Year In The World Part 11

I kept those evenings to hold against days when my mind felt like a kerosene-soaked rag. Now I'll have these, too. The natural world saves me.

Everyone heads for the buses bound for the monastery where monks had to lower themselves in baskets from the sheer mountain. I get vertigo and claustrophobia just thinking of that, and Ed refuses to board a bus so soon after the long trek to Delphi. We are docked at Volos, close to where Jason and the Argonauts set sail. Dozens of cafes and fis.h.i.+ng boats line the harbor. One taverna displays fifty or so octopuses on a clothesline. Take your pick. At the dusty archaeological museum, we discover the grave stele with faint paintings revealing the faces of those long gone to more dust. And we see necklaces they wore, with wrought charms of inlaid sapphires, rubies, and etched-gold portraits. Back out in the heat, we decide to take a taxi to the village of (Makrynitsa), where thousand-year-old sycamore trees cast their immense shade over the plaza. They're as impressive as California redwoods. We visit the little Byzantine church. I'm used to lighting thin candles in churches by now, standing them up in sand. One for my aunt Mary, sick in Savannah. One, always, for my family. Protect them, please. One for all those I love, and one for the conviction I once had that red and yellow, black and white, Jesus loves all the little children of the world.

I buy a jar of pickled caper leaves, something I've never seen before. I'm tempted by dried foot-long stalks called "tea of the mountain," opaque dark honeys, dried mint, and oregano. Ed nudges me on. Working donkeys with men on sidesaddle plod up the hilly streets.

At a taverna under the trees, we skip the rabbit in sauce and the boiled goat, so heavy in the heat, and order instead spiced feta to spread on delicious rough bread, savory eggplant with tomatoes, and-because the platter at the next table lured us-fried potatoes, golden and light. A man at that table has finished his lunch, and his wife chats with people at adjacent tables. He takes out his komboloi and seems to go into another world. The plying of his gold beads sounds soft like water over rocks. He fingers his red "G.o.d" stone, then each bead, rubs the red one all around, and starts over, looping the whole circle around in his hand before he starts again.

Leaving-we sail at five-we find no taxi. Oh no, we're told, taxis only come here; try the next village, only two miles. We set off in the heat and after-lunch torpor-easy to write, but we're walking down an oven-roasted paved road in August, temperature easily over a hundred degrees, with steam coming up off the asphalt. Hot wind in the aspens sounds like waterfalls, but the stony streams are dry. We're winding slowly downhill, thank Zeus, to another village-where there is no taxi. My sandals rub blisters across all my toes. My heel is bleeding. Finally we get on a bus and slowly inch down to Volos again, getting off near the harbor and walking another mile to the s.h.i.+p.

Here, at sea, I am breathing cooled h.e.l.lenic air again. The gossamer breeze makes me want to say the word aeolian. The Milky Way strews a path of grated diamonds. Off the port side the coast rises, mysterious in shadowy outlines against the sky, and on the starboard, only swells breaking against the s.h.i.+p, swells that almost break. Out there somewhere a sh.e.l.l rides the foam, bearing Aphrodite covering her b.r.e.a.s.t.s with a handful of seaweed. Tonight the sea resembles s.h.i.+ny obsidian, the calm water a mirror, the mirror into which Ed's father looked in his last week on earth and said, Who is that, and why isn't he saying anything?

Inside they're always dancing to music that goes way, way back: "Night and day, you are the one," I sing along. "Listen to that, Eddie. You are the one."

Since distances are not far, the s.h.i.+p zigzags to fill the allotted days. At Rhodes we hit the full tourist impact. Although we skip breakfast and disembark early, the streets are a human avalanche; you could be crushed. We decide to return to the s.h.i.+p and come back someday to Rhodes, perhaps some rainy February. As we retrace our steps, we see one of the gentlemen hosts sitting on the curb drinking a beer and looking dejected.

We cross to the Turkish coast and moor at Kusadasi. Back on a bus, we're en route to Ephesus, zooming past figs along the road, peach and orange orchards, and broken columns and carved blocks scattered along the way as though unremarkable. The messy nests of storks festoon chimney tops and electrical poles. If we were driving, we would stop for a basket of peaches, park under c.r.a.pe myrtles, and let the juices run over our fingers. Instead, I sip bottled water and pray that the sun does not turn us into pools of b.u.t.ter.

We make an unexpected stop at the House of the Virgin Mary. A Jewish friend told me he was unexpectedly moved by the house and the outside wall of Kleenex ex-votos, tied on for memory. I see, also, one knee-high stocking, a few rags, and scrawled notes on paper napkins, as though we are all unprepared when we want to give thanks. Inside the little house-it is almost surely only a wish that Mary lived here-the familiar candles in sand lift the gloom. The idea of Mary in her later life living in a small house near the ruins intrigues me. Maybe she had another child, a girl who climbed the dusty trees and played on the marble streets of Ephesus. As we board the bus, I hear a British tourist say, "That was spot on."

Ephesus-hallowed by Saint Paul and by Herac.l.i.tus. At the entrance an impish child sells thirty postcards for one American dollar. As we pa.s.s up that bargain, he says, "You break my heart."

"Jingle jangle," the guide says. "These stands are selling jingle jangle."

Then we're walking those marble streets in a stream of other people. Several guides are lecturing in front of the famous library, after Alexandria and Pergamum the greatest in the ancient world. By now adverse to our guides, I walk around the groups, listening to s.n.a.t.c.hes of their guides' spiels. The statues are protections by Wisdom, Intelligence, Destiny, and Science, although another guide omits Science and says Love.

Medusa's blue eyes protected the Temple of Hadrian. Was this, as the guide claims, the origin of protection against the evil eye? That eye decorates the prows of boats and the doorways of houses. It is to Greece what the household shrine is to Italy. Protect this house.

Our guide lets us roam the amphitheatre after telling us in an accusing tone that Sting, in a high-decibel rock concert, cracked the theatre's foundation. "Imagine, after all the centuries, the American causes this." She grimaces and glares. We don't bother to tell her that Sting is English.

Where is Herac.l.i.tus' Maeander, the river you cannot step in twice? I can see only stone and tourists. For the water is already far downstream. But Herac.l.i.tus, it's not the water, it's the river, and I always step in the same river twice. The flow of the river is memory, just as the mitos, the white ball of thread Ariadne handed to Theseus as he entered the labyrinth, was the thread of memory.

The bus makes a stop at a center for rug making. A concept for tourists, but nevertheless we see that the colors of the wool are the colors of herbs and spices-saffron, bay, cinnamon, paprika, sage, turmeric. I like hearing that one coc.o.o.n yields one and a half miles of silk thread. My favorite art springs from folk tradition, and I've always loved the spontaneity of woven rugs-the little animal and human figures that interrupt a design, the abrupt changes of color when the thread runs out and the nomads have moved on to other locales with other colors available for dying the wool. I like the use of what's at hand, walnut sh.e.l.ls, rock-rose hips, oak bark, tobacco leaves, medlar. Even these bored women hired by the state to demonstrate weaving techniques must find a little magic emerging on the loom.

In the hour we have to roam in Kusadasi, we go into a couple of rug stores. One dealer says, "I can take your money."

At sea, tooling along the coast at night, the water looks blue, the darkest blue, a folded uniform at the bottom of a trunk. And the air in the dark-great tides of fresh sea air. The lights of fis.h.i.+ng boats blink in the distance, and I imagine the men on board playing cards, looking up at the white apparition of our s.h.i.+p pa.s.sing across their porthole. At sea, I get up early for the dawn colors reflected in the lovely, lovely water, bluer than thy first love's eyes. I could not have imagined the glancing of light on these waters. All I want to do is lean over and watch the petticoat flounces of white foam and the heaven-sent blue. The impulse to jump feels strong and not destructive but rather a joyous desire to join another element.

Bodrum, the next stop on the Turkish coast, is simply appalling. Not yet totally ruined by development, it soon will be. The streets pulse with holiday people in T-s.h.i.+rts, halters, and short shorts, drinking beer as they go. Ticky-tacky condos spread like a case of s.h.i.+ngles on the hills. I wonder why at this late date the town powers would allow such a rape of their sublime coast, the old city of Halicarna.s.sus. Isn't it obvious that development quickly reaches the point of diminis.h.i.+ng returns? Those previously drawn to the glorious place will go elsewhere. We trudge through the castle and have lunch in a waterside restaurant where garbage floats just under our table. "Height of summer," Ed says.

"Let's go back to the s.h.i.+p where it's cool. We can have a frozen daiquiri and go to the string quartet concert."

"To h.e.l.l with Halicarna.s.sus."

As we enter the Dardanelles, the color of the sea changes to green, and the green does not have the happiness of the blue. We're entering the territory of Dardano, our hometown boy. He was born in Cortona, according to legend. In his wanderings he founded Troy; then Aeneas left Troy to found Rome. Because of Dardano's circuitous history, he made Cortona the "mother of Troy, grandmother of Rome."

We wonder if the pillboxes along the sh.o.r.e are "the tumbled towers of Ilium," but no, we are pa.s.sing a more recent catastrophe in these historic waters, the site of the battle of Gallipoli. All the British pa.s.sengers move up to the bow and silently watch as we glide by. Their fathers, grandfathers, even great-grandfathers have perhaps breathed the word Gallipoli. As the captain recounts the action over the loudspeaker, the Germans stick to their novels and deck chairs and the Americans look puzzled: Gallipoli rings a bell but far away. We were not raised on stories of how the sea turned red with blood in 1915.

We awaken just in time to see the cut-out domes and minarets against the sky as the s.h.i.+p glides into the Istanbul harbor at dawn. This is the bookend to the evening sail out of Venice. The memory of arriving in Istanbul as the opaline colors spread across the sky and the city comes to life will always be worth the mobs of Rhodes and Bodrum. Our bags are by the door of our "stateroom," and we do not bother with breakfast. We disembark without a backward glance.

The Turkish poet n.a.z.im Hikmet was imprisoned for years in what is now our hotel. We arrive early, but our room is ready. In the dining room I see on the menu "wine leaves," "clothed cream." The gorgeous young woman server offers to read Ed's fortune in his coffee grounds. She looks at him with great solemnity and says, "Your mother has died and she wants you to visit her grave." We are silent. This comes out of nowhere. Since Ed's mother's death, he has not returned to his hometown.

In a magazine I read a recipe for Head Broth. It begins, scrub a sheep's head with salt and spices, rub with onion juice, wrap in parchment and roast. Undaunted, we are ready to taste Turkish food in the capital. On the first dinner menu we find soylenmez kebap-kebab that shall not be named. The waiter enlightens us; the kebab is made of ram t.e.s.t.i.c.l.es. I prefer bride's soup: red lentils and rice, with mint, tomatoes, and herbs. For dessert, gullac: sheets of pastry flavored with rose water. The waiter takes our credit card and smiles. "I'll see you tomorrow."

We sleep in the luxurious hotel in great comfort. Big bed, soft, and no sound of water sluicing below, threatening to rise and swamp us. Only the memory of the literary prisoner, who might have written his poems in this very room. I awaken to the call of the muezzin from a minaret. Mournful, innocent, shrill, otherworldly-a call of the wild-it stops my heart. If I were Muslim, I would prostrate myself immediately for prayer. The domes are rising suns, the minarets its rays.

On the way to Topkapi, we pa.s.s shops emitting smells of lacquer, spices, leather, straw, lanolin. Topkapi is still a wonder of the world! Those sultans! When they wanted someone executed, they stamped their feet. They sprinkled rose water on their hands. Their spoons were made of mother-of-pearl or horn, with handles inset with rubies and turquoise. The crests for their turbans were huge emeralds with plumes. I stare at the hand and occipital bone of Saint John the Baptist, a dagger with a carved emerald handle, wild dress-up clothes with crests of jewels startlingly large, water pitchers and rose-water sprinklers bedecked with pearl, lapis, and coral. The place itself is leafy and serene, with courtyards and pavilions and cool tiled fountains and delicate wall paintings. The architecture, perhaps inspired by a tent camp in the desert, feels harmonious and inviting and at the same time utterly strange and fascinating. In feeling, it reminds me of its opposite, a fine liberal arts college.

There's a long line waiting to go inside the Harem, which once was home sweet home to a thousand concubine slaves. Hardly anyone stirs in the rooms where the treasures are displayed, and I can imagine the sultan stepping into one of the lavish robes in the Royal Wardrobe and making his way to his prayer room.

This is our two-day tasting menu of Istanbul, a city that requires at least a month. Those mosques! Muslim men prostrate themselves in the courtyards, on the steps, and at the entrances to the mosques on Friday. They spill over into the street, among the parked cars. The Blue Mosque, Hagia Sophia (built as a Christian church, mutated into a Muslim mosque, now a museum), the Tulip Mosque, the dozens of scattered mosques, all punctuated by the minarets, offer their domes to the sky, giving the city a soft aspect. How far back does this city travel across time? In 658 B.C. Byzas, a Greek, consulted the Delphic oracle. Where to go? he wanted to know. She advised him to settle on the banks of the Bosporus. His city became his namesake, Byzantium.

Istanbul! It is n.o.body's business but the Turks'-that is, the mysterious city does not open to the foreigner easily, though anyone will be struck by the architecture, the bazaars, the encounters with merchants and buskers who stroll around trying to la.s.so tourists into some shop. The old-quarter outdoor cafes look so inviting with low benches and tables covered with kelims. Little wheeled carts are laden with mesir, roasted corn. In the cobbled, narrow street behind Hagia Sophia, we find a row of wooden Ottoman houses built against the town walls, a quiet enclave of fountains and birdbaths, a place one could live.

Many women wear ankle-length coats of ugly gabardine over long sleeves, with gray long skirts, leggings. They must be boiling. I'd faint. This must be their choice, since many Turkish girls are in short skirts and sleeveless T-s.h.i.+rts, with bra straps showing. For the covered, only the feet are exposed. Ugly sandals, too. I bet they have on pink silk thongs and push-up lace bras. A few are masked but walk hand in hand with young children in shorts. The young wife of a rug merchant tells us, "I like fas.h.i.+on and alcohol, and I don't want to cover myself. For what? I have Allah inside. That's what matters."

The hawkers are aggressive. "My brother lives in Seattle," they call.

"Honeymoon?"

"Second honeymoon?"

"Do you want to be my first customer today?"

"I've seen you three times. We are already well acquainted." We have to laugh at that and are then followed for blocks.

"You are going the wrong way," one calls. They are lined up outside a shop near our hotel. Much of their banter is for their mutual amus.e.m.e.nt.

We ask our concierge for a recommendation. "What kind of rug do you want?" he asks.

"Old, faded colors, like the one we're standing on."

"Oh, that is for sale. The rugs we have are from a merchant we know. Go there." And so I fall into the hands of an expert rug merchant.

We meet Guven Demer, speaker of eight languages, young and pa.s.sionate. We are no match for Istanbul rug dealers. They are performers and shrewd psychologists. They are relentless and should give lessons to international negotiators of foreign affairs. They could prevent wars. Guven, in business with four brothers and several cousins, has practiced his craft for two thousand years around the Mediterranean. After an hour he has the smell of the hunt about him. The rugs are flying through the air, the prices fly, combining with other prices, turning from Turkish billions into dollars and back again. The showroom is windowless, stacked with rugs that go back, in the heat, to the scents of camel. He begins to touch us, a tap on the shoulder, a hand on Ed's knee. Sweet tea is served, boxes of Turkish delight presented. The rugs are too bright for me, too new, and he asks for two hours, during which time he scours his contacts. When we return, the rug I had envisioned lies on the floor, and I nod and say "Guven, it's beautiful." It is a hundred-year-old Herez of faded blue and salmon and biscuit colors.

He turns around and around. He's a dervish. "She likes it, praise to Allah," and he dramatically falls to the floor in the prayer position. By the time we have bought the rug, plus two small ones and the one on the floor of the hotel, he is embracing us, inviting us home, inviting us for two days on the Asian side to see how real Turks live. He is coming to visit us in California. We walk out dazed; he had us in the palm of his hand.

"And therefore I have sailed the seas and come/to the holy city of Byzantium." What a clunky rhyme, come /-tium, I suddenly notice. But I, too, finally have come to Byzantium, to the fabled Bosporus, to the Sea of Marmara. The word, mar, mar, has the breaking of waves in it, the oldest sound other than that of mama, mama.

Leaving Istanbul, the taxi careens along the Bosporus, hot wind blowing my hair behind my ears. We are not "dewy," as my southern relatives used to say, we are downright sweating. I flash on an image of Alain back on his terrace in Cortona sipping a gla.s.s of cold white wine. Then we enter the most state-of-the-art airport in the world, where we are cooled down to morgue temperature until we enter the sleeve of the plane, where it is again one hundred degrees. Everyone is emanating hot odors-oil, the wrung-out stink of lamb, rancid breaths, pungent underwear, a whiff of tea tannin, dirt. I've been to Greece and have grazed the edge of Turkey. Praise Allah. Praise Professor Hunter who called me a Maenad. Praise the Oracle. In the plane the fans blow away the smells.

Alitalia seems to take off with more confidence than other airlines. The pilot angles up as soon as the tires lift off the runway, accelerates, spirals up, and turns with brio. We are over Romania, Bulgaria. We are served our last tastes of Turkish food-little meat kebabs and fried pastries stuffed with vegetables, baklava. Then down into Fumicino and home to Bramasole, home to our green paradiso. Home to no electricity and a broken water line, a printer zapped by lightning. Rampant morning glories have vaulted onto the jasmine and across the terrace wall, the blooms, blue as the Aegean, trumpeting joy.

In a few weeks a package from the merchant in Istanbul arrives. On a small wooden loom we read, woven in a miniature rug of red and tan wool, our names and below: In Love, Guven.

Bulls, Poets, Archangels Crete and

Mani

You heard your voice saying thanks . . . you were certain now: a large piece of eternity belonged to you.

-YANNIS RITSOS We have come to Greece for the baptism of Constantine Demetrios Mavromihalis at the Church of the Archangels, Ayion Taxiarchon, in Areopolis, ancestral home of the fierce Mavromihalis clan, deep in the Mani.

First we light in western Crete, near Chania. On our cruise through the Greek islands, the stop at Knossos and Heraklion seemed more frustrating than not seeing the places at all. The deadly heat, the crowds, the limited time, and the head 'em up, move 'em out aspects skewed our experience of the island. We vowed to return. Even inside those blighted circ.u.mstances, I glimpsed, in a hand flipping a rag at a window, in the rotten sweet scent of fallen apricots that even the bees had left to the ants, in the philosophical goats among the dusty tamarisks, the elemental nature of Crete.

We have rented a house in Chania, where watercolored Venetian buildings line the C-shaped harbor, the scene nicely accented by a domed Arab mosque and a lively quay of tavernas with outdoor tables. The town, long swamped by tourism, yields charms at night. Around the bend from the crowds, you can have dinner right beside the water and, looking through your gla.s.s of local white wine, imagine the din and activity of the trading port as successive conquerors arrived and took over for a century or two. A sloe-eyed Gypsy girl jangles with bracelets and anklets as she offers her roses for sale. Four old women, who surely would have worn heavy black a few decades ago, sit down next to us, order tall lime daiquiris, and settle in to talk. We dine to the music of their laughter, the occasional clomp of the horse-drawn carriages, and the slap of small waves against the mole.

Our house, on a scruffy hillside overlooking the bay, calms me just to be inside the four rooms. The two bedrooms and kitchen-all small-jog off a large main room, with French doors opening to s.p.a.cious outside terraces that drop abruptly to citrus trees and shrubs. Night wanderers beware. The utter simplicity of the architecture corresponds to the plain furniture, comfortable enough, with chairs draped in bright cotton cloth. The coolness of white marble floors promotes serenity. A white s...o...b..x of a house, but petals of plumbago and bougainvillea blow in the windows and doors, filling the bottom of the bathtub and gathering in pools in the hall. One covered terrace with chairs around a low table becomes my favorite place to read. Ed takes his notebooks to the second bedroom and closes the shutter. He likes to work in semidarkness.

Because our other trip was go, go, go, this time we are going nowhere for at least a week, except on short drives and down to a family beach nearby. We play in the water of a clear cove, sit in the sand, and throw back the kids' ball when it falls near us. Olive trees grow to the edge of the beach, giving the landscape a timeless appeal. Frothy aqua water, golden sand, a little drink stand under the trees-we stay for hours, floating on rafts out into the horseshoe cove and drifting. The pleasure feels so simple. I can visualize the ventricles of my heart filling with salt and sunlight.

At Irini's in Horifaki, not far from another beach where much of Kazanzakis's book Zorba the Greek was filmed, the lamb has been roasted a long time and slakes off the bone in meltingly tender hunks. The waitress takes us back in the kitchen to select what we will eat, and there's Irini, wrapped in a white ap.r.o.n, rosy cheeks, and a big greeting. She's yanking huge pans of moussaka out of the oven. We choose lamb, baked chicory stuffed tomatoes, and the ubiquitous Greek salad, which they serve not with crumbled feta but with a thick slab. First she brings rough bread with olive paste and sesame on top. A menu exists, but everyone is taken to the kitchen. Lamb has been translated as "lamp," which she offers as "lamp with frica.s.see bad," whatever that might mean. Also listed: humburger and fish soap (soup). "Well, her English is better than my Greek," Ed says.

Irini's becomes our favorite. Every visit there's a new big cheese pie, pikilia, seafood tidbits with orange avocado salad, or ofto, lamb on skewers grilled upright in the fire and brought to us on pasta mixed with creamy cheese and broth. Platters of crisp roasted potatoes, which benefit from the drippings from chickens, are plunked down on every table.

On our third day we've settled into a routine. Read. Beach. Irini's for lunch. Nap. Walk. Shop for food in town. Cook something utterly simple. The potatoes are wonderful, fresh and earthy. We make dinners of Greek salad and steamed potatoes and bread. At night we lie out on the terrace watching the stars. We see no neighbors, only swaying lights on boats.

We vary on the fourth day and visit the Chania museum in the morning. They've rescued a patchy mosaic of Dionysus on a panther with a companion satyr. That's what pa.s.sed for a floor covering in Chania in the third century A.D. Another of Poseidon also shows two roosters trying to peck the same cherry. Such whimsy! Poseidon was wors.h.i.+ped around here not as a sea G.o.d but as a fertility deity. The museum displays cases of votive oxen and bulls from a rural sanctuary active from the fourth century B.C. to the second century A.D. The pots look like the first things you'd throw in beginning ceramics, but the jewelry! Exquisite. Gold hair spirals, a rock crystal and gold ring, and the most fabulous earrings from the eighth century B.C. Could I reach in and s.n.a.t.c.h the necklace inlaid with lapis and medallions with raised heads? The artists were playful, too-a clay censer shaped like a hedgehog from 1800 B.C. makes me smile, as does the drinking cup with eyes on it to protect the drinker from the evil eye. The ancient pithoi, terra-cotta storage jars, are taller than I am. Most mysterious are the coins for Charon, made to go in the mouths of the dead. I guess they came from long-gone-to-dust skulls, the fare uncollected. I first thought a clay s.h.i.+p from 1900 to 1650 B.C. was a child's toy, but with the honeycomb inside, this must be another object to speed the dead on their way. Honey, so essential to the Greeks. Glaukos, son of legendary king Minos, fell into a pitho of honey and drowned. Some bodies, according to Herodotus, were buried in honey.

At the covered market, a short walk away, piles of lambs' heads, eyes open, regard us as we enter, and bunnies, with white fur only on their feet like little bedroom shoes, line up on ice. Vats of yogurts and fruits and nuts in syrup, and dried fruits, especially figs, give a totally Mediterranean cast to our shopping. The herbs mostly come in packages convenient for tourists to tuck into their bags. But they look stale to me. When I see the cheeses-so fresh-I know that my attempts at home to reproduce the luscious dill-scented pies we're eating everywhere will not be the same. We taste the specialty of the area, pyktogalo, a soft, slightly spicy cheese, and malaka, also a Chania cheese, similar to Gruyere. Anthotyro, a cream cheese, and staka, a big pale mound in the market case, both go in my notebook, along with cheirokasi, and stakovoutyro-what is that? How wonderful-everything is so unfamiliar. Ah, -kasi-that must mean cheese. Big wreaths of bread for a wedding are decorated with bread roses. An organ grinder pumps away. We walk out with fennel, yogurt, and cheeses-but who knows which is which-and a bunch of dill.

Such activity. We don't get to the beach until late afternoon, when the sun angles across the water and the children are gone. We have twilight to ourselves, splas.h.i.+ng like the G.o.ds.

From a crack in the house, two yellow beaks open and the mother sparrow flits over our heads, to and fro from the grove. Her angry chirp warns us that she might dive-bomb our reclining forms. A visiting gray cat stretches on the warm stone terrace, purring at her reflection in the door. She ignores the sparrow. Under my pulled-down hat, I begin to think of old attachments, friends, those I have failed, those who failed me. The elemental nature of Greece, I suppose. Or sometimes travel just unlocks Pandora's box. What I've put off considering in my quotidian life rushes forward when the body and mind achieve a quiet level of receptivity. What has been lost comes looking. Problems overly suppressed can erupt as a full-blown crisis. I start with the drifty thought, Mother would love this, followed by the petulant, childish (but true) thought, She failed me, no? Then an old friends.h.i.+p I bluntly broke off. My mind jumps to Bill D. Oh, he let you down, big time, then the tidal rush of how he would have loved Greece, how funny he was, and what a good poet. Drunk, he lurches over the hors d'oeuvres table, I reach to catch him, but he crashes into the bowls and plates. Hardest to understand, the friends who recede, become vague, their names in the address book but their numbers forgotten. Friends from college stay fixed. I pick up with Anne and Rena immediately, out of such long connections. As an adult, I moved six times, and for the most part the intense friends.h.i.+ps of each place gradually faded, replaced by the next set. And yet I still care about Ralph and Mitra and Gabby and Hunter and Alan and, and, and. That conference when I shared a room with Karen and we talked late. In the dark, her voice sounded so familiar, a little sister whispering from the other twin bed, kicking off the quilt. We lost touch. I always mean to go back, pick up the dropped st.i.tch, continue the round hem. But the present grounds me-I first wrote grinds me-so firmly. A tidal wash of losses, all under the big energy sun. I gather Ed's s.h.i.+rt, dried over a chairback in the sun, the blue cotton warming my hands.

At a little monastery on the sea, the caretaker shakes his head sadly at Ed in shorts. He points to a rack inside the door with various pairs of jogging pants and beach wraps for visitors to cover their shameful bodies. "Am I okay?" I ask. He regards my white linen Capri pants and short-sleeved T-s.h.i.+rt and concedes that I am. Determined to break through his officious manner, I start asking him about the fountain outside the monastery, which looks distinctly Arab to me, but he doesn't know.

"Could be anything," he shrugs. His friend rounds the corner of the building with a handful of sprigs. Ah, the universal language. Ed, now in navy pants, asks what he's picked. He holds up a handful.

"Origano dictamnus." We later recognize this oregano growing in the maquis that covers the coastal hillsides. "This one is very good if you cut yourself, and for the ladies, it helps in birth."

"And for cooking," the caretaker adds. An Italian would launch into recipes right now, but they are more interested in the other herb. They both begin to explain at once that this is a special plant, used to make tea. "Fascomilo," the friend says. He writes the name in Greek on our guidebook and gives us a few branches that perfume our car with a sage and dust scent. "Smells like marijuana. Throw it out." Ed fans his face. But I slip the leaves inside my guidebook to scent the pages with the smell of the countryside.

The deep country monasteries deeply stir me. Triada seems holy, holy, and someone is chanting in one of the monastery rooms. He has a loud and terrible voice, accompanied by the rattle of pots and dishes. Women are cleaning up after a wedding lunch. The priest in stone gray robes sits against a stone wall under the arched entrance, cooling off after his duties. Inside, the floor is scattered with crumbled bay leaves, as in the Middle Ages when santolina was piled on the floors of cathedrals to keep down the stench of the unwashed. At the entrance a man fills an enormous basket with leftover slices of bread. I can't get enough of the Byzantine icons and altars, the heady scents of incense, and the elaborate iconostases. The Orthodox churches feel very close to the bone, as if they tap into those same archetypal openings where myth comes from. So many are smaller than the Italian and French neighborhood churches. The domes are blue and covered with stars, a motif I adore. The top section of the cross-shaped churches always are closed off by a curtain, suggesting mystery.

At the Holy Monastery of Hyperaghia, Lady of Gonia, in Kolymbari, another visitor gives us the , the fascomilo again. Must be the day for gathering-his basket is piled high. This monastery sits above the Chania bay. An icon of Mary is completely covered with ex-votos-rings, watches, metal eyes, and tiny crosses. The wooden crucifix, with two side panels held by carved gold dragons, looks as though it landed from the Far East. But the three domes of immense blue covered with stars and the incense burning bring us back to Greece. We are not able to see the famed icon collection in a small building across the courtyard. The caretaker must have been out picking fascomilo. We take a path to the earlier ruins of the monastery, another outpost of peace.

En route to Rethymnon, we see a wreck. In the driver's seat a young man with black hair, trickles of blood running down his face-his seriously dead face. He sits upright inside his crushed car. How impossible to come upon. The visceral desire rises to rerun the moment, have him swerve from the truck, right himself, and speed on home to the dinner his mother probably is preparing at this moment. The s.h.i.+ny j.a.panese compact, brand new, now smushed like a stepped-on c.o.ke can. Get up, we want to say, but he is gone, someone's love, someone's boy, someone. Just before we left Cortona, two American tourists' car struck a college student's Vespa. He jumped up and went in the bar across the road and had a gla.s.s of water. The drivers must have been immensely relieved. But when the ambulance came, he was weak, and he died-punctured lungs filled with blood. Why seek danger? It may be on the loose for you.

As we drive on, we realize no airbag popped out for him. Cheap car, but what a crime. I look down and notice that there's no airbag on my side of this rental car. We will go to the airport tomorrow and trade this compact for a heavier car.

In Rethymnon bakeries make bread in the shapes of swans, dinosaurs, and deer. Street after street in the old section entices us to wander. Turkish balconies, Venetian fountain, curtained doorways, broken arches, stone-edged Cretan windows, twisting medinalike streets, where an ancient way of life a.s.serts itself in spite of the mobs of tourists a few streets away. An old man plays backgammon with a child, a woman sh.e.l.ls beans under a grape arbor, women in black sit in doorways, children play in a street as narrow as a good hallway. I step into the timelessness I expected when I came to Greece.

We linger into the evening, not wanting to drive by the place the boy died. We choose the restaurant for the vine-draped arbors and the sound of music. A sweet-faced mandolin player and his child stroll among the tables. The British couple at the next table will not look at him when he stops to play right at their table. The waiter laughs. "They're afraid." Greece on a summer evening, someone strumming a mandolin just for you, and you ignore him? Ed always tips musicians lavishly, thinking that people who bring music should be crowned with laurel. We're treated to several songs and a shy smile from the little girl.

Now we're in the car every day, wanting to explore this wild end of Crete. The land is scattered with pink, blue, and green beehives in fields. Wild goats with long black hair chomp away on the spa.r.s.e hills. Tall hollyhocks punctuate the roadsides, along with the memorials to the dead that you see all too often. I start photographing these small dollhouse structures, which are furnished with photographs and candles and sometimes objects belonging to the deceased. Some are plaster models of a church, some look more like homes. There are just so many of these memorials, so often on straight stretches of road. I doubt that so many people have met their fate in these spots. They must also be primitive votives or tributes to G.o.ds of the crossroads and the journey.

Up on the hills I see groves of b.u.t.ter-yellow and pink oleander along the dry watercourses. The vibrant double blooms often entwine with profligate pink and blue morning glories. I love these liaisons of two or three plants and vines. The vivid pink bougainvillea cooled by its white partner. The orange trumpet vine twirled with pale blue plumbago, the blue morning glories splendid within ma.s.ses of fluffy white bougainvillea, woody honeysuckle tangled with the flat pink rose.

We jump out at cemeteries in the countryside and their pure white churches, so white they hurt your eyes. Their blue doors and blue-edged windows seem cut out of heaven. The graves have gla.s.s-fronted marble boxes at the heads. Inside, a photo of the person laid to rest, an oil lamp, with perhaps a plastic bottle of extra oil, and some matches. The box may have pictures of a saint, notes, wicks, lace mats, or mementos of the dead person-a teddy bear, a bottle of Johnnie Walker with two shot gla.s.ses. Unbearable, a child's grave covered with toy cars, stuffed animals, and his bottle and rattler propped beside his photo, a merry two-year-old with wide-open eyes.

Houses, typically low and white, sometimes have crenellations at the corners of the roofs, a reminder of North Africa, not far away. Many one- and two-story houses are topped with rebar around the edges of the roof, in case they want to build up someday. No one has built a decorative plaster wall around these unsightly metal rods, and it's clear that many of the houses have been there for years and years without the next construction stage. Even prosperous-looking new houses display this odd feature.

The landscape, barren at a sweeping glance, often looks like carefully planted rock gardens. We pa.s.s many gorges. "Gorgeous gorge," Ed says.

"You had to, didn't you?" We smell the dry, herbal maquis, the miles of coastal hills blooming with rounded bushes-violet, purple, yellow, sage, mossy green, gray-and the earth ferrous red and sienna with rocks and boulders. A stupendous palette, especially with the blue, blue sea in the distance and the cloudless sky extending the blue as far as the imagination can go.

We come upon war memorials and cemeteries everywhere. At first we'd been puzzled why so many people asked us if we were from Australia or New Zealand. Then we saw the graves of those troops who fought so bitterly hard in this lonely countryside in World War II. Their relatives come here to find their loved ones' graves. As a major gateway to Egypt to the South, and the whole Aegean world to the North, Crete was strategically crucial. Every record attests to the heroism and arduousness of the population here. The Allies did not arm the Cretans; they fought to the death with whatever they had. In the Souda war cemetery, close to our house, most graves lack names. But there's Archibald Knox Brown. All boys in their early twenties, in peaceful rows, as orderly as war is not. Even in death, they overlook a Greek military base on the harbor and a former NATO site. Red roses grow everywhere, also orderly, and the color of the blood the boys shed so far from home. Many Allied troops evacuated from Souda Bay in 1941; then the Luftwaffe swarmed the area.

Donkeys, few houses, olives everywhere to the sea, shrines, figs-the clarity startles me, and I have the odd thought, I'd like to rise to this occasion. From reading the Greek poets I understood intellectually the qualities of this powerful place. Days here move the knowledge into the body. I find in my notebook a few words by Kimon Friar in his preface to Modern Greek Poetry: Many have felt that in the dazzling sun of Greece the psychological dark labyrinths of the mind are penetrated and flooded with light, that in this merciless exposure one is led not to self-exploitation but to self-exploration under the glare of necessity, that to "Know Thyself" is for all Greeks, from ancient into modern times, the only preoccupation worthy of an individual. Beneath the blazing sun of Greece there is a sensuous acceptance of the body without remorse or guilt.

What calls out from the landscape? The purity, essence. Simplicity: a handful of shorn wool. I think only a Greek poet could have written these lines: Here, in this mineral landscape of rock and sea, sapphire and diamond, which to the wheel of Time offers nothing that's perishable; here in the great victorious light whose only stain is your own shadow, and where only your body carries a germ of death; here perhaps for a moment the false idols will vanish; perhaps once again in a dazzling flash you may stare at your true self.

-ALEXANDER MaTSAS Out early for a swing around the coast, we stop for coffee, good G.o.d it's bad, at a terrace taverna overlooking the sea. The young waiter retires to the side to play his lyre, and I can't eat my roll because I am watching the black curls and lithe body of young Orpheus back on earth.

We drive on around where northern Crete curves into western Crete, delicately colored in the morning, but this must be the place for big sunsets. Many plastic greenhouses, that blight so helpful to the farmer, blot the landscape. We stop for walks on deserted beaches and a dip in one irresistible cove of purling turquoise water.

At a taverna at Francocastello's beach, we taste volvi, translated on the menu as "wild roots." The waiter's English can't enlighten us, but he brings out a German wildflower book on Crete and points to a purple flowered plant, Muscari comosum. Little muscari corms? After we have "stuffed wine leaves," roasted eggplant with an intense taste of roastedness, and tomatoes spiked with mint, we take the person-wide path through bulrushes down to another beach. "What is the decibel level of a single Greek cicada?" Ed wonders. The volume approaches that of a rock concert he attended in Perugia. This wide, endless beach, the polar opposite of the hideous holiday villages that ruin much of Crete, invites a long walk. No one at all swims here on a weekday morning. We don't swim but wade-the water stays shallow way out.

When our Chania stay ends, we go back to Knossos and the museum at Heraklion. We leave our dream cottage and drive across Crete. We then will stay a couple of days at Elounda on the coast, fly to Athens from Heraklion, and drive to the Mani for the baptism.

We find that we absorbed more than we thought on our first trip, when we were travelling in a group in August. These places probably always are crowded, though much less if you're the first ones there. Getting up early is the key. I have to myself the bull head carved from serpentine, with crystal and jasper eyes and elegantly erect horns, excavated from Knossos. Here's the bull symbol, way back at the beginning. He had holes on top of his head and in his mouth, probably where libations were poured. The double-ax insignia of the Minoans is carved between his eyes. He gazes with distinctly G.o.dlike disdain. As evocative, the kinetic ivory carving of a bull leaper and the figure of the snake G.o.ddess in her tiered skirt and bodice with her b.r.e.a.s.t.s popping out. She holds two snakes at arm's length, and I'm certain something loud and oracular is coming out of her mouth. She's one of many precious artifacts that point to a profoundly symbolic level of Minoan life-the lion, leopard, sea creatures, ax, double spirals, birds, and of course the myriad bulls. I will be studying in detail the famous bull-leaping fresco found in the palace by Sir Arthur Evans, who must have had the most exciting days of any archaeologist. He even named the civilization he was discovering, although Homer says Minos was king for only nine years. We call them Minoans after him, but what they called themselves we do not know. The longer I look, the more mysterious these people become. The fresco's intricate borders prove to be more fascinating than the figures suspended between the spotted bull's long horns, or the leaper on the bull's back, or the standing figure with outstretched arms as if waiting to catch the leaper. An American English professor discovered the hidden meaning of the borders. The tiny stripes and lozenge-shaped overlapping designs represent days of the year and the lunar months. They combine in ways that indicate the magic nine-year cycles that crop up over and over-youths were sacrificed, kings met the G.o.ddess. The cycle of nine-and what does this have to do with the leaping acrobat? Interesting as it would be to know, I like being forced to wonder. The art of the Minoans sounds such a dithyrambic call from the ancient world: We were alive, we feasted and loved beauty and saw the world as an animated, forceful dynamic with our beings. Join us in the dance, the leap over time.

Minoans were addicted to jewelry-intricate necklaces and earrings, gold hairpins, bracelets and ankle bracelets, gold spirals through which hair was twisted, an artful pendant of two bees, beaded clothing, arm bracelets, tiaras and other hair ornaments made of flat gold leaf-leaves and crowns. Many artifacts reveal how they lived, what they wore. A bit of mosaic shows early houses. They enlivened their rooms with frescoes, as at Pompeii and Herculaneum. An early small cart shows that they had four-wheeled transport. How often women's b.r.e.a.s.t.s are displayed. The clothing looks constructed to showcase the b.r.e.a.s.t.s. How much and how little we know about these mysterious people who rocked the cradle of civilization. These stones stood at the beginning, and laying a hand on one makes me imagine the hand that placed it.

The site at Knossos again thrums with buses and clumps of people on tours. How good to travel alone and slip in and out at will. Ed seems fascinated by the drains. Flus.h.i.+ng toilets were available to the Minoans-something that flashes through my mind when I encounter those hole-in-the-floor toilets with the rippled footprints on either side, apparently to guide a giant to straddle the opening. At one serene and pure monastery perched high above the sea, one of these holes emptied directly into the aqua and violet water below. A fetid barrel of water with a scoop made from a detergent bottle stood by, in case you wanted to flush. I glanced in and backed out, as did two Greek women.

The Minoans guided rainwater from the roof cistern into an open pipe in the floor, located just outside the bathroom, which flowed under the toilet seat. Even when no water flowed from above, by employing the same system as the monastery, you could flush. Even today Cretan houses typically have water tanks on the roof, providing pressure to the system. Knossos is riddled with means for draining or bringing in water to the complex. Little channels run down the sides of staircases; there are stone drains that lead to sediment traps, reminding me of the installation of our elaborate septic system in Italy. A pozzo, a little well filled with stones, was constructed every few dozen meters, for settlement and filtration. Ever since, we've been fixated on plumbing.

Ed is wandering. I sit down on a hot stone with my notebook looking down at many terra-cotta pots, imagining what they held and what people ate. Accounts from Knossos list large quant.i.ties of coriander, used both in cooking and perfume making. Pistachios were produced in quant.i.ty, too. I can imagine the tables around the bull-leaping ring laden with baklava layered with dried cherries and nuts, plates of dipla, those folded pastries with a filling made with sweetened eggs, and others scented with thyme, honey, and nuts. The deeply rustic smoked sausages with c.u.min, and others with vinegar, and the omathia, a sweet sausage stuffed with liver, rice, and raisins-all these must have fed the Minoans, too. Lighter fare might have included the many preparations of snails, and the pilafs-a rice boiled in lamb broth and seasoned. The Mediterranean diet came to fame after a study of long-lived natives. Cretan food does have its spleen with fennel, and "lamp" bowels in various guises, but the strong counterbalance comes from the olive oil, wild greens, cheeses, and salads such as boureki, which is made of dakos, rusks of barley, topped with tomatoes, cheeses, and oil. We've loved eating here-the rabbit with oranges and olives, meatb.a.l.l.s in egg and lemon sauce, but mainly the variety of salads, such as grilled eggplant salad with walnuts, and all the fresh cheeses. I like the invitation to the kitchen in all the tavernas, the olive oil cans planted with begonias, the bright clotheslines strung between ma.s.sive olive trees. Imagine the table, and the people spring to life.

Dusty from Knossos, we check into Elounda Mare. The hotel has a basically modern design, but they have recuperated old door surrounds and Cretan stone floors, weavings, and copper trays. Old farm doors are sparingly but effectively used for ornaments, on either side of openings, and for tables. We get lost. The architect must have been inspired by the labyrinth at Knossos. We are luckily upgraded to a room with a private pool, terrace, and small yard with the sea below. We have a couple of days to look around at this part of Crete, but really we just laze about, taking a brief jaunt to see Spinalonga, a tiny island that formerly was a leper colony. Back at the hotel gift shop, I buy gla.s.s evil eye protectors for my house in California. The clerk says, "The sun gives us power. If we have two days without sun, we go crazy."

We walk to dinner at the Calypso restaurant. It's under the tutelage of a chef with a two-star restaurant in France. We're seated near a marble pool with fountain jets; below, the sea spreads calmly to infinity. At the next table I'm convinced we have a member of the Russian mafia. The big-muscled, no-neck guy can't put his arms down because of his expanded waist. He's sweating alarmingly. His wife across from him is plump, too, but they have refused to acknowledge girth and are squeezed into clothes from an earlier size. He looks like a bouncer, and she's forced-smiley and crunched into an aqua blue sequined top with tiny straps cutting into her soft meaty shoulders. Square-cut emerald earrings dangle on either side of her puffy little face with darting eyes. She looks trapped. He is silent, she is chattering. He moves to another chair at the table. Didn't want his back to the door? Doubtless my mind is leaping; he made a fortune in cell phones or BMWs. We say good evening to them as they leave, this being a civilized custom practiced all over Europe, but they stare stonily ahead and do not respond.

This is our last night in Crete.

A quick flight to Athens, and we're suddenly in our rental car, heading toward the city. After the solitude of Crete, these roads look chaotic. We're on a b.u.mper-car course, with detours, closed lanes, flares in the road, and no signs. I'm gazing at the map, trying to catch a name, a street, a direction. Ed plows forward. We cross the entire city and somehow, miraculously, emerge on the road to Nafplio. The baptism of our friends Steven and Vicki's boy will be in three days.

Just out of the Athens sprawl-oh, please let us find the airport when we return-we pa.s.s a building supply company that sells prefabricated chapels, painted yellow, trimmed in white. I want one. I've photographed every one we've pa.s.sed. They may be memorials to the roadside dead, but I think of them as tributes to the travel G.o.ds. Ed keeps driving. "They weigh probably two hundred pounds. Hoist that onto luggage check-in?"