One evening, Claire and I go out to dinner at Kastro in Megalo Horio, which has good, home-grown food: Dina and her husband keep their own goats and pigs, grow many of their own vegetables and make their own olive oil. Stelios joins us a little later when he's finished work. Bringing another plate of food, Dina asks Claire how she's enjoying Tilos; then jokes that we should find her a nice local boy so she can come and live here. Since Stelios is about Claire's age, Dina starts teasing him, asking him when he's going to get married.
'I'm too young for that!' he says.
'How old are you now?' she asks him.
'Twenty-seven.'
I choke on a sip of wine.
When Dina leaves, I say under my breath, 'I thought you said you were twenty-eight?'
'Next birthday,' he says.
One day he comes over with a huge batch of red mullet and skaros, extremely tasty little fish, so I invite Anna to join us for dinner at my house. While Stelios is out with the fishing boat in the evening, putting out the nets, I make salad from the garden, and mix yoghurt, garlic, grated cucumber and olive oil for tzatziki, squeezing the juice out of the cucumber so the tzatziki is thick and creamy. I lay food out on the wooden table on the terrace along with drinks, and leave Anna and Claire to chat while I gut the fish. Stelios is late so I start frying them. He arrives as it's getting dark, takes one look at the frying pan and says far more olive oil is needed. He takes over. Much later, after dinner, we have an idea to go dancing at Mikro Horio bar, as it may be closing soon for the season. We debate how we might get there. Claire begs off, ready for sleep, so that solves the problem: Anna and I will both ride on the back of Stelios' motorbike, he insists. No problem. He's not had much to drink as he was busy cooking. I think Claire is still a little shocked and relieved to be staying at home as we laughingly roar off down the dirt track in the dark, three of us on the bike without a crash helmet between us. Welcome to life on a tiny Greek island.
Although it's mid-September, locals joke that it's the 47th August – because midsummer weather continues, blissfully unaware that autumn should be on its way. While night sometimes brings a cool breeze, swimming and cold showers are still essential during the hot days. So when Claire and I drop in to see Maria and her daughter Evgenia one afternoon at their house halfway up the hill to the village, we're grateful for glasses of cool soumada, almond cordial. Pavlos and Maria were in Athens at the same time I was, for a wedding. 'Zougla!' Pavlos called it – jungle. Now we learn from Maria, as she's shooing away a cat that's determined to get in the house, that someone has been stealing the eggs from their hens.
'What,' I ask, 'an animal?'
'No, people have been stealing them!'
Goodness. I'm surprised.
Maria says it's not the first time. 'In Athens they rob banks – in Tilos it's just eggs!'
It's also a reminder of what Pantelis was saying the other night when he treated us to a bottle of retsina in the kafeneion. Life is hard in Greece at the moment, with people losing their livelihood, the prices of everything going up and no way to pay for it all. A new property tax is being imposed via electricity bills, which means people who don't pay up have their power cut off. Which makes it doubly kind when a pensioner like him insists on buying us retsina.
All summer, people have talked about whether Greece will leave the eurozone. On the islands, many say they'd prefer to return to the nation's former currency, the drachma, as the cheaper prices would attract tourists; others say those benefits would be short-lived. Tilos, like many islands, has been less affected by the crisis than cities on the mainland. The public workers are the worst hit, those who work for the local council or phone service or schools; salaries in the public sector have been cut by over a quarter. There's very little other work except tourism and farming, which remain steady year after year. At least if you're hungry, there's always the option of growing something, gathering wild food or catching a fish.
When Claire leaves, I suggest to Stelios that he stay at my house whenever he wants to, rather than driving back up to his parents' place. He always leaves at dawn, when the owner of the fishing boat rings him; cigarette smoke drifts up towards the bedroom as he makes coffee. I expect that once the summer is really over, he'll drift away to a job elsewhere, using his training as a plumber to find work in construction, even though work is now scarce and his last employer on Rhodes still owes him seven months' worth of pay and says he's broke.
'Maybe you'll take me to England so I can find work there?' he says, half-joking.
'Make no mistake,' I say, 'I'm not going back to England for a while, not even for you.'
Chapter 6
The Seahorse
'In the evening we put out nets, richnoumeh dichtia, and in the morning we take out fish, vgazoumeh psaria.'
The fishermen go out when the sun's coming up, as that's when the fish come out. In summer that could be 5 a.m., but this late September Sunday it's 7 a.m., and I've been invited along because soon they'll be switching to a different kind of net, the trata, when the season opens for that type of fishing. We stop at the bakery for breakfast of warm spanakopita, spinach pie.
Nikos Haralambakis is the owner of the boat, appropriately named as Saint Nicholas is the patron saint of fishermen. He's in his early forties and has been fishing for thirty years, since he was a boy, in all seasons. Nikos is one of seven brothers, including Yorgos who has the kafeneion in Livadia, and another Stelios who works with him on the boat. The fishermen change into orange rubber overalls and rubber boots. Someone sits at the back to steer. I'm given a seat in the middle where I can see everything and keep out of the way.
It's a calm morning, cool as we set out, a few wisps of cloud on the hilltops. Along the headland to the south of the bay, the water is still a pale grey. At the first net, Nikos' brother uses a wooden pole to hook the float out of the water and reels in the rope; then a motor takes over, winching it over a series of wheels; he pulls out the fish and tosses them into a bucket of seawater, and winds the net into a neat heap.
Nikos leans over the side, watching to see what's coming in; shouts, 'Good skaros, take it!' and instructions to the rudder to keep the boat where he needs it. 'Bros!' Forward. 'Anichta!' Away from land. 'Isia!' Straight.
The first fish to come over the side include spiky orange skorpio or scorpion fish, and yermani, Germans, with poisonous spines that can give a nasty sting; all these are extracted expertly from the nets with bare hands. For a while there's nothing, and then about six good-sized fish, followed by a karavitha, a type of reddish-brown lobster with no pincers but a powerful tail that curls and snaps back. The lobster's a good find; it can fetch up to €40 a kilo. Then there's a sinagritha, 2 kilos at least, the 'king of fish', silvery blue. When eventually there's nothing more coming up but weeds, it's time to move on.
Feegeh! Go! Valeh gazi… Give it some gas.
Crossing the bay to the north side allows a brief break for a cigarette and fresh coffees. A sudden panic: no more coffees! Searches are conducted for the disposable plastic frappé cups. A brief despondent lull, knowing there's no more coffee this morning. The disposable cups come with their own coffee and sugar so you just add water and shake, and they're probably very useful to busy fishermen; but having seen the empty plastic cups being disposed of over the side of the boat, the part of me that cares about the environment thinks maybe the fish will be happier.
The island looks different from here, outside; the sun is coming up now over the side of a mountain and brightening the colours. We skirt the shore where the cliffs and the coves are a rich red, reflecting in the still water, pass Gaidouronisi, Donkey Island, then stop at the next net. Tiny fish have to be extricated and thrown back, but soon the bucket starts filling up. There's a flurry of excitement when a strange-looking fish appears, bluegreen spots on top, bright white bloated belly: lagokefalos.
'If you eat this, you die!' Nikos stabs the poisonous fish, an invasive species, in the head with a knife before throwi
ng it overboard.
Then someone finds a seahorse in the net, an alogaki tis thalassas – little horse of the sea – otherwise known as ippocampos. They put it in my hand. It's beautiful, a tiny, perfect, grey, dragon-like creature. 'Take this home. It's beautiful for the house!'
But it's alive, and it doesn't want to die. I don't want it dead in my house. Its mouth forms an 'o' as it gasps for air and it flexes its body and curls its tail in and out. I keep it in my hand and try to ignore it. I'm a guest and don't want to be rude by throwing it overboard. It could even be bad luck to throw it back, and I'm trying not to be a pest while the men do their work – I'm grateful to be here. They celebrate the arrival of a nice catch of reddishwhite barbounia, red mullet, a good fish to sell. Nikos' brother starts singing a popular Greek folk song that has a chorus about a black horse and a white horse. I laugh; I seem to remember it's a song about a man with two girlfriends. 'To allo alogo, eineh aspro…'
It's horrible watching a seahorse die, its little body stretching out in what looks like agony. I look at the sad thing in my hand, wrapping its tail around the pen I'm holding.
Stelios assures me, 'There are lots of them.' Of course all the fish we're catching today are meeting the same fate, so why do I feel this way about the damn seahorse? Because we have a sentimental attachment to seahorses, the way they faintly resemble an embryo curled up inside its mother… Or because nobody needs to eat this, so it's dying to be beautiful in my house; dying, in fact, for no reason, as I can't imagine decorating my house with a dead seahorse. It's a cultural difference. I put it to one side.
The fish is packed in a box, sluiced down with fresh seawater and covered with wet hessian in the shade. We continue past the pretty beach of Lethra, then another little island, Prasouda, and mineral-blue rocks that drop sheer into the sea until we reach turquoise water, where on a sliver of pale beach a couple of goats are picking their way down the rocks to drink.
'How can the goats here drink salt water?' I ask Stelios.
'There's nothing else in the summer. It's evolution!'
We stop, and the men gather in the net, unsnagging knots, pulling off rocks and plants, sometimes singing a little to pass the time. There are no fish for a while, and they all look a little edgy. Then suddenly, we know why. A big grey seal emerges from the sea nearby, flips over and disappears again.
'This, the fokia, is why we take no fish here.'
The seals eat the fish from the nets. They eat through the nets to get at the fish – Stelios shows me the holes. It's an easy feast. The seal surfaces again on the other side of the boat. Monk seals are an endangered species but they thrive on the fish around the shores of Tilos, which is a protected conservation area.
'That's a small one,' says Nikos. 'They get bigger.'
This net is empty and we continue in a more sombre mood. Two cormorants stand on some low, jagged rocks silhouetted black and grey against a silver-blue sea in the early morning light. The seal comes up again, eating a fish.
Next time, we're farther out, deeper. The winch winds up rope, then net, and soon up over the side is a lobster, an astako with pincers and feelers, purple with orange markings. There's also a cuttlefish, soupia. And because we're fishing deep, there are clumps of compacted earth and weeds that get caught in the nets and have to be stamped out flamenco-style, leaving a big mess in the boat. Stamping out the chunks of dirt, winding nets into piles, standing for hours to extricate fins and feelers, leaning over to pull out the fish, it's got to be exhausting. Occasionally a fish caught in the net has been eaten away by something else, and they still have to extricate the remains and throw it overboard as the net has to be cleaned. They wind the nets twice over a wooden pole to remove all the dirt, and then sweep and sluice the deck. All the rope and net and spiny fish and salt water every day – no wonder Stelios has rough hands.
Nikos places several live lobsters carefully under the wet hessian sack as if he's tucking them up in bed, and they stop moving. 'Ipno!' he says. 'Sleep. That was a good net.' Seals don't eat lobsters.
No sooner has the deck been cleaned than we're preparing to pull in another deep net. This one's coming from 140 metres, outside the mouth of Livadia harbour. It brings in a smerna, a moray eel, glistening brown and yellow. Nikos gives it a swift blow to the head with his boot to kill it quickly, as if it smells blood or food (the other fish) it can be dangerous. Then small sharks or dogfish, galeos, start to come in, one after another, five or six of them; they do look like miniature sharks, with smooth, silky, darkgrey skin and bright-blue glassy marbles for eyes. Stelios opens a shell and hands me a fresh scallop to eat.
As it gets closer to midday, the sun is hot overhead and since the boat is continually moving around, they have to keep moving the boxes of fish into the shade and wetting the hessian. As we chug back to port, Nikos gets on the phone. In the summer, he sells direct to the island's restaurants; in winter, when they're closed, a small catch might be sold locally and the rest put on ice and shipped to Rhodes or Athens. There aren't as many fish as there used to be, and the water has warmed up so there are more fish from Africa like the poisonous lagokefalos, and no more mackerel.
There's a little more singing while the hard work of winding and cleaning and sorting progresses. I've never seen three Greek men smoke so few cigarettes: there's no time. I'd never have imagined so much shaking out of nets, sweeping and washing, day in, day out. They continue winding nets into piles ready for the evening, selling and filleting fish, as I step off the boat, still awkwardly holding the seahorse.
I've never been interested in watching sport, but this morning a text came through from Anna asking if I'd like to go to the football, and seeing the Tilos team play at the start of the season seems an important step in getting to know my new home.
The football ground is a ten-minute walk from my house; I set off along the dirt track surrounded by sage bushes and cypress trees and roaming goats, pass the entrance to the village, the high school and the army base, and reach the ground just before kick-off, wandering in past cars parked haphazardly, saying hello to people in the half-full stand as I make my way to a seat beside my friend. And the view makes me think it really might be a beautiful game after all. Trees surround the pitch, and beyond are the rugged, empty hills, with a deep blue sky above. To the left are the first few houses of the village and the church belfry.
The team line up alongside the boys from the neighbouring island of Symi, then all shake hands and move into position. At the outset, it looks as if our boys in red and blue might be out of practice, having spent their summer working in bars, rooms, restaurants, shops or driving the bus. But soon they're passing gracefully and pushing forward confidently. Within the first fifteen minutes, Tilos has scored. Goooooaal! Two local ladies lead a round of 'Ti-los, Ti-los!' We're in a very vocal part of the crowd.
Both teams are an assortment of shapes and sizes but they do appear to be playing their hearts out. After Symi equalises, the yellow cards start to mount up. Anna says Tilos matches have been known to get a little heated, with the odd fight. There's a bit of rolling around the pitch, and Yorgos the nurse makes an appearance.
At imichrono, half-time, a couple of little boys come out on to the pitch with refreshments for the players, and their mum follows to take a photo. The score is 3–1 to Tilos, and Anna and I celebrate by buying cold drinks and juicy pork souvlaki, which have been sizzling on the grill. There's no queue, as the crowd is pretty small, just the half-full stand of those of us who've paid €5 for a seat, and half a dozen men leaning on the railings at the other side. After school finishes, a few teenage girls saunter in to join the crowd.
Symi scores again early in the second half. For the rest of the match, the ladies next to us shout themselves hoarse. They know all the Tilos team and are somehow related to most of them, and they direct the match play-by-play. A lady supporter uses choice language that makes the army boys grin. A few balls shoot over the fence into the eucalyptus trees, both teams get
more yellow cards, and at one point an injury is ignored as a fight nearly breaks out at the other end of the pitch. It isn't a dull game. And the Tilos team hangs on to its win.
It occurs to me that the population of Tilos is a lot smaller than Symi, meaning that they are the underdogs. I check with Stelios, who has joined us.
'Yes, Symi is two thousand people. We are three hundred. And we drink and smoke a lot.'
The official number of Tilos residents is about seven hundred, but others say it's as low as three hundred in winter; I estimate around five hundred, depending on the time of year. Some work or study elsewhere, and even many who run summer businesses on the island leave when the season ends. It's a sad reality that the money they have made during the summer leaves with them. Not everyone can live on the island all year round. Anna will leave soon too for work back in England.
Later, I'm picking ripe tomatoes when Pavlos shouts hello. 'Yeia sou, Jennifer!'
I tell him I went to the football. 'Usually I don't watch football,' I say, 'but it was nice as I knew so many people.'
An Octopus in My Ouzo Page 5
