It's All Greek to Me!

by John Mole

  ‘Hello neighbour,’ he said, casting a rheumy eye about our ruin. I relaxed. ‘What do you do for water up here?’

  ‘I don’t have any. I can give you a whisky though.’

  He looked puzzled, but wasn’t going to look a White Horse in the mouth. I rummaged in my tool bag and brought out a bottle and a couple of taverna glasses. I poured and we toasted each other. Spiros knocked his back in one go, sucked his moustache and tried again in pidgin.

  ‘Water. Need water. Water for building. Cement.’

  In the old days women went up and down the hill to the spring with pitchers or leading donkeys loaded with skins. But in the old days they did not have to feed a voracious cement mixer. Spiros’s answer was to have mains water laid on by the village. He said that I was entitled to it as I was going to live there and, since we were neighbours, offered to help me apply to the village council.

  ‘Neighbour?’ smirked Barba Vasilis the shepherd when I told him. ‘They want you to lay on water so they don’t have to bring it in jerry cans for their animals. Make sure you get them to pay their share of the cost.’

  An afternoon meeting was arranged in the café with Eleftherios, President of the Village Council. He was a pearshaped man grown fat with the cares of office. The only energetic parts of him were his narrow, hooded, politician’s eyes, darting constantly from side to side even when the rest of his body seemed still immersed in its afternoon sleep. Spiros was there and several others who kept animals in the ruins. Aussie Alekos the taxi driver from Melbourne, who kept rabbits further down the hill from me, appointed himself advocate and interpreter. He insisted on translating everything into garbled Strine. Once we had ordered coffee, the conversation went something like this.

  President (in Greek): ‘Kyrie Johnny, I understand you want village water in the old village?’

  Me (in Greek): ‘Yes, please.’

  Alekos (in Strine): ‘Lookere myte, you wanna worder pype upper the Old Plaice?

  Me (in Greek): ‘That’s what I said. Yes, please.’

  Alekos (in Greek): ‘Yes, Mr President. What are the formalities he should complete in order to effect mains water?’

  President (in Greek): ‘Will he have a permanent residence?’

  Me (in Greek): ‘Yes. We intend to live here.’

  Alekos (in Strine): ‘Lookere myte, this erser youse, you wanna live int awler toime?’

  Me (in Greek): ‘I just said yes.’

  Alekos (in Greek): ‘He says, President, that since he intends to live there permanently, that is to say all the year round, President, and that he understands that in the interests of public health as well as a matter of entitlement …’

  So it went on. In the end it was less confusing for me to stay with English. In any case it didn’t matter what I said, I was only the catalyst.

  After an hour’s discussion about the route the pipe would take, which to English ears sounded like a blazing row, Yannis tore a page out of his exercise book and they drafted a formal petition to the President to be typed up in his office and forwarded with the President’s recommendation to the district authorities in Aliveri. These functionaries would examine it, redraft it and forward it with their own recommendation to the headquarters of the Nomos – the Department – in Halkida. I was assured that the officials dealing with such matters lived only to serve the public and wanted nothing more than to demonstrate their diligence and efficiency. Eleftherios promised that approval would be back in a trice and that by the end of the month I would be washing and showering and inviting my friends round for swimming parties. In anticipation of the good life, we parted on the best of terms.

  Ten days later I went to the President’s office to find out what progress had been made. He slouched in a wing chair behind a large and empty desk, bleary and unshaven, belly bursting out of the waistband of his silvery suit trousers, eyes flickering restlessly from side to side. Opposite him was an elderly farmer. I was not interrupting anything. Their only occupation seemed to be warding off the pangs of solitude by breathing in each other’s cigarette smoke. The rest of the room was piled with sacks and machinery parts and half a dozen pot-bellied stoves that bore an uncanny resemblance to their distributor.

  Behind the President was a map of the island with the districts luridly coloured in and a framed picture of Lord Byron. The hero posed in front of the Parthenon wearing pantaloons, a hussar’s jacket and a helmet like a coal scuttle, several sizes too big for his head, adorned with a crest of what looked like chicken feathers. Taking courage from my heroic compatriot, I took a deep breath of the musty and dispirited air of bureaucracy and asked what had become of my application.

  With immense effort, the President leaned forward and opened the top drawer of his desk. It was stuffed with papers. He shuffled among them, squinting in his smoke, and found my hand-written petition. He handed it back to me and said he was sorry but he was not in a position to forward it to Aliveri because my house was outside the village building zone. I was furious. Ten days! Why hadn’t he told me before?

  Stylish Barba Vasilis the shepherd was cynical. ‘He’s too idle even to ask for a bribe.’

  Genial Spiros the carpenter was fatalistic. ‘There’s not enough pressure in the pipes to go up the hill.’

  Dyspeptic Dimitris the builder was idealistic. ‘Better to dig your own well.’

  Dapper Nektarios the roofer was pessimistic. ‘I can do nothing until you have water.’

  Yannis the café owner was constructive. ‘Fetch Aristotle the hydrologist.’

  Canny Barba Mitsos took me to see Aristotle. A mile from the village on the road past the lake, we turned down a narrow track through fields of beans and melons to a small house of whitewashed breezeblocks and Ellenit. In front was parked a large blue Ford tractor and a water tank on wheels. Appropriately to his calling, the hydrologist was knee deep in water, slopping around in one of the ditches that criss-crossed his property as he rearranged a complicated network of blue and pink hoses. He was a jolly man with a moon face and a tatty straw hat. We began the courtship necessary to get anyone to do anything.

  ‘I’m sorry … I’m watering … I can’t stop … I have to pick beans for the market in Aliveri tomorrow … my back is hurting … I don’t have my equipment … you’ll have to ask my wife …’

  She was bent double in an orchard of peaches and walnuts, massive bottom in the air, rooting for carrots in the dark, damp soil. Without bothering to stand up she shrieked, ‘Of course he can’t go, he’s too busy, in any case it costs five hundred.’

  I reached for my wallet, but Barba Mitsos put his hand on my arm and winked.

  ‘His balls are full of water,’ he whispered and then shouted to the woman. ‘All right. We’re going. Costas in Drossia will do it for two hundred.’

  He was answered by a shriek from the orchard. ‘All right, he can go, but he’s to be back in an hour.’

  With the sigh of a put-upon professional, Aristotle climbed out of the ditch and washed his rubber boots in a leak from a hose. He picked up a piece of rusty wire about a metre long and we drove back to Horio. He seemed glad to get away and joked and gossiped about wells and springs and water tables. He was curious to know if it rained much in England. When I told him it did, he rhapsodised about the exquisite melons and grapes and peaches that must grow there without watering. I saw no point in disillusioning him.

  At the house, Barba Mitsos and I stood respectfully under the olive tree as Aristotle looked critically at the lie of the land. He teased the wire into a semi-circle and, with a solemn expression, moved to the far corner of the yard beside the remains of a rat-eaten mattress. He pushed his straw hat to the back of his head and stood with his eyes closed for half a minute, the wire hanging down from his hands in a curve. He opened his eyes and with a flat-footed, bow-legged gait paced up and down, covering all the ground, muttering to himself, holding his arms straight out in front of him, his eyes fixed on the wire that turned round and round in his hands. It re
volved in slow circles, sped up, slowed down, stopped, started again.

  He halted where the wire turned fastest, halfway between the house and the olive tree. He closed his eyes, faced the house and turned the wire four times. Then he faced the olive tree and turned it seven times.

  He opened his eyes and looked at us as if he had woken up from a dream. He was no longer the jolly bumpkin. Flesh melted from his moon face, unblinking eyes sank into their sockets and his face became a ritual mask crowned with a golden halo. I had thought it all a bit of a joke, a ridiculous charade, but now my amusement evaporated.

  In a solemn voice, Aristotle intoned, ‘Right here … four metres down, three metres deep … not enough for a field of crops … enough for a family and a tree and a few vegetables … what more do you want? … water is never bad … always good … the water of life … always trust the water … I recommend a concrete cistern bitumen sealed … it’s the blood of the earth … the water was before the earth and before the moon … you’ll need a good pump … you are born in water and made in water and will rise again in water … American pumps are best, try the Briggs and Stratton … give back to the earth what is the earth’s and it will reward you … village water is bad and it comes from Rodi and they are all donkeys up there … water washes the living and the dead and the in-between … I have to pick my beans before it gets dark …’

  The incantation ceased and abruptly he tossed away the wire. He became jolly again. We drove him home and he invited us in for a glass of Sprite. I offered him five hundred drachmas, which he waved away and his wife took instead. On the way back to the village Barba Mitsos complained that two hundred would have done. I gave him five hundred for his own trouble.

  ‘I hope he’s right,’ I said.

  ‘Eh. Get Zenon to dig a hole with his machine. If there’s water you’re in luck. If it’s empty you can use it as a cesspit and fill it yourself. You can’t lose.’

  I went in search of Zenon the excavator to dig my water hole. I also wanted him to level the mule path for vehicles, despite my guilt at being the first person to bring the internal combustion engine to our unspoiled hillside. I belonged to Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace and Save the Planet, but my principles were no match for a Datsun pick-up.

  Zenon lived on the edge of the village. The house was not difficult to find. Parked in front of the door was a bright yellow digger with a large-toothed shovel at one end and a smaller-toothed bucket on the end of a hydraulic arm at the back. It was personalised with a bright red clenched fist painted on each side of the cab.

  An old woman opened the door. She was doubled up as if endlessly searching for the groat that was lost. She contemplated my muddy trainers and addressed my knees, while I wondered if it would be more polite to squat or stay on my feet looking down at her hump. Zenon had gone to his sister’s in Aliveri. As hopefully as astronomers who send messages to other galaxies, I left a message that the foreigner required his services.

  Although I never saw her face, I got to know the bent widow well over the next few days. If I had not seen the digger parked in a slightly different place each time I called, I would have doubted the existence of the elusive Zenon.

  There was nothing anyone could do until I had water and a road, so I sat in my yard with my tiles and through the scrawping of the wire brush listened to the sweet sounds of the countryside rising from the village on the crystal-clear air. Yodels and whoops of siren women, explosions of laughter and shouting, the grinding gears of the Aliveri bus, chunderings of diesel compressors, the first ten notes of Waltzing Matilda from Aussie Alekos’s taxi, a score of radios blaring different lyrics to the same tune, different words with the same complaint of unrequited love. Over all this were blasts of bouzouki music and the frenzied loud-spoken hollerings of travelling merchants. From further away came the scream of warplanes and the boom of blasting at the cement quarry.

  At two o’clock when people went to bed, the noise gave way to more rustic sounds, the bleating of goats and the leprous clanging of neck bells, the crowing of untimely cocks, the song of other birds, secret rustlings in the grass and leaves, gentle sounds ripped apart by the despairing bray of a donkey. At the peak of the day, around three o’clock when the sun was at its hottest, these sounds died away leaving nothing, the abyss between two heartbeats. Then the stirrings and rustlings began again. At five o’clock the voice of the village rose into the jaded air and was joined by the babble of television.

  Laying down my wire brush at last, I sat in the gathering dusk under my blossoming almond tree and an Islamic moon, breathing the scent of summer flowers and mountain herbs, and wallowed in the nostalgia of ancient television programmes melting into the soft night air – I Love Lucy, Bilko, Benny Hill. When Perseus the Gorgon slayer strode the sky, I strode down to Yannis’s for an ouzo.

  A word about ouzo. It starts off, like grappa or marc or raki, as the alcohol distilled from grape skins after wine making. Then, with slight variations according to which label you read, it is distilled again with some or all of aniseed, liquorice, coriander, cloves, angelica root, mint, wintergreen, fennel, hazelnut and cinnamon. Aniseed, the main ingredient, has medical and magical properties. Like all herbal nostrums, there is something for everyone. Over the millennia it has been recommended for indigestion, sexual performance, breastfeeding, flatulence, bad breath, water retention and averting the Evil Eye. Ouzo turns cloudy when you add water because diluting the alcohol turns the aniseed oil into microscopic crystals.

  Yannis stocked several brands with labels to suit every taste: the elegant 12 on a red and black background, a pretty cheerleader in a short white skirt and red top, a classical goddess, a bottle shaped like an amphora. Some of them were in boxes or wrapped in cellophane or gift-wrapped with ribbons. He kept them on the highest shelf near the ceiling, along with Amaretto and Dubonnet and Campari and other exotic brews, the equivalent of the back of the drinks cupboard at home, Eurobeverages from the duty-free that never taste the same as they did on holiday and gently ferment in the dark until they are recycled via a bottle stall or a tombola to the back of someone else’s drinks cupboard.

  His customers drank real ouzo from twenty-litre wicker demijohns that he decanted into half-litre jugs. There was no label, no list of ingredients, no indication of alcoholic strength. Like fancy bottled ouzo it probably turned white when you put in an ice cube or a splash of water, but how would we know? In Yannis’s café it would be like putting Coke into single malt. You filled a shot glass, tossed it back, slammed the glass on the table, gasped and lunged for an olive or a bit of tomato. The finer points of tasting? Bouquet – you could smell a glass from across the table. Tongue – the blisters went in a few hours. Back of the throat – fire from your nose to your oesophagus. Palate – dead. Aftertaste – the kind of aromatic high you got from drinking bottles of traditional cough mixture before they banned it. No wonder the villagers preferred whisky when they could afford it. Nowadays more Scotch is drunk in Greece than ouzo. More ouzo is drunk in Germany than in Greece.

  I was brushing the thousandth tile when the elusive Zenon finally arrived on his motorcycle, bucking and revving in a cloud of blue smoke up the rocky, pitted track, daring himself not to put his foot down for balance. The bike was East German, a Zündapp 500cc. He wore a brown leather jacket and a matching old-fashioned dispatch rider’s leather helmet, strings dangling down his cheeks. He was slight and wiry and had red curly hair, which spoke of Celtic incursion into the gene pool. A Pelasgian invader? A Macedonian prince? An Irish tourist? Redheads are called children of Alexander. He gunned the engine, killed it and leaned the bike up against the olive. He stood legs apart among the ruins in his helmet and leathers like a Russian tank commander.

  There were no preliminaries. ‘Where do you want the hole?’

  I pointed at the ground under his feet. He kicked it and frowned as if he expected it to yield to his toe as easily as it would to the blade of his digger.

  ‘Hard. Too har
d. You need a compressor. And a jack-hammer. Krak. Dynamite. Boom. In any case I can’t get the machine up that track. It’s too narrow. There’s nowhere to turn without knocking all those ruins over. Fta. And where shall I put the dirt? I can’t eat it. You can’t eat it. Yach. Despite what the government says. I’d like to see them take a mouthful. They care nothing for the people. They’re out for themselves. Filthy capitalist pigs. Oink.’

  ‘Can you make the road as well while you’re here?’

  ‘Impossible. The track is all rocks. You need dirt to pack down. Vlam. Where do I get the dirt from?’

  ‘How about the dirt you dig up from the well?’

  ‘How am I supposed to get it down there? With a teaspoon? I’ve got to do a road for the council in Kidoni and a well to dig for Aristotle …’

  Everything is difficult, but nothing is impossible. I waited for Zenon to finish his rigmarole and name his price. Political conviction had not blunted his commercial instincts. His price was outrageous. However, I was proud of my improving haggling skills. It was a question of mentality rather than technique, overcoming English embarrassment about money and a fear of giving offence. I halved what he said. He stuck at his price. I split the difference between it and my first offer. He stuck at his price. I split the difference again. He stuck at his price. I agreed and we shook hands. I felt foolish and foreign and angry that he did not have the common decency to knock off just a few per cent.