Chania, Crete. Days 2 to 4 2/3

As we entered To Mikro Karavi (The Little Boat), a bookstore on Daskalogianni Street, Maria Callas — I assumed it was Maria Callas — was deep into some aria. I could see her at stage front, shattered, bloodied, defiant. Callas was cranked up so loud you couldn’t hear yourself think.

When I was finally able to concentrate long enough, I discovered that To Mikro Karavi has an excellent stock of books in Greek; Greek writers in translation (in several European languages); as well as bilingual editions (Greek text and translation on facing pages). Later on I also discovered that To Mikro Karavi also has a reputation for rudeness, which I didn’t know about when we walked in.

I had hatched a plan some years ago to improve my Greek by reading Greek translations of familiar books. David Sedaris seemed like a good bet: his sentences are simple, and he doesn’t go in for long words and fancy metaphors. As for the funny bits, well, we’d see how a translator would handle that.

“We don’t have any Sedaris books left,” shouted the handsome, bearded man over Maria Callas’s insistent wailing. He was sitting behind the counter. “But let me check on the computer,” he added. He read off a few titles, and I chose “Calypso,” one of my favourites. It would arrive next Saturday.

After learning we’re from Canada, the handsome bookstore proprietor and I fell into a typically Greek — which is to say typically disputatious — assessment of the political climate.

“The problem,” he announced in Greek, “is that your democracy is not a real democracy.” I bristled at this, at his presumptuous and lecturing tone. He then proceeded, in English, to tell me precisely why our democracy is debased. We talked on for a while, at high volume. Callas was still going strong, and by this time my ears were bleeding.

On the way out, I also bought a bilingual selection of poems by George Seferis (Nobel Prize for Literature, 1963), as well as “The Shortest History of Greece.” I simply couldn’t resist the title.

The following evening, we ate at Chrysostomos, whose menu we had studied closely while still in Canada.

Chrysostomos serves traditional dishes from the mountain region of Sfakia. In olden days, a journey from Sfakia to the coast by foot or donkey took several days — and why bother? The olives and goats need tending, the coastal people are all bandits anyway. So, necessarily, fish is not on the menu at Chrysostomos. Instead, there’s lamb and mutton, goat, rabbit and vegetable dishes baked in a wood fired oven. The bread, maybe the best I’ve ever tasted — its crumb moist and yielding and perfect — is baked in the same oven. It is impossible to stop eating it.

That’s half the menu. The other half is long-simmered stews, such as rooster and spaghetti, lamb and artichokes, octopus (the sole reminder that we’re on an island) and potatoes. All of it familiar: dishes from my own family’s table, and that I still sometimes cook.

We drove into the ancient mountain village of Gavalochori yesterday morning, where the air was cool. As in every corner of Greece, cats are everywhere in Gavalochori, sleeping under cars, sunning themselves on doorsteps, sauntering imperiously on high walls.

We stopped at a kafenio, beside a monument to fallen soldiers, those who resisted the Turks in the late nineteenth century, and the Nazis more recently. Greek coffees and a bottle of sparkling water appeared on our table, and we sat contentedly, Shari sketching the village road behind me, as I wrote some of these fragments.

Eventually I wandered off to take pictures of hanging laundry, laneways, and the twin churches of Agios Charalambos and the Nativity of Mary. A cat on a whitewashed wall was licking its mitten. It paused to glare at me. It resumed its licking.

In many ways, it was a perfect morning.

Our next stop was the village of Vamos. Not as pretty, we thought, but maybe we were tired by then and made the wrong turn. We were also hungry. So, based on a guidebook recommendation, we tried the I Starna Tou Bloumosifi (I have no idea what that means, nor did I ask). I had the classic rooster and spaghetti I had already been hankering for (served here instead with egg noodles), while Shari had a stew of chestnuts, wild mushrooms and small whole onions. It was all pretty terrific.

By now, we’re used to the waiter appearing at the end of the meal with extras: in this case, a saucer of yogourt topped with a spoonful of quince jam, alongside an inevitable vial of raki and shot glasses. It’s lunchtime, we’re stuffed, we have to drive back. But it is impossible to refuse, and why would you?

Shari opened her book and sketched the grizzled old chef taking a cigarette break at a nearby table. When she was done, I invited him over to browse through her sketches.

He was impressed. “Ah, you are professional,” he said. His English was pretty good.

As a young man, he had once assisted a painter of icons. He had done some painting himself, in fact, using the traditional egg tempera medium on wood panels. It was a difficult medium, he agreed. Actually, he added, the true iconographer does not paint directly on wood. He first stretches skin made from donkey ears over the wood, and paints on that.

When I returned to the bookshop to pick up David Sedaris’s “Calypso,” the lecturing Cretan was gone. I was disappointed, because I had been formulating a strong rebuttal in my broken Greek.

Instead, his wife or business partner sat at the desk. She looked formidable.

“I’m on a mission to improve my Greek,” I said in my best unaccented Greek. I smiled, wanting to break the ice. “I think this book will help.”

“Hmm,” she responded.

The last lines of Cavafy’s most celebrated poem, “Waiting for the Barbarians,” come to mind:

What’s to become of us without barbarians?

These people were some sort of solution.