Mnemonic (9 page)

Thirty-three years later, I am thinking about that girl on the bus, heading to the unknown. I am thinking about her innocence and her hope. I am in the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts when I find myself stopped in my tracks by a small terracotta sculpture.

It's not much more than thirty centimetres tall. The label tells me it's from the first half of the second century BC, possibly from Taranta, Italy. The label says it's a young woman with Eros on her shoulder from an
ephedrismos
group. I have no idea what an
ephedrismos
group is, but I note down the information into my notebook and move along to the rest of the Mediterranean archaeology exhibit.

And yet she stays with me, the young woman. Eros holds out both hands, as though in benediction and she looks up at him over her right shoulder. Her right breast is exposed, the draperies of her chiton show that she is using the muscles of her thighs to support the weight of the god.

I try to find out something about
ephedrismos
. It turns out it was a game played by children in ancient Greece. Julius Pollux tells us: “They put down a stone and throw at it from a distance with balls or pebbles. The one who fails to overturn the stone carries the other, having his eyes blindfolded by the rider, until, if he does not go astray, he reaches the stone, which is called a dioros . . .”
³

There are other examples of
ephedrismos
figures as well as depictions of players on vessels, even the special jars used to hold oil for funerary purposes. Several are of girls partnering each other, and one fascinating rendering, from a fifth-century BC funerary flask, shows a satyr with a
maenad
on his back. These are both followers of the god Dionysus, associated with wine and sexual frenzy, and there is something deliciously suggestive about the notion of them playing a child's game in a context that is decidedly adult.

Back to the little terracotta figure from the Montreal museum: I wonder why Eros is this young woman's partner, and why his hands are raised, not covering the young woman's eyes as the game's rules require? I know that Eros is sometimes represented as a child god, playful and mischievous. In his ikonography, he is most often shown with a bow and arrow, ready to shoot desire into the hearts of his victims. Yet here he is a participant in a children's game, riding the shoulders of a young woman whose breast is exposed, her cheek resting against his abdomen, close to his groin.

The driver drove very fast down the hill and stopped in a square with a planter of flowering hibiscus in its centre. This was Agia Galini, Saint Serenity, a village right on the edge of the Libyan Sea. There were some restaurants around the square and boats at the quay, with more of them pulled up to shore.

I walked up through the village with the Americans. They paused by a house with a Rooms sign and knocked on the door. I kept walking, almost to the outskirts of the village, where I'd noticed a house as we drove in. It was across from the church and its separate bell tower and had flowers tumbling from cans and pots all around the front door. I don't know why it caught my eye, but a room was waiting for me there in Angela's house, painted blue with green trim; impossibly cheap, with a bed, a table, and a few hooks on the wall for my clothes. “Come in, come in,” Angela said, and brought a tray with a glass of water, a spoon, and a jar of cherry preserves. She took my pack from my shoulders. I could have been a goddess in disguise, not a potential tenant at all. The sweet taste of cherries on the tongue, and then the long fall of cool water down my throat.

Most of this from memory, by heart. I have a journal with the kind of entries a young woman of twenty-one would make, eyes open, her finger on her own pulse — the colours of the earth on a hike up above the village; a funny anecdote about a German woman marching up to a
taverna
owner to ask that he turn down the music (that heady delightful stuff that poured out of every café or tavern) and leaving in a huff when he refused to; loneliness; the sight of a loom on a rock floor, strung for weaving; a donkey saddle leaning against a wall, broken. I remember the bakery, also across the road, with its fierce wood-burning ovens, and how most women in the village took their casseroles there to bake — most didn't have ovens in their homes — and how on a bread day, I'd buy a warm brown loaf, pulling chunks off to eat with cheese on my walks up to the olive grove above my house.

Angela and her husband grew olives, oranges, lemons, and grapes, as well as vegetables and herbs. Some days when I went into my room, there would be a bowl of sliced tomatoes and cucumbers, drizzled with oil from the village press, where each family took in their fruit and participated in the pressing. On the days when my sheets were changed, I'd find my nightdress folded on the pillow, smelling of the myrtle bushes where Angela dried her linens, and I'd realize she'd taken it out with her own laundry.

From memory, by heart: the clicking of beads as men watched soccer in the bar with a television. The mournful bray of a donkey at dawn. A woman delivering fresh cheeses to the store where I bought my yogurt and honey, and the taste of that cheese — goaty and faintly pine-flavoured, as though the animal had been feeding on rosemary, which was entirely possible, as it grew everywhere, loud with bees. Dancing at the
tavernas
in the evenings after golden retsina while travelling musicians played their eerie, repetitive songs into the small hours.

There were two villages. There was the one with tourists (and I count myself among them), sitting at the sidewalk tables and talking, laughing at all hours of the day, or else heading over to the bay just beyond the last house, towels over their shoulders. We loved Joni Mitchell, and would listen to
Blue
at night while the lightning flashed from cloud to cloud and the donkeys brayed. And there was the village that went on as though none of us were there, or mattered. The narrow streets with closed doors and shutters. Storekeepers completely indifferent to the impatience of a young person wanting to pay for a slice of baklava to take to the beach and going on with the job of stock-taking or arranging loaves of bread in a basket by the door. The men who came down to a bar to drink raki and play backgammon, their worn trousers stuffed into boots. The women, secretive, dressed entirely in black, sweeping a few chickens into a doorway with a handful of straw.

A very old man, a fisherman with a bright blue boat, used to bring me slices of melon when I sat at the dock and read my book. One day he brought his son, whom I will call Agamemnon. He was older, had served in the army, and spoke English only marginally better than my Greek. He owned a
taverna
where I'd eaten a couple of times — stuffed tomatoes made by his mother, Maria, salads piled with salty cheese and thick onions, bottles of cold beer. We walked out a few times in daylight, walked to the end of the long pier and back; he pointed to birds, the distant horizon, a boat rigged with sails. His hand, when he reached to hold mine, was calloused, from helping his father. Mornings, he met his father returning from a night of fishing, lifting off boxes of strangely coloured and whiskered fish, untangling nets, removing shells and bits of kelp. His father always pulled a flask from his pocket and offered it around. No one wiped the rim first; drinking from it was intimate as kissing. The burning in my throat told me it was raki. I remember the feeling of the salt-stiffened ropes as we hauled in the boat to the shore, my own hands rough and bleeding afterwards.

“If you deconstruct Greece,” wrote Odysseas Elytis, “you will in the end see an olive tree, a grapevine, and a boat remain. That is: with as much, you reconstruct her.”
⁴

When Angela brought me a dish of cucumbers drizzled with oil, she asked, “Do you like?” And yes, I said I did, very much. She woke me one morning to go with the family to harvest their olives. They did this over a period, taking the fruit that was about three-quarters ripe. This made the best oil. Let them ripen more, I eventually understood she was telling me, and the oil will not be good.

Angela's family grove was not large but very beautiful; the trees well tended and growing on a slope facing the sea, about a kilometre above the village. The donkey came with us, worn panniers on his back. The panniers carried lunch on the way up and olives at day's end. There was Angela, her husband Yianni, and their older daughter Eleni (oh lovely Helen, who was engaged to Demitreos, doing his military service; she looked like a Byzantine ikon); their younger children were in school.

They spread wide, fine-meshed netting under the trees, three or four at a time. There were long sticks with straw at the ends, like brooms. The idea was to agitate the branches so the riper olives fell. The straw was dragged along the branches like a fork, loosening olives that didn't respond to beating. Then the olives were gathered and sorted, leaves and twigs brushed away, overripe ones saved for the animals.

After a few hours of this, we ate hard-boiled eggs from the family's chickens, with ripe tomatoes and bread. They also ate onions, crunching into them like apples, but this didn't appeal to me. Rough red wine was shared from a single bottle.

When we'd finished for the day, Yianni took the donkey down to the building where the olive press was. It was important that the olives be pressed immediately. The family would receive a substantial portion of the oil, but some went to the co-op to pay for the cost of the press and its upkeep.

I loved being in their grove, the wind rustling through the grey leaves, the grass dry and fragrant. There was pungent sage and
rigani
, thyme and chamomile, and I could see the seedpods of poppies left from the spring. “Watch for snakes,” they warned, and I nervously kept an eye out for movement.

Several million olive trees grow on Crete, some of them more than one thousand years old, with trunks measuring twenty metres in circumference. They have the capacity to sucker strongly from severed trunks so some trees could be far older than their present form might suggest — and Greeks will tell you seriously that all olives come from rooted cuttings taken from Athena's original tree. Fossil olives and olive wood found on Thera indicate production predating the great volcanic eruption of roughly 1600 BC, which destroyed the Minoan civilization flourishing on Crete and exported elsewhere by trade and perhaps colonization. Frescoes from the early Minoan period thirty-six hundred years ago at the palace of Knossos at Herakleion show olive trees, the long leaves as lovely as any growing now.

I took the bus to Herakleion several times to visit the Museum there. The first time I went, I walked out to Knossos. I wanted to see that ancient palace and have an idea of its size, its shape, and function before I looked at objects from the site. It was very imposing — its throne room, shrines, courts, and the vast system of storage rooms. I wasn't sure about the vivid colours used on some of the reconstructed areas, or how much of the wall painting imagery to believe was original.