Mnemonic

by Theresa Kishkan

  In 1906, Charles Newcombe sold a portion of his private collection of artefacts to the Canadian Geological Survey for $6,500; this paid for the house he built the next year at Ogden Point, the house I’d hoped was the one I’d visited as a Brownie, the same house now sheltering paroled inmates from federal prisons. It no longer even carries the Newcombe name but rather that of a deceased chaplain of one of the local penitentiaries, its original owner forgotten by the neighbours — who maybe even wonder why the large tree on the corner of their property is protected by heritage status and can’t be cut down.

  Newcombe increasingly devoted his attentions to the British Columbia Museum of Natural History and Anthropology, which had opened in 1887 and had concentrated, until then, on stuffed animal specimens under the direction of its curator John Fannin rather than the cultural riches of the province’s Indigenous peoples. If this omission had resulted in the materials being left in villages of their origins, then one could commend Mr. Fannin from this century to his own. But alas, as a visitor to New York observed in 1900, there is “a veritable forest of totem poles” at the American Museum of Natural History in Central Park.18 And the Field Museum in Chicago, through the collecting tenacity of George Dorsey and others, had the contents of many Haida burial caves and gravehouses.

  Rising to the heights of umbrage, The British Colonist featured this headline in November 1903: “LOSS TO BRITISH COLUMBIA Through The Depredations Of United States And Other Foreign Collectors Of The Province’s Most Valuable Indian Relics.” The article goes on to say:

  The government might take a leaf out of the book of the universities of the United States. Several of these have collectors constantly in the field collecting and cataloguing relics and collating their histories. The province could do likewise and appoint some one [sic] to conserve what rightfully belongs to us.19

  Of course, the matter of ownership goes uncommented upon. Newcombe continued to do some collecting as well as writing and publishing on historical and zoological topics.

  Memory provides a curious and unreliable template. In an attempt to fit a house into a specific memory, I found another house, its gracious rooms and verandah given over to the healing of men released from prison and trying to find their way back into the world. I discovered that another house I had known in my childhood and had believed then to have stood in Thunderbird Park since the beginnings of time (whatever that meant to me then) contains a series of paradoxes, both territorial and cultural. Nothing is as permanent as change and the shifting boundaries of how we remember the past. A house is more than those who live in it, its secrets encoded in its architecture and domestic history long after its residents depart this earth.

  That child on her small blue bicycle explored the fringes of a time and place on the cusp of change, though she didn’t know it then. Stepping into the home of a missionary, it didn’t occur to her that the masks on the wall and the rattles used by a shaman somewhere on the coast of the province had been gathered improperly. She had no idea the place where she lived had been colonized so thoroughly that even the namesake plant of her own playground at Clover Point had been supplanted by invader species. Yet she grew up with such clear maps in her mind of that beloved terrain — the snowberry bushes of Lover’s Lane hung with the treacherous nests of wasps, the location of the beautiful fawn lilies on Moss Rocks that turned their faces to the world after pollination, a small park where curls of cedar drifted to the ground to be collected by children — that as an adult, sleeping far from those familiar streets, her dreams were often filled with their houses and their trees, the waves washing onto the shores of Ross Bay a distant sacred music.

  Olea europaea

  Young Woman with Eros on her Shoulder

  Full noon, July . . .

  If the olive groves didn’t exist

  I would have invented them . . .

  — Odysseas Elytis, Eros, Eros, Eros: Selected and Last Poems

  I’d treated myself to a cabin on the ferry from Brindisi to Piraeus. My journal tells me it cost about thirty dollars, which was expensive in 1976; but I’d come from Madrid by train across southern France and hadn’t slept for three days or nights. (One day I will tell the story of being alone in Madrid without luggage, which had been lost en route from Canada. It was my first trip, I was twenty-one years old, and I still don’t understand why I didn’t turn around and go home.) The compartments were full and the seats cramped. I’d doze off for a few minutes and then someone would inadvertently elbow me as he or she reached up for baggage or else rearranged clothing or rummaged in a basket for a leg of chicken or bottle of wine. I kept pinching myself to remind myself I was in Europe — that, and everything else kept me awake.

  The cabin was plain but comfortable and after leaving the party of Greeks I’d met on the train from Rome to Brindisi — a group of guys heading home from jobs in England to a family wedding in Athens — I crawled between clean sheets and slept. Waking, I stepped outside my cabin just as the ferry was passing through the canal cutting across the Isthmus of Corinth.

  I’d never seen a blue like that of the water and sky. Every adjective was called into being; and every one found wanting. Above the city of Corinth, on the Peloponnese, was the Acrocorinth with its remains of temples and fortifications. There was an important sanctuary to Demeter and Kore there; I’d studied their cult and it was glorious to be so near a site associated with two faces of womanhood — the mother and the maiden. The sun, even early, was warm.

  My Greek friends came by to offer me breakfast on the deck of the ferry — they pulled cheese and apples from their rucksacks (they’d slept on the deck, under the stars), provided small slugs from a flask of Metaxa, and little cups of coffee they brought from the ship’s cafeteria. The previous night they’d surprised me by quoting poetry — Yannis Ritsos — and I asked what poems they had for a morning sail through the Isthmus of Corinth:

  The harbor is old, I can’t wait any longer

  for the friend who left for the island of pine trees

  for the friend who left for the island of plane trees . . .1

  I recognized Seferis. “Now say it in Greek,” I asked. One of them continued the poem:

  Τ' ἀστρα της νύχτας με γυρίζουν στην προσδοκία

  του Οδυσσέα για τους νεκρούς μες στ' ασφοδίλια

  (“The night’s stars take me back to the anticipation / of Odysseus waiting for the dead among the asphodels . . . ”).2 I wanted such ease of transport, between London and Athens, Greek and English, those days of Odysseus among the asphodels and myself on the deck of a ferry sailing for Piraeus.

  Travelling through Spain and France, I’d grown to love the sight of olive trees. How beautiful they were, the gnarled trunks of the old ones, and the grey-green leaves trembling as the train passed. I knew from my Classical Studies courses that olive trees were sacred to Athena, that the first olive tree was a result of her striking her spear into the soil of the area which became her city, Athens, and that the original tree still grew there.

  I’d also grown to love olive oil in my very early twenties, which is the time I am writing of — though it was something I’d never had at home. Reading Elizabeth David and Jane Grigson had made me realize that a world of food waited, just as a world of other wonders did, and it made me impatient for my life to begin. That was one reason I was heading to Crete. I was hopeful that all the things I’d wanted and wished for in Victoria and which hadn’t materialized — love (my friends were all pairing up and the men I wanted never noticed me), a table laden with figs, wine and fine cheeses, herbs picked from the land itself, a sense of myself as a writer in my own right, with passion and purpose — were possible here.

  Who knows why the young attach such yearning to places other than home, and take to the skies, the seas, the mountains of the world? In those years (and I dare say in these years as well), they were abroad with their rucksacks, their passports, clutching well-worn
copies of Europe on Ten Dollars a Day, watched by those who’d done the whole thing a decade earlier on five dollars a day. I had none of those books — only Henry Miller’s The Colossus of Maroussi, Lawrence Durrell’s Reflections on a Marine Venus, and my beloved copy of The Odyssey, in Robert Fitzgerald’s wonderful translation. In these books, there were olive trees, and lamb bathed with oil grilling on open fires. I thought I could travel the way my heroes did, with luck and the blessing of the gods.

  Two Americans began a conversation with me; they wanted to know where I was going. After a private consultation with each other and their guidebook, they wondered if they could tag along to Crete. My Greek friends helped us to figure out the boat connection to Herakleion. This gave us a day in Piraeus. The harbour was filled with boats and sailors. Catcalls followed us everywhere, and hisses — even into the taverna where we went for a meal. A carafe of retsina materialized on our table with a table of men on the other side of the taverna bowing in our direction.

  It was a night ferry, and most of its passengers were Greek, some carrying cages of chickens; one man had a goat with rope around its neck. There were bunks with mattresses covered with cracked vinyl, wide enough for two. The three of us shared one bunk after a meal of macaroni with nutmeg-flavoured sauce, washed down with a glass of rough red wine. I can’t recall the names of the young Americans, but I remember the woman and I settled lengthwise on the bunk and her partner, a man, stretched out across our feet and wrote in a journal. All around us people talked, drank, and smoked cigarettes that filled the compartment with grey smoke. Children cried; the goat bleated and was soothed by its owner. The smell was powerful — of cheese, and sweat, and wool. Someone played a bouzouki and I fell asleep to its strange familiar music.

  I don’t know what I expected of Crete but it surpassed anything I had imagined. To approach by sea, at dawn, the water dark and Herakleion glowing in the first light. To stumble off the ferry and into the streets where people offered rooms, transportation in dusty taxis, guide services to Knossos or the archaeological museum.

  We found the American Express office and cashed traveller’s cheques before finding out when the bus left for Agia Galini. Tickets purchased and packs stowed by the bus while the driver went out for a meal, we went in search of food for the bus trip. A bakery offered loaves of chewy bread; a small store had bins of tangy cheese, chunks of which were weighed and placed in plastic bags; and I chose some olives — bright green, darker green, and cracked, purple. Tomatoes. I also bought a tub of thick yogurt. The woman in the store asked, “Meli? Meli?” She took a spoon and dipped it into a bucket, holding it up to my mouth. “Meli,” she smiled. I tasted. Ah, honey! And it became one of my first Greek words — μέλι. And yogurt with this honey — γιαούρτι με μέλι — became my preferred breakfast, the sheep’s yogurt thick and creamy, honey ribboned through it like gold.

  A revelation: the underground public toilet near the bus station. One descended stairs to a cave, where a very old woman dressed in black guarded the entrance. Her anteroom held a bed, a table, and a chair. An ikon hung above the bed and a spidery piece of knitting rested on the table. The woman held out her hand, preventing me from going through to the poorly lit room beyond, and I finally realized that the basket beside her held sections of toilet paper. One had to pay for a few squares before entering. The odour was appalling. There was no door to close. And the toilet itself . . . wasn’t. It was a hole in the floor, with two slightly raised metal rests for the feet beside it. There was nothing to hold on to. I squatted carefully and peed into the hole. The paper was slippery, waxy. I don’t know if I’m correct in remembering that there was nowhere to wash my hands afterwards. The experience felt strangely mythic, and yet I wasn’t sure what it portended.

  When we finally boarded the bus, it was as though we were stepping into a small shrine. The dashboard held many objects, ikons and votives, with still more hung above the window. Some were fringed with small bells, and when the driver turned a corner, they rang and chimed. The driver mostly drove with one hand while the other worried at a string of beads on his wrist. Music filled the bus, mournful at first and then beautiful as it entered my blood, finding my pulse.

  As we left Herakleion, the road became rougher and climbed higher. When I looked around me, I realized that all the men, young and old, were wearing beads on their wrists and the clicking I heard, along with the bells, was the sound of them as we rounded corners, passing sheer drop-offs without any abutments to prevent the bus going over the cliffs. Tiny churches appeared here and there on the high slopes, and every time we passed one, the beads clicked as people crossed themselves in the Orthodox fashion. A man riding sideways on a donkey stopped as the bus hurtled by and that was my first sight of the old Crete — baggy black trousers tucked into high boots, an elaborate head wrapping, long moustaches drooping from the mouth. And there were mountains everywhere, rocky and pierced with caves. In one of them, I knew, Zeus had been born — which didn’t surprise me. It was an island of beginnings, somehow. I hoped for one myself — a new beginning.

  Tell what you saw as the bus raced towards Agia Galini. Mountains. Tiny villages, white with churches, perched so high that you couldn’t imagine a reason for a village to be there until you remembered the history of Turks, Venetians, Germans; and yet a road lurched up the mountainside, sheep and goats grazed on the stony slope, a few donkeys carried their riders uphill, laden with sticks and sacks.

  Steep rises covered in dittany, juniper, plane trees in the squares of the towns we passed through, shady and green. Holm oak and kermes oak. Rocks covered in low-growing thyme — by now you’d eaten your γιαούρτι με μέλι and knew that the bees had worked the thyme flowers to create this ambrosia, the first honey for which you’d been able to detect its origins.

  Groves of olives, and long rows of grapes on the fertile plains. Through the open windows you smelled dust and unfamiliar wind.

  Signs in Greek, which you yearned to be able to read. (You had your grammar and were trying to master the alphabet.)

  You passed houses almost smothered in vines, the window frames and doors painted blue. Rusty oil cans held geraniums and lush basil tomato plants climbed the whitewashed walls. Old women shrouded in black sat on chairs and held up a hand to the driver of the bus.

  Outside a church in a small town, you saw an Orthodox priest eating an apple.

  Thirty-three years later, I am thinking about that girl on the bus, heading to the unknown. I am thinking about her innocence and her hope. I am in the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts when I find myself stopped in my tracks by a small terracotta sculpture.

  It’s not much more than thirty centimetres tall. The label tells me it’s from the first half of the second century BC, possibly from Taranta, Italy. The label says it’s a young woman with Eros on her shoulder from an ephedrismos group. I have no idea what an ephedrismos group is, but I note down the information into my notebook and move along to the rest of the Mediterranean archaeology exhibit.

  And yet she stays with me, the young woman. Eros holds out both hands, as though in benediction and she looks up at him over her right shoulder. Her right breast is exposed, the draperies of her chiton show that she is using the muscles of her thighs to support the weight of the god.

  I try to find out something about ephedrismos. It turns out it was a game played by children in ancient Greece. Julius Pollux tells us: “They put down a stone and throw at it from a distance with balls or pebbles. The one who fails to overturn the stone carries the other, having his eyes blindfolded by the rider, until, if he does not go astray, he reaches the stone, which is called a dioros . . .”3

  There are other examples of ephedrismos figures as well as depictions of players on vessels, even the special jars used to hold oil for funerary purposes. Several are of girls partnering each other, and one fascinating rendering, from a fifth-century BC funerary flask, shows a satyr with a maenad on his back. These are both followers of the god D
ionysus, associated with wine and sexual frenzy, and there is something deliciously suggestive about the notion of them playing a child’s game in a context that is decidedly adult.

  Back to the little terracotta figure from the Montreal museum: I wonder why Eros is this young woman’s partner, and why his hands are raised, not covering the young woman’s eyes as the game’s rules require? I know that Eros is sometimes represented as a child god, playful and mischievous. In his ikonography, he is most often shown with a bow and arrow, ready to shoot desire into the hearts of his victims. Yet here he is a participant in a children’s game, riding the shoulders of a young woman whose breast is exposed, her cheek resting against his abdomen, close to his groin.

  The driver drove very fast down the hill and stopped in a square with a planter of flowering hibiscus in its centre. This was Agia Galini, Saint Serenity, a village right on the edge of the Libyan Sea. There were some restaurants around the square and boats at the quay, with more of them pulled up to shore.

  I walked up through the village with the Americans. They paused by a house with a Rooms sign and knocked on the door. I kept walking, almost to the outskirts of the village, where I’d noticed a house as we drove in. It was across from the church and its separate bell tower and had flowers tumbling from cans and pots all around the front door. I don’t know why it caught my eye, but a room was waiting for me there in Angela’s house, painted blue with green trim; impossibly cheap, with a bed, a table, and a few hooks on the wall for my clothes. “Come in, come in,” Angela said, and brought a tray with a glass of water, a spoon, and a jar of cherry preserves. She took my pack from my shoulders. I could have been a goddess in disguise, not a potential tenant at all. The sweet taste of cherries on the tongue, and then the long fall of cool water down my throat.