gifted seaman, he held his first command at the age of twenty-two. In 1938, restless for fresh horizons, he moved to California to take command of a new passenger cargo ship for the Pacific Star line, working the San Francisco–Tokyo run.
Money meant nothing to him. His father had deposited one hundred thousand dollars to his account in a San Francisco bank, a considerable sum in those days. What he did, he did because he wanted to do it. He had his ship, the sea. Only one thing was lacking and he found that in Mary Fuller, the daughter of a high school music teacher, a widow named Agnes Fuller, whom he met at a dance in Oakland in July 1939.
His father came over for the wedding, bought the young couple a house by the sea in Pescadero and returned to a Europe where gunfire already rumbled like thunder on the horizon.
George Mikali was half-way to Japan when the Italians invaded Greece. By the time his ship had made the round trip and docked in San Francisco again, the German Army had taken a hand. By 1 May 1941, Hitler, by intervening to save Mussolini’s face, had overrun Yugoslavia and Greece and driven out the British Army, all in twenty-five days and for the loss of fewer than five thousand casualties.
For George Mikali there was no way home and from his father there was only silence, and then came that Sunday in December when Nagumo’s strike force left Pearl Harbor a smoking ruin.
By February, Mikali was in San Diego taking command of a transport and supply ship not much different from his own. Two weeks later his wife, after three years of ill-health and miscarriages, gave birth to a son.
Mikali could be spared for only three days. In that time he persuaded his mother-in-law, now a high school principal, to move into his home on a permanent basis, and tracked down the widow of a Greek seaman who had served under him and had lost his life in a typhoon off the Japanese coast.
She was aged forty, a solid, heavily built woman named Katina Pavlo, a Cretan by birth, who had been working as a maid in a waterfront hotel.
He took her home to meet his wife and his mother-in-law. In her black dress and headscarf she had seemed to them an alien figure, this short, stocky, peasant woman, yet Agnes Fuller had found herself strangely drawn to her.
As for Katina Pavlo, barren through eighteen years of marriage, her prayers and several thousand candles lit in desperate supplication to the Virgin unanswered, what was happening seemed like a miracle when she looked into the cot at the side of the bed and saw the sleeping child. She gently touched her finger to one tiny hand. He made a fist, held on as if he would never let go.
It was like a stone dissolving inside her, and Agnes Fuller saw it in the dark face and was content. Katina returned to the hotel for her few things, moved into the house that night.
George Mikali went to war, sailing to the islands again and again, one milk-run after another, until the early evening of 3 June 1945 en route to Okinawa when his ship was attacked and sunk with all hands by the Japanese submarine I-367 commanded by Lieutenant Taketomo.
Always in ailing health, his wife never recovered from the shock and died two months later.
Katina Pavlo and the boy’s grandmother continued to raise him between them. The two women had an extraordinary instinctive understanding that drew them together where the boy was concerned, for there was little doubt that both loved him deeply.
Although Agnes Fuller’s duties as principal of Howell Street High left her little time for teaching, she was still a pianist of no mean order. She was therefore able to appreciate the importance of the fact that her grandson had perfect pitch at the age of three.
She started to teach him the piano herself when he was four and it soon became apparent that she had in her hands, a rare talent.
It was 1948 before Dimitri Mikali, now a widower, was able to make the trip to America again and what he found astounded him. A six-year-old American grandson who spoke fluent Greek with a Cretan accent and played the piano like an angel.
He sat the boy gently on his knee, kissed him and said to Agnes Fuller, ‘They’ll be turning in their graves in the cemetery back there in Hydra, those old sea captains. First me – a philosopher. Now a piano player. A piano player with a Cretan accent. Such a talent is from God himself. It must be nurtured. I lost a great deal in the war, but I’m still rich enough to see he gets everything he needs. For the moment, he stays here with you. Later, when he’s a little older, we’ll see.’
From then on, the boy had the best in schooling, in music teachers. When he was fourteen, Agnes Fuller sold the house and with Katina, moved to New York so that he could continue to get the level of teaching he needed.
Just before his seventeenth birthday, she collapsed one Sunday evening before supper, with a sudden heart attack. She was dead before the ambulance reached the hospital.
Dimitri Mikali was by now Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Athens. Over the years, his grandson had visited him for holidays on many occasions and they had grown close. He flew to New York the moment he received the news and was shocked by what he found.
Katina opened the door to him and put a finger to her mouth. ‘We buried her this morning. They wouldn’t let us wait any longer.’
‘Where is he?’ the professor asked.
‘Can’t you hear him?’
The piano sounded faintly through the closed doors of the sitting-room. ‘How is he?’
‘Like a stone,’ she said. ‘The life gone from him. He loved her,’ she added simply.
When the professor opened the door, he found his grandson seated at the piano in a dark suit playing a strange, haunting piece like leaves blown through a forest at evening. For some reason, it filled Dimitri Mikali with a desperate unease.
‘John?’ He spoke in Greek and put his hand on the boy’s shoulder. ‘What’s that you’re playing?’
‘“Le Pastour” by Gabriel Grovlez. It was her favourite piece.’ The boy turned to look up at him, the eyes like black holes in the pale face.
‘Will you come to Athens with me?’ the professor asked. ‘You and Katina. Stay with me for a while? Work this thing out?’
‘Yes,’ John Mikali said. ‘I think I’d like that.’
For a while he did. There was Athens itself to enjoy, that noisy, most cheerful of cities, that seemed to keep going day and night without stop. The big apartment in the fashionable area near the Royal Palace, where his grandfather held open house most nights. Writers, artists, musicians, they all came. Particularly politicians, for the professor was much involved with the Democratic Front Party, indeed provided most of the finance for their newspaper.
And there was always Hydra where they had two houses; one in the narrow back streets of the little port itself, another on a remote peninsula along the coast beyond Molos. The boy stayed there for lengthy periods with Katina to look after him and his grandfather had a Bluthner concert grand shipped out at considerable expense. From what Katina told him on the telephone, it was never played.
In the end, Mikali came back to Athens to stand against the wall at parties, always watchful, always polite, immensely attractive with the black curling hair, the pale face, the eyes like dark glass, totally without expression. And he was never seen to smile, a fact the ladies found most intriguing.
One
