Digging at the Crossroads of Time

by Christos Morris

  From this tiny tomb, the climb to the top became easier for Mimis. He felt the wind at his back. He admired his old walking stick. It was strong and beautifully knotted like the bastooni that old men used. His long fingers touched the contours of the protruding gnarls.

  “A sensuous man,” his wife called him. She said she was attracted to his brains, fell in love with his good looks and married him for his smooth charm. His hands were gentle and soft to the touch, yet his nature was cautious, silent and filled with pride which both invited and repelled. He was not a man that could be summed up easily. Professor Steffanakis was both warm and coldly aloof, humble yet arrogant. Some revered him, though his link with humanity seemed like a precious, long, thin thread. He was a distant man, a solitary one.

  The professor continued along the rocky ravine washed bare by centuries of wind and winter rain. The clicking of the rocks beneath his feet echoed, duplicating the sound coming from his shoes. This echo gave him pleasure, conjuring up thoughts of invisible ancient footsteps travelling with him.

  The Minoans had climbed here four thousand years before. Traces of their path still remained, appearing and reappearing. Mimis stopped briefly to pick a leaf from an herbal bush, sniffing the wild scent. It was such a familiar smell to him, as he had passed this way hundreds of times since he was a boy. Oaxsa had a very special place in his heart. Mimis had spent a lifetime excavating the entire length of Crete, but until now, never in this ground he knew best.

  Demetra had once said to him, “You avoid this place on purpose. The Minoans are here, beneath your big feet.” She then lifted one eyebrow and whispered, “Ahhh, maybe you are waiting for just the right time.”

  Demetra had arrived on the first day of the ecavation, greeting Mimis with the eyes of a shaman and a warm embrace. “You are digging in the right place,” she had shouted over the wind.

  Mimis had looked at her quizzically.

  “This is the place where the partridge sings the best!”

  To Steffanakis, these words had been like a blessing from the highest priest. She was more than his closest friend. Demetra had eyes that could see where he would not. He had pinched a sprig of mountain tea from a bush and smelled the yellow flower with delight. Placing the sprig behind one ear, he said, “How sweet a morning like this is.”

  Demetra had picked a twig of her own to smell. She bit the yellow flower stem and crinkled her face, saying, “How can something so sweet taste so bitter?”

  It may have been Demetra’s way of speaking in symbols or maybe she knew of the troubles that were to be faced on the site from that day on. Maybe she sensed this excavation would alter the life of Mimis Steffanakis and the village he loved. Whether Demetra had seen the face of horror far out to sea or whether her comment was harmlessly playful, Mimis would never be sure. It did not really matter. Nothing could have altered the events that were to follow.

  Slowly walking up Oaxsa, Steffanakis wondered whether he could ever explain to the world or his colleagues what he had uncovered up there, to divulge what he believed would most certainly destroy his reputation. Yet carrying the secret within him, disguising the meaning of it all, was a painful burden. Bones and shards and fragments of pottery had been uncovered so slowly. Each particle of earth was removed by a fine-haired brush to reveal a single moment in time. The large clay feet of a xoanon, a Minoan deity, had been found intact. The wooden head and body had been dissolved over time. A stone altar used for blood sacrifice emerged and beside it, a large knife blade, now without its handle. There were hundreds of pieces of pottery. Each new fragment, dusted of its mountain soil, was pitted with new questions. There were so many artefacts, but he had yet to hear the ancient voices that could tell him what had happened here – and why.

  The remains of four Minoans lay beneath the earth, one of them a possible victim of human sacrifice. The others, ironically, were victims of a cataclysm of nature, the very thing he thought the sacrifice was intended to prevent. The bones lay precisely where they had been when the roof collapsed.

  Mimis finished his ascent to Oaxsa, kneeling on the rocky rise above the excavation site. He placed his walking stick securely beside him. The wind seemed chaotic, blowing one way, then another, malevolent one moment, mischievous and playful the next.

  Mimis pondered the imaginary sight of it. Was it a coincidence of nature or was it time for the Minoans demise? Had they grown old like their Goddess, this destructive hag who now shook their buildings to the ground? If the Minoans believed the hostilities of nature were caused by the Goddess, how would that be reconciled? What could they have done to appease her anger?

  While looking northward, the ancient priest would have seen the daylight turn to darkness, the Goddess stretching Her black hand across the horizon. He would have seen billowing black soot and ash exploding miles above the sea, rolling thunderously toward him. When She swallowed the sun, what might he have offered in sacrifice to ease her madness? In panic, did the priest or king offer his son or himself to save all other life?

  Mimis envisaged the brutal horror of it. His thoughts were filled with a rolling stream of images. Ancient people ran screaming, their hair thick with ash. They coughed and wheezed, a poison burned their lungs; the toxic sulphur taste lay dissolved on swollen tongues. The Goddess’ breath of life was now her breath of death.

  The stream of images that blew past Mimis’ face had suddenly vanished, leaving him with only the chill of the mountain air. His ears ached, yet he was smiling. The wind was filled with life.

  He inhaled deeply through his nostrils. The wind sharpened his senses. Miles above anyone, he was in ecstasy and filled with pride. Archaeologists had combed this mountain for years, scratching the surface with their spades. The seekers of ancient treasure had done the same. How many of them had stood upon this mountain? Was it fortune or luck that blinded any man from seeing what lay beneath, or had fate waited patiently for him to lift the lid of time? These questions he asked himself, over and over again.

  It was his wife who first came upon the temple site, recognizing the tip of a Minoan horn of consecration protruding from the earth. It had once decorated the building’s apex. Together they had walked an hour past the stench of the garbage dump and the putrid burning smoke rising from it. From there the sharp spine of the mountain descended toward the sea in a straight line except for a unique gully. It was as if a piece was missing from the mountain. It was within this missing piece the buried temple was found.

  For months, he had brushed the earth away, layer upon layer, revealing the form of the temple, the collapsed walls and cornerstones and pieces of clay pottery that had been smashed in a tumultuous quake. Then, fragment by fragment, he had unearthed the surprise of punished human remains: four human skeletons. Who were these people? He felt an urgent need to bring them back, to reconstruct their faces in clay so he could look into their eyes.

  Mimis lit a cigarette, smoking it to the end, then butted it on the ground. Dozens of old stained butts huddled together there. Maybe one day, in years to come, the cigarettes would be found beneath the soil by an archaeologist like himself, suggesting someone had returned to this place many times. Maybe they would build a story from the remains of these tiny butts, envisaging a solitary man sitting, looking out from the dizzying heights of Oaxsa toward the miniature life below. They might imagine a man looking beyond the fishing boats anchored in the gulf, looking beyond Elefsis Island, the island of the seven breasts, and into the vanishing mists of the Aegean. They might imagine him sitting upon the sacred rock of contemplation waiting for the sun to rise. They might say he was a special man, wishing to defy mortality or, at least, the certainty of life below; wishing to escape gravity and the things that held men to earth. They might only guess, but could scarcely know his identity for certain, or why he had climbed Oaxsa year after year.

  This day, Steffanakis remained until the last red kiss of the sun, dipping behind Oaxsa, slipped from the sky. The fiery orb sank into the dawn of som
e strange place, leaving him alone with the mysteries of the wind. He knew this temple had been a very private place. It was a sacred sanctuary used to make offerings and receive the spirit of the chthonic Goddess of the earth. These collapsed walls held powerful secrets.

  Often, while brushing away the layers of time, Mimis wondered if he should return everything back into the earth; leave the missing piece of the mountain as it was. Did he really need to know who they were, how they died or what they were doing? Mimis Steffanakis was yet to discover that the deeper he dug, the closer to death he would come.

  Maybe, if he had known in advance the events that were to happen to him and his village, he would have replaced the shards of the entombed and covered them. Maybe he would have touched his wife as she knelt before the protruding stone horn of the bull and said sweetly, “Let the dead rest.”

  The ancient mountain paths of Crete

  Remain, though they are incomplete.

  Once meant for gods, not human feet

  Are walked on by shepherds, goats and sheep.

  When joined they reach the golden tree,

  On the crossroads of eternity.

  And if you fail to see or hear

  The truth will always be unclear;

  With you upon your side of time

  And they beyond this mortal line.

  Mavrokakis

  Circa 1880s

  Elefsis, Crete

  August 1938

  H

  ow heavy is the sun? The red eye of the morning cannot rise before it is called. One rooster in Pano Elefsis crows in the darkness and sets in motion a chain reaction of all the roosters, all mindful of their role to raise the sun. Their voices, in quick succession, holler from the Pano hilltop to the hill on Dacktilo, down to Kato Elefsis and then back to Elefsis Port. The simple order of crowing grows slowly into madness, waking the donkeys. The sun is heavy and this the donkeys know. With a rope tied to their throats, they begin to cough and wheeze. “Pull!” is the cry, alerting animals from all four villages to do the same. “Pull the sun up from the horizon line. Pull! Pull! Pull!”

  Each morning this rooster and donkey magic is performed as the purple ergot haze of Demeter’s light rises silently from the sea. Each morning, from the wheezing chaos of darkness, comes the light bearing the order of a new day.

  In the light of the morning, an old woman lifted her hands from a wooden bowl of mulched bread and water. She cupped her dripping fingers in the air. “Mimis, come. Bring the water.” She paused, awaiting a reply. “Mimis!” Trepsithea’s shrill, screeching voice disturbed the lazy morning. The sound was an acquired voice shared by many women of the village, as though Greek men had taken to their complaining throats with scaling knives. Trepsithea’s voice, which once sang like a mountain bird, had died, replaced by something nasal and sharply metallic.

  At the table, Manolis, her husband, sat peeling an orange with careful precision. The old pocketknife had been sharpened daily over many years by scraping it across a piece of hard aconi stone until the blade had shrunk to a razor stub.

  Trepsithea shuffled from the kitchen, still holding her wet hands upwards. “That boy! I curse the day you sister died. Manolis, you hear me?” She walked past the old man and out the door, screaming over the cement balcony. “Mimis, you bad boy. I’m calling you.” The shrill singing voice suddenly barked. “Mimis! Ahhhh. You little skatooli.” She made the sign of the cross quickly and in anger.

  The old man carefully removed the last bit of orange peel as she stepped inside.

  “Manolis, I can feel his mischief burning my skin. The boy is in the perivoli. He’s playing with the dead again.”

  Manolis looked up, smiling with success, showing one long thin peel of orange unravelled to the floor.

  Still holding her dripping hands, Trepsithea could not gesture in the customary way. She stabbed one arm out the door, pointing into the sunlight. “Manolis … get up. You must punish the little boy.”

  The old man looked at the orange peel dangling between his fingers and let it drop onto the rough wooden floor. He stood like a child being scolded as he threw both hands towards his uneaten orange. “No man is at peace in this house,” he snapped.

  Trepsithea walked back to the courtyard mumbling her curses. The morning sun yawned, kissing the whitewashed walls. She covered her eyes, annoyed by the brightness, and out of habit, made the sign of the cross again. She, like many of the villagers, greeted the morning by drawing the stavro on her chest, feeling blessed that her soul was spared the stale breath of death in the night. This was a blessing to all Gods: Father, Son and Holy Ghost. The sign was made three times in succession, sometimes more if there was doubt or fear. Humility and reverence were exchanged for God’s invisible shield of protection.

  Trepsithea wore the wrinkled face of burden. The furrows of torment now converged between both eyes. She was thin, with a bony face and limbs. Her eyes were so black and cold that neither Father, nor Son, nor Holy Ghost could warm her soul.

  The home of Manolis was part of a dowry, given gladly by the in-laws upon his acceptance of Trepsithea’s hand. The old house was more Turkish than Greek, made by intuition rather than design. Yet, like most houses surrounding Elefsis, it had defied wind, earthquakes, and the stresses of gravity for over three hundred years. The windowless ground floor smelled of musk from the goats and chickens that slept inside. A water well lay beneath the floor. It was covered by heavy timber ever since the time a thirsty goat fell inside and drowned, spoiling the water.

  At night the animals were shut inside to keep them safe from the demons. Their ears pricked to the sounds of clumping feet and Trepsithea’s voice moaning through her sleep.

  Mimis would always remember the sight of his naked aunt upon her bed, her sleeping voice groaning from the curse of scaling eczema. He could not forget the sight of her raw red body, wet from stinking animal fats and mountain herbs. Her arms were tied with strips of cloth to iron pegs in the walls. Still she tore and scratched her skin throughout the night. It was a horrifying sight to a young boy, watching his unconscious aunt’s arms twisting to be free and do damage. Her duty in life would be to wear the oozing skin without complaint, in which she would fail badly.

  He would remember his uncle’s house always being dark, day and night. All the shutter hinges, barring one, had rusted shut. The blue paint had cracked and fallen off, allowing the louvres to rot and blacken on the edges in the sun and salt air, like the ears of old goats. Inside, the pungent fume of church candles and one old kerosene lamp intoxicated the room. Mimis slept on a straw mattress on the floor. He spent hours peering through the floorboards. As his eyes chased the splice of lamplight cutting through, he counted the animals below. In the summer, the smell of rank goats and donkey dung rose to capture his senses. It was a scent that grew pleasant over time.

  Mimis dug holes in the perivoli, near the large fig tree, believing one day he might dig to the other side. His imagination went where giant men roamed the land with their gods. The holes he dug were private holes. They were deep enough to keep the world and the winds at bay, deep enough to seclude him from the world he knew, protect him from the sound of it. They were his holes. The holes of Mimis Steffanakis, the son of no man.

  Often he stared up from the darkness of a hole and out to the rich blue sky. In his mind, he leapt into space and was embraced by thoughts of being invisible, floating a million miles away. He longed to be a free man and, then again, never too free. He wished to remain on earth in his garden hole, this intimate tomb, gazing out with his elastic eyes.

  The soft earth was comforting. Mimis buried himself under the dirt, covering his shoes, legs and body, so nothing but his head could be seen. Closing his eyes, he listened. Hush! It is quiet but for a hollow rush of wind passing overhead. The wind was ever-present, a familiar voice, like the braying of a mourning mule or of Trepsithea’s unforgiving whine.

  Trepsithea insisted her troubles, for reasons unknown to her, were God’s
curse. Wasn’t life’s extreme suffering enough without the coming of the boy? Unwanted burdens, all of them. She had been chosen, amongst all others, to live in agony and without earthly sainthood. Even the people of the village had not shown her their respect, their pity. But Trepsithea insisted someone must share the torment of God’s curse on her. As God chose her, she chose Mimis. His debt to her was born out of his mother’s death, his father’s abandonment.

  For the first four years of Mimis’ life, his father went to sea, returning once a year to his family on the slopes of Mt Ida, which stood between the forest of ten thousand poplar trees and the town of Zaminthos. Mimis’ mother could not tolerate the loneliness of the bitter Ida winters and moved to the city of Heraklion, and into poverty, where she died. After her death, her husband never returned to his son. Young Mimis was left with his mother’s older brother, Manolis, from that day onward. The childless couple grudgingly accepted the responsibility, blaming Mimis’ mother for this additional worry. He was added to their long list of daily chores.

  A small reeded chair had been placed near the entrance to the courtyard. Mimis sat there for many hours of the day without moving, honouring Trepsithea’s wishes. Remaining fixed for long periods was a symbol of goodness. It was his “mischief chair”. There he must sit without complaint. Listening. Watching. From his tiny chair he listened while Trepsithea sang religious hymns. He listened while she shelled the almonds and prepared the meals. He watched while his uncle smoked and coughed up heavy phlegm. And from this chair, Mimis was available for chores. There was no room for imaginings, for crazy thoughts that lurked in the garden. He was too young, they said, to recognize the devil lying in wait, beckoning him to dig a little deeper. And no devil’s filth would enter their house concealed upon the soles of innocent feet. Goodness could be learned upon his “mischief chair”, away from temptation. Was there not sense to that? Both debt and duty were being fulfilled, coinciding nicely together.