by Paul Preuss
Hilda was the first. “Have you seen the bust yet?” she cheerfully inquired.
Evans shook his head. “Wouldn’t dare to peek under those sheets, shiver to think of looking at my own brazen image. I was in the metropolitan’s office half the afternoon yesterday, but they won’t be dissuaded from a public unveiling. He says we can expect over a thousand people! What am I going to feed them?”
“I believe you can rest easy, Sir Arthur,” Hilda said. “Kostis and the others have been bringing in food for days.”
“Ah, well.” Under his brows, Evans’s eyes were gleaming with amusement. He turned his attention to Manolis. “Then there’s our young linguist and geometer and pottery fancier. He’s already let himself into the palace.”
“So he has confessed,” Pendlebury said.
“Since that’s the case, he certainly ought to have a look at what we’ve taken out of the palace.”
“Yes, it’s high time Androulakis and I were off to beard the ephor in his museum,” said Pendlebury, jumping up again and straightening his shirtsleeves. “Don’t forget those sherds of yours,” he said to Manolis, “they’re material evidence.”
“Surely you’re not planning to walk!” Evans feigned surprise, and Hilda smothered a giggle.
“It’s less than three miles,” Pendlebury said defensively.
“You’ll ride with me,” Evans declared. “I have business in town this morning. Walk back, if you feel the need to stretch your legs.”
A long black shining automobile with running boards and a canvas roof rolled down the path, its fat tires popping the gravel. “Climb in here, John,” Evans called from the back seat, leaning to open the door. “You sit up front, Androulakis. View’s better from there.”
Once through the gate, the car rapidly picked up speed. Between Knossos and Kastro the dry hills were green with leafy vineyards and flowering orchards. Manolis sat upright beside the driver, fascinated by the scenery tearing past at a fantastic rate, perhaps as much as twenty-five miles per hour. In the leather-upholstered back seat Sir Arthur, tiny to begin with and further shrunken by his eighty-four years, sank deep into the cushions, while Pendlebury hunched over to keep from hitting the canvas roof with his head.
“Athens was all aflutter,” Evans was saying. “There’s no doubt many quite moderate people have been shut away, on the excuse that they had something to do with the revolt. I was treated grandly at first—then almost prevented from getting on the boat in Piraeus.”
“You must take action, sir,” said the driver, breaking in, eyeing Evans in the rearview mirror. “The fleet is in mutiny. In the east they are shooting the palikaria!”
“I’d be much less apprehensive if you would watch where you are going, Kostis,” Evans said crossly. “We can discuss the political scene later, if we must.”
The honey-colored fortress walls of the city soon came into view. The road crossed a dry moat on a stone ramp and entered under a massive gate. The car was instantly surrounded by a crush of people and pushcarts and laden donkeys and overladen lorries; when Kostis tried to turn he was furiously waved off by a policeman standing in front of a barricade where workmen were digging up the pavement.
The black limousine moved on slowly, past Turkish houses with overhanging wooden balconies, past the teeming market, its stalls piled high with fresh goods—glowing oranges, piles of fish the color of new-minted coins, skinned rabbits whose purple flesh was gaily decorated with tufts of fur on ears and tail…
They inched past a square graced by a Venetian fountain, then turned through narrow back streets to another square overlooking the sea. Here a new concrete building was set hard against the old stone ramparts among plantings of palms and figs intended to mask its impertinent modernity. Kostis pulled the limousine to the curb.
“We dismount here,” Pendlebury said to Manolis, as he opened the car door and unfolded himself from the back seat. “Thank you, Sir Arthur.”
Evans smiled impishly. “Please convey my respects to the ephor.”
As Evans drove off in his black chariot, Pendlebury led Manolis across the raw garden and through the tall doors of the museum. Inside, he gave the guard a friendly greeting; to Manolis he said, “Go wherever you want in here, but stay where I can find you. Oh, and let me have those sherds.”
Manolis handed them over, and Pendlebury left him alone to wander the sunlit halls.
Disoriented, Manolis entered the first room. Low glass cases, wood framed and brassbound, stood in the middle of the wide floor, and taller cases stood against the cream-colored walls. The paper labels on the artifacts were handwritten in Greek, some in English and German and French and Italian as well, informing the visitor that these were Neolithic and Early Minoan finds, none of them younger than four thousand years old and many of them twice that age. Manolis was entranced by the clay models displayed in the tall cases, rough little pinched-out figures, full of life, which he took for children’s toys. One showed three men wrestling with a bull, hanging haphazardly from its horns.
In the next room there were carved stone and molded clay figures, painted cups and vases, and tiny gemstones incised with strange scenes and mysterious picture writing…These were a little less ancient, only thirty-seven hundred years old.
In each room, the dates decreased by a century or two and the wonders multiplied: two figurines of crowned women in full skirts, their breasts bare, their arms writhing with snakes. A clay disk stamped with spiraling hieroglyphs. Vessels in the shape of bulls’ heads and lions’ heads and giant seashells carved from hard black-and-white stone. Bronze cauldrons, bronze swords, bronze saw blades big enough to cut down cypress trees; heavy bronze axes sharp enough to hew house beams and ship keels; thin gold double axes for worship and ceremony; a multitude of clay leaves, burned reddish black, incised with an unreadable script. Burial tubs—in the Greek of the labels, these were called larnakes—made from intricately painted clay but shaped exactly like the zinc tub in which Manolis had had his first bath last night.
In every room, exuberantly sculpted and painted pottery, from giant storage jars to rotund pitchers wriggling with painted octopuses to delicate cups decorated with abstract designs in black and white and red…
Upstairs, the walls were devoted to murals: the Priest King (as the label called him) with his plumed headdress, the bare-breasted ladies of the palace, an astonishing depiction of acrobats playing with a bull—a girl grasping the enormous forward-thrusting curve of the horns, a boy doing a handstand on the animal’s back, another girl standing behind the beast, ready to catch her flying comrade.
The reproductions in Knossos were flat copies; these had dimension and texture, their molded plaster bulging like flesh, but even these looked artificially new.
Not all of them were heavily restored. Manolis was taken by a small fragment of a fresco, repaired but wholly original, showing a big-eyed, red-lipped, impish young woman wearing a curious knot in her curly black hair.
While he studied it, Pendlebury came into the empty gallery. “I’m afraid it’s bad news, Androulakis,” he said, radiating mischief.
Manolis took in Pendlebury’s expression and sighed, straight-faced. “So it’s prison for me.”
Pendlebury laughed, beaten to his punch line. “Not just yet. But the ephor says he has all the Middle Minoan gastria he needs right now, and there’s no room for these in the museum.” Pendlebury held out his hand, offering Manolis the sherds. “You’ll have to keep them.”
“Mm.” Manolis pocketed the fragments. “I understand. The museum does seem very full.”
“Always room for the unexpected. I aspire to add a few items to the collection myself.”
“What I’ve seen, the Minoans were great…a great…” Manolis hesitated; he had never before been confronted by such an abyss of time, such evidence of vanished exuberance and vitality as he had found in this building, where the dead seemed more alive than the living in his own village.
When it was evident that he could not finish hi
s sentence, Pendlebury came to his aid. “Any thinking person must stand in awe of that energetic and inventive race. But did you know, Androulakis, that most of what you see here was collected only since the beginning of this century? For hundreds of years before that, no one bothered to look even an inch under the ground—because of sloth and ignorance and superstition. All those Crusaders. All those Turks. Then in just five years, Sir Arthur uncovered Knossos. And meanwhile Halbherr was digging at Phaestos, and Miss Boyd was digging at Gournia, and the French and the Greeks were active too; the excavations at Malia, where they found the marvelous golden pendant with the bees—did you see it?—those were begun even during the Great War. We’ve hardly skimmed the surface. It costs more to dig now, of course, and there is rather less money to go around. But there is so much yet to find.”
“Your life must be exciting, kyrie, to be able to find such treasures,” Manolis said quietly. Of course he had seen the bee pendant. Who could have missed it?
“It’s not the treasures, it’s the knowledge. Look at this amazing girl,” Pendlebury said, turning to the small fresco. “Sir Arthur named her la Parisienne, I suppose because Parisian girls were wearing their hair that way at the turn of the century, or because Parisian girls have always seemed a bit saucy to us English. She’s alive. She’s almost four thousand years old, but she’s alive today, because of the spirit and skill that guided the hand that painted her.” Pendlebury’s bright gaze turned upon Manolis again. “And her blood is in your veins.”
Manolis was astonished. “Those people were not like us,” he said, thinking of the bare-breasted women and the men with their bare torsos and long hair and feathers.
“They were your ancestors.”
“That can’t be.”
“Oh, you had other ancestors, Mycenaeans and Dorian Greeks and Romans and Byzantines and Saracens and Franks and so on. You’re a mathematician, Androulakis, you tell me how many generations separate you from this woman. But I’ve studied you living Minoans, with your wide shoulders and your narrow waists and your dark grace and your laughter; I’ve seen you in every part of this island, which has always been your home.”
“Approximately two hundred generations.” Manolis’s attention had drifted while he calculated; there was something comforting about labeling that gulf of years with a number. “Fifty-seven lifetimes.”
Pendlebury smiled. “Yes. Thank you.”
“You said it was four thousand years since this woman was alive. Assuming twenty years for a generation, seventy years for a lifetime…”
“Yes, Androulakis, I believe you.”
Manolis refocused his attention on the little fresco. “Was she my ancestor?”
“Our business here is done,” Pendlebury said; “it’s time we got back to Knossos. Feel like a short stroll?”
Manolis grinned. “I’ll race you.”
13
On Mykonos the sun was high and the light was fierce, even in the flickering shade of the eucalyptus that overhung the little square. Minakis leaned away from his demitasse, which had only a smear of oily grounds left in it, and looked at his watch. “It’s after eleven. You’ll be getting hungry soon,” he said to Anne-Marie.
“Perhaps you are getting hungry.”
He smiled. “Perhaps. Before lunch, I intend to hear your husband’s talk”—he searched the square for the waiter—“Garzon! To logariazmo—and afterward, we can attack the buffet at the villa. It really is far superior to anything we can get in town.”
The waiter trotted to their table, adding up the bill. While Minakis reached into his jacket for his billfold, Anne-Marie drew a large, colorful banknote from her purse and put it on the table. He pushed it back. “I won’t accept your money.”
“Then the waiter will get a very big tip.”
Minakis saw that she was serious. “I suppose things are done differently these days”—he took her bill and replaced it with a sheaf of smaller bills of different colors, pushing her change across the table—“and of course it would be a profound ontological error, not to mention a social error, to become mired in the past.”
She brushed the hair from her eyes. “You’re not mired in the past, Professor Minakis, you’re reviewing it at my request.”
“And flattered to be asked. But do call me Manoli.”
They made their way through loud and crowded narrow streets, hemmed in by whitewashed walls and jostled by tourists, passing shop fronts that displayed bronze utensils and bright woven fabrics, gauzy shifts and blue-striped shirts and flimsy sandals, and postcards by the thousands—most of them scenic, many of them prurient, ancient Dionysian orgies painted on vases alongside modern Nordic nudes photographed live.
Minakis cut a path through the crowds as easily as if he were walking through a flock of sheep in a mountain pasture, with Anne-Marie following closely in his wake. It was a relief to reach the harbor, where the crowd dispersed over the broad quays.
They walked along the quay, past the crowded fishing boats and tourist craft. A white motor yacht lay moored by its stern in the Mediterranean fashion, its gangplank obscuring its name. Minakis took no notice of the boats; he resumed his story without slowing his pace. “Sir Arthur’s big affair came the day after my visit to the museum. At midmorning the metropolitan arrived in golden robes and led him to the West Court of Knossos with lesser priests going before, swinging their censers and chanting. I tagged along in the train.
“Thousands of people were waiting, enough to repopulate the ruins—clustered on the ancient walls, hanging from the branches of the pine trees—some who’d started celebrating early were already falling into the ancient trash pits. The bronze was unveiled to wild applause. You’ve seen it: Sir Arthur guarding his labyrinth, an old man with a stern gaze and big ears and an aggressive necktie—not so much a portrait as a sketch in metal, much too modern for its subject, who was a thoroughgoing Victorian though he lived forty years into this century.
“I made no aesthetic judgments at the time, however. What a glendi, what a party it was! More people than I had seen in my life, all in one place on one day! They put a laurel wreath on Sir Arthur’s head. ‘So far indeed, as the explorer may have attained success,’ he intoned, ‘it has been as the humble instrument, inspired and guided by a greater Power.’ Purest poppycock, but perfectly suited to the occasion.
“Afterward he entertained dozens of dignitaries in his villa, spending more money on food and drink in an afternoon than had been exchanged in Ayia Kyriaki since I was born. I was in the presence of the gods, and they were English. Pendlebury was my Apollo. Evans was my Zeus.”
Minakis and Anne-Marie had reached the end of the quay. High above them, across a two-lane road busy with traffic, sprawled the gleaming white villa that housed the Delos II conference, crowning the dry slopes that overlooked the harbor. They dashed across the road between cars. Minakis began the steep climb without hesitation, his strides lengthening as the angle of the slope increased, and Anne-Marie struggled to keep up.
“That was to be Sir Arthur’s final visit to Crete, the place that had made his reputation, the place he had put on the world-historical map. The next time I spoke to him we were in a different country. We might as well have been in a different century…”
A few days after the festivities at Knossos, the Pendleburys and the Hutchinsons joined Sir Arthur for luncheon on the terrace of the Villa Ariadne, at a long table under the wisteria trellis.
Manolis had grown increasingly uncertain about his role in the affairs of the Knossos establishment. He hadn’t been invited to Sir Arthur’s luncheon—which would have terrified him—but his offers to help were ignored by the household staff. He hovered in the shadows inside the passageway to the kitchen, trying to stay out of the way of Kostis and old Maria as they trundled in and out, serving bowls of olives and garlicky yogurt and cheese-filled pastries and baked tomatoes stuffed with spicy rice and ground lamb.
Sir Arthur’s store of cold champagne fueled the talk around
the table. He was an imperious host, with a store of scandalous anecdotes about the local authorities which he dared his guests to deny, or better yet to corroborate. “Of course you know the Greeks are ever more insistent that we drop the name Candia and call the place Iraklion, Mrs. Pendlebury,” Sir Arthur demanded of Hilda, baiting her, “after Herakles, who I believe once paid a brief visit.”
She declined to rise. “Iraklion has been the official name of Candia for a dozen years now,” Hilda said mildly, “and no one I know pays the slightest attention.”
Her husband, never one to avoid an argument, took up the gauntlet. “I don’t blame the Greeks for preferring Herakles to the Arabic khandak, which means ‘ditch,’ after all. Would you name a castle for its moat?”
“Let them call it what they have always called it, John, Megalo Kastro,” Evans returned. “Surely ‘Big Castle’ is sufficiently grand for anyone.”
“That is a corruption of the Italian,” Mrs. Hutchinson put in, “and from everything I have heard, the Venetians were a greater scourge upon Crete than the Turks.”
“Perhaps they were, Mrs. Hutchinson,” Evans replied, “but it is to the Venetians that the Cretans owe what notice they have deserved for most of the last two thousand years. I except El Greco, who at any rate preferred to live among Spaniards, but genius sprouts randomly and is always wild. I mean that the Venetians’ principal business on Crete was the export of fruits preserved in sugar, known as products of Candia and therefore as ‘candy.’ Thus a new word entered the English language.”
“So when we eat candy, we are eating something named after an Arab ditch,” said Mrs. Hutchinson haughtily. “Frankly, Sir Arthur, I would have preferred not to have known.”
Evans was flustered for an instant; then he laughed, delighted. “Quite right, Mrs. Hutchinson. I should not have raised the subject during luncheon.”
Manolis, listening in the shadows, heard them talking about Crete the way they might have talked about their children, at once condescending and proud—as if they had invented the place for themselves. It had never occurred to him that he had a right to be proud of his homeland; he only knew, from his grandmother’s tales, never questioning what she told him, that the people of Crete had struggled for centuries to be free of foreign control.
