The element -inth in Greek

by Alison Fell

  The van people have got out, a man and a woman in blue tabards. They have bare arms and wristwatches, but they don’t look like police. The woman comes towards him, smiling; she has short black hair and round dimpled cheeks.

  ‘Going to take a trip with us, then, Pericles?’

  ‘Up you get,’ says the Sergeant, supporting him under the armpits and heaving him to his feet.

  The young woman lends a hand. ‘Gently does it.’

  ‘Wait!’ says Kyria Dora, going to rescue the sandal that has fallen off his foot and been left behind. She grasps his ankle and braces his foot in the lap of her white skirt, so that he worries about thr mark it will leave there, like a footprint on a perfectly empty white beach. When she slips the sandal on her fingers are soft and cool, with bright pink nails. ‘There you are, Pericles.’

  One of the runaway tomatoes has burst under the wheels of a car, while several others loll perilously in the road. Knowing that it’s a crime to waste food, for waste makes an empty larder, he cranes his neck, fretting, as they steer him towards the van. He was the one who made Markos so angry, wasn’t he, so shouldn’t he be the one to pick them up?

  ‘He likes to sit up front,’ the Sergeant says. There are three seats, one for the driver and a double one next to it. The young woman climbs in first and waits for the Sergeant to help Pericles up the step. He clasps the gifts tightly to him while she struggles with his seatbelt, pinning them under his right arm while they get the belt under his left and buckle him him.

  Then Kyria Dora comes running and thrusts a plastic bag through the open window. Inside are two cans of 7up, Swiss chocolate, and twenty cigarettes.

  ‘For the wedding?’ he asks, and she covers her mouth with her hand.

  ‘Good luck, old friend. Behave yourself!’ The Sergeant slaps the wing of the van and, stepping back, gives him a smart salute. As the van drives off Pericles sees them in the wing-mirror: Kyria Dora with her face in a handkerchief, his friend the Sergeant with his hand steady on her shoulder.

  ‘All right?’ the young woman says, patting his knee. ‘Don’t worry, you’re in safe hands now. Just you sit back and enjoy the ride.’ Her hands are plump and dimpled like her cheeks, her bosoms like warm loaves. Her shoulder so near his own he could lean his head on it.

  Katomeli shrinks in the mirror. Pericles watches signposts, cars zipping by in the fast lane. Buses too, like the one he took to Knossos. The young woman taps his arm and tells him that her name is Flora. Her pink tongue teases around the name. The sight of it makes Pericles blush and look away.The driver lights a cigarette and turns on the radio: Greek tunes which make his foot jig, make him sorry he never learned to dance.

  Flora grins at the driver. ‘Ready for the clubbing scene, this one!’

  Soon the city looms into view, a bowl of sugar-white buildings with huge boats in the bay and the harbour arm reaching out like a claw to clasp at the sea. The van slows down with the rest of the traffic, and the air is so heavy with exhaust fumes that Pericles wants to hold his breath. There are red lights, delivery vans, darting motorbikes. Also crossings where everything stops for pedestrians and makes you late.

  ‘Oh for Christ’s sake!’ says the driver, sounding his horn. ‘We’ll be here all day!’

  As the procession trails across, the lights turn from green to orange to red again.

  ‘They certainly lay it on for the tourists these days, don’t they?’ Flora says.

  Pericles shakes his head. He sees no tourists. Tourists have cameras; they wear trainers and shorts and sunglasses. The driver has leant out of his window to gesture rudely.

  ‘Bloody re-enactors! Haven’t you got honest jobs to go to?’

  What is invisible to man is visible to the gods. On the 12th day of Hekatombaion, when the old year is over and grain fills the pithoi to the brim, the new Year King is inaugurated at the harvest festival of the Kronia.

  At the head of the procession come the most beautiful children – for all who attend the festivities must be kaloi k’agathoi, good-looking and free of blemishes – some bearing boxes of incense to fill the thumisteria, while others carry small chairs and tables to accommodate the chthonic goddesses, and a larger chair for Ge Kourotrophos, the Great Nursing Mother, who receives the first offering of barley and honey-cakes.

  Following the children come the four Hydriaphoroi – for four is the sacred unit – carrying their water jugs on their shoulders, and four Kitharodoi strumming their lutes, and the four flute-players or Auletes, dressed in short chitons and mantles, leading four flawless ewes and four flawless heifers with necks garlanded for the sacrifice.

  After the sacred animals come the purple-gowned Skaphephoroi, who carry bronze trays of cakes and honeycombs, followed by a crowd of the most handsome and distinguished elders, the Thallophoroi or sprig-bearers, waving their olive branches.

  The first of the ox-carts is dedicated to Kronos himself, god of the Harvest and the Last Sheaf, he whose year has run its course. His presence requires no statue or graven image, and is symbolised only by the barley stooks and the sickle with which he castrated his father Unranos.

  On the second cart, drawn by two oxen coloured uniformly white, and seated on a throne surmounted by bulls’ horns, is the Priestess herself, she who incarnates Ge, as indicated by the milking-goat tethered at the foot of her throne. In her right hand she holds an olive-wood staff encircled by the holy snake. Her face and breasts are painted chalk-white, the nipples rouged red and ringed with the same black pigment that outlines her almond eyes. Like the yokes of the white oxen, her throne is wound around with honeysuckle, barley ears, and the scarlet poppies which bring both ecstasy and sleep.

  The last cart is surrounded by a prancing, laughing throng of masked athletes of both sexes, who pelt the onlookers with cakes and flower petals. On this cart stands the triumphant eniautos, the Chosen One. Winner of the agones or contests, king of the kali k’agathoi, and bridegroom to the goddess. Slender and muscular, with long oiled locks curling over his shoulders, he wears a short saffron skirt in place of the athlete’s bronze codpiece, the absence of which signals the successful consummation, and the concomitant change in his status. On his head the tall crown of white lilies and cascading peacock feathers symbolises fertility in the year to come. The sight of this beautiful youth occasions joy and awe in the hearts of the onlookers, who salute his bravery as they salute his coronation, knowing it is no mean feat to mate with the goddess.

  The dance tunes on the car radio are drowned out by the tumultuous sounds of the procession: the rumble of wooden wheels on the tarmac, the shouts and whoops, the music of drums and lyres and flutes. Flower petals litter the car bonnets, and cow-shit has been trodden into the road.

  Even from here Pericles can tell it’s his friend up there, his peacock head-dress bobbing proudly above the crowd. Those oiled locks, and the smile he remembers: sidelong, insinuating. The sheaf of lilies he holds in his hand like some angel would.

  Happiness makes him hold his breath; he laughs suddenly, full of light energy, the gifts burning their eager hole in his lap. This time he won’t let him down. Even if he’s afraid of crowds – the elbows and voices and strange shifting faces – Pericles knows that he has to go. Before the procession ends, before the lights turn green again, while the aura of his friend still infects him with the fever of youth.

  The driver gives another blast on the horn. ‘Get a bloody move on!’

  The door opens easily but the seat-belt is harder to unbuckle. His old man’s trousers stick sweatily to the plastic cover of the seat.

  ‘Hey, steady on, pedi-mou!’ Flora grabs at the back of his jacket and holds on. ‘Where are you off to?’ Pericles feels the weight of her as she leans over to slam the door, the strong arms pinning him down. ‘You forgot to lock the damn thing!’ she shouts at the driver, who pushes something on the dashboard, cursing. ‘Fed up with us already?’ she chides, as she fusses with the seat-belt.‘That’s not very nice, is it?’

&
nbsp; Pericles looks at her flushed face. One minute her presence is warm and kind and draws him like a thirsty horse to a water-trough, but the next minute he shies away from the angry shimmer in her eyes. The packet of rice has burst in the scuffle, scattering grains across the floor. See what a mess you’ve made, Pericles. He catches sight of himself in the mirror, his hands locked over his ears to blot out the scolding. A bald head dappled with brown sun-spots, grey hairs bristling out of his chin. His face has the haggard look of one of the pedlars his mother used to shoo away from the door: poor, foreign people who sold shoelaces, sharpened scissors. There’s an aureole of blue sky around it, framed in silver.

  He thinks of the Sergeant’s girlfriend, Kyria Dora, her hands cool as water. If he did what he wasn’t supposed to do it was only because he was invited. And even if he wanted to say Sorry the element that beckons him is so huge and speechlessly beautiful that it strangles the word in his throat.

  What he’s supposed to do is kick off his rotten flip-flops, dart barefoot across the pavements to catch up with the crowd, dodge like a Beckham through the defenders.

  What he’s supposed to be is shoeless, shadowless.

  59

  Yiannis felt he had taken a Great Leap Backwards. Every day at the Station he discharged the duties that were required of him, while inwardly shrinking from the dullness of routine. In the time since Ingrid left he’d dealt not only with the unhappy departure of Pericles, and the usual summer rash of thefts on Katomeli beach, but also with the recovery of the body of an old man who’d lain undetected in his farmhouse for 2 weeks, and an outbreak of food poisoning tracked down to a Turkish-owned café called The Perfect Kebab which had recently opened on the beachfront. The culprit turned out to be the ‘Perfect Special’ offer – a chickenburger with cheese, chips, and a Pepsi, all for 1 euro 95.

  The Flagstaff group had flown safely back to England, after being personally escorted to the airport by Gaylene Evnochides, who was glad to see the back of them. ‘There’s always one group, isn’t there,’ she complained, as if the drama had been all their fault. At the last minute the Wilson-Wilsons had asked her to convey their thanks for his assistance, a display of gratitude Yiannis hadn’t expected.

  Every day Karen smiled her timeless smile from his desk, reminding him of the dead weight of the past and making him all too conscious that he had no photographs of Ingrid – nothing, in fact, that waved a promising flag from the future. At nights he came home to a house of ghosts. A house his father had built for his mother, in which he himself had lived as a child, an adolescent, and finally as a widower. Never as a husband, as a man with his own woman.

  When he wandered through the rooms he saw only the traces of others: the heavy oak furniture which had been there since the 50s, the rugs, hand-woven by his grandother, the dowry chest in which his mother had kept her best embroidered linen. It was a family house, built for a family to live in: too big by far for a single man. He’d considered buying new furniture, skinny and Swedish, and painting the rooms in rainbow colours, like the refurbished city of Tirana. Or else simply selling up, building something smaller that would feel more like his own.

  In his dreams Ingrid was a pale shape he clung to when the decrepit roof-joists fell in, crushing the washing-machine like a tin can and scattering broken tiles across the rooms. Their marriage bed, dust-shrouded, was afloat on a sea of terracotta rubble. Let loose by the earthquake, his little companions crawled out of their ruined crevices and cupboards and took up residence between the sheets. He would wake in a cold sweat with an erection, quivering with the shadow-memory of caresses, still half-believing that if he vibrated at the wrong pitch the bees, offended, would take revenge on him.

  It had struck him that he ought to propose some sort of arrangement to Irini, perhaps raise the possibility of a move. But before that, he really ought to set the place to rights. Plane down the sides of the doors that kept sticking, for a start. Repair the subsidence damage to the terrace wall.

  Within a month or so, Irini and Tassos would need more space. He’d gone to eat with them, sitting out on the tiny balcony, which floated on the gusts of traffic noise like a ship riding out a storm. Hands proudly clasped over a stomach that was still as flat as a washboard, his sister had announced that she was pregnant at long last. He’d been happy for her; his congratulations to both of them had been sincere. He felt obliged to accept their invitation to a celebration at the Medusa, even though he was fairly sure Dora, whose name hadn’t been mentioned, would be there. The Pericles business seemed to have put things in perspective, at least while they’d been linked by circumstance. She’d been upset about the old man, and she’d accepted his comfort: did that amount, perhaps, to a détente?

  Irini, who liked things to be cut and dried, had interrogated him about Ingrid. She was worried for him, she insisted. Had he thought about the future? A foreign woman, from a far-off country, and neither of them in the first flush of youth. Was he being realistic about their prospects?

  Yiannis reminded her that Australia was even more foreign, and much farther away, but Irini persisted.

  ‘You haven’t even met her!’ he protested, trying to deflect the onslaught, although, thinking about it, he couldn’t honestly see them ever being bosom buddies.

  All dark looks and pursed lips. Irini clattered the dishes on to a tray and carried it inside, returning with a dish of baked custard. She slammed a plate of melon down in front of Yiannis, glaring at him.

  ‘What now?’ he said tiredly.

  ‘Oh, they seem friendly enough, the English! But they’re a cold-blooded bunch, when you get right down to it.’

  This gem of national prejudice was delivered with the authority of one who had spent six whole months in London. He laughed angrily. ‘She’s Scottish,’ he objected.

  ‘Even worse! Ice-water in the veins! Not like Dora. Your trouble is, you don’t know when you’re well-off!’

  And your trouble is you’re an idiot, thought Yiannis. Luckily Tassos had chosen that moment to step in. ‘Give the guy a break, Irini,’ he said, in the mild tone he saved for keeping the peace between the siblings.

  *

  Yiannis ate his supper in front of the television. The programme was a compilation of archive news clips, one of which featured George Bush delivering a laughably dyslexic tirade against Al Qaeda tourists in Iraq and fatter gunmen on the West Bank.

  ‘Ai gamisou!’ he shouted, changing the channel, although ever since George Dubya had been consigned to the dustbin of history he’d missed the mordant pleasures of jeering at him.

  Last night his mother had phoned to say her left knee had blown up like a football, and the doctor advised against flying. She could take the ferry, he’d pointed out, but although he didn’t like to think of her sweltering out the summer in Athens while Crete enjoyed the benefits of clear air and cooling sea-breezes, his encouragement was half-hearted. When she insisted she couldn’t come until well into the second half of August, and then only if the doctor permitted, he’d made the appropriate noises, but secretly he was relieved to be left alone with his depression.

  He set his plate down on the coffee table and gazed critically around the room. The sideboard he should have thrown out years ago, with its glass cupboards full of terracotta cockerels and dreary key-patterned tureens. On top of it the silver-framed family photos were arranged on a crocheted runner: weddings, christenings, graduations, the gathering of clans at his grandfather’s 90th birthday. All the marker-posts of life, at least those that were sanctioned by social ritual. Although death was the final, culminating stage, no one ever took photographs at funerals.

  On impulse, he went to the sideboard and took down his wedding photograph. Wrapping it in tissue paper, he carried it through to the bedroom, opened the dowry chest, and tucked it inside the folds of a lace tablecloth.

  The bed had a raddled look. Although the sheets had been on for a week he’d had no inclination to change them, part of him clinging on like a babe
at the breast, nuzzling hopefully for some faint scent-memory of Ingrid. He stripped them off, carried them to the washing machine, and bundled them in.

  Although he’d put up a spirited defence against Irini’s sisterly outburst, she’d managed to activate some fundamental fright in him, for the qualities that initially attracted him to Ingrid – her autonomy, perhaps, her self-sufficiency, now appeared in their negative aspect. That coolness of hers could also be construed as the power to shut him out and hug her troubles jealously to herself.

  Not a card, not a word. As if she had no notion that he might want to know how she was, or, for that matter, her ailing mother. As if she didn’t know how much that terrible reserve could hurt him.

  He took fresh sheets from the airing cupboard, and grimly set about remaking the bed. His mobile rang in the sitting room, and he went through to answer it. Hoping against hope, he snatched up the receiver and said ‘Embros.’

  It wasn’t Ingrid, however, but Panos at the Station, apologising. ‘There’s some kind of domestic over at Panomeli, can you attend?’

  Yiannis swore under his breath. Had they forgotten there were such things as duty rosters? Okay, Christos had finished his secondment and was currently earning his spurs at Agios Nikolas, but what about Sotiris? ‘Isn’t there anyone else you can send?

  ‘I wouldn’t be calling if there was, would I?’ Panos said huffily.

  Kore was poised on the coffee table, tail erect, nibbling at his leftovers. The sight enraged him, for it seemed to symbolise everything in his life that was, or could become, sordid. He scooped her up and threw her on to the sofa, furious at himself for letting the place go to rack and ruin.