Secret Passages

by Paul Preuss

  “Everywhere we went on the coast south of Dikti, Pendlebury made friends with the villagers, inspecting the antiquities they showed him and prospecting for himself—his one good eye could spot a bit of painted pottery sticking out of the soil ten feet away.” Minakis began clicking his worry beads in quick-march time. “For days we raced up and down the dry red cliffs until he satisfied himself that he’d seen as much as could be seen on the run. When we retreated to Vianos, I thought my time in his company was coming to an end.

  “He installed us under an enormous plane tree in the village square and allowed the locals to ply us with food and wine while he scribbled in his notebook—odd to watch a big man write such a tiny hand, but paper was worth something in those days. Along with his notes he scratched out maps indicating routes and walking times, drawing shorelines and craggy mountains so quickly it was clear that he’d been doing this for years, that maps of Crete were second nature to him.

  “He had the gift of concentration. The villagers pelted him with questions, but he left me to do the talking and refused to linger when he was done with his work, telling them that there was an urgent need to take his companion—me, that is—to Candia, where I had an appointment with the ephor.

  “‘Asteievasai! You’re joking, that’s impossible, nobody could walk to Kastro in less than a day!’ they shouted after us, as we raced away at our usual ankle-breaking pace.

  “An hour later we were in country I’d never seen, and when night fell we were still walking, up hills and down into streambeds and up hills again, enough to make me lose my sense of direction. Villages came into view, with lamps flickering in the windows of the houses; I lost myself in reveries of the warmth and laughter and caring and tenderness of the families who lived in them. I’d never known such families, but it seemed a pleasant thing to imagine.

  “Meanwhile I was trudging along behind this unyielding Pendlebury, a sort of Bronze Man like the legendary Talos who could circle the island of Crete three times in a day. It was long after dark when he called back to me, ‘Looks like we’re not going to make it to Candia after all,’ his voice full of amusement. ‘I know some people who live nearby. Maybe they will give us a place to sleep tonight.’

  “I had no idea what was so funny.

  “We crossed a stream on a low stone bridge. A mass of dark buildings without a single light showing covered the hilltop to the right. I assumed it was an abandoned Muslim village, a place of ghosts. Across the road, at the end of a long wall covered with vines, was an iron gate; Pendlebury pushed it open as casually as if he owned the place.

  “A house stood inside the wall. Pendlebury ran up the steps to a veranda in back, waving at me to follow. He threw open the door and shouted, ‘Hilda! I’m home.’

  “I was stuck behind him when he stopped in the doorway.” Minakis laughed at the memory. “It wasn’t until he got out of my way that I saw the ancient woman inside, swathed in layers of starched cotton, enthroned on a chair with embroidered cushions—and beside her, struggling to get up from a sofa with little napkins on its arms, a man about as old as Pendlebury but whose skin was as smooth as I had ever seen on an adult; on this warm spring night he was wearing a necktie and a dark blazer with a university crest embroidered on his breast pocket. Intending to surprise me, Pendlebury had surprised himself. These were the Hutchinsons, mother and son, and apparently it had slipped his mind that they were living in his house—that in fact it was now their house.

  “Hutchinson and his mother were both as tall as Pendlebury, and I was convinced the English were a race of giants. When Pendlebury presented me to Mrs. Hutchinson I transferred my shotgun to my left hand, lunged into the room, and grabbed the woman’s hand in mine and began pumping it up and down; my first attempt to pronounce ‘Hutchinson’ came out something like ‘Shuckingzon.’ She yanked her fingers to her bosom and said rather edgily, ‘Charmed, I’m sure.’

  “Then Pendlebury introduced her son, ‘the Squire,’ and told me he was the curator of Knossos, a term which meant nothing to me. Meanwhile he kept a grip on my elbow and tugged my hand away from the Squire’s when I latched on to it, at the same time gently relieving me of my shotgun. I didn’t try to pronounce Hutchinson again, but I did tell the Squire, ‘Charmed, I’m sure.’

  “Another woman came into the room, and catching sight of her, I forgot my English entirely.

  “‘This is my wife, Hilda, the very fine archaeologist of whom I spoke.’ Pendlebury’s chest swelled up like a rock dove’s with pride. Indeed, she was quite the most entrancing human being I had ever set eyes upon, small and dark, with pale skin but a bright smile. Compared to the Hutchinsons, I found her merely human scale a comfort. Having mastered the business of hand shaking, I took hers firmly but did not cling to it.

  “She wished me a good evening. ‘You could hardly have given my husband a better gift than to show him a new route over Dikti,’ she said, and before I knew it she was sending us off to bathe, having relieved us of our weapons…

  “Despite my protests—and a moment of real fear—Pendlebury made me go first into that tin tub, which a servant woman had filled with hot water. I was accustomed to washing myself a handful of water at a time. I’d never taken my clothes off to bathe, and no one but my grandmother had ever seen me naked, and then only when I was an infant.

  “Warm water, I quickly discovered, is narcotic. I lay there outrageously exposed, trying to make sense of a day that had begun on the familiar slopes of Dikti and ended in this strange house. There was no sense to be made; it was surely a dream. If life was sweet this moment, it had been sweet before, every moment of sweetness preceded and followed by bitterness; it was the bitterness that defined the sweetness, and the other way around. Still, here was this moment. Best not to spoil it. The water was warm, the soap was scented with flowers…

  “‘Out of there, Androulakis. It’s my turn. Quick, quick, or we’ll miss a hot supper.’

  “He towered over me as I stood up streaming out of the tub, shocked awake and panicked by my own nakedness and by his.

  “‘Clothes in the next room,’ he said. ‘Put them on.’

  “I had never seen anything so fine as the dining table around which the adults were gathered, the wine red cloth set with painted plates and cups and bowls of steaming food, lit by tall candles and with a centerpiece of purple irises. Mrs. Hutchinson looked hungry enough to eat a donkey; they’d been waiting for Pendlebury the whole long day.

  “When he finally appeared, fresh from his bath and dressed in crisp khaki trousers and a white shirt, they almost cheered. He paused a moment, preening. His sun-bleached hair, wet from the tub, was slicked back along his scalp, its natural wave lending him the aspect of a kouros—an impression not at all discouraged by his enigmatic smirk and the crystalline gleam of his glass eye. He knew he was the focus of attention, and he loved it…

  “The moment is vivid in my memory, yet I am ashamed to tell you that I don’t remember a word of what was discussed around the table that night—although the history of archaeology would no doubt be richer if I could. I was enthralled, overwhelmed; I did not even take my hands out of my lap until I saw all the others take up their soup spoons, and then I did as they did, following their every maneuver, while the talk continued with no sign that any of them noticed me or my silence. All I can say for myself is that I didn’t fall asleep before the main course…”

  Manolis awoke early the next morning and found himself on the sitting-room sofa, covered by a thin wool blanket. After a disoriented moment he remembered where he was and why he was wearing odd trousers. They were British trousers. The people who lived here had lent them to him.

  They were kind people, but their solicitousness was excessive and alien; he felt constricted by the too-plentiful furniture in the room, by its fulsome decoration, the painted lampshades, the pictures of strange ruins in desert lands hanging on the walls, the folds of printed cloth that covered the windows. He kicked off the clinging blanket, found th
e door, and opened it to the morning air.

  The terrace was surrounded by a garden, planted with fragrant jasmine and red hibiscus and pink oleander, overshadowed by palm trees and pines, with dewdrops trembling on every petal and leaf. Doves mused among the branches and waddled in couples along the path. Farther along, Manolis could see a bigger house of an unfamiliar style of architecture—fieldstone blocks set in mortar, overgrown with wisteria vines.

  Down the path, the iron gate that he and Pendlebury had entered last night stood ajar. He went through it, pausing to seek his bearings before crossing the dusty road into the shadow of the pines whose masses of perfumed needles sifted the morning air. He was puzzled to find the ruined village he’d seen the night before cut off from the road by a high wire fence. He walked fifty meters along it until he found a locked gate. After a moment’s consideration and a glance up and down the road, he climbed the fence and dropped into the enclosure.

  What he came to first under the pines was a shrouded columnar shape as high as a roadside shrine, wrapped in a canvas sheet. He’d never seen anything like it, and he might have lingered to investigate but for the more enticing mystery that lay just beyond: walls and pillars, some fallen, some built recently but left unfinished, not like any abandoned village.

  He walked past ancient walls made of enormous stones scarred by fire…paving flags and free-standing blocks of gypsum that looked to have melted in the rain like sugar lumps…pillars of modern concrete painted red and white and black, tapering downward, with narrow bases and swelling capitals that supported fragments of roof and passageway…

  He followed a passage to the right and found himself on a porch high above a brook, the one he and Pendlebury had crossed in the night. Ruined buildings with inverted columns littered the slopes of the gully below, thrown into stark relief by the morning light. The hillside opposite the stream was covered with rows of grapevines, their spring leaves translucent in the sun; farther away, a solitary peak rose from the jumbled hills and caught the same light. As if to frame that distant peak, a sculpture of ancient stone and modern concrete, an enormous rack of bull’s horns, was set at the edge of the terrace.

  On a restored wall nearby were big framed pictures, life-sized men with broad shoulders and narrow waists, carrying jars and vases; they were wearing only short aprons or straps around their loins, and their long black hair was decorated with plumes and flowers. And there were women with the same almond eyes and curling black hair, whose dresses covered their arms and shoulders with flounces but left their breasts bare. The wall pictures were patchy, as if parts of them were older, or were meant to seem older, but ancient or modern they were nothing like religious icons, the only pictures Manolis knew besides muddy photographs and illustrations in borrowed books.

  What Manolis had thought was a village covered many times the area of Ayia Kyriaki; unlike any village he knew, the wrecked buildings on the hilltop were all perfect rectangles, all connected to one another as if the whole complex was a single structure. In the center was the biggest of the rectangles, an open courtyard with the remains of walls and colonnades on three sides.

  The wall paintings confirmed what he had suspected when he saw that first downward-tapering pillar. This was Knossos, the very Knossos that Sir Arthur Evans had dug out of the ground a third of a century ago, rebuilding it as he uncovered it. This was the palace of Minos, the heart of the Minoan empire; this was the labyrinth. Theseus of Athens had come here in chains, had made love to the princess Ariadne, had escaped with her and later abandoned her, but not before she had helped him slaughter the Minotaur.

  All this Manolis had read in the books he had borrowed from every schoolteacher within a day’s walk of Limnakaros.

  Last night he had stayed in the home of the curator of Knossos. Whatever the title meant, perhaps it meant someone who could explain these wonders.

  First he would have his fill of them…

  For an hour he climbed over the walls of the palace; descended a pillared staircase, winding down three stories of a light well to frescoed rooms below; studied pipes and channels that brought water inside the rooms and carried it out again—plumbing which did not exist in the villages of Dikti—and stood amazed before giant jars, their shape as familiar to him as the jars that stood in his grandmother’s courtyard, as ordinary as the broken jar that was the chimney on the roof of her house, but half again as tall as he was and more than three thousand years old. He poked into airy living rooms and shadowy throne rooms, into dark chambers with massive square pillars engraved with the sign of the double ax, into basement storerooms now open to the sky and lined with rows of even bigger jars.

  Beneath the palace’s reconstructed upper stories, locked behind wire-mesh screens, he found wooden trays full of broken pottery. Hundreds of boxes were stacked atop one another, all bearing neat labels, many in a spidery hand Manolis recognized as Pendlebury’s. Manolis tried to picture the man who loved to run up and down mountains sitting quietly for hours poking through innumerable bits of broken jar and cup.

  As he was trying to decipher the labels through the wire mesh, a shadow fell in the passageway. A man stood at the end of the narrow corridor; in a voice rough with age he demanded, “What are you doing here, young man? Thinking of absconding with those potsherds?”

  “Sygnomi, I am…”

  “You are the famous potsherd thief John warned me of.” The man approached, wielding a thick cane. He was shorter than Hilda Pendlebury, older than Mrs. Hutchinson, the shortest, oldest Englishman Manolis had seen yet, with bright eyes, a grizzled mustache, and a felt hat smashed down on his head, dressed in a wool suit as rough as sacking. “You’re trespassing here. You’re up to no good.”

  “My name is Manolis, I am—”

  “Another Manolis. What am I going to do with all you Manolises?” the irate little Englishman demanded.

  “O kyrios Pendabri brought me here…”

  “You mean to say John Pendlebury.”

  “Nai, Pendabri.”

  “Pendle-bury. Oh, never mind. He intends to take you into Candia, he told me. Couldn’t find you; thought you’d made a dash for it.”

  “Sir?”

  “Well, what are you doing here?”

  “Looking,” Manolis replied. “This is Knossos.”

  The man squinted, his woolly brows fretting. “So it is.”

  “I have read about it. About King Minos and about Sir Arthur Evans. When I saw that I was here, I wanted to explore.”

  “You have let yourself into the labyrinth, child.”

  “I knew it when I saw it.”

  “Did you?” The old man’s mustache twitched. “Time and again, earthquake and fire have brought these buildings low. What you see here is only a fragment of a fragment of what once stood here, and even the fragments are artificially linked. How can you understand what you are looking at? How can any of us?”

  “I don’t understand anything, sir. I’m only looking.”

  “You need a clew, child, such as Theseus had—Ariadne’s thread, that he took into the labyrinth to lead him out again. Didn’t John tell you he had written a guidebook to the place, when he was curator?”

  Pendabri had been a curator here? “O kyrios Pendabri didn’t talk much about himself.”

  “Only talked about your potsherds, eh? Well, go on back now, he’s waiting for you. Worried you haven’t had your breakfast.”

  Manolis was eager to obey, but the unmoving little Englishman was blocking the way out. Manolis got up the courage to squeeze past him; once past, he turned back. “I wasn’t stealing potsherds, sir. I’m not a thief.”

  “Aren’t you?” The man raised a bristling eyebrow. “We’re all thieves in this pursuit. Even if all we steal is time.”

  Manolis hesitated, not sure he understood the meaning of the English words. “How are you called, sir?”

  “I’m called Arthur Evans, when they speak plainly of me.” The man waved his cane imperiously. “Go on, child; go
on back.”

  “So little Arthur caught you in the palace?” Pendlebury grinned knowingly at Manolis, meanwhile bouncing his happy three-year-old son upon his knee. Freshly shaved and wearing a cotton shirt with every wrinkle ironed out of it, surrounded by his family in the sunny garden of the house he called the Taverna, he was no longer an archaic kouros but quite the new man, a strictly modern European. “Were you really trying to get at the sherds?”

  “I was only looking at them through the wire,” said Manolis.

  “Don’t tease him, John,” Hilda said. “A joke can go too far.” She held her fretting baby girl to her shoulder, shading the girl’s head with her palm.

  “Androulakis is not a child, my dear. He stands up for himself quite well.” If Hilda expected to hear more, Pendlebury disappointed her. He set their son on the ground and reached for an orange slice, leaning forward to let the juice spill on the flagstones. Meanwhile the boy spotted a fat green lizard and set off chasing it into the garden.

  “Will you have some more fruit, Manolis?” Hilda asked. “Some more yogurt, perhaps?”

  To show his gratitude to Hilda he would have eaten anything she offered, but his overfull stomach threatened to cramp. “Thank you, Mrs. Pendabri, I have had a sufficiency.”

  Pendlebury suddenly stood up, grabbed a napkin from the table, dabbed it at his chin, and quickly tossed it aside. “Sir Arthur,” he called, as the vigorous old man strode up the drive past the garden. “Will you join us for coffee?”

  “Kind of you to ask, John. Good morning, Hilda,” Evans said, doffing his hat.

  “Good morning, Sir Arthur.”

  “No coffee, thank you, but I’ll sit a moment.” Evans climbed the garden steps. “No, you stay,” he said firmly to Manolis, who had gotten out of his chair and was sidling away. “You’re a growing boy. Eat your breakfast.” Evans perched himself in the chair Pendlebury pulled out for him and cast a regal eye over the family scene, waiting for someone to address him.