It's All Greek to Me!

by John Mole

  ‘Every day of his life he had half a kilo of wine and a chunk of cheese for his breakfast. Now he doesn’t have the cheese. Eh, soon he won’t have the wine. You should come down and see him before he goes. They say it will be tomorrow or the next day.’

  The next day at lunchtime I paid my respects to the local hero. A tiny old woman opened the door and without a query ushered me into a front room stuffed with heavy dark furniture. Barba Petros lay propped up on a large brass bed in the middle of the room, diffusing an aura of sweetness and stale urine. The shutters were closed and he was illuminated by a single bare bulb of modest wattage above the bed. The walls had gilt-framed pictures of heroes of the War of Independence, posturing with swords and muskets in tasselled caps and fustanellas.

  I had come not a moment too soon. I abandoned hopes of hearing about the Panama Canal. Petros lay with his head back and his eyes closed and his mouth half open. His breath came in hoarse, irregular gasps. Shrunk and wizened he was lost in the bed, a giant laid low. Around him were waxy-fingered Elpida and half a dozen other women in black sitting on kitchen chairs. A woman fussed round with damp flannels and cloths, while another dusted the sideboard. They chattered in low voices but I couldn’t tell what about.

  Vasilis stood behind the head of the bed, his hands gripping the brass rail like someone in the dock. It was as if we were all on stage behind the curtain, waiting for it to rise. I wanted to leave, but more people were coming in behind me and pushing me over to the far corner of the room. One of them was green-eyed Eleni. She was surprised to see me and I was the only one she greeted before bending down to kiss her grandfather. She stood next to Vasilis at the head of the bed and joined in the general muttered conversation.

  As the room filled up, the talk got louder and Petros’s breathing became rougher and more irregular. Once it stopped for a couple of seconds, like a baby’s sometimes does, and we all held our breath too. Then it started again and the buzz of conversation resumed. By now the room was full and the air was thick and stale. Fortunately there were no cigarettes in the hero’s honour.

  I decided I had had enough and wormed my way to the door, to find it blocked by Papas Konstantinos, wearing a stole and carrying a leather bag. The crowd parted to let him through to the bed and I stayed to see what he did. He had timed his entrance perfectly. Petros’s eyes clicked open like a doll’s and there was a collective gasp from the onlookers. He looked up at the ceiling, or rather through it. His face was radiant and full of strength and vigour, as if a beam of sunlight pierced the roof. He struggled to sit up and Eleni, tears welling in her lovely eyes, leaned over to help him. He smiled a beaming, toothless smile so full of joy that many of us could not help joining in.

  ‘Te quiero,’ I heard him say in a clear and gentle voice, ‘te quiero.’ And with those words he closed his eyes, the light on his face went dim and he breathed a long sigh and fell back into Eleni’s arms.

  There was a stunned silence. Then Elpida started to keen in a throaty contralto and one by one the others took up her lament.

  ‘Alas what an agony the soul endures when it is parting from the body, a man’s body, a strong body like yours, Petros …’

  My own reaction caught me by surprise. My chest swelled and my eyes were moist in pride on his behalf as if he had won a great victory. The feeling of triumph was bizarre but genuine. I stayed to watch the papas administer the Unction and then those of us who were neither related nor acolytes at the rituals of washing and dressing filed out of the room behind him, the men lighting up as they got outside. The church bell began to toll its terrible message.

  Spiros the carpenter was waiting outside with a coffin. He asked what the old man’s last words were. I didn’t say they were ‘I love you’ in Spanish.

  Elpida was behind me. ‘He said Kyrie, Kyrie,’ she said, ‘Lord, Lord,’ and they crossed themselves three times.

  I had probably misheard. Elpida was probably right. In any case, I was glad for Petros that after such a long life he had found at last whomever it was he saw. But if he had said te quiero, it would have made a nice story.

  After a coffee and a gossip in the café, I went back up to the house and tried to work. But I could not get Petros’s expression out of my mind or the turmoil of feelings out of my heart. Or the terrible sense of finality. I wanted to be with my family and at about five o’clock I couldn’t stand it any more. I ran down to the cemetery and got in the car. As I drove past the church the funeral procession was forming outside Petros’s house. Tonight he would be in the ground with lamps flickering above him.

  I got home in time to read stories to the children. In the small hours I held Arfa tight and told her about old Petros and how I never wanted to be separated from her for a single moment and that life was too short for absence and longing.

  We will grow old together in a stone house with a red roof under the mountain by a grassy meadow dotted with olives and almonds. I will build a floor with mellow pine from Olympus and gleaming chestnut from Macedonia and a chair of silky beech seated with ochre rushes from the Acheron and a table with sea-washed oak from shipwrecks and a great bed of African mahogany perfumed with wild lavender and thyme with posts and bedhead carved with flowers and grapes and furnished with silk from Mistra and the down of countless birds of passage. When we are old we will sit hand in hand under a canopy of vines and look out for our grandchildren over a silver sea scored with currents, the wakes of invisible ships …

  We wept together and fell asleep as the sky grew light. When she woke she reached over to touch me, but I was gone. I had to see Haralambos about the plumbing.

  Making it up

  People who buy houses in nice places often end up running a guest house. Friends and relations who usually keep in touch through photocopied Christmas letters start to phone and write in the spring, just to see how you are and coincidentally to discuss their holiday plans. In our case word had got round about the standard of accommodation, so we had few visitors and those who did come did not stay very long.

  Our friends Frank and Marcie from Pittsburgh were not put off, however. They were our first visitors and stayed with us at Kyria Sofia’s fish taverna down in Limanaki. They had just finished converting an old barn and advised us on our new wooden floor.

  Barba Mitsos said that in the days before imported chestnut and pine floorboards, the floor would have been made of earth laid on layers of reeds, supported by olive or cypress joists. The neighbours joined in trampling down the earth and poured on buckets of pig’s blood to make it hard as concrete. It sounded jolly, but what about the smell and the flies? A waste of good food, said Elpida. In any case, it was hard enough to lure my craftsmen away from chipboard and plastic tiles onto wooden floorboards. In the interests of fake authenticity we thought old boards would look better than new Swedish pine, but there were none to be found on the island.

  One of the most famous temples of Ancient Greece was Eleusis, pronounced Elefsis, about fifteen miles from Athens. It was allegedly the last place that the corn goddess Demeter looked for her daughter Persephone, who had been carried off by Hades alias Pluto alias Lord of the Underworld. Zeus intervened and let her have her daughter back, except for the four months of winter when she had to go back down to be Queen of the Underworld. Every autumn for thousands of years, until about 400 AD, secret ceremonies commemorating the death and rebirth of corn and promising life after death were held at Eleusis. The solemnities began with a procession along the Sacred Way from Athens. So I did my best to instil a sense of awe and timeless mystery in the two eldest lads as we sat in fumes and traffic jams on the way to the tips and salvage yards that now line the Sacred Way.

  Frank came along to help load the splintery old boards. If I sat sideways at the wheel they just fitted between the front and rear windows and left a space for the boys to stand in their usual place, leaning up against the back of the front seats. Frank slept off jet lag and last night’s retsina on the back seat under a low planking roof.
Dangerously loaded, we laboured in third gear from Athens to Skala Oropos.

  Everything was going well until we were halfway down the steep winding road to the port. I was musing on the past lives that had seeped into the wood and wondered what memories would season it in future. A scream from Jim pierced my eardrum. I stamped on the brakes. We fishtailed to the unfenced cliff edge. In the mirror I saw Frank jerk up out of his doze. He banged his head on the planks and fell back dazed. Both boys screamed. Off brakes, steer into skid …

  It probably felt more dramatic and dangerous than it really was. Scrunching to a stop, I jumped out and wrenched open the sliding door. Frank clutched his head. Where am I? Where am I? Jack had his hands over his ears. Jim screamed. He clutched his crotch. I made the diagnosis. As we drove along he had been idly whipping his zip up and down, as one does, forgetting that he had not put underpants on that morning. He had meshed himself in the zipper. Tiny bobbles of pink skin protruded all the way up the line of clamped metal teeth.

  Frank saved the day. He had been a US Army medic in Korea and he took charge. After a scream to out-scream all the previous, we saw that the skin had not been broken, only savagely mauled. We continued on our way while Frank entertained us with similar cases he had seen. Another of life’s dramas seasoned the old boards, another sentimental memory to relive, especially when Jim’s friends come to stay.

  We delivered the boards to Spiros for sanding and regrooving and told him the reason for getting old wood was that it was cheaper than new, which was untrue. I was already in trouble for buying chestnut beams for joists instead of straight pine. He grumbled that it would be impossible to lay the floor level. To prove him wrong, Frank and I did the work ourselves. The basement was only about two metres high so we could easily reach and it was simple enough to fit the chestnut poles, split in half lengthways to make a flat side, into the existing holes in the walls. The only problem was that chestnut is as hard as oak and as difficult to saw. My arms were like jelly before we finished.

  When we laid the floorboards I realised what Spiros meant about a level floor. In addition to the unevenness of the wood the house had settled over the years, so the slots for the joists were out of alignment. Old floorboards are not flexible like new ones, nor do they take nails well. I hammered down one end and the other sprang up with a rattle like a diving board. We weighed them down with the heaviest rocks we could carry and soaked them with water. It worked, sort of, although there were gaps between the boards, which I explained to Arfa were expansion joints for when the walls settled in the future.

  At last we could stand at the windows. The view was exquisite. We looked out on our little almond tree, whose blossom had been replaced by delicate leaves. All we could see of the old village was the church and the ancient olive next to it. Down the hill stretched an intricate jigsaw of tiny pastures and vegetable plots dotted with almonds and olives and mulberries. The village was screened by trees. We could see the church and the top of the plane tree in the square and Spiros’s old olive mill. Beyond was the plain beside the lake, yellow and green with corn and melons and tomatoes and darker green as it got marshier near Dystos on its conical hill. I could see crafty Athina’s little house and the reed bed where I had cut the ceiling. In the distance was the ring of hills that made the plain a gigantic amphitheatre. Leaning on the stone sill, we were in a box halfway between the stage and the gods waiting for the play to begin.

  One day Frank, Marcie, Arfa and I were sitting by the sea with the children. As usual, we had the beach to ourselves. We saw an old lady hobbling over the sand towards us with a bow-legged waddle acquired from a lifetime of stooping in fields. From her wrists to her calves she was dressed in faded black and wore her scarf like a Tuareg, wound round her head and face with only a slit for her eyes. We speculated nervously whether she was coming to tell the women off for their bikinis or for letting our pale-skinned little children run around in the malevolent sun.

  She stopped beside us and as she was little and bent was on the same level as us sitting down. She smelled of liniment and fish. We gave her our bravest kalimeras. She had eyes only for Frank, who was black. She held out her hand and when he took it did not let go.

  ‘You are the first black person who has ever come to our village. Welcome and God keep you well and give you many years and bring you back again.’ She turned to the women. ‘They are lovely children. May they live for you.’

  After a dry spit to avert the evil eye, she took out of her apron a dozen little dried figs, which she laid out ceremoniously one by one on our beach mat. ‘May you be well,’ she said, turned away and waddled back to her spinning.

  The four of us could do nothing but look out to sea. Kate ran up. ‘Why are you all crying?’ she asked.

  For the rest of his stay Frank acted like an honorary ambassador, giving out kalimeras and shaking hands with strangers. Alas, he never came back and died of cancer a few years later.

  Genial Spiros was to make the doors and windows using old frames that we scavenged from the house and the salvage yards of the Sacred Way. Every morning I went down to his workshop to chivvy him into making a start. Every morning he greeted me as if we hadn’t seen each other for months. We sat under a feathery walnut tree and sassy Antigone slouched over with coffee in the best flowery china cups with rims scalloped like tulips. We discussed the world as if one of us had just come back from a long journey.

  Spiros was the exception to the rule of migration from the islands and villages into Athens. His family was born and bred Athenian. His father lived in Plaka at the foot of the Acropolis and was a photographer, plying his trade round the Parthenon with a bucket of water, a box of plates and a large wooden box on a tripod. Every autumn, when the summer trade slackened, he brought his family and his gun to the lake for the geese that stopped over on St Athanasios’s day, regular as clockwork. He paid for their holiday by taking portraits and wedding photos in the villages around.

  The Germans occupied Athens, bringing brutality and famine. Although he had no family connections, he sent his wife and three children to Evia, which they associated with peace and plenty. They nearly died of starvation in a hunter’s shack living off frogs from the lake and acorns from the mountains and what flour they could beg. The Germans squeezed the islanders for everything they could not hide. Without family and connections it was hard to survive. Money would have helped, but after six months none came from Athens. Spiros’s father had stayed to take photographs of SS officers posing against the marble gods and heroes they emulated. But when the Germans discovered copies of his photographs in a raid on the headquarters of ELAS, the communist resistance, he was arrested and never heard of again. When the Germans finally left, the photographer’s brother warned Spiros’s mother not to come back to Athens from Evia because of a British purge against communists, including families of resistance heroes. The real reason was that he had moved his own family into his brother’s house in Plaka.

  Spiros found work with Nikos the carpenter and married his only daughter. He married well. Her dowry was a house in the old village and the olive mill. The olives now went to an industrial mill in Aliveri and he made the shed into a carpenter’s shop for his German woodworking machines. He kept doves in the house opposite ours. During the day they chortled and grumbled and pecked at the grain and water brought up by Antigone. In the evening they wheeled in intricate patterns with a rushing and beating of wings over the heads of the women on their way to graves and shrines and chapels to light lamps and gossip. When their white wings turned to crimson in the setting sun, they came back to roost.

  This was all very interesting, but when was Spiros going to finish my doors and windows? It was always tomorrow. I tried reasonableness, persuasion, pleading, threats, anger, all with the same result. He would take me by the arm, his punk moustache close to my cheek, and pull me into the workshop. There was a lintel on the planing machine, a box of hinges on the bench and a door plank on the saw.

  ‘My f
riend, my compatriot, don’t worry, you will have the finest doors in Evia. Do you have fine wooden doors in England?’

  ‘How the fig do you think we get in and out of the houses?’

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘Just an English expression, Spiros.’

  ‘Here. Take these.’

  I went back to the house with a handful of apricots or a couple of fresh eggs, disarmed and bursting with frustration. The next day the materials were all in different places but untouched. I asked stylish Barba Vasilis’s advice.

  ‘If you want your doors and windows made down there, why are you up here?’ he queried, leaning on his stick.

  ‘Why? I’m not making them. He is. I’ve got plenty to do up here.’

  ‘He thinks you don’t care. He thinks you come in the morning just to pass the time of day.’

  ‘But I’ve given him money. A third of his price.’

  ‘Bah. That’s just commercial. Go and work with him.’

  In Greece when you walk into a carpenter’s or a metal worker’s or a garage, the customer is often there watching the work being done. It is partly to make sure it gets done right and partly because you have embarked on a relationship that is more than commercial. So the next day I did not leave Spiros after coffee. By afternoon I had watched him plane and fit the wood for the window and door frames. The next day I watched him build two doors modelled on the oldest I could find in the old village. To one of them I fitted the ancient lock that I had found in the straw and laboriously dismantled and cleaned. It took another three days to make the windows and shutters. I put two coats of yacht varnish on the windows and took them to Haralambos to glaze.