Secret Passages

by Paul Preuss

  Bumps and breathing.

  “It’s me, darling. Can you hear me?”

  More breathing, then a joyful “Ma!” Then a clink as the receiver hit the floor.

  “What, Mama, a duet? Certainly I’d like to hear it.” She heard her mother’s voice almost whispering the words of the nursery song:

  “‘Ainsi font, font, font

  les petites marionettes.

  Ainsi font, font, font

  trois p’tits tours et puis s’en vont…’”

  And in the foreground, Jenny’s cheerful, arrhythmic huffing: “Fon, fon, fon, fon.”

  Anne-Marie laughed. “Bravo! I’m sure she’s having a grand time, it’s really good of you…I’m on my way to Crete, but I don’t know where I’ll be exactly…A day or two. Peter sends his love, can’t wait to meet you at last…Truly, he said so…He would tell you himself, except he’s not here right now. We’ll call you later…Good-bye now.”

  At last Anne-Marie hung up, weary with the effort of polite conversation.

  Ever since she’d arrived in Athens the loudspeakers had been announcing that all departing flights were delayed due to “technical difficulties.” People were elbowing their way to the ticket counters and shouting at the clerks—Greeks, especially when they’re unhappy, don’t stand in line—and knots of dejected travelers were camped out on hard plastic chairs in the waiting rooms. Evidently one translation of “technical difficulties” was “labor dispute.” To get to Crete she would have to go by sea, and she barely had time to make the overnight ferry from Piraeus.

  The taxi stand outside the terminal was built like a cattle ramp, with iron railings to contain the crowd. Anne-Marie dived in, suitcase and camera bag swinging, but suddenly froze when she saw a familiar tall figure ahead of her and almost had to bite her tongue to keep from calling his name: Peter.

  She pretended to have trouble with her suitcase, allowing frantic men and women to push past her. Peter was standing at the curb now; she watched surreptitiously as he let two men push past him to grab taxis that hadn’t reached the front of the line. Finally he got wise. He blocked the next man who tried to get by him with an elbow; then, as a cab came swerving in off the coast road, heading for the taxi rank, he loped to the back of the line of cabs and cut off another queue-jumper; Peter had swung his bags into the back seat and dived in with them before the cab had come to a full stop. The driver gunned around the loading cabs in front of him and headed back to the coast road on squalling tires.

  Anne-Marie had to laugh, even as she hoped Peter’s luck didn’t last. She needed a day alone with Minakis without him.

  Bumper cars at fifty miles an hour—rush hour on a boulevard with three painted lanes of traffic that somehow accommodated four, plus motor scooters that buzzed through the gaps like angry wasps—and twenty-five minutes later Peter reached the Intercontinental Hotel, still fuming.

  An hour later, as dusk was settling over the city, he was ready to try again. It was a short cab ride to Minakis’s address on a low hill in Pangrati.

  The three-story building was a fortress with no windows on the ground floor and only a single massive wooden door, although it looked to be opulent, with balconies and arbored terraces and glazed tile roofs and a fine view of the Acropolis. City lights glistened for miles around in the purple twilight, but the rock on which the ancient High City stood was a dark silhouette. Peter rang the bell repeatedly; no answer. He climbed back into the waiting taxi.

  He had hardly closed his hotel-room door behind him when outside his window, across the streaming traffic on Syngrou, the Parthenon came suddenly alight, blazing with garish yellow and red and blue—son et lumière, the instant history of Athens.

  He’d had no luck in Athens. Crete, then. But it was a big island…

  He swallowed his pride and picked up the phone. Maybe, after all, his mother-in-law could suggest where to find his wife—

  “Yes, Mr. Slater?” responded the hotel operator.

  —when it occurred to him that he knew someone, a former colleague now working in Crete, who would surely know Manolis Minakis if he was in the neighborhood.

  “Operator, I want to reach…I think it’s called the Foundation for Research and Development, in Iraklion.”

  “I have a Foundation for Research and Technology, Hellas,” said the operator.

  “That’s it.” FORTH, that’s what it was called…

  “No one answers, sir.” It was late, even for Greeks. “If you would like to try again another time, here’s the number…”

  Anne-Marie arrived in Iraklion harbor at dawn, sitting upright in the ship’s second-class lounge after a fitful night.

  The bus ride to Lasithi revived her. It was a good and soulful bus, whose young driver had decorated his windshield with garlands of lace and pictures of saints and nightclub singers. He sang along at full volume with the tapes he played on his cassette machine—he favored Maria Pharantouri and the music of Theodorakis—while the conductor went up and down the aisle punching tickets and rolling his eyes at the driver’s high notes. After a few miles the bus left the tourist clutter of the coast; the air grew sweeter as it climbed higher. Poplars shimmered and grape leaves glistened in the sunshine; villages went by quickly, and the road pitched ever more steeply as the mountainside grew wild.

  “Thymos! O thymos!” cried a woman in black, lowering the window beside her seat. Soon half the passengers in the bus had lowered their windows; some were sticking their heads out, sniffing the air as enthusiastically as puppies. “Thymos!” they exclaimed. Even over the diesel fumes, Anne-Marie could smell the wild thyme on the slopes. In her fatigue she shed happy tears, as if the scent of thyme made her nostalgic for better days.

  Memory is a charlatan. The months she had spent on Crete had been among the most desperate of her life. After seven years she had returned to undo what had been done to her here—not even to undo it; perhaps the best she could hope for was to finish what had been started here.

  The bus let her off in Ayios Georgios, and she got a lift from a farm boy who claimed business in Ayia Kyriaki. His name was also Georgios, like the dragon-slaying saint in the miniature polychrome that dangled from the mirror of his Toyota pickup. He asked the obligatory questions and quickly learned that yes, she was married, and yes, she had children, and yes, when her own business in Ayia Kyriaki was done she would be rejoining her husband. She was here only to make a few photographs of someone who lived in the village, she told him.

  “That must be the rich man who bought a house there three years ago,” he said, “but he hardly ever stays in it.”

  “I’m only here on a job.”

  Having gotten what news he could from her, Georgios spent the rest of the trip lecturing her on the inevitable triumph of the KKE in the coming elections—never mind low ratings in the polls, the demise of the Soviet Union—due to the moral superiority of the Communist Party over the Socialists of PASOK, who were a bunch of fascists no better than the right-wing New Democracy Party. She listened politely, allowing herself a tiny smile at the icon of Saint George dangling from his mirror.

  The road was new, a lane of raw dirt that a bulldozer had scraped out of the cliffside, climbing steeply up the gorge until it entered the plain and reverted to a rutted track through the almond groves. Georgios’s pickup plowed through almond petals drifted like snow.

  He squeezed the truck into Ayia Kyriaki’s single narrow street and stopped beside the cistern in the village square. Anne-Marie climbed down and looked around avidly, seeking what she had imagined.

  Sure enough, she knew the place. Here was the chapel and here was Louloudakis’s place, with men sitting in front of it who could have come straight from Minakis’s narrative—a bearded priest in dusty robes, a gray-haired ancient in baggy pants with a sariki drooping on his brow—except these weren’t quite the vigorous fellows she had pictured from Minakis’s description; these were old men and frail. There were other people on the terrace she hadn’t picture
d at all, two big boys and a big girl, all with white-blond hair and pale Nordic eyes, stretching their long tan legs out of their canvas shorts as if they owned the place, eyeing her with the annoyance of tourists who think they have found the end of the world only to be interrupted by you—their presence partly explained by the sign beside the door that read, “Zimmer. Rent Rooms. Chambres a louer.”

  Anne-Marie reached into the truck bed for her suitcase, but Georgios was quicker. “You must allow me, kyria,” he said, as he yanked it over the tailgate and set it on the ground.

  They stood there a moment, nothing left to say; it would be an insult to offer him money. “Let me take your picture,” she said.

  He brightened at the prospect. She pulled the beat-up Canon from her camera bag and fitted it with a 50mm lens. She waved at him to pose in front of his truck—this way, no, a little more that way. Behind him, the late-morning sun lit the squat church tower across the square and the gray-gold cliffs of Dikti beyond.

  “Is it a Polaroid?” he asked through his clenched grin.

  “Sorry, no, I’ll have to send you a print.” She snapped four frames while she talked, then four more. Letting the camera fall from its sling, she pulled a pen and a pad of standard releases from her bag. “Put your address here. And sign your name, if you don’t mind me using your picture in a magazine.”

  He wrote carefully and handed the pad back to her. “Do you need help, finding this man you are supposed to photograph?”

  “How many doors are there to knock on?” she said tartly. Then, more gently, “Forgive me, Georgio, I’m tired. I can find the house myself.”

  “Andio, kyria.” He got back into his truck and drove away up the narrow street. His only business in Ayia Kyriaki had been to give her a ride.

  “Anne-Marie! What a pleasant surprise.” Standing at the open gate, wearing a black silk shirt and tan corduroy trousers, Minakis looked more at ease than he had on Mykonos.

  By contrast she felt bedraggled. And miffed. “Why surprised? You invited me.”

  “Only that you got here so soon.” He took her suitcase in one hand and her elbow in the other, drawing her into the courtyard, away from the curious eyes of the villagers who had followed her to his gate.

  Again she had the sensation that she knew the place. A recent coat of whitewash had rendered the house and walls almost antiseptically clean, but the beehive phournos, the walls of the courtyard crested with scraps of broken pots…

  “And Peter? Is he with you?”

  “I came alone.”

  “Ah.” A complicated expression—regret trying to hide itself—rippled across his face. “I wonder, did you…?”

  “I gave him your envelope. We didn’t have time to talk. I expect he’ll join us soon.”

  His charm grew wary. “Did you have a pleasant flight?”

  “I couldn’t get a flight out of Athens, some kind of work slowdown. I slept sitting up in the second-class lounge of the ferry from Piraeus.”

  “You must be exhausted,” he said sympathetically.

  “I’m wide awake. And like Squire Hutchinson’s mother, I’m hungry enough to eat a donkey.”

  He smiled. “That won’t be necessary. I made an early-morning visit to the market in Ayios Nikolaos.”

  “How did you get here so fast?”

  “My yacht reached Ayios Nikolaos last night.”

  “Oh.” She swept the hair from her forehead, the involuntary gesture he found so endearing. “I didn’t know you had a yacht.”

  Lunch was an appetizer of urchin roe followed by red mullet rubbed with herbs and grilled over coals in the fireplace, accompanied by sliced potatoes deep-fried in olive oil and a salad of lettuce and shrimp and hothouse tomatoes with oil and vinegar and herbs. Anne-Marie ate with dedication.

  They were sitting at a table that looked a hundred years old, upon which he had set gay pottery and fresh flowers so picturesquely that it might have been one of those slick magazine spreads Anne-Marie occasionally photographed. He poured the last of a bottle of cold sauvignon blanc and apologized for not having had time to build a cellar of good local wines.

  At last she looked up from her empty plate, smiling blissfully. “You are a marvelous cook.”

  “Hunger is the best sauce. Cervantes, I think?”

  “You must learn to accept a compliment, Manoli.” She sipped her wine. “Now I’m brimming with questions.”

  “Of course. You’re here to interview me.”

  “The boy who brought me here said you’re hardly ever in residence. Where do you live?”

  “I have a house in Athens. And I spend time on my yacht.”

  “I can’t picture this place as a weekend retreat.”

  He feigned surprise. “Even with all the rugs and pictures? My restaurant range? My inside plumbing?”

  “Oh, you’ve made it lovely. But why are you here, in your grandmother’s house? I took you for someone who wants to understand his life…”

  He cocked his head, inquiring, inviting her to go on.

  “Not the sort who wants to relive it,” she finished.

  Minakis watched her, bright-eyed and quiet as a cat. “You’re right,” he said at last. “We live our lives once. And until yesterday it had never occurred to me to look back at my own in such detail.” He propped his elbow on the table and put his chin in his palm and studied her. “I’m afraid it’s not going to be as easy as you hoped.”

  Her pale eyes widened; she tried not to betray her sudden apprehension. She no longer had any doubt that he knew why she was here—but was he willing to bargain? Did he know how much she was willing to give?

  “You’ve inspired me to try my hand at autobiography, you see,” Minakis said. “I spent yesterday afternoon and most of the night at it.” He got up and went into the room beyond the arch, returning with a manila folder. He put it beside her plate. “Completely raw, no doubt filled with error and self-delusion.”

  “Sounds like an autobiography, all right.” Was this his bargain? She covered her confusion, opening the folder to a thick pile of yellow lined pages torn from a legal pad, filled with line after line written with a felt-tipped pen in a tiny hand.

  “Tell me what you think of it. Honesty counts.” He wasn’t smiling. “Then I may answer more of your questions.”

  She gave him a wry look and, leaning back in her chair, began reading his spare, demotic Greek:

  In the spring of 1936 John and Hilda began excavating the Trapeza cave above Tzermiado. On my first weekend free of school I went to join them, starting before dawn, walking the twenty-six miles to Lasithi in six hours. There I encountered Miss Money-Coutts on the ledge in front of the cave, where she and Hilda were washing sherds. When I saw her in front of the cave it was as if I were seeing her for the first time…

  18

  Never having confided his passion to Money-Coutts or anyone else in two seasons of digging on the Nail, Manolis had no one to confide in now. Back at Knossos in the stifling summer heat, he escaped into the cool depths of the labyrinth, where the Squire had put him to work cataloguing boxes of sherds. Manolis had learned the Knossian pottery styles from Uncle Manolakis, his foster father, and though none of the Brits said it out loud, they considered him an expert.

  One morning he was sitting on the cool floor of a basement storage magazine with his back to a wall four thousand years old, a crate of dusty sherds beside him and a sketch pad in his lap, with a pool of diffuse light descending through a grate in the concrete floor over his head—he could hear the shuffle of tourists’ feet and the murmur of foreign languages above him—when a shoe scraped in the corridor.

  “Who’s that?”

  Elpida Pateraki came into the light. “Good day, Manoli.”

  “Good day to you, Elpida. What are you doing here?”

  “I thought, if you didn’t mind, that I would keep you company for a little while.”

  He shrugged. “Not much here to interest you.” She was his foster cousin (however
one labeled these relationships); he saw her every day in the crowded Akoumianakis household.

  “I’m interested in what you’re doing. But I don’t want to bother you.”

  “What I’m doing is listing these broken pieces of pot.”

  Her look encouraged him to elaborate. Indeed she had a most encouraging look; her green eyes glowed and her black curls tumbled over her ears, and in the shadows her white teeth shone in a shy smile.

  “Where and when they were found,” he went on, feeling a sudden sense of importance. “What period they came from. What sort of vessel they were part of—if I can tell. Sketching the pieces that are the most characteristic or unusual. Not many people would find it interesting.”

  “But you do,” she said, her voice knowing and sympathetic. “Don’t you want to be an archaeologist?”

  “That’s not possible,” he said automatically. “Maybe I can be like Uncle Manolakis and help a man like John or Sir Arthur.”

  “Why not a woman like Hilda or Mercy?” she asked, teasing.

  “A woman?” The idea hadn’t occurred to him. Not that English women couldn’t be archaeologists—almost all the English women he knew were archaeologists—but to direct an excavation?

  “Like Miss Boyd,” Elpida said, “who dug at Gournia and Kavousi. Mercy told me about her. I asked Mercy if she thought I could be an archaeologist.”

  “You?” A Greek girl an archaeologist? This was a fantasy. “Miss Boyd was a rich American.”

  “Mercy said I should let nothing stand in my way,” Elpida said calmly. “She said there are better things for women to do than cook and sew.”

  “She did?” It sounded like something Money-Coutts would say, although Manolis had never discussed these things with her. But if Money-Coutts had said it…“If you want to become an archaeologist, do your best.”

  “If I do, that doesn’t mean I’m not good at cooking and sewing,” Elpida added.