AWOL

by Jennifer Barclay

  Paleochora, Crete

  November 8, St. Demetrius’s day on the old calendar.

  It’s because I’ve seen the fresco in the Chania museum and learned it comes from a church of St. George near Kantanos that I seek the help of the only travel agent who is still operating this time of year. She has no idea how I might find this particular church; I need a guide and they are all off, now that it is November. I should come back in May. Between lazy puffs on a cigarette, she is posting the exchange rates on a kind of tablet. May? Who knows where I’m going to be in May?

  I loiter in the little office, examining brochures. Under a pane of glass on the counter, I examine a map of the district around Paleochora, noting the symbol for a church—the cross-on-ball—all over the countryside hereabouts. The agent sends me down the street to the photo shop. The shopkeeper, she says, is selling a book about the area’s Byzantine monuments. I rush over. The book, outsize and richly illustrated, a project of a historical preservation society in Kantanos, costs me almost forty dollars. I carry it back excitedly to the travel agent. She is no longer there, but her husband is, and he writes out for me a text in Greek: “I want to visit the church of St. George. How do I get there?” I am to show this at the kafenion in Floria, just north of Kantanos.

  Kantanos, Crete

  The bus from Paleochora to Floria was packed with the faithful going to the church of St. Michael the Archangel, today being his day, I guess. I sit in the sun that has sprung up from behind the hill across from this no-name café where I have disembarked, sipping my metrio, feeling pleased that I have made myself understood to the proprietor: Tha ithela na pao sto Ayios Yiorgos. Apo pou? I can see the church, blazingly white in the dun fields.

  I walk over and step inside. There are no windows, only crude holes carved through the thick stone in the east wall and in the apse. So pushing open the creaky, narrow wooden doors has the effect of turning on a flashlight in a cave. It is a small vaulted room furnished with iconostasis, lectern, a cross-stitched icon of St. George—“the gift of Dimitra Lionaki, this year.” The glory of this little space is the much-abused frescoes, cemented over in spots, gouged and pitted and scoured by time or design, with here and there the ochre of a cape, a horse’s flank, the gilt of a crown and halo, the piercing gaze, all that is left of a prophet, the soft mouth and moustache, all that is left of a king, showing through the ravages. I can make out Demetrius’s cherubic mouth upturned in a little smile, and the coiffure of curls framing his face, but the eyes have been torn out.

  Back at the café, I learn, just in the nick of time, that it is not possible to return to Kantanos by taxi, only by bus—yikes, here it comes!—and my host makes a gallant flying leap into the bus’s path to make it stop for me.

  On a country road near Kantanos, I almost walk by the crudely lettered little sign tilted on a fence gate that tells me “this way to the Archangel.” I creep down a stony path, ducking under the netting strung out to catch the ripening olives, and into the pristine courtyard of St. Michael’s. The local worshippers have been and gone—I smell the dissipating wafts of incense even as I open the door. The interior is as clean as the parish ladies could make it, with fresh newspaper under the glass jars of fading yellow chrysanthemums that line the window sill, and a newly ironed, pure white altar cloth embroidered with the Byzantine motif of the double-headed eagle. (Ah, but they missed the little bit of cobweb dangling in a corner of the window.)

  Even though the walls are heavy with the darkened pigment of the Middle Ages, all is lightness here, as if the Angel found the celebration in this modest church among the farms so much to his liking that he has decided to stay awhile. I can make out the frescoed figures easily. Although my poor Demetrius has had his face half gouged out of the plaster and thrown away (Turks? Iconoclasts?), his shoulders still bear an exhilarating amount of drapery blowing in the breath of wind. “Who are you?” I ask in a kind of prayer. “Where are you leading me? Show me a miracle.” I feel a tenderness, standing as I am within the merciful gaze of a young man who had once been a fellow human being and to whom whole villages and cities prayerfully entrust the miracle of their salvation. He rides his red horse on their ramparts, defending their faith.

  And so it goes, all day long, an itinerary of Byzantine chapels. I rest at each one, staring at images of St. Demetrius, or what is left of him, in profound silence except for the occasional faraway bleat of sheep and goats that reaches me from behind the splutter of beeswax tapers, which are always alight in these chapels. I step outside: birds and the wild blooming of geranium, and the soft breeze up from the valley. I sniff the end-of-season roses as I walk along pathways shaded by olive trees. I cannot be farther away from the rest of my life.

  Temenia, Crete

  From Elena, the forbearing travel agent in Paleochora, who is doing a bit of freelance research of her own, I have learned of other Demetrius churches in another direction altogether. And so I march over to the town’s only taxi office and hire a driver, young Yiorgo, for a day’s outing. He of the little spoken English and I of the less Greek do manage to communicate. “To Ayios Dimitrios church in Moni, parakalo!” And off we go, a bottle of water and bag of pistachio nuts on the seat between us.

  We fail utterly to find the church in the valley between Moni and Livada, despite Elena’s annotated map showing us where to look. “In the olive grove at the end of the road,” turns out to be unhelpful. Yiorgo is sure he knows exactly where it is, and where we first stop looks promising: a well-kept, shaded grove, a rocky pathway marked by a bit of a grotto, and then nothing. We walk around peering through branches, squatting for another perspective, standing on boulders to see farther. No telltale flash of white church plaster to be seen. And yet when we climb up from the river bottom to the very apex of the neighbouring mountain, we see several splotches of white down in the valley from which we have just ascended. Damn.

  The drive has taken us way up to an elevation alongside the magisterial White Mountains of the Cretan interior. We make our way over stony roads, winding around mountainsides of boulders, that link the villages. Bits of precious earth, ground up between the rocks, clutch the exhausted roots of spiny bushes and dying trees. Then down we go, hurtling seaward—it glints metallically from every direction—until we hit hardtop again.

  As we climb into the town of Temenia, coming the other way in a battered green car is the priest of the St. Demetrius church of Moni himself, Father Panayiotis. We stop in the middle of the road so that he and Yiorgo can have a chat, hanging out the car windows, while traffic piles up behind us. Yiorgo explains that we have not found his church but that this Canadian in the car is hoping to speak with him about it. I push my face forward over Yiorgo’s shoulder so Father Panayiotis can have a good look at my earnest expression. It is decided that we will pull off the road and convene in the nearest café, a charmless establishment of unpainted cement floors and a scattering of chairs pushed up against the scabby walls. A young man sits at a window, watching us with bemusement; another arrives to pick up his newspaper and winks at us.

  As I set up the tape recorder, I become aware of the hum of the ice cream cooler, but I cannot prevail on Father Panayiotis to sit with Yiorgo and me at our table. He has leaned up definitively against the opposite wall, tilting back in the chair, as though to be at the farthest possible reach from me and my microphone, which I now stick out into the several metres of space between us, hoping for the best. He’s wearing baggy soldier’s pants and army boots under his worn-out dark-blue cassock. His hands are stubby and calloused, and I wonder just how reverential I am expected to be. He can’t be more than thirty.

  I have enlisted Yiorgo as co-interviewer and supplied him with the basic questions I can manage in my pidgin Greek. Who was St. Demetrius? How do you celebrate St. Demetrius’s feast day around here? He’s scribbled them out for himself on a small piece of paper, which he grips with a kind of terror. Father Panayiotis’s thick hands chop the air around him as he speaks rapidly
, loudly, non-stop. I am at the other end of the microphone, oblivious.

  This is what he is saying: “St. Demetrius and the Romans struggled with each other. He was in the Roman army but refused to collaborate with the Romans in their persecution of the Christians. He was very young when he was brought to trial and executed. He was tortured, which is why he is a martyr. He died for his beliefs. That is why Thessalonica has him as its protector. He helped Constantinople in its times of trouble too. In Salonica’s times of trouble, the people saw the saint as a horseman [mumbling]. That’s all I know. If you want to know more—how he lived, where he grew up and studied—you have to do research.

  “[mumbling] The reason the people go to the church is that they believe, not just to please their parents or the priest or their neighbours. [He keeps repeating:] They go for the saint.”

  Sweet martyr Dimitri, whose bones, they say, exude an aromatic oil that has healed the sick and dying, body and soul. Later in the afternoon, when Yiorgo and I are driving back through Temenia, we see Father Panayiotis again, priest of Livada, Souya, Kostogeraki and Moni, cutting up wood with a chainsaw by the side of the road, tossing logs around like bowling pins.

  When I pack up, ready to leave Paleochora, I leave my icon to the last, as though it is important that St. Demetrius supervise every one of my gestures, reciprocating the contemplative hours I’ve spent looking at him. He’s a presence: not in the paint on the wood or on the plaster walls but behind the image, an intense energy that is merely using the exquisite lines and hues of the picture to send his sweetness out to me.

  Yiorgo’s scribbled questions.

  Weeks later in Thessalonica, I am in a taverna, tapping my foot to music from Greek films. Niko, the proprietor, is a particular fan of Melina Mercouri. While he cooks my supper—lamb chops and garlic cloves sizzle in the pan—he circles my table, pouring the house retsina into my small glass tumbler. He seems about twenty-five years old, but on a small shelf by the door, he has arranged an old oil lamp, an ancient water pipe, and a bleached cloth as though he has laid out a shrine to the irretrievable past.

  I tell Niko what I’m doing here: haunting the Basilica of St. Demetrius and prowling through religious bookstores. For a break, I visited the Museum of Byzantine Civilization, I tell him, and chatted with the young security guard. In front of a case of silver reliquaries in which pilgrims bore away with them the lythron, the soil mixed with the holy blood from the tomb of St. Demetrius, the guard told me shyly that once, and only once, when he was praying in the basilica, he smelled the sweetest smell, as though he were standing inside a rose bush, and he knew he was in the presence of the saint.

  Niko leans against the door frame of the kitchen. He’s not surprised, he says. While paying their respects in the crypt of the basilica, both his grandfather and father heard the clangorous hoof-beats of St. Demetrius’s horse clattering over the stones as he descended from the city walls. He has been riding there forever.

  Full-time writer Myrna Kostash lives in Edmonton but is a persistent traveller to eastern and southeastern Europe. She has followed St. Demetrius around Bulgaria, Macedonia, Serbia and Istanbul as well as Greece.

  Cristo Rey.

  008Destination: Mexico

  BUS RIDE TO BIG JESUS

  Rick Maddocks

  Standing on the baking tarmac of the bus station outside Guanajuato, Mexico, I’m sure I can see the blurred shape of Christ looming on the mountaintop to the west. “Erected in 1950,” she reads from our guidebook. “They say it’s situated smack dab in the exact geographical centre of Mexico.” We’ve been waiting a half hour for the bus to Cristo Rey. Sickness clings like damp clothes to our bodies; we’re both hot and irritable, but mostly tired. (In Guanajuato the caged birds start singing at daybreak, and that’s just a prelude for the church bells.) She’s annoyed at my lack of excitement. It’s she who wants to go to Cristo Rey today, though I’ve been the one compulsively drawn to churches and cathedrals, I who haven’t stepped foot in a church back home for nearly twenty years, save for weddings and funerals. Before we left for Mexico, my father wrote to say, “I hope you find what you’re searching for.” I’m not sure what it is by name, but I have always been drawn here, by Mexico’s real and fictional past and its brooding, religious rituals and icons. My companion grew up Catholic; until now she hadn’t been so interested.

  The Wild Bunch.

  Mexicans are interested in her; they’re not used to seeing someone of Chinese extraction. An Asian woman with a white man is an even more exotic sight. Alone I hardly get any attention, gringo that I am. She says the crowds part like the Red Sea when they see her coming. Small children clutch their older sister’s or mother’s arm as they pass her. Young girls lean toward each other and giggle. Boys nudge elbows, hiss, “Chinita,” perhaps to impress each other more than get her attention. Men study her with dark curiosity, look her up and down. Whole families stop their squabbling to stare. We buy drinks at the concession stand—agua purificada for her, Coke for me—to get away from the attention, but even there the girl behind the counter can’t stop giggling at us.

  Finally it arrives: a royal blue school bus with a large crucifix fastened above the windshield. At the main stop in town, the Americans get on the bus. Nick, Sally and Leo from Portland. They’re on their way to the Valenciana silver mines. They wear their moneybelts outside their clothes. We met them when we arrived in Guanajuato three days ago, and we keep bumping into them everywhere. They’re middle-aged folks who are as bright and kind and interesting as they are bossy and opinionated. Generous too. Last night they took us out for dinner to a place definitely outside our price range. As soon as we walked in the place, Nick demanded that the music be turned off. The portly middle-aged waiter unhooked the nearest speaker, tottering dangerously on a wicker chair. “No, no, señor,” said Nick, pointing around at all the speakers. “Todos.” The waiter gave him a long stare, then went and turned off the stereo.

  The Americans flaunt a practised, serene enthusiasm over everything. “Will-to-happiness,” D.H. Lawrence called it in The Plumed Serpent. At dinner they confessed about failed marriages and attempts at celibacy and laughed over some sexual innuendo between Leo and Nick. Life as talk show. Meanwhile, she and I, the consummate Canadians, made the odd agreeable remark and silently analyzed their conversation and characters. When asked to take a side on one of many seemingly contentious issues, I said, “You’re both right.” They got a kick out of that. The waiters, their dignity untainted, brought paella and enchiladas verdes and bottles of Negra Modelo.

  Next the Americans joked about the religious superstition of the Mexicans, and everybody else come to think of it, and then, catching their breath, said, “You guys aren’t religious, are you?” We smiled and shook our heads, saying nothing about how I spent my entire day searching the town’s antiguedades shops for a religious icon, the Virgin of Guadalupe, painted on a square of tin. After dinner Sally joked that they had bored us to death. “No, no,” we protested. “Thank you, it was a great dinner.” The Americans did pay our way after all.

  The Cristo Rey bus leaves Guanajuato behind. We rumble past worn-down buildings and rubble and wrought-iron fences, tiled courtyards. Faded yellows and pinks and greens. We pass over a valley miraculously flooded, a ruined church half-submerged in water, vegetation luminous and dripping from bleached stone. Like something out of a Tarkovsky film. At the Valenciana mines our American friends alight from the bus. “Enjoy the big Jesus,” says Leo.

  “Vaya con Dios,” shouts Nick from the sidewalk as we pull away.

  My heart sinks at these words, “Go with God,” their wistful scent of mortality. I’ve always had the premonition that I would die in Mexico. A flash of lying broken in a sweating motel room, staring up at a ceiling fan, a big black cross whirring to a stop above me. But now I’m certain it’s going to happen on this ride. The road is already steep, and we keep climbing higher and higher through narrow zigzagging roads. Below the crucifix and the stic
kers of the Sacred Heart and the Virgin in the front windshield, there’s a No Fear sticker. The driver is a burly guy with big-lidded eyes, who likes to wave at people. Maniac. He takes big wide turns, almost runs one truck off the road. He and the conductor—a thin kid with a wiry moustache and an unerringly good memory for who’s paid the two-peso fare—have a good laugh as the bus skitters around a gravel bend.

  I think how, despite their chaotic history and legacy of violence, their suffering under the gluttonous weight of North America, Mexicans on the street seem to be such a calm people, unfazed by anything, sitting in a town’s cobblestone square for quiet hours full of dark serenity among friends and birds and shoeshiners, seeming to live each august minute as a slow-moving thought in the mind of God. Yet get them behind a wheel and everything changes. I’m ghost-white and shivering with sweat, fists clenched on the seat in front of me.

  Worse, my Coke has shown itself as the pure bottled evil it is; I have to pee bad. It occurs to me that for all the people on the bus, this trip is probably a daily occurrence, and here I sit, a thin pale gringo who’s romanticized Mexico for years, visions of Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch and Sergio Leone flicks and Cormac McCarthy’s Border Trilogy now crumbling like weathered stone in my mind, nearly pissing my pants and thinking I’m going to fall to my death in a careening school bus. She’s serene beside me, taking it all in and sipping primly from her water, looking like a pretty nurse’s aide in her blue gingham dress. She hasn’t been stared at once on this ride. I look around at the passengers, their oblivious faces. Doomed, I think, all of us, but you don’t know it! So this is where my fantasy of Mexico has led me.