Feudal State of Affairs – Part 4

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“PO PO PO PO,” said the elderly man dressed in an aged dark gray suit, standing stiffly at attention in front of Monty and Thomas, his “po pos” matching in volume and enthusiasm the increasing length of each passing missile and formation of marching soldiers. They had come across the parade by chance their first morning in Athens while returning from the American Express office near Syntagma Square, where they’d collected their mail. (Monty had a letter from his parents saying they would try to adjust to his new life.) They’d known, of course, that Greece was in the grips of a military dictatorship which had taken power in a coup two-and-a-half years earlier. They’d read about it in American magazines but hadn’t thought much about it. They were in Greece to enjoy the land and its history and people. They didn’t care about politics. They’d left politics behind, in America – America with its own war and its own nasty government. But seeing firsthand the evidence of Greece’s fascist regime shook their apathy; it made them feel uneasy, somehow complicit. Most of the crowd watched the parade in silence, voicing their opinions with a somber lack of expression, not resigned but impassive.

When the Americans arrived in Athens the night before, Monty contacted the family of a Greek student who had transferred to his college in his senior year. The boy’s father and a cousin met them at the train station and drove them to a new hotel near the Acropolis. The family knew the hotel’s owner and bargained for a rate of three dollars a night, inexpensive even for Greece in those days. The hotel sat directly across the street from the Thesion Temple, at the northwest corner of the ancient agora. From their balcony they could look directly up at the Acropolis, brightly lit after dark for the nightly Son et Lumière show. The view became routine as they settled into Athens and its pace of life, still easy-going and less polluted than it would be in later years. Every morning Monty would get up before his lover and stroll through the nearby market streets of the Placa, in the days when it was still frequented by locals, not tourists. There he would buy their daily supply of fresh bread, feta, kefalograviera, thick yogurt, Cretan oranges, honey smelling of thyme and olives of various colors, sizes and tastes.

They celebrated Christmas, not a major event in the Greek Orthodox calendar, with the family of the absent student. They were wealthy shipping magnates, though far below the level of Onassis and his ilk. Their handsome split-level house overlooked the city from Lykavittos Hill, the preserve of Athens’s privileged classes. A few days later Monty and Thomas drove with friends of the son to see the famous sunset at Sounion, at the tip of the Attic Peninsula, south of Athens. Polite explanation of the ancient historical sites they passed along the way eventually turned to politics.

“They’re quite comical, these colonels,” said one of the friends, speaking of the military junta’s rulers. A pudgy boy with thick black-framed glasses, his family owned a chain of drug stores. “The best thing is to ignore them and one day they’ll just disappear.”

“You’re so naive,” said another boy, who kept his hair long as a mark of protest. “We have to rise up and throw them out or they’ll get stronger every day. If only you and your family’s rich friends were braver, we’d be rid of them already. You think you can just bide your time. You’ll see.”

“You’re too hot-headed,” said the first. “You and your leftist friends will play right into their hands. You’ll prove their argument that if it weren’t for them the Communists would take over. What do you think, as foreigners?” he asked the Americans.

“Well,” said Monty, “I don’t think we should comment. We don’t really know that much about what’s going on.”

“You should,” the second boy shot back. “It’s your tourist dollars that are keeping the regime alive, you know.”

“Hey, take it easy,” said the curly-haired girlfriend of the boy attending Monty’s college. “Besides, who are we to speak; our families keep making lots of money and stay comfortable all this time just by shutting up.”

The second girl in the car, who had remained silent until then, began to cry. “Stop it,” she shouted, her voice cracking. “Stop talking about this. It scares me. No matter how rich our families are, the government can get us if they want. You know what they’ll do to us. Just shut up.”

The others immediately changed the subject, not so much out of fear, though there was plenty to fear, but because they knew the girl’s brother had been detained during a protest the year before and hadn’t been seen or heard from since.

After New Years Monty and Thomas toured the Peloponnese, going as far south as the site of ancient Sparta. It had been another case of the younger man’s insisting they visit a piece of history. But there was nothing to be seen of the ancient city other than a few weedy, rectangular indentations where buildings had once sat. Nor were there any tourist accommodations. A police officer suggested they spend the night at the home of local peasants who took in guests.

The family received the visitors graciously. “Please, you stay bedroom,” the father insisted, by which he meant their bedroom, the only bedroom; he and his wife would sleep in the other room, the only other room, along with their three children and the man’s elderly mother. “Here, you have heater,” he added, lighting up the charcoal briquettes on a metal brazier supported by a tripod.

Sinking into the soft mattress of the four-poster bed, the two guests snuggled together between soft hand-woven cotton sheets. Despite feeling awkward at having taken the parent’s bedroom and wondering if they might be asphyxiated during the night by the richly scented olive-wood embers smoldering on the open brazier, they fell asleep quickly, sleeping better than they ever had in their modern Athens hotel room.

IN FEBRUARY MONTY AND THOMAS booked passage on a small passenger ship heading to Santorini, the southernmost of the Cyclades Islands, an island visited by other Greeks but not yet widely known to foreign tourists. Arriving just before midnight, the ship slowly puttered into the caldera-shaped bay that had formed when the center of the island, a giant volcanic cone, blew up in a cataclysmic eruption sometime in the 16th century BC. The largest in historical times, the eruption caused a massive tidal wave so catastrophic that it wiped out the Minoan cities and settlements on the unprotected north coast of Crete. The apparent destruction of that civilization along with the literal collapse of Santorini, known in ancient times as Thera is thought by some to be the origin of the Atlantis myth. The island today is made up of the crescent-shaped remnants of the original land.

The Americans climbed down a ladder on the side of the ship and jumped into a small rowboat which took them to the island’s tiny dock. Monty bargained unsuccessfully with one of the donkey-drivers who had congregated at the dock to offer transport up the steep cliff. Today there’s a funicular, but back then donkeys provided the only way up other than walking. Under a full moon, the black sky ablaze with thousands of shining stars, they looked upwards, up to the top of the cliff and to the sky, as their donkeys, complaining and occasionally kicking each other, nudged grudgingly backwards and forwards along the trail as they zigzagged up to the island’s main town. At the top they were met by several scruffy men, each offering to rent them a guest cottage. The island’s one hotel was closed for the winter.

The February nights on Santorini were frigid, the cold, damp Aegean wind howling through the houses and shops that clustered tightly together at the edge of the cliff like haphazard congregations of white birds. Nothing seemed to dry in the cabin, certainly not the hand-woven sheets of their bed, where Thomas and Monty huddled close together at night trying to keep warm, too cold and damp for it to be romantic. The cabin was very basic, with a small electric heater that barely functioned, an indoor well for water, and no stove. They had no need to cook, however, since the island’s tiny restaurants were cheap and the seafood and vegetables, fresh and delicious. In the evenings they would sit in a bar that occupied a small dark cave on the side of the cliff, where they drank copious amounts of local wines, ouzo and a tangy citrus liqueur called Kitron, a specialty from the nearby island of Naxos.

One day their landlord introduced them to another of his renters, an archaeologist from Athens who was spending the winter on the island. He was there to lead the excavations of what would turn out to be one of the major finds of the century, a complete Minoan town buried by pumice in the great Bronze-age volcanic explosion. He invited the Americans to tour the dig and drove them in a small jeep to an isolated site called Akrotiri, near the far end of the island’s outward-facing flat-sloping side. The site was marked by two aluminum sheds covering the excavation. Following closely behind the man, they crawled through the entry into a tunnel leading downwards to an open space, where they could see the dimly lit remains of the corner of a house, at the crossroads of what seemed to be streets or lanes.

“Do you see these channels?” the archaeologist asked, pointing to two narrow grooves running along the ground. “These supplied water to the buildings, even hot water, geothermal water. No water piping older than these has ever been found.

“And over there,” he said, pointing to a spot toward the bottom of a wall of dirt and pumice, “we think there’s a palace buried.” (A year later Time magazine featured the first photographs of spectacular frescoes uncovered at the remains, depicting blue monkeys and youths boxing.)

From the excavation site Thomas and Monty hiked up to the top of a steep hill to see the remains of a Hellenistic city, which turned out to be of little interest after the exhilarating experience of seeing a freshly revealed, far more ancient site. A heavily whiskered wiry man, communicating mostly through gestures, told them how to get directly to where they were staying by walking along the top of the hills. “Two, three cigarettes, maybe,” he ventured, when they asked him how long it would take.

More like ten or twenty, they figured as they slowly made their way over rocky bluffs, the sky darkening, the wind picking up. A heavy fog rapidly fingered over the hills, obscuring the landscape. Through the damp dark mist they could just make out a black horse wandering on its own, half wild, half mad. As they walked further, a sinister periodic beep, faint at first, grew louder and more menacing. By now they had lost confidence in the directions they’d been given and concluded they were utterly lost. Suddenly, out of the fog, they came face up to a high barbed-wire fence with sharp spikes running along the top. The fog cleared enough to reveal a radar station, evidently the source of the beeping. The station’s militaristic aura added to the chill of the darkening evening. Perhaps it was a NATO outpost, spying on Eastern Europe, symbolic of the West’s complicit support of the military junta.

“Why did we come this way?” moaned Monty.

“It was your idea,” Thomas reminded him. “I suggested we go back down the hill and call for a taxi.”

“I wanted to see more of the island.”

“Yeah, just like you wanted to see Sarajevo.”

But Thomas hadn’t pushed for the more reasonable alternative. He’d gotten used to giving in to the younger man’s whims. It was easier than bickering. Thomas hated bickering. The two rarely argued, though Monty would sometimes lose his patience and swear at his lover. “Shit,” he’d sometimes cry out when he felt frustrated, just as his father had when he was exasperated by a tool’s breaking or by the briquettes on the barbecue failing to light or by any of life’s many other little disappointments. “Fuck you,” Monty would occasionally burst out, and then apologize and back off, fearful his temper might alienate Thomas. Most of the time the younger partner got his way just by badgering. As a child he’d fine-honed the art of pestering, learning that he could get what he wanted – a toy, drama lessons, a new car – by playing one parent off against the other, working on his more pliant father first, getting him to go along, and then laying it out to his more frugal mother.

This required Monty to suppress his otherwise impulsive and impatient nature. He hated delays of any kind: waiting to leave the house to go somewhere or waiting for things to get done. And so what most irritated him about his lover was waiting for him. Thomas habitually took his time, whether meticulously shaving in the morning or carefully selecting postcards from a rack in a tourist shop. Monty would pace nervously back and forth, anxious to go. It was almost as if the older man knew how much it irritated the younger one, as if it was his only way to get back at Monty for being so domineering. Monty would brood over these irritations for hours, hearing endless circular dialogues in which he would deluge Thomas with the illogic of his ways.

GO TO PART 5

© G S Sirotnik 2010. All rights reserved.