Journey to Paradise

Before I picked up the book, before I knew the title, Rosalia spoke to me about it in two words, literally: ‘It’s not a book about the old days,’ she told me. “It’s a book about today. What we are doing today. We.” Her words troubled me. What did she mean? To let go of our past? How can she, who is of Pontian origin, say such a thing. I was in a hurry to draw conclusions.

It all started to unravel when I picked up the book and flipped through it. A few pages, five black and white photos, grey clouds on the cover. A memory, I thought. Maybe nostalgia. Maybe a faded dream, like the scattered memories left by grandparents when they tell stories to young children, who try to understand the words and tears, amidst forgotten song lyrics. As they struggle to separate fairy tale from reality.

Yes, you know as soon as you start reading that the author is a musician. Clear, unadorned, overflowing with emotions that don’t need many words to express. She leaves unfinished descriptions of places, people, emotions. And what the word does not end, the sigh completes.

Her journey starts from Thessaloniki and Ithaca is a village that no one knows. No map has it and its name hasn’t been heard for years. She doesn’t even know if she’s pronouncing it correctly. But he knows how to find it. After all, he owes it to those, all of them, who are no more.

It begins a quest based on human instinct and trust in people who are unknown and places that are almost mystically familiar. How similar this journey is to that of the first traveller, Odysseus, who longs for ‘Nostimon orar’. It is also for Rosalia of the return the day she seeks and knows it.

The name of the village is mentioned only at the beginning. After that it is almost forgotten. Perhaps it is not necessary. What the traveller is really looking for is something else. It is to fill in the blanks. The voids of the soul and the voids of memory. And it was this that made her seek and learn music. It was what made her tear up every time she rhythmically strummed the dulcimer playing songs old, nostalgic, never forgotten.

The ancestor’s village, the welcome of the inhabitants, even the cleansing rain, led her to catharsis, like the end of a tragedy. Is it not a tragedy? But there is always the “now”. And that has people searching and people who exist and live and want to understand. Because the visitor cries and is not cold, because he doesn’t mind the rain and the mud that stains his shoes.

I read and reread “Journey to Paradise”. Short as it is I could easily revisit it. But every time I read it, the book got harder. While it begins as a narrative of a journey, one that many descendants of refugees have taken, or dreamed of taking, as it progresses towards completion it becomes a poem . Even the form of the speech is reminiscent of verse, and reading it brings a melody so familiar to your ears that its echoes linger long after the book is over.

Its difficulty lies neither in form nor in speech. It lies in that delicate chord of the sensitive reader, touching it and making it pulsate sweetly as he is left in his own whirlpool of memories.

Each one of us reading this book makes our own journey of return. The village that Rosalia seeks may be one of the hundreds of lost, burned, abandoned and reborn villages of our own ancestors. Her merge in its streets is the merge of each of us, in the place that was once our homeland. The stately mansions, the fallen church, the tombs… Images so familiar that you say you have lived them too, in a way. And then, the muddy earth in her skirt, you think you touch it and you feel like bending down, kissing it, reverently.

It is also a walk along the paths of history. History that has remained unwritten and forgotten for years. And just when you think that oblivion has done its job, the language, with its ancient roots, the Pontian language, comes to remind us that the seed sown in these places is not uprooted by massacres, Islamization and refugeeism.

Don’t look for heroes and heroines in this book. You will not find plot and action. We all know the ending beforehand, but the journey has the greatest value. Read the book, not once, but many times and you will be surprised. In this personal journey of returning a new pony, you will find yourself. “For your self is a vast and unmeasured sea” says the poet and continues “Do not say: I have discovered the way of the soul. Say rather : I saw the soul walking on my own path. For the soul walks on all roads”.

You will discover aspects of yourself well hidden. In your timeless wanderings, indulge in the intoxication brought by the smell of wet earth. The smell of grass, leptocarps and mould on hallowed stones.

Because, as the poet Khalil Gibran says, “The timelessness that you have within you understands the eternity of life. And it knows that yesterday is but the memory of tomorrow and tomorrow is but the dream of today.”

And, then, you too will find yourselves in the ancestral homes, the pain will subside, the soul will heal. The metastasis will take place and awaken desires to seek. Perhaps, after that, we will all begin our own journey to paradise. A paradise that will not resemble the Eden we were taught, nor the one described to us by our ancestors. A paradise grayish, after a painful journey that will ,however, be able to make us exclaim what Rosalia exclaims at the end: ‘Deserve, O God, to be buried there….

Vicky Hadjikyriakou, philologist, radio producer.