by Paul Preuss
“Followed me? Oh, because Peter’s already at the morning talk, I suppose…?”
She aimed at him and snapped the shutter, all in one quick motion, then thumbed the lever to the next frame.
Minakis hid his surprise in rambling talk. “I confess I have little use for Hawking’s ‘imaginary time.’ A mathematical stunt to get rid of the Big Bang, apparently because he finds singularities distasteful.”
“Thanks so much.” She snapped the shutter and thumbed the lever again, pressing her mobile lips together to suppress a grin.
“For…?” He raised an inquisitive eyebrow.
“For explaining what doesn’t interest me in terms I don’t understand.” She said it with more humor than heat, keeping her eye to the viewfinder. She snapped one more frame, then let the camera dangle from its strap. “I followed you to take pictures of you. And to ask you about yourself. I decided that while Peter was working, I would work too. I suspect you would make an intriguing subject for a magazine piece.”
“I’m flattered.” And impressed. He knew the truth more completely than she could imagine, and he knew how carefully she had to step around it. Yet nothing she said was untrue.
The waiter brought custard and coffee and cold water. Minakis watched as she ate hungrily, following each forkful of sugar-dusted pastry with a sip of coffee, then a sip of water. Finished at last, she sat back in her chair. “That was good.”
“Mm. The only better I know is in Iraklion, at a place on Fountain Square. Two places, these days. Two brothers shared a restaurant, but they got into an argument and split it down the middle. They haven’t said a word to each other in years. The tables are shoved up to the line, so if you want to start a fight, just put your plate down on the table beside you. It will vanish into the enemy kitchen. Then come the gruesome threats and the arm waving.”
She laughed happily, letting down her guard. “You showed us a wonderful time last night. I meant to thank you. Peter too.”
“Alas, my repertoire is exhausted.”
“You mean you’re not a tour guide at heart?”
“Nude beaches aside, Mykonos is a very ordinary place.”
“I think you showed us Delos because you want to know Peter. And right now you’re dying to hear everything I have to tell you about him.”
“And do you have anything to tell me?”
“I heard him claim an interest in reality last night. But I think for him reality means a kind of aesthetics, something he can deal with rationally, at arm’s length.”
Minakis took a sip of his bitter coffee. “I would like to know how you came to that conclusion. When did he first…?”
She smiled again, faintly. “I’ll let him tell you what he wants you to know. The truth is, I’m really not interested in talking about him this morning. Peter, Peter, Peter. Say it three times and be done.”
Minakis straightened in his chair. “Forgive me, I’ve behaved extremely rudely.”
Her gaze was hard upon him. “Now tell me about what I’m interested in. Tell me about Manolis Minakis.”
“What is there to tell?”
“Oh, the usual things. Are you married? If not, why not? How many children do you have? If none, what’s wrong with you?” She bared her teeth. “Nothing personal.”
Her teasing delighted him. “I was married once, for a short time, a very long time ago. My wife died. As for children…none that I know of.”
“No bride stealing, no sheep stealing, no blood feuds?” She pouted. “A dull story, for a man of Crete.”
“Although I was born on Crete, Minakis is not the name I was born with.”
She brightened. “That sounds like the beginning of a tale.”
“A long tale, much too long for a demitasse of coffee.”
“I’m in no hurry.”
He paused, entranced by the teasing impatience that animated the beautiful face before him. He, who had perfected the art of intimidation, who had meant to draw her into his web, had been disarmed by her, invited to spin his web for her amusement.
“I was born in a village below Mount Dikti, above the Lasithi Plain,” he said at last. “A village too small to appear on most maps. But as a man named Pendlebury once said—and it is still true—‘maps of Crete are in any case woefully inaccurate.’ My mother’s name was Sophia. I never knew her.”
5
“Yip! Yip!” The girl raced up the thorny mountainside, hardly breaking stride as she hurled sharp stones from her apron pocket at the sheep and goats that fled from her and her mongrel dog. She was imitating the dog—“Yip! Yip! Yip!”—a matted black-and-white cur who bounded ecstatically after the sheep, nipping at their hocks with his eyes rolled back in his head, although without the girl to set an example he would never have dared cause such commotion. The bedraggled sheep ran this way and that, clattering over the rocks, spilling miniature avalanches down the steepening slope, their efforts to escape frustrated by the frantic dog and the girl’s missiles, which forced them to climb higher still, while the handful of goats in the flock went along with what must have seemed an exciting game of tag. Above them, Dikti’s limestone cliffs were golden in the evening light.
“Sophia! Curse you, stop that!” a male voice roared, echoing from the cliffs. “Come here! Come here!”
“Yip! Yip!” she cried, urging the panicked sheep upward. But the dog stopped and nervously cocked an ear to the man down the mountain. Nikos Androulakis, Sophia’s father, had once been as adept at chasing sheep and goats over the crags as she was, and he was not kind to dogs.
When her father started up the slope, Sophia turned to watch, planting her shoes wide in the dirt and squatting on a boulder. She rested her jaw on the heels of her hands and set her elbows wide upon her knees; her bare elbows poked through holes in her blouse and sweater; her skirts hung in scallops. The flock, no longer harassed, milled around bleating.
Androulakis picked his way unsteadily among the rocks and thorns. Soon enough he was pawing the earth just to keep himself upright. Sophia guessed that he’d been sitting in front of Louloudakis’s place all afternoon, drinking the raki he distilled himself, while the other village men sipped boiled coffee. At last he staggered and glared up at her, still a hundred yards down the slope but close enough for her to see the sweat shining on his forehead, and his heaving chest.
“You won’t obey?” he cried. “To the devil with you, you whore of Babylon!”
At thirteen, Sophia was vague about his meaning, but whenever Papa Kriaris, the village priest, sang those verses of Revelations about the Whore of Babylon in church, he wore an expression of disgust on his bearded face, so it was probably worse than an ordinary insult.
Scowling, she stood up. She jammed two fingers of her right hand into her mouth and whistled at the flock; instantly the animals launched themselves down the mountain, tumbling past her. She followed in their dust, gangling down the slope, while the dog trailed at a safe distance.
As she passed close by her red-faced father, he drew his arm back and swung at her, open-handed. The tips of his fingers stung her ear. She tossed her head and straightened her back and kept on down the slope. He lunged after her, this time aiming his fist at the back of her head, but she ducked away, and he stumbled and fell hard to one knee. A second later, feeling the hurt, he bellowed in frustration.
She didn’t laugh; she pointedly ignored him. Like the goats, her downslope progress was a dance among the rocks.
The dozen raw stone houses of Ayia Kyriaki—the name means “Holy Sunday”—sheltered three extended families, fewer than a hundred people when everyone was at home. The village clung to the slopes of Dikti above a wide arroyo that wound through the almond groves of the Limnakaros Plain, a watercourse that was dry most of the year but became a rushing torrent when the snows melted. At the foot of the little plain the seasonal waters fell through a cleft into a gorge that opened into the Lasithi Plain below—verdant Lasithi, six miles across and three thousand feet above sea leve
l, ringed with mountains and sporting a necklace of twenty villages. Poor Ayia Kyriaki was alone in Limnakaros, a thousand feet higher and hidden from its neighbors behind a stony ridge.
By the time her father had descended to their house at the top of the village’s single street, Sophia had already driven the flock into their rock-walled pen against a limestone outcrop. When Androulakis pushed through the gate into the courtyard he found her seated demurely beside her mother on a bench beside the door, her apron full of bean pods, helping to hull broad beans into an iron pot. The dog lay on its belly beside the beehive oven that was still warm from the afternoon’s baking, eyeing him nervously.
Androulakis said nothing but limped past the women, through the open door into the house. They heard him rattling around inside, making more noise than he needed to.
“You have been tormenting him again,” Sophia’s mother said in a harsh whisper.
Sophia snapped a pod and said nothing.
“You must respect your father, child.” At thirty-five, Katerina’s face was browner than her daughter’s and netted with deep wrinkles. Long ago she might have been pretty, perhaps even cheerful, but Sophia could not remember any expression on her mother’s face less bleak than the one she wore now.
“He does not respect himself.”
“Hush.” It was a whispered plea. “Why do you cause trouble for nothing? No matter what people think of him, they will think worse of you.”
“They do already,” Sophia muttered.
Androulakis came out of the dark doorway, his walking stick in his hand. A net sariki was wrapped tightly around his head, dangling its knotted black tears across his brow, and a gray wool sakouli bulged at his side; the neck of a raki bottle protruded where the drawstrings puckered the mouth of the bag. The knees of his black pantaloons were red with dirt, and the backs of his hands were striated with thorn scratches. He’d shoved a big curved knife into the sash around his waist.
“You are going somewhere, Niko?”
“What does that matter to you? You are the witch who foisted this accursed child on me.” Saying it, he did not look at Katerina, but stared at his pale-eyed daughter with hatred. “May you be happy together.”
“But you will be home for dinner? The bread is fresh. There is still some lamb. And onions for the stew.”
“I will never enter this abode of demons again.” He hauled himself across the courtyard and through the gate, slamming it behind him so hard that a loose board fell to the ground.
“Ha!” Sophia jumped to her feet, spilling beans from her apron onto the ground. “His friends will drag him back here—after he drinks himself to sleep,” she said, loudly enough to be heard in the street.
Any other mother in the village would have screamed at this obstinate child, beaten her, sent her to bed hungry, but Katerina knew that nothing she could say to her daughter would bend her from her self-destructive course. In truth, she feared the girl was mad.
“Here is what I imagine happened next,” Minakis said to Anne-Marie, pausing to sip his bitter coffee, “although I was not there to see it, for it was almost a year yet until I was born.”
“Tell me how you can imagine any of this?”
“Later an old woman told me things.”
“Oh, things…” she said skeptically.
“And when I pressed her, the truth slipped out.”
“Well, that explains it.” Pale-eyed, Anne-Marie returned his black stare without flinching.
Minakis supposed that he could read her thoughts easily: here is an old man indulging himself, taking advantage of her curiosity—yet she finds it an amusing story, and by necessity she has as much time as he wants to take.
His amber beads came out of his pocket; he twirled them through his fingers. He would take a little more of her time.
“I picture the disreputable Androulakis outside his gate, hearing his daughter’s insults but telling himself that he chooses not to dignify them. He limps down the cobbled lane a few dozen paces to the village square, a level space with the chapel on one side and Haralambos Louloudakis’s coffeehouse and one-room general store on the other. He notes the mules tethered to the stone trough in front of the cistern, one saddled, the other packed with odd bundles wrapped in canvas.
“A stranger sits at one of Louloudakis’s tables, surrounded by village men competing to keep his glass full of raki; Louloudakis and his two boys hustle back and forth, bringing plates of olives and cubes of cheese and fragments of grilled sheep’s liver. In the mountains, nothing is of more urgent interest than a xenos, a stranger and therefore a guest—who quite apart from whatever news he might bring is sure to be odd and interesting in his own right.
“This one certainly is—a thin young man with glossy hair and a neatly trimmed mustache, who instead of a mountaineer’s baggy breeches and high black boots wears a blue serge suit and scuffed brogans. He’s holding forth, making a speech: ‘Thrace is ours, and the Aegean Islands. And soon Smyrna, best of all.’
“Androulakis stares at him, avid with curiosity, and stares even more hungrily at the feast. But when he tries to push his way into the circle, his neighbors act as if he isn’t there. He has to peer through a wall of shoulders.
“‘Smyrna is to be ours, you say?’ Stavroudakis is the oldest man in the village and half deaf; he doesn’t know he’s shouting and wouldn’t care if he did.
“The men are passing something from hand to hand, a flat piece of cardboard. As it is about to change hands in front of Androulakis, he reaches between the two men in front of him and plucks it away. It’s a photograph showing a city’s waterfront, with masts in the foreground and palm trees and pines and white European-style buildings reflected in the waters of a wide bay.
“‘After five years, if the people of Smyrna vote to unite with Greece, then it will be done,’ says the stranger.
“Now Michalis speaks up, a man who owns more almond trees than anyone else in the village. ‘How could they not vote to unite with Greece? Smyrna is Greece.’
“Androulakis’s brother-in-law, the priest, snatches the photograph out of his hand, but he has seen enough.
“‘Venizelos has worked a miracle,’ yells old man Stavroudakis, louder still, and the others join in. ‘To Venizelos!’ ‘To his health and ours!’ ‘Many more years to him!’ The men drain their glasses and slam them down, but as soon as the stranger’s glass hits the table someone pours it full again, and Androulakis, hovering outside the circle, is increasingly annoyed. He was the last to join the group; they should have offered him hospitality.
“‘So much for Smyrna,’ he insists. ‘What of Constantinople?’
“Now the circle opens to him, for he has asked the obvious question. ‘The Allies maintain their garrison there,’ says the stranger, looking at him for the first time. ‘They will make sure the sultan keeps his word.’
“‘Well…next year, maybe,’ says Androulakis with a kind of grim satisfaction. It’s a catch phrase: Next year in Constantinople. Grinning at his own cleverness, he yanks the bottle from his sakouli and proposes a toast. ‘I’ll drink to next year.’
“They cannot but join him, pushing his bottle away and standing him to a glass of Louloudakis’s best. ‘Next year in Constantinople!’
“Stars burn over Dikti, hardly dimmed by a lopsided moon rising over the almond groves. The men progress from shouted toasts to shouted verses, celebrating their fathers’ victory over the Turks—most of whom were not Turks, of course, but their own Greek neighbors, converts to Islam.
Take up your blade and stab the earth and stones,
Warriors’ blood stains your blade; it breaks on their bones.
“Aside from a spill of yellow lantern light from Louloudakis’s doorway, the night sky provides the only illumination in the square. At the edge of the shadows, women and girls advance and retreat, staring with wide eyes at the stranger and repeating in whispers what they can hear about him: ‘He comes from Athens.’ ‘He is here to make picture
s of the mountains.’ ‘He brought his machines on his mule.’ Katerina is there among the watching women, and Sophia too.
“Finally the priest’s wife pulls the priest out of the circle, and the rich man and his sons drag the stranger and his mules off to their house. Left without entertainment, the others wander away to their homes, and Androulakis is alone with his bottle. He sits watching Louloudakis’s boys rinse glasses at the trough. Soon the oil lamp goes out, and their father emerges into the moonlight, pulling the door shut behind him. ‘Kalinichta,’ says Androulakis, but they ignore him.
“Now he’s alone, his bottle almost empty; his sariki has come untied and fallen to his chest. He’s sworn never to go back to Katerina’s house, but of course he’s sworn that many times; only once, long ago, had he found the energy to walk all the way down through the almond groves, down through Lasithi and on down out of the mountains. That time he’d spent a few days in the ouzeries beside Kastro’s harbor, watching caïques and fishing boats sail in and out, and when his cash was gone he’d made the long walk back.
“So he sits in the dark, disgruntled. Beside him on the tabletop is the photograph in its cardboard frame; Androulakis picks it up and peers at it by moonlight—there are fewer minarets in this city of Asia Minor than there are in Christian Kastro. Surely it is a kind of paradise on earth.
“‘I’m glad you found it.’ The stranger has come out of the shadows and stands watching. ‘I was afraid someone had carried it off.’
“‘Smyrna is a grand place, is it?’ Androulakis asks, his speech slurred.
“‘As you can see. It is more beautiful than Nafplion, more beautiful than Thessaloniki.’
“‘More beautiful than Kastro, even?’
“The stranger shrugs, not wishing to give offense. ‘All the nations of Europe do business in Smyrna. Everyone speaks Greek, but they speak Italian and German and English as well. Turkish and Arabic too, naturally.’
