dominating the chapel were the ancient olive trees, designed, to judge by appearances, by the artist Arthur Rackham. Over the centuries, their girth had thickened, they had grown gnarly arms and hands stretching out to detain visitors, while their seamed bark had created distorted countenances, like hostile anthropophagi with faces in their stomachs. Year by year they must be creeping up on the building, I thought. This little chapel was never locked, not once in its eight centuries of existence. I stood by it. My shadow was on its wall, together with the pattern of shadows cast by the nearer olive trees. All that was real, tangible. Even my shadow was tangible, in a manner of speaking.
And I had to go and get an idea for another novel. I stood there, while a story unwound in my head.
I had travelled several hundreds of miles to reach this particular olive grove, outside the village of Kyriotisa. I simply stood there and the idea arrived from… wherever it is ideas come from. What the relationship was between the reality of my situation and the unravelling proto-fiction in my head, I leave as a mystery.
This is one of the central questions, as far as I am concerned, the question of consciousness, and why to certain tormented minds do ideas present themselves unbidden, like gifts, which have to be pursued? All I wanted on this holiday was a blank mind.
Instead, I had this obsession with storytelling. And I would write about a man whose obsession ruined him.
The novel that sprang upon me would take at least a year’s work, and then all that business with publishers, when really I wished to do nothing at all constructive. Maybe the odd screw here and there, if I was still capable of it, with some darling woman, and another helping of that amazing understanding men and women reach when locked together.
But it was a fruitful idea I had. I stood in the dappled shade, turning it over in my mind, while a lizard scuttled up an olive tree hand-carved by time. Its ancestors had probably lived in that tree in the days of the Paleologues.
‘Are you okay, Pop?’ Boris asked.
‘Just thinking …’
The novel, I knew at once, would have two protagonists: a contemporary man, a man of probity whose character would bring about his downfall, and a woman dead for two thousand years, whose legend was possibly false. He would be respectable, while she would be remembered only for her breasts.
Sex is not respectable. It is our last freedom, still untaxed.
Oh God, please not a novel with ideas. I can’t cope with ideas; the racecourse is more my territory. I’m old, too old to be intellectual. I’m due for retirement, if not the funny farm. It’s all I can do to hit the correct keys on my computer keyboard. When you are rapidly becoming impotent, a number of other inadequacies also kick into place.
However, if write another novel was what I was going to do, I had better get the starting point clear. I had better go back into the chapel and take a closer look at that painting.
The man who had led me to this particular olive grove, and this particular little chapel in the olive grove, reopened the chapel door for me. It was a low door, virtually a stable door. I’m a big chap. I had to bow low to enter. The threshold had probably been designed to induce humility.
The guide waited outside. He stood and smoked a cigarette.
Boris waited outside, ostentatiously patient. He dug his hands into his pockets and planted his right trainer on a stone, to stand there, leaning forward and whistling through his teeth. Boris had not acquired a taste for Crete’s Byzantine mysteries.
The daylight died almost as soon as it crept inside the chapel. The candle I had lit still burned on the small altar, in a little haze of darkness. My passion for the mysteries and intricacies of Byzantium awoke again. Of all the pasts of the world, it was the most alluringly rich and religious and corrupt. Its music began to play in my head: deep, masculine, monotonous.
I stood in a small room, maybe three metres by four. A cattle shed, little more – probably built by men who understood only cattle sheds. Rush-bottomed chairs clustered there, vacantly waiting. Having gathered for a chat about old times, they had found nothing to say. The chapel contained no ikonostasis; evidently the family who worshipped here were not the créme de la créme. Rather crude paintings adorned the wall, their holy images in blues and reds made indistinct through the erosion of neglect and the centuries. A smell of damp and aroma of candle, laced with the ghosts of incense.
This assemblage of reverend relics had remained imprisoned in this stone cell since the Paleologues ruled in Constantinople. A family of Kyriotisa had built the chapel, to worship here, generation by generation, until something untoward had happened. Wealth and prayer had failed them. Those remaining had gathered up their garments and had cleared off, perhaps to Hania to start a new life.
Without its congregation, their chapel had died, their olive trees had embraced the grotesque.
Modern me, I unholstered my Olympus camera, switching to flash. I focused on one particular painting, daubed on the irregular plaster.
The painting was of a woman nursing a child.
The woman’s eyes had been scratched out. In consequence, her face was almost obliterated. Mould and damp had destroyed other parts of the painting. Age had mottled the plaster like a living hand. The head of the babe the woman held could hardly be distinguished. Not that the Byzantine artist had ever been numbered among the masters of his calling. Nor had he, poor man, enjoyed an intimate knowledge of a woman’s anatomy. The breast the woman had produced for the babe’s nourishment was the size and shape of an aubergine, and protruded from her lower rib.
Above the painting the wording was clear: Agia Anna. Saint Anna.
Shutter clicked, flash briefly lit, like the flash of inspiration. And again. And once more, from a slightly different angle. Better get it right, chum. You’re not likely to come this way again.
Recollecting that time, as Boris and I walked back up the hill, I remember I was happy. It’s a curious thing about happiness, that, unlike misery, it frequently eludes our awareness at the time; only later can we say, perforce using the past tense, ‘I was happy then’. It is hard to determine if this is because for much of our lives we are experiencing frustration, disillusion, boredom, or even pain. We never get enough practice at recognising happiness when its wings brush our lives.
As Boris, the guide and I trudged up the stony way to the guide’s car, we were shaded by gnarled olive trees, themselves witnesses to centuries past. The guide informed me that the saint’s eyes had been scratched out by Turkish invaders. His tone was both confident and confidential. The eyes represented witnesses to the Christian church, which should not be allowed to gaze on the rituals of Islam.
I contradicted him. My argument was that the damage could have been more recent. It was too easy, in all lands which had been under Ottoman rule until after the turn of the century, to blame the Turks for everything. Maybe the Communists, or maybe the Nazis, who had occupied Crete in the early forties, had desecrated the image. Or what about the superstitious – those whose incipient blindness had moved them to scratch away the plaster of the saint’s pupils, dissolve it in water, and drink it?
My faith in all these ideas was not strong, being unsupported by evidence; or maybe I had presented the guide with too many alternatives. He continued to insist the damage had been done by the Turks. The Turks were somehow to blame for the awful poverty that had recently befallen this entire area.
And why should I challenge his beliefs? He lived by them. It was
