I imagined this was true. I asked him about the monastic way of life in this remote region, and he told me that solitude and separation from the world do not suit everyone. With a slight incline of his head, indicating the monastery that was visible above us, he told me about something that had happened there a few years ago.
MAN ON A MOUNTAINTOP
The phone rang in the living room, and a tall, muscular man, around forty-five years old, snatched the receiver from its cradle. The line went dead, but he knew who had called.
‘Giannis!’ he shouted into the other room. ‘Get in here, now!’
Giannis appeared.
‘Tell that girl to stop ringing,’ he said angrily. ‘You see enough of her at school.’
He cuffed his elder son roughly round the ear.
‘Why can’t you be more like your brother?’
Dimitris, who was reading quietly in the corner, had announced his intention to join the priesthood some time before. A teacher at his school had taken a group of boys to visit one of the monasteries on Mount Athos, which was a mere fifty kilometres from where they lived. After the visit, Dimitris had never been the same again.
‘I have been called,’ he told his parents. Unlike Giannis, who was older, Dimitris had never kicked a ball, was diligent with his studies and did not think about girls. Now, his main preoccupation was God.
Their grandmother, who lived with them, continually crossed herself, on trains, buses and in the street, her hand mapping out Father, Son and Holy Spirit across her chest. It was an obligation whenever she saw a roadside memorial, chapel or church, and it was hard to go more than a few hundred metres without seeing one. Before Dimitris’s visit to Mount Athos, this was the closest the boys had to a living experience of religion, apart from when this same yia-yia took them to church at Easter. Their father’s religion was clear and liquid. If he did not want his wife to go to church, she did not dispute it. She had been a victim of his drunken abuse on so many occasions that she did not want to add further provocation.
When she heard of Dimitris’s decision, however, Yia-yia reacted as if she had been slapped:
‘Thé mou! My God!’
She was a devout woman herself, but for her own grandson to devote his whole life to God? That was a different matter altogether. Where had he got such an idea? It was insanity.
‘You shouldn’t have left that picture of Mount Athos on his wall,’ she said to her daughter. ‘You shouldn’t have let him go on that trip in the first place. The whole business! It’s not normal for a child of his age.’
His mother thought it was an adolescent phase. She had one son who prayed and had a Bible tucked down the side of his bed, and another with acne and dirty magazines beneath his mattress. She hoped that both boys would grow out of their respective habits. Her husband threatened to beat them if they did not.
After a few years, Giannis stopped getting spots, but Dimitris went to study for the priesthood and was eventually sent to a place far from where his family lived. Meteora was a long way from the sea, and the twenty-four monasteries (only a few of them still functioning) teetered precariously on pillars of limestone, one thousand metres up in the sky. It was as if the priests lived between this world and the next, suspended somewhere between earth and heaven. The houses in the shadows beneath them never saw the sun.
Every year, Giannis would make the long journey to see his brother. For him, this annual visit was the only day when he came into contact with the sublime. As he tore along the straight road from Karditsa in his latest sports car, he felt a surge of adrenalin. It was not brought on by the first glimpse of the monasteries, remote and mysterious, up ahead. It was being able to put his foot down on the almost empty road.
Every time he went to Meteora he was driving something a little flashier. In the early days of his brother’s time in the mountains he had arrived in a Nissan. He had progressed to a BMW and, this year, it was a red Porsche. Sadly, his younger brother never saw his car, as he was obliged to park some distance away.
Giannis usually came early in the year, when the weather was misty, and this month snow had fallen heavily in this part of Greece. As he locked the car, he realised with annoyance that he had forgotten to bring a change of shoes. His suede loafers were totally unsuitable for the climb to the monastery, which involved a long ascent through a forest of ancient trees whose leaves formed a damp carpet underfoot.
He had to focus on each step. Dense mist obscured everything beyond five metres, but as he reached the top of the hill he saw that he had emerged above the clouds.
He could now see the monastery and, in a few more minutes, he reached the cobbled path that took him to its main door. He stood there and looked out above the landscape of undulating grey fog. At that moment he saw a figure emerging, floating effortlessly through the sky.
Giannis smiled. Dimitris seemed to be arriving in some kind of spaceship.
Dimitris stepped out of the small cable car and walked towards his brother. He was holding a secular blue plastic bag full of provisions, left down below by a local shopkeeper each week.
Giannis leaned forward to embrace him and caught a whiff of his brother’s unwashed skin and stale-smelling hair. He saw that his beard was matted. The hand-knitted black cardigan that he wore over his habit had several holes in it and the habit itself was flecked. With soup? With milk? It could have been anything. He was shocked by the change in his appearance from the previous year.
‘That’s a nice way to travel,’ commented Giannis. ‘I thought it was God arriving.’
‘A bit safer than the old method,’ smiled Dimitris. Before the cable car was built, the monks used to hoist each other up from below in a net.
As they walked up to the door together, Giannis noticed that his brother was limping.
‘Your foot …?’ he enquired.
‘No, no. It’s just a broken sandal. I need to sew it.’
The strap had worn and snapped, and his brother was dragging his foot to keep it on.
Giannis remembered with annoyance that his own shoes would probably have to be thrown away. Even his socks were saturated, and he could feel his toes going numb.
Beneath the volumes of dense black hair on Dimitris’s head and face, his brother’s skin was pale and pure, saved from the elements by the high walls of the monastery, where daylight never shone. He scarcely had a line on his face. In spite of the beard, he looked childlike.
Drink, drugs, smoking, late nights and exposure to the sun were among the pleasures and vices of the life that had aged Giannis. Added to these was the constant anxiety of working out devious ways to avoid paying debts and taxes, of ducking and diving, wheeling and dealing. His body, by contrast, was in good shape. Despite a decadent lifestyle, he always made time for regular visits to the gym, where he lifted weights, and he occasionally ran half-marathons.
Dimitris did not study his brother. All he noticed was the garish logo emblazoned on Giannis’s jacket and, as they walked through into the monastery, that the smell of candles that burned all around them was not enough to obscure Giannis’s strong aftershave.
Dimitris put the bag of provisions down in a small scullery next to the entrance, and the two brothers walked through the chapel.
The wall paintings were among the most rare and precious in Greece, executed by an artist from Crete four hundred years earlier. Theophanis had also painted at Mount Athos, and the faces that surrounded them now bore the same mixture of joy and sadness, the harmolipi, that had so affected Dimitris on his school visit.
There was a large plate of holy bread cut into cubes on a low table in front of them. Suddenly hungry after the long climb, Giannis resisted the temptation to take a piece.
Dimitris noticed his brother’s left foot twitching nervously up and down and how the little gold stirrup on the shoe caught the light each time he moved. He was conscious that Giannis was in need of nicotine.
‘No change in the rules, I suppose?’ asked Giannis.
>
It was ironic that, in a place where precious sixteenth-century wall paintings were gradually darkening and disappearing in a haze of candle smoke and incense, smoking a cigarette was not allowed, even outside, where ash could be flicked hundreds of feet into the void beneath.
‘Alas, no,’ answered Dimitris, raising his eyes to heaven.
‘God’s rule?’
‘No,’ said Dimitris. ‘The one above Him.’
‘The bishop?’
As Dimitris moved further into the chapel and sat down, Giannis watched him more closely. In contrast to his youthful face, Dimitris had a protruding stomach and stooped posture; to Giannis he looked like a man who had gone to seed. Giannis was proud of his own physique.
Dimitris’s own turning circle was smaller than a prison yard. Members of his flock could arrive at any time, and they did not expect him to be out. Since the lift that brought him up and down the rock had been installed, even the minimal exercise he used to take had been reduced to walking a few metres a day.
‘How are our parents?’ asked Dimitris.
‘The same,’ answered Giannis. ‘Nothing changes. Father still drinks. Even more now that Yia-yia has gone. At least she tried to discourage him.’
‘So he still raises his hand against Mother?’
‘Of course he does.’
‘Can’t you do anything?’
‘Can’t you? Pray harder …?’
Giannis still did everything to provoke his pious brother, just as he had when they were small boys.
‘I live above them, so I hear what goes on sometimes. But when I get downstairs it’s usually all over and done with. There they are, sitting watching TV as if nothing has happened. Mother sniffing. Pretending to have a cold.’
A moment passed. Giannis wondered if Dimitris was praying, but he soon interrupted the silence in any case.
‘Gamoto!’
The sound of swearing in this sacred place jarred, but Dimitris did not respond.
‘Mother made you some sweet biscuits … I left them in the car.’
‘That’s nice of her. But it’s Lent. So not to worry. You can eat them on the way home.’
Dimitris was well used to his family being out of touch with the Church calendar.
Giannis could not ask his brother what he had been doing, because he knew the answer. Reading the Bible, praying and meditating. Even now Giannis was not sure if there was a difference between them. Perhaps hearing confession was the one thing he would have been interested in. He was always intrigued by what people might offload on to his brother and how someone who knew nothing of sin could respond.
‘How is business?’ asked Dimitris.
‘In spite of everything, it’s going well,’ answered Giannis. ‘People will spend their very last cent on an espresso. They’ll be drinking coffee as Greece collapses around them!’
Giannis was now running five outlets of a coffee franchise. During the recent crisis, he had offered the lowest prices in Athens and there were queues every morning outside every branch. He was doing very nicely.
‘Let’s say, I am offering a public service … a bit like you.’
Dimitris was a man of few words. His brother’s sarcasm bounced off him.
‘You know what I mean … confession? Coffee and confession? Don’t you think they have something in common? A quick fix of something to make people feel a bit better?’
Dimitris folded his hands in his lap and looked down at them. It would be better not to rise to his brother’s bait nor to find himself debating the differences between a caffeinated drink and one of the sacraments. Silently, he prayed to God for the strength to keep calm, digging the fingernails of one hand hard into the other. Giannis’s mention of ‘confession’ stirred unutterable torment in him.
The woman. She was always on his mind.
A couple had visited the monastery a few months before. It was during August, when large numbers of people made the journey to Meteora. Many of them were standard tourists whose chief interest was in taking pictures, but others came on a more spiritual quest.
A large coach party had arrived one day. Most of them were in their seventies, and for many it was a considerable struggle to reach the monastery.
There was also a younger couple. Dimitris had realised that they were not part of the main group.
The woman’s husband had wandered off to the museum, and she remained behind in the room where they were now seated. It was a hot day, so it seemed natural for anyone to want to rest.
She had long, curly blond hair that Dimitris noticed immediately. All the women in the coach party had stiff, short styles, specially coiffured by a hairdresser for their outing.
None of the older people had any interest in speaking to Dimitris, but he could see this younger woman was trying to catch his eye.
‘Excuse me,’ she said quietly. ‘Is it possible to say confession? I need to do it as soon as possible.’
A pair of dark green eyes looked pleadingly up at his. She seemed small and vulnerable and yet there was a wildness about her, accentuated by her lion’s mane of unruly hair.
It was odd for someone to be in a hurry over such a thing, but he realised afterwards that she wanted to do it while her husband was looking around the museum.
‘Come with me,’ he said.
They went into the chapel, and Dimitris led her into the sanctuary, where he took the epitrachelion, the holy stole, from its hook and put it round his neck. It transformed him into someone with the power to absolve her of her sins, and at the end of the confession he would place it over her head and read the prayer of forgiveness.
They sat opposite one another and she began to speak. Her voice was so quiet he had to lean forward to hear her.
‘I’m so ashamed,’ she said. ‘My sins are heavy.’
‘God will forgive you,’ Dimitris told her. ‘God will wash away your sins.’
‘I don’t think He can,’ she whispered. ‘Because I can’t get rid of my desire.’ There was a breathless urgency in her voice.
‘He forgives every imperfection, purifies you of every transgression.’
‘But every minute of the day, every hour of the day, my mind is filled with such desire, with such a powerful urge that I cannot resist it …’
The woman’s voice was husky, full of sexuality. It stirred something in his memory and he began to sweat profusely as he listened. Her words faded in and out as he tried to focus on what she was saying. The temperature in the small, airless space seemed to rise and rise until he was gasping for breath, his head swimming. He was struggling to remain sitting, holding on to the edge of his desk to stop himself collapsing. With a sudden, terrible realisation, he knew that it was he, Dimitris, whose sin could never be washed away.
When he came to, he was lying on the cold stone floor. The woman had gone. She had fled as soon as Dimitris fainted and alerted a visiting novice, who was now mopping his brow with a damp cloth. The stole was twisted beneath him.
He lay still, agonised by the memory of his teenage transgression, which he had tried every day to suppress and which at that moment had come flooding back.
Only once, a year or so before he had left home to go to Theological School, Giannis had persuaded him to go into their grandmother’s room. Yia-yia was away with their mother, at a funeral. There was a telephone extension in her room. Not for the first time, Giannis called a ‘hotline’ to talk to someone called ‘Natalia’. He had talked to her before, but this time he had bullied Dimitris into taking a turn to hear what she would like to do to an eager adolescent. The feeling of desire that came over him was unfamiliar and overwhelming, and when Giannis thrust a porn magazine in front of him the image of a naked Natalia appeared in his imagination, pearly skinned, huge-breasted, wavy-haired, bottle-blonde.
The encounter was interrupted by the slam of the front door. Dimitris dropped the receiver, but their father was already in the room.
Over by the window, Giannis stood smirking. D
imitris, meanwhile, was hastily doing up his flies, red-faced. His father, who had come straight in from the bar, extracted enough information from him to justify a severe beating on his naked behind.
Talking to Natalia was the closest Dimitris had ever come to any kind of sexual encounter, but the shame of being ‘caught’ had lived with him, even haunting his dreams. The woman on the phone was still the subject of his regular fantasies.
This voice that he had heard in the sanctuary was the same as the voice that had troubled him for the past fifteen years. Just like Natalia’s.
The woman’s confession had taken place a few months earlier, but every day since he had been tortured by the memory of her voice, lying awake until two or three in the morning, then getting up to spend the rest of the night on his knees, praying until his back was sore and he shed tears of pain from kneeling on the stone floor.
He sought confession for himself, but nothing shifted the burden of his sin or silenced his obsession. For months Dimitris struggled, and the expression on the faces of the icons that surrounded him no longer seemed kind. They were reproachful.
Giannis glanced at his Rolex.
‘I need to get back,’ he said.
Dimitris stood up.
‘Thanks for coming,’ he said.
‘It was good to see you,’ said Giannis, backing away from, rather than moving towards, his brother.
‘Send my love to our parents,’ Dimitris murmured.
The solid wooden door closed behind him. Giannis felt relief to be leaving. He had been there for an hour, and it was more than enough. He slipped and slid back down the hill. It was even harder going than the ascent. It took him more than forty minutes but, eventually, he could see his car, gleaming like a ripe tomato on the road below.
At last he reached it, got in and sat for a moment, leaning over to the passenger seat for the sweet koulouria that his mother had made for Dimitris. He ate five, one after the other, then lit a cigarette.
Cartes Postales From Greece Page 13