Secret Passages

by Paul Preuss

  “She had the help of fate. The day of my baptism, everyone came to stare at us. Knowing her, I suspect she looked straight back at them, though it must have pained her. The day after I was baptised, Louloudakis’s older boy, Theo, the would-be sheep stealer who had made the sign of the devil at my mother, complained of soreness under his eyelids. He had trachoma, pinkeye, a common disease then, and it half blinded him. He was not the only victim of the disease; within the month three other people who’d been in the chapel that day, and of whom it was remembered that they had openly criticized my dead mother, came down with trachoma.” Minakis’s smile was rueful. “The villagers knew with folk certainty that they were victims of Katerina’s evil eye, and after my baptism they were afraid to look at her; they blamed every accident or misfortune on her. The tama of the baby vanished from the Virgin’s icon. Someone wrote panoukla on my mother’s tomb, in blood.”

  “That means plague.”

  “It also means a female demon—my mother’s reputation before I was born, the reputation my yia-yia inherited. The next summer Katerina hid her valuables and took me into the mountains. Without help she rebuilt the collapsed hut, and there we lived from early spring until late autumn. She did what business she had to with villages on the south slope and came back to Ayia Kyriaki only in winter. No one disturbed her property. They were afraid to touch it.”

  Anne-Marie was momentarily dizzy, appalled by what she was hearing. “How hard that must have been. How hard for you.”

  He shrugged. “It was life, how was I to make comparisons? I spent my boyhood quite happily, with an indomitable old woman for a parent and a flock of sheep and goats for playmates.”

  “She wasn’t old,” she said, surprised. “You said she was less than forty.”

  “In Crete, in the 1920s, she was an old woman.”

  8

  For seven years, much of that time spent in the high mountains, Katerina tried to hide her worry from the growing boy. Sometimes when Manolis was alone with the flocks, chasing sheep and goats on two skinny legs almost as nimble as their four, he caught his yia-yia spying on him from a distance and laughed, taking it as a game. It was no game to her, and she knew it was no help to him to see his grandmother always hovering like a guardian angel, an angel carrying a shotgun. A real guardian angel, yes. That would have been helpful. That she prayed for.

  But she could not follow him everywhere. As he grew tough and self-reliant she despaired of trying, and at last grudgingly allowed him to roam on his own. He was a tireless explorer; before he was eight years old he had circled the mountains.

  To the west the landscape was grim and fantastic, layers of limestone lifted out of some ancient seabed and cooked and bent like stiff dough into loaves of earth-bread—only cliffs and caves there, few bushes and fewer trees. The south was precipitously wild, blue-shadowed with oaks and pines, with springs spewing from every crevice in the rocks to water miniature paradises that glimmered with flowers and birds. On the eastern slopes there were labyrinths of eroded limestone spires and topiary forests of holly oaks, their bizarre shapes sculpted by tree-climbing goats. Selena to the north was an expanse of naked rock, so high and pale and gray as to have taken its name from the moon.

  This wild landscape was thickly populated, not only by the shepherds and farmers who lived in the villages that nestled in the canyons and clung to the heights, but by vampires and water sprites as well, of whom Katerina warned Manolis. He believed her warnings and managed to avoid them. In every village he made a friend or two—schoolmasters especially, because they could sometimes be cajoled into lending him books—except his own.

  One day, as he was bounding along the ridge above Ayia Kyriaki, pursuing a fractious lamb—at two thousand feet below the cliff-edge, the village was practically beneath his feet—something smacked hard into a boulder a yard away, sending up a spray of rock dust, and an instant later he heard the crack and simultaneous echo of the gunshot from the cliffs. There was nowhere to run on the barren ridge. He dived, rolled into a heap behind the melon-sized rock the shot had struck, and lay still, arranging himself so that he looked right at his assailant, a stick figure far down the slope on an opposing rise. Possessed of a mountaineer’s natural teleskopia, Manolis could see exactly who it was, a boy who would have had no trouble coming up the mountain after him.

  Evidently he didn’t have the courage; instead he stood watching, waiting for Manolis to get up. Finally, perhaps hoping that he’d hit his mark but not willing to find out for sure, the would-be assassin turned and scurried away down the hill.

  Manolis felt something in him melt like wax in a flame; the terror that he had not let himself feel now reduced him to tears. Why did they hate him so? Sobs shook him, until finally he wiped tears and snot away on the back of his dirty hand. His self-pity soured into fantasies of revenge. One of these nights, with some clever arrangement of ropes and stones and pig manure…Meanwhile he lay still on the hillside, giving the incompetent shooter plenty of time to get away.

  After that day, Katerina gave Manolis his great-grandfather’s shotgun to carry when he went alone in the mountains. The gun had a single hexagonal barrel of rippled blue Damascus steel; it was almost as tall as he was.

  He and his grandmother had no choice but to spend the winters in the village. Kriaris the priest fulfilled his duties as nonos to Manolis by setting his lumpish son as guardian over his bastard nephew, but the younger Kriaris was lazy and indifferent, and most of the time Katerina insisted that Manolis stay out of his sight, out of sight of everyone in the village.

  At first he hated the cold months when he was confined to his grandmother’s dark house and its courtyard, but soon he came to love winter’s compensations, when Katerina helped him learn his alpha, beta, gammas and read to him from the Bible and her father’s tattered history books. She recited the tales her father had told her of Crete’s heroic struggles against the Turks and Venetians and Saracens, along with her own tales of the saints and angels and demons that had always lived unseen among the living.

  When they were together in the mountains, she taught him the Erotokritos, making him repeat it after her, month after month, until he had memorized all ten thousand lines of Crete’s epic poem. In this feat, however, he was no different from the illiterate shepherds who also knew it by heart and would recite it for hours on end, like Homeric bards, around a long night’s campfire.

  Shortly after his eighth birthday, Manolis and Katerina brought the flock down from the mountain earlier in the year than usual. The village school had acquired a new, full-time teacher. Manolis was full of anticipation; Katerina was full of fear, but she would not let her precocious grandson grow up an ignorant shepherd.

  “Good morning, everyone,” the schoolmaster said firmly.

  “Good morning, sir,” the class replied, in ragged unison.

  “Who wants to say the prayer this morning? You?” The schoolmaster consulted his notebook. “Your name is Stavroula?”

  The little girl bobbed her head and blushed.

  “Go on, child.”

  She stood up beside her chair and recited the prayer in a high, clear voice, never stumbling until the conclusion: “And forgive us our debts, as we forget—mm, forgive—our debtors, and deliver us…And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.” She sat down abruptly and gazed up at the new teacher in stunned bliss.

  Yannis Siganos contemplated the ten young faces in the room that peered at him in awe or resentment. Six-year-old Stavroula was the youngest. The room’s oldest and most sullen face belonged to fifteen-year-old Dimitris Louloudakis, who Siganos imagined must consider himself a prisoner in a roomful of babies. Siganos could sympathize. Despite his tailored wool suit, despite the longish nail on the little finger of his right hand that none too subtly boasted of his education and proclaimed him above peasant labor, the young teacher was just another boy from the neighborhood, from Tzermiado in the Lasithi Plain, lucky enough to have a merchant father who coul
d afford his university education. Having secured a teaching credential, he’d found himself right back where he came from, assigned to the smallest village in the Lasithi nome.

  “Those in the higher class—I mean Nikolaos, Christophoros, Sotiris, and you, Dimitri—take the book to the back of the room and turn to the chapter on the Age of Perikles. Share it,” he said, forestalling the objection on Dimitris’s sour face. “I’ll question you after the younger children have practiced the alphabet.” Chairs scraped in the narrow, whitewashed room. Besides the chairs and the teacher’s table and an iron stove in the corner, a slate board on the wall was the room’s only furniture. Siganos took up a piece of chalk. “The rest of you say after me: alpha, vita, ghama.”

  The younger children were enthusiasts. “ALPHA! VITA! GHAMA!”

  “Very good.” Siganos energetically chalked the letters on the board, firmly pronouncing them aloud. He’d gotten as far as omikron, pi, ro when he realized he was no longer being echoed. He straightened and turned, scowling, and found the children whispering and staring at the schoolroom’s open door.

  A boy’s thin figure was silhouetted against the bright light of the courtyard, a boy wearing scuffed high-topped shoes and ragged canvas shorts and a threadbare wool tunic. He was long legged and curly headed, of indeterminate age because he was hard to see in the glare.

  Siganos said, “You are here for school?”

  The boy nodded.

  “Come, child, come inside. And close the door behind you.”

  The boy stepped inside and carefully pulled the door closed.

  “What is your name?”

  “I am called Manolis Androulakis, sir.”

  Stavroula’s eyes widened and she leaned out of her chair and whispered to Christoula Michali, who giggled.

  “Be quiet!” Siganos said angrily, and the girls froze.

  For a moment the silence was deep enough to hear the buzzing of grasshoppers in the courtyard. Then Dimitris Louloudakis snuffed and hawked and spit on the floor.

  Blood rose in the young schoolteacher’s face. He took four long strides to the back of the room and struck the boy hard across the cheek with his open hand. “Have you no respect?”

  “I did not mean any disrespect to you, sir”—the formal words of apology were undercut by Dimitris’s dark look, which filled Siganos with unease; the boy seemed already a grown man with a grudge, old beyond his years—“but you don’t know what that one is.”

  “That one? Is that any way to speak?”

  “That one is the devil himself.” Dimitris glared at the newcomer, his voice rising. “His grandmother is the witch who made my brother blind.”

  “That is ignorant, un-Christian superstition. You may not say such things in this room”—Siganos, sensing a pending crisis of authority, worked himself up—“and you may never spit on the floor. Apologize or leave here this moment.”

  Dimitris turned his implacable gaze back upon the teacher, whose handprint still glowed on his cheek. Then he stood up and walked to the door, flinging wide the door Manolis had just closed, letting it crash against the wall as if trying to hit the newcomer with it.

  Siganos followed him as far as the doorway. “You can come back to school when I have talked with your father,” he called, too loudly, but Dimitris did not even look back.

  The schoolmaster closed the door and returned to the blackboard, eyeing the newcomer with irritation. “Sit down, sit down, over there. We are learning the alphabet. You are to say the letters out loud.”

  In a high, clear voice, Manolis said, “Alpha, vita, ghama, dhelta, epsilon, zita, ita, thita, yiota, kapa, lamdha, mi, ni, kzi, omikron, pi, ro, sighma, taph, ipsilon, phi, shi, psi, omegha.”

  Like the other students, like Siganos himself before he’d gone to Athens and had the Cretan accent ridiculed out of him, Manolis’s pronunciation was atrocious. Yet he obviously had no need to learn the alphabet. Siganos polished his schoolmaster’s fingernail against his vest and, sighing quietly, turned to the other children. “Alpha, vita, ghama…”

  When the midmorning break came, the older boys got up a game of kickball in the little courtyard between the school and the chapel, using a sheepskin tied into a ball. The two girls sat on the porch and put their heads together, whispering secrets. Manolis stood beside the schoolhouse door, watching. The September sun reflected heat from the limestone flags, and grasshoppers droned in the still air, thrumming a bass line to the ballplayers’ high-pitched shouts. Dikti rose above the rooftops, serene and softly gray, near and distant at the same time, as if its crags were part of a different landscape in a different time.

  The gate in the wall across the courtyard was open; Dimitris Louloudakis was leaning against the jamb. He beckoned Manolis silently. Come here, come here.

  Manolis considered the invitation. He knew Dimitris well, though they’d never been introduced; he’d heard what Dimitris had just said about him in the classroom, his odd words and phrases resonating with other things Manolis had picked up by eavesdropping on street conversations from behind his grandmother’s wall.

  He crossed the courtyard. His eyes were not on Dimitris but upon the ground, searching the swept pavement for stones. Stones were what he used to ward off angry dogs he encountered in his wanderings across the slopes of Dikti. Stones comforted him.

  There were no loose stones here. Manolis reached the gate and stopped, and raised his eyes to Dimitris. “What do you want?”

  “I want to see you close, child. To see what devil’s spawn looks like.”

  Manolis leaned forward and peered up, open-eyed. “Can you see me now?”

  Dimitris flinched away. “Don’t try to give me the eye.”

  “I wouldn’t,” the little boy said reasonably. “You don’t have anything I want.” It was envious people who cast the evil eye, his grandmother had told him.

  Dimitris flared. “May your balls swell up anyway.”

  “Why do you say those things to me?”

  “Because your eyebrows grow together, stupid.” But the boy showed no fear, so Dimitris tried to mount a more persuasive show of menace. “Because of your mother! She was a demon and a whore.”

  The schoolmaster came into the yard. “I sent you home, Dimitri. When I talk to your father, I’ll ask him where you were today.”

  Dimitris turned away quickly, glad for the excuse to leave, but he paused on the other side of the wall, out of Siganos’s sight, long enough to whisper to Manolis. “Look out when you go home tonight, devil’s child.”

  Manolis, raising his hand as if to wave good-bye, pinned the older boy with his intense, unemotional gaze. For a moment time faltered; Dimitris Louloudakis stood still in his tracks.

  You, looking so fierce, your name means “little flower,” and your nickname means “parsley.” Do you believe in the evil eye? Ponder this.

  Manolis lowered his hand and let his gaze flick away. “I always look out where I go…to make sure I don’t step on any tiny little parsley plants, Maindanaki.”

  Dimitris spit and crossed himself and fled down the narrow lane. Manolis was delighted, so taken by surprise that he laughed out loud.

  “You shouldn’t have insulted him, child.”

  Manolis turned to find the schoolmaster peering down at him. “He shouldn’t have insulted my mother, sir. She’s dead.”

  “Has your son told you why I sent him home today?”

  Siganos had refused Haralambos Louloudakis’s offer of a raki at a table on the square, preferring to talk with the man inside his store, out of sight of curious loungers. To Siganos, a merchant’s son, there was something comforting and familiar, something almost luxurious about the cool interior, with its barrels of wine and cured olives, its crates of oranges and coils of stiff new rope, its sacks of flour and bins of dried beans that stood open on the stone floor, its shelves stacked with loaves of sugar, cans of tobacco, bars of fragrant soap from Rethymnon—whatever the citizens of Ayia Kyriaki could not conveniently grow or make f
or themselves.

  “He told me.” The storekeeper’s lips barely moved under his stiff mustache. “Now listen, young Mr. Schoolmaster, you’re new here, but you have to know that that Androulakis bastard is an evil influence and a provocation to the other students.”

  “He is a very quiet and inoffensive little boy, Mr. Louloudakis. He can read, and he can add and subtract and multiply and divide. Apparently his grandmother taught him.”

  “The devil knows what they get up to with each other, living up there on the wild mountain.”

  “Who was the boy’s father?”

  “Nobody from around here.” Louloudakis found that the sacks of dried beans on the floor needed rearranging; he bent over them busily, his back to the teacher.

  Siganos’s eye took in the rest of the place, the counter with its enameled basin beside the iron stove where Louloudakis boiled coffee in a long-handled copper briki, the nearby shelves with rows of glasses and bottles of cloudy spirits. His glance fell upon the trophies mounted high on the back wall, the pine marten and the wild goat’s head—and the shotgun that rested there on wooden pegs. Unlike the typical villager’s ancient fowling piece, this was a fine weapon with a barrel of blued steel and an ebony stock inlaid with silver. For a moment Siganos forgot about Manolis. “May I ask you about…?”

  “You already did. His mother was a filthy girl, a wild girl, the witch who scratched out the Virgin’s eyes in the chapel; she wandered everywhere. What happened to her was God’s will.”

  Siganos was reminded of his purpose. “Surely people must have talked about her—who did it to her. Made some guesses.”

  “Nobody knows who got the bastard on her”—Louloudakis stood up and turned angrily on Siganos—“but I’ll tell you this much: he’ll be the only one in your school if you let him stay. How will you explain an empty schoolhouse to the politicians who think we need a full-time teacher, Mr. Schoolmaster?”