Mnemonic

by Theresa Kishkan

  Most of this from memory, by heart. I have a journal with the kind of entries a young woman of twenty-one would make, eyes open, her finger on her own pulse — the colours of the earth on a hike up above the village; a funny anecdote about a German woman marching up to a taverna owner to ask that he turn down the music (that heady delightful stuff that poured out of every café or tavern) and leaving in a huff when he refused to; loneliness; the sight of a loom on a rock floor, strung for weaving; a donkey saddle leaning against a wall, broken. I remember the bakery, also across the road, with its fierce wood-burning ovens, and how most women in the village took their casseroles there to bake — most didn’t have ovens in their homes — and how on a bread day, I’d buy a warm brown loaf, pulling chunks off to eat with cheese on my walks up to the olive grove above my house.

  Angela and her husband grew olives, oranges, lemons, and grapes, as well as vegetables and herbs. Some days when I went into my room, there would be a bowl of sliced tomatoes and cucumbers, drizzled with oil from the village press, where each family took in their fruit and participated in the pressing. On the days when my sheets were changed, I’d find my nightdress folded on the pillow, smelling of the myrtle bushes where Angela dried her linens, and I’d realize she’d taken it out with her own laundry.

  From memory, by heart: the clicking of beads as men watched soccer in the bar with a television. The mournful bray of a donkey at dawn. A woman delivering fresh cheeses to the store where I bought my yogurt and honey, and the taste of that cheese — goaty and faintly pine-flavoured, as though the animal had been feeding on rosemary, which was entirely possible, as it grew everywhere, loud with bees. Dancing at the tavernas in the evenings after golden retsina while travelling musicians played their eerie, repetitive songs into the small hours.

  There were two villages. There was the one with tourists (and I count myself among them), sitting at the sidewalk tables and talking, laughing at all hours of the day, or else heading over to the bay just beyond the last house, towels over their shoulders. We loved Joni Mitchell, and would listen to Blue at night while the lightning flashed from cloud to cloud and the donkeys brayed. And there was the village that went on as though none of us were there, or mattered. The narrow streets with closed doors and shutters. Storekeepers completely indifferent to the impatience of a young person wanting to pay for a slice of baklava to take to the beach and going on with the job of stock-taking or arranging loaves of bread in a basket by the door. The men who came down to a bar to drink raki and play backgammon, their worn trousers stuffed into boots. The women, secretive, dressed entirely in black, sweeping a few chickens into a doorway with a handful of straw.

  A very old man, a fisherman with a bright blue boat, used to bring me slices of melon when I sat at the dock and read my book. One day he brought his son, whom I will call Agamemnon. He was older, had served in the army, and spoke English only marginally better than my Greek. He owned a taverna where I’d eaten a couple of times — stuffed tomatoes made by his mother, Maria, salads piled with salty cheese and thick onions, bottles of cold beer. We walked out a few times in daylight, walked to the end of the long pier and back; he pointed to birds, the distant horizon, a boat rigged with sails. His hand, when he reached to hold mine, was calloused, from helping his father. Mornings, he met his father returning from a night of fishing, lifting off boxes of strangely coloured and whiskered fish, untangling nets, removing shells and bits of kelp. His father always pulled a flask from his pocket and offered it around. No one wiped the rim first; drinking from it was intimate as kissing. The burning in my throat told me it was raki. I remember the feeling of the salt-stiffened ropes as we hauled in the boat to the shore, my own hands rough and bleeding afterwards.

  “If you deconstruct Greece,” wrote Odysseas Elytis, “you will in the end see an olive tree, a grapevine, and a boat remain. That is: with as much, you reconstruct her.”4

  When Angela brought me a dish of cucumbers drizzled with oil, she asked, “Do you like?” And yes, I said I did, very much. She woke me one morning to go with the family to harvest their olives. They did this over a period, taking the fruit that was about three-quarters ripe. This made the best oil. Let them ripen more, I eventually understood she was telling me, and the oil will not be good.

  Angela’s family grove was not large but very beautiful; the trees well tended and growing on a slope facing the sea, about a kilometre above the village. The donkey came with us, worn panniers on his back. The panniers carried lunch on the way up and olives at day’s end. There was Angela, her husband Yianni, and their older daughter Eleni (oh lovely Helen, who was engaged to Demitreos, doing his military service; she looked like a Byzantine ikon); their younger children were in school.

  They spread wide, fine-meshed netting under the trees, three or four at a time. There were long sticks with straw at the ends, like brooms. The idea was to agitate the branches so the riper olives fell. The straw was dragged along the branches like a fork, loosening olives that didn’t respond to beating. Then the olives were gathered and sorted, leaves and twigs brushed away, overripe ones saved for the animals.

  After a few hours of this, we ate hard-boiled eggs from the family’s chickens, with ripe tomatoes and bread. They also ate onions, crunching into them like apples, but this didn’t appeal to me. Rough red wine was shared from a single bottle.

  When we’d finished for the day, Yianni took the donkey down to the building where the olive press was. It was important that the olives be pressed immediately. The family would receive a substantial portion of the oil, but some went to the co-op to pay for the cost of the press and its upkeep.

  I loved being in their grove, the wind rustling through the grey leaves, the grass dry and fragrant. There was pungent sage and rigani, thyme and chamomile, and I could see the seedpods of poppies left from the spring. “Watch for snakes,” they warned, and I nervously kept an eye out for movement.

  Several million olive trees grow on Crete, some of them more than one thousand years old, with trunks measuring twenty metres in circumference. They have the capacity to sucker strongly from severed trunks so some trees could be far older than their present form might suggest — and Greeks will tell you seriously that all olives come from rooted cuttings taken from Athena’s original tree. Fossil olives and olive wood found on Thera indicate production predating the great volcanic eruption of roughly 1600 BC, which destroyed the Minoan civilization flourishing on Crete and exported elsewhere by trade and perhaps colonization. Frescoes from the early Minoan period thirty-six hundred years ago at the palace of Knossos at Herakleion show olive trees, the long leaves as lovely as any growing now.

  I took the bus to Herakleion several times to visit the Museum there. The first time I went, I walked out to Knossos. I wanted to see that ancient palace and have an idea of its size, its shape, and function before I looked at objects from the site. It was very imposing — its throne room, shrines, courts, and the vast system of storage rooms. I wasn’t sure about the vivid colours used on some of the reconstructed areas, or how much of the wall painting imagery to believe was original.

  I know that many find the whole Arthur Evans enterprise problematic — a wealthy Victorian amateur archaeologist, he bought the land on which the ruins of Knossos stood and began his excavations in 1900 — and modern archaeological principles are certainly much more sensitive to authenticity and accurate interpretation. Still, beyond the painted pillars and patched frescoes, there was the undeniable sense of deep history. Closing my eyes, I could imagine its busy life — the potters, the metalworkers, those preparing food. The Minoan deities were largely female; the priestesses and goddesses in graphic representation held snakes or animals; their breasts were proudly bared to emphasize fertility, and there were often poppies nearby.

  The Museum was wonderful, chock full of glorious, animated Minoan ceramics — octopi wrapped around jugs, flowers (the lilies were particularly lovely), marine life given an airy and naturalistic place of hono
ur. The Minoans were a trading culture that excelled at metalwork, importing copper from Cyprus to alloy with local tin to make bronze tools, implements, and statuary, as well as weapons. I loved the gold jewellery, resplendent with bulls and bees.

  But it was the frescoes that impressed me most. Their composition was so harmonious, space organized the way a composer might notate music, main theme embellished beautifully by use of colour and motif. My favourite showed a man stretching out to gather the long stigmas of saffron from crocuses scattered over the surface of the fresco, with long, undulating horizonal bushes containing the activity. (Years later I was startled to read that this particular work had been erroneously restored by Arthur Evans because contemporary forensic methods show that the man was in fact a blue monkey gathering saffron!) Crocus sativus could be found all over Crete, and so it was a moment when the past transected perfectly with the present.

  Giant amphorae held olive oil and wine, two constants of Mediterranean culture. The plants providing these important resources were evident in the art, on the seal stones so beautifully carved. I saw slender leaves incised into stone, little fruits dangling. Some of the small seals were so worn that all I could see was a cup of wine raised to a mouth.

  Later on during my time on Crete, I visited Phaistos, and Hagia Triada. In many ways, I preferred the wilder Phaistos to Knossos. Beautifully situated on a low hill west of the Mesara Plain, it had none of Arthus Evans’s fanciful reconstructions. “Phaestos [sic] contains all the elements of the heart,” wrote Henry Miller after his experience there in 1939, describing so beautifully its mythic quality in his great book, The Colossus of Maroussi, first published in 1941. He explored the site in the company of its caretaker, Kyrios Alexandros, whose son held the same position as his father had when I came, years after Miller. The son never treated me to Mavrodaphne wine, however, and I remembered Henry Miller’s description with envy: “He opened a bottle of black wine, a heady, molten wine that situated us immediately in the centre of the universe with a few olives, some ham and cheese.”5 As a result, he’d felt closer to the sky than ever before, a feeling I also had at Phaistos, where the blue dome met the earth in an expression of physical love.

  The palace was itself compact, of a piece, somehow, devoid of the erratic sprawling organization of Knossos, which spread itself over a large chunk of land near Herakleion. It’s thought that the villa at Hagia Triada, about three kilometres from Phaistos (two elegant wings flying out from a central courtyard and surrounded by a verdant valley), was a summer residence for the priest-king of Phaistos. And there’s also another ancient site, Gortyn, on the plain of Mesara, which is where Zeus took his abducted paramour Europa (some say he took her from Lebanon) and made love to her there under a shady plane tree, impregnating her with triplets — Minos, Rhadamantys, and Sarpedon, all of whom became kings of Minoan palaces.

  These stories hung in the air like golden dust. You could believe them or not, but you breathed them in regardless. The profiles of the priestesses from Knossos were evident everywhere; the young women of Crete had those eyes, that lustrous hair, the full lips. And who is to say that the olive groves of Mesara are not descendants of those olives that filled the amphorae with their oil, fuelled the beautiful pottery lamps, that kept the wheels of Minoan commerce running smoothly.

  I was so young and earnest, walking the dry earth around the palaces with my notebook, trying to describe it all, trying to draw those elongated eyes, those goddesses, snakes in their fists, the priest-king with his headdress of lilies.

  How much am I remembering, how much is dreaming? When I went with Agamemnon in his three-wheeled car to Kokkino Pirgos to pick up something for his mother, we stopped and walked away from the road. Did he carry me to the patch of myrtle or did I walk, alert for snakes? Knowing about them made every sound a danger. I do remember the smell of the myrtle as our bodies crushed the dark leaves under the sun, my back imprinted with a lattice of sticks. There were bees in the white blossoms. I do remember his eyes like almonds, his rough hands, and how I sat on a little terrace at Pirgos while his mother’s friend asked questions in rapid Greek, sizing me up, then going into the house where there was the ceremony of water, a spoon, quince jam.

  Sometimes he frightened me. He was strong, his arms thick with muscles, and he said — I think he said — “I want to make love to your bottom.” I was unsure because of my imperfect Greek, his cursory English. But he was also funny, patient when I tried to learn a new phrase of Greek, and he was so graceful when he danced with the men who came to his taverna after several days at sea on a big boat. On such occasions, he’d spent the day cooking a special meal, and the taverna was closed to everyone else. I helped serve the dinner of lamb, cauliflower pie, zucchini blossoms stuffed with rice and dill. There were earthenware jugs of wine decanted from a barrel in the corner of the windowless cellar; I’d never tasted this particular wine — it hadn’t ever been decanted in my presence — but one mouthful told me it was remarkable.

  After dinner, the men all threw their plates to the floor. Maria and I cleaned up while they drank and musicians arrived to tune up. The lyra players were dressed in black, with bright sashes on their waists and across their heads; their instruments were shapely as pears. Some had hawk-bells on their bows, an ancient rhythmic accompaniment. The dancing was beautiful and wild, the drunker of the celebrants stepping onto the tables and turning, stamping, a few of them falling while the others shouted and clapped. When the musicians took a break, they held their lyras in their arms like beautiful women, stroking the wood with knowing fingers.

  Did I love him? From this great distance, I don’t think so. But it was exciting to walk with him and to listen to his heart when we lay down in the myrtle. I think of the way Eros involved himself in a game with a young woman, holding his hands out as though to suggest a path into the future while her chiton fell from her, her breast so young and exposed, more than two thousand years ago. I can believe how easily this happened. The boy who commanded her to take him on her back was unknown to her, a winged divinity. How quickly our childhoods recede so that we find ourselves recumbent in wild plants with an almond-eyed man or, braced against the earth, lifting him to heaven.

  In those years, I did things I never intended to do. Some mornings I’d wake from a night I couldn’t remember, head aching from too much wine. My body hurt and I wasn’t sure why. Taking a towel, I’d walk down through sleeping streets to the sea and plunge in, swimming out in the buoyant waves until my arms were sore, turning to look back at a village impossibly beautiful and other in its secrecy. Maria would hold my waist in her hands and measure my hips, telling her son I was made to carry children in my body. I had enough Greek to know what she was saying, especially when she spoke slowly, almost lovingly. Swim farther, I’d tell myself, swim and swim until you reach Africa, then step onto the sand and begin again.

  Two children at play. The one who fails to overturn the stone carries the other, having his eyes blindfolded by the rider, until, if he does not go astray, he reaches the stone, which is called a dioros. Only now the carrier is a girl. Her burden is a boy. She runs. It’s a field of sunlight, ripe grasses under her feet. She tries to reach the dioros. She’s laughing. And what’s that, what is that lightness she feels at her cheek as the boy hoists himself higher? Her shoulders are aching but she runs. This is a game. She runs and her chiton drops from her chest; helped a little, who knows. What’s that lightness? A wing. A wing? She is carrying the god on her shoulder and suddenly they are alone in a field of myrtle, olives, the dry pods of poppies, pale cyclamen, bitter herbs. Going astray with Eros. It has happened without anyone noticing.

  I am writing now from a distance of nearly thirty-five years. A couple of summers ago, I met Joni Mitchell briefly in a local restaurant. We talked a little about Crete. “Where did you live?” she asked. “Not far from you in Matala,” I replied, “in Agia Galini.” Then, “Are you glad you went?” she wondered. And I knew she meant: are you glad you
were brave enough, foolish enough — because this was before email and cellphones, when a regular telephone call was too expensive to contemplate, when letters took weeks to arrive at my Poste Restante address — a cardboard box in the Galini post office where once a day I’d search through the letters to see if any had come for me. I felt I was on the very edge of the known world.

  “Were we ever that young?” I asked her. We both laughed.

  I went to Matala once, with Agamemnon. At least three cafés called themselves the Mermaid, but he assured me that he would take me to the original one and he’d buy me a bottle of wine. There were caves where people lived — not Greeks but a ragtag bunch of Swedes, Germans, a few Americans, some Britons. A woman joined us at our table, and we offered her a glass of wine. She gulped it down appreciatively, then told us that she and her boyfriend were in the process of moving to a new cave. The ones on the upper level were choice, she said, and they’d been there long enough to be able to claim one that others were leaving. She was from San Francisco. Her children were out on the square, selling bracelets they’d made from beads and shells. A thin dog sat with them. They waved to their mother and went back to drawing pictures in the dirt with their toes. I think now of another ephedrismos figure, the joy of the two girls at play, and hope that those children in Matala were as happy.

  The market sold shepherd’s bags, green peppers, thick sweaters, used books, bright rugs, shawls, fruit, twine belts, and surprisingly (this was 1976) body jewellery of every style and description. And yes, when I looked carefully, most of the young people going to and from their caves had pierced noses, eyebrows, and lips.