kept hoping I'd find Mildred here or there. I never held it
against her.
Easter
I went to Crete to live and write. I didn’t know much about
it except that my roommate at the Y was from there. What I
found was heaven on earth: the bluest sky; water in bands of
turquoise, lavender, aqua, and silver; rocks so old they had
whole histories writ en on the underside of their rough edges;
opium poppies a foot high and blood red; a primitive harbor;
caves in which people lived; peasants who came down from
the mountains to the city for political speeches - there would
be a whole family in a wooden cart pulled by a mule with an
old man walking the mule; there was light the color of bright
yellow and bright white melted together, and it never went
away; even at night, somehow through the dark, the light
would manifest, an unmistakable presence, and in the darkest
part of night you could see the tiniest pebble resting by
your foot. This was an island on which old women in black
cooked on Bunsen burners, olive trees were wealth, and
there was a universal politics of noli me tangere with a
lineage from 400 years of Turkish occupation through Nazi
occupation; the people were fierce and proud and sometimes
terribly sad.
The place changed for me one day. It was Easter. I was with
an English friend and a Greek lover. The streets began fil ing
up with gangs of men carrying lit torches. They seemed a
little KKK-ish. Their intentions did not seem friendly. My
Greek lover explained that the gangs were looking for Jews,
the kil ers of Christ. That would be me. My companions and
I hid behind a pil ar of a church. I don’t think there were other
Jews on the island, because this search for Christ’s kil ers had
gone on year after year, even before the Turkish occupation. I
wondered if the gang of men would kil me. I thought they
would. I was afraid, but the worst of it was that I was afraid
my Greek lover would give me up - here she is, the Jew. I was
the faithless one, because this question was in my heart and
mind. I wondered what would happen if the torches found us,
saw us and took us. I wondered if he’d stand up for me then.
I wondered how the people I’d been living with could turn
into a malignant crowd, a hate crowd. If there were no other
Jews on the island, it was because they had been killed or had
fled. (Tourist season had not yet begun. )
