The Golden Step Read online

  A tiny wayside church came into view beside a scummy cistern. I went in and found lamps burning before an icon of a long-faced Virgin. The frame of the image was loaded with gently tinkling strings of taximata, tin squares stamped with legs and arms, eyes and hearts, youths in smart school uniforms, playfully kicking babies – symbols to reinforce prayers for afflicted body parts, for family members in trouble or joy, for a longed-for child. It was a continuation of an ancient tradition. The Minoans, too, had offered clay taximata to their gods in caves or in sanctuaries at the peaks of mountains. The tiny, crudely made models of dogs, babies, male and female genitals, heads and limbs, together with other statuettes of slim-waisted figures praying in a backward-bending attitude with the right hand pressed to the brow, are one of the staples of Cretan archaeological museums, somehow retaining their mysterious force even when confined in a glass case. Here in the lonely church the metal taximata, uncomplicated symbols of the faith of their successors, held power, too.

  The path ran past the empty pens and locked-up mitata or cheese-making huts of Zakathos, a seasonal settlement still waiting to receive the lowland shepherds who would soon be settling themselves up here to tend their sheep and make cheese all summer long. The E4 waymarks had been consistent enough, but now they melted away. Did the path go down that rocky defile to the left, or did it bend to pass beyond the bluff over there to the right? I looked at the map. No help. I got out the little field binoculars that Jane had given me as a parting present and scanned the ground ahead. Looking for six-inch-square scraps of faded yellow and black against a predominantly yellow and brown landscape is quite a challenge, I discovered. I was to get good at it before the journey was done, but this first day out my eyes and brain still needed too many clues. Sod it – go right and hope for the best. Ten steps more, and a decapitated waymark pole suddenly appeared among the rocks just ahead as if someone concealed there had sneakily poked it forth. The binoculars had swept over it a dozen times, but the eyes had failed to spot it. I stumbled on from pole to pole, trying to sense rather than see the way, letting my gaze slide over the jumbled landscape to pick up as if by osmosis the general line of the path. It was like trying to reach the image concealed in one of those computer-generated 3-D patterns, defocusing the eyes and looking beyond the psychedelic scribbles to the jungle animals or beach babes hidden within. Jane and the children had all been able to manage this without any effort from their very first attempts, but it was something I’d never been able to do. Now I found that trust was generally repaid with a sight of a section of kalderimi or a curl of identifiable path ahead. It was my first intimation that Map-and-Compass Man might have a kernel of intuition, even of common sense, somewhere about him.

  At last I crossed the dirt road as it came looping in from the north. Now I had something to fix to the map. Soon enough the huddled flat roofs of Ziros appeared in their fertile valley far below. It was a great moment of relief and satisfaction. Between the Scylla of a dog on a long chain and the Charybdis of a donkey with a nasty kicking habit I descended the path into the village, some seven hours and ten miles out from Kato Zakros. If that was going to be my rate of progress here in the easy hinterlands, what on earth would it be once I got into serious mountain country? Just as present, with the prospect of tilting a cold bottle of Amstel to my lips in the foreground, I didn’t give a rap.

  How stupidly accustomed an Englishman becomes to speaking his own language around the world, forever confident that some courteous elderly person or bright kid will materialise and be only too glad of a bit of free practice. In monoglot Ziros, a big back-country farming village very much absorbed in its own doings and a long way from any tourist trail, no English-speaker was forthcoming. I rummaged for my home-made phrase book and prepared to dive in. No rent-rooms, I’m sorry, said the village priest from his seat at a tin table outside the kafenion. The rooms are closed, confirmed the girl who brought the coffee. Rooms at Papagianades, maybe – ten kilometres that way, gestured the village grocer. Certainly I know Mr Kharkiolakis, said the tractor driver. Certainly he has rent rooms, but they are closed now. Ah – you are a friend of his friend Charidimos Kakoulakis. These rooms can be opened, then. No, Manolis, excuse me, but they are shut. No, Father, excuse me, but Kharkiolakis will open them. So much of the conversation I gathered through hand slap and arm wave.

  The room above the Kharkiolakis taverna was typical of dozens of other village rent rooms I was to stay in over the coming weeks – quite spartan, quite featureless, clean enough, cheap enough, with cold water in the tap and hot bright sunshine out on the balcony. As I sat down on the hard bed I realised that the clip on my belt was empty. The Dog Dazer was gone. It must have twisted itself free somewhere in those wide uplands. Some shepherd would find it; what would he make of it? Would he press the button, and then puzzle over the sudden tail-between-legs flight of his canine companion? For me it would have to be the katsouna and a shout of ‘Pare ta skilia!’ against all bogey-dogs from now on. I found I didn’t really mind. It was only a bit of kit.

  Later a fit of the blues felled me. The taverna failed to open. Out in the streets of Ziros the shops stayed shut. The unshuttered house windows framed tableaux of families round dining tables loaded with meatballs, with stuffed vine leaves, with cheese wedges, with floury loaves. I was hungry. I couldn’t speak to anyone. My washed clothes were wet, my unwashed ones stank. My room was cold and dismal, its electric light both weak and harsh. By its chilly pale glow I sought comfort in the words of the Psalmist, and was cheered in a sour sort of way to see that he was in a state of self-pity even more pathetic than mine as he ranted against the heathen. ‘The ungodly are like the chaff which the wind driveth away,’ he raved. ‘Thou shalt break them with a rod of iron; thou shalt dash them in pieces like a potter’s vessel.’ That was the stuff to give the troops. ‘Arise, O Lord; save me, O my God; for thou hast smitten all mine enemies upon the cheek bone; thou hast broken the teeth of the ungodly.’

  Odysseus was in poor form, too, when I turned to him – a wandering, stormbound stranger in strange lands. A good read about someone else’s troubles was as good as a feast. I went to bed on an empty stomach but in a better frame of mind. Out in the dark the occasion Eastertide explosion made the village dogs bark near and far. Other sounds in the midnight hour: mournful singing on a crackly radio, the clonk of sheep bells from some pen, and down by the reservoir a tremendous jabba-jabba-jabba as all the frogs in Ziros let their love come tumbling down.

  Next day dawned cold and fresh. Along the road in Chandras there were no E4 signs to be seen. In the kafenion, already full of cigarette smoke at eight in the morning, I drank a short, thick, intensely sweet coffee. ‘Papagianades? Along the road to Etia and then turn right, you can’t miss it. What, walking? Well … if you really mean it, then I would head for the windmills on the hill, and then – well ….’ I followed the pointing fingers and came to a line of wind turbines at the crest of a ridge. Here at last was a proper forward view, huge and inspiring, ten miles west to the crumpled walls of Orno Oros and of Thriptis, the first of the four mountain ranges over which E4 was said to travel. I gazed on them and felt my heart lift, an actual physical sensation of pleasure and elation.

  People were feeling good this morning. In Papagianades a woman gathering herbs by the roadside made me accompany her home so that she could fetch a bag of sweet cheese pies from her Easter stock. She handed them down over her balcony with, ‘Sto kalo – go to the good!’ Yes, exactly. I was trying my best to go to the good, but map and E4 signs were once more doing their best to frustrate me. Down in Vori, an untouched little hamlet of close-packed houses along needle’s-eye lanes, an old man had blocked the street with his pickup while he unloaded firewood. What he told me about the path was in local dialect so strong I could make out only one word: ‘Epano! Up!’ But his pointing forefinger left me in no doubt. From the fantastic tangle of dirt roads on show in the valley below I was to select the one that would bring me up into the O
ros foothills beyond.

  For the foreigner, and especially for the walker, Cretan dirt roads are a hydra-headed puzzle. Since the 1980s and the universal advent of the pickup truck they have proliferated a thousandfold. Everyone wants to bring a dirt road to their hill village or their vineyard or cheese hut, and most applicants have been successful. Some dirt roads have subsequently been tarred, but most remain surfaced only with earth and stones – squidgy rivers of mud in winter, boiling funnels of dust in summer. Unsignposted side turnings to olive grove and vegetable garden, all identical to the main drag, are legion. Compass work on these murky byways is useless, because wherever you strike a dirt road you can be sure that within a mile it will have thrashed around through 360° without giving a clue to its ultimate destination. I did what I could to worry out the way, descending three times to the floor of the valley, each time ignominiously sweating it back up the hill into Vori’s main street to be met with the steely gaze and uncomprehending head-shake of the old man. Didn’t he have anything better to do than spend all morning unloading his wretched wood? Evidently he thought I was doing it on purpose. At last he grabbed me by the arm, quite crossly, and stabbed his finger forcefully at the mountains. Epano! Epano! Up there! Kat efthia! Straight ahead!

  To escape from the social embarrassment of having to meet my nemesis again, I retraced my steps to Papagianades and hitched a lift with a fishmonger. A voice inside me piped up: ‘Hey, that’s cheating, Mr So-Called Solo Walker!’, but I quelled it with ease. Not so my terror on the drive to the coast. The fish-man drove more furiously than Jehu, son of Jehoshapahat, frequently gesticulating with both hands off the steering wheel, while he harangued me about Kosovo. Beel Cleenton! NATO! Like Nazis! Yes, I temporised, expecting to meet death head-on round every hairpin bend – it’s truly terrible.

  The prospect of war in the Balkans had formed a stormy backdrop to my Cretan adventure ever since I had begun to think seriously about the expedition. After the ending of the disastrous and bloody Bosnian war in 1995 – either a civil war between ethnic factions in Bosnia, or a wider battlefield involving Bosnia’s neighbours Serbia and Croatia, depending on where your political standpoint lay – the world’s attention had switched to the republic of Kosovo, squeezed between the south-western border of Serbia and the north-east border of Albania.

  Both Serbia and Albania had long-rooted claims to the territory of Kosovo. However, expansionist aspirations on the part of Serbia – the major component of the Yugoslavian federation of republics during the post-war half century that Communism held sway in the region – had been curbed, under the rule of Yugoslav President and strongman Josip Broz Tito, by granting a great measure of autonomy to Kosovo. The republic had its own political assembly, national bank, police force and university, and was largely controlled by the ethnic Albanian Kosovars who formed the majority of the population.

  In the years preceding the fall of the Yugoslav Communist system in 1991, tension had grown between the Albanian Kosovars and their ethnic Serb counterparts, who accounted for only 10% of the population. Serbs in Serbia came to believe that their Kosovar cousins were being ‘ethnically cleansed’ by Kosovo’s Albanian majority. In 1989 a new strongman leader, Slobodan Milosevic, emerged in Serbia and became President. He oversaw a crackdown in Kosovo against the ethnic Albanians, which its victims and critics viewed as a form of ethnic cleansing in itself. Political autonomy was abolished and a state of emergency declared ‘to protect Kosovar Serbs from the Albanian majority’. Yugoslav state troops and police became responsible for law and order in the republic, and there were curfews and arrests along ethnic lines. Most of the lecturers and all but a small handful of the students were expelled from the university of the capital city, Priština. Albanian language newspapers, TV stations and radio outlets were shut down or heavily censored. Serbians took over the state-run companies, and over 100,000 Albanians lost their jobs. Soon four-fifths of Albanian Kosovars were unemployed.

  It was a situation bound to lead to angry reaction once the binding glue of Communism had melted away from the mutually mistrustful republics of the Yugoslav federation. The Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), an organ of Albanian Kosovar resistance, began guerrilla attacks on the security forces and civilian Serb residents of Kosovo in 1996. At the same time, international pressure grew on Serbia to call a halt to the ethnic cleansing of Kosovo. The Dayton Accords, the treaty by which the Bosnian War had been ended the year before, had not addressed the situation in Kosovo, and now things there got much worse – especially after Slobodan Milosevic became President of all Yugoslavia in 1997. The following year engagements between Serb forces and the KLA escalated; there were stories of Serb police brutalities, of the killing of women and children. Warplanes from the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation military alliance (NATO) began making flights along the borders of Serbia as a show of power in response to Serb army operations against the KLA there. The KLA itself began capturing new ground, provoking Serb incursions that brought rumours of massacres of civilians and prisoners. By September 1998 30,000 Albanian Kosovars were homeless, with the fierce Balkan winter just around the corner. It was a tragedy speeding quickly out of control, and the outside world felt compelled to step in.

  US Special Envoy Richard Holbrooke had chaired the Dayton negotiations, and now he was sent by US President Bill Clinton to Belgrade to confer with President Milosevic. Under threat of his country being bombed, Milosevic agreed to allow unarmed ‘verifiers’ from the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) to enter Kosovo. Their presence produced no restraint on either side, and by the end of the year fighting was worse than ever. 1999 began with the world’s press reporting the violent deaths of forty-five Albanian Kosovars on 15 January in the village of Račak – civilians massacred by Serbian police, or KLA terrorists killed in combat, depending on the onlooker’s standpoint. The incident was a catalyst. Within fifteen days NATO had announced its intention of bombing Yugoslav targets – a decision unratified by the United Nations. Peace talks between Serbs and Albanians were scrambled together at Rambouillet near Paris on 6 February, but after a month or so they ended inconclusively. On demand was a right of passage through Yugoslavia for NATO peacekeeping troops, which to the Serbs seemed like having to accept a de facto NATO occupation of their country.

  To Cretans, historically the allies of Serbs against their sworn common enemy the Turks, the NATO position looked very much like aggression, if not downright imperialism – in spite of the fact that the island’s parent country, Greece, had been a member of the organisation for nearly forty years. Many Cretans especially disliked the presence and influence of the United States in the Balkans. The USA had been a bugbear to Greeks in general since helping to instigate the undemocratic political coup in 1967 which left Greece internationally isolated under oppressive military rule for seven years; while Cretans in particular, with their island’s history of invasion and occupation over three and a half millennia, have always had a fierce hatred of outside interference and of the idea of foreign troops on friendly soil. Now in the spring of 1999 their televisions were showing them nightly images of Uncle Sam at work in the background of the escalating crisis in Kosovo only 900 miles to the north, his fingers in every pie from diplomacy and humanitarian aid to military rhetoric and the provision of ordnance for NATO bombing planes. They were outraged when, diplomacy and the threat of the big stick having failed and the OSCE verifiers having been withdrawn from Kosovo, NATO bombing of Serbian targets began on 24 March, exactly a fortnight before I touched down at Iraklion airport. Greek TV news is no-holds-barred when it comes to graphic reporting, and already there had been a plethora of horrific footage of bomb damage, shattered bodies and scattered lives. Bill Clinton had become Beelzebub Beel, the universal devil in the Cretan consciousness. As a very obvious Englishman, and therefore undoubtedly a supporter of US policy towards Yugoslavia, I found myself elected the fairest of fair game for every roadside harangue-merchant and kafenion pundit I had
the misfortune to come across.

  Down on the coast in Mavros Kolimbos I got free of the death-wish fishmonger (‘Fuck Beel Cleenton!’ was his valediction) and slogged it up the long and winding road back into the mountains. Orno Oros stood up before me, grey and craggy against stormy black clouds that had been mustering from the north. A hole like a sinister Tolkien-style eye, pierced clean through one of the summits, looked down on me as I climbed through cool pinewoods and banks of thyme where little square beehives hummed to themselves in haphazard rows. A cold wind began to blow. I took off my sunhat and let the wind dry my sweaty brow. Everything felt good, but vaguely ominous, as the afternoon storm gathered force in a slaty sky. It was a relief when the tight white sprinkle of Orino’s houses came into view far above on their saddle of ground, gleaming among the peaks in a shaft of sun that snapped off like a spotlight as the first spits of rain began to toss around in the wind.

  In the village taverna, just reopened after the winter, I watched the sluicing rain through steamy windows. It was cosy and warm in there. A single pot simmered fragrantly at the back of the range. I lifted the lid on a green vegetable stew. It looked and smelt fine to a hungry man with only a couple of cheese pies between him and yesterday’s lunch. The woman of the house ladled out a generous helping, which gave a curious clatter as it met the plate. A dozen round objects rolled clear of the greens. Snails. You is or you ain’t a snail fancier, and I sure ain’t. To me a snail is purely a garden pest. I hadn’t put one in my mouth since conducting a childhood experiment in the cabbage patch. But here and now, with my hostess looking on, I couldn’t possibly baulk at them.