by Stav Sherez
She didn’t know a lot about labyrinths – the myth of Theseus and Ariadne, of course, but not much more. She learned how labyrinths were linked to early mystery religions; how, unlike mazes, there was only one choice and that was whether to enter or not; how they were seen as a metaphor for not running away from your fears but facing them. She re-read the minotaur myth she thought she knew: how King Minos of Crete hired Daedalus to construct a labyrinth which would hide the half-animal, half-human offspring of the King’s wife; how, once built, the King shut Daedalus and his son, Icarus, in the labyrinth; how Icarus only escaped by making himself a pair of wings. She’d never known the two myths were connected. How many other liminal connections were there?
She read how Theseus, the King of Athens, had to send, every nine years, a tribute of seven boys and seven girls to feed the minotaur. She thought about the victims of the recent murders. She wondered if the cult was using the natural hiding places of the labyrinth. She remembered the fresh footprints they’d seen behind the locked gate. The scowl of the priest. She traced her fingers against the neat lines on the map wondering what was happening on this island and how it was linked to the past. She turned a corner, and some of her questions were answered.
It was the last room. She’d looped back on herself and stood just to the left of the library.
There was a photo of a clearing and uniformed policemen with long sideburns and longer hair standing around looking dazed. Another photograph of the ruins. A set of bone-white columns, broken and cracked, describing a circle around a small clearing. She squinted, put her face up against the photo, but couldn’t make out what lay in the centre. She read the sign below, amazed the town would not only acknowledge but actually enshrine such an event.
She scanned the paragraph of text:
Site of cult suicide in 1974. An unnamed cult was found to have committed mass suicide on the morning of 23 June. They had been living for over a year in the interior of the island, in the vicinity of the ruins. No photos exist of them and their belongings were all that was left to show of their passage.
It was an oddly poetic and yet uninformative statement. It struck her as weird. It was almost as if they were proud such a tragedy had occurred on their island. Perhaps they thought it put them in the big leagues.
Arranged carefully around the photos and text were small boxes of amber containing dead centipedes. They circled the display like an orange halo ringing some Byzantine saint. Someone had put time and care into this.
She wound her way back through the library to the office. The librarian was staring intently into her monitor, a cigarette clamped between her teeth.
‘Hi,’ Kitty said, her voice soft and low as the lighting above.
The woman glanced up, reached for her cigarette and placed it in the ashtray. She didn’t smile.
‘It’s a very nice museum,’ Kitty continued, not sure what to say or how to lead into it. She noticed the woman’s bitten fingernails, the cuticles red and cracked.
The woman shrugged. ‘It is what it is.’
‘I liked the room about the cult.’
The woman looked up, examining Kitty’s face. ‘What’s there to like?’
‘I guess we can’t help being drawn to such events. It’s like the firebranding of the Turkish fleet you had in the first room. Big violent events make chapters of history.’
‘Ottoman, actually.’
‘Pardon?’
‘You said “Turkish”, but back then it was Ottoman.’
Though her tone was friendly, Kitty could tell this was a woman who liked to correct others. She knew it because she herself had this trait, enumerated and recalled by Don, who would goad her, telling her stuff he knew was untrue just to see her correct him.
‘Wasn’t this the island that Leonard Cohen settled on?’
The woman looked up from her computer, frowning. ‘Hydra,’ she corrected, pronouncing it with the silent H. ‘That’s where he lived.’
‘Oh, OK. I was wondering if there was a book on Palassos? Maybe something with more about the cult in it?’
The woman frowned. ‘You didn’t see enough in there?’ She looked back down at her computer.
‘It only made me more intrigued.’
The woman crushed her cigarette in the ashtray. ‘Some things are better left untouched.’
The librarian’s evasiveness frustrated Kitty. ‘If that’s so, why even have a display?’ Then, without thinking, she added, ‘I’m writing an article about these islands and I want to make sure I get my facts right.’
‘Your facts?’
Kitty couldn’t tell if the librarian was being sarcastic. The woman shifted her eyes, looked Kitty up and down as if measuring her for a dress. ‘You a writer?’
Kitty nodded, mentioned the names of a couple of her novels.
The woman switched off her monitor and turned towards Kitty. She did this weird thing with her mouth, like she was sucking the insides of her cheeks. ‘What exactly did you want to know?’
‘I wanted to know more about this cult. It sounds fascinating. Why did they choose this island? What did they believe in? That kind of thing.’ Kitty made sure her tone was laced with naivety. It seemed to be working. The woman was more engaged than she’d been all morning. ‘I was wondering if there was anything written about it I could use?’
The librarian looked up. ‘Yes. There is actually. A book written by a German who lived here during those years. It includes several chapters about the cult as well as the tourism boom that came in the late seventies. A terrible old book. Fussy and pedantic but with a startling lack of insight. You know how German ex-pats get so romantic about the old days before civilisation crawled in? He was one of those. Had the book published himself. It’s not something you should use: most of it is wrong.’
‘I want to get the story right,’ Kitty repeated. ‘I could use whatever help you can give me.’
The woman nodded, having made up her mind. ‘It was before my time here. I only know from the book, which I don’t particularly trust, and from talking to people on the island. You know what, there’s a small café four streets down, you go and get me some coffee and I’ll tell you what I know, save me having to lock everything up, OK?’
She came back with coffee. She lost her way again in the twisting alleys but followed the white conical point of the church steeple protruding like a finger into the sky. She cradled the two cups as she opened the door. Something caught her eye. A flicker of shadow to her left. She turned, spilling coffee, and saw him standing there, across the street, watching her. The man with the jaw. The man who’d mugged her. She remembered the malefic smell of his breath, spilling more coffee as she quickly closed the door behind her and fell into the dark silence of the museum.
She stood in the cool hallway. She stared at the door. Would the man follow her in here? She looked down at the cracked tiles, breathing slowly, trying to stop the thoughts in her head. It was just a coincidence, she told herself. It was a small island. She looked up, and the door was still closed. She turned around and headed back to the librarian’s office.
‘How long have you been working here?’ She asked, passing the woman her coffee. Her voice was trembling. Seeing the man with the jaw again had affected her badly, but she wasn’t going to let the librarian see how much. She took deep swallows of air and concentrated on the woman in front of her. She noticed her hands again as the librarian took the cup from Kitty, so raw and mangled as if the woman was punishing them for what her life had not delivered.
‘Six months. My husband comes from here though we lived in Athens most of our lives. When he came back to the island, I followed him.’ The librarian gave her a raised-eyebrow salute, the kind women give to other women to signify the demands of men.
‘Thought I’d hate it. Coming from a big city. But I just fell in love with the place. With the landscape, you know. The peace and quiet. After a couple of weeks, though, I got bored. The island women tend to stay inside. I saw
the sign one day saying they needed a new librarian. It was either that or sit home all day. My husband, he’s not so happy about this but he’s got used to it. Many women still don’t work here on the island.’
No, Kitty thought, not unless you count cleaning the house, cooking and taking care of the children.
The librarian took two small sips of coffee. ‘But you don’t want to know about me, right, you want to know about the cult … our big headline story.’ The woman laughed, more to herself than anything else. Kitty sipped her coffee as the story unfolded, listening to the woman’s voice as it echoed through the long halls of the museum.
‘I don’t know when the first ones came. I think in 1970 or so. Certainly we saw them more and more in Athens back then. Wide-eyed blond kids, mainly from America but from England and Northern Europe too. They had long hair and colourful clothes so they stood out. They came here for many reasons, some political I’m sure, but mainly I think it was a thrill for them, a cheap way to live in the sea and sand and get away from their responsibilities back home.
‘At first, they stayed on the mainland, but I guess that was too much like the cities they came from so, eventually, they began to spread out into the islands. Some islands got reputations as good places for them, tolerant, a lot of free land, and became big hippie communities during those years. Hydra for example. Cohen, Joni Mitchell, Crosby, the whole Malibu Canyon set. Well, Palassos was less so. But even here they eventually ended up.
‘I think they started out in town but it was all farmers and fishermen then. They wouldn’t have been very tolerant of outsiders, let alone Americans with garish clothes, the men with hair longer than most women’s. So, while there was no outright violence, I think they made it clear the hippies weren’t welcome. I think that’s when they began to drift towards the interior’ – the woman looked up at a yellow stain on the ceiling above her – ‘or maybe it was the interior that called to them. Who knows? Many went back of course, back to their universities or wars or just the rest of their lives. They were happy to sit on a beach all day and smoke weed, but living in the interior required much greater self-sufficiency. It gets cold and windy in there, there’s no obvious recreation, and you have to haul everything in yourself through those mountains. Many came in those years, some stayed a few days, others until the end.’
The woman took a long drag off her cigarette and crushed it in the ashtray. She popped another Chesterfield from the pack, angled it towards Kitty. ‘You smoke?’
Kitty shook her head.
‘Good thing,’ the woman said, putting the cigarette to her lips. ‘This will kill me. I know this. But I still smoke. Funny, huh?’
Kitty saw nothing funny about it at all, but she nodded, eagerly waiting for the woman to get back to her story. Her accent was clear and precise but her voice betrayed a certain loneliness which Kitty recognised, the loneliness of living with someone and yet being alone. It came out in conversations with strangers, an eagerness to talk and a thankfulness for being listened to seriously.
‘At some point, they stopped seeing the hippies in town. Before that, every week some would come and buy provisions, hang around drinking coffee and then go back, but around this time they became totally self-sufficient.’
‘When was this?’
‘Oh, maybe late ’73 or so. The murders occurred about six months later.’
Kitty looked up from her coffee. ‘Murders? I thought it was group suicide?’
‘That was later. This is something not many people talk about on the island, like they do not talk about the years of occupation. It is too raw. Some pain never goes away.’ The woman shook her head, sighed. ‘It was June of 1974 when a local couple found the bodies of two schoolchildren, naked and mutilated. They’d been staked to the altar out by the old ruins.
‘Police from Athens were called in, detectives and the like. The two boys were both seven and from local families. It was the first time something like this had ever happened on the island. Though the police took the bodies away, the couple who’d found them had already told all the taverna men about the mutilations and centipede bites. Stories and rumours whipped through town all day. Vigilante committees were set up, local police and some of the island men decided to go and pay the commune a little visit.
‘But they were too late. When they got there, the entire cult was dead. That’s the story everyone tells. That’s the story that goes into the history books whether it makes sense or not. You believe in remorse? Well, maybe that was it. There were thirty-five people, and each lay in his or her sleeping bag, a single gunshot to the head,’ she exhaled, the words wrapped in bitterness, broken off like shards of glass.
Kitty was about to mention the recent killings when there was a bang in the next room. She jumped. A door slammed. She’d been so ensnared in the tale she’d forgotten where she was. As the librarian looked towards the door, a man entered. He was wearing a string vest and looked like he hadn’t washed in months. With him came the sea breeze and a faint smell of diesel. He looked at Kitty, and she had to turn away. His eyes penetrated her like needles. He began to talk to the librarian. His voice gruff and staccato. She picked up a few words but his tone was so slurred they seemed cut off from meaning. Kitty wondered if this was her husband or someone sent by the man with the jaw. The old man kept gesturing, his arms flaying the air. The librarian didn’t say anything, just nodded once in a while and did that funny thing with her cheeks. The man stared at Kitty, shook his head and walked out.
‘Are you OK?’ She tried to take the librarian’s hand, but the woman pulled it back.
‘It’s nothing,’ she replied, leaning back into her chair. ‘Nothing at all. But this is it. That’s the story. That’s all I know.’
‘What about the book you mentioned?’
The woman looked towards the front door, then back at Kitty. ‘It sees the cult as some kind of utopian society that went wrong. The writer actually praises them for setting themselves up as self-sufficient and then tries to grapple with how the idealism which set the whole thing off could have turned into such tragedy. Needless to say he doesn’t have an answer. Who does?’
‘Do you have a copy of this book?’
‘Sure.’ The woman got up, flicked ash which had settled on her blouse and led Kitty back into the library. She looked through one of the shelves, moving books and setting off miniature dust devils. ‘That’s strange.’ She turned to Kitty but didn’t explain herself. Kitty followed her back into the office where the woman was going through an old leather-bound book.
The librarian then checked something on her computer, shook her head and frowned. ‘This can’t be right. It says someone from the monastery took it out and never returned it. One of the priests.’ She seemed to be talking to herself more than Kitty. ‘Why on earth would they do that?’
FOURTEEN
He looks across at his wife. She’s sitting at the table, shelling peas. Her fingers slide in under the flesh and peel back the skin. A scowl sits on her face but it is not a recent visitor.
‘Who was she?’ Nikos says, feeling the words fall through his tongue like razor blades.
Alexia looks up, acknowledges the depth of pain in her husband’s eyes. Wishes their lives had begun differently, wonders where they would be if they hadn’t met that day. How much easier his life would have been. The past now seems to her like something carved out of stone: you can’t change it, the best you can do is turn it into rubble.
‘She was English,’ she replies, dropping more peas into the plate. The sound they make reminds her of the hospital monitor’s constant pulse, the rhythm of living.
Nikos takes a deep breath. There are days which wait for you all your life. You know they are coming but not when. You try and prepare yourself for them but, really, you know there is no preparation and that, each year, as the lies get more deeply embedded, there is less and less chance of reprieve.
‘What kind of questions was she asking?’ He tries to keep his voice dow
n, but there it is, rolling under his sentences, and, in her eyes, he can tell she’s heard it too.
Alexia looks up. ‘She wanted to know about the cult,’ she replies, broaching the topic, the words cold and flat as a sudden slap.
Nikos exhales. This is what he’s been dreading. What he spends most nights waking up from. Sometimes he feels as if he’s stranded in deep water, constantly paddling to keep afloat from the rip tide of the past. ‘She doesn’t know, does she?’
His voice is almost a whisper, Alexia has to lean forward to catch it. In the silence between this and her reply she can see the past thirty-three years collapse in her husband’s eyes. She shakes her head quickly. ‘She said she was writing about the island.’
She watches the lines deepen in Nikos’s face, the way the years have taken everything from him: his looks, his humour, his certainty in the rightness of what he was doing. ‘You know what this could mean,’ she says, and it’s no longer a question.
‘Maybe it’s time.’ He doesn’t know he’s going to say this until he does, but, as soon as it leaves his mouth, he knows it is right.
The plate with the shelled peas goes flying to the floor. The ceramic shatters, sounding like a gunshot, and peas scatter across the tiles. ‘No!’
He looks at his wife and can see fear make her small and gnarled like an old root. He remembers her as a young woman, the fullness of her smile, the carefree glitter of her laugh.
He takes her hand. Kisses it and keeps it clamped in his. ‘We should never have come back to Palassos,’ he says, because he can’t say all the other things, the things he wants to say.
She nods. ‘I know, Nikki, I know… but it’s too late. We made our choices. We have to stick to them.’