To add to my pleasure, Jack immediately ordered a helping of Cherries Jubilee, another Greenwald variation, flambéed, with ice cream, and tucking in, he said, “Doesn’t this go down nicely after the strawberries?”

Afterwards, he said that he had joined the cruise—he was going on to Haifa after Istanbul—in order to lose forty pounds, “but I’m having my doubts.”

• • •

Morning in Lesbos, dreary in a drizzling rain, but there were floods elsewhere. FLOODS! CATASTROPHE! the Lesbian headlines cried. DEATH IN CRETE! Torrential rains were general all over the Peloponnese: cars washed into the sea, stranded tourists, cliffs broken by erosion, roofs collapsed.

Because so little vegetation existed in Greece, whether mainland or islands, the soil did not hold the rain. Lesbos was a study in erosion, the gravelly hills sluicing down their own gullies and washing into the street; dirt, mud, stones, silt, sand traveling fast in streams and pouring into the sea, reducing the island, making it starker and stonier.

Had Greece always looked like this? I began to think that there had to have been a time when it was forested, and that the loss of trees had given it this crumbly and lined appearance. It had perhaps been quite a different landscape in ancient times, not the white wasteland of hot pockmarked stone and blazing sand, but a cooler place of shade trees and forests.

I traipsed through the town of Mitilini, bought a newspaper, made a telephone call, visited a church, and watched a fisherman plucking tiny fish from the thick folds of his net. It continued to rain. Few places are gloomier than a tourist town in a rainstorm. The weather seemed to make the Greeks crabbier, too; the frowning chain-smoking men in the damp tavernas they had turned into men’s clubs.