Coming of Age in Χανιά

'Yasou, Dooglahs!' Mihalis hailed to me as I passed the bzzzpthump-thump of his shop. His voice was so sharp it wasn’t a passing halloo. 'Yasas,' I said, 'Tikanete.' 'Kalaaaaaahh.' The way he said it, it meant, 'Good, but better than good.'

He was sitting on the multihued blanket of the guests’ bench. I looked around as my eyes adjusted to the dark interior and was taken aback. Anya was working the loom! I recalled the afternoon when Mihalis was lamenting the loss of his craft, and now there she was. 'Anya, I didn’t know you wove!' 'So! Now you do,' she giggled in that contralto nightingale voice of hers.

Her slender fingers were manoeuvring the shuttle bobbin through the maze of the warp and woof, on the near side of the upper strands for six or seven threads, then to the far side of the lower strands for a carefully counted number more, meticulously working her way across the hundreds of threads that made up the its width, adding one more line to a pattern that, when the carpet was done and one day lying on a floor, this line so carefully counted would never be noticed amid the design of the whole. There, in one place and for one moment, Anya at the loom was the timelessness of weaving on a scale I could behold. A man and a woman and a loom and a land. If not for unexpected glimpses, such truths I would never see. 'How long have you been doing this?'

'Ohhh, a little time now. Watching Mihalis work decided me to stay in Kriti. I learned a little every day from him—a thread at a time, you would say—and then I noticed he was looking at me secretly the same way as I was looking at him secretly. It was such a delicious electricity!' She leaned forward and put her hand over her mouth in a childlike laugh. 'So we decided to make sparks.' 'So—maybe there’s hope that there will be someone to take over the loom after all?' 'We’ll see.'

Perhaps it was merely the way her face reflected the light as she was intent on her work, but there was a womanliness is her smile that I had seen somewhere before.

‘But Mihalis said he was the last weaver in Crete.’

He interjected, 'I am, Dooglahs. The last Kriti weaver in Kriti. As much as I love Anya, she is not a Kriti. Only a Kriti is a Kriti. It gives me much sadness that it is only the foreigners who come to learn our old trades. Our own boys and girls don’t want the old Kriti. They want the new Kriti. But when I ask what is the new Kriti, what they describe to me isn’t Kriti, it is advertisements from America and Europe.'

‘Mihalis, why did you take up weaving?' I asked him. 'It seems such an obsolete trade for someone who studied engineering.' 'My father was a policeman. He wanted me to be an officer. But my mother noticed how much I loved colours. I would see different worlds in different colours. She knew the family blood line was within me. One day when I was eight years old, she told me to go down to the ice maker. We didn’t have refrigerators then, we bought ice. She told me to watch the ice boy’s face as he picked the blocks of ice into chunks. When I returned she asked me, “Do you want to grow up like that?” So she taught me to weave. The first thing I learned was to sweep the floor. The second was to go get mulberry leaves for dye from the big tree on Cavalierotto San Caterina bastion. Right around the corner from where you live,

Dooglahs. In those days the people who lived there planted the mulberry trees for shade that have grown to big trees now. There were almond trees, too. As a little boy, I would gather the almond seeds and dry them on a tray. Then I would sell them at ten for a drachma.' 'Who bought weavings in those days?'

‘In those days a woman getting married needed a dowry. The usual dowry was ten blankets, five rugs, five pillow cases, plus the copper cooking ware that used to be part of a bride-to-be’s dowry. In the country young women wove their own dowry blankets. In Χανιά the girls weren’t taught how to weave. Our family worked all winter to make dowry orders for spring weddings. If there weren’t many orders we would do pieces anyway, knowing what most people would want. My mother taught me never to bargain. “You just cheapen yourself if you bargain," she told me. She had bad experiences with people who bargained. They would promise a thousand drachmas and give eight-hundred saying they would come back to pay the rest. Then she would never see them again. When I objected about that being disrespectful, she told me, “They have to live with what they see in their mirrors. You have to live with what you see in yours. If you live with Theïkí agápi, θεϊκή αγά/η, you will see Theïkí agápi when you look in the mirror”.’ 'Were you going to school at the same time?' 'Of course! We had to go for six years, whether we learned anything or not.' 'What were your school years like?' 'I was more interested in weaving than grammar and maths. When my teenage time came, my father sent me to an English school in Johannesburg. I stayed with some family friends. Three other foreign kids stayed there, too. I was the one who spoke the best English, so we hung around with each other. When our exam marks were good, we were allowed to go out on the town. I loved the shopping centres. The clothes, the noise, the people. In those

days my real dream was to have a boat so I could go sailing on the water behind the Vaal Dam. So I worked extra hard until I could buy a boat. Everybody said I was the luckiest kid, to have my own boat. But it wasn’t luck, I earned it. It was a big lesson for me. When I left Johannesburg I gave the boat to the other kids. I just gave it to them. I couldn’t sell something I loved so much. That was my first Theïkí agápi.'

By now Anya had gone over to sit on—what else?—a pile of blankets to listen to us.

Mihalis continued, 'I came back to Kriti at the age of nineteen. That was in 1974. My family was still working behind closed doors because young women in those days didn’t want their future husbands to know what they were getting with their dowry. But even then the traditional weaving business was falling off. People didn’t like the old reds and yellows any more. They said home-woven wool was too itchy compared with the softer factory wools. 'After the first charter tours began, every year more and more tourists came. A lot of Χανιά shopkeepers who had never sold weavings before saw all the tourists and started selling machinemade carpets—the ones with dolphins and those blue colours that don’t look like anything the sea ever looked like. Soon every clothing and leather store in Χανιά was selling carpets, telling the tourists the carpets were ‘hand made’. Between 1978 to 1980 Ρόκα’s carpet business fell by half because even the locals were buying machine-made. 'But then the local people found that the machine-made carpets wore out quickly. So they started coming back to Ρόκα. Our wool was hand-spun. Clean and strong. People realised hand-wovens were still the best. One lady told me she had bought a machinemade but it was so badly made she put it in her cat box and came to buy a real carpet from me. By 1980 business was just enough for my mother and me to survive. If we didn’t own Ρόκα and my floor in the family house, we wouldn’t have made it.'

'Your floor?' 'On Kriti when people know they are going to die soon, they give away their property to each child. It is supposed to be that everyone gets what they need. But when families were big that system resulted in lots of tiny parcels with lots of owners. Parents would split up the fields, give the olive trees to one child, the vines to another. They would give parts of the houses the same way, this room to one, that room to another. The idea was to keep the property in the family. But you know how people are. When the family got along, it was fine. But when they didn’t, it became impossible to sell a house. The whole family had to wait for somebody to die before they could dispose of their part of the property. Many times a house would fall to ruin because one member refused to sell their part or demanded an unreasonable price. Other times a family miser wouldn’t help with the costs of upkeep. That didn’t happen with fields people inherited because if one person didn’t want to do the work to keep their portion, they’d lease it to a farmer in exchange for part of the produce. In old times when people had lots of kids and not much to give them, the family property would get so divided up that no one could make a living from it. The children who didn’t get anything had to find work on the ships or go to America. Today so many young people are leaving for Athens with no plans to come back to Kriti, the little pieces of land are coming together again. That’s why Anya and I have the whole second floor to ourselves. My sister lives on the top floor.'

We were interrupted by a tourist couple who entered to look at carpets. Given the white walls and subdued track lighting, Roka could just as well have been an art gallery. Anya rose to greet them. The couple spent a long time examining a large living-room carpet hanging in the back that had been stitched together from eight of Mihalis’s normal-sized pieces. Yet the complex pattern didn’t skip a stitch from one carpet end to the next. I thought of the Indo-Lankan Buddha carvers who had so mastered the laws of body proportions

that they could scale an image to any measure so the image would come out perfectly proportioned no matter its size.

I realised I was in the presence of a man whose gene of continuity came from a taproot much deeper than any other I had met on the island.

As she was speaking with the visitors, Anya put her hand to her abdomen. It was an unconscious gesture.

A few moments later she did it again.

Then I recalled where I had seen that smile of Anya’s before—on Giovanna Cenami, the wife in Jan van Eyck’s Marriage of Giovanni Arnolfini. Her hand, too, was on her abdomen.

That’s when I knew.