Cretan Teat

It seemed as if Kyriotisa were having a nap, by way of celebrating the sun’s passage from azimuth. A garage and service station stood at one end of the main street, to all appearances closed. The main street presented a dead, greyish appearance, although the shops were open. A dog crossed the road with infinite leisure. Billboards displayed rather faded advertisements for Coca Cola, brands of cigarettes, mobile phones, and Nentelstam Milk for Infants. On higher ground, behind the buildings lining the street, Langstreet could see the dome of an Orthodox church. Despite this token of higher authority, the town appeared to Langstreet to lie under a deadening materialism, the banal everyday. He took a turn up the street, observing that the town was built about a road that went in a great curve to avoid a severe drop into a valley. Behind Kyriotisa, hills rose almost immediately.

Entering a nearby taverna, he ordered a coffee, enquiring whether anyone spoke English who might lead him to old Byzantine churches in the district, as mentioned in his guide book. The waiter who served him with a cup and biscuit was a man with a grand moustache, his wrinkled face much resembling the bark of an old olive tree. He eyed Langstreet closely.

‘You are Germany?’ he asked.

‘I’m English. Do you speak English?’

The waiter still looked dissatisfied. Raising a hand in a ‘wait and see’ gesture, he wandered into the street.

Langstreet drank his coffee, with pauses between sips. The taverna was completely deserted except for an old lady who sat in shadow, unmoving behind a counter.

The silence was broken when the waiter returned with a black-clad monk. The monk was corpulent, not particularly tall, his round weather-beaten face fringed by white stubble. Langstreet rose and gave him a slight bow.

‘You speak English, sir?’

‘You are from Germany?’

‘No, I’m not. I’m from England, although I do in fact work in Germany. Germany and Switzerland. I am an official of WHO, the World Health Organisation. I am here on holiday. Why do you ask me that question?’

‘The Germans were here many years and destroyed this place.’

‘I can’t help that. I’m English, as I’ve already told this waiter here.’ Langstreet stood stiff and formal, looking slightly down on the monk.

‘Then what can I do for you, sir?’ The monk’s expression relaxed as he asked the question. He moved a step nearer Langstreet’s table, resting a hand on it, as though he found its weight a burden.

‘I understand from my guide book that there are several old Byzantine churches hereabouts. I wonder if you could guide me to some of them? I have a car outside.’

‘They are only very small churches, very old, very small,’ said the monk with grave courtesy, as if he felt personally responsible for their shrinkage. ‘They have no merit of architecture. Not a one can hardly be worth your visit.’ When he saw that this statement made no great impression on Langstreet, the monk gestured to him to sit at the table again. He then took the chair on the opposite side of the table, saying, ‘Yes, I will show to you some churches. We are glad to assist our English visitors. First you must know some facts about this place, Kyriotisa. Then you will understand more.’

He motioned to the waiter with a gesture of dismissal, speaking sharply in Greek, the results of which were that the waiter left, to return some while later with two cups of coffee and two glasses of water on a tin tray.

The monk now clasped his heavy hands together on the table, hunched his upper body over them and began a long account. Most of the while, he stared down at the grain of the table, looking up sharply now and again to make sure that Langstreet was attending.

He claimed that Kyriotisa had once been a wealthy place. Its olive groves had made it rich. Its olive oil was regarded as the best in the Empire (by which Langstreet understood him to mean the Byzantine Empire). Its wealthier families were thereby enabled to build their own private churches in which to worship God. Often they built these churches in their own olive groves, the trees of which were sacred.

This was a happy period of calm and prosperity.

Worse times followed. Vendettas broke out among some families. Morality declined. Times were uncertain. A variety of rulers presided over the fate of trade. Also, there came a plague. The wealth all disappeared. The monk waved his chubby hands in dismissal of this vague period of history.

And then the war! Germans came and times were very bad, with many good people killed.

The monk looked up sharply at Langstreet. ‘Many good people killed,’ he repeated. ‘A very cruel time.’

Time, Langstreet thought, when the arrival of another customer and the greetings this entailed brought a momentary pause in the monk’s account, had somehow been squeezed from the narrative. The days of the Paleologues and the Venetians, the Ottomans and the Nazis, were all part of a seamless cloak of disaster. Only the uniforms changed.

According to the monk, the Nazis descended in strength on Kyriotisa by parachute.

‘From the planes passing over they come.’ He drew pictures in the air above his head with those same heavy hands.

The partisans fired on the invaders as they descended. The Germans exacted terrible retribution. People were shot indiscriminately, even children and women. The monk had been just a boy at the time. He had taken food up into the mountains to feed the partisans who lived up there. He remembered it well, going to the back door of the taverna, through the kitchen, to point to one of the mountains he’d had to climb.

He beckoned Langstreet to stand by him.

‘There, you see? That one. I climb it once a week when I am young, with a loaf of bread underneath my shirt.’

His account of youthful heroism went on and on. The afternoon was growing late. Langstreet politely concealed his impatience.

As a reprisal for local resistance, the German soldiers had set fire to the houses of the village. Women, children and the sick had been sheltering inside the houses. All died. The fires could be seen up in the mountains where the partisans hid.

The partisans set a trap. They lured a German patrol to follow them into the mountains. The patrol was ambushed. The soldiers were made to jump, or were thrown, into a great cavity in the ground. Their cries were greeted with rejoicing by the partisans.

After three days, one of the local men was lowered on a rope to see if he could rescue some of the German weapons. The rope was old. It broke. The partisan fell on the bodies below. Some of the Germans were still alive, although their legs and heads were broken. They rose up and seized hold of the man. He shot them all.

The priest had many more tales of this sort. Langstreet felt sick and glanced at his watch, quickly, when the monk was gazing down at the table.

The Nazi commandant of the area had been a terrifying man. He rode about on a dapple stallion. He would execute locals arbitrarily, without trial. One day, a partisan sniper shot him. The partisans then wrote to Nazi HQ, explaining that they had shot the commandant because he was extremely evil and cruel, and that they hoped there would be no reprisals. The HQ had evidently formed the same opinion of their commandant: no reprisals followed his death.

Langstreet was finally moved to speak. ‘This was all a long while ago, of course. Half a century. Things are very different now.’

‘Not here!’ The monk grasped Langstreet’s wrist. ‘Kyriotisa does not forget,’ he said. He picked up the story again. ‘After the war, in the early sixties, the Germans they come back again. This time, a very different crowd of them. This time, they wear suits, not uniforms.’ He laughed, revealing his old yellowed teeth. ‘To make up for what they do, they rebuild on a more grand scale the houses they destroy in the war. They build a good main road, and build a bridge over the river. They also build the large war memorial down the street, denouncing Nazi atrocities and listing the heroic dead among our partisans.’

At this point, the monk went into an exact description of the war memorial. He said that the inscription carved in the stone concerned the complete destruction of the town, which the Nazis had inflicted as a reprisal for the death of a few German soldiers.

‘In fact, the post-war Germans gave back to Kyriotisa more than they ever take away. A ceremony was held, with a band from Frankfurt, when they left. Not one inhabitant of Kyriotisa waved or clapped or cheered them. So the Germans were forced to leave in silence.’

Langstreet looked challengingly at the monk. ‘So, no gratitude from Kyriotisa, then? After an unrivalled and generous act of restitution? Why was that, do you think?’

The monk made a face, spreading his hands in dismissal.

‘You must not think us to be unkind people. They did not gave us back our dead, did they? Or our lost limbs? Good riddance to them, I say.’

Langstreet stood up. He gave a slight bow, looking grim. ‘Thank you for the coffee. I shall return to Paleohora immediately and not come back to Kyriotisa, thank you.’

‘What’s the matter? You don’t wish to see the little chapels? Do you wish to see the war memorial?’

‘I hate all this talk of war. It was over half a century ago, wasn’t it?’

‘Not for us, no. My father they shoot him in the back. My brother remains injured and is half-mad. I myself had to carry bread up that mountain in fear of – ’

‘Yes, yes, you told me about that. I’m sorry for you.’

The monk gave a sly smile. ‘Sorry, eh? Well, you didn’t do it. I just show you one little chapel. Quite near here. Don’t be upset. You’re British, aren’t you? The British helped us in the war.’

While he was speaking, the monk was edging through the door into the street, holding Langstreet’s sleeve with one hand while gesticulating towards his car with the other.

Telling himself to be calm, to see what he had come to see, Langstreet unlocked the car door and let the monk settle himself in the front passenger seat. He started the engine.

This passage seems to reveal something of the trauma existing in the town, as well as something of Archie Langstreet’s character, without labouring the point too greatly. It is a tenet of his morality to believe that when forgiveness is sought, it should be given. Now I have to get him to see the painting of Agia Anna, where his response will be very different from mine. He is not a shallow man, not like me.