by Tobias Hill
–Who is it?
–I wouldn’t know, I’m sure, Sudoku drawled. Will I say you are coming down?
He pulled on clothes, boiled the kettle, burnt his mouth, discovered that his shoes were lost, his thoughts all muddled up with hopes.
He discovered himself by the window, his morning ritual asserting itself. Sparta taking precedence, as if that should be all that he looked for. Full morning on the mountains. Buntings of clothes on balconies. The swimming pool unwavering, its lanes as straight as rules on paper. He remembered Natsuko, stopping for breath in the deep water, and remembering her, eel-dark, realised he was hoping most of all for her.
The lift was out and he took the stairs. An odd noise carried up the well, an insistent, ugly, snagging sound, like the grinding of teeth or untoothed gears, and as Ben reached the entrance hall he saw Chrystos in shirtsleeves, out of place in the hotel’s marble and brass, a big man in a too-small seat, impervious to the twin glares of Sudoku and the cockatoo, his cap folded on the sofa beside him.
He held a trowel and a bastard file between his knees. He was sharpening the trowel with long strokes of the file, like a boy whittling a scrimshaw. He held up both as Ben reached him.
–A perfect point.
–Chrystos? It’s Sunday.
–Eh. No holes today.
–So, you…we’re not working somewhere else, are we?
–No. Here, he said, his English as halting as Ben’s Greek, and he stood up and put down both hafted blades on an occasional table, gesturing. –For you. Take please. Souvenirs.
–Gifts, he said, and picked them up, their weights sinking unexpectedly in his hands. –Souvenirs are when you leave. Thank you. It’s very kind of you.
–The trowel is good. Marshalltown steel. From Iowa in America. Not like the old things they lend you. With this the digging is not so hard. Keep it sharp, like how you saw. So now we go now?
–Go where?
–To sightsee. You don’t want, you can say no.
–No, no, I mean it’s fine. I just wasn’t expecting–
–Then we will go now, okay?
The van was there as always, at first only the absence of Giorgios and the presence of sunlight distinguishing the morning from that of a working day. Only little by little, as they drove, did Ben notice other differences. Chrystos was more at ease, and by degrees more talkative, though whether through release from work or from his brother, he couldn’t say. There were takeaway coffees for them on the dashboard, and the Sunday papers by Ben’s seat. It was finally election day. The front pages were full of it.
–So where’s Giorgios?
–At church.
–You don’t go?
–It’s not for me, he said. Then nodding at the tools, A joke.
–Are they? I thought–
–Gifts for you. A joke for her.
–For who? Sudoku? he said, and Chrystos frowned and laughed.
–Marina. My sister’s friend. Very proud.
–Do you know Crossword too?
That made him laugh again, an oddly boyish giggling. –Crossword is a good name for her. Marina’s cousin. Even worse. Lucky for me it was only one.
–You know everyone.
–Of course. Everyone knows everyone, here.
They were heading west, the plaza, its bars and colonnades already behind them. The cathedral loomed up, a crowd in the square in its Sunday best. Beside him Chrystos turned the radio on, surprising him again, burrowing through blocks of talk to veins of music, pop, Greek folk, humming tunelessly along.
–Today is an important day.
–Are you going to vote? he asked, and Chrystos glanced at him, a quick keen sideways question which he shrugged easily away.
–You don’t?
–Sometimes.
–Sometimes you do not vote?
–Not everyone does, where I come from. It doesn’t make much difference there. It doesn’t change much, he added, unaccountably embarrassed, though it was a conviction he had held for as long as he could recall. –I don’t believe in them.
–In who?
–Politicians. Like you don’t believe in God.
–It is not the same.
–It seems the same to me. One kind of disbelief is like another.
–It is not the same. And I did not say I do not believe. I do not have faith. And that is also not the same.
He was relieved when Chrystos turned his full gaze back to the road.
The edge of town. The van jogging over potholes. Cars up on bricks in bare front yards. Concrete and red geraniums. A dead tractor under mulberry trees. Carillons of dogs passing them along from one dog-realm to the next.
–Here, Chrystos said finally, It makes a difference.
–Maybe you have better politicians here.
–I do not vote for politicians. I vote for politics, Chrystos said, tight-lipped. And then, relenting, Look. Up there.
He looked up through the smudged windscreen. The land ahead was rising, orchards of oranges giving way to less pastoral olive groves, the groves to rocks and Aleppo pines, and rocks and pines to the Taygetos. The western mountains were much closer now, and darker, too, shoulders and ridges blocking out the clear blue sky.
He blinked. A city lay concealed in the mountains. Wherever he could see through the trees were vertiginous cobbled streets, fortresses and palaces, lichened domes and buttresses. Gardens, towers, gates, and halls, all of them barely clinging on, their rooftops falling into ruin, their walls held up by vines, each tier capped by another tier, as fabulous as cloud castles.
It dizzied him. He muttered some empty sacrilege, Christ or God, and heard Chrystos’s smile in his voice.
–Only a few find him here now.
–Is this Mystras?
–Mystras, the city of the Byzantines. You like it?
–It’s beautiful! Beautiful…
They parked under the walls. A buzzard in the pines below went loping away through the air. Chrystos was rooting in the van, passing him out shopping bags full of food and bottled water.
Already they were high above the valley. He could see the river and the city below, and beyond them, miles away, the rise of the Parnon foothills. He traced the road to Therapne, found the ridge that marked the dig, then closed his eyes, breathing in the air of the strange end-of-the-world he had come to. Olives, woodsmoke, oranges.
–Laconia, Chrystos said. He had come up to stand at the car park’s edge. In one hand he held a wide-brimmed, much-worn hat, in the other a HellaSpar shopping bag. He pointed with the hat, the gesture proprietorial. –Over the Taygetos, Messenia. Over the Parnon, Arcadia. Once there was a time when all this was ours.
–Ours? he said, and Chrystos tutted, as if it were of no consequence. He brushed off the hat.
–Here, for you. Ready?
The entrance looked unmanned, but as they reached it Ben could hear the squabble of a radio. An old man in the gate-booth waved them by, his head cocked to a sports phone-in. They went up through the shadowed gate and out into the sun-bleached streets.
He leaned into the ascent, soon finding himself out of breath. Chrystos climbed with a farmer’s stroll, lumbering against the gradient but always somehow still ahead, his voice hollow, booming back from doorways and vaulted passages, putting names to ruined buildings–the Mansion of Laskaris, the Palace of the Despots, the Convent of Pantanassa–his face bright-eyed with something that Ben belatedly recognised as pride. As if the palaces were his, and Ben an honoured visitor.
They met no one. At one turning Ben glimpsed something in black, a huddled, hurrying figure, but when he looked back it was gone, and rooks were rising over the rooftops, cawing and threshing at the wind.
Above the town a fortress stood guard, acropolis on acropolis. They struggled up the last few stairs and came out on the fortress-top, the wind blowing up from the south, whistling at the mountainside, nabbing at wrappings as they unpacked the food.
They ate in the shelter of t
he wall. The bread was Saturday’s, and tough, but warm from the sun and their own exertions, and bread and water aside Chrystos had brought more than enough. A Volvic bottle one-third full with homemade pink wine, the smell of it as rough as meths. Big donkey olives and the smaller local kind, fresh from the harvest. Almonds and pistachios and slabs of cheese dusted with thyme. Snails in oil and herbs, wrapped up in dark-stained newspapers. The boiled bulbs of hyacinths.
–Once many people lived up here, Chrystos said, breaking the bread into fists and heels. –Hiding behind their walls.
–From what?
–Enemies. Whenever people here were weak they would live up in the mountains. Sometimes it is easier.
–To be weak?
–You don’t agree. You think it is easy to fight.
–I wouldn’t know.
–No? You don’t fight for what you believe in?
He laughed. –I would, if I knew what that was.
Tsk! Chrystos was shaking his head. He took out a penknife, halved one slab of cheese.
–Try.
–It’s good.
–From Trípi. Not far from here. Some say Trípi is where the Spartans took children born sick. There is a high rock where they were left. You know what I’m talking about?
–I wouldn’t say the Spartans were heroes because they left children to die.
–Not heroes, I did not say that. I said it is hard to be strong. It is not easy to kill a child.
–Not easy for the child, either.
–Harder for mother than for child. To live down there, without walls, to be Sparta, not Mystras, the people had to be hard. So that is what the Spartans were.
–And now?
–Now is different. Now we are just people. There are no Spartans now.
They ate for a while in silence, sharing the bulbs. The rooks were back, Ben saw, watching from ridges and fissures, their voices echoing between outcrops of juniper and opuntia.
–In winter we come up here, Chrystos said, unscrewing the wine.
–What for?
–For this. To look and drink. The wine keeps us warm.
–Warmer indoors.
–Nothing to see, indoors. Also my brother brings things, for the people here.
–People still live up here?
–Some. Not many. Not young. In the convent there are holy women.
–Nuns?
–Giorgios saves something for them. Calor for cooking. Oil. Meat. Chocolates from Switzerland. They like the chocolates best.
–It must be hard up here in winter.
–The ice is bad but the view is good. We have a nice time. Five, six of us. First we go see to the…nuns…then we come to sit up here. We look down where our fields are. Some years it is all under snow, Chrystos said, and sketched out a line miles across the valley’s gulf.
He took the wine, swigged it, leaned back, closing his eyes. Afterimages flickered in his private darkness. The sky’s light and the snow on the heights. It would change a people, a landscape like this. A place of small horizons. The mountains reproaching departure. The valley a haven of green, cut off from the world. Something worth defending.
The stone was warm against his head. It came to him that there was really nowhere else he would rather be–Not Athens, Oxford or London–and he closed his eyes tighter, as if that reflex could trap the reflection. Beside him Chrystos was still talking, lapsing into his own language, the wine loosening his tongue.
–Like kings with kingdoms. That’s how we feel up here. Really we are like boys. We come here to forget what we are becoming. None of us has the land our grandfathers had. Even the Chatzakos have less. There are more outsiders now. And the children go to Athens and the farming is always hard. Some of us build property. The Maxis have only two good fields. My cousins harvest the olives now. Giorgios and I find other work. Every few years you people come looking for Sparta. You hire us because others have hired us. We go again to the acropolis or Amyclai. We never find enough. You always leave disappointed. And all the time Mystras is here, where anyone can see it. Much more beautiful than anything you dig out of the ground. Much less work to find.
–Maybe that’s why we don’t come here.
–…You want it to be hard?
–No, no. We want to find something no one else has seen before.
–The things you find are not unseen.
–Forgotten, then, whatever. Secret. There were secrets up here too, though. I read something, about a man who went on worshipping the old gods here. Zeus. Poseidon–
–Plethon. Chrystos waved the name away. –In Rome they believed he was clever. Here not so much. Gemistus Plethon was not secretive. He did not keep his secrets well. Now you look surprised. You think all I do is dig? That I would never read a book?
–Of course not, he said, looking away, feeling himself blush at the crude lie. When he looked back again Chrystos was watching him, another of his sideways looks, this one amused and tolerant. –I’m sorry.
–Pff. No need. You give me the pleasure of surprising you.
They finished the last of the wine. The sun was climbing higher, the fissures of the mountainside filling one by one with light.
–You are not like the others, Chrystos said, as if it were a compliment.
–Others? he said; and realising, What are they like, then?
Chrystos took out a pipe and began to fill it, fretting over spilled threads, so occupied with it that Ben tried again.
–Missy said things were weirding out.
Chrystos shrugged, lit the pipe. –Weirding out? I don’t know. They play strange games.
–Games?
–They talk about them, down there.
–What do they say?
–They don’t behave like foreigners.
–Is that bad?
–Some say they are rude. They don’t make friends. They keep too close.
–That doesn’t sound so strange.
–They eat together, drink together. They do not stay at the hotels. They look for rooms in the old town, places not meant for visitors. They hunt together.
–They hunt?
–Eberhard and the quiet boy, Max, they know what they are doing. They buy from the hunting shops. They go for rabbits in the hills. Not just the boys. Also the girls. It is the wrong time for rabbits but that is not a problem. What they do is their own business. A friend of my brother has seen them. People think it isn’t right. Not for women. Not for foreigners. It isn’t what people expect. More to eat?
They cleared away the last remnants, stones and shells, the pages of old newspapers, headlines from Estia and Stohos, Chrystos leaning against the weathered wall as he stood, grunting at his stiff joints.
–So. What do you believe in, Ben?
–Believe in? Oh, well, not much.
–Not God? Not God, not politics. You should believe in something.
–Why?
–Otherwise it is too hard. Maybe you believe in yourself. You have faith in yourself.
–To do what? he said, and laughed, the echoes ushering his voice back oddly.
–To do well in your work. Archaeology. To find what is left of the past. Or to live a good life.
–I haven’t lived a life which anyone would have faith in.
–That is a shame. If you think it. What is it you believe in, then?
It was a moment before he realised they were both still waiting for an answer. A wretched panic began to unfurl in him, a subtle coil of it at first, like the first loose threads of smoke. He nodded down at Mystras. –I believe in this.
–In this? This is just stones, Chrystos said, taking the pipe out of his mouth. –Old stones.
–No. It’s history.
–You only believe in history?
–At least that’s something, he said, What’s wrong with that? But Chrystos only shrugged again, his face surprised, then bleak. He dry-spat and turned away.
–We should get back.
–Already?
<
br /> –I have to vote, and you must want time to yourself.
They finished clearing and went down carefully through the ruined streets. There was no more talk on the way home. Chrystos dropped him by the hotel.
–Thanks for the sightseeing.
–You liked it?
–Very much.
–Do something for me.
–What?
–Stay away from the others.
–Well, that shouldn’t be too hard, they haven’t exactly–
–Even so.
–Alright. But I don’t understand–
–No. But I see that you are easily surprised.
He stood there as the van pulled out, awkward with the sense of something unfinished. For the first time all week he felt alone. Only as he went up the hotel steps did he remember that he had forgotten his gifts. He turned back, raising a hand, and found Chrystos already gone.
The afternoon was his own to kill. At first it seemed a luxury. He took his notes and went back out. For a while he walked, seeing the town as he had not all week, the shops shut but the streets crowded. He went by the museum, hoping he might find books there–something in the way of a library–but expecting to find it closed and not disappointed in that.
At three o’clock he ended up at a kafeneion in the square, a grimy place full of grim old men in saggy suits, like second-string mourners at a funeral, acquaintances of the dead, no one talking to anyone, the waiter setting out umbrellas and vinyl armchairs to catch the best of the cold March sun.
He ordered coffee, medium sweet, and made it last an hour, avoiding the waiter’s eye. The light moved up and over him. It lit up the page in front of him and left him in sharp blue shadows.
Children were playing in the plaza, their mothers watching over them from tea houses and coffee bars. An old woman sat by the fountain, counting hyacinth bulbs from a green bag to a red bag. There were no young men, he realised. It was as if they had all gone off to war.
The waiter came to take his cup. He ordered more, not wanting it. The lights around the square came on.
Still he sat, writing at first, then not writing, only looking. Then only looking, not seeing. The pen lying lax in his hand, his hands and face as motionless as those of the old men sitting inside, each of them unutterably alone.
