Halcyon Days

By Zamira Kristina Skalkottas

September

When we first arrived, we opened rooms that had long been shut. We were creators of rectangles of light as we unlatched windows and pushed open shutters. The view from the second story drew us in with so much sea: long bolts of blue stretched to the horizon. Crosses burned into doorways, letters written in charcoal, pots of basil on every terrace—not for cooking but for good luck. All of it was strange and new.

Penelope and I worked alone in different parts of the house. If we were miffed that the first task given to us as "house tutors" by the directors of the study abroad program was to clean the rooms that housed our small campus, we didn't mention it. With two master's degrees between us, we quickly swallowed any sense of privilege and got busy. We even relished the pounding out of mattresses, the airing of bedding in the sun, the dusting of furniture. We filled the rooms with buckets of water and mopped the brown water through open doors onto balconies until it ran clear, sloshed over edges, and trickled down narrow lanes to thirsty cats and chained-up dogs.

Mosquitoes bit our legs as we worked. Our arms turned brown. We ate hearty meals that the cook, Roula, made for us: big casserole dishes of boureki, eaten at the long table in the courtyard, before she would get a call in the middle of the day from her married lover and slink away. After the afternoon siesta, we would swim from the rocks at the monastery, a place the directors had told us about, lowering ourselves in one limb at a time, like a rope.

Then 9/11 happened. The director called, and I answered the phone in the little downstairs kitchen of my apartment, the news sending a lightning bolt into the ground, welding me to this specific moment in time and space forever. The next day we were glued to the TV in the directors' house, a house high on the mountainside that they had designed themselves, inspired by the palace of Knossos: wide geometric windows framing shapes of land and sky and sea.

For a week, the whole program hung by a thread, most students from the US and Canada stuck en route in New York. We waited to see if they would arrive, if their parents would still let them leave. For a week we had only one student, Sébastien of Quebec, because he had already been traveling in Europe when it happened.

In the meantime, the director—a Greek educator from the UK of the public school type, an old sea dog—told us stories. He filled our heads with gossip from the village: tales about men who died young, or those who "tricked" death. As we drove the island roads, we saw signs pockmarked with bullet holes and shrines at almost every mountain bend where cars had gone off the side. We heard of sea voyages that lasted years and of distant ports memorialized in local restaurant names. One evening, as we listened, we watched a red harvest moon rise over Argentina Tavern.

In our home, new-people sounds and old-house sounds continued to get acquainted. The rooms seemed to expand to let in air and light as we lived in them, as our stomachs stretched to fit more of the heavy food. With the physical labor, the sunbathing, and a bath in the sea every day, we felt like a layer of skin had already been sloughed off. Drunk after the hearty midday meals, we careened into afternoon sleep, then listened as shutters, doors, and trees knocked about in the late afternoon wind. The breezes seemed to go on and on, adding extensions, out over the waters around Crete. So much quiet, yet nothing ever seemed quite still.

After our daily baptisms in the Aegean, we would head to the tavernas, where the conversation at tables was strewn with politics and hyperbole. We drank strong, sweet wine poured from plastic jugs and ate from communal plates. Bitter, sharp thimbles of tsikoudia went down well after the lamb. We did away with silverware. Our hands became like knives, tearing at meat and bread. After dinner, we leaned forward on our forearms, listening to more tales. Soon, I thought, we might begin to speak in the local poetry, in fifteen-line rhyming couplets, in mantinades, like the ones carved into knives by the knifemakers of Chania.

That was our first month in this muscular land, where nets of light seemed to hold us in. Even though September was coming to an end, it still felt like high summer. The cicadas made music around the clock. We were biding our time, waiting for the students to come, for school, classes, and internships to begin, for routine to set in. It all felt outsized in this month in limbo, as if the island were broadcasting live to us: Eat more. Love more. Hate more in Crete.

October

The students finally did arrive, and the shocking images we had seen on TV in the directors' house gradually began to fade, receding behind the day-to-day life of the village all around us. I gave up getting into arguments with taxi drivers whose anti-American views were so fixed they couldn't see 9/11 as a human tragedy, even when one of their own—a young woman from Chania working at the World Trade Center—was killed. A Greek-American friend from Astoria who had already lost a brother in a car crash lost her other brother in the attack on the Twin Towers. Her letter to family and friends was wild with grief.

The little corner of the world that was Kolymbari, Crete quickly became our whole world. Penelope and I busied ourselves making a chores chart, coordinating shopping with the cook, scheduling internships with local families for the kids. We'd send them off each morning, and they'd spend the mornings working variously with a local carpenter or restaurateur or shepherd or homemaker. In the afternoon, we held classes. Penelope taught anthropology while I taught beginning Greek, and the directors took on other courses like Greek history, poetry, and creative writing.

November

As the days finally began to cool, visiting professors came and held seminars on Greek politics and archaeology. On the weekends we went for hikes all over the western end of Crete and on longer excursions to Phaistos, Knossos, and Heraklion. Stavros, the dance teacher, came in the evenings and gave us lessons in the courtyard, where we snaked around and around in open circles. Dimitris, our knifemaker landlord, came always bearing gifts: a bag of pistachios, moonshine tsikoudia.

As the head house tutor, I had an apartment to myself: a small kitchen and dining-living space downstairs, and a bedroom upstairs. As the nights got longer, my fireplace became the hub where we gathered to sip raki, tell stories, and dance, creating a kind of paniyiri of our own.

Throughout the program, Penelope and I mostly stayed with the kids on our little campus—a sprawling house around a central courtyard—and in the village. But I felt the pull of nearby Chania. Having lived in New York City for four years before moving to Crete (I had left September 1, ten days before 9/11 happened), this sudden shift to a very quiet life was sometimes hard. Sometimes it felt like I should have been in New York when it happened. It was hard to believe that the place where I went dancing—the Greatest Bar on Earth at the top of the North Tower, where I used to rest from swing dancing to exceptional bands in window seats looking down 107 floors—was all gone.

The directors kept us and the kids busy with traditional village ways, so we marked all the local holidays. We tried our hands at weaving, pottery, and pig slaughtering (my vegetarian self feeling somewhat pleased by the disgust many of the students felt watching the butcher hang the pig by its hind legs, slice it open down the middle, and pull out its organs). Whenever we had occasion to go into Chania, I looked longingly at the cafes that lined Koum Kapi beach, young people sitting outside like baby gods in the sunlight with Nescafés, cigarettes, and mobile phones. I wanted to become one of them, and I knew I would.

My uncle from Athens and my cousin—on my Greek side but born and raised in Sweden—came to visit me, and we went to Milos Cafe, a favorite with the students for the giant, delectable desserts. Eva told me I was beaming with health. I grabbed the chance to go to Chania again with them, where I first encountered the cafe-bar I would work at later. To counteract the eating and drinking at all hours, I would run in the evenings along the water even as we headed into winter, and sometimes the wind was so strong it would blow the tall calamus plants nearly to the ground.

December

At the end of the program we had a glendi, an outdoor party with singing and dancing. A band came, including the beautiful Cretan lyre player with a face like an icon. The students showed off the dances they had learned. The table was laden with food, wine, and local raki. All of the families where students had interned were there, as well as the teachers, Roula the cook, Dimitris the landlord, and Stavros the dance teacher.

Then we said our goodbyes. The program shuttered in January, and I moved to Chania, renting a studio in a building called Venus Apartments. I had been caught in this net of light. "Stuck" is the Greek expression, which sees love or infatuation as something sticky, something tentacled that grabs you and does not let go. Nymph-like Chania had a surprisingly tight grip. But it was the timing too. Having left behind a good job at a publishing company in New York, having finished my master's degree, having left behind a marriage too, I had no reason not to.

January

Within a week of moving into this Minoan, Roman, Arab, Byzantine, Venetian, Ottoman, and Greek port city, I met Apostolis—whose name means apostle—at a local gym where he worked. He drove a Lancia and had studied in Italy, which gave him a slightly less provincial quality. He was an insider with a little bit of an outsider mindset, while with my Greek roots and American accent, I was an outsider with a little bit of insider status. He was bronze, tall, fit, with wide hazel eyes and big ears that made his handsome face a little goofy when he smiled.

"You're the tear that burns in my eyes, you're the star that lights up my nights," Yannis Ploutarchos sang on the radio everywhere that month. Greek has a looser syntax than English as well as masculine, feminine, and neuter endings, so it's easy to rhyme and learn pop lyrics quickly. I immersed myself in this bubblegum Greek pop, bought my first TV, watched reality TV shows (especially Survivor Greece), and learned the language fast.

The original name for Chania is wrapped up in fruit, cooking, love, and beauty. The ancient Greek name, Kydonia—Κυδωνία in Greek—means quince, Crete being one of the places where the fruit was first cultivated successfully. Like the pear and apple, which are from the same family, quince apparently first came from the Caucasus. In ancient Greece, quince was thought to be a type of apple and held great honor as a symbol of love and fertility. It was probably even the golden apple that Paris gave to Aphrodite in that fateful moment that precipitated the Trojan War, when Aphrodite told Paris that if he chose her over Athena and Artemis, she would give him the most beautiful woman in the world.

I came across quince trees all around Chania, but before living there I was hardly familiar with them or how they could be used in cooking. When I first made a dish with quince, following a recipe from Aglaia Kremezi's The Foods of the Greek Islands, I baked it in a sweet wine from Samos and served it with clotted cream to colleagues who were enraptured. The decadence of this dish is now tied up with the delicious beauty of the place in my mind, delicious also being a word—nostimos in Greek—commonly used to describe someone who is attractive. As I was reading about the etymology of Chania, I also learned, incidentally, that the word marmalade comes from the Portuguese word for quince, marmelo, which in turn was derived from Greek. Another fruit I had never heard of but discovered in Crete, used frequently in sweets, jams, and cosmetics there, was citron, apparently one of the original citrus fruits in the world.

While kydonia does mean quince, it's likely the city lent its name to the fruit rather than the other way around, for the city was allegedly named after Kydon, the son of the daughter of the mythic King Minos—of labyrinth and Minotaur fame, or infamy—who lived in Knossos Palace. Later, the city's name changed to La Hanim when Chania was conquered by Iberian Arabs in the ninth century, though other sources say it was the Ottoman Turks who gave it this name. Under the Venetians, the name changed again to La Canea. When Crete became independent, the first word was dropped and the second Greekified to Chania—written XANIA in Greek capital letters and pronounced "han-YA," with the accent on the second syllable.

The city's history, like its name, is richly layered. Minoan civilization became Roman, became Arabic, became Byzantine. In 1205 Crete fell to the Crusaders, at which point it became an overseas colony of the Republic of Venice and was named the Kingdom, or Realm, of Candia.

Venice ruled Crete for over 400 years, while most of the rest of modern-day Greece was falling to the Ottoman Turks. In fact, Crete was the last Greek island to join the Ottoman Empire. It took 25 years for the Turks to wrest control of the island from Venice in 1669, and it wasn't until 1715 that the last Venetian fortress outposts were completely conquered. Coming so late to the Ottoman Empire, Crete had quite a different development from much of the rest of Greece. For one, Crete experienced the European Renaissance via Italy and had its own version of it. The Greek-Spanish painter El Greco, born Doménikos Theotokópoulos, dates from this period. The long romance Erotokritos is also from this time, written in the 15-syllable rhyming lines of Cretan dialect. It is probably Venice that has most left its mark on Chania, especially in the old Venetian Harbor, where I had moved.

The harbor of Chania took the Venetians over 300 years to build. Today the Grande Arsenale, the biggest of the old shipyards remaining at the eastern end of the port, has been converted into a museum of soaring vaulted ceilings, and the entire port inside the old fortification walls is a protected site. At the western end is the Firkas Fortress, and jutting out on a peninsula is the 16th-century lighthouse, both built to protect the harbor and both marks of Venetian rule.

In my new digs in this storied place, much of this history was a stroll away, palpable. Leaving the Venus Apartments, if I crossed the diminutive square, turned into an alley, and took a quick jog to the left and right, I would reach the crescent-shaped 14th-century harbor where the pale pink mosque from the Turkish period stands. Just to the right of my building were also two Ottoman-era dark wooden houses with their characteristic closed balcony windows, where women could formerly look out but could not be seen—the architectural equivalent of the veil. There was also a tiny chapel in my square and the well-reviewed Well of the Turk restaurant. From my first-floor window, I could see part of the Ahmet Aga minaret down an alley to the left.

Venus Apartments was like a mini Greek version of L'Auberge Espagnole. In the top-floor garret lived Miriam, a Slovak girl who was always having several of her fellow tour guides over from Slovakia and Czechia. She was petite, vivacious, funny, multilingual, and with her pixie haircut, a Michelle Pfeiffer lookalike. Just above me lived Lina, a Greek girl, and one of those postmodern Greeks. We met when she complimented me on the Louis Prima music I was playing and later took me along to her modern dance classes. There was one more apartment, downstairs from me, where Alex—a kid (very often in Greek, young men are called "kids") from Athens—lived. Whenever we passed each other and chatted briefly, he would press upon me his cynical outlook on life, telling me, Cassandra-like, that I would never fully belong to this place.

February

I needed a job quickly, and my uncle in Athens, who was friends with someone who ran a café-bar in the old town called Dyo Luxe—the one we'd gone to with my cousin in the fall—hooked me up. In February, I began training there. My supervisor was a woman named Niki, and her approach to training was to hover over me one moment and completely ignore me the next while she gossiped and socialized with customers. She would critically scrutinize my every move, but then, when I actually had a question and needed her, she was unavailable, engrossed in a long, smoke-filled story with big gestures and laughter, holding court before a large party.

I began by learning how to make all the coffees: the elliniko, that single potent shot of boiled coffee, which could also be ordered as a diplo, the equivalent of two shots of coffee boiled over low heat in a briki; the Nes, instant coffee crystals mixed with sugar until a paste formed, then hot water added to create a thick layer of cream; the frappé, Nescafé shaken or blended with ice to make a light and frothy drink, omnipresent on Greek beaches in the summer; and the Galliko, brewed coffee, which for some reason they called the French.

The entire time I worked at Dyo Luxe and knew Niki, she always seemed to be suffering through something trying. She had high cheekbones, almond eyes, a large straight nose, dark hair that fell in waves to her shoulders, a compact figure, and a perpetual cigarette in her mouth or fingers. What was this heavy burden she had to carry? I finally decided she just liked the look.

Apostolis came with his brother Giorgos one day when I was still in training. It's customary in Greece to invite people if you work in a café or bar, or at least the line is blurred. Once, in the Chora of Amorgos, the owner of the restaurant in the main square set an open bottle of rakomelo, or honeyed raki, on our table with two shot glasses. Sometimes friends pay, sometimes they don't. They pay for the main thing, and then you offer something as your treat. If you order a drink, there is always something served with it: peanuts, potato chips, popcorn. If you eat at a taverna, there is usually a complimentary fruit or halva or yogurt with a spoon sweet served after. This is the kerasma, on the house. I wondered if this gesture had roots in the hospitality of ancient Greece and the notion that any stranger could be a god, so you'd better treat them well.

So anyway, I treated Apostolis and his brother that day and felt a nice sense of graciousness, a little more of this place. They sat for a while in the sun and chatted with a woman sitting nearby, and after his coffee, Apostolis came up to the bar to speak to me. He had donkey eyes, as they say in Greek, or what I will call mandorla eyes.

After two weeks, I'd had enough. I was ready to work like anyone else, even if I still tripped over my Greek sometimes. I had learned the whole menu, knew all the different kinds of coffees and fruit juices offered. Still, on the very first order I went to take by myself, the man ordered an anameiktos, a "mixed," a word that somehow I had never heard before. I thought it was a new kind of fruit instead of all the fruits blended together, and the man looked at me like I had grown a bull's head when I didn't understand.

Makis was a co-worker I had admired even before I started working at the café. He had a Clark Kent thing going, with thick black hair, a classic Greek (Roman?) nose, and mad scientist glasses. On my first day, he sort of poke-pinched me in the back as he walked past. I had come to Dyo Luxe with my uncle in the fall, who went way back with the alcoholic owner—or was it the alcoholic boyfriend of the owner? I couldn't keep it straight. Makis had been our waiter that day, and I had to keep myself from staring.

One day Makis and I were talking drinks. I had asked Niki whether they had well drinks in Greece, or what they served if people didn't specify a brand. Then we got onto different types of vodkas, and Niki said there was only one person who drank the Finlandia. I raised my hand, as I had been ordering it since I'd read in Saveur magazine that Finlandia won in a taste test of vodkas, and Makis said, "Oh, you drink Finlandia too?" So we had that in common. Vodka suited him. He was crisp and clean in his beauty. He usually dressed in white. His synapses, his speech, his wit were all quick. He only drank "white" drinks, he told me once. But I tricked him once in a blind taste of white and gold tequilas.

A week later, I worked with Eleni for the first time, another Chania beauty. She was pale, long-fingered, with long black hair. She could have been the Lady of Shalott, but instead she worked in this bar in the port with the rest of us. Later, when she put on a blond wig for Carnival, she turned into a Monica Vitti lookalike.

Toward the end of my second month in Chania, I got a call from Vasilis Pesmazoglou—of the famous last name—a professor from Athens who had taught at the University of Crete in Rethymno and returned often. He had been one of the visiting professors at the program in the fall and lectured on political science. He was twice my age, I learned over dinner, which was a surprise. He hid it well with a head of thick chestnut-brown hair.

We ate at the Well of the Turk, and he told me, "Write at least two hours a day." I took this advice well but struggled to follow it when my life on this island seemed so tenuous, ephemeral. He also told me he was grateful to the people who had hurt him in the past. I couldn't do much with that at the time, but in the years to come I had more than one occasion to remember it.

Niki found a way to nose around in my life even when I was done with training. She thought a guy named Yiannis, one of the regulars at Dyo Luxe, and I would make a great couple. Finally, I agreed to go out with him, so he came by on his motorbike one evening and we went to Fagotto, a jazz bar, and then to a wine bar called Oinopoioio (pronounced eeno-pee-ee-o). Truly, we shared some interests in jazz and tennis. He was a shade more cultured than the average Chaniotis, who seemed to care only about looking beautiful and being seen. But still. He had this attitude toward me like he was the person I was supposed to date, and I couldn't muster up much real interest.

Meanwhile, on a day both of us had off, Apostolis drove me to the south side of Crete, to Elafonisi, or Deer Island. There's a beautiful beach, and from there you can wade through turquoise waters to get to the slender island. Around the halcyon days, the air was warm and the sea was calm but still a bit too cold to swim in, so we crawled inside a beached caique, took our shirts off, and had a nap, seeing nothing but the bright colors of the boat, the sky, and the sun.

Then we drove back over the White Mountains, so called because of both the snow that covers them in winter and the visible limestone in the warmer months, that divide north and south Crete. We stopped at a place called Milia, or Apple Tree, a completely restored stone-village retreat. Everywhere we looked we saw stone, like being inside a fortress. We seemed to be in a completely different latitude too, after we had come up the mountain. Just hours earlier we had been dozing in the sun, half-naked, but when we pulled into Milia, our car was shrouded in mist.

That quick change speaks to the astounding fact of Crete, which has so much topographic variety packed into a space 35 miles wide and 160 miles long. That day we went from the fertile northwest with its bamboo and calamus plants, to the dry, desert palm trees of southern Crete on the coast of the Sea of Libya, where they say Africa is closer than mainland Greece, then to this mountain inn out of the Middle Ages, smoke coming from chimneys, a fireside dinner, and fog whitening the windows.

Some days later, my upstairs neighbor Lina and I finally arranged to go to her expressive dance class together, driving in her big old American car with the door that kept falling open. I had done a lot of dance in the past and was still folk-dancing, but this class seemed more like the absence of dance, a kind of movement aimed at creating negative space, a very feminine counterpoint to the showy, traditional, leaping male dancers of Crete. The class was in an old mansion with wide-plank wood floors and high ceilings and faded Venetian colors in a part of Chania they call Halepa, near where all the old tanneries used to be, in a neighborhood called Tabakaria. The museum of Eleftherios Venizelos, a native Cretan and Greece's most famous statesman, is also there. I loved seeing the space and appreciated feeling a more elevated side of Chania, whereas most of the people I met there didn't seem interested in pursuing culture, just going to bars, to the beach, to the gym. I think Lina and I always thought we'd spend more time together and be friends, but she left Venus Apartments not long after that.

After the class, we went for a drink together at Dyo Luxe, and then I got a call from Apostolis, who was eating nearby, so I told him to join us. Later that night, all of my doubts about idling in Chania bubbled up. He was lovely, but I was ambivalent. Still, he reassured me and complimented me on my Greek, saying that I spoke as if I had lived there for years, and I began to think again of staying longer, of creating a life there.

I continued going to the gym where he worked and to the Bouzakas Cretan Dance School, which I had started in the fall and which was the reason I had discovered his gym in the first place. In the spring, I even joined Stavros's dance troupe and we started performing at hotels. I felt a bit like an impostor, dancing Cretan dances in a traditional costume in front of tourists, but it was so much fun.

I did need more work, though. The study-abroad program in the fall had left me with savings, which were dwindling fast, and the café work didn't pay well, so I started to look for tutoring or teaching hours at one of the private language schools. I went to meet Mr. Zachariou, who had one of the largest schools in Chania, housed in a beautiful neoclassical building. He didn't need any teachers at the moment but took the opportunity to ask me personal questions.

"Are you married?"

"Divorced," I said, bracing myself.

"Don't look for perfection."

That was it. I was expecting something cliché, but this arrow found its mark and got me brooding. Was this my problem, actually? At a time when a lot of people would have said I had it all, I had walked away from that life, from marriage, graduate school, work at a prestigious publishing company in New York off Central Park. I thought I would only be in Crete for the four months of the program, but now it was late February and I was still adrift—but happy—in lovely Chania.

I turned my mood around and went out once more with Yiannis. I needed to tell him this wouldn't go any further. He picked me up on his motorbike, and we went for a drink at Teseres Epoches (Four Seasons). I told him then that I was with Apostolis. He still wanted to give me a compilation of music he had made for me that included the hit of the season, "Dark Sea of Mine" by Nikos Portokaloglou. The appropriate refrain went: I had it all once, but I wanted more. What should I do now that I've lost you? It made me think of my ex, and the apartment we had in Brooklyn, the job I had at Zagat. Now that I had arrived in this land of lotus eaters, all ambition—even memory, at times—seemed to have faded away.

After a string of perfect days in January and February, we had a cloudy Sunday, something that always seemed a little wrong in Greece. There is the famous rembetika song "Cloudy Sunday," by Vassilis Tsitsanis, which, according to one source, has become a kind of national anthem. Cloudy Sunday, you look like my heart, which is always cloudy. You are a day like the one on which I lost my joy. Cloudy Sunday, you bleed my heart. When I see you rainy, I am not calm for a moment. You make my life black, and I sigh heavily. All of which sounds so much better in Greek.

But the cloud cover soon gave way to bursts of erratic, gorgeous sunlight. The sun never seemed to leave this narcissistic city for too long, on this island that gets more sunlight than any other part of Europe. Chaniotes want to see themselves. They must see the beauty all around them, the city preening itself, and think they see a reflection of themselves. So they keep looking and never want to leave. Then again, Chania is so full of beautiful people that maybe the natural and architectural beauty somehow rubs off on them.

Despite many late nights, I would often wake early to the now familiar sound of shutters banging in the trade winds. Apostolis caught me by phone one morning as I was heading to Koum Kapi for coffee, the crème de la crème of this port's young and idle crowd, once a place I had longed to be and now so easily reached. Later, when I lived in Istanbul, I learned that Koum Kapi in Crete gets its name from the waterfront neighborhood of the same name in Istanbul and means Sand Gate in Turkish, and that even earlier it was called Sabbionara, the original Venetian name, referring to a gate that once stood on the eastern end of the old city walls and opened onto the beach there.

Now Koum Kapi had become a long line of sun-facing cafés strung like a necklace along the waterfront east of town. Though the café tables were above the beach, spume from the waves would reach them. Women would sit there with their long hair, some overly made up, cigarettes in tan fingers, with their men and their perfectly coiffed hair, brown forearms on the table, mobile phones, cigarettes, and frappés within easy reach. It was as if they had no jobs or responsibilities, or nothing else to do but pose for an invisible camera, playing at being palikaria, a word that dates from the Greek Revolution to describe tall men in fustanella skirts who fought for independence from the Ottoman Empire, Byronic figures who shouted "freedom or death"—the title of the Kazantzakis novel about the uprising in Crete against the Turks in 1889. But now the term was thrown around much too loosely for any male with studly pretensions.

Apostolis was in a tree when he called. Later he appeared with a bulging bag of avocados. He was always bringing me things—or taking things away, including my dirty laundry. All the time we were a couple, I assumed he was just giving it to his mother to wash, since he lived at home and I had no washing machine in my building, adding it to his own loads. But later I found out that he washed my clothes himself. When I mentioned this out loud, appreciative, later in Athens to a group of people that included his older brother and a friend of his brother's, apparently it got him in a bit of trouble—a faux pas on my part. The lesson I learned was this: a Cretan man may do your laundry, but you should never tell anyone.

The waters of cross-cultural gender relations were sometimes tricky to navigate. I came to Crete expecting machismo but found so little of it in Apostolis, or at least that the machismo was different from what I expected. For one, he was fastidious. He would never sit or lie on a bed in clothes he'd worn outside. He spent more time than I did getting ready in the morning, especially on his hair, which was so short I could hardly see how. I could see the influence of his time in Italy and the ethos of bella figura, that insistence on always looking fine.

Apostolis's older brother, Giorgos, had much more stereotypical, showy machismo. It was only a matter of time before he spotted Miriam, my Slovak neighbor. He saw me with her one day and quickly made a move, a kamaki—which means harpoon, as in when you hit on a girl, you throw a harpoon at her. So one evening we had a double date, all going to see the French movie The Pianist. The movie was bizarre and disturbing, so we quickly moved on to a bar called Praxeis (Acts), which was crowded, noisy, and smoky, and after two rounds of drinks, we all felt our heads clear.

Miriam was her usual sparkly and nervous self, and Giorgos was quickly smitten, apparently not unusual for him, according to Apostolis, but she wasn't interested. I found out soon afterward that she was, in fact, entangled in an affair with an engaged man. Her Cretan lover was already committed to marrying a local girl because of a longstanding connection between the families, but he was seeing Miriam on the side. I thought she was crazy to let this go on, but she loved him, and he apparently loved her, yet couldn't find the strength to break his parents' rather medieval expectations. This affair continued for years before Miriam finally pulled herself away from the island, wasted by this punishing half-love.

Whatever else he was—flirt, someone who wears his heart on his sleeve—Giorgos was a great dancer. We all went to see him perform, and he was one of those Cretan dancers who wear high white boots and a black threaded cap, the sariki, and leap high in the air, using the shoulder of the man next to them for leverage, turning nearly horizontal to the floor and slapping their heels. He was a good conversationalist too, gregarious, clever, and funny. He and his brother were like opposites in appearance and personality. Giorgos was short, dark-haired, outgoing. Apostolis was tall, with dark blond hair, laconic.

It was actually a running joke in their family that Apostolis had a different father. Truly, he did not look anything like his siblings, who both had black hair and eyes and were short and stoutish. At the time, I also thought of it as a joke, but in hindsight, with all the infidelity I witnessed in Chania, I'm not so sure. Apostolis looked so much like the sea, whatever that means. Like a diver, with a smile that made me think of dolphins or a kouros statue, and a wry way of being quiet without being unsocial. He could say just enough to keep a conversation afloat before silence created too much space between us. He was slow, careful, thoughtful—the opposite of Makis too, my co-worker at the café, who was always buzzing like a hummingbird. That night at Praxeis, we talked about decisions and responsibility and sharing experiences versus sharing thoughts. I said that I liked to talk about my experiences, and he said he liked to share his thoughts of the moment. He also said that I had dangerous eyes.

The days passed like water. I became more attuned to my neighborhood and the city. I watched from my window one morning as a cat curled and uncurled itself on the hood of a car parked in the square below, elegant as calligraphy in motion. Another slept in the outdoor spiral stairs next to my building like an ampersand. Still another, a calico, picked its way over piles of multicolored rubble. Something always seemed to be simmering in a pot on a stove close by, midday meals that would pull everyone to sleep. Drowsiness seized people in the hot hours of the day as if they'd eaten poppies. The streets emptied and the shops closed, and lips were sealed in the sleep of islanders, a people haunted by ships.

I could hear the Bulgarian couple next door to me fighting sometimes. There was blood on the tiles another day, a rumor of violence. I remembered a Cretan folk ballad we had learned in the fall that goes, "When will there be clear skies at night so I can take my rifle and make mothers without sons and wives without husbands." This was a land of vendettas, a place where blood feuds took a long, hard time to die and clung to mountain villages like Sfakia well into the 20th century.

Feeling a little bored, I went to see Dimitris, our former landlord in Kolymbari, the knifemaker. He did a busy trade with tourists. His white-haired mother, the yiayia, was sitting on a wooden chair by the door while he worked. She spent most of her days there. Dimitris was the one who told me about mantinades, the lines of poetry carved into knives, and how you should never give a knife as a gift because it denotes ill intent. I loved the briny, flinty smell of knifemaking and felt that it evoked something of the history of the island. Despite the lavish beauty, it didn't take much digging to see this stratum of violence in Crete. The klephts, mountain brigands who stole sheep and sometimes women, who defied Ottoman rule and were precursors to the revolutionary fighters, had been well established there, their exploits memorialized in song.

Leaving my house one day in late February via the alley that passed the Ahmet Aga minaret, I got a text message from Spyros and stopped in the cool shade of the minaret to answer. He was another Dyo Luxe regular, who worked as a plumber and was always trying to boycott American products, but not very successfully, because his favorite drink was rum and Coke, and apparently none of the local colas tasted the same, though he had tried. He was effusive about his two trips to Cuba and shared photos of the girls he met there. He also shared that he had a mountain of credit card debt but that he was set to inherit everything from his parents and planned to pay it off then, which seemed like a dubious plan to my mind. He made unsuccessful passes, first at me, then at my friend Miriam. Then, when Miriam's friend Tina came to visit from Slovakia, there was an instant, electric chemistry between them. Tina went straight back to Slovakia, divorced her husband, came back to Crete, and married Spyros, and the last I heard they were still living there with their two kids.

The next day, I met Katarina for coffee. She had been our archaeology teacher at the program in the fall and lived on the outskirts of Chania at the far western end, on the road to Kolymbari. With her, we had gone to visit Aptera, the ancient Minoan city and archaeological dig above Souda Bay outside Chania, where the American base is located. Later, a local boy I met at the bar I would work at in the summer—who was getting his PhD in Montreal—took me there, and we could see the whole of the bay, a surround-sound sea of lights and stars and moon reflected.

Katarina and I met at Constantinople Café, an old wooden building whose roof was ringed with flags from countries of the world. I had not noticed Katarina's appearance until the students mentioned it. "Hot" was their word. Truly, she was quietly striking, with a face something like the model Tatjana Patitz. What I had noticed, and what struck me again, was how knowledgeable, sharp, open-minded, and kind she was, without any of the provincial judgmentalness I sometimes felt from locals in Chania. We talked for hours.

But then I had to leave to work a shift at Dyo Luxe with Eleni and Makis. Makis was waiting tables, and he took turns between a big group of his friends, or parea, who were playing backgammon at a corner table, and the bar where I was working, chatting with me. Some bit of poetry I wrote down on a napkin he folded up and kept. Because of the slightly stormy weather, all the doors were closed and everyone was huddled inside. I loved the afternoon shifts, how the café slowly slid into the evening and coffees gave way to shots. By now, I was versed in all the frappés, freddos, and Greek coffees, and the drinks were not that hard because most people ordered beers or simple mixed drinks, and there were a lot of regulars who ordered the same thing over and over again.

At the very end of February, Apostolis invited me to a traditional Greek club with his brother Giorgos and some other friends. Most of the night, we sat in a dark alcove, danced near our barstools, and people-watched. There was a lady trailing a little white napkin spiked by her heel. Sauntering in a long leather coat, she didn't notice that anything was spoiling her seductive after-midnight air. From under his wrists, the bartender whipped five shot glasses and, in one fluid motion, filled them all. But our cocktail waiter had had one too many on the job. He was short, stocky, and too happy for a waiter. He carried our drinks out in front of him like a proud banquet server, but when he came to our table, the stems of the glasses caught on the edge and the wine spilled in a dark pool. I watched him carefully after that, for more entertainment. Smoke made spiraling dances in the spotlights. We alternated between glasses of a dark wine called Mavrodaphne (black laurel) and shots of tequila. Later, we drove to Apostles Beach in the early morning hours. We waded in half a foot, and the water gently washed our heels. The water was cold, but his mouth was warm.

March

Early in March I took the local high school exit exam that I had been studying for, the one that was supposed to open up more work opportunities for me. At some point I picked up a few hours at an English language school, but nothing else came along. I even interviewed at the base, though I could hardly stomach the idea of working there, even with the thought of having a sustainable American salary that could justify my staying on Crete. When we went out to eat, Apostolis's friends gently hinted at our moving in together. I felt, but didn't say, that I needed to make a decision one way or the other soon.

After teaching or shifts at the café, I would still head to the gym. It was never very crowded, which was nice because I was able to talk to Apostolis quite a bit and it was almost like having a personal trainer. We went through a new program together, and I started to feel stronger. One night I stayed while he closed the place, shut the lights, turned off the TVs and the music. I was back in a corner on one of the leg machines. He sat at the one next to it and pulled me on top of him, but we couldn't stop laughing. Finally, we got our things together and headed to To Avgo Tou Kokora (The Rooster's Egg) for salads, mine with paximadi barley rusks, chopped tomatoes, peppers, corn, black olives, shredded carrots, and mizithra cheese, and his from the sea.

We were about to give up on the idea of going to hear Greek music, but we turned ourselves around and made the night young again. The club this time, called Gasoline, was in Halepa, the same place Lina and I had gone for the expressive dance class, the old aristocratic part of town that was still quite posh. We were yawning a bit when we first arrived at three in the morning, but eventually the alcohol worked its spell and put another leg in the night. He danced a slow zeibekiko, an eagle dance that was strange and beautiful. A friend of his was singing that night. He looked like another typical Greek guy with a cigarette and a drink in his hands when he came over to talk to us, but when he opened his mouth, his voice filled the place, and it was something out of the caves of time. We didn't sleep until six in the morning.

Apokries, or Carnival, was now upon us. A Greek friend from New York paid me a visit around this time, and we went out for Tsiknopempti, when everyone goes out and gorges themselves on grilled meats before Lent begins. I made an exception and ordered a steak smeared with staka, a kind of clarified butter made from goat's cream, and it was one of the best things I had ever tasted.

Hot winds blew in from Africa all during Apokries and disturbed the potted trees, the laundry hanging outside, and the island girls' hair, which they preferred to wear long and loose. It got busier at Dyo Luxe. Suddenly everyone wanted to dance, though it was not typically that kind of place. Something carried in on the wind? We moved in and out of doors during shifts, and the music traveled the continents. Faces were painted, opening up behind the masks. I learned to pour a lot faster, and the cash register filled with brand-new euros in the same colors as Chania's old Venetian houses, Greece having said goodbye to the drachma in 2002, when it had been in circulation since 1832.

Some of these whippersnappers believed they had invented drinking and smoking and sex. That really got me. They would confidently slaughter the pronunciation of Anglo brand names. Why was I chasing down an alcoholic manager? Why was the other partner a ghost? Her companion, who was half her age, ordered shot after shot of "Tsonnie" (Johnnie Walker). He learned my name fast, as I suppose he would anyone who kept those golden pours of whisky flowing. The chain double-espresso drinker explained to me that he drank so much coffee because he had sworn off liquor, and then the very next day ordered scotch after scotch to my face. The Amaretto addict would order the almond liqueur doused in fresh-squeezed lemon until most of the bottle was gone. I couldn't understand why he didn't just buy the bottle outright. Still, I was happy he turned me on to this simple, delicious drink.

The city was crawling with American boys. Probably a ship had come in. One of them stopped me to ask for directions and then complimented me on my English. At the carnival party, they asked for Greek words to be painted on them. One walked around with the word ΠΛΥΝΤΗΡΙΟ (washing machine) on his forehead. I told him it could have been a lot worse.

What a time. It was beautiful, and the early spring months were exquisite, but something was starting to wear thin. As summer approached, the city began to feel more washed out, bleached in the sun. It was the same picture, but somehow different, faded. A fixation for me became the fact that Chania didn't have a single classical radio station.

I wondered how many people visiting the city were as dazzled and a little dazed as I was. I wondered if part of the spell of any island is quite simply being completely surrounded and arrested by water. I thought about what Alex had told me, the Athenian who lived downstairs, that we would never really belong. If that was true for him, how much more for me. There was a pallidness that grew with the start of the tourist season, blowing through the calamus plants by the water, through the flags over Constantinople Café, through the sea before the lighthouse. The islanders started to look blank behind their beautiful mummy eyes. The tourists arrived and the Crete I had known in the halcyon days seemed to get overexposed.

A freakishly beautiful mistake, something accidentally dropped by the gods that took root and bloomed—that was how Chania seemed to me, a bit of ambrosia that should not actually exist on earth but did. I wasn't sure if I was the only one who felt unsure of her footing here, at sea on land. Could I turn into one of them, I wondered, fair, empty, plaything of the sun and the wind and the gods?

But no. As summer approached, I started to feel that the place wasn't mine and gradually felt myself turn away from this fair island life. Apostolis couldn't understand, since he was so in his element, wrapped up in family, friends, almost everything he had ever known. He had been kind, welcoming. His family too were warm and easy to be around. They never judged. They laughed easily. They made me feel at home.

Alex claimed this is what outsiders came for, for a love with a people that somehow had more of the elements. But we couldn't change. I couldn't be remade by the sea and the sun and become the wild innocence of this place. I was too far gone, perhaps spoiled by city life, ambition, education.

Apostolis and I were not connecting. A week passed and we didn't see each other. Then I came for dinner at his parents' house, and it was lovely. That night, as I walked by the kitchen, I saw snails in a bag in the sink, and some were crawling out and onto the counter. Apostolis told me they collected them from their back garden. They were delicious. We napped in his childhood room until called to the table. Then I showered at their house and got dressed in his old army uniform from military service, and we all went out in a truck for the end of Carnival.

It was fun, but after we had been out a few hours and had something to eat and had gone to a club and some people had started leaving, I wanted to go home, but he still wanted to stay out. At the last minute, he changed his mind, probably because Merminos, his best friend, also went home. So finally it was just us again, but something was unsettled between us.

Monday was Clean Monday, a day of kite-flying on the beach and the beginning of Lent. It was a bright, breezy day, and Apostolis was as sweet as a spoon sweet, and everything seemed to settle again, the evening's long conversation ending with the words S'agapo (I love you).

The next day we went to the movies and talked for several hours in the car, paying for it with only a few hours of sleep. A couple days later he brought lemons and artichokes and Cretan borek. Things seemed to be righted, but I couldn't shake the feeling that my days on this island were numbered. I felt I couldn't turn my life over to this place even if I deeply wanted to.

April

In April I went to Athens and saw my family and connected with some old friends and began to think of moving there. When I came back, I hemmed and hawed but knew that I would have to end it with Apostolis.

May

One of the last times I saw Apostolis before leaving Chania, we went out to Koukouvagia (Owl), a place where Katarina the archaeologist had first taken us in the fall. It sits on a hillside on the Akrotiri peninsula east of the city and looks out over the whole bay of Chania. Years later we met again at this spot. In the photos we took, our smiles are big. We have the same hazel eyes and nearly the same skin tone. There is one shot of me in profile with the bay of Chania behind me, and seeing it, I felt that I was embedded in the landscape. At least part of me would remain there.

The old mosque that was the color of the rosy fingers of dawn, the Ahmet Aga minaret, the Venus Apartments, the Well of the Turk, Koum Kapi, the old fortress walls, the White Mountains and Akrotiri, Halepa and Apostles Beach, Elafonisi and Milia, Dyo Luxe, Constantinople Café, Praxeis, Fagotto, Gasoline, the Rooster's Egg, and all the places we walked and drove and drank and ate and danced and loved.

June July August

In June, I started working at a travel agency where Miriam worked. I picked up another gig at a bar along the coast. I changed to a gym along the way, as I had to take the coastal bus to get to work, and finally, after a month of this, I quit my day job and just worked at the bar because the money was good.

It was a lurid, surreal life in which I barely saw the day. My hours were from 9 p.m. till 6 a.m. Many of my co-workers would go out afterward, stopping at the bakeries that were just opening for the Cretan bougatsa, a heavenly, flaky, custard-filled pastry. I was given so many phone numbers that summer, I could have put them in a display case in an exhibit called Being Hit On as a Barmaid, but I didn't date.

Pretty Swedish boys that some of the local cocktail waitresses would fake swoon in front of, saying Po po, ti andras (my my, what a man). The girl from Canada who looked like a supermodel and gave her whole life away so she could be with the sexy owner of this bar, who treated her like she was dog food. Manolis, I think his name was, would drive up on a big motorcycle. Once he saw me chatting with a guy at the bar for some time.

"Are you dating him?" he asked me later.

"No, he's just a friend."

"We're not in the business of making friends," he said.

The girl from Norway who gave me 20 euros for a hair clip I was wearing. Local Greek boys who couldn't have been older than 14 coming to gawk at the tourist girls. The single mother in her 40s from England traveling with her 16-year-old daughter, whom she would bring to the bar. The girl from Italy and the local Greek boy who fell in love, and whom I helped because neither spoke the other's language. My fellow bartender who always gave me a hard time because I wasn't as fast as he was. It was true, but I could talk to everyone, locals and tourists alike.

It was garish, glitzy, trashy, but kind of wonderful, and not at all the Chania of the halcyon days but something else. The beautiful city had turned itself inside out. At the end of the high season, I got on a boat and sailed away.