that it can hurt to look at him and hurt more to turn away.
Nikko is taller than anyone else on Crete and they tease him in
the bar by saying he cannot be Cretan because he is so tall. The
jokes are told to me by pointing and extravagant hand gestures
and silly faces and laughing and broken syllables o f English.
Y ou can say a lot without words and make many jokes. N ikko
is dark with black hair and black eyes shaped a little like
almonds, an Oriental cast to his face, and a black mustache that
is big and wide and bushy; and his face is like an old
photograph, a sculpted Russian face staring out o f the
nineteenth century, a young Dostoevsky in Siberia, an exotic
Russian saint, without the suffering but with many secrets. I
often wonder if he is a spy but I don’t know why I think that or
who he would spy for. I am sometimes afraid that M is not safe
with him. M is a radical and these are dangerous times here.
There are riots in Athens and on Crete the government is not
popular. Cretans are famous for resistance and insurrection.
The mountains have sheltered native fighters from Nazis,
from Turks, but also from other Greeks. There was a civil war
here;
Greek communists
and leftists
were purged,
slaughtered; in the mountains o f Crete, fascists have never
won. The mountains mean freedom to the Cretans; as
Kazantzakis said, freedom or death. The government is afraid
o f Crete. These mountains have seen blood and death,
slaughter and fear, but also urgent and stubborn resistance, the
human who will not give in. It is the pride o f people here not to
give in. But N ikko is M ’s friend and he drives us to the
country the nights we go or to my room the nights we go right
there. M y room is a tiny shack with a single bed, low,
decrepit, old, and a table and a chair. I have a typewriter at the
table and I write there. I’m writing a novel against the War and
poems and theater pieces that are very avant-garde, more than
Genet. I also have Greek grammar books and in the afternoons
I sit and copy the letters and try to learn the words. I love
drawing the alphabet. The toilet is outside behind the chicken
coops. The chickens are kept by an old man, Pappous, it
means grandpa. There is m y room, thin w ood walls, unfinished wood, big sticks, and a concrete floor, no w indow ,
then the landlady’s room, an old woman, then the old man’s
room, then the chickens, then the toilet. There is one mean,
scrawny, angry rooster who sits on the toilet all the time. The
old woman is a peasant who came to the city after all the men
and boys in her village were lined up and shot by the Nazis.
T w o sons died. She is big and old and in mourning still,
dressed from head to toe in black. One day she burns her hands
