Secret Passages

by Paul Preuss

  “‘I curse the Turks.’

  “‘Of course you do.’

  “‘A man could do well there?’

  “‘That land has been Greek since the war against Troy.’ The stranger smiles. Certainly a Greek patriot could do well for himself in Smyrna.’

  “‘I could do well for myself?’

  “The stranger studies him as if weighing the question. ‘You are more than a farmer, I suppose. More than a herdsman?’

  “‘You saw the iron windmills in Lasithi when you were coming here? When I lived there I made them by the score. In my hands, iron is like leather in the hands of a saddlemaker.’

  “‘Well, then. A gifted, decisive man. Who could do better in Smyrna? There will be need of artists in iron, in the Greater Greece.’ The stranger leans forward and lifts the photograph from Androulakis’s hand, then bows and turns away.

  “‘Malista,’ whispers Androulakis. ‘This time I will not give up; I will not come back.’ In Kastro he will find a ship to Athens—or to Asia. ‘I will do well for myself. And for Greece.’ He raises himself from the table, dragging his wool bag with him. He walks unsteadily across the square and takes the lower road, toward the almond groves and the beckoning moon.”

  Minakis stilled his restless worry beads and paused to watch Anne-Marie, trying to judge the effect of his tale spinning.

  “I’d be inclined to say that you have an impressive imagination, Professor,” she said, her eyes wide with challenge, “if imagination weren’t so simple—lazy, even—in the absence of facts.”

  “You are a photographer, an artist. Rightly concerned with authenticity.”

  Her face grew hot. “Meaning we fake it for a living?”

  “I meant the opposite. Your medium—any artistic medium—is so easily manipulated that you must struggle against it to tell the truth. Reality is the physicist’s medium. Reality and mathematics. We must struggle to tell truths that are not the accepted truth. Imagination is what we value most.”

  “What possible ground of reality do you have for the tall tale you just told?” Anne-Marie replied testily.

  “The reports of eyewitnesses—although they came to me at second hand.”

  “By all means tell me more.”

  He felt himself absurdly threatened by this woman whom he had imagined he could control. He spun his worry beads, and spun them again.

  “It was Sophia,” he said at last. “She watched Androulakis and followed him out of the square. She had hidden in the shadows with the other women; when the stranger left, when they had given up watching and gone home, she had lingered. Now she crept silently after her father, as far as the edge of the village.

  “There she stayed, watching Androulakis haltingly descend the path beside the watercourse, until his shadow-figure dissolved into the moonlit fretwork under the almond branches. When at last she lost sight of him, she smiled.

  “Yes, I think she must have smiled. Certainly she was satisfied.”

  6

  “My grandfather never came back to Ayia Kyriaki. He had spoken of Smyrna with patriotic fervor—this from the priest’s wife, Katerina’s sister, who had it from the priest, who had it from the photographer—so Katerina chose to believe that her husband had joined the army. The Catastrophe made heroes of countless missing persons. In that Royalist adventure, Smyrna was burned to the ground, thirty thousand Greeks were slaughtered, and a quarter of a million swam for their lives. Six months later, the Great Exchange: a third of a million Greek Muslims were sent to Turkey; a million Turkish Christians arrived in Greece.”

  Minakis rattled the spoon in his empty coffee cup and pushed back his chair, his eyes burning with the apparent memory of events he had not been alive to remember, but which were topics of Greek conversation to the present day.

  “Katerina and Sophia didn’t have to wait that long for their troubles to begin…”

  “Hey, you clumsy thieves! You think I don’t see you?” Sophia watched from the ridge as the Louloudakis boys, Theo and Dimitris, climbed the hillside toward her and the flock. They came within a few yards of the stragglers, studiously ignoring her, before they began shouting and whistling and driving off the nearest animals.

  She ran toward them, shouting as she ran. “You think your father will not hear about this? Your mother will not know? The whole neighborhood will hear that you are stupid thieves, and cowards without honor!”

  The little one, Dimitris, proved too sensitive to ignore Sophia’s insults. He stopped chasing sheep and turned to face her. “You are without honor!” he called back in his clear, high voice. “Your father left you. You are a whore. And your mother is…your mother is the mother of a whore.”

  Stones from her apron were already in Sophia’s hand. She flung the first and hit Dimitris in the side of the head. He shrieked and clapped his hand to his ear; bright blood seeped through his fingers, and he wailed louder at the sight of it.

  Eight-year-old Theo paused in his frantic herding. “You go to the devil,” he yelled at Sophia, shaking his open hand in the five-fingered curse, just before her next stone caught him in the neck. He screeched wordlessly and, seizing his throat, burst into tears.

  Down the mountain she came, the stones flying from her hand as if from a sling. The boys fled in panic.

  No one said anything in the village that night or in the days that followed. For Louloudakis to accuse Sophia of hurting his boys would have been to admit their bungled crime—after all, only primitives from western Crete were sheep thieves. But on the next night, someone threw garbage over the wall of Katerina Androulakis’s courtyard. And each night after that, until the night when Sophia, perched on the wall waiting, heard approaching footsteps on the cobblestones and said loudly into the darkness, “Those who want to use this place as a dump must pay a tax.” She hurled a stone, bouncing it high off the wall of the house downslope, where it fell clattering to the street. “Did you understand me? You will pay a tax”—she threw another and heard a solid thunk and a surprised cry of pain—“to the doctor.”

  Amid complaining curses, the footsteps retreated, and from that night on no one would come near Sophia or even speak her name aloud. She was a creature of a kind they had never encountered, and though they imagined much, they knew nothing of her. Sophia, the daughter of Androulakis the ironsmith, a manually gifted lout, and Katerina the would-be village scholar, who had read the dozen books in her possession so often they were crumbling—and taught her daughter to read as well, which was a useless and dangerous art in a woman.

  Who knew of Sophia’s dances among the thorns and rocks of the highest peaks? Who knew whom she might have met on the wild heights, whom she might have enticed to those heights with her gray-eyed smile and flashing brown limbs? Who was she really, in the eyes of the man who first desired her? Only a laughing child-woman? Or the Lady of the Animals, or a neraïda who enticed men, under the noonday sun, to momentary bliss and everlasting disaster…

  Who knew of the young girl’s passion and humor? Who knew why she despised hypocrisy and seized everything vivid that life had to offer? Did anyone really know—or did they merely assume the worst—that it was Sophia who had perpetrated the worst scandal in village memory, who had crept into the chapel of Ayia Kyriaki after midnight, Christmas night of 1921, and scraped the eyes out of the fresco of the Virgin and saved the scrapings in her kerchief and then walked barefoot in the thin snow that covered the cobbled street of the village and blew the scrapings of paint out of her hand through a crack in the shutters of a certain room in a certain house? And that when she did these things—if it was she—that she was not only barefoot but completely naked.

  That was a potent spell, but unlike the usual lovelorn village girl who needed a presiding witch to go with her on such a blasphemous errand, Sophia would have needed no one.

  The man upon whose sleeping face the powdered saint’s eyes had fallen sought her out within the week, high up in the snow-covered mountains where he had peculiar busines
s but she had none at all, except to meet him there, laughing, and to draw him into her secret grotto and to lie with him there, her heat warming him against the winter cold, his ardor causing her quick pain and fleeting ecstasy.

  “All-Holy Mother, how can this be true?” Katerina whispered the words, then fell silent, her jaw slack, her palms pressed to her cheeks. Silently she beseeched the icons of Nicholas and George and the Virgin, paper prints framed in dark wood that were set on the shelf beside the dying fire. Sophia huddled in the corner below them, almost invisible in the feeble glow of the embers. Her body shook with sobs and shivered with the cold.

  The girl had been running away into the winter mountains; Katerina had badgered her for it. But it was only when she had seen her daughter’s uncharacteristic morning nausea and tears, noticed her shielding her tender breasts, which upon inspection were swollen larger than a normal fourteen-year-old’s, that she guessed the truth.

  Roused from her bitter meditation, Katerina stood up and went to the hearth and reluctantly put another billet of olive wood on the coals. There was only a little firewood left in the house. It was late March, and the nights were bitter cold. Yesterday the sky above Limnakaros had spit multiple lightning bolts, as if dead Zeus were returning to the mountains of his birth; snow and freezing rain blanketed the valley, and Dikti’s crest was invisible. She turned to stare at her daughter. “Who did this?”

  Sophia only shook her head, hiding her face in her hands.

  “You were raped,” Katerina said.

  Sophia shook her head again.

  “It does not help us, it makes no difference, but tell me you were raped.”

  “No, Mother.”

  “Who did this with you? Your no-good cousin? One of the Michalis gang? Who robbed our honor?”

  “None of them.” Sophia smeared the back of her hand across her face. “It’s my fault, nobody else’s.”

  “I don’t think so. You are not the Virgin Mary.”

  Sophia sat up and moved closer to the fire. She stared into the flames. “I’ll kill myself.”

  “Don’t speak blasphemy, child.”

  “What can I do but kill myself?” Sophia started crying again, silently this time, letting the tears flow down her cheeks, where they wetly reflected the firelight. “I won’t go down and be a whore in the towns.”

  “No,” Katerina whispered. “Before that, I would kill you myself.” In the silence the olive wood caught and sputtered with brighter flame. “We must keep this a secret. You must bear the child secretly.”

  “What good will that do,” Sophia wailed, “after my child is born?”

  Katerina did not answer; she did not know what to answer. “We must keep the secret,” she repeated. “When spring comes you will stay with the flock in the high pasture. Stay there, don’t come back. Stay until your time. I’ll bring you what you need.”

  Sophia fell silent. If her mother wanted to delay the inevitable, who could blame her? To Sophia, whether she killed herself now or later would not make much difference.

  Winter fitfully softened into spring. In the first week of April Katerina and Sophia moved the flock out of Limnakaros, up steep slopes to pastures lying beyond the ridge of Dikti, already fragrant with thyme. Here Katerina’s father had built a round shepherd’s hut of flat stones and perched it on a spur of rock, with a view across the pine forests that fell away down to the south coast and the blue Libyan Sea.

  The ewes and nannies were already round and heavy; the morning after the women arrived at the hut, the first lamb tumbled out. Alerted by the excited barking of the dog, Sophia was there to watch the birth. She’d seen it happen often, but she watched with new curiosity. The wet, staggering lamb found its legs within minutes, and was soon making drunken attempts to run and jump.

  Sophia put her hands under her sash and felt her hard abdomen. If only a human baby had the self-reliance of a lamb. The thought unexpectedly saddened her. What were lambs for, but to slaughter?

  She went into the stone hut, where Katerina was vigorously sweeping out the winter’s trash. “We have to make this a fit place to live,” Katerina said, as if to explain her obsessive sweeping.

  “I’ll be fine here,” Sophia said.

  “Not just for you,” said her mother.

  In the hut there was a low stone bench for a bed, and a table made from rough planks laid on stones, and two low stools in front of the fireplace. On the walls hung black iron tubs for boiling milk into cheese.

  Sophia and Katerina arranged the bedding they had carried up from the village on the back of the ancient donkey. They hung a tight-woven red rug to cover the worst of the fissures in the curved walls and another ruined and patched rug over the open door. There wasn’t much more they could do, given the dirt floor and the smoke-blackened walls; men were meant to inhabit these ugly heaps of stone, not women. Men were supposed to herd the sheep and cut the firewood and boil the milk into cheese. When there was no man around, a girl could do the job.

  For breakfast, they ate cheese a year old and hard shepherd’s bread soaked in oil. Soon Sophia would be busy with the cheese making, milking the animals and cutting wood and boiling the milk and squeezing out the whey. Then she would have fresh, soft mizithra for breakfast, and—with a little honey mixed into the white cheese—for a moment or two life would be smooth and sweet. She laughed aloud, delighted by the thought, then covered her mouth when she saw her mother’s troubled stare.

  Sophia watched a long time when Katerina, on foot, led the ancient donkey back over the ridge—to ride the animal would be to shorten its life, and where would they get another when it died? Then Sophia skipped back to the hut. She loved this place better than anywhere. Her mother’s father, of whom Katerina still spoke reverently, had chosen it for its good water; he had laid a channel of carved stones from a natural basin, into which copious amounts of water seeped from a fissure in the ridge, down to the trough where the animals now drank. The trough and the hut and the low-walled milking pen were on the edge of an airy precipice. Sophia stood there, looking down on drifting clouds that were still pink with morning light, listening to the water that overflowed the trough and fell two hundred feet into the pine forest below. The smell of pines, the morning light, the sound of falling water—her heart lifted above the clouds.

  “My mother lived in that place all spring and summer. I think of her singing to the sky, rehearsing lullabies, making little toys for her baby out of wood and cloth and string, skipping and dancing and dreaming of the hard times and good times that awaited her and her child.”

  Anne-Marie watched Minakis quietly, betraying no emotion.

  “But that’s all imagination; I have no evidence for it, not even secondhand reports.”

  “I’ll trust your imagination,” she said.

  His gaze faltered and he looked down, as if surprised to find a coffee spoon in his hand and no coffee in his cup. He waved at the waiter and indicated their empty cups, then turned back to Anne-Marie. “My grandmother told me that once or twice a week she climbed over the ridge and brought my mother what she needed—bread and oil, a honeycomb, wild greens, a mended sweater, a shawl she had sat up nights weaving. Meanwhile my mother grew heavier with me. Everyone in the village knew where Sophia was, but they left her alone because—now I’m guessing, for my grandmother never would have told me this—they were afraid of her.”

  Anne-Marie smiled. “From what you’ve told me, they had good reason.”

  Minakis nodded. “She was formidable. I think they believed, quite literally, that she was a demon. You’ve heard of neraïdes?”

  “Water nymphs? That’s ancient mythology.”

  “In the villages, we still believe in them. Beautiful women who love to dance in the wildest places. Sometimes they can be tricked into marrying ordinary men. But you mustn’t betray them, or they will steal your voice and drive you insane.”

  Anne-Marie’s sophisticated smirk faded when she realized Minakis wasn’t smiling.
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br />   “I think that someone was telling spells against her,” he said, looking at her as if daring her to contradict him.

  “Who was telling spells?” she asked.

  “They say priests don’t tell spells, but I think it was Kriaris, the priest.”

  Anne-Marie hesitated. We still believe in them. How much was included in Minakis’s version of reality? A door had opened, just a crack, and beyond was darkness.

  For a long time he was quiet. When he spoke his voice was a dry monotone. “The time came for her to be delivered. August, the hottest, driest month, but subject to sudden storms in the mountains…”

  Lightning hit the triple peaks of Dikti in multiple bolts that flickered and flared white. Thunder followed instantly, crashing through the rain. The night was a livid landscape of wet rocks alternating with nothing visible, only streaming blackness.

  Sophia and the dog worked the bleating sheep into the stone pens near the cliff-edge. When the last of them was in the pen she staggered into the hut; there was no door to close against the night, only the tattered rug. The dog followed her inside, shaking himself vigorously before flopping down by the fire. Sophia was drenched and shivering, and as she collapsed on the hard bed she was seized with sudden apprehension. She gasped and clutched her belly.

  She did not want to do this now. Not without her mother beside her. Not at all. But her belly contracted and she knew she had no choice.

  She hauled herself to her feet, forcing herself to move while she could. She went outside again and hauled a tub of fresh water from the trough. Already the storm was passing, moving west, and stars were coming out overhead.

  Inside the hut, Sophia struggled out of her rain-soaked clothes, standing as naked as on that winter night when she had magicked the father of her child, the child who now insisted upon being born. The dog watched with a kind of sympathetic curiosity as Sophia piled wood into the fire pit. She pulled a rough blanket around herself and sat down again, waiting.