Bestiary

  “Have you ever seen such a book?” I said.

  “No.”

  “Or heard of it in your family?”

  His eyes narrowed. “No. Why should I?”

  “I thought perhaps if it came into Nicanor Simonides’ hands, he might have passed it on to his descendants.”

  “That’s not possible,” he said with surprising vehemence.

  “Why not?” I thought I had offended him.

  He leaned forward. “Will you be putting any of this in a book of your own?”

  “No, I’m not writing a book. Whatever you tell me is just between us.”

  He seemed satisfied, but paused to formulate his words. “Nicanor Simonides was a scoundrel,” he said. “Through generations of Simonides, there’s been no one like him.”

  I was stunned. “What did he do?”

  “He deserted his family. His wife and two sons. He disappeared the same year you say this man Sarkas died, 1822.”

  “Why?” I imagined some scandal—embezzling church funds, an illicit affair.

  “Nobody knows. He was the priest at the Church of Saint Stephen, by the harbor, and thus responsible, too, in those days, for the Church of Saint George on Skalos, which was part of the parish. His eldest son was my grandfather. All Grandfather remembered was that his father told the family he had to undertake a holy mission and would be gone for several months. He wouldn’t tell his wife what this mission was or where he was going. Then he didn’t come back. And she didn’t hear from him again. Not a single letter, nothing.” He grimaced. “Some people said maybe he was in an accident or fell ill. Others that he got the call again—from God, you know—as he had for the priesthood, but that this time he became a monk or a hermit. My great-grandmother scoured his papers. She found only one thing out of the ordinary, tucked away in a trunk: an Armenian grammar.”

  Now it was my turn to lean forward. “Did he speak the language?”

  “Not that anyone knew. She was convinced he went there.”

  “To Armenia.”

  “But it made no sense. My grandfather always said she had nothing else to grab on to. He didn’t think the grammar meant anything.” Simonides shook his head. “Grandfather never forgave him.”

  “And you never heard of Adolphus Sarkas, Mr. Simonides?”

  “Not until today.”

  So there were two churches which might have been “Sarkas’s church,” both connected to Nicanor Simonides, to whom Sarkas had entrusted his remains, his final affairs—and what else? For a moment, I thought of telling Simonides’ great-grandson that Sarkas was Armenian, that he had been a monk in the Orthodox Church, that he too had once set out on a mission to Armenia. But what would this have accomplished? Alexander Simonides was an old man, and the history that had been passed down to him was bitter and confused enough without my injecting further confusion at this late date.

  Instead, I said, “So Nicanor Simonides conducted the services at the church on Skalos as well?”

  “Correct. Sundays he conducted the morning service in town, and in the afternoon went to Skalos. When the village on Skalos was abandoned, he maintained the Church of Saint George for a while.”

  “It hasn’t been used in a long time, then.”

  “Not since he disappeared. It was locked up soon afterward.”

  The heavyset woman appeared in the doorway and nodded to him. Her sharp black eyes stood out in a face that was otherwise tired, pasty.

  “I must go now,” he said, standing up.

  We shook hands. I thanked him for his hospitality. At the front door, the dog by his side, he said, “Mr. Atlas, I’ve told you a few things—would you tell me something?”

  “Of course.”

  “Why didn’t your father bring you to Crete with him?”

  I looked him in the eye. “I’m afraid my father was a bit of a scoundrel, too.”

  THE PILOT POINTED to a strip of land across the water. “That’s it,” he shouted over the motor.

  The launch was bumping over the waves, belching smoke. The pilot wore a soiled cap and a striped vest. The stubble was white on his brown face. Long ago a fishhook had torn away a piece of his cheek. Rope burns had scarred his hands. In Xaniá, his shrugs in response to my questions made clear his disdain for Skalos. When Lena had approached him on the docks the previous day, he told her—by way of his grandson, who spoke English—that she must be mistaken, surely she didn’t want to go to Skalos. Replying that it was exactly where she wanted to go, she negotiated a good price for his services. When we boarded the launch, and he saw we had no fishing tackle, he was even more baffled. English birdwatchers also visited the island on occasion, but that was it. At the same time, he didn’t pry.

  When we were close enough to the island to make out the jagged coastline, he broke his silence. “There’s nothing on Skalos. The goatherds who live there aren’t even Cretans,” he added contemptuously, “they’re Gypsies.”

  He meant Gypsies with a capital G.

  “Romany,” he emphasized, to make sure I understood.

  “Have they been there long?” I said.

  “As long as anyone can remember. But they’re always on the move. One day they’ll leave Skalos, too.” He shrugged. “Who knows, they may already be gone.”

  “No one has seen them recently?”

  “I wouldn’t know. There used to be a lot more of them, but during the war many fled to Kos to hide out from the Germans. They never returned. And none of them fought.”

  A crucifix and a small Greek flag hung inside his salt-streaked windshield beside a photograph of his nine grandchildren.

  “I was in the Resistance,” he went on. “There were thirty Germans for every one of us, and they came here like beasts, not soldiers—shooting children, hanging women, cutting off people’s hands—but we never surrendered.” He put a cigarette between his lips and turned back to the sea. “There is nothing good about war, even if you survive.”

  “What’s he talking about?” Lena whispered.

  “The evils of war.”

  She was surprised. “Did you tell him you fought in Vietnam?”

  I shook my head. “That’s not a war that would interest him. More to the point, he said the only people we may encounter here are Gypsies.”

  Like the meltemi, the wind shearing the tips off the waves had a name: the sirocco, a hard, sand-filled wind that blows across the Mediterranean from Africa. It draws up moisture from the sea, but not before raining down more sand than water on the small islands off Crete, like Skalos.

  The moment we were ashore, climbing the slope from the crumbling dock, sand filled our shoes and stuck to our lips. We put on our sunglasses and pulled our hats low. My knapsack contained a flash-light, a compass, and a pocketknife. In my khaki jacket I had a notebook and a map. Lena carried a camera, sandwiches, and a canteen. It was eleven o’clock. The launch was going to return for us at six.

  “Make sure you’re here,” were the pilot’s final words to us. “We can’t sail through those reefs once it’s dark.”

  We climbed one hill, then another, before following a goat path through a rocky field. Thorns snagged our jeans. Thistles crunched beneath our shoes. To protect herself from the sun, Lena had put on a long-sleeved shirt. She walked with the sure step of someone who spent a lot of time in rough country.

  The entire island was hilly. Much of it was bare. We saw no sign of human life. The vegetation grew in clusters: scrub pines, cacti, sea grapes, and wild thyme. The goat path branched off into small clearings. Heading toward the eastern end of the island, we saw a pine forest, outlined against the sea. According to my map, the ruins of the village Simonides mentioned were on the southern shore; the Church of Saint George was on higher ground, beside the forest.

  When Lena and I had rendezvoused at the harbor in Xaniá the previous afternoon, I told her about my interview with Alexander Simonides. As we walked to the Church of Saint Stephen, she said, “So you think this priest took the bestiary to Ar
menia after Sarkas bequeathed it to him?”

  “It’s a strong possibility. It’s hard to say if he and Sarkas were confidants, confederates, or just opportunists who used one another. What we do know is strange enough: a Cretan priest arranged the funeral of a stranger and then ran out on his family, his parish, and his homeland. His wife believed he went to Armenia, of all places. That can’t be a coincidence. On his deathbed, did Sarkas repent and confess to Nicanor Simonides? Did Simonides promise to put things right and carry the bestiary to Ani, completing the ‘holy mission’? If so, it may have been tucked away at the Monastery of Saint Jacob in Ani until 1840, when it would have been destroyed.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Because in 1840 there was a volcanic eruption and the monastery burned to the ground.”

  She stopped short. “My god. And you knew about this?”

  “I knew there had been a fire, but until I talked to Simonides, I thought the bestiary had been spared because Sarkas never reached Ani. But what if Nicanor Simonides did go there? Or maybe he set out with the best intentions and then yielded to temptation himself and absconded with the book. I doubt he got the call to be a monk. That would have been a reaffirmation of his faith, not a reason to act dishonorably. And why flee to Armenia when Greece is filled with monasteries? Anyway, if Simonides didn’t go to Ani, the book may still exist.”

  “And if he didn’t take it at all?” Lena whispered, as we entered the Church of Saint Stephen.

  “Then it could still be here in Xaniá—or, far more likely, on Skalos. Because Sarkas had himself buried there, I feel certain the church on Skalos was the one Zetto was referring to as ‘Sarkas’s church.’ The fact it was closed up soon after Sarkas’s death is interesting, too, don’t you think?” We were now standing in the nave of the church, which was empty. “Since we also just learned that this church, too, was overseen by Simonides, I thought we ought to check it out—just in case.”

  First and foremost, Adolphus Sarkas was an artist. In veering off, becoming a thief and a renegade, relinquishing his holy orders, he had changed the course of his life, and of the bestiary; but I doubted he would have stopped painting, no matter what his circumstances. His renderings of animals—of sea, sky, land, and ether—had been powerful enough to jolt Giorgio Zetto, whose diary was otherwise short on enthusiasms. Yet, after months of digging, I had discovered no references in any other source to the paintings Zetto saw. But I wondered if Sarkas might have also created formal ecclesiastical art for Nicanor Simonides—as he had for Father Aucher—here in the Church of Saint Stephen. If so, it had not been noted by the author of The Churches of Crete, who relegated a single workmanlike paragraph to this church, providing its date of construction (1514; rebuilt 1735), size (60 by 54 meters), height (49 meters), building materials (Naxian marble and mountain oak), and notable events (the christening of one Cretan governor, the wedding of another, and the funeral of Admiral Christos Valiotes, who defeated the Turkish fleet off Cyprus). But there was nothing about artwork.

  For good reason, I realized, after examining the church’s icons and murals. They were pedestrian depictions of Saint Nicholas distributing alms, a pensive Virgin Mary, Jesus with the disciples in Gethsemane, and Jesus crucified, many times over: all of these standard issue in every Orthodox church from Serbia to Siberia. There was no sign of Sarkas’s brilliant, distinctive style. And no way of knowing if the Caravan Bestiary had passed through there in 1822, in transit to Armenia, or to Skalos, whose Church of Saint George wasn’t mentioned in The Churches of Crete—not even a footnote.

  Lena and I walked on across Skalos. The sun beat down hard, but until we reached the pine forest, there were no trees large enough to offer shade. Twice we stopped to empty our shoes of sand. Horseflies circled our heads. Lizards skittered through the weeds. The island felt so deserted I was beginning to think the pilot was right: maybe the Gypsies were gone altogether.

  At the top of a steep hill we were startled by the clatter of goat bells before we saw the goats themselves. There were four of them, with shaggy white fleeces, eating tufts of spiky grass on the downward slope. The one male, with curved yellow horns, looked up at us, chewing slowly.

  Mopping my neck, I looked around. “I guess we’ll find out soon enough who put those bells on their collars.”

  Beyond the next hill, we came on three more adult goats and two kids, also wearing bells. For these animals a pail of water and a block of salt had been left beneath a scrub pine.

  We were just a few hundred yards from the forest now. We crossed a shallow ravine. The goat path widened from there and, just short of the forest, forked right, to the ruins of the village, and left, up an incline, to the Church of Saint George. We turned left and had gone about a hundred yards when the church steeple appeared through a break in the trees.

  “There it is,” Lena said, squeezing my hand.

  We continued on, the path increasingly clotted with weeds, when suddenly a man stepped out of the forest up ahead. He was in his forties, wearing baggy pants, a shirt worn through at the elbows, and a wide-brimmed black hat. Tall and muscular, he was brown-skinned, darker than the darkest Cretan, with large hands and feet. He carried a knife in his belt and a staff in his hand. He stared back at us, then put a finger to his lips and descended the path quickly, nimble as a goat himself.

  He carried the odor of his goats, and of tobacco. I didn’t understand why he wanted us to be silent until he pointed to a grassy slope where a flock of snowy egrets were picking for insects.

  “Wait,” he said, “they will fly off as one.” His Greek was strangely accented—the final syllables dropped too quickly, the consonants high-pitched.

  “The birds are beautiful,” I said, “but that’s not why we’re here.”

  “No?” He seemed disappointed. “I know all about the birds. I can guide you.”

  “No, thanks.” I extended my hand. “My name is Xeno. This is Lena.”

  “I’m Sampson,” he replied, and we shook hands. His hand was rough and unexpectedly cold. He had a tattoo on his wrist, but I couldn’t make it out clearly because of his shirt cuff.

  One of the egrets flew off, but the others remained on the slope.

  “You see,” Sampson said, “they didn’t follow because he is not the leader.”

  When I translated this for Lena, she smiled pleasantly and murmured, “Not true.”

  Sampson had obviously developed a line of patter for the birdwatchers.

  When he sensed we weren’t buying into it, his smile faded and he turned suspicious. “So why are you here?”

  I pointed at the steeple.

  He squinted at me. “The church?”

  “We’re tourists. We heard it was interesting.”

  “Who told you that?”

  “Alexander Simonides, in Xaniá.”

  If the name meant anything to him, he didn’t let on. “He must not have seen it for a long time,” he grunted. “There’s nothing there. Anyway, it’s locked up. My father is the caretaker.”

  “Caretaker?”

  He nodded. “My father, Rumen.”

  “I didn’t know there was a caretaker,” I said skeptically.

  “Well, there is. And now I have to see to my goats,” he said abruptly, and started down the path. “Goodbye.”

  “What did he say?” Lena asked, and I repeated it while we climbed the remaining stretch to the church.

  It was bigger than I expected, and better preserved. The architecture was Venetian. At one time, it would have been brightly whitewashed, with blue mosaics around the door and marine talismans, dolphins, and miniature galleons adorning the terra-cotta roof. The building’s stone and mortar were still intact. Only the steeple showed signs of crumbling. The windows were boarded up with splintering planks. The rear wall was covered with red bougainvillea. The rusted padlock on the door must have accommodated a giant skeleton key.

  “Let’s try to find Sarkas’s grave,” I said.

  Circl
ing around to the cemetery, we soon discovered this would be impossible. The dust lay an inch deep, and on the few tumbledown gravestones that remained intact the elements had worn away names and dates. Somewhere beneath all that dust was Sarkas’s dust.

  I turned back to the church. There was a small door on the rear wall, nearly concealed by the bougainvillea. “We’re going in,” I said, gripping the doorknob and putting my shoulder to the door. The hinges creaked and the door opened. A wave of stale air washed over us. “Get out the flashlight.”

  Lena shone the beam into the darkness: there were piles of rubble, shattered tiles, mounds of sawdust. Mice scurried into the shadows. My head grazed the low ceiling, and clouds of dust rose beneath our feet. We went through an arched doorway into the sacristy, where the ceiling shot up twelve feet. The cobwebs were thick. There were bat droppings beneath the beams. A cross taken down long ago had left an outline on the back wall. Below it, a shelf remained intact on which a line of books had been reduced to dust. A baptismal font was lying on its side. A gutted cabinet was pushed against the wall. In the corner there were brass hooks where Nicanor Simonides would have hung his vestments.

  Three plain wooden doors led out of the sacristy. We went through the middle one and found ourselves directly behind the remains of the altar, facing the pews. Icons were painted on the three doors: Saint George and Saint Christopher flanking the Crucifixion. I took the flashlight from Lena and examined the images beneath layers of grime. Then I shone the light on the mural of the Ascension above the altar and on the domed ceiling from which Christ Pantocrator, copper-skinned, olive-eyed, gazed down sternly. I was disappointed. Like the icons in Xaniá, these were dull, standardized pieces of work. My hope that this was “Sarkas’s church” was fading. If those wondrous animals Sarkas painted were not in either the Church of Saint Stephen or the Church of Saint George, Giorgio Zetto must have seen them in some other church in northwestern Crete (there were hundreds, many long gone) or on canvases that could be anywhere. As for the bestiary itself, if Simonides did not take it, if, instead, either he or Sarkas hid it away in this church, it must now be dust, like those books in the sacristy. Either way, here on Skalos or in the monastery in Ani, the bestiary must have been destroyed.