The Doctor of Thessaly

by Anne Zouroudi

  By the time the fat man arrived back in Morfi, it was late afternoon. He found a phone booth on the far side of the high school, on a street that was quiet when the school was closed.

  Taking a handful of coins from his pocket, he pressed several into the slot and stacked the remainder on top of the phone. He knew the long-distance number by heart; he knew, too, the uncertainties of OTE, the Greek phone operator, and so dialled slowly and with care. The phone was answered quickly, but the line was not good; the cable connecting the receiver to the phone was loosely wired. ‘Yassou, cousin!’ said the fat man. ‘Do I find you well?’ He listened to exclamations of delight; he was chastised for being so long absent; he was questioned on his whereabouts and activities, and asked whether he was staying out of trouble. As soon as there was opportunity, he spoke again.

  ‘Listen,’ he said, ‘I’m arranging a little surprise. If you’re free, you’re the ideal one to help.’

  He explained what was required; the cousin laughed, and readily agreed. The fat man named the time and place, and they wished each other goodbye, until their meeting.

  Thirteen

  Early evening brought the townspeople outside. Youths gathered by the new fountain, shouting like louts, shoving and cuffing each other, impressing the passing girls with stunts performed on old bicycles. Slippered housewives made their way to the grocer’s for small necessities – a tin of milk for coffee, a little sliced salami for supper – and stayed there half an hour, gossiping.

  The streets and alleys grew dark, and the green cross over the pharmacy door was lit. Behind iron grilles, the window displays were visible in the shop’s fluorescent light, and for some minutes, the fat man studied an arrangement of relics from an earlier age of medicine: cornflower-blue syrup jars – Syr Marrubii, Syr Rhei, Syr Simplex, Syr Rhamni – and a run of hexagonal poison bottles arranged from large to small, all stamped ‘Not to be taken’. The right-hand window carried advertising: a photograph of a woman with glowing, unlined skin, and before the photograph, a pyramid of jars of face cream linked by fine strands of cobwebs, the jars’ sun-faded labels painted with long-stemmed roses.

  Pushing open the pharmacy door, the fat man found himself at the back of a gathering of black-clothed women, all shortened and bent in some degree by age – bandy legged, or hump-backed, or stooping a little at the neck – as if bowing under the weight of their years. Behind a counter carrying a till and a small stand of wintergreen lozenges, the pharmacist’s face had grown red, and his thin hair stood on end where he’d run his hands through it. Now, he leaned forward with both hands pressed on the counter, as though set in defence against attack.

  At the front of the gathering, the most elderly of the women held up a box of blood pressure tablets, along with her health-service-issued booklet of entitlement, validated and stamped.

  ‘Eight years, I’ve been taking these,’ she was saying. ‘You know it, and I know it. And now for lack of a piece of paper, you deny me this medicine which keeps me alive.’

  ‘The law,’ said the pharmacist, ‘is very simple: no prescription, no free medicine. You’re welcome to pay. I can’t break the rules; it’s more than my job’s worth.’

  ‘You’ll kill us all,’ came a querulous voice from the back of the gathering. ‘You sentence us to death!’

  ‘You could catch the bus to town and see a doctor there,’ said the pharmacist. ‘Come back with a prescription, and the medicine’s yours.’

  ‘All that way!’ objected the woman at the group’s head. ‘Look!’ She opened up the booklet, flicking through the pages of ink-stamps and signatures in the pharmacist’s own hand, the records of the prescriptions he had dispensed. ‘All these, you gave me. All I ask is another box of what I always have.’

  Without warning, the pharmacist reached out, and grabbing the box from her, opened it and pulled out two blister packs of tablets, one part used and one untouched.

  ‘How many of these do you have to take a day, kyria mou?’ he asked.

  ‘Three. I have to take three.’

  ‘Then you have . . .’ He made a quick count ‘. . . a full week’s worth of medication remaining. You have at least a week of life left. Your situation is not of life and death, this evening. You must wait until they send us a substitute.’

  Amongst the women, there was a murmur of disgruntlement.

  ‘And how long will that be? The vacancy was unfilled for many months, last time. There’ll be no doctor here within a week!’

  ‘You’ll kill us all,’ came the querulous voice again.

  ‘For God’s sake!’ The pharmacist raised his hands. ‘Listen,’ he said, ‘listen, all of you. Is there anyone here who does not have medication for at least two days?’

  ‘Mine runs out on Friday.’

  ‘At least two days?’

  There was silence, and a shuffling of feet.

  ‘Then go away, now. I will phone to town, and tell them we need to borrow a doctor for our surgery. You can all see him when he comes, and get your prescriptions renewed.’

  ‘But how will we know when he’s coming?’

  ‘I’ll put a notice in the window.’

  With reluctance, the women began to leave. The fat man promptly stepped forward and held open the door, smiling and offering a small bow to the back of the group, and wishing them kali spera. The women filed out, not thanking him, as though respect and good manners were rewards due to age and infirmity, whatever they had been in their younger years – grasping or selfless, good-humoured or bitter, faithful or faithless.

  As they left, a small child watched from the doorway where the pharmacy became the pharmacist’s home. Anxious for the pharmacist in his difficulties, she sucked hard on her thumb, and followed the old women with wide and lovely eyes as they reassembled on the square outside to continue their complaining.

  The fat man closed the door behind them. As the pharmacist saw him, his expression changed; frustration and forced patience became displeasure.

  But the fat man’s smile remained, and, as he laid down his holdall, he turned to the child in the inner doorway.

  ‘Who have we here?’ he asked, as he approached her. ‘Who is this gorgeous little creature, quiet as a mouse and pretty as a picture?’ The child dipped her head in shyness, but her eyes brightened at his compliments. Grasping the hem of her skirt, in delighted modesty she twisted it in her fists. ‘What do they call you?’

  ‘Kokkona,’ she whispered, not daring to look at him.

  ‘Kokkona.’ He repeated the name as if he’d known it all along and she had merely confirmed it. ‘My very favourite name: Kokkona.’ He crouched beside her, reducing himself to her height; the pharmacist busied himself with the lozenges. ‘A pretty name for such a pretty girl! And I know when you grow, Kokkonitsa, you’ll be a real beauty, and that beauty will lay all the world before you. So use your gift wisely, koritsi mou; use it to draw to you the handsomest and wealthiest of princes.’

  The pharmacist gave a cough of disapproval, but the fat man ignored him and went on.

  ‘Do you like magic, little one?’ he asked. Hesitantly, she gave a nod, and at this signal, he pulled a silk handkerchief from his pocket, and wafted it before her to display its colours

  – purples, blues and greens. ‘Watch,’ he said. ‘Watch very carefully.’ He held out his palm to show its emptiness; the gold of the ring on his little finger shone. Draping it with the handkerchief, he covered his outstretched hand. ‘Now, very quietly, we say the spell.’ Eyes fixed on the child, he touched his finger to his lips and whispered words the pharmacist couldn’t hear; then, with a flourish, he whipped away the handkerchief. Between his forefinger and thumb he held a sugar mouse with a short tail of pink thread and dots of gaudy colouring giving a bright blush to its cheeks.

  Smiling with delight, she stepped forward to take the mouse, and he, laughing, tousling her black hair, gave it to her. He stood and put the handkerchief away in his pocket, whilst she called to her mother and ran away
into the house behind the shop.

  The pharmacist still seemed busy with the lozenges.

  ‘Quite the magician, aren’t you?’ he said. ‘Any more tricks up your sleeve?’

  ‘Mere sleight of hand – a little conjuring I’ve practised that’s quite impressive when it’s mastered. But, since you ask, I never run out of tricks.’

  Outside, on the square, the old women were still complaining to one another. The fat man crossed to the window and looked out at them, over the photograph of the woman with perfect skin and the jars of face cream. ‘They feel the loss of their doctor. They believe, no doubt, he is the only thing standing between them and death. They put a lot of faith in him, and in the products you supply. Do you have faith in them yourself, Vangelis?’

  The pharmacist shrugged.

  ‘It doesn’t matter whether I have faith or not,’ he said. ‘When your time’s here, it’s here. Taking your tablets every day won’t stop you falling off a cliff.’

  ‘Quite right,’ said the fat man. ‘I was admiring the display you have in your window, the common cures of days gone by. Syrup rhei, you have there, I noticed – rhubarb syrup, not used, strangely enough, as a laxative, but as a cure for loose stools. Whereas the syrup marrubii – syrup of horehound – is a laxative, and also, I believe, is very good for colds. And the rhamni – buckthorn – is a purgative. In other words, a poison.’

  ‘Are you a medical man, then?’ asked the pharmacist.

  ‘I’m afraid not. Perhaps you were thinking I might step into the vacancy and get the angry mob off your back? No. I have a cousin who takes a great interest in such things, and he’s taught me some of what he knows. Little Kokkona there, by the way, is quite charming and so lovely. Is she your daughter?’

  ‘My granddaughter. I had only sons.’

  ‘The way we live, sons are much easier. The Kaligi sisters are a case in point. Have you, by the way, any tincture of merbromin? It’s hard to find, these days, but I’m lucky sometimes in these smaller places.’

  Frowning, the pharmacist turned to the bank of drawers behind him, all labelled with a range of letters from the alphabet. Opening a drawer marked ‘M–O’ he rummaged through the medicaments – pills, salves, ointments, linctuses – until he put his hand on a small brown bottle, which he extracted and placed on the counter.

  ‘What do you mean about the sisters?’ he asked.

  ‘Well, we very often judge women by their looks, don’t we?’ said the fat man. ‘Their looks are a large part of their value.’ Picking up the bottle, he unscrewed the cap, sniffing the bottle before he replaced it. ‘Excuse my checking this; as it gets older, it loses its potency. As do we all, I suppose. So, on the face of it, the Kaligi sisters had little value to begin with; and as spinsters past their prime, well . . . Not like little Kokkona. She’ll be a real prize. There’ll be plenty of offers there. You’ll get a good match, for her.’

  ‘Her value is not only in her looks.’

  ‘Is that so? What, then, left the Kaligi women on the shelf? Some vice of character? Were there debts in the family or genetic flaws? Or were they perfectly nice girls no man would be seen dead with?’

  There was a short silence.

  ‘Three hundred drachmas.’

  ‘You know, I’m very partial to wintergreen. I’ll take some of those lozenges. It must have been a great relief to Chrissa to find someone to take her on, so late in life. Wouldn’t you say?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ The pharmacist placed a box of lozenges beside the tincture bottle. ‘I barely know the woman. That’ll be four-fifty.’

  ‘When did you first meet the doctor?’

  ‘He came into the shop, just wandered in to talk. He was here as a visitor and found he liked the place. I told him there was a vacancy and he said he’d put in an application. Couple of weeks later, here he was. At first he practised privately; he took a room off the square, close to where he rented a room to sleep in. He had a sliding scale of charges, charged folks by how much he thought they could pay.’

  ‘How altruistic.’

  The pharmacist looked at him, sharply.

  ‘People thought so. Was there a reason they shouldn’t?’

  ‘In my experience, a willingness to work for less than the going rate is not common amongst doctors in private practice. Was that how things remained?’

  ‘He borrowed the key to the public surgery from time to time; there was equipment there he needed, and it seemed absurd for the community to go without a decent diagnosis when the paraphernalia of the profession was there, gathering dust. Before long, the move was permanent and he saw all his patients there; I assume when his public appointment was confirmed.’

  ‘So at that point he no longer charged for his time?’

  ‘I have no idea. My family and I did not require his services.’

  ‘Why did he not take the public appointment from the first? Much easier for everyone, surely?’

  ‘I asked him that myself.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘Taxes, was what he said to me. I wondered, between us, if he lacked the papers to work, with his being a foreigner.’

  ‘But you assumed that, in the end, he had squared it all away?’

  ‘It seemed a reasonable assumption to me, yes. Your tone suggests there may have been a problem.’

  ‘You liked the man?’

  ‘I didn’t know him well. It’s not relevant whether I liked him or not. I found him easy enough to deal with, professionally. He didn’t prescribe obscure medicines I had to send away for. And our ladies there –’ he pointed to the gathering in the square ‘– well, with them he was charming. That’s why they want him back, if you ask me.’

  ‘So you don’t know for certain, then, that his appointment was official? There was no notification to you from the Medical Board, nothing like that?’

  ‘The Medical Board has no obligation to inform me of its appointments.’

  ‘You took his word for the fact he had been given the job?’

  ‘He never told me he had the job. I just assumed it.’

  The fat man turned away and seemed for a moment drawn into the changing scene outside, where a battered truck piled high with freshly picked oranges had pulled up outside the grocer’s, and the truck’s driver – swarthy, dirty and with the Arab-dark eyes of a gypsy – had begun to call his wares. The grocer had abandoned his customers inside the shop to remonstrate with the hawker, pointing to his half-filled box of oranges. But ignoring him, the gypsy called out to the women; smiling his amusement at the grocer’s annoyance, he picked up three of his fruits and began expertly to juggle them, tossing one higher than the others from time to time, or passing one beneath his leg. From nowhere, small children appeared to watch. When the first of the old women crossed the square to the gypsy, purse in hand, the grocer threw up his hands and retreated inside his shop.

  The fat man laughed.

  ‘Your friend is beaten in the fruit market, at least for today. The entrepreneur wins out over the traditionalist, the innovator over him who stands still too long. As I think you found, at the last election. Let me pay you what I owe.’ He took coins from his pocket and laid them on the counter. ‘By the way, when the doctor was brought down from the chapel, it caused quite a stir. It pulled a crowd in the end almost as big as our juggling friend here. And yet, you weren’t there. A man with a little medical knowledge – and a pharmacy – might have been invaluable. But you weren’t there.’

  The pharmacist slipped the coins, rattling, into the till.

  ‘I have commitments,’ he said. ‘I can’t be there for every dog-hanging and drama.’

  ‘Maybe not.’ The fat man smiled. ‘Well, I’ll say goodbye for now, and go and see what this young fruit seller has to offer. We’ll speak again, perhaps.’

  Picking up the small bottle of tincture, he put it in his pocket; and as he made his way to where the crowd was gathering, he opened up the box of wintergreen lozenges, and removing the paper from one of th
e sweets, popped it in his mouth.

  Fourteen

  With reluctance, the fat man accepted Evangelia’s offer of dinner. He knew the state of the kitchen; he had seen the liberties the cat took with the food and how she let it lick the unwashed dishes; the evidence of rodents found in his bedroom was even more compelling here downstairs. He had noticed, too, how the cockatoo (when allowed its daily half-hour of freedom) flew around the kafenion to stretch its wings, letting feathers and debris from its cage fall everywhere; and wherever its droppings landed, Evangelia, complaining, cleaned up with some dry rag or sheet of newspaper and did not go back to wipe the table tops with soap and water. But the evening was dull and uninviting, and so the fat man decided he would dine in.

  Examining his cutlery for cleanliness, he stirred meat sauce into his pasta, and winding strings of spaghetti around his fork, took a mouthful. The spaghetti was soft and tasteless, left to stand too long in the water it had boiled in; the sauce had an undertaste of burning, as if scraped off the bottom of a pan. He tried the salad (a roughly cut, under-ripe tomato, a few slices of red onion going soft and the tired end of a Kos lettuce, all doused in vegetable oil and sharp vinegar) but pushed the plate away and drank down half his beer to take the taste away.

  He was considering a second mouthful of pasta when the kafenion door opened, letting in a draught which caused the cockatoo – miserable in its cage – to huddle into itself on its perch and hide its face amongst its feathers. A man entered slowly, tapping ahead of himself with a bamboo cane, which carried the weight his right leg should have taken. He closed the door, and not noticing the fat man, was making his way slowly to the empty table where the four men had sat the previous evening.

  But the fat man, recognising him, spoke up.

  ‘Kali spera, yiatre,’ he said.

  Somewhat startled, Dr Dinos looked across the room. Realising who had spoken, he smiled and made his slow way towards the fat man. His clothes, though still immaculate in appearance, were those he had worn last night, and as he reached the table, the fat man noticed the strong, sweet scent of violets, as if the doctor had overused cologne to mask the consequences of irregular hygiene.