By Robert Castle

Iraklion, Crete, appeared to have received belated Marshall Plan funding. My bus passed dozens of construction sites. Scaffolds supported half-erected cinder block structures surrounded by piles of sand, dirt, concrete dust, and plain rubble. No one worked these places after three in the afternoon. The streets quickly narrowed upon entering the city’s center but broadened as we approached the bus station, situated a couple hundred yards from the harbor. We passed a motorbike shop, Daedalus Vespa, reminding me why I had come here: the ruins at Knossos, former home of King Minos, the Minotaur, and the creator of the Minotaur’s labyrinthine prison. Was there an Icarus Travel, as well, around the block? Maybe Daedalus should have fled from Crete on scooters. Or would Icarus have tried a wheelie and killed himself anyway? You can tell these kids but they never listen!

Iraklion’s harbor was protected, if not created, by a long curving jetty stretching nearly two miles into the bay. Along the harbor, as I set out from the station to find a room, the fishermen had lined up carts to peddle that day’s catch. I didn’t see a hotel until I walked a half-mile inland, but it had three blue stars on its facing above the entrance. The building itself, eight stories, when compared to the others in the area, seemed so superior that I didn’t even bother to go in to know its prices. Others should be nearby, but after a forty minutes walking, I had not seen another pension or hotel. I then headed directly into the city’s center. The open-air market carts were being wheeled down the narrow streets. After an hour, I became familiar with boot and leather shops; I was going in circles. Maybe I should have taken the three-star hotel for the night and find cheaper lodging the next day.

The sun had set, and the city’s byways darkened. The streets were ill lighted. I began to think that I wouldn’t be able to find my way out. I tried searching unfamiliar streets and alleys. My shoulders ached carrying the backpack. My shirt was drenched with perspiration. Finally, a sign appeared in red: ROOMS. The doorway was open and dark leading to a stairway. There was no bell. Atop the stairwell a single bulb produced a pale, inadequate light. I slowly walked up the steps, listened for noises, and came to a door. Still no bell.

I knocked and walked into a room with three women sitting around a television set. Behind the chairs was a line of laundered bed sheets and female undergarments. On the other side, several pots cooked on the stove. A woman with gray hair, in her sixties, stood and greeted me. I stammered a phrase book "good evening." The other two continued watching television. The older woman even turned toward the television after she spoke to me. Neither surprised nor visibly overjoyed to have my business, the women indicated that none of them spoke English. I held up a finger to emphasize that I wanted a single room. Yes, yes, they nodded. The old woman brought a piece of paper to me and wrote: 100. For one room and one night, I gestured. She held up a finger. She wanted me to follow her to the room.

"That’s not necessary," I said uselessly and followed her to the second floor.

Halfway down the corridor she opened a door without a key. I noted that I wouldn’t be able to lock the door and shouldn’t leave anything valuable there. The room was mammoth. Three beds, thirty feet apart, one per corner, with the door in the fourth corner. I walked to the nearest bed and feebly tested its spring. I peeked inside the clothes closet and happily noted the absence of clothing. Then I warily gazed at the sink, from which I was certain no prayer could induce hot water to flow. I had already experienced its absence or very limited availability in Khania, Athens, Kalamata, Olympia, and Patras, unless one wanted to pay to take a shower. I had stopped shaving two days before-for different reasons: my shaving cream had run out-and shampooed my hair the last two times with cold water. The room’s two steam heaters seemed to work, although the entire place seemed damp but not chilly.

I nodded approval and returned downstairs with the old woman. Surrounded by the blaring television and the steaming food, I was prepared to pay for three days in advance and brought out a five hundred-drachma note. It was too late to continue to search for room. I thought I could last here. The women seemed unthreatening, I didn’t see or hear any other boarders. I probably couldn’t have found a cheaper place.

The woman wouldn’t take the money.

I didn’t understand. She had indicated she wanted money. I proffered the five hundred again.

She picked up the piece of paper on which she had written earlier and jabbed at the 100.

I took out my wallet to put the five hundred away. As I opened the billfold, she reached into it and plucked out a one hundred-drachma note and tucked it into her apron pocket. She only wanted one night’s payment and didn’t care or understand that I wanted to stay three nights. Fine, I had my room and they weren’t throwing me out, a thought that has briefly crossed my mind when she wouldn’t take the five hundred. We had reached a desired monetary understanding. I could finally unpack and go to dinner. I didn’t ask for a receipt.

*

Downstairs the television blared. When I had returned from supper, the women were absent and four children watched a cartoon spoke in English with Greek subtitles. Now I heard the introductory music for the news show. The news show signaled that it was ten o’clock. I had written several letters to my friends in the State, then had lain on the bed and begun Lawrence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy. Sterne defined several classes of travelers: Idle, Inquisitive, Lying. Proud, Vain, Splenetic. One type, however, seemed appropriately to me. He spoke of the man who crossed the seas with the view of saving money upon any pretense or reason. "They might also," he wrote about Simple Travelers, "save themselves and others a great deal of unnecessary trouble by saving their money at home." How else to explain someone who found himself in these bare quarters, willing to stay three days, except his unwillingness to pay an extra one hundred drachmas? I may also have qualified under another class.

As a Lying traveler, for example, I remember the time four Americans, two men and two women students, entered my train compartment. They were eager and inquiring. I said nothing to them but one saw me reading a book, Ulysses.

"You speak English," she said. "Are you American?"

"Yes," I said, putting the book turned over onto my thigh.

"Where you headed?" asked her boyfriend.

"Assisi."

"We’re going to Rome."

"Really."

There was a pause. Perhaps they expected me to interrogate them.

"What do you do in the States?" asked the other girl. "Are you going to school?"

"I’m studying to be a priest."

"Oh, really," the guys nearly gasped. The girls wanted to know where my collar was.

"A collar isn’t offered to seminarians until the fifth year," I replied.

"Oh, really."

In less than minute, they turned to each other, and I could return to the novel. I was surprised they didn’t leave the compartment. Stuck with a priest! What a bore. I supposed they had expected me to talk about God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit. Who wants to hear that when you’re traveling? Thank God he’s not going all the way to Rome with us.

I doubt whether Sterne or many others of keen sensibility of the 18^th century could have tolerated the 20^th century American tourist. We were a new class: Loud. Loud as if sound conquered territory. You would have thought the Declaration of Independence was meant to be shouted. Loud and Ignorant. Americans complained how Europe wasn’t Americanized enough. How many had I met who complained about the lack of a hot shower everyday? Americans walked around Florence and Rome with Walkmans plugged into their heads, filling themselves with noise so as not to be too affected by anything they were seeing.

How would Sterne have classified the fellow I had met atop the Arc de Triomphe, an automobile executive from Detroit touring with his wife and teenaged son. We gazed over Paris from Etoile. He spoke to me about one thing for five minutes, Parisian traffic.

"That’s not too good," he said, pointing down, "All the cars coming toward us but there’s no lights or policemen to alleviate the flow into the circle."

"It’s moving pretty well."

"Wait for rush hour," he said knowingly. "Do you know what the basic trouble with traffic circles is? People have to use judgment and must be courteous simultaneously. Something we have trouble doing each one alone. Just asking for trouble."

He started talking about the Citröen, an ugly looking mess.

"Like a submarine." I said. He didn’t hear me well. What was like a submarine? "The Citröen, the car you just mentioned."

"Oh. I didn’t quite get you. I was referring to its engine. I was wondering why you were comparing it to a submarine engine."

"I don’t know much about engines." Actually, I knew nothing about cars.

"If I had one wish, if I could make one thing happen, and I don’t mean any disrespect to you, but people would save so much more money and have a better respect for the product itself and the people who make it, I wish people like yourself would learn what’s under an automobile hood, know how the engine works, and if something goes wrong, be able to fix it."

His wife came over and told him that their tour group was leaving, in effect, saving him from thrashing me further for my ignorance of car engines. I had suffered his diatribe for the billions of people in the world who drove cars without a clue as to the secrets of the internal combustion engine.

*

I continued reading Sterne. A half-hour passed. The television continued to roar. Suddenly, the door opened and a man walked in, went to the closet and put his jacket on a hanger, then sat on the bed across the room. He was in his thirties, maybe as old as forty, had a dark complexion and jet-black hair.

"Who are you?" he asked.

"I checked in around six o’clock."

"Ah, an American," he smiled. "I have been here two days. Where do you come from in the United States? Oh, Pennsylvania. That is a very good state. I have never been there. To the United States. I have read about it."

I couldn’t detect his accent. He wasn’t fighting through the Greek language to talk to me. He spoke clearly yet with unidentifiable tremors. We exchanged names but he contributed the majority of questions. He wasn’t passing time but pumping for information. He listened carefully, wanted clarifications and precision to my answers, for fifteen minutes. Where my father worked? His job there? Did he retire with a big pension? When he heard that my father had been fired after thirty years at RCA, the man became upset. It didn’t fit into his idea of what big corporations were supposed to do. I told him RCA called the firing "early retirement," and he latched onto this to absolve the corporation’s actions. I couldn’t imagine why all this interest nor why he wanted all the details about my college and post-graduate career. Unimpressed by my Bachelor of Arts in English, he was beside himself when I said I had gone to Columbia University, which seemingly redeemed my apparently worthless Bachelor’s degree.

"You will finish Doctor of Philosophy soon?"

"Yes," I lied.

He lit a cigarette and asked if I minded. I pulled out a Marlboro. He nodded approvingly. Yes, everyone smoked Marlboros.

"Could I have one?" he asked. He stubbed out his cigarette and walked over to me. "Greek cigarettes are shit. Thank you. America makes the best cigarettes. Don’t you think?"

"Oh yes," I said. He seemed more patriotic about America than most Americans I knew.

He was quiet while we smoked, but when he finally spoke again he was more forthcoming about himself.

"I am a doctor, the only one in my village. On the road west to Sitia."

"I am going to Sitia in a few days."

If he was a doctor, I wondered, why was he staying in this cheap place? Had I run into the rarest of species, one most people would have thought was extinct in the western world: a poor doctor? But he was more than that!

"I came to Greece ten years ago. I was born in Germany. I love Greece. In a month I will become a Greek citizen. I will love being a Greek citizen."

With a flick of his hand he brushed aside my congratulations.

"I am telling you this because I want you to realize how much I love this country and its people." He re-lit his stubbed Greek cigarette. "You might think I do not love Greece after what I have to say. The Greeks are a lazy people. That is why they never accomplish anything. They will always be poor. I will always be poor. I will always be poor because the Greeks are lazy. I make them healthy but I never get paid. They tell me there’s no work. They don’t want to work. Greece has no system. Nothing works right here. Everything is broken."

"I noticed all the partially built buildings when I came into Iraklion."

"Half of them will not be finished."

"Why did you come to Greece?"

"I love it here."

"You should move to a bigger town."

"I like where I am. I knew you would not comprehend."

He was quiet for a minute and finished his cigarette. I thought he was going to bed. I was about to go to the sink and brush my teeth when he said to me: "The roads in Greece are terrible. The government never repairs them. That is so because the government does not have a system. The Greeks need a system. Like the United States."

"How like America?"

"The roads in your country are in good condition. Your government takes care of them."

I mentioned a news article I had read last winter that reported a pothole in Pittsburgh so large a trash can could fit inside it.

"You do not know what you are talking about," he replied.

The poor Greek doctor didn’t want to hear how the American system had a few imperfections. As the immigrants last century dreamed of an America paved with golden opportunities, he dreamed of an America paved over. He believe the American system could be grafted to Greek society, a system which would brink a work ethic, completed building projects, and people who paid bills on time. Yet, I sensed his complaints about the Greeks, as well as his surrogate American patriotism, had germinated from a deeper source and that he was eager to let me know what it was.

He spoke about his practice again. Not only did he serve his own village but worked for no charge in isolated villages in central and southern Crete. He had just returned from a clinic in Iraklion where he had volunteered his services while he was staying in town.

"I did not come to Iraklion to doctor. I do not mind, but I must get other things done. I must leave in two days."

"Why are you here?"

He laughed mirthlessly.

"You are a young man, you will learn eventually. Women are deceitful, treacherous. You cannot trust them."

I didn’t understand what he was getting at.

"It is a custom for the mother-in-law to live at her daughter’s house. I understood when I got married this was so. She is always scheming against me. I came back from one of the village yesterday. I stayed overnight. I do not find my wife in the house. Nothing, nowhere. The mother-in-law says her daughter has left me. Does not want to be married to me."

"She didn’t leave a note?"

"This is the way of the Greeks. I am supposed to understand. I love the Greeks. I love Greek women. I came to Iraklion to find a new wife." He smiled warily. "I have already picked her out."

"What about your wife? Did you get a divorce?"

He waved his arm. A divorce would be easy. He couldn’t wait to kick the mother-in-law from his house. I wondered how he got a wife so soon.

"This is my third time married."

Okay, I thought, but wouldn’t he have to contend with another mother-in-law? He seemed happy over his choice of a new wife. She lived in Iraklion. He loved being married. If only the Greeks could get a system.

When the lights were out, he asked about the roads again. Weren’t most of them in good shape? I said yes and he asked nothing else. Five minutes later, though, he made sounds, a combination of breathing and throat clearing, an incantation of huffs, hutts, puffs, acks and quacks and snorts. The sinus-larynx melody last five minutes. I lay immobile, listening, thinking how I was going to make it another night with this guy and his noises. Were these part of his personal system which, eventually, scared away wife number two?

*

My eyes opened. Daylight. I must have heard something. Across the room the poor doctor left his bed and walked to the door. The room was cold. I faced the ceiling and rolled my eyes to the side. He wore underpants and a tee shirt. The toilet was ten feet from our room. After three or four minutes the toilet gushed. Seconds later was a second less forceful flush. Two flushed: part of his system? For instance, some people will flush before sitting and down and getting to business.

In the room, he turned on the taps full blast and washed his face. The nose and throat sounds resumed. He expelled mighty wads of phlegm into the sink. He continued:

"Ahhh-ahhh-ahhhhhgggggggkkk. Uhhh-uhhh-uhlllgggggggkkk. Aaaaaaahhh, akkk-akk-akkk."

He expectorated one good glob.

Remember, I told myself, do not touch the sink.

Then he bathed himself, removing his undershirt and lathering his armpits and chest and pulling down his underpants to his knees to scrub his balls and perineum.

Did the old women understand when I said that would stay three days? Thank God, I hadn’t paid for those days or given her my passport. I wasn’t going to spend another night or morning with this man. I pretended to sleep. Yes, I would not have to say goodbyes to anyone. Sneak out of her and look for another room. No problem. Just worry about getting out unseen. If the women stopped me, I would play dumb.

He grabbed the only towel, a long white bath towel, and with one end wiped free the later, with the one he dried himself.

Don’t touch the towel either, I thought. Just get up, put on your clothes, pack your stuff, and get the hell out.

Ten minutes later he was dressed but didn’t seem to want to leave. First, he needed to clean a grease spot from the lapel of his olive green jacket. He moistened the lapel under the water tap and rubbed it hard with the bath towel. He muttered in Greek, and I surmised he was unsuccessful. The prospective wife would not be impressed. Or, perhaps, cleaning the jacket would be her first duty. Next, he brought the towel to his bed, spit-sprayed his black shoes and wiped them shiny. Did he say last night he was returning to the clinic? When he replaced the towel, he cupped his hands beneath the tap and rinsed out his mouth. Ahhhhhhhhh-spit. And drove whatever had come out down the basin with a surge of water.

I waited ten minutes after he had left the room. On the way to the toilet I saw and heard no one. I brushed my teeth three feet from the sink. Did the dark streaks on the towel come from his shoes or his body? I dressed, packed, and tiptoed downstairs. The large living room was empty. No sounds.

I was gone.