by Jamie Smith
Her thin eyebrows were raised in a question.
“I’m, ah, I’m just browsing, thank you,” he stammered, for the first time in his life.
“Not true, because you were staring at something in the window for nearly five minutes before you came in.”
Nikita flushed, angry for losing himself so quickly on his first full mission.
He looked closer at her, and she gazed back at him defiantly. Time to put some other aspects of his training into practice.
“Maybe it’s not your stock that I found entrancing, maybe it was something else,” he said, lowering his voice and fixing his eyes firmly on hers.
The girl laughed. “You really think a line like that would work?” She asked, lighting up a cigarette, the smoke circling up towards a gently rotating ceiling fan. Her voice had a curiously American twang to it that was throwing him off guard. In a world that had always made it crystal clear that where you were from was vitally important, he felt unnerved by his inability to place her, on an island where it should be obvious.
He grinned. “Epitrèpste mou na sas keràso èna potò.” Let me buy you a drink.
She smiled. “Is that a question or a statement?”
“That depends which will get me what I want.”
“And what is it you want?” She responded, tipping her head to the side as she exhaled the smoke. “Aside from a lesson to improve your truly awful Greek?”
“Right now, all I want is your name, a drink, and…” he picked up the dog carving, “this.”
She looked at him and smiled playfully, “OK, strange man who speaks Greek badly, I’ll let you buy me a drink. But the carving will cost you; it’s from a rare wood only found on the nearby Cyclades islands, called Cyclades ebony. And the sculptor gets to work with it very rarely.”
“The cost is unimportant. Who is the sculptor?” He asked quickly.
“Does it matter? I would guess that you don’t know all of the sculptors in the Sporades.”
Nikita paused, feeling wrong-footed and not knowing what to say.
She laughed at him, a rich throaty sound that came up through the body and closed her eyes.
He giggled sheepishly, immediately feeling idiotic for being sheepish. This was not in his training and it felt uncomfortable and oddly pleasant at the same time.
“You make a good point. But what of my third request? Your name?” he pressed, as she picked up a scarf, and walked with him to the door. They exited the shop as she turned the sign to say closed.
“You tell me yours and I’ll tell you mine.”
“I’m Nathan,” he seamlessly lied, conscious of his American accent. “And you?”
She fixed her dark eyes on his, and they glinted in the bright sunshine. “Elysia.”
***
Elysia led him up the narrow street next to her shop which went up a slope and away from the touristy shops lining the streets closer to the seafront. The homes were still pretty and whitewashed, but the paintwork slightly more chipped and the buildings increasingly in need of some love and care.
“Where are we going?” he asked her.
“You said you wanted to go for a drink, so I’m taking you to the sort of place that the islanders go for drinks,” she responded in that direct tone that singled her out as a strong Greek woman. Again, though, he was struck by the hard-to-place accent she used when speaking English.
“Then I shall be led by you,” he said, doing a mock bow.
She smiled but said nothing, and stopped as they came to what appeared to be a house like any other on the street. The door was covered by strings of beads hanging down over it, rattling in the breeze. The door behind them was only half closed and nothing but darkness was visible through the beads. Elysia parted the beads and pushed open the door. Nikita paused, his KGB senses tingling as they always did when entering an unknown property, especially as in this case he was with an unknown person and there was no clear secondary exit. How could he have been so stupid as to be led into such an obvious ruse?
Elysia smiled at him and beckoned him to follow her down what he could now see were dark stairs. Despite his apprehension and the bead of sweat he could feel at his temple, he stepped through the beads and onto the staircase. The stairs curved round to the right as they went down in a half spiral, but he could see a warm glow emanating up from the foot of them past the silhouetted form of Elysia. He could hear some music playing gently and as he reached the foot of the stairs, his eyes quickly drank up his surroundings. He was in a small bar, and his eyes immediately sought out all the available exits, which were not plentiful. The small bar was painted terracotta, with a couple of wooden tables and chairs in the corner and high wooden stools at the bar.
To the right of the bar was a pair of French windows, wide open, with pale translucent curtains pulled aside, swaying in the gentle breeze. Sunlight streamed through the windows, and beyond it Nikita could see there was a terrace looking out over the harbour.
Spotting that he had again stopped in the doorway, Elysia grabbed his hand and pulled him to the bar, which an elderly man was sat behind, smiling broadly at Elysia. His face was heavily aged, with deep creases scored across his forehead. Nikita could see a lifetime of laughter there, and great hardship too in the callused old hands.
As Elysia approached the bar and saw the old man’s smile she cried, “Pappoús!” before throwing her arms around him across the bar. He pulled back and held her face in his hands and landed two firm kisses on her cheeks.
Nikita stood there awkwardly, trying to look confident without feeling it at all. He knew enough of Greek from his phrasebook to know that ‘pappoús’ meant grandfather. Elysia turned and introduced the old man to Nikita in Greek. He smiled at Nikita and shook his hand, but there was a twinkle of cynicism there too. Nikita wondered if a black man had ever set foot in this back-street Skyros bar before. He suspected not.
“This is my grandpa, Theo. He doesn’t speak much English, but this is his bar. Anything there is to know about wine, he knows it.” She gestured behind the bar to the rows of wine bottles in racks.
If nothing else, Theo clearly knew the English word for wine, as his eyes lit up and he turned to pull a bottle of red wine out of the rack.
“Greek wine is best,” he said in a powerful and rich voice at odds with his small and wrinkled body, which made Elysia laugh. Theo spoke with her, pointing at the bottle before turning.
“Grandpa says that this is a special wine because it is made from only Agiorgitiko grapes which can be found nowhere but Greece.”
“That sounds great to me, but I can’t pretend to be a wine connoisseur,” replied Nikita, feeling totally out of his depth.
“Well then you’re in the perfect place to learn; Greek wine has more history than any other,” Elysia said with a tinkling laugh, as she again grabbed his hand and pulled him outside through the French doors. He looked at Theo, who nodded his head to him before turning his back to begin wiping down the bar.
Outside, the sun was searing despite it now being around five p.m. and Elysia led them to a table shaded under a grapevine. It was fairly busy with men dotted around, sitting on their own reading newspapers and sipping wine, and a group of women of all ages gathered around a table, sipping a bright red drink that Nikita couldn’t place. They were talking very loudly and animatedly, about what Nikita could only guess. Looking around the terrace, he could see it had been created in a traditional Greek style, with grapevines overshadowing half of the terrace, and in the other half small olive trees grew in large terracotta pots, with some of the scrubbed wooden tables shaded by rusting parasols. The terrace wasn’t large, but looked out to the harbour and the surrounding mountains. The sea was glistening and shifting gently, a vivid blue under clear sunlit skies.
As they sat, she placed down the bottle on the table. “I forgot glasses!” she exclaimed, rolling her eyes. “I’ll be back in just a moment.” As she left to wind her way back to the bar, Nikita noticed that all conver
sation had stopped and everyone was staring at him. He sat up straight and stared boldly back at them. What it must be like to be white and not always be the only black man in every room, he thought to himself. Nikita reprimanded himself for losing focus on the reason he had come to Skyros. It wasn’t to enjoy himself, but to carry out the assassination of a Russian double agent. He slipped into musing about the task he was here for, forcing himself to think of the gruesome murder he must commit. Not murder, he told himself. Not murder, but political assassination. He had to hold on to the difference.
As Elysia approached the table, she saw that everyone was still looking with judging eyes at the pair of them. Some of them looked positively livid.
“Ti?” she asked them all defiantly. A couple of them muttered to themselves but most of them turned back to what they were doing. “Ignore these people. They aren’t too used to black men in this part of Skyros.”
“Trust me when I say I’m used to it,” Nikita replied with a wry grin.
“I don’t doubt it. I don’t care though, and that’s all that matters,” she said matter-of-factly, with her chin raised and a half smile playing across her full lips.
Nikita couldn’t help but laugh. It was a strange feeling to him.
“Your face doesn’t look like it’s used to laughing; what’s your story?” she said, hitting rather too close to the bone.
“You’re not wrong, Elysia. But what I’m really interested in is your accent; I can’t place it. I can hear the Greek, but when you speak English it sounds pretty American, but not quite.” He picked up the bottle and began pouring it into both glasses. The dark red liquid was almost translucent in the bright sunlight.
She smiled. “Well, that would be because I am American actually.”
“You are?”
“Sort of.”
“You’re infuriatingly vague, you know.”
“This coming from the man who avoids questions about himself, only telling me his name and that he has a weird thing for statuettes of small black dogs.”
He said nothing, but smiled at her, staring intently into her eyes.
“OK Mr Intense, I’ll bite. My grandparents are all from Skyros, but in the forties my mom’s parents moved to Baltimore. There’s a big Greek community there; it’s even now called Greektown. My mom grew up as an American, but despite marrying my father, also from Skyros, she felt out of touch with her roots and wanted me to grow up Greek, not American. So she sent me to an international school in Athens where I got my weird Greek-come-American-come-vague-European-type accent.”
“That would explain it. So do you feel more Greek than American, as your mother wished?”
“Instead of making me Greek, it made me feel like I don’t quite belong anywhere. At least in Baltimore I can feel comfortable with others who don’t know whether they’re American or Greek, but at the same time nowhere has ever been as comfortable for me as Skyros. My pappoús rented the shop for me because he wants to keep family close, as family is the most important thing for Greeks, but I may try moving back to the US for a while soon I think.”
“Maybe instead of needing to just be one thing, you will come to love being many different things,” Nikita said.
She looked intently at him, and for the first time her face softened. “I like that way of looking at it,” she replied. “And you? Are you many different things?”
“I think that’s a very good way of putting it. But like you, I haven’t yet found the joy in it. For the moment I can content myself with the American bits of me, as I grew up in Daytona Beach, Florida.”
He felt like a fraud, responding to her openness with KGB lies. He couldn’t help but feel totally captivated by Elysia, who seemed to wear her heart on her sleeve and hide nothing. He took a long drink of his wine and was struck by how rich and complex it was, barely considering his personal pledge to stay teetotal throughout his mission.
At that moment in walked Giorgos, his lift from Houlakia Bay earlier that day, and upon seeing Nikita he opened his arms in a broad smile. “Nathan!” he called out, accidentally knocking over the bottle of wine of a man in a wide-brimmed straw hat who had just sat down at a nearby table. The man swore at Giorgos, who waved him away jovially. Nikita stood, and Giorgos embraced him like an old friend. Again, unsure how to react to kindness, Nikita tried to seem as though he was comfortable with it.
He turned to Elysia. “This is Giorgos, a recent acquaintance of mine.”
“Well, there is certainly more to you than I expected, Nathan,” she said, looking amused, then kissed Giorgos, who embraced Elysia fiercely and again planted the two kisses firmly on her cheek and spoke to her in rapid Greek too fast for Nikita to follow. “So my uncle tells me he brought you into town earlier,” she said with a twinkle in her eye.
“Your uncle?”
Giorgos and Elysia chuckled, and Giorgos put his arm around her, planting a big kiss on her cheek.
Nikita smiled begrudgingly, again feeling wrong-footed. He briefly noticed the man in the straw hat trying to shake the last drops from his bottle of wine, still muttering to himself, before standing and heading into the bar for another bottle. The uncle and niece sat down opposite him. “So how are you finding Skyros, Nathan?” Giorgos asked.
Nikita smiled insincerely. “I had a feeling you knew English,” he said, his senses prickling.
“It pays to know things on this island,” Gorgios said with a wink.
“It’s always useful to know the people who know useful things,” Nikita replied, his shoulders bunching.
“This is one of the vaguest conversations I’ve ever heard,” Elysia said, breaking the tension.
Nikita laughed, but didn’t take his eyes off Giorgos. Giorgos was staring right back, his deeply lined face showing a mixture of concern and humour.
Nikita topped both his and Elysia’s glasses up. “Will you join us for a glass, Giorgos?”
“Of course. There is always time for wine on Skyros.”
At that moment, Elysia’s grandfather called her name from inside the bar.
Elysia rolled her eyes. “He probably needs help reaching something at the bar. I’ll bring a glass for you on my way back, Uncle. Be gentle with him!”
She got up and wound her way back through the tables, but Nikita wasn’t watching, his eyes still fixed on Giorgos. He leant back in his chair. Something didn’t feel right.
“You like my niece, yes?”
Nikita said nothing.
“Men like you are no good for girls like her.”
Nikita’s eyes flashed, and his jaw clenched. So this was what it was all really about.
“Men like me?”
Giorgos laughed. “You think I mean because you’re black! This isn’t what I mean. Although yes, that would be hard for the family and the island to understand. It would provide entertaining gossip for years! But no, my friend, I mean because of what you do.”
Nikita said nothing, but slowly put a hand round to the small of his back where his revolver was tucked into the waist of his jeans.
“You say very little, my friend,” said Giorgos.
“I have little to say. Stop speaking in riddles and tell me what you are working towards.”
“So, I deliver wine for a living in Skyros.”
“Good for you. Why are you telling me?”
“I make deliveries to some very wealthy people around the island.”
The smile disappeared from Giorgos’s face as he stood and put his hands on the wooden table and leant forward until his head was next to Nikita’s ear. “Tonight, I deliver wine to a fortress on a hill,” he said breathily.
Then he said loudly in Greek, “Where is my niece with that wine glass? Whom God wishes to destroy first he makes mad!” he said, reciting an old Greek proverb with a look of comic tragedy on his face that caused people around the bar to laugh. As he turned to walk to the bar he winked and whispered one word: “Kemran.”
Nikita leant back on the legs of his chair and
exhaled. This island was full of unlikely surprises. His mind was now clear and back focused on the mission ahead. He needed to get out of this bar and speak to Kemran about Giorgos and check in with Ambassador Yitski to confirm the trustworthiness of these sources. If Giorgos was telling the truth, then his job of getting into the fortress just became an awful lot easier.
Elysia returned to the table and Nikita noticed she wasn’t carrying an extra glass. She smiled at him as she sat down and Nikita was knocked out all over again. Now he was more prepared for it, however, and steeled his heart and mind to keep him in mission mode.
“Where’s your uncle?” he asked.
“He got called on to do a delivery,” she replied. “Before he left, he said to tell you that he would be driving back past your hotel tonight at eleven p.m. if you wanted to hitch another ride with him.”
“That’s very good of him; I may just take him up on that offer,” Nikita said, smiling.
Noticing the pensive look on his face, Elysia said, “Don’t mind my uncle. We struggle to understand him as much as you.”
He smiled but said nothing.
She poured him a glass of wine and raised her own to him. “In wine there is truth,” she said.
“So that’s where the truth has been hiding,” Nikita replied as they clinked glasses, and she laughed.
“You like your secrets, don’t you?”
“I like you more,” he said, taking another deep drink of the wine. It really was delicious. So much fuller of fruit and flavour than any he had tasted before. He rarely experienced alcohol other than vodka in Russia, but that was sharp and strong and designed to keep you warm. His experiences of wine had been limited to training in being able to pass off a working knowledge of wines should he ever need to mix with that crowd. None of his training had given him Greek wine, however.
“That’s delicious,” he said to her, nodding to his glass.
“As my grandpa said, Greek wine is the best.”
“He’s clearly a very wise man! Why have I never had it before?”
“As with everything else, Greece doesn’t get the respect it deserves around the world. We have fallen behind and there doesn’t seem to be the motivation to catch up and let the world enjoy what we do here. Also, I must admit that we are over-inclined to keep it all for ourselves.”
