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A Self Effacing Man

Page 13

by Sara Alexi


  ‘And why should this year not be a year that is unlike any other you have had?’ Cosmo asks himself as he walks across the square.

  ‘Talking to yourself is the first sign of madness!’

  Vasso’s kiosk is not open on New Year’s Day. There are no magazines out, no crates taking up the path, but she has something in her hand and is locking up the little door at the back. Perhaps she had forgotten something. Cosmo laughs at her joke, which surprises him. He does not feel defensive over being called mad, which this time last year would have left him feeling embarrassed and annoyed in equal measure. Recognising this change makes him laugh even more.

  At home, he takes Poppy’s oversized key, opens her shop, turns on the light and walks over to the selection of cards on the counter. He walks his fingers through them until he finds one that will do. He is not sure if he should leave the money on the counter or talk to Poppy when she returns. As the card has no price, he decides not to leave a coin but simply locks up and returns home.

  At the kitchen table he opens the card and writes.

  ‘De-ar Than-a-sis, Hap-py name day from your vill-age friends.’ He speaks the words out loud as he writes.

  ‘There,’ he says, admiring his handiwork. ‘Tomorrow we begin the hunt.’

  Chapter 16

  The sun, filtering through the thin curtains, begins to warm the room. Last night was so cold it woke him up, sending him groggy with sleep to struggle, in the early hours of the morning, with the woollen blankets in the trunk at the end of his bed. The blankets smell of mothballs and are age-worn and scratchy but at least, after a while, he warmed up and finished his dreams.

  A strip of sky is visible between the top of the curtain and the edge of the window. Light blue, not the deep azure of summer. He hopes there was no frost last night. There were no warnings of frost, no talk of it in the kafenio, but he needs to do something about that fan he thought he had fixed. He put it on last week and to his dismay and deep concern it did not work. In a panic, he called the fan-servicing man, who insisted he was booked solid every hour until sometime next week.

  ‘What if the frosts come before that?’ Cosmo asked, but the man explained that it was not the summer now and everyone wanted their fans servicing. There was nothing for it but to wait. So, after such a cold night last night, Cosmo’s priority today, after delivering the post, must be to try to fix the fan himself.

  The sun has not warmed his room yet and the bare boards are cold against the soles of his feet. If he can sell the oranges before the frosts come he will invest in a rug.

  The edges of the wooden stairs are smooth from decades of his feet rolling over them on the way down, sliding off onto the next step. He started doing it as a boy, enjoying the feeling on his instep, and now it is a habit that he cannot break. It is how he imagines a foot massage might feel.

  The kitchen is cold too. He opens the front door, and the air outside is a little warmer, but not much. At this time of year his mama would roll the electric storage heater from the guest room and have it gently warming the corner of the kitchen. Now the thought of it burning electricity day and night seems like a ridiculous expense. Cosmo puts on his coat and fills the briki with water and sets it on the stove. He needs coffee before he does anything.

  In the time it takes for the sugar to dissolve and the water to heat, for the coffee to be absorbed and the mixture to boil, Cosmo has surfaced enough to begin to consider what might be wrong with his orchard fan. They did have a couple of screws and a washer left over when he and Thanasis reassembled it. The fan worked when he had set it back in place, but he only tested it the once, just a burst, and did not run it for long. Maybe, he thinks hopefully, one of the power wires has come loose. He could fix that easily enough.

  The bubbles on top of his small cup of coffee glisten with the dissolved sugar. He sips the hot nectar carefully and lets it slowly wake him. Halfway through his coffee, he feels his stubble. He shaved yesterday; he will not shave today. On the table in front of him is the card for Thanasis. At least that is something positive he can do, even if the fan turns out to be beyond him. Draining his cup, he puts the card in his satchel.

  On the way to Saros he first hears and then sees the fan rotating in one of the orchards, but that might just be the wind catching the blades. The oranges in all the orchards look fine, and there are none on the ground. He stops at a place where one tree hangs over the road and he examines the fruit more carefully. They do not seem frost damaged. He squeezes one and is relieved to find it is still firm. He smells it: it still has that strong citrus smell. There are no spots or discolouration on it and under the tree there are no fallen leaves. All of this, of course, is no guarantee but it puts his mind at rest. It did not feel like it was minus two Celsius last night, the critical point for the oranges. But then, it is not the air temperature that he needs to worry about. The temperature between the branches of the trees can be as much as five degrees lower than just above the canopy. That is what the fans are for, to mix the air. Even turning on the watering system can circulate the warmer air from near the earth upwards, keeping the frost at bay. Tonight, of course, might be a different story, so after work his priority must be to fix the fan.

  There is a lot of mail today, probably backed up over the New Year. But on the plus side it means he will visit a lot of the people he wants to sign Thanasis’s card.

  The air is cold on his face on the return journey to the village, and he makes a note to find his scarf. He wonders where his mama used to store the winter clothes.

  ‘Scarf, card, oranges!’ He whistles through his teeth. This time last year he would not have had a thought in his head; now his mind is constantly filled with things he must do or remember.

  Sakis, as usual, has many letters, and once they are safely posted, Cosmo’s satchel feels lighter. Presumably it is fan mail – they cannot all be contracts and business, can they? There is no strumming this morning; instead, a recording is being played: the grating voice of Sotiria Bellou, like marbles against the shore. It is a popular song and it stays with him as he goes next door to Dora and Yorgos’s. Dora must have seen him coming because she opens the door before he has a chance to knock. Dora, despite her age, squeals like a child, exclaiming that the letter he hands her is from Yorgos’s second cousin in America.

  ‘We are thinking about visiting them. Can you imagine? Me in America!’ Dora enthuses.

  Yorgos smiles at her lovingly and then wishes Cosmo a good day. He is by the garden gate before he remembers the card. He feels uncomfortable asking Yorgos to sign – he would be saddened and appalled if Yorgos’s writing were to match that of the anonymous love letters, but he turns back to the house anyway.

  ‘Ah, Yorgo,’ he says, ‘the name day for Athanasis is soon’ – he uses the formal version of his friend’s name. ‘Well, Thanasis the donkey breeder has been a good friend to me so I thought it would be nice to give him a card, you know, just to wish him well on his name day. I thought I would get everyone to sign.’

  As he says the words he realises how ridiculous it seems. Who in the village gives cards to their friends? Sure, men to their wives occasionally, grandparents to their grandchildren, but one grown man to another? To cover the blushes he feels must be showing, he bends his head to search his bag for the card and brings it out hesitantly.

  ‘A card?’ Yorgos says, and he takes it, looking at the front, the back and then inside. ‘But no one has signed.’

  ‘I’ve just started.’ Cosmo can feel his face burning now.

  ‘Whatever next, eh?’ Yorgos chuckles. ‘I am getting old, I think, but first Marina selling Christmas decorations and now cards for our friends’ name days. The village is moving with the times and leaving me behind. Do you have a pen?’

  Cosmo is glad of the distraction of looking for a pen. ‘Here you go.’

  ‘It’s a pretty card. And I think it is a nice idea. Why not? Good for you, Cosmo,’ Dora says, looking on as Yorgos signs in a large swirling
hand that Cosmo is very relieved to see is nothing like the anonymous lover’s. He glances at Dora to see if she is making fun of him, but her words are sincere.

  ‘Cheers,’ he says as the card and pen are handed back.

  The more houses he visits, the easier it gets to ask, and the responses are generally positive, especially from the wives. Cosmo almost forgets why he is arranging for the card to be signed, and instead begins to think how much Thanasis will appreciate the gesture. By the end of his round he has handwriting samples from all but three of the men on his list, and they seem like very unlikely candidates. One is old Aris, who is older even than Mitsos. He has been with Katerina since he was eleven; married at sixteen, they have ten children. When would he even have the time to fantasise about Maria? Another is Mitsos himself, and he is clearly devoted to Stella. The third man is Takis, who has no farm and survives by doing odd jobs in Saros. To Cosmo’s mind he is a bit of a thug and he hopes for Maria’s sake it is not him.

  ‘But if it is none of these?’ he says, hanging his satchel on the hook by the front door and retrieving the card. ‘Then it must be one who hasn’t signed.’

  He takes off his coat, puts the card on the table and rubs his hands together for warmth. He is tempted to bring the heater from the other room, just to warm up the kitchen for an hour or so, or he could go straight to Stella’s or Theo’s.

  ‘Oh, and Theo, so that’s four. I forgot about Theo. But Theo has Anastasia.’ He frowns. ‘But that could be his motive – Tassia will not marry him,’ he mutters to himself. ‘No! He is too in love with her. It cannot be him, can it?’

  But a part of him wishes it is someone like Theo. Maria deserves to be wooed by a good man. He would not wish that on Tassia, though. He plucks the card off the table and puts it on the shelf in front of the letters he has still not delivered to Maria – and perhaps never will, he admits to himself.

  He cannot think about it any more. There was something pressing he needed to do. Now what was it?

  Chapter 17

  It is beginning to grow dark and he has not had a mesimeri. He yawns but he must continue. If he does not get the fan fixed there is a chance he will lose his crop. Grigoris came wandering through the trees from the next orchard earlier and called up to him that a frost was forecast for tonight.

  ‘Panayia!’ Cosmo swears as a washer slips from his grip and tinkles down the inside of the fan’s upright support. That is gone for good; it is ten metres to the tube’s bottom, and there is no opening. Holding tightly on to the ladder, he climbs up one more rung to look down the tube.

  ‘Gamoto!’ There is no ledge that it could have caught on; it is just straight down to the bottom. Well, it will have to be fixed without the washer.

  An hour later it is almost dark and Cosmo admits defeat. Climbing down, he berates himself.

  ‘Save a couple of euros, you said to yourself, and now you are going to lose the whole crop. Prove that you aren’t lazy, you said, and now the whole village will see how useless you are. You are such a useless idiot, your mama was right.’ His feet land on solid ground.

  ‘Talking to yourself won’t fix it.’ It is Grigoris again, hidden in the shadows.

  Cosmo does not even bother to feel embarrassed; he just feels a fool. Overconfidence – that’s what his mama used to say he suffered from when he tried to do things, and that is what has let him down now.

  ‘You are putting your fans on tonight?’ he asks.

  ‘Of course, but they won’t reach all the way across your orchard.’ Grigoris looks through the trees that stretch beyond what is visible.

  ‘What am I to do?’ Cosmo is speaking as much to himself as Grigoris.

  ‘Well, in the old days they would light fires underneath the trees, keep them burning all night. Or you can just apply to the government for compensation for frost damage. You’ll only come out a little less well off, and at least you are guaranteed to get paid, eventually.’

  He chuckles at this, and begins to walk away. Cosmo watches him disappear in the twilight.

  ‘Compensation!’ he hisses. ‘A handout!’ And with energy he didn’t know he had, he runs to the back fence where last year’s prunings are neatly stacked, and he pulls them and drags them and gathers them in armfuls, and when his pile is exhausted he crosses over to Grigoris’s orchard and takes all his prunings as well. It takes him some time, and night is upon him before the job is finished. But he cannot light the fires to see by – he must save the wood for when the temperature gets really low. He must get more wood. He has wood at home, but how to bring it here? He will think of something.

  He jumps on his motorbike and heads back home. Once there, he prises open the door of the woodshed. There is a tarpaulin over the logs, and he lays this on the ground and, turning on the light in the kitchen and using this to work by, he makes a pile of wood in the tarpaulin’s centre, pulls up the corners, ties it with rope, attaches this to the seat of his bike and then drives very slowly back to the orchard. He has just about got there when logs start to spill out onto the road. The tarmac has worn a hole through the tarpaulin, rendering it useless, but it has done the job well enough for him to run backward and forward for a while adding logs to each of the waiting piles under the trees.

  He has also brought his mama’s cooking thermometer and a blanket. He will wait until the temperature is nearly at freezing before he lights any fires. He does not have enough wood to waste any. The coldest time will most likely be an hour or two before dawn, and hopefully the temperature will not be below zero for long, or his wood will not last. He will wait and watch, and if the wood runs out he will have to rely on the watering system. This is less effective, apparently, but what else can he do? He has with him a jerrycan of petrol to get the fires going.

  After a couple of hours in the dark, staying awake begins to be a problem. He tries walking about, singing and whistling the song that Sakis was playing earlier. He checks all the piles of wood. He checks the lighter he took from his kitchen. Everything is ready. He sits again and waits, and it’s not long before he has nodded off.

  He wakes, panicking that he has overslept. He can hear voices through the trees. The voices are not speaking Greek, so it cannot be Grigoris or any of the other farmers. He cannot identify the language. Who would be in the trees at this time of night? Whoever it is, they cannot be here for a good reason. He will call out, see what they want. But something stops him. There are several people, and they are speaking furtively, as if to avoid detection.

  Cosmo tries to get closer without being seen, and he can see they have a stack of orange crates. He is almost by his rear fence now and he can see three trucks pulled up on the dirt track, two white ones and a blue one. The lights are on and the number plates are clear to see. If only he had a pen and a piece of paper – but his satchel is at the house. One of the men comes towards him and Cosmo bends down, crouching near the ground. With his hand to the floor for balance, his fingers find a twig and then, in a moment of inspiration, he writes with this stick in the dusty ground the registration number of each truck, and then shuffles back carefully so as not to smudge his handiwork.

  He watches from a safe distance as the men begin to fill the crates with oranges, a few from each tree, working quietly and methodically across the orchard. The crates are carried back to the trucks and loaded on, and Cosmo feels his anger rising. Both he and Grigoris will lose some of their valuable crop if he does not do something. The village is too far to go for help, and no one will be awake now. A dog barks in the distance, and he stops to listen, noting that the men in the trees have paused in their work too.

  Sounding harsh and alien in the natural environment, a strange whipping sound suddenly begins. The momentum of this noise grows, and it is echoed somewhere deeper in the orchard, until finally, as if this corner of the world is being invaded by helicopters, the noise is all-encompassing, coming from every direction. The blades of Grigoris’s fans are turning at full speed, as are Yorgos’s on the other si
de of Cosmo’s orchard. The gang of men seem to relax, speaking with greater ease, and Cosmo wonders if they have chosen to come tonight, knowing that there will be a frost and that the noise of the fans will mask any sounds they make.

  The fans! That must mean the temperature is below zero, and it means his crop is now at risk from the frost, as well as from the thieves. But he has an idea. He creeps around, nearer the front of the orchard, grabbing a log from one of the piles that he stacked under his trees earlier, just in case. Under the cover of the trees it is quieter and he can hear his own footsteps. Then, suddenly, he starts to bark, as aggressively and as loudly as he can. The sound travels under the tree canopies. He stops and moves to his left and barks again, a lighter bark, but more manic. The foreign voices have gone silent now. Then they speak more quietly, and Cosmo wonders if he can detect an edge of fear. He goes back to his first position and barks again, advancing towards the men. He can see them in the headlights of their own trucks, backing away slightly, looking nervous. He returns to his second position and barks manically. Now he can see the men picking up the crates they just put down. It gives him courage, so he barks more loudly still and, just because he is getting carried away, and because he’s scared, he ends with a howl, looking up through the trees to the black sky, and then moves closer still to see the effect. He feels pleased with the dramatic touch, which surely sounded more like a wolf than a dog! Two of the men seem to be arguing, one pointing into the trees and the other pulling at his friend’s sleeve, guiding him towards a hole in the fence.

  With another tentative step forward, Cosmo’s toes come up against something hard. One of the men is looking into the undergrowth in his direction, and Cosmo bends down to feel the hard thing on the ground. It is a log, and he picks it up and throws it as far as he can through the undergrowth. The man who was coming towards him changes direction, towards the noise. There are more than enough of them to overpower a couple of dogs, and Cosmo needs to do something more. On light feet, he backs further into his orchard. After the hours spent strimming around each trunk and over every root, he knows exactly where he is in the dark, and he finds his way easily back to the jerrycan and his bike. He can still see movements through the trees behind him: the men are coming. The temptation to jump on his bike and drive away is enormous. There is a tremor deep in his belly and a taste of metal in his mouth. But there is anger there too, and it fights with his fear, and the anger wins. How dare these men come in the night to take what he has spent months cultivating and nurturing?

 

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