A Saint for the Summer

by Marjory McGinn

  Angus noticed my puzzled expression and explained that the kalderimi was a great feat of rural engineering, a cobbled stone pathway, of which there were many in the Mani, connecting villages, and built to last. According to the taverna owner, this one was the longest in the region.

  “You go up there one day,” said the man, with a wink, “slowly maybe, ‘cause you no young any more, eh? Take your lovely daughter. Kalderimi goes straight up mountainside to Platanos. Villagers once bring mules and donkeys down it for their fields in winter. Then back up again, spring,” he said, waving his arm around to indicate the effort involved.

  Angus was keen to see this kalderimi and wasted no time following the man’s instructions to the signpost. We didn’t need to walk to the start of the track, however. It was possible from the road to make out the stone outline of it as it zigzagged perilously in sharp angles all the way up the rockface, hundreds of feet high. Here and there the track and some of the stone walls that buttressed it were obscured behind fir trees and bushes, which meant that from a great distance, the construction would have been almost invisible to the naked eye. We later discovered the kalderimi had been built around 1900 over an existing, rough donkey track. It was the only year-round access route for people and livestock before the modern road was built.

  “This is great, Bronte. Remember in Thomas’s account of the escape down the Mani when the local Greek told the soldiers there was a track leading up to the mountains? This kalderimi is definitely that track since it does go up to Platanos, as we’ve just been told. This would have been the easiest, quickest route to it. This means it was definitely possible for soldiers to have walked from the coast all the way to the mountains. But a long slog, I admit.”

  He gazed up at the track with a curious longing. “I’d dearly love to ascend this kalderimi one day, Bronte.”

  “Well, you can if someone adds in a Stairmaster, or you can ping yourself onto Myrto’s donkey.” I couldn’t think which feat would prove harder.

  We set off on the drive home, feeling slightly more uplifted. The discovery of the kalderimi was probably our only success in the whole day.

  The Zefiros kafeneio in the early evening had its usual vibrancy. There were a few tables occupied inside, with Greek men playing a board game and watching TV. There were some Greek families outside, and one rowdy table of expats enjoying a few carafes of wine.

  I sat outside so I could watch everyone easily while I checked my emails and enjoyed the cool breeze that snaked its way up from the gulf, carrying salty, herby aromas. It toyed with the plane tree above, making a pleasant susurrus through the leaves. I supposed that many Greek villages nestled under plane trees but it was ironic that this village had a plane tree in its plateia as well, as if it really were a sister village to Platanos, yet in no other way did it resemble the outpost we’d seen today.

  Elpida saw me and came straight over. I only wanted an instant coffee but she brought me some cake she’d made that day. I wasn’t hungry after lunch at the Crisis Café, but the cake was good, not too sweet.

  “Rivani,” she said, “Everybody likes my rivani, Bronte.”

  She sat down at the table, as was her habit.

  “How is Angus today?”

  “He’s good. Gone out to see friends tonight.”

  “And today, where you go today?”

  I wondered if she’d somehow seen us driving off in the morning.

  “Just some sightseeing.”

  “Where you go?”

  “We were in …”

  I was about to say Platanos, but then I thought it wasn’t a good idea to let everyone know yet that we were digging up family history in the mountains. And telling Elpida was the same as getting one of those village hawkers to give it a blast on their loudspeaker.

  “We were driving along the coast road.”

  “Ah, nice. Seeing the sights with your father? And what he does other days?”

  “Em …. he reads a lot.”

  She laughed. “Reading? Once, no reading. Once, he used to come up here every weekend from where he lived on the coast. We had music. Bouzouki. Lots of dance. He liked a party. Sometimes he played his guitar and sometimes just a little bouzouki, for fun, after a few glasses of ouzo,” she said, with a vibrant smile showing her small teeth. She looked like a terrier who’d just dug up an old bone.

  “He played here? Really?” I already knew he had a bouzouki but actually playing it here stirred my imagination. I had a strange image of Angus with his ponytail, playing and singing in Greek.

  “Your father is what we call leventis. Means brave, bold man. We Greeks like this kind of man.”

  Okay. Whatever! I thought. It was funny how the Greek view of Angus didn’t quite chime with mine. But I was learning something new every day.

  “Where is your husband, Elpida?” I asked, realising I had never seen him, only one of her younger sons, who helped out in the kafeneio when he wasn’t at school.

  “He works in Kalamata in a taverna in summer. Times are tough. He earns more money there than here, in the crisis,” she said, making that gesture of rubbing her thumb and forefinger together.

  “So you’re the boss here?”

  She slapped me affectionately on the back. “You got it right, Bronte. And I am tough,” she winked. “Don’t forget the celebration on Sunday. You tell Angus to leave his books and come, okay?”

  “The foreigners, will they come?” I asked, glancing towards the table of expats.

  She grimaced. “One or two maybe,” she said softly. “The xenoi, foreigners, don’t like our celebrations so much. Don’t like the church service. Standing for hours and kissing the icons. But they like the roast goat. And the wine, Bronte.” She laughed heartily, her ample chest bouncing up and down. I could tell she was itching to reveal a lot more about the foreigners but wouldn’t because, after all, the expats were loyal clientele. I had no doubt she knew a lot too. If ever I wanted to write an exposé of expats in the region she would be my go-to woman.

  “Everybody comes to this celebration from village. And even Doctor Leonidas comes too,” she said with another wink. My face flushed and I wished she hadn’t seen that. She gave me a long, analytical stare. It felt like emotional dermabrasion. Then she was on her feet again, a genial smile, bustling away to another table.

  It wasn’t quite what she thought it was with the mention of the doctor. It was merely that her questing, gossipy nature made nearly every subject a minefield. Yet, since I was tasked with grilling Leonidas about Platanos during the war, his appearance on Sunday would be most fortuitous.

  Chapter 9

  Crosses to bear

  The chanting reached us through the trees from over a hill in the still morning air. It blended seamlessly with the environment, sounding ancient, assured, as if it had been conceived at the dawn of time. As we drew closer, the chanting began to mix with the mortal sounds of people chattering, kids scrambling about, chairs scraping on hard surfaces, the chink of crockery, and the divine aroma of roasting meat and incense. The air seemed to fizz with joyful expectation.

  Once we crested the hill, the church came into view, a small white building with a backdrop of the Taygetos mountains in the distance. It would have been hard to find a more extraordinary position for a chapel, hidden in the hills behind Marathousa. It had a small forecourt, where rows of chairs were set out for those who couldn’t find a space inside. To the right of the church was an orchard circled by olive trees. To the left was the new fournos, a solid brick oven with a chimney puffing a ribbon of dark smoke into the air. A young man wearing a stout apron and holding a pair of kitchen tongs stood guard at the fournos, holding court with several tables of men nearby, their religious observations having been attended to earlier perhaps.

  Other men were huddled under a tall olive tree, smoking and talking quietly. There was obviously a protocol here that everyone understood, yet underlying the church ritual and the social imperatives there was a seam of unstructured move
ment: villagers walking in and out of the church, gossiping, fidgeting, yawning vibrantly. It should have been contradictory and distracting but it wasn’t; the ritual and the chaos seemed to co-exist very well. And maybe that was uniquely Greek. I couldn’t tell.

  I could see Elpida sitting on one of the chairs outside. She waved and patted an empty seat beside her, but before I could make my way there, Myrto scooped me away by the arm. She looked rather handsome in her Sunday clothes: a black dress, gold jewellery, a black bag hooked over her arm. Her hair was swept into a knot at the back of her head, pinned with a tortoiseshell clip. She wore a little make-up. She looked nothing like the woman I had seen the other day in her farm compound.

  “You come with me, Bronte. We will squeeze inside and later get a blessing. It is the day we honour the holy cross of Jesus.”

  She directed me towards the door of the church, while Angus kissed the icon outside, waved at me and made his way towards the men under the olive tree. Myrto propelled me into the church, using an elbow to skilfully divide the crowd in the central aisle, as if it were made of butter. We slithered further in. I could see the papas over the heads of the villagers in a bright gold and red robe, swinging a censer, the clouds of aromatic incense rolling over us and up towards the dome of the church. There were rows of men to the right, women to the left, in an antiquated nod to Byzantine ritual no doubt.

  Myrto stopped for a moment at an icon on a wooden stand, decorated with a garland of flowers. She kissed it and urged me to do the same. It was an icon of Christ on the cross. I bent low over the glass front and noticed the imprints of many kisses, the odd smear of lipstick, and the neat freak inside me decided to air-kiss it instead, which I did with a gusty gesture, like an overawed Oscar winner.

  Myrto spied two old women about to vacate their chairs and somehow, with practised ease, managed to shoehorn them out of the way while grabbing the chairs for us. I was glad to sit down, away from the crush of people. Along the wall of the church sat very old women in high wooden seats. They were impassive, thin as coat hangers, in black clothes. They had a timeless patience about them, having survived many such long services, many trials as well in their lives. The ancient Greeks invented the concept of stoicism, and centuries later it was still being sired in the deepest corners of the Orthodox Church.

  The service was interminable. After a while, the drone of chanting and the clouds of incense made me sleepy. I was close to dozing when the sight of a well-dressed man in a dark suit with lustrous black curls, gleaming under the chandelier, snapped me out of it. Leonidas cut an impressive figure in a crowded church and everyone turned to look. Like Angus had said, he was almost a minor deity, but adoration seemed to glance off him as he made his way to a seat in the men’s section, given up for him by a younger worshipper.

  At the end of the service, everyone lined up in the aisle to receive a blessing from the papas, standing at the front of the church. Myrto again grabbed my arm and pulled me into the aisle. Out of the corner of my eye I could see Leonidas leaving his seat. He offered a regal nod in my direction and that twitch of a smile, as if my presence as a foreigner had been logged and approved.

  Myrto directed me to where the papas was thrusting a large silver cross towards each worshipper’s face for a pious kiss and then pelting them in a strange manner with a large bunch of greenery doused in holy water. An arc of water strafed my face, bringing with it the sweet smell of basil, and I had no defence against the cross colliding with my lips, as it had with dozens of others. At the moment when I should have felt blessed I was counting up how many viruses I’d just come in contact with, and if I’d survive without a cold − or something worse.

  Out in the sunshine, Myrto was still holding my arm as I mopped basil water from my face. She was fussing over where to sit, checking out the rows of tables, with rising panic in her eyes, as people sprinted out of church, corralling their family members and making a dash for tables in shady positions, as if this was some new and exotic version of musical chairs. I had no idea a yiorti, church celebration, was going to be this entertaining and slightly crazy. Elpida also appeared at my side and took hold of my other arm, insisting I sit at her table with her family and friends since it was she who had first told me about the celebration. I felt like the new girl at school in danger of being pulled in two as the women fought over me. In the end, Myrto dropped my arm and sprinted off to commandeer a table under an olive tree, waving me over when she got there, shouting my name vibrantly.

  “So sorry, but I’m sitting with Myrto. She asked me before,” I explained to Elpida, tipping my head towards Myrto’s table.

  Elpida looked peeved. “Oh. But you must come and talk to me later, before you go. You must not spend all the time with xenoi.” She patted my shoulder and strode towards her own table. I already knew that xenoi meant foreigners and wondered if she considered Myrto a foreigner because of her years in Australia and her independent rural lifestyle. However, when I reached the table I discovered that Cynthia, the expat woman I’d met on my second day, was also there.

  Cynthia was in a floral dress with her hair tied behind in a loose ponytail. She had too much make-up on for a rural knees-up, but apart from that, she seemed pleasant.

  “Chronia polla, ‘many years’, as we say,” she trilled loudly when I sat down, air-kissing me on both cheeks. Myrto sat on the other side of me and several other people filled the rest of the table, village Greeks, I imagined. I looked at my watch. It was only 10 o’clock and I felt exhausted already.

  “Angus is over by the fournos, captured by his male friends,” I told Myrto.

  “Don’ go over there, Bronte. They like to be alone, smoking and talking their politics, drinking wine. The women never go there. It reminds me of Aussie barbecue: men on one side, women on the other. Not just the Greeks, everybody. That’s why the Greeks feel at home in Aussieland,” she said, laughing heartily.

  I could see Angus talking animatedly with his Greek buddies, waving his arms about, as if he’d known them all his life. If I’d taken a picture of that scene and sent it to Marcella, would she have trouble believing it was the man she had married? I didn’t doubt it.

  Soon after we sat down, food was ferried across from the oven – sizzling pieces of roasted goat on small metal trays, for each table, oven potatoes, bowls of salad, bread, and carafes of wine. I still wasn’t sure about goat meat. This would be a first, but I was ravenous. Everyone tucked in with gusto because a village feast during the crisis must have been a rare treat. I tried a sliver of goat meat and found it quite delicious. When Myrto saw me smile with delight she forked more goat onto my plate from the metal platter.

  “Eat up, Bronte, you never find nice boy if you skinny like a mountain rabbit,” she said, causing others at the table to stop and stare. Even if they didn’t understand, it was her cajoling manner that caught their interest. Cynthia giggled and I decided to ignore the wind-up, my head bent over my plate, enjoying the morning feast and the wine under the dappled shade of the olive trees. I felt gloriously relaxed all at once. There was an appealing simplicity about this gathering. Was that what Greeks were best at, I mused, deriving pleasure from good food, health and family? We could learn a lot from them, especially about family ties.

  As I glanced around the dozens of tables, I noticed one set slightly apart from the others. It must have been the top table. The papas who took the service sat at the head of it. He looked young, with very black hair tied in a knot at the nape of his neck. He had changed back into his everyday black robe. He was laughing and others had joined in, including what seemed to be village elders, and close by, Leonidas too, facing in towards the rest of the other tables. He had his jacket off and his white shirt had the sleeves rolled up. He was wearing reflective sunglasses, tucking into the goat meat with relish and drinking wine.

  Myrto and Cynthia were chattering in a lively fashion though I wasn’t paying attention. I could sense, however, that Myrto had at some stage taken Cynthia under
her wing, possibly when her husband died. After we had all eaten, several women at the table got up to leave, taking some of the leftovers with them in plastic bags, which earned them critical looks from some of the other matrons, though not from Myrto.

  “No-one can resist roast goat, Bronte,” whispered Myrto, tapping my arm. “And especially not in the crisis, eh? Not like the Aussie barbies, yes? I see many times – big lamb chops and steaks, big as plates, being thrown to the family dogs. Too much for everyone. Aussieland, eh? Land of plenty waste. But here in Greece, we make a face at people picking up food, not wanted, from the table. But okay out of the bins, eh? Po, po, po!” she said, waving her arm around and chuckling. “I go now, Bronte, just to see few of my village friends. I come back to you later, okay?” she said, rubbing my shoulder as she left.

  “How are you enjoying your stay in Marathousa, Bronte?” asked Cynthia, topping up our glasses with wine.

  “It’s very pleasant, but there’s a lot to see and not much time. I have just 10 days to go.”

  She looked surprised. “So short, oh my! What a pity.”

  “What made you come to Greece?” I asked her, falling into the occupational habit of the journalist in not being able to resist interviewing every person I met.

  “Running away from life, Bronte, simple as that. Charles, my husband, and I had been both married before, you see. We met at work and left our respective partners for each other. We had one child each. They were independent by then, well, at university. We left them to get on with their lives and came to Greece to avoid all the guilt and anxiety, and judgemental relatives. That’s the potted version. And we were very happy here, I must say.”

  “What about your kids? How did they take it?”

  “They were miffed to start with, but then they started to come out regularly to see us. It was fine. The thing is, Bronte, the expats here are all very nice. They are fun, actually, but they are all running away from something: divorce, decrepit parents, rebellious kids, bankruptcy, something. We get washed up here and though it’s very pleasant, as you can see, we end up not being able to leave.”