The Best of Fiona Kidman's Short Stories

by Fiona Kidman

  That is not possible all through the year, because of snow in the winter, or, in the spring when I was there, melting snows can cause flash floods in the Gorge. If you begin to go down and then find that the way is impassable, there is only one way to leave, and that is by the way you came, back up the rough mountain path.

  The sign at the bus depot said that the Gorge was closed, but the woman who sold the tickets said that it was open. She wanted me to buy a ticket for the entire journey. I pointed to the sign and she laughed. There were young Germans with blond hair and flashing white teeth waiting in the queue. They were wearing mountain boots and they were impatient to buy their tickets. I looked at their boots and asked the woman about my shoes.

  She did not understand. I took off my soft slip-on sneaker and held it up. Was it suitable? She laughed again, and took off one of her own shoes, a little high-heeled pump. She shook her head at her own shoe — ochi, no. She clicked her teeth with disapproval at her offending footwear. Then she nodded at mine. ‘Endaxi. Okay. Understand?’

  The Germans were muttering to each other. I bought my ticket and boarded the bus.

  In the Mountains I looked for a guide, but there was none. When you go into Samaria you are on your own. I think that that is as it should be. The silence of the Mountains becomes your own silence. Each decision you make belongs only to you.

  What you can, or cannot, or will not endure becomes something for which you are responsible.

  It may be that you will make the wrong decision in the Mountains and then I believe it would be possible to die. But this would have been your mistake, an inability to judge elements and your capabilities in the face of them.

  Oh well, yes, you may say, that is all very well, that is what mountaineers and white water rafters and adventurers of one kind or another do all the time.

  That is so, but theirs is a calculated risk, a knowledgeable gamble; they are not tourists thrown suddenly and unexpectedly for a day into a primitive wilderness.

  I do not pretend that I was anything else. ‘Dear little Ellen,’ murmured the English woman in the bar, the night before, ‘do go, I’m sure you will love Samaria.’ She and her husband claimed they knew I was a New Zealander the moment I opened my mouth but I did not believe them, for they did not say so until I told her from where I came. We may recognise each other’s curious flat vowels but Londoners who visit the same place each year, year in and year out (even Chania), and read important literary works as they sit beside the window looking into the bay where the fisherman lifts his lines by night flares, do not know about us. I do not think they know much about anything.

  They thought I would not go to Samaria. They had smiled at each other in the way of people who know better. I nearly didn’t go, because of them.

  Two miles or more down into the Gorge, there is a tiny monastery. If I get as far as that, I said to myself, I will have done well.

  For, although it is good to be alone in the Mountains, there was also a confusion in the air that day. Certainly there is an aloneness of spirit there, but it would be untrue to suggest that I didn’t encounter any other human beings. I had not gone very far along the path when I began to meet people who were coming back up it. They had begun earlier in the day. Nobody seemed to be certain whether the Gorge was open or not, and while some (people who, like the Germans, were wearing heavy boots) had gone on and not returned, others who were already tired just from going down were beginning to understand the enormity of their peril, the distance, the sheer climb back that would be entailed if they kept going and then found the Gorge impassable. Some had gone too far, and quite young people were coming back, their faces contorted with distress. It seemed impossible that some of the old ones would ever get back.

  I said to a young woman, who was crawling back — this is true, the heat of the day had come upon the mountain, and she would walk a few feet forward then fall on her knees on the jagged path and crawl a short painful way — ‘How far did you go?’

  She looked at me with glazed eyes, and said, ‘Don’t go any further, for God’s sake, don’t go on.’

  So that when she and her companions had gone, I sat down in the White Mountains, and I looked at the way that I had come and the way that there was to go, and I thought that I could die in the Mountains if I carried on to the monastery. Sometimes on this journey I had wondered if I would ever reach home again, sometimes I had been afraid. I had left home believing that I was a self-contained person. I was not certain any more. I was often lonely. Other days I felt ill. I am forty-five and my health is no better and no worse than that of many women of my age whose bones are beginning to feel the edge of change.

  In the White Mountains I was not afraid, or lonely, or sick. I did not feel that I had to challenge myself to some limit beyond my endurance. The choice was simple which is not to say that the route back was. The heat was pouring between the rocks and midday came and passed and still I climbed back the way I had come. But I would not die in the mountains, I would return from them, and go on.

  At two o’clock in the afternoon, at the top of the ravine, there are not too many places to turn. A canteen, and a rest house where a considerable crowd of tourists milled around knowing each other, and that was all.

  And no transport until six o’clock that night.

  I knew the way we had come, across the Plain of Omalos. It stretched away before me, a plateau about five miles across in the middle of the Mountains, and on the far side of it, a mountain village.

  If I were to test myself, this was how I would do it. I would cross the plain on foot. I would move close to the Greek earth, yet surrounded by clear ground. I would put myself in the middle of that wide space where I would not be touched. I am not afraid of space.

  The sun had dropped more than I realised when I set out, or perhaps there was cloud descending on the Mountains. It was much colder than it had been in the ravine. I told myself it was bracing.

  I would not have seen the things I did that afternoon if I had not walked across the plain.

  At ground level, and obscured by the dead winter foliage from the bus where we had passed before, I could see whole carpets of blue and red anemones. I took out my camera and aimed it in the general direction of the flowers. I felt ridiculous at first, thinking that the flowers would see how inept I was at using a camera, and then laughed at myself, at the silliness of shooting off picture after picture at such crazy angles and without consideration for the way the light fell. I had not used the camera before. It had been my father’s and it had been insisted by my family that I carry a camera. I had not wanted to take it because I cannot take photographs. I have resisted learning because I am afraid I will not take the very best of photographs. Oh, that is quite true. That is how I am.

  What I did not think of then, but do now, is that my father had used the camera to take pictures of flowers which he would later paint. Subtle little watercolours. He was old when he began to paint but even then, he was not bad. No, better than that, he was good, but he left it too late to be the best. I think he might have been if he had begun when he was young. That was his tragedy you see, to have failed at so many things, when he might have been the best at this one thing. The very best I mean. I do not exaggerate.

  Anyway, that was what I photographed on my travels, that and nothing else. Flowers hidden under dead branches. Months have passed and I have still not had the film developed. Perhaps there will be nothing there. Maybe I won’t have it developed.

  On the flat fields, shepherds minded flocks of rangy sheep. And hundreds of people collected wild vegetables and herbs, tiny plants which emerge in the spring and have to be burrowed for in the earth. The vegetable gatherers sought the tiny stawyagathi, each one no longer than a finger, yet they carried bulging sacks. As I passed, their glances would flick across me but their expressions changed little.

  So I arrived at Omalos, a little after four, and sat outside the taverna to watch the people of the village. I watched discreetly and
from a distance, I did not cast bold glances in their direction. They filled the centre of the village and it appeared as if a celebration was in progress. On the tables stood bowls of freesias and irises. Slanting-eyed girls were learning to flirt. I wondered how long this would last, for I had observed that women in Greece were grave and industrious and worked while their men sat in the sun and looked at women tourists.

  A tractor hauled a trailer load of young men backwards and forwards through the village past the girls. The girls peeked and giggled.

  At length, a man approached me, and offered food and a glass of retsina. He said that the food was special — it was a dish of something that looked like curious little batter pancakes with proved to be filled with a mixture of very strong herbs and a cheese-like substance. They were quite delicious. I accepted this food with modesty and downcast eyes, not looking at him — or not very much, although I did see that he had blue eyes, which in itself was exceptional. But I was careful, for I did not wish to antagonise the women. That care was to no avail.

  The party folded, the air grew colder with mountain chill, and I moved inside the taverna which was run by a very strong-looking though quiet young woman. Many people came and went as the afternoon wore on and she entertained them, offered hospitality, but not one inch would she give to me. I asked for, and paid for food, I asked for the use of the toilets and she pretended not to understand me. I showed her my phrase book — ‘Ghinekon, ghinekon parakalo.’ She tossed her head. ‘Lavatory please, please your lavatory,’ I said.

  She pointed over her shoulder and looked the other way. If she looked at me at all that afternoon, her look was always cold.

  The man came back with more food. I refused him. I smiled, but I sat very still, not accepting him at all by movement or gesture.

  No one else spoke to me.

  A young French couple, dressed as in the time of hippies, came in. They had hitched up from the town. They hired a room for the night above the taverna for three hundred drachmas. I asked them if they spoke English. A little, they said, and we talked but not for long. They had not come to talk to strangers, only to each other. The villagers welcomed them. I could see that it was because they were a man and a woman together, a couple. No matter how they looked or dressed, it was this togetherness that was understood.

  The cold began to frighten me. This was deep biting mountain cold. My kidneys ached.

  New Zealanders who fought in the war are buried in Crete. They fought on the beaches alongside the Greek people. At school, a girl in my class was called Crete, and her little brother, Maleme. I asked the woman for a brandy and she told her son to fetch it for me. I said to her, ‘Eema Naya Zeelandya.’ I am a New Zealander. A special kind of pleading. She appeared not to have heard me and I did not say it again.

  Her legs were perfectly clad in dark stockings and she wore neat laceup shoes but her feet danced when she moved and she never missed her step no matter how much she was carrying from table to table. She continued this dancing unfaltering step as she walked away from me.

  The bus came at last, sounding its high fluting horn as it crossed the plain which led to Omalos. The bus was full of vegetable pickers from the plain, and we descended from the mountains, moving into hairpin bends as if to pass over the edge of each cliff, and then as we came to the valleys the strong heavy scent of the orange groves came up to meet us, and the temperature rose again.

  I ate, as I did every night, at one of the waterfront restaurants, surrounded by the hordes of tiny half crazed and mangy cats which hunt in packs on the Chania waterfront, and I waited for the scarlet sun to fall into the sea.

  But I chose a different kind of restaurant that evening, one which sold bland Americanised food. I liked to eat Greek but my stomach was in rebellion. I asked for a half bottle of wine such as I had every evening on the waterfront, but this restaurant did not have half bottles, only a large carafe-shaped jar. For those who travelled alone, the choices were to be dry or drunk or out of pocket. As I was about to refuse the jar, a woman at the next table spoke to me.

  She said she had bought one of the jars but she did not need all the wine either. She asked me to share it with her, and that was how I came to join her.

  Her name was Anneliese, a Dutch woman with long straight iron grey hair and wide cheekbones. Her face was clean of make-up. She spoke flawed but elegant English, and she asked me if I minded her smoking roll-your-own cigarettes. I reminded her that I was her guest.

  She too travelled alone.

  The waiter brought two meals although she had already eaten and I had ordered only one. I said I would buy her the fresh dinner if she would help me drink the jar of wine. She said she was still hungry and, like me, she had come here because her stomach needed a rest from oil.

  We ate and drank and sat by the lapping water and the night submerged us.

  I told Anneliese about my children and her face grew sad.

  She smoked awhile, then said: ‘I would like to adopt a child.’

  ‘Why can’t you?’ I asked.

  ‘Because I am not married.’

  ‘Can you not have a child?’ I asked.

  ‘I’ve thought about that, but I could not carry a child without love for the father. I could love a child for itself.’

  ‘Have you never loved a man?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ she told me. ‘For twelve years, and I thought he didn’t want a child, and neither did he think so then. Then he went away, and he had a child whom he loves with a woman that he does not love. He wants to come back to me.’ Her voice was full of tears, but she did not seem to be a self-pitying kind of person.

  ‘Won’t you take him back?’

  ‘No. Because I cannot take him from his child.’ She shook her head, as if in disbelief.

  ‘It seems like a muddle,’ I said. ‘But yes,’ I added hurriedly, for she looked at me as if I had not understood. ‘I can see you’re doing the right thing.’

  ‘It’s no good, soon I will be too old to have a child and too old for the authorities to allow me to adopt one. I would take any child, any child in the world that has nowhere to go. I would take a black child, a brown one, a sick one, if it had no parents. It doesn’t have to be like me, I don’t seek my own image.’

  I said that in my country adoptive parents were not always held in high regard, that there was a backlash towards women who took other people’s children, that it was regarded as a political act against natural mothers, to take and adopt their children. I said this with a trace of bitterness.

  She regarded me intently. ‘So there are no lonely or abandoned children in your country?’ she marvelled.

  We both smiled, relaxed from the wine, and a little lazy about following up absurdities, although not so much that we did not, mutually, remain inscrutable about our position in relation to the absurd.

  ‘Are you a feminist?’ she asked.

  ‘I suppose so,’ I said. ‘Aren’t you?’

  ‘Well … I believe so. What else is there …?’ She hesitated. ‘It’s hard to know what one is here.’

  She had long cat-like eyes. I thought she was beautiful. She made me think of my friend in New Zealand who wrote to me care of each poste restante, good, vigorous, loving letters. And other friends. Those of us who touched, trusted, moved up to each other and away, protected and protested on each other’s behalf, in our own ways. I thought of the dark Greek woman with dancing feet and of the blue-eyed man at Omalos. Had she been protecting someone? Was she like us, after all? But if that was so, why had she not seen me as I wanted her to? Why had she sat in judgement upon me, and why had I failed?

  ‘What are you looking for in Greece?’ I asked Anneliese.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said, as if startled. ‘What are you?’

  I shook my head. ‘I’m not certain. I see things and they go away.’

  It was true, and even now it comes back to me only in flashes of brightness, and a whiteness in the mountains. There is little to hold on to. I thou
ght I would write to my friend that night and tell her about this, and about my day. Only days before she had said in a letter that she had come to the conclusion that it is moments lived most intensely that are often soon forgotten, or somehow erased. They leave their mark, she said, but the edges become blurred.

  I did not write the letter and she will have to make do with this, after all. It is the nearest I can come — to holding on I suppose.

  When I parted with Anneliese we looked searchingly at each other. I was going to give her an easy kiss on the cheek and I think that that was what she had in mind too, certainly I would have embraced her, if we had not, at the same moment, changed our minds and withdrawn from each other. I cannot be certain what she thought then, but I suppose she may have considered, as I did, that it was not as simple as that.

  We shook hands, firmly and gravely, and looked at each other in order to remember, as best we could, what we saw. We walked separately into the Greek night on a Sunday that wasn’t Easter.

  At the Homestead Hotel

  ‘WE’VE BEEN TRYING to get in somewhere decent all day,’ the woman said at dinner. ‘And look where we’ve ended up. Isn’t this revolting?’

  There were six plain tables in the dining room of the Homestead Hotel, each covered with light plastic cloths patterned with a lace design. The tables were placed close together so that everyone in the dining room heard what she said. Other guests turned to nod their agreement and they were all so near to each other that they could take up the conversation from where they were sitting. Some commented on the old floral carpet underfoot, others on the quality of the meal, which though ample was of the roast and three vegetables variety; still others mentioned the small stuffy bedrooms they had been allocated and the mosquitoes that infested them, especially in the annexe where the ceilings were so low that the men could hardly stand up straight in them. And the Lord only knew what other bugs might be lurking in the woodwork.