Secret Passages

by Paul Preuss

  “You’ve come to see how we’re doing,” said Hilda.

  “I’ve come to see what you’re doing, kyria,” Manolis said. “Everybody talks about archaeology, but I’ve never seen it done.”

  “You’ve seen more than you think,” Hilda said. “Thousands of potsherds and the tedious accounting of them. There’s not much more to see except the digging up of them. If you want to see that, go right in.” She pointed to the cave entrance.

  Manolis brightened. “Thank you, I will.”

  The entrance to the Trapeza cave was a gap between two leaning slabs of rock, into which had been set a door of iron bars in a heavy wooden frame. Manolis stood aside as a man carrying a basket of mud emerged. Then he ducked into the twilight interior.

  He was in a room as big as a village house, roofed with stone and floored with mud, decorated by stumpy stalactites and stalagmites and lit by daylight from the entrance. Nothing about this cave struck him as unusual or interesting; he’d poked his nose into lots of places like this. A yellow light showed at the far end of the chamber, and in that light he glimpsed moving shadows. He went toward it.

  There, in a lower chamber lit by paraffin lamps, the excavators were at work. The whole mud floor of the place had been peeled back like the skin of a corpse, and underneath were bones, the fragmentary remains of small bodies, their knees pulled up to their chins, buried under only a few inches of soil and not nearly so well preserved as the bones Manolis had found in his own cave. John Pendlebury was down on his knees beside one of the shallow graves, scraping at a crumbled skeleton with a narrow trowel, bringing the scene into existence as if with an artist’s brushstrokes. So intent upon the moment was he that Manolis did not dare announce his presence; he crouched beside a stalagmite and peered down upon Pendlebury as he worked.

  “Oh there it comes,” Pendlebury murmured. “Oh there it comes.” He reached into the grave and grasped something and gently moved it. “Oh bravo!” He held the thing aloft in the yellow lamplight. Manolis couldn’t see what it was, a bronze spearpoint perhaps, or a dagger. Pendlebury laid the corroded spike of dark metal carefully aside and jotted in his little notebook, then went back to his scraping.

  Manolis dodged another workman carrying a basket of dirt, then let himself down over the slippery stones into the lower chamber. “Kyrie Pendabri.”

  “Androulakis!” Pendlebury got up from his knees, ducking to avoid the low ceiling. “Kalimera! Damned good to see you.” He thrust out his muddy hand, and Manolis shook it firmly. “Heard you’ve been giving the schoolteachers what for.”

  “Oh…well. They say I ask too many questions.”

  “Impossible,” Pendlebury said firmly. “The way you ask them, perhaps.”

  Manolis said nothing, trying to hide his distress with an innocent and inquisitive gaze.

  “We must have a talk about it.” Pendlebury looked around. “Gentlemen, an intermission. Tea and sunshine.” He scrambled up the short slope to the upper level of the cave and, bending low, turned to give Manolis a hand. “Here to help us out?”

  Manolis jumped up the slope he had just slid down. “Today and tomorrow—if I’m to go back to school.” Not that he would have minded skipping the rest of the year.

  “Splendid, splendid.” They dodged the rock overhangs and emerged into the blinding afternoon light, Pendlebury pushing Manolis ahead of him onto the ledge. “If you’ve come to learn a bit of practical archaeology, I can’t think of a better teacher than Money-Coutts here, when it comes to sorting things out.” Miss Money-Coutts and Hilda looked up from their muddy work. “Would you mind taking on a pupil for the next day or two, Miss Money-Coutts?”

  “If he doesn’t mind getting his hands dirty,” the young woman replied, concentrating on her work.

  “Right, and let’s all wash up. Androulakis, do the honors, will you? At the moment you’re the only one with clean hands.”

  Manolis made tea on the camp stove (that day and the next and on many afternoons thereafter) with all the ceremonies of pot warming and cozying that he had learned from the Squire and Mrs. Hutchinson. Later he sat beside Miss Money-Coutts, sifting sherds from the mud, trying to follow her example and listening for her sparse hints on how to clean artifacts without destroying them, adding what he gleaned to what he had already learned from Uncle Manolakis, his foster father at Knossos.

  That night and the next he slept in the house of Siganos, the local schoolmaster, the cousin of his old tutor (who was now a journalist in Athens and in constant trouble with the government). Well before dawn on the second morning after his arrival, he walked the twenty-six miles back to Kastro and his classes.

  He made the round-trip every weekend until school let out for the summer, when at last he was free to spend every day of the dwindling season at the dig. As the season drew to a close, Hilda Pendlebury joined her husband in scouting other promising sites in the neighborhood, leaving Manolis to spend mornings and afternoons alone with Money-Coutts on the ledge outside the cave, rooting through ever-fresh baskets of mud—occasionally resting his eyes by gazing into the distance, over the tops of the oaks on the hillside to the windmill-studded plain below, trying not to peer at Money-Coutts.

  But always there was Money-Coutts, her sun-browned face lambent with perspiration, her mouth bent in a small moue of concentration, her green eyes sometimes just glancing away from his. She never acknowledged his fervent glances except by the lifting of an eyebrow, for she was many years his senior, though she looked as young as any Greek girl Manolis’s age.

  All that season the British School excavated the cliffs above Tzermiado. By June the picture was almost complete. The cave of Trapeza had been occupied in Neolithic times by people who were among the earliest to reach the island. Centuries later their descendants, the Minoans, were using it as a burial place and a shrine, and so it remained until the Minoans transferred their worship to a more spectacular cave at the opposite end of the Lasithi Plain. In that place, Psychro, during the last decade of the nineteenth century, Hogarth had brought up golden treasures; Psychro was one of those caves that claimed to be the birthplace of Zeus.

  Pendlebury told the tale grandly, of Kronos eating his children, of Rhea substituting a stone for the infant Zeus and hiding him to be raised on milk and honey by Melissa the bee-nymph and Amalthea the goat-nymph. “But if Zeus was born in Psychro, and if Psychro succeeded our Trapeza as a site of worship in the Bronze Age, ipso facto Trapeza was the home of Zeus’s parents. It was a rather modest little cottage, but never mind; we have excavated the home of Kronos and Rhea, the home of Father Time and Mother Earth’s daughter, the Great Goddess of Crete herself. Which is what the inhabitants of Tzermiado will tell you to this day.” He helped himself to a tumbler of the strong green wine from the pitcher on the table, tossed it back in a single throw, and drew his thumb across his wet lips.

  Seeing the enraptured look on the faces of the students at the table, Hilda spoke up. “But whether that story has been passed down from the Bronze Age or Professor Hogarth put it in their heads forty years ago, who but John would venture to say?”

  “No need to make a choice,” Pendlebury replied. “Who’s to say Hogarth didn’t simply prod their race memory?”

  The students—Money-Coutts too—laughed at this, but Manolis didn’t join in; he thought Hilda had touched upon something deep. On his first visit to the Iraklion Museum, Pendlebury had suggested to him that he was a descendant of a pretty Minoan girl pictured in a four-thousand-year-old fresco. How much of our history has been put into our heads? he wondered.

  It was a question he took with him when the digging season ended. It never went away; instead it grew in him, taking different forms as he grew older. How much of the past is merely the present projected backward? How much of the present is conditioned by what we have not yet experienced…?

  When John Pendlebury came back to Lasithi the following year, he was alone and in a sour mood. Hilda was ill, and he’d suffered professional setback
s. Hiking and climbing, always his boast, was now his solace; while his students dug and sifted through rock-shelter burials and a settlement on the limestone bluffs above Trapeza cave, he scoured the ramparts surrounding the Lasithi Plain, desperate to find a new and more spectacular site.

  “I visited your cave,” Pendlebury said one night when he’d returned late to Tzermiado after a long trek. “Found sherds, left them where they were. If it ever was a shrine, it wasn’t an important one. More likely a den of thieves.”

  They were sitting alone at the table in front of the apothiki, the abandoned house the British School had rented in which to study and store their finds. The villagers were in their homes, and the students had staggered to their rented beds, exhausted.

  “Not worth excavating?” Manolis said.

  “Too remote for an organized expedition. What I got for my pains was a wallow in cold mud. And missed another chance to do the three peaks of Dikti.”

  In the light from the paraffin lamp, Pendlebury looked haggard. His shirt and shorts hung loosely about him. In former years there had been a provocative smoothness to his long-muscled frame, a glowing finish to his bronze limbs that would have been natural on a swimming champion but looked too polished on a hiker. The smoothness was gone now; the bronze was ropy iron, and both his eyes, the flesh and the crystal, glowed eerily in shadowed recesses.

  Pendlebury poured wine from the jug on the table and drank deeply from his glass. “You didn’t tell me about the bodies.”

  Manolis said nothing.

  “Your affair. Can’t say I blame you for keeping the secret from your old village gang. Still secret, rest assured. Anything in that cave, you’re welcome to it.”

  The end of the 1937 season was approaching when Pendlebury summoned Money-Coutts and Manolis to accompany him on a closer inspection of a site a mere half-hour’s scramble from Tzermiado. It was called Karphi, the Nail.

  Manolis had known the place as long as he could remember; it was a landmark on the northern scarp of Lasithi. He followed close behind Pendlebury and Money-Coutts, hoping to see it this time not with a shepherd’s eye but an archaeologist’s.

  They climbed over thorny pastures and shattered gray rock to come upon the Nail from above. As they walked over the edge of the massif, the world dropped away beneath their feet. Looking down, they saw sheer cliffs interrupted by verdant olive groves and vineyards, plateaus of cultivation where white villages nestled among vertical gorges; 3,600 feet below them, the Cretan Sea glittered like cold metal under an approaching layer of cloud.

  They kept walking, onto the thin ridge that connected the Nail to the fortress cliffs of Lasithi. The rock here was pale gray and hard, its strata standing on edge, sculpted by wind and water into points and blades and sinister knobs. The ridge formed a little saddle that was filled with rubble and overgrown with thorns.

  “These are walls,” Pendlebury said, pointing to fractured stones lying atop one another in heaps, “and they weren’t built by shepherds—not last year and not last century.” He dropped to one knee and scratched in the red clay that filled the interstices of the stony ground. He brought up a sherd and handed it to Miss Money-Coutts, who pushed the hair out of her eyes to study it. “Don’t say what you think,” Pendlebury told her. “Let him have a chance.”

  Money-Coutts handed the sherd to Manolis. He spit on his thumb to rub away the mud. The clay was pale pink, with a whitish slip on which he could make out part of a black triangle filled with close-set parallel lines. “Late Minoan III?”

  Pendlebury cocked an eyebrow. “A fair guess. Money-Coutts?”

  “Sub-Minoan,” she said. “Almost Protogeometric.”

  “This was their last refuge.” Pendlebury swung his walking stick across the panorama of precipices on three sides. “This is where they came when the palaces burned, when the barbarous Dorians overran the lowlands, when Minoan Crete fell. Here and at Vrokastro and at Kavousi. Here the Dark Ages began.”

  The cries of vested ravens, rising with the flowing mist, announced wet gray clouds that suddenly welled up around them, closing in as they roamed the stony heights. Pendlebury leaped ahead, shouting to be heard in the damp wind. “We could be back in the Neolithic, back with those first poor seafarers who were so terrified of the sea that they hid in mountain caves. Here men built robber castles where their ancestors built shrines. There’s a whole fortified town on this peak, and work enough for years.”

  Manolis hung back with Money-Coutts, who was making no attempt to keep up with Pendlebury, although she threaded the paths among the stones and thorns nimbly enough in her jodhpurs and high-laced boots. Without looking up, Money-Coutts muttered, “This business of the robber castles will go into his book. John never throws a good line away.”

  In his cabin aboard La Parisienne, Minakis took a copy of Pendlebury’s book from the shelf above his bunk, the original 1939 edition, sheathed in a clear plastic library cover: The Archaeology of Crete, subtitled An Introduction.

  He smiled at the subtitle’s false modesty. Pendlebury’s book wasn’t an introduction, it was a condensed encyclopedia that noted every site where a telling sherd or artifact or bit of wall had been found, period by period, from the Neolithic to the Roman, along with estimates of how long it should take an athlete like himself to walk from one place to the next. For although Pendlebury described his pace as “half-way between a running messenger and a party of merchants,” it was more like that of the running messenger.

  The book was sent to press a year after Pendlebury began work on the Nail, and it included some of what he found there. In 1938 Hilda came back to Crete with her children in tow; she and John made wonderful discoveries, including a clifftop shrine that had been sacred to the Minoans long before the site was a fortified town. That season Manolis really learned to dig and draw and photograph; he learned to reconstruct the wreckage of the past. But what the archaeologists found was what they expected to find, for they lived under the shadow of war, and to them the ruins of Karphi were the remains of a beleaguered people. Pendlebury imagined himself with those Dark Age survivors, bracing for the last battle; perhaps he even looked forward to it.

  Minakis stretched himself upon his bunk and opened the book, looking for the thousandth time at Money-Coutts’s bold ink drawings of potsherds. He smiled now at the memory of his desperate passion. He had not thought about Mercy for years; he had done little to preserve his own past, the human emotions of his past. Any researcher could learn facts about him, but not what had mattered at the time. After the archaeologists have stripped away the material evidence, what is left? Data. Space-time coordinates.

  Peter was right to echo Kant. In the end, meaning arises only from experience.

  Minakis sighed. Six hours to go until Ayios Nikolaos, and a whole night ahead. He would take the time to set down a few reminiscences. Peter might like to read them someday.

  Anne-Marie might like to read them too. Unless her interest was sheer pretense.

  17

  Peter knew nothing about Minakis except that he was said to have done early work on semiconductors, half theoretical, half practical, back in the 1950s before Peter was born. Peter knew little about the solid state and had never read anything Minakis had written.

  Now there were these drawings and notes spread out on the bed beside the suitcase that Peter was packing as quickly as he could. What slowed him down was that he kept stopping to ponder some facet of Minakis’s scheme. Though solid-state physics had little in common with particle physics, no branch of physics was unaffected by quantum theory, and it was evident that Minakis had thought about its paradoxes long and deeply. It was equally evident that he had a flair for experiment that Peter lacked.

  Earlier, when Peter had tried to track Minakis down, he’d learned about the yacht, which had left Mykonos shortly after one o’clock. But Mrs. Thanatopolou didn’t know its destination and she had no luck trying to raise La Parisienne on the villa’s satellite phone. Mrs. Thanatopolou put Pet
er through to the University of Athens, where Minakis occasionally lectured, and she did most of the talking for him until the secretary yielded up an Athens street address and a phone number. But there was no answer at the number, not even a machine.

  Peter thanked Mrs. Thanatopolou for her efforts and hung up, then stacked a couple of cord adapters and plugged his laptop into the phone jack. He hunched over its tiny keyboard, searching for traces of Minakis on the net. The net was wide in space but shallow in time: he found references to a few of Minakis’s recent articles and letters in The Oxford Journal of Archaeology, Revue archeologique, and Praktika tis en Athinais Archaiologikis Etaireias, but Minakis didn’t seem to have published any physics papers lately. When Peter finally snapped the laptop shut and stuffed it back in its bag, all he had was a list of articles about archaeology.

  Well, he would have to go to Athens anyway; it was impossible to get anywhere in a hurry without going through Athens.

  There was one more call he ought to make. He hadn’t spoken to Jenny in three days; he’d expected to see her when her mother arrived on Mykonos. Not that she was likely to hold it against him…and what would he say when Madame Brand answered the phone? “I called to say hello to my stepdaughter, Mama, and by the way, it seems I’ve lost track of your daughter, my wife…”

  Maybe he’d call Paris from Athens. Right now he had a plane to catch.

  It was almost 5:00 P.M. when Anne-Marie got through to her mother from a phone booth in the Olympic Airlines terminal in Athens, after waiting twenty minutes for the call to go through, but finally, “Hello, Mama…I’m good…Yes, Peter’s good too. Everything’s fine, marvelous.” She stared at the wood panel of the telephone cabinet, enduring her mother’s worried interrogation and listening for sounds of Jennifer in the background. “Would you give her the phone, please? Just so she can hear my voice…”