Shoplifting at Dracula’s, cont’d.
Crete had come as part of my all-in-one wanderjahr in Greece. A car trip with two schoolmates through Italy and Greece in the summer after graduation had revived my juvenile Hellenism and turned me into a proto-Hellene. I’d been immersing myself in the bleak and blistering books of Nikos Kazantzakis: Zorba, Report to Greco, The Last Temptation of Christ, Saint Francis, and The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel, later parsed for me in Athens by a friend of the book’s translator and of Elena, the great man’s widow and biographer, who lived in Geneva—and to whom I brazenly wrote a letter of self-introduction, to which, surprisingly and graciously, she responded by inviting me to tea in her luxurious apartment on the Quai Gustave-Ador (on the mantelpiece: a signed photograph of President-Archbishop Makarios of Cyprus; above the mantel, a portrait of the late Nikos, peering at far horizons), where we talked about her husband and writing; for she’d never remarried, and was no mean writer herself. She autographed my copy of her biography of Nikos. We had more tea. Smoking was de rigueur then, so we smoked. She lived in Geneva, she explained, out of distaste for the colonels then running Greece.
But they didn’t bother me, those colonels. For me it was all about Mounts Olympus and Ida and ouzo and the sirtaki and the shivering silvery olive groves of Attica. Greece was this introvert’s way out of himself. It was my destiny, I hollered, my eyes burning with pure self-love. Never mind Britain or Ireland; having followed the British stream at the International School I’d taken my O- and A-levels and scored sufficiently well to be admitted to Keele and Sussex, a couple of perfectly decent new universities that sent me handsome brochures advertising their courses, their campuses, their amenities. But the British Isles wouldn’t do, yet. I came over all (Lawrence) Durrellian about it (come to think of it, it would have been around that time that I read The Alexandria Quartet). Like the Greek-Cypriot freedom fighters, I wanted my own personal Enosis with Hellas. Mum gave in, but on one condition: A plain old gap year wouldn’t do. My footloose foray had to wear dignified pedagogical disguise. So we (well, she) got me enrolled at an English-language school affiliated with the impressive-sounding Hellenic-American Institute, through which a Greek family was contacted to serve as my hosts, and I was on my way. At Lausanne station I hauled an enormous steamer trunk aboard the couchette wagon of the grandly-named Orient Express—yes, that one, but fallen on hard times—and set off through the Balkans for Greece and, I foolishly hoped, some kind of glory.
