It's All Greek to Me!

by John Mole

  At the end of each day I painted the wood with preservative using a long-handled brush, trying not to look down from Nektarios’s rickety scaffolding. Then they took four days to lay the reeds across the battens, fixing them with laths nailed into the rafters. When they finished in the evening I crawled over the reeds, straightening them and painting them with preservative as well. My hands were full of splinters and dripped blood. When we finished it looked like a Club Med hut, but there was a sense of habitable space inside, cool and light and enclosed. It had become a house again.

  Then they began work on the tiling. They manhandled onto the scaffold long pieces of stone, which Nektarios trimmed with a mason’s hammer and laid along the top of the wall for the soffits. At the end facing uphill he built the chimney. He wanted to use brick but, after an arm-waving argument, agreed to use stone. He was fussy about the mortar for the tiles. He said that the more cement you have in the mix, the more it expands and contracts with changes in the temperature and so loosens the tiles. He used an orange-pink sand to blend in with the terracotta. Adonis mixed it while I handed up the tiles on an improvised hod. First Nektarios spread mortar over the reeds and put down the bottom layer of tiles on their backs and overlapping end to end. Then he put the top layer face down on them and sealed the join with a dollop of mortar. He finished tiling at sunset on the second day.

  After more than twenty years, we still sit outside and admire the roof as the sun goes down. The natural unevenness of the beams and reeds gently distorts all the straight lines. The curve as the pitch flattens out towards the eaves is deliciously sensual. It doesn’t squat heavy on the walls like a stone roof but strains to lift off, airy and buoyant, taking the rest of the house with it like a balloon. The colours are exquisite, a palette of reds and yellows and pinks that reflect the moods of the day, fresh light pink in the dawn, ruddy and strong at midday, ochre and subdued in the afternoon, ripe and luscious in the evening. In the setting sun they glow with their own inner light like iron in a furnace.

  You can see the roof clearly from the road to Aliveri, a warm and natural red against the dark green hills. Inside is just as beautiful. The chestnut beams gleam a rich brown in an intricate geometric pattern. The pale yellow ceiling behind them is smooth and warm and textured. We love our roof.

  I was so happy that I gave Nektarios a whole bottle of Old McSporran. He was very touched and opened it right away. The three of us sat on the steps of the chapel and watched Spiros’s white doves wheeling over the new roof. Nektarios held up the amber liquid to the setting sun.

  ‘Oh mama,’ he said, suddenly moved. ‘My father and all my brothers were drunkards and wastrels and my dying mother made me promise on the hair of her head never to drink wine or ouzo or brandy or beer. Thank God she died before she heard of whisky. Oh my little sparrow, she used to say, remember the story. The God Dionysos came out of the east and showed the farmer Nimichos how to make wine. He planted his wand in the ground and touched it and it sprouted leaves. That was the first vine. Then he said “Nimichos, fetch me a lion and an ass and a pig.” Nimichos caught a lion on Pendeli and brought the other animals from his stable. Dionysos told him to cut the lion’s throat and pour the blood on the vine. Nimichos did this and Dionysos told him to cut the throat of the ass too and pour the blood on the vine. Nimichos did this too and Dionysos told him to cut the throat of the pig and pour its blood on the vine. That is why when you drink wine you become first like a lion and then like an ass and then like a pig. Stick to whisky, my friend, and you’ll stay a randy old goat.’ He cackled with laughter and picked a flower where it grew in a crack in the steps and stuck it behind his ear.

  Rites and rituals

  Our beautiful new roof glowing in the setting sun acted like a beacon. By the time Nektarios the roofer had finished his story, which is at least three thousand years old, men were gathering for an informal topping-out. In England if you put up a fence or add on a garage the neighbours pretend not to notice. They twitch the curtains or take a quick sideways look as they walk past. But in Greece they come round and tell you what you are doing wrong the moment the first sod is turned. And when it is finished they come and wish you health and good luck.

  Spiros the carpenter was the first, after he had fed his doves and chickens. Ajax the butcher saw from his balcony that the roof was finished and drove up in his Datsun. He left the headlights on to illuminate the party, which attracted others from the village like moths to a candle. It was the first time lights had been seen in the old village for twenty years. Dimitris the builder drove up. Aussie Alekos came with a taxi load. Haralambos the builder’s merchant strode erect over the fields. I caught a glimpse of sun-touched Dionysos hovering in the background.

  In the dying light of day they walked round the house and inspected the work and reminisced about the stick they had taken in the nearby houses. I had three glasses, Alekos found a couple in the church and Spiros went into his old house for some chipped cups, so with my last two bottles of Old McSporran and a cheese that Ajax produced and a bucket of olives that had been lurking in a pick-up, we had the makings of a party. Ajax turned up the Datsun’s radio and left the door open in case we were disturbed by the noises of the night.

  ‘Why do you want to live on your own in a stable?’ asked Nikos, the bus driver whose snorting blue Volvo plied between Limanaki and Aliveri twice a day in a cloud of dust and black diesel.

  ‘He likes things the old way,’ said Ajax.

  ‘That’s because he never knew them. If he’d lived in the old days he wouldn’t want them back.’

  ‘Ten people in one room and the donkey in bad weather.’

  ‘No medicine, no schools, no electric …’

  ‘Tell them what you got up to in the old days, Barba Fedon,’ said Nikos and we turned to an old man sitting on an upturned bucket in the shadow of the olive tree.

  Barba Fedon was well into his eighties and looked as if he had always been little and wasted and not simply shrunk by old age. He did not take advantage of the licence for shabbiness given to the old. His chalk-white death’s head was topped with a chestnut-dyed comb-over and he was always carefully shaved and perfumed and dressed in a black leather jacket and pressed grey trousers and patent leather shoes. He was one of a quartet of regulars in the café who shared a copper kilo pot of wine and half a kilo of feta for breakfast before the rest of us had finished the first coffee of the day. Sometimes they stayed there until it was time for the afternoon sleep, dealing with copper pot after copper pot, while they played cards or tavli. I had never seen him with anyone who might have been a relative, even on Sundays or holidays.

  I occasionally saw him going slowly but purposefully up the mountain on his donkey and coming back with a bulging plastic bag or a stick of wood or a scrap of rusty wire. Our relationship had got off to a bad start when he stopped to watch me levelling the earth outside the back door for a terrace. He asked me what I was doing and I said that I would like to plant vegetables but I didn’t have the time. Unfortunately the word for vegetables and the word for sausages are confusingly similar and he thought that I was making fun of him. Since then his bright rheumy eyes flickered over my yard like an old magpie’s and we exchanged ‘good evenings’, but he did not stop to talk.

  ‘Come on, Fedon, tell us about the old days,’ said several men, laughing and glancing at each other. Barba Fedon obviously had a party piece.

  He cleared his throat and worked his lips and started his story. My Greek wasn’t up to understanding all of it and I had to piece it together afterwards from Ajax and Vasilis and Mitsos. You have to imagine for yourself the men’s guffaws, bouzouki music from Ajax’s car, cries of owls, moths in the headlight beams, bats above our heads, the enticing glug-glug of a bottle and Barba Fedon’s thin but vigorous voice wafting out of the darkness on a breath of cologne.

  ‘Ah, the old times. You all think of the hunger and the sickness and the wars. Me, I think of the people and how we were and what we did. When I
was a boy old women muttered over bird bones and red flannel and mothers fiddled with amulets and charms against the evil eye and girls played with grains of wheat and pomegranate seeds and buried them and wept and didn’t wash and ran round in the full moon and bathed in dew and all that. The men were the same. We carved crosses and signs on our tools and saddles and guns and played with little leather bags of bones and God knows what. The eighth of January is St Domenica’s day. The saint of midwives. It was a cold day and dull and there was snow on the ground. The men always stayed indoors on that day while the women went out to have fun on their own. But I said I was going to hunt hare on the mountain.’

  ‘Ah, winter hare. On the spit.’

  ‘Bah. In the oven.’

  ‘With garlic purée. Has to have garlic purée.’

  ‘Op-pa. Let Barba Fedon get on with his story.’

  ‘I put on my greatcoat and my cap with the earflaps and the gun and a few cartridges I begged from my father and kissed my mother and left at dawn. But when I got to the edge of the woods, just up there, I hid my coat and my gun and crept down to old Dimitris’s olive mill on the main road that Spiros now has for his woodwork. It was just a big shed with the press at one end and we used to have it for parties in the winter before they built the kentro.’

  ‘We know all that.’

  ‘Give the old boy a drink.’

  ‘It was all locked up, but I knew there was a trapdoor at the back for the belt drive to the press from the old engine they had. I was always a skinny lad and I wriggled through that hole like a rat. I was scared, I tell you. A bird fluttered in the rafters and I nearly died. At one end of the shed was a platform with a chair draped in a white sheet. At the other were trestle tables. In one corner were empty wine barrels I had helped my father unload a few days before. I opened the nearest and threw in a bale of straw to sit on. I turned it round so the bung hole in the middle faced outwards and got inside. It soon got warm I tell you, even though I left the lid open a crack. The fumes made me drowsy. Only the straw pricking my bum kept me awake. My neck and my back were getting stiff and I decided to give up the whole stupid idea and get my gun and go up the mountain when the women came in. Five more minutes and I would have been off to chase hare and women the rest of my life.’

  ‘Get to the good bit, Fedon.’

  ‘Let him tell his story.’

  ‘So in came all the women of the village except those too old or too young to bear children. There were about fifty of them. Some wore the old costumes and others Sunday best and they all wore yellow scarves. I saw two of my aunts and lots of cousins and my mother. And I saw Persephone, the priest’s daughter, with two of her friends. She was fifteen and older than me, but I was in love with her. These three were quiet and shy while the other women giggled and chattered so I guessed it was their first time. They bolted the door and lit a stove and some oil lamps, which made my barrel even stuffier.

  ‘Then there was a loud hammering on the door. Everyone went quiet. Four old women came in hobbling on their corns. Behind them came Thea Katina, Aunt Katina, the midwife. She was short and fat and had brawny arms for pulling babies out. She sat down on the chair on the platform and the women lined up to give her presents. A woman who had just had twins put a woollen shawl round her shoulders. They put a wreath of garlic and onion on her head and a string of dried figs and carobs round her neck. She ended up with a big onion in one hand and a giant leek in the other, a basin of water at her feet, a new pair of scissors, a knife, a fancy jug and bowl, embroidered towels and bars of soap that cost a lot in the old days. They all came up to kiss her hand. Persephone and her friends were the last.

  ‘“My dears,” said Thea Katina, “this is your first Domenica’s day. A woman’s lot is pain, pain from men and pain from children. Be a brave child of Domenica. Now kiss.” They had to kneel down and kiss the vegetables. While this was going on they sang a carol about an angel coming down from heaven to help with the birth of Christ. I thought it was all ridiculous and I was uncomfortable and dizzy cooped up in my barrel.’

  ‘We’re going to sleep too, Barba Fedon.’

  ‘Go and watch television if you don’t want to listen.’

  ‘They dragged out the tables and benches and laid out the food. Thea Katina was put on her throne at one end. Persephone and her two friends ran round the tables with jugs of wine they refilled from a barrel near mine. I have never seen women drink so much, not at weddings or Easter. They talked louder and louder and laughed a lot and started singing. First it was the songs they always sang when they were working and then the rude songs the men sang when they thought the women could not hear and then songs much worse than the men’s, which I had never heard before. They made my ears burn, I can tell you. In between the songs they told dirty stories about the village men. My mother said my father had flippy-floppy balls like a ram on a spit and massaged them with olive oil.’

  ‘I prefer butter, what about you?’

  ‘Massage myself? Never. I get someone to do it for me.’

  ‘Then they started to dance. There wasn’t any music, because playing was man’s work then, so they beat time on anything they could find. One of them thumped the top of my barrel and I nearly shat myself. By now it was really hot and they all shone with sweat and unpinned their hair and undid their bodices and corsets and waistbands. They put two poles under Thea Katina’s chair and carried her round the room and she sprinkled them with water from her basin. They sang faster and faster until they were jogging round the room and singing nonsense. All at once they stopped and heaved the chair up towards the roof. Thea Katina reached up and scrabbled round the beam. With a great shout she brought down something long and fat and showed it round like a holy relic on a saint’s day. When I saw what it was I had to stuff my fingers in my mouth. It was a sausage. A metre-long sausage.

  ‘The women didn’t laugh. They stopped yelling and chanting and cheered instead. They put Thea Katina down in the middle of the floor. She put the sausage in her lap with the end sticking out over her knees. She called in a low voice “come women come” and they all crowded up like they do at church for the bread and tore off chunks of it and ate them.’

  ‘I hope Eleni’s not got salami tonight.’

  ‘If not you’ll give her some, will you?’

  ‘I tell you, it was bad enough during the songs and dancing, but now I couldn’t help it. I exploded like a ripe melon. I sent the lid of the barrel flying through the air. The singing stopped. Those eyes, how shall I ever forget them? They stared like basilisks at my poor head sticking out of the barrel. They tipped it over and dragged me by the hair in front of Thea Katina. I was too dumbstruck to say anything. She looked down on me like Christ in the cupola. “A man,” she said in this terrible voice.’

  For all the times he must have told this story, Fedon’s voice was shaking.

  ‘Go on. What happened then?’

  ‘He never tells us.’

  ‘But I’ll tell you what was the worst. It was their cries like the baying of hounds.’

  Fedon stood up from his bucket and stepped into the light. His eyes were moist, but whether from tears or laughter or the rheuminess of age I couldn’t say. He smoothed down his comb-over and without saying goodbye he picked his way carefully through us to the path and down past the chapel. The rest drained their glasses and queued up to shake my hand and wish me kalo risiko before getting in their cars. I stayed to enjoy my roof in the starlight and watch the constellations trace ancient tales across the sky.

  Thanassis, who sold me tiles, was my first dead body. Now I was invited to my first death. The host was stylish Barba Vasilis’s father, Barba Petros, the oldest man in the village. They said he was a hundred but nobody was sure. In addition to his great age he was famous for introducing cigarettes to the village. Before then, everyone smoked the hookah.

  ‘In his day he was a giant,’ said Barba Vasilis. ‘He could lift a rock that size with one hand and toss it on top of a wall like h
alf a brick.’ He tapped a boulder in front of him with his stick. ‘Eh, the wood we ate. One whack and you felt you’d had a hiding. That was after he came back. Before we were born he went away to build the Panama Canal.’

  He made it sound as if Barba Petros had cut the trench single-handed like some modern Hercules or the logger who stirred his coffee with his thumb.

  ‘That was before the First War. The French came round the islands in a steamer collecting men. My father signed up. He had no idea where Panama was. He had never been off the island before. He told my mother there was digging to be done and he’d be back at the end of the month. He was away three years. They sailed round the islands picking up men and took them to Marseilles. That’s where he learned to smoke cigarettes.’ He said this as if Barba Petros had taken a course with exams and a certificate.

  ‘They were collecting men from all over Europe. My father told us stories about the fights they had with the Sicilians. From Marseilles they went to Panama and he stayed until the work was finished. He came back with enough money to build a house, but he never told anyone where the rest went. And of course he came back with the cigarettes. He taught everyone to roll them [again I thought of classes in the schoolroom] but it was Yannis’s father who made a profit from the idea and sold the tobacco and the papers. We used to have the Turkish pipe, but you had to be sitting down for that.’

  Cigarettes are such an integral part of the Mediterranean diet that it is hard to imagine a time when people did not smoke them. Here I should make a distinction between the Mediterranean Diet, which is an invention of Californian hypochondriacs, and the Mediterranean diet, which keeps Mediterraneans alive into their nineties. The real Mediterranean diet consists of a cup of strong black coffee in the morning, a quarter pound of cheese and a couple of beers for elevenses, stews or a fry-up for lunch with eggs and chips and cheese, more meat and cheese at night and the odd cheese pie during the day when you feel peckish. Plenty of salad but also plenty of fried vegetables, a litre or so of wine, a few beers and a couple of ouzos along with whisky when you can get it. And don’t forget a couple of packs of cigarettes a day.