Secret Passages

by Paul Preuss

  Siganos paused to consider the question, trying to conceal his surprise at the depth of the man’s rancor. “I thank you for the advice,” he said as coolly as he could. “I’ll start thinking about it now—about how I’m going to explain why an entire village does not wish to obey the law.”

  Louloudakis’s mustache twitched involuntarily. “You mean to let him stay?”

  “The law requires it, sir.”

  “Politicians in Athens,” the storekeeper said contemptuously.

  Siganos said, “We have been a modern state for over a century, and only this year—at last!—we have a constitution. Thanks to those politicians in Athens, Ellas is a nation, not a collection of primitive tribes. For your own sake and the sake of your sons, you should learn to respect the law.” Having delivered himself of this admonition, and finding his cheeks radiating in the gloom, Siganos turned and left the store.

  Over the next three days the population of the schoolroom dwindled, until Manolis was the only student in the room. On the fourth day even Manolis was absent.

  Siganos waited in the empty schoolroom, his face getting warm. He wiped the sweat from his mustache. Benighted peasants, refusing their children an education because of some incomprehensible feud…perhaps they will have to be taught a stern lesson.

  The door opened without a knock. Haralambos Louloudakis came in, followed by half the men of the village. Standing at his blackboard, Siganos watched them drag themselves in and shuffle about, arranging themselves with their backs flat against the walls, many of them hoping to be inconspicuous.

  “Good morning, gentlemen,” Siganos said. “Have you brought your children with you?”

  “We don’t want Manolis Androulakis in this school,” Louloudakis said without preamble. “You can take his part or you can take ours. Either way, Mr. Schoolmaster, you’ll take what comes next.”

  Siganos didn’t try to stare Louloudakis down—a waste of honor—but instead shifted his gaze to Stavroula’s father and asked him, “Is that what you think, kyrie Stavroudakis? You think little Androulakis is a threat to your daughter?”

  He got no answer, only a defiant and embarrassed stare. He asked each of the men the same question and got the same lack of response. A few such crude exchanges conveyed the message: law or no law, Manolis Androulakis was a pariah.

  Yannis Siganos was a well-intentioned man, but he was also a realist. “All right. I’ll see what I can do about your fears.”

  He was aware of the eyes that followed him as he walked up the steep street in the midday sun. He said good-days to the black-clad women perched in their gateways, but only a few murmured replies, and none smiled back at him.

  He came to Katerina’s gate and rapped on it with the back of his hand. There was no answer. He knocked again. “Kyria Katerina? Are you at home?”

  “Kyrie Siganos?” The voice was barely a whisper from the other side of the gate.

  “May I talk with you?”

  The bar scraped back and the wooden gate opened enough to admit him, but Katerina did not show herself to the street. Once he was inside she quickly barred the gate again.

  “Come inside the house, sir. I can make coffee.”

  “Please don’t trouble yourself.”

  “No trouble. I am honored. Inside, please. Come.”

  Siganos could not refuse the woman’s hospitality, so he let her lead him inside; it was almost noon, but here the shadows were thick. He saw household implements and a few cooking utensils beside the fireplace. Icons on the wall. In one corner, a shelf with a dozen tattered books; except for the Bible and the Erotokritos he did not recognize their titles, only their age.

  “The coffee will take just a moment.”

  It occurred to him that she would be saving fuel for the winter. “No coffee, please. If you have a little cold water, that would be very satisfying.”

  “Yes, of course, right away.”

  “Is Manolis at home?”

  Katerina nodded and bobbed her head toward the inner room, past the wide arch that divided the house in half. Siganos could see little but the outline of a chair and a chest and a bed inside; his eyes needed time to adjust to the gloom. He stood waiting quietly, listening to the woman as she moved behind him, collecting cups and tipping water from a jug.

  As the pupils of his eyes slowly widened, Siganos realized that the amorphous form on the bed was not a pile of bolsters; it was the boy, who seemed to be asleep. Siganos stood and approached him cautiously. “Are you all right, child?”

  Manolis rolled over and sat up. Even in the shadows his puffed-up bruises, some of them still bleeding, were enough to make Siganos wince.

  “How did this happen?”

  “I met some boys when I was going to school.”

  “Some boys? How many?”

  “Three. They didn’t bother me too much.” Manolis’s face twisted in a sudden grimace, meant to be a grin. “Their faces aren’t so good either.”

  No good to ask the names of the attackers; no doubt their parents, following Louloudakis’s example, would defend their children’s right to assault whomever they pleased. Siganos considered what comfort he could offer. “It wouldn’t be good if this happened every day,” he said feebly.

  “I can go there and back by different ways.”

  The teacher perched himself cautiously on the side of the bed. He laid his fingers on the arch of the boy’s tough bare foot. “Manoli, I think that you are more…”—he didn’t want to say more intelligent, although that’s what he meant—“more ready to learn than the other students. What if I taught you alone? One person to another.”

  “After school?”

  The truth: “Instead of school. You don’t have to go there at all. I’ll be your tutor.”

  “Say yes, child.” Katerina’s raw voice was passionate behind them. “Papa Kriaris also advises it. There is no community for us here. You can learn your lessons despite that.” She bobbed her head toward Siganos. “I bless you, sir, I bless you.”

  Siganos turned to her. “Mother, you mustn’t hope for much.”

  “Why do I have to stay away from the others?” Manolis demanded, leaning forward from the bedclothes. “They will like me soon. I can make them.”

  “Never,” said Katerina.

  “They are only children, Manoli,” Siganos said. “Sometimes they can be made to behave. But they can’t be made to feel what they don’t want to feel.”

  “Why don’t they want to?” Manolis asked.

  “Because they haven’t been taught well,” Siganos said.

  Manolis looked back at the teacher, his dark eyes wide in his bruised face. “I want to be taught well. I want to learn what you know.”

  Siganos, looking into those wide eyes, suspected that the boy already knew more than he realized, that he had yet to discover what he knew. “We’ll make plans, then. We’ll make arrangements,” he said, patting the boy’s bare foot, its sole as stiff as shoe leather. “I’ll teach you what I can.”

  9

  “In the first three months he read every book in the schoolhouse, even the most advanced,” Siganos said. “After school, while I sat there watching, because I had to carry them back again next day.”

  It was an autumn evening and already dark outside; Yannis Siganos and his cousin Georgios were perched beside the stone fireplace in Georgios’s house in Tzermiado, a small house in the biggest village on the Lasithi Plain.

  “You helped him through them,” his cousin suggested.

  “Very little. I was supposed to be teaching him, but it was all I could do to keep up. He was voracious.”

  “Is his grandmother so gifted a pedagogue, then?” Georgios asked skeptically. “Surely he’s a bright child, as you say, and very curious—but he must have seen those books before.” Georgios’s wife and her mother had pulled their chairs close on the other side of the hearth and were steadily shelling a heap of black walnuts while they listened to the men talk. Mutton chops sizzled on an iron gril
l over olive-wood coals; the smell was enough to make Siganos’s jaws sting with saliva.

  “Maybe, but he’d never seen a book in English. It was a year later that I happened to be carrying a copy of Treasure Island, by Robert Louis Stevenson. You’ve read Stevenson?”

  Georgios thrust out his chin, a silent no. The women gazed at Siganos as if he himself were speaking some incomprehensible foreign tongue.

  “Anyway, the boy found the book and asked me questions about the Roman alphabet, and in a few minutes he was sounding out words on the page. Pronouncing them oddly, but still…it was as if I could see ideas forming in his mind.”

  “He took this book from your sakouli? He is not only curious but bold.”

  “It’s a story of pirates and hidden treasure, what boy wouldn’t love it? But to read it, he had to learn a foreign language and a foreign system of writing. After a month of instruction, no more—and the loan of my English lexicon—he read it straight through. Later I brought him other books. Voyage au Centre de la Terre, by Jules Verne. Kinder- und Hausmärchen, by the Grimms. Using them he learned to read French and German too. I helped, but he has a gift.”

  “What good can it do him? No father, no mother, no prospects. He will spend his short life in these mountains.” Sparks popped and flew up the chimney, sending shadows dancing through the chilly room. Georgios leaned toward his cousin. “Listen, my child, I want to hear no regrets from you. Go back to Athens with a good conscience. You’ve given two years of your life to that filthy one-street village and the filthy peasants who inhabit it. You were wise not to challenge them. They’re the sort that wouldn’t hesitate to toss you over a cliff.”

  “In Iraklion, that’s what they say about Lasithi,” Siganos replied irritably, “that up here in the mountains, we’d as soon slit a throat as say kalimera. In Athens, that’s what they say about Crete. In the rest of Europe, I expect, that’s what they say about Greece.”

  “How wrong are they?”

  “Well, we ought not be proud of it.” Siganos stared into the fire. Then he glanced almost apologetically at his cousin. “I didn’t tell you about the arithmetic—I mean the mathematics. You know I was never good at numbers. Between you and me, I didn’t completely understand what I was supposed to be teaching the older boys. There’s a book of algebra, but most of it was just a puzzle to me. This past year, when I had difficulty, I asked Manolis.”

  “Really.”

  “He explained it to me.”

  “What makes you think he knew what he was talking about?”

  “He made it seem rational, simple—I could understand it myself, I could teach it to others. To you, if you dare me.”

  His cousin thrust out his chin again. The sizzle of chops and the creaking of hot coals filled the silence.

  “He’ll waste his life up there, you’re right about that,” Siganos went on sadly. “What’s to be done about him?”

  Although the women said nothing, he felt their disapproving gaze. He glanced at them, then back at his cousin. Their answer was plain enough. Nothing.

  That fall, Manolis stayed on the mountain. The schoolmaster had gone to Athens, and at Louloudakis’s instigation there would be no one to replace him—no one to teach school in Ayia Kyriaki and no one to tutor Manolis…

  On a late November morning he and Katerina started the flock down the mountain, retreating before oncoming winter. The sky was veiled with cirrus. Far below, sickled yellow almond leaves were falling away in the breeze, drifting beneath the smooth gray branches, making the narrow plain of Limnakaros into a bowl of silver and gold. They descended at a businesslike pace, not wishing to diminish the reserves of fat on their robust animals. But Manolis, full of energy, often darted ahead, far down the slopes. As they approached the slide he scrambled back and took Katerina’s hand to help her down. All innocence, he looked at her with bright eyes. “Tell me again, Grandmother. What is a whore?”

  “Be quiet,” she gasped, her knees and toes already suffering from the descent. “Don’t you think I know what you’ve been hearing? Those who say these things to you will burn in hell.”

  They half slid down the talus while he considered her words. “So my mother was a whore. And I am a bastard.”

  Katerina set her thin lips and trudged on, but she did not let go of the youngster’s hand; instead she gripped it tighter. If she had been a few years younger, if he had been any less long-legged and agile, he would not have been helping her; she would have been dragging him down the slide. When at last she spoke it was with determination. “Once and for all, your mother was not what you said and you are not what you said. Your father was”—her brows knotted in an anguish of improvisation—“an Englishman.”

  “An Englishman?” Manolis was astonished. He had read a great deal about the English—pirates and explorers and clever children who lived in a rainy land full of toads and rabbits and hedgehogs—but the only Englishman he had ever seen depicted was in a photograph in one of Katerina’s old books.

  “A fine young man, a very fine young warrior,” Katerina said, “and his father was a very great lord, and very rich…”

  “Oh, Grandmother.” Manolis laughed happily. “You are making a joke.”

  “He was an officer in the English army and a true friend of the Hellenes,” Katerina insisted, raising her voice. “He married your mother secretly.”

  This news silenced the child’s laughter. How was it possible to be crowned in marriage secretly? Manolis had witnessed two marriages in the village, when Stavroudakis’s youngest son had married Michalis’s oldest daughter, and when Louloudakis’s cousin had married Michalis’s youngest daughter, and those were grand coronations, involving everyone in the neighborhood; indeed, he and his grandmother were the only ones who had not been invited.

  “But then the Catastrophe! The greatest of misfortunes, the ruin of our family!” Katerina descended with more vigor, gasping for breath and hoping her grandson was still too young to ask the most awkward questions, too young to realize the absurdity of the yarn she was spinning. “Before he could announce that he was Sophia’s husband, your father was killed—like your grandfather—fighting the Turks in Anatolia.”

  “Fighting the Turks with Grandfather?”

  “Yes, exactly.”

  Manolis considered this. The stories about Pappou Niko, his mother’s father, were no kinder than the stories about his mother. Surely his own father was a better man than that. But an Englishman? “Why did you never tell me?”

  “What good could it have done for you to know?”

  “I always wanted to know about my father. You only said he might come back one day, that I should wait for him to tell me.”

  “You would have repeated what I said. The others would have laughed at us, worse than they do now. Anyway, it makes no difference.”

  “You care about it,” he said, daring to defy her.

  “It was your parents’ secret, my child. They took it with them to their graves. Now it is our secret.”

  “Why do you tell me now, if you want it to be a secret?” Manolis persisted. “I want to know more about him.”

  In his distress Katerina felt her own. She paused to rest, her chest heaving. In truth, she had never met an Englishman, and all she knew about the English were the stories her father had told her of the reign of Prince George, of the Great Powers, of fiery young Eleftherios Venizelos. But her vivid imagination had always been at its best combining elements of the familiar. She conjured up a creature of mythic proportions even as she described him to Manolis: a man with a saber at his side and a white pith helmet on his head—a helmet crowned with a spike!—resplendent in a high-collared tunic with gold buttons down his front and gold stripes on his sleeves, wearing black patent-leather shoes on his feet and white gloves on his hands. She gave him a noble family and great deeds and manly virtues. Let the dead Englishman be capable of every refinement of honor and paternal feeling. Let him stand for everything that Manolis—and Sophia, and Ka
terina herself—had lacked in childhood.

  Never mind that she had described the very photograph Manolis remembered from the old book. The splendid male icon found a niche in his mind and gleamed there as he and Katerina made their way downslope, herding the animals in front of them until at last they came to the rock pen beside the last house on the edge of Ayia Kyriaki.

  Manolis gnawed at a chunk of shepherd’s bread soaked in sour wine. Dead thorn branches burned on the hearth. “How do I know he even cared about me?”

  “He cared about you,” Katerina said with passion. “He loved you, even if he never saw you; he wanted the best for you.” Having embarked recklessly upon this mythic journey, there was no reason to hold back now. Her eyes widened, catching bright reflections from the fire. “He left you a treasure.”

  “A treasure?” For all her fantastic notions, Manolis had never had reason to doubt that his grandmother believed what she told him. “What kind of treasure?”

  “He didn’t tell anyone. Or if he did, only your mother.”

  Manolis chewed off another chunk of bread. “Where?”

  “He didn’t tell anyone where, child. Only that…”—she hesitated; Manolis waited—“it is under the ground.”

  “Somewhere on the mountain?”

  Katerina shrugged.

  “Then I will look for it.”

  “Next year. In the spring.”

  “I’ll look for it now. Until the first snowfall.”

  “That is foolish. Why do you want to hurry?” Tears started in Katerina’s eyes. But if she despaired at what she had begun, she said no more about it that night.

  Early the next morning Manolis packed his sakouli with shepherd’s bread and hard cheese; he hardened himself against Katerina’s pleas and left, almost running up the mountainside.

  He might have searched for signs of buried treasure in his favorite grottoes and glades, or on the promontories where he had lazed and dreamed of a legendary past or a future as hazy-bright as the sun seen through the mountain mist—places where he had sometimes contemplated an infinite regress of other worlds, which might include so improbable a manifestation of reality as a father who was an English officer. He might have spent his days visiting every site that had caught his fancy during his years of far-ranging travels.