The Golden Step Read Online Free Page A

Hotel Zakros, where the old men of Ano Zakros were thumping down greasy playing cards and yawning prodigiously when they were not hobbling to the street door in order to hawk and spit into the gutter. It wasn’t really a place for the stranger to hang out. I retreated to my room and got a handful of dirty clothes out of my backpack to wash them in the sink. No plug. Why hadn’t I thought to bring one? I looked up ‘plug’ in my word-book. Confusingly for English-speakers, it was tapa. My request for a tapa at the bar counter fluttered the hen-coop, but a basin plug materialised at last. Back in the room I got out my plastic bag of soap powder. It seemed curiously limp, and there was a hole in the bottom. I looked in the pack; a blue and white snowstorm. I washed the clothes in the residue, rinsing out the gritty suds. Now to hang the wet clothes up to dry on my balcony. Oh – no washing line. Ah – no clothes-pegs. And no shops open. Here was a lesson, the first of many: think ahead. And stop sulking – it’s really quite funny, isn’t it? No? Oh, come on, Mr Grumpy, hang them up behind the door and have a sleep and get over it.
    At nightfall the boys of Zakros ran through the streets throwing firecrackers, while their grandmothers rolled up and down the stepped alleys with bags of eggs and bread for the night’s feast. Mrs Daskalakis, the owner of the Hotel Zakros, invited me to come to her house after the midnight church service for the family’s Easter meal. Mr Daskalakis bought me a beer with a wordless smile. Towards midnight they escorted me up to the church where the bare-headed priest with his tightly rolled pigtail was performing hidden mysteries behind the painted wall of the iconostasis. Unlit candles were distributed among the congregation. Just before midnight the lights were extinguished, leaving the church in darkness. The face of the priest appeared in one of the portals, lit dramatically from below by the single taper he was holding. He turned and touched its flame to the nearest candle. Slowly the light passed from person to person, spreading ever more rapidly out from the centre until the whole church and the square outside were filled with soft radiance.
    â€˜Christos anesti, Christ is risen,’ murmured Mrs Daskalakis to me, and I was able to dredge the proper response from the back of my memory: ‘Alethos anesti – risen indeed!’ I could have said anything, in fact, because at that moment the men and boys waiting outside lit the fuses of the firecrackers they had been saving and threw them in a deafening volley onto the forecourt of the church, where they spat and snapped like mad cats. It was the signal for an orgy of explosions. Whizzers fizzed across the sky, rockets went up with corkscrew trails of gold sparks, and out in the back country something was let off that boomed and reverberated in the hills behind the village like a naval gun. ‘There are some crazies with dynamite …’ sighed Mrs Daskalakis.
    Up at the house Mr Daskalakis marked a smoky cross on the front door lintel with his carefully warded candle flame. The family sat round the table with a few neighbours and we ate soup of rice, eggs, lemon and globs of stock fat, together with cold chicken legs and lamb cutlets. Mr Daskalakis’s wine was very cloudy and very strong. After the meal we grabbed red-stained boiled eggs and attempted to smash those of our neighbours while retaining our own intact. Three-year-old Athi, the melt-in-the-mouth granddaughter of my host, ran out the winner by a mile. The roosters of Ano Zakros were already crowing the day as I entered my room at the hotel, full of egg soup and cloudy wine, and walked face first into my wet shirt. This time it did seem funny – bloody funny.
    Mr Daskalakis himself drove me the last few miles down to the sea on Easter Sunday afternoon. Beyond the road the ground opened immense rocky lips to form the