Beach Bodies

CLAIRE POLDERS

“There is a region in my heart, uninhabited, which welcomes children looking for an unoccupied area to pitch their summer camp,” the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish wrote in A River Dies of Thirst.

I removed my dress and leaned back. Or rather, I removed the wrap masquerading as a dress and craned my neck to scan the seaside territory. I wanted to find a place better than the boulder that was currently mine.

The narrow beach below me was overcrowded with teenagers, possibly college kids, thirty of them at least. Like me, they had taken the seventy-two stone steps down the cliff in search of coolness. The rocky shore along the bay lay shadowed by ficus and puffs of cypress. The water twinkled with a blue you only see in Greece.

I watched the teenagers with bitterness. They had appropriated the entire beach, a small area I usually shared with only a handful of locals and other tourists, quiet, respectful people. Most of the kids were overgrown, flaunting milk-fed faces, heavy thighs, and rolling bellies. I remember thinking, they take up too much space.

I also remember correcting myself immediately. Don’t be spiteful. Don’t judge on looks. Like you, they have every right to be here. The Mediterranean is a body of water meant to be shared.

There are thousands of flea-ridden cats on the island, some with broken paws, blind eyes, missing ears. Most cats are hungry, unless a tourist feeds them, which happens regularly. Who doesn’t pity a cat? Every food market worth its feta sells overpriced cans of tuna and sardines.

No one, however, likes the stink of cat pee. The smells of pines and pastries are much preferred.

The teenagers were loud. They called to one another from the water to the beach and back. They shrieked with pleasure. They played music on a boombox, or, if that dates me too much, a portable iPhone speaker dock. They splashed. They laughed. They were young.

High on my uncomfortable boulder, I closed my eyes and tried to relax. Reading was impossible. Heat and annoyance dilated my veins.

There are hundreds of donkeys on the island, flies in their eyes, carrying luggage and water bottles up the hills for lazy residents and tourists. Hydra is an island with almost no roads or cars. When you look a donkey in the eye, as it stands motionless in the port, the strong summer sun burning its back, you see the emptiness of surrender. Forced to accept a fate of slave labour, the donkey has given up on hope, rebellion, sympathy, life.

Tourists, generally, don’t pet them. Donkeys always smell of manure.

I removed my bikini top. I wanted to swim and didn’t want the top to get wet. Plus I love swimming semi-nude, the cold water flowing around my free-floating breasts, embracing me. There was a wish for an even tan as well—no shade over the water—but this was a minor reason.

I climbed down from my boulder onto the pebbled beach and zigzagged between the kids toward the water. I admit: I mainly removed my top to shock the prudent youngsters who had usurped my beach, frightening them with my wild nakedness.

There are thousands of refugees along the European borders. They cannot board a plane unless they already have a visa or an asylum request (papers that are hard to come by in a war-torn country). The refugees board unreliable boats, sometimes no more than inflatables, to cross the body of water that separates their hellish past from the promise of a future. They know the sea is full of waves, but they cannot care; they already care too much about the bullets and bombs they’re trying to escape. Many of the boats capsize and sink. Many of the refugees are swallowed by the Mediterranean water.

The sea as a burial ground.

I swam in the calm coolness, feeling suspended. I don’t live near the coast and get to swim in natural waters once a year at most. The water was very salty and I imagined its healing power drawing impurities from my skin. To me, the sea was a life-giving force, a place in which to safely abandon myself.

Back on my boulder, I moved my ass on the hard rock. I couldn’t get comfortable and blamed the loud kids once more. Why were they so oblivious of other people? So insensitive?

The sun and salt made my skin feel old, like the wrinkled figs dangling from a branch above my head.

The sea wasn’t smooth enough to reflect anyone’s face.

Over the years, hundreds of bodies have washed up on Mediterranean beaches. Some people grieved or showed concern. Many did not. Ignorance or indifference?

Interest grew when a photograph of a particular lifeless child went viral.

Look at that boy’s cute face. His blue shorts. His oversized red shirt. His hair not too dark. His skin light enough. How real he is, this boy. His body so human and vulnerable. He resembles us in so many ways.

Only then it was felt. The horror. The tragedy. The disgrace of bodies on the beach.

“If you’ve been an arsehole today, acknowledge it. Try not to be one tomorrow,” the English poet Kate Tempest wrote in Hold Your Own.

On the beach below me, a thin white cat appeared, its soulful eyes gleaming. The animal seemed to come for me, and I considered feeding it. Would a cat gobble down the almonds and cucumbers I had brought with me for lunch? I didn’t try to find out, because I feared that feeding the cat would attract more cats, which would threaten my safety; I’m allergic to cats. The other day, when a few got too close, I sneezed and sneezed. I convinced myself that I couldn’t afford to sympathize with the cats’ starvation.

The refugees who do not drown are often held in under-supplied camps with limited facilities, mostly run by volunteers. When a press visit is scheduled, the toilets are scrubbed. In Piraeus, Greece’s main harbor near Athens, refugees live on concrete parking lots, in nylon tents, underneath highway viaducts, in abandoned barracks. In many cases, there are no toilets.

Seeing the cat on the beach made me think of the donkeys. For a moment, I considered freeing one. I probably had enough money to

buy at least one out of slavery. But what would the donkey do with its freedom on this island? Starve, probably, or wage a war against its former oppressors. Can donkeys swim?

I ate my almonds in a darkening mood, bare-breasted, thinking of the sirens Ulysses tried not to hear.

The boats on the horizon looked like silhouettes being burned by the sun.

“Other countries may offer you discoveries in manners or lore or landscape; Greece offers you something harder—the discovery of yourself,” the British author Lawrence Durrell wrote in Prospero’s Cell.

He wrote these words not long after the fall of Greece to the Germans during the Second World War in 1941. The island he knew best was Corfu, not Hydra, but I don’t believe this detail is relevant.

The majority of houses on this prosperous island are used only a few months per year. Although Greece is suffering from an economic crisis, there are plenty of people who are not. As the summer season draws to an end, they board up their secondary homes and let them stand empty for the rest of the year. The water in their toilets will stink from not being flushed.

The teenagers turned up the boom box/iPhone dock. To not hear music had to be a betrayal of who they were, of the human condition.

I applied more sunscreen, even though I was still in the shade, then contemplated another swim.

Something was gnawing at me and it wasn’t a donkey.

Because of the music no one could hear the drowned calling to us from the water.

Some say the war in Syria began when the nation under its oppressive regime met the worst drought on record. Soon it went from severe water shortages to unemployment to starvation to violent protests to mass executions to torture to attacks with chemical weapons. The West watched. Millions of civilians got trapped between the fire of rebels, religious extremists, and the old regime. Many fled the country. In a cruel twist of irony, thousands of them would find their end in an abundance of water known as the Mediterranean Sea.

As I sat looking at the water and the teenagers on the beach, I lost track of the place, solid underneath my bones. What was I doing here, what were the kids doing here, why were mothers surrendering their children to the waves?

I went on this short inexpensive holiday because I’d worked hard and needed things to briefly fall away. I deserved peace and quiet. And coolness. Or was it wrong of me to seek comfort here? Heartless?

I sat looking at the water and at the people beyond, the ones I couldn’t see. Absences constitute presences, you know—just look at a Dali.

My body grew heavy with self-reproach. How could I be bitter about a pebbled beach while others were dead from the blue? I imagined war and blood and then waves. The coolness of water versus the swallowing sea.

Everything undressed before my eyes, and feeling exposed, I covered my breasts in shame.

Dear drowned, I am sorry.

If I could stop animal cruelty by feeding a cat; if youth and music could save us from guns; if I could guarantee a just world by electing the right politicians; if distinguishing good from evil were enough; if Syria had no oil and plenty of water; if survival on Earth were not a challenge; if boats would not sink and bombs not explode; if refugees were allowed to board planes and arrive safely; if giving up my comforts would increase theirs; if I could disarm fanatics by showing them my hate; if sending strangers my love would make a difference; if we could stop seeing the world as a reflection of ourselves; if awareness were contagious; if knowledge were enough; if the world would contain more than rocks and wishful thinking.

The next day, the teenagers were gone and I reclaimed my spot on the beach. Still, it remained impossible to look at the sparkling blue sea and not see death, only the clear salty water that connected and separated three continents.