Cartes Postales From Greece

by Victoria Hislop

  Then, suddenly, the stone seemed to rise and he felt a small mound beneath his big, gnarled hand. He picked up his spade again to dig down, and managed to lever huge clods of earth away from the sides. An hour or so later, the soil was piled up in hillocks all around him.

  It was two o’clock in the afternoon. His back ached and his hands were blistered. Some hours earlier, he had dropped his jacket on to the ground and now his shirt was saturated with sweat. He ambled over to the row of orange trees and sat slumped beneath one so that he could lean against its trunk. All that had sustained him during the past hours were regular sips of brandy.

  The task was going to take longer than he had anticipated, but he was determined to continue, even though his heart was beating fast from exertion. He carried on for several more hours before calling it a day.

  He had no time to go to the kafenion that night, and went straight home. As soon as dinner was swallowed and he had washed his plate, Costas went out into the yard for his final cigarette of the day. His wife had kept up a barrage of complaints at his lateness but, outside, there was a welcome silence.

  At noon on the third day, still spurred on by that first musical note he had heard, his suspicion that this was no ordinary piece of stone was confirmed. It was something smooth and sculpted. By mid-afternoon, he realised he was looking down at the plump cheeks of a woman’s bottom. He laid his hand on her curves and felt the cool marble beneath his palm. By three o’clock, he had brushed away more dirt and, from the dent between the buttocks, his finger could follow the subtle indent of a spine.

  By six o’clock, grimly determined, he had revealed an expanse that was perhaps forty centimetres by eighty. It was only when he stood up to stretch and looked down at his morning’s work that he appreciated for the first time what he was seeing.

  It was a whole body. A woman’s. Her entire back was now exposed to the air; her legs, behind, neck and the edge of what must be her hair. He picked carefully at the soil with his fingers now. She was lying face down and, as he brushed away more and more earth, he could see that one of her arms rested by her side. The other ended at the elbow. For Costas, born and bought up in a rural village, such a sight was unfamiliar. In his whole life, he had never visited a museum.

  He realised how wrong it was to be using a spade and ran his hand over her very cautiously, very lightly.

  The memory of touching a woman’s body was so distant that he felt almost sinful. It had been more than thirty years. Perhaps thirty-five. He could not be specific about when it was that he had last touched his wife, or had any desire to do so. She had been ravishingly beautiful at eighteen when they married, still lovely at twenty-five, but by the time they had had two children it was as if she no longer cared.

  Her weight gain was not the only issue (Costas had got used to the idea that his wife was heavier than him). It was her abandonment of hygiene that upset him. Her hair was unwashed for many months, and he could not tell if it was her skin or her hair that gave off the odour that filled their bed. By forty years old, she had looked sixty, had lost her teeth and had sprouted hair in all sorts of new places. Costas did not look at other people’s wives, but he did not look at his own either.

  Several more hours went by as he scraped away, just with his fingernails now, picking individual clods of earth to try to loosen the hold that the ground seemed to have on her body. It was almost impossible to believe what was emerging. By ten o’clock that night, he was exhausted, and darkness was hampering his efforts.

  When he got home, there was a plate of food on the table and his wife was already in bed. The gristly meat had gone cold, but he swallowed it almost without chewing and then took his nightly shower. Today he had to scrub his fingernails especially vigorously. Each one was packed hard with dirt from his labours in the kypos.

  When he came out of the shower, he gazed into the darkness and an unfamiliar sense of contentment came over him. As he smoked his last cigarette of the day, he heard the hoot of an owl.

  The following morning, he was gone before dawn, taking with him a small brush from the kitchen. He would use it to sweep away the dirt from his discovery.

  Perhaps he would see her properly today.

  He worked more like an archaeologist than a gardener now. He had even forgotten about the need to sow.

  That morning, he felt the stone shift slightly again. He wanted so much to see her face, but it was going to take some time until her whole body was free and even then she might be too heavy to turn over.

  For many more days, he worked meticulously and carefully, treating the woman as though she were the most precious thing on earth. At this moment in time, she was.

  As he worked to remove the earth from beneath her body, he found a long, slender object. At first he imagined it might be an animal bone, but then realised it was a finger. It was slightly curved, with a perfectly shaped fingernail and creases for the finger joints. He put it carefully in the breast pocket of his shirt. A while later, he found the remainder of the hand. It was so fine, so fragile, and he held it gently, resting it on his palm. It had survived, almost intact, presumably for many, many years, but he treated it as though it were made of porcelain. He took it over to where his jacket lay and rested it on top. Forgotten feelings of tenderness stirred inside him.

  In the early hours, during the third week of excavation, Costas was awoken by the sound of heavy rain on the roof. He leapt out of bed, managing not to disturb his snoring wife, dragged on his clothes (checking that the forefinger was still in his shirt pocket) and left the house.

  The truck outside roared to life. Costas crunched it into gear and drove off. He should have covered his woman up the day before.

  When he reached his plot, he could see the area that he had exposed in the past few days was covered once again. This time in damp sludge. He felt guilty for not having protected her. As the sun rose, he used a cloth to clean her up and then continued. Now that the earth was damp, he could make faster progress and loosened it clod by clod from around the torso, then began on the legs. It was painstaking but a process that he did not want to hurry. The anticipation was a pleasure in itself.

  With each tiny new space on her thighs and calves and ankles revealed, his obsession with her grew. She was taller than him. From the top of her head down to her heel was almost two metres.

  Four or five more days of meticulous work, and she was almost free.

  The other men in the kafenion noticed that Costas arrived later and later each night. As the days lengthened, so did his hours of excavation. They also noticed how thin he was getting and how wild his hair was (he did not make time for a weekly visit to the barber). They also noticed how happy he seemed. Unkempt, but contented.

  Even though they were usually silent, these men began to murmur and mutter among themselves.

  ‘Looks like he has a girlfriend,’ said one.

  ‘Costas?’

  ‘What else makes a man change his habits?’ said another.

  ‘But his appearance …?’ said another. ‘He’s losing his grip.’

  Costas Arvanitis was a man in love. Of this there was no doubt. He was in love with Aphrodite. He did not even know her name, but that’s who she was. She had lain there for millennia, waiting to be found and, like an ancient Sleeping Beauty, needed to be revived. The effect of her beauty was a powerful force. Many thousands of years before, as all craftsmen had when they were depicting the gods, the sculptor not only believed that she represented the goddess, he also believed that she actually was the goddess. Costas was experiencing the potency of this conviction.

  Finally, she lay there, face down, in her entirety. Naked, perfect, sensual and strong. The goddess of love and beauty. Costas gazed at her. His curiosity about her face was immense, but he would wait until the following day to try to turn her.

  At around midnight, he covered her with a blanket.

  ‘Kalinihta, agapi mou,’ he whispered in the darkness.

  Between that moment
and the following day, he thought of nothing but this woman. His dreams were filled with her image. Suddenly, life had something that transcended the day-to-day struggle, the sound of a grumpy wife and bickering politicians, the sight of the long-suffering faces in the kafenion whose deep-set lines revealed the misery that had become a habit. An absence of joy was replaced by the presence of love.

  The sun was just peeking over the mountains when he reached the kypos the next day. Even as he approached through the olive grove, Costas’s heart was beating fast. He set his tools down and pulled away the blanket. There she was, in all her perfection. The first rays of the sun made her seem whiter and purer than before. There were even hints of crystal in the marble that made her sparkle.

  Using a series of wooden planks that he had dragged from the truck, and some rope, he would have to lever the body to turn her. This was work for half a dozen men, but he didn’t want to share his woman with anybody. He was determined to do it alone. It took some time to get everything in position and the first attempts failed. Throughout the process, he was terrified of her breaking.

  Finally, at about three in the afternoon, the arrangement of all the various parts came together. As he leaned down on his lever, the woman rose slightly from her sleeping position.

  Just for a second, before she fell, Costas caught sight of her face. It was just a brief glimpse of her profile, but it was enough.

  He saw a strong nose, full lips and the edge of a perfectly oval eye. With the lightest touch from his chisel, the sculptor had indicated the lines of a smile at the corner of that eye.

  Not only was her body without flaw, but so, also, was her face.

  Costas gasped. As Aphrodite fell once more face first into the soil, he felt the full force of her erotic power, just as every mortal before him who had ever looked at her.

  He gasped again. His shortness of breath continued and was soon followed by a tightness around his chest and pains in his arms. He knew he had over-exerted himself in trying to lift her.

  Costas lay down, hoping that this would alleviate these unfamiliar aches and pains, stretching himself out close to the statue and putting his head on her shoulder. She was surprisingly soft, and his cheek fitted into the nape of her neck.

  Costas never got up again.

  By the time Orestes reached his friend’s kypos, it was too late to do anything. He noticed that his friend had a smile on his face. With sadness, Orestes carefully moved Costas’s body to one side and, while doing so, felt the hard piece of stone in his top pocket. He removed the finger and then wrapped Costas in the blanket that had been used to protect Aphrodite.

  Orestes knew that the discovery of an ancient sculpture in a field, or even in a city, was in the interest of only the very few. It could cause serious disruption to day-to-day life. All over Greece, building works (the Thessaloniki metro was a good example) took ten times longer than they should have if there was any suspicion of ancient remains in the vicinity. Nobody in the village would welcome the discovery of this artefact. Who knew what else might be under there? The last thing anyone wanted was archaeologists crawling over their land and banning development or agriculture.

  He covered the sculpture once again with layers and layers of soil. It took him an hour or so to replace all the earth and to build it up again, perhaps a little higher than before, and to smooth it over.

  He drove at full speed back to the village and went to see Stella.

  ‘It must have been a heart attack,’ she said.

  The doctor agreed. Orestes called in at the kafenion and, with two other men from the village, loaded a wheelbarrow on to a truck and went to collect the body. The funeral would take place the following day, but before the burial Orestes would visit Costas’s home, where his friend would be lying in an open casket, and discreetly slip the precious fragment of Aphrodite into the breast pocket of the deceased’s only suit. He knew that Costas would want that.

  Perhaps another man, in years to come, would be digging the ground and make a similar discovery. It was possible that Costas had not even been the first …

  I have an image of Costas, happy and fulfilled at the moment of death. Maybe this is what really matters. I think that, for those few weeks, his feelings for Aphrodite gave him a zest for life that he had lost. The Greeks recognise that there are different kinds of love and that one word does not fit them all. The boundaries between them are blurred but, broadly, agapi (perhaps the most cerebral) is for God and family, filia is for friendship and erotas is for sexual attraction. Erotas had been absent in Costas’s life for so many years and, for a brief while, he felt its full, enriching power once again.

  In many mountain villages that I passed through, where older people have lost their teeth, their hair and their interest in what they look like, it is difficult to imagine what attraction still exists between the sexes. Given that the appreciation of beauty seems to be something innate, one wonders why nature blesses so few people with it, and even then for such a brief period.

  I am not scornful of Costas’s worship of beauty. He was overcome by Aphrodite’s power. I have realised in these past months that appreciating beauty and being seduced by it are two different things. In the future I will be more cautious, knowing that it can make us lose our minds. Socrates said: ‘Beauty is a short-lived tyranny.’ He was right.

  I went to Costas’s funeral, and his family welcomed me to the lunch afterwards. I did not feel in the least like an intruder. I watched Stella, all dressed in black, and noticed that she did not seem to be grieving any more than I did.

  Orestes and Eleni rented me a room above the taverna and I ended up staying for many weeks. It felt like home. I even became fond of the nagging cats who wrapped themselves around my legs as I ate each night – and, with great reluctance, I usually left a mouthful of Eleni’s delicious cooking for them. I was writing all day and spending most of each evening in the kafenion. One of the men there (he had gone with Orestes to carry Costas home) patiently taught me the three variants of backgammon that they play in Greece: plakoto, fevga and portes. I forgot everything else while I was playing, since it was crucial not to lose concentration even for a moment. Tavli, as it’s known here, seems to me the best metaphor for how life works. Luck dictates how the dice land (maybe a double six, perhaps a one and a two), but then it’s down to the player to decide what happens next. At the moment your fingers slide the counters from one triangle to the next, good fortune, skill, experience, wisdom, stupidity, carelessness and concentration can all play a role. I even began to get the odd game off him.

  Almost two months after arriving in this village, I had reached the midway point of drafting my book and, in spite of Eleni and Orestes’s protestations, I felt that I should move on. Eleni was quite determined to introduce me to her unmarried niece.

  ‘She’s a schoolteacher,’ she said. ‘And she’ll be coming from Arta at the end of March for a holiday. She’s nearly thirty-five. You two would have so much in common – and you need a good woman!’

  ‘She won’t want someone my age,’ I insisted. ‘I’m forty-five.’

  ‘Well, you’re still a handsome man,’ said Eleni, stroking my cheek affectionately.

  I had to be tactful, but the last thing on my mind was another relationship. I was neither ready nor interested.

  Apart from anything, there was much more of Greece yet to see. On the wall above the table in the taverna where I always sat for dinner, there was an old poster. It almost looked like a photomontage. It was an old monastery perched on top of a pillar of natural rock and must have been completely inaccessible from the ground.

  ‘You must go there,’ insisted Eleni. ‘Akseizi ton kopo.’

  ‘She’s right,’ said Orestes, uncharacteristically agreeing with his wife. ‘It’s worth it.’

  Promising them both that I would return in the future, and that I would bring them a copy of the book I was writing (Orestes and I had spent many hours talking about the power of sculpture), I packed
my bags and, at ten o’clock one morning, with great sadness, left the village. I had found real peace there.

  My next destination was more planned than the previous one.

  The poster had not really prepared me for the strange, otherworldly landscape of Meteora. I felt as if I had arrived on another planet. Meteora means ‘suspended in the air’, and this is how the monasteries seemed, far above my head, on pinnacles six hundred metres high. Around twenty-five million years ago, when there were waters at the height where the monasteries sit now, a gap appeared to allow them to pour through the rock and into the Aegean. Wind and rain has since moulded a landscape that is both mystical and sublime.

  Over one thousand years ago, the first ascetics, in order to deny themselves the pleasures of the world and the flesh, climbed up to the caves which had been eroded within these rocks. Away from the world, above the clouds, they sought a state of ecstasy that connected them with God.

  A few hundred years later, in an almost impossible feat of engineering, some monks lifted rocks to the top of a pinnacle and built the first of twenty-four monasteries. Six of these remain today, with small communities of monks kept company by nothing more than painted images of the saints. They live far from the world and closer to heaven.

  Having climbed a very steep path to visit the highest of the monasteries, Megalou Meteorou, I wondered about the effect of this isolation on the few monks who live there. Does it still give them peace of mind?

  In Kalambaka, the town close to the monasteries, I met a priest. We were both waiting in a long line at a cash machine, which seemed incongruous. We got talking, first of all about the restriction on withdrawals from Greek banks (it was still continuing, many months after having been instituted). ‘Personally, I can easily manage on sixty euros a day,’ he said to me. ‘It’s more than I get through in a month.’