Cally's Way

by Jane Bow

  His waiting room held four metal-legged chairs, lined two and two on each side of a table decorated with plastic roses in a small vase. An iconographic painting of an aged saint with angels flying about above his head hung over it. So the doctor must be a practicing Catholic, Greek Orthodox. She was the day’s first patient. He knew she was out here, must have heard the bell jingle when she opened the door, but here she was still waiting ten minutes later, agonizing.

  “Parakaló.” A squat man with protruding brown eyes, he stood in the doorway, gesturing for her to come through, to take the chair across the desk from him. His eyes, surveying her suitcase and sleeping bag, looked interested, intelligent, kind.

  “Do you speak English?” she asked.

  He put up a hand, rotated it back and forth.

  “Little bit only. You are sick?”

  “No.” She pointed to her stomach, pantomimed a bulge, and shook her finger. “I need the morning-after pill to not become pregnant.” A blush prickled her neck and cheeks.

  He took his time looking at her.

  “You are from where? You not live here.”

  “No. I have been on vacation.”

  “Ah,” he nodded, got up, came around the desk. “I am not tourist doctor.”

  “I know, but I’ve made a mistake and—” Her voice quivered. The cough started. A dam burst, for the second time today. “I’m sorry.” She opened her handbag, looking for a tissue, heard him sigh. He did not, however, move from the doorway, and when finally she blew her nose and looked up, she saw the 19th-Century prejudices pulsing behind his veneer of kindness.

  “You go home now.” She was a wanton woman, a slut. “Where is your family?” God would decide whether or not to bring new life into her womb.

  She gathered up her handbag and suitcase, and fled. Why on earth had she imagined that a doctor with a saint in his waiting room would help her? His shame followed her into the street.

  In the next square, a squat, round Byzantine church was dedicated to Agía Sofía — Saint Sofia, whose name meant wisdom. Cally had come across her more than once in her guidebook’s history of Greece. The air inside was cool, still scented from the last mass, the rows of rattan chairs empty. Stone walls thick enough to withstand cannons muted the hustle and bustle in the square outside. Medieval iconography covered them. There was Mary, surrounded by miniature angels, holding a baby Jesus who looked like a young adult. Other female saints held an urn, a scroll.

  Saint Sofia was front and centre, accompanied as always by three women: Faith, Hope and Charity. And look, the wooden cross carved above the iconostasis that closed off the sanctuary was the ancient, symmetrical cross of life. Back in school, a mandatory undergraduate humanities course had introduced her to the various religions’ ancient antecedents. Painted on a panel below the cross, against a sky blue backdrop, was the same Seeing Eye found both on the back of the American dollar bill and in Egyptian mythology five thousand years ago. For some reason she found that comforting.

  Glass cases in the centre of the nave held rings, necklaces, watches, and little tin pictures of a leg, an arm, a child: offerings from the supplicant faithful.

  She sat down. Church had never held any meaning for her. Their parents had insisted that she, Sam, and Johnny attend Sunday school, to expose them to Christ’s teachings.

  “Why?” Sam had wanted to know. “What’s so great about Christianity? Why don’t we learn Buddhism?”

  “Yeah, or how about Judaism?” said Johnny. “So I can have one of those Bar Mitzvah parties.”

  Islam was not yet part of the Overhampton lexicon. There were Muslims, but they lived in their own neighbourhoods.

  “Really,” said Sam, “they just want to get us out of bed.”

  “Or they’re hedging their bets,” she said, “in case God is on Jesus’ side.”

  Sam looked out at the cookie-cutter houses all the way down an empty street on which the only trees were wired to support poles. “As if.”

  Saint Sofia’s face, in her large gilt-framed painting, was serene, mother-calm above the flare and dip of a forest of votive candles. Gazing at her, Cally felt herself enveloped, as if by wings of care that shut out everything else, so that the inside of her could safely open. Surrender.

  Pain, unnameable, unquenchable, came into her gut and heart and throat. Tears — she seemed to have a bottomless supply of them this morning — streamed as reels of memory played images across the screen of her mind. She did not try to stop them.

  Her mother’s body, wasted and white in the lamplight, her fingers trembling, just once; her handwriting, shaky on the cruise brochure: For Cally.

  Did you want me to come here, Mom, to save me from playing the game, from living my life dead? Like you?

  The Cretan cemetery, candles flickering, lighting silver-framed photos.

  Grampa MacIntyre, the warmth of his lap, the smell of his pipe when she was a little girl. His picture of her Grandmother Callisto, her mother’s mother. His newspaper held up like a shield against her questions.

  Oliver on the sunny Preveli mountainside: “Your grandfather might have stood right here.”

  Oliver’s hand lying on the dinner table.

  The musky sun-sea smell of him.

  Her fear on waking. Because there could be no life with Oliver. He had given her a day, a night of love, but that was all. He was here today, gone tomorrow. The waiter had told her. And what kind of man does not have condoms ready in his bedside table, if not against pregnancy then to prevent disease?

  Dust motes floated in shafts of sunlight coming through the windows as, inside Saint Sofia’s embrace, she went on weeping. In the wash of clarity that followed, she knew that she would not start the six-month contract with EO Petrochemicals. She had a master’s degree in business and had been recruited by a multi-national corporation, but she knew nothing.

  Wars, eruptions, tortures, corruptions came to her in two-minute television news clips: rage, rape, women stoned and forced to beg in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, Nigeria, Somalia and Afghanistan, Rwanda, the Congo, and the Sudan. Young boys running through African streets armed with sub-machine guns, teenaged girls honouring Allah by wrapping themselves in explosives, their parents wailing in pain. None of it had any connection with the unfolding of her day.

  She knew nothing about the company to which she was about to tether her life, nothing about her own family, nothing about herself. Beyond what was apparently a bottomless pit of fear. Nothing even about sex, how blinding was its power.

  The next time she checked she was buying a cheap nylon knapsack from one of the market stalls, a pair of hiking sandals, and a Swiss Army knife. There was a station for Athens’ new Metro at the foot of the market square, and now here she was travelling west to Piraeus, the same port from which her catamaran cruise had left in what seemed, now, to have been some other life.

  The station stairs came up to the sidewalk across the road from the ferry terminal. She left telephone messages telling both her father and Gordon Sinclair at EO that she was taking some time out, due to the riots in Mumbai, so that they would not set Interpol on her trail. Really though, once she stepped out of the traces, what difference did it make to either of them what she did or when she came home?

  Ferries were taking on truckloads of cargo, cars full of families, foot passengers. A ship would leave this evening for Rethymnon, Crete.

  “Slee, I know it’s 4 a.m. your time but listen, I’m taking a ferry back to Crete.” The refund from her airfare would buy her ticket and keep her for a short while. Beyond that, for the first time in her life, she had no plan, was afraid even to think of what would happen when the money ran out. Still, saying the words made her happy. “Yes, I met a man there, but no, he is not part of this picture. I’m going to a monastery where I might be able to find a picture of my grandmother. I might be out of cell phone range, so don’t worry, okay?”

  The three-quarter moon was still laying a silver path south across the black night
sea. Standing at the ship’s rail, she could not stop trembling. Whether from cold or fear or illness, she had no idea.

  vii

  Half a dozen chattering high school students from the coastal villages and a couple of black-clad widows were left on the bus when it ground through the Kourtaliotis Gorge then down the narrow roads walled on both sides by bamboo canes, olive trees, and red, blue, purple, white, yellow wildflowers. When the arched bridge below Moní Préveli appeared outside the window, she jumped up, signalling to the driver to let her off. Anyone noticing would think she was a tourist setting out to hike, stopping first perhaps at the tavérna under the trees just beyond the bridge.

  The hibiscus blossoms welcomed her from their pots on the patio. The old woman was wearing the same black dress and shawl. She stopped sweeping the steps down to the road to watch Cally approach, her face a map of wrinkles, showing no recognition of this lone hiker in sandals and jeans ripped at the knee. The old man was sitting in the shade on the patio with his newspaper, cigarette and coffee.

  What if, recognizing her from last night, he sent a message to Oliver? Worse, what if Oliver showed up here for dinner with another woman? Maybe he brought women here every week—

  No. The candlelit intimacy had been theirs alone, and there was nothing here but olive trees, scrub bush, the dirt road leading away into the mountains on the other side of the river valley. Oliver would have no reason to come back here unless the old man sent him word, and she would make him understand that that must not happen. The pain of denial was deep but this, she knew with certainty, was where she wanted to be.

  “Domátio parakaló?” A room please?

  The old woman squinted at her. Recollected.

  “Naí, naí!” Yes, yes! “Oliver?”

  She shook her head, looked sad, put a finger to her lips, shook her finger and her head, and made the palms-together prayer sign. Please don’t tell him. She needed time, to stop her running toward or from anything. To face the fact that she was alone, and to see what was there.

  “Ah,” the old woman nodded sadly, then ushered her toward the room she had used to change before dinner last night. There was the single bed, the cross, and a picture of the Virgin Mary, a wooden bedside table, the tiny bathroom with its marbled mirror. Outside the window, birds twittered around a flowering white oleander. The woman touched her arm, a stream of Greek augmented by the sign language telling her that love was a brutal dictator, but she was safe here. She tried to smile her gratitude.

  An hour later, she found herself sitting at a table just outside the kitchen door drinking the traditional Cretan cure-all, herbal mountain tea. Platters of dolmádes wrenched her back to last night, the pain an ache deep as bone, but now here was the old woman with plates of hummus and freshly baked pitas and salad and the tastiest chicken stew Cally had ever eaten. The old man filled a battered tin jug from a great plastic drum of homemade wine. It was only noon, the sun high in the sky, but after the tea she poured a glassful and found her penicillin. Then, after lunch, she peeled off her clothes and fell into the bed, a new spate of coughing as ugly as before she had started the antibiotic. If this bug was viral, the penicillin wouldn’t touch it. What then? She pulled the blankets higher as fear, illness’ ready ally, rose out of its pit.

  She imagined her grandmother and grandfather in this valley sixty-one years ago. As soon as she felt better she would go up the mountain to Preveli Monastery. Her eyes had barely closed before the dreams began:

  Scanning the bay, looking for his prow because she knows this is the day. See, there he is now. She kneels down to pray. But hey, listen! His triumph sounds, proclaiming his coming, the life he has planted, his dearest wish granted. His boat scrapes the sand, and now here are his hands, caressing her lushness, his lips on her fullness. Treasures he has brought, the fish he has caught, all that they seek, right here—

  No! She sat up. Got up. Opened her suitcase. Walked a little way up the track. Listened to the birds, inhaled sweet spring air. She was alone. She tried to make friends with that. Had dinner. Slept again.

  The sky above the mountain on the east side of the valley was blue when a knock sounded on her door. She must have slept all night.

  “Kaliméra.” Good morning. The old woman put a cup of coffee on the bedside table, felt her forehead, and nodded, satisfied. “Poly kaló.” Very good. Then, sniffing the air, she loosed a staccato string of Greek.

  Cally’s suitcase was still open, its contents spilling onto the floor. The American girl at the airport had warned her that her jeans, T-shirt and hoodie — black with “Giants” emblazoned in orange — were a little smelly, and her own clothes were overdue for a wash. Before Cally could say anything, the old woman gathered up the clothes and was gone. By late morning, her wardrobe was strung across the yard between the tavérna and a concrete bungalow behind it, where the old couple must live. By dinnertime it was dry and folded in a neat pile on her bed.

  Sun, food, rest. Wine with dinner, short walks, time to examine the tavérna’s vegetable garden, the carpet of flowers in the meadow behind it, and olive trees gnarled and twisted by sun and storms, their leaves rustling in the wind.

  Sun, food, rest. Wandering suspended in the peace that warmed meadows buzzing with bees and hillsides tinkling with sheep’s bells. No screens or phones or traffic to blunt her observation of the bamboo canes clacking in the morning breeze, of the tastes of a freshly picked orange for breakfast, of the warmth still trapped in the bread the old man had just baked in an ancient humpbacked outdoor oven behind the tavérna, or of the jitter-dance of a plover drinking from the river under the arched bridge.

  The night moon, nearly full now above the Preveli mountain, turned the bridge into a graceful arch of black against black, the moon silver, blinking in the water flowing under it. A hundred thousand stars lit the sky. Strolling under them, she thought of the flickering lamps in the cemetery at Sellia, of the souls communing in the language of light with the stars, of her grandmother. There was a lamplit shrine at the back of the tavérna’s patio, a concrete pedestal with a little roof under which a photograph of the Virgin Mary smiled. She stopped in front of it. Maybe Mary wouldn’t mind if she used it to think about her grandmother Callisto and the little girl who had become her own mother.

  Her period came, thank heavens, but every thought she had wanted to link itself to Oliver. She must not go here, must not lose herself—

  “Sure,” said Slee’s voice, “any excuse to run.” Slee blamed her failure with men on her mother: “When did she ever take you to the hairdresser or discuss dresses, or boys, or anything with you?”

  Maybe, but another mistake was a luxury she could not afford.

  A bookshelf under the window in her room held a handful of paperbacks, apparently left behind by other travellers: Albert Camus’ Outsider, a German thriller, an English romance. A book on the geology of Crete told her about the antiquity of the mountains guarding this river valley and the origin of the gorges that cut between them to the sea.

  At night she continued to dream.

  Here is Gordon Sinclair, standing behind his desk in what must be EO’s New York office, punching the air between them with his finger, so angry. She starts to run and now something or someone is chasing her down dark nighttime streets, but the pavement is cracked and broken, and the lights in all the houses are out. She wants to turn her head, to see who or what it is, but she dares not risk twisting an ankle, falling, being caught. Whatever is menacing is so close she can hear it breathing, smell its foulness. An intersection opens ahead, traffic streaming from every direction, small European cars, honking, bumper to bumper. Crossing would be suicide.

  Look, though. There on the other side is a young woman, Greek, her wool skirt swaying as she walks through a mountain meadow, a shepherds’ crook slung across the back of her shoulders and held by a hand one each side. A little girl is dancing along beside her—

  The dream explodes. A whole army advances now, shoulders glancin
g one against the next, every one of them exactly the same, tufts of wool on their heads—

  But these are not soldiers. They are sheep, their stick legs clicking on the meadow path as they hurry along. And here again, behind them, is the woman. She is singing, her little girl adding snippets to the song. Both of them so familiar. Cally tries to look more closely, but sensing something the woman turns, shifting the shepherds’ long hooked staff into her hands. Angry.

  Why? Waking, Cally tried to recall every detail of the dream. Was the shepherdess with her little girl the woman in Grampa’s picture? She should write down her dreams, trap them before consciousness shooed them away.

  “Waste of time,” Slee’s voice told her. Once during an undergrad psychology course, Cally had become fascinated by dreams. When a free weekend workshop on dream tending was advertised, Slee would not get off the couch in the apartment they shared to sign up. “Body poo, that’s all dreams are. We eat, our bodies take what they need, and we excrete the rest. Same with our brains. We stuff them all day long with sights, sounds, thoughts, and feelings then shit them out at night.” Writing off Carl Jung and James Hillman and Joseph Campbell and entire fields of study, as if facts and reasoning and the pile of law books around her were the only way to know the world. Slee, whom she had always admired, was as ignorant as she was.

  Sun, food, rest. Her face in the spotted mirror above the bathroom sink looked fuller, softer around the eyes. Her eyebrows had grown in, and how long was it since she had put on makeup? Or given her hair anything more than a quick brush? Or used any kind of electronic device? Or spoken English?

  She was strong enough now to hike up the mountain to the Preveli Monastery. Maybe she could find a register of the soldiers rescued at Limni Beach and pictures. Her guidebook contained a dictionary of common words and expressions. After breakfast the next morning, she found the word for lunch, pointed to herself, and then walked her fingers away across the table.