by Jane Bow
She was still some distance above the lower monastery’s ruins when a car came up the road. It stopped beside her.
“Bitte.” German. The girl in the passenger seat was her age. “Moní Préveli?”
Cally pointed back up the road then turned away. Sixty-one years may have passed, but new knowledge is always raw.
The car accelerated away. Two minutes later it was back. The weather must have changed their minds.
“Hallo.” The driver was also German. The girl peered around him at her. “You are very wet. You want to get in? We give you ride.”
The sun came out again. Somewhere out over the sea there would be a rainbow.
“Thanks.” Cally found a smile. “You’re very kind, but I’m fine.”
A hammock was strung between two big old trees in the garden between the tavérna and the old couple’s bungalow. She lay in it, reading the book Brother Paul had given her. Her grandmother’s picture was tucked between the front cover and the first page. After awhile she put the book down and just lay there rocking, looking at the girl in the photograph, trying to imagine her. Above, the sky was a patchwork of blue and white puffs of cloud now. She smiled at it.
Are you glad, Mom?
ix
The old woman’s legs were swollen. Her hips, obviously fragile, gave her a listing, sideways gait. When hikers dropped by for lunch or a late afternoon drink and snack, when couples drove in for dinner on the candlelit patio, the old man did the serving. The old woman was clearly the boss, however, her stream of instructions issuing from the kitchen, where she stirred the great pots she always had on the boil or sat on a wooden stool pulled up to her chopping block. Tonight there was no such sound. Instead, when Cally sat down for dinner, she found the old woman scurrying from the kitchen to a table full of boisterous Germans. The old man was nowhere in sight.
Her usual table was near the kitchen door. From it she could see the sweat beading on the old woman’s forehead as she lifted the lid off a pot of stew, scooped some into a bowl. A leg of roast lamb lay on the chopping board. Where was her husband?
Three bowls of stew now sat on a tray. The old woman wiped her hands on her apron. Cally got up, went into the kitchen, picked up the tray.
“Here, let me.”
Four hours and twenty dinners later, she flopped into a chair. Her feet felt as if they had been flayed. A Cretan contractor was doing some roadwork in the area and had stopped in to eat, and he’d had enough English to translate between the cook and her waitress. The old man had come down with the flu, and neither their son nor their daughters had been able to get here in time to help. When the last guest was gone, the old woman brought out a carafe of wine, two tumblers and two plates piled with leftover lamb, potatoes, and the green beans she had seen growing up a trellis near the bake oven. Never had a meal tasted so perfect.
“Poly kaló,” said Cally. Very good.
The old woman nodded brusquely and went on eating. Though their language rose and plunged and shot and spat all the emotions, Cretans did not appear to display much emotion in any other way. Cally chewed her lamb, looked at her hostess.
Maybe the old woman’s family need not be disturbed. The menu was in English, German, and Greek. Between them they could muddle through, and doing a Shirley Valentine — waiting on tables in return for bed and board — would allow Cally to stay a little longer, to get up to Geratti.
She went to her room to get the photograph and, using sign language, her phrasebook, and her tiny collection of Greek words, told the old woman who its subject was.
“Ah, naí, naí!”
She put forward her idea of waiting on tables in return for her room and board.
The old woman’s face broke into a smile. When they were finished and Cally had cleared the plates, the old woman brought two plates of baklava, two tiny shot glasses, and a plastic water bottle to the table.
“Rakí!”
During the mornings she hiked, following the path the men in Flowers of Rethymnon had taken on the night of their escape: down the track along the river and over the cobblestone bridge that crossed the other tributary that started on the wild, roadless side of the mountain to the north. Each day she explored a little further, the scent of oregano, sage, marjoram, and thyme filling her with a sense of well-being. Bees buzzed around the little ruin she had visited with Oliver.
Below the ruin a goat path crossing the scree on the east-side mountain was the only way down to the gorge behind the beach. For goats, a twenty-centimetre width is a highway. She planted one foot then the next, heel to toe, extending her arms for balance. To her left the fall of shale rose sharply to the sky. To her right the mountainside fell away. One missed step and she would tumble, bouncing helplessly down the great slide of jagged stones, two hundred feet to the patchwork of sun and shade playing across the valley floor. The wind brought her the tinkle of sheep or goat bells, but she dared not look at anything except the path ahead. Finally the scree gave way to land on both sides of the path. She looked around her. Her knees could stop wobbling.
Sixty-one years ago, in August, the river bed must have been dry. The soldiers had followed it, probably because the bamboo shielded it from sight, but then, hearing German patrols coming the other way, they’d had to turn back. Was that why they had climbed the eastern headland just ahead on her left? She turned right, down to where the path stopped suddenly in the shadows of the gorge ahead, grass and earth cut away by the river.
Flowing swift and black, the river looked deep here, cliffs and great car-sized boulders obscuring its course downstream. The air smelled of minerals. The sandbar on which she and Oliver had sunbathed must be just around the bend. She looked for a land route between the cliffs.
There was none. You had to swim to the beach this early in the year, or climb the headland, as her grandfather had done. A steep climb, it would take several hours at least. She sat down, took off her sandals so her feet could dangle in the water. It was cold, still tinged with snowmelt from the mountain tops to the north. She watched it course around her feet.
There was something about living close to the earth, eating food freshly grown, drinking wine from the next valley, sleeping when it was dark, feeling the weather as a force, that came right into your bones. No more facts about her past were available but maybe that was okay. Facts and thoughts and preconceived ideas were like clothes. You learned to put them on when you were too young to know any better. She wiggled her toes, watched the stream of river water jiggle around them. Maybe it was time to strip off everything she had ever relied on. To be completely alone with her imagination, and see what was there.
The old man was well enough to sit out, a blanket over his knees, when one of the old woman’s daughters and her family came from Rethymnon on the weekend, bringing supplies. The teenaged son and daughter would wait on the tables. She could have the night off.
She would hike down through the valley then swim the river gorge to Limni Beach. If she stripped off her T-shirt and jeans the river would carry her. She could be down among the palm trees in minutes. When she came into the kitchen just after daybreak, both the old woman and her daughter pointed to the sky.
“Óchi, óchi.” No, no.
She shrugged. So it might rain later. She could handle rain.
The old woman shook her head.
“Óchi. Sirókos.”
Her daughter, a younger cosmopolitan version of her mother, made a blowing sound then tried German. “Nicht, nicht.”
Okay, wind. In the Garden of Eden. Cally would take her sleeping bag, and if worst came to worst, she could take shelter in the cave Oliver had shown her.
Muttering unhappily to her daughter, the old woman gave Cally a plastic bag with two oranges, half of a fresh loaf of bread and some cheese in it for her lunch.
The bamboo on the riverbank was chattering in the wind. One of the old woman’s chickens, pecking in the ditch, squawked as she stepped into the road.
“Oh, not you to
o, Scratchy.” She turned south toward the ruin.
Funnelling up from the south, the wind was whispering through the olive trees when she reached the plateau, but on the scree it was her ally, pushing her into the mountainside so she had less fear of falling.
Down at the river’s edge, she took off her T-shirt and jeans, stuffed them into the pack with the sleeping bag, and strapped it onto her back over her bikini. It would get a little wet, but so what? Her arms would be free to ward off the rocks. If she stayed close to the bank on this side, she should be able to find a landing above the chute that she and Oliver had used as a shower.
Taking a last look around her, she held her breath and slid into the black water. Its languid iciness pierced her skin, made her scalp ache and her limbs heavy. She kicked just enough to steer herself along the river’s edge. This worked fine until she rounded the bend where some of the rocks were as big as rooms. Others were nearly submerged, the river roiling around them. Her body left her mind then as, kicking, gasping, reaching, she tried to see rocks in time to fend them off with her hands and feet, to find something on the bank above her — a branch, a boulder — to hang on to, to brake with. How she was delivered onto a patch of sand in a shallow indent in the gorge’s wall was a mystery for which all she could do was be grateful. To whom, she was not sure. Her arms and legs were scratched. Her cough returned, her body trying to disgorge some of the river she had swallowed. The pack was as wet as she was.
A dumb risk to have taken?
She laughed. So what? Edging along the river stones, she found handholds in the bushes until the cliff opened out at the sandbar beside the chute. The sand felt cold under foot as she crossed to it. Several more hours would pass before sunlight reached this place — if there was any sun at all today. Grey clouds, heavy as galleons, were traveling north now on a wind that sighed through the palms, tossing the oleanders’ pink blossoms.
She was picking her way along the path toward the palms when the wind paused. In the sudden hush, a bell tinkled and there, silhouetted at the top of the cliff above, was a billy goat. The same one she had seen with Oliver? The straggly wisps of his skirts fluttered. His legs looked delicate as twigs. Even his goatee was sharply outlined against the darkening sky.
The clouds were a strange reddish brown colour. She had better scope out some shelter. The goat path leading up to the cave Oliver had shown her was just ahead. She made her way through the rocks and scrub bushes and the tough little flowers growing up between them to the opening in the cliff face. People used to camp in these caves, he had said. And, she thought now, at some time during the last six thousand years, someone might have lived here.
Billy had left droppings by the door. She would cut some brush, use it to sweep out the floor. By the time she was finished, the palms along the river were thrashing in the wind. The first globs of rain fell, making a rivulet of red-brown sand-mud on her arm. It must have come all the way across the Libyan Sea from the Sahara!
Of course, Sirókos. Sirocco, the fierce Sahara wind that blew north into the eastern Mediterranean! She had read that, pulled north by low pressure systems over the sea, it sometimes reached hurricane speeds. What if it had hit while she was walking across the scree? Or swimming?
The air inside the cave was rock chilled, but how much safer could she be than in a cave? The sleeping bag had its own waterproof bag, thank God. She laid it out, peeled off her bikini and snuggled into it, naked and warm, while outside the narrow rock crevice the wind and rain lashed the gorge.
A bell. Too close. Behind it, outside, the wind was racketing through the palms but in here the air was still, and now came a clipping sound. Terror opened her eyes, stopped her breath. But it was only the goat, Billy. The outline of his back hovered against the pale reddish rain-light outside. His curious nose was no more than a metre away. She could hear the huffs of his breathing, his bell again as he stepped closer, every muscle tensed, ready to leap out of reach. His grassy breath brushed her cheek. She wanted to lie still, to keep him close—
Too late. He jumped away, bell clattering, and was gone, back out into the rain.
The older palms bowed under the weight of the strange grainy rain. It landed with a heavy splatting sound, covering everything with a reddish brown film.
She needed a toilet.
There might be one down at the beach, behind the concession stand she had seen under the cliffs. Too far. Better to take a lesson from Billy: pee between some rocks along the base of the cliff.
There was no point in putting on clothes.
The stones outside the cave were slippery, the rain running like mud-blood onto her bare shoulders. The wind churned her hair, raised goosebumps on her stomach. Squinting into it, she spied Billy cowering under a cliff ledge a few feet above her.
“Come on, boy. I won’t hurt you. Sorry I took your cave.”
The goat glared. She did not blame him.
The friendly stream of her pee cloaked her buttocks in a little cloud of steam. Back in the cave she ate her bread and cheese and then climbed back into the sleeping bag. The cave’s ceiling was an abstract painting, black on brown, cubist, its lines squared. It was a perfect canvas against which to visit the same torrent that, in the other rainstorm on the Preveli clifftop, had burst through her dam:
Oliver. A soldier who knew Botticelli and Vivaldi, who had cared to show her the cemetery where she could touch the spirit of her mother. The most beautiful man she had ever known. With whom she had briefly lost her mind.
Oliver. Do not dance with this man. Because he had no more interest in sticking around than she did. And yet.
Oliver. That moment of excruciating sweetness in the morning.
The girl in the photograph, her grandmother, had made love to her grandfather before he left, had risked everything to do it. And then she had birthed their child, Cally’s mother.
She, too, was once a live wire, a brilliant rainbow. Who had grown up to do the same thing, bearing Sam. Then, sometime after having Cally and Johnny, she had lost all her colours.
Why? Sadness, an all-over ache, accompanied Cally as, searching her memories, she looked for clues.
Instead a new, ludicrous idea arrived.
Had she forgotten to ask Oliver to use a condom on purpose? Did her subconscious mind want her to gallop out of her planned, ambition-cloistered life into the freedom both her mother and her grandmother had known?
Because whether or not she chose to admit it, the reason behind the reason she had come back to Crete was Oliver. Which made no sense. But then — she was lying in a cave in a mud storm — what did?
She must have fallen asleep. When she awoke rain was still falling but the wind had died. Daylight was waning. What to do?
There was no path back up through the gorge. Her only options were to climb either the cliff stairs to go to the monastery or the headland on this side of the beach. There was not enough daytime left to do either. She had imagined sunbathing on the river sandbar, trying to open herself, to release everything she had ever thought and see what came. Instead she would have to spend the night in this cave. The old woman and her daughter would be worried. They had no idea where she had gone, but there was nothing she could do about that.
Her lunch was long gone. A person can last without food, but water is essential, and her bottle was empty. Better fill it now while it was still light. As she teetered down through the mud-coated rocks, the mud-rain landed like an army of micro-troops in her hair. Red-brown rivulets ran down between her breasts. Her nipples, erect in the chill and chafed by the falling mud, stung. She pushed back slimy clumps of her hair and tried to hurry.
The weight of the rainfall had broken some of the palms’ big old fronds. Still attached to their trunks, their yellowed tips bowed to the ground. She hurried past them to the river, stepped out into the current below the chute, and filled her bottle. The water came up cloudy, full of silt, and what about giardia and other bacteria? Billy’s poo probably got washed into this
river. Still, it was flowing quickly.
Once, during her first year of university, her father had taken her to Cuba on a business trip. A village they had visited had put on a lunch. It was very hot and the food set out on a long table under a banyan tree was spicy, but the beer truck from Havana had not arrived. The only non-rum drink available was local water in which she could see particles floating. “No se preocupa.” Do not worry. Their host had cut up a lemon. “We squirt in some juice, like so, to kill all germs.” Not convinced, Cally had reeled through the rest of day drunk on rum.
Now she emptied her bottle, edged in deeper. The current pulled at her legs, dislodged the sand under her feet, the water cold as death. But once her body recovered from the shock, the force of the water massaged her. Her hair swirled on the surface as if she were a water creature or a mermaid. Popping up, she gulped in the muddy air and filled her bottle.
Back in the cave she used her jeans to towel herself dry. Then, pulling the sleeping bag close around her, she squeezed the juice from one of her oranges into the water bottle and drank.
Now what? There was nothing to do but sit, listening to the patter of the rain. Behind her the cave’s rocky gloom disappeared into black. Fear syrupped through her. Another hour and the darkness in here would be absolute. She found her clothes, put on everything she had, and then snuggled down again into the sleeping bag.
Closing out the night awakened memory. Her mother on a Saturday morning not long after her father had left. Cally had come into her parents’ bedroom to find her mother sitting on the side of the bed looking at nothing in particular, just sitting there in her nightie, her shoulders rounded, her hands clasped in her lap. She had no make-up on yet. Her hair’s dark roots sprouted along a wayward part left by sleep. Seeing Cally, her face switched on, became animated.
Now here was her mother again, lying in her bed the night Cally had found the Crete brochure and the rings, her lips moving.