Aetherial Worlds

Faraway Lands ^{A letter from Crete to a friend in Moscow}

Green clouds, the foul air of the fatherland, and especially its heart—Moscow—are behind us, and so here we are, giddy with joy and from lack of sleep, drinking ice-cold white wine and looking out at the sparkling desert of the sea, not caring to know anyone below Odysseus. And here is one, bringing us fried fish and tzatziki, as well as some horta (boiled bitter greens, in case someone forgot what horta are), and the pearly gates are once again open to us for two weeks. Perhaps we didn’t sin all that much in the previous year.

The role of gatekeeper this time was played by Aegean Airlines, which sold us tickets for a laughably small sum but omitted a caveat, and of course there was one. The night before our departure we got an email: Your flight is not tomorrow afternoon as you had hoped, dear passenger, but at six in the morning. And you’ll have a twelve-hour layover in Athens, with nowhere to lay your sleep-deprived head. Nothing to be done but sorrowfully sprinkle that head with ashes, throw some stuff into our suitcase, and race to the airport at three in the morning.

But somewhere along the way the Creator had mercy on us, and in Athens we were able to rebook our tickets for an earlier flight to Heraklion; not only did our luggage arrive safely, but we even got the rental car we’d reserved, although, as we arrived earlier than expected, the car wasn’t ready and there were still spiderwebs on the back seat, a visual manifestation of the ongoing European economic crisis.

The crisis was also evident at familiar places and store counters. The paucity of choices at the supermarket, the joy of the greengrocer on seeing us—he almost kissed me, touched by my repeat custom, and I left his shop weighed down by bags full of vegetables and oranges for only three and a half euros in total.

Our hotel was half empty: a handful of mothers with children under ten. Maybe the season hadn’t really started yet, but in years prior it was difficult to find a table with the view of wisteria. (Or was it jasmine? Palm trees? Rhododendron? Our friend Pasha would be appalled at my ignorance if he ever sobered up.) But now you can sit and peck at your paltry complimentary breakfast wherever you want: for instance, they rationed only one thinly sliced cucumber per meal. That is, one cucumber for all the hotel’s guests. Cross my heart. Fortunately, I had brought my own for dieting purposes, at a cost of seven or eight euro cents; and besides, I didn’t want to pilfer the provisions of the owners—stingy Stavros and his German wife. They also didn’t set out any boiled eggs—what if no one ate them?—but if you asked, they obliged. I got a whole egg, and had I asked for two, I would have gotten two: Come quick, dear friend, this is a land of plenty. “Live your myth in Greece.”

I’m sticking to my self-imposed Ramadan by eating canned turkey at night; I loathe it, and this particular brand has an unnatural look to it: petal-like pieces in some sort of preservative brine. But at least it’s not pork or garlicky salami, which we used to gorge on in our more zaftig days. There aren’t any Greek strawberries in the markets, they must all have gone to the markets of Moscow. Would a Frenchman eat truffles in lean times? No, he would sell them to a rich oil sheik instead.

Yesterday we went to a seafood place and ordered a whole platter of various fried fish. Twenty-nine euros for two, everything fresh out of the wine-dark sea. There were two sea breams, mother and daughter; a piece of swordfish; some sardines, which by default smelled of their wood-smoked fate; two unidentified fish; and a few giant prawns. All this was drizzled with lemon and delicious homemade olive oil—so long, diet—and garnished with green salad leaves. Turns out greens are yummy if they are fresh picked and not as they’re served in the Fatherland. They’re meant to be crunchy and not to sluggishly wrap around your teeth. Oh, there was also a side dish, but we, as you’ll understand, had to abstain. The side dish was rice.

Yesterday’s dinner meditations compared the behavior and motivations of a Russian to those of a European. Here is a classic theme: the drinking man. European literature, cinema, and anecdotal observations all paint the same picture: a lonely middle-aged soul in a bar, drinking alone but with dignity (which sometimes excuses his bluish nose, blotchy cheeks, trembling hands, and ancient scarf) at a table or at the counter, solitarily looking into his glass; if he does raise his eyes, perhaps only looking wistfully and forlornly like Pierrot, he doesn’t stare, doesn’t catcall, doesn’t grab anyone’s ass. He drinks slowly, staying past last call. He is contemplating his loneliness, we surmise, the meaninglessness of existence, the impossibility of emotional attachment, and the passing of the more-or-less good ol’ days. My poor old mother, ma pauvre vielle mère, as well as the long-gone young lady in white bloom. If he has a dog, it’s also as old as the sea, and he’s sure to bring it, as the dog is always allowed. Imagine! A dog allowed in a bar! Because European canines don’t jump up on people, tearing their pants and humping their leg—no, they lie under the table with toothless dignity and sightless wisdom, mirroring their owner’s quiet heartache. One of the best stories about this is Hemingway’s “A Clean Well-Lighted Place”—although there is no dog, the solitude is total and complete.

My sister was right in observing that the female hypostasis of the lonely European is a lady over forty, often bitter, having coffee and a dessert alone in a pastry shop at lunchtime. Inescapable sadness in her eyes: her feminine charms are no longer in demand, there has been no happiness, or perhaps, having deceived, it drained away like water through a sieve, and there lies ahead an endless desert, where even an encounter with a camel’s prickly thorn is not guaranteed. We saw one woman just like this in Baden-Baden, in a pastry shop where we stopped for apple pie (with the shyness and audacity of a horny teenager at a brothel). She was sitting by the window—a plate with the ruins of a mille-feuille beside her—looking out into nothingness with such intensity that she was burning through all the oxygen in her line of sight. We saw another one like that in Florence—she was drinking espresso at a table outside in the square, that is, smack in the middle of the biggest crowds, the maze of flower beds, under the shining sun, in the midst of the vortex.

The Baden-Baden lady was hopelessly unattractive, and her heart couldn’t soar over this wall of unsightliness, barrenness, and social leprosy. And as it couldn’t soar above it, neither could anyone make their way through it, even if they tried. The Florence lady was not young—over sixty, but still capable of traveling solo. Varicose veins hadn’t yet carved up her legs, her nose hadn’t yet turned into a strawberry from a daily drinking habit; still, she was separated from this sunny world by her age, which she visibly hated and cursed, and in hating her age, she raged against the sunny world around her.

Sure, we might observe and ponder why a lonely woman is more likely bitter while a lonely man is more likely sad, although it’s pretty simple, really: an unwanted man is a buyer with no money, and an unwanted woman is a seller with empty shelves. That’s how, seemingly, the theme of the European financial crisis comes full circle.

Although we shouldn’t jump to any conclusions.

Meanwhile—as you rightly know—a Russian man who is lonely and sad in a bar is unimaginable. Upon entering any establishment for the purpose of drinking, he immediately seeks out company, instantly infiltrates it, and, without delay, forges a quick, if shaky and dangerous, friendship while stepping on everyone’s toes and violating personal boundaries that his drinking buddies didn’t even suspect existed.

If a group of men are drinking, he’ll plop down next to them, uninvited, instantly “logging in,” so to speak, with widely accepted passwords: “This is some game, huh?” or “Those Sauerkrauts don’t know shit from clay.” And bam, he’s already found like-minded countrymen; bam, he’s entered a vague financial relationship fraught with catastrophe, such as “This round’s on me!” thus uncovering a snaky path to a snafu to be followed by fisticuffs. If there are ladies drinking, he’ll rush to them—the outcomes are obvious if diverse. Police reports usually detail only the fallout, the crowning glories of these encounters: perpetrator was drinking, got acquainted, continued party at new acquaintance’s apartment (or park, or basement), started an argument, assaulted victim (new friend / lady friend) with a wooden stool (or kitchen knife, ax, etc.). But the intentions, the intentions were perfectly openhearted and pure.

You can’t escape a lonely Russian on a beach: he doesn’t hide behind a distant boulder, as a European would, but instead unrolls his beach towel overlapping yours, and upon hearing Russian spoken proceeds with a tactless line of questioning. Thank God for iPods: these days everyone is wearing headphones, but just think, a mere ten years ago they used to bring boom boxes to the beach, NSYNCing for all to hear.

Russian women, as you and I have often discussed, love to flock together. The stereotypical picture of old ladies congregating on a bench by their building’s entrance is improbable in Europe—I mean real Europe, Western Europe. Not sure about Eastern Europe, but didn’t see it there, either. In Greek villages, however, you have solitary old ladies in black sitting solemnly and wordlessly on folding chairs by their open front doors, red chintz curtains drawn. Only once, in the magical village of Margarites, did I see a group of such ladies in black quietly talking, and they, upon seeing me, a stranger, fell silent. Greek men, by contrast, are forever and routinely congregating; they drink coffee outdoors, fingering their worry beads and talking about women, soccer, high prices, and politics. More precisely, they begin with politics, and only then move on to the rest. They people watch with lively interest, and so outdoor cafés by bus stops are especially popular: folks get on the bus and they get off the bus; this provides endless entertainment.

Today there was a German family at dinner: mother and father and two boys aged around eight and ten. All four of them ate and drank in complete silence—it made me want to reach out and turn up the volume. On their faces—I looked at them closely—was good-natured indifference, and in twenty minutes of chewing nothing transpired: no remarks, no smiles, no jokes. At some point one of the boys reached over and seemingly pinched the other, but I rejoiced for naught: there was no reaction. And soon, silently and synchronously, they got up and left.

I couldn’t help thinking: Fifty years from now, when their parents are gone and those boys are old themselves, everything good already behind them, they will go to sit alone at separate bars, somber drink in hand, among other dignified, lonely old gents, each of them honoring the great European tradition of respect for other people’s privacy, staying mute till his very last breath.

Oh, the life they could have had—fighting with their neighbors, banging on the radiator with a stick, writing querulous petitions to the courts, spoiling the fun of youngsters, imposing themselves on others with recollections of battles in Königsberg, and enjoying other debauched behavior.

No, if for some reason I were forced to choose—“Are you with us or with them?”—I would, after protesting, resisting, and throwing a tantrum, still choose our boorish yet warm, loquacious, and insufferable way of going through life, if only to avoid the polite, dreadful, and deafening silence.

Bought a local Russian-language newspaper. From the classifieds:

Many, many moons ago—twenty-five, to be precise—I first came to Crete and lived on the outskirts of the town of Rethymno. Back then, Rethymno was small, its border right by the old university. Past there were ditches and gullies, the rattling of a backhoe digging the foundations of future buildings, which now stretch out for fifteen kilometers from that very spot.

Basically, everything was still fresh, young, and untouched. The roads on Crete were impassable; some were simply dirt roads, and I enjoyed taking off my sandals and walking on the cooling evening dust that felt like flour. Nowadays, asphalt is everywhere and it’s easy to drive places, but not just for me—and that’s the problem. These disgustingly convenient highways were built straight through magnificent and mysterious mountains full of birds and trees; there are no more trees and no more birds there, only heaps of red stone in the whistling wind.

So there I was, on the Island of Crete for the first time, sitting at a restaurant in the harbor, right on the water, people watching. The restaurants there were crap—tourist traps with frozen fish and jacked-up prices—but there was one authentic spot, low-key and right under your nose. Everything was homemade and done right, the giveaway being that Greeks ate there. The tablecloths were blue gingham, and you could crumble bread straight into the sea to feed the fish without leaving your table as the sun shone down.

About ten feet away from me, in one of the tourist traps, there was a Swedish woman—around thirty-five, orange hair brushed straight up, T-shirt with no bra the way they like it in Scandinavia—surrounded by three Vikings of enviable height and heroic good looks: rosy cheeks, golden locks, and piercing blue eyes. All four of them were three sheets to the wind, very jolly, most noticeably the woman, who was laughing loudly with her mouth open wide. You couldn’t miss her.

A quarter century passed and the Crete of yesterday, so inviting in its pristine remoteness, bucolic and patriarchal, had faded and surrendered to cement hotels and boardinghouses. Its distant outskirts, where summits once afforded mind-blowing vistas of sparkling seas and uninhabited shores, were now dotted with greenhouses and covered in abominable white film, all to grow tomatoes, say, for the visitors of those cheerfully painted cement hotels and boardinghouses.

And no longer did you feel like getting behind the wheel and driving farther, farther, farther, because in the distance, there, too, were asphalt and white film and convenience. The joy of these wild expanses that I got to experience was gone forever.

And so, twenty-five years on, I am once again sitting at a homey restaurant in the small harbor of Rethymno, my elbows resting on that blue-checkered tablecloth. Maria, the proprietress—now long in the tooth—is making her way toward me with my meal while I, as usual, deliberate the relative merits of driving drunk. But how can one not drink with dinner? And then from the table next to me comes this loud, drunken, mouth-wide-open laugh. I turn around—my God!

Thinning orange hair brushed straight up, peeling skin, T-shirt worn over a bra-less wrinkly body, leg in a cast sticking out like a bazooka, arm wrapped in some bandages—it’s that very same Swedish woman, now in a wheelchair! Surrounded by the very same three Vikings, now slouchy and ruddy-faced, the remnants of golden locks blowing in the wind, eyes faded almost to white.

All of them shit-faced, all of them laughing hysterically; one is plagued by a smoker’s cough, he’s waving his arm—“Enough!”—which only makes the rest howl louder with jolly boozy laughter, and she, that faded carrot-haired beauty, the loudest and jolliest of them all.

And the sight of these invincible people filled my heart with awe and my eyes with tears.

The blood feuds here are like those of Sardinia. You visit some tiny mountain village in the year 2000 and then, ten years later, you read in the latest travel guide: they all perished, killed in a standoff. Toward the end of that standoff, the police came, surrounded the house where the shooter was hiding. They yelled into a megaphone: That’s it, Cousin Manolis, surrender! And he yelled back: This is none of your business, let me just shoot the last one and I’ll come out myself. How do you not respect that? They are all related down here.

We know one such family. About fifteen years ago we used to frequent a taverna run by Yorgos, a young man of uncommon good looks. If you’ve ever seen those preclassical kouros sculptures—that’s Yorgos: tall, heavy hipped, with an inscrutable Mona Lisa smile that isn’t really a smile but a natural crease of the mouth, for Yorgos was never amused. His eyes were also preclassical, Mycenaean, wrapping around his face like a pair of sunglasses and aiming somewhere behind his ears; their color was pale grape, perfect for staring blankly into the distance.

He was the son of the proprietor of the taverna, as I say, and as it was customary here, the entire family—all ten—toiled away during the high season from dusk till midnight: they bought, they brought, they peeled, they chopped, they served, they cleared. And everything was cooked by one immortal granny; well, there were two dark-haired short ladies helping in the 100+ degree kitchen, but the chef was Granny, all in black and shaped like a question mark. She’s still toiling away there, fifteen years later.

So here is Yorgos, balancing on one tanned arm six oval plates of seafood and potatoes, the wine and six glasses held in his other tanned arm—the sun is setting, everything is bathed in golden light. The Germans already had ordered their Schweinekotelett and Mythos beer. Paradise. With his pale eyes, Yorgos is looking out over the German heads and ours—always above the tourists’ heads—his eyes glancing over the mountains, the rooftops, the balconies and treetops.

“Sit with us, Yorgos, have a drink!” we say; we have known him for a long time. Or we think we know him.

Yorgos sits.

“The world is full of evil,” says he.

“Sure, that’s true,” we respond lightheartedly. “But the weather is delightful.”

And then it all comes pouring out. Yorgos is first in line; someday a bullet will come for him. Or not. It might be a knife. They are from a mountain village about twenty miles from here up a small green road. (We’ve driven past it, by the way, there was nothing sinister. A mini-mart, ice cream kiosks, gas station.) But in the nineteenth century, somebody stole somebody’s sheep. The victim’s honor was insulted: A sheep? Rustled from me? And so he stole two back. The initial offender was outraged in turn. Soon somebody’s second cousin once removed was, well, removed. So it was necessary to retaliate by killing that clan’s next in line, a daydreaming sixteen-year-old boy: you snooze, you lose. And so it went. Yorgos’s family ran away from the village to the shore, a little safer there, no one is going to just start shooting in a crowd full of tourists, that’s not manly, completely out of the question, the most important thing here is honor! But when the crowds have dissipated, then maybe.

Yorgos wanted to major in architecture and got into some European university. But his father yanked him away from his studies come peak season: You need to work, there are hordes of tourists coming. You can go back in the fall. Father spoke, son obeyed: from April till the end of October, Yorgos carried, stacked on his beautiful tanned arms, platters of tourist feed. “My heart’s in the Highlands, wherever I go.” They have a good restaurant. It was the best in the area. Year after year, the money flowed.

By November, visions of architecture fade: you close your eyes and Schweinekotelett is all you see. No impetus even to try. So he makes his way to Switzerland, to Germany where he spends lavishly, skis, frequents casinos. They could kill him there, too, of course, and there is no knowing who the killer might be.

His brother is also a target. His sister is married and living in a neighboring village; they wouldn’t kill her, that’s bad form. By killing a woman, you lower yourself, losing your place at the top of the social hierarchy. Same for old people. The best is to kill a killer, but, failing that, killing a young man before he’s had a chance to father any future avengers.

And so Yorgos and his brother look out into the distance, scanning the mountaintops with their pale Mycenaean eyes.

“We never tell the truth about where we’re going and when. If we need to leave at noon on Monday, we always say that we’re leaving at two p.m. on Wednesday. We never know who’s listening. Never know who might come. Never know how long we’ll live. The world is full of evil.”

All Cretans are liars, it’s said. Maybe that’s why? He got up and left: too much work to do. Can’t leave him a tip; he’s the owner, not simply a waiter. The Germans don’t know, they tip. But are Sauerkrauts people?

Blood feuds are studied from every angle as a particular type of ancient institution that supports the clan structure of society and as a post-traumatic reaction—this leaves a wide berth for all things Freudian. There is something called “afterwardsness”; those who are interested can delve further. Wherever the concept of honor exists, so does the concept of insult. Where there is insult, there is revenge, spilled blood and the avenging of said honor. It’s not only sheep that can trigger a conflict—it could be a woman, or disrespectful speech, or a disrespectful glance, even. “Sing, Goddess, sing of the rage of Achilles, son of Peleus.” Rage—өυμός—is a typically Greek quality. It’s as if it is stored somewhere deep inside, kept fresh forever.

An example: A man gets killed and is survived by his wife and baby. The wife hides his bloodied clothes in a dower chest; throughout his childhood the boy keeps asking: Where is my father? “You’ll know when you grow up.” When he finally does, his mother hands him clothes caked with blood. He puts them on and goes out looking for vengeance.

Or another: In 1987, a shepherd killed a hospital orderly he encountered at random. They were chatting, and the orderly, for some reason, shared that a long time ago, his distant relative killed a man with this or that last name. The shepherd realized that the victim in question was his uncle. The orderly’s last name was the same as that of his uncle’s killer. That meant they were related, and that meant the blood feud applied. “Suddenly, blood rushed to my head, my brain was cloudy, I just knew I had to kill him.” Astonishingly, this shepherd was born twenty-two years after his uncle was murdered.

I went to see Yorgos this week, too. He’s still alive. His face puffy, his eyes paler than ever, habitually scanning the balconies and rooftops. He looked at me with indifference.

“Yorgos,” I said. “You don’t recognize me?”

“I do.”

He set my food in front of me and walked away. Not being dangerous, I was of no interest to him whatsoever.

In Greek villages you always find: white walls, blue doors, and a grim-faced old lady sitting on a rickety stool, looking out, possibly at you or possibly into the obscure depths of a life lived. She’ll be wearing a black dress, or a black top and skirt—hard to tell; her head will be covered in a black scarf, her wizened black-stockinged legs set wide apart for stability. She will also be leaning on something: a walking stick or a shepherd’s staff.

That must be the tradition. How many centuries have they been sitting like that? And at what age are they expected to exchange their colorful clothes for full-body black, forever abandoning femininity and full living?

At first I thought that this was prolonged widowhood, transformed into death during life. But no, these grannies often coexist with layabout husbands who never sit by the door but spend their days hanging out at the café in the town square with other slacker grandpas. Pale azure short-sleeved shirts, beige trousers (washed and ironed by the grannies in black), thick heads of hair—old Greeks rarely go bald. Some even proudly sport fancy mustaches. Worry beads—hands need to keep busy somehow. Cigarettes and tiny cups of very sweet coffee are de rigueur.

The grandpas in beige congregate at café tables in the shade of a tree—there is always a tree in a town square—where they discuss local, as well as world, politics. With lively curiosity they observe people getting off buses—at every village a bus stops twice a day, dropping off new, interesting, bewildered foreigners and their women. A few of the foreigners ask for directions, and the grandpas oblige with dignity, slowly gesturing with their hand: Go this way, then that way, and then turn there. They follow the clueless tourists with a stern gaze, and then it’s back to world political machinations and ogling women.

The ladies in black don’t discuss anything, they simply sit there. What’s to discuss, right? Gave birth, cooked, did laundry, waited, loved, cried, condemned, forgave, didn’t forgive, hated, harvested olives from a black mesh laid under the trees, bade farewell, buried, mourned, and then again cooked, washed dishes, and returned them to the shelf.

What’s to discuss?