by John Mole
First thing in the morning I got everybody up early and, while they were still half-asleep, herded them into the camper. We passed Vasilis on the way up and I shouted out of the window that we had to go to Athens on urgent business. I drove to the other side of the island, where we played and fished on the beach all day. I felt a coward, the children had yet more evidence of grown-up double-talk, and Arfa was smug but happy that I was a sensitive soul after all. We skulked back after dark with the headlights switched off in case Barba Vasilis had not done the deed yet and was lying in wait.
He delivered Denis to us on Saturday morning, mercifully unrecognisable without his rakish black beret, wrapped in an old shirt, lolling on the back of the mule like an outlaw brought back by the sheriff. I carried him into the basement and hung him head down from a ceiling joist. I wrapped him in muslin and the flies had to make do with the little pool of blood on the floor under his nose.
Ruddy-faced Ajax lent me a spit. It was a long metal bar, pointed at one end and bent into a crank at the other. With it came two Y-shaped metal supports. I cleaned and oiled it and sharpened the point with a file. We dug a shallow trench in the field at the back of the house and stuck the Y-shaped supports in the ground at either end. We collected brushwood and sticks from the hillside. Not trusting my ability to keep the fire going on wood alone, I went to the Monopoly in Aliveri for a big sack of charcoal.
At dawn on the day of the feast we impaled our friend. I improvised a table under the olive tree out of an old door and a couple of chairs. I brought him outside and peeled off his blood-stained shroud. He was covered in a translucent white membrane, greasy to the touch. The children were fascinated by the red gash in his throat, the staring eyes and the grinning mouth. I put the point of the spit into his anus. I was gentle with him, but his resistance surprised me. With every thrust he slid along the table and his head flopped over the edge, so the children had to hold him down. I pushed the spike into the intestinal cavity and up into the rib cage, trying not to tear the flesh. With careful probing I found the thorax and pushed up into the neck.
There are two schools of thought for the head. Some push the spit through the brain so that it bursts out through the forehead. Others, who think that the brain is a delicacy, avoid damaging it by pushing the spit between the jaws so that it looks as if the animal is biting on the iron. We decided that the mouth was more elegant.
When Denis was impaled more or less in the middle of the spit, I fixed his backbone to the pole and sewed up his belly with wire. I tied his rear ankles back to the spit, fastened his front ankles to the ribs and tucked his elbows into his side. I embalmed him with oil and lemon and oregano and salt and pepper and covered him with a clean muslin shroud.
It was time to light the fire. We heaped brushwood over the shallow pit, splashed it with lamp oil and threw in a match. It flared for a few minutes, crackled and settled down to a fitful blaze. It was a hot day and we sweated to be near it.
‘Po-po-po. You want to set the mountain on fire?’ protested Barba Vasilis as he stomped up to us, thrashing at the dry grass with his stick. ‘Go get water in case it catches.’
I ran to connect a hose to the water tank, while Vasilis beat the grass and coaxed burning branches back into the pit. This was not as easy as it sounds. In the bright sunlight the flames were invisible. When they died down I covered the white embers with charcoal.
‘Are you roasting a cow?’ asked Vasilis, prodding down the charcoal with his stick.
We fetched Denis from the table and mounted the spit on its supports. For a moment I wallowed in the romance of turning our own spit on our own fire in the garden of our own Greek house. Then Barba Vasilis announced that the fire was in the wrong place and facing the wrong way, I had bought the wrong sort of charcoal, the spit should have gone through the forehead, there was not enough salt and lemon, it was not tied on properly, I had used enough wire for an ox … In principle I thought highly of the outspokenness of Greeks compared with English hypocrisy. When I was on the receiving end I found it bloody rude.
‘Oh bugger off,’ I said in English and by coincidence he did so in order to tend the survivors of his flock. Unfortunately Arfa came out of the house as the children sweetly waved him off with choruses of ‘bugger off’, which earned us a collective telling-off.
The hot juices and not the direct heat of the fire cook the meat and keep it moist. The trick is to turn the spit fast enough so that they don’t drip onto the charcoal but continually baste the meat. It was harder work than I anticipated. I realised I should have put Denis at the end of the spit and not in the middle, so that the handle was as far away from the fire as possible. We took it in turns to squat at the handle with our faces turned away from the heat until the children couldn’t stand it any longer.
Arfa fashioned a spit turner’s mask for me out of a paper bag with holes for eyes and nose. My face ran with hot, salty sweat and stung my eyes. I called for a can of wine and tore a hole in my mask to drink it through. I allowed myself a swig every fifty turns, then twenty, then ten, telling myself that I was sweating out the alcohol. At the end of two hundred turns I had a splitting headache. Meanwhile, Denis shrank as if he were ageing. The tendons on his limbs stood out and the muscles turned brown and wizened. His eyeballs swelled and burst and shrivelled to black prunes in the sockets. As the flesh on his head contracted his grin grew wider. His scrotum shrank and his testicles flip-flopped as he turned.
‘Hey kids, did you know that Denis is Dionysos in Greek? Greeks called him the Liberator. He liberated people from themselves by getting them drunk. You know what happened to him? The Titans got him. They were giants but they were intelligent. They liked everyone to be reasonable and rational. They didn’t like all his hocus-pocus. They didn’t like the way he got people out of their heads. So they killed him. They roasted him on a spit and tore him to pieces and ate him. Zeus was mad. He whacked them all with a thunderbolt. Boom. All that was left of them was smoke. And from the smoke the human race sprang up. So we mostly take after Titans but we have all got a little bit of Dionysos inside us. See?’
‘Maam, Dad’s drunk too much wine again,’ shouted Jim.
Arfa drove down to the village for last-minute supplies. The children lost interest in the hard work of spit turning and went with her. My shoulder and elbow and wrist began to seize up. I got cramp in the legs if I squatted and a pain in the back if I stooped. I turned as fast as I could, but not fast enough. Juices escaped and dripped on the charcoal and caught fire. I beat out the flames with sprigs of brushwood that also caught fire. Flaming twigs fell into the dry grass. I stamped on the wisps of smoke and beat them with my hands. I ran for the hose and gave the ground all round a good soaking. Denis, neglected and stationary, dripped and caught fire again. I beat out the flames with a bucket and the smell of burning plastic joined that of charred meat. The skin melted away from my palms where I had burned them beating out the flames, and bloomed into blisters where the iron handle rubbed. I prayed for someone to come.
My prayers were cruelly answered by sun-touched Dionysos, sucking a crust of bread. I couldn’t understand why he was looking curiously at me until I remembered the paper bag. I tore it off and beckoned desperately for him to come closer. He shuffled towards me. I pointed to the handle and made manic revolving gestures with my free hand. He gave me the patronising look that he was used to getting from other people and walked round to the other end of the fire. He stared at the revolving face of Denis, wizened, sweating fat, hollow-eyed, biting on the iron bar and grinning. Dionysos rolled his head in time with the spit. He took the crust out of his mouth, slimy and dripping spittle, and grinned back. Then he grinned the same grin at me, still rolling his head.
‘You’re turning it too fast,’ said ruddy-faced Ajax behind me.
‘Thank God,’ I gasped and fell back on the grass, dizzy with heat and wine and pain.
‘It takes two to roast an animal. He doesn’t count,’ he said, taking the spit and b
rrrhing at Dionysos, who obediently ambled off to the church, sucking his crust.
Arfa and the children came back and then our guests arrived with slabs of spanakopita, anchovies, cheeses, olives, plastic bottles of wine from their own barrels. Fighting the desire to go inside for a lie-down, I sat on the stone stairs with my back to the wall, clinging to the strip of shade cast by the eaves from the midday sun. I watched swirling whorls of colour inside my eyelids, listened to the humming in my ears and concentrated on not passing out. Now and then I opened my eyes for snapshots of our party.
Waxy-fingered Elpida took charge. She came straight from church and her best black dress was spattered with new candle grease. She brought loaves of round, flat bread left over from the service, stamped with the sign of the All Holy One. With Ajax she humped Denis onto the table covered with newspaper and attacked him with a cleaver. She ordered Arfa to fetch plates and a carving knife and fill jugs from the jerry cans and generally make herself useful. Barba Mitsos jerked his thumb at her, laughed and sat down with the men under the olive tree, where they waited for the women to bring them food.
Siren Roula alternately cuffed her children away and screamed at them to come and eat. She took a plate of food to her Dimitris, who grimaced and patted his dyspeptic stomach. He sustained himself with tumblers of wine and salt anchovies and Denis’s tail, crunching the crisp yellow fat and tiny bones with the relish of forbidden fruit. Lanky Adonis the labourer smiled and drank steadily, with no apparent effect. His mother Maria brought him food and then sat apart from the rest, picking at her frugal plate and looking timorously up at the others as if one of them was about to dash it from her hands. Old Barba Fedon, his comb-over slicked with extra pommade for the occasion, picked at a piece of spanakopita and eyed useful bits of wire discarded from the carcase.
Showing antipodean manners, Aussie Alekos the taxi driver brought cans of lager in a crate of ice. Youthful Doctor Solomos browsed in our library inside the house. Athina and Pericles her wraith-like husband came up from the reed bed by the lake and sat with her brother Barba Vasilis, scratching the mosquito bites in her scalp with the handle of a comb. The ghosts of black-pelvis Christos and their father Panamanian Petros sat with them. Dapper Nektarios the roofer came alone, dancing along the path with a yellow flower behind each ear, his face as red as a roof tile. He clapped his hands and did a little dance around the fire. He didn’t know where his wife was.
‘I’m sure she set out with me this morning. But just now she wasn’t in the pick-up. We called at her brother’s on the way, so perhaps she’s still there. Or was that yesterday?’
‘When did you last see your wife, Nektarios? Tell me, how many fingers?’ shouted Dimitris, sticking his middle finger rudely in the air.
‘This many,’ said Nektarios and thrust his open palm towards Dimitris’s face in the rudest gesture of all.
Zenon the digger burned up the track on his Zündapp and stood by the fire in his tank-driver’s helmet and leather boots, hands on his hips. He tore a bone off the pile of meat and gnawed it while he sauntered among the others, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. Moon-faced Aristotle the hydrologist squatted beside the water tank and beamed and rhapsodised about England, where it rained all year round, Mother of God, the peaches they must have, it must be paradise. His wife brought him his plate of food and waddled round the back of the church to forage for wild greens. Spiros our carpenter came on his own, since his wife was still in Athens with their baby grandson. He sat quietly with the men under the olive tree, sucked his punk yard-brush moustache and waited for a woman to bring him something to eat.
‘They should have had a carpenter from Aliveri. Spiros couldn’t nail a cross for his own grave.’
‘They should have had a roofer from Aliveri. Nektarios is better at mixing drinks than mortar.’
‘They should have had a builder from Aliveri. Shit-houses is all Dimitris is good for.’
‘They should have had a mason from Aliveri. My thing stands up longer than Barba Mitsos’s walls.’
‘Why do they speak badly of each other?’ Arfa asked Elpida.
‘Eh. Love without bitterness has no taste.’
Sassy Antigone came as the dutiful wife. Her hair was carefully set and brushed and gold dangled from her ears and neck and wrists and she wore her pale yellow honeymoon dress with high-heeled gold sandals. She kept a wad of gum in her cheek that she frenetically chewed when she thought nobody was looking. She waited on Haralambos and heaped his plate with the best of the meat and potatoes. She served her father Spiros too. The women looked at her pale face and wondered if she was pregnant yet.
Eleni came as the dutiful mother with her hair scraped back and no make-up and a long skirt and a long-sleeved shirt and ordinary sandals. She held the twins by the hand as they waddled by her side, nappies sticking out from the legs of their elasticated shorts. Their father sat under the olive, scratching his brawny forearms and flicking his handsome moustache. He and Haralambos bantered like two butting rams. Eleni brought him a plate of meat and vegetables and went back to the boys. She sat with them throughout the meal, feeding them with a spoon from a jar and wiping their cheeks after each mouthful.
When everyone had crossed themselves and started to eat, I pulled myself upright. I felt sick and sun-struck. I hoped to sneak inside without being seen. Ajax saw me and clapped his hands.
‘Bravo. A speech. Meine Damen und Herren. Es freut mich. Speech!’
They all looked up at me, jaws chewing. I took a deep breath. But I couldn’t think of a single word of Greek. It was completely gone, drowned in exhaustion and wine.
‘Eff-harry-stow,’ I managed, thank you, and Dimitris clapped. But nothing else came. Sun-touched Dionysos watched me curiously through the leaves of an oleander. Arfa slunk into the kitchen, embarrassed, and the children started to giggle.
‘My friends,’ I said in English. I enunciated the words slowly and deliberately and tried not to bite my tongue or the inside of my cheeks and held up my glass as if it was a strap-hanger to stop me falling over.
‘Kein Englisch,’ shouted Ajax.
‘We are children of Dionysos,’ I managed, in English. ‘Oh don’t start that again, Dad,’ stage-whispered Jack.
Dionysos heard his name, shambled over and stood in front of me, his head on one side, listening intently. Out of the recesses of my brain, somewhere between the recipe for mortar and the phone number of the wood merchant in Aliveri, came memories of Greek words, which weren’t my own but good enough.
‘My friends. We are neighbours now. We are compatriots. We are friends. To our health and may we live many years. Thank you.’
Ajax led the applause, which was only fitting as they were his words on the fateful morning when I first saw the house. Dionysos carried on clapping after the rest until Haralambos brrrhed him away. General conversation resumed. Arfa came up and I waited for her congratulations.
‘Phew,’ she said, ‘you’d better eat something,’ and like a good Greek wife pushed a plate of Denis into my hands. He was delicious. There is no better way on earth to cook meat.
Ajax led the singing after lunch. His speciality was the love songs of Epirus, the Albanian north, full of tremolos and quarter tones. Elpida’s girlish soprano gave us an Anatolian love song. Barba Fedon croaked and grumbled a rembetika ballad, in the way the hash-fuddled blues of Piraeus low life should be sung. We sang pop songs, retro songs of the 1930s and in Arfa’s honour everyone joined in Never on a Sunday, whose Greek words feature a woman with four children. In return, we gave them a raucous version of What shall we do with a drunken sailor?
Alekos, pie-eyed on Metaxa and lager chasers, navigated himself by touch to the boot of his taxi and brought back a loaded shotgun. He sat down with the end of the stock on his knee and fired up into the air, bringing down on himself a hail of leaves and twigs. He tried to reload but couldn’t focus, so the children helped him for a second deafening salute.
When our voices cr
acked and people forgot the words, Ajax drove his pick-up as close as he could, stuck a cassette of wedding music into the player and turned up the volume. He and Haralambos started to dance, arms round each other’s shoulders, looking down at their feet to shouts of op-pa. Zenon tossed his leather cap under the table, seized a napkin and joined the dancing. His right hand in the air, his left supported by Ajax holding the napkin, he cavorted with extraordinary lightness and delicacy, crouching and leaping and pirouetting and slapping his feet to more cries of op-pa. Others joined the fray, linking up at the other end with Haralambos. Elpida took over from Zenon at the front of the dance and led us around the yard threading between the trees.
When we collapsed in laughter and exhaustion Spiros, who had danced the last dances in the old village at his wedding, blew his nose and wiped his eyes. He staggered over to Arfa, kissed her on the cheeks and thanked her for bringing the old times back.
And so we passed the afternoon until the sun lost its strength and it was time for the evening chores. There were sheep to pen, goats to milk, grave lamps to light. With kisses and wishes of kalo risiko the men ambled off with flowers behind their ears, the women with empty pots and dishes. By the time bats began to flit they had all left. When the children had gone to bed, Arfa and I collapsed hand in hand on the terrace, bathed in the scent of bougainvillea and mosquito repellent, and watched shooting stars zipping past the constellations.
‘Remember when you first came up to the house,’ I asked, ‘and we saw the view through the window? It looked like a perfect Greece. Waiting for the characters to be painted in. Well, here we are.’
