The Golden Step (21 page)

Next day I made north-west at a good lick across the narrow western waist of Crete, leaving the Libyan Sea and the south coast behind me as I set off, and topping a rise within a mile or so to see the Cretan Sea ahead in the Gulf of Amirou on the north coast of the island. Over the grey wall of the Lefka Ori foothills to the west peered the conical crests of the highest White Mountains, still blanketed with snow. They seemed to have marched very close all of a sudden. Whether I was going to be able to make a direct crossing through the High Desert heartland of the White Mountains, or whether I would be obliged to take the south coast route with its great gorges, was not really up to me. In the end it would be the Clerk of the Weather who would give the high-level route the thumbs up or down. Having seen the sink holes on Psiloritis, I knew the heights of Lefka Ori would be impassable under any kind of snow blanket. I needed sun, lots of hot summery sunshine in the next few days, to melt that late-lying snow. It was just a question of wait and see.

In the month since I set off from Kato Zakros the thistles, poppies and mulleins had all flowered. The roadsides were a madman's palette of splashed and spattered colours. Down in the tree-hung village of Moundros I got directions from a kafenion owner. See that old kalderimi? Down there, past that black and yellow sign, says
epsilon tessera
on it – that'll tell you you're on the right track. Then you just kind of follow the valley to the north, due north, all the way to Argyroupolis – OK?

Hello again, E4. Side by side my inconstant lover and I descended the cobbled pathway and made our way through olive groves and stands of cypress into a gorge. Marked on the map? No. The track rose to run through the ruins of a deserted village high on the hillside, then passed a nice bold yellow and black waymark on a boulder and continued its climb as a well-engineered, carefully walled kalderimi. An hour later and 500 feet higher, I pulled out the compass. I was heading due south. Too disillusioned even to curse, I retraced my steps back into the ruined village.

Just beyond, the track split into two identical paths. One up, one down, neither going north. The map, for what it was worth, showed the path dipping shortly to cross a river. I ventured fifteen minutes along the down track. No signs, no river. Back to the fork. Up the left track for fifteen minutes. No signs, no river, and no northward trend. Not a sound among the trees. I stopped, and could feel my heart beating heavy with rage. Back to Moundros and face a three-hour slog along the tarmac, with Argyroupolis, the City of Silver, a mile away at most? A month ago, confronting the same kind of obstacle at Vori, I'd lacked the confidence to grit my teeth and go for it. Now, with 200 miles and plenty of bumps and bruises, inside and out, under my belt, I was absolutely damned if I was going to go all the way back to Moundros with my tail between my legs. I carried on down the up track, and smacked the first E4 sign I came to so hard I thought I'd cracked my katsouna. It was just as well I hadn't, because round the corner, just where the track swung decisively north and sloped towards a water splash, an oil-barrel dog kennel blocked the way.

I had given myself many a talking-to about my Cretan dog phobia. Generally speaking, I love dogs, and they get along pretty well with me. That was the funny thing. No matter how much I tried to reason with myself, no matter how many times I told myself that no packs of rabid hounds roamed the Cretan mountains, somewhere in my psychological backpack the worry drumbeat on. By this stage of the walk I'd got a fairly clear idea that it had nothing to do with reason; that the dogs were just four-legged, fang-baring middle-aged anxieties, running loose in my head but nowhere else. I wrote a poem to expel them and to chide my inner coward, and tried to think of something else.

Cretan dogs – the real ones – have a bloody time of it. I'd grown used to seeing them roped short to iron stakes in the full sun, or chained like this one into a makeshift kennel, usually an old metal barrel guaranteed to become an oven in summer, a fridge in winter. Sympathy for their plight as a race, however, wasn't going to get me past this particular cur. I took a firm grip of the katsouna and sidled up level with the barrel. Diogenes looked to be fast asleep. He also looked to be a cross between an Alsatian and a timber wolf – the dog, in fact, of my pre-adventure nightmares. I took a step forward. Like a flash he was out and at the end of his rattling chain, snarling like a lion and doing that terrifying dog thing that involves twisting blue-black lips back into a wrinkled muzzle, exposing shocking pink gums studded with far too many yellow teeth. Those teeth snapped together, so close to my leg that they made an incision in the knee of my trousers as neat as any surgeon could have managed. I said a bad word, lashed out with the katsouna and jumped back ten feet – or that's what it felt like. Diogenes stayed hackling in the middle of the path for a minute or so. Then he slunk back into his oven and collapsed again with nose on paws, still grumbling, keeping both ears pricked and both eyes fixed on me.

I pulled up my torn trouser leg, but the yellow teeth had missed me by – quite literally – a whisker. I waited till the shock waves subsided, then inched forward once more. The head came up, the lips flickered, and the growling changed gear like a motorbike meeting the open road. I stepped back. Christ! What now? Then I remembered the slices of paximadia, dried rusk bread, in my pack, left over from today's picnic lunch. Cretan guard dogs don't exactly live off the fat of the land. I got a rusk out and threw it to Diogenes. It didn't bounce twice. Problem solved. I won't say he licked my hand as I passed, but there was no more of that lip business, and the drooping tail gave the ghost of a wag.

Argyroupolis, the City of Silver, is one of the most charming spots in Crete, a handsome little town among the mountains, perched on a hilltop above a valley shaded by big sweet chestnut and plane trees where springs of water come gushing and tumbling by the dozen out of ferny clefts in the rocks. The water is the liquid treasure of the City of Silver – it supplies the whole of the town of Rethymnon, and has spawned a clutch of tavernas around the sources, which have used the waterfalls for scenic effect with spillways, sluices and cascades. A steep zigzag path, lit by muted lamps by night, connects the upper town with its springs, and the whole effect is of one of those ‘Little Switzerland' resorts at the height of some Victorian heyday. Yet you need only a glance around the town to see relics of a far more glorious Venetian past. Along the narrow streets one spots handsome doorways with beautifully carved capitals, fluted columns and elaborately bevelled pediments, some opening onto ancient vaulted interiors, others into wastelands of weeds. One carried the fading inscription ‘Omnia Mundi Fumus Et V…' (‘…mbra' was missing) – ‘All this world is but smoke and mirrors'.

Nowadays it is Stelios ‘Steve' Manousakas who makes things hum in Argyroupolis. Stelios is an archetype of a very particular kind of modern Cretan – a self-made man who lived away for years in Canada, making money in the restaurant business, and has come back to Argyroupolis with his French-Canadian wife Joanne and a nice wad of money to inject some pep and some prosperity into his home town. An ex-mayor of the place, a proprietor of tourist shops, restaurants and tavernas all over town, he can fix anything for anybody. Needless to say he, too, is a friend of Charis Kakoulakis. ‘In Argyroupolis, Christopher, you will see Mr Manousakas and say that you are my friend. You will have no problems in Argyroupolis.'

Indeed the only problem I encountered in the bustling little town was finding a time when Stelios Manousakas could make himself available for a chat. ‘Ten minutes, please, at my shop, OK?' In the event, of course, we sat in the archway outside his tourist shop for three hours, absorbed completely in our talk, while business went on all round us. The returned exile and successful entrepreneur could detail just what was needed for his little town – and by extension, for every town in Crete. Drive, imagination, an ability to see the bigger picture, a willingness to grasp those small opportunities for investment – classy little tourist shops selling soaps and perfumes made locally, decent rent rooms done out the traditional way but with proper mod cons, computers for the use of youngsters with a good idea. ‘But many of us don't want to see that, or can't see that. It's kind of a problem all over the island; how do you get the brightest and the best to stay around and put their eggs into the Crete pot, rather than the Athens pot or the London pot? Or the Canada pot, come to that? And then they have to follow up the bright idea, make it really work. A lot of Crete isn't quite ready for that yet.'

The talk, as so often in Crete, turned to war – not the current NATO bombing of Yugoslavia, Stelios didn't want to open that subject, but the Second World War and how the Greeks felt about the British. Hitherto I'd heard nothing but expressions of brotherhood and mutual goodwill whenever the topic of the British and the war in Crete had been raised. Didn't you help us drive out the Germans? Weren't there many brave Englishmen fighting alongside our andartes? We are friends, you know! Good health to the British, and let's have another! Perhaps unwisely, I made reference to the old shepherd of the Nida plain and his pleasure at discovering, as he thought, that my father had been with the Cretan resistance. Stelios clearly had other ideas, and took pains to redraw the emotional map for me.

‘The English are not necessarily regarded as heroes because of the war, you know. The Germans certainly did bad things – for example, they destroyed Kallikratis, where you are going tomorrow. But it must be said that their message when they came was: Leave us alone, and we'll leave you alone. Many men joined the resistance, left their house and family, went to the mountains. Many suffered, many died.' Stelios spread his hands, palm up. ‘Then when the world war finished and the Greek civil war began, what happened? The English supported the Greek government, the King, all the forces of reaction. The Greeks saw some people who had collaborated with the Germans given positions of power, given influence and opportunities. ELAS, that was our pro-Communist party, it was defeated, and many good patriotic wartime andartes were killed or discredited. And the people saw the British supporting this. They remembered how at Yalta, Churchill had carved up the world with Stalin and Roosevelt, and Britain had taken Greece as part of its sphere of influence. Lots of Greeks didn't like that, and they didn't like the English very much.'

‘But what about Crete?' I said. ‘I've never heard a word of this anywhere I've been in the island.'

Stelios shrugged and stirred his coffee. ‘Here in Crete it was different. It always is! We didn't want to fight each other – we had only isolated incidents, somebody shot here or there. There wasn't the same bitter struggle. So maybe feelings against the British were not so strong, and maybe that's still true today. All I am saying is – if you really want to know Crete and the Cretans, you must be realistic and hear all sides. Don't expect to be treated with special friendliness when you come to Greece, just because you are British and we fought on the same side in the war.' He looked up under his brows. ‘This is real history I'm telling you, not some romantic bullshit. That's the way we felt, as Greeks.'

That evening, on kafenion TV in the town square, a reiteration by NATO of its five demands of Serbia – to stop the killing in Kosovo, to withdraw its forces, to accept a NATO-based international security force, to allow refugees to return, and to work towards a permanent political solution. The spokesman's harsh, intransigent, uncompromising American voice crackled out: ‘Mr Milosevic has only one exit strategy – to say to our five demands: yes, yes, yes, yes and yes.'

Leaving Argyroupolis shortly after dawn the following morning, a little sobered and subdued, I passed a number of deflated but still sheep-shaped hides, complete with fleece, skin, hanging blue sinews and blood streaks, laid limply over the roadside fences to dry. The road west ran through the shady Grigaris gorge towards Asi Gonia, home village of George Psychoundakis, the ‘Cretan Runner'. Psychoundakis's entire flock of sheep was stolen from him after the war, and he endured many vicissitudes, at one low point working as a navvy building the gorge road to raise the means of living for his family. It was during his work breaks, and during quiet periods at night in caves and shelters along this road, that his masterly account of his years in the resistance,
The Cretan Runner
, took shape. I looked around me, picturing the slight figure crouched scribbling by the flicker of an oil dip, as I walked on into the borders of Sfakia, that harshest, highest, least compromising and most macho of all the regions of Crete.

If the lowland country of eastern Crete is a ripe fig tree sheltering in a sunny garden, and the central upland a steadfast olive tree nurturing a rich harvest of fruit against the wind and weather, Sfakia in the south-west of the island is a grim and knotty old prinos in a dry crack of the mountains, tough, durable and prickly, carrying the threat of a sharp spike for any intruder. The aspect of Sfakia is rugged and hard, a bare south-facing coast cut with fearsome gorges that rises steeply out of the ink-blue Libyan Sea and climbs for 8,000 feet to a roof of pale, parched mountains. Nothing is easy. Fishing on the rocky coast is unpredictable, shepherding in the remote mountains fraught with hardship and danger. People have to grab what they can, when they can.