Cartes Postales From Greece

by Victoria Hislop

  I drove eastwards from Preveza towards Karpenisi. I took the wrong road at one point and found myself completely lost, on an unmade road high up in the mountains. For many hours, I was alone, far from civilisation but exhilarated by the solitude. The route was accidental, but it took me into magical landscapes which I would not have seen if I hadn’t made a map-reading error. I began to wonder about serendipity. Can mistakes turn out to benefit our lives? Can the things that seem like disasters actually lead to better things? I wanted to hope so. At least I was beginning to consider the possibility. Up in the wilds of those mountains, I had moments of feeling free and light.

  Ellie put the notebook down. She had been in Greece for four days now and was enjoying every moment of her time. During the day, she swam and sunbathed on the beach of her hotel in Tolon and, mid-afternoon, took a bus into Nafplio, where she explored something different each day (a castle, a church, a museum – it was a town rich in beauty and history, just as Anthony had described), before having a drink in the square and catching a bus back in time for dinner. On her second day, she wrote a postcard to her mother, knowing that she would be hoping for one. It seemed so old-fashioned to write it and then stick on six stamps, that left almost no space for the address. She smiled as she wrote her enthusiastic description of Nafplio. ‘It has something special about it.’ Without the evidence of Anthony’s cards, she would have had little belief in it reaching its destination. To her friends, she just sent texts, with a selfie against a backdrop of the sea.

  Ellie saved Anthony’s notebook for the evening, reading a few stories a day on her balcony. She wanted, as atmosphere, the stillness of the night, the bright stars, the rhythmic noise of cicadas, the gentle lap of the waves on the beach. It seemed the right way to read this stranger’s thoughts, privately and quietly, without the sound of pop music coming from the bar or the metronome beat of people playing beach tennis. Several times she had looked up on her map the distance between Nafplio and somewhere else that Anthony had visited. Her ideal would have been to go on a day-trip to Preveza or Patras, but enquiries at reception led her to the conclusion that a return bus journey even to Kalamata would be impossible in a day. She would stay put. Both Tolon and Nafplio were so delightful that she did not mind. Anthony’s descriptions would have to suffice for now.

  Greece was becoming more familiar to her both through his writing and through her own experience of being there. The scents of this country, the sound of its language, the flavour of its food and the smiles of its people were already sinking in, and she understood why Anthony had decided to go on his travels rather than return to London to face that dreary autumn. It had been one of the wettest on record, and she was glad for him that he had stayed away. His mood would not have been helped by the relentlessly grey days.

  Ellie had never had a serious relationship and certainly not one that had caused her so much anguish. Girlfriends of hers had faced these traumas, and she had been a willing shoulder to cry on, but she had never imagined these emotions from a male perspective, and the bitterness Anthony described seemed very strange and strong.

  Ellie’s solitude on holiday was not so different from her day-to-day life. She knew that other guests in the hotel found it curious that she always ate alone, but she wanted to wear a badge advertising that she did not care. One night, a very nice couple in their sixties insisted that she join them for dinner but, even before the main course arrived, she knew more than enough about their granddaughter’s exam results and a Caribbean cruise they had taken the previous year. Solitude was infinitely preferable and, for the rest of her stay, she retreated swiftly to her balcony as soon as dinner was over, with a glass of wine in hand.

  That night, sitting on a simple plastic chair, her bare toes resting on the metal balcony railings, she thought about Anthony’s sense of feeling ‘free and light’. Perhaps the chilled wine had helped. She felt as if she were floating and, in that instant, there was nothing that troubled her. It was a precious moment, a rare and fleeting feeling. Calm and inquisitive, she read on.

  I almost run out of words to describe the beauty of this country. Perhaps people who are born here, particularly those who have not travelled outside Greece, assume that the rest of the world looks like this, or perhaps they get so used to it that it no longer has an effect on them. I have had so many moments of love at first sight in Greece, so many instants when I have felt the lightning strike, the ‘keravnovolos’. I am like an addict, waiting for the next time that my heart will almost be stopped by an unexpected view.

  It is clear from their sculpture and architecture that beauty mattered to the Greeks in ancient times. When I look inside a glass case containing artefacts from five thousand years ago (Cycladic sculptures, for example), I can see that these are not purely functional objects. Not only did they understand aesthetics, they worshipped them.

  Perhaps this is why I am so shocked when I see something ugly in Greece. I am often stopped in my tracks by beauty, but sometimes by ugliness, too. As in all things, this country wins the prize for extremes. There are landscapes that have been destroyed by the presence of huge concrete structures, put up and left half complete to stand perhaps for another thousand years: hotels, factories, office buildings simply abandoned midway through construction. Even with finished buildings, I sometimes look and just wonder ‘why?’ as I stare with horror at nine floors of orange-tinted windows and cracked concrete. In some areas, regulation seems not to exist. Styles, colours, materials clash together like anarchists and riot police.

  One day towards the end of January, I saw a dam. A massive, abandoned dam. The rusting mechanism by which electricity should have been generated, the tonnage of concrete, the graffiti that is now daubed everywhere are a violation, a glimpse of hell. It will be there for ever like an open wound, the worst rape of a landscape I have ever seen. Millions of euros have been squandered and made someone somewhere very rich. I imagined visitors in another two thousand years trying to make sense of it all: the Acropolis, the dam across the Achelous. In the same country? What went wrong? It will be as mysterious as the Phaistos Disc.

  I stopped there for a while. It was somehow impossible not to.

  I felt like a tourist, as much as I had in Nafplio, but instead of taking in beauty and history, I was looking at destruction on a scale I have never seen before. Finally, I drove on. I wanted to put as many kilometres between me and this place as I could before darkness, so I drove and drove and drove, as if running from the devil, heading west again towards the sea.

  Eventually, I came to a village that I liked the look of. I discovered later that it wasn’t far from Dodoni, an ancient sanctuary. The village was mostly comprised of old traditional stone houses, but there was a pretty square with one kafenion and one taverna, and I spotted a bakery up a sidestreet. As I parked, I observed a dozen funeral notices on a board next to the small church. For some reason, I always stop to read them. They are the most obvious public notices in any place you go. People have to react quickly if they see the face of someone they know, because the funeral will be either that day or the next.

  I find that learning who has died and how old they were tells me something about the place itself. If they are mostly in their late eighties or nineties, it is sad but comforting. Here, though, among the octogenarians posted up that day, was a much younger man. His name was Constantinos Arvanitis. He was sixty-two.

  As I walked into the taverna, I realised the owner had been watching me loitering by the noticeboard.

  ‘Ton gnorizate?’ he asked. ‘Someone you know? Costas Arvanitis?’

  I was wearing a black T-shirt and black jeans that day, so perhaps he thought I was there for a funeral.

  The people in the taverna were friendly enough and happy to have some business on a quiet Tuesday evening. It was called To Tzaki, which means ‘fireplace’, and in the corner was a huge log fire which the owner kept stoking. Even though the days were warm enough, the temperature plummeted at night and this cheerfu
l glow was a welcome sight.

  ‘We were all surprised by that one,’ said the wife. ‘Arvanitis was fit and healthy, always at his smallholding. Never missed a day there. Slim, vigorous, not a spare kilo on him.’

  She brought a jug of water and some cutlery and set them down on my table, continuing to talk as she did so. Her comments were addressed more to her husband than to me.

  ‘Personally, I think there should have been a post-mortem, but his wife said no. So what can you do? The doctor wrote the certificate, and that’s that. But I don’t like it.’

  ‘Eleni … you mustn’t say that.’

  ‘Agapi mou, it’s too quick. A man dies suddenly. The wife doesn’t shed a tear. Then he is in the ground. No questions asked.’

  ‘That’s normal here,’ he said, turning to me. ‘The funeral happens within twenty-four hours. It’s tradition. It was a necessity I suppose, before the days of the morgue.’

  ‘Yes, but we have refrigeration now, Oreste mou,’ his wife chipped in.

  ‘Eleni!’

  ‘Anyway, there is the funeral tomorrow. And everyone will come back here afterwards. The menu is a bit limited today, as I’m getting the fish all ready for the makaria, the lunch afterwards.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ I said. ‘I’ll have whatever is easy.’

  When his wife went into the kitchen, the man leaned over and said quietly:

  ‘My wife won’t believe it, but trust me, there was no foul play.’

  He seemed very sure.

  ‘Costas’s wife had got suspicious because he kept being late home, and she asked me to find out whether he really was spending all that time at his kypos … so I went to check.’

  The man was obviously keen to talk, but somehow reticent at the same time.

  ‘You’ll be gone soon, won’t you?’

  Satisfying himself that I wouldn’t repeat it in the village, he told me what had happened.

  IN LOVE WITH LOVE

  There had been little rain that winter, so the ground was hard. It was taking longer than usual to dig over, but Costas Arvanitis was glad to be out in the twilight, just at the time when the sun was going down and the moon was rising over the hills. The cypresses stuck out of the hills like blades.

  He had been working in his smallholding all day, digging and digging, in an attempt to get the soil ready for planting. There were a few hectares, with half of them taken up by orange and olive trees. At about eight, he was ready to stop.

  It was not love at first sight, but at first sound. His spade struck something. It was not the metallic chung of spade on flint, which set his teeth on edge and was a common sound in this rocky terrain, where he was endlessly sifting soil to rid it of stones. This was another tone. A bright ching that rang out like a musical note, a clear, ringing, bell-like sound, one that he had never heard before.

  It was almost dark now, but he bent down to see what was beneath his spade. It was impossible to make anything out clearly, but he picked a little soil away with his fingernails, revealing what looked like a large white stone. He tried to lever it out of the earth, but it was stuck. It would have to wait until tomorrow. He gathered his tools, stood up and leaned backwards to bend his back. He could feel his bones creak. His body found the hours of labour a huge strain, but this little patch of land was his reason to get up in the morning, his life.

  He ambled through the adjacent olive grove, flicking his cigarette lighter to illuminate the path through the trees. His kypos was almost a kilometre from the gravel track where he parked his truck, and it was getting to be a struggle for him to carry all his heavy tools. It took him half an hour in the darkness.

  He was in no hurry. Twenty minutes later, he was in the village, and even then he stopped off first at the kiosk and then at the kafenion to delay his homecoming.

  The nights were still cool and a wind had got up. He felt a chill on his lungs and the warming effect of the firewater that the owner immediately put on the bar in front of him was welcome.

  ‘Stin iyeia sou,’ said the kafetzis, putting a glass on the bar and filling it with clear liquid. ‘Cheers.’

  Costas tipped his head back and drank it in one, gently putting the glass back down on the bar for a refill.

  Four men were playing cards in the corner and had not looked up when he entered. Few words or smiles were exchanged. Peace and quiet was valued in this place. The screen of the small television high up on the wall was blank.

  Nobody took much interest in anyone else here. Everyone got on with his own business, and all had the same stories to tell. Most had children who had left the village, and wives waiting for them at home. They did not discuss politics because they shared the same views, and those with right-wing opinions went to the other kafenion in the village. It left little to talk about, and silence to fill the air.

  The moment he stepped into his home, Costas heard a shrill voice:

  ‘Where have you been? Why are you late? Dinner is cold! Did you bring onions? Couldn’t you get here earlier? Have you been at the kafenion? Have you been drinking?’

  His wife was shouting at him from a small scullery adjacent to the living area. The barrage of questions scarcely deviated each day, and neither did his grunted responses to each one.

  Grey-haired, and as wide as she was high, Stella waddled into the room and put a plate down in front of him, and a second at the far end of the table.

  He proceeded to eat, head bent over his plate, scooping food into his mouth without lifting his eyes. They had no conversation. This same pattern repeated itself every day, and had done so for many decades. He looked at the food but not at his wife. She slopped and slurped her way through her dinner. With only four or five remaining teeth, it was difficult for her to chew, and yet she continued talking, spraying pieces of meat and vegetables towards him as she kept up her assault of slurping and noise.

  The television was on at full volume, with the screen split into eight squares. There was one woman and seven men, each politician stating his or her view of an economic problem to which there was no solution. No one listened to the others; all voices were raised, each person trying to be heard over the cacophony. The debate began in the morning and went on until night, on one channel or another.

  Costas’s life had two parts. Day and night. Tranquillity and noise.

  Once he had eaten, he was ready for bed. The shower and WC were outside, just as they had been for all six decades of his life, and the water was unheated. Cold showers had never bothered him, but for Stella it was an excuse to avoid washing. Sometimes her skin was dark with dirt, but a lack of strong lighting and mirrors in the house meant that she was unaware of this. Like many women in this village, she had not seen herself for years. There was one small mirror in the outside shower room that Costas used for shaving, but it was too high for her to use. The burnt meals proved that she had no sense of smell, something he was reminded of each night as he climbed the stairs to the concrete-based bed they shared.

  She was already under the thin blanket, tossing and turning and muttering in her sleep. He took his place next to her and gazed at the ceiling, a shaft of light penetrating the gap between the curtains and casting a beam on the faded marriage crowns that were nailed to the wall behind them.

  Eventually, Costas fell asleep, waking the next day with the dawn to the eerie sound of his wife grinding her teeth. He slid out of bed, picked up his clothes, stole downstairs and grabbed his car keys from the shelf by the door. Within a few moments he was out of the house and starting his truck, praying that the coughing of its cold engine would not wake her.

  It was only just light, but by the time he reached his kypos the sun would be above the line of the hills. Though his joints still ached, he was eager to get back to his digging.

  His was the only vehicle on the road. In the twenty-minute journey he passed no one. Even with his foot hard down on the accelerator, the needle on the speed gauge scarcely reached thirty kilometres an hour. Normally, this did not both
er him because he was not in a hurry to reach a destination; there was never any pressure of time, nobody he was in a hurry to meet, nothing he was in a hurry to do. Except for today. Something felt different today.

  When he turned on to the rough road, he found his heart beating. At last, he pulled up at the side of the dirt track. All his tools were kept under a tarpaulin in the back of the pick-up. He pulled out a large spade and reached inside for a trowel. In the dashboard, he kept a small bottle of brandy and, tucking it inside his top pocket, he began walking purposefully to the kypos.

  When he got there he looked at the ground, and his eyes rested on the pallid stone. He would work on that first. There could be no sowing until he had removed it. During the night, the wind had disturbed a few more millimetres of soil and, as he approached, he could see that more of the stone had been exposed. He brushed some away with his hands and realised it had a pearly sheen. The spade now seemed too brutal. Whatever it was, this stone looked special, and he did not want to damage it.

  All morning, he scrabbled with his hands to reveal more and more of this shape. It seemed that it was a flat expanse with no edges. How his tomatoes, courgettes and fasolia could have grown for so many years with such an obstacle beneath their roots he had no idea. There had been some seismic movement in the area lately, and this must have shifted the soil and brought it to the surface. His vegetables could only benefit if he cleared it from his land.