by Sara Alexi
He opens his mouth to speak. But then there is Stavros. He is not a kind man. Mitsos doesn't want Stavros to know his business. If it wasn't for Stavros he would probably eat chicken and chips more often. In fact, if it wasn't for Stavros he would take Stella out and have someone else cook for her, in a taverna in town, God knows she deserves it. But taking her out would mean taking Stavros too, and he has no desire to spend any time with him at all. He closes his mouth again and puts the envelope back in his pocket.
His foot begins to jiggle, shaking side to side rapidly. He nearly spoke without thinking. She is just too easy to talk to. He doesn’t feel he has control of himself.
‘I have to go.’ He stands.
‘But you haven’t eaten. The chicken will be ready any minute now.’ Stella sounds almost alarmed. Mitsos feels tempted; he is hungry, but he needs to think. Recalling the beach bar has changed his perspective. Manolis owed him. He needs to talk things through, even if it is just with himself.
‘I’ll get a cheese pie from across the road.’
‘Oh, ok.’ She sounds disappointed but Mitsos cannot make out if it is due to the loss of business or the loss of his company. It sounds like she will miss the company but that is surely just his own misplaced ego wishing, his desire to talk to someone twisting his perspective. He is a one-armed sixty-five-year-old farmer; she is just a girl in her late forties. He is not so lonely as to be delusional to the point of thinking she holds anything more than a casual friendship for him. He is just another customer. Besides, she is married. To Stavros.
He puts his hand in his pocket to pay and then realises he has not bought anything.
‘See you tomorrow?’ Stella crosses her arms across her chest.
Mitsos nods, but it is more an acknowledgement that she has spoken than a consent. Guarded.
He concentrates on his balance as he crosses the road. He has not brought his shepherd’s crook with him today. He buys a spinach and feta pie, with a thick crumbly pastry made with olive oil, and makes his way to the kiosk.
Vasso apologises profusely, blames the striking lorries, blames the ordering process, blames the entire Greek system for Mitsos’ cigarettes still not having arrived. Mitsos looks at the other brands. They do not appeal. He cannot be bothered to get used to another flavour. He will wait. Vasso gives him a packet of chewing gum as compensation.
He turns up the lane towards his house. The whitewashed wall where he had squatted all those years ago, drawing in the ground with a stick when Manolis had been jumping around trying not to tell him the details of donkey-swapping idea – it seems so long ago.
He wonders, if he had declined that one piece of mischief, would all the rest have followed? Would he have ended up with the beet patch rather than the prime agricultural land left him by his Baba? If he had avoided Manolis from the beginning and not been there when he got into trouble the first time, over Theo’s carnival suit, maybe he would not have been cast as a trouble maker and people would have treated him differently.
If he had been treated differently, more kindly, softly, maybe he would not have been so busy fighting to be himself, so headstrong; he might not have felt the need to take the stance that resulted in him turning Marina down. Maybe he would have grown up working on the farm by his Baba, making his Mama proud, and accepted the offer of an arranged marriage and been happy?
What a bloody hypocrite Manolis turned out to be. All that teasing he had done over the potential arranged marriage, and then he accepted the very same girl.
Mitsos turns into the track towards his home and kicks the gate open. It reverberates. He kicks it closed and fastens it, shutting out the world, the people who treated him like a trouble maker, the wrong decisions he made, all on the other side of the chipped painted metal gate.
He heads up the track, looking at his feet. The leather on his left shoe is coming away at the toe and the sole scrapes as he walks, but he doesn’t care. He wants to rip it more. Tear it apart and throw it to the wind. Rend his life apart and let the pieces be taken away on a gust. He lifts his chin to the sky, and through clenched teeth and closed lips he suppresses a wail, moisture running from the corners of his eyes back across his temples and into his grey hair.
He stops walking and waits for the feelings to subside but the anger is bubbling. When it turns inward he wants to explode, howl, shout; when it turns outward he wants to do harm.
How could Manolis have not played fair over the beach bar when he, Mitsos, had put up his land, his inheritance, as a sacrifice? What sort of a friend would do that? No, a friend would not do that. A self-centred, hypocritical, ignorant villain would do that.
He howls again, from the pain of the one-sided friendship, for the lack of care, the absence of love. His lips bitten between closed teeth, the sounds rumble in his chest until he gives in and opens his mouth and hisses, ‘What’s wrong with me?’
A bird squawks from the nearest tree and flies off over the hill.
Mitsos’ feelings dwindle and rationality begins to return. He wipes from his temple to his hair line with the back of his hand and draws in a deep breath. His sadness feels heavy in his chest, a rock on his lungs, his mouth pulling down at the corners.
How far back had Manolis not been a friend? It was obvious when he returned from his national service that he had changed. He was much more self-obsessed. The boy was gone. He still had the charm and command but not in the same capacity. The girls didn't flock around him in the same way. Even he, Mitsos, had only gone along with him because he had nearly been drowned. No, not because he had nearly been drowned, but because he had wished Manolis dead and felt guilty.
Mitsos blinks and dismisses the uncomfortable memory. He has reached the brushed-earth yard and changes his focus to look out at the world. He hangs his bag with the spinach pie in it on a hook by the back door.
The almond blossom is so thick now that hardly any black branches are visible. Right at the top a few twigs appear as black lines etched in the deep blue sky. Blossom clings in clusters to their length. Years of hard pruning have brought good crops but left nubs and angles where branches have been hacked off. These stumps offend Mitsos, the suppression of life, organisms forced to grow in a particular way because of damage inflicted on them when they were young.
Mitsos looks up to the sky. Not a cloud, deep blue, another scorcher.
He has wandered the length of the grove to the wall that Manolis once hid behind before the donkey swap. Mitsos puts a leg over the low wall; it had seemed so much higher then. He puts his hand on the top to maintain his balance as he lifts his other leg over. The land climbs sharply up to the hen-house.
It had been his old hen-house, too, that the villain had driven over; there had been no mention of that. He could have used it elsewhere.
He probably wouldn't have, but that is not the point. It was not Manolis’ to drive over with his truck.
Mitsos expels air noisily through his nose and looks around him.
Whilst he is up by the chicken coop he has another look for the eggs hidden by the broody hen. The chickens cluck as he approaches, expecting corn. It is a soft, homely sound. When he was very small, he had tamed one until she could be held. In the end she would only eat corn if she was sitting on his knee plucking grains from his hand.
Then there had been the engagement and the marriage. He picks up a stone and throws it with all his strength out across the roofs of the village.
The engagement party demonstrated how cruel life could be. Everyone was at Manolis’ family’s house, the three brothers, their parents, neighbours, Mitsos, his brothers and their parents. And in she had walked with her mother. She looked terrified. She daren't even look up. Mitsos wanted to grab her by the hand and run from the room, take her somewhere she could grow and blossom unconstrained, without deformity. But he hadn't; instead, he had drunk too much ouzo and watched silently.
She lifted her eyes on occasion, just for a second, to scan the room. Her head stayed at the same angle
, chin to the ground. She repeated this gesture a few times and Mitsos realised she was looking for something. Manolis was between his two brothers and they were all getting heartily drunk, not one of them paying any mind to the girl he was to marry. When the three brothers gave an almighty cheer and raised their glasses together she looked up and gave each one of them a hard stare. Realisation came to Mitsos that she didn’t even know to which one of these buffoons she was engaged. His heart reached out to her. Manolis had not even bothered to introduce himself, let alone put her at her ease. It was in that moment, on top of the recent beach bar rip-off, that Mitsos began to hate him. For a second time, he wished him dead. He had been shocked at the strength of his own feelings.
His mother came and stood beside him.
‘How old is she, Ma?’ Mitsos asked.
‘Just turned fourteen.’ Mitsos tried to swallow. The wedding was scheduled for the next week. He gulped a mouthful of ouzo to loosen the lump in his throat.
The festivities had gone on all night. Manolis and his brothers became more and more drunk until they went outside to celebrate with a gun in the garden, shooting the stars. Mitsos watched Marina, who jumped at the sound of every shot. He could stand it no longer. He walked over to her as she stood by the wall unnoticed, an unsipped glass in one hand and a plate of untouched food in the other. He took the plate of food from her and put it on a side table.
‘Marina …’ But no words would come. He waited, but his thoughts were scrambled. He urged his brain into action but for some reason he began to internally question whether he had fed the chickens or not. He raised his hand to touch the fingers that held her glass.
Marina’s mother bustled over to chaperone the exchange.
‘Congratulations,’ whispered Mitsos, and Marina’s mother led her away.
That was the moment he made his pledge. He had let Marina down by not consenting to his marriage to her, and now she had a lifetime of that villain Manolis to endure. If she became unhappy it would be his fault. He could not undo the situation and so he pledged that he would look after her from afar. He would look after her by trying to get Manolis on the right track. He would guide Manolis and plant seeds in his mind to make him the best husband it was likely he could be. He would stick by Manolis so the money would not all be spent, so that he would not stray from her and so that he would get home every night. He would play bodyguard, chaperone, financial advisor and spiritual guide to her husband-to-be. He would be Manolis’ friend in order to be her friend. He owed her that much at least. Beautiful Marina.
He went home.
Manolis asked him to be best man. Mitsos, despite his newly kindled hatred, agreed to this, his first conscious action to fulfil his silent pledge to Marina. Manolis, who seemed just as fed up about his wedding as Mitsos was, decided to go out the night before his wedding. Mitsos accompanied him.
He was laughing loudly and turning his blue eyes on every girl that came into the bar. Mitsos had known him long enough to understand that he was looking for an opportunity, a single girl he could take down to the beach in the moonlight. Mitsos wanted to cry out ‘Have you no respect for your marriage to Marina tomorrow?’ but he knew Manolis would laugh in his face and so he stayed quiet.
The bar was filling with young tourists in their late teens and early twenties. There were some Greek boys of the same age lining the walls. Mitsos smiled. He and Manolis were now thirty. They might feel like boys but they no longer looked liked boys. To these young girls they would look like old men compared to the youths leaning casually around the bar.
‘What are you smiling about? I have to get married tomorrow,’ Manolis barked above the music.
‘Why?’
‘What do you mean, why?’ He drank down his whisky and caught the barman’s eye, nodding for a refill.
‘Why did you agree to this? Why are you still agreeing to this? Call it off, Manolis. You are not a man for marriage.’
‘Don’t I know it! But I have no choice.’ Mitsos waited, nodding for Manolis to tell more. ‘I had a little bit of fun.’ He took a swig of his whisky. ‘You weren’t around. It was whilst I was in the army. Well, this fun …’ He drew it out, looking into his glass. ‘It wasn’t …’ a long drag on his cigarette ‘… strictly legal.’
‘Did you get caught?’ Mitsos shouted in his ear above the music.
‘They tried to expose me, talked about a very long spell in prison, but they had no evidence. They told my family. When I came home my Mama went through everything, seeing what needed washing, mending, you know. Well, she found the evidence.’
Mitsos didn’t know what he was talking about but nor did he want to know. ‘So?’ he asked.
‘So time passed and nothing. Then they were approached with this marriage deal. They gave me an ultimatum: marry the girl and settle down, or else. So I said or else what, thinking the worst they could do was to throw me out of the house, which they wouldn’t do, as it would look bad to the neighbours.’ He scoffed at this, mumbling to himself about his mother’s pretensions until he continued loud enough for Mitsos to hear. ‘But no, they dragged up ten years ago when I was in the army. I said that was done with, there was no evidence, and that’s when they dropped the grenade. All this time they hadn’t said a word, just sat on the evidence, knowing that one day they could, and would, use it against me.’ Manolis drained his glass and caught the barman’s eye again. ‘And these are my parents, unconditional love and all that.’ The barman poured.
‘Maybe a wife will be a good thing, keep you focused, a reason to work hard in the olive groves?’ Mitsos said emphatically.
‘Tshh, absolute goat droppings. I will marry the girl because I have no choice. That will take a day, but then life as normal as far as I am concerned. Sure, we will move into her house just on the corner and she will cook and clean instead of Mama, but that’s it. They can’t bully me into being a dutiful husband.’
‘What about the girl?’ Mitsos lit a cigarette but did not offer one to Manolis.
‘What about the girl? She means nothing to me!’
‘Yes, but her happiness will depend on the sort of husband you are …’ Manolis interrupted gruffly, before Mitsos could finish his sentence.
‘Then her parents should have chosen more carefully.’ He slammed his empty glass on the counter and slipped off his bar stool. He homed in on the nearest pretty girl and walked straight up to her. Mitsos watched. Manolis put his hand on the wall behind her and leaned right in to say something in her ear. She laughed. He leaned in again and said something more. She laughed again. He went towards her and whispered again. The girl looked shocked, dodged under his arm and ran to sit back with her friends, a group of tall blonde tourists. They all dipped their heads towards her and Mitsos could see her mouth moving, and then the table of girls broke into laughter like a pack of geese sounding an alarm.
Mitsos smiled. Manolis stomped out of the bar.
The wedding was unremarkable. Mitsos performed his duties and they were duly married. The rings were blessed. The stefania – crowns – were crossed above their heads three times. When the Papas said Manolis could kiss the bride Mitsos’ stomach flipped over. He had to put his hands in his pockets to stop himself from launching a punch at Manolis. But Manolis allowed Marina to give him a peck on the cheek; he offered nothing back, not even eye contact. Marina was crying.
When Marina became pregnant so fast Mitsos had the fantasy that they were becoming a happily family. It was better than imagining the alternative. The baby was born; it looked like Manolis, but the man himself was not interested. ‘It’ll keep her busy,’ was all the comment he made about it. But Marina was still a girl, and she spent more time outside playing hopscotch, her mother calling her in when it was time to nurse the weak little thing.
The poor baby died within months of its birth. Mitsos wanted to comfort Marina, and he pressed to spend more time at Manolis’ house. It didn’t take long to find out that Manolis no longer occupied the marital bedroom. Mi
tsos felt such relief; the thought of Manolis forcing himself upon her was more than he could bear. But Marina looked tired and unhappy either way. She had aged quickly and lost her girlish bounce. There were arguments about money, fuelled by accusations by Marina’s mother. Marina herself never offered a word. It seemed that under Manolis’ care his portion of the farm was not doing well and there was not enough to support them all. In the arguments, Manolis would spit that they, Marina’s parents, should move out if they were not satisfied, and this would bring tears and fear to Marina’s eyes.
Mitsos knew of no one whose life was enhanced by Manolis. Like a mosquito, there was no point to him, just irritation. He wondered if Marina wished him gone. Or worse.
Mitsos leaves these thoughts behind as he walks past the chicken coop up into the pine trees to the stone. It is a rock he has sat on many times over the years since his parents died. The pine tops hiss in the wind, a lonely but comforting sound. Under the trees it is silent, the fallen needles muffling all sounds, bringing a stillness that Mitsos has only ever experienced up there; no insects, no small animals rustling. As a boy he would come and lie in the pine needles to get away from his Baba when he was too drunk. They were soft and warm and smelt sweet, and so thick he could scrape out a trench with his bare hands where he could hide from anyone coming seeking him who could not be bothered to climb the whole of the hill but instead just called from past the chicken coop.
As he lay face down in his foxhole, his face buried, his fear would subside as the softness of the needles and the familiar scent of decay soothed his senses. He would breathe again, and by then his Baba would have given up trying to find him.