Digging at the Crossroads of Time

by Christos Morris

  Giorgos raced up the steep incline to the famous Church of St Giorgos, making the stavro as he passed it. He glanced carefully toward Steffanakis, out of respect for his misfortune. He wondered how important the loss was or if it would matter in the end. He sensed the archaeologist was silently aching. It was a silence Giorgos had no intention of interrupting. He left the conversation until the truck passed the church. He lit a cigarette.

  “I was baptized there. Same as my father, Giorgos, and my grandfather, Giorgos.”

  “Is there anyone in your family without the name of Giorgos?” quizzed Mimis.

  Giorgos turned his head to Mimis with indignation. “Yes! Of course.”

  Mimis grinned. “I mean besides your sister.”

  “My mother’s name is Anthi, but my auntie from Vrouhas, her name is Giorgos too.” He laughed. “Giorgolina.”

  The pickup truck flew down one hill and whined up another, approaching the tourist town of Mallia on the coast. It was the same Mallia where French archaeologists had excavated to find Crete’s northernmost Minoan palace. It was there, in the middle of town, they overtook the large chauffeur-driven car.

  Giorgos pulled alongside, beeping his horn, motioning for the diminutive driver to pull over. The driver, taking orders from the back seat, flicked his hand at the intruders, motioning to them to go away. Amidst the swerving cars and maniacal beeping of horns, Giorgos drove along-side the enemy the entire length of Mallia on the wrong side of the road. For nearly a mile his head was out the window hollering obscenities at the driver to pull over. When they reached the open road again, Giorgos sped ahead, slammed the brakes hard, forcing the driver to slow – then stop.

  Mimis leapt out of the truck and walked forcefully to the ministerial car. He swung the back door open and grabbed Skoulis’ beard. He gave it an almighty yank, causing him to holler and whine shamelessly.

  “You thieving old goat! You stole from me once. Never again!” With his free hand he confiscated the boar-engraved knife. “And what would you have told those idiots in Athens? That you discovered this yourself? Where’s the seal stone?”

  Still grimacing, Skoulis yelled, “I have nothing.”

  Steffanakis squeezed the beard in his fist until his hand shook. Skoulis squealed and fumbled in his coat pocket, producing the seal stone. Mimis snatched it.

  “Let go of him,” shouted Aristides. “You crazy man! Do you know what you are doing?”

  “Ah, you, Aristides,” said Steffanakis as he looked at the man in the dark glasses. “Could I have expected anyone else? Two thieves masquerading as saviours.”

  He released the beard, glanced at his hand as though it had been stained, and wiped it on Skoulis’ suit coat. “Go back and tell your friends about this moment. They too will laugh in your face.”

  Skoulis wiped his mouth with a handkerchief, and with a quivering lip, bellowed: “They will remove you from Oaxsa. Not only Oaxsa, but from any excavation in all of Greece.”

  Steffanakis smiled through his thick moustache, a smile of self-assurance, but also of mockery. “Once upon a time, years ago, I might have believed you. But not now, you old thief. Never now.”

  Leaving the door of the car open, he returned to the pickup truck. He paused to light a cigarette, offering one to Giorgos, who accepted with a grin. “Now we go back,” said Mimis. “Only this time, drive slowly. You scared me half to death.”

  Giorgos’ truck proudly cantered back home. After an hour had passed, the adrenalin dissolved into warm pleasure. Mimis placed the long bronze blade across his lap. The gleam from the dying sun opened wide the engraved eyes of the boar. Mimis and the boar stared at each other, eye meeting eye. Steffanakis imagined the long-fingered hand of the Minoan priest from Oaxsa as he claimed back his sacrificial knife. Upon his wrist, tied with leather, was the carved seal stone. It was delicate, small, and finely engraved with a crescent-shaped boat. It was a boat of the netherworld, the underworld, poled by a dead man in search of life, in search of the Goddess of the Earth – or maybe not. Maybe historians were wrong. Was it poled by a living man in search of the whiteness of God and life beyond himself? Was he seeking a wormhole to the other side beyond the Great Green Sea, that quantum place afar, but never too far away? Deeper, Mimis, deeper.

  Mimis’ eyes dimmed in the orange glint of the afternoon. A whisper of wind touched his face and he dissolved into vague consciousness. A luminal light touched his senses, bursting through the shadowy eyes of the boar. From this light he heard the voice of the ancient priest.

  “To truly look into my eye is to become my eye. To understand my voice, you must speak in my voice.”

  A startled Mimis opened his eyes and the voice of the knife ceased. The voice was gone, replaced by his own thoughts. His fingers brushed across the face of the ancient bronze engraving. It is a boar, nothing more. Never will I know this man.

  Mimis’ thoughts broke away as Giorgos began to recite a poem, and then burst into song.

  “Do you like poetry?” he asked Steffanakis.

  “Why do you ask?”

  “Because I love it. I have read poetry in my shop for years. Who do you like better, Seferis or Elytis?”

  “I like them both, but they are very different writers.” He paused as Giorgos’ eyes begged an explanation. Mimis continued, “Seferis went inwards. Elytis outwards, through the senses. Seferis collects landscapes from the past like an archaeologist. He identifies with the ancients so he can discover order and meaning in the present.”

  “The present seems so hollow. You know it doesn’t make music in the ears. Have you read T.S. Eliot’s dialogue with his literary ancestors?”

  “No,” said Mimis with a sharp stare, intrigued and surprised.

  “Well, I think he’s like Seferis. Anyway, I like Seferis better.”

  “Bravo, Giorgos. I did not know you are a thinker as well as a grocer.”

  “Of course! Are you not a thinker as well as an archaeologist?”

  Mimis chuckled in agreement, slapping the dashboard, thinking how little he knew of Giorgos after all these years. Mimis continued. “Those two writers are at the crossroads between two worlds; the life of the present and the life of the past. That is why I like them both. They meet at the crossroads.”

  “Like at Hamithi.”

  “Why do you say Hamithi?” he asked.

  “Because I once heard you say you stood on the crossroads of Hamithi up on Mt Ithos.”

  “You have a good memory. Well, it is true. It was the first time I truly sensed a place where the past meets the present.”

  “I don’t know,” said Giorgos in confusion. “I don’t know if I have ever stood upon a place where the past meets the present.”

  Mimis smiled. “You would know if you did.”

  “How? How can you know for sure?”

  “It just happened. I don’t know how to make it happen, like Demetra. She tried to teach me, yet I believe I have failed in her eyes. I only know the ego dissolves. Then for one brief moment, there is a light inside you, as bright as the sun, and you feel your insides being soaked in warm honey. You stand in the present but are at one with the past. Giorgos, I don’t understand it either.”

  “Have you felt that only once?”

  “No. I feel it on Oaxsa. For me it is a sacred place.”

  “So you dig for more than clay pots and old bones.”

  “Yes, of course. Am I not a man? The crossroads is not a place at the end, a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow, a place to say, ‘At last, I found it.’ It is a place of all our beginnings, not only mine.”

  Giorgio drove for a few minutes in silence, then whispered, “How can I find this place?”

  Mimis shrugged. “This, my friend I cannot tell you.”

  “Does Demetra know?”

  “Oh, yes,” he said with a wry smile. “She is an inspiration to me. The crossroad travels with her wherever she goes. Unfortunately, my feet are glued to this earth. Hers have wings.”

  E
lefsis

  August 17, 1980

  M

  imis and Giorgos arrived back in Elefsis in the early evening. The wild winds kept all but the lonely and the brave from strolling on the platea. Even Angalia’s taverna was closed. So was Miropi’s pereepterro. With a look of concern, Mimis asked Giorgos to stop. He obeyed, pulling up in front of the taverna.

  The sun had passed behind Oaxsa. A grey light remained, silhouetting the mountain in a heavy shroud. Mimis stepped out from the truck. With Giorgos at is side, he gazed toward the mountain. The strong winds buffetted them with ceaseless waves of heavy air. A dirty haze filled the sky’s dome. Normally the dusk was majestic. This time, for Mimis, it was not. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath through his nostrils as if smelling the scent of something unfamiliar.

  “Something is wrong,” he said.

  The sound of wailing could be faintly heard coming from the flat above Angalia’s. There was a light inside. The figure of Perdos, Angalia’s husband, could be seen at the window. He appeared to be sobbing.

  Mimis and Giorgos could see a cloaked figure running awkwardly down the centre of the main street. “The priest,” said Giorgos, pointing.

  Mimis lowered his head, almost in dismay. “This is a bad wind, Giorgos. A bad wind.”

  Father Dimitrios’ face came into view. It was a face filled with anguish, wrenched away from priestly stoicism. He arrived breathless, but resolute enough to stare directly into Mimis’ eyes. Their eyes, filled with fear, formed a union.

  “Pharmacos is dead! The only son of Angalia and Perdos climbed Oaxsa to meet his fate. Maybe it was by the hands of God. Maybe the devil’s. He is dead. God bless his soul, Mimis, and God bless yours.”

  Mimis recoiled. The accusation, a swipe of a razor’s edge, caused his body to weaken. There was no forgiveness in the voice or the heart of Father Dimitrios.

  “I have stood by you, Professor, in the face of dissent and accusation, against those who want to remove you from here, from your temple, from that mountain. I have stood by you until now. I cannot just kneel within that church and pray to God that no one else dies up there. Prayer alone is not the answer. For your sake and mine, this must end.”

  “There are no devils at work here, Father. You are an educated man. Pharmacos insisted on climbing the mountain every day. I have sent him back, pleaded for him to stay away, but he insisted that the mountain made him feel alive.” Mimis wiped the tears from his eyes. “And now he is dead.” He whispered, “It’s a paradox.”

  “Pharmacos was so alive earlier today,” said the priest. “He was sitting there in that chair at the taverna. Now his breath is in the wind; Pneuma Haigion; Spiritus Sanctus … it is no longer with us. I don’t know what drew him up there, or the others. But I suspect it is the same thing that beckons you.”

  A rush of wind blew between them. The curse of the unwanted death filled Mimis’ lungs. His breath was short and quick. Father Dimitrios’ words were suffocating. The muffled cries of Perdos jerked the priest’s eyes toward the upstairs window. The priest walked swiftly into the taverna.

  A month before, on his eighteenth birthday, Angalia and Perdos’ son had come down from Oaxsa claiming a voice had spoken to him as he gazed within the Minoan temple. The villagers gathered to listen to his tale. “I climbed higher and higher just as the strange voice told me. I walked out onto a ledge, a precipice where the wind was very strong. I grabbed on to the rocks, thinking ‘This is insane. What am I doing here?’ But I continued. I walked further along the ledge until I came to the spine of the mountain. I could go no further. Far below, the villages were barely visible. It was beautiful, even though I was flirting with death on this small ledge. From way up there, nothing was human. There wasn’t even any smell of oregano. I could barely see the outline of the white walls covered with asvestos. I couldn’t hear the bells of the church. Only the wind. So close yet so far away from all of you. There was the big sky, the wind – and me. And one thing more. Piled neatly on that ledge, way out there, were four sea-washed stones, oval-shaped and smooth. It was all I could do to bend down and pick them up without falling off, falling right here on top of this big red umbrella. With my luck I wouldn’t have flown this far and probably landed in the garbage tip. Anyway, I picked up the stones, knowing there was a reason why I had walked out there. How could four sea-washed pebbles get on top of Oaxsa? Who would be crazy enough to take them up there and then walk out on that narrow ledge and set them down. One, two, three, and one on top of the pile. Tell me? Who? No one did. No one from here, that is. But I know who left those pebbles.”

  “You’re crazy as your father,” barked one man.

  “You may be right. But I am telling you the truth!”

  “Then tell me this,” said the man. “How can the waves from the sea go as high as Oaxsa? Even in ancient time. Never.”

  “Yes, of course, never,” said Pharmacos. “They were put there; but my whom? And why?”

  “For no reason. Who needs a reason when you go crazy? And everyone who ever climbs that mountain goes crazy.”

  “Well, I’m not crazy and I will tell you what I heard. What I saw. Because there is more. You want to hear it?”

  Three old women made the sign of the cross and got up to leave, complaining to Pharmacos that he had become a bad boy. They told him that all this storytelling would bring the curse of the mountain down upon them. Others remained, intrigued, invigorated by the mystery.

  Pharmacos continued. “So when I escaped the ledge with my pebbles, I walked down to the excavation site of Steffanakis. There I sat on the edge of the back wall in clear view of all of you down here, the beautiful isthmus of Eleus going out to Elefsis Island. It was so lovely, I never wanted to leave. This was ecstasy to me. No wonder Steffanakis digs there every day. If there is a gateway to heaven, then it must be the place.

  “For most of the day I sat up there, thinking, looking at the pebbles. I rubbed them with my hands, trying to discover what they meant and why they were placed on a dangerous ledge. I bashed two of them together. The sound it made echoed all over the valley like a rifle shot. I thought maybe the clicking sound was like a code to the gods. It was my job to discover how I could talk to them. I clicked them twice and with the echo returned a gust of the wind. I waited for it to calm. Two clicks and again a rush of wind. My heart raced. Every time I clicked the mysterious stones twice, a gust of wind would blow. Every time. When I walked to the temple’s edge and stood on its highest wall and clicked the stones, an almighty gust pushed me backwards. I fell into the excavation site. I climbed back up and did it again. Then I held one stone in each hand and stretched out my arms like a cross. My heart nearly jumped out of my chest when the wind snatched the pebbles out of my hands and blew them away. Where did they go? Who knows? I never found them again.

  “There were only two stones left so I dared not lose them. I clicked them like before, spread my arms out like wings, squeezing the stones very hard. The wind came and tried to steal the stones from me. I was almost flying while I leaned over the edge. It was then I heard the voice again. Only this time it was laughter. It was so loud, so real, I turned around thinking someone was there mocking me … and when I turned, I saw a man. He was in ancient dress and was leaning against the temple wall on one elbow, laughing at me. Then, as if he was a ghost, the man and his voice vanished. As hard as I tried, again and again clicking my pebbles, I never saw him again. The voice was gone too, as well as the wind.”

  The audience at Angalia’s sat in silent wonder until Paki Pilofakis stood up and clapped, “Bravo! Bravo! Pharmacos! Now we know all the weed you smoke has ruined your brain.”

  Demetra slapped her hand on the metal table, shaking a small coffee cup in its saucer. “Bravo, Pharmacos, you see what many artists cannot. At least for a while you flew like the ancient perthekes, and saw life then and now. Bravo, Pharmacos.”

  Paramendes, the fisherman, pointed at Demetra with an accusing finger. “I’ll take the risk.
By God, none of you will. I’ll take the risk and tell you to your face that you are the devil’s messenger, the witch of the sea, and the conjuror of demons and bad luck. I speak from experience and for all the fisherman. Tell us you have not seen this ghost or made him appear. Tell us that you—”

  Demetra interrupted. “No, I have not seen what Pharmacos has seen, but I know of the story of the voices. My own mother told me such a story. These are good voices, not bad voices.”

  “Pharmacos invents these voices,” shouted Paramendes, “and you give life to them.”

  “Perhaps there is no life here without these encounters, these stories that you avoid. Perhaps we are all dead here until we look into the face that can awaken us.”

  “What does that mean? You speak like the priest.”

  “It means we first have to see the other side beyond the horizon and not turn away in fear. Pharmacos did not run away. The challenge is not just to see the invisible, but to join it in life.”

  “None of this can be joined to life,” said the fisherman, “only to death. You have an evil eye – and so does that mountain up there. The old ladies are right. You put a curse on all of us.”

  King’s Palace, Eleus, Crete

  1643 BC

  Half my crew coughed out their last breath upon the water of the Great Green Sea. I prayed that their souls would swim to Egypt, to everlasting safety, but the journey is filled with treachery. For a soul to pass safely to our world of spirits there must always be a guardian to take them through the unknown, to help them through the turbulence when life and death touch. These were unfamiliar waters, even to a guardian. Their chances of success were dim. The thought of the psychros lying beneath Keftiu seas made my thumos sick. I was but a humble merchant with no priestly knowledge. I stood helpless as I watched their bodies sink beneath the water.

  The sea calmed near the Keftiu shores and the sun shone brightly on us. Familiar faces welcomed my return. It was the day of a festival in the palace of Wannaxsos. I could hear the people singing happily.