Escape to Ikaria

by Nick Perry

  I walked back to the café clutching a handful of letters, all but one in Eleri’s handwriting. I didn’t know why Lysta had never been given the post; maybe she had simply been misunderstood. I opened the other letter; it was from my mother, five pages of news from England, including a cutting from the sports page with the latest football results. She told me Jack was still a shepherd, and that he and Corinna were enjoying life in Gloucestershire. Meg, his old sheepdog, had retired and Moss, my border collie, was now his number one worker. As soon as I read that I could see Moss sweeping in a large circle, gathering up the flock. The letter ended with the hope I was taking all the necessary precautions.

  Stamati eventually returned, bringing with him a wild-eyed young man called Stelios, who looked as if he had just walked out of the sea. His thick hair seemed fixed in permanent little waves that rolled across his head in a north-westerly direction. His hands, when we shook, were rougher than a hill farmer’s, coarse, the skin dry and cracked. I took to him immediately, he had a dishevelled tiredness I felt at home with. He was another one with several days’ growth. Deeply tanned from years of sun and sea, he could not have turned thirty; his eyebrows were bleached and sparkled with salt crystals above two exhausted eyes. He had enough English, spoken in a gruff voice that came from smoking or shouting into the wind. He leant back and eyed me up. ‘You are sure, yes? You have the strength for this work?’

  ‘Yes, I am sure. I was a farmer. I can carry a pig over my shoulders.’

  ‘It is not the same as pulling in the nets. Shake my hand again.’

  I did, gripping it tightly.

  ‘All right, that is good.’

  ‘When do we start, and how much will you pay me?’

  ‘You are a man in a hurry,’ he said. ‘I give you five hundred drachma a day’ – he didn’t wait for an answer – ‘but first we must fish together. I never fish with a man I do not know. It’s lonely out there, even lonelier if you don’t like each other.’

  So a couple of days later we went out into the Aegean in his boat Panagia, Mother of God. About thirty foot long, painted blue and orange, it had a small, cluttered cabin I could hardly stand up in, with two cramped berths on either side. Beneath a hatch on the deck was the engine, which bore an oval plaque embossed with the words Made by Listers of Derby.

  I sat at the bow as we made our way out of the harbour. The sea, a glassy blue, reflected the winter sun as the coastline gradually disappeared behind us. A flock of birds whizzed past, their wingtips no more than a foot above the water. The cold Aegean breeze whistled in my ears. There was a freshness to the air that I found exhilarating, and I took deep breaths as if I were drinking it.

  After he’d cast his nets, Stelios came and joined me, letting the boat drift. He told me about his life as an Ikarian fisherman and I told him about my life in North Wales as a farmer. Our two lives, I said, shared a common thread: the weather. I wasn’t sure he understood me; it made me realise how complicated the English language can be. I needed to choose my words more carefully. I told him how I had lost sheep buried in a snowstorm, while he recalled the night with his father when gale force winds blew their boat onto rocks and smashed the rudder. They had drifted for hours before being towed back to Aghios Kirikos.

  Any doubts he might have had about me must have vanished, for he simply said ‘Do we like each other?’ and, smiling, turned the boat back to shore. And so, having made my living from the land, I would now earn it from the sea. Gazing out across the waves at the shoreline of Ikaria, I felt a curious sense that I was returning to something in the past, perhaps of a life I’d already lived.

  After we had secured the boat we sat at the end of the quayside, Stelios smoking a Karelia, a Greek cigarette with a curious, musty smell. He wanted to close the deal, just like the hill farmers, who never dragged things out, and we sealed it with a spit into the hand.

  ‘We fish two days a week, five hundred drachma a day. I give you some fish, maybe octopus, squid, sometimes barbunia. Are you happy with this?’

  I was, but I wasn’t so sure Ros would be.

  I suppose the taverna at Lefkada was what you would call our local, since we lived less than a hundred yards away. It was run by a married couple, Yannis and Maria, who had been born in the same mountain village and must have been in their seventies. ‘Taverna’ was probably too grand a title for the place: a dozen or so tables with rush-seated chairs on the bare earth surrounded by eucalyptus trees. At the top of a short flight of steps behind this area was a low building with a flaky green door and shuttered windows hiding two rooms that Maria let out to the occasional game tourist, if they didn’t mind sharing with the cheeses that hung from the beams. In each room were a couple of old cast-iron beds with mattresses so thin you could roll them up.

  The building that housed a small kitchen looked like a converted cowshed made from breeze blocks. It had a corrugated roof and, like everything else, was whitewashed: the tree trunks, a row of olive oil tins used as flowerpots, the low stone wall that separated the tables from the coastal road, even an old wheelbarrow that reflected the winter sun, had all seen the paintbrush.

  It was a very basic set-up. One day when I was walking past I saw Maria hosing down the plates people had just eaten from and cleaning them with a worn down scrubbing brush. There were more bristles on her husband’s chin.

  She and Yannis, I’m sure, barely covered their costs, probably making just enough money in the summer to keep them going through the winter months. She didn’t have the strength to lift the pile of plates she had just washed, and Yannis made several journeys to carry them back to the kitchen.

  Little did I know then what a pivotal part the taverna would play in our lives as the social centre of our tiny universe, where we would spend our evenings chatting to visitors, finding out where they’d come from and where they were heading. Most just turned up, dropped their rucksacks for a while and moved on, but a few stayed and we got to know them well, talking long into the night under the star-filled skies.

  It was here that I gradually acquired a taste for retsina, despite its unfortunate hint of pine disinfectant that lingers in the mouth as if you are drinking lavatory cleaner. Ros wouldn’t go near it, and if you wanted to indulge you couldn’t get it by the glass, only in small bottles. But it was a cheap way to get pissed, although it did odd things to your stomach.

  I’d just finished my third glass when I said to Ros, ‘You know, this stuff plays around with your head. I thought I just saw a nun go past on a moped.’

  ‘You did, and she wasn’t hanging around,’ as a cloud of dust engulfed the taverna.

  ‘Don’t tell me she was being chased by Henry VIII on a Harley-Davidson.’

  ‘I didn’t think retsina was a hallucinogenic.’

  ‘You know, it doesn’t taste that bad, once your mouth is anaesthetised.’

  ‘Dad’s not making sense again,’ Lysta butted in.

  ‘What do you mean, again?’

  The conversation changed direction, a full one hundred and eighty degrees.

  ‘What’s going to happen out at sea if you and Stelios get stuck into the retsina? Can you drink and steer a boat?’ asked Ros.

  ‘Well, it’s not like driving a car, is it?’ I said. ‘Anyway, I have no idea if Stelios has a drink when he’s fishing.’

  I could tell Ros was anxious, and her tone didn’t lighten up.

  ‘You promise you’ll wear a life jacket? You know you’re accident prone.’

  ‘I really don’t know what has given you that impression.’

  ‘Well, I don’t think I was imagining it when you nearly cut your foot off with that chainsaw, for instance. Or when you had to be rescued from the sea at Dinas Dinlle. Don’t you remember the undertow from those gigantic waves that kept dragging you back?’

  ‘All right,’ I conceded. ‘There has been the odd occasion when I’ve got into dodgy situations. But that was then. I’m not going to make a habit of it.’

  I knew she w
as right. I had nearly injured myself on the farm several times for no other reason than a lack of self-awareness. I cheered her up by painting a picture of me coming home with the fish I had caught out in the Aegean, bringing them to her with the smell of sea salt in my hair, hugging her in the twilight, laying out on the table the fresh squid that we would eat by candlelight.

  ‘All very romantic, wouldn’t you agree, Ros?’

  Well she did, not that she admitted it, but she looked a bit dreamy, with the flicker of a smile.

  ‘I’m worried for you, that’s all.’

  3

  Out on the Aegean

  The children’s first day at school. We’d called it Lefkada School to give it a proper name. Ros explained to me the psychological bridge the children had to cross, from her as their mother to her as their teacher, otherwise it wouldn’t work. We had an assortment of books from Carmel primary school and the curriculum for the year ahead. It was important to both of us, and Ros wanted to create an atmosphere that would set the tone. Until the warmer weather arrived, our bedroom would be the classroom. After breakfast, we turned the bed sideways to make space for the two chairs Maria had given us and our kitchen table became a school desk.

  ‘It’s what they need,’ she said. ‘To have a routine, some structure and discipline back in their lives. Will you tell them they need to be clean and tidy for school?’ Ros said, anxious not to be the only disciplinarian.

  Sam and Lysta were quite excited by it all, while Seth was oblivious, chasing a fly that was buzzing around the room. I suggested I should take him for the morning, that he would disrupt the class. But Ros said he would be all right lying on the floor drawing and, besides, she wanted him to be a part of it.

  Suddenly I had time on my hands. Ros had said the night before that she’d be uncomfortable with me watching her playing her schoolteacher role. I reminded her that most of life was role-playing, particularly in a marriage, keeping things spiced up, wink, wink. She threw a shoe at me.

  So I took myself off, heading to Xylosirtis, a small village some five kilometres along the coast road from Lefkada. It felt strange to be out walking on my own, not having to wait for children to catch up, back to my natural brisk pace. And not engaged in conversation, silent, the way it used to be walking in the fields at Dyffryn, only now I didn’t have Moss, my dog, at my side.

  When I reached Xylosirtis I found a quiet village of no more than a few whitewashed houses in the morning sunlight. I thought I would walk straight through it without meeting a soul, until I saw a solemn figure with a heavy tread walking towards me beside a donkey carrying two cages full of chickens on its back. Tied around his head was a black scarf and he had a thick grey beard so overgrown that it was hard to imagine how he had lit the cigarette now long finished, that hung from his lips. Surely not something to be tried when the wind was blowing. If he hadn’t stopped at the taverna we would have passed each other. He cast a furtive glance at me, throwing a handful of carob on the ground and tethering the donkey to a lemon tree. I’m not one for guessing a person’s age, but he was getting on. He bent over his coffee, lifting the cup no more than a few inches to reach his mouth. I’d forgotten my phrase book, so started with what little Greek I knew.

  ‘Kali mera,’ followed by ‘pos se lene?’ Good morning, what is your name?

  ‘Stephanos,’ he said. And so began a conversation that took me on a journey into an old man’s life. We sat for over an hour and the only person we saw was his niece, Taviva. She appeared on her bicycle and stayed, translating the adventures of this Cretan who fought in the resistance during the Second World War.

  He took faded photographs of a group of young men from his wallet, all killed by the Nazis. He blew little kisses into the air, and then surprisingly started to sing ‘We’ll Meet Again’. He looked at me with a pair of sad eyes, speaking his only English.

  ‘Vera Lynn, good.’

  I asked Taviva if he was a contented man, and she put it to him. As he got up from his chair he smiled, giving his reply to his niece.

  ‘He’s just a communist now,’ she said.

  According to Ros’s luminous wristwatch, I had woken up two hours before I needed to. I always did when I had to be somewhere early. The shuttered light had not slanted through our window yet. So I lay in bed remembering the last time I had worked for someone, which must have been at least eight years ago, in a sausage-skin warehouse, of all places, in the east end of London.

  No wonder it felt like my first day on the job, because that’s exactly what it was, going fishing with Stelios. It wasn’t going to sea that worried me, but a niggling doubt about my sea legs if it got rough. I didn’t want to spend my first morning vomiting over the side of the boat. After what we had gone through on the ferry, I decided not to eat before I left. If there’s nothing in the stomach, then there’s nothing to come up. Ros had reminded me the night before that red was for starboard, green for port. As it happens I’m colour blind, but I was sure port and starboard didn’t come into a Greek fisherman’s life. She was also concerned that I had no knowledge of knots and asked me what a sheepshank was. I said it was a joint of meat you cooked in a slow oven. All she was doing was expressing her fears, but I thought it was necessary to mention that I couldn’t tie my shoelaces until I was ten.

  Ros didn’t understand how much the idea of being a fisherman out in the Aegean excited me. She was afraid some disaster would occur and I’d be lost at sea. I hadn’t told her that Stelios had said we would sometimes be night fishing off the island of Samos.

  I left without kissing her, not wanting to wake her up. Allowing myself half an hour to walk to the harbour, I stepped out into the still air of the night, before dawn glimmered on the horizon. I hadn’t yet seen the sun come up over Ikaria, but as I walked and the earth turned, the distant shapes of islands slowly emerged from the gloom, Fourni and Samos becoming visible, defined in a soft, pinkish light. The flowing sunrise washed over the sea, and all that had been of the night gradually disappeared.

  Stelios had a younger brother, Theo, who usually fished with him, but recently had got distracted by girls and become unreliable. There was a big gap in their ages, nearly eleven years. Theo was only eighteen and Stelios said he was irresponsible, whereas he could depend on someone like me with mouths to feed. He understood the weight a married man carried, being the breadwinner. He had a wife and two children and also supported not only his mother and father but his grandparents as well; they all depended on him. There were no social benefits handed out in Greece; no wonder he was fed up with Theo, pulling girls instead of his weight.

  From the road I could see Stelios busy on his boat, working on the nets. It was cold but the sea was flat, and I was relieved to see only the tiniest waves making it to the shore, no more than ripples. Seabirds with yellow beaks floated in the clear water and I could see shoals of silver fish swimming close to the surface. A semicircle of orange buoys broke the view between the harbour walls and the white sails of a lone yacht.

  He greeted me warmly, heating up coffee in the cabin, wearing a faded Kansas USA baseball cap, a cigarette hanging from the corner of his mouth.

  ‘You’re not dressed for fishing,’ he said, throwing me an oilskin coat and a pair of cut down wellingtons.

  ‘Today I show you how a fisherman makes his living.’

  He laughed, winding a coil of rope neatly around his forearm. ‘We will soon see what you are made of, yes?’

  There were piles of nets and floats all along one side of the boat, worn car tyres every few feet. I constantly had to watch where I was walking, since everything seemed to be a potential hazard.

  He turned on the engine and cast off, I think is the expression – we certainly didn’t set sail, because we didn’t have any – and headed out to sea, leaving behind the harbour walls and lighthouse of Aghios Kirikos. The engine spluttered in the bowels of the boat, a throaty sound you would hear from a car with a broken exhaust, clouds of blue smoke billowing out behind
us.

  At the stern Stelios held the tiller, puffing on his cigarette, staring into the distance, his collar up against the wind. I stood at the bow, the deck hand on his maiden voyage, feeling the rhythm of the boat gently rising and falling, the air biting my cheeks, smelling the diesel fumes. I didn’t feel seasick at all and why should I, with the sea so flat and calm? All around us was nothing but the great blue expanse of the Aegean, empty but for our little vessel chugging along under a huge sky. Where we were heading I had no idea. Stelios obviously knew, not that I had seen him go into the cabin to check the compass. No stars above to guide us, just a blood-red sun rising.

  After what felt like about an hour he reduced the revs of the engine and suddenly sprang into action unwinding the nets, feeding them through a steel spool. They trailed out into the sea and slowly sank, leaving only the floats visible. Seagulls appeared from nowhere, a noisy army of them circling the boat.

  ‘Why here?’ I asked him, my first words for some time. ‘Why put the nets down here?’

  ‘Why not here?’ as if it was obvious. ‘You know what instinct is?’

  I nodded. ‘Of course.’

  ‘Well then, you know why here.’

  ‘No electronic equipment to help you?’

  ‘Ha! I live the sea, I feel the sea, and my father before me, you understand?’

  That was my first lesson in the art of fishing, that there was no science to it, that for Stelios it was all about intuition. And it appealed to me because it came from the man. It was all so simple, as long as his inner faculties didn’t let him down.

  Once the nets were cast we headed to a small cove and dropped anchor. A swell rocked the boat. Stelios brought out a basket of bread, tomatoes and onions from the cabin. There were no plates, we didn’t need them, just a wooden tray, two glasses and a bottle of retsina. We sat and ate beneath the stony cliffs, the water breaking over the exposed rocks. The winter sun gave out a gentle warmth as I chewed on a few mouthfuls of bread, sipping a glass of retsina. I didn’t want to be seasick and refused when he passed me the bottle.