I experienced culture shock when I followed my husband to Crete. As one might expect, the Cretans lived up to their notorious hospitality, the skies and seas glistened, and we busied ourselves balancing business with medicine and art. But we also learned the Cretans lived up to their notorious tempers too. Nearly every household secreted a vendetta. Every man housed a gun. It wasn’t unusual to see the old police-car scattering goats and chickens along the dirt roads, its siren broken and silent, one tire rattling without a hubcap, its windows full of silhouettes that never learned better. Just last week a helicopter carrying guests to a christening in our mountainous haven made an emergency landing after a group of gunmen opened fire with their automatic rifles, mistaking it for a police helicopter. The men only wished to show that our remote village had the spunk for mutiny. That, and to warn them away from their cultivation of not-so-legal substances.
On our way back from a hike one day with our conquests (armfuls of chamomile and a live twitching rabbit that Kons had caught by its ear!), when we heard the familiar volley of gunshots. We rushed down the path, and I froze at to see the church at the outskirts of the village.
“This is gun porn,” he said. We stood before the bullet-riddled building. “The kind that makes my gut writhe. It’s as if you’ve blown me up inside.”
I followed his gaze and my eyes traced the grazed church. No. Not grazed. It had been peppered, punctured, persecuted. A hundred holes ate through the whitewashed walls, as if demons had tried to wedge their way in with razor-sharp tooth and claw.
No other soul around us. The locals knew well enough not to seek death when it would come on its own time, later, anyway. Even the gunman and the victim had fled, their scene finished. Later we would learn an old man had gone mad with jealousy and chased his girlfriend here. The fellow’s name was Themistoklis Athanasakis, but we all called him Mad Maki. He’d fought in the war, which left him with one arm and a machine gun to prove it. So when his girlfriend hid in the sanctuary of the church, he paced outside, braced the gun in his arms, and released hell. Now that was passion for you.
“This is sacrilege,” I gasped. “They’ve begun raping religion, now.”
Kons wrapped me in his arms, and that’s when I felt my tears burning my cheeks. “It’s okay,” he murmured in my ear. “They can’t hurt us. They can’t kill a church. It’s just a building.”
His words echoed those of my father, years ago, after the diaspora. Just a building. I wondered how many buildings mankind would have to blow its way through before we realized—what in the world were we blowing our way to after all? What did people seek, along this path that they’d chosen? Bullet-riddling a way through buildings and bodies would only drag them on a path to the direst parts of the mind and soul. Heaven is what we make of it; our lives are what we make of them.
I opened my hands and dropped the chamomile and watched the rabbit run away.
"Angreek87"
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