Cally's Way

by Jane Bow

  “I have no idea.” Long pause. “No good can come of this.”

  Nevertheless, a new, thoughtless joy took root between them. Sometimes it needed no words; other times torrents burst out, commingled, ignited into argument, or flowered into understanding and new ideas. She was surprised at how well-read he was.

  “Why wouldn’t I be? Don’t I live in the cradle of Western civilization? And the Plakias library receives thousands of donations in about five different languages.” Tourists who didn’t want to cart books around or expatriates returning home left the classics, reference books on geology, history, mythology, Cretan plants and birds, and even some of the newest fiction in the little shack some British expats had set up in an olive grove at the edge of town.

  Sometimes they talked about war. Oliver tried to find words for the way horror changes the hard-wiring in your psyche.

  “Millions — not thousands, millions — of bright men and women were killed in the First World War, millions more were wounded or shell-shocked. What would Europe and North America be like now, I wonder, if that hadn’t happened? And then just twenty-one years later, when the survivors’ kids were old enough to enlist, the Second World War started. Two generations of excellent brainpower lost or twisted, or stunted and blunted, is it any wonder the world is such a mess?”

  They did not make love.

  The old couple adored Oliver and the way he cared for their orphan waitress. No matter what time they returned to the tavérna, a meal and wine were waiting, and of course rakí.

  Spring warmed into summer, and still Theía Adonia said she was not well enough to receive Cally. Every weekend now, the old couple’s daughter and her family arrived to take over cooking and serving at the tavérna. The old man appeared to be fit again, stoking his bread oven every morning, weeding and watering his garden, then sitting on a chair outside the kitchen, reading his newspaper. He and his wife must be pushing eighty, however, so once the children finished school, their daughter would leave her store in the city to spend the summer here. Cally would no longer be needed.

  She had known this was coming, that one of these days the world beyond the gorge would reach out for her. During the long days of the following week, sweeping the patio after the lunch crowd, using her fledgling German to take orders, hearing herself try to explain to English tourists what she was doing here, her mind began to tick over. She would be sorry to leave the peace and safety of her little room here, and the old couple, but the truth was that she’d had enough of tourists. Her journal was filling, her grandmother’s voice in it becoming stronger. When she was free, she liked to read what she had so far, imagining her mother as a toddler up in Geratti. A finished life is free to take its place in a story much bigger than its own, and now the emotional void she had always felt with her mother, and the pain and confusion with which she had filled it, was shrinking against the vibrant verbal landscape she was painting of her grandmother.

  The canvas was not finished, however. It was time to leave the tavérna, but not to go home. Theía Adonia had more to say, the jutting jaw had told her that, but a ninety-eight-year-old memory is delicate, capricious, reliable as bone marrow, and just as inaccessible.

  By the following weekend the river was waist high. They could wade through to the sandbar. When they reached it, she pulled Oliver up the path to the cave she had sheltered in the day of the sirocco. Why couldn’t she live there for awhile? The cave would be cool, and police patrols probably would not come back this far. She had a camp stove and a sleeping bag and could buy a foamy. Could she borrow one of Oliver’s pots?

  “You think you can survive here?”

  “Why not, if you help me. Will you?”

  He looked her over, as if appraising her cut-off jeans, her wild, tied-back hair.

  “Only if you promise to wear your mauve-and-green ‘dry clean only’ sundress, the one you had on that first night in Yannis’ fish restaurant.”

  She laughed.

  “I can’t. You ruined it, remember?”

  “Only because you were trying to be some kind of coquettish package—”

  She took a swipe at him. “Was not!”

  “And I wanted so much to open it, to see what was inside.”

  “So you left.”

  “And next thing I know there you are at the dance club—”

  “You didn’t have to dance with me.”

  “I would have danced all night—”

  “But instead you opted for a cold swim.”

  “So I’m floating out there all alone, and guess who shows up yet again? And I am the picture of restraint.”

  “You tried to throw me into the sea! And I was so sick.”

  “So, so sick.”

  xiii

  She got up at dawn every morning and, stowing her camping gear out of sight at the back of the cave, did yoga stretches on the sandbar — the cat, the cobra, a sitting twist, the warrior.

  “Hello, arms. How are you, legs?” They were covered with honey-coloured hairs, so soft. She began to hum and then to sway, humming her own accompaniment. A belly-dancing class she and Slee had once taken came to her. Hadn’t the teacher said belly dancing was invented somewhere over here? Figure eights, hips swinging out to one side, then the other. Belly dancing, according to the teacher, was communication between women, a celebration of female sensuality, the moves acting out enticement, courtship, marriage, carrying, birthing, holding, feeding, loving, moulding. Practicing the steps she remembered, she made up the rest. And thought of the Cretan, Aphrodite.

  “Was it your idea to make us forget to use a condom?” Cally asked her.

  She bathed naked in the river with the birds before the busloads of tourists descended the Preveli cliff paths, and before tour boats chugged in to lower ladders, disgorging bathers onto the beach. The river’s water slowed, widening the sandbar. Sometimes she took her towel around to lie on a smaller, hidden sandbar behind the boulders that had made the chute. The movements, whistles, and whisperings that come alive when humans do not intrude soon joined her.

  Living removed, at the back of the gorge, she stopped dressing. A costume, that’s all clothes were, a way of saying “look at how beautiful or alluring or successful I am.” Criticized, moisturized, never sleek enough or pink enough or good enough in the life she had left, now the skin on her arms and legs was flaking from too much sun. There were, however, no tan lines, because what was better, on a perfect morning, than the sun and breeze on your breasts and stomach and thighs? To feel a joy that, ironically, her grandmother would not have known, in her day.

  “Oh?” came the voice from her diary. “And how would you know that?”

  She laughed, thinking of the day at the river when her mother had been conceived. Maybe they took all afternoon. Her mother, a child born of natural, luxurious love.

  The few intrepid walkers who ventured this far upstream sometimes saw her. They smiled — there were nudist beaches all over Crete — but she did not allow eye contact. When a young woman joined her on the sandbar one morning, shedding her T-shirt and shorts and trying to make conversation, Cally wanted to leap away like Billy, to escape. Instead she kept still, silent. Glancing repeatedly at her watch, the woman soon dressed again and went away.

  At midday the sun became fierce, turning the gorge rocks into an oven. She decided to go down to the beach, to cool off in the sea. She got out her bathing suit and tried to pull a brush through her hair. Such a tangled mess, always. If she had scissors she would cut it all off. Or shave it, like Oliver. Would have hair under her arms and on her legs, but none on her head. She twisted her hair into a knot and stuffed it under a frayed baseball cap Oliver had given her.

  Ten minutes later she was standing in the shade of the tamarisk trees by the cliff, at the top of the beach. Sun chaises and umbrellas were lined up in rows across the sand, bodies lying, running, diving, splashing, calling, laughing, squalling, lashing out in English and Slavic and German, crossing the river shallows balan
cing pop and beer and bags of chips from the concession stand near the cliff stairs. She fled.

  Early the next morning, she went back to the beach to climb the headland and, sitting in her carved-out boulder seat, tried to work out where, exactly, her grandmother had hidden — right here! — the night of Robert’s escape, just after their lovemaking. The only sounds were of wind and waves and the tinkle of bells in the meadow behind the ridge above her.

  She returned the next day and the day after that, exploring paths up over the ridge. Bees filled their leg pouches from tiny white thyme flowers, mauve-tinged marjoram, lavender, chamomile, rose. She gathered oranges lemons and hórta, watching always for shepherds, farmers, children, police. Then, late in the day when boats and buses had removed the tourists, she climbed back down the headland to run on tiptoe across the sizzling sand into the evening sea.

  Sometimes she stayed on, lying on the beach to watch the stars that, in a night unpolluted by human lights, massed into great bands across the blue-black Mediterranean sky. Venus hovered just above the horizon and there, near the moon, was Mars, her consort.

  If the moon governed a woman’s tides, Cally wondered, what did the other planets do? Sumerians, Babylonians, Minoans, Egyptians, Greek, and Roman physicians studying the heavens had determined that each one’s energy had power over humans. They were right. Aphrodite, a.k.a. Venus, was right here inside her breasts, her groin. Who needed a Hubble telescope to know that?

  She washed her hair in the river then spent all morning brushing out the tangles. When he visited, Oliver would park his motorbike at the top of the cliff stairs. She had one sundress left over from the cruise, which she had worn once or twice to serve dinner on special occasions at the tavérna. In the evenings now she put it on and sat on the beach to watch the sunset. When finally he arrived, he had a leg of lamb and potatoes, wine, and a grill. After darkness precluded the possibility of police, he laid a fire outside the cave.

  Sitting with him afterwards, her suntanned body tingling under her dress, her cheeks and hands wet with grease, her tummy full, she wanted nothing more than this moment in time and space, that it might wrap her in itself.

  Two nights later, the waves were high. He showed her how to paddle forward onto a crest at just the right moment, then bodysurf into the beach. Concentrating, missing one wave, then another, she did not see him ride in ahead of her. When finally she caught the crest and surfed in, he was sitting in the foam at the water’s edge, waiting to catch hold of her hand, to anchor her against the undercurrent. She did not think. Sliding into his lap, wrapping her legs around him was as natural as the rhythm of the waves.

  After that they made love wherever, whenever it came upon them, sometimes excruciatingly slowly with great care, other times urgently, no consent required, up on the headland or in the cave or on the beach, unhindered nature unfolding.

  Oliver visited more and more frequently, always returning to the cave with water, vegetables, fruit, meat, wine, and a stack of books for her from the library. Considerate and solicitous, he could also be moody, given to long silences, but she did not mind. Moods were weather, sunny with cloudy periods, wind or tropical storm or frost warning.

  Whenever he left, she did not ask him where he was going or for how long. She was here, that’s all, and the world outside this gorge did not belong within it. Always though, on seeing him again, she found that she could not wait to surrender, to feel the thrust that, filling them both, painted her colours.

  The sun grew fiercer, baking the sandbar, reducing the river to a dribble. Its heat, reflecting off the cliffs, turned the cave into an oven. She thought of her grandmother.

  This was the time of year when you found Grampa, by the road up in Myrthios. How you must have sweated up there! Callisto would have been used to it, but for Robert, from Scotland, what a torture. How doubly sweet that afternoon in the river.

  She moved her bed outside, but when Oliver was with her and no one was patrolling the beach, they often spread his picnic rug on the sand to catch night breezes off the sea.

  Very little money will go a long way when you eat mainly rice and local tomatoes, potatoes, onions, oranges, lemons and strawberries, and juicy purple figs. Did she ever pine for a cheeseburger, fries, and a Coke? With sweat dripping off the end of her nose, did she dream of an air-conditioned movie theatre, a bag of buttered popcorn? A night out, eating and drinking and laughing with Slee? Of course she did. But these possibilities now lived in the same memory file as the home she had lost. This gorge and this beach and Oliver, the air and rock and sea, and the books Oliver brought were all that she needed. Other than the story Theía Adonia still refused to tell.

  Any day now, however, what little money she had would run out. If she went on living here, Oliver would have to support her. The nights would eventually grow cold. The cave and gorge rocks would become wet with rain, the future a guillotine suspended, waiting.

  xiv

  There was nothing left to do but force a meeting. Armed with chocolate croissants from the Plakias bakery, she begged Georgia to let her visit Theía Adonia for just a few minutes.

  “I just want to ask one question. If my grandmother Callisto survived the war, how did she die?”

  The room was stuffy, summer’s heat trapped in its dimness, and the old lady was not pleased to see her. Her fingers, knobbed by arthritis, ran back and forth over the tablecloth in front of her as if there were crumbs on it, her sightless eyes fixed on the wall as Georgia translated.

  “She left, took the little girl on the boat to Athens. That’s all I can tell you.” Her voice went up an octave, the words coming faster. “So we thought everything was fine, why wouldn’t we? She was happy, Little Callisto was excited. Why wouldn’t we think they were fine?”

  Georgia poured the coffee and put Cally’s offering on a plate in front of her great-aunt.

  “Here, Theía, Cally has brought you a chocolate treat.”

  Adonia ignored her, muttering. “Why wouldn’t we?” Her eyes were closed, her jaw jutting, a stubborn bulwark, her head shaking away both the question and its answer.

  Georgia stood up, shrugging apologetically, but Cally could not bring herself to leave.

  “Just one last thing. Can you ask if she ever heard of my grandfather again? Did he come back to Geratti?” There must be something else, some way to at least guess the rest. She had come so far.

  Georgia put the question, but the old lady’s lips were zippered shut, her sightless eyes obstinate.

  Cally reached across the table to take her hand.

  “Parakaló.” Please.

  The old lady pulled away and began spitting invective. Georgia started talking to her as, startled, Cally stood up.

  “Please tell her thank you, from the bottom of my heart. What she has given me is a great treasure.” Whatever more there was, here in the shadows, was beyond reach. “And if ever she would like it, I would love to come back.”

  Listening to Georgia’s translation, the old lady’s eyes flicked toward Cally then away.

  “Why?” Rancour rising. “What more does she want?” Her chin wobbled. “The past is dead.”

  She started toward the door, embarrassed.

  Adonia went on talking. It sounded like more complaint but, lifting a hand, the old lady was pointing toward her bed.

  Georgia knelt to pull a locked wooden box out from under it. Thick dust and cobwebs clinging to the edge of its lid told them it had not been touched in many years. The old lady went on talking. Georgia got up to look into her dresser drawer, found a key and opened the box. It was full of papers, a few ancient photographs, a Bible, some letters. Under them was a small leather-bound diary.

  “Maybe that will satisfy her.” Adonia pointed to Cally.

  Tucked inside the first page of writing were two creased black and white snapshots, taken inside the same courtyard she had seen in the photograph she had found at Preveli. The light in the room was very low, but still it was clear that this w
as the same girl, with an older woman in the first shot. Auntie Ioanna? In the second one she was holding the hand of a little girl, both of them smiling.

  III

  1945

  i

  The words were packed tight across the pages, to save space probably, the ink so faded in places it was barely discernible, but the voice! Cally could hear her grandmother’s enthusiasm, her rage at the sheep thief, her enthrallment with the Scottish soldier on the mountainside. Sitting on the sandbar, a plane tree on the river bank whispering in a breeze off the sea, she read the diary over and over:

  “They don’t think much of academics here, even Uncle, who is a school teacher. The other day when we were arguing, he said girls should stay home, where their families need them. This because girls everywhere are rising up, forming groups to spread the Allied news and bring food and medicine to poor children throughout these mountains. You don’t need muscles or a gun (or a penis) for that! And girls have always been good with their brains, I argued, look at the great fourth-century mathematician philosopher Hypatia. He turned away, mumbling, and that’s how I knew that he had never heard of her — even though she was Greek! If he had, he could have said she was a case in point, that if she had not been riding around Alexandria, teaching and trading ideas with the rich and powerful, she would have been safe. I used to think her hideous torture and murder by Christian zealots fifteen hundred years ago was the result of a lower kind of human, but now, with these Nazi goon squads made of Cretan criminals brutalizing villagers, I have to wonder. I used to think I knew quite a lot. I have always loved to study, but now I see that I don’t know anything at all …”

  Cally looked up at the plane tree, thinking of last fall’s attack, by Muslim terrorists, on New York’s World Trade Centre. How right you are, Callisto.

  “Robert wants me to meet him one last time in the valley. There is a ruin there, he says. I have never been that far below these mountains, but how I want to go, to be with him, closer than close. I would do anything, that’s how sure I am …”