The Last of the Minoans
I fondly remember the day I first saw the old house of Ana’s estate across the river, well obscured by the built-up outskirts of a mining and industrial town.
The house was squeezed in-between haphazardly erected dwellings, yet somehow prevailed to stand aloof. The main building and its adjacent pig barn were all that remained of a former economic hub of activity.
The water-powered lumber saw and grain mill were gone, as if they never were, erased by over-enthusiastic modernism that straightened the river meander which had persisted for a thousand years before, welcoming journeying birds to a safe rest in its bank growth.
I would soon learn that the building belongs to a Minoan.
I glimpse Ana’s house, but only from afar. As it will turn out, I will not be meeting my mother-in-law until the next time we drive down from the capital.
This visit will be all about the preliminary recon for my benefit, then moving on to sightseeing the few of the town’s highspots, avoiding, of course, the House itself.
I have just parked near the inn on the opposite bank of the river, after following my wife’s — technically, my girlfriend’s at the time — exciting directions.
I step out of the car and she waves me quickly to the other side, away from the house’s view.
“Hunch down”, she orders me in a low voice.
“What do you mean?” I demand, “why should I crouch at the edge of a housing estate?”
A suburb awash in 80’s blocks of flats is behind me, a concrete jumble overgrowing — what I will learn later while listening to Ana’s stories — were once the green fields of the Three Valley Houses.
“Will somebody shoot at us?” I joke.
“She has binoculars,” my future wife whispers.
It had been different forty-five years before, just before the government decided to make a political statement by submitting the small market town to the “great economic forward surge”. For the plan to work, large expanses of pasture land and fields between the two castles had to be rapidly stitched over by roads and built-over with a large home-appliances factory, expanded surface facilities of the coal mine — and housing blocks aplenty.
The flats were quickly erected for the thousands of workers and miners from all the country’s reaches, bodies and souls to join the brave new study of briskly implanting an industrial hotbed into a farming landscape.
Needless to say, the programme which transfigured the rustic locality by the end of the 20th century into a two-industry town, squeezed in between meandering hills, morphed some of the former qualities of the place.
The authorities had set the melting pot of a multitude of cultural backgrounds and belief systems upon the campfire, but the flames had petered out too early.
But I believe I mentioned Minoans.
To the consternation of my acquaintances, I am an amateur student and devotee of the Bronze Age in the Aegean. I enjoy injecting pieces of anthropological and archaeological lore into conversations that have nothing to do with my pastime and launching into unsolicited lectures.
Some archaeologists, such as Jan Driessen, believe that the first European civilisation with indoor plumbing, book-keeping, state-of-the-art craftsmanship, writing, and a superpower’s naval fleet, flourished through the centuries on Crete also because its people benefited from a House Society.
Houses were to Minoans of immense importance; the greater they were, the wider was the influence — or even administrative control — of their inhabitants over the community.
Therefore, despite the rhythmic destruction by earthquakes and fires through the centuries, the Minoans always rebuilt and even expanded their “palaces” and monumental buildings, constructing on the hallowed ground of their predecessors.
The House was the society, the long-term booster-shot for interpersonal relationships. She, who resided on the premises and bore children, ruled.
The French philosopher Claude Lévi-Strauss defines the House Society as a corporate group which perpetuates itself through time down a real or imaginary line, if not by kinship then with at least affinity.
In other words: if the other Houses recognised you as a House displaying all the expected practices and outward signs, you were one.
My imagination soon latched on to the similarities between the Minoan house societies and the customs of the great families in the valley of my wife’s birth.
Let’s return to the river.
By the watercourse, I am sitting in the kitchen of the three-hundred-year-old dwelling of the Millers. Ana has four daughters and lives together with her second oldest one, Nusa, who never married. Ana’s husband died from cancer twenty-one years ago.
Since then, only the two women lived on the estate, Nusa being both companion and the replacement for most of the estate’s staff, now long gone — except for a handyman gentleman who speaks in an incoherent local dialect.
A couple of the former crew still drop by and sit with Ana to remember the glory days that were, at the time, often anything but that.
Group photographs of unsmiling relatives hang on the walls. A crucifix spreads its wings in an upper corner as if eager to depart the scene of half of a century’s worth of adversity and grim everydayness.
Everything in the rooms is clean, ordered and meticulously maintained in its polished, worn condition. The metre-thick stone walls silently echo the centuries. I am sitting down with Ana for the first time.
“Nusa, will you bring the coffee, and the pastry,” says Ana, who is sitting facing me. It is not a question.
“And the wine glasses — the premium ones.”
I would later realise I had been elevated to the medium House visitor status within fifteen minutes of my first visit.
“So you are from the capital. That’s nice. I was there on several occasions for the entire day, sightseeing all the fine buildings and streets, resting by the Poet’s statue at the Three-Bridge, watching the passers-by,” she informs me, watching me intently.
“I have the largest apples from our orchard here,” she continues after a pause, indicating the basket on the table.
“I would like to give you one for each in your family, starting with your parents — they are alive still, aren’t they ?— and for the young ones.”
Only later will I realise that I was being vetted on the number of relatives and especially any possible children from my first marriage.
She peers into my eyes, as my wife-to-be lets out a reprimand: “Mother!”
“Oh,” Ana smiles innocently, reminding me of Rutger Hauer as the Replicant team-leader starting an interrogation in the cinematic masterpiece.
“Do you know that we produce our own wine? You will try some, no?”
Nusa, my sister-in-law hides a wide grin.
I will learn that it is Ana’s way to gather information and evaluate it under the outward appearance of an old farm lady, who seemingly randomly uses an arsenal of conversational phrases, such as “You don’t say”, “You never” and “So it goes”.
Especially the latter will become an ongoing source of fascination for me, as Ana melancholically speaks it with the same timing Kurt Vonnegut used to indicate the end of a matter. I even asked her once whether she had ever read Slaughterhouse-Five, and, of course, she didn’t — but I could see in her questions about the book that in a different life, she would.
Ana would have understood Billy Pilgrim’s uncontrollable hops to various moments of his life completely.
Ana and her husband were both in the Resistance during the War. The occupying Germans treated opposition even more harshly in their parts as they considered it insurrection at the very borders of the Third Reich. And the latter also threatened the important communications routes passing the Eastern Alps towards the Balkans and Greece.
Ana was the Miller’s daughter by day, cooking the odd meal for the German soldiers on patrol, and an intelligence officer at night. After the War, everybody and his uncle claimed to have hidden wounded partisans from the Germans. Ana was one of the few that did.
I went once down the ladder into the claustrophobic dampness of the underground bunker under the old pig barn. I wouldn’t have lasted one hour down there.
Had the Germans, especially the Orpo under SS supervision, found this out, the whole family would have been stood in front of the house and summarily shot.
Ana’s father had a worse poker-face than his daughter, so she arranged that he usually worked away from the main house when the patrols visited.
Based on Ana’s information, at least a dozen German soldiers and policemen lost their lives. Nevertheless, she told me on several occasions that she felt sorry for the middle-aged Germans in uniform, sent to these rebellious hills under the Third Reich’s belly.
She was that kind of person: astute, tenacious, compassionate but with a streak of mental toughness I will never possess.
Within one month of her death, she kept a Zbrojovka Pistole Modell 27 Kal. 7.65 in a tin box and a set of field glasses on the window sill.
Eight years before she died, diabetes ravaged her arteries, and they had to cut off both of her legs.
But soon after recovering, she was exercising regularly in the mornings with the determination of a Marine Staff Sergeant and keeping a watchful eye from the first-floor window or the seat of her newly acquired mobility electric four-wheeler. How proud she was of her “car” and how dressed up for her driving occasions!
Sadly, the hard times did not flee the House of the Millers after the Second World War. The times were, as all proper shit-storms are, mothered by a new economic ideology.
Although both Ana and her husband were “on the right side of history” during the War, and both were members of the Valley’s Houses, their economic fortunes went from bad to worse after the change of the socioeconomic order.
They were not allowed to operate the lumber saw and grain mill and were forced to live by subsistence farming on land that was too steep and too unsuitable. Looking back, I guess they were lucky that they were not dispossessed entirely.
The Revolution does not take kindly to its children, pointing out Her inconsistencies. She ate Ana’s overly righteous husband but decided to spit him out at the last moment, to let him endure a lifetime of hardship.
As one of the Furies, Revolution knew such a lesson could be memorable to the cowering audience.
The House of the Millers never recovered and is, as I write, dead and buried under scars of concrete reconstruction, the whisper of the centuries of toil and laughter, tears and dreams weightless in the night breeze.
But I am still bound to the House, my promise holding fast through the darkness.
I have left the door of the Honda Civic open for an hour to help cool down the parked car. It is Summer, and we have stopped at the Upper Place, near where Ana’s husband had been born.
We are midway on one of our rare car excursions of remembrance. My wife and Nusa were sent to scout out on foot the condition of Father’s birthplace.
Throughout the drive uphill, Ana pointed at buildings and grounds, commenting excitedly on their state of appearance. Now the car won’t start, the car battery drained by the trickle of current drawn by the interior lights.
I curse myself loudly for not replacing the battery the day before. I had suspected it was nearing the brink.
“Oh, don’t worry,” Ana tells me breezily.
She is sitting in her wheelchair in the shade beside the car.
“This happened to me as well last time, when I was in town with my car!”
Of course, she and her husband never owned a car, even when it became common for all neighbours to have one. Resources were a trickle, priorities a score. They had possessed a tractor and some attachments for it, however, now long sold.
Ana is beamingly happy to call her new mobility scooter “her automobile” at any convenient turn of conversation. Fate may have taken away her legs, but it has, as a concession, offered her the excuse to splash out with her meagre savings on a small electrical four-wheeler.
“So how did you solve your breakdown?” I ask, somewhat disgruntled.
I am eying a farm in the distance, the only one that is showing signs of immediate activity. Will they have starter cables?
“It wasn’t a breakdown,” she corrects me.
“You have a breakdown. I just ran out of charge. It seems I was hitting the accelerator too much. You know how it is when you are in a hurry.”
There is a twinkle in her eyes.
“Yes; but how did you get the scooter moving?” I insist.
“Oh, I told Nusa to find help, and she returned with a gentleman with a car and cables. He was quite hearty.”
At ninety-two years old, she looks utterly smug and twenty years younger under her fashionable sun hat, a lady of the House exchanging war stories with a fellow driver.
Ana went from a pre-war position of an— in today’s terms — upwardly mobile young entrepreneur preparing to run an established family business to a beleaguered mother of four daughters after the War, frantically trying to make ends meet.
She worked in the barns and the fields, cooked during the day, and sew late into the night to keep the family clothed and fed.
After a few visits, Ana started recounting stories of her times to me. She was proud of how she had co-managed the family sawing and milling business, dealt with the occupation and survived the baby-boom age that brought advancement to almost all in the Valley except her.
She had a specific and differentiating view of social standing that was not based on any official designation of the day but upon her inherited criteria of what is proper for a House.
She enjoyed receiving visits. With Nusa, they always put on a brave face and a semblance of House protocol, although Ana at times privately reprimanded Nusa for slipping up.
Nusa had to, for example, keep three classes of glasses, cups and plates ready and three quality levels of whiskey — for the common folk, the eminent and persons of the House Society.
The Millers even at the end still produced their own vegetables from the last small garden and House wine from the remaining few vines fighting to catch the sunlight on soil and terrain foreign to them.
The House wine was sour as hell, but it came from the proper cellar.
Nusa always prepared delicious and plentiful food courses for important guests, menu-scripted and supervised by Ana — not to mention the cookies and the small chocolate mini cakes named judases for an unknown reason.
Ana also loved writing batches of Christmas and Easter greeting cards and dispatching them to family and the other Houses, coupled with small gifts. And how would she enjoy entertaining the return visits of the gifted, complaining gleefully how preoccupied she is in the weeks after the holidays!
Her final years were no more peaceful than most of her life before.
After surviving the shock of a double amputation and fighting cardiovascular illness, she went forth on her mobility scooter each day for weeks on end.
It was to challenge the partial blockade of the only road in existence to her estate, confronting the determined members of a family that had recently bought the building on the opposite edge of the road.
Interestingly, she did not believe them to be of a House.
Ana is beside me in the passenger seat, both of her prostheses stowed on the floor behind the seats. It is eight months before she will die and is the last time we speak alone for an extended period.
The former resistance fighter and COO of the Mill has, unexpectedly, demanded I stop at the curb near a grocery supermarket and has sent my wife shopping.
The grocery list Ana recited contains many small necessities spread over all the shop’s sections, so it will be at least half an hour before my wife returns.
We both know about what the stop is.
Ana is closing the books on her estate and entombing the centuries of the Schalleg millers. She wants me to witness this. I cannot say that she is passing the proverbial keys to me as we are both aware this is her final act as the last effective Head of the House.
“So,” she says, “I can trust you to remember all this or will you have to write things down?”
I am indignant: if she can recollect them to me, I am bloody well capable of memorising them.
She nods: “I will start with what I owe; that would be nothing.” She smiles thinly.
“But we’ll go down the catalogue, so you can later refute any naysayers.”
Ana starts with the payments for hiring a tractor after she had sold her own one. “I always covered the cost for the double quantity of used diesel and all assorted costs,” she says.
She looks me in the eye: “Got that? Everything to do with that damn machine and labour involved was paid!”
The ninety-four-year-old woman is continuing through the register.
I hear her sigh softly as she is now moving to the register of debts owed to her, moral and financial; this one is considerably longer. She is very clear in distinguishing between the two, underlining injustices.
“And then there is the matter of my father’s separate burial,” she declares indignantly and describes to me the details and agreements not honoured.
I am sitting here, in the Civic, with misted-up windows, disoriented by all the information.
“One final thing”, she murmurs, twisting more fully towards me in her seat: “Promise me this, in spite of whatever happens later, you understand?”
I nod, but she knows better than I, that in the future I perhaps would not be so agreeable.
Her land is to be freed from the booby-traps it had been afflicted with during the decades, lowering its market value to practically nothing. Her House is the only one in the Valley that has been so punished.
Ana explains to me the way she wants me to do it. I consider it for a moment, but, of course, I have no opt-out, no way to refuse — not really.
I am now of the House. I give her my word.
What kept Ana going, I believe, was her in-born determination and the fundamental belief that she was of a House. But the latter was also a curse.
It is better not to have known than to know what had been denied.
It is the same for many who spent their youth in circumstances that moulded their expectancies of better lives and softer futures, to be later tossed as ragged dolls into a novel sociopolitical and economic landscape that has neither the need or sympathy for their aspirations.
Hundreds of thousands of young Afghans have glimpsed the glitter of Western culture, and regardless of the falsehood of the mirage, have it stamped in their imagination. The sparkle will painfully deteriorate to greyish half-remembered snapshots in their old age.
Hundreds of millions of Millennials and Gen-Zeds know how their parents lived and have this imprinted in their minds. But the perfect tempest of the Automation Revolution is approaching, with its AI outriders of the storm, that Yuval Noah Harari warns may create the “global useless class”, transmuting the memories of the middle-class into historical fantasy.
In a nondescript cardboard box in the attic, Ana left behind a handful of photographs. These were not the official ones from the House walls — the equivalence of Minoan frescoes.
A faded print shows a young Ana, smartly dressed, wearing a dashing hat, standing on the pavement, obviously up and around the nearest city, on her lips a smile waiting to break.
For the grace of God or the throw of the Dice that determines in which quantum branch in the infinite-dimensional Hilbert space we inhabit, everything could have been different.
A Multiverse Reality camera that records all in the infinite series of realities in which Ana and I know each other makes a metallic sound.
Click: It is 2041, and true General AI is still out of reach despite the prevalence of quantum computing. A third of former Gen-Zeds still have a job, although the megacorps contract it by the minute.
I am sitting on a bench in a virtual park reading serialised science fiction through a neural implant. A handful of us, old geezers, can still tell what was written by a human.
Click: It is 2016. At Yalta, although irritably, Roosevelt joined Churchill in increasing pressure on Stalin regarding the control of post-war liberated Europe.
The cigar-smoking devil had pulled out the half-sheet of paper of the secret Churchill-Stalin “Percentages” Agreement on the Balkans from the 9th of October 1944 and placed it on the meeting table.
The Tito-Subasitch agreements were not confirmed. Stalin died in a car accident eleven weeks later, and in the ensuing confusion of succession, the Russians ceded the upper half of Yugoslavia to Western control. The Iron Curtain made a detour to the East. There was no Korean war.
I am sitting in Ana’s Tesla S-Orbit. My mother-in-law is wearing a colourful hat and is on her way to a board meeting with the Chinese. She feels much better after receiving her last shot of engineered AAV vectors that delivered CRISPR/Cas9 into her heart.
Her legs sometimes tingle in the morning, but the transplanted gene-edited beta-cells are performing their job.
She is thinking of going to Crete in the Summer. As the car drives itself to the gigafactory she owns half of, she lectures me on making a better living and abandoning writing.
Ana is the only Minoan Lady I will meet in any of the Universes.
If you enjoyed this story, you might be interested in my other tales, such as why I rather like the old Stoic philosophers even though they were slave owners.
Don’t worry; not all of my stories are long.
