Villa Ariadne

by Dilys Powell

  The first time I went to Yerakari I was a visitor; by going back I won acceptance as a friend. George Akoumianakis’s sad dark face was illumined, his wife rushed to greet me; every detail of our first meeting was recalled, and my account of my walk over Ida was laughed at and applauded as if it had been the March of the Ten Thousand. I was taken to the orchard. The family filled hands and aprons with cherries; and like Tom, like the other British officers who in the war had been entertained I was loaded with fruit.

  But your uncle, I asked, where is your uncle who took me on his donkey to Ano Meros? The old man was waiting outside a café. ‘Why didn’t you ask for me?’ he said reproachfully. But I did, I did! I cried as we clasped hands; how could I forget you?

  ‘I saw you go by when you arrived,’ he said proudly, ‘I knew you at once.’

  He speaks, Mrs Akoumianakis said afterwards, very highly of you because you knew how to ride his donkey.

  At Kardhaki I stopped to ask for Sotiri who had told me about Tom’s little book with its list of good men. He was not at home; and at Ano Meros I learned that Mrs Saridhakis had gone to Rethymnon. But Tom’s warrior-priest, Kyriakos Katsandonis, he was there, a benignly commanding figure sitting outside a café.

  It was late evening, and in the pale light I did not recognise his companions. Teasing, he asked me where I had last met them; then, amused and quizzical, he told me. One was the muleteer who had taken me from Ano Meros to Nithavris; the other was Karapanos, the man I had last seen in a drone of flies at Khordhaki. We sat together for a while, talking. The village murmured in the dusk, men’s voices ricocheted in the crowded café behind us. Passers greeted their priest respectfully, and once a young couple came up to kiss his hand. We talked about Philadem, we talked about the song of the eagle; once again Kyriakos repeated the words for me. At last I made a move to leave.

  ‘Let us go,’ he said, standing up. In his priest’s tall hat and long skirts, his beard streaked with grey, he looked immensely powerful. Stifling an instinct to make some gesture of obeisance, I put out a hand in farewell.

  ‘But aren’t you staying the night?’ he said, startled. My car was hidden from view by the bus which he thought had brought me. No, I said, I have to get back to Rethymnon, I must go now.

  ‘But you can’t go!’ he said angrily. ‘We have killed a chicken, you can’t go yet!’

  Clearly there was no gainsaying him. We went up the lane past the house where Mrs Saridhakis had entertained me for lunch. We were a party of four, Kyriakos, Karapanos from Khordhaki, my driver and myself. Mrs Katsandonis was cooking the chicken and presently would serve it.

  Photographs on the walls: not only Paddy in his Cretan panoply (‘He was very handsome,’ said Kyriakos) but our host himself – with the British in Cairo, with the King of the Hellenes. The church’s treasure, the heavy sacerdotal cross with its chain was brought out of a drawer for us to admire. The scene was easy, domestic, contented. There was a bowl of honeysuckle on the table. A kitten stalked round the priestly ankles; Kyriakos looked at it with indulgent liking. Chicken fried in good Greek oil, cheese, wine, coffee – the dinner was delicious. Lamplight shone on elated faces. Grateful to feel myself admitted, I listened to the talk about the war, about Cairo, about life in the mountains. The echoes of the terrible past grew convivial.

  Churchill, said Kyriakos, ah, Churchill, a great man, a saviour. ‘Eviva!’ we cried. More wine was poured. ‘Eviva!’ we cried again. Philadem, said Kyriakos, and the other two repeated the word.

  ‘Philadem!’ The name was a kind of talisman, and this time it was to Paddy that we drank.

  v

  At Yerakari and Ano Meros I had debts of gratitude to pay. But the slopes of Ida, those I did not think of revisiting. In England I had sometimes remembered the grave on the mountain overlooking the plain of Nidha. Surely, I said to myself (one forgets, in sedentary comfort, what it is like to be tired out), surely you could have noted down the inscription. But when I arrived in Crete that following year I certainly had no intention of climbing again.

  I went up to Knossos and installed myself in the Taverna, where by the courtesy of the British School I was to stay. On the other side of the road there was a petrol station now. And that very evening a kentron was to be opened, a little eating-place (called, of course, the Ariadne) with dancing at night; and next afternoon, so Ourania told me, there would be a Festival, an entertainment in celebration of some local anniversary with a show in the Villa gardens and schoolgirls performing what was described as a Minoan play.

  Startled by these marks of sophistication, I climbed the outside stairs to the terrace roof of the Taverna. The air was cool and soft, and already in the late afternoon the owls were calling from the pines. Droves of tomorrow’s performers were leaving after rehearsal, and when I took the Herakleion bus I found myself in the middle of a party of schoolgirls. They were singing Samiotissa with the lover’s promise of roses and golden sails for his Samian girl, and I could not resist joining in.

  ‘Are you a journalist?’ a woman next to me asked. ‘Perhaps you will write about our Festival.’

  In search of a new place to dine I walked through familiar streets – Evans Street, 1866 Street, through the market and past the banks of fruit and the hens sitting silent with tied feet, past the butchers’ open stalls with bloody hunks of lamb, beef, veal, pork, liver and pigs’ trotters hanging from brutal hooks, up into Liberty Square with the big cafés and the cinemas, down again into Lion Fountain Square, now a confusion of rebuilding with the Morosini fountain temporarily dusty and dry.

  There was a crowd where a man lay inert on the pavement, a policeman holding his legs and a woman nursing his head and rubbing his chest. Supposing him ill and not wishing to add to the watchers, I walked on. I dined in a taverna looking across the ramparts; oily fish, beer, small stony black cherries, a woman’s voice singing on the radio, youths in jeans, a faintly homosexual look about the customers.

  On my way back to the bus-stop a voice hailed me. ‘Kyria Dilys!’ It was Micky Akoumianakis, sitting having a drink with his wife. ‘Why don’t you come up to the cave on Ida tomorrow?’ he said. ‘Mr Hurst – he used to be Vice-Consul – is here on holiday. He has been spending four days in the White Mountains, now he wants to see the Cave of Zeus, the Idaean cave. Why don’t you come?’

  I hesitated. I should straggle behind, I said, I have just arrived and I am out of practice, and anyway I am terribly slow at the best of times. Then I thought of the cave and my failure the year before to go out of my way to see it. Here was a chance I might never have again.

  Well, if you are sure Mr Hurst won’t mind, I said, and I sat down to make arrangements about a car to fetch me in the morning.

  Did you know, Micky remarked conversationally, that we had a murder here this evening?

  ‘It was where you saw the crowd and the man on the pavement. A girl shot him. She had been what she called engaged to him for months but he wouldn’t marry her, so she just took a pistol out of her bag and shot him then and there in front of everybody. When she was arrested she said she had done the right thing. She was glad, she said.’

  One learns, I thought as I went home by bus, about the sudden violent passions of the Cretans. At that moment the driver, though I had said nothing about the Villa Ariadne, made a special stop there for me. Afterwards I saw the bus swinging on over the bridge towards Arkhanes as I made my way through the dark garden, past the dog barking and bouncing on his chain, to tell Manoli and Ourania that I must be up at five o’clock and that I should have to miss the Minoan play.

  Michael Xylouris, I found, was to join the expedition. I had never met him, but I knew his name from accounts of the Kreipe episode when he and his guerilla group had received the kidnappers on their way up to Mount Ida; several people, among them the Squire, had recommended me to try to get in touch with him.

  We must start, Micky had said, at six o’clock, and at six o’clock I presented myself at Mr Hurst’s hotel. Nobody, of
course, was to be seen. Nobody ever is ready at the hour planned for the start of a Cretan expedition, but I cannot break myself of the habit of credulity. Presently an elderly gentleman with obviously English aquiline features emerged from the interior of the hotel. I knew that Mr Hurst was an experienced climber. He had been Vice-Consul at a tricky moment in the Cyprus troubles, but his taste for the mountains, Micky said, had won him the respect of the Cretans. Anyhow here he was in climbing clothes – fawn jacket, shorts, stockings, heavy boots, green felt hat, large knapsack; to my alarm he was carrying an ice-axe. But while he ate his breakfast he reassured me. He had no walking-stick and used the axe instead. Comfortingly, too, and with enviable courtesy, for I could see that nobody had warned him that I should be gate-crashing his party, he said he no longer cared to walk fast and would insist that the rest must take their pace from him.

  At last Micky Akoumianakis arrived, bringing with him a good-looking young man who was introduced as George. He was Michael Xylouris’s nephew; and in a large stout car we set off to find his uncle. After an honourable career in the Resistance Michael had settled down to civil life; he had a butcher’s shop in Herakleion. White hair, white military moustache, the sturdy figure putting on a little weight, he wielded a kind of authority, and not only in the Xylouris clan. Certainly his presence that day, as well as Micky’s, gave the trip a special quality, and it was with an ambassadorial air that we drove to Anoyia. We drank coffee under a plane tree in a part of the village I had not seen on my first visit. Then we jolted up a track first of stones, next of grass. The driver was told to come back for us at six o’clock. It was half-past eight, and we started to walk.

  ‘I shan’t come with you, I can’t walk so far.’ Michael was reluctant. Then, drawn perhaps by memories of the war and the passage of Kreipe and the kidnappers ‘along this very path’, as he put it, he relented. At first the climb was gradual and interrupted by patches of level walking. Low on the ground, the minute yellow globes of some creeping plant; ahead, the crests of Ida were streaked with white, though there was less snow, I think, than when Paddy and Stanley Moss had gone this way with their prisoner.

  At a shepherd’s hut we were invited to rest. A curve of stone half-enclosed a stone table; above it, a flypaper and a ceaseless buzz of flies. A boy fetched cheese. It was the first, the pure, fresh cheese, soft, warm, delicious; sitting in bars of shade and sun, we ate it with a little dark bread. ‘Why don’t you stay here with us?’ the shepherds cried. But we excused ourselves and hurried on – downhill, through a little pass, across a small plain. The place, Michael Xylouris told me, was called Hagios Mamas.

  ‘The Germans camped here when they were looking for Kreipe, fourteen battalions of them. And all round up there’ (he pointed to the surrounding heights) ‘we had look-outs watching what they were doing.’

  Last year, I said, I crossed in the opposite direction, from Nithavris. I described the walk which should have taken nine hours and which I had ignominiously completed in fifteen and a half. Everybody laughed. But which way did you come, from Nithavris to Nidha which way? I tried to identify the paths which Elias and I had followed. But I knew none of the names. We climbed, I said, over the mountain till we were high over Nidha, then we came down by a steep slope to the spring; it was terribly steep, I insisted, shuddering, almost like a cliff. Heads were shaken, faces were blank; nobody could understand. It really was terribly steep, I repeated.

  At a second shepherds’ encampment there was a chapel by a spring, there were offers of hospitality. We will stop, we promised, on our way back. A little farther, and we were in sight of the fierce north-looking slopes above the Nidha plain.

  ‘I shan’t go any farther,’ said Michael. ‘I will wait for you here.’ Once again he pointed to the heights. ‘Over there we took Kreipe.’

  In my turn I pointed to a savage descent a little to the left. ‘That is where Elias and I came down.’

  There was a general cry of recognition.

  ‘Eh!’ Michael exclaimed. ‘Now I see. From what you said I couldn’t understand where you crossed.’

  ‘But it really is very steep, isn’t it?’

  ‘Oh yes, of course, very steep,’ said Michael and Micky in unison, with the indulgent smiles one offers to a boastful child.

  Down through the folds of the hills, across the huge green expanse of Nidha, up to the chapel and the spring where Elias and I had eaten lunch. I had forgotten how far it was above the plain; the Cave is higher still. I dragged myself up the last yards of the path; gratefully I noted that Mr Hurst had kept his promise about pace. All the same Micky and George Xylouris were already at the top, grinning. Inky birds flapped and scattered. The huge arched mouth in the cliff belittled the visitors. Striated, the rocks showed their teeth; patches of scrub and a clump of stunted trees grew in front. ‘A big comfortless cave, with bats inside it,’ Tom Dunbabin had written. Black in the grey face of the mountain, the mouth had a dead, empty look; only in the cracks of the lips there was life where flowers grew, white, virginal, springing from brilliant green leaves. Oozing and slippery, the entrance sloped down sharply. George lent me his stick, but I was disinclined to explore far. I was not sorry when we turned and went down once more towards the sunny plain.

  This time I wrote down the epitaph on the grave. ‘Michael Basil Brentsos,’ it said in touchingly mis-spelt Greek, ‘was executed here by the barbarous conqueror on September 3, 1943.’ In the enormity of the landscape death took on a new dimension of loneliness. But to the Cretans, inured both to violent ends and to the silence of the mountains, the memorial seemed less dramatic. ‘Ah, 1943, h’m,’ said Micky, casually reading. We tried the door of the chapel. It was locked, and we went to join the others at the spring.

  The dipsítes were still there. But nobody noticed them; only when I asked again what they were somebody brushed a little of the water out of the bowl with his hand. We all drank from the cup which the infallible Mr Hurst had brought; we ate frugally and fortified ourselves with a nip of Micky’s tsikoudhiá. We could hear in the distance the sound of sheep-bells, like clear water trickling over pebbles. It grew louder; then there was the quiet thunder of feet as a pale, solid, walking cloud, forming and re-forming, moved up the hill. The cloud stretched, lengthened, wound on the path towards us. At last the flock, jostling and crying, came to file along the line of troughs watered by the spring; and embraced by the sense of pastoral company we sat and watched until it was time to set off for our rendezvous with Michael Xylouris and the shepherds.

  It was three o’clock and more when, after crossing the plain and climbing through the surrounding hills, we arrived at the encampment by the chapel. The sun was hot, and I was beginning to flag, but the beaming faces of the shepherds showed that this was no time to be unsociable. Immediately we were pressed to make a night of it, to eat, drink, stay till morning. Michael himself backed the invitation. I was thankful that the decision lay with Mr Hurst, and that he firmly said No; left to myself, I might not have had the moral courage to refuse. As it was we were in for a beano. Secretly Micky called me to look behind the chapel wall. One of the shepherds was there. He was standing by a fire of sticks, roasting the spitted carcase of a lamb.

  When I went back to the party a large round sheep’s cheese was on exhibition; there was joking competition, since Mr Hurst had a camera, to be photographed holding it. Our hosts were all smoking. In the mountains a shepherd soon runs out of cigarettes; by the end of the afternoon Mr Hurst had given away five packets. So had Micky. ‘They are thirsty,’ he said, ‘for cigarettes.’ Timidly, for I was conscious of the robust masculinity of the company, I asked George Xylouris to distribute the few I had brought.

  ‘But no,’ he said, smiling, ‘you must offer them yourself.’ And with my single packet I went along the line of unshaven, fiercely friendly faces. When we were called to eat I looked at the building by which we sat. It was one of the cheese-houses of which Tom Dunbabin had written and in which he had again and again bee
n given food and shelter. Then once more I heard his name. Tom, said one of the shepherds, Tom often came here. It was Charalambos, yet another member of the Xylouris family, speaking.

  ‘Tom was in the hills above here, he had a radio in a cave. Many of the English came this way. Bill – yes, Moss, that’s the one – Bill slept here many times. And Philadem – as you know, they brought Kreipe this way… .’

  And laughing he talked of the abduction and the time when Paddy had absented himself for several days from the party. He was in fact, as Moss’s book makes clear, trying to get in touch with one of the British wireless operators. But for the Cretans his trip, far from being practical and necessary, had an impudence which they admired. Of course it is possible that for reasons of security they were deliberately kept in the dark. But in the story which Charalambos told there was no hint of secrecy. Paddy, it said, ‘never apologised, just came back and said he had been on a binge somewhere’.

  The tales multiplied. Michael, too, had adventures to describe. ‘Once I spent forty-eight hours hiding in a cave on Psiloriti’ (Psiloriti is the Cretan name for Mount Ida). And to the listener something of the mood of the mountain people during the Occupation was communicated, something in their temper which had responded to the deadly times. As with the priest and his friends at Ano Meros, distance and memory had transformed hardships and dangers into a kind of pleasure.

  Something else, too, I recognised. We ate sitting on stone benches round a flat circular stone. The roasted carcase of the lamb was hacked up, the joints were laid on the stone; everybody took a piece with his fingers and gnawed it. We threw the bones over our shoulders; we drank water from the spring and wine from the shepherds’ own stock; we finished up with slices of sheep’s cheese and the last of Micky’s tsikoudhiá. Freshly killed, the lamb was as tough as it was skinny; I had a struggle to hide how little I could get down. But everybody else ate heartily. We laughed, we toasted one another, and George Xylouris explained and I fancy refined for my benefit a joke I had not understood.