by John Mole
‘Melons like breasts,’ he promised one day over our lunchtime ouzo. ‘A gift from God and I deserve it.’ He spat to avoid the evil eye, a dry spit as we were at table.
‘Before the war those were the days for melons. They came from all over the island. They even came from Athens. The men all dressed up in the old costumes and had a market at the side of the lake. The dealers didn’t have trucks then, of course, they had mule carts. And there were peddlers and card players and gypsies with violins and clarinets. What a time we had. There was even a whore or two from Athens earning their holiday money. Summer was slack for them in those days because their clients spent August with their families. They say it’s different now. With the fast boats and the good roads Father joins the family for weekends and says he has to work in Athens during the week. In fact he’s having a good time with his girlfriends. And of course the girls stay in Athens for the tourists. What was I saying?’
‘Rubbish as usual,’ said Elpida, standing at the stove with her back to us.
We were having keftethes again. We had them three times a week. I had made the mistake that you learn to avoid with your mother of saying how much I liked the ones she had cooked the first day.
‘The melon market,’ I prompted.
‘Ah yes. The whores rented tents from the gypsies. They had guards because we boys would try to cut the guy ropes. You should have seen the farmers drinking and gambling and strutting in front of the women in their old Albanian costumes with wads of money tucked behind their daggers in their belts.’
‘What did their wives say?’ I asked.
‘Nothing. They knew what happened in the tents but what could they do?’ He chuckled and shot one of his crafty glances at Elpida’s broad rump. ‘My uncle never went. He had been on the ships in Piraeus and when he retired he came back with a good-looking wife much younger than he was. Her name was Thekla. He told everybody she was from an old Constantinople family ruined by the Turks. She put on airs, I can tell you. You’d think she was the pasha’s wife.
‘My uncle got my father to sell his melons for him while he stayed at home with his wife, because he didn’t want her to see the drunkenness and immorality that went on. The papas set him up as an example to the rest of us. You’d think they were Aghios Ioannes and the Virgin herself the way they carried on. They missed the melon fair two years running and then it came round again. Thekla was down in Aliveri when the ferry came in with the whores. They saw her on the promenade and fell on her like a long-lost relative. It was all round the island by nightfall. My uncle never recovered and he died a few months later. It turns out they weren’t even married. She went back to Athens. Back to work with the girls, I suppose. What was I saying?’
‘Rubbish as usual,’ said Elpida from the stove.
‘About the melon market.’
‘Ah yes. Everyone had a good time. When it was all over the strangers went away with the melons and the money. All we had was a few trinkets for the women.’
‘That wasn’t much.’
‘Bah. Those were good times. And we had seeds for next year.’
‘What happens today?’
‘The dealers come in their trucks and we pay the money into the mobile branch of the National Bank. It parks in the square on a Tuesday.’
‘That’s how it should be done,’ said Elpida, plonking down the dish of keftethes in tomato sauce, along with its aura of garlic and tomato and mountain oregano. ‘We aren’t peasants any more. We are Europeans. We know things.’
We crossed ourselves and tucked in.
Labour of Herakles
Now I knew I wasn’t going to get our money back, I launched myself on the task of rebuilding the house with an enthusiasm that took me by surprise. As anyone knows who has moved house, you don’t feel you belong until you muck about with it, paint the walls, get a new kitchen. In this case muck was the right word. The first job was to clear out the goat dung.
Ever mindful of the opportunities for indoctrination, I pointed out round the family supper table in Athens that Herakles – or Hercules as he was known to the Romans – had a similar task. As one of his twelve labours he had to muck out the cowsheds of a king called Augeas in return for a tenth of the king’s enormous herd. He diverted a river through them and did the job in a day. When Augeas went back on the deal, saying that it was the river that had done the work, Herakles killed him and installed Augeas’s son in his place. In commemoration, Herakles founded the Olympic Games.
Having established my heroic credentials, we went through the other labours, most of which involved killing wild animals like lions and boars and dragons. One of the children asked why Herakles had to do the labours in the first place. We looked it up and discovered that it was because he had murdered his wife and children. They did the washing up and went to bed without argument that night.
Unfortunately, the only stream near the house in Horio came from the spring lower down the hill. There was no alternative to manual labour. I thought of hiring someone to do it, but I wanted to get stuck in myself, to feel the place was mine, to possess it.
I bought tools from Haralambos, the distinguished-looking man with iron-grey hair who had persuaded Ajax the butcher to give me a receipt. By trade a plumber, he owned a business that catered for every stage of house building, from piles of sand to doorbells that chimed Für Elise. His own house behind the yard was based on the design of a Texas ranch house, adapted to local taste by the addition of concrete stilts and a lean-to for the goats.
When I arrived he was reading the newspaper among the bathroom fittings. Even sitting on a bidet he looked distinguished. He wore a crisp, white shirt rolled to the elbows and was freshly shaven, even though it was the beginning of the week and not Friday, the customary shaving day. I admired his classic profile in a dozen bronze tints in a range of Italian bathroom cabinets. His Grecian nose was from a vase painting, a continuation of his forehead, long and straight with no indentation at the bridge. I warmed to him when he spoke to me in Greek and not German.
‘My friend! Welcome! We are compatriots now.’
‘Thank you. And thank you for the symbol.’
For a moment he looked puzzled and I wondered if he had forgotten his intervention in the café. But he had a mentally handicapped son and was therefore more skilful at dealing with foreigners than his fellow villagers were. He mentally adjusted a vowel or two.
‘Ah, the contract. It is nothing. You have to do things right. A little cup of coffee?’
I turned down the invitation with the conventional ‘I have drunk one, thank you’ and escaped with a fork and a rake and a warning about snakes.
‘Be careful. They are dangerous in spring. They live in the stone walls. There was a man in Rodi who fixed up an old house. He plastered over a nest. When he dug a hole in the plaster for an electric socket, a snake jumped out and bit him between the eyes.’
So I also bought rubber boots and thick gloves and relied on my Buddy Holly glasses for the rest. I plodded past the cemetery with the tools on my shoulder, feeling like an illustration from a mediaeval book of hours. It was a delicious spring day, warm sun and clear sky. The air was like wine, or rather gin and tonic with a zap of ice from the north and a zest of lemon from the south. I was apprehensive and excited as if I were setting out on a long journey. I still treasure the memory of those last moments, when delight and dreams remained unspoilt by the harsh reality of the weeks to come.
First, I dragged out the door that I had knocked down from the first floor. It was rotten but I salvaged the massive iron lock, although the key was missing. I set to work on several decades of manure. I found that by digging the rake in and pulling, I could roll up a layer of fermenting straw like a carpet and drag it out into the yard. Initially the warm and cloying smell was not unpleasant, like the sweetness of Turkish drains sniffed from a distance. It became worse as I dug down through the years. Although I breathed through my mouth, I gagged at every rakeful.
The ch
aracter-building part of the project came sooner than I expected. My arms ached. Sweat poured down my body and filled my new rubber boots. Blisters sprouted on my hands inside the rough work gloves. It soon became obvious that goats were not the only denizens of the straw. If I stood quietly there were rustlings around me and the glimpse of a thin brown tail. On the first evening I left my work trousers hanging on a wooden peg in the wall. When I came back in the morning, all that was left was the leather belt, a few loops and a pile of metal buttons on the straw underneath. I woke up wild bees as big as walnuts and a nest of orange hornets. The air was filled with angry humming. Twice I ran away into the yard and up the hill, flagellating myself around the head and body with my discarded sweater like a demented Jesuit. I became more and more nervous as I dug deeper. What other creatures had made their homes in the manure?
With a grunt I dug the rake in and pulled back a swathe of matted straw. I looked down on a snake. Its black, whiplike body seemed to stretch from wall to wall. The grey scales around its mouth resembled the puckered skin of an old man. It had an eye like a glistening black pearl and a flickering tongue. It moved. I yelled. I swung the rake. A jarring shock like electricity ran up my arm. I heard the tines clang against the stone wall. I turned and fled.
I stumbled up the steep path, my heart thumping in my throat. My arm tingled as if it were still plugged in to the current. I wrenched it round with my other hand and plucked at the skin, trying to find the bite. The English voice, full of common sense, told me that this was a friendly, mouse-eating, milk-drinking, pussy-cat snake and that the pins and needles in my arm came from banging the rake against the wall. Eventually shame overcame fear and I tiptoed back to the house in squelchy boots, ready to run away again.
The snake lay on the straw, curled around the rake handle. Two tines pierced its head. It was about four feet long. Like a follower of Asclepius, the ancient god of medicine who has a snake curled round his staff, I carefully picked up the rake. I shook it at arm’s length, spattering cold blood on the ground, until the snake slithered off and I could poke it under a bush.
After this I was more wary. I wriggled the rake in gently instead of whacking it down. About a decade down I found the missing key of the door. It still turned in the lock with a satisfying double chunk.
Fear of venomous creatures in the straw nurtured my feeling of being watched. When I glanced over my shoulder I saw only a flutter that might have been a bird or heard a rustle that might have been a goat, but once I was sure I saw a face peeping through a clump of buddleia. I had to tell myself not to be stupid, satyrs only existed to keep the children interested.
Around midday, on the second day of labouring at my dung, I looked round for the umpteenth time and found that I was indeed being watched by a man of about sixty, leaning on his stick in the middle of a flock of sheep. A khaki greatcoat was slung nonchalantly across his shoulders over a thick grey flannel suit of unredeemable shapelessness. A debonair red cotton scarf was tied round his neck in place of a collar for his striped blue shirt and his oxblood shoes were spotless. A grey cloth cap was perched at a rakish angle on his grizzled head and he sported a stylish brown-dyed moustache. He nodded to the house.
‘Turkish,’ he shouted. I leaned on my rake, reflecting his body language to facilitate bonding and grateful of the excuse to stop.
‘Turkish,’ I repeated in a low voice, hoping he would get the message that I was only foreign and not deaf.
‘Jawohl. Turkish. House Turkish,’ he boomed. ‘Door very low.’ His free hand patted the air about three feet off the ground.
‘Turks little people,’ I replied and nodded vigorously to humour him. Either he was retarded or he thought I was.
‘Turks. On horses. Very big.’ This time he patted the air about six feet off the ground. ‘Get off horses no. Never. Greek door low. Turks in houses no come in. Jawohl.’ He repeated this intelligence in a louder voice.
‘Oh, I understand. The Turks always remain on horses so the Greeks made the doors low so the Turks could not ride into the house.’ I said this softly in as fluent Greek as I could muster in order to get on syntactical terms.
‘Bah. Turks,’ he said and spat on the ground. Then something struck him. ‘Greek? Speak Greek? Bravo.’
He made a loud brrrhing sound at a sheep that was clambering up my olive tree. His conversation was constantly heckled with brrrhs and shouts and whistles to stop his charges straying into a wheat field or climbing trees for their tender twigs. He stared me in the eye.
‘Deuts?’ he asked hopefully.
I raised my chin and tutted. ‘Englesos.’
But the breakthrough had been made and he spoke in whole sentences. ‘I know the Germans. I was a soldier in the north. They are good fighters. They killed my two brothers. I walked back all the way. I have never been off the island since. When I got back home they had to cut the boots from off my feet. They were all one with the skin.’
He looked down fondly at his polished ox-blood shoes. I wanted to ask why he did not feel the same about the Germans who had killed his brothers as he did about Turks whom he had never met, but my Greek was not up to it. He brrrhed and shook his stick at a sheep that was chewing the sleeve of my sweater slung on the fence.
Ruddy-faced Ajax the butcher told me later that Barba Vasilis had killed an Italian in the war by hitting him on the forehead with a stone from twenty paces. The Italian had been coming at him with a bayonet.
In 1940 the dictator Metaxas refused to let Mussolini’s army enter Greece. His defiance is commemorated every year with Oxi Day on 28 October – the x is pronounced like the ch in the Scottish loch.fn1 Oxi means no. The story is that the Italian ambassador came to see Metaxas in the middle of the night of 28 October 1940 and gave him an ultimatum based on various pretexts about frontier violations with Albania. Metaxas waited for an hour or two and then gave his one-word reply. OXI was the massive newspaper headline the next day. Every Greek who read that headline must have tossed their head, raised their eyebrows and given a great inhaling tut of defiance, like a waiter in a taverna when you ask for something that isn’t on the menu. To foreigners, even me after thirty years here, it looks contemptuous and bloody-minded, but in 1940 it was most appropriate. With great courage and resourcefulness the Greek army held the Italians in the mountains of the north for nine months, before Hitler lost patience and sent Germans to finish the job.
Barba Vasilis’s biblical feat was not a fluke. Any Greek who keeps sheep is an excellent stone thrower. I often saw him hit a sheep on the head from twenty yards. When he was close enough he whacked their heads with his stick. They didn’t seem to mind, although it’s hard to know if sheep get a headache. From a distance they are soft and cuddly, but close to, underneath the woolly sweaters, they are hard and bony and a devil to catch hold of.
Stone throwing is also useful against the sheepdogs that guard the mountain flocks. Greek sheepdogs are not the eager-to-please collies of the Welsh borders but fierce creatures who will attack anything that comes near, especially wolves and hikers. Stones are the first line of defence and a stout walking stick the second. You don’t see so much stone throwing among the young these days, however. Only the old people keep animals. Where’s the boy who looks after the sheep? He’s in school until he’s sixteen and in the crammer learning maths and English in the holidays. He rides a motorbike not a mule and watches television instead of hunting cats and frogs and little birds with stones.
It took three back-breaking days to get down to the floor. Outside the house was a vast dung heap swarming with flies and villagers anxious to know what I was going to do with this treasure. There was too much to fertilise my own patch of land, which was already rich in droppings. Ajax had the most forceful claim. He insisted that he had sold the house and not the contents. It was his father’s dung and his grandfather’s dung. Spiros, the genial carpenter with the yard-brush moustache who had witnessed the deposit, kept doves and chickens in a ruined house opposite min
e and stressed the duties of a neighbour. Aussie Alekos the taxi driver called on the bonds of patriotism – after twenty years in Melbourne he knew all the words to God Save the Queen. Dyspeptic Dimitris the builder had no claim at all, but made the most impassioned plea on behalf of his eight children whose imminent death from starvation and disease could only be averted by a few hundred-weight of manure. He would collect it that very evening in his pick-up.
I faced a serious dilemma. In these early days it was vital to establish good relations with everyone in the village, but at the same time I had to make clear that I wasn’t a pushover, a foreigner to be milked.
‘What are you going to do with all that dung?’ asked stylish Barba Vasilis, inspecting a long little fingernail.
‘Why, you want it too?’
‘Me? No thanks. But don’t give it away.’
‘What shall I do?’
‘Sell it.’
‘No. I don’t want to sell it. It cost me nothing.’
Vasilis did not actually say ‘Eh, crazy foreigners’, but it was all in the shrug of the shoulders.
To tell the truth the thought had crossed my mind, but I shrank from the haggling.
‘Give it back to God then. The priest wants to plant roses in front of the church.’
It was a great idea. I could get rid of the dung without favouritism and with credit. Even those who thought it a waste to decorate the church instead of growing vegetables couldn’t say so out loud. The pious gesture would establish my public spirit and cost me nothing.
That evening I changed into a clean shirt and trousers as a sign of respect and lay in wait with an ouzo at one of the little metal tables outside Yannis’s café. Every evening between six and seven Papas Konstantinos made his round of the village. He was in his seventies, with the long white beard, lined cheeks and large black eyes of a Byzantine saint. His hair was lumped into an untidy bun that never sat neatly on the nape of his neck but slipped round under one ear or the other. He stalked around the village with an air not of the shepherd tending his flock but the commandant showing the flag. As he passed, I downed my ouzo, took a deep breath and accosted him in the middle of the street. All eyes were on us.
