Greek Unorthodox

O lovely red mullet, Anna said to the fish as Vassilis of the scraggly eyebrows in the agora, Chaniá’s covered market, held it up for her to inspect, cleaned and ready to wrap in paper once she agreed on its worth. Such a fish for a January night, to bring into the house a whiff of the sea. She would bake it in the classic Greek way, with tomatoes and olive oil, garlic and white wine, and they could drink the rest of the bottle with it—do them both good, after the depressing week of clearing the dreadful old house. Those miserable cans! They’d cleared cans for hours, out of every damned cupboard, and Livvy had hauled them valiantly downstairs for Alexis to take away. Anna imagined the former tenant, Mrs. Mary Walsington, walled up behind cans of imported English tinned foods, like some particularly awful horror story by Poe. An impenetrable bunker of Heinz baked beans, runny custard, beans in tomato—toMAHtoh—sauce . . . and mushy peas. To have a soul the color of mushy peas (if mushy peas could be said to have color)—what a way to meet your maker. Anna shuddered inwardly and took her comely fish from Vassilis. That, at least, wouldn’t be her fate, God wot—or Zeus wot, she should say. Unless the spirit of Mrs. Mary Walsington got spiteful because they’d thrown her cans out, and transmigrated.

She trudged back through the drizzle with her faithful old buffalo stick (and one of those attractive plastic rain hats, like wearing a Baggy on your head) through the Chaniá streets between the agora and her House of Horrors. Since she had only the fish to carry today, and a bit of feta in its own folded square of paper, she let herself steer a wayward course home through the artistic back streets and alleys of the old Moorish quarter at the feet of the minaret. Every time she saw a car trying to get through one of the impossibly narrow passageways in that part of town, she thought promptly of a camel and the eye of a needle. But they seemed to make it through—unless the mounds you saw were where the crafty Venetians had just thrown a little masonry and plaster over vehicles abandoned to their fate?

On her ambles and rambles and preambles of the past few days she had identified bougainvillea, oleander, pine (that Mediterranean variety which was or wasn’t Aleppo, and the funny-looking Norfolk), cactus and aloes. Reminding you that Crete was just as close to Africa as to Europe.  Orange and lemon trees. Herbs in pots, and growing everywhere in the old walls. Fig trees; vine arbors. Fan palms, and ferns in rusted barrels. Papyrus. Ficus. A tiny olive tree in a pot, on rusted iron stairs. Mint growing around the foot of a rose tree. Palms and leafless cottonwoods on a street in the Turkish quarter.

On a ruined street, with herbs growing in every crack and crevice of the walls, a few patches of bright blue paint and some a blue wash, like a distant sea, remembered or seen through haze—out with Gerald in the boat, off Cape May on a fuggy August morning. Some walls ochre, or honey. In the heart of winter (such as it was, puny by comparison with what she was used to that would have challenged the mettle of the Vikings), a defiant red geranium. And yesterday, when it wasn’t raining, a rug cast down an outside wall, a striped curtain or bedspread hanging out a window between open shutters. Splashes of color here and there. Chaniá wasn’t your typical Greek island scene, all tarted up with new paint for the rich tourists. Your immediate impression was not of color, of the intense contrasts the calendar people were calling “Greek Style,” but there were those moments of color that came over you, unawares, almost like happiness. True unto themselves. To restore you, like a good bracing Tanqueray martini, after the unspeakable atrocities that were your inherited house. The house that you went poodling or puddling around in the rain to avoid.

Fraught, as her young friend Livvy had said, that first night in the kitchen. Too fraught, all right.  Fraught with previous inhabitants—Mrs. Mary Walsington, the Germans, the doomed young family, the Venetian merchant . . . . The thought of it followed you like a stray cur, like the dog that had tagged along with her yesterday, maybe smelling the lamb she had bought for kleftiko, bandits’ lamb, in its paper wrappers. She considered it objectively from this longer vantage, like the subject of a bad painting. The cleaning was coming along, but it was still practically Augean.  After their attack on the kitchen the filthy bathroom had been cleaned from floor to ceiling, and pills and potions and powders tossed mercilessly out. Enough to have stocked a competent apothecary’s.

“We must get rid of all the stuff first,” she’d told Livvy, “so we can get at the furniture to decide. I’m tempted to just have the whole kit and kaboodle hauled away and made into a heaping pyre on the shore—that would be so much faster, and a good beacon for ships; but maybe there will turn out to be something of it we can use. Or hidden treasure—a looted snake goddess or Priam’s gold or such, if we’re lucky.”

They had agreed that Anna, for her sins, would look through it all quickly— drawers, shelves, bins, boxes, bags, abandon-all-hope-chests—and pull out anything she might want, to set aside in a designated area; and Livvy would go on bagging or boxing everything else, for the Herculean Alexis and Kostas to dispose of one way or another. Anna had taken to flirting with the two young men quite shamelessly, she admitted to herself. But they were heroes indeed—and had, the day before, gotten good money for the horde of dolls from some antique dealer one of them knew on the mainland, Piraeus maybe, which they insisted Anna have. “Blood money,” Livvy’d said with a malicious grin.

They’d gotten into a loose rhythm—Anna, up before Livvy, went for long walks ending at the agora, then came back to sort until she got too out of sorts. They’d break for lunch in early afternoon, and eat something light—bread and feta and olives, leftover horta (cooked greens of whatever sort, wild or tame, jazzed up with lemon) cold from the refrigerator—which seemed to have been replaced not too long ago, though Zeus and all his cronies only knew what Mrs. Mary had had to refrigerate. They’d rest their weary old bones for a couple of hours, or Livvy would go walking if the rain wasn’t too fierce (seeming to imagine she might melt), and then resume their labors until 6:00 or 7:00, when the Adonic Alexis came by. Sometimes Penelope came earlier, when she was done with school, and sat on the floor chatting laconically with them or reading one of those French adventure comics she devoured. Livvy would work by herself in the late afternoons, since Anna had long since exhausted her limited usefulness by then (Livvy designated her a new Cretan judge, in the ranks of Minos and Radamanthes, weighing the worth of Mrs. W’s pharaonic possessions), and Anna would go out again briefly for some air and color, restoration of the soul, and come back and dabble in the kitchen. They didn’t typically eat until 10:00, Greek style.

“But it’s not fair, me having all the fun,” she’d chided Livvy the day before. “You come too.” Insisting that she see the agora for herself.  The child lived too much in her head.

So she marched her out on a guided tour. Indicating culinary highlights with her stick as they walked, ferociously informative. She pointed out the devastating aroma of fresh bread, between the House of Horrors and the inner harbor, bread baking or just baked, plump and self-satisfied in a dusty shop window. The useful broad street Minoos, that she liked to take whenever it was headed her way. Nearby, she could pop into a little butcher shop which sold attractive chickens too; get red cabbages at a decent hole-in-the-wall vegetable and fruit market. She could buy potatoes at what was over-euphemistically called a “super” market, to roast in their jackets or brown with lemon and garlic; or more satisfyingly, she’d learned, from the parked truck at end of Minoos, offered with the good Greek soil still on them by Manolis Kazantzakis, no relation to the author, who drove in once a week from Kissamos, twice in the summer.

She drew their attention in passing to the minaret outside the agora, and three or four basic cafés with umbrellas on the pavement for good weather, in case you felt yourself needing a coffee. The agora was shaped like a cross. The fish- and meat-vendors clustered along one of the sideways arms, sporting chunks of meat hung on strings for handling, heavily salted fillets of cod in flat boxes. Elsewhere were the ubiquitous cans of olive oil in a bevy of sizes. Scant winter fruits and vegetables. Very thin-skinned Cretan mandarins. A few wild—or tame, this time of year, sometimes completely cowed—greens to sauté. African tomatoes for pasta sauce, dry-cured Thassos olives, a slice of graviera cheese made from ewe’s milk.

But pleasures enough even in January—Kayyam’s pleasure dome, god wot.  Various teas: sage tea, lemon tea, chamomile tea. And the herbs that seduced Anna with their olfactory palette—thyme, oregano (whose name meant “it rejoices in the mountains”), marjoram (dedicated to the goddess Aphrodite), all the different colored peppercorns, Greek saffron (like in the Minoan crocus paintings with the blue monkeys gathering it, she pointed out to Livvy, who looked surprised at that too), paprikas, chile peppers, rosemary, cinnamon, cloves. Crete was close, after all, to Africa.  Mixed spices variously for fish, chicken, kebobs, tzatziki, salads, rabbit, though she’d want to play with her own mixtures. And then of course dittany, that uniquely Cretan herb, which (named for Mount Dikti) grows in mountain crevices and in its high treacherous places is dangerous to pick.  But well worth it—said to be good for stomach and headache and any number of ills, not to mention more important things like immortality and sexual prowess. Aristotle himself famously immortalized Cretan dictamus.

“You remember?” she asked Livvy.

“No, I don’t think so . . . .”

“He wrote that wild goats on Crete, wounded by hunters, healed themselves by grazing on the herb.  It made arrows eject themselves from the body. And so when Aeneas was gravely wounded by an arrow in the Trojan War, Aphrodite plucked dittany from Mount Ida to cure him. A stalk ‘clothed with downy leaves and purple flower.’”

“How do you remember that?”  Livvy was impressed.

“My man Virgil.  And my study of plants and rendering them exactly.”

Before they left the market, Anna introduced Livvy to one of her guilty pleasures:  fish soup—the possibility of fish soup every blessed morning. She’d eat it for her breakfast, a big reeking bowl of it, thinking how shocked poor Gerald and the kiddies would have been, how low the old relict had sunk from her days of prim Scottish pinhead oatmeal out of Mother’s Haviland Limoges china (twelve place settings, thank you). From the same stall, you could get calamari, both rings and tentacles, or fried vegetables (keftedes, vegetable fritters). Livvy, a little dubious about the soup at that hour of the morning, had not been able to resist buying a wild greens pie—hortopita—at the bakery stall, still warm from the oven.

“Divine!”

They sat at one of the simple wooden tables outside the fish stall and ate, gratefully, ravenously, as if they’d been up all night carousing. They’d started a list of the various sorts of Greek pite they’d seen around the islands. Pies in Greece, most often in the portable turnover form, can come filled with just about anything. Between them they remembered

cheese (feta)
minced meat
spinach
cheese (kaseri)
rice
sausage
cheese (myzithra)
artichoke
potato
local Santorini cheese
milk
green pepper
ham & cheese
beet & eggplant
liver & cinnamon

“And now the very best of all,” Livvy sighed.  “Wild greens!”

The girl was wearing the patterned Navajo jacket she’d gotten from the Chimayo weavers back in New Mexico, which looked almost like one of the local Cretan weavings, a heathery gray with overlays of ruby, blushing persimmon, and Dame de Coeur tea rose.  The strong reds suited her.  Her hair was beginning to grow out, less hectic somehow and more flattering, softening the intensity of her face. Crete was obviously good for her, and the hauling and scrubbing. She seemed less self-conscious, more comfortable in her own skin—which was glowing fit for a baby soap commercial, Anna noted enviously, in contrast with the agèd Naugahyde that one was cursed with after seventy or so. And the market had worked its charm as intended.

___

But wooed though Anna felt both of them being by the sensual pleasures of Crete, and in spite of the progress being made on the house, the now perfectly functional kitchen in which she experimented with the local offerings of produce, fruit, and fish, she felt restless and dissatisfied a good part of the time. Why in the ever-loving world should that be?  Contrary wretch. She chafed to get out, even in the rain and cold. She felt closed in, miserable without a view, without beauty observable around her, without bodacious trees and rosebushes outside a light bright picture window. That was what she really craved.  Soon the house would be empty and ugly instead of full and ugly, and so what? It all seemed futile, still, an imbecile mistake. Something she had done to pacify the dead—Ginny, Nikos (damn him). Her long dead girlhood self, buried away under the beautifully ironed trappings of a responsible life.

Early in the first week Penelope had come up with her friend, the Frenchwoman from the whitewashed house at the corner who let her borrow the lurid French comics, whose husband worked at the French Consulate—Claire et Daniel, the child said excitedly, anxious, sure they would all like one another.  And indeed they did; soon they were back and forth continually. They were all dear, these new young friends of hers, and Alexis a veritable young god who might well be immortalized on a red-figure drinking vessel, but Anna had been wrong to involve them in this pointless endeavor. She felt she was fast becoming Mrs. Mary Walsington, drained of her own color, washed out absolutely by the more colorful—and more authentic—Crete. The larger-than-life character she’d invented as a kind of sleight-of-hand to draw the eye away from her aversion to weakness of any ilk was being ruthlessly unmasked. The transmigration of souls was coming to pass just as she’d feared.

She, perverse old baggage, already longed for Philadelphia, for her own house, her cobra lilies.  (If not, truthfully, for the snow.) For the theatre.  Maddy Cray wrote on a belated New Year’s card that they were doing a Gurney play based on a Henry James story that spring. Anna knew it from a fine performance in New York one weekend a few years back with Bill and Evelyn Prince, and she wanted badly to be there painting a backdrop for them, in the little room that smelled of mothballs and burnt coffee and stage fright, to be back in—back in charge of—her familiar world. It was too late to be some crazy old woman adventuress, though that wasn’t exactly what she meant, was it? A woman who had adventures, anyway, like what’s-her-name who wrote famously about Africa, Countess or Baroness someone, or Agatha Christie with her archaeologist husband, fifteen years her junior, imagine!, or the wonderful Rose Macaulay.

Greece was all very well and good, colorful as all get-out, she’d be the first to agree—but she’d left it too long. Or maybe even back then she had been all wrong for it. This wasn’t her element. She felt, what? Not a fish out of water, by no means that, rather a fish lost in a sea of other fish, all swimming in the same direction, all the dreadful same. A school or herd or brace or whatever it was tunny came in (and not the can, blast you Mrs. Mary), identically googly-eyed. Oh, Gerald, she thought. I miss your dear, dull, comfortable old face. We muddled along those fifty years each in our own fashion, even if ours wasn’t a grand passion, or even a baby grand. (She thought for no reason of the year early on when Bill Prince’s King Charles Spaniel had had a mess of puppies, and they had foolishly agreed to take two. She’d wanted to name them Theseus and Pirithous, for the way they refused to be separated, but Gerald got quietly mulish, the way he did, and couldn’t be budged from Lucky and Homer—after his grandfather, an old gentlemanly Virginian dog-lover, of course, rather than the nodding poet.) I miss terrorizing you. And those unfortunate hulking sons of ours, dreary changelings, who have essentially disowned their outrageous old mother. Here, I have to behave myself because it ain’t my country, and it ain’t polite to misbehave as a guest. Oh, Zeus, and all you gods in bliss eternal—I want to go home, to my own small fiefdom, where I can misbehave all I damned well want.
___

As a sign of her displaced spirit perhaps, like the reproachful ghost of Hamlet’s father or the undigested bit of beef and potato that was Scrooge’s partner Marley, she had taken to wandering into churches around Chaniá. It started with a morning’s quest for the little underground church of Aghia Irini she had read about but hadn’t yet managed to find. Others, unexpected, thrust themselves at her in droves. Like unplanned flowering things that popped up in your dahlia bed from seeds carried by birds or on the wind, volunteer churches. The little Aghia Ekaterini in the Splanza, full of icons, dedicated to St. Catherine and St. John the Hermit; little Venetian San Rocco — “saintly Rocco, 1630”—covered with unsaintly or in any case unsightly weeds; Ag. Anargyri with its interesting icon of the Second Coming (a rousing crowd of tormented sinners, bless ’em).

She had poked her head into Ag. Eleftherios on what was the feast day of Saint Athanasios, hoping illogically for a panegyri, one of the festivals of celebration, with properly melodramatic goings-on and something good to eat and drink, some xerotigana maybe, the celebratory fritters flavored with burnt sesame and cinnamon. But she found it empty. Each church had its own festivals, its own naming days—you couldn’t just call up and order one on a whim, like ordering take-out Chinese.  There was a complex pattern long in place, an inflexible social network (that had bound Nikos all the way across the ocean).

Something held her in the vaulted church, though, something indefinable. The feeling that it had just emptied, that it was humming quietly to itself with a score of remembered voices and she might just overhear what they were saying if she prowled about and found the right spot the acoustically perfect center like in one of the ancient theatres where you can pick up a whisper a pin dropping from anywhere in the tiers. The feeling of just-departed company was heightened by the smell of wax, the quantities of gold—candles burning low after a dinner party, dregs of cognac in the big-bellied glasses, dessert plates left on the table.

A sunbeam fell through a high, crossed window—meant, charged. Half the time she wondered whether religion wasn’t all about aesthetics. Like theatre, it involved putting on a good show, lest your audience quickly lose interest. Her eye followed the commanding beam of light that cut across the dawdling arches straight and sure, like a theatre spot. A spotlight was meant to highlight faces, the action at dramatic center stage where the whisper was happening. But moving into it, she was aware only of gold. A field of gold. A sown field and a battlefield. (She would have to start incorporating gold into her paintings, it had such a dazzling effect.) The dizzy gold of bees of saints of all the wisdom of antiquity passed down through scholars’ hands, hushed and guarded as religion, forbidden as passion. To her, knowledge was deified in bell towers, Virgil and Aristotle, pistils and stamen, equations on a page, icons— something about icons she knew but had forgotten. Following the track of light up to its source, she felt light-headed, strange. A rush of dizziness took her, something like taking off in an airplane when the earth drops away underneath you and you rise and rise and sink at the same time and know there’s nothing you can do to stop it. She felt all defenses falling away—gravity and other arbitrary laws and bounds. Time, too, expanding so fast it became meaningless.  Gold moted light behind her eyelids. Some force much bigger than herself, that yet came from inside herself. And somehow it encompassed all of Greece, fallen heroes (the arrow point in flesh, the tragedy that was goat song), those fallen at Troy or to the Germans, though by then the gods had stopped attending and you had to set out for the mountains on your own to seek out the remedial herb in its high crevice that might heal you—or kill you, in falling.

Next she knew, she found she’d sunk down onto her knees on the cold stone floor, not finding a pew to take her suddenly ungainly weight, her stick flailing and useless. Someone came in, crossed the light beam. A priest, who looked like Nikos. She lay half sprawled there foolishly, butt up against a sturdy golden candelabra stand (how surprisingly cold it was, gold), incapable of gathering her wits or limbs or even of arranging her clothing. He stood above her, asked if he could help, grave and pleasant as he’d been her sophomore year at university before all the passion, teaching her Greek verbs. The man she had once equalled. It shamed her to lie gawking up at him like this, now so much younger and abler than she was—and not a glint of recognition. She had been too cavalier about the passing time, and the changes that it (and she) had wrought. She had somehow in the space of a heartbeat become this ridiculous creature, too weak even to get herself up. Or to demand that he go away and not watch her struggle to pull her fool self back together. At least he had the grace not to look pitying, as he held his hand down to help her up.

Strong emotion ran through her, a dark tide swelling up from the depths of some indwelling ocean, chill as the Atlantic beside which she had over two dozen summers raised her sons (and for what, in the end?).  Grief, mostly, a great weight of sorrow—the kind that involved whole races and the merciless golden light and mariners too long away and their widows, spinning and spinning, dreary flax to gold or sometimes vice versa. The sorrow that was laid into the foundations of any church worth its salt. A feeling remembered from ages past, a kind of memory of species maybe, but new again, oh cruelly new, and so, stronger this time around than she was. Was this rebirth? A swift boot back to the mewling helplessness of your inglorious beginnings? Heaven forbid. Grossly overrated if so, and not an experience she’d choose to repeat.

With the priest’s help she had regained her feet, if not her sea legs, and a modicum of dignity, patting vaguely at her dust-streaked skirt. But she was chilled through again to catch a glimpse of her mortality in his eyes for a moment and all time before he could look away, elsewhere, knowing he would not believe what she would be hard-pressed to prove to him, that she was only a girl still, less than his age, her life ahead of her. And so much to do with it. His eyes came back to hers, unflinching now, and she saw too that he knew she did not believe it any more than he did. A lie would not do, between them. They had always been too much of one mind to pretend with one another. She shook his hand off, damning and dispassionate, with almost a shudder—a shiver from the mortal cold, insisting she was fine though it came out in a froglike croak unlikely to convince even a dullard. Damned Greece. I’m just too old for this, she thought illogically, furiously resisting.

The words came through her head as she stood, wobbly, summoning her resources. And now, following his hand, without constraint, the arrow fell out, and newborn strength returned, as of yore. And the rest of it might have been applicable too, if only . . . “Not by mortal aid comes this, not by masterful art, nor doth hand of mine save thee, Aeneas; a mightier one—a god—works here, and sends thee back to mightier deeds.” She had looked up the passage on the curing by dittany for Livvy, and it had come ironically to taunt her. It would clearly not do, the god working here was a different god, and the deeds she was being sent back to less than mighty—less than ever, now that she’d been found out.

“You’d do better to chuck me out,” she said to the equanimous priest when she could trust her voice. A good try anyway at crispness. But she’d not risk the Aenead on him, lest he take that from her too. “I’m not the dear feeble old lady you think you can help. I’m a ferocious sinner, gone truant from Dante’s First—or no, Second, I guess it must be?—Circle, with no intention of repenting or regretting.  What you might call Greek Unorthodox.”

___

She took herself off home more slowly and painstakingly even than she had done the day after her illness in early fall, when she first ventured out onto the harbor front. She depended heavily on  her again staunch old stick, feeling the whole way still cold so cold and disoriented. When she came tottering up the cursed long stairs from the entry, Livvy, seeing that she wasn’t well in spite of her best efforts to hide it, came rushing over to make the most awful fuss, and put her arms around her shoulders. Why was it everyone kept trying to manhandle you, to lay claim to your body in infirmity, like when you’re pregnant, eager to rush into the already violated space and pick over the spoils? Anna shrank away from the girl’s well-meant embrace; she couldn’t help herself.  Immediately after, she saw the hurt in her eyes, the recoil—damn, she would undoubtedly be thinking of her wretched mother.

Anna tried to explain her stand-offishness, without admitting to whatever had just happened in the church. Wrapping herself in one of the downy blankets she’d brought from Philadelphia, she struggled to verbalize what she’d been turning over in her head the past few days.

“Within those things that were in progression my life—a Classical education, the traditions of art, marriage, nice sailing clubs and gardening societies, theatre, the Episcopalian church, and then, triumphantly, old age—I could be as fierce as I wanted. I was safely buttressed. But here, I’m only ordinary. And that throws me for a loop. Being found out. Being shown up as only a painted paper dragon, when there are scores of genuine scaly ones to be had.”

“But you fit right in,” Livvy protested. “You seem so perfect here.”

“That’s just the trouble, damn it all—I don’t want to fit in. I don’t want to be just another of the ferocious old Greek women with strong profile standing arms akimbo in accusatory black at the roadside like hell-hath-no-Furies, fixing with hawklike eye any poor fool who has the nerve to venture through their village. Not for me, thank you. I want to stand apart, in my own ferocious way.” Pleased with the phrase, she repeated “I want to be able to claim I’m Greek Unorthodox.”
___

And so, as intensely as she had once said I want to be in Greece in the spring, drawing wildflowers among the noble stones at Mycenae and Delphi, Anna now told herself I want to be home by lilac season (and before my cobra lilies die in those untutored hands, or revolt out of self-defense and eat the hapless plant-sitter). I’m a tired old woman, and I just want to be home, where I can say exactly where I am and what I want. We will have finished up the chucking out long since by then, and Livvy must jolly well have her blasted thesis written, and I’ll leave instructions to sell this infernal oppressive place, and go. Some young couple without good sense will be happy enough for it, nicely redone.

She resolved that she would be home for the lilacs, and never ask anything again.

Christie Cochrell loves the play of light, the journeyings of time, things ephemeral and ancient. She’s worked with ship cargoes, rare books, and British archaeologists, traveled extensively since her childhood in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and woolgathered compulsively along the way. Her work has been published by The Saturday Evening Post, Tin House, The Plentitudes, Catamaran, and a variety of others, receiving several awards and Pushcart nominations