by Leta Serafim
At first the priest had declined to accompany them to the beach, saying it wasn’t seemly, a man of the cloth sitting in a lounge chair under an umbrella, but he’d finally agreed to join them.
On the ride to Grikos, he’d spoken of the mythological origins of Patmos, reading from a pamphlet he’d discovered in the hotel lobby. “Supposedly the island was once submerged, existing at the bottom of the sea, until the moon goddess, Selene, cast her light on the ocean and revealed it.”
“The moon goddess, huh?” Patronas said, remembering his nightly swims.
“Yes, she convinced the goddess Artemis to raise it from the sea, and they enlisted Apollo, who convinced Zeus, and it was done.” The priest spread out his arms to take in the island. “Voilà, Patmos.”
Patronas thought that if he ever had cause to leave Chios, he might take up residence on Patmos, buy a little apartment and swim every night, keep the moon goddess company. He had come to love the island.
The sand of Grikos was very fine, the beach lined with gray-green tamarisk trees. The old government hotel, the Xenia, was now in private hands and stood in pristine splendor at the center of the cove. A few boats were tied up at the dock in front and there was a taverna called Stamatis a little farther down.
Happy with the outcome of the case, Evangelos Demos had invited them to a celebratory dinner at his house that evening. He hadn’t come to the beach with them, saying he needed to stay home and help his wife with the preparations.
Patronas had already spoken to Antigone Balis and checked out of the hotel. After the meal at Evangelos’ house, he and the others planned to board the ferry and leave.
He was still working on purifying his tongue. They weren’t taking a vapori to Piraeus, he’d told Tembelos, as the word was of foreign origin—Italian, he believed. They would instead tha epivivastoume eis to ploion tis grammis—experience the art of travel by boat.
These exercises gave his speech a stilted quality, Tembelos informed him, and were becoming very tedious.
“Milas san daskalos,” he said. You sound like a teacher.
It was a grave insult. Maybe his language purification program wasn’t such a good idea.
He had decided to forgo the pleasure of swimming naked with Antigone Balis. Playing Adam and Eve at his age was a perilous idea. Already rusty, his man parts might well lock up and stay that way permanently.
“I wanted to thank you for the lunch you made us,” he’d told her when he paid the bill. “It was delicious, especially the keftedakia.” He kissed his fingers like a Frenchmen. “Magnifique!”
He’d spent some time preparing this little speech, even going so far as to practice the hand gesture, the magnifique in front of the mirror. Although it was a violation of his Greek protocol, he liked the sound of it. He’d wanted to strike exactly the right note, a little show of worldly sophistication. Cary Grant, he was thinking. Manly, but beguiling.
“You’re welcome, Chief Officer,” she said. “Anytime.”
If not her, then another, he told himself.
He was on his way. Women were fifty-two percent of the population of Greece. Sooner or later, he’d find one.
Tembelos and he had discussed it as they lounged in Grikos that day, and his friend had offered to introduce him to his cousin, a thirty-five-year-old named Calliope.
“What does she look like?” Patronas inquired. Tembelos, much as he loved him, was an exceedingly homely man. It was said on Chios that given Patronas and his friend’s appearance, homeliness must be a requirement to join the force. One had to be a runt to be a cop on Chios—a runt with a big nose.
“She plays the piano well,” Tembelos said of his cousin.
Greek shorthand for ‘ugly as sin.’
She was newly arrived from Crete, Tembelos went on to say—another strike against her in Patronas’ mind—and was looking forward to meeting people. “She’s a good girl. Sturdy.”
Yes, the world was full of possibilities, Patronas told himself. Him and a Cretan whale. Sure, why not?
Tembelos waded into the sea. “Come on, Yiannis!” he shouted, splashing him with water.
Patronas stumbled in after him. There were women everywhere, marvelous women swimming in the water all around him.
A woman in a red bikini was doing the breast stroke. She caught him eyeing her and smiled.
He smiled back, feeling better than he had in ages. Perhaps a woman like her would find her way into his bed someday, his heart even. Anything was possible. In the movie about his life, Stephen Hawking had said, ‘Where there is life, there is hope.’ Hawking knew better than Papa Michalis. He was smarter.
Evangelos Demos lived not far from the police station, in a large second story apartment overlooking the harbor. He opened the door when Patronas rang the bell, a brown haired boy clinging to him. The child was about eight years old and wearing a gladiator’s helmet. It appeared to be historically accurate, the helmet—bronze-colored with sculpted ear flaps and a plume of feathers five centimeters high.
Patronas crouched down next to him. “What’s this?” he asked the child. “Are you going to reenact the Persian War?”
“I made it.” The boy rapped the side of the helmet with a knuckle. “See? it’s made of papier mâché. I copied it out of a book. It took me a long time.”
His name was Nikos, he said, and he had just turned nine. Patronas and Giorgos Tembelos spent most of the evening playing with him, while Papa Michalis sat in the kitchen and talked to Evangelos and his wife, Sophia.
The child had a plastic sword and they grabbed wooden spoons from the kitchen and pretended to fight with him, battling their way from room to room, shouting like musketeers, while the boy’s grandmother, Stamatina, chased after them with her walker, yelling at them to stop.
Nikos’ vocabulary was very childish, far too young for his age, and he kept repeating the same words over and over again in a wooden monotone. He didn’t seem to understand what was being said to him and would look at Patronas blankly whenever he spoke to him.
Patronas thought he might be deaf and asked Evangelos about it when they were alone in the kitchen.
Evangelos’ shoulders sagged. “No, it’s something else. We took him to the doctor and he said Nikos will never grow up in his brain. No matter how old he gets, he’ll always be the same, a little boy. There is nothing we can do.”
Having no children, Patronas had no idea how it felt to raise a mentally challenged one. It must be hard, especially here in rural Greece, where people weren’t always kind to the less fortunate, weren’t always patient with those who couldn’t keep up.
No wonder Evangelos was eating himself to death. He wished he’d been kinder to him.
Grabbing his spoon, Patronas stomped back into the living room.“Come on, Nikos!” he shouted, thwacking the boy’s sword with his spoon.
It was the best he could do. At least tonight, he’s see to it the child had fun.
After hearing Evangelos Demos complain about his diet, Patronas had been afraid his wife would serve them vrasmena, boiled crap, for dinner, but the meal she’d prepared was wonderful: a roast leg of lamb and little roasted potatoes, a savory zucchini pie with a homemade crust, and a multitude of appetizers—everything from stuffed vine leaves to artichokes in the style of Constantinople, lemony and redolent of olive oil. For dessert, there were spoon sweets, tiny nectarines and cherries, and revani, a cake heavy with honeyed syrup.
The four of them toasted one another, laughing and congratulating themselves on solving the case.
Patronas joined in, although his heart wasn’t in it. Theirs had been a pyrrhic victory at best, like that of the king in Epirus whose victory had been tantamount to defeat. What had been gained by solving the case? Nothing. He, for one, wished they’d never gone to Aghios Stefanos, never learned what had been done to those children in the cellar.
When it came time to leave, Evangelos’ son grabbed him around the waist and wouldn’t let him go.
“Kne
el,” he kept insisting, tugging at his pants.
After Patronas got down on his knees, the child tapped him on his shoulder with the little plastic sword. “Arise, Sir Yiannis. Go forth from this day and do good.”
Evangelos walked down the stairs with Patronas. “King Arthur is one of his favorites,” he explained. “I read it to him every night. He knows all the words by heart.”
He touched Patronas’ arm. “Come back and see us sometime, Sir Yiannis. It was good having you here.”
Touched in spite of himself, Patronas called Stathis after he left and asked that Evangelos Demos be reassigned to his precinct in Chios. “I need more men. There’s a lot of crime now in the bars along the waterfront.”
Stathis, pleased with the outcome of the case—the person of interest being a German national—readily agreed. “Sure, take him,” he said. “I’ll put through the paperwork. He can start immediately. I’ll even kick in a little for moving expenses.”
Overhearing the conversation, Tembelos raised his eyebrows. “Evangelos Demos, a burden to the earth and now, yet again, to the Chios Police Department. You’re getting sentimental in your old age, my friend.”
“Boy will do better on Chios,” Patronas said gruffly. “There’s a school for kids like him there and I know the principal. She’s a good woman. She’ll see that he gets the help he needs.”
A group of Greek college students were sitting on the quay waiting for the ferry. Accompanied by an older man with a bouzouki, they were passing around a bottle of wine and singing ‘Strose to stroma sou gia dyo’—Make your bed for two—a song from Patronas’ youth.
The ferry was delayed and the kids continued to sing, one Greek song after another. Then a pair of them got up and began to dance. The others quickly fell in, forming a line and moving in a circle across the cobblestones, singing as they danced, their feet flying.
The sight of them filled Patronas with joy. The song was by Theodorakis, and the dance they were doing was one of the most popular in Greece. Those were the steps Zorba had taught his friend on the beach at the end of Kazantzakis’ novel. They were immortal in Patronas’ mind. More than five thousand years ago, his people had come to inhabit this sunlit land. It was theirs then. It would always be theirs.
We tried being European, the kids seemed to be saying as they danced, and it didn’t work out for us, so let us be what our parents were and their parents before them. Let us be Greek.
Patronas joined the dancers a moment later, breaking into the circle and grabbing the hands of people on either side of him. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d danced, his wedding maybe, and whistled loudly as he spun around and around. Tembelos entered the circle a few minutes after him, leaping high in the air and touching the soles of his feet with a hand when his turn came to lead. On and on they danced, the crowd growing more and more frenzied as more people joined the circle. Soon there were so many, it was impossible to contain them, and they danced on into the square, pushed the chairs and tables back, and formed a ring around the blue fountain, shouting and laughing.
As inevitable as rain, trouble came. But just as inevitably, one day it departed.
Nodding, Patronas continued to dance.
His homeland would endure. These kids would see to it.
* * *
Leta Serafim is the author of the Greek Islands Mystery series, published by Coffeetown Press, as well as the historical novel, To Look on Death No More.
She has visited over twenty-five islands in Greece and continues to divide her time between Boston and Greece.
You can find her online at www.letaserafim.com