Chapter 4: Ivory Veil

5 April 2016

It was a shock to my system to get off the plane in Athens where the temperature was 47° Fahrenheit. It was 96° when I boarded the plane in Bangkok and just plain hotter than hell when I transferred in Abu Dhabi. But Athens was cold and the airport, by comparison to the last two I’d been in, was practically deserted. Passport control stamped my book and waved me through without more than a cursory glance. There was one store in the airport and it didn’t have a phone SIM.

The thing about Greece is that I could read the letters of their alphabet. That’s thanks to a course in New Testament Greek that I took years ago. If you can read the letters, you can sound out the words. And if you are educated at all, you will find many Greek words have an English equivalent that isn’t far off from the sound of the Greek. Like ‘train’ is τρένο, pronounced ‘traino’. Roll the ‘r’. Anyway, I found the train station, asked for directions from the ticket agent and boarded the train. Of course, it is also helpful that since the Olympics in 2004, nearly every sign in the city is in both Greek and English.

I managed to follow the directions to my apartment and my host was very nice (and pretty, of course) and helped me get settled in. We sat on her top floor deck to have a smoke and looked across the roofs to the Parthenon. Yeah. That brought it home. I’m sitting in an apartment in Athens looking over the rooftops at the frickin’ Parthenon! Kalli gave me directions to a nice taverna not far away and I had a delicious meal with a quarter liter of red wine for seven euros. I was in heaven.

Kalli, however, was another of those who didn’t drink coffee. As pretty as she was, it was the only flaw I could find. She was an actress and was performing in a play on the east side of Athens over the weekend. It was a political drama that revolved around the refugee crisis.

Yes, there is a refugee crisis in Greece. Over 300,000 have come into the country this year. The U.S., with a population of 360 million people, is in a panic because of the ‘threat’ of 200,000 Syrian refugees entering the country after careful screening. The whole country of Greece probably doesn’t have enough food to feed that many extras. The Greeks, living in a country with a population of twelve million, just keep pulling the refugees out of the water and feeding them, even though their own country is nearly bankrupt. They are a people with a huge heart.

Because of the unrest and potential demonstrations, though, Kalli advised me not to come to one of her shows. She did tell me where to get good coffee in the mornings. In most of southern and central Europe, a ‘coffee’ is a single shot of espresso. It is always served with a little biscuit or cookie and a glass of water. A shot of espresso is about two swallows, but people stretch drinking it over two hours. For a guy who liked a sixteen-ounce Starbucks Americano, it was a lot to get used to.

Being in Greece was a lifelong dream. It was one of the reasons to travel around the world. The Parthenon. The Temple of Zeus. The Dionysian Theatre. The museums. The art. What the Greeks still had after the Brits left. I’d seen almost as much Greek sculpture in the British Museum. But it was better to see it here. On the Acropolis that had been a fortress for four thousand years. I wandered around Athens for three days discovering something new each day. Including Greek coffee with half an inch of muddy grounds still in the cup after I’d finished. And still, it seemed as though I had only scratched the surface.

And the beautiful actress who let me use her second bedroom was also a delight. Just not how you are thinking. I met her boyfriend the day after I arrived. He was nice, too, but didn’t speak English quite as well as she did. Her day started around noon when she got up to walk the dog. It ended about three in the morning when she walked the dog after returning from performance and going out with the cast. I know she returned sometime in the late afternoon or early evening to walk the dog again, but we seldom crossed paths. I got up around five in the morning and was usually sound asleep by ten at night. Old habits die hard and it didn’t seem to make a difference what time zone I was in; I still woke up at five a.m.

I left the keys on the table by the door the morning I left with a note that said ‘Thank you for your hospitality.’ I boarded the train north an hour later with too much excitement to be sad about leaving Athens. The Plains of Thessaly tugged at my heartstrings.

If you are reading this, you’ve probably read some of my other stories. A story I wrote a long time ago and titled “The Four Faces of Carles” was reworked, spiced up, and released as The Props Master 1: Ritual Reality. I got a bit of flak over the story because it seemed like it picked up in the middle. Well, it wasn’t the middle, but the first novel I ever wrote will soon be released as The Props Master Prequel: Behind the Ivory Veil. A lot of that novel is set in Greece in an area called The Metéora. I’d written about it—in detail. I’d researched the area and read everything I could get my hands on about it in the days long before the Internet. In libraries! But I’d never been there.

The reality was so much more magnificent than what I’d imagined that I was glad I had delayed the release of Behind the Ivory Veil. From the moment I saw the spires of rock from the train window, I was enthralled. Legend has it that in a battle between the Gods of Olympus and the Titans they displaced, huge meteors were hurled against each other. Hence the name Metéora. The spires of rock that jut up out of the Plains of Thessaly became an obvious retreat for religious ascetics who could truly isolate themselves from civilization by perching at the top of these rocks. Monks began living in the caves sometime in the eleventh century.

The largest and highest of the monasteries was begun in the fourteenth century and is still in use. The walls of the monastery extend out of the sheer cliffs of the rock on which it is built. I had imagined rocks a hundred feet high. We were talking about cliffs a hundred meters and more up to the walls of the monastery!

The taxi took me directly to my hotel in Kastraki for five Euros. From my window, I could see the Monastery of Agios Nikolaos Anapafsas. It’s one of the lower relics and would be the first that I visited. It was too late in the day to make the visit after I’d checked in, though. I walked through the village and spotted several taverna that would be good places to stop for a meal. I won’t make this a travelogue and describe every item on the menu that I ate. I will mention, however, that my meal included lots of meat, coffee, dessert, a complimentary shot of raki—the Greek equivalent of moonshine. Oh, and a half-liter of good red wine. Total cost was about €10. I was definitely liking Greece.

A Long Time Ago: First Novel

I’d just finished writing my first novel—oh so many years ago. I typed “The End” on page 120. I had no idea that most novels were longer than 40,000 words. I was proud of my first ‘book-length’ manuscript. I’d had a few of my plays produced, but people had been encouraging me to write a book. With my love of mythology, it seemed natural to weave a new myth into the fabric of the Greek canon.

My soon-to-be second ex-wife read the first page and exploded in laughter. It had to do with the opening line: “Dust billowed explosively with each step as the explorer trod out of the canyons lecturing to himself.” Okay. Not my finest work, but it was my first. All I needed to do was find a reader who would appreciate my genius.

Elliot was one of the guys I’d met in a dramatic theory class as I got my advanced degree in playwriting. He was trying to move from writing novels into plays. He agreed to read it and let me know what he thought. I visited the next day (it didn’t take long to read) and waited anxiously for his assessment.

“Wow! It’s really freeze-dried,” he said.

Well, that wasn’t exactly the response I was looking for, but it was better than laughing through the first page.

“What I mean is that you have all the ingredients necessary to make a novel, but it’s so compact that you start and it’s over. If you added a little hot water, you’d have a whole, satisfying cup of coffee.”

It was my first draft. Of my first novel. I had things to learn.

I walked the three miles from Elliot’s apartment to mine that evening trying to figure out what was missing. Elliot had challenged me to look at my main characters and interview them. Ask them questions. Give them challenges like the exercise we’d done in tossing out a challenge to explain a subject from the character’s perspective. So I started formulating a bunch of questions I’d ask of my main character, J. Wesley Allen. What was it like to be isolated within your mind? How did you manage to accept the reality of the myth within the context of your Christian belief system? Where did you expect to end up when you spent the night on the mountain?

I was nearly run over at an intersection where I’d ignored the red light. Jerking back into the present, I heard a voice as clear as if he was standing beside me.

“If you’d just shut up, I’d tell you about it. The entirety of that which exists, has being only because it has been remembered from the collective consciousness of humanity. As long as someone remembers something, it exists in what we call reality. It may exist in a different time frame or at a different dimension than we imagined, but it does exist.”

I ran home and grabbed a notebook. I listened to Wesley and wrote down what he said. Thus was born The Book of Wesley. (http://bookofwesley.blogspot.com/2013/08/x.html)

A popular quote that has made the circuit of writers for the past several years, without attribution, is “If you hear voices in your head and they are ignoring you, you are probably a writer.” Wesley’s was the first of many voices that I would hear in my head over the coming years.

Several years and a dozen drafts of the book later, Dee Dellas read the manuscript. She smiled at me when I sat to get her critique.

“It’s good,” she said. “But it’s not ready.” She paused and looked at me. “Let me rephrase that. You are not ready.” I wasn’t sure what she meant. By that time, I’d completed two more books in what I deemed would be my breakthrough series and was well into the fourth. I just waited, hoping the older woman would enlighten me.

“You write about passion, sorrow, loss, and hope,” she finally continued as we sipped our coffee. “These are subjects we Greeks know well. Your playwriting education has shown you this. We invented the tragedy. We invented the comedy. We invented the satire. We know passion. You write about them, just as you write about the beauty of the Metéora. But you don’t know them.”

“Well, I can’t really travel there,” I said. “I don’t have the money. But I did a lot of research.”

“Everything you say about it is completely accurate,” she said as she held up her hands in surrender. “One day, though ... One day you will travel to Kastraki. You will sit beside the well of tears where the women gathered each day to mourn the loss of their children killed in the war or kidnapped by the communists. You will look up at the impotent citadels on the rocks. You will weep because you have known great joy and great sorrow. Then you will be ready.”

Back to Greece

Sunset was magnificent with light reflecting off the high rocks long after the day was done. I walked from the restaurant back toward my hotel and past the central plaza. In the center of the plaza was a circular wall about two feet high. A tree was planted in the center with flowers around it. Kastraki had city water and sewer, now. The houses were plumbed. The well of tears had long since been filled in.

But I sat next to it and wept.

My first experience of a normal European breakfast opened my eyes to the joy of boiled eggs. In my family, we ate cold boiled eggs on Easter. Those were the eggs we’d spent Saturday coloring. The packets of dye were potent enough to leave both the eggs and our hands stained through. Then Mom and Dad would hide the eggs early Easter morning and my little sister and I had to race to find them all before church. There was always one egg that didn’t get discovered until June.

But eating the eggs involved cracking the gaily colored shells and peeling them away from the hard, cold white, often tearing a significant portion of the white away with the shell. Then we salted the eggs and ate them. For days. Seldom for breakfast, but often as an after school snack.

The only other time I ever saw my mother boil eggs was in the summer so she could make deviled eggs when company came to dinner. I still love deviled eggs, though I’ve discovered that of three different wives, none had the same recipe. And even my sister’s are not the same as our mother’s.

So, having a hot boiled egg in an egg cup with a plate of cold cuts and a plate of cheese with hot bread was a real treat. It took me most of the remainder of my trip, however, to master the art of removing just the top half of the shell and using my egg spoon to scoop out the egg as I ate it from the other half. (Big end down, of course. I can’t remember if that makes me a big endian or a small endian.) I dawdled over my breakfast in the hotel dining room where the teenage hosts had set a table for one amidst all the other tables set for two or four.

I was smearing butter and strawberry preserves on yet another piece of warm bread when all hell broke loose in the hall adjacent to the dining room.

“Just pack your shit and leave!” a woman screamed. “You were supposed to be a help on this project.”

“I can’t help that you’re sexy. And you enjoyed it!”

“I can’t work like this. It’s my final project and you aren’t taking it seriously. I wanted to be out to catch the first light this morning. I’ll be lucky if I get anything shot today at all because all you can do is fuck and play video games. Just go back to Thessaloniki. And when you get there, clear your shit out of my apartment. I don’t want you around when I get back. I’m through with you!”

“Stacy...”

“Just go! I have work to do.”

The door slammed and a tall skinny guy came through the lobby with a backpack and his nose almost touching his cell phone. He didn’t even look at the food. He stumbled through the front door and slammed it closed behind him.

The drama for the day apparently being over, I finished my coffee and went to my room. The St. Giorgio Villas was a nice but inexpensive hotel. The room was large and the bed comfortable. I opened the French doors to the little private deck where I knew I would later sit to have wine and a smoke—probably while I was writing. First, though, there was the matter of an adventure to be had. All the monasteries that accepted visitors were open today and I planned to do a walking tour.

When I left, I couldn’t help noticing the Greek goddess who was now seated at the table I’d abandoned, drinking coffee and eating her egg. She didn’t look up when I passed, but I was thankful that I’d already put on my dark glasses so my stare wasn’t so obvious. Wow!

The maps were good. I stopped at a little grocery store and bought a couple bottles of water and a bag of nuts and dried fruit. Agios Nikolaos was the closest and the walk to it took only about twenty minutes. Well, thirty minutes, but the other ten were taken up by me stopping to take pictures every ten feet. There was a sharp contrast between the classical ruins of Athens and the monasteries of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. They each held their own mystic grandeur. After I finally climbed to the base of the spire, I had to make my way up the steps to the monastery. The first thing encountered was the classic rope lift that at one time would have been used to lift supplies and people to the entrance, still a hundred feet above.

I’ve used the old joke about them changing the ropes whenever one broke, but scratched at the base of the pulley track was a sort of memorial with the number of people who had died when the ropes broke. Sent a shiver down my spine.

Of course, now there is a narrow set of steps that have been attached to the cliff so that visitors can climb up to the entrance, pay their three euros, and tour the sacred halls. The artwork was exquisite. I joined a number of tourists who had arrived on a bus just before I got there and their guide pointed out the significance of the art as we crammed more people into the tiny chapel than it was meant to hold. It was a relief to reach the rooftop and be in the open air.

Parts of the monastery were not open to the public. This was still an active religious home, and though there were not many monks, they still had their duties, religious services, and living quarters in the tiny monastery. My guess was that at peak occupancy, fifty monks would have made this space feel crowded.

The rooftop garden, though, was a place where I could well imagine spending a lifetime of quiet meditation. Mountains were visible on the other side of the little village of Kastraki. Behind me, the bulk of the next and even higher spire of rock cast its shadow on the tiny monastery. I sat out there for quite a while, even after I’d snapped dozens of pictures.

And so my day went. A road now looped around to the base of the next three monasteries, but from the road there was still a climb of several hundred steps. The day was sunny and bright. Before I had reached the second monastery, which I discovered was actually a convent, I was hot and sweaty. I sat at its gates to drink some water and rest after the climb and a cat stalked down off its perch near the gate and decided my hands would be better put to use by petting it.

“Well,” I sighed. “Got my hands on a little Greek pussy at last.” The cat didn’t get the joke and I don’t think the Japanese tourists approaching spoke English.

I climbed all the way up to Meteoron, the highest of all the monasteries, next. I think it might be the largest, as well. What got me was that after I climbed up to where all the buses were disgorging their hordes, we had to walk down nearly two hundred steps before we could cross over to the spire on which the monastery actually sat and climb up to it. At one point the passage had been cut through the rock and was narrow enough that people coming from opposite directions did some very personal rubbing getting past each other.

The architecture, the artwork, and the history of this monastery were incredible. It included three museums and a gift shop for the three-euro admission. One of the museums was purportedly of traditional dress of Greece, but proved to be primarily military uniforms. Amidst this collection was a painting that has been reproduced frequently. It shows a monk on one spire shooting a German soldier attempting to plant the Nazi flag on another. The resistance here in the Metéora was intense.

My resistance was failing. Or at least, my endurance was. I’d been walking and climbing for several hours in the heat and stopped at a vendor in the parking lot to buy a walking stick with the word ‘Metéora’ burned into one side. I’d need it when I followed the shortcut from the next monastery down to the village. I’d been told about the path, but hadn’t found any sign of it, so I asked the ticket guy about it. He nodded and told me to continue straight down the stairs next to the spire when the main path turned to cross over to the parking lot. The path I was looking for started at the bottom of the stairs.

The bottom of the stairs entered a construction zone where they were staging materials for the constant repairs and rebuilding of the monastery, so the first thing I had to do was climb over piles of sand and gravel. There were only two exits from this construction yard. One was the service entrance where, presumably, trucks delivered the materials. The other was a narrow path past the garden. I followed it into a different world.

The enchanted pathway story is pretty common, especially in fantasy literature. This was the kind of path that led you to believe those stories of fairies and unicorns could be true. It was cushioned by a thick fall of leaves, but the scuff marks indicated that it was not completely abandoned. I was thinking that if I lived in one of those monasteries on the pinnacles, I’d come down here to meditate.

Well, that was about as far as my mystical ramblings could take me, but I could certainly imagine old Doc Heinrich treading down out of the hills on this path, lecturing to himself on Schliemann’s discovery of Troy. What I wasn’t expecting as I listened to quiet forest sounds and disturbed a flight of butterflies that seemed to be everywhere at once, was the sound of a woman weeping.

Damsel alert!

What can I say? I simply have a soft spot for women in distress. That’s why I wrote that whole series of Hero Lincoln stories, unrealistic as they were. I followed my ears and the sounds led me along the path to a stone footbridge on which sat my damsel. The beautiful Greek goddess that I’d seen in the hotel.

“Excuse me, are you all right?” I asked. She looked up at me but said nothing. “I’m sorry, I don’t speak Greek, but can I help you?”

“It’s okay,” she said and sniffed. “I speak English. You just surprised me. I’ve been here for an hour and didn’t think anyone else used this path.”

“They told me about it at the hotel,” I said as I pushed back my Panama and mopped my brow. It was considerably cooler here in this little forest than on the roads to the monastery, but I was still sweating. “We’re staying in the same hotel, I think. Do you need some water?” I unslung my daypack and retrieved the two bottles of water I’d picked up before I started the trip. I’d indulged in the food carts earlier and had never broken into my second bottle. This would lighten my load. She took the bottle gratefully.

“I didn’t bring water with me. You are far more clever. I’ve been carting this equipment all over creation looking for the perfect spot and when I finally found it, the light started to go and I twisted my ankle. I’ve just been sitting here crying since then,” she sniffed. “Thank you for your kindness. I’m Anastasia,” she said, holding out a delicate hand. I took it, and for some reason did not shake it, but bent to kiss her fingers. I don’t know if she got anything out of it, but it sure gave me a charge.

“Aroslav, at your service. What brings you out here in the wilderness alone?”

“I’m a cinematographer,” she said. “Well, a student. I’m supposed to be working on my final project for my graduate degree. Ha! What I’m really doing is lugging fifty pounds of camera equipment up and down these slopes feeling sorry for myself.”

Oh, my! This was the shrew that threw her boyfriend out of the hotel this morning? Wouldn’t you know.

“I’d be happy to help schlep your equipment back to the hotel. Do you think you can walk? Otherwise I’ll go get an ambulance,” I said.

“Please, don’t leave!” she said. There was a trace of panic in her voice. “I mean, yes, I think I could walk, but I didn’t want to abandon my equipment. It’s all I have.”

“Um ... Perhaps if you used my stick, you could support yourself enough that if we go slowly you’ll make it. If you take my pack, I’ll shoulder yours. Believe me, with the water gone, my pack hardly weighs anything.”

“I’m sorry I can’t promise you the same thing.”

We made the exchange and she helped adjust the straps on her pack for me. I don’t think the pack I’m carrying to go around the world with weighed as much as her equipment bag. Oh, well. I was in pretty good shape, all things considered. It’s just that after all the climbs in the heat today, I was pretty well fagged out.

Anastasia gripped my arm in one hand and my stick in the other. It took us close to an hour to reach the main track that would take us back to the hotel.

“I didn’t know about this track,” she said.

“How did you get up there?”

“I had a taxi drive me to the peak and then started walking. Don’t tell me you walked up that steep trail!” she said.

“I walked, but I went by way of the roads. I visited four of the seven monasteries today.”

“My God! You must be exhausted. And still you came to the aid of a stupid girl who let her ego get in her way.”

“I must say, that has been a high point of my day,” I laughed. We were on pretty level footing now, but she kept hold of my arm, less for support than companionship.

That feeling when you know you’ve been hooked but don’t want to fight being reeled in? Yeah. That. I figured Miss Anastasia had men do just about anything she wanted and that I’d be schlepping her equipment around for the rest of my stay in the Metéora. I didn’t care. I liked the feeling of her hand on my arm and the way she was leaning against me. There were worse ways to spend a few days.

As soon as we were back at the hotel and got her equipment into her room, I contacted the host to ask for an ice pack. It amounts to a plastic baggie full of ice wrapped in a towel, but it’s cold and it works. Anastasia hobbled out into the lounge area, still using my staff for support, and deposited herself onto one of the sofas with her leg raised elegantly onto a pillow. She had quickly changed from her jeans into a pair of shorts and it was a damned good looking leg and ankle that I applied the ice to.

She grabbed her tablet and started tapping on the screen. That looked like a good idea, so I retrieved my laptop and settled into a chair nearby. Before long, we were each lost in our own worlds. My mystery had stalled when I left Thailand where a good portion of it is set. My word count was falling daily, so I decided to devote my energy to the do-over I was contemplating. That was going to bend some people’s minds as they figured out what was happening. I grinned and launched into the story.

“Are you playing games on your computer?” Anastasia asked a little harshly. I saved my file and noted that I’d already written nearly 2,000 words in the new story.

“No,” I said. “I don’t really have time for games. I’m working on a new story.”

“A story? You are a writer? Are you writing about your travels?”

“Let me see. Yes, a story. Yes, I’m a writer. No, I don’t write about my travels. I tell lies for a living. Maybe that didn’t translate right. I write fiction.”

“Really? Why are you clear out here?”

“Well, a few years ago I had an epiphany. I woke up one morning and thought, ‘I’m a writer. I could do this anywhere. So why am I doing it from a basement in Seattle?’ At that point, as the song says, I sold the house, closed the shop, bought a ticket for the West Coast. Only my ticket was a pickup truck and travel trailer. I traveled around the U.S. for over two years, through forty-four states and three Canadian provinces. Then I decided to spend the winter in Hawaii. So I stored the truck and trailer and rented a cabin on the Big Island. I was daydreaming and looked at a map one day and discovered I was halfway to Japan. It seemed silly to go back to Seattle, so I decided to just keep going west. I’ll get back to my truck in a few months.”

I heard her stomach growl. It was loud enough that she blushed and laughed.

“Sorry,” she said. “I skipped lunch.”

“It is getting on toward dinner time. Even by Greek standards. Do you feel up to going down to a restaurant? I could go and order something to take away.”

“I’ll still be limping, but it would be a shame to deprive you of an evening in one of the terrace cafés. Could you do with company?”

“Anastasia, I am a healthy if not particularly young man. To deny myself the company of a beautiful and intelligent young woman would be unheard of.”

“I just need to stop and freshen up a minute first,” she said. I helped her to her room and returned the melted icepack to the kitchen. My experience with beautiful women told me that I had at least half an hour to wait while she ‘freshened up’ so I didn’t hurry as I washed my face and trimmed my beard a little. I changed to my relaxed drawstring pants and a pull-over shirt instead of my hiking jeans. When I emerged from my room, a vision of loveliness awaited me. She was dressed in a simple full skirt and a kind of loose blouse that slid down over one beautiful and silky shoulder. She took my offered hand and limped the hundred yards into town to the nearest taverna. My furtive glances at her shoulders confirmed my opinion that she was not wearing anything under the blouse.

We sat and talked as we ate dolmas and drank wine. When we’d finished one half-liter of wine, we ordered another. When it was gone, we ordered coffee. I’m not sure what her reasoning was, but I simply didn’t want to end being in her company. I found that we had a great deal in common when it came to artistry and our opinions on various movies.

“I like foreign films,” I said. “I mean films that are not in English.”

“Why?”

“I can turn off the sound and just read the subtitles as I watch the action unfold. I hate the music used in movies,” I said.