I crawled into my bed. Well, there, I am seventy. What do you expect? Sometimes, ideas of romance outlive the anatomy.
Sprawled on the bed in total darkness, I found cause to reflect – as everyone must do at some time or another – that life, which seems so full of opportunities, denies us too much, whatever we do or refrain from doing, or find ourselves incapable of doing.
Perhaps this is one of the reasons why we enjoy reading novels: there, in the secrecy of their pages, we find persons who defy life and do those things – grand, awful, delectable, or trivial – which we have denied ourselves, or have been denied. You don’t imagine that in a fiction I would have been unable to negotiate a balcony or two, do you?
It was when lying in bed that I began again to think about Agia Anna. It was curious to reflect that a rather vital episode in the life of the infant Jesus Christ seemed to have been edited out of the Gospels. Perhaps that censorship had been accomplished by prudes and religious bigots. There may be those who fear the female breast, as they fear the vagina, because of the lascivious thoughts they engender. Something of that nature may have accounted also for the flabby modesty of Agia Anna’s breast, as depicted in the mural.
I could not help smiling at such reflections. Alas, I lacked seriousness. How different it was for my hero, Archie Langstreet. How much more Archie was destined to achieve than I!
The monk in Langstreet’s car directed Langstreet into wild and deserted countryside. At a certain bend in the road, the Punto had to be abandoned. Langstreet and the monk proceeded on foot. They made their way down a narrow track, which ran between ancient olive trees; the branches of the trees on one side of the way met the branches of the trees on the other side. It was dark here; evening was approaching. Langstreet stumbled on a stone.
‘Who owns this lane?’ he asked his guide.
‘Fighting was all here,’ said the monk, with a sweeping gesture.
‘I asked you who owned the lane.’
‘Maybe is Family Paskateris. At the end of the twelfth century, Byzantine noblemen moved to Crete. They fight against the Venetians. Once was very rich, long ago but not now. Except one man, is now our mayor.’
They trudged on as the gloom intensified.
At last, the monk grunted and stopped. He heaved at a section of fencing that guarded the grove on their left. It fell away. Langstreet climbed through, to stand amid rank grass. The monk followed, replacing the fencing behind him.
He gestured ahead. ‘Here is a chapel, but is too near to darkness to see in a good way.’
They tramped among the trees, distorted into bizarre shapes by the extremes of old age. The gloom was pierced by a lingering ray of the setting sun which cut through a gap in the mountains nearby. Its smouldering light lit the front of a small stone building. The building was low and square, resembling a stable except for a bell set in its front facade.
The monk pushed at the door. It yielded grudgingly at his third heave. They entered with bowed shoulders.
A scent of incense, just a ghost of a trace of incense, reached Langstreet’s nostrils. Incense, mingled with damp and age and old stories. The monk shone a small pocket torch.
‘No, wait!’ The thin white beam destroyed the atmosphere. Langstreet went to the rear of the chapel. There was only a cubby-hole, no ikonostasis: clearly this family, Family Paskateris, had not been of the wealthiest. In the cubby-hole lay a few brown candles, slender as willow twigs, and a rather damp box of matches. Getting a match to strike, Langstreet lit the wick of a candle. Its frail glow warmed the preoccupied lines of his face, making of it an ikon in the surrounding gloom. He carried the candle back to where the monk stood.
‘Would you permit me to remain here alone for a moment, please?’ he asked.
‘I shall remain outside.’ As the monk opened the door, Langstreet had a glimpse of the thicket of olive trees, hieroglyphics of age as they slipped into darkness. The door shut. He was alone in the old chapel. He crossed himself.
No windows punctuated the rough stone walls of the building. Four cane-bottomed chairs huddled together in a corner, refugees from family congregations. There came to Langstreet’s mind the thought of his family’s fortunes, his parents arriving in England, a foreign land, his mother dying – that pain, still attendant on him – his father’s remarriage into a wealthy Scottish family, his own marriage to Kathi. That change of nationality a generation ago: it was brought about by the tides of history. This chapel must have represented security, piety, to a family facing the changing fortunes of time.
Langstreet was moved to kneel on a damp patch of carpet. Clasping his hands together, he uttered a short prayer.
‘Great Lord, I thank you that I have been able to emerge from the darkness of an evil history into the light of goodness, through your good guidance. Here in this humble place where you still dwell, I beseech you to remain with me while I endeavour still to make restitution for the past. And I pray that my dear wife may come to understand these things which I do in your name. Amen.’
Whoever the generations had been, worshipping here, they had certainly experienced no diminution in the desire of the outside world for olive oil. But slowly their means of processing and distribution had fallen behind the technological advances elsewhere. Now the olive-crushing machines in Kyriotisa – those old-fashioned engines Langstreet had briefly glimpsed in the town – supplied their oil to Italy, where it was bottled and sold as genuine Italian oil. There was no longer a name for the Kyriotisan olive oil which once had been praised in Constantinople.
Shading the candlelight from his eyes, Langstreet rose to his feet and gazed about him. He felt the brooding presence of God. The door had no lock on it. Thieves were unknown. But there was nothing worth stealing.
The light shone on the rough-hewn stone walls, some of which had been plastered. Here, an artist-monk of long ago had attempted some religious decoration. Perhaps at about the time the Fourth Crusade was wreaking havoc in Constantinople, a monk had set out on the journey to Christian Crete, glad enough to escape the chaos in his city. It was apparent at a glance that he had been a poor artist, perhaps the best the Paskaterises could afford. Nor were the rough walls conducive to fine art. However passable the results had been when fresh, the centuries had been about their slow work in destroying colour and form.
One painting in particular claimed Langstreet’s attention. It was formally headed Agia Anna and showed a woman suckling an infant. He took the candle closer, sheltering its flame with his hand.
The woman, St Anna, had had her eyes scratched out, the vandalism obliterating most of her face. The ugly child she was clutching sucked at a teat resembling an aubergine. It protruded from St Anna’s garments somewhere about the lower rib cage. It was clear that the artist, holy man that he must have been, had scant personal knowledge of a woman’s anatomy.
After gazing at the painting with reverence, Langstreet called in the monk, to ask him who St Anna was.
‘Anna is auntie of Jesus. The Blessed Virgin Mary, she dries up her milk, so she gives Baby Jesus to his auntie for suckle. Here you see him at the breast.’
‘The aunt of Jesus? I don’t understand. What is the evidence on which this painting is based? It seems sacrilegious. It’s not in the Gospels.’
