A Self Effacing Man

by Sara Alexi

  ‘Such a sweet child,’ she concludes, leaning back in her chair so she can open the drawer beneath the table. She takes out a sheet of paper and a pen and slides them across to Cosmo.

  Reading and writing were not Cosmo’s strong points at school, but in the twenty-five – no, nearly thirty years he has been the village postman he has had plenty of opportunity to practise both. When he took the job it didn’t occur to him that many of his neighbours were even less literate than he was. Many of the older generation are unable to read or write at all, and there are several of his contemporaries who were pulled out of school for one reason or another – generally to help on the family farm – and who never mastered reading and writing.

  He flattens the sheet of paper against the tabletop with the edge of his fist and licks the tip of the pencil.

  ‘Right, so – Dear …’

  ‘Dearest,’ Anna corrects him. He writes what she dictates. Occasionally he rephrases something so it reads better, but he makes sure not to embellish or change the essence of what Anna is saying. He tried that once, for an old lady who lived over near Thanasis. She has passed on now, but at the time she was so missing her son in Thessaloniki, who seemed to have very little interest in her. She had Cosmo write about her cough that wouldn’t go away, and he exaggerated and made it sound worse than it was, to make the boy more concerned. Well, he was more concerned all right. He was on the next bus down, and lost his job over it, and Cosmo has been very careful ever since.

  ‘You want me to put some crosses for kisses?’ he asks.

  ‘No, let me.’ Kyria Anna takes the pencil and clumsily adds a cross at the end.

  The whole exchange must have taken three quarters of an hour and when he returns to his bike he discovers old Vangelis has a letter, as does Grigoris. That will be another half hour. But for some of the older generation, especially the widows and widowers on the outskirts of the village, these moments, being read the words of their loved ones, is the highlight of their week. It reminds them that they are not alone, that they are loved and considered, and Cosmo never rushes.

  People in the village think he is lazy. He knows they do. They have come to that conclusion because he doesn’t always get all the letters delivered in a day. He could challenge this view they have of him, but that would mean breaking confidences and he is not about to do that for the sake of a little vanity. Sometimes a letter holds some emotional content, and the recipient needs comforting, or calming, and it is exhausting. If he has had such a morning and he goes home for a coffee, to revive himself so he can continue his work, another villager might see this as shirking, and he has been classed by some as a man with no pride in his work. But what can he say? Should he betray who can read and who cannot – explain that the two hours at Georgia’s house was to read her a letter that announced her pension was going to be reduced as part of the austerity measures? Was it not crippling enough for her to hear that the few hundred euros a month she had to feed and clothe herself, keep herself warm in winter and cool in summer, was going to be reduced, without the humiliation of the whole village knowing she was illiterate?

  ‘My last water bill was that amount alone,’ she said, and he sat and comforted her, and then, together, they worked out a budget that meant she could survive. He could explain to the postmaster what had held him up, relate in detail how he had spent the morning; however, the postmaster is not naturally discreet – in fact, he is like an old woman in his love of gossip. How long would it be before everyone in the village knew all that had been said if he were the postman! Cosmo shakes his head at the thought. Better to let them think him lazy and inefficient than to embarrass those who cannot read, or those who are in distress. They have their pride just like anyone else.

  Neither Vangelis nor Grigoris is in so he puts their letters back in his sack – he’ll try again tomorrow – and continues his round. Occasionally he thinks of his mama, but more often he thinks of the letter on the kitchen table at home. He has still not decided if he will deliver it or not.

  His route takes him past his mama’s orange orchard.

  ‘My orchard.’ Even speaking the words aloud do not make it feel real. They will always be hers, her dowry, her mama’s before her. How soon before he needs to do something with them? When do they need spraying with chemicals, for example – isn’t that in the spring, to make them fatten? He has no idea. Have the weeds been cleared from under the trees, so they do not suck up the water? Is the watering system even turned on?

  ‘Oh, Mama.’ He both calls on her and curses her. He needs a coffee. Normally she would make it, and they would sit together and talk. Often, when he had drunk his coffee, she would give him a list of things she wanted from the shops in Saros. That was another reason why he didn’t always get all the letters delivered. She never wanted everything from just one shop in Saros. No, he must go to one place for the pasta, and to another for the toilet rolls. She had fixed ideas about which shop was cheapest for which item. As the shops closed at two for mesimeri, his workday was often eaten into by this task. In all the time she was alive, he never questioned whether it was reasonable of her to ask this of him. He does now.

  ‘Helping her to save those few cents could have lost me my job,’ he says to himself as he drives into the square. There is no point in going home. He does not have the patience it takes to make a good coffee and he can have one at Theo’s instead.

  The kafenio is situated along the top of the square, on the corner, with tall windows on two sides, facing the village shop on one side, and on the other the square and the road that brings visitors from Saros, family from Athens, hawkers, dealers, gypsies collecting scrap, and primary children returning from school. It is the perfect vantage point from which to see all the comings and goings in the village.

  Cosmo kicks the stand out on his bike next to a dozen others outside the kafenio. He recognises most of the other bikes and he knows who will be in the kafenio before he enters.

  Three steps take him into the large, unadorned room with its high ceilings. The walls are bare and the wooden chairs have raffia seats and are time worn, the paint rubbing thin on the top rails and stretchers. There are four seats to each of a dozen or so square wooden tables, the tops of which are sheeted with metal, stark and uncompromising. The pot-bellied stove in the back right-hand corner was the focal point last month, but now, with the spring’s heat, the men have spread themselves around the room and the stove is abandoned for the rest of the year. There are no embellishments here, nothing to soften the practicality of the place. It is designed to set a farmer or a postman at his ease. There is nothing a man needs to take care of or treat gently.

  ‘Yeia sou, Cosmo,’ Theo greets him, and, leaving his low counter to welcome him, he gives him a gentle slap on the back in acknowledgement of his so-recent loss.

  ‘Ela.’ Thanasis kicks out a chair where he is sitting with Mitsos.

  ‘Coffee?’ Theo asks.

  ‘Thanks.’ Cosmo slumps heavily into his seat and they sit in silence. In the square the central palm tree casts a spiky shade. Two people are at the kiosk and their voices carry: two farmers sharing a joke with Vasso, who works inside.

  ‘They may as well just change the date on these newspapers and reprint them, for all the actual news they carry,’ one is saying.

  ‘Be glad there is no news. It’s all horror and shock these days anyway,’ the other replies.

  ‘I’ll be charging you both for each page you read. Are you going to buy the thing or not?’ Vasso is teasing them, on the edge of laughter.

  ‘Ach!’ Theo is a naturally quiet man and the exclamation is loud enough to divert the attention of every man in the kafenio away from the action in the square.

  ‘Would you look at that!’ He holds up his briki, the handle in one hand, the tiny pan in the other.

  ‘Ach,’ he says again, and he tries to match the two, as if simply doing so will join them again.

  ‘Don’t you have another?’ Mitsos asks. ‘D
o you want me to go and get you one from the eatery?’ He raises a finger, vaguely pointing past the kiosk to the ouzeri he runs with Stella.

  ‘Nah, I have another … But – well, you know how it is, you get used to the feel of the thing, the weight, the balance.’

  ‘Best not to get attached to these things,’ says a man leaning on his shepherd’s crook by the cold stove.

  ‘Ah, but you do, don’t you,’ Mitsos replies, and several of the men nod.

  ‘I still have an old pencil I got when I was at school,’ the shepherd says.

  ‘And what would you want with a pencil?’ Thanasis laughs.

  ‘Cleans his ears with it,’ a farmer with his sleeves rolled up and a bushy moustache retorts.

  Mitsos chuckles and Theo throws the briki in the bin with a clang of metal against metal. The banter continues. Someone has a ruler that was bought for him when he went to school and now he has passed it on to his grandchild, and someone else has a skeparni that he remembers his baba buying when he was only twelve, and they continue to list the things they have stored, or used, for decades. Theo makes coffee in the new briki, tutting and sighing as he does so. After pouring the contents into a little cup, he puts it in front of Cosmo and looks at it, shaking his head.

  Cosmo drinks the brew and feels somewhat revived and, leaving his bike, walks home almost with a bounce to his step. It is only when his hand is on the door and his lips are poised to announce to his mama that he is home that he sniffs the air, smells no food cooking and remembers that now he is entirely alone.

  On the kitchen table, instead of plates and cutlery laid out for two, there is only the letter next to the box of matches. He had forgotten about that too.

  Chapter 5

  Cosmo picks up the letter and turns it over. A part of him clings to the vain hope that he was so drunk last night that he was mistaken – that he had a paranoid delusion. But there can be no mistaking the handwriting, and if he opens the envelope, he knows, the message inside will be written on lined paper, torn down one side as if from a school exercise book, and it will have a stain in the top left-hand corner where at some point the book got wet. He replaces the envelope back on the table and takes a deep breath, then lets it out noisily. Who is he to play God? There is nothing for it: he must deliver it, and accept all it brings.

  He looks around the kitchen blankly. He never liked the pale-green that his mama insisted he apply every five years or so to the walls and the home-made cupboard doors, to freshen them up. Maybe he will change it now. White, perhaps, to make the room feel airy, light.

  Right now, though, he needs food, and this is a challenge. Pans! There were often pans on the stove and dishes in the oven. Where did she keep them? He opens a cupboard and discovers a stack of plates. The next cupboard door is stubborn, and he finds the hinge is broken. He can recall her voice now.

  ‘Cosmo!’ Her tone alone made him put down his postal bag heavily. ‘The cupboard needs fixing,’ and he sat down, exhausted, and put his feet up on the stool.

  ‘Take your feet off the chair and find a screw.’ At this he reluctantly dropped his feet to the floor again and relinquished his ease.

  It had been a difficult morning. Old Grigoris had received a letter from his lawyer, and it had been hard work to follow the formal language, and even harder to reply. After that, Widow Katerina could not work out her electricity bill and when Cosmo told her the amount she must pay she broke down and cried. She did not have that sort of money, she said, and her sorrow had softened his heart, and they had cried together at her predicament. Her misery was too much to witness and so, taking out his wallet, he pulled out the twenty-euro note he kept at the back for emergencies.

  ‘I cannot take that!’ she insisted. ‘When would I ever be able to pay you back?’ and she had cried and looked like her heart was breaking and her world was ending.

  ‘Please, I want you to take it. A gift.’

  But a gift was out of the question.

  ‘In all my life I have never been in such a position.’ She cried all the more and then she started crossing herself and asking God why He was punishing her. In the end Cosmo, used her own religion against her.

  ‘Katerina, by the grace of God I have this money. You think He would want me to clutch it tightly all to myself?’ he reasoned. Her eyes, tight from sobbing, had opened a little then, big lakes of sorrow holding just a little hope at his words.

  ‘Make me seem better than I am in His eyes,’ he implored. ‘Take the money, Katerina, for it will do me good.’

  ‘Oh no, no, I cannot. Who can say when I will be able to pay you back?’ she said, but her crooked fingers opened enough for him to stuff the note into. ‘I will pay you back when my pension comes,’ she said.

  ‘Please do not be in such a hurry – the longer I am in God’s good books, the better for me.’

  As he climbed onto his bike, old Katerina came hurrying after him, her hands cupped.

  ‘Take these.’ And she held out three eggs to him, one still with a small, soft, brown feather attached. ‘My hen, she laid them this morning.’

  Cosmo felt tears pricking his eyes again.

  ‘I would love to, Katerina, but they will break on my rounds. You keep them.’ And he kicked the bike stand up and hurried away.

  The whole exchange, what with crying and arguing with her to take the money, had emotionally exhausted him, so, once at home with his feet up, he was loathe to move because some hinge was loose. But when did he not do his mama’s bidding? With some effort, he got to his feet and shuffled to the cupboard under the stairs for his tools and spent the last of his energy searching in vain amongst washers, bits of string and wire and spanners for a screw. Finally he admitted defeat and returned to the kitchen, sat down again and put his feet up.

  ‘What about this door?’ His mama prodded him in the shoulder.

  ‘I will do it, Mama, but it needs a screw.’

  ‘Well, go and buy one if you don’t have one.’

  ‘Give me a moment.’

  ‘Oh, I know your moments …’

  It exhausts him just to think about it. He closes the cupboard door carefully to avoid making the situation with the hinge any worse, and he looks around the kitchen again, hoping beyond hope that food will have magically appeared. His eyes land on the letter again. Perhaps it is just his natural inclination to put things off. Perhaps this is not the best course of action this time. Maybe he should take it immediately. Maybe it won’t be as bad as he thinks.

  He sits at the table and turns the envelope over and over. She was the first person on his rounds that he ever read for. Thirty years ago now. The image is burnt into his mind.

  The door opened so quickly after he put the letters through the box it startled him. It was only his second week on the job and he was still nervous about the possibility of making a mistake.

  ‘Did I make you jump?’ It was beautiful Maria from school. Despite living in the same village, he had seen her only seldom since he left three years ago. Once or twice in the corner shop, and once at the laiki in Saros, when she was laden with bags of vegetables. He had never spoken to her, not at school and not after they left. At one time, all the boys in the village had a crush on her, and she seemed far beyond his reach. Only few had the courage to ask to court her and they had no luck. Cosmo never had the courage and had to content himself with adoring her from afar. Until, suddenly, there they were, standing face to face on her doorstep, his postbag over his shoulder, and she was asking him in. He didn’t ask why – he just followed her mutely to the kitchen where her mama and baba sat with a small pile of unopened letters in front of them.

  ‘Did I do something wrong, delivered to the wrong address?’

  He hurried to the table ready to gather up the envelopes, apologising for his mistake. But Maria’s baba put a hand on top of the pile.

  ‘The thing is, Cosmo, I never really paid much attention even when I did go to school.’ It was Maria who addressed him, her eyelashes
fluttering. He took hold of the back of the chair next to him.

  ‘And mama and baba, what with the farm and everything, and a herd of two hundred goats – well, they didn’t have much time for school either.’ She would not meet his eyes now and the colour in her cheeks was heightening.

  ‘We cannot read,’ her baba barked, and both the women looked up sharply. ‘There, it is said,’ the baba snapped, glaring at the women, and after a brief silence Maria continued.

  ‘So we were wondering if maybe you could take the time to read these to us. Kyrios Spiros was kind enough to do the same before he retired, and we miss his kindness. He was also good enough not to broadcast our shortcomings. You know how people can sometimes be.’

  Her eyes flicked up at him at this point, and he almost felt she was reminding him of how he was teased at school for not being too clever.

  ‘I know what it is like to be laughed at,’ he replied.

  ‘Well, I am embarrassed to ask,’ she answered and then shrugged.

  ‘We each have our strengths. The best I can do is try.’

  And he hoisted his bag off his shoulder and held out his hand for the first letter. They were mostly bills. Money they could manage, Maria’s mama said, ‘If we know how much we owe.’ And so he took the time to show them how to read a bill and where to look for the total. He wondered why his predecessor had not done the same thing. As well as the bills, there were a couple of letters from an aunt in Athens – to whom a reply must be sent, Maria’s baba said. All the while, as he read and scribed, he felt her proximity. It sent electricity through his body. Why could he not have a pleasant face and good conversation – but more importantly, why was that all it took to get a girl as pretty as Maria? His heart was good, he would be loyal and he would love her dearly – surely that was worth more?

  It was Maria who showed him out again that day. The boys playing football in front of the church opposite stopped their game and turned to stare.