Ruth has a bungalow with a tamarisk in its garden, two reclining chairs and a parasol, from which she wanders down to the beach. All around her, German is spoken, and the beach itself is dense with mature mahogany northern European flesh. The car had passed similar beaches; in the mind’s eye, this island wears a fringe of sunburned bodies, laid out like kippers on the coastal sand. Ruth considers having a swim and returns to the bungalow for her costume, where a flashing light on the telephone tells her that she has a message.
“I am Manolo,” says a male voice. “I am your guide for tomorrow. For Phaistos and Gortyn, right? I shall come with the car at nine-thirty, if that is all right. Here is my number if you have any problems.”
Ruth puts on her swimming costume, takes a towel and walks back to the sea, where she bobs around for a while in lukewarm water and thinks about the children. Will Peter see that Jess does her homework? Will he remember to get in apple juice, and put his foot down about bedtime?
She returns to the bungalow, has a shower, reads up about Phaistos and Gortyn, and goes over to the restaurant for dinner. The menu outside offers apfelstrudel and goulash. “Guten abend!” says the waiter, whisking open her napkin with a flourish. It is a long time since 1941. “Good evening,” says Ruth firmly.
The next morning, she is outside the main building of the hotel at nine-thirty, and stands looking around. A young man is waiting. He steps forward: “Miss Faraday?”
“Yes. Ruth. You must be Manolo.”
Manolo has the face of a Greek icon—dark brown, almond-shaped eyes, aquiline nose. He ushers Ruth into the car, talking hard. His English is immaculate. Within minutes it emerges that he is not a professional guide at all but an unemployed archaeologist who does this sort of thing in order to earn a bit of cash. He studied in both England and the United States, which accounts for his English. “And now we are too many. An excess of Cretan archaeologists. And fewer and fewer excavations.”
“Has most of it been dug up by now?”
Manolo’s hands fly from the wheel in a gesture of rejection—alarmingly. “You’re joking! There is much, much more. Anywhere you put in a spade. Minoan, Greek, Roman. All still out there. You will see. I shall show you.”
They are speeding along the coast road, back to Heraklion. Manolo has outlined his proposed itinerary. “You say you want the not-so-much-visited places—so, right, we just glance only at Knossos, and the museum. Then we go to Phaistos and to Gortyn and if time we do one of the monasteries. You have three days, yes?”
“That’s right,” says Ruth. “But there’s somewhere else I need to go as well, apart from the historic sites.”
“Fine, fine. You just tell me what you want. But first—how much do you know about the past of Crete?”
“Not a lot,” says Ruth cautiously. “I mean, I’ve done some background reading, but apart from that…” She passes over her intimacy with 1941, which is irrelevant. Manolo has been hired to guide and brief her so that she will be able to write an informed piece for the Sunday newspaper reader who wishes to see more of Crete than the destinations of the tour buses. She will have to fit in her own crucial itinerary as best she can, later.
“Ah. So…” Manolo goes into over-drive. He whisks her through Knossos, ignoring the crowds, and thence into the museum, where he spins her from one choice exhibit to another, talking all the time. He talks with such verve, such panache, that Ruth becomes as absorbed in listening as in looking. He is a born narrator, he is telling a story—a succession of stories. He unfurls a verbal banner, a series of blazing pictures of these other times. His eyes flash. “Now imagine this…” he says. “Now this is how it would have been…” He conjures up entire societies, whole cultures—everything volatile, vulnerable, evanescent, time sweeping one lot aside, another surging up. The Minoans fade away—the palaces, the bulls, the dolphin frescos, the dancing girls—and the Greeks are here, putting up temples, doing things differently. The centuries roll on. “Wait,” says Ruth. “I’m losing track. What date are we now?”
They are in the car again, heading for Phaistos, which is Minoan—that at least she has grasped. Phaistos is the Minoan site that escaped the ministrations of Sir Arthur Evans and remains an unreconstructed ruin. So we are back with 2000 B.C. or thereabouts.
These enormities of time are having a curious effect on Ruth. There is something both soothing and sobering in contemplating these immense reaches. It puts you in your place. She says as much to Manolo, who again takes his hands off the wheel, and bangs the dashboard in agreement. “Yes, yes! Just that!”
There is a good road from Heraklion to Phaistos. “Not far at all,” says Manolo. “Sixty kilometers—from north to south of the island.” Ruth looks out of the window as the landscape flies past—golden hillsides patched with gray-green scrub, the spring green of vineyards, the silver of olive groves, mountain ranges that are pink-tinted as they vanish into the haze. She takes the map and examines the long thin shape of the island, the north coast with its string of towns, where everything happened in 1941, the mountain ranges in the middle, the mountainous south coast. Not a big place, not a big place at all. So now time and space seem to be in apposition—the thousands of years of activity, construction, birth and death, do not seem to fit into this small island. How can so much have happened to so many within the confines of this place? She looks at the map again, and out of the window. But of course she is seeing it with the eye of the twentieth century—no, the twenty-first, one keeps forgetting—which shrinks the place to its own assumptions, just as her BA flight reduced Europe to a few hours of cloud and sky. She sees Crete in the context of her known world. Back then, it was the world. Sixty kilometers was a different kind of distance.
She says as much to Manolo, who once more thumps the dashboard in his enthusiasm, and hastily swerves to avoid a lorry. Ruth decides not to pass on any further thoughts.
Phaistos is a great baffling expanse of low rubble walls, paved areas, flights of steps. Manolo leaps goat-like from wall to wall, expounding: “Now we are in the Central Court…Here now is the Propylon…Imagine here a row of workshops.” The sun beats down. Ruth blinks from under her big straw hat. Just as she is starting to wilt Manolo cries, “Now we take a break!”
They sit at a little café with a majestic view of mountain ranges, drinking ice-cold Pepsi. Manolo talks about their next stop, Gortyn—a city that was first Greek, then Roman. “And what are its first origins?” says Manolo. “Imagine! Zeus himself! Taking the form of a bull, he brought the beautiful princess Europa here from Phoenicia and married her beneath a plane tree by a stream. And there the city sprang up.”
Ruth frowns. “In all the paintings I’ve seen, it’s a question of rape rather than marriage.”
Manolo spreads his hands. “I was sparing your feelings.”
“I’ve got reservations about the Greek gods, I must say. Jealous. Vindictive. Squabbling away among themselves up there. Appalling examples to the human race.”
“Or else,” says Manolo, “a reflection of ourselves?”
“Maybe. Either way, they’re not much good as role models.”
“Is the Christian God any better? An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. Fire and brimstone. Dealing out punishment on all sides.”
“Well, I’m not that keen on him either.”
“Ruth is a Jewish name, isn’t it? Are you Jewish?”
“I don’t think so,” says Ruth. “But who knows what they are, in the long view of things.”
“I am possibly a bit Turkish. A Cretan prefers not to think that, but it cannot be avoided that there was some—mixing up—during the occupation period. So I have perhaps a Turkish foot, or hand.”
“Could there be Cretans who are partly Minoan?”
“Why not? Peasant families sit still in the same place for centuries.” And he tells her the story of a Minoan pithoi, in perfect condition, a great jar used as his oil store by a farmer in a remote village. Some archaeologists spotted the pithoi an
d begged to buy it for the museum. No way, said the farmer, he was attached to it, it had been in the family for some while (like three thousand years?) and anyway where would he keep his oil? In the end, he was persuaded to part with the pithoi in exchange for a custom-made new one.
Time to move on. But at the car park Manolo stops, glances around, and beckons Ruth toward an area of scrub and olive trees that lies beyond. Here, he moves around, eyes to the ground, and after a moment bends down. “There you are—Minoan.”
Ruth holds the little sherd with reverence. “One should not really do this,” says Manolo, with a shrug, “but one does. Anything significant I would take to the museum but all this is just…everyday stuff. You find pieces like this all over.” Within five minutes they have more—a thin fragment of rim, a black painted piece of a cup base, a lump of wall plaster with red Minoan paint.
The next stop is a thousand-year-old Byzantine church, where Manolo sets about a demonstration of the theatrical highlights of the Greek Orthodox service. He stands before the altar, arms raised, eyes flashing, and declaims. Afterward, Ruth studies the eloquent array of thank-offerings of today—a miniature leg, a pair of eyes, an ear, a baby.
“The gods again,” says Manolo. “Or God. Demanding payment.”
Ruth examines a tiny torso, and a cow. “Claiming credit, I suppose. Though on the other hand, perhaps it helps people to have faith. I wouldn’t know, never having had any.” She glances at Manolo—has she gone too far? But he would not appear to be a man with beliefs.
“When I was taking my final school examinations,” says Manolo, “my mother prayed for a month on end. Throughout each paper, and before and after. When my results came—which were excellent—she fell to her knees once more, in gratitude to God for steering my pen. Any religious inclinations I had went out of the window that day.”
Ruth smiles.
They walk back to the car. There is a small village—a scatter of buildings and a café with a turquoise blue door, outside which two old men sit on wooden chairs, drinking coffee. A dog lies slumped in the dust. There is absolute silence, except for the rasp of cicadas, and the occasional low murmur from the café.
“This place was a battle,” says Manolo. “In 1941. A big engagement.”
Ruth looks sharply at him.
“My father remembers,” he goes on. “He came up here after and saw bodies lying all round—German, British, Australian, New Zealanders, all of them. He was very young. It stayed with him always, seeing that.”
“Well, it would,” says Ruth. She takes a breath. “Actually—that is why I am here.”
And so she tells him. About Matt. About her grandmother and her mother. Manolo listens attentively. When she has finished he says, “Now I see. You are here for your ancestor.”
Ruth has not thought of Matt in quite those terms, but she nods.
Manolo’s eyes are huge, brown and complicit. “This I understand. Of course. So I take you to the cemetery. Tomorrow?”
“No,” says Ruth. “First I have to do the rest of the itinerary for the paper. On the last day.”
“If you say.”
It is early evening when Manolo drops Ruth back at the hotel. “So—tomorrow? Same time?”
“Yes, please,” says Ruth. “And we’ll have company. I should have told you. I’d entirely forgotten—there’s a photographer arriving today. He’s probably here by now. The paper booked him. He was going to fly in straight from some other job.”
Manolo raises his eyebrows. “We have photographers in Crete.”
“That’s Sunday newspapers for you. It’s got to be someone expensive with a name.”
“Ah,” Manolo reflects. “Then I hope that you too are expensive.”
“I’m afraid not. And I don’t have a name either. I’m just a hack. But there you go…Anyway—I’m looking forward to tomorrow.”
Walking over to her bungalow, she thinks about how she has enjoyed the day, which was not really the idea. She is not here for enjoyment. She has been intrigued and stimulated by what she has seen, Manolo’s company has been a delight. He is a very attractive person. All right—sexually attractive, if one is going to be candid. Possibly he is gay—Ruth is aware that she lacks good antenna when it comes to that sort of thing. Whatever, there is no question that either of them will behave other than impeccably. Anything else would be the equivalent of package holiday girls cavorting with Turkish waiters, and an insult to them both.
At the bungalow, there is a phone message. A laconic voice announces himself as Al, the photographer. He will be in the bar from seven-thirty, if she’d care to get together.
Ruth showers, changes, makes some hasty notes, and then calls Peter’s number, to talk to the children.
“Are you all right?” she asks.
The children are unspecific. Jess has an issue over her best friend, who no longer is. Tom has a new reading book.
“Love you,” says Ruth.
“Love you back,” say the children vaguely. They have pressing concerns right now, to do with a lost pencil case, and whether or not Peter will let them watch The Simpsons.
Ruth finds the photographer sitting beside the ambitious fountain in the hotel’s central courtyard, drinking whiskey and reading the International Herald Tribune. He is a laid-back Canadian, and has come from an assignment in Somalia. “Bit different from this.” He waves a hand at the surroundings: the fellow guests, fresh fried from the beach and decked out for the evening, the darting waiters, the three-piece band just tuning up. “Amazing outfit, this. They have twelve hundred beds, I’ve read. And four hundred staff. The shops sells mink jackets at fifteen hundred pounds a throw. Custom was not brisk, I noticed.” He chuckles. “So what’ve you got lined up, Ruth?”
Ruth describes where she has been today, and outlines the plans for tomorrow. He will probably need to go to Phaistos himself at some point, and the monastery, she tells him.
“I’ll hire a car. No prob. Or your guy can run me there. What about some dinner?”
They move through to the dining room. Ruth notes with irritation that the waiter treats her with greater deference now that she is with a man. Al talks easily; a person used to chance encounters, she thinks, accustomed to get along with whoever comes to hand. He zips around the world on demand, it seems, a hired gun for whoever needs prime quality photography of whatever. He has tales of disastrous shoots, of risky shoots, of shoots in places where shoots are not supposed to take place. He has fallen into the Amazon, along with most of his equipment, he has been sniped at by Afghan tribesmen, he has confronted a bear in the Rockies. A long, rangy man, he has a long, wedge-shaped face, and a cool assessing stare; nothing much would faze him, you feel. Ruth senses that she is measured up as he talks. Occasionally, his face breaks into a grin, and she finds herself grinning back. He’ll do, she thinks, he’ll do as someone to be stuck with for a couple of days. Him and Manolo—I’ve struck lucky.
“So—how’s it with you, Ruth? Where d’you hang out when you’re not on an assignment?”
Ruth explains that she seldom is on an assignment of this kind. She says she is a Londoner but does not refer to her personal circumstances. “Where do you live?”
Al is trying to get the waiter’s attention. “Nowhere, really. There’s a pad in London when I need it, and one in New York. Hey! Another of these, please.” He points to the nearly empty wine bottle.
“Oh, gosh—I’m not sure I…It’s going to be quite a long day tomorrow.”
“Nonsense.” He fills her glass. “We need to keep our strength up. Oh gawd—here comes the entertainment.”
The band has moved to one side, to make way for the floor show. The lights are dimmed, and two over-worked but indomitable girls struggle into one set of sequins after another, shimmy around, and belt out songs in German, English, and Greek. “Christ!” says Al. “We certainly need to fortify ourselves against this.” He tops up their glasses. His running commentary makes Ruth laugh. When eventually the show en
ds and the band strikes up again she is quite light-headed.
The floor has been cleared for dancing. Leather-skinned middle-aged couples are shuffling around, cheek to cheek. Al gets up and holds out his hand. “C’mon.”
Ruth has not danced in years. Possibly she has not danced since she was at college. Peter did not dance, and anyway they never found themselves in dancing situations. How does one do it? Al holds her quite firm and close—he has that warm, toasty, male smell—it is far from disagreeable, in fact it is entirely to be commended, all you do is move. “That’s the girl,” he says, his hand in the small of her back. “D’you come here often?” Ruth giggles. The band changes tempo. “Tango,” says Al. “Now this I can do. I had a South American girlfriend once. Let’s roll…” He swoops her around the floor. The German couples fall aside. Dear me, thinks Ruth, I am getting a taste for this.
It is quite late when they leave. Al escorts her back to the bungalow. “That was great, Ruth. Take care. See you in the morning.” And he is gone, loping off between the hibiscus and the tamarisks.
The next morning, Manolo is already waiting when Ruth arrives outside the main building. Within a minute Al appears, slung about with photographic equipment. He is brisk and professional; the off-duty persona of last night has been laid aside. “Hi, there. Hi, Manolo—good to meet you. Can we get this gear in the back? What’s the program?”
They drive up into the mountains. Manolo has proposed a visit to Arkadi, the monastery that is the Cretan Masada, where a thousand inhabitants blew themselves up with gunpowder rather than submit to the besieging Turks. After that, they will tour some mountain villages to give Ruth material for her piece and to provide Al with photo opportunities.
Arkadi is tranquil, scenic—the mountains all around, the battered honey-colored monastic buildings, monolithic cypresses, a desultory café selling cold drinks and postcards. The place is not unvisited; there is a cluster of the fuchsia pink scooters and the scarlet or powder blue jeeps hired by the more adventurous tourist. Al is immediately drawn to these, and spends much time angling the right shots, with the monastery as background. It is easy to see why: the incongruity, the apposition, the colors.