by Gregory Day
He took me down a brief dim hallway, then into a small low-beamed room stuffed to the gills with women and children. With repeated references to ‘Mister English’ I was welcomed to a table where coffee and roasted nuts, cherries and boiled eggs had been hastily arranged. This was his extended family, none of whom spoke English, and so there was much nodding and pushing forward of various plates and a beaten coffeepot; I’d already learnt that the little amount of Iraklio dialect I had picked up from Tassos meant next to nothing on the plateau.
I was figuring I’d just stay polite and leave at an appropriate moment to find a safe place to sleep out in the hills on the southern side of the plateau. Before long, however, I was being cajoled to rise from my chair and to follow my original host, whose name was Manolis, back down the corridor and out into the street. A black-garbed woman stuffed chunks of dried bread into my bag and patted me fondly as I backed out of the house. Quite frankly, I didn’t know where to look.
Manolis, still inexplicably overjoyed to be in my company, had me follow him down the narrow lane to another house. He called and banged on the worn blue door with his fist until a man answered. There was a quick spirited exchange, in which I got the distinct impression that I was the issue being discussed. The man at the door smiled at me courteously and stepped out with us into the dirt street. He was impeccably neat, with a pure black goatee trimmed to an absolute point that reminded me of Bert Regan, the president of the Colac Turf Club. He closed his door behind him and amidst more rapid discussion the three of us set off back the way Manolis and I had come.
Arriving back to the central lane of the village we turned right and continued down a drystoned slope, past doorways upon which and into which Manolis, with what seemed an alarming lack of discretion, shouted and whistled with glee for the inhabitants to come out and join the party. I saw crone-like faces peering from the dark entranceways to see what all the fuss was about and I began to feel like the lone camel I once saw paraded down the main street of Geelong. The possibility crossed my mind that I had fallen into a village of Axis sympathisers – Gestapedes was the local term – and that I was being marched off to some kind of public execution. Why else would they be taking such an interest?
As it turned out this little village of Marmaketo was anything but a Gestapedes stronghold. Eventually, with perhaps a dozen people in tow – mostly men but also women, children, and one huge Alsatian dog – Manolis led us to the village kaphenoi, which we entered through saloon-like doors to a fairly rousing reception. Manolis stepped to one side of me as the card players and smokers turned towards the door. With open palms upturned in my direction, he appeared to speak passionately of my bona fides and before too long I was seated at a central round table with plates of meat, potatoes, beans, bread, a bottomless glass of raki, and clusters of conversation flying about me like thrip on a hot day by the lake back home.
There was much happy laughter in the room, and not an Italian soldier to be seen anywhere. Manolis was slapped on the back and embraced, as if he was quite the hero for bringing me in. There seemed to be no fear of discovery, no reason to curtail pride and joy. I had gone from hiding out in caves, as instructed by the andarte networks, to being the toast of a Lasithi village. As the hours went by the festivities grew and the reason for this strange behaviour emerged bit by bit. I heard the words ‘Mister English’ mentioned a lot, the name ‘Pendlebury’ and ‘Mister John’ too. Initially I presumed all three of these names referred to the same person, but it wasn’t until Manolis’ friend with the beard like Bert Regan’s explained the distinction that I could see some of the reason for all the fuss.
Back in ’36 and ’37, in those summer seasons Spenser had told me about on our long walk to Karfi, when he and Pendlebury and the others had first excavated on the Lasithi plateau, there had been an almost unending rapport between the visiting party and the people of the hills. This, according to the broken English of Manolis’ friend, was largely to do with Pendlebury’s great personality. He was given Lasithi clothes to wear and he wore them proudly, believing that the clay shards he was uncovering on the windy saddle of Karfi were part of an unbroken line connecting to the villagers he was eating and dancing with in the kaphenois.
This, however, had not been the case with Spenser. Whereas ‘Mister John’ was soon kitted out with a Venetian sword, bog-catchers and the like, Spenser refused and his relations with the Cretans were uneasy. At the time, the local people were hurt by this but they did their best to excuse his ill manners. If he would prefer to sweat all day in Irish linens and Scotch waistcoats than have his own differences absorbed into the surrounding vistas by donning the local garb, that was up to him.
So when Spenser and I turned up with the wireless set at Karfi, the people of the plateau were bemused to see that he’d donned the island mufti, even to the extent of the curling native moustache. When the supply drop was bungled, most people involved had let their dislike of ‘Theseus’ run free. And this is where I came in. Ignorant, but for once it seemed inspired, and in luck, the snipping of Theseus’ moustache had made an unwitting legend of me on the plateau. The mantinades on the subject were already flowing in the kaphenoi because I had managed to perfectly express what neither a university education nor sheer bitterness could authentically employ – the necessary sting in the tale.
*
The hours rumbled by in the rowdy kaphenoi and more and more people arrived to enjoy the festive occasion. Once it was explained how Spenser had refused the local culture in the days of free choice, I found it harder to resist my role. The party went on into the night, with still no visible anxiety about Eyetie surveillance, and absolutely no acknowledgement that the whole island, including such high and remote ground as we were on, was under Axis occupation.
At a late hour I was escorted by Manolis back to his family house. I was shown into a small room, with a trough and a bed whose sheets were made from what looked to me like coarsely stitched parachute silk. The next morning I woke, disorientated, until I noticed the doleful eyes of Simmo staring in at me through the glassless window. The poor beast was nothing if not steadfast, and by his look he’d been watching over me all night.
Sometime later I was brought a potato omelette with the scent of dittany, and coffee, and told by Manolis’ friend with the Bert Regan beard that I was to be taken to the village barber. (I did learn the name of this friend of Manolis’ the previous evening but in the swing of the festivities had taken to calling him Bert, a name which his fellow Marmaketans, with some amusement, instantly adopted. I’ve wondered ever since if he will go in honour to his grave under the name of a western district racing doyen.)
At the barber’s, in front of a dozen or so excitable spectators, my hair was dyed black with a foul-smelling liquid, and my throat and face, aside from my moustache, which was also dyed, were shaven clean. The barber was a tiny old bloke with inflamed drooping eyelids, but his hand was steady throughout. When he’d finished the job he bowed in what seemed an antique manner and made me a parting gift of a small ceramic jar of the dye. He handed it over with great ceremony, the jar containing a secret weapon for the months to come, and I nodded my thanks, feeling a further layer of guilt at how misplaced I intended their faith in my commitment to be.
Festivities resumed at the kaphenoi on that second day, and by the afternoon I felt already quite drunk again, but also increasingly uneasy. I began to falter in my politeness, to worry about the Eyeties, and to think again of Vern. He would have relished this unending rapport on the plateau but it was I who was in his place now, I who was being feted as a luminary, and, by the afternoon, I felt a familiar phoniness, like I had when he was stuck on the farm teaching himself Greek and I was off wasting the old man’s time and money at school. Once again I was sure the big wide world had got the wrong man and my only possible absolution seemed to be to get to the south coast and then to Egypt to start asking questions.
The fervour
of Manolis’ possessive pride, the relish of the villagers for a folktale such as I had produced, broke out into dancing by nightfall. The nights of the plateau had been growing increasingly cold with the autumn and by now fires were lit in the kaphenoi, around which the mantinades continued tumbling and raucous, as the lyras were bowed. I grew glum. I had legendary shoes to fill but only Corangamite feet to fill them, and midst these unusual mountain people I felt my overwhelming ordinariness to be something more like Spenser than Pendlebury, more like myself than Vern. But no one seemed to notice my mood. My new head of black hair was praised, my health was toasted, and every few minutes a swarthy face would leer at me out of the tobacco smoke, laughing and babbling his approval of the snipping of the moustache.
It seemed a given that Manolis’ life would never be the same again, and late on that second evening he began to grow maudlin in his thanks. After two days he was now inconsolably drunk, and began to cry on my shoulder with a melancholy gratitude. With the excuse of needing a leak, I extricated myself and managed to plead with Bert to guide me back to the house.
It was well past midnight. We walked soberly down the lane. Gradually the tick of the windmills in the fields beyond the village replaced the din of the kaphenoi subsiding behind us. At the low door of Manolis’ family house I made it clear to gentle Bert that I needed to move on the following day. He tut-tutted through his shapely whiskers, not because he didn’t find my desire reasonable but because he knew my departure would be resisted at all costs.
At last, after we shared a smoke from a packet of Sigarette Nazionali he’d produced from the folds of his mountain jacket, Bert agreed to talk to Manolis in the morning. To prepare the way for my exit. Or that was how I understood it, from his broken English. With a soft embrace, he bade me goodnight.
*
I woke late the next morning in my little room to find Manolis sitting on the end of my bed, staring at me. I knew immediately that Bert and he had spoken. I could see the worry in his eyes, the sense that his proximity to my legend was slipping away. I could also see that he wouldn’t let go without a fight, though a strange and lugubrious old fight it was going to be.
I ate breakfast in the large kitchen at the end of the dark corridor. It was clear by the family’s behaviour that they also had been told of my intentions. It was presumed, of course, that my keen sense of duty as a soldier was what was making me depart, which made it difficult for Manolis to hold me back. He sat opposite me at the breakfast table, tortured by a peculiar struggle between equally admirable forces: legendary hospitality on one hand and a warrior’s courage on the other.
By lunchtime we were back in the kaphenoi and a third day of festivities had begun to brew in my honour, if a little tentatively. In the hope of preserving a sober mood I began asking about the Eyeties. Wouldn’t they pounce on us at any moment? Surely such brazen celebration in the village kaphenoi wasn’t safe? But this ploy backfired, encouraging only more rowdy laughter. The complete absence of Italian surveillance was explained away cheerfully as par for the course; they were lazy, I was told, they didn’t want to be in Crete, and would most likely approve of the joke made at Theseus’ expense. Bert explained over more raki that the Italians were doing their best to treat the remoteness of the plateau as a chance for a holiday. As such, a tacit agreement had been struck between the plateau and their occupiers, an agreement which involved subtle collusion to protect Lasithi from the manic streak of the Germans. Bert spoke in soft philosophical tones of this arrangement, telling me that although the villagers would take advantage of the freedom while it lasted he feared for what it may eventually lead to.
After many toasts, which I tried to accept with a valedictory grace, I made it adamantly clear that my time had come. I must leave. Rising from my chair, I did my best to make a point of publicly farewelling my principal host, but he would have none of it. He petulantly turned his back on me when I approached for a parting embrace.
Well, now I was getting plain angry. After unsuccessful remonstrations with Manolis himself, I pleaded with Bert for help. Finally, to my great relief, Manolis, who I had, after all, merely happened to bump into, sulkily agreed to guide me south out of the plateau.
Morosely then, reluctantly, in a filthy mood and without a single word, he walked me back to his house where, after I’d said my farewells to his shy but teary family, we untethered Simmo and headed across the plateau.
*
Along the maze of cart-tracks through the flat crops we went, silently, with the Dikti range looming ahead, the breeze in the rustling leaves of the trackside plane trees and the soft thwack of the windmill sails beating gently under the donkey’s tread. We crossed, and crisscrossed, rows of potatoes and broad beans, just two inconspicuous farmers of the plateau walking low across the patchwork ringed by a fortress of mountains.
When we arrived on the far side, in the village of Kaminaki, where the Kalantzakis brothers were from, we passed straight through the rustic lanes, without a word, on and up a winding route into the mountains.
We climbed amongst the clonk of the goat bells for what seemed like two or three hours, rising above the plateau, with eagles soaring above us in the chill, and long views into the west, and still the towering snow-patched slopes of Mount Dikti ahead in the southeast. The sullen Manolis led the way through stony switchbacks for what seemed an interminably long time until finally he halted at a fork in the track. To the right, I could see a path slowly declining into the west. To the left, another track simply wound further up, through more stony scrub, though in truth I couldn’t see far in either direction.
Standing motionless at the fork Manolis simply stared at me. His leathery face seemed no longer sad but defiant, and more than a tad derisive.
I asked him, by pointing and gesturing, which way I should go. He shrugged, and replied, in plain English: ‘Free choice.’
I opened my arms wide and turned in an incredulous arc to the hills around, as if to say: ‘How would I know which way to go, I’m not from here!’
He only shrugged again.
He felt, I’m sure, that I had misunderstood the reason for the festivities he had initiated on my behalf, and by his next gesture he made it clear that I had also misunderstood the whole point of life itself.
Feeling too annoyed now to attempt an embrace I thrust out my hand to shake his in farewell. He refused. His arm stayed by his side. With a look of intense dignity he stared into the distance.
Rightio then, I thought. Left with no alternative I slowly led Simmo along the track that continued uphill over the mountains.
But after only a few steps I heard Manolis shout. I turned around.
He stood, this enigmatic spud farmer of Lasithi, brandishing a lemon in one hand and with his other pointing above us at the sun. He shook the lemon violently in front of his face and thrust his pointing finger repeatedly into the sky. He said a word, in his own language, one word, over and over again, as he shook the lemon and prodded his finger into blue air.
He was telling me something, but I was none the wiser. And so he concluded finally that I was a dead loss. He turned in disgust and walked away.
XXI
In the days after I’d left the package with Lascelles I had no peace. The straits were pitched in the furies of late autumn, warning only of a wintry future, coming headlong at my hut. When the easterly blows, in this ever westerly realm, it seems indeed to be against nature. It is like being caught in a backlash where the routine of dominant forces is finally overcome. Added to this, just as the westerly invariably has a degree of southerly in it, thereby mustering the icy objectivity of Antarctica, so too the easterly often holds a glancing wedge of the north, the fuming streak of the mainland, which rather than the clean truth of the south, seems to usher in a man-made retribution, as if every scuffing whitecap contains a wicked human curse.
I battened down, wrote not another word, and worried myself
sick at how my package would be received.
Then, after four days in the brunt of the weather on Wait-a-While, days in which not even a rodent let alone a wallaby was seen, the backlashing petered out and in some kind of missed meteorological stitch I went for a ride.
My limbs were stiff but it cleared my head to roll downhill to Naracoopa and inspect the damage. I pedalled south through the storm-muddied tunnel of tea-tree beyond the jetty until I popped out onto the Tuddenhams’ bone-strewn pastures running along to the reefs of the shore.
For a while I stood amongst scurrying ground birds, lichened boulders and terraced cowpats, observing the washed-up feeling you get after such a storm. It occurred to me then how the weather on this island could wear anything away, flesh and muscle, joy and sadness, a caustic idealism such as mine, or even a commitment to die. For what would be the point of that? On the coasty paddocks the new light picked up the blond glare of bones. It would happen soon enough. Right then it seemed big-headed, vainglorious, among other things, to bring it on any quicker. So any terrible thoughts I’d had during those wrecking days from the east I now dismissed as inconsequential.
I made my way back through the tea-tree and wheeled the bike out onto the long jetty for a peek. Not a soul around. I scouted out for an hour or two along the beach north of there, wandering parallel to the narrow road and right past where I now sit, and then, pushing the bike back up the long haul to Wait-a-While, noticed my gate had been closed with one less loop of the chain. Pushing through, I warily rounded the tank stand south of the house to find not a visitor but a box waiting for me under the bullnose at my front door.
