The Road to Ithaca by Ben Pastor

Author:Ben Pastor
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
ISBN: 9781908524812
Publisher: Bitter Lemon Press
Published: 2017-02-13T00:00:00+00:00

5 June, south-west of Týlissos village, in a spot marked as Chorafi on my map. Noon. We halt for a bite and to get away from the brutal heat.

Thus far, three old people in and around Týlissos have given me a foretaste of what I’m likely to be up against: two of them locked themselves in their huts and there was no luring them out again; the third, who must have been already grey-haired when the Turks lost Crete to Greece, said he’s heard and seen nothing, and would have me believe he doesn’t know the island has fallen to us. There’s no calling them koumpares, either, a sort of endearment they got from the Italians, which means “godfather”, short as I understand it of addressing them as mou derphé, “brother”, which however Miss Allen couldn’t use with them – and they’d laugh if I tried it. I hope to do better the further we get away from the coast, to isolated farms and villages where travellers still receive some hospitality. Maybe. Goatherds on ridges, the moment they catch sight of us, run off, followed by their devil-headed animals with bells around their necks.

I don’t think these peasants have changed much ever since Grandfather was here. One of them at least must have been a young man then. They hate the Turks and they dress like Turks, wear Turkish moustaches and guard their women like Turks. Frances Allen married into folks such as these, letting go of whatever she’d been before. I bet she’d have been a nurse in the Great War, were she five years older. You wonder how Sidheraki proposed to her. While digging for antiquities, leaning on a spade in the hot sun, or sitting by the fire in the evening. I bet she proposed to him. Yes, she’d laid her eyes on him; decided she’d have him. She did all the thinking, all the wooing, and he just said yes. His sisters, if he has any, don’t like her. His mother hates her, calls God’s curse upon her. Gloats and at the same time weeps over the fact that they have no children. Well, Father doesn’t like Dikta either. Nina is too tactful to say. Only Grandmother Ashworth-Douglas is firmly on Dikta’s side, although she puts it in a quizzical way: “She’s exactly what you need at this time.” Grandfather on the other hand declares her the most beautiful girl in Leipzig.

Frances Allen doesn’t smile at those she meets; married women don’t play coy with men. To me, she’s still giving the cold shoulder. She replies telegraphically to a direct question, keeping mum the rest of the time. She might think it annoys me (it doesn’t; I’m indifferent to her moods), and since I am myself rather taciturn, we walk and hike hardly exchanging a word. My stepfather is loud, like most men of his class and profession (Peter takes after him); I’m like Nina, who seldom raises her voice – or needs to.

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