Going Up
Page 42
A sadly smiling young woman called Flora came down to help Beetle with the washing. Her husband, Paniotis, was Yorgios Galatsios’s rival for our chicken business. To denigrate him, Yiorgos made the traditional gesture, a thumb for the spout, his fist for the bottle, to indicate a drunkard. On the day before we were due to catch the Despina for Piraeus, Flora said, ‘Thelete akrivos na agorazete ena spitaki?’ (Do you really want to buy a little house?) I said, ‘Veveos, alla nomidzo pou then boroume.’ (Indeed I do, but I don’t think we can.)
She led me up to the village and down the bouldered path on the other side to the uninhabited bay of Mylopota, which I had never seen before. At the far end, above the long, wide scimitar of golden sand, at the top of a quartet of terraces of olive, almond and fig trees, a green-shuttered cottage looked out over the Aegean facing the neighbouring island of Sikinos (which Solon once derided as the place for people who cared only for a quiet life). The roof of the little house was the cropped skeleton of a eucalyptus tree, with bamboo slats across the branches, not unlike Odysseus’s bedroom on Ithaca. The only well was down on the beach level.
Flora wanted money in order to be able to send her children to school on Santorini, a place of black, once toasted beaches. The island is hooped around a great lagoon where the volcano’s crater was, and is. Early in the second millennium, its eruption split the island open and spewed lava over the Aegean and, so they say, suffocated the bright Minoan civilisation that some people think was the fabled Atlantis. On a clear day, if you stand on the heights above Mylopota, Santorini is visible, hull down, on the horizon.
Going up, I asked Flora how much she wanted for her house. She said, ‘Dtheka pente chiliades’. Fifteen thousand drachmae; in those days, roughly £150. I feared that she would raise the price, if I agreed; but I did; and she did not. As we walked back down to the beach, we crossed a field with a broad frontage directly onto the beach and a well in one inshore corner. Flora said, ‘Afto einai dthikosmou, an to thelete’ (This is mine too; if you want it). ‘Poso einai?’ I said: ‘How much is it? ‘To ithio,’ she said; the same. I said, ‘Tha to paro.’ (I’ll have it.)
That afternoon we went to see the eirenodikes, the justice of the peace (more literally the peace of justice) and the transfers were formalised, in longhand. Sarah wept as Despina sailed past the white church of Aghia Eirene and out of Ios harbour; but I could now promise her that we would be back. Sarah always called Ios ‘that place’. It mattered to her more than anywhere else. She painted images from it, big and small, again and again. Her ashes are scattered on the terrace below our renovated house up on the hill. Fifty years later, we and our sons and Sarah’s daughters have built three houses, directly on the beach, facing Solon’s lazy Sikinos.
Since I was now officially an American citizen, when we arrived in England I had to fill in the usual form. Having no other address, on the line labelled ‘Permanent Residence’, I wrote, ‘Ios, Cyclades, Greece’.
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First published in Great Britain in 2015 by
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Copyright © Frederic Raphael 2015
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