The Golden Step by Christopher Somerville Page B

a big needle in the heart of rural Crete and has been siphoning off our life blood. Maybe this ‘Real Crete’ thing will encourage some of our brighter youngsters to start a business here, raise their children in their home village. Maybe these computers will help, too. Who really knows? Anyway – as long as I have Katharo, I will stay sane, that’s for sure.
    The fertile plain of Katharo (‘the clean place’) lies 3,600 feet up in the Dhikti Mountains a few miles west of Kritsa. Most big villages of the Cretan lowlands have a ‘mountain garden’ high in the hills where they grow their vegetables, cultivate their nut trees and graze the sheep and goats on the spring and summer grass while they make cheese from the rich mountain milk. From Kritsa the rough road climbs some 2,300 feet to Katharo, and when you tip over the rim and descend into the lumpy, roughly circular plain in its cradle of mountains, it’s like entering a green corner of heaven full of birdsong and the trickle of well water. So Iannis Siganos thinks, anyway. We leaf through the books of Cretan botany that he has brought along to the kafenion. ‘You see this lily, this crocus, these white star flowers? All of Katharo! Oh, I love Katharo, my little house there, my garden. When I eat Katharo tomatoes, Katharo beans, it’s something beautiful. There I can leave all my problems – breathe the air – be free! If I can live in Katharo all year, I would be happy. Ah, yes!’ We bang our glasses on the table and chink them together. Yia sou, Christophere! Yia mas, Ianni! The emptied thimbles clash down on the tin table top, and Iannis tilts the raki flask once more while I select another olive from the dish.
    Disgusting horrors from Yugoslavia flicker on the kafenion TV screen. There is certainly something to be said for showing these appalling things nakedly on television at the dinner hour if you want to bring home what war is and does. Iannis turns to watch. The Greek reporters employ measured tones as they reel off the places that have been hit – ‘school … houses … hospital …’ Shots of roasted and disembowelled corpses, of head-scarfed women wailing in the rubble. Crying, shouting, denunciation and fury on the smoky streets of Belgrade. ‘One can’t have an operation like this without some mistakes being made,’ remarks a US spokesman. ‘We are trying,’ explains British Prime Minister Tony Blair, ‘to stop those who are murdering and oppressing each other.’ These statements don’t go down too well in the Kafenion Kamara. The impression Cretans are getting is of NATO, not the Serbs, as the murderers and oppressors, heavy-handed bullies imposing their will and destroying fleeing civilians from god-like perches in the sky. ‘Why?’ asks Iannis Siganos passionately, driving his two hands together with a smack. ‘Why is America here? Why do they want to push everyone down beneath them? I am not a hating man – but now, in my head, I am hating America.’ He gives me a long look, exhales, and ends with a low growl of ‘Beel Cleenton – fascista! ’
    Next day dawns calm. I go out for a walk, wielding the white figwood katsouna, and am stopped by the first old man who spots it. ‘Poli orea, very beautiful!’ he exclaims, and holds out his hand for it. He hefts it, inspects the curve of the handle and taps the end lightly on the ground, nodding his head slowly. ‘Stergios,’ he smiles, and goes on. I stand with dropped jaw. That stick was presented to me on an Easter trip to Kritsa five years ago, and the giver’s name was indeed Stergios. How on earth could the old man know that? I examine the stick myself on the way back to Argyro’s, but it carries no name. Is it the shape, the wood, the feel in the hand that so clearly spells out the identity of the maker to those in the know?
    Soon the light