by Sara Alexi
‘Thank you, Cosmo,’ she whispered.
The next time he went, she was alone. Her mama and baba were working in the orchards, she said, and an amazing smell permeated the whole house.
‘I am making biscuits.’
‘They smell delicious.’ Cosmo’s mouth was watering.
With a touch on the back of a kitchen chair she invited him to sit, and then she made them both Greek coffee and put a biscuit on a plate, breaking it in half and nodding encouragingly. They dunked the biscuit pieces in unison, Maria laughing as hers almost fell in two. She got it to her mouth just in time, and Cosmo was mesmerised by her charm.
‘Amazing,’ he said, spraying crumbs over the table. The heat in his cheeks burnt but she simply smiled. If only he had his time again, he would not be so gauche.
It was then their friendship started – and it is a friendship, surely?
Chapter 6
In another cupboard, Cosmo finds a bag of dried beans, and he puts them in a pan to boil. Does he add chopped tomatoes now? What else went into the sauce his mama used to make? Perhaps an onion? Should he add that now too? He chops half a tomato that he finds in the fridge, which is squishy and disintegrates into mush rather than slicing as he expected, and the wet mess slides off the chopping board into the boiling water. Then he does his best to chop an onion, but the skin will not come off, and then the centre slides out as he tries to cut it.
‘Panayia mou,’ he curses. After a few more hacks, he decides he has done enough and the chunky onion pieces follow the tomato into the pot.
His friendship with Maria might have taken a different path if she had not received a letter of such callous rejection. They were not his words, but it was his mouth that spoke them and she will not have forgotten that.
How embarrassed she was, and with each word he read he could feel her pulling away, retreating inside herself. When he finished and looked up, her cheeks seemed sunken and her eyes unfocused.
‘You’d better leave now,’ was all she managed to say, and it felt like his ribcage cracked open and his heart leapt from his body to comfort her, but she ran through an inner door, leaving him alone in her kitchen. He let himself out.
The next day there were bills for Maria and her family, and a letter from her aunt, judging by the handwriting, but there was no answer to his knock. Nor was there the day after. On the third, her mama opened the door just wide enough to reach out a hand for the post, and then the door closed again.
There were no more letters from that same source, but it took time for the rift to heal. Maria’s family did not get an abundance of letters, but each time there was something to be delivered the door opened a little wider. Over the course of the next month or so, there were a couple of bills, and a notice from the water board, and finally he was invited in to read a letter and to write a reply. But Maria’s mama was there too, and Maria herself was cold and distant, a flame rising in her cheeks if she caught his eye.
Eventually there was a day when Maria was alone, and eventually there was a day when it was almost, but not quite, like old times. But those months had stretched into more than a year. He became keenly sensitive to her every mood and he died a little with each perceived rejection.
Maria had changed since hearing the contents of that letter. Her softness had gone, and in its place something hard and unreachable lived in her. She would snap at the boys playing football outside her house and had little time for conversation in the street. She was particularly critical of the priest, which was understandable, under the circumstances. This behaviour earned her a reputation for being sour, and the boys who would once have given their right arm to walk out with her began to back away and count their lucky stars.
Her isolation only increased when first her mama died and then her baba. Now she has her cats for friends and lives a solitary life.
He puts the letter on the shelf with the canister of coffee and sugar and goodness knows what else his mama stored in all the other metal containers. The tomatoes smell like they are cooking – and the onions? He can just smell the onions.
Tomorrow is not a workday. He will take his boat, a bottle of agioritiko, a hunk of bread and a little feta and he will fish. It makes him smile. Not the thought of going fishing, but the fact that for thirty years he told his mama he was going fishing and in all that time he caught one fish. It was a big one, too, but when he hauled it over the side it flapped and thrashed about and he didn’t know what to do. He hit it with the oar and blood spurted out but this did not kill the creature. There was an old axe handle in the bottom of the boat, so, thinking he might be more accurate with that, he hit it again, releasing more blood. By the time he had bashed it another five or six times the interior of the boat was a bloodbath and Cosmo was left panting with the exertion. He would never have guessed that such a creature could have so much blood inside it, and still its tail flapped feebly in the bilge.
He still recalls the anxiety of feeling that he was caught between two evils – if he were to throw it back, the poor thing would carry on suffering out in the open water. For how long? But to kill it, he would have to hit it again and again. The inside of his little craft was red and his stomach turned. But it had to be done, so he bashed and bashed until the innocent thing flapped no more.
Of course, most men his age, just out of their youth, knew how to kill and gut a fish, but his baba never had time for him and taught him nothing. For years he wondered what he had done to deserve this, speculating that it was his short stature that embarrassed his baba, who was a tall, broad-shouldered man. But, insidiously and covertly, it was disclosed to him that his baba suspected that Cosmo was not even his child.
This knowledge cut Cosmo like a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it was a relief to know there was nothing intrinsic to him that was ‘wrong’, but on the other it meant he was a displaced, unwanted bastard. He never mentioned his suspicions to anyone, and over the years he came to terms with the possibility; but, without design, he alluded to it in the course of more than one conversation with his mama. His insinuations must have fitted the truth as his mama never picked up on them or denied them. That was enough of a confirmation for him, and after a while he thought no more about it. But he grew so distant from his baba that when the old man died his mama made a point of asking if he was going to the funeral.
‘How would it look if you were not there?’ she said, but it was a rhetorical question.
‘Of course I am going, Mama – whatever made you think I wasn’t going?’ And she gave him a sideways look, almost as if she was trying to judge how much he knew. Mostly he didn’t care, but he never said that.
Since that first fish he has continued to go fishing. At least, that was what he told his mama. It gave him a day of peace on the water, where he was unreachable and where she thought he was being useful. When the day was done and his boat neatly moored back on the tiny wooden pier, he would pop into Saros and buy a fish from the fishmonger. His mama seemed perfectly satisfied for a while. A time came, of course, when she was no longer satisfied, and then she started to put in orders, as if a fisherman can decide what he will and will not catch.
‘Can you not catch some barbounia?’
If he had actually been landing the fish, he can see, this would have been the moment when even going fishing would have become a contentious point at home, and his days of peace on the water, dreaming and sleeping, would have been no more. As it was, he could buy any fish she wanted, and so at least one part of his life escaped her caustic criticism.
The tomatoes smell like they might be burning. Cosmo leaps from his seat and looks into the pan. The water has boiled off and they are burning black, the skins withered. He looks in the drawer for a spoon to stir the mess, a wooden one like his mama used, but there isn’t one. With building panic, he looks about the room until he spots an earthenware pot with a selection of wooden items. He grabs the pot handle. It is hot.
‘Gamoto!’ he shouts, using a word he would ne
ver have dared to utter in the house when his mama was alive. The tea towel, folded neatly into a triangle, proves to be the perfect shape to hold the pan handle, and he lifts it from the heat and stirs at the tomatoes that are now sticking to the bottom. It takes a little practice to get a bean on the blunt-edged spoon, and after blowing on it he gingerly takes it between his lips and then into his mouth to see if it is cooked.
‘Aw!’ His teeth jangle at its hardness. ‘What?’
He spits the offending bean back into the pot and, taking another, blows again to cool it, and then, gingerly this time, he tries this one.
‘These are not beans, they are stones!’ he says to himself. Maybe he got the wrong sort of beans. Perhaps the way he is trying to cook them is incorrect. Who knows?
His stomach grumbles in complaint and he throws the pan back onto the stove, the spoon into the sink and the tea towel onto the table. It gives him a sense of satisfaction to make the decision to go to Stella and Mitsos’s eatery for lunch. Not least because it is an act she would have condemned.
‘Why would you waste your hard-earned money for a plate of food there when there can always be a plate of food here?’ she argued once.
‘I was just going to eat there and chat with Thanasis,’ he countered.
‘Well, I have cooked, so you can’t,’ she said, and that was the first and last time the subject was discussed. He managed to eat there once or twice after that, though, and the lemon sauce that Stella poured over his chicken and chips was to die for.
‘Yes!’ he exclaims to the burnt pan. ‘I will eat there.’ And without a further thought he steps into the sunshine and hurries over to the ouzeri.
Chapter 7
Lunch at the eatery has become a matter of routine very quickly. Then, in the evenings, Cosmo either cuts himself a salad at home or he goes to the kafenio for an ouzo, which comes with a meze of bread, cheese and olives. His trousers have become baggy and he tightens his belt to compensate. The loss of weight gives him energy, and it has slimmed his face a little, so he has taken to shaving his chin but leaving his moustache thick and bushy. He enjoys that too – the slow awakening in the morning, taking his time over a shave. It feels a little indulgent.
The practicalities of his mama being gone, which he originally saw as insurmountable problems, have turned out to be manageable. Babis, the village’s ‘lawyer for the people’, was quick to slink round to his house to divulge the reason for his presence at the funeral.
‘Probate, Cosmo, there is no avoiding it.’ And he listed the services he would be happy to perform on Cosmo’s behalf, and presented his quotation.
Cosmo told him straight. ‘I cannot afford that. Forget your probate.’
‘But it is the law. And I like to think of myself as a reasonable man.’ Babis patted his chest with one hand and leaned so far back on his chair that Cosmo thought, and even hoped, for a moment, that he might fall over.
‘So here, I’ll give you a discount.’ Babis leaned forward and spoke quietly, as if to give the impression that his fee was very modest. ‘Over twelve months. Now, I am sure that is most generous, wouldn’t you say?’
Cosmo would not say so at all, but he told Babis to start the work and that he would consider the terms anyway. With this, he held the door open and bid Babis good day.
Poppy was quick to offer to wash his clothes once a week, and he is happy to give her a few euros to supplement what little she must make in her shop. He insists on paying her something – for the electricity and the washing powder, but mostly because it means he need not feel beholden to her. She is one of the sharpest, wittiest, not to mention kindest women in the village, but even so he prefers to keep things – well, manageable. So, some of his outgoings have risen in a very short period of time, but he is not concerned as he is surely making savings. The damn television is not on all day, for a start, nor the air conditioning, nor the fan in her bedroom, and there are no longer her lotto tickets to buy several times a week, and goodness knows how much he will save in time and petrol. Most surprising is the amount he is saving on groceries. The few things he needs, he buys from the village shop, rather than that endless trawling around the shops in Saros that his mama required. He is most definitely saving on his food bill, and with just one electric light on from the time he comes back from his evening at the kafenio until bedtime can only enhance the small fortune he is saving on electricity.
There is still the running of the orange orchards to sort out. He has done nothing about it since she died, and this is the next pressing issue, but it no longer frightens him as it once would have. Somehow, he feels more capable now than ever before, and that is also a surprise.
The other pressing issue is the letter, which he has still not delivered.
It was the forty-day remembrance service a few days ago and he even took the letter with him in case Maria was there. But when he saw her, she spoke to him in an intimate way, expressing some of her own concerns. She said that someone had stolen her clothes from her washing line and that it was not the first time. Cosmo tried to reassure her that it would just be a boyish prank.
‘I feel sure it is,’ Maria agreed. ‘Those boys who play football. They think it is funny.’
Cosmo suggested having a word with their mamas, but Maria only exclaimed, ‘Huh!’ and set her mouth into a thin, hard line.
Over the years, following various encounters, the villagers have tagged her as an awkward, trouble-making, friendless woman. Every village has one, and she, the village has decided, is theirs. The children have picked up on the adults’ view of her and then they, in turn, act accordingly. The way people treat her has caused her to react badly, and it has become a cycle.
Cosmo even volunteered to talk to the boys’ mamas for her about her stolen clothes. But Maria responded with an emphatic ‘No!’ and the frown lines between her eyes gathered, and all that had remained of her beauty in her now lined and dry face was lost.
With Maria in that sort of mood, and because she had confided in him about the clothes, he was not about to offer her the letter, knowing it would cause her to push him away and isolate herself even further. So it stayed in his inside pocket, and soon he forgot it was there.
Over the following days, he delivered a bill or two to Maria, and she invited him in, making coffee as usual and taking out the tin of home-made biscuits, breaking the first in two and offering him half. Their ritual is as intimate as they get, and it is important for that reason.
His new routine of meeting Thanasis at the eatery for lunch also adds satisfaction to his days, and it has many practical benefits, too. He has quickly learnt that whatever Thanasis does not know about paying bills, keeping house and any of the smaller issues he has to deal with, Mitsos knows instead, and if both of them are stuck, Stella is sure to have the answer. These are mostly trivial matters; for example, having decided not to keep the wood by the fire any more through the summer because it took up space, he discovered he did not know where his mama kept the key for the woodshed. It was Stella who gave him the number of a locksmith.
The days are getting hotter, but to Cosmo May is a stunning month, when the heat has not yet dried everything out and the flowers are still blossoming everywhere they can. On his rounds the village is splattered with shocks of brightly coloured flowers; huge banks of them beside the road, great swathes of them climbing arches over gates, and walls cascading with blossom. He arrives at the eatery wondering if his oranges are growing just as abundantly and whether anything needs to be done about them.
He sits with Mitsos at one of the tables that are packed together on the pavement, with their blue gingham cloths.
‘Have you strimmed under your oranges yet?’ Mitsos asks, as if reading Cosmo’s mind. In amongst the tables, breaking through the cracks in the pavement, sprouts a tree that Stella has wound round with fairy lights. Cosmo leans sideways against the trunk and traces a finger in the condensation on his beer bottle.
‘You mean the long grass? Why w
ould I do that? It will die off in a month,’ he says.
‘I think you’ll find it won’t,’ Thanasis chips in.
‘Your watering system will keep it lush for a while yet,’ Mitsos explains. He is watching Stella, whose head is just visible inside the eatery, behind the counter. She is pouring more charcoal onto the grill.
‘Do you need a hand, agapi mou?’ he calls to her.
‘No, I am fine. Cosmo, did you want sausages with your chicken today?’ Stella calls back.
‘Now, why would I not want sausages?’ Cosmo says by way of answer.
‘And for me,’ Thanasis calls.
‘No sense in paying for water to keep the weeds alive.’ Mitsos returns to the conversation.
‘I mean, you could leave them, because, as you say, eventually the sun will turn them brown, but if they dry they become a fire risk. Better just to strim them back.’ Thanasis rubs his rumbling stomach.
A car slows as it approaches the square. The driver could have parked further down the road, or further up, but instead he stops right next to them, hemming them in and blocking the road. Babis jumps out.
‘Well, hello. I was just going home for something to eat but this looks like a cosy group,’ he says, grinning and showing his teeth.
No one answers him. Stella comes out with two plates of food.
‘Geia sou, Babi,’ she says. ‘Can I get you anything, a beer?’
‘I think I might have a plate of food, that looks so good.’ And he takes the plate she is about to put down in front of Thanasis.
‘I’ll just get you yours, Thanasi,’ Stella says, a smile playing on her lips. Thanasis looks at the chicken and chips that Babis is now salting.
‘There is more on the grill,’ Stella assures him, and she skips back inside.
‘Oh, and beer,’ Babis calls after her. ‘What are we talking about?’ He forks up some chips, dipping them in the lemon sauce.