by Jane Bow
“I have exactly four days.” Slee looked at her friend. “From what you told me on the phone, I thought I better get over here. We’ve got a lot to talk about, but look at you! Whatever the hell you’ve been doing, kiddo, it suits you.”
Cally’s jean cut-offs had not seen a washing machine anytime lately — washing machine tariffs here were outrageous — and fine, sun-gold hair covered her legs. Her hair, pulled back in a ponytail, was damp and full of salt from her morning swim, her skin already covered in a film of sweat in the early September heat. Slee had always made her feel as if she were in second place, running always to catch up, when it came to fashion. Now all she could do was laugh.
The hotel restaurant was air-conditioned. The first thing Slee did was slide an envelope across the table.
“God only knows what shape your credit card bills are in, but you are going to need money. Call it a loan.”
She felt the thickness of bills.
“There’s two thousand dollars.” Slee picked up her menu. “You can repay me when you come back down to planet earth. In the meantime, I have eaten nothing since the plane.”
Salads, a carafe of wine, souvláki-in-a-pita, another carafe of wine, complimentary pastries, shots of rakí, cups of coffee. By the time they were finished Slee had heard every nuance of the last four months. Watching her lift her glass as she listened, one eye checking the perimeter always, Cally marvelled that her oldest and dearest friend was right here in the chair opposite. Slee may be a wife and the mother of two children now, but still she had the ability to place herself wherever she was, whole and concentrated, as if no other world existed. Cally finished with the story Adonia had told about her grandmother Callisto, how the last part was missing. If only there was a way to pry open the calcified fortifications of the old lady’s memory.
“But—” Cally had been talking for a long, long time. Dear Slee. “You didn’t come all this way to sit inside. Come on.”
She waited for Slee to put on a bikini then took her to Oliver’s room across the road from the beach. Slee stood looking at the book towers on the floor, the jumble of CDs, piles of clothes.
“He’s in the middle of packing.” Cally picked up her stained, dusty, and overflowing knapsack. “I’ve been mostly living out of this for months now, and you know what?” She grinned at Slee. “It’s all I need.” She lifted her T-shirt, lowered her shorts proudly. “See? No tan lines.”
The wind was no longer whipping the beach sand into stinging needles. She showed Slee the beached dinghy where she had hidden Oliver’s clothes on that long-ago night, then they floated in the sea, two disembodied heads still talking, talking. The sun was beginning its descent toward the Dragon’s Head when new hunger drove them back across the beach, towels wrapped around their waists, to the bakery beside the fruit and vegetable store.
“You need to taste the finest baklava on the planet.”
“Kalispéra, ladies.” The baker, a portly fellow who had spent a teenaged summer twenty-five years ago working in the United States, liked to practice his English on Cally. “You are taken, I know.” He turned his deer-brown eyes to Slee. “But you! How are you?”
Slee flashed him a smile.
“Very happily married, thanks.”
They sat on a stone wall across the road eating out of the bakery box, drinking cold lemonade, laughing as the honey dripping off their elbows smeared on their stomachs when they tried to wipe it, but Cally noticed new tension underlying her friend’s practiced veneer. Lines had sprouted at the outer edges of Slee’s blue eyes. Divested of power suits and legal arguments, sitting nearly naked, dribbling honey in the sun, she showed her vulnerabilities.
“Come on!” Cally stuffed the remainder of her baklava into her mouth, “Let’s get clean.” Half an hour later Oliver found them back in the sea, their bikinis flung up onto the sand at the water’s edge. He stripped off his shorts and T-shirt and dove through the waves.
“Now here is a man I can fall in love with!” said Slee.
Slee’s being in Crete was like a thread drawing Cally back across the Atlantic to skirts and steaks and television, nylons and heels, clock watching, decisions. She wanted none of it, but the choice was non-negotiable.
Oliver must get a lawyer, someone with experience in desertion cases, Slee said. Someone good, because since 9/11, “it’s Us against Them, and if you ain’t with Us …”
Catching any kind of a break was out of the question. Someone from New York City was his best bet. She looked at her watch and started punching numbers into her cell phone.
“And what about you?” They were sitting over breakfast in the hotel restaurant, the blue-green sea breaking across the road. “If Oliver’s going to New York to turn himself in — and by the way, he should lose the fake passport as soon as he clears customs — why don’t you drop in on your buddy Gordon Sinclair at EO?”
Cally was sipping freshly squeezed orange juice, a luxury she would soon not be able to afford. It turned bitter in her mouth.
“You were his first choice four months ago,” Slee went on. “The best defence is always a good offence and he did try to play you—”
“No.” There was no road back to the life she had abandoned.
“What then? What’ll you do?” Slee grinned. “Maybe you should start your own company. Make condoms. Call them Aphrodite’s Gift.” Her cell phone jangled. She listened, talked, thanked the person on the other end, hung up, and smiled. “Wheels are in motion.”
A juggernaut waited to chew them up. She could not bear to think about it. Tomorrow afternoon, she and Oliver would marry. She stood up. Today she would show her Cretan life to Slee. They would drive Slee’s rental car to the ruin beyond the arched bridge so she could envision the story of Cally’s grandfather’s escape and meet the place where he had loved her grandmother, Callisto. They would drive up behind the Kourtaliotis Gorge to the little village of Geratti, where Callisto had been sent to live with her uncle and aunt, where she had got to know Grampa MacIntyre and taught the women and girls to read, where her own mother had spent her first years. Like the rest of Crete, Geratti had a war memorial opposite the church. She would bring some flowers to lay on it. They would finish the day at Preveli. She would show Slee the monastery, the headland, her cave, and the sandbar, and then after the tourists left, they would run through the late afternoon surf into the sea before Brother Paul, Oliver, Yannis, and Georgia arrived to rehearse the ceremony Brother Paul had cobbled together.
Yannis would stand up for Oliver. Georgia and Slee would be mismatched bridesmaids. After the rehearsal, all of them repaired to the old couple’s tavérna by the arched bridge for dinner, except Brother Paul, who was a cloistered monk and said he needed to spend the rest of the day praying for the crazy couple he and St. Paul were about to launch. Sitting there in one of her old silk summer dresses, toasting the old couple who, delighted with the news, brought out course after course and bottle after bottle, Cally watched her closest and oldest friend laugh and kibitz with Oliver and the others across the table as her past and this present came together. New, solid, whatever the future held, this was the home of her happiness.
“A few people might show up tomorrow,” Yannis warned them. “We’d better put out some of those sun chaises.”
xiv
The picture they had prepared for was of Oliver, looking strange and handsome in a new blue suit they had bought in Rethymnon, his curls long enough, thank Heavens, to brush, waiting with Yannis at the bottom of the ramp up to the altar they had built below the cave. Wrecks, on a leash held by Yannis, would wear a blue bow on his collar. In Cretan tradition, Oliver would be holding Cally’s bouquet of white heliotrope.
“Heliotrope for luck,” Georgia told her. “Theía Adonia said it must be so.”
Behind the altar platform, a wooden trellis had been decorated with ribbons and delicate pink and white sprigs of oleander. In the foreground were the two pots of hibiscus, heavy with yellow and red blooms now, from
the patio of the tavérna by the arched bridge.
“We’d go there for lunch while we were doing the building,” Oliver told her. “When they heard about the wedding they insisted we borrow them. So we put them into a wheelbarrow and brought them down the riverbed.”
Dressed in Georgia’s floor-length ivory gown with pearls beaded into the bodice, Cally was to walk across the beach to the altar with Slee, Georgia, and little Sofia. Planks had been laid across the trickle that was all that remained of the river. Her feet would be bare.
“No!” Georgia was appalled, “Not on your wedding day! We must find some white sandals—”
Not on sand. She was adamant. The dress represented the custom of marriage. Bare feet represented who she was.
They were coming down the cliff stairs to start the proceedings when a tourist boat rounded the point.
How many times during the summer had she watched from the headland as this boat drew into the shallows, lowering a ladder out the back so that holidaymakers carrying blankets and towels and hampers and radios could skip through the surf? Surely it was too late in the day though—?
“Callisto! Oliver!” The boat’s throng of passengers was waving, calling.
News travelled with the sun and moon in Crete. By the time they reached the bottom of the stairs, Preveli beach was swarming: mothers, fathers, grandparents, children chasing each other between the rows of sun chaises set in rows in front of the platform.
There was old Theo and his wife from Sougia, “how could we miss such a special moment?”; Leftherio, the shepherd, and his family, “You didn’t say a word, you rat”; the whole crew from Milia; and so many others. The couple from the tavérna by the arched bridge kissed her and Oliver on both cheeks. And look, there ahead of her, Georgia’s sister had just lowered old Adonia into a chair at the end of the front row. Her head swivelled this way and that, trying to identify sounds. Her features were all but swallowed by the folds and wrinkles in a face that had witnessed nearly a century’s parade of births and hopes, terrors and triumphs.
Stopping at the old lady’s chaise, Cally said her name, to warn her, before leaning down to kiss Adonia’s cheek.
“Efcharistó,” she whispered, “for giving me back my family.”
The old lady tensed under her touch, then looked away, her lips a tight line, but quivering.
At the top of the cliff stairs, where once a German searchlight had been mounted, music started, voices raised in what must be a wedding song. Brother Paul, wearing his tall black Greek Orthodox monk’s hat and surrounded by his boys’ choir, descended into the Garden of Eden to conduct this oddest of Cretan weddings. Yannis placed crowns joined by a ribbon on Cally’s and Oliver’s heads and then interchanged them three times when Brother Paul instructed him, bringing to this moment hundreds — maybe even thousands — of years of tradition.
She glanced up to the top of the headland where once long ago her grandmother had lain watching, where every tuft and shrub was glowing now in the same afternoon sunlight that was reaching into St. Paul’s cave. Listening to Brother Paul’s words, she looked along the base of the headland, where her grandfather had waited for the rescue submarine. Imagining them brought them to her.
Yannis had had a grill going all afternoon beside the tables at the concession booth on the other side of the beach, and the guests had brought cheese and olives and fish, salads, and the traditional sweet cinnamon bread. The baker had arrived with an entire batch of baklava. Wines and rakí from every part of the island appeared. Someone had a guitar, someone else a fiddle and a zither, and soon singing and dancing filled a perfect September night.
They dropped Slee at the airport and rented the car for two more days. Cally had thought it was to load their baggage for transport to the airport, but Oliver turned east.
“There’s one last place I want to take you.” He smiled. “Call it our honeymoon.”
At the bottom of a hill in the southeast corner of Crete, the ruins of the Minoan Palace of Zakros lay behind a small bay. Removed from today’s world, fringed by nothing but a line of tavérnas along the beach, the foundation stones of Zakros still vibrated with energy, as if at any moment its walls, archways and workshops would reconstruct themselves, craftsmen’s hammers ringing, the palace storehouses filled with gold. Oliver parked the car outside an empty ticket booth. They had the ruin to themselves.
Thirty-five hundred years ago, some of the finest artists the world has ever seen made gold jewellery with precious stones imported from all over the Middle East. She had seen Zakros’ fabulous alabaster pottery in the museum in Heraklion. Now, late in the afternoon, sleek black-green turtles lay out on the stones, taking in the day’s last warmth through their tummies. Oliver showed her the walkway where the sailors would have carried gold bricks up from the harbour to be melted and graded for quality, the drainage ditches, the houses and banquet hall, imagining with her the world that had existed here, people who had lived and loved and traded. It was not hard, the faces on their clay sculptures, in the museum, were laughing or smiling or frowning comically, all of them so human, full of grace.
When finally they reached the queen’s apartment, Oliver spread the blanket he had brought, and drew her down beside him.
“Imagine this room painted with gold.” He took her ring finger, put it beside his own and looked at them, then at her, his eyes full of the things for which there really aren’t any words. “You are my queen.”
Later, after dinner at a little lopsided table by the sea, they returned to their blanket in the queen’s apartment, and looking up at the night sky, she wondered how many generations had given birth in this room. Until the most enormous tsunami the world has ever known, striking the beach just a few kilometres from here, had wiped out their entire civilization. How fragile was the constellation of energies called a human. She put a hand on her tummy.
Where did the shaping of a life begin? She thought of her grandmother Callisto, of her mother, of herself.
Not simply at birth.
xv
Yannis had taped a note to Oliver’s door.
“Bring Cally please, right away, to Theía Adonia.”
When no one answered her knock, she pushed open the door.
“Georgia?” A new easy chair was pulled up beside the bed. Georgia had obviously been snoozing in it. She jumped up and smoothed her hair. In the bed Adonia looked smaller, and frail, her chest barely moving the sheet. Her eyes were closed, her lower jaw hanging open.
“She has a terrible cough but she will not go to hospital,” said Georgia. “She says they’ll kill her there. And she keeps asking for you, I don’t know why.”
Adonia’s voice came to them, soft as a cat’s paw.
“She recognizes you.” Georgia moved to the bed, obviously following orders and, lifting the old lady, sat down behind her, holding her upright. Adonia turned her head toward where she judged Cally to be, and pointed to the easy chair. She summoned a new breath.
“You are with child?”
“Yes, Theía Adonia.”
The old lady’s eyes closed. Silence stalked the room. Neither Cally nor Georgia moved until finally the wisp of Adonia’s voice started. Leaning close, Georgia translated.
“You were right. There is a little more.” The old lady’s chin wobbled. “And I cannot go to God without telling you.”
IV
1946
i
Day and night, booted footsteps sound in the street below. Doors are knocked on then flung open. There is screaming, crying. Waiting for Robert, praying daily that he will find them, Callisto rarely goes out, tries to shield little Callisto by reading her stories. They are deep inside The Secret Garden when the footsteps come up their stairs.
Shielding Little Callisto with her body, she explains that she is waiting for her husband, a British soldier.
“Sure, sure, missy.” The thug-leader laughs. “And I’m the new King of Greece.” He takes her roughly by the arm. “We know who you
are.”
Callisto jerks out of his grasp, picks up her little daughter, and tries to stand tall. Her parents were founders of Greece’s resistance movement, her father the right-hand man of a previous prime minister, and Robert is British. Her job is to hang on.
Through the next weeks, packed into a stinking, windowless stone cell with dozens of others, she holds Little Callisto close to give her warmth and mute the screams and the wailing. The women in here were all members of the Greek resistance. The girl sitting on one side of them, about Callisto’s age, spent the war years walking into the mountains north of the city with medicine. On the other side, an older woman tells her she shot three Germans during the battle of Crete. But rape, beatings, and torture stalk these halls. Each day women are removed. If they come back, they are bent double, bleeding. Dying. Because they will not sign a form called a Declaration of Repentance. Repentance for what? None of it makes sense.
Weeks pass. Callisto tries to not to draw attention. Robert will come for them. Again and again she repeats it, like a mantra.
When finally her name is called, she is forced to leave her little girl with the women beside her. Little Callisto cries out for her. The sound follows her down the hall.
In the warden’s office the window is open. A breeze quivering through the leaves of a tree, brown with dust in the street outside, comes in to stroke her arm. A sparrow lands on a branch, looks around, and flies off. Callisto refuses to cry.
“Sign this declaration, and you will go free.” A man in the khaki uniform of a petty-rank officer hands her a pen.
According to the Declaration of Repentance, everything she has done for her country during five years of war against the Nazis is treasonous. Her father, a founder of EAM, was a criminal.
This is madness. Not a mistake. The tiny cranny in her mind that has been clinging to that hope gives it up. She looks into the officer’s eyes.