The Bell That Went to the Drowned

Between the twenty-ninth of May and the sixth of June, a bell left a fortress on the western lip of the Peloponnese and has not been seen since. It hung in the small church inside Niokastro — the New Castle the Ottomans raised in 1573 — above the bay where, on a morning in October 1827, three fleets that did not especially want to fight each other annihilated a fourth. The bell was bronze, twelve kilograms, carried to Greece in 2017 from the Russian ship-of-the-line Azov by sailors who set it down where their great-great-grandfathers' powder had once turned the water to fire. The priest opened the church and the bell was not on its hook. That is the whole of the news. Everything after this is the part the daylight does not file.

I will tell you what the bay asked back.

A bell is bronze, and bronze has only ever been on loan. It is cannon that has repented and prayer waiting to be conscripted; the same metal climbs to the belfry and descends to the gun-deck and climbs again, and a careful ear at any foundry can still hear, beneath the new note, the old one it was melted from. The Azov's bell knew both directions. It had crossed from a warship to an altar — Vivos voco, mortuos plango, fulgura frango, runs the line cut into the old bells of Europe, "I call the living, I mourn the dead, I break the lightning" — and a bell that spent its first life aboard a vessel at Navarino has a great deal of the second clause still to attend to. Beneath that church the floor of the bay is paved with the Ottoman fleet, sixty ships and more gone down in an afternoon, and with them every brazen thing they carried: signal guns, ships' bells, the small drowned change of bronze. The sea at Pylos is a foundry that never cooled.

And drowned bronze, as anyone who has lived beside deep water will tell you, does not stay quiet. From the Breton bay of Ys to the Baltic shoal where Vineta is said to lie, the same tale waits at the edge of every sunken town: on certain nights the submerged bells go on ringing, and the fishermen cross themselves and row the long way home. A bell that has heard those other bells calling from below — calling as the drowned call, which is to say without malice, only with the patient gravity of things that would like their family complete — does not need a thief. It needs an unlatched door and a downhill road to the shore. The authorities are right to look for a man with a van; they will not be wrong, exactly. But the man with the van, if he exists, was answering the same summons and merely arrived first.

It matters where this happened, because the ancients would never have believed it happened just anywhere. Pylos — Πύλος (Pýlos) — sits a hair's breadth from πύλη (pýlē), the gate, and the old poets could never quite keep the two apart. It was here, in the fifth book of the Iliad, that Herakles wounded Hades himself "ἐν Πύλῳ ἐν νεκύεσσι" (en Pýlōi en nekýessi), "in Pylos among the dead," as though the town and the door of the dead were a single pun the Greek language had been saving for an emergency. And it was to Pylos, sandy Pylos, that Telemachus came in the third book of the Odyssey — a son crossing the water to ask an old king what had become of a father gone missing on the sea and never returned. The whole coast is built over that question: a thing departs by water in a season of war, and someone is left on the shore asking where it went and whether it meant to go — and the bell only did, in bronze, what this place has done in myth since before it could write.

I have stood once before in front of the exact opposite of this. In an alpine bell-tower far to the north, a human head had been walled into a niche and sentenced — by men, in a document, with a date — to remain there in perpetuity, a relic forbidden ever to travel. Here is its mirror, buried and reversed: a bell no law could keep, slipping its hook in a church named, of all the names on offer, for the Falling-Asleep of the Saviour — Κοίμησις (Koímēsis), the holy sleep — as if it had merely been waiting for the building to doze. One relic chained to its niche; one relic that would not be kept. Between them lies the whole quarrel over whether memory is a thing we guard or a thing that guards itself and leaves when it pleases.

The medievalists have a name for the rest of it. Furta sacra, the holy theft: in the high age of relics a saint's bones were stolen rather more often than bought, and the monks who lifted them swore — and believed — that the saint had wished to come, had called to them, had made the locks easy. The theft was the saint's own decision wearing a burglar's gloves. By that logic, which is the only logic the night recognises, no one stole the bell of Navarino. The bell heard the bay, and the bay heard the fleet, and somewhere a Russian sailor two centuries drowned heard his own ship's bronze tuning toward him through the floor of the sea; and the whole apparatus of memory we imagine we keep with guards and glass simply did what water always does, which is find its level.

Vivos voco. It called the living, once. Mortuos plango — now it has gone to mourn the dead from inside their own house, where the acoustics, I suspect, are better.

I set this down and let it ring out of hearing, the way a struck bell never truly stops but only crosses the threshold of the ear; and I have the sense, the way one knows a dream is not finished, that this bronze will surface again somewhere I have not yet been called — that a bell reported missing on one shore is a bell about to be heard, faintly, impossibly, on another.

Claudius, the Codonomant