A Year in the World (37 page)

As we drive on, we realize no airbag popped out for him. Cheap car, but what a crime. I look down and notice that there’s no airbag on my side of this rental car. We will go to the airport tomorrow and trade this compact for a heavier car.

In
Rethymnon bakeries make bread in the shapes of swans, dinosaurs, and deer. Street after street in the old section entices us to wander. Turkish balconies, Venetian fountain, curtained doorways, broken arches, stone-edged Cretan windows, twisting medinalike streets, where an ancient way of life asserts itself in spite of the mobs of tourists a few streets away. An old man plays backgammon with a child, a woman shells beans under a grape arbor, women in black sit in doorways, children play in a street as narrow as a good hallway. I step into the timelessness I expected when I came to Greece.

We linger into the evening, not wanting to drive by the place the boy died. We choose the restaurant for the vine-draped arbors and the sound of music. A sweet-faced mandolin player and his child stroll among the tables. The British couple at the next table will not look at him when he stops to play right at their table. The waiter laughs. “They’re afraid.” Greece on a summer evening, someone strumming a mandolin just for you, and you ignore him? Ed always tips musicians lavishly, thinking that people who bring music should be crowned with laurel. We’re treated to several songs and a shy smile from the little girl.

Now
we’re in the car every day, wanting to explore this wild end of Crete. The land is scattered with pink, blue, and green beehives in fields. Wild goats with long black hair chomp away on the sparse hills. Tall hollyhocks punctuate the roadsides, along with the memorials to the dead that you see all too often. I start photographing these small dollhouse structures, which are furnished with photographs and candles and sometimes objects belonging to the deceased. Some are plaster models of a church, some look more like homes. There are just so many of these memorials, so often on straight stretches of road. I doubt that
so
many people have met their fate in these spots. They must also be primitive votives or tributes to gods of the crossroads and the journey.

Up on the hills I see groves of butter-yellow and pink oleander along the dry watercourses. The vibrant double blooms often entwine with profligate pink and blue morning glories. I love these liaisons of two or three plants and vines. The vivid pink bougainvillea cooled by its white partner. The orange trumpet vine twirled with pale blue plumbago, the blue morning glories splendid within masses of fluffy white bougainvillea, woody honeysuckle tangled with the flat pink rose.

We jump out at cemeteries in the countryside and their pure white churches, so white they hurt your eyes. Their blue doors and blue-edged windows seem cut out of heaven. The graves have glass-fronted marble boxes at the heads. Inside, a photo of the person laid to rest, an oil lamp, with perhaps a plastic bottle of extra oil, and some matches. The box may have pictures of a saint, notes, wicks, lace mats, or mementos of the dead person—a teddy bear, a bottle of Johnnie Walker with two shot glasses. Unbearable, a child’s grave covered with toy cars, stuffed animals, and his bottle and rattler propped beside his photo, a merry two-year-old with wide-open eyes.

Houses, typically low and white, sometimes have crenellations at the corners of the roofs, a reminder of North Africa, not far away. Many one- and two-story houses are topped with rebar around the edges of the roof, in case they want to build up someday. No one has built a decorative plaster wall around these unsightly metal rods, and it’s clear that many of the houses have been there for years and years without the next construction stage. Even prosperous-looking new houses display this odd feature.

The landscape, barren at a sweeping glance, often looks like carefully planted rock gardens. We pass many gorges. “Gorgeous gorge,” Ed says.

“You had to, didn’t you?” We smell the dry, herbal maquis, the miles of coastal hills blooming with rounded bushes—violet, purple, yellow, sage, mossy green, gray—and the earth ferrous red and sienna with rocks and boulders. A stupendous palette, especially with the blue, blue sea in the distance and the cloudless sky extending the blue as far as the imagination can go.

We come upon war memorials and cemeteries everywhere. At first we’d been puzzled why so many people asked us if we were from Australia or New Zealand. Then we saw the graves of those troops who fought so bitterly hard in this lonely countryside in World War II. Their relatives come here to find their loved ones’ graves. As a major gateway to Egypt to the South, and the whole Aegean world to the North, Crete was strategically crucial. Every record attests to the heroism and arduousness of the population here. The Allies did not arm the Cretans; they fought to the death with whatever they had. In the Souda war cemetery, close to our house, most graves lack names. But there’s Archibald Knox Brown. All boys in their early twenties, in peaceful rows, as orderly as war is not. Even in death, they overlook a Greek military base on the harbor and a former NATO site. Red roses grow everywhere, also orderly, and the color of the blood the boys shed so far from home. Many Allied troops evacuated from Souda Bay in 1941; then the Luftwaffe swarmed the area.

Donkeys,
few houses, olives everywhere to the sea, shrines, figs—the clarity startles me, and I have the odd thought,
I’d like to rise to this occasion
. From reading the Greek poets I understood intellectually the qualities of this powerful place. Days here move the knowledge into the body. I find in my notebook a few words by Kimon Friar in his preface to
Modern Greek Poetry
:

Many have felt that in the dazzling sun of Greece the psychological dark labyrinths of the mind are penetrated and flooded with light, that in this merciless exposure one is led not to self-exploitation but to self-exploration under the glare of necessity, that to “Know Thyself” is for all Greeks, from ancient into modern times, the only preoccupation worthy of an individual. Beneath the blazing sun of Greece there is a sensuous acceptance of the body without remorse or guilt.

What calls out from the landscape? The purity, essence. Simplicity: a handful of shorn wool. I think only a Greek poet could have written these lines:

Here, in this mineral landscape

of rock and sea, sapphire and diamond,

which to the wheel of Time offers nothing

        
that’s perishable;

here in the great victorious light

whose only stain is your own shadow,

and where only your body carries

        
a germ of death;

here perhaps for a moment the false idols

will vanish; perhaps once again

in a dazzling flash you may stare

        
at your true self.

—A
LEXANDER
M
ÁTSAS

Out early for a swing around the coast, we stop for coffee, good god it’s bad, at a terrace taverna overlooking the sea. The young waiter retires to the side to play his lyre, and I can’t eat my roll because I am watching the black curls and lithe body of young Orpheus back on earth.

We drive on around where northern Crete curves into western Crete, delicately colored in the morning, but this must be the place for big sunsets. Many plastic greenhouses, that blight so helpful to the farmer, blot the landscape. We stop for walks on deserted beaches and a dip in one irresistible cove of purling turquoise water.

At a taverna at Francocastello’s beach, we taste
volvi
, translated on the menu as “wild roots.” The waiter’s English can’t enlighten us, but he brings out a German wildflower book on Crete and points to a purple flowered plant,
Muscari comosum
. Little muscari corms? After we have “stuffed wine leaves,” roasted eggplant with an intense taste of roastedness, and tomatoes spiked with mint, we take the person-wide path through bulrushes down to another beach. “What
is
the decibel level of a single Greek cicada?” Ed wonders. The volume approaches that of a rock concert he attended in Perugia. This wide, endless beach, the polar opposite of the hideous holiday villages that ruin much of Crete, invites a long walk. No one at all swims here on a weekday morning. We don’t swim but wade—the water stays shallow way out.

When
our Chaniá stay ends, we go back to Knossos and the museum at Heraklion. We leave our dream cottage and drive across Crete. We then will stay a couple of days at Elounda on the coast, fly to Athens from Heraklion, and drive to the Mani for the baptism.

We
find that we absorbed more than we thought on our first trip, when we were travelling in a group in August. These places probably always are crowded, though much less if you’re the first ones there. Getting up early is the key. I have to myself the bull head carved from serpentine, with crystal and jasper eyes and elegantly erect horns, excavated from Knossos. Here’s the bull symbol, way back at the beginning. He had holes on top of his head and in his mouth, probably where libations were poured. The double-ax insignia of the Minoans is carved between his eyes. He gazes with distinctly godlike disdain. As evocative, the kinetic ivory carving of a bull leaper and the figure of the snake goddess in her tiered skirt and bodice with her breasts popping out. She holds two snakes at arm’s length, and I’m certain something loud and oracular is coming out of her mouth. She’s one of many precious artifacts that point to a profoundly symbolic level of Minoan life—the lion, leopard, sea creatures, ax, double spirals, birds, and of course the myriad bulls. I will be studying in detail the famous bull-leaping fresco found in the palace by Sir Arthur Evans, who must have had the most exciting days of any archaeologist. He even named the civilization he was discovering, although Homer says Minos was king for only nine years. We call them Minoans after him, but what they called themselves we do not know. The longer I look, the more mysterious these people become. The fresco’s intricate borders prove to be more fascinating than the figures suspended between the spotted bull’s long horns, or the leaper on the bull’s back, or the standing figure with outstretched arms as if waiting to catch the leaper. An American English professor discovered the hidden meaning of the borders. The tiny stripes and lozenge-shaped overlapping designs represent days of the year and the lunar months. They combine in ways that indicate the magic nine-year cycles that crop up over and over—youths were sacrificed, kings met the goddess. The cycle of nine—and what does this have to do with the leaping acrobat? Interesting as it would be to know, I like being forced to wonder. The art of the Minoans sounds such a dithyrambic call from the ancient world:
We were alive, we feasted and loved beauty and saw the world as an animated, forceful dynamic with our beings. Join us in the dance, the leap over time.

Minoans were addicted to jewelry—intricate necklaces and earrings, gold hairpins, bracelets and ankle bracelets, gold spirals through which hair was twisted, an artful pendant of two bees, beaded clothing, arm bracelets, tiaras and other hair ornaments made of flat gold leaf—leaves and crowns. Many artifacts reveal how they lived, what they wore. A bit of mosaic shows early houses. They enlivened their rooms with frescoes, as at Pompeii and Herculaneum. An early small cart shows that they had four-wheeled transport. How often women’s breasts are displayed. The clothing looks constructed to showcase the breasts. How much and how little we know about these mysterious people who rocked the cradle of civilization. These stones stood at the beginning, and laying a hand on one makes me imagine the hand that placed it.

The
site at Knossos again thrums with buses and clumps of people on tours. How good to travel alone and slip in and out at will. Ed seems fascinated by the drains. Flushing toilets were available to the Minoans—something that flashes through my mind when I encounter those hole-in-the-floor toilets with the rippled footprints on either side, apparently to guide a giant to straddle the opening. At one serene and pure monastery perched high above the sea, one of these holes emptied directly into the aqua and violet water below. A fetid barrel of water with a scoop made from a detergent bottle stood by, in case you wanted to flush. I glanced in and backed out, as did two Greek women.

The Minoans guided rainwater from the roof cistern into an open pipe in the floor, located just outside the bathroom, which flowed under the toilet seat. Even when no water flowed from above, by employing the same system as the monastery, you could flush. Even today Cretan houses typically have water tanks on the roof, providing pressure to the system. Knossos is riddled with means for draining or bringing in water to the complex. Little channels run down the sides of staircases; there are stone drains that lead to sediment traps, reminding me of the installation of our elaborate septic system in Italy. A
pozzo
, a little well filled with stones, was constructed every few dozen meters, for settlement and filtration. Ever since, we’ve been fixated on plumbing.

Ed is wandering. I sit down on a hot stone with my notebook looking down at many terra-cotta pots, imagining what they held and what people ate. Accounts from Knossos list large quantities of coriander, used both in cooking and perfume making. Pistachios were produced in quantity, too. I can imagine the tables around the bull-leaping ring laden with baklava layered with dried cherries and nuts, plates of
dipla
, those folded pastries with a filling made with sweetened eggs, and others scented with thyme, honey, and nuts. The deeply rustic smoked sausages with cumin, and others with vinegar, and the
omathia
, a sweet sausage stuffed with liver, rice, and raisins—all these must have fed the Minoans, too. Lighter fare might have included the many preparations of snails, and the pilafs—a rice boiled in lamb broth and seasoned. The Mediterranean diet came to fame after a study of long-lived natives. Cretan food does have its spleen with fennel, and “lamp” bowels in various guises, but the strong counterbalance comes from the olive oil, wild greens, cheeses, and salads such as
boureki
, which is made of
dakos
, rusks of barley, topped with tomatoes, cheeses, and oil. We’ve loved eating here—the rabbit with oranges and olives, meatballs in egg and lemon sauce, but mainly the variety of salads, such as grilled eggplant salad with walnuts, and all the fresh cheeses. I like the invitation to the kitchen in all the tavernas, the olive oil cans planted with begonias, the bright clotheslines strung between massive olive trees. Imagine the table, and the people spring to life.