by Dilys Powell
Pierced by the chill of the burned, murdered, resurrected village, I was thankful to be taken at last to the Akoumianakis house; thankful, though I had to force myself to eat, for wine and the supper of eggs and potatoes cooked over a fire of sticks by Mrs Akoumianakis; thankful for the warmth and laughter of the café where I was taken for a post-prandial peppermint; most thankful of all to go to bed. I slept in the main room, my hosts in a room leading off it; the door between was left open. In the corner there was a symbolical picture of Liberty; an oil lamp hung on the wall. ‘I will come,’ said Mrs Akoumianakis, ‘and turn down the light.’ I undressed and scrambled unwashed into bed. I was too sleepy to worry about the consensus of opinion that for me to walk from Nithavris over Mount Ida to Anoyia in a single day was out of the question.
Only vaguely, as in a dream, was I conscious of a figure putting out the lamp and tucking me in for the night.
ii
With her indulgent, faintly motherly air my hostess woke me up at seven. It was late, she said, and I must get up, for I had a long trip to Nithavris ahead of me. Yerakari was buzzing with life, and an old man – it was Mrs Akoumianakis’s uncle – was already waiting with a donkey to take me on the next stretch. I had letters to deliver, and every few miles along the valley we halted, sometimes at a ruined settlement, sometimes at a hamlet gradually reviving. Once I was reproached by a country policeman, a ragged poverty-stricken representative of a burned tumbledown village.
‘The English forget us – don’t they know the sacrifices we made?’
We know, I said, we know. But I rode on sad and ashamed. And once – it was in the village of Vryses – I was reminded of the British involvement in Cyprus.
The place was tiny, but in August 1944 it had lost thirty-nine dead, the church had been destroyed and the local spring had vanished. ‘We found it again later,’ said my informant, who had been in the Middle East in the war; and he went on to describe an example of what I could not help regarding as unusual attention to detail on the part of the German Government.
‘When the President of West Germany heard about the village he asked if the church had really been burned, and when he was told that was true he sent some money for rebuilding it… . Would you like to see the new school?’
The schoolmaster was already at the door, and when I went in the room, large and airy, was full of children watching me with unquenchable interest. Without a pause I was guided round the pictures on the wall. ‘Here we have the Saints … and here are the heroes of the War of Independence.’ I expressed admiration of the proud whiskered figures in klephtic dress and the fiery churchmen preaching revolution. ‘And these’ (it was said wholly without malice or intention to embarrass an English visitor) ‘these are the heroes of Cyprus, here is Makarios.’ I recognised the continuity of history. The men of 1821 might have been the guerillas of 1941. The portrait of Makarios might have been the portrait of that Archbishop Germanos reputed to have raised the flag of rebellion at Hagia Lavra more than a century earlier.
‘Very fine,’ I said; and the schoolmaster led me into his house for a drink.
As we moved farther into the Amari country the echoes of war deepened. At Kardhaki, in 1959 still a scatter of half-repaired shacks, I was led to the home of one Sotiri (long afterwards I learned that he was the brave cobbler of Tom Dunbabin’s diary). He looked politely puzzled until I said I was a friend of Micky’s; then he rushed me excitedly into his house, called his wife and children and burst into anecdotes about Tom and Paddy. Especially Tom.
‘When he came here for the first time I said to him: How do you know I am not pro-German? How can you be sure I shall not betray you? Bah, he said, I know you won’t. He had a little book with the names of all the good men, the reliable men written in it.’
It is perhaps unlikely that Tom, dedicated as he was to his job, would have carried about with him quite so incriminating a document. Nevertheless the story testifies to the trust which existed between him and the Cretans; I was sorry that I had no personal messages for this good friend.
But my guide, stumping along and talking with great sweetness as I rode his affable donkey, distracted me from melancholy reflections: ‘It is a good donkey, six years old, quiet. Its name? I don’t know; it hasn’t got a name. I was afraid you wouldn’t know how to ride, it is difficult going up and down hill, but I see you are used to it, I am relieved. In other parts of Greece do you see the man riding or the woman? Ah, in Crete the woman must always be the one who rides. I think that is beautiful, don’t you. … I never had time to learn much reading and writing, I was always a soldier, always fighting, ten years I was in the army …’ (Breaking off to address a group of men working on the road) ‘Good morning, this is an Englishwoman, she is a writer, she has come to see Crete.’
I began to feel a sense of detachment from my normal life. Everything I saw, everyone I met belonged to another world. The valley had died, the valley was being born again. Today Tom’s ‘most beautiful village in Crete’, Ano Meros, had no ‘handsome balconies’ and no ‘vine-covered arbours’. But it was stirring in the early summer air. I had brought a letter from Saridhakis to his wife Calliope, the schoolmistress here, and at midday she came out of the school and took me home for a lunch of mince cooked in vine leaves, fried eggs, salad, olives, wine. The food was delicious, but my head buzzed with my cold and again I had to force myself to eat.
From the window I could see my hostess’s children playing in the lane outside. Their voices came high and faint as the cry of young birds, the sun blanched the soil at their feet. There was something reviving, too, in the atmosphere of the little house and in my hostess’s pleasant eager manner. Nevertheless the past still murmured in my ears. Saridhakis had told me he had barely escaped with his life from Ano Meros. His aunt had not been as lucky. After lunch Mrs Saridhakis took me across the lane into a tiny orchard overgrown with grass and flowers.
‘There was a tree,’ she said, ‘it has been cut down now. Here we found the body of our aunt. She had been killed, she was lying just here.’
A little girl, one of her children, stood listening.
‘Do you like quinces?’ Mrs Saridhakis asked. ‘They aren’t quite ripe yet, though.’ She picked one from a tree. It was sour, like the presence of death in that quiet sunny orchard.
But triumph too, that was present.
Ano Meros was the parish of Kyriakos Katsandonis, a priest famous in the war and the Resistance; hunted by the Nazis, evacuated to the Middle East, he had worked for the British and for the Greek Government in exile: the warrior-priest, Tom called him. I waited for him to wake from his midday rest, then I went up the steep little track to his house. A tall imposing presence, a brilliant glance; his wife brought coffee. On the wall I saw a photograph of Paddy in Cretan dress, heroic with a dagger. Philadem, said Katsandonis, beaming, Philadem. The old Cretan song with that refrain was a favourite with Paddy; he sang it often, and the name stuck; in Crete you will still hear him called Philadem. I remembered the legendary tales: Paddy in his Cretan disguise going up to a German sergeant at a village café near Knossos and clapping him on the shoulder with the greeting ‘Servus, Kamarad!’ – and Micky, seeing the man putting his hand on his revolver, dragging his friend away; Paddy on the same evening, still elated with wine, pushing between two drunken German soldiers, embracing them and walking a quarter of a mile arm-in-arm with them towards Herakleion, singing German songs and exchanging expressions of warm regard while poor Micky, distraught, followed on the other side of the road. Now the warrior-priest told me how after some lucky escape from danger Philadem had begun softly singing ‘sto psilo vouno’ – ‘on the high mountain’; the eagle perched on a rock and drenched with snow calls on the sun (the sun of liberty is intended) to rise and dry his plumage.
I took my leave, reluctantly said goodbye to my gentle old guide and set off with a stouter, bouncier donkey on the last stage of the day. My new guide, a man of about thirty, tall, lean, cheeks slightly hollo
wed, eyes intent, the manner respectful but self-respecting with the air of inherent independence characteristic of the Cretans, walked behind, silent unless addressed. I had a letter from Saridhakis to one Karapanos at Khordhaki. I found him sitting outside his tumbledown hut in a cloud of flies which I was hospitably invited to share. But I learned little, despite my companion’s help in questioning, except that Karapanos had spent the Occupation in his village, collecting information for the British, instead of going to the mountains. The afternoon deepened as I bounced on up stony slopes, down hills ferociously stepped with rocks between the olives.
Once we crossed a fine old stone bridge over the River Platis. ‘Are you afraid, would you like to get down?’ ‘I feel fine,’ I said, thankfully at ease on level ground. Once my guide gave me an opportunity only too rarely offered to a woman travelling alone in the remoter districts of Greece. ‘Soon we shall be coming to a village – would you like to urinate?’ Then as we turned away from the embryo road and took a short cut the landscape expanded. The leafy slopes were left behind. From Rethymnon I had almost crossed the island; there ahead was the southern sea. The hills were naked. In the hollow beneath us, a village: at last Nithavris. Behind it, a steep bare mountain-side. With apprehension I looked at the range I was to traverse next day. In the sinking afternoon sunlight the view was menacing.
We came down into Nithavris about six o’clock. I am looking, I said, for Elias Voskakis, I have letters for him. He will be back, a woman said, he has gone to Rethymnon, he will come by the bus. My luggage – a knapsack and an air-bag – was deposited in his house with injunctions from my guide that the children were not to touch it. Then I waited.
The café tables were set on a verandah. After a few minutes a Voskakis cousin appeared, and with him I went up the wooden stairs and sat watching the business of the evening. Men and women were coming home from the fields, leading flocks and herds to the spring. Young calves pranced gaily to drink; the soft-moving cattle were a frieze of bronze and gold in the last of the light. Around me the village elders sat talking. One old man had a shepherd’s staff with a metal crook. It was examined, fingered, pronounced useless: too small, everybody said, it won’t hold the fleece of a sheep. I offered cigarettes and asked about the walk to Anoyia. Across Ida? People shook their heads; impossible in one day.
‘It would be all right if you found somewhere on the way to sleep for the night.’
Remembering that this was the opinion at Yerakari too, I was discouraged but obstinate. I must, I said, get to Anoyia tomorrow night, for I have to be in Herakleion by the next day. Well, they retorted, you can’t go over Ida, then.
The company grew. The scene was gentle, friendly, pastoral; I alone with my suffocated cold felt chill. People came politely to shake hands. Presently the schoolmaster arrived, a handsome young man in smart black trousers and a white open-necked shirt: bright dark eyes, a moustache close-trimmed, pink cheeks. Had I been to Gortyna? With graceful courtesy he talked about the famous inscription which runs forwards and doubles back. Boustrophedon, he said, using the classical word and illustrating with a gesture of his hands, it is like oxen ploughing a field.
Then a moment of social embarrassment. Did I speak French? Yes, I said, then, in French, do you? Everybody stopped talking and listened. And as he smiled in silence, I realised with self-reproach that I had humiliated him. He could neither speak nor understand a word of French.
Time crept, my stock of conversation dwindled. I began to doubt that bus from Rethymnon. At last as dusk fell there was a murmur in the square below us; then wheels, voices, the clatter of arrival. A short, strong-set man of about forty with dark round head and curly hair came up the steps; it was Elias Voskakis. Silently he handed me an envelope. It came from the Director of the Rethymnon orphanage, it brought me the poem, elaboration of the Pendlebury legend, which I have already quoted. ‘You sleep with the smile of triumph on your lips’ – my visit had stirred Anglophile memories of war in my friend Saridhakis of two days earlier, and he could not wait to share them. Chilled as I was, half-dazed from my journey, I felt a kind of amused, grateful warmth as I read his verses on the life and death of John Pendlebury.
Recovering myself, I gave Elias my letters of introduction. Deliberately he read them. Then gravely, and in the words and the tone used twenty-four hours earlier by George Akoumianakis, ‘Let us go,’ he said. I bade the company goodnight and gratefully followed him across the square, past the stable at the foot of the outside staircase and into the house. In the main room, a cloth-covered table, a sideboard and a big photograph of Elias, with hair standing out in two defiant wings, as a young man. And again a good simple supper – eggs, cheese, black bread. But you must eat, cried his wife, her young cheeks red with welcome, you will need strength for tomorrow. My reluctance to take more than one hard-boiled egg was incomprehensible to them all. Relatives appeared; everybody joined in the discussion about the chances of getting to Anoyia in a day. The cousin suggested that I might do it if I rode a mule. A mule, said Elias darkly, couldn’t do it. Perhaps, somebody hinted, if you arrive at night – at least there is a moon. The opinion was still that the trip was impossible for me. Only Elias, looking grimly at me, was for trying, and that, I knew, only because the letters from Micky and Saridhakis had placed me in his charge.
At last the cousin and the other visitors went home. My bed was made, and Elias and his wife withdrew up a few steps to an inner room. But first she suggested that I might wish to use the lavatory. Enthusiastically agreeing, I was given a lamp and led to the stable at the foot of the outside stairs.
‘There,’ she said, pointing genially to a corner in the straw, ‘there you will sit.’ And delicately she left me. A few pigs grunted, and in the pale lamplight I could see a trio of sheep looking at me with mild astonishment.
That night I scarcely bothered to undress before I crawled into bed. I was surrounded by solicitude, and Kreipe himself could not have felt a stronger inclination to bolt.
iii
When I woke Elias was standing in the room holding the lamp in one hand and pulling his trousers over his shirt with the other. He had a cold; I had heard him coughing in the night. ‘What time is it?’ he asked. The children had broken the clock; ‘They break everything,’ he grumbled. Four o’clock, I said. It was not yet light. I put on a skirt and combed my hair. Would I like to wash? I stood on the stairs outside the house while Mrs Voskakis poured a mug of water over my hands and I splashed my face. ‘A little over your hair too,’ she said encouragingly.
There was no breakfast. I had forgotten that you cannot expect breakfast in a remote Cretan village. In Rethymnon I had bought some sweet biscuits, but improvidently, thinking with justice that we already had too much to carry, I had offered to leave them for the family, and I could hardly take them back now.
‘You must give some to the children yourself,’ said Mrs Voskakis.
I handed one to a little boy. ‘Do you like it?’ I asked.
He ate it. ‘No,’ he said.
Then I remembered something in my skirt pocket – a gift of a handful of almonds from the schoolmaster and his wife at Vryses – and surreptitiously in the grey half-light outside the house I munched a few. Why we were waiting I had no idea. A shepherd came out of a cottage, and I could hear Elias asking him about the possibility of riding a donkey over Ida.
‘Certainly,’ the shepherd said, ‘the animal could go up and it could come down, so long as you don’t mind its coming down’ (his hands made a roly-poly gesture) ‘head over heels.’
He gave me a measuring look; only too clearly I did not pass the test. About the details of the expedition ahead I knew that I was to be shown a cave where General Kreipe had been hidden. Nothing more. I felt hungry and a trifle faint. We went on waiting.
Presently Mrs Voskakis came panting up the hill, leading a donkey; perhaps suspecting what might be in store, the creature had escaped but been recaptured. For a few mad seconds I almost thought of making a ru
n for it myself. Too late. My luggage was loaded. I bundled on. And off we went, Elias in front and two little boys, his son and a friend, trotting behind. It was a little after five o’clock.
For an hour I was in a fool’s paradise. The grey sky was only thinly patterned with blue. But the donkey was comfortable, the slope was easy, and we climbed through woods which exhaled an agreeable morning damp. After half an hour one of the boys made off up a hill; ‘he has work to do’. We climbed on. What, I thought, is all the fuss about?
At that moment I was told to dismount. The second little boy, the son, was sent back with the donkey. ‘Let us go,’ said Elias.
One learns by experience what a Cretan means by a walk; even Tom Dunbabin had to learn. Elias, who had generously lumbered himself with my airplane bag, my coat, everything except my knapsack, set off uphill at a pace which no doubt was moderated for my benefit but which in three minutes left me breathless. He was wearing riding breeches, high black leather boots, a light shirt, a dark blue jacket, no hat; all that day I saw in front of me his round dark head, his neat, burdened shoulders and those boots marching briskly, inexorably forwards. The first stretch was mercifully short. At the top of the slope we turned and doubled back a few yards. The trees were dense; not until we were standing directly above it could I see the fissure in the hillside.
‘Here it is,’ said Elias, ‘here we hid Kreipe.’