It's All Greek to Me!

by John Mole

  ‘But Daad …’

  ‘Please don’t interrupt.’

  ‘Dad wait …’

  ‘See, firm as a rock.’

  ‘Dad!’

  ‘Make sure the rope’s not knotted or snagged.’

  ‘Daaaad …’

  ‘OH FUDGE!’

  I used a different word. I got into trouble for it then, so I won’t repeat it now. We peered down through the ripples at the anchor plummeting to the sea bed and nestling with its chain in a cleft between two rocks. I still have souvenirs of the occasion, the scars on my knuckles where I punched the mast. When I got over the sulks, I took a mask and flippers back to the grotto. The anchor did what it was designed to do, held on to the rocks like a limpet, but I won in the end. My ears were popping for a week.

  Bringing back Arcadia

  Dapper Nektarios and his mate lanky Adonis drove up my new dirt road in a Mitsubishi pick-up to start work on the roof. Adonis was in his thirties.

  He was blonde and tall and thin and had a lazy, shy smile. Although he looked more like a tubercular poet or an artist, there was great strength in his slender body. Every evening he sat in the café and quietly drank away his wages in Amstel.

  The pair enjoyed demolishing what remained of the old roof. The stone slabs were kept in place by their own weight without nails or other fixings. The two men sat astride the ridge and, with warning whoops, dislodged them so that they slid to the ground and cracked in pieces. After a dozen slabs had smashed, I interrupted them on the pretext of a morning whisky. When they came down I explained that I wanted to use the stone for the floor downstairs and a terrace outside. They gave me the look I had come to know so well in the last few weeks, the same one they gave sun-touched Dionysos.

  ‘You know how long it would take to hand them down one by one? We don’t have time to waste. We’d need a crane.’

  ‘They didn’t have cranes when they built the house.’

  ‘How do you know? Were you there?’

  ‘I read it in a book.’

  ‘Bah, books.’

  We argued, all three of us talking at once and waving hands and slapping thighs and turning on heels. When I first came to Greece and saw these violent displays of vituperation, I expected weapons to be drawn and blood on the street. Coming from England it seemed so distasteful. Now I was used to it I enjoyed the crude rhetoric and the adrenalin it produced, although I always came off worst. Like haggling, it has to be learned at a mother’s knee.

  The argument was reaching a crescendo when I realised that we were knee deep in sheep. Barba Vasilis stood watching us, leaning on his stick and gently teasing his trim moustache. He took advantage of a lull in the shouting.

  ‘These stones are worth something. I know a man in Aliveri who buys them for fifty each. You’re throwing good money away.’

  Enlightenment spread over their faces. We agreed on a small bonus for each slab they stacked unbroken. When they were out of earshot up on the roof again, I give Vasilis his morning tot and asked if there really was a man in Aliveri.

  ‘You speak Greek but you don’t know our mentality. Who would want these old stones? They are Titans who built these houses. They had no engines. They used bone and muscle. We degenerates, who take pride in our superiority, can’t understand that. There’s no strength any more and no passion. Bah. This is the cementolithic age.’

  He downed his drink, summoned his flock and ambled away up the path into the hills.

  By the end of the next day the house was roofless. I was dismayed by the broken slabs lying heaped about the walls, blackened ceiling reeds in a spiky heap and cemented together with gigantic papery wasps’ nests, beams honeycombed with woodworm and piled like old bones. The warm, dark rooms were open to the sky. Rubble covered the basement floor. The house looked shrunken and pathetic and exposed for what it was, a pile of old stones and a few wormy beams.

  Barba Mitsos the melon farmer said that in the old days such a house took four masons and two labourers ten days to build, sixty man-days. In the two hundred years since it was built our house had withstood storms and earthquakes and the more patient enemies of rain and insects. In one day I could push over the walls single-handed and nothing would remain except a rocky field. The house had been a promise, a link with something that I only vaguely understood, and now there was no more than rubble.

  I could see Ajax’s house from mine. At the back was a slaughtering yard and a holding pen for condemned animals. At the side he kept a lawn, a little piece of Düsseldorf, where it could be seen from the narrow road that ran down the side of his property. He put a white plastic fence around it to keep out goats and children. Once a week he got out an electric mower and made it stripy. It was the first lawn in the village. Lawns were a recent innovation in the countryside, where using land for anything but food was a waste. The Greeks use the French word, gazon.

  In the morning Eleni shook rugs and bedding over the balcony. Then she came out with food for the chickens and washing for the line. In the evening she milked the goat and picked vegetables and watered the fruit trees and the gazon.

  As the weather got warmer domestic life moved out onto the balcony. At the end of siesta Ajax scuffed out in slippers, trousers unbuttoned, idly scratching himself through his vest, and sat down at a white plastic table where Eleni served him coffee. Then he went back to the shop or sat in the café or drove off in his red Mercedes. On the rare occasions that he ate dinner at home, he brought the television outside and watched it while she served him. More often than not he left her to watch it alone. I could see her face in the green glow of the screen. Moths, snatched in the light, flashed round her head like fireflies.

  Every day I watched their self-absorbed activities as you watch a hill of ants, knowing their purpose but ignorant of their reasons. In one of my ramshackle conversations with Barba Vasilis, he mentioned his niece.

  ‘May she live for you,’ I said, leaning on my shovel and grateful for the rest. ‘Ajax is a lucky man.’

  It came out less like ‘lucky’ than ‘stuck up on the wall’, but Vasilis was developing the necessary linguistic gymnastics and got the drift.

  ‘Eh, she was on the shelf. She was twenty before she let us marry her. None of the men were any good for her. She had fancy ideas about going abroad.’

  The thought of beautiful Eleni disposed of like a chattel was shameful but titillating. ‘Where did she want to go?’

  ‘Athens,’ said Vasilis and spat on the ground as if he had said Gomorrah or Ankara or some other ungodly place. ‘My wife’s niece had a beauty shop there.’

  ‘Did she go?’

  ‘Bah. The business went bankrupt. You should see my wife’s niece. Ugly as a goat. What an advertisement.’

  ‘So you married her to Ajax the butcher.’

  ‘He lived in Düsseldorf. He left the village to work for his cousin. They’re all butchers in that family.’

  ‘So how did Eleni marry him?’

  ‘After fifteen years in Düsseldorf he came back to the village to marry. Eleni jumped at him so she could get away to Germany. It was a big wedding. Fifteen hundred people. There was food for everyone. Mind you, his father was the butcher so it was easy for him.’

  ‘When did they come back from Germany?’

  ‘They never went. The day after the wedding his father died. Ajax took over the shop with his bride and his Mercedes and his big ideas and his fancy cuts. We ate Wienerschnitzel for a month before we got tired of it. Six months later she had the twins.’

  ‘May they live for you.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Other children?’

  ‘He won’t have any more. Two’s enough these days. That’s the end of it, thank God.’

  ‘Thank God,’ I repeated piously.

  That was the end of it. Poor Eleni. I wondered what she thought of us moving into a place she was probably desperate to get away from. Eventually I had the chance to find out.

  Waxy-fingered Elpida
sent me to buy meat. She was weaning me off keftethes, which are round meat balls, and on to soutsoukakia, which are oval meat balls. Eleni was sitting behind the counter wistfully chewing the end of a pencil over a magazine of logic problems. When I came in she jumped to her feet and slipped the magazine under the counter like a guilty secret.

  ‘A kilo of mince please.’

  For once kilo came out right and nothing to do with chemistry or sleep or bellies or ruptures or any of the other words like kilo that usually complicated my shopping. Without a trace of puzzlement, she opened the door of the new chill room that my money had paid for. It was empty, the bright metal walls dulled with a thin coating of frost. Meat hooks hung from racks in the ceiling. I am not sentimental about eating animals, but I shivered at the sight of the waiting, empty room.

  A breath of cold air followed Eleni as she returned. She dumped a hunk of marbled red meat on the counter and sliced off lumps with a long, thin-bladed knife. She switched on the mincer and fed chunks of meat into the funnel, tamping them down with a brass pestle. The bottom of the machine excreted long pink worms onto a stack of greaseproof paper.

  ‘How can you live up there? There’s no electricity.’

  ‘We like the simple life.’

  ‘Do you have a simple life in London? Tell me how you live.’

  Where do you start? She had never been further than Athens. I conjured up an afternoon in Tesco’s and she marvelled at the enormous trolleys and the length of the aisles and the fifteen varieties of everything. I loved watching her eyebrows and the corner of her mouth twitch as she tried to remain unimpressed by these wonders.

  A couple of days later I offered to buy the braising steak that Elpida was going to turn into stifado with the help of the year’s first crop of little onions. This time I took Eleni with me on the underground and double-decker buses. I described the weather, how it hardly snowed and rained less than people imagined but how it was grey and chilly most of the year.

  Over the days that followed she was entranced by the English countryside, vast bright yellow and green fields, unalleviated by hedge or pond or tree, in which extraneous flowers and weeds and birds and animals had been eradicated by chemicals. She could not picture a countryside without farmyards, where all the cows and chickens were locked away in sheds, and she thought I was joking when I described country villages where a loaf of bread was made in the city fifty kilometres away and beans came from Africa and churches and pubs were abandoned.

  Her fascination with all this was nothing compared with her amazement when I described the way we lived. She could not understand why it was rude to ask personal questions, for example about what people earned or spent or paid for their houses. I tried to explain privacy, but it was impossible. It wasn’t that she didn’t understand the concept, she thought it was an aberration. She didn’t understand why you went to strangers in a bank if you wanted money for a house or a car. What was your family for? The idea that tax evasion and otherwise cheating the government were looked down on she found peculiar, considering that politicians were thieves and liars and that the aim of government was to steal from one lot of people and give to another. She pitied people who lived alone, single-parent families, children growing up without their father or with someone else’s, old people looked after by strangers instead of their children. She was shocked that we burned our dead, gave names to children without baptism, were married by a civil servant. She envied girls who married whom they liked and without a dowry.

  ‘Po-po-po,’ she said after every revelation. The romance of Tesco’s and the Bakerloo line rubbed off on me. I was an alien with news of foreign parts. I liked the way Eleni looked at me with curiosity and compassion, abhorrence and excitement. One morning, I plucked up courage to ask what people thought of us.

  ‘When you first came to the village we were disappointed. You are not how we imagine Europeans. You want to live like a vlach up there and you dress like a labourer and you drive a cheap old car. But we see now you are European. You are alone in the world. You do what pleases you. We want to be European but not like that. Ti na kanoume? What can we do?’

  I needed five hundred reeds for the ceiling. Barba Vasilis inspected his long little fingernail and said that his sister Athina had the best reeds on the island. She lived in a small, low concrete and Ellenit house by Lake Dystos.

  I found her in an overgrown garden whacking a bramble bush with a machete. She was a plump little woman in her sixties who flouted convention by wearing bright flowery dresses and pink velvet slippers with pompoms instead of black. In those days most women over the age of forty were in mourning for somebody. Her head sprouted green curlers and was shrouded in a mist of tiny, silent insects. She ignored them, but I swatted and slapped at mine. We went through the usual preliminaries.

  ‘Deuts?’

  I fell into the trap of shaking my head when I should have nodded my head backwards with a disdainful tut. So she repeated the question in a louder voice. ‘Sind Sie Deuts?’

  ‘Nein. Englesos.’

  ‘Ah. Thatser.’

  In those days they said ‘Ah, Thatcher’ or ‘Ah, Benny Hill’. These days they say ‘Ah, Beckham’ or ‘Ah, Mister Bean’.

  I pronounced the speech I had rehearsed about the reeds and asked how much. She hesitated, so I expected a ridiculous foreigner’s price, which I would have to beat down. I was not disappointed. She held up a chubby finger with a sweet, innocent smile.

  ‘One drachma? Each?’ I spread my arms and tilted my head back and treated her to a histrionic tut.

  ‘Alright, two for one drachma,’ she said.

  ‘OK. OK. Right. It’s a deal.’

  I could have kissed her. I had finally haggled someone down. I looked round for a neat pile of golden reeds.

  ‘Where are they?’

  ‘Over there.’

  She waved her machete dangerously close to my stomach towards the reeds crowding her garden wall like extras from The Day of the Triffids.

  ‘What do you want for that price? You have to cut them yourself. Are you afraid of water snakes?’

  I forced myself not to run away as she went into the house to fetch a pruning knife and a pair of long rubber boots. They were several sizes too small and my heels would not go in, but I hobbled in them anyway for fear of snakes.

  ‘Just make a noise and they’ll go away,’ she advised.

  You could hear me singing and splashing all over the island as I started chopping at the reeds. The ones on drier ground near the house were too thin. The good stuff was in the marsh. I laboured and sweated as the sun rose higher in the clear blue sky. I could have done with gloves. The cane was covered in a green, feathery husk as sharp as razors. Hands cut by the reeds, feet sucking in the black mud, crippled by the boots, fearful of quicksand and snakes, I edged closer and closer through the stench of rotting vegetation and marsh gas towards the ancient city of Dystos on its conical island. Water rats and birds scuttled away and clouds of insects condensed around my head. Exhausted, aching, crippled, blistered and covered in bites, this was not how I imagined having a Greek island dwelling would be. I finally hacked the five hundredth reed and added it to the pile to lug back up to Athina’s house.

  Lunch was waiting on the veranda along with Athina’s husband, Pericles. I can’t describe him because I can’t remember anything about him. Rare among Greeks, he was quiet and unobtrusive. It must have been a precious gift for ambushing duck or netting warblers or stalking eel with a trident or fishing frogs with a bit of raw meat on the hook. We ate the fruits of his labour. Little lake birds stewed in lemon sauce, bigger birds stuffed with cheese and roasted, deep-fried frogs’ legs tasting like squid, chunks of shallow fried eel in lemon, a poached carp, peppery watercress, waterweed blanched and oiled … A sea eagle perched on a telephone pole to watch us for a while and then took off to find his own dinner.

  I paid Athina for the reeds and lashed them in bundles on the roof of the car. My knots have never progres
sed beyond the granny and the reef, so half of them ended up slung over the sides and trailing on the road. Like Birnam Wood I crawled back to the house, peering through the fronds and swatting away little creatures that lived in them and had decided that the inside of the car was a nicer place.

  ‘How much did you give her?’ snorted Vasilis. ‘But they don’t belong to her. They don’t belong to anyone. They are free to everybody. Bah. Athina was always crafty.’

  So much for my haggling skills. Far from beating her price down, I’d beaten it up from nothing. But she’d given me an excellent lunch.

  I had to strip the reeds, so I bought a pruning knife and sat in a growing pile of reed husks, wondering how to get Nektarios to finish the roof. I had given him a third of the price as a deposit and he was in no hurry to finish. Like contractors everywhere, he had several jobs on the go at once. The best way to persuade him to start was to get up early and lie in wait at the café where he came for breakfast coffee and aspirin. This worked unless other suitors were competing for his favours, in which case I brought out the Scottish seducer and corrected his coffee, as the Italians say.

  Anyone uninterested in the restoration of island roofs might want to skip the next couple of paragraphs. While I find this sort of thing fascinating, I can see that it could be boring.

  While I finished stripping the reeds, Nektarios and Adonis built a rough scaffold around the top of the walls by poking timbers into holes in the wall that the original builders had left and nailing old floorboards over them. Meanwhile I negotiated with Aristotle the diviner for the hire of his water tank on wheels. Nektarios needed water for concrete, which he laid on top of the walls to stop water getting in and for the beams to rest on. When the concrete was set and the shuttering removed, he laid down three massive chestnut joists that spanned the house and were notched into the concrete. They formed the base of three equilateral triangles made up with a pair of rafters each.

  The rafters were joined at the top by a sort of keystone made by a timber that hung vertically downwards almost to the horizontal joists. This allowed the rafters some play under the heavy weight of the roof. The tops of the triangles were connected by a ridge beam running lengthways. Parallel to the ridge were four rows of chestnut battens that also connected the rafters. The roof was hipped at the end, meaning that it sloped down to the short sides as well as the long sides of the house, so that long rafters stretched from the ends of the ridge to the corners of the walls and were connected by battens.