Читать книгу Looking for Aphrodite - David Price Williams - Страница 20

As the ship approached the end of the Reşadiye Peninsula I saw the forbidding mountain landscape of Turkey for the first time, tier behind tier of grey silhouetted peaks reaching skyward from the sea. The air was fresh, with a light breeze, and the white waves danced away from the prow. The open foredeck was cluttered with students in sleeping bags, surrounded by a jumble of back-packs. The bright sunlight had woken them, but they had not yet risen. One or two were idly smoking. The ship passed very close to Cape Crio and Knidos as it rounded the Peninsula on its final leg to Rhodes. I could even see the tents on the beach which were to be my home, and just make out the outline of the lower theatre. But of course we could not stop; I had to cross into Turkey through a port of entry, and that would have to be Marmaris via Rhodes. I remember a song that was playing on a tinny tape recorder. I had never heard it before and it was some time before I discovered what it was. But it was to become the talisman of my new life, my ‘Knidos music’ - Judy Collins singing ‘Both Sides Now’. Every time I hear it I am transported back to that morning passing Knidos to Rhodes. And every time I make the journey the words still haunt me – “It’s life’s illusions I recall, I really don’t know life at all!”

So I had arrived in Rhodes that same mid-morning. There was someone touting hotel rooms on the quayside and I accepted. In fact, he was the owner of a recently-built, small hotel in the new part of the city, in Kolokotroni Street, very close to St. John’s Gate through which I had to pass into the Old Crusader town that afternoon to organise my ferry from Rhodes to Marmaris for the following day, a task which turned out to be far more difficult than I had imagined. At this time in the 20th century, with the calamitous rule of the Colonels in full swing in Greece promoting a rife and morose anti-Anatolian jingoism, Turkey as a country, and by definition Marmaris as a port, seemed not to exist in the minds of most Rhodians, so that theoretically it could not even be a topic of conversation, let alone be reached by sea. They had collectively blotted it out of their imagination, despite the huge land mass across the water that could clearly be seen from the northern end of the city.

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