Prick of the Spindle: Nonfiction: Kerr: Stranded in Kosmas

Stranded in Kosmas: A Tale of Lost Love, Betrayal, and the Necessity of a Good Shot of Ouzo While Traveling in Greece With Your Brother and His Ex-Girlfriend.
By Michael Kerr

An overseas vacation should never begin with the words, "you don't have to be such a fucker." Ever. In my experience this statement is predictive of future violence. Personally, I have always preferred, "I'm really excited for this trip," or even, "we may have to leave the airport to get a decent exchange rate." Luckily the words were not directed at me but rather at my brother Greg. Unfortunately, my then-fiancée, Nikki, and I would be traveling to Greece with both Greg and the utterer of this phrase (and numerous other phrases that usually contained a pronoun, an adjective, and some variation of the word "fuck"). This person, this woman who could serve up profanities the way Emeril Lagasse juliennes carrots, was my brother's ex-girlfriend Amy. And, tragically, this wasn't the beginning of the end of their relationship. No, Amy began this trip as an "ex." You may wonder why someone would travel overseas with a person they had already evaluated and subsequently dismissed as a potential life partner. Well, it can be summed up in that two-word darling of Internet travel bargain-seekers—the nonrefundable ticket.

The best thing about living in the Internet age is you can find both cheap airline tickets and a girlfriend online. The worst thing is the tickets are usually nonrefundable and the girlfriends are usually carrying a lot more baggage than is required for a two week vacation in Greece. To be fair to Amy, however, when she smacked my brother with this particular verbal assault at the Portland, Oregon airport, she was severely sleep deprived, having been involved in an argument with him that started well before we pulled up at his apartment at 4:00 in the morning to pick them up in order to catch a 6 am flight. This particular dispute, the first of many they would have on this trip, began because Amy had found a bracelet belonging to another woman in my brother's bed. My brother, despite the fact he can work Match.com like a master playing Tetris, isn't exactly Don Juan—nor is he the sensitive, Tobey Maguire-type. Greg is more the quippy, what-you-see-is-what-you-get-Bruce-Willis-in-Moonlighting-without-chiseled-features-type.

So when Amy discovered someone else's jewelry hidden in his sheets only a few short weeks after their breakup, I imagine his response was something like, "you need to get over it." Which, in retrospect, would have been well-heeded advice, but was, at this ridiculously early time of the morning, the last thing Amy wanted to hear. Amy, still smitten with Greg despite his directness and the distress it caused her, hoped to use this vacation as a means to reconciliation. My brother is no sentimentalist though—in his mind, any reasonable person should have been able to move on—as he already had. Amy, it turned out, was anything but reasonable.

Nikki and I were thrilled to be traveling to Greece, so the tension between the former lovers hardly tainted our enthusiasm—that is, until there was a problem with Greg's ticket. Somewhere along the line in booking the tickets, a glitch in the system issued Greg two return tickets but no outbound one. Amy, still in a rage over the unfortunately misplaced bracelet, decided that because Greg had failed to confirm beforehand, his irresponsibility was going to cost her not only a trip to beautiful, historic Greece, but any chance at winning him back. She had obviously not heard the old cliché about attracting flies with honey rather than vinegar because she launched into a rabid tirade that Stephen King's Cujo would have envied, right there in front of God and the ticket agent, who, for the purpose of our vacation, were one and the same. After a few cleverly applied expletives, she screamed, "Why in the fuck didn't you call to confirm?" "Calm down," Greg replied. Apparently startled by his nonchalance, Amy bellowed, "You don't have to be such a fucker!" Meanwhile, Nikki smiled uncomfortably at the shocked agent while I mumbled something about them having been up all night. Greg, the consummate traveler, was unfazed and went about the task of negotiating a seat on the plane which, fortunately, he acquired but, unfortunately for me, was several rows away from Amy, who spent the entire flight to Utah puzzling over "the mystery of Greg" to me. I must have explained to her upwards of a hundred times that there is no mystery. My brother is no Arc of the Covenant. It doesn't take a scientist like Indiana Jones to read ancient tomes, dodge gigantic boulders, or outwit Nazis to find his essence. He is, as I mentioned, a completely open book—a straight shooter. There was no good way of explaining this to her though. She had already drawn a portrait of this journey—one with beautiful hyacinths, heliotropes, hearts, and happily-ever-afters and nothing, not even the edification from someone who had spent his entire life with her would-be betrothed, could erase it.

We landed in Athens on March 17, 2003—the same day U.S. bombs began falling in Iraq. One hundred thousand anti-war protesters filled the ancient streets and the chaos of the scene shook us from our mundane concerns regarding who my brother was currently sleeping with or whether Amy preferred taupe or bone-colored paper for her imaginary wedding invitations. At one point we were literally swept up in the anarchy, trying to capture this historic moment on camera while, at the same time, trying not to appear "too American" as we watched, first-hand, our home country's fall from grace in the eyes of the world community. Streets were barricaded while police officers in full riot gear stood at the ready in case things got out of hand. Sirens blared as emergency vehicles sped from one firebombing to another as United States interests were torched by Molotov-cocktail tossing protesters. Recognizing we were living through something unique, we ran toward, instead of away from, the smoke and the sound of the sirens in search of a perfect Kodak moment—confirming, possibly conclusively, the stereotype that American tourists can be simultaneously stupid and arrogant. The frenetic scene did, however, have a positive side—our little band of four was, for a few days anyway, drawn together like Jason's Argonauts. In terms of our vacation, those first few days in Athens were heady times indeed; they were the salad days. We laughed together, ate together, explored the Acropolis together, stumbled over broken Greek together, and, luckily for me, we discovered Ouzo together.

Amy, contrary to my heretofore description, was not, usually, a shrill lout of a human being. Tall, educated, and with a biting sense of humor, her dark, sharp features fit in well in the land of Aristotle and Socrates. In those first days, I saw what it was that originally attracted Greg to her. She often had us laughing, blowing retsina wine from our noses, with her keen observations and razor wit. In just a few short days things would change. In retrospect, the real trouble began when we discovered a rental car brochure with the humorously malapropian "Why to Pay More When You Can Pay Less?" emblazoned on the cover. After renting a car from them, it turns out there were many reasons to pay more. Perhaps we should have, for instance, paid more for tread on the tires as it would have come in handy for an ill-advised drive over a snow covered mountain road later that week.

We didn't have much of an itinerary other than to explore Athens for a few days at the beginning of the trek and then split up later—Nikki and I off to the volcanic island paradise of Santorini and Greg and Amy to Crete. Like the wax on Icarus' wings, the middle of our trip turned out to be dangerously malleable. Pouring over the guidebooks, we plotted a course to the Peloponnese in Southern Greece, which required the above--mentioned rental car and, we were soon to find out, far more patience than Amy possessed.

Everything was fine at first. We drove to Nafplio, a medieval city on the Aegean complete with a fortress situated on a little island on a bay. For all its quaintness, however, Nafplio was just not old enough. I mean, if we'd wanted to spend a vacation looking at Roman castles we would have gone to Italy. In contrast to the classical architecture of Athens' Acropolis, Nafplio felt a little too modern. We decided to strike out early in the morning for the ruins at Mycenae, a truly ancient city where, legend has it, King Agamemnon ruled and was murdered by his wife Clytemnestra after returning, victorious, from the Trojan wars. With this on our minds we barely noticed the clouds rolling in on the horizon. We should have paid more attention because, like the Hekatonkheires—the fifty headed gods of storms from Greek mythology—they foretold the violence to come.

We reached Mycenae around 8 am on the morning Sunday, March 23rd. Because it was Sunday, there was nobody selling tickets at the entrance and, because it was early, there were no other visitors at the site. We had Agamemnon's ancient kingdom to ourselves. We passed through the fabled lion gate, a ten foot high archway with two carved lionesses flanking a column, and into Homer's 8th century BCE. Greg is a seemingly unending repository of trivia, which can be insufferable if you're playing Cranium against him but can come quite in handy 6,000 miles from home when you're standing in the middle of massive piles of cyclopean stones that once were part of one of the mightiest kingdoms in the world. Using his vast knowledge of Greek mythology and our invaluable "Rough Guide" and "Lonely Planet" guidebooks we were able to triangulate the spot where, supposedly, Clytemnestra took an axe to her husband while he bathed. It is probably never a good idea, as Agamemnon did, to return to your stilted wife from a ten year absence with your new lover in tow (in this case the cursed prophetess Cassandra).

We explored the area for a couple hours as snow dusted the rocky hills and colored the sporadic olive trees surrounding the city white. Now, when I use the word city, I don't mean it in the modern sense. There were, for example, few walls and no ceilings to speak of on the dilapidated structures. You could, however, determine from the excavations done by archaeologists where certain tombs were located, where different rooms and buildings once stood, and get yourself in deep trouble on a slick stone stairwell that wound down into a dark cistern. The triangular entrance and ancient steps leading down into the pitch blackness of this particular cistern (which we got endless comedic mileage out of by naming the twisted cistern—based on the 80s hair metal band Twisted Sister) were too inviting to pass up, so Greg and I went back to the car to get a flashlight which he, a little condescendingly, referred to by the British "torch." He gave me the history of the cistern on our walk. It was, he told me, where Orestes, son of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, hid after killing his mother in retribution for her killing his father. Ancient Greeks were a murderous lot and perhaps it was all of this talk that led my thoughts, two days hence, to the idea that one of our traveling companions had, quite possibly, been violently done in—not by some deranged Greek shepherd but by one of our own. Also, I probably wouldn't have laughed as hard when Greg slipped on the mossy steps of the cistern and bounced and clanged down the steps into the darkness, breaking his "torch" in the process, had I known his scrapes and bruises wouldn't be the worst injuries he would sustain on this trip.

I suggested we drive up and over the mountains to the coastal town of Monemvasia. It seemed like a nice place to visit based on a conversation I'd had with a lovely Greek woman on the flight over. Unfortunately we never made it. The snow which had been pleasantly covering the lower foothills began falling harder as we drove our rental car (which, for all intents and purposes, was little more than a Pepsi can on bald tires) up the increasingly slick and winding road. Greg, despite his reasonableness in most areas of his life, has a reputation as a reckless driver. His politics border on socialism but when it comes to driving he is a complete libertarian. His disregard for anything resembling speed limits—or safety for that matter—oddly didn't seem to affect Amy who, apparently, had decided to forgive this one glaring defect in his character in her effort to regain his love. Nikki, with no such agenda, spent much of our journey up until then, biting her tongue and digging her nails into the armrest and my thigh in the back seat. Finally, very real concerns about sliding off a thousand foot cliff to certain and horrible dismemberment and death (unlike in America, there were no guard rails to protect people from their stupidity), allowed us to wrest control of the vehicle from him and put it into my safer and somewhat more capable hands. The deepening snow would soon take my control away.

As we pushed farther and farther up the mountain, creeping along more slowly than an unfortunate giant caught in a Moerae's web—the car fishtailing and skating on the now invisible pavement—we began to realize that any chance of reaching Monemvasia was lost and the best we could hope for was to get to the top, where a map told us there was a tiny village and, hopefully, someplace to spend the night. As the daylight waned so did the car and, eventually, the passengers had to get out and push in order to keep us moving. Because we had packed clothing for the spring weather we'd expected, this turned out to be a miserable and clumsy job as everyone (except for me, because I was driving) took turns slipping and falling in the slushy road. Fortunately, by about the time everyone had had their third or fourth face-plant, we were rescued by a couple of stocky Greek men and their girlfriends. The men did the pushing while one of the girls drove their car. We watched in awe as they, alternately, pushed our car and jumped on the hood of their car (which was smartly equipped with tire chains) until, once more, our little-engine-that-couldn't-quite began to slide to a standstill and they'd jump off and push again. This made the grueling trek much faster and, in no time, we were at the peak of the mountain.

"Go no farther; you will not live," warned one of the muscular Greeks.

"Did he say leave or live?" asked Nikki.

"I think he said live," Greg responded. He definitely said live. We pushed the car to the side of the road at his admonition and, from the top of the hill, saw that the road descended steeply with more twists than a Hydra's neck. It would have been certain death riding what amounted to a glorified sled. The half mile down to the little hamlet would have to be completed in Rockports and knee-deep snow. We unloaded our luggage, bid our new friends farewell and hiked into what turned out to be oblivion.

The tiny village of Kosmas had exactly one taverna where we could eat and sleep, and, as far as we could tell at the time, one resident—the wiry little proprietor of the place, who spoke exactly no English but ran around like a ferret on Dexatrim making sure the dozen or so people stranded at his establishment were well fed. A taverna is a café that sometimes (like this one) offers accommodations for travelers. The town was now buried under more than a foot of snow, and we found the steps up to our rooms at least as treacherous as the ones in the cistern. Short of having crampons and pickaxes, we literally had to claw our way up the steep ascent on our hands and knees. Nikki and I were fortunate to have procured a room one flight down from Amy and Greg who, at this point, were still getting along reasonably well. The rooms were large but spare, offering little more than two beds and a toilet. As I unpacked the bag I realized I still had, tucked away between my underwear and a dog-eared paperback copy of Homer's Iliad, a half bottle of ouzo left over from our last night in Athens. Ouzo, an anise flavored liqueur made from 96% ethyl alcohol, is an acquired taste but turned out to be just the thing to make everything seem okay when you're stranded in a blizzard in a village with nothing to do as your dream vacation screeches to a halt faster than someone on the business end of Medusa's gaze. In retrospect I should have turned it over to Amy because she needed it way more than I did and, unfortunately, there was none to be had in the restaurant.

After getting settled we headed downstairs to assess our current situation, reassess our future plans, and to get something to eat. A nice thing about Europe is that, even when you are stuck in a snowstorm halfway around the world, someone will speak English. This was particularly useful the next morning when we negotiated a set of tire chains from the president of the village (who knew?) and contracted a local man to put them on. The man happily took our twenty Euros, apparently thinking he'd just scored what amounted to the Golden Fleece for doing something that should only take a couple of minutes. He was probably rethinking his position a half-hour later, as he lay on his back in the snow under our tin can of a car trying to dig out the tires and affix the chains. It turns out there really is an International language and it begins with the letter 'F'. When the chains were finally installed some time later, we were able to get the car down to the village but that was it. There would be no escaping Kosmas until the plows came, and nobody quite knew when that would be. We were trapped until further notice.

Nikki and I made the best of the situation, hanging out in the café with our fellow refugees discussing the war (which was beaming in on the television around the clock) and the snowstorm (nobody could remember a worse one in their lifetimes—and we talked to some very old people). Everybody was incredibly nice and able to separate us from the policies of our hapless president, and we happily delved into local dishes like moussaka, tzatziki, and souvlaki, and for the most part, made the best of our situation. Greg had bigger problems. He was used to the travails of travel but Amy was not. Stuff sometimes (okay, always) happens on the road and you just have to roll with it. There was no telling this to Amy, however. We tried to reassure her that her vacation wouldn't be a bust. "The plows will come," we said. "Don't worry, everything will be okay." But she obviously sensed we were just trying to placate her (after all, we had no idea when the plows would actually arrive) and became increasingly despondent as the day dragged on. Greg, perhaps feeling a twinge of guilt for his part in her situation, dedicated himself to at least trying to help her through her distress. Empathy, it turned out, could be painful.

Because you can only spend so much time watching the images of bomb-guiding tracers blazing across a television over and over accompanied by commentary in a language you don't understand, Nikki and I would occasionally mountaineer our way up the icy steps to our room for a change of scenery. As day turned to evening we gave up on the plows and split our time between eating downstairs and reading upstairs. Like Amy, our anxiety about the situation was building but, unlike Amy, we found ways to cope. For my part, I read the Iliad from cover to cover and sipped from the bottle of ouzo. My angst washed away with every warm, delicious swallow. Nikki, like Galene, the Goddess of the calm sea, didn't even bother with the ouzo—she was just fine with a book. Greg, however, was playing Zeus—trying to bury the Typhon building in Amy before it was too late. But it was too late.

Amy, her expectations buried in a snow drift in Kosmas, had become increasingly withdrawn and by the next day, Tuesday, March 25th—Greek Independence Day—our hopes for the plows to show up were fading as quickly as her fragile sanity. We had already booked our flights to the islands from Athens for the morning of the 26th and it was beginning to look like we were going to miss them and, with the phones down due to the storm, looked like we would be unable to reschedule them. Still trying to make the best of the situation, I suggested we go up to Greg and Amy's room to invite them to breakfast as we hadn't seen much of them the day before. Each room had a foyer, so we stepped out of the cold and knocked on their door. No answer. We heard noises on the other side. I knocked again.

Finally, Greg answered the door. It took a few seconds for the scene before us to make sense. Greg was bleeding profusely from a cut under his left eye and another on his arm.

"Uh, we wanted to see if you wanted to come to breakfast," I stammered.

"Not right now," Greg replied matter-of-factly, "we're having a bit of an altercation."

"Sure, uh, okay," I said as he disappeared behind the closing door.

"Why did you tell them that!" Amy screamed.

Nikki and I looked at each other, then back at the door as cries of rage erupted behind it. The sounds of Amy's fuck yous followed us into the cold morning air.

Nikki, perhaps confused by Greg's composure, asked, "What's going on?"

"Amy snapped," I said shaking my head, "Amy snapped."

We sat in the restaurant unsure of the etiquette of dealing with domestic violence in a place with no emergency services. As we morosely pushed the food around on our plates, Greg came in looking like Hector after Achilles dragged his body around Troy, and sat down across the table from us. "Are you okay?" I asked.

"I'm fine," he replied.

"What happened?" asked Nikki expectantly.

"Well..." he said, and proceeded to tell us a cautionary tale of what happens when you tell someone who is already on the edge that, maybe, she should take her meds. This was precisely one unsympathetic barb too many for Amy, who exploded like the volcano that destroyed the ancient city of Akrotiri on the island of Thira. Just prior to this Amy had made one last ditch effort—one final Hail Mary pass—to win Greg's love. She tried to persuade him to have sex with her. Uninterested, Greg shunned her and, apparently unfamiliar with flirting, Amy tried to bully him into it. Rejected again, she pinned him in the corner of the room next to the bed and let loose. Like Clytemnestra, she swung an axe of profanities at him—pissed about the other woman, pissed about his apparent indifference to her situation, and pissed that she was spending a once-in-a-lifetime trip to Greece holed up in an empty room with nothing to do—she pushed Greg to his apparent breaking point, and he shot back with the crack about the meds. That was it—Amy went for blood.

Amy was not what you could describe as fragile. She had the size and temperament of the warrior goddess Athena—so when she tried to take Greg's eye out she nearly got it. Greg, in very real fear for his life, fought back, wrestling her to the ground so he didn't end up a Cyclops, pinning her to the floor until she calmed down enough to go back to old-fashioned name calling and profanity. That's about the time I knocked on the door. And now, here we were, unlike Dionysus' followers whose cages fell open when they were to be imprisoned, trapped with no end in sight. Blood had been shed. Greg, having finished his tale, hesitantly went back upstairs.

In a couple of hours he returned, and he and I went outside to have a look around. The weather had broken, and the sun was shining brightly in the deep blue sky. It would be a perfect day, we thought, for the plows to come to our rescue—except for the fact it was a holiday. It also occurred to me as we hiked up the snow-packed road calmly discussing the events of the day, that, except for the tirade several hours earlier, I hadn't heard a peep from Amy. It was then the suspicion of murder entered my mind. I began pondering whether my younger brother had killed his ex-girlfriend. There was no evidence other than her absence. The only blood he was covered in was his own and he looked at ease. But he always looked at ease. Did my brother's calmness belie a merciless heart? Was he some protean shapeshifter, capable of murder? It began to occur to me that, perhaps, Greg's demeanor was too calm. He was just easygoing enough to get away with dispassionately dispatching someone who had become too much of a nuisance, I thought. There was plenty of deep snow around. It could be weeks before anyone would find the body. This was crazy—I was probably just foggy from the previous night's ouzo and my own cabin-fever. Plus, I'd just read the Iliad, one of the bloodiest books ever written. Yeah, that was it. But my suspicion lingered.

Later, while Greg was still inspecting the town, I privately discussed my concerns with Nikki. "He wouldn't have killed her, would he?" I asked.

"Um, I don't think so," she answered.

"Maybe I should check on her," she said.

"Good idea, but just knock on the door," I replied, fearing what she would find if she went into the room. "I'll go look for Greg."

Luckily my fears were unwarranted, Amy was alive, albeit despondent, and luckier still, the snowplow crested the hill just a few minutes later into the village square. It was chaos, as former compatriots in confinement said their goodbyes and scrambled to their vehicles and civilization. I drove to the bottom of the mountain where we had agreed to drop the tire chains off, and then we relied on Greg's lead foot to get us back to Athens.

We shared one last dinner before we were to split up and head our separate ways early the following morning. Amy hardly spoke. In fact, I really hadn't talked to her in days. I could tell she was in deep pain though. Because of the events of the morning she'd finally come to the realization the rest of us had come to long ago; there was no chance of getting Greg back. Not now. Not after the events of the morning. Nikki and I were happy to be leaving—our own patience pushed to the limit by the drama in Kosmas. We snuck out early the next morning to catch our flight to Santorini without saying goodbye. We never saw Amy again. Greg's videos of Crete showed a sad woman trying her best to have fun. They didn't fight anymore, though. Amy was too broken down, too tired. In the end, she became not Clytemnestra but Klytie, the nymph who, when abandoned by the sun-god Helios for another, turned into a heliotrope and spent her days staring at the sun, longing for a love that was perpetually beyond her reach. And, sadly, there wasn't a fucking thing she could do about it.

Michael Kerr began his adult life as an entrepreneur but, because of an aversion to both numbers and cerebral aneurysms, he decided to return to school to follow a passion for writing. His work has appeared in Ashland Magazine and the upcoming "Manifesto" from Salt Publishing among others. He lives in Ashland, Oregon with his dog Poe and a diminishing collection of those things you squeeze to relieve stress.