The Lizard in the Cup

by Peter Dickinson

  “Pater …” said Pibble feebly, and gestured towards where he had last seen the monk, but as his arm was hidden by the leaves the man could not see the gesture, and must have thought that Pibble was claiming an improbable kinship. He blinked, and kicked the tree again. Pibble poked an arm through the screening leaves and pointed up the grove. The man turned and started shouting again, but not at Pibble. The monk appeared in his circle of vision, put his hands on his hips and stood his ground, like a fishwife about to embark on repartee. The stranger, still shouting, gestured fiercely at Pibble. The monk smiled up through the leaves and pointed emphatically towards the ground.

  “Englesos,” he said to the other man.

  Pibble didn’t want to come down. There was still plenty to pick up here, and for all his work his little basket was less than half full. But there was nothing for it, so he made his way carefully to earth.

  The moment he landed the newcomer rushed over, snatched a handful of olives from the basket and thrust them under Pibble’s nose.

  “Don’t ask me,” said Pibble.

  The English phrase was like a bucket of water thrown over a fighting dog. While the man grappled with the knowledge that here was someone it was no use shouting at, the monk began to answer the accusation in his deep, harsh voice; as he did so he pointed with priestly emphasis at various parts of the grove. Without warning the newcomer turned away and rushed down the slope to a yellowish lump of rock that projected among the dark tree-trunks some twenty yards away; when Pibble looked at it properly he saw that it was the butt of a broken column. The man took his stance by it, then paced towards them, shouting the number of the steps as he came, until he stopped well beyond the tree in which Pibble had been perched. He spun round, his body tense with triumph, and barked at the monk. Calmly the monk pointed up the slope and began to count trees from the top. Pibble fidgeted and hoped that he was not going to be called as a witness in a law-suit—that would be partaking in the life-pattern of the inhabitants too intensely.

  He was scratching a minor itch near his left nipple when his hand bumped against something bulky and unfamiliar in his shirt-pocket. Thanatos’s cigars—this might be a chance to get rid of them. Both Greeks were in full voice as he unscrewed the metal caps and shook the huge weeds half out of their protective metal cylinders; then he stepped forward and offered them to the disputants.

  Both stopped in mid-shout. The monk’s blue lips smiled. “Epharisto,” he said as he took one. “Parakalo,” said Pibble, knowing what was expected of him, though the conversation didn’t usually take place this way round. The other man took his more gingerly, and sniffed at it. The monk bit off the end of his with yellow teeth and spat it out.“Fotia?” he said, and the other man produced a box of matches, lit one and held it out. The monk made a clicking noise and took the whole box. He lit a fresh match, warmed the end of the cigar, lit another, repeated the ritual, and finally put the cigar in his mouth and drew at it. Quite a monk-of-the-world, thought Pibble. The stranger imitated the monk, if dubiously, and soon the sweet and civilised reek of Cuban tobacco was drifting through the grove, bringing inappropriate memories of city dinners to mix with the dusty, herby smells of the island air. The stranger turned and politely offered his box of matches to Pibble.

  The brown face flickered at the realisation that Pibble was not smoking. The man took his cigar out of his mouth and offered it, glistening with saliva, back to Pibble, who shook his head, realised that that would be meaningless to a Greek peasant used to the click-and-eyebrow trick, and pulled out his Collins phrase book. The only reference to smoke in the index was to do with the funnels of steamers, so he put the book back, tapped his chest and coughed expressively. The stranger stared at him, sniffed warily at the smoke of his cigar and glanced sideways at the monk.

  “Englesos,” said the monk, puffing confidently. God might permit his olives to be spilt, but He wasn’t going to let him be poisoned by such an excellent cigar. The stranger’s face cleared, as if he thought it quite reasonable that a non-smoking Englishman should be climbing his trees, stealing his olives, carrying two enormous cigars. Even if Pibble had been bilingual, he’d have found it difficult to explain the nuances of gifts from Mr. Thanatos—deliberately useless tokens being his host’s notion of tactful generosity. It was fellow-millionaires who had ten-thousand-drach notes pressed into their hands as they left for a walk round the town, non-smoking paupers who were given cigars. Perhaps the reasoning was that it was indelicate to imply that anybody was so poor as to need anything, so if you wished to be generous you had to load them with gifts they didn’t need. Also it embarrassed them: Thanatos would enjoy that aspect.

  The monk stood in silence, relishing the tobacco, then spoke quietly to the stranger, who answered with perfect placidity and took the small basket from Pibble. The monk strode up the grove to where the other baskets were and emptied his small one into one of the big ones; then he stacked the small ones into the other big one and picked that up. It couldn’t have weighed much, Pibble reckoned—certainly not as much as the half-hundredweight or so of the morning’s harvest which he was left to carry. The stranger watched, clucking at Pibble’s efforts to swing the thing up between his shoulders, then took other handle. Together they carried it up to the path.

  The gold-coloured gravel and rock of the path dipped just beyond the grove and passed a neat well before rising to another horizon, a ridge screened by more olives, a few cypresses, and a little wood of twisted ilexes. Pibble was puzzled, because he was certain they must be very near the sea—had in fact expected to top the previous ridge and look down on a spread of white walls and pink tiles, with perhaps a cracked bell clanking, and all this silhouetted against calm blue water. But no. Here they were, striding out of yet another close and broken valley. The monk’s skirt swished; cicadas squeaked their intolerable endless squeak; one helicopter troubled the enormous air.

  It also troubled Pibble; he felt very frivolous having spent an hour learning to pick olives; but at least he’d been told to come, and had wormed his way effectively into the monk’s reeking bosom.

  The monastery had been hidden by the ilexes, and it was a disappointment. Instead of the interlocking planes of sun-soaked tile and plaster, he saw only a wall topped with a negligible slope of roof. Apart from one large doorway there was no opening in all its length, though it ran in an irregular fashion out of sight behind trees in either direction. It looked old, or at least battered, but uninteresting. Away to the left a couple of workmen were re-tiling a section of the roof. Between the wood and the wall ran a cleared strip, most of it rank with withering weeds; but by the path someone had scratched the soil enough to produce a few rows of vegetables.

  The monk opened the door with a silly little key and stepped inside without looking round. The peasant muttered something to Pibble and lowered his side of the basket. When Pibble did the same, the peasant made flurried gestures with his cigar to show that he was now going to carry the small basket only, and Pibble would have to do the best he could with the big one.

  “All right,” said Pibble, “but you’ll have to help me up with it.”

  The doubled weight seemed enormous. He nearly let go, stepping through the doorway, and again nearly fell as he followed the peasant on to one of the two flights of stairs that led down from either side of the big landing inside the door.

  There were windows on the left side of the stairs, letting in a flood of light and glimpses of dazzling water, but he couldn’t gaze out to discover why there seemed to be no tree-tops or roofs beneath him because he had to go down the stairs crabwise, looking away from the windows, to balance the weight on his back, picking his way through the slippery hollows worn by generations of holy soles.

  The bottom step led straight into a room where Greek voices were already talking. Pibble lowered his basket carefully on to the nearest of a number of shiny red café tables and looked about him.

 
The room was a barrel-vaulted chamber, large and plain. It was lit by two glassless windows, each with a central pillar that supported a pretty double arch of carved stone. The tall monk who had brought them was now at the inner end of the room, rattling in a cupboard and talking over his shoulder to another monk. This one was smaller and older; he had swung round from a sloping desk at which he had been painting a picture and was making inquisitive noises. Beside him an even smaller painter worked on, wearing blue jeans, a pink blouse and long dark hair—a hip novice, wondered Pibble. The peasant had put his basket of disputed olives on to another of the incongruous tables and stood sentry over it.

  The large monk turned from the cupboard and put glasses, a bottle and a pitcher on to one of the four tables that had been arranged together in a line up at that end of the room, to form a sort of High Table. The pitcher had a piece of sponge jammed into its neck. The small monk licked his lips, which were a shade bluer than the large one’s, just as his beard was dirtier and his spectacled eyes more bloodshot. He turned to the visitors.

  “Kalos irthate, Vangeli,” he said.

  “Kalosti, Papa,” said Vangelis, standing surly by his basket.

  “Kalos irthate, kirie,” said the old man to Pibble, so mumblingly that he sounded uncertain whether his visitor was there or not.

  “Kalos sas vrikame, Papa,” said Pibble, and went sturdily on with a couple of other sentences that he knew reasonably well, from practice: “Imi Anglos. Legomai James Pibble.” He never said this without imagining how his hearers would be mentally spelling the syllables into Greek: Tzaimz Pimpel.

  “Anglos?” said the monk with doddering interest. “I Nancy inai Anglida.”

  With a sigh of boredom the supposed novice looked round. She had large, dark eyes but her other features were small; her skin was smooth, brown, young and very dirty.

  “Hello,” she said with nought per cent friendliness in her voice. “What are you doing here? Yassou, Vangeli.”

  “Yassou, Nancy,” said Vangelis

  By now the large monk had poured five shots of colourless liquid into the tiny glasses; Vangelis darted forward, picked one up, muttered a health and almost drained it at a gulp. He glanced over his shoulder, as if to make sure that both Pibble and the basket were still where he’d left them, and poured another colourless liquid from the pitcher into the dregs. The result was a chalky white. Hell, thought Pibble, ouzo. The small monk lurched off his stool while this was going on, and had drained his own glass before Vangelis turned to carry his diluted drink back to his guard-post. The monk refilled his own glass from the bottle, not the pitcher, and wavered back to his desk with a second shot of neat ouzo. The girl swore in English and went to get her own; now that he saw her standing, Pibble realised that she was tiny; but for that experienced young face she might have been a twelve-year-old. As he followed her to the drink-table he was able to see what she had been painting—an icon, the Virgin and Child in the traditional pose, but done with slick modern brush-strokes. She had been copying the design from a postcard pinned to the board, and had finished the background and most of the robes. Only the faces were still blank.

  The artist-monk said something in that curious interrogative note which Pibble was so bad at catching; the big monk came round the table and handed over his cigar; the painter took several appreciative puffs at it and then offered it to Nancy, but she had been quick with her own cigarette and, though she didn’t light it, had an excuse for refusing. Pibble was glad to see that she hadn’t even sipped her ouzo, and in the confusion was able to refrain also. He followed her over to the window.

  The big monk repossessed his cigar and took one of several ancient box-files from the shelves by the cupboard, crossed the room again to pick the spectacles off the painter’s nose, put them on his own and began to hunt through the papers. The girl swore again, nastily; or at least the old word sounded nasty on her lips.

  “I’m afraid we interrupted you,” said Pibble, very stiffly.

  “Sorry,” said Nancy, tucking her cigarette back into its case. “You get into bad habits when nobody understands what you’re saying. The trouble is Father Polydore can’t paint without his glasses, so he’ll drink. And after a couple more drinks he won’t be able to paint, even with his glasses. And I can’t paint if he doesn’t, because then pictures aren’t holy and it would be a fraud to sell them to the tourists.”

  “I could help myself to another and knock the bottle over,” said Pibble, looking down at his untouched glass. Nancy’s, he noticed, was already empty. He was sure she hadn’t drunk it.

  “There’s a dozen more in the cupboard,” said Nancy. “We’re in for a session with Vangelis here.”

  Her eyes followed the movement of his hand as he edged his glass over the sill and tipped the liquor out. She must have done the same, but her look was not one of complicity.

  “I can’t stand the taste,” he said.

  “I like it,” she said, “but I’m off liquor.”

  The large monk called, and Vangelis left his post and pulled up a chair opposite the central seat of the High Table. The monk tossed him a sheet of paper. He picked it up and stared mu it, rubbing his chin. The monk snatched it back and, holding it at arm’s length, started to read it out in a deep, intoning voice.

  “Vangelis can’t read,” said Nancy, “let alone legal Greek. What the hell’s all this about?”

  “I was helping the old man to pick olives, and I was up the tree he’d shown me, picking away, when Vangelis appeared underneath and started bawling me out. It looks as though we’ve come down here to look at a legal document.”

  “You’ve come down here to blow your tops on ouzo,” said Nancy sourly. “What kind of a tree was it?”

  “Are there different kinds? I suppose there must be. The olives looked just like the other ones but the tree hadn’t been pruned for several years.”

  “He’s a bloody old crook,” said Nancy. “If it hadn’t been pruned, that means that nobody was quite sure who it belonged to, so no one was prepared to do the work. But anyone would pick the fruit if they got a chance, especially if they could get a stranger to do the dirty work. These early olives are worth a mint.”

  “They seem pretty engrossed,” said Pibble. “Will it be rude if we turn our backs on them? I’d like to look at the view.”

  “No, it’s all right,” she said. “In fact I’d be glad to keep out of the row. Vangelis is my landlord, sort of—that’s to say he lets me live in a hut in his vineyard—and I earn my keep from the Fathers. Anyway, it’s worth looking at.”

  There was just room for a pair of shoulders between the window’s edge and the central pillar. Pibble leaned his elbows on the gold sill and craned out. Faint noises, and the feel of the air, had prepared him for half of what he saw—the sea lolling against the rocks of the deeply indented bay a hundred feet below. But not the other half. Where the cliffs should have plunged sheer there was nothing but building—blue and pink and gold, ornate and plain, arched windows and square, a vertical village appliqué-ed to the rock. He might have been leaning out of the window of a city fiat and looking at a complex old tenement across the square, except that where the traffic would have churned there was still water, and the buildings didn’t reach to it; on an irregular line, but always at least twenty feet above the surface, they stopped and became natural rock. In places where the cliff sloped back there were quite big areas of roofing, the common rounded tiles of the Mediterranean, or a scree of slates; but mostly the walls went vertically up, pocked with windows, scarred with erratic balconies. It was like … like the houses of a town pictured in a mediaeval manuscript, all on top of each other? Yes, a bit. No, it was like the combs of wild bees clinging to the cliff.

  “Crippen!” he said at last. “How old is it?”

  “Oh, bits of it are very old. There’s always been a monastery here, ever since St. Sporophore.”

&nb
sp; “I’ve missed out on him.”

  “He was a beautiful youth, a Christian, and one of the pagan emperors wanted to make him his lover. Domitian, I should think. It’s usually Domitian. So he prayed to be made unacceptable to the emperor, and the Virgin Mary came to him in a vision and gave him a beak and covered his body with feathers, which made the emperor cross enough to peg him out on a hill to be eaten by crows. But the crows undid the ropes and picked him up and carried him over the sea and set him down in a cave here, in the cliff, and fed him like Elijah. And that made him so holy that a group of disciples came and formed a … a lavra, I think the word is … and filled up the other caves and then started to build huts on the rock, and the monastery grew out of that. Until about two hundred years ago you couldn’t reach it except by being lowered from the top or pulled up from the sea.”

  Pibble missed his moment to ask about the harbour, because he was amused by the story and the way Nancy told it, as though all the parts of it were as true as each other.

  “Does St. Sporophore have his own day?” he said.

  “Of course he does. As a matter of fact it’s next Sunday, November the first.”

  “But that’s All Saints’ Day, isn’t it?”

  “Not in the Eastern Church. They have their Ton Panton on the first Sunday after Pentecost. But actually St. Sporophore’s day is a bit like All Saints’ here, because they do a marathon service for all the other holy men who’ve lived in the monastery. There’ve been hundreds of them.”

  Pibble looked at the nicked and noduled cliff-scape and thought of the centuries of occupation by bearded, black-robed monastics. He remembered the legend.

  “The monks must look quite like crows,” he said. “I mean, from the other side—if there were one on that balcony there. How many of them are there?”

  “Only these two old birds.”