Cally's Way

by Jane Bow

  Back at the beach the sun was dropping toward the top of the cliff stairs. The tourists were gone. No one else would come down here today. Oliver shed his clothes again to run in through the sea’s breaking waves.

  “It’ll feel warm after the river!”

  Freshly washed, sand-free, she hesitated, while high above her Ares caught Aphrodite around the waist, scattering the flowers she had been picking. Laughing, flush with desire, Aphrodite shook free and dropped down to play in the waves.

  By the time they climbed the stairs and returned to the stone bridge, Cally was famished. Oliver turned the bike onto the dirt track to stop at the tavérna. Shadows were reaching across the road, lengthening up the hillside behind it. They chose a table on the patio. Wild roses nodded from bushes at its edge. Large ceramic urns of red and yellow hibiscus showed off to each other while on the other side of the road, along the river, slanted rays of light shuffled through bamboo stalks as high as the tavérna. They were its only customers.

  “Kalispéra.” said an old man who appeared to be the owner.

  “You’d like a snack, some wine?” Oliver translated the rest.

  She nodded then realized how chilly she was with nothing but a sarong and shirt covering her bathing suit. Oliver must have heard the thought. After placing their order he jumped up, returned to the motorbike to rummage through a storage hold behind the sidecar seat, and came back to hand her a sweater and a rolled up pair of jeans.

  “I keep them on the bike for emergencies.”

  The owner’s wife, a tiny old woman dressed from head to toe in black, showed Cally a bedroom behind the tavérna’s kitchen: a single bed, chair, a cross on the wall, a bathroom.

  “Efcharistó—” Her cough awoke.

  “Parakaló.” You’re welcome. The old woman’s black eyes could have belonged to a bird, a starling maybe, or a swallow. Grizzled hair secured in a bun at the back of her head, face creased by the Cretan winds, she was ageless, both ancient and timeless. She drew a bead on Cally’s skimpy sarong, shivered, and launched into a speech, illustrating with her hands. Get dressed, get warm.

  Ten minutes later, her hair brushed into new pony tail, Oliver’s rolled-up jeans cinched around her waist with a belt fashioned out of her bikini top, his sweater snug against her breasts, she returned to find him chatting with the old man. A lighted candle winked beside a carafe of red wine on the table. Under it, Wrecks was fast asleep.

  Watching her approach, the old man said something.

  “He says you look like a shipwreck survivor,” Oliver translated.

  “Oh—”

  The old man spoke again. Oliver laughed, nodding.

  “A most beautiful one, he says, maybe even a goddess.” The old man pulled out her chair for her. “Aphrodite in jeans.”

  What to say? She hardly knew anymore where she was. Back in her hotel bed maybe, delirious. Because when, in all her life, had anyone ever made her feel this beautiful?

  The old woman arrived with a plate of dolmádes, vine leaves stuffed with herbed rice, and a second plate with cheese, olives.

  “All our own,” she told Oliver. “Made right here. Kalí órexi.”

  Oliver poured a glass of wine for Cally, and raised his.

  “Kalí órexi: good appetite.”

  Warm inside his clothes, she smiled back. Such a strange man. His newly shaved head made him look like a cross between a schoolboy and a convict, yet sitting with him here, she felt safe, cared for in the gathering shadows.

  The dolmádes were succulent, moist, delicious.

  “Órexi,” she wondered aloud, “appetite? Like anorexia?”

  “Right: an — no, orexia — appetite. Greece is always with us in English.”

  She chuckled. “In the language maybe, but you won’t find food or a restaurant like this in the world I know.”

  No cars came down this way and the birds had gone to bed. Behind the whispering bamboo she could hear the river. “Who comes here? Who stays in that room I changed in?”

  “Hikers, mainly. They have three rooms.”

  “But they’re so old.” Her grandparents’ age.

  Again Oliver seemed to follow her thought.

  “While you were changing, I told the old man about our visit to the beach and how your granddad might have been rescued from there. He said he remembered those nights, how the soldiers, dozens of them, slipped down through this valley like ghosts in the dusk. He was a teenager, living right here, having to watch his mother hand over cheese, eggs, chickens to the German soldiers. They gave her money, but what use was that? There was no food to buy. The whole island was starving. He said they used to try to get their own back on the Nazis by stealing tires. There were no real roads through here then, and tires would blow on the rough tracks. If he and his friends found a piece of tire they’d bring it home and hide it because if the Nazis caught you they’d shoot you. But how could they look in every cave, under every stone in all these mountains? And the rubber made good soles for the worn-out sandals of shepherds and for the runners passing messages for the Resistance. They attached them to the leather uppers with bits of wire made into clips all around the sole. ‘Funny looking,’ he said, ‘but if it cushioned a whole Jeep, imagine how comfortable for a single foot, and in those days we ran a lot of kilometres!’” Oliver refilled her glass, raised his. “So here’s to your grandfather and the freedom he fought for.”

  Grampa MacIntyre, right here in this valley. She was afraid, suddenly, that she might cry.

  “But why,” she sipped her wine, “will he not talk about it, or about my grandmother?”

  Oliver lowered his glass.

  “Sadness? If she died.”

  “My mother would never talk about it either.” But someone must know what had happened. A girl called Callisto, who had become pregnant by a Scottish soldier and birthed a daughter — someone must remember her.

  Oliver called to the old man, who thought it over then sent a spate of gunshot Greek in the direction of the kitchen. The old woman appeared in the doorway.

  “Callisto?” She thought about it and shook her head. No, she didn’t remember anyone of that name, but she was just a girl then.

  “And neither of us ever went very far from home,” her husband told Oliver. “My wife was born just over the hill in Lefkogia.”

  The old woman fired off a whole series of sentences.

  Her husband nodded. “Naí, naí.” Yes, yes.

  Oliver translated. “If this Callisto went with a soldier, her family may have sent her away to relatives or to marry someone in another place. There was more than one hushed-up baby born in those years.”

  “They couldn’t have done that,” said Cally, “because Grampa came back after the war and found my mother. She was five.”

  The old man touched Oliver’s shoulder and started to talk.

  “The monks up at Preveli might know. They have an archive with records—”

  “And photographs maybe,” added his wife. “Remember how the British officers used to take our pictures?”

  A long shot surely because how would she even know what to look for? She did not even know her grandmother’s last name. And she was leaving tomorrow. The light was leaving the hibiscus, the shadows lengthening quickly now that the sun had dropped behind the mountain. The candle flickered as Oliver reached across the table, squeezed her hand, and then let it go.

  “Enough for now about war, Callisto Armstrong. Let’s talk about you: who you are, where you come from.”

  She screwed up her face. “Not interesting, a Canadian city suburb called Overhampton, where every house looks the same, where you could pull into a driveway on a dark night, go inside, and maybe even snuggle into bed before you knew you were on the wrong street.” She tried to laugh, did not want to tarnish this precious night with yesterday’s or tomorrow’s realities. Better to focus on the wooden tabletop, its patterns swirling in the candlelight. Anyway, she did not live there anymore. Or anywhere.

/>   “And now your mother has died. That’s why you’re here?”

  She nodded, her stomach contracting, her throat closing, tears welling, the way they should have a month ago at home. Shorn even of curtains, the emptied house had been a coffin full of memories, all that remained of the lives that had kicked and shouted and laughed and thrashed through it. And then everyone left. Imprints in the broadloom outlined the spot her mother’s sick bed had occupied and the easy chair beside it, in which Cally’s father — in another, earlier life — used to take Cally onto his lap, the Christmas tree glowing by the bay window while Johnny, so excited, helped Sam build a new Lego train. Without the beat-up table at which they had eaten, done homework, argued, the kitchen looked scuffed, anonymous.

  Hugging Sam and Johnny at the airport, she had broken down, weeping into their necks, but that had been for her loss of them. Returning home, she had watched the auctioneers take everything away except her mother’s television. Her father had offered her a bed until she left for New York, but she had decided to camp on her mattress, which was destined for the dump. That way she would not have to talk to anyone, or do anything, or go anywhere except to the grocery store.

  Her bedroom was an empty box, its apple-green walls patterned with pinholes left by posters that had changed with her phases: Smurfs, Sting, the Dixie Chicks, Van Gogh. Gone was the bed in which she had cried, dreamed, watched Oprah after school and late night horror movies with Slee, drunk secreted sleepover bottles of beer. The same bed in which — unbeknownst to her mother — she had shed her childhood with Justin one afternoon in grade eleven. Her mother was out showing houses and Johnny was at hockey practice. Slee had told her what to do the night before, and afterwards Justin had held her, skin to skin, smiling crookedly — had a cozier moment ever existed? Justin had finished high school a year ahead of her and when he left for college, he seldom wrote or telephoned. It was Christmas before she finally got the message. Since then, through university and graduate school, a few relationships had sparked, usually on a dance floor, but inevitably boredom and then obligations at home extinguished them. Then one weekend while her mother was still in hospital, the doorbell had rung.

  “I heard about your Mom and came to tell you I’m sorry.” Justin looked older, a little thinner in new jeans and a grey sweater. His smile was still crooked and maybe it was the house’s emptiness or her need, or his smell — exactly the same — but the next thing she knew, there was a trail of clothes across the floor of her apple-green bedroom. He had not forgotten what she needed, how to make her want him so much she would do anything. Afterwards, lying back, bolstered by her pillow, he took one of her breasts in his hand, bouncing it gently. As if he owned it. She rolled away, got up, found her robe. During the early weeks of her mother’s illness she had put a bird feeder on a pole outside the living room’s bay window so that her mother could watch it from the couch. Under it, seed husks now lay scattered on a shrinking carpet of snow. Above it the winter clouds were grey. Justin came to stand beside her as a black squirrel launched himself from a nearby tree, his front paws landing on the edge of the feeder tray, his body swinging, back legs scrabbling for purchase as he climbed aboard then tucked into a feast of seeds.

  “To the swiftest go the spoils?” Justin’s big hand took hold of one of hers. “I made a huge mistake, Cally.” Now all he wanted was for her to love him again, to make a home with him, and he was so warm and sexy, so safe and comforting. So tempting. But she also sensed that whatever the future held for her, allowing Justin into it would ruin them both.

  Never again, she had decided right then, would she allow her body to be a playground or copulation to feed her needs. She had cemented the pact by throwing out her birth control pills. Not until she had locked the front door for the last time had she wondered: shouldn’t there be some kind of ritual to mark the end of the only life you have ever known?

  Oliver’s expression, softened by the candlelight as he listened, was free of everything but simple care and curiosity. The tears fell.

  “I’m sorry.” She used her napkin to blot them.

  “Don’t be.”

  “It’s just so strange. My mother’s dying wish was that I should come to Crete, but my winding up down here, where she might have been born, is sheer coincidence.”

  “Some say that ‘coincidence’ is a word used by people who don’t know any better.” He smiled. “I don’t know whether I believe that or not. And you fly home tomorrow?”

  “No, not home. To Mumbai.”

  “India?” His eyebrows blew wide in surprise. “To do what?”

  Her skin prickled under his sweater. A flush spread up into her cheeks.

  “My first job.” Time to let him have it, to ruin what could never come to anything anyway. “Marketing condoms for an international petrochemical company called EO.”

  “Condoms?” She watched him laugh, joined him. It felt good. But then he frowned. “EO? Wasn’t it just in the news?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve been floating around on a catamaran.”

  “There’s something… What else do they make?”

  “Plastic medical equipment, Tetra Paks, beer.” She tried to think what else. “I don’t know. They own all kinds of subsidiaries.”

  “Weapons?”

  “No!” She stopped, shocked. “Actually, I have no idea.”

  “You should, don’t you think? If you’re going to work for them …”

  She searched, through the candlelight, for judgment or criticism. There was none.

  The old man reappeared. The dolmádes and cheese were gone, the carafe empty. Would they like to have dinner? He had roasted a lamb on the spit just yesterday.

  Oliver looked at her, enquiring. Not put off apparently. And she did not want to leave this table, this globe of warmth, the lovely languorous shadows deepening outside it. The old man turned on a string of coloured lights woven through grapevines that were sewn like a roof above the patio.

  A second carafe arrived.

  “Yámas.” Oliver raised his glass. He looked out at the track disappearing into the dusk. “People have been living on this island for more than a hundred thousand years, did you know that?”

  “No.” She was relieved to have the subject changed.

  “Tools they’ve found in a cave near Plakias are collapsing all the old theories about Homo sapiens, because it means people back then were capable of building boats, crossing the sea.” He shook his head. “There’s so much we think we know but don’t. Even about the Minoans. They were trading with the Middle East and Africa sixteen hundred years before Christ but had no need for a navy.” His head shook again. “Beautiful.”

  “Until everything they built was destroyed.”

  “By an earthquake, not by people.”

  “So they built their palaces all over again—”

  “And then two hundred years later, Wham! Again.”

  “By what, do you think?” she asked. Theories conflicted, according to her guidebook.

  “A tsunami, after the volcano that was Santorini erupted. Archaeologists have dug evidence out of the dunes at the eastern end of Crete.” Oliver drained his glass. “And then the invasions began.”

  “Tell me.” She twirled her glass, wanting to banish the horrors from their little sphere of candlelight. “How does an itinerant American shepherd-orange-picker know so much about history?” She smiled at his surprise. “Your friend Yannis, the waiter, told me about you. So now it’s your turn. What are you doing here?”

  His arms came up, elbows resting on the table, hands rubbing each other, shoulders huge, pulling the fabric of his T-shirt tight. She recalled the feel of them around her on the Preveli cliff stairs.

  “Let me guess, you were a soldier.”

  He looked out from under his eyelashes, hands still rubbing.

  “Right on the first try.” He pointed at the insignia on his bicep. “U.S. Marine Corps, eleven years ago: the Gulf War.”

  She waited
but there were no more words, just a wave of pain so intense it was palpable. One of his hands came down, opened the basket of bread, napkins, knives and forks the old man had put down on the table. She watched one of hers reach across to where his other hand rested on the table. So warm.

  When their dinners arrived the old man hovered, waiting for them to eat, beaming when they exclaimed. It truly was the most tender, the tastiest lamb she had ever encountered.

  “You know why it’s so good?” Oliver lifted a second forkful, looking at her as he chewed. “Because just last week this little guy was running around these mountainsides eating oregano, marjoram, thyme. Baaaa—”

  The old man understood the sound and laughed, slapping Oliver on the shoulder, repeating, “Baaa, baaa—”

  “Stop it!”

  A plate of steaming greens arrived.

  “Hórta,” Oliver smiled at her, “Maybe our cook was one of those women we saw in the valley.”

  There was no invitation, no conversation as Oliver’s bike turned into Plakias. She simply could not imagine leaving him. The room he rented was at the far end of the promenade, in a building across the street from the beach. He drove straight to it, parked, ordered Wrecks into the upturned crate that was his dog house, and then, his hand on the small of her back, guided her in through the dark hallway to his room.

  Whitewashed walls, rumpled sheets, a wash stand, wash cloth carefully folded, a toothbrush and razor on a little glass ledge below a speckled mirror, an easy chair, a tower of books on the floor beside a tasselled 1950s floor lamp. A portable sound system dominated the top of the dresser. By the time she came back from the shower, her body still wet under the towel, Vivaldi’s violins were filling the air.

  Sand caught at the top of Oliver’s jeans scraped her belly as, opening the towel, he kissed her.

  “Are you Zeus?” she murmured.

  Outside the open window, Vivaldi’s concerto spiralled up with Aphrodite’s excitement, until, holding out her arms to Ares, the great goddess of love came into the room.