The Golden Step Read online

  In the evening Patricia returns from the old man’s memorial with a dish of koliva. It’s the traditional titbit at such ceremonies – sugary, fragrant, seeded with little silvery sweeties. Greeks have been making it since long before the birth of Christ. Patricia tells us how it’s done, from what she has herself been told by the village women. Boil wheat with the leaves of an orange tree. Sieve it. Spread it out and roll it on lemon leaves. Add to the broth: orange leaves, sesame, cinnamon, chickpea flour, sugar, salt, walnuts, raisins, pomegranate seeds, nuts, parsley. Incense it well with a church censer. Take a tray of it in procession to church, covered with sugar and decorations, along with raki, oil and a lit candle. Thus one eases the path of the soul.

  The high man

  The high man straddles over Vistagi:

  not that they see him there, though their

  dogs bark warnings day and night.

  Theirs is a spring view, a window looking

  west into the bowl of Amari, green

  watered valley, terraced and tended, where

  grass lies lush, bees investigate new sage.

  Behind their back the high man walks

  winter, behind the bald nape of the gorge,

  above road scar and tree line.

  Yesterday I learned that ground

  for dear life, breathlessly hammering

  each step with my heel, descending the snowfields

  and rock slides where the high man hid.

  Cold fingers stroked my neck, cold breath

  told of his closeness as I passed,

  seeing only snow hard packed into a gully.

  Watching him now through vine and olive leaves,

  deep in the drowsy valley, I see

  the high man small and shrinking. The sun

  will have his head, Salome-like;

  trunk and legs will run through the forest;

  all the springs in Vistagi will sing

  the high man’s prophecy of summer.

  I know him now. Away from green pastures,

  up every rocky track, the high man

  walks winter and waits for me.

  We eat with Maria Papoutsakis, dolmades, salad and damp new cheese. Maria’s husband Lambros, owner of the Taverna Aravanes and my friend from past visits, will be back tomorrow night from Rethymnon, she says. George the laouto-player joins us, and the wine goes round. George speaks no English, but he drops a slice of apple in his wine ‘to sweeten the talk’. Soon the laouto case is brought out and the big round-backed instrument is lifted from its red velvet nest. ‘Play us a tune,’ gestures George to me. As the senior, in truth the only proper musician present, he’s offering the stranger a pleasant courtesy. I can’t spurn his civility, but neither can I really play. George hands over a thin strip of plastic, doubled to form a narrow and flexible vee. It’s the pena or laouto pick. I’ve never handled one before – Dimitri’s laouto in the Taverna o Pitopoulis back in Prina had come complete with a familiar plastic guitar plectrum. The pena used always to be a vulture feather, George remarks. When he started out playing laouto, a vulture pena would cost 50 drachmas and last one session in the hands of a good vigorous musician. Now, if you can by chance and good luck get hold of one, it costs 5,000 drachmas and lasts a hundred sessions. Why? ‘Because vultures are getting harder to kill!’

  Everyone in the place laughs, then falls silent and looks on expectantly. I grasp the awkward shape of the laouto to my chest and try to remember a mandola tune – any tune. In the end I strike up an old Incredible String Band number, Schaeffer’s Jig, a tune I can be absolutely certain no-one here will know, and one I can doubly guarantee will never have been forced from this or any other laouto. Four bars in, George’s fingers gently imprison my pena hand. No, Christophere. Like this. He repositions the business end of the pena between my thumb and the tips of my index and middle fingers, with the two loose ends of the vee trailing out along the back of my hand. It feels bloody odd, but I soldier on as drops of pure sweat of embarrassment plop down on the fretboard. Two times round the circuit and I fall silent. D minus for execution. Yet applause is forthcoming, and smiles of genuine pleasure. With a nicotine-rich laugh, George refills my glass. A for effort, it seems. The stranger has put his handful of potatoes, however small and green they may be, into the communal pot, and is entitled to share the stew.

  Now George begins a series of mantinades, sung with great force and emotion, aimed at appropriate targets among the company. Maria Papoutsakis sits nearby, joining in the verses. These traditional expressions of love, aphorism or pithy commentary may be well known to those present, but here they are sung as if freshly minted and passionately felt. With the laouto in his hands George is transported beyond intensity. His eyes glitter and burn as they flick between the fretboard and the face of his victim, his nostrils dilate, his voice shakes as if in the hands of some vindictive god. It’s as if he has reached a state of electrical charge. If Kostas Raki, sitting alongside, were to reach out and touch him as he sings, it would be no surprise to see blue flashes arcing between the two of them.

  Patricia, who has been asking George to clarify certain recondite plant lore for her, becomes the recipient of a mantinade.

  ‘Do not cry, you worrier,

  For the world is not being destroyed –

  With the plants of the earth

  All suffering is healed.’

  She grins at the lightness and aptness of the sally, while I, struggling with the colloquial terms and elongated sounds of the sung words, smile and clap uncomprehendingly with the only other two monoglots in the taverna. David and Wanda Root, the middle-aged American couple whose room adjoins mine, are from upstate New York, very gentle in manner, very much in love with each other and with Cretan ‘graciousness’. George fixes his gaze on Wanda’s pretty round face, jerks his head, fills his lungs. Has Patricia mischievously whispered a translation of Wanda’s surname in the singer’s ear?

  ‘At the full of the moon

  Other trees don’t take root –

  Only the tree of love,

  Which always extends its root.’

  People grin to themselves. Everything is cool. Here in the quiet pastures of the Amari Valley these two compatriots of Beelzebub Beel have faced no breath of criticism, no challenge from anyone. The Taverna Aravanes maintains an old-fashioned dedication to food and drink, talk and song. Its big bar TV is hardly ever on, so no serpent from Kosovo has yet sneaked into our green Eden or disturbed our fair dreams with toxic little stabs of bad news from beyond the boundaries of Lotus Land.

  Lambros Papoutsakis returns to Thronos for the weekend from Rethymnon, where he has been spending the week working in a bank and dreaming of the day when he will no longer have to wear a suit and tie, but can retire to the hills and tend his taverna and his vines full-time. On sight of me he tilts his head on one side and throws his arms wide, sighing, his face breaking out into a turned-down grin. ‘Christophere, Christophere, Christophere …’ He enfolds me, then lightly slaps my cheek. ‘Why have you not been in Kriti for so long? You are very bad to forget your friends.’

  For several years I have made the Taverna Aravanes my base of operations whenever I’m in Crete. Lambros is not just a friend, but a mentor. He has taken me far into the secret places of Amari, far into the village celebrations, the singing walks and moonlight expeditions that are the breath of life to him. On a mountain precipice he will pose in proper palikare style, curly shepherd’s stick held out at full extent of his right arm as if he would gather rocks, plants and birds under his protective wing. Wandering the byways of Amari he has Psiloritis constantly in view, and speaks of the mountain as a friend, occasionally as a god. Once, climbing on Psiloritis to find the grave of an old man killed in a wartime German revenge raid, we picked up a hollow stone and discovered a tiny honeycomb clinging by a thread inside. Lambros brought it home and built it into the wall of the Taverna Aravanes, part keepsake, part talisman.

  The hollow stone

&nbs
p; The hollow stone, black-eyed, skull-like,

  lay among prinos, partisan trees

  of great Psiloritis, pressed to the mountain

  by weight of brute winds, but apt to stab.

  Lambros, you struck the pose heroic,

  bold on a craggy perch, arms flung

  wide to embrace outspread Amari.

  Fire in the veins: fire in Vrises,

  Meronas, Gerakari. Old men’s bones

  charred in reprisal; eyes in the prinos,

  burning, recording – these you venerate,

  honey-hearted Lambros.

  The hollow stone

  winked a dark eye: whisper or thought

  lodged in the inner ear, timeless.

  Many-celled womb, a wild bees’ comb

  clung in this cranium scoured by the centuries’

  gales to pruned strength, nurturing sweetness;

  sign from the mountain, great Psiloritis.

  Lambros is the Green Man of Thronos, a cornucopia of newly shelled almonds and freshly cut artichokes forever in his hands, a glass of wine always filling on the table, trailing mantinades and prayers in his wake. In him palikare and aegagros seem perfectly in balance. Every time I have to tear myself away from Thronos and descend to the drab lowlands of life once more, it is with a head refilled by Lambros with a new stock of songs and dances, of wayside herbs and mountain flowers. Bags of dictamos, little plastic bottles of raki and jars of sweet, smoky honey from his hives rustle and chink together in my suitcase, to be spilled out on the table at home with a burst of scents that bring the warm and sunlit essence of Amari to my dark northern kitchen.

  May Day dawns cloudless and hot. ‘First of May, big picnic,’ announces Lambros. All Thronos is packing its baskets and heading for the hills. ‘Thou hast made us to drink the wine of astonishment,’ forecasts the Psalmist, and he’s absolutely spot on.

  Up at Lambros’s vineyard we decorate his ancient pickup truck – rickety, rattling and all but brakeless – with nosegays. David and Wanda, Patricia and I fill our hat bands and buttonholes with flowers. We clamber into the truck and go jolting up dirt roads towards the woodland party. Among the oak trees several dozen people from the villages round about have gathered around a big square fire fenced in with spits. Meat hangs roasting in chunks and chops, racks of ribs and whole sides of lamb. There is a great dripping and spitting of fat, and a wonderful smell. Tables hold bread, cheese, bowls of salad, bowls of seasoning, wine and raki in plastic bottles. Blue wood-smoke veils the view out west over the trees to the distant snowy peaks of the White Mountains.

  A bowl of choice titbits of offal is passed around; then the main feast begins. It takes me a few minutes to work out the etiquette of proffering and accepting food and drink in this setting. I follow Lambros’s example and arm myself with a wooden spit of meat chunks, a knife, a little tower of small plastic cups and a 2-litre bottle of wine. The trick is to juggle these without letting anything slip. You slice off a sliver of meat and place it directly in the mouth of friend or stranger, then follow it up by handing over half a cup of wine. Now you accept in turn your share of this rustic Eucharist, which mixes the savour of roast meat, the sherry-like richness of village wine and the pungent bite of raki. Empty cups reclaimed, both of you nod and smile your thanks and move on. After ten or so encounters of this sort I feel myself pretty well browsed and sluiced; by the time I have completed the courtesies with forty fellow-picnickers, and notice that a whole new rake of roast pork is being pulled from the spit and more wine and raki bottles are being fetched from the parked pickups, I start to wonder whether I am going to prove quite man enough for the First of May.

  A young fellow in a red T-shirt comes up. ‘Hello!’ I say brightly in my best party Greek. ‘Happy May Day! My name is Christopheros – what’s yours?’ The man scowls and glares. ‘Beel Cleenton – bombas!’ is his reply. ‘Beel is fucker … fuck Beel!’

  This isn’t good. I imagine he has been provoked by the quiet upstate New York accents of David and Wanda, who are sitting modestly with friends from Thronos on the edge of the party. I try to muster a reply, but the angry boy stomps off. Later that day I learn that a missile from a NATO plane has cut a bus in half on the Pristina-Podujevo road in Kosovo, killing sixty civilians. The boy must have been listening on his car radio as he drove to the picnic, arriving hot with fury. Now his friend comes up, a dark-browed youth in a black shirt who has had a cup or two. ‘Yermanika? Amerika?’ he asks aggressively, and leans into me with clenched fists. I find myself suddenly fluent in Greek. Oh no, I am English, I love Crete, I hate war, war is terrible, Crete is beautiful, my father was an andarte here in the war (may God and Dad forgive me), Lambros is my friend, do you know him?

  He does know Lambros, and subsides. We rally. There is a general gathering in a clearing under the oaks. Musical instruments are brought from the trucks. Andonis the Thronos church cantor, a calm man with a classic Greek profile, sits with his back against a tree and carefully tunes a lyra across his knee. A keening tune gets under way as the laoutos join in. A line of dancers forms, stepping sideways and back among the trees, dancing the siganos, the dance of friendship and unity. Lambros is in his element, twirling with his daughters, a flower behind his ear.

  One dance follows another. The sun begins to decline towards the White Mountains, and there is a drifting away of revellers. Empty plastic bottles, lamb and chicken bones, tatters of silver foil and shreds of ejected tomato skin lie everywhere. Patricia, David and Wanda have disappeared. By six o’clock a hard core of a dozen dancers and players remains under the trees. Goat-eyed Kosti from Kalogeros has abandoned his mandolin and has taken over the lyra. The summery flow of Andonis’s playing gives way to thunder and lightning. In Kosti’s hands the lyra whimpers and screams. He jags the bow into the strings, rapping the body of the instrument with sharp smacks, now burying his face in his chest, now tossing it up to the sky, teeth bared in a rapturous grin. The dancers shake themselves into new life. The daughters of Lambros have gone home, but he dances on, sometimes alone, sometimes with an arm around the shoulders of friends, far out on some ecstatic sea. I sit among the musicians, anaesthetised by meat and wine, entranced in the whistling of the lyra and the ringing, percussive thud of the laoutos.

  The youth in the black shirt looks up from his laouto and beckons me to his side with a jerk of his head. Lambros catches sight of me as he reels by. He bends his face close to mine, trying to articulate. Black-shirt lets his instrument fall and clamps our three heads together, an acknowledgement of a moment’s drunken and euphoric bond. Someone very close pulls out a large black pistol and lets off three shots into the treetops. Lambros vents a wild laugh, and shouts out words no-one can catch.

  At dusk the survivors come to a decision to move on elsewhere. I get into Lambros’s old pickup with some trepidation. After several unsuccessful attempts to fit the key into the ignition slot, Lambros looks round as if in a dream and enquires wonderingly, ‘Where is this?’ He has certainly had a lot to drink, like all of us, but his state is more that of a man transported onto another plane entirely. Our progress down the dirt roads contains more excitement than I think I want to deal with. Soon we pull up outside a house where the lyra and laouto players are gathering, all with a second wind on them. Here I leave Lambros in the arms of Orpheus and set out on foot. Thronos, when I reach it, lies quiet under a brilliant starry sky, its spell broken only by a single barking dog. That’s until some of the picnic revellers turn up at midnight, bringing the spirit of Pan with them. They forage for food and play till dawn.

  The First of May

  The older man starts. An axe blade smile

  slashes his face, a fixed grin of absence.

  Across his knee the lyra shivers, pours

  a distillation: braided flowers, oil,

  sizzle of sheep fat, Homeric sounds

  and sights – clouded wine, the singing air

  under the oaks, a blue strip of hills

 
; holding the ring, a low shimmer of fire.

  Now Kosti takes it. Tips his goat head

  to the sky, thrashes the bow. Blood

  and drink tilt the trees. A pistol cracks.

  Hands tug my hair, friend or foe

  plunging me to the dance. The voice of Lambros

  burrows in my ear: ‘Now we are mad …’

  The Psalmist, of course, is all for locking the doors on such wild fellows: ‘They return at evening; they make a noise like a dog, and go round about the city. Behold, they belch out with their mouth … Let them wander up and down for meat, and grudge if they be not satisfied.’

  Lambros turns up at the taverna the following evening, very subdued, and sits drinking lemonade and groaning gently to himself. He is not the only one.

  A quiet day of spring in Lotus Land, with a blue heat haze on the mountains and the songbirds warbling in the middle of the day. Lambros is back in Rethymnon, sweating out the working week in his bank. I sit and yawn on my balcony. ‘Thou crownest the year with thy goodness, and thy paths drop fatness,’ sings the Psalmist. ‘They drop upon the pastures of the wilderness: and the little hills rejoice on every side. The pastures are clothed with flocks; the valleys also are covered over with corn; they shout for joy, they also sing.’

  I have certainly dropped some fatness on the paths and the pastures of Crete over these past three weeks. My feet are healing nicely, and only sheer bloody indolence is keeping me on this balcony. I stick a bottle of water and a couple of oranges in the day pack and take myself off for a good walk along the roads of the upper Amari. All is very quiet and empty in the hot sun. Green-backed lizards flick off the road, where they have been stretched out soaking up the heat through their pale bellies. One or two have taken up permanent residence where the tyres of passing cars have smoothed them into the tarmac.