by John Mole
I sat down at the imitation cast iron patio table. Up on the hill I could see my house with its two blank windows staring sightless. Eleni came out with a cup of Nescafé and a glass of water on a tray. She had combed her hair and changed into a clean white frock and she smelt of perfume.
Ajax lurched out in furry leopard-skin slippers, jeans and a string vest, which raised lozenges on his belly. Black hair sprouted from his chest and neck and shoulders. He rubbed his face with the backs of his hands and finger-combed the glistening quiff that flopped over his forehead. He sat astride a chair, his burly arms resting on the back, and groomed his handsome moustaches.
‘Eleni, let’s have a beer. Johnny will have one too. Engländer trinken Frühschoppen, nich’?’
‘Not so early. The coffee is very nice.’
‘You’re right. It’s too early for beer. Eleni, he’ll have a whisky.’
I tried to put out of my mind the thought of ruddy-faced Ajax coming home in the small hours and pawing Eleni with meaty hands. He had the biggest Mercedes in the village and the biggest freezer and the biggest wine barrel and the biggest herd of goats and the most beautiful wife, who had given him not one son but two, may they live for you.
‘You’re a great man, Ajax.’
‘Was sagst du?’
‘I’m sorry. I was speaking English.’
‘Ich sprech’ kein Englisch.’
‘I was saying you’re a good man to help me like this.’
‘Nichts zu danken.’
Eleni came back with a bottle of Glen Gorbals and olives and two glasses. She did not sit down with us but stood like a servant. Ajax poured two whiskies and clinked his glass against mine.
‘Our health,’ he said and drained it in one gulp. Not wanting to seem standoffish, I did the same. I was ashamed that I didn’t have the nerve to turn down the drink, but actually it tasted quite good. You could get the habit. Ajax stood up, clapped me on the shoulder and went away to get showered and dressed.
‘Do you see me up there?’ I asked.
‘No. Why should I look up there?’ replied Eleni, her eyes flickering up the hill.
‘You were born there.’
‘Eh,’ she said.
Eh is not in Greek-in-a-Week but it is a vital word, a verbal shrug, resignation and defiance.
Ajax strode out, perfumed and glistening. We got into his Datsun pick-up. Our first stop was half a kilometre down the road at the house of Dimitris the builder. Two mixers, a compressor and a pick-up were parked outside on the road. The house looked permanently incomplete. Steel rods sprouted from the roof, a heap of breezeblocks might or might not have been an extension in the making, shuttering propped up the concrete veranda. The yard was a warren of breezeblock sheds roofed with Ellenit. Washing lines strung apparently at random fluttered with the clothes of eight children. Rusty oil drums full of cement and lime and plaster and rubble, piles of bricks and sand and gravel and steel bars lay around without any apparent order or arrangement. Goats and chickens wandered among them finishing off any green stuff that struggled through the lime and cement dust.
Dimitris’s wife Roula was busy with a long stick chasing a yelling little girl round the oil drums. She was a big-boned woman with close-set eyes and the voice of a siren, not one of the sweet-voiced sea nymphs that lured Homer’s sailors but an air-raid siren. All the village women had voices that could carry over several fields. I heard them at noon like a flock of angry seabirds, calling their husbands and children in to eat. Roula had the loudest voice of all, a high-pitched yodel, which she also used in normal conversation.
‘Where’s Dimitris?’ shouted Ajax. Mother and child stopped in their tracks, wide-eyed and panting.
‘The place,’ she shrieked and pointed her cane at a wooden privy in a corner of the yard next to a vegetable patch. ‘The old shit-bag’s been there all morning.’
Ajax acknowledged this intelligence with a wave of his hand, which was the signal for hunter and hunted to resume the chase. Roula was a split second faster off the mark and she caught her victim by the hair. I followed Ajax over to the privy accompanied by the sound of screams and the thwack of the stick on tender flesh.
The privy was the only part of the house that looked finished. It was patriotically painted blue and white like a sentry box. The door was decorated with heart-shaped holes. Ajax banged on it with his fist.
‘Come out you constipated bugger,’ was his greeting.
‘Constipated?’ came the reply. ‘Mother of God, if only I was. Just for a week. Or a day. Just one little day.’ Dimitris’s voice sounded muffled and distant, as if he had fallen into the pit. ‘What do you want? Can’t you see I’m busy?’
‘No we can’t, thank God. The foreigner wants your old tiles. You don’t need them.’
‘What do you mean? Are you mad? They are my grandfather’s,’ replied Dimitris.
‘Your grandfather doesn’t need them. We buried him last year, for God’s sake. The foreigner will give you five little drachmas each. You need the money.’
Ajax hectored and wheedled, the church bell tolled for the liturgy, Roula yodelled for her children and whacked them when they came, Dimitris grunted and farted behind the door and finally we settled on seven drachmas.
‘I’ll pick them up tomorrow.’
‘Pay me now, then. Tell Roula we agreed on four.’ The door opened a crack and a hand emerged. Ajax peeled off the notes, handed them over and the door slammed shut.
‘Watch what you use for paper,’ he shouted and thumped the door in farewell.
We set off in the pick-up on the road to Lepoura. On the outskirts of Neohori, we turned into a narrow track through a dense thicket of mountain oak and down to the bottom of a dry valley. We slowed down by a jumble of stone buildings, the largest of which boasted a handsome Ellenit roof, and parked next to a Toyota truck.
We pushed open the rough wooden garden gate. Bright nails and shards of pink tile were scattered on the ground beneath the eaves. In the corner of a potato patch was a neat stack of tiles, faded and moss-mottled. Ajax pointed to them and winked at me. The windows of the house were shuttered, but the front door was open and dark shapes moved behind the blue and white stripes of a fly curtain.
‘Ho, Thanassi,’ shouted Ajax. A middle-aged woman dressed in black came to the threshold. ‘Where’s Thanassis? I came to see him about his tiles.’
Without a word, the woman beckoned us inside. Amber candles flickered in the gloom and the air was heavy with beeswax and sweetness. Three old women, dressed in black with shawls over their heads, stood beside a table. On it lay a man in a dark suit and white shirt buttoned up to the neck. His eyes were closed and his arms were at attention by his sides. One of the women held up his right leg, stiff and heavy, while another pushed the foot into a shiny shoe. The third woman waved the flies away from his face with a newspaper.
‘God help us,’ exclaimed Ajax, crossing himself three times. ‘Condolences. Holy Mother of God. What happened? Heart?’
The middle-aged woman clutched her breast and rocked on her heels and in a high-pitched monotone gabbled a plaintive lament. I couldn’t take my eyes off the dead man. His jaw was tied up with a white cloth, so he looked as if he were suffering from nothing more serious than toothache. It was my first dead body and I waited for the appropriate feelings. I didn’t know what feelings to expect, which was worse than realising that I had none. It was all so matter-of-fact. The new widow sighed the final strophe of her lament.
‘He breathed out heavily three times and his soul departed. Do you want a coffee?’
‘No thanks,’ said Ajax, ‘we’ve had one. We have work to do. We have to load the tiles.’
‘What tiles?’
Ajax jerked his thumb towards the corpse. The two women were tying his feet together with cord, as if they were afraid he would leap off the table and run away.
‘Thanassis sold me the tiles. God rest him.’
‘How much did he ask for them?’
<
br /> ‘Four little drachmas.’
‘The fool. They’re worth ten.’
‘Bah. New ones cost ten. I shouldn’t have agreed on more than three. Thanassis got the best of me, may his soul be with God tonight.’
‘He doesn’t want to sell. He’s keeping them for the pigsty.’
‘He changed his mind. His very last words to me were Ajax my friend, you can have them for twenty. Then I can buy Voula that necklace I saw in Halkida …’
With that the widow burst into tears and Ajax turned to the body and crossed himself.
‘I won’t go back on his word,’ said the widow, crossed herself and took up her threnody again. ‘Thanassi, what have you done to me, have you no pity for me?’
I followed Ajax outside. I held the gate open and he reversed the pick-up as close as he could to the tiles. There were five hundred and by the time we finished I was pouring sweat and my hands were rubbed raw and stained red. We were fastening the tailgate when a green truck arrived. It had a loudspeaker on top of the cab and a canvas body supported by a metal tube frame. Two men got out, exchanged greetings with Ajax and unloaded a simple coffin from a pile of potatoes.
We followed them back inside. They put the coffin on the floor beside the table and bundled Thanassis in. His head clunked against the edge and fell on one side and fluid dribbled out of the corner of his mouth. The woman with the newspaper used it to wipe his chin. I helped them lift the coffin back on the table. A woman tucked a white sheet round the lower half of his body and placed an icon on his knees. They tied his hands together with a strip of white linen and put a long white candle between them.
Meanwhile, the widow brewed coffee and put ouzo and glasses beside the coffin. Ajax peeled money from the wad that he kept in his back pocket, watched closely by the other men who counted every note. He restored the wad to his right buttock, dug into his trouser pockets and looked at me.
‘Got any change?’ he asked, so brusquely that I didn’t dare ask why. I came up with a few ten drachma coins and held them out on my palm. Ajax took all of them and dropped them on the dead man’s chest like the tip you leave on a taverna table. He bent down and kissed the icon and then the marble forehead. Thankfully, I was not expected to do this. I obeyed with alacrity when Ajax said ‘Let’s go’.
Back along the narrow track up the side of the valley and through the thicket of oak and onto the road, the pick-up laboured under its new load. We passed more trucks coming the other way. Men sat in the cabs and women in black rode behind, holding onto the bars and peering out like calves on the way to the slaughterhouse.
‘Did Thanassis really sell them to you?’ I asked, picking a coffin splinter out of my palm.
‘He would have if he’d been spared. Don’t worry. You got a good price. So did he for where he’s going.’ Ajax hummed a few notes and started to sing. His voice was pleasant.
‘The world is a meadow and we are its grain … and Haros the harvester gathers what’s his …’
‘What’s that song?’
‘Haros,’ he said and mimed scissors with his fingers.
‘Charon?’
‘Charon, Haron, the same. You know, whenever I have a problem getting it up I think of old Haros asking for his fare and boum, I’m like a stallion.’ He guffawed and launched into a pop song about unrequited love with many slurs and vibratos and quarter tones.
We spent the rest of the day jolting over potholed roads and along rutted dirt tracks in search of tiles. We went higher and higher into the mountains. It was like driving over a Turkish carpet. The fields were covered with an intricate pattern of closely woven red, yellow and blue flowers against a fresh green background of new grass, guarded by stripes of meandering grey stone walls and the dark green scrollwork of oleanders. The hills ahead were a mosaic of flowering shrubs and streams and midnight blue rock spangled with turquoise and cobalt. The mountain rose like a mihrab in a tapering arch of richly chased ivory to the dome of a faience blue sky. Brightly coloured birds perched among the almond and olive blossom.
Ajax pointed to a hoopoe on a telephone wire, preening its brilliant yellow plumage and flourishing its crest. He joined the fingertips of his right hand and kissed them.
‘Good eating, on the spit with a little fresh cheese.’ He took his hands off the wheel and pointed an imaginary gun out of the window.
‘Vlam. Vlam.’
We skirted the mountain until we saw the sea on the other side. Every time we saw a little stack of tiles, Ajax tried to buy them. Sometimes he was successful, sometimes not, but each time we had an ouzo and discussed the price of meat and how many lambs and kids were available for market. I realised that our expedition was not just for my benefit. The tiles were a pretext for Ajax to sound out the supply of meat for his new chiller without driving up the price.
By early afternoon the springs of the pick-up were groaning and I had heartburn and a headache from ouzo to go with backache and the agonising rawness of my hands. We reached a tiny village at the end of a potholed road where it widened out into a square, three sides of which were formed by single-storey whitewashed houses and a small church. The fourth side was a low wall that overlooked a precipitous drop down the hillside to the turquoise sea below. In the middle of the square was an ancient Aleppo pine that shaded a few metal tables and chairs belonging to a coffee-ouzo-everything-emporium. Fixed to the trunk of the tree with wire was a large metal litter bin embossed with the words ‘City of Detroit’, doubtless the gift of a villager in exile, since it was unlikely that the two communities were twinned in any more formal way.
There was something else odd about the square that took me a minute or two to put my finger on. There were no other vehicles or motorbikes, no television sounds, no music. And, most obvious of all, no people.
‘Where is everybody?’ I asked as I got out of the Datsun.
‘America,’ replied Ajax.
Detroit had a good bargain for its litter bin. I spotted a man watching us from the shadow of a doorway and a woman looking out of a crack in the shutters of another house. They were old and dressed in faded black. I followed Ajax into the coffee-ouzo-everything-emporium. Despite the promise of its name, the place was bare. Blue-painted shelves reached to the ceiling, but there was little on them except dust. One wall offered nothing more than a bundle of rubber sandals tied up with string and a car exhaust pipe, another memento of Detroit perhaps.
An old man, wizened as a nut, shuffled out of the back room and eyed us suspiciously. Ajax began a long negotiation for lunch and finally persuaded him to open a tin of sardines and fry some eggs, which we ate beneath the pine tree under the gaze of hidden old eyes. The meagreness of lunch was compensated for by tumblers of tart wine to wash it down. We wolfed the food in silence and then Ajax retired to sleep it off. He sprawled across the front seat of the Datsun and his snores echoed round the square. I was too sore and bloated to sleep and sat on the wall looking down at the sea, swallowing air and burping to relieve my indigestion.
To the right the bare rock of the mountain rose steeply to its summit. A stream tumbled past the wall and into a deep gorge overhung with trees whose foliage was speckled with blue flowers too far down to identify. It was a savage, romantic scene and I peopled it with klephts, the guerrillas of the War of Independence against the Turks. Recalcitrant janissaries would have hesitated to follow the goat paths up the narrow defile to the muskets of the fierce mountain men.
My reverie was interrupted by a bent old woman wearing the traditional yellow scarf of the island, now faded to calico. She had a squint and one eye was milky white. She carried a blue supermarket bag filled with rubbish, including eggshells and a sardine tin. With an impatient flourish, she tossed it over the wall and it plummeted into the void. Dismayed, I followed its flight into the trees below, where it joined myriad other scraps of fluttering blue plastic. My klephts evaporated.
‘Deuts?’
I said nothing. I wasn’t in the mood for pleasantries. She did
n’t give up and treated me to the customary grilling: where do you live, do you have a wife, what work do you do, how much do you earn, what rent do you pay … She reminded me of an old custom of the Greek islands, now only a folk memory, by which old women who became a burden to their families were taken to high places and thrown off like so much rubbish. There are many peaks and precipices throughout the Aegean called ‘Granny’s Leap’ or something similar. But she survived, detritus from the days of famine and emigration, like my old tiles.
By the time Ajax had hammered out his calculations, preening his moustaches and looking innocent, the cost of my second-hand tiles was the same as new and I still had to clean them. I spent days sitting in my yard in the sweet spring sunshine, working on a tan and brushing old mortar and moss and spiders from the tiles with a wire brush.
New beginnings
It was a time for new beginnings. Fresh green fields were stippled with colour and every cranny in paths and walls big enough for a thimble of earth held a flower. There were rustlings and slitherings, the whip of a tail and the scuttling dart of green, as snakes and lizards came out with the flowers from the underworld. The wind was from the south, not yet tasting of desert and suffocating with ancient dust, but warm and kind. It would soon bring birds, fattened on the fruit of Africa. Men were cleaning guns and laying in tiny shot for songsters instead of the heavier stuff they used on winter game.
The face I had seen in the buddleia when I was digging out the dung was no satyr. After a few days, Dionysos plucked up the courage to come out in the open. He was the son of Haralambos, the builder’s merchant. He was in his early twenties. He had his father’s nose and forehead, but the rest of his face was crumpled and squashed. His body was stunted and bandy-legged. Summer and winter alike, he shambled round the village barefoot in white sailor’s trousers and a hooped blue and white shirt, like a refugee from the Club Med in the north of the island. He walked with a stoop, his head on one side looking curiously at things that took his fancy.
