The Bull of Mithros

by Anne Zouroudi

  Outside, the captain handed Manolis several coins.

  ‘You’ll find the payphone easily enough,’ he said. ‘I have to run an errand or two. We’ll meet as we arranged, in about an hour.’

  ‘There’s no point in my meeting you at the kafenion,’ said Manolis. ‘What am I supposed to do there, without money?’

  The captain regarded him.

  ‘If you talk fast on the phone, you’ll have half the price of a coffee with what I’ve given you,’ he said. ‘Otherwise, I suggest you sing a song, and pass round a hat.’

  The captain left him, and Manolis made his way back to the harbour-front; but when he came to the payphone, he passed it by, walking on as far as the National Bank branch. He glanced around to see if anyone was watching, and went inside.

  Loskas Vergas, the bank clerk, was brewing coffee. He had a special spoon for measuring the powder, and was levelling it with the flat side of a knife. When Manolis opened the door, he turned off the butane burner, and turned with polite professionalism towards his customer. Posters around the walls offered favourable savings accounts rates. Under a glass dome at the back of the office, a small stuffed owl perched on a twig. A fan turned slowly, stirring the hot air.

  ‘Kali mera sas,’ said the bank clerk. ‘May I help you?’

  He shuffled on to his high chair at the counter, and looked expectantly at Manolis.

  ‘I hope so,’ said Manolis. ‘My situation is somewhat unusual. I’ve lost all my papers in an accident at sea, and have ended up here on Mithros with no means of identification, and no money. So I was hoping, under these exceptional circumstances, you could arrange access to my account.’

  ‘An accident?’ asked the clerk. ‘Not serious, I hope?’

  ‘Only in that I lost my belongings. But it’s vital I get home as quickly as possible. You understand, I’m sure. So if you could see your way . . .’

  The bank clerk pulled a face.

  ‘Doubtful,’ he said, ‘very doubtful. We wouldn’t be doing our job if we let anyone walk in here, and take money from your account.’

  He looked Manolis in the face, and frowned.

  ‘Do I know you?’ he asked. ‘You look familiar.’

  ‘I don’t believe so,’ said Manolis. ‘If you could help me, I’d really appreciate it. Please.’

  ‘I could make a phone call, I suppose,’ said the bank clerk. ‘If you give me some details, we might see. Of course we aim to help our customers in distress, if we can. Otherwise I’m afraid you’ll have to get your wife to send some proof of identity.’

  He picked up a pen and paper.

  ‘Name?’

  ‘Never mind,’ said Manolis. ‘Forget it. I’ll come back some other time.’

  Five

  Enrico held the dinghy steady. The fat man picked up his hold-all and climbed from the boat on to the harbour steps.

  ‘Don’t expect me for at least a couple of hours,’ he said to Enrico. ‘And don’t get into trouble whilst I’m gone.’

  ‘Ilias asked me to get some parts for his engine,’ said Enrico. ‘They’ll take some tracking down, I’ve no doubt. And they say they do a decent wine from the barrel here, so I’ll see what I can find. After that, I thought I might do a spot of fishing.’

  He looked up on to the quayside, where a woman at the attractive beginning of middle age was choosing a copy of Die Zeit from a stand of outdated newspapers.

  ‘Be here when I want you,’ said the fat man. ‘And make sure Ilias’s parts take priority over yours.’

  Enrico smiled his satyr’s smile.

  ‘Of course, kyrie,’ he said.

  The fat man wandered along the quayside, adopting the summer visitors’ unhurried pace. From a barrow, a fisherman with a catch of pipefish shouted for buyers; a lorry piled up with bricks rattled by, the driver cursing the dilatory pedestrians. Drying nets were spread along the moorings; outside his shop, a baker yawned.

  On the square, under awnings which gave shade like desert tents, a market had drawn in the local traders. Their day’s offerings and prices were scrawled on blackboards, and the traders sat behind tables of their produce: cantaloupes and honeydews, apricots, peaches and nectarines; courgettes capped with their wilting orange flowers; scarlet tomatoes, from fist-sized globes to small, sweet cherries; glossy peppers, aubergines and green chillies. The fat man ambled amongst the stalls, stopping to talk where his interest was caught. He bought a jar of thyme honey, and a tranche of waxy honeycomb; he tried slices of several sausages and air-dried ham, and bought two pies of home-made feta and spinach, eating the first as he went along and finding it so good, he followed it immediately with the second.

  From the market, he moved on amongst the other dawdling tourists to the shops. Business was good, the range of merchandise eclectic – Caribbean shells and Florida sponges, olive-wood carvings and T-shirts with crude slogans; and everywhere, on every shelf, in every display there were bulls – brass bulls, ceramic bulls, vases painted with bulls, bull ashtrays, bull labels on liqueurs, bull-leapers on plates.

  The fat man stopped at a display of postcards and began to spin it slowly, looking at the views of Mithros and the pictures of bulls.

  In bad English, a woman called out to him.

  ‘Very nice, very nice,’ she said. ‘Five cards three hundred. I have stamps. Five cards three hundred, I give you good price.’

  ‘Thank you most kindly,’ said the fat man, in his perfect newscaster’s Greek. ‘When I have made my choice, I shall let you know.’

  The woman looked him up and down, taking in his Italian linen suit and the powder-blue polo shirt beneath, and staring for a moment at his shoes.

  ‘Forgive me,’ she said, in Greek. ‘I took you for a foreigner. My apologies. For a countryman, the cards are five for a hundred and fifty.’

  He chose his postcards and paid for them. Further along the harbour-side, a hand-painted sign nailed to the side of a building read, ‘Museum’, and he went in that direction, through the backstreets. At the church of the Archangel Michael, a white-haired woman, on hands and knees, was scrubbing the steps; when she saw the fat man approach, she sat back on her heels and smiled at him with warmth.

  ‘Kalos tou,’ she said. ‘Kalos tou.’

  ‘Kali mera sas,’ said the fat man. ‘That’s hot work for a day like today.’

  ‘I do it for the saint,’ she said, and crossed herself. ‘He’s been very good to me, and so I’m happy to do what I can for him.’

  ‘Admirable,’ said the fat man, ‘admirable. Am I on the right track for the museum?’

  ‘Go straight, and then right,’ she said. She looked at him with curiosity. ‘Where are you from, kalé?’

  ‘Athens,’ he said. ‘Though I spend little time there.’

  ‘You look familiar to me,’ she said. ‘Have you been in Mithros before?’

  ‘Once or twice,’ he said. ‘But not for many years.’

  ‘Well, you’re very welcome here.’ She gave him another smile. ‘A handsome man like you is always welcome.’

  He followed her directions, to a path that rose in broad stone steps. Ahead, he heard the clip of hooves and the whack of a stick on hide, and in a moment met a young man driving an overladen donkey. The young man’s head was recently shaved against the heat (a clumsy shaving, which had left his scalp, in places, cut and scabbed). In almost incomprehensible vernacular, he offered a gruff greeting.

  The fat man called after him, ‘Am I on the right path for the museum?’

  The donkey-driver neither slowed nor turned his head, but raised his hand and made a cutting motion to signify straight on, and called out, Pano – up.

  The fat man came, at last, to a doorway in a whitewashed wall. One side of the door stood open, and on the other side a sheet of paper mounted with drawing pins gave the museum’s opening times. Breathing in to shrink his belly, he passed through the narrow half-doorway into a courtyard shaded by the branches of a pair of fig trees. The courtyard floor was a mosaic
of black and white pebbles, its design’s perimeter a trail of vine leaves, and at its centre was the circle of a compass with north, south, east and west picked out in diamond points. Around the walls, amphorae high as a man’s waist were filled with white geraniums, and appearing to grow out of the wall itself, were long stems of pink valerian. A coiled hosepipe dripped under a brass tap; recent watering had softened the petals of the flowers.

  The fat man lifted a bloom of valerian to his nostrils, and as he sniffed its oddly odorous sweetness, a telephone rang inside the museum. There were footsteps on floorboards, and the receiver was picked up from its cradle; he heard a man’s voice – Embros? – and then only the hum of a conversation conducted at a low volume, so anyone nearby – someone such as himself – would not hear. The fat man released the valerian, and moving silently in his white shoes, crossed to the museum entrance; but his big stature blocked the light, and the man on the telephone looked up from the desk where he had sat to take the call.

  ‘I’ll ring you back,’ he said, and replaced the receiver in its cradle.

  The fat man stepped into the room; the man at the desk smiled over at him, politely rather than warmly, and pushed his hair back over his head, briefly leaving his hand on the back of his head as though frustrated or upset. Dressed in a short-sleeved shirt and camel trousers, he seemed a professional man, and though not handsome, was pleasant-looking, a man beginning to soften but only recently past his prime.

  ‘Yassas,’ he said. ‘Welcome to Mithros’s museum.’

  ‘Yassas,’ said the fat man. He looked around. The room was the downstairs of a large house, with most of the dividing walls knocked out and the old pine floorboards bare of paint or varnish. A steep, carved staircase rose to a sleeping-platform crammed with cardboard boxes and parts of the collection which lacked display space: a spinning wheel, a harpsichord, a stringless bouzouki inlaid with mother-of-pearl, a model of a sailing ship with broken rigging. The high ceiling was embossed with plaster flowers over-painted in mushroom gloss; the walls were covered in artwork and posters, and photographs in dark-stained frames: the crews of turn-of-the-century boats, arms folded, proud and mustachioed as they prepared to sail; women in traditional costumes with grinning children at their feet, all enjoying their moment in front of the camera, and all now certainly dead.

  Throughout the room were display cabinets of irregular sizes and styles, with treasures of all kinds under their glass covers: shards of crude pottery and nineteenth-century ceramics, official letters, certificates and newspaper clippings, hats and caps, shoes and boots, lamps and small arms from the last war. An anchor was propped against a wall, beneath a splintered plank and a painting of a shipwreck. The collection had the air of final resting places, and yet everything was cared for; the woodwork smelled of beeswax polish, the glass on the cases was free of fingermarks, the labels on the exhibits were all in place.

  The fat man held out his hand.

  ‘Hermes Diaktoros, of Athens,’ he said. The man shook it, glancing as he did so at the fat man’s shoes. ‘I see you are admiring my footwear, my winged sandals as I call them. Diaktoros is an ancient word for messenger, and since I carry both the god’s name and his epithet, it seems fitting I should also wear his shoes.’

  ‘They call me the Professor,’ said the man. ‘Professor Philipas. The title’s grandiose, for what I do here. I’m really no more than a curator, a caretaker of objects whose value, I must be honest, lies more in social history than anything else.’

  ‘Are you not a university man, then?’

  ‘I’ve never visited any educational establishment since I left what passes for a high school down the hill. But I’m self-educated. I’ve taught myself plenty, enough to bore you on the history of many of these objects. I’m a bookworm, and a magpie. The results of that combination are what you see here. Please, feel free to look around.’

  On the professor’s desk were a few cheaply printed pamphlets, with the print not quite straight on the page and the paper yellowing with age. There was a cardboard box with a slit made in the lid for donations, and a piece of paper stuck to it which read ‘50 drachma’.

  The fat man found several coins in his pocket. He dropped them in the cash box on the table and took a pamphlet. The cover bore a picture of a bull.

  ‘It’s a shame my father can’t see this place,’ he said. ‘He’s a classical scholar, and would be intrigued by your collection, as I am myself. Would you steer me in any particular direction? My preference would be to work chronologically. My main interest has always been in the ancient.’

  ‘You’re unusual then,’ said Professor Philipas. ‘Most of our visitors want to know about the bull, and nothing else.’

  ‘In Mithros, the bull is hard to miss,’ said the fat man. ‘Though I confess, the last time I was here – it was some years ago, admittedly – I remember no reference at all to any bull.’

  ‘He was a recent discovery,’ said the professor, standing up from his chair. ‘Found by chance less than twenty years ago, and tragically stolen shortly afterwards. Where he’s been since then, no one knows. Every summer, visitors come in the hopes of being the ones to find his hiding place. But all we have here is a replica – a good replica, but a replica nonetheless. Here, let me show you. It’s still our most treasured item, a craftsman’s piece in itself.’

  The professor led the fat man to a padlocked display case of ancient relics. Both men looked through the glass on to the exhibits below. The fat man scanned the objects – coins with the heads of long-dead rulers, belt-buckles tarnished and weathered almost beyond recognition, a comb carved from bone with the turquoise of its decoration still largely intact. Four glass beads were swirled with what seemed contemporary colours; there were arrow heads from ancient battles or hunts, and a bronze armlet of remarkable size, worn once on the bicep of some warrior.

  And at the centre of the case was an ebony bull, small enough to sit on a man’s palm, modelled head down ready for the charge, pawing at imaginary ground, so lifelike it felt as if it might charge out of the cabinet, if it were opened. Its horns formed an elongated hoop, with a disc representing the sun held between them, and both horns and sun were of pure gold, as were the animal’s hooves, and an object resembling a tongue which hung from its mouth.

  For some moments the fat man gazed at the bull.

  ‘This really is a beautiful piece,’ he said. ‘As you say, a work of art in itself.’

  ‘It was made by a local jeweller,’ said Professor Philipas. ‘He worked from the memories of those who had seen the creature in the flesh, as it were. I believe the bull to be a representation of Zeus, from the myth of his union with Europa. Do you know the story? Zeus saw Europa gathering flowers in a meadow with some nymphs, and was immediately smitten. So he changed himself into a bull, and carried her off to Crete, where she had three sons by him – one of them the great Minos – before he abandoned her.’

  ‘It is not a story which shows Zeus in his best light,’ said the fat man. ‘But he was never one to be thwarted in his desires. Do you think, then, this handsome creature originated from Crete?’

  ‘No. I think he was made somewhere in our group of islands, probably around 1400 BC. The Minoan culture spread throughout the ancient world. They built settlements as far afield as Egypt and Israel. In some ways, their culture was way ahead of our own. They recognised the sexes as fully equal. Their famous rites of bull-leaping involved both men and women.’

  ‘You are untypical of the modern Greek male, to be suggesting sexual equality as enlightenment.’

  ‘My wife has strong views on the subject. She has strong views on many subjects.’

  ‘And the protrusion from the mouth – what is that?’

  ‘I believe it’s a crocus. The saffron trade was very important to the Minoans.’

  ‘Fascinating.’ The fat man leaned down closer to the case. ‘What a treasure the original must be – and what a tragedy to have been found, and then lost so quickly. Ple
ase, tell me, what happened?’

  ‘The discovery caused a great stir of excitement throughout the island, as you would expect. The bull was found in the basement of a harbour house, during building works. My father was the museum’s curator at that time – I have my passion for this work from him – and was already preparing this case in the hope of welcoming him here, though he was still in the care of the man who found him. Then, one morning, the bull vanished, as if he had never been.’

  ‘Stolen?’

  ‘Stolen.’

  ‘And who was suspected?’

  Professor Philipas shrugged.

  ‘It was always felt it must be an inside job, by which I mean someone from Mithros. Who else would have known of his existence? He was found in the winter months, when no strangers were around. Secondly, he disappeared on a night of storm and tricky seas. There were no boats in or out, so no one took him away. The next day thorough searches were carried out, and as is the way in these islands, the police had their ears to the ground. But no one knew anything, and no one knows anything to this day. It’s as if those who made him came back to claim him. Most believe he’s never left this island. Hence the treasure-hunters.’

  ‘Your father was an optimist, if he was preparing a home for the bull here,’ said the fat man. ‘I don’t doubt he would have made an excellent custodian, but surely an object of such quality and value would normally have a place in one of the national museums.’

  ‘I don’t doubt you’re right. The archaeologists were already on their way when he went missing. You’ll find the whole sad story in detail in your pamphlet there.’

  ‘Did you write it?’

  ‘I’m its author, yes.’

  ‘Is it possible the bull came from Mithros itself?’

  ‘Almost certainly not. There’s no Minoan outpost on Mithros that I’m aware of. Any such settlement would’ve been built on the coast, for obvious reasons – trade, transport – and the few spots where the coast is habitable here are all still inhabited. Our longest inhabited site is over at Kolona, and there’s no basis for saying the Minoans were ever there, only our own mongrel ancestors.’