It's All Greek to Me!

by John Mole

He never spoke or made any sound. Like a sacred cow, he went where he pleased and people behaved as if he weren’t there. He stood in the middle of the square for hours looking up at the sky, ignored by everyone except drivers, who made a detour round him. He wandered into people’s houses and if he was in the way was shooed off or given a titbit and led by the hand to the door. You would be sitting talking at a table in the café and suddenly you noticed him standing beside you, bending down as if to listen or staring inside an empty coffee cup. The Greek word for such a person is sun-touched, attributing to the sun what we attribute to the moon.

  ‘Born on Christmas Day,’ said waxy-fingered Elpida darkly as she shovelled keftethes onto my plate.

  ‘Rubbish,’ retorted canny Barba Mitsos, ‘he was born in January.’

  ‘What do you know?’ she snapped. ‘It’s Christmas in the old calendar.’

  Children born at midnight on Christmas Eve are doomed to become kalikantzari, imps with hairy bodies and swarthy skin and the legs of an ass or a goat. They are allowed into the world for the twelve nights of Christmas, when they play tricks and make mischief. They don’t like fire or black cockerels and they are not very bright. If you meet one you should give him a sieve and he will count all the holes. As they can only count up to two, it will keep him busy until daybreak, when he will have to scamper back underground.

  ‘It’s wicked to spread those stories,’ said Barba Mitsos. ‘No wonder the children run after him.’

  I too was an oddity to the villagers, yet I felt welcome. They already gave me countless kindnesses. If ever a man lives alone, even for a day, the first question is always ‘Who cooks?’ All I had to do was walk into the square and invitations were pressed on the man with no woman to look after him.

  I was sometimes irritated by the unrelenting inquisitiveness and criticism, but there was no shortage of help or advice or just someone to talk to if I needed it. It was hard to imagine a foreigner descending on an English community and being welcomed with such immediate acceptance and hospitality. My heart was heavy when I thought of London, where friends and neighbours are no more than fellow passengers, good manners pass for kindness and ‘community’ is social workers’ jargon. All I had to offer in return was entertainment, something to gossip about.

  After work I had a shower and joined the rest of the village in the square at one of the tables outside Yannis’s café. One side of the square was formed by a big new church. It was faced with grey stone, pointed black in a crocodile-skin pattern and roofed with bright red tiles. In front of the church was a massive plane tree with marble benches, supplemented in good weather by tables and chairs from the café opposite. The official name for Yannis’s establishment, stencilled in black above the door, the letters cramped a little at the end where he ran out of space, was a coffee-ouzo-everything-emporium, like the one in the deserted village. He was licensed by the state to sell charcoal and paraffin. These present-day barbecue essentials were the main means of cooking and lighting in country areas until the 1970s and were still a state monopoly. He was also the unofficial sub-post office. The postman from Aliveri dumped the mail on a shelf beside the coffee grinder for addressees to collect at their convenience. At the same time you could riffle through the pile to see what correspondence your neighbours were getting.

  On the third side of the square was officialdom. On the ground floor was the office of the President of the Village Council. His name was Eleftherios, but he was always addressed as Mister President. His day job was agricultural supplies and machinery. On the floor above was the police station. It was rarely occupied, as Sotiris, like all good policemen, hated crime, so went to great lengths to avoid it. He preferred to keep order in his vegetable garden in another village down the road, where he had married into a local family. Making the corner between him and the barber’s was Haralambos’s building supplies and hardware store.

  On the corner between the council office and the church was the ramshackle smithy where fat little Banos laboured over his fire and his anvil, mending tools and turning rods and sheets of steel into fences and gates that he called fer forzai, the French for wrought iron. Summer and winter he worked in vest, shorts, sandals and nothing else. A mat of luxuriant body hair from his chin to his toe knuckles was his only protection against sparks and filings.

  Ajax’s butchery was on the fourth side. Next to it was a little lock-up shop where Kyria Anna sold newspapers, stamps, lottery tickets and football pools. She also had a telephone, which is why Aussie Alekos parked his big grey Opel taxi in front under the mulberry in the expectation of calls from Aliveri bus station. He was not available on Friday and Saturday evenings because he was also the barber. His shop was next door to the café and a virtual extension of it. A man could stand up from his ouzo at an outside table and take his place in the barber’s chair without interrupting his conversation.

  Making up the last corner was Kyria Dimitra’s bakery, known as the fourno, the oven. Kyria Dimitra looked like a Greek goddess. Not an aristocratic goddess of classical sculpture, but an earth goddess of the prehistoric Aegean. Great hips to give birth to demigods, swollen dugs to suckle them, a big belly and colossal thighs to steer the plough, brawny arms to reap and winnow and massive hands to knead. Her two sons were on Samos defending Greece against the Turks and from the way she described them they were standing on a headland in crested helmets and sandals staring down the ancient foe. She had inherited the bakery from her father Theodoros, along with a wine vat built on the side. This was a six-metre cube filled with juice every autumn, left to ferment with resin until January and drained from a tap at the bottom for the rest of the year. Some years it was vinegar, other years it was nectar. That year it was somewhere in between.

  In addition to bread and wine, Kyria Dimitra provided the communal oven. In those days you cooked on gas rings or the stone oven in the yard. Few people had electric stoves. Every morning, at about half past nine, a procession of women carried the midday meal to the fourno in big roasting tins or earthenware dishes, which they collected some time after noon, leaving appetising vapour trails of roasts and pies and stews criss-crossing the square.

  The villagers’ remaining commercial needs were provided by travelling salesmen, who hawked their wares from crackly loudspeakers on top of battered trucks and tricycle vans. Fish was a regular, as were the fruit and vegetables that the villagers did not grow themselves or were out of season, Arcadian cherries or Cretan tomatoes for example. Household goods, clothing and fabrics came through from time to time, although most people bought these in the Saturday market in Aliveri. My favourite was the honeyed seduction of the underwear salesman. I have a photo of a little gaggle of women in black dresses and yellow scarves with distaffs and spindles in their hands rummaging through nylon fabrics in a huckster’s van.

  In the ‘little evening’, half an hour either side of sunset, the square milled with any villager who could walk. We men strolled to the café in clean shirts and slicked-down hair. We sat outside, flicked worry beads and made a coffee last two hours. Women sat under the plane tree and in front of the church. Young people found errands that took them from one end of the square to the other and back again. It was not as deliberate as the systematic evening patrols in Spain and Italy but, in its disorganised Greek way, it was the same idea.

  Before the new church in the square was built, the little one near our house served Horio. There may have been a church or a temple for much longer than the present building. A marble column and scraps of ancient brick were built into the walls. The church had been restored and renovated many times since then. Above the front door three porcelain plates were set into the plaster showing Britain’s King George and his family. Evia is predominantly socialist with a communist streak, but our village was an island of royalism, transmuted in these republican days to the right-wing New Democracy. The church’s original stone slab roof had been replaced with red Ellenit. The green metal door had opaque glass panels and a wrought-iron cross
clumsily welded in the middle. It squealed on its hinges and grated on the floor.

  The main icon on the iconostasis, the wall that enclosed the sanctuary, was Aghios Ioannes. His beard was white, his eyes tearful and his mouth turned down like a fish’s. He held a white lamb. It was a cheap reproduction, paper pasted on board and varnished. Around it was a withered garland of flowers and in front hung a shiny metal oil lamp. With him were the Blessed Virgin, St Peter and a glowering head of Christ. An old wooden lectern was the only furniture in the room.

  Every evening Antigone, the daughter of genial Spiros the carpenter, came up to light the lamp in front of the altar. She was about eighteen, plump and big breasted, with a round face and streaky blonde hair. She wore jeans carefully torn at the knees, off-the-shoulder T-shirts and a new-fangled Sony Walkman. She had been born in the house opposite ours by the light of oil lamps and washed with water fetched from the spring a hundred yards downhill. In 1964 the family were the last to move down the hill to electricity and water. Spiros now kept chickens and doves in the house.

  First Antigone fed the birds. Very carefully, because of her nails, she lugged a bucket of corn and scraps to empty into a trough made of an old tyre, poured water from a jerry can into another tyre and collected eggs from inside the house, which she put into the bucket to take back down. I waved to her, but she always looked the other way.

  One evening I followed her to the church. Although she left the door open I pushed it further, scraping the floor with a tooth-grinding squeal so that she wouldn’t be startled. She had washed her hair. It was damp and smelt of shampoo and conditioner and tint and streaking stuff. She had probably spent all afternoon doing it while the rest of the house was asleep. She was busy with the lamp, topping the oil up from an ouzo bottle that was kept with matches and wicks on the window ledge, next to the icon. It was odd seeing someone dressed for the urban jungle at such ancient chores.

  ‘You like pop music?’ I asked in a loud voice because of the Walkman. I could hear the beat like a noisy pacemaker. She shook her head and I shouted louder. ‘You – like – pop – music?’

  She shifted her chewing gum from the incisors to the molars and shouted back. ‘I hate it. My father makes me listen to this all day.’

  She giggled and I felt stupid, but she had the courtesy to slip the headphones down round her neck. U2 echoed round the chapel. She floated on the oil a new kandili, a piece of pink waxed string stuck through a tiny flat cork.

  I tried again, abandoning youth talk. ‘This church is very old.’

  ‘I know. Thank God they cleaned it up. It was so creepy before, all dirty and full of spiders. You couldn’t see because of the old glass in the windows. And there were these old wall paintings with staring eyes. Ugh.’ She exaggerated her shudder so her breasts shook.

  I pointed at the icon. ‘The first St John in this church didn’t look like that.’

  ‘Really?’ she asked. Her eyes were a dull, cow-like brown.

  ‘He had the head of a goat.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘I read it in a book. Some people who came here a long time ago wrote about it.’

  ‘They must have been dreaming. There’s no saint with a goat’s head.’

  ‘Why not? There’s a saint with a dog’s head.’

  ‘That’s St Christopher. Everyone knows that.’

  In the Orthodox Church St Christopher, patron saint of travellers, the giant who carried Jesus across the river on his shoulders, is said to have come from a North African people with dogs’ heads. There are icons and carvings of him all over the Aegean, a normal-looking saint with the head of a friendly retriever. His devotees and those named after him deny any connection with the dog-headed Egyptian god Anubis.

  ‘I suppose your parents were married here.’

  ‘It must have been a real bore. Now there’s a kentro in Aliveri with good music.’

  The word kentro is untranslatable, at least by me. It means a glorified taverna where they lay on parties and receptions.

  ‘Were you baptised here?’

  ‘Of course. And my brother. They had a big party for him and my father fired his shotgun. When I was baptised they passed around Turkish delight. It’s not fair.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘That’s what they always do.’ She picked up the matches. The box was damp. Two of them smeared pink stuff down the sandpaper, but the third caught fire.

  ‘Are you at school?’ I asked. She tutted. ‘What will you do now?’

  ‘Anything as long as I don’t have to live here. My brother’s married. He and his wife live in Athens. They’re computer programmers. My mother lives with them to look after the baby.’

  ‘Do you want to be a computer programmer?’

  ‘I want to be a croupier on a cruise ship, but I have to stay here and look after my father. It’s so boring.’ She turned and faced me. Why does chewing gum look so insolent?

  The cassette finished and there was an angry hissing from the headphones. She led the way out. I went back to my tiles.

  Sassy Antigone, like passengers waiting for the ferry, was rushing to leave the island and the past. What was I doing trying to recreate it? What was the point of gentrifying old buildings, old stories, old saints? I should be living for the present. I closed my eyes and heard the familiar English voice, so practical, so common sense: ‘It’s too late now. Get on with it.’ So I got on with coating myself in terracotta dust. I wouldn’t have minded one of those new Walkmans though.

  Hector, scourge of the Greeks

  One of the compensations for missing my family was not missing Hector, our dog, who had arrived about 18 months before we bought the house. One day I had woken up at dawn, hadn’t been able to get back to sleep and had gone for a walk on Mount Parnis. It was a grey, drizzly morning and I should have stayed in bed. It had the same raw feeling of getting up in the dark to go away on holiday or slipping out of the house before your girlfriend’s parents catch you, but without the excitement.

  After an hour I reached a ridge and took a breather. Everything looked glum, from the grungy green holm oaks to the grizzling grey sky and the whine-dark Aegean. There was no sign of life, not even a flock of sheep with its ferocious, hiker-hating guard dogs. I headed back home on a tarmac road, keeping my spirits up by trying to hum Hearts of Oak and simultaneously whistle The British Grenadiers, like my father could. A useless accomplishment but a satisfying one.

  On a bend, where the road widened, I came to a fly-tip. It was the usual agglomeration of fridges and stoves, old tyres, little mounds of builders’ rubble and plastic bags, good for ironic photographs but otherwise an eyesore.

  I heard a whimper. In my daydreams I carry on walking. It sounded like a baby in pain. I stopped. In my daydreams I turn away and walk on. I stood at the edge of the tip and listened. Nothing. In my daydreams I shrug my shoulders. Out of the corner of my eye I saw a blue plastic bag twitch. In my daydreams I give it a kick. I picked it up. The top was knotted and I tore it open.

  Inside was a tiny black-and-white-and-brown puppy, his eyes barely open, trembling in the palm of my hand. He whimpered. In my daydreams I toss him into the thorn bushes for the weasels. I wetted the tip of my little finger on my cagoule. He licked it with his tiny soft pink tongue. Again I wetted my finger and gave him suck. In my daydreams … if only, if only, if only … I tucked him inside my cagoule next to my shirt. He grew still but for the beating of his tiny heart. I felt a surge of warmth like a new mother whose baby is laid on her breast, but it was only the little bastard pissing on me. I carried him home feeling like a shepherd in an ancient tale who finds an infant abandoned on the mountainside. Such stories rarely have a happy ending.

  The children were thrilled. Up to now our pets had been a succession of rodents, carried off by disease, accident or neglect. Although we can’t remember their names at the precise time of these events, they were sure to have been something like Fluffles or Snuggly. A tour of the headst
ones in our extensive pet cemetery was not so much nostalgic as nauseating. We had never had a real pet before, the kind that chases sticks and goes for walks and rides in the pram dressed in baby clothes.

  Arfa was less ecstatic. ‘Who’s going to clean up after it? Who’s going to feed it? Who’s going to take it to the vet?’ Rhetorical questions to which, despite fervent promises to the contrary, we all knew the answer.

  ‘Ah, he’s so sweet.’

  ‘What’s his name?’

  ‘Muffly. Can we call him Muffly? Can we? Can we?’

  ‘No, let’s call him Snuffles.’

  ‘He hasn’t got a cold.’

  ‘Chuddly then. Cuddly Chuddly.’

  In hindsight I wish we had given him such a name. Like Spielberg calling his shark Toothy or his T. Rex Trixie. At the time I preferred something more noble, which I wouldn’t be embarrassed to call out in public when we went for walks. I insisted on my rights as finder and christened the dog Hector. It was a good classical name, although not a favourite of Greeks at the font since he was the chief warrior of the Trojans. Chaucer called him the ‘scourge of the Greeks’, which turned out to be appropriate. But the real reason was one of the favourite nursery rhymes of my childhood:

  Hector Protector was dressed all in green,

  Hector Protector was sent to the Queen,

  The Queen did not like him nor yet did the King,

  So Hector Protector was sent back again.

  This sorry tale of hope and rejection made me cry when I was little and still made me sad when I read it to the children. Calling our foundling Hector was some sort of reparation. It never occurred to me that the King and Queen might have been on to something.

  The first task was to deal with the ticks and fleas. I put my clothes in the hottest wash and stood naked in the garden to dust myself down with the powder that Arfa collected from the hardware store. Then we attended to Hector. We bedded him down next to the boiler in the kitchen in an olive basket with an old cot blanket and surrounded him with sheets of newspaper. Later on he developed the knack of scraping away the paper with his paws before relieving himself and then putting back the paper. Getting to the fridge was like tiptoeing through a minefield.