It's All Greek to Me!

by John Mole

  ‘Eh, they both think they’re big men. And big men stick together.’ She crossed her fingers, slimy with curd. ‘Besides, they’re family. Haralambos married Ajax’s sister. She died when her sun-touched son was born. That’s why Haralambos left to work in Arabia. He came home when old Dionysos his father died and took over the hardware store. It’s time he married. He has no one to look after the house.’ She edged past me to the back door and hung the ball of cheese on the branch of a walnut to ripen in the air.

  I was depressed and angry, I hoped because I deplored the men’s treatment of women, but I suspected because I wished I could be the same.

  ‘What did Barba Mitsos do for you, Elpida?’

  She laughed. ‘What did I do for him you mean? He came at me with a stick once and I flattened him.’

  The only drawback to Haralambos’s eligibility, which had already put off the families of two potential brides, was his son Dionysos, Ajax’s nephew, whose stepmother the new bride would become.

  ‘Dionysos is no problem. Don’t worry. Antigone did well,’ said Elpida, washing cheese slime off her hands.

  Haralambos came to do the plumbing. It had to be done before the walls were plastered and the basement floor laid. He was keen to show that he had worked abroad for foreign companies and knew the proper way to do things. It was so refreshing that he did not need cajoling and persuading and begging and bribing like the others but came on the day he promised. He arrived in a tipper truck with Dionysos riding behind the cab. He made no effort to involve his son and behaved as though he were invisible. I joined in the conspiracy to save them both embarrassment. I felt so sorry for them and thanked God for my own children.

  Dionysos did not seem to mind. He chewed a crust of bread and watched while I helped his father unload the copper and the plastic pipes. He stood over us like a fussy clerk of works while we dug a trench from the basement to the hole that Zenon had dug. Haralambos laid pipes along it from the bathroom and the kitchen and I was glad to see that he used levels and lines and not innate craftsmanship to get the falls right. Then we put down pipes from where my water tank would be to the house. When the trenches had been filled he installed the plumbing.

  We worked hard through the morning with a break at noon for bread and cheese and finished by three o’clock, the end of the working day. We sat on a bag of cement under the olive. Dionysos lurked in the shade of the almond tree, watching us. I poured whisky.

  ‘How will it be to be married again?’ I asked.

  ‘A man has to have a wife.’

  ‘You were lucky to find her.’

  ‘Eh, luck. You go where the wind takes you. She’s a good girl. She’s young but she’ll be a good woman.’

  He leaned back against the tree and sipped his whisky. He nodded to the little church. ‘You know that Ajax’s uncle murdered his wife’s lover? He waited for him outside that church and shot him in the head. He would have killed her too, except they stopped him in time.’

  ‘What happened to him?’

  ‘He was unlucky. The judge made an example of him. He got four years.’

  ‘That’s not much.’

  ‘Too much for what he did.’

  ‘Who was the lover?’

  ‘The saddle maker. The father of Adonis. His wife Maria sings at the funerals. She lives just along the hill.’

  ‘That’s terrible.’

  ‘It was. Everyone had to go to Aliveri to get their saddles mended. Then Barba Vasilis took over the business.’

  ‘Does that sort of thing happen now?’

  ‘He was the last. But who knows? You never know what the fates have in store.’

  ‘It wasn’t fate. They could choose. The saddle maker did not have to sleep with Ajax’s aunt. Ajax’s uncle did not have to kill the saddle maker. They could choose what to do.’

  ‘Eh. Eros drove the saddle maker. Nemesis drove the butcher. They had no choice.’

  He finished his drink, stood up and clapped me on the shoulder as if he had delivered the clinching argument. I let it go. He got into the truck and drove down the hill. Dionysos scampered onto the back and sat with his legs dangling over the edge, looking at me. I waved goodbye to him but he did not wave back.

  As the crow flew mournful Maria, mother of Adonis and widow of the murdered saddle maker, was my closest neighbour. She and Adonis lived in a stone house almost as dilapidated as mine along the hill but reached by a different mule track. It was as if she lived up there in disgrace, spending the days in atonement for her adulterous husband, growing vegetables and flowers in the flinty soil of her narrow terraces, rarely to be seen in the village but only in the cemetery at dusk where she sat over one grave or another, gently crooning. She made grief her life’s vocation and with her sobbing voice and talent for improvisation was much in demand for funerals and exhumations. She earned a living from performing the daily graveside rituals on behalf of relatives who lived too far away to carry out the duties themselves.

  Now that Haralambos had laid the pipes, I needed a concrete cistern for the water to fill them. On a hot, hazy day I found Dimitris the builder repairing an old diesel pump in his yard. He looked worried. For twenty-five years I have never seen him look anything else.

  ‘It’s got the gut ache like me. I’ve got the gut ache all the time. And diarrhoea. Chronic diarrhoea for five years. The doctor gives me Librium and kaolin. Do you get gut ache?’

  ‘Often,’ I said and ran through a few ailments whose Greek names I knew.

  The fastest way to a hypochondriac’s heart is through symptoms. Within half an hour we were sipping ouzo and eating salt anchovies – good for the gut ache, brings it on a treat – and discussing the merits of bulldozing the houses in the old village and building something nice and modern. The artist in Dimitris looked down on crude work like building cisterns and messing around with old stone. He loved to render walls and finish them off square and shiny with marble dust or pour bright-coloured marble floors from a can and ride a polisher over them. He looked pained at the work I wanted him to do and rubbed his stomach.

  We went through the ritual of negotiation. I knew all the techniques by now: cajoling, flattery, breaking off, walking away. I haggled all morning and as usual ended up agreeing to the price he asked in the first place.

  It took two days to build the tank out of breezeblocks in the highest part of the field behind the house. Adonis hefted the blocks and mixed the cement. I rendered it myself and roofed it with Ellenit covered with leftover tiles. It held two tons of water, which Aristotle the hydrologist delivered with his tractor and tank. Now I could plant olives and almonds and mulberries and vines.

  Anxious not to make a mistake and deprived of gardening books, I asked for advice.

  ‘Dig the holes three metres apart and fill them with manure, so they get a good start,’ said Barba Vasilis.

  ‘Two metres at most so they share each other’s shade and no manure so they don’t get lazy,’ said Barba Mitsos.

  ‘Three metres and just a little manure,’ said Spiros.

  So much for the collective wisdom of country folk. I planted some close together and the rest far apart and some with a lot of manure and others with little and the rest with none and they have all done equally well.

  I spent a week bribing Dimitris with promises of Lomatil and Kaopectate from England to start the plastering. I was dreading the ordeal of badgering him yet again when one morning I heard a tractor. It was Zenon towing a cement mixer behind his digger. Following him was Dimitris in Haralambos’s tipper loaded with sand and cement. I ran out with refreshments and indigestion tablets in case they went away again.

  Within an hour the mixer was chundering and Adonis was caked white with dust and running backwards and forwards with raw sand and cement and buckets of mortar, while Dionysos stood chewing his crust and peering into the revolving drum for the secrets of the universe. Inside the house Dimitris and Haralambos worked together with cloths tied round their heads and mouths, tossin
g trowels of rough plaster at the walls and smoothing it off with careless swipes.

  While the mixer was there they built a bathroom in the basement, installed a kitchen sink upstairs and laid stone floors.

  It did not seem right to install a cheap eastern European bog from Haralambos in our old stone house. Nothing at all would have been authentic or, if we were going upmarket, a Turkish squatter over a pit in the yard, but we decided that our bowels should move with the times. We made a family outing to the Sacred Way and tracked down a fine Royal Doulton suite. We drove it as far as the cemetery and then Arfa and I lugged it over the fields in the middle of a thunderstorm illuminated by lightning.

  For ten days Dimitris and Haralambos started at half past seven and worked until noon. After bread and cheese and a few glasses of wine they began again and worked until the heat of three o’clock. When they went home I cleared up after them and used the leftover cement and plaster for jobs of my own. My hands were soon wizened with cement where they weren’t weeping from blisters as big as saucers.

  In one of our lunch breaks it came out that Dimitris was a cousin of ruddy-faced Ajax. His mother was Ajax’s aunt and grew up in my house. To postpone getting back to work, I encouraged him to tell me about his family.

  ‘You know the man who built your house? He was my great-great-great-great-grandfather. He wasn’t Greek. He was an Albanian. We all are. My parents’ first language is Albanian. You find us all over Greece. We came here under the Turks. We are mountain people from Epirus in the north round Yannina. The Albanian speciality is mules and horses. In our language we have six different names for a mule. As far as the Turks were concerned, we were the animals. They moved us from field to field wherever we gave the best milk. That place doesn’t give enough taxes, eh, plant some Albanians. So they sent my ancestor Yannis here. He was a giant and a good man. He and his brothers built all the houses here. They were the best saddle makers on the island.

  ‘The time came to take back our own from the Turks. There was no fighting here because what could we do on an island? So we sent our best men to the Morea. Now the Pasha of Aliveri had to send mules and saddles to Athens for the Turkish army. He rode up here one day from the seraglio down by the lake with his men and found old Yannis sitting on those steps where you are sitting now. He was about seventy years old but he was still strong. The Pasha was a bastard like all of them. They never got off their horses so they could always look down on the Greeks. He said that if he didn’t have twenty new saddles by sunset the next day he would impale the old man. You know what impaling is? A sharp pole up your arse. Twenty saddles. One saddle takes a week to make. But what could Yannis do? He prayed to the Virgin and then gathered all his relatives together and anyone in the village who could help and he gave them all jobs to do. But he kept the tricks of the trade for himself and his eldest son so they had to do the difficult work themselves.

  ‘They worked all through the night and all through the next day with the Virgin helping and all they could think of was the pointed stake. At sunset the Pasha rode up with his soldiers. All the saddles were ready and he took them, without paying of course. Our people were overjoyed. Old Yannis had cheated death again. The old man went to bed and died in his sleep of exhaustion. It was his fate to die that day whatever he did.’

  ‘It wasn’t his fate,’ I said. ‘He chose to make the saddles. He could have gone into the mountain with his gun. Anything.’

  ‘He was a dead man whatever he did,’ said Haralambos.

  ‘Anyway,’ said Dimitris, ‘that’s not the end of the story. You’ve seen our saddles, haven’t you? We hammer in five brass nails so the heads make the blessed crucifix. Before the Pasha arrived Yannis gathered all the old women and told them that he was not going to put the crucifix on the saddles for the unbelievers. Instead, he wanted to put the evil eye on them. The women did it in the church over there. Those saddles were cursed by Aghios Ioannes himself. But the Pasha didn’t know and he put them in a galley along with other supplies for the army and sent them off to Athens.

  ‘The ship never arrived. It was captured by Bouboulina. You know Bouboulina? From Spetse. She was a woman but the fiercest of all the admirals. She took the booty and sold it to the Greeks. So what happened to the accursed saddles? Of course the Greeks noticed straight away that they didn’t have crosses and nailed them on and had them blessed by a priest and that took away the evil eye. But one of her customers didn’t because he wasn’t a Christian. He was a crazy Englishman like you. You know who it was?’

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘Lordos Byron. He sat on Yannis’s saddle and in six weeks he was dead of a fever. He was a dead man whatever he did.’

  Greek dancing

  The wedding present was easy. No cake stands and fish slices at a Greek wedding, you give money. I sorted out some clean notes and bought an envelope.

  We were pleased when Arfa was invited to help make spanakopitas for the wedding, spinach and cheese pies. It was a sign that we were beginning to be accepted. She was less pleased that she had to be at Elpida’s at seven in the morning. These spanakopitas were not the dainty little filo triangles that you find on the canapé tray with cherry tomato halves spread with taramasalata and cucumber sticks for dipping in the hummus. They were slabs two feet square and three inches thick and enough of them to give five hundred guests a couple of decent slices each.

  The women gathered at Elpida’s because she had the biggest stone oven. Barba Mitsos had already stuffed it with brushwood and logs and thrown in a match. On trestle tables in front of it were bags of flour, boxes of eggs, laundry baskets of fresh spinach, jugs of olive oil, cheeses piled in pyramids like cannonballs. The women divided the tasks, mixing pastry, rolling and tossing it into thin sheets, washing and chopping spinach, mashing up cheese. Elpida raked out the burning wood and brushed out the embers and threw the finished slabs onto the floor with a wooden spade. Arfa’s slender arms were an asset in a cocktail dress but a liability at a pita-making party, where brawny biceps were needed for kneading and pounding and lifting. She made herself useful doing delicate things with a four-inch paintbrush pressed into service as a pastry brush and tried to make sense of the wedding gossip that seasoned the pies with slander and scurrility. She came back to us knackered.

  After the siesta we dressed up. The children demonstrated their extraordinary capacity to attract dirt simply by sitting still on a chair in clean clothes reading Asterix. Through the vagaries of the airing cupboard, all six of us were in white shirts and dark blue trousers with slicked-down blonde hair. We looked like some kind of sect. At five, after a last face scrub with a licked handkerchief, we ambled along to Haralambos’s Texan ranch house and joined the queue winding up the steps and through the lounge and in and out of the bedroom.

  There was plenty of time to inspect his collection of brass Arabian coffee pots and pictures of charging purple elephants in heavy gilt frames and Louis de Lebanon gilt curlicued furniture. We threw coins on the bed, trying not to hit a sleeping baby who had been placed there to tempt fate and as a reminder of the point of the whole business. The women appraised the quality of the needlework in the dowry clothes and linen laid out for inspection in piles on the padded pink dressing table and a Yemeni sandalwood chest. In the lounge we were offered little glasses of a sweet liqueur.

  As usual, it was an ordeal for the children. Old ladies pinched their cheeks, tweaked their blonde hair and spat on them with spits of varying degrees of dryness to chase away the evil eye. ‘May they live for you,’ they said to us.

  At six o’clock we gathered outside the church. The men were in open-necked, short-sleeved white shirts but the women, whether they lived on the island or came from Athens for the occasion, were dressed for a reception at the Athens Hilton, clanking with jewellery, glittering with lamé and sequins and helmeted with lacquered hair. Only a few old grannies wore the traditional yellow scarf of the island. Arfa skulked with the dowdiest women, feeling underdressed.
/>   Car horns blaring different versions of Colonel Bogey and the Marseillaise announced the arrival of the bride and groom in the back of Ajax’s red Mercedes. Behind were the bride’s parents in Haralambos’s white Mercedes, followed by a hooting and tooting procession of humbler vehicles. They made a couple of circuits of the village, horns still blaring, before drawing up outside the church.

  Ruddy-faced Ajax stepped out from behind the wheel, resplendent in a light grey double-breasted German suit, embroidered two-tone blue shirt, white tie, white belt and white patent shoes. His curly hair was slicked down and shiny and his moustaches sculpted and oiled so they looked like a plastic stick-on. A beaming smile showed off the gold dental work that matched his rings and pins and chains and links. He held the door for Haralambos, who wore a cream Italian suit and bright blue tie held down by a thick gold chain. He stood smiling and upright, chest out and stomach in, as if waiting for the paparazzi. They ignored Antigone struggling to get out of the other side of the car in her voluminous white dress. She was shy and sweet and nervous and waited to be told what to do, quite unlike the sassy teenager I knew.

  Ajax the koumbaros took charge. With beefy hands scrubbed clean and manicured, he cleared a way through the crowd and ushered the wedding party into church. Parents and relatives followed and then the rest of the guests, jostling like a bus queue. Eleni was koumbara, matron of honour. She was stunning in a simple emerald green velvet dress and with her hair done up in intricate braids. She led sun-touched Dionysos, her nephew, by the hand up the aisle.

  By Orthodox standards the service was mercifully short. It took place halfway down the church on a kind of bandstand with a little altar and a canopy twined with flowers. I stood on the men’s side, the right, choking on aftershave and incense and wishing that I didn’t smell of goat and old lime. Our children wormed their way to the front. Yannis the chief cantor and Giorgos his sidekick batted the responses to and fro in deep nasal quarter tones, oblivious of popping Instamatics and howling babies and the chattering congregation.