Secret Passages
Page 36
“Okay,” said Carlos, unconcerned, as he bit off half a slippery dolma.
Then Peter experienced a moment of…not bliss, exactly, but of happy comprehension. A Zen moment. He knew the feeling well enough not to cling to it, having experienced it only once before, in connection with a mathematical insight—not with children (as much as these two were his own, his chosen children, he could never pretend to own them), not with a woman (not even Anne-Marie, his chosen and rechosen mate), not with the food on the table or the sun in the sky or the cliffs of Dikti looming above the rooftops.
This evanescent instant of enlightenment had only to do with love and how love expands, infinitely…or for a moment, so it seemed.
In the village square, beside their rented car, Peter swung Jennifer round and round in the air, she dizzily shrieking, “More! More!” while Anne-Marie went into the churchyard to lay a wreath on a gravestone, and Carlos, out of curiosity, tagged along with her.
Three names, three sets of dates were deeply carved in new dark granite: KATERINA K. ANDROULAKI, 1886–1935; SOPHIA A. DIDASKALOU, 1908–1922; MANOLIS A. D. MINAKIS, 1922–1997. Anne-Marie’s wreath of chrysanthemums, bought the day before in Iraklion, was big enough to cover them all.
“Who are they?” Carlos demanded, tugging at her hand.
“One was a friend of mine,” she said.
“And Dada’s?”
“His too.” More than his friend, his sadalos, his sponsor, although she was not at all certain he would have approved of Peter’s decision to move their work to Switzerland.
Her son, bored with graves, tugged urgently on her sleeve. “Are we ready to leave yet?” he demanded. Anne-Marie got a grip under his bottom and lifted him to her flank, and they left the graveyard.
Catching sight of them, Peter wearily set Jennifer on her feet. She was still calling, “More! More!”
Anne-Marie brushed strands of dark hair from her perspiring forehead and jerked open the passenger-side door of the rented Mercedes. “Inside, kids. Dada’s taking us home.”
They tumbled in and settled themselves. The car circled the cistern and bumped over the cobblestones, heading downhill through the almond groves. Through the back window the children waved and made faces at the old men in front of Louloudakis’s place. The old men stared back unsmiling.
Afterword
John Pendlebury and his family and colleagues are historical figures I have treated fictionally here. Dilys Powell’s The Villa Ariadne gives a good account of the Knossos community, British and Greek, yet much of Pendlebury’s remarkable story remains to be told.
In several trips to Crete I attempted to retrace the ancient routes Pendlebury describes in The Archaeology of Crete, but I’ve made slight necessary adjustments to Pendlebury’s itinerary and the geography of the Dikti Mountains—there is no village of Ayia Kyriaki in the Limnakaros Plain—and it’s important to stress that none of the nonhistorical characters in this book, good or bad, is based on a real person.
I’m indebted to Dr. Catherine de Grazia Vanderpool, U.S. director of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, for substantially assisting my research in Greece, and to Margaret Cogzell, librarian at the British School at Athens, who provided me with photos of Pendlebury and his companions, plus contemporary maps and other documents, and who helped me determine that it was his left eye which was glass. Among other xenoi who helped, I owe much to Rosemary Barron, Willy Coulson, Steve Frisch, Sue Haas, Stephana McClaran, Karen Preuss, Mona Helen Preuss-Guillemot, and Kent Weeks.
Among natives of Crete, Christophoros Veneris and his brother Georgios were endlessly helpful and generous, as were the Kargiotakis and Siganos families of Tzermiado. I’m especially indebted to Sophia Lenataki-Gallagher, once of Sitia, now of San Francisco, who instructed me in Cretan usage and pronunciation and tried valiantly to teach me Greek—but was finally forced to correct my numerous errors, including social blunders, by reading the manuscript herself. Efharisto poli, Sophia!
Cramer’s transactional interpretation of quantum mechanics is not fiction—a simplified account of it can be found in John Gribbin’s Schrödinger’s Kittens—but although John Cramer was good enough to comment on the manuscript of Secret Passages, he is not responsible for my far-fetched use of his work.
For encouragement and good criticism I am thankful to Ursula Le Guin, Vonda McIntyre, Virginia Beane Rutter, Steven Yafa, Lynn Yarris, and my long-suffering agent, Jean Naggar; to Allen Dressler, Molly Giles, Kate Pelly, Michael Russell, and Debra Turner, who were meticulous in telling me just how to write and rewrite the book on a monthly basis; and to Charles Brown and David Hartwell, who crucially helped me focus a story that had become a years-long labor of love.
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