Our house, on a scruffy hillside overlooking the bay, calms me just to be inside the four rooms. The two bedrooms and kitchen—all small—jog off a large main room, with French doors opening to spacious outside terraces that drop abruptly to citrus trees and shrubs. Night wanderers beware. The utter simplicity of the architecture corresponds to the plain furniture, comfortable enough, with chairs draped in bright cotton cloth. The coolness of white marble floors promotes serenity. A white shoebox of a house, but petals of plumbago and bougainvillea blow in the windows and doors, filling the bottom of the bathtub and gathering in pools in the hall. One covered terrace with chairs around a low table becomes my favorite place to read. Ed takes his notebooks to the second bedroom and closes the shutter. He likes to work in semidarkness.
Because our other trip was go, go, go, this time we are going nowhere for at least a week, except on short drives and down to a family beach nearby. We play in the water of a clear cove, sit in the sand, and throw back the kids’ ball when it falls near us. Olive trees grow to the edge of the beach, giving the landscape a timeless appeal. Frothy aqua water, golden sand, a little drink stand under the trees—we stay for hours, floating on rafts out into the horseshoe cove and drifting. The pleasure feels so simple. I can visualize the ventricles of my heart filling with salt and sunlight.
At Irini’s in Horifaki, not far from another beach where much of Kazanzakis’s book Zorba the Greek was filmed, the lamb has been roasted a long time and slakes off the bone in meltingly tender hunks. The waitress takes us back in the kitchen to select what we will eat, and there’s Irini, wrapped in a white apron, rosy cheeks, and a big greeting. She’s yanking huge pans of moussaka out of the oven. We choose lamb, baked chicory stuffed tomatoes, and the ubiquitous Greek salad, which they serve not with crumbled feta but with a thick slab. First she brings rough bread with olive paste and sesame on top. A menu exists, but everyone is taken to the kitchen. Lamb has been translated as “lamp,” which she offers as “lamp with fricassee bad,” whatever that might mean. Also listed: humburger and fish soap (soup). “Well, her English is better than my Greek,” Ed says.
Irini’s becomes our favorite. Every visit there’s a new big cheese pie, pikilia, seafood tidbits with orange avocado salad, or ofto, lamb on skewers grilled upright in the fire and brought to us on pasta mixed with creamy cheese and broth. Platters of crisp roasted potatoes, which benefit from the drippings from chickens, are plunked down on every table.
On our third day we’ve settled into a routine. Read. Beach. Irini’s for lunch. Nap. Walk. Shop for food in town. Cook something utterly simple. The potatoes are wonderful, fresh and earthy. We make dinners of Greek salad and steamed potatoes and bread. At night we lie out on the terrace watching the stars. We see no neighbors, only swaying lights on boats.
We vary on the fourth day and visit the Chaniá museum in the morning. They’ve rescued a patchy mosaic of Dionysus on a panther with a companion satyr. That’s what passed for a floor covering in Chaniá in the third century A.D. Another of Poseidon also shows two roosters trying to peck the same cherry. Such whimsy! Poseidon was worshiped around here not as a sea god but as a fertility deity. The museum displays cases of votive oxen and bulls from a rural sanctuary active from the fourth century B.C. to the second century A.D. The pots look like the first things you’d throw in beginning ceramics, but the jewelry! Exquisite. Gold hair spirals, a rock crystal and gold ring, and the most fabulous earrings from the eighth century B.C. Could I reach in and snatch the necklace inlaid with lapis and medallions with raised heads? The artists were playful, too—a clay censer shaped like a hedgehog from 1800 B.C. makes me smile, as does the drinking cup with eyes on it to protect the drinker from the evil eye. The ancient pithoi, terra-cotta storage jars, are taller than I am. Most mysterious are the coins for Charon, made to go in the mouths of the dead. I guess they came from long-gone-to-dust skulls, the fare uncollected. I first thought a clay ship from 1900 to 1650 B.C. was a child’s toy, but with the honeycomb inside, this must be another object to speed the dead on their way. Honey, so essential to the Greeks. Glaukos, son of legendary king Minos, fell into a pitho of honey and drowned. Some bodies, according to Herodotus, were buried in honey.
At the covered market, a short walk away, piles of lambs’ heads, eyes open, regard us as we enter, and bunnies, with white fur only on their feet like little bedroom shoes, line up on ice. Vats of yogurts and fruits and nuts in syrup, and dried fruits, especially figs, give a totally Mediterranean cast to our shopping. The herbs mostly come in packages convenient for tourists to tuck into their bags. But they look stale to me. When I see the cheeses—so fresh—I know that my attempts at home to reproduce the luscious dill-scented pies we’re eating everywhere will not be the same. We taste the specialty of the area, pyktogalo, a soft, slightly spicy cheese, and malaka, also a Chaniá cheese, similar to Gruyère. Anthotyro, a cream cheese, and staka, a big pale mound in the market case, both go in my notebook, along with cheirokasi, and stakovoutyro—what is that? How wonderful—everything is so unfamiliar. Ah, -kasi—that must mean cheese. Big wreaths of bread for a wedding are decorated with bread roses. An organ grinder pumps away. We walk out with fennel, yogurt, and cheeses—but who knows which is which—and a bunch of dill.
Such activity. We don’t get to the beach until late afternoon, when the sun angles across the water and the children are gone. We have twilight to ourselves, splashing like the gods.
From a crack in the house, two yellow beaks open and the mother sparrow flits over our heads, to and fro from the grove. Her angry chirp warns us that she might dive-bomb our reclining forms. A visiting gray cat stretches on the warm stone terrace, purring at her reflection in the door. She ignores the sparrow. Under my pulled-down hat, I begin to think of old attachments, friends, those I have failed, those who failed me. The elemental nature of Greece, I suppose. Or sometimes travel just unlocks Pandora’s box. What I’ve put off considering in my quotidian life rushes forward when the body and mind achieve a quiet level of receptivity. What has been lost comes looking. Problems overly suppressed can erupt as a full-blown crisis. I start with the drifty thought, Mother would love this, followed by the petulant, childish (but true) thought, She failed me, no? Then an old friendship I bluntly broke off. My mind jumps to Bill D. Oh, he let you down, big time, then the tidal rush of how he would have loved Greece, how funny he was, and what a good poet. Drunk, he lurches over the hors d’oeuvres table, I reach to catch him, but he crashes into the bowls and plates. Hardest to understand, the friends who recede, become vague, their names in the address book but their numbers forgotten. Friends from college stay fixed. I pick up with Anne and Rena immediately, out of such long connections. As an adult, I moved six times, and for the most part the intense friendships of each place gradually faded, replaced by the next set. And yet I still care about Ralph and Mitra and Gabby and Hunter and Alan and, and, and. That conference when I shared a room with Karen and we talked late. In the dark, her voice sounded so familiar, a little sister whispering from the other twin bed, kicking off the quilt. We lost touch. I always mean to go back, pick up the dropped stitch, continue the round hem. But the present grounds me—I first wrote grinds me—so firmly. A tidal wash of losses, all under the big energy sun. I gather Ed’s shirt, dried over a chairback in the sun, the blue cotton warming my hands.
At a little monastery on the sea, the caretaker shakes his head sadly at Ed in shorts. He points to a rack inside the door with various pairs of jogging pants and beach wraps for visitors to cover their shameful bodies. “Am I okay?” I ask. He regards my white linen Capri pants and short-sleeved T-shirt and concedes that I am. Determined to break through his officious manner, I start asking him about the fountain outside the monastery, which looks distinctly Arab to me, but he doesn’t know.
“Could be anything,” he shrugs. His friend rounds the corner of the building with a handful of sprigs. Ah, the universal language. Ed, now in navy pants, asks what he’s picked. He
holds up a handful.
“Origano dictamnus.” We later recognize this oregano growing in the maquis that covers the coastal hillsides. “This one is very good if you cut yourself, and for the ladies, it helps in birth.”
“And for cooking,” the caretaker adds. An Italian would launch into recipes right now, but they are more interested in the other herb. They both begin to explain at once that this is a special plant, used to make tea. “Fascomilo,” the friend says. He writes the name in Greek on our guidebook and gives us a few branches that perfume our car with a sage and dust scent. “Smells like marijuana. Throw it out.” Ed fans his face. But I slip the leaves inside my guidebook to scent the pages with the smell of the countryside.
The deep country monasteries deeply stir me. Triada seems holy, holy, and someone is chanting in one of the monastery rooms. He has a loud and terrible voice, accompanied by the rattle of pots and dishes. Women are cleaning up after a wedding lunch. The priest in stone gray robes sits against a stone wall under the arched entrance, cooling off after his duties. Inside, the floor is scattered with crumbled bay leaves, as in the Middle Ages when santolina was piled on the floors of cathedrals to keep down the stench of the unwashed. At the entrance a man fills an enormous basket with leftover slices of bread. I can’t get enough of the Byzantine icons and altars, the heady scents of incense, and the elaborate iconostases. The Orthodox churches feel very close to the bone, as if they tap into those same archetypal openings where myth comes from. So many are smaller than the Italian and French neighborhood churches. The domes are blue and covered with stars, a motif I adore. The top section of the cross-shaped churches always are closed off by a curtain, suggesting mystery.
At the Holy Monastery of Hyperaghia, Lady of Goniá, in Kolymbari, another visitor gives us the Φασκόμηλο, the fascomilo again. Must be the day for gathering—his basket is piled high. This monastery sits above the Chaniá bay. An icon of Mary is completely covered with ex-votos—rings, watches, metal eyes, and tiny crosses. The wooden crucifix, with two side panels held by carved gold dragons, looks as though it landed from the Far East. But the three domes of immense blue covered with stars and the incense burning bring us back to Greece. We are not able to see the famed icon collection in a small building across the courtyard. The caretaker must have been out picking fascomilo. We take a path to the earlier ruins of the monastery, another outpost of peace.
En route to Rethymnon, we see a wreck. In the driver’s seat a young man with black hair, trickles of blood running down his face—his seriously dead face. He sits upright inside his crushed car. How impossible to come upon. The visceral desire rises to rerun the moment, have him swerve from the truck, right himself, and speed on home to the dinner his mother probably is preparing at this moment. The shiny Japanese compact, brand new, now smushed like a stepped-on Coke can. Get up, we want to say, but he is gone, someone’s love, someone’s boy, someone. Just before we left Cortona, two American tourists’ car struck a college student’s Vespa. He jumped up and went in the bar across the road and had a glass of water. The drivers must have been immensely relieved. But when the ambulance came, he was weak, and he died—punctured lungs filled with blood. Why seek danger? It may be on the loose for you.
As we drive on, we realize no airbag popped out for him. Cheap car, but what a crime. I look down and notice that there’s no airbag on my side of this rental car. We will go to the airport tomorrow and trade this compact for a heavier car.
In Rethymnon bakeries make bread in the shapes of swans, dinosaurs, and deer. Street after street in the old section entices us to wander. Turkish balconies, Venetian fountain, curtained doorways, broken arches, stone-edged Cretan windows, twisting medinalike streets, where an ancient way of life asserts itself in spite of the mobs of tourists a few streets away. An old man plays backgammon with a child, a woman shells beans under a grape arbor, women in black sit in doorways, children play in a street as narrow as a good hallway. I step into the timelessness I expected when I came to Greece.
We linger into the evening, not wanting to drive by the place the boy died. We choose the restaurant for the vine-draped arbors and the sound of music. A sweet-faced mandolin player and his child stroll among the tables. The British couple at the next table will not look at him when he stops to play right at their table. The waiter laughs. “They’re afraid.” Greece on a summer evening, someone strumming a mandolin just for you, and you ignore him? Ed always tips musicians lavishly, thinking that people who bring music should be crowned with laurel. We’re treated to several songs and a shy smile from the little girl.
Now we’re in the car every day, wanting to explore this wild end of Crete. The land is scattered with pink, blue, and green beehives in fields. Wild goats with long black hair chomp away on the sparse hills. Tall hollyhocks punctuate the roadsides, along with the memorials to the dead that you see all too often. I start photographing these small dollhouse structures, which are furnished with photographs and candles and sometimes objects belonging to the deceased. Some are plaster models of a church, some look more like homes. There are just so many of these memorials, so often on straight stretches of road. I doubt that so many people have met their fate in these spots. They must also be primitive votives or tributes to gods of the crossroads and the journey.
Up on the hills I see groves of butter-yellow and pink oleander along the dry watercourses. The vibrant double blooms often entwine with profligate pink and blue morning glories. I love these liaisons of two or three plants and vines. The vivid pink bougainvillea cooled by its white partner. The orange trumpet vine twirled with pale blue plumbago, the blue morning glories splendid within masses of fluffy white bougainvillea, woody honeysuckle tangled with the flat pink rose.
We jump out at cemeteries in the countryside and their pure white churches, so white they hurt your eyes. Their blue doors and blue-edged windows seem cut out of heaven. The graves have glass-fronted marble boxes at the heads. Inside, a photo of the person laid to rest, an oil lamp, with perhaps a plastic bottle of extra oil, and some matches. The box may have pictures of a saint, notes, wicks, lace mats, or mementos of the dead person—a teddy bear, a bottle of Johnnie Walker with two shot glasses. Unbearable, a child’s grave covered with toy cars, stuffed animals, and his bottle and rattler propped beside his photo, a merry two-year-old with wide-open eyes.
Houses, typically low and white, sometimes have crenellations at the corners of the roofs, a reminder of North Africa, not far away. Many one- and two-story houses are topped with rebar around the edges of the roof, in case they want to build up someday. No one has built a decorative plaster wall around these unsightly metal rods, and it’s clear that many of the houses have been there for years and years without the next construction stage. Even prosperous-looking new houses display this odd feature.
The landscape, barren at a sweeping glance, often looks like carefully planted rock gardens. We pass many gorges. “Gorgeous gorge,” Ed says.
“You had to, didn’t you?” We smell the dry, herbal maquis, the miles of coastal hills blooming with rounded bushes—violet, purple, yellow, sage, mossy green, gray—and the earth ferrous red and sienna with rocks and boulders. A stupendous palette, especially with the blue, blue sea in the distance and the cloudless sky extending the blue as far as the imagination can go.
We come upon war memorials and cemeteries everywhere. At first we’d been puzzled why so many people asked us if we were from Australia or New Zealand. Then we saw the graves of those troops who fought so bitterly hard in this lonely countryside in World War II. Their relatives come here to find their loved ones’ graves. As a major gateway to Egypt to the South, and the whole Aegean world to the North, Crete was strategically crucial. Every record attests to the heroism and arduousness of the population here. The Allies did not arm the Cretans; they fought to the death with whatever they had. In the Souda war cemetery, close to our house, most graves lack names. But there’s Archibald Knox Brown. All boys in their early t
wenties, in peaceful rows, as orderly as war is not. Even in death, they overlook a Greek military base on the harbor and a former NATO site. Red roses grow everywhere, also orderly, and the color of the blood the boys shed so far from home. Many Allied troops evacuated from Souda Bay in 1941; then the Luftwaffe swarmed the area.
Donkeys, few houses, olives everywhere to the sea, shrines, figs—the clarity startles me, and I have the odd thought, I’d like to rise to this occasion. From reading the Greek poets I understood intellectually the qualities of this powerful place. Days here move the knowledge into the body. I find in my notebook a few words by Kimon Friar in his preface to Modern Greek Poetry:
Many have felt that in the dazzling sun of Greece the psychological dark labyrinths of the mind are penetrated and flooded with light, that in this merciless exposure one is led not to self-exploitation but to self-exploration under the glare of necessity, that to “Know Thyself” is for all Greeks, from ancient into modern times, the only preoccupation worthy of an individual. Beneath the blazing sun of Greece there is a sensuous acceptance of the body without remorse or guilt.
What calls out from the landscape? The purity, essence. Simplicity: a handful of shorn wool. I think only a Greek poet could have written these lines:
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