Where the Bougainvillea Grows

by Gary Cleaver

  His voice trailed off, when Dimitris had finished the translation there was a long, long silence. Iannis wiped his eyes, finally Peter spoke again.

  ”She suffered a major stroke in the summer of 1987 and died a few weeks later, my sister is an old lady now but she is still with us, she will be overjoyed to see this.” He held up the locket, “Gentlemen I owe each of you a debt of gratitude, your integrity and tenacity are beyond praise.”

  He addressed Iannis directly, “But to you sir I am especially indebted, I think were I in your place I would have sold this without a second thought,” strangely he chuckled, “Perhaps I am not the man that you clearly are. I insist you accept a small reward.” He produced his wallet and pulled out a single five hundred Euro note, Iannis held up his hands and shook his head, but Peter would not be denied, in faltering English Iannis thanked him.

  “Gentlemen I will be leaving your wonderful country tomorrow, I would be delighted and honoured if you would join me for dinner at the hotel Hermes this evening, that is if Dimitri here can bear several more hours as an interpreter.”

  Dimitris smiled “It would be my pleasure.”

  At midnight, long after dinner was done, Iannis stood on the quayside with Aspro looking down at Danae.

  “It has been quite a day my boy, quite a day” he took out the bank note. “And look here, enough to fix the boat with a little to spare,” he looked down at the dog. “There are many waves still to cross Aspro and more fish to be caught….but someone else can do it.” Aspro jumped into the boat and barked twice.

  “Oh don’t worry, little Danae will be fixed you can be sure of that, and then we will sell her to someone who will make her into a pleasure craft, she gave us a living, now she can bring joy to others, the money we get for her and the compensation from the government will help sustain us in our old age, come on boy, time for the thing you do best, time to rest.” Aspro’s tail swished back and forth as he followed his master home.

  Festival

  “Her name is Rio and she dances on the sand

  Just like that river twisting through a dusty land

  And when she shines she really shows you all she can

  Oh Rio, Rio dance across the Rio Grande”

  Matthew kept the CD player on his stall to keep him company through the long hot evenings, he played the music of his youth; Elton John, David Bowie, Dire Straits and of course Duran Duran. It was a comfort and served to counteract the Greek folk music that the others played, something he had never developed a taste for. When the song had finished he rejected the disc and selected a new one from the pile, he stabbed the play button and slow piano chords drifted out into the night, a long dead voice cut in,

  “Imagine there’s no heaven

  It’s easy if you try”

  Every year at the end of the first week of August, the seafront of Katsimila is transformed. A long row of stalls stretches from the corner of the harbour, along past the hotels and bars ending opposite the last of these, the Bar Six, seventy in all. For the next three weeks the stalls are occupied each evening, from 6.30 until ten, by farmers, artists, craftsmen and women, wine growers and bee keepers. The Katsimila country festival is famous throughout the Peloponnese; loved by tourists and locals alike, the stall keepers themselves are from villages across the region and all except Matthew are Greek.

  Matthew Hutton had landed by accident in Katsimila in the summer of 1981; he and two friends from university were touring the area in a distinctly unreliable Volkswagen camper van. They had visited the great theatre of Epidavros and were on their way south to Poros when the old van had thrown a driveshaft and come to a grinding halt. They had been rescued by Iannis Stamos, Dimitri’s father, who had towed them back to the garage in the village. It had taken six days to fix the camper and six days, as Matthew had discovered was more than enough to change a person’s life forever. Every year now he kept a stall at the country festival, every year he knew he would see her again and make up his mind that the time had come to speak to her again; and every year his courage would fail.

  Matthew was an oddity among the small group of ex-patriot English in Katsimila, they were mostly married couples, early retired with grown up children and growing grandchildren, in the main they were ten years and more his senior. Unlike them he spoke fluent Greek, not only the national language but also the dialect spoken only by the older men these days. He found his fellow countrymen narrow and opinionated; in return they thought him reclusive and not a little strange. He was therefore only rarely invited to their functions and dinner parties and if he was, he seldom went, he became of interest to them once a year, during the festival when they would all visit the stall. They were always pleasant and sometimes they would even make a purchase, for their own houses or for families and friends back home.

  His stall too was an oddity, he made decorative candles, large and in assorted colours, most were cylindrical, some pyramids, others hexagonal. The most successful were cubiform and all featured a pleasing addition, the sides were decorated with small pieces of tree branch, he would comb the local beaches during the winter months and collect these, the action of the sea, rocks and sharp limestone sand would wear them down into smooth, gnarled shapes. Also on the trips he would find small white pebbles with striated patterns and add these too. Sometimes he would stand, the cold wind whipping at his thinning hair and fantasise for a few moments; she would come along the beach, she would find him, she would smile her wonderful smile and things would be as they were. Back then.

  The twenty seven years that had passed since they had said goodbye had not all been spent in solitude. The entire decade of the nineties had been taken up with two long relationships, both sometimes tempestuous and both ultimately doomed. The first had been with Flo, a large Dutch girl with shaggy blond hair and a booming voice which he had first heard at the now forgotten “Yoyo” discotheque behind the football ground.

  “Hello!” she had thundered over the music, “You look interesting, I shall speak with you.”

  The conversation had been short but the night of wild, thrashing sex that followed seemed, on reflection, an eternity. She worked as an hostess with a flotilla sailing holiday company which meant she would come each spring, stay for six months, disappear off for a few days, return at the weekend, exhaust him and then disappear again, her brief absences would give him a little time to recover. In the autumn she would return to Eindhoven and he would receive the occasional letter. When she was around his every waking moment seemed to be spent in some kind of alarm, she was clumsy, untidy and had some strange and annoying habits. Not the least of these was her penchant for doing twenty five minutes of step aerobics to loud “club anthem” music on the balcony at seven thirty each morning, for these sessions she always wore her hair up in a tight bun; and she was always nude. Once she’d had a bad night with a stomach upset and it was therefore Matthew not her who was on the balcony next morning in a dressing gown and holding a mug of tea. As half past seven approached a small group of elderly village men began to assemble in the street, Matthew stared at them for a long time; finally one of them broke away from the group and called up,

  “Where is the girl? We know she is home.”

  In October 1994 she packed her battered hold-all, kissed him and told him to be good; he had never heard of or seen her again, in a way it was a relief.

  In the spring of the next year he had met Pamela. If anything she was the “Anti Flo”, petite pretty and charming she had come to Katsimila with two friends who had organised the trip to help her over a short and disastrous marriage. They met at a beach party, she had found him aloof, distant and fascinating. It had taken her five years to find these qualities irritating, she left after one too many furious arguments on the last day of the country festival 1999. Since that day he had been alone and was determined to stay that way, unless a miracle occurred. A miracle he knew could never happen.

  Early on the morning of the first day of the 2008 country festival Mat
thew stood on the balcony where Flo had once cavorted, where Pam had sat reading her Maeve Binchy novels and allowed his mind to drift back once again to his first summer in Greece and his second day in Katsimila. He, David and James had spent the morning on the beach, speculating between swims on the future of their trip should the VW be completely dead, the temperature soared and by mid day it had been forty degrees. They deserted the sand and headed off to one of the hotels on the seafront for a beer, they sat on a pleasant, shady terrace and cooled off. After a while four girls came along and settled themselves at a table nearby, the eldest of the four was Gabriella Koutalidas (who would one day become Gabriella Lambakis), they were the only two parties in the place so the conversation was inevitable, Gabriella spoke the best English and introduced the others, Eleni and Katarina were both local girls and their friend Mena was visiting from her tiny home village of Koliaki to the north. Mena Angelidis was neither tall nor short, her hair and eyes were dark brown, her face was pretty but not in any dramatic way and the moment Matthew looked at her he knew he was lost.

  Conversations between groups of young people around the world are very much the same, flirtatious, trivial, with much teasing and plenty of forced laughter. But over the course of the next hour it became obvious to five of them that the other two only had eyes for each other. David, ever the spokesman for the boys, put forward the idea that they all return to the beach. Matthew and Mena said that they would like to stay a while longer. There was much whistling and cat-calling from the others as they departed, only Gabriella was quiet, she was concerned, she knew Mena well, knew her family, she sensed trouble and she was not wrong.

  The teasing and the trivia stopped abruptly after the rest of the group had disappeared. They communicated in a mixture of her halting English and his hesitant Greek but in truth words were not really needed, for long moments they simply looked into each other’s eyes, that was the only communication necessary. They told each other of their different lives and families their interests and a few dreams, the rest of the world drifted away and became meaningless, they knew nothing of the everyday events around them. And they were totally oblivious to the fact that they were being watched.

  At the back of the bar Christina Karamis spoke in a low voice to George sitting on a stool beside her.

  “A young Englishman and an even younger Greek girl, tell me that is not a disaster waiting to happen.”

  George grunted, “You and your fancies, they are just friends, they have only just met, two people are having a chat and you are…” he played an imaginary violin until Christina slapped his arm.

  “You are an insensitive pig, Karamis.” as they spoke the young couple got up to leave, they walked along the street towards the beach and their friends. George and Christina watched them go. After a few paces Mena reached out and quietly took Matthews hand, Christina turned to her husband with a smile of triumph,

  “One day you will listen when I speak.”

  George shook his head, “Bad news my young friends, Bad news” he whispered.

  At eleven o’clock that night, they stood together beneath an almost full moon on the harbour wall. They kissed and she folded herself into his arms, she tilted her head and whispered in his ear.

  “I truly do not think I was alive until this day.”

  He couldn’t think of anything else to say but her name, then he decided to go the whole way and tell her the simple truth,

  “I love you.”

  They spent every day together until the old camper was fixed and it was time to leave. They swapped addresses and over the following months wrote countless letters. The next summer Mena returned to Katsimila to spend to spend two weeks with her cousin Eleni, the day after she arrived Matthew stepped off the mid day bus from Athens. They met on the harbour wall that same afternoon and the year that had passed was instantly irrelevant.

  He had rented a small apartment in an ugly little block behind the church, on the third day of their reunion, a sweltering august afternoon they had gone there together. Twenty eight years later those few hours were so welded into Matthew’s memory that he could, at any time, close his eyes and replay them like a favoured old movie. The curve of her breasts, a cry of joy, the sweet sting of orgasm, the sights, sounds and sensations of that long lost day could be brought back at once. He loved them. And they haunted him.

  He asked her to marry him that evening and for the first and last time their happiness was complete. They made plans, he would meet her family and tell their story, he told her he expected distrust and maybe even some hostility from them, but if they stuck together they would come through ok. He got much more than he had bargained for. Matthew spent one awful hour in the Angelidis household three days later. He was told that their feelings for each other were of no concern to the family, a relationship between their daughter and a foreigner was not an option, they were not to see each other again. He had tried to reason with them and had met a stone wall, finally he had been unceremoniously ejected from the house, but this was not the worst thing. Throughout the whole miserable experience Mena had said not a single word, to him this was nothing short of betrayal, she should have said something in their defence, shown some kind of defiance. But there had been nothing.

  He had returned to Katsimila, determined to find work and stay around for as long as it took to win them over. Mena managed to visit occasionally but after that terrible day the relationship started to change. It took another six months but their parting was inevitable. Matthew stayed in Katsimila and never really gave up hope, even when he heard, two years later, that Mena had married the son of a neighbouring family in Koliaki, he stuck around, hoping for a miracle. Eventually he had started up the stall at the festival and had kept it every year save one, he missed the summer of 2006 when his father became seriously ill and did not return until after the funeral in October. Every year he sold his candles. Barely sixty metres along the line Mena had a stall where she sold produce from the farm in Koliaki, on occasion he would catch her eye, she would always look away. She brought her children, two girls, Matthew had watched them grow, they were now teenagers.

  On the final night of the 2008 festival at 9.30 he was starting to think about packing up, it had been a good year. He reached down, opened a large cardboard carton and began stacking the few unsold candles inside; he would sell these to various gift shops along the coast and to the wholesaler in Argos. Around him other stallholders were tidying up and preparing to leave and a sizeable line of old pick-ups had formed along the seafront. Finally all that remained for Matthew was the CD player, he stooped and picked up the small rucksack he used to transport it; when he straightened up Mena was standing in front of him.

  He had not seen her up close for more than twenty five years, there were lines on her face as there were on his but it was her, to him they were beautiful. Just as on that long ago evening of the full moon he was lost for words, he couldn’t think of anything to say. So he said her name.

  “How are you Matthew?”

  “I’m good.”

  “I have wanted to come and speak with you so many times, but I suppose I have lacked the courage.”

  He stared at her for a moment, “so how is the family?”

  “Oh, you must have seen the girls, Eleni is seventeen now and Pavlou is fifteen, they are lovely ladies, I am so proud of them.”

  “They are beautiful…like their mother. How is your husband, I’m sorry I have forgotten his name.”

  “Andreas” she looked away. “He has his life, I have mine, that is really all there is to say.”

  There was silence between them and it was not an easy one.

  “Mena, is something wrong?”

  Without warning she reached up and lightly touched her right breast.

  “There is a lump ... I found it a month ago, the doctor says it must be removed if there is to be…”

  “Oh Mena.”

  She began to babble and to cry.

  “I am frightened Matt
hew, my girls do not understand and my husband does not seem to care and I am so scared Matthew, I don’t know what to do, I know you cannot help me, I don’t know why I came…I don’t know…”

  He took both her hands in his.

  “I love you Mena, I always have and I always will. That’s the only way I can help, we have unfinished business you and I and it will remain that way. But I will never stop loving you, don’t forget that.”

  He took her in his arms, ignoring the stares of those close by; after a few minutes she regained an amount of control, she wiped her face with a tissue, then she looked into his eyes, her voice was quiet and weak.

  “Thank you Matthew, you have helped more than you know; I really should get back to the girls they will be worried. I suppose there is only one thing left to say. I so love you Matthew, however dark things get, I will not forget”

  She went back to her stall. Matthew sat on the small stool beside the counter and stared at the ground, above his head a low voice drawled from the CD player

  “And in the roar of dust and diesel

  I stood and watched her walk away

  I could have caught up to her easy enough

  But something must have made me stay

  And the big wheel keeps on turning….”

  He used his thumb to stab the “Off” button.

  Sofia’s place

  Extract from the Athens daily newspaper “SIMERA” Monday March 28th 1994

  Two die in nightclub shooting

  Several shots were fired at the “Blue Horizon” club in Strinzis street, Glyfada, last night. A man described by an eye witness as being well dressed and in his forties entered the premises at ten thirty pm and began arguing with the proprietor of the club, Iannis Koutsis. In the incident Mr Koutsis, 46 was fatally wounded. Melina Hadjadakis, 31 employed as a dancer at the club was also wounded and died later at Venizelos hospital. Police are appealing for witnesses.