Andrea Dworkin - The Political Memoir of a Feminist Militant

elegant and mysterious Orient Express. A sweet boy offered

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The Orient Express

to share his canned Spam with me, but I foolishly declined. It

was a four-day trip from London to Athens, each hour after

Paris more sordid than the one before. I did love the train ride

through Yugoslavia because the country was so very beautiful,

and I promised myself I would go back there someday, a bad

promise nullified by war. I had never been in a communist

country; there were more police than I had ever seen in my

life, and each one wanted to see everyone’s passport and go

through everyone’s luggage. I was easy on that score. I had

one small piece of luggage and nothing more.

While still in Yugoslavia, I began talking with an American

named Mildred. She was wrinkled as if her skin had been

white bread, squooshed and rolled and then left to dry. She

had smudges of lipstick here and there and was very kind to

me. I needed water desperately by the time we reached

Yugoslavia, but I was afraid to run out to the station when the

train stopped because I didn’t know when it would start up

again. I’ve always found traveling by train exhausting and anx-

iety-making. Mildred gave me water or pop or something I

could drink. The cows were in touching distance now, and so

were the peasants, though there were many more cows than

peasants.

Mildred was going to Athens. Someone had stolen al of her

money. She wondered if she could borrow some from me -

what I had would be exactly enough for her to liberate her

things, being held by an irate landlord, and then later that

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Heartbreak

same day she would have the money wired to her by her son

so she would be able to pay me back. We made a date to meet

in a town square in Athens for the day following our ar ival.

I gave Mildred pretty much al of my money. I had enough for

the YWCA that first night. The next day at the appointed

hour I waited in the square. She never came. The direct consequence was that as it started turning dark I had to find a man to take me to dinner and get me a room. And I would

have to do the same the next day and the day after that. I

kept hoping I'd find Mildred here or there. I never held it

against her.

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Easter

I went to Crete to live and write. I didn’t know much about

it except that my roommate at the Y was from there. What I

found was heaven on earth: the bluest sky; water in bands of

turquoise, lavender, aqua, and silver; rocks so old they had

whole histories writ en on the underside of their rough edges;

opium poppies a foot high and blood red; a primitive harbor;

caves in which people lived; peasants who came down from

the mountains to the city for political speeches - there would

be a whole family in a wooden cart pulled by a mule with an

old man walking the mule; there was light the color of bright

yellow and bright white melted together, and it never went

away; even at night, somehow through the dark, the light

would manifest, an unmistakable presence, and in the darkest

part of night you could see the tiniest pebble resting by

your foot. This was an island on which old women in black

cooked on Bunsen burners, olive trees were wealth, and

there was a universal politics of noli me tangere with a

lineage from 400 years of Turkish occupation through Nazi

occupation; the people were fierce and proud and sometimes

terribly sad.

69

Heartbreak

The place changed for me one day. It was Easter. I was with

an English friend and a Greek lover. The streets began fil ing

up with gangs of men carrying lit torches. They seemed a

little KKK-ish. Their intentions did not seem friendly. My

Greek lover explained that the gangs were looking for Jews,

the kil ers of Christ. That would be me. My companions and

I hid behind a pil ar of a church. I don’t think there were other

Jews on the island, because this search for Christ’s kil ers had

gone on year after year, even before the Turkish occupation. I

wondered if the gang of men would kil me. I thought they

would. I was afraid, but the worst of it was that I was afraid

my Greek lover would give me up - here she is, the Jew. I was

the faithless one, because this question was in my heart and

mind. I wondered what would happen if the torches found us,

saw us and took us. I wondered if he’d stand up for me then.

I wondered how the people I’d been living with could turn

into a malignant crowd, a hate crowd. If there were no other

Jews on the island, it was because they had been killed or had

fled. (Tourist season had not yet begun. )

The next day teenaged boys dove into the Aegean Sea to

look for a jeweled cross blessed by the Orthodox priest and

thrown by him into the water; one boy found it and emerged

like an elegant whale from the water, cross raised above his

head as high as he could hold it. The sun and the cross merged

into an astonishing brightness, the natural and the man-made

making the boy into some kind of religious prince. It was

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Easter

beautiful and savage, and I could see myself bleeding out the

day before, a corpse on cold stone.

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Knossos

I didn’t know anything about anthropology or the reconstruction of the ancient Cretan palace of Knossos by the English archeologist Sir Arthur Evans. I didn’t know it was the labyrinth of Daedalus or the palace of King Minos, the Minotaur symbolizing generations of sacralized bulls. I had no idea of