2. Sailing to Byzantium

I guess you might wonder about the wisdom of my going to Turkey with a broken leg and my suitcases full of drugs. When I left New Zealand in February 2004 I did not have a broken leg. I was using crutches and I had braces on both legs to counter foot-drop, which is what happens when the nerves in your feet and ankles die – your feet don’t lift when your legs do and you trip over your own toes. But that wasn’t what had broken my leg this time.

As for the suitcases full of drugs – they weren’t illegal – except the codeine, which I hadn’t been able to bring myself to dispose of in Italy, especially after smashing myself up in the men’s shower in the Villa Camerata in Florence. The trouble with foot-braces and elbow crutches, is that there are times when it is impractical to make use of them. Showers are one such time, toilets are another. I’d left the crutches in my room and gone barefoot to the ground floor bathroom. The women’s shower room was on the floor above and I didn’t want to use the stairs, so I quietly took the shower at the far end of the men’s cubicles, dried and dressed inside the shower box, and sneaked forth – just as some ugly person turned the lights off. I yelled out of course – there were limits to my want of invisibility – but the lights did not come back on.

The thing about having no feeling in your feet is that you cannot sense any irregularity in what you are standing on. So you find yourself falling without ever having the chance to correct your balance. Normally, feet are terribly clever. When I think about how I used to get around in high-heeled slip-ons (slip-offs), I am just so impressed about how clever the feet of women are. I suppose that some clever-dick will respond that women keep their brains in their shoes. My answer, if I were to answer, would probably be that at least, that way, they keep them out of the shit.

Anyway, I looked the next day and found I’d stood on a row of tiles sloping into a drain. My left foot had slipped violently and knocked my right leg out from under me, thus causing me to thump down hard on my left side. I picked myself up – as you do – with a powerful sense of injury and indignation. My ankle felt bad and I was hoping like hell that it wasn’t too badly bruised. It felt broken, but I’ve had broken ankles before and discovered, to my cost, that treating them with a plaster cast can be worse than ignoring them. If the plaster starts breaking the skin you can get cellulitis and that telltale red line tracking up your leg in no time. Then again I’ve had a bruised (but apparently unbroken) ankle that was more painful than the broken one. I didn’t know what to hope for.

The next day I knew that things weren’t so good when I was suddenly obliged to get out an airsick bag and vomit into it at the breakfast table. I studiously avoided looking at the other people at the table, so I don’t know how they responded. I decided it was time to shoot some intra-muscular hydrocortisone before I lost it altogether. I managed to walk, with Finn, down the long driveway from the Villa Camerata, through spring-green woods, to the bus stop. But I had to change my crutch technique from the sort of cross-country skiing way, to the one-legged hop with both crutches together. It was very tiring – especially to the shoulders and neck.

I was eager to get to the Uffizi early, as we had to wait in the great Unbooked queue, but Finn kept being distracted by this and that, and by the time we got to the gallery there was a queue around three sides of the square. I bit the bullet and positioned myself at the rapidly growing end of it, but Finn baulked. There was no way he was gonna wait half a day shuffling round in a queue. He would cross the Ponte Vecchio and take a walk up the hillside. He’d come back in a few hours.

So I dragged my rapidly swelling ankle round the square for nearly four hours. Behind me there was a group of a dozen or so young Italians who took the happy attitude that queuing was as much fun as viewing. In four hours you can grow quite fond of people without even exchanging a word. I took photos of them and they performed for the camera. As we edged up towards the door, Finn came back and brought me some food, which was good. I have a high pain threshold, but the leg was powerfully painful, and I was knocking back the codeine and doing panadol to the liver-safe max.

When I think back now, I can date an emerging bad temper to that day. Just as we got to the place where the queue to the gallery goes behind a barrier, I watched two young and very beautiful Italians – they could have been brother and sister, with the same long dark wavy hair and the same petit exquisite features – nonchalantly approach and sidle into the queue behind me, and take up residence there as if they’d been there all day.

“Actually,” I said loudly, “the end of the queue is over there.” I pointed across to the other side of the square.

“Oh,” said one of them in beautifully accented, but flawless English, “we thought this was the end.” They looked studiously innocent.

“Oh yeah,” I said, “Try pulling the other one. These people and I have waited here for hours, so bugger off!”

“Oh, we didn’t know,” they protested. They clearly thought that I must eventually be swayed by their beauty and innocence.

“Bugger Off!” I said, pointing a witch’s finger at the end of the queue across the square.

I swear it was the leg talking.

That night, after four hours in the queue and four hours in the gallery, I was shocked to see that both the ankle and the knee were blackened with bruises and the whole leg was swollen. I still thought it was the ankle that had come off worst, but the knee was increasingly painful. Even so, I was hoping it was just a matter of toughing it out for a while until it healed.

The next day we went to Ravenna. Battling bags and buses left us both buggered before we even got to the station. But changing trains at Bologna became a bit of a nightmare until we found a helpful official who got a free porter to take our bags on a funny wooden cart to the locked lift, conduct us down a long subterranean corridor and up another locked lift to platform 11.

Ravenna is wonderful. It was, for a while, the capital of the Western Roman Empire. Long before that, in 49 BC, it had been the place from which Caesar went to cross the Rubicond – though I’ve never been quite able to keep in my mind the reason why Caesar felt obliged to cross the Rubicond. I was inspired to walk considerable distances in Ravenna, but keeping expenses down went to hell when we tried to find a bus to Saint Apollinare in Classe. My leg insisted on taking a taxi to see the sheep. And we took a taxi back to the hostel.

Had I known what was to happen when we got to Bari, I would have extended my stay in Ravenna and spent more time with the mosaic apostle-sheep in Classe, or with the Good Shepherd and the sheep in the exquisite little cross-shaped church called the Mausoleum of Galla Placidia, though it maybe isn’t, since Augusta Galla Placidia – daughter of Theodosio the Great, niece of the Emperor of the East, mother of the Emperor of the West, and a ruler in her own right, even if she were a woman much handed around in marriage and incest at the hands of her brother, from whom she escaped by sailing to Byzantium and returning in triumph – actually died, in 450, in Rome. But the idea that she might have chosen to spend eternity under the magical starry sky in the little dome is irresistible. I felt none of the claustrophobic horrors, there, that tombs more often trouble me with. The drinking doves and the deer and the sheep and all the fruits and vines are so reassuring. And the stars!

I might even have spent more time with that illustrious couple who seem to epitomize Byzantium, Justinian and Theodora, who never came to Ravenna, but sent their armies to conquer the Arians, and their images in tiny pieces of glass all the way from the Golden Horn.

But I’d forgotten my password for Paradise email, so I missed all the messages from Paleologos Superfast Ferries telling me that the ferry we were booked on would not be sailing because it was Easter Sunday. I found myself taking a dim view of Bari even before I got to the ferry wharf. At the train station there was a line of taxis, but the officious men insisted I go to the one at the head of the queue. This involved walking a lot further, so I made a little scene and pointed out that I was getting a taxi because I wasn’t fit to walk. Then, as I started hobbling towards the other end of the line, they decided that I could take a taxi at this end after all.

The driver spoke no English and made me think of a blue-eyed killer. He had no clear idea of where the Superfast Ferries left from, so he took us on a roundabout route, dropped us at the wrong place, and insisted we pay him more than twice as much as even the roundabout way should have cost. By the time we had dragged my livid whale of a leg and the bags to the right wharf I was already very pissed off, but when we were told there was no sailing I lost it completely and sat down on the bags and sobbed while some Italian jokers, vacillating between concern and amusement, kept optimistically insisting that there was “No problem, Lady.”  I didn’t know what planet they were on, but the one I was on was rapidly degenerating into utter dysfunctionality. Bari might have stolen the relics of Santa Claus from Turkey, but St Nick’s corporeal remains had obviously not done the town any lasting good.

Eventually we got to Greece. Day hadn’t broken in Igoumenitsa. A taxi took us to the correct bus station without overcharging. But the bus station was not built to accommodate buses. They had to resort to backing and bother just to get through, so I found myself sitting there in the pre-dawn dark wondering how the descendants of the people who had built the Parthenon could not even build a workable bus station. They could make good roads, though, across mountains huge and icy in the spring dawn, with Judas trees blooming a violent pink among the green trees, and white blossom trees clinging to bare hillsides in a thick low cloud.

At Ioannina we had time to walk around the lakeside below the cliffs of the Kastro. There were rowers out training on the lake and, near the point, two men – obviously full of the joys of spring – were singing their heads off. In a wide strip of lawn dotted with large sculptures, I lay down in the sunshine on grass thick with white daisies. It was only later that I discovered that the 35 Euros in notes that I had stuffed in the coin-pocket of my bum bag had fallen out because I had neglected to close the zip. Finn ran back to the spot but only recovered 10 Euros and a few coins. It was an indication of how tired and pain-affected I was. We were already too far over budget to be literally throwing money away.

Finn was already irritable about the slow pace I was making him keep, and he hated the pain that showed on my face. He couldn’t help interpreting it as anger or disapproval, and he took it personally. Now he became positively angry with me for losing the money and for his failure to find it.

Things came to a head when we lost our way back to the bus station. Finn didn’t really care about how far we had to walk, so long as he could find his way without asking for help. I was pretty exhausted and my arms and shoulders and neck were aching along with the dire pain in my leg. As I made a move to approach a young man to ask for directions, Finn humphed with disapproval, so I turned on him and accused him of being “a heartless arsehole” who didn’t give a shit about making me walk further than I needed to.

“And do you absolutely have to be the typically pigheaded bloody Kiwi male who can’t bear to display what he can’t help seeing as his own inadequacy due to not having a fully functional Global Positioning System implanted in his scrotum before birth,” I screeched recklessly. “And why the fuck does it matter so much to you, if some young Greek guy you’ll never see again in your entire life, thinks that you are somehow inadequate because you don’t know the way back though streets you’ve never seen before, to a bus station for which you have no map? Why the hell do you damned silly men have to pretend that you fell to earth in a space-egg when every mother knows you’re just little sucky babies who come out bigger, and take longer to grow up, and keep killing yourselves when you get it wrong?”

Naturally, this outburst was not calculated to bring about the immediate cessation of hostilities, but I was already feeling that freedom of the desperate. That humph had been one humph too many to humph onto a camel with a very sore leg and no sleep on an all-night ferry which had vibrated heavily at exactly the same frequency as the quake of a diabetic having a bad hypo. It was the last straw and I just had to get the whole lot off my chest – or my evil-tempered camel’s back.

I found the bus station – by asking – and Finn sulked. He retrieved the bags from short-term storage, and I sat down on them and asked him to ask the bus drivers which bus was heading for Trikala and stopping at Kalambaka. He disappeared and didn’t come back. I got more and more angry and went, myself, to get the information – an almost pathetically simple task. Then he turned up saying he hadn’t been able to make himself noticed. He’d tried to be polite and wordy, and all they’d wanted was loud and simple: Trikala bus? Yes this bus Trikala.  Kalambaka stop? Yes, yes Kalambaka stop. Luggage?

I was feeling sorry for my boy now. Being blunt only comes naturally to him when he’s angry, and asking strangers for information produces fear in him but not anger. He has to get over this before he can ever make his way in life, and I am really the only person on hand who cares whether or not he makes his way to anywhere at all. But he was still mad as hell. Instead of helping me onto the bus, he got in first without even taking my carry-on bag. I struggled up the steps with some urgency because I could see that a woman with a small child felt impelled to assist me. I saved her the trouble. I saw no place to put my small, but heavy backpack, so I dumped it on Finn without remorse, and squeezed myself into the seat. My leg could still bend at this point.

Finn, who normally hates sulky behaviour, sulked all the way to Meteora, but the sight of that fantastic wall of rocks (though rocks hardly begins to describe those massive, mountainous upthrusts) made him forget all about the heaviness of his pride and my baggage. I had chosen the Hotel Meteora from the list in my guidebook, but I began to think it was a mistake when I saw that it was at the top of a steep slope. Finn, however, surged up the hill bearing his backpack and dragging both my heavy trolley bags topped with both our day packs. The hotel manager saw him coming and raced out to relieve him of some of the bags, but then he saw me hefting myself painfully up on my crutches, so he jumped in his car and came down to get me. Later we went out for a very good Greek meal where Finn discovered the delight of moussaka, and he dragged me back up the hill, impressed by the stars and the soaring darkness of the rocks. We could see some little lights and a cross on the tops. Finn ached to get up there.

In the morning, after a breakfast during which I fell under the intense scrutiny of the manager’s noble Mama, we took the bus to Kastraki and set off up a path made very sweet by the blossoms of lilac and hawthorn and plum and snowball trees and countless other flowers, along with the perpetually miraculous and unsynthesizable green of spring leaves. Who would ever wish to forego winter and lose such a reward for enduring it? Even my leg was lightened by it.

I had some doubt that we were going the right way, but Finn was unstoppable, and I figured that this was as good a way of seeing the place as any. It was a gorgeous day (we got sunburnt) with just a bit of wind in exposed places. The track got more and more like a goat track, but there was a stream alongside it and lots of fragrant herbs like pennyroyal, which released its delicious smell under our feet. We saw hardly anyone. Everyone else was going up the regular road in cars and tourist buses.

Just where our path crossed the regular road, a shepherdess emerged from under a big hat. We heard her flock of tinkling goats and sheep, guarded by two big black dogs, before we saw them. Finn decided to take the mountain path up to the monastery (even though I assured him the road would take us there) so I waited, on a seat under some trees, for him to go up and back down as well. As he was leaving, the shepherdess brought her flock out onto the road and down the path we had come up. He took the camera with him so I was unable to record the scene that followed.

Having heard the tinkling of the sheep and goat bells begin to fade, I was interested to find it increasing in volume again.  Suddenly a very flustered shepherdess reappeared with her flock and disappeared behind a huge round boulder the size of the Albert Hall. There was a lot of swearing (I presume) in Greek, and what sounded like a bit of flogging as well, and then they all appeared again and there was a bit of a contretemps between the flock and several motorists who seemed unacquainted with the nature of such beasts, and one naughty billy (perhaps the subject of the probable swearing and flogging) ran off the wrong way − up the road instead of down the track − and I was reminded of just how quickly Arcadia can turn into something else.

I waited an awfully long time and saw almost no one except an old Greek couple who were terribly well dressed and well-educated people. They had a conversation with me and with each other. I gather they were debating about whether to offer me a lift up the hill by the regular road. They may have been disturbed by my pallor. The man had looked at my diary and knew English when he saw it, and he asked me if I was all right. It took me a while to convince him that I was perfectly all right and that I was just waiting for my very adventurous son to stop thinking he was a mountain goat. Then a dog came to visit me, and an English couple emerged from the path and assured me it was a very long way. Another old Greek woman appeared with a bunch of wildflowers, and she sat by the road for a while. Finally Finn appeared looking elated. We smiled and spoke to the old Greek woman as we set off up the regular road.

But it was getting quite hot, and it was steep, so I stuck out my thumb experimentally, and we looked round as a car stopped, and Finn said "It's a taxi" and we laughed and then laughed some more when we found the old Greek woman sitting in the back with her mobile phone, and she was arguing with the old Greek man who was driving and they gave us a ride to the top of the hill and the old man laughed and waved away my offer of money. He got another fare and tooted at us on his way back down.

We had noticed that Greek men and women do a huge amount of arguing. It is usually the women sounding off at the men, who are classic avoiders and don’t really argue back (very annoying that − the men get to remain the "good natured" ones, and the women never manage to get the bastards sorted). The men bugger off to the teashops, and the women take out their frustrations on the billygoats.

            Finn’s email home that day made it sound as if I was too lazy to go up the steps to the monasteries, which capped the vertical mountains of stone. I would have been fine about climbing up the steps to the damned monasteries, it was climbing down again that I couldn't face. It would have been painful, yes, but dangerous also. Even Finn confessed that he thought the wind might blow him off the steps in parts. The fact is: I walked along that road between monasteries for bloody miles and bloody miles, and right near the end I broke down and cried by one of those roadside shrines. And I was rescued (Finn too, he had sore feet that night) by a traveling van full of Romanian Christians who were on their way to Athens to an “Aloe Vera Gelly Conference”. There was an economist woman who could speak English and decided that it had to happen that we met on the road like that, and she was sure that their aloe vera "Forever Living" product would cure me. They also had a doctor with them who felt how hot my leg was and prescribed an X-ray. They took us all the way back to Kalambaka, and they scared Finn with the two young women in their company − at least Finn said afterwards that they were "intimidatingly hot". Yes, very slim and small, but they seem to have used aloe vera on their breasts to achieve miracles. Or maybe their God does have a sense of humour.

            Anyway, it was a great day, right to the end when the van had to stop for a stroppy billygoat that had gone to sleep in the middle of the road. Date: Fri, 16 Apr 2004 04:58:41 +1200 (NZST)

At breakfast on the morning of our departure from Kalambaka, the reason for Mama’s scrutiny of me became clear. This thin, black-dressed, perfectly grey-coiffed woman who seemed to be very much in command of the sons and the rest of the family, had seen that I did blood-tests and injected insulin, and concluded that I was diabetic. She had become a Type II diabetic (usually non-insulin-dependent, usually late-onset). She had no blood-sugar monitor, and was a little concerned about her BG levels, so she sent the son to ask if I would use my equipment to test her.

I was a little appalled at how trusting she was. I didn’t have a clean lancet except in the bowels of my carefully packed suitcase. The lancets in my finger-prickers get used for months before I decide they are a bit blunt and change them. If I lose one when I’m out somewhere, I just prick my finger with an insulin syringe. So I found an unused syringe and she meekly gave me her hand. I pierced one of the fingertips, squeezed, and touched the fat ladybird of blood with the test-strip of the meter my now-ex-friend, Jade, had given me after I’d lost my Glucocard in the Natural History Museum in New York. (My Glucometre Esprit had broken even earlier, and Clive was bringing a replacement from Bayer in Auckland.)

Mama’s blood-sugar, at 11.3 mmol/L, wasn’t very high − not by my standards, anyway. It took me a little while to figure out how to convert the mmol/L to mg/dL so that they would understand it. When the meter converted it to 204 mg/dL they were not so pleased, because they had hoped that, after all her dietary efforts, it would have come down from that. I wanted to reassure them that it was by no means immediately life threatening, but I could see that Mama was making the most of her diabetes. And who was I, to interfere with her emotional blackmail? I was thanked graciously. I left them the insulin syringe I’d used on her finger. The son gave me a lift to the bus station, while Finn wheeled the bags down the steep street.

We caught the bus to Trikala, where a Judas tree by the river had thick blushing flowers all over its trunks. The bus station was inadequate again, but the bus to Thessaloniki via Larisa was on time.

The Vale of Tembi was beautiful. I wanted to stop the bus, but I had to make do with what seemed like just a minute’s drive through its twelve kilometres. The narrow gap, between Mount Olympus and Mount Ossa, is shared by the road, the railway and the river. The bus drove along a dark bank to our right, making Mount Ossa invisible. But on the left we could see the river through lovely sunny spring trees, and, behind them, the mountainside of Olympus, all gray and crumbling rock, with its heights − and all those ancient gods − invisible to us. It was too lovely a place to think of invading armies. The idea of the Germans coming through here in 1941 seemed as remote as Xerxes and his Persian hordes doing the same thing nearly two and a half millennia before. Did they notice how gorgeous it was? How aware were those good Christian German soldiers, that in two years they would be sending 45,000 Salonika Jews (who had thrived under the Ottoman Empire) for extermination in Poland? Was Zeus watching the show and applauding?

I had originally planned to cross Northern Greece at a more leisurely pace, but we ran out of time. I decided on two days in Thessaloniki − the old Salonika in the days of the Ottoman Empire − leaving out all those other wonderful places I’d read about. As it turned out, though, I saw very little of Greece’s second city, thought I did get to see quite a lot of Plateia Dimokratias (Democracy Place, I presume) and we ate at a Macdonald’s there rather more than I would have liked in a city rich in cuisine, but it was my choice, not Finn’s: he doesn’t much like Macdonald’s, but I didn’t much like walking.

In fact, the relationship between me and my son was breaking down. He has always been very close to me, and we’d had seldom argued on our trip. He always preferred to share a room with me away from home. We’d even had no trouble sharing a double bed when that was all that was on offer: in Omaha, in London, in Kalambaka. One night in Honolulu we’d even shared a top bunk in the hostel because the guy who’d driven us all round Oahu in a convertible, had lost his bunk there and had no place to go. But, after the accident in the shower in Florence, I had begun to spend all my resources just dragging myself around. Finn’s infinitely loving mother had retreated behind a tight-faced shrew, and he had begun responding negatively to her.

We were at an internet café when I got diarrhoea. This is no slur on Macdonald’s, it’s just the complicated state of what the newspeak, which euphemizes illness, would call my “health”. There's nothing strange about the fact that the argument between Finn and me coincided with my attack of diarrhoea. Cause and effect gets complicated, but let's just say that my problems make him shitty and his anger give me the shits. On this particular occasion, let’s say it started when I called out to him as he strode off ahead: “Finn, Finn, FINN!” and he reacted angrily, having heard, he said, only the loudest yell (How did he know?). He doesn’t like being yelled at and I don’t like yelling, so I have asked him not to walk off ahead. He says he can’t walk beside me because there is not enough room and he can’t walk just ahead of me because he can’t naturally walk that slowly and he can’t walk behind me because he keeps walking into me. I say that is all nonsense.

Anyway, on this occasion I point out to him which way (on a complicated intersection) he has to go to pick up the digital camera flash cards and the photo CDs. He reacts angrily and says “I know,” as if I’ve insulted his intelligence. I point out that he often seems not to know. He gets angry. At the internet café he refuses to let me do or suggest anything. He won’t even let me add my letter to the bottom of his – though he wants me to sit there so I can provide the odd place name and such for his own letter home. It is very “controlling” behaviour, but I don’t have the energy to fight it.

After he has finished at the place, he walks off ahead of me. I am very tired and my leg is very sore and I need the loo very badly. My recollection is that the street with the hotel is about diagonally opposite the internet café, but he takes off up the main street, and rubbishes my idea of where the hotel is. We get to a knife, sword and gun shop and he looks in the window. He decides he wants a small sort of pistol crossbow. I say, lets go back to the hotel, so he sets off up the street again. I say, wait, this is all wrong. He says it would help if we were on the other side of the street. I say, “Well, is it my fault that we aren’t?” − which isn’t all that diplomatic, but it’s hard to be diplomatic when you are feeling like hell. We cross the street. I insist we go back.

Eventually we find the street of the hotel across the road from the internet café. I am exhausted and desperate, but halfway up the hotel staircase, I realize that Finn is not behind me. I call back to him, but he answers unintelligibly. I walk the rest of the way up the stairs and wait. He has the key. He has asked the guy at the desk for directions to a gym. By the time he gets up to the room, I’ve shat myself and I’m pretty upset about it. He knows he should have given me the key, but decides that it doesn’t matter, and the problem is mine because I’m the one who is making the fuss. His logic, within the shelter of his thick head, is unassailable.

The following day I am too ill to leave the hotel room. I sleep a terrible sleep all day while Finn goes to the gym and then runs round all the sights of Thessaloniki/ Salonika. He takes many photographs of the White Tower, which is not white, but was once called the Bloody Tower until the Ottoman Empire collapsed and the Greeks whitewashed it. It is ironic that, in a city where almost all traces of five centuries of Ottoman rule has been deliberately expunged (helped by fire and earthquake), the symbol of the city is an Ottoman tower. They used it as a prison for naughty Janissaries – an elite force of impressed Christian boys – until they got totally out of control and were slaughtered in the “White” Tower by order of Sultan Mahmud II. But I’m not sure that Finn finds out any of this.

He also takes photos of lots of excavations of ancient ruins, and photos of lots of old Byzantine churches. He doesn’t bother to go inside any of the churches, so he misses most of the stuff I came here to see. He doesn’t bother with the house in which Mustafa Kemal was born and grew up, and in which his mother and sister lived until they were forcibly “repatriated” to Turkey. Finn has never been to Turkey, so why should that mean anything to him? I still have another day to see the bare essentials instead of going to Pella (birthplace of Alexander the Great, a man who conquered the East but may well turn out to have done less to change the course of history than Mustafa Kemal). He comes back to the hotel with a sore throat.

Saturday, April 17. I wake full of optimism, thinking my leg is getting better. It seems cooler. So we take it for a walk to the Railway Station along Egnatia Street. It has actually become much worse. At the station I buy the tickets for tomorrow’s train to İstanbul. But then I have to ask the woman at the ticket office where I can find a hospital. She writes down two names − one near and one far − and we get a taxi to the near one, Ithokpateio, but although we see some impressively dead and dying bodies lying around by the entrance, we are told (after many language problems) that, because it is Saturday, they are only doing cardiology that day. I wonder if they told that to the dead and dying accident victims.

We have to go to Agios Paulos (St Paul’s). I presume they will treat accident victims there – though perhaps only if they have no cardiac involvement. A lovely young man, who has brought his mother in with chest pain, translates for us. He then decides, on consultation with his mother, that since she will have to wait anyway, he might as well take us to the other hospital himself.

I didn’t have to say much for him to be “impressed” with my knowledge of Greek history. He told me his name was Philip, and I said "Ah, Philip of Macedonia" (Thessaloniki is the capital of Greek Macedonia – not to be confused with that other Macedonia which isn’t Greek). Philip, it turned out, worked for the Thessaloniki water supply, so I congratulated him on the excellence of the Thessaloniki water, and he assured me that its quality was indeed as good as it seemed. He had been to Canada and the USA. He asked where we were from and where we were going and told us that even though the Turks were the enemies of Greece he knew they were actually nice people. In fact his grandfather came from Turkey and was “repatriated” when the Greek Turks were sent “back” to Greece and the Turkish Greeks were sent “back” to Turkey. He knew, too, that New Zealand was a fantastic place because he'd seen The Lord of the Rings at the movies. He took us right to the door of St Paul’s and said goodbye.

At reception the people spoke English and whipped me into a wheelchair and gave me a piece of paper with number 52 on it. They didn't waste any time in this hospital and the sign 52 came up over the door in just a few minutes. Finn wheeled me into a room with three or more doctors behind three or more desks. They asked me what had happened and the woman doctor got me up on a table and looked at my leg and twisted it around a bit to make sure that it hurt. It did. It hurt horribly. Then I was very efficiently wheeled off to X-ray. Once again it didn't take any time at all. I was then wheeled straight back to the doctors, who looked with concern at the X-rays and talked like the clappers at each other and asked me repeatedly if I'd ever broken my leg before. They told me I would need to stay in the hospital for three days at least, and have more tomography and possibly surgery. I said that I was going to İstanbul tomorrow, and could they not do it today? To which they said no, it was the weekend. I said maybe I could get it done in Istanbul. They laughed as if I had made a joke. You see, Greeks are like that about Turks. They haven't seen the tomography department at the İstanbul International Hospital.

The big doctor said I should not be walking on it (this was not news to me). He sent me to the plaster room and they very efficiently furnished me with the white whale, a very rigid plaster from my groin to my toes. I had no idea how utterly dependent we are on having knees that bend − even just a little bit. I had to learn to walk all over again. I learnt that you cannot get into a car in anything like the usual manner. I learnt, the hard way, that when you step down off the kerb the rigid leg has to go first, and when you mount a kerb the non-rigid leg has to go first, and when you sit down it has to be backwards. I had to master the twenty-odd stairs to the hotel room, cope with not being able to close the toilet door, and look forward to 14 hours on a train (a bus would be difficult) with a change of train at the border between Greece and Turkey. After that there would be the challenge of getting round Turkey. Oh dear. But at least the plaster cast had stopped the pain.

The amazing thing was that at no time, during our visit to St Paul’s Hospital, was money ever mentioned. I did tell them that we lived in England. We both had British passports, though they never asked for them, or for addresses. Nothing. They never even got my name. I was down as “Vivian Jameson” − their interpretation of a verbal “Vivienne Jepsen” − and that was it. Having become used to a New Zealand hospital system almost paralyzed with paperwork, I could see huge benefits in this expedient system without a flicker of red tape in sight.

It rained a lot. I had to put my plastered foot in a blue plastic bag. I had to resign myself to having missed Thessaloniki – missed not just the Greek city and the Byzantine city, but that ghostly city of the Ottomans and their invited guests, the Ladino Jews. I’d half expected to find one of the many keys to Turkey here. But all I had was a ticket on the railroad to a new and terrible me. Call her Vivian Jameson.