The Bull of Mithros

by Anne Zouroudi

  ‘So he was an import, then? Why so?’

  ‘Who knows?’

  ‘How much would you say your little bull is worth, if it were found?’

  ‘Really, I’ve no idea. To me, he would be priceless.’

  ‘To you, maybe. But I have known far inferior antiquities change hands on the black market for many, many millions of drachma. One item like this would secure a man’s retirement quite happily, and let him live in style for the rest of his life. You didn’t say who the unlucky man was, who found and lost him.’

  ‘He wasn’t so unlucky,’ said the professor. ‘He was a local man. The house had been in his wife’s family for generations, and was her dowry house. Of course he was devastated to have lost his treasure, but his wife came into a legacy some months later, and the family used that money to emigrate. To America, I think.’

  Professor Philipas returned to his desk, whilst the fat man spent a while browsing the cases of curios, from time to time asking the professor for more information about objects that piqued his interest. He stopped before a table of stuffed animals: a mountain hare frozen as it ran; a five-legged cat spitting and arch-backed; a number of pretty songbirds posed in leafless branches, overhanging a collection of their eggs.

  ‘I always find it poignant to see creatures this way,’ said the fat man. ‘This poor bee-eater, for example. How can its skin and feathers capture the essence of the living bird? And to take the eggs of any wild bird is a crime.’

  ‘Really?’ The professor looked surprised. ‘I find them very lifelike, and people are interested to see the birds up close. They’re done by a local man, Loskas Vergas, who works in the bank. He prides himself on his work, and I have to say, I think he’s very good.’

  ‘Then you and I must agree to differ,’ said the fat man. ‘May I ask about the portrait on the wall there?’ He pointed out a painting, amateur in its execution, which showed a man of resolute expression in modern dress. ‘The face is familiar to me.’

  ‘That’s our benefactor,’ said the professor. ‘Kyrios Vassilis Eliadis. Uncle Vasso, as he is known. He’s a very generous man; without his interest and his donations, the museum would have closed down long ago. He’s a Mithros man who spent many years abroad, and made a fortune in Egyptian cotton. Now he’s come home, and lets the community benefit from his fortune.’

  ‘He’s a popular man, no doubt.’

  Professor Philipas smiled.

  ‘He is,’ he said, ‘and the most sought-after godfather Mithros ever saw. He’s known for his generosity to his godchildren. He’s a knack of choosing perfect gifts on their name-days. He lives in the Governor’s Villa on the harbour promontory – no doubt you’ve seen it.’

  ‘I believe I know the house you mean,’ said the fat man. ‘It’s a beautiful property. Perhaps I should walk over there, and take a closer look.’

  ‘Not too close,’ said the professor. ‘He doesn’t much like visitors.’

  ‘Is that so? I shall bear that in mind. Professor, I thank you for your time.’

  ‘Are you here in Mithros long?’ asked the professor. ‘I wonder if you’d come for dinner? I’ve an archive at home of photographs and archaeology, everything there’s no room to display here. My wife doesn’t share my interest – I caught her once ready to make a bonfire of it all – so I’d enjoy showing it to someone who’d appreciate it. You’d be most welcome. Though I’d have to give my wife a little notice – she’s not a woman who likes surprise guests. Maybe the day after tomorrow?’

  ‘Thank you,’ said the fat man. ‘It would be my pleasure.’

  Professor Philipas picked up an envelope from his desk, removed a letter from inside, and on the unaddressed side drew a plan of how to reach his house from the museum.

  ‘Shall we say eight o’clock?’ suggested the professor.

  ‘Perfect,’ said the fat man, and took his leave.

  Outside the museum, the fat man was undecided which way to go. He might return the way he had come, or turn left, in the opposite direction; but in the end he chose a narrow path which led uphill behind the museum, winding away between the houses.

  On this path the day’s heat was reduced by the shade of the stone walls which surrounded the houses’ courtyards, all irregular heights, and with the work of individual builders a signature in their styles; one builder had favoured flatter, smaller stones, another smoother-cut, squarer slabs, whilst a third had picked at random and produced less competent work, as his walls bowed at their centres, and were in danger of collapse.

  Around a corner, the fat man found a painter in spattered overalls, working with easy confidence from a plank balanced between two stepladders. One set of ladders was markedly lower in the lane than the other, and neither was stable on the cobbles; but the painter seemed not to notice the wobble in the plank as he applied green paint to a pair of window shutters. In the heat, the smell of the linseed oil which thinned the paint was pungent.

  ‘Will I find anything of interest up this lane?’ asked the fat man.

  Comfortable on his narrow plank, the painter looked down, his brush in one hand, his paint pot in the other.

  ‘Depends what you find interesting,’ he said. ‘Houses. Not much else. Old women with rheumatics and young women with babies. All the action here’s in the town, friend, where you must have come from.’

  A wasp landed on the wet paint, and was stuck. Carefully, the painter picked it off the shutter by its wings, dropped it on to the plank and stepped on it, crushing it with a twist of his boot.

  ‘Well,’ said the fat man, ‘I find the architecture interesting. I shall go on.’

  ‘Don’t get lost, then,’ warned the painter. ‘The place is a maze for those who don’t know it. Strangers go up that way, and are never seen again.’

  The fat man smiled.

  ‘If I lose my way, I’ll shout,’ he said. ‘If you’ll be good enough to shout back, your voice will guide me.’

  ‘Gladly,’ said the painter. ‘But don’t be too long. I’ll be knocking off for lunch soon, and there’ll be no one to rescue you before morning. And who knows what ghosts and ghoulies might have grabbed you by then?’

  ‘Should I be afraid, then?’

  The painter laughed.

  ‘Only of the widows,’ he said. ‘There’s one or two up here haven’t had a man in years. A fit, strong man like you – they’d eat you for breakfast!’

  But as the fat man went on, he found himself not amongst houses as the painter had suggested. Instead, he came into an open square with a threshing floor, made – like a dance floor – from segments of stone laid to form a circle. The floor’s circumference was surrounded by a low wall of upright stones easy for man or animal to step over, but enough to keep the sheaves of grain in place when tossed in for threshing. At its centre was a pole, and mounted on the pole was a spoked wheel, like a ship’s wheel, to which donkeys or mules were tethered as they toiled round.

  And around the floor a grey mule plodded. The sound of its hooves was muffled by the crop it was threshing; its long ears twitched to repel the flies drawn to its smell of soiled straw and sweat. Over its mouth, it wore a muzzle of twisted wire, a cage tied to the leather of its headcollar; a rope from the headcollar (whose brow-band was painted in bright checks, with a crucifix dangling on to the mule’s forehead) secured it to the central pole. Its head was low, from boredom or fatigue; but when it noticed the fat man, its ears pricked up, its head lifted and it slowed its already steady pace, as if it scented a reason to relax.

  But as it slowed, the mule-driver on the far side of the threshing-floor flicked its rump with a switch of bamboo. The mule trotted a few lively paces, then settled back to its previous rhythm, watching the fat man’s approach.

  The mule-driver’s eyes flickered over the fat man, but dropped immediately to the ground, and he bowed his head to one side, showing his wish to let the fat man pass by without acknowledgement.

  The fat man walked across the square to the edge of t
he threshing floor, where he stopped and put his hold-all down at his feet.

  ‘Kali mera!’ he called out to the mule-driver. ‘This is marvellous! It’s a sight that’s all too rare, these days.’

  The mule-driver offered the obligatory greeting, then turned to a cart behind him stacked with brittle stalks of lentils. As he gathered up as many as he could hold, lentils dropped tinkling from their pods back into the cart, along with a scattering of leaves, a few stones and a puff of dust from the field.

  He dropped the stalks into the mule’s path, where they crackled as they broke under its hooves. The mule attempted to shorten its circle and cut its circuit tight, but the driver picked up his switch, and poked the animal’s shoulder to push it out to the wall.

  Apparently intrigued, the fat man picked up his hold-all and moved closer to the mule-driver. He held out his hand.

  ‘I must introduce myself,’ he said. ‘I am Hermes Diaktoros, of Athens.’

  The mule-driver held out a dirty, dusty hand; but the hand, as the fat man clasped it, was not hard-skinned, but soft, and his fingers were long and limber.

  ‘They call me Milto,’ he said.

  The fat man looked more closely at the mule-driver’s face.

  ‘I know you,’ he said. ‘I’ve seen you before.’ He snapped his fingers, as if the thought had just come to him. ‘In the taverna. You’re the violinist. You play very well, as I said to you last night.’

  Milto inclined his head as a thank-you.

  ‘I put a great deal into my music,’ he said. ‘I hope folks see that in my playing. I go nowhere without my violin.’ He pointed to the cart, and there, on the back, the end of a black violin case stuck out from under the unthreshed lentils. ‘If I’ve ever an idle moment, I use it to practise.’

  ‘I’m something of a musician myself,’ said the fat man. ‘I have a special interest in ancient music, so I suppose you might call me a revivalist. I play the lyre, which is a rare skill these days. Certainly, I meet very few others who play. Is there a history of music in your family?’

  ‘None,’ said Milto. ‘Most of what I know, I taught myself, the rest I learned from anyone I could persuade to teach me. Mithros has its share of players. My violin was a gift from my godfather, when I was a boy. I began to learn the skill in my father’s memory, to make him proud; thanks be to God, music spoke to me, and the more I played, the better I got. I think my father’d be pleased to hear me play now. He never did hear me play. He was taken before I played a single note.’

  ‘I’m sure he would have been proud,’ said the fat man. ‘And I hope in his absence, your godfather did his best to be a father to you in his own right.’

  ‘He did his part,’ said Milto, tapping the slowing mule on the rump once more. ‘He’s been very good to me. But with the best will in the world, he was no substitute for my own father. The loss of my father is something I’ll never forget.’

  ‘Nor should you,’ said the fat man. ‘May his memory be eternal.’

  A silence fell between them, with the fat man seeming pleased to watch mule and man work together, and Milto occupied with his threshing. The fat man reached into his pocket, and took out a pack of cigarettes – an old-fashioned box whose lift-up lid bore the head and naked shoulders of a 1940s starlet, her softly permed platinum hair curling around a coy smile. Beneath the maker’s name ran a slogan in an antique hand: ‘The cigarette for the man who knows a real smoke’.

  ‘Do you smoke?’ he asked, and held out the pack to Milto, who took one.

  The fat man lit their cigarettes with a slim, gold lighter.

  ‘I’ve just been to your museum,’ he said. ‘They have quite a collection of agricultural memorabilia, though it did strike me that some of the implements which have found their way to the museum are tools I still see in daily use, in certain parts. As you, here, keep the old traditions alive. I applaud that.’

  ‘No disrespect, but I’m no museum piece,’ said Milto. He held his cigarette in his mouth, and squinting through its smoke, followed the mule a few paces with the switch, tapping on its rump in an attempt to hurry it on. ‘I’ve a job to do, and to my mind, there’s no better way to do it. The lentils need threshing, and here’s a threshing floor, and my mule. What’s the alternative? A smallholder like me can’t afford expensive machinery.’

  ‘You have a smallholding, then?’

  Milto gave up on hurrying the mule, which now seemed determined to hold to its own pace, regardless of the switch. He removed the cigarette from his mouth, and waved a hand towards the hills.

  ‘I’ve a bit of land, not much to speak of,’ he said. ‘We used to have more. We had land over at Kolona, where I was born. But the well there ran dry, so we moved over here, to a piece of my mother’s dowry. There’s a tangerine orchard, and that’s good; it makes a few drachma, in winter. Then the army took over Kolona. They offered us no money. One day, someone comes to me and says, the army’s moved on to your land. They’ve got equipment, the army; they can drill down, where a spade and a bucket can’t go, and they got water back in the well. So I thought I might move back there, but Captain Fanis told me no. He says they aren’t in permanent occupation, but the army is the army, so who knows? They don’t stop me taking my olive harvest, such as it is. The few trees over there, and the few trees over here, together we get a pressing to last us the year. We’d be better off if the tangerines were olives. But God grants us the part he wants us to have, and that’s all.’

  He pitched more lentils on to the floor; the mule exhaled, in what might have been a sigh. Milto wiped sweat from his brow.

  ‘It’s hot work, today, just standing still. I learned to grow lentils from my father. He always gave a portion of the land to lentils. I remember him saying to me: green crops can rot, or get damaged by storm. Have your dry goods as stand-by, boy, and there’ll always be food on the table.’

  ‘A wise man,’ said the fat man.

  A shadow crossed Milto’s face.

  ‘He died a dog’s death,’ he said. ‘Where was the wisdom in that?’

  In the harbour, the fat man found the public phone. He took a small notebook from his hold-all, and searched the handwritten entries at the back. Finding change in his pocket, he put coins for a long-distance call into the slot, and dialled an Athens number.

  The phone rang out for a long time, until at last a woman answered in bored tones.

  ‘Museum of Archaeology.’

  ‘Despina Kara Athaniti, please,’ said the fat man. He waited again as an extension rang out. A man in half an army uniform came to stand nearby, obviously wanting to use the phone.

  ‘Embros?’

  A woman’s voice answered the extension. At its sound, the fat man smiled.

  He put his mouth close to the receiver, so she would hear him even if he spoke quietly.

  ‘Kara,’ he said.

  ‘Hermes!’ she said. ‘Is that you?’

  ‘The same,’ he said. ‘How is the most beautiful woman in archaeology?’

  ‘Ready to spend some time with you,’ she said. ‘Are you in town?’

  ‘Alas, no,’ said the fat man, with regret. ‘I’m a long, long way from home. Where doesn’t matter. I might perhaps be coming there, in a few weeks, but the story’s always the same, koukla mou. The demands of the work grow no less.’

  ‘Ach, Hermes,’ she said. ‘I heard your voice, and had already picked out the dress I was going to wear.’

  ‘What colour?’

  ‘I shan’t say. If I must wait, so must you.’

  ‘In my mind, I see it,’ he said. ‘Put it to one side, and don’t wear it until I come to take you out. Promise me?’

  ‘I promise you.’

  ‘No, I’m ashamed to say, my beautiful girl, I’m phoning to pick that encyclopaedic brain of yours.’

  He glanced over his shoulder. The man half in army uniform still waited, arms folded in impatience.

  ‘I’ve just seen an object of particular beauty, which seems not t
o belong in the place it’s ended up,’ said the fat man to Kara. ‘Or at least, not the object itself, only a replica. The original, I gather, has been lost. Its origins may be near here, but it might equally have found its way here from anywhere in someone’s suitcase. I want to ask you what you know about it.’

  ‘Try me.’

  ‘It’s a bull, an ebony bull, decorated with gold. A small piece, but very fine; probably Minoan. Found and lost again, a couple of decades ago. Does it ring any bells?’

  Kara didn’t hesitate.

  ‘Now I know exactly where you are,’ she said. ‘Hermes, you’re in Mithros, aren’t you?’

  He laughed.

  ‘No secrets from you,’ he said. ‘So, kouklara, tell me everything you can about Mithros’s bull.’

  She told him what she knew, and they said a lengthy goodbye. The fat man hung up the phone.

  ‘So sorry to have kept you waiting,’ he said to Manolis, and gave a small bow as he left him to use the phone.

  Dusk brought little coolness, only relief from the sun’s glare. Overhead, the swallows swooped after insects, cutting low between the kafenion’s awning and the heads of its clientele. At a table near the water, Loskas Vergas, the bank clerk, joined a man already there.

  ‘Yassou, Loskas,’ said Spiros. Out of his coastguard’s uniform, he had no more of an air of authority than the men around him, though his cheeks were more carefully shaven, and the crease ironed into his slacks was very sharp. His shirt was a jaunty yellow, and his sandals were recently polished; he had applied both hair oil and cologne. ‘Sit.’

  ‘How are you, Spiros?’ asked Loskas, pulling out a chair. He nodded a greeting to three men intent on a game of tavli, one there only to offer advice to the losing player, who glared each time his helper opened his mouth. The bank clerk’s face was flushed; the heat was troubling him. He pulled a cotton handkerchief from his shorts pocket, dabbed the sweat from his forehead and wiped the back of his neck, then ran the handkerchief over his bald spot. ‘It’s too hot.’ He settled into the chair and crossed one foot over his knee. ‘I ate pasta for dinner, and it was a mistake.’