by Jane Bow
“A real bed!” She sank onto it.
“There’ll be time enough for that later,” said Oliver. “Let’s catch the afternoon light.”
A path through a canopy of the chestnut trees took them over a little bridge at the top of the ravine then out onto the mountainside opposite. Soon they were looking down on Milia, a silent, dream-world Shangri-La. High above it, near where the two mountains came together, goats were grazing. Further up the ridge, they could see range after range of the White Mountains they had just driven through. The breeze cooled her skin, riffled her hair. Oliver took her hand and stood looking.
Fresh arugula, more carrots, the sweetest leftover chestnut and onion and tomato and potato stew she had ever tasted, a loaf of fresh bread: this must be the top of the world.
There was a whole shelf of wine bottles. They selected one and carried two glasses back to the terrace outside their room to watch the sun’s last hurrah tint the few breaths of cloud above the mountain opposite.
Hot running water, what a divine luxury it was after so many months! She stood under the nozzle, let the water beat onto her scalp, shoulders, and back. It made the stone gleam. She ran her hand over its unevenness, tracing the white striations of quartz through its metallic black.
The bathroom door opened, ushering in a draft. With it came Oliver.
“I thought we could save water.”
When they emerged from the cloud of steam, wrapped in towels, he handed her a glass of wine. Taking a blanket off the bed, they sat close together on it in front of the fire. The bed was waiting. When their wine was gone, she would move up to it and he would kneel between her legs in this firelight, his chest against the inside of her thighs, his mouth looking for the breasts he had just washed.
If heaven was anything like this, she decided, she might have to get serious about God.
Oliver listed all the things he had built at Milia and told the story of his friends’ struggle through funding and government and real estate red tape — sometimes with nothing more than their own vegetables to live on — and how the dream was finally beginning to take on life.
A goal, a plan, lots of drive, hard work: she understood these. The world beyond her gorge was waiting whenever she was ready to discover what her dream was and how it would play out. Sipping her wine, the fire’s heat bathing her face, she leaned into his shoulder.
“I wonder what we’ll do.”
The firelight winked, wavered, threw up a miniature shower of sparks.
Oliver said nothing for awhile. Then: “One day at a time, okay?”
“I wish.” She sighed.
“What?” His tension, sharp as a jackal, startled her. “What do you wish?”
“Well, it’s like the story you’ve just been telling me, if you want to make something, you have to have a plan—”
“Why? What plan? Whose?”
The floor under the rug was stone but still she felt it give.
“You just can’t let go, can you?” He put his glass down. “Even here.”
“Let go?” What else had she been doing all these months? “I was just wondering about the future—”
“See, that’s the trouble with people like you.” He got up, retrieved his pants from the bed. “What could be more beautiful than this place, right here, right now, but oh no, you always have to be on your way to someplace else—”
“‘People like me?’”
“—so you can eat and drink and breathe according to your plan.” The Marines tattoo on his bicep caught the firelight as he tossed her clothes aside, looking for his T-shirt. “I should have known—”
“What?” Now she was on her feet too.
He looked at her in the flickering light as if she were a stranger.
“I was doing fine,” he said, “getting along, living my life—”
“Yeah?” She picked up the blanket, clutched it around her. She had had enough. “Well news flash: so was I. I took myself to Preveli, remember?” Her fury was clear as a stream. No a waterfall, a high mountain one, cold as a knife blade. “And I do not recall inviting you—”
“You didn’t have to, you knew I’d come.” Dressed now, he looked around.
“What?” He believed she had been manipulating him all along? “Go to hell, Oliver.”
He found what he was looking for, the room’s emergency flashlight, then opened the door and was gone.
Night up here was absolute, the darkness broken only by the stars. There was no moon. A nearby branch, jiggled by the night breeze, brushed against the window as she watched the beam of his light move down the path, away from her. Behind her the fire crackled as she tried to replay what had happened.
Inspired by the Milia story, she had just wanted to talk about how they, too, could make a future—
But it had happened so fast. Almost as if he had wanted it to. Like last night in Sougia, when she had dared to suggest that people had choice, and he had stormed off, leaving her to eat alone. As if somehow his upset was her fault.
How easy to believe that. But he was the one who was fucked up, who could not handle life beyond the Kourtaliotis Gorge.
“Get over yourself, man!” It felt good to shout. She should do more of it. “Get a life, why don’t you!”
She had been warned, by the people who knew him best.
Yannis: “Do not dance with that man.”
Brother Paul: “So, you know what you’re getting into?”
She got into the bed.
“People like you …” The words still stung. He did not like her. He would not leave her here though, could not drive back down that mountain in the dark, back to his perfectly isolated existence, even if he wanted to.
Lying in the bed, listening through the night play of the branches against the window for his footfall, her every nerve twitched: waiting, hoping, fearing.
A familiar place, this. How many childhood nights had she spent in bed, listening as downstairs her father and mother, or Sam and her mother fought. So much anger venting.
Anger and fear. She had seen the tremor in Oliver’s arm as he reached for his pants on the bed. The two were connected — his silences and now these explosions. They were protecting the wound of his desertion. He had rejected, and been rejected by, the world in which futures were built. Thoughtlessly, flush with love, she had tried to draw him back into that place.
She turned over, tried to find comfort. The branch scratched at the window.
What had her mother been so afraid of, and why had she and Johnny been exempted from the resulting anger? Sam was the most like their mother, and in the two years before her mother had met her father, her mother had been on her own with Sam. When he entered adolescence, had his devil-may-care attitude struck buried chords that she could not contain? Just as Cally had done with Oliver.
Tears of mourning fell slowly.
Glowing embers were all that remained of the fire when the door opened. She did not move. Oliver’s body folded itself around her, his hands, legs, feet bringing her the earth-cold smell of the night.
Confusing, contradictory. Irresistible, but not okay.
vi
Wrecks must have heard Esmee come through the Kourtaliotis Gorge. Yannis said his ears had pricked up and he had been pacing the road outside the restaurant for the better part of an hour. By the time they rattled to a stop, he was frantic, trying to leap into Oliver’s lap the moment the bike came to a halt.
“Easy, boy.” Oliver picked him up, let the little dog put his paws up on his shoulders to cover his stubble with kisses.
It seemed much more than a few days since they had hauled their belongings up the cliff stairs. Summer heat had reduced the river to a trickle. Even the tough little shrubs were wilting. Pink and white oleander blooms on the riverbanks still flounced like blowsy ballet dancers on fits of wind that snuck into the gorge though, and the cave, tucked away in the shade, felt like home, protected from any world but the one they made themselves.
Oliver
put away the battery lantern, the cooking pot, the bags of oranges and tomatoes they had bought from the old couple at the tavérna. She peeled back the tinfoil Yannis had wrapped around the Styrofoam plates of chicken souvláki he had insisted they take with them for dinner.
Everyone has unresolved baggage that has to be unpacked and sorted, she told herself. Wasn’t that why she was here? And the suitcases were open now. So leave Oliver alone, go with the flow of the sea and the moon and his touch here on the sand where nothing but each moment was real.
Sunlight had not yet started inching down the cliff across the river when she awoke. As she stretched, a stirring of nausea gave her news she understood immediately.
Oliver was still asleep. Down at the river, she lay in water that was no deeper than the width of her body now and imagined his sperm, thousands of them, swimming inside her. Until one, this one, had found her egg and embedded itself, new cells splitting, then splitting again and again, creating a new person.
Such joy. She looked up at the white morning sky. Her grandmother had felt like this. How different from that faraway day when she had fled from Oliver’s room in Plakias. In that life, to have a baby — to interrupt her plans — had been untenable, unthinkable. But since Oliver’s return to her, neither of them had mentioned birth control. Now, as the river’s cool water ran over her stomach, down her sides, into the small of her back, she wondered if the reason was that subconsciously she had wanted this. Maybe Oliver was right, the real reason she had come back from Athens was to be with him. To become pregnant naturally, like her mother and grandmother. To make a baby out of love.
Her stomach lurched. Fear. But there was no need, surely. Oliver, too, must have wanted this, must have been aware of the possibility during all these weeks.
Their bed in the cave smelled of the pine boughs that underlay the sleeping bag. Her tummy churning now with nervousness, she dusted his cheek with an eyelash, watched him waken, and whispered the news.
He blinked once, twice, pulled his head back to look at her. A century passed, squalls passing back and forth across his face until, finally, it opened into a smile.
Up on the headland she told her grandmother and her mother and the sky. When she came back, Oliver and Wrecks were gone.
To buy something they needed?
There was plenty of tea, rice, still half a leg of lamb, a bag of oranges. The plastic water drum was nearly full.
A bottle of champagne to celebrate? One glass wouldn’t hurt the baby. And a chicken to roast, maybe. Red meat was bad, wasn’t it?
The sun had long since sunk behind the cliff top when finally she accepted the fact that he was gone. Of course he was.
“What the hell did you expect, asshole,” she shouted, “when you make love day and night? You could at least have had the guts to talk about it.” She picked up a stone, hurled it at the cliff beside her cave. Its force dislodged a shower of chips, but rage offered bleak comfort.
And what else could she have expected? He was a rolling stone, a nameless, stateless criminal. He’d told her that. The choice, and this baby, were hers. She need not be ruled by anything other than this.
Losing love, however, was another death, loneliness gnawing.
vii
Shallow, thin as a stream, the river dawdled between the rocks. She had a thorough wash, including her hair, sheathed her body in the blue and white sarong Oliver had bought her, and then packing her journal and a bottle of water into her knapsack, splashed up the river into the gorge. She would hike up the valley behind it to the ruin where her grandmother had found her grandfather, where love had created that other love baby, her mother, in 1941.
The valley was tawny brown, the flowers and grass long dead, the evergreens covered in dust. At the back of the ruin, near the covered room there was a fig tree. Had it been there, growing up out of the ruined rock walls, sixty-one years ago? No one had harvested the figs. She sat in its shade, the sweetness of the sun-warmed fig meat an elixir. How tough but soft was a fig’s deep purple skin, a hide almost, protecting its juicy innards from the sun. In her head she replayed the drama of her grandparents’ story, the characters as alive to her, in this silent landscape, as she was. And realized that with Oliver, she too had known the power of that kind of love. His absence felt like amputation, but wherever he was, whatever their future held, she was his woman and he was her man, and he knew that as deeply as she did. He would not just abandon her.
A white butterfly flew by. Light, airy, free, it would only be alive today.
Was free love like that? Maybe it simply could not stand up to the outside world, must be contained behind a bamboo curtain or in a wild gorge. She leaned her head back against the rock wall and thought of her mother. Maybe only closed, hard-shelled beetle love had any future in a world where over and over and over again people raged and raped and killed.
What would Brother Paul have to say about this baby? They were not married, did not go to church. Go home, he would tell her.
No, she would stay right here. Women since the beginning of time had birthed and nursed and raised and loved their babies among these mountains. She could turn her sarong into a papoose so this baby would know where he or she came from—
A sun-baked valley, ripe with dreaming, can so easily seduce. Be careful, warned her mind. Heat kills.
The river felt cool on her feet going home. Tonight she and the baby she was making would go for a swim.
She spent her mornings on the headland among the low prickly evergreens and the curling stems of the caterpillar weed’s toughly beautiful little white flowers. Earlier in the summer, Oliver had brought her a book about Cretan flowers and she had set about learning their names and stories. Now, reaching to one side, she stroked the lovely purple whorls of a low shrub called a chaste tree, thought to be an aphrodisiac but only for women. How ironic. Its alternate name was monk’s pepper.
Scantily clad northern Europeans, their boiled-lobster backsides glistening with sun lotion, clambered down the Preveli cliff stairs to bake themselves on the beach. She closed her eyes, tried to fit herself into the great play of air and sun and land and sea, to hear it speak through the flow of her blood, the play of her nerves, to bring its strength into her cells. It was so hot, though. Even the beetles had taken shelter.
A snail, beautifully patterned in beige-and-brown swirls, must have spent the night under the bush beside her. Now it came out of its shell to inch through the dirt, its eye-stalks questing in every direction, checking for danger as it sought what was left of the night’s dew.
You’re right, snail, she admitted to it at the end of a week. We have to do whatever it takes to survive. If she was to have this baby she would need safety, a home, a doctor who spoke English, electricity.
She would have to go home.
Her father would be enraged, but he would help her, let her stay with him until she got her feet under her. When they had had dinner after the funeral, he had mentioned a new woman in his life. She would not stay any longer than she had to. She saw the city, cars, highways, concrete, and could not bear to think about it.
If only Oliver could have found it within himself—
“If only.” Such a dead end path, strewn with the bones of wishes.
On the way back from Milia, they had stopped at a place by the road where steps led up a steep mountainside, through fig and pine trees to an enormous hidden cave called Agía Sofía. Standing in its mouth, they could see out across the mountains. Swallows played in the air right in front of them. Behind them stalagmites were thick as pillars, very old. Six or seven thousand years ago, Neolithic men, women, children had taken refuge here. One of the corners of the cave had been whitewashed. Behind a small altar, gilt-framed pictures of Saint Sofia with her three acolytes, Faith, Hope and Charity, had taken her back to the day in Athens when she had changed the course of her life. Now she closed her eyes.
Please, Saint Sofia, I really need your help now.
Aphrodite doesn�
�t let just anyone know her son Eros. Humans must perform impossible tasks: sorting seeds too small for a human fingers to separate; taking the golden fleece from the angry ram; bringing a cup full of water down from the top of a mountain too high to scale; navigating the underworld’s River Styx to bring Aphrodite her sacred box first. None of this can be done without help. Finally however, when she has been mollified, the great goddess of love allows Eros to marry his human.
viii
She was cooling herself in the sea under a translucent red sunset, wondering if she had the energy to walk over the headland to the bus stop beside the arched bridge, and then through the thronging streets of Rethymnon’s market, when she spotted movement high on the cliff stairs. Gone almost before she could recognize it.
Partying kids and lovers seeking privacy rarely came down here. Was it the police? It was not hard, from such a height, to see a body lying in the water.
The movement reappeared and was gone again, round one of the stairway’s bends. She rolled over and swam for shore, crossed the sand to wrap herself in her towel, and retreated into the tamarisks at the top of the beach. Thank God she and Oliver were rigorous about storing their belongings deep in the cave, where no one could see them unless they picked their way up through the rocks. If the person who came out onto the beach was a patrolman or a wacko, all she had to do was run back up the path and hide herself.
She began to tremble as she watched. Refused to acknowledge hope—
Because now she could see a little dog scampering ahead.
Because now the sun, the air, the sea — something — was telling her …
Because she knew precisely how every one of his muscles moved—
Because now, rounding the last bend in the stairs, he was picking his way down through the rocks to the sand.
She stayed where she was.
As soon as he crossed the river shallows he stepped out of his sandals, dropped his knapsack and shorts and walked into the reddening sea. Wrecks ran back and forth, sniffing the day’s human detritus. If Oliver had seen her from above, he must think she had gone back to the cave.