The Lizard in the Cup

by Peter Dickinson

“It’s a hell of a lot for them to keep up, isn’t it? Or does the government help?”

  “Nobody’s bothered till just recently. Look, over there, there’s a whole patch of roofs fallen in. And round to our right—you can’t see it from here, but it’s a bit beyond the Catholicon—a strip of cells fell out about twenty years ago, from top to bottom, and now you have to get across to the other side on planks.”

  “Someone was mending the wall at the top,” said Pibble.

  “Yes, they’ve come into money. They’re probably the richest men on the island—I mean, of the people who really belong here. Ages ago, in the nineteen-thirties, I think, the government in Athens confiscated a lot of land from the monasteries all over Greece. They used to be huge landowners before that, but then they became poor, and that’s one of the reasons why you practically never see a young monk, except in places like Athos. Anyway the government couldn’t get rid of all the land at once without playing hell with land prices, so they sold it or gave it away bit by bit. But then there was the war, and other things, and a lot of it was never sold and two years ago this government—you know, the Colonels—passed a decree to give back anything that hadn’t been sold to the monasteries. There was quite a lot on Hyos, all in little scattered patches, where people had made wills leaving the monks strips of land here and there. And it had always been a bit unlucky to take monastery land—though not nearly as unlucky as it was to sell it afterwards. I know a family in the town who did that, and within three months the mother had died of apoplexy and the two elder sons drowned fishing in a calm sea. So Father Chrysostom has been going round checking on his property. The first thing he did with the money was to buy these gruesome tables. There used to be fabulous stone benches in here, but he chucked them out. That’s a bit of one you can see down there—no, don’t bother—it’s only when you know what it is that you can see it isn’t a rock. He didn’t start repairing the monastery until he found he had enough money to be wasteful with it. By the way, I bet you he went picking olives next to Vangelis on purpose, as a way of checking whether he could claim those particular trees. You must have been a godsend to him—he’s a cynical old bastard.”

  “He knew all about how to light a cigar.”

  “He would. Are they your cigars?”

  “I was given them—beads for the natives, sort of. I don’t smoke.”

  “Are you staying at the Aeschylus? You don’t look the type.”

  “No, I’m staying with a friend.”

  “In one of the South Bay villas? I see quite a lot of that gang.”

  “No, the other side of the town. Porphyrocolpos, it’s called.”

  “Buck sent you up here?” she asked.

  “Buck Budweiser? No. You’ve met him?”

  “Well … he’s been up here a couple of times in one of those beach-buggy things. He drives me mad, talking all the time, showing off his Greek. He’s better at it than I am, though his accent is gruesome. I thought he was alone there.”

  “No—Mr. Thanatos is there now.”

  “He’s your friend?”

  “Well, sort of.”

  She stared at him round the pillar. Her look slowly changed from astonishment to something harder—either that chilliness he’d heard in her first words, or else the prospector’s madness which seemed to infect everybody—even a grubby girl who lived in a hut on a hill—at the mention of that gold-loded name.

  “I’m not that type either,” said Pibble. “I did a job for him once, and I was in Corfu, and he wanted me to talk about another one.”

  Her look didn’t change. He heard a bumbling noise behind him and Nancy withdrew into the room. He did the same, and found Father Polydore swaying there with the bottle in his hand. He filled their glasses, inaccurately, and tossed the now empty bottle through the window.

  “Epharisto,” said Nancy and Pibble together, raising their glasses to sip the vile muck.

  “Fuck off,” said Father Polydore, smiling bluely.

  “Some sod of a sailor taught him that,” said Nancy. “Told him it was the polite thing to say. It’s the only English he knows.”

  “Angliko?” queried Father Polydore.

  “Very good,” said Pibble. “Poli kalo.”

  “He’s a bit simple,” said Nancy. “That’s why I’m allowed in in here at all. I’m a bit simple too. If I weren’t, I’d be living down at the villas, instead of in Vangelis’ hut. When he’s finished his next glass, try and get him to say something about me, and you’ll find he uses the masculine.”

  She gave a sharp cry as Father Polydore tottered over to the desks, but stayed where she was. Father Chrysostom looked up from a document he was expounding to Vangelis, got to his feet and strode swiftly round the High Table. Meanwhile Father Polydore had picked up a brush and jabbed vaguely into several paint pots before holding it wavering above Nancy’s unfinished icon. Father Chrysostom arrived just in time to slide his document between the brush and the picture; Father Polydore painted a brisk oval on it, and two long eyebrows before Father Chrysostom took the brush out of his hand and led him gently back to the High Table. He took the glasses off his face and put them on Father Polydore’s, and settled him down to continue reading the document to Vangelis while he fished and fussed in the store cupboard. Father Polydore read in a brisk, reedy chant, as though the document were part of a liturgy. Pibble was interested to see that the cupboard was well stocked with bottles and cans, and also held a number of pots and jugs, all carefully covered with little squares of cloth with beads round the edge.

  “They’re very hygienic, in some ways,” he said.

  Nancy was baffled.

  “They haven’t washed for fifty years,” she said.

  “I meant about covering food up.”

  “Oh, that’s because of the samimithi. Everybody covers food and drink up on Hyos. I don’t know about the other islands.”

  “What’s a samimithi?”

  “It’s a sort of lizard. A gecko. A little pinkish thing with pads on the end of its fingers so that it can run up walls. If it runs across your food you get very ill, and if it drowns in your milk you die.”

  “Is it true?”

  “I don’t know,” she said restlessly. “I tried to look it up last time I was in Athens, but that was before I’d seen one, and my Greek wasn’t very good then—it isn’t now—and I thought people were talking about a sort of spider. Anyway, it wasn’t in any of the books under that name, but it might have a different name on the mainland. But it isn’t in any of the guidebooks either. They usually tell you about things like scorpions.”

  Pibble looked at her. She’d spoken in an offhand mutter which at first made him thing she was bored with his company; then he sensed that it was something else, perhaps a general fidgetiness and frustration at being prevented from painting. She looked, if anything, slightly feverish rather than lethargic.

  “It sounds a useful custom for a country with so many flies in it,” he said, and told her about the hotel at Portofino where, years ago, Mary had complained about flies in the hot milk and the waiter had fetched a sieve and sieved out a whole pile of corpses before their eyes and put the milk back in triumph on the table. Nancy might not have been listening.

  “Let’s go and look at the Catholicon,” she said. “I’m not allowed in, but you might as well see it.”

  She called a brief word to the men at the High Table, who answered without looking up, and led the way out through an archway to the left of the painting-desks. They walked into a narrow passage, with cell-like rooms on their left, between the passage and the sea. In the first one every inch of wall was covered with tatty reproductions of scenes involving the Virgin Mary.

  “Father Polydore’s pin-ups,” said Nancy. “Hagiography can he just like pornography. In fact I don’t have to paint any different now from when I was doing bra ads in London. Careful here.”r />
  The corridor dipped and curved. It was more like a country lane, accommodating itself to the contours of a hill, than any mason-measured thing. Pibble put out his hand against the inner wall at a steep, dark place to steady himself, and found that it was indeed the rock of the cliff, though all its projections were polished and greasy from a million similar touchings.

  “The Catholicon is the main church, isn’t it?” he said.

  “Yes. There are a lot of little chapels—most of them are caves, really—but the Catholicon is the important one. It’s where the monks met for all their day-to-day services.”

  “I’m surprised you’re allowed into the monastery at all,” he said. “On Mount Athos …”

  “I know, I know. Father Polydore’s forgotten about all that. I do the backgrounds of his pictures for him, and he does the faces, and that means he can do one a day like he used to twenty years ago. They’re still holy, provided he does the faces. Father Chrysostom doesn’t care what anyone thinks. It’s his monastery and he likes company—that’s why he bought those tables. But the island women won’t come beyond the gateway at the top—a lot of them say I’m a whore, trying to steal the Fathers’ treasure. They don’t blame the Fathers; they think it’s quite natural for them to want to have their own whore—but really they all know, with another part of their minds, that Father Polydore is only interested in painting and Father Chrysostom is only interested in boys. Last year he had a ghastly German hiker who. . .”

  “What treasure?” said Pibble. He thought that Nancy’s previous brusque animosity might be easier to cope with than her current brusque frankness.

  “There’s always treasure,” said Nancy, stopping where a wooden walk spanned an overhung section of cliff to which the monks had been unable to attach masonry.

  “Anywhere where people are used to being very poor they always know that there’s treasure buried in some old man’s orchard, or up in the hills, or down a well. Haven’t you noticed?”

  “Like a cargo cult?”

  “Or the pools. And there sometimes is treasure, really. All these islands were full of pirates for more than a thousand years. Christian pirates, Turks, Russians, all with secret harbours and so on. This was one.”

  She leant on the rail of the walk and pointed down at the innocent-looking water. Pibble stood beside her. From here he could see all round the bay. There was no perceptible landing-place. He knew that he ought to be hurrying back to the town to check on the meaning of the helicopter.

  “It doesn’t look very hospitable,” he said. “Could they get ashore?”

  “If the monks would let them. There are places where you can lower a ladder. Vangelis’ aunt told me that usually the monks were the pirates themselves, but Father Chrysostom says that’s the sort of lie you’d expect from someone whose second cousin married a communist. I expect that the monks had a sort of arrangement with the pirates, the Christian ones anyway. They were a front.”

  Pibble grunted, thinking of Stubbs of Boston.

  “You know,” said Nancy, “selling the pirates food, looking after the loot, taking a small cut, lying to the authorities. It’s the only other possible harbour on the island, apart from the main one in the town. And even if the pirates weren’t friendly they’d have been pretty safe—I found some brass cannon over at that end there, too. Their only trouble would have been water. The well’s down the hill. Anyway, there may have been treasure here once, but my guess is that they spent it on the Catholicon. Come and see.”

  She moved off brusquely. The walkway led into another wriggling corridor, and then on to a much more imposing arcade than anything Pibble had yet seen. Stone pillars supported round-topped arches, all carefully carved; the pavement was a pattern of egg-shaped black pebbles set into mortar; the inner wall was of squared stone, and contained two dark-glazed windows and a large painted door. Nancy twisted the handle and leaned her small weight against the wood, like a waif at an orphanage portal. Pibble helped her push the door open.

  “You won’t be able to see much,” she said in the nervy whisper that agnostics tend to adopt when inspecting religious monuments. “I’ll wait here.”

  The church was a dim and incense-reeking cavern lit by two dismal lanterns. At first their reddish flames were all that Pibble could see, but gradually glittering awoke in the gloom, where the light was reflected from glass and gold. The place was as oppressive as a rain-forest; heavy pillars carried round arches, and every flat or curved surface was covered with mosaics and pictures; right above his head he could just see the Christos Pantocrator frowning down from the unnecessary dome. Unnecessary because this was a church hollowed out of the cliff, an extension probably of an existing cave; but the diggers had shaped it as though it needed to stand in the open air, giving it the inner architecture of any other Greek church that had real walls and a real roof. But they could never give it windows other than the two in the outer wall, and these were filled with green and ochre diamonds of stained glass; so where the mosaics were meant to dazzle with Mediterranean light, as they do at Rimini, these could only gloom in the dark. Pibble paced about for a few minutes, until he felt as though the rock were about to fall in and crush him, clenching him in its fist. It was difficult to move with decent slowness to the door. The reek of incense seemed to follow him out.

  “Do you like it?” said Nancy, throwing her cigarette into the sea and looking suddenly cheerful.

  “Not much, honestly. Do you?”

  “I’ve never been in. But you can give yourself a few marks for good taste, because nobody else likes it either.”

  “It’s very odd, and that’s better than nothing. Do you know how old it is?”

  “Victorian. Father Chrysostom lent me a useless old book about the island, written by a schoolmaster before the first war, pages and pages about the temple just down the bill where there’s only a bit of pillar standing, and less than half a page about the monastery. He says the Catholicon was enlarged and all the mosaics put in after the English left. You know the English governed the Ionian islands, and Corfu, until eighteen-sixty-something …”

  “I saw boys playing cricket in Corfu.”

  “They do here, too. You must go to the English cemetery— it’s a real weepie. What was … Oh, yes, my theory is that the monks still had some pirate treasure which they couldn’t let on about while the English were here, being strict with the natives, you know … but they blued it on the Catholicon as soon as we’d left. I mean, these pillars—they match, and they’re good marble, and we haven’t got any marble quarries on the island. If they’d been penny-pinching they’d have used local stone, and bits of the temple, and so on …”

  “I saw what looked like a bit of a classic pillar when I was coming out of the town. Part of the wall of a house.”

  “That’s right. Anybody uses anything they want for anything here, if it doesn’t belong to anyone else. Father Chrysostom pulls down bits of the monastery and rebuilds them just as he fancies. Last spring he … Shall we go back?”

  As they moved along the arcade Pibble said, “Was that St. Sporophore’s original cave?”

  She hesitated, then answered with a rush.

  “That’s what Father Chrysostom says, but it doesn’t mean anything. It takes about a week for people to persuade themselves that something new and horrid is old and holy. A few years ago, Mark Hott told me, the priest down at the church in the town sold their miracle-working icon to an art-dealer, and everybody was furious and there were riots until he came back from Athens with another icon—it looks old too, but Mark says it’s a good fake—and that worked some miracles and everybody was happy, and now if you ask they’ll tell you it’s been here for a thousand years and was an original portrait of the Virgin painted by St. Luke—even people who had their windows smashed in the riots. But I don’t see why it shouldn’t be St. Sporophore’s cave.”

  “I’d have expec
ted something smaller,” said Pibble.

  She looked at him as though he’d said something odd, then led him through the dark and dazzle of the honeycomb in silence. Pibble mused on the life of the two remaining monks. In a few years—very few, to judge by the blue of their lips—they would both be dead, leaving no memorial except a submerged hill of ouzo bottles below their window. The uselessness of such a life-style oppressed him; it seemed a caricature of his own, with a few minor exaggerations; of most lives, in fact. Nancy oppressed him too. She was like a curious hermaphroditic doll, a toy only occasionally loved, but usually left to lie, battered and dirty, in this forgotten corner. To live out one’s sappy youth in a hut in a vineyard, and toil at horrible slick icons.

  The men were quiet in the Refectory. Father Chrysostom and Vangelis were playing dice with moody concentration; Father Polydore was asleep beside them with his head in his hands, as though he had fallen asleep at his prayers. Nancy went over to her desk and swore again, but gaily; the same word sounded perfectly acceptable in this different tone; Pibble went to look.

  Evidently Father Polydore had found the inspiration to complete her icon before he passed out, and had done so in brusque, careless brushstrokes, a world away from the genteel inanity of his sober art. Though the blank for the head of the Holy Child had been left in profile, it had been filled in with both eyes visible, and a spare nose.

  “Influence of Picasso,” said Pibble.

  “Oh, yes,” said Nancy quite seriously. “The old monkey could draw like a saint if he’d been exposed to decent influences. I couldn’t. This is my achievement peak.”

  She flicked a disgusted grubby hand at the slippery brushwork of the Virgin’s blue headdress.

  “I must go now,” said Pibble. “Thank you for being my guide and showing me everything.”

  “Everything worth seeing,” she said.

  “There’s one thing …” he began. She stiffened, but he hesitated and went on, “I’d rather like to meet some of the people at the South Bay villas—can I just go and knock on the door and say hello?”