The Doctor of Thessaly

by Anne Zouroudi

  When she left him, she walked slowly in the direction of the library. At the florist’s on Angelaki, the bouquets for the wedding had been packed up and taken away. She paused a while, admiring the flowers that remained: orange gerberas, white lilies, roses in softest pink. There was a little cash in her handbag, which she counted, and went inside.

  A group of youths had gathered by the fountain. As one of them drank from a bottle of Fanta, another slapped him brutally on the back, making the drinker splutter and spray his friends with the lemonade out of his mouth. They laughed, all of them; the others called the drinker a pig, and he, indignant and wiping drink from his clothes and clearing his nose, took a swipe at the boy who had slapped him. This boy skipped away to hide, looking back at his pursuer.

  He ran into the fat man.

  The fat man grasped him by the shoulders, and held him at arm’s length.

  ‘Be careful, son,’ he said. ‘You’ll hurt yourself if you don’t look where you’re going.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said the boy. His hair was blond; he had his father’s eyes.

  ‘You’re the mechanic’s son, aren’t you?’ asked the fat man. ‘What do they call you?’

  ‘They call me Christos.’

  ‘Well, Christos,’ said the fat man, ‘it’s fortuitous, us meeting in this way. Do you remember me? You father’s done some work for me, on my car.’

  The boy gave a single nod of his head.

  ‘I want you to take a message to your mother. I was admiring your grandfather’s photographs, and I told her I thought they might be worth a little money. I want you to tell your mother I’ve been in touch with an expert in the field, and he’d like to see your pictures. Would you let your mother know, and ask her if she could let me have some samples?’

  The boy said nothing, but looked across to where his friends were waiting, and curious.

  ‘The problem is, your mother wanted to keep the idea of selling from your father. Just for now, I think; I suppose she wanted to surprise him.’ Again the youth said nothing, but his eyes were shrewd, as if he had understood his mother and the fat man exactly. ‘I expect she wants to take her time, and choose what’s sold and what’s kept. They are family documents, after all. So the problem is, where she and I can rendezvous in private – no need, of course, to announce the business to the whole town – but equally there must be no whiff of impropriety. I am all too aware of how people talk in these small places, and I don’t want to compromise your mother in any way. Perhaps you could accompany her, as chaperone.’

  For a moment, the boy remained silent.

  ‘Tomorrow,’ he said at last. ‘My father will be away from home. You could come then.’

  ‘Excellent,’ said the fat man. ‘Shall we say one o’clock? If that isn’t suitable, you can bring me a message here. Please let your mother know I shall be looking forward to seeing her.’

  Noula found Chrissa seated at the kitchen table, a pen in her hand and a tablet of writing paper under her wrist. Scattered across the table were a number of sheets of paper, half filled with writing or written with only one line; on the floor were several more abandoned letters, screwed up and tossed away. The letter she was writing now was barely begun, just five or six words on a single line. Before Chrissa covered it with her arm, Noula read the salutation. The letter began, ‘My Dear Louis’.

  The kitchen smelled of fried meat and spices: cumin, cinnamon, cloves. The window was clouded with the steam of boiling pasta.

  Chrissa looked up at Noula.

  ‘Roses,’ she said. She put out her arm and gathered all the rejected letters towards her. ‘Who’s been sending you flowers?’

  ‘No one,’ said Noula. She held out the glorious bouquet – sugar-pink roses and brilliant-green ferns, glossy, crackling cellophane and a bow of satin ribbon. ‘I got them for you.’

  A smile came to Chrissa’s eyes, and in a moment spread to her lips, lifting some of the tiredness from her face. She held out her arms for the flowers and put her face in them, breathing in their perfume and enjoying the petals’ softness on her skin.

  ‘They’re beautiful,’ she said. ‘What’s the occasion?’

  ‘No occasion. I thought you’d like them, that’s all. A gift, from me to you.’

  ‘I’ll find a vase,’ said Chrissa.

  ‘I’ll tell you which vase to use,’ said Noula. She held up a key. ‘The cut-glass one from upstairs. It’s perfect for them. We’ll christen it.’

  Chrissa frowned.

  ‘The dowry vase? We can’t use that!’

  ‘Why not? Who’s to stop us? They’re our things, yours and mine, and we can use them if we want to. What’s the point, Chrissa? All those lovely things up there, and us two old spinsters living like poor folks down below!’

  Chrissa’s head dropped.

  ‘I was just writing to Louis. To find out how things stand between us.’

  Noula sighed.

  ‘Put the flowers in the vase, Chrissa. You’ll arrange them beautifully; you have the knack. And whilst you’re doing that, we’ll talk. I have something to tell you. I went to the hospital today.’

  Twenty-three

  The fat man drove again to where the log bridge crossed the stream, and followed the track up to Orfeas’s meadow.

  But as he crossed the meadow and the cabin came into view, immediately he knew something was wrong. By the outcrop which gave the cabin shelter, something moved. Holding his hand to his eyes to block the glare, he trained his eyes to where the creature had hidden behind the rocks. Unmoving, he waited, until the creature judged it safe to move again, and showed itself.

  The fat man knew its long-legged, skinny form. In Orfeas’s style, he made a circle of forefinger and thumb, and stuck them under his tongue to give a whistle which came back to him in an echo.

  The mistrustful dog was not fooled; though it showed its greying muzzle around the rock, it came no closer. Puzzled by the dog’s liberty, the fat man went on towards the cabin, passing the empty stock pen, whose gate stood propped open with a rock. The fat man frowned, and again shielded his eyes from the glare to scan the slopes which ran up to the high mountains. Here and there, enjoying their liberty, were Orfeas’s Easter lambs, fattening themselves for slaughter on the grass’s new growth.

  All at liberty: now the implication struck him. At the cabin, the door was unlocked, and calling Orfeas by name, he went in.

  The place was as he expected – empty, and so bleak and sparse it was impossible to believe a man had ever lived here. It was impossible, too, to know whether there had been possessions here of value he would take with him, or whether he intended ever to return.

  But he had left something behind. Hanging on a stake of wood driven into the cabin wall was a case of black leather, so thick with dust and cobwebs it seemed to be growing on the wall, attached to it like fungus. The fat man laid down his holdall and lifted down the case, brushing the dirt from it as best he could.

  He touched the base of the primus stove and found it warm. Orfeas, like all his countrymen, would set off on no journey without coffee; the warmth of the primus said he was only minutes on his way. Outside, the old tarpaulin had been dragged aside and the doctor’s silver Yamaha was gone. He had an advantage, possibly, though the shepherd was no expert in riding motorbikes on rough terrain. And the rough route was the way he must have taken, or the fat man would have passed him on the road.

  Without doubt, he must move quickly; so, picking up his holdall and the black case off the wall, he set off at a run towards the mountain.

  When the fat man arrived at the chapel of St Paraskevi, no one was there. Despite the speed of his journey and his strenuous run, his breathing quickly slowed to a comfortable rate, and the slight pinkness of exertion which had coloured his cheeks soon left them. Perplexed to find the little church, kitchen and refectory all closed up, he succumbed to a moment of doubt, until, climbing on to the courtyard’s stone bench, he looked over the wall to where (according to Adoni
s Anapodos) the doctor’s bike had been left by his attacker.

  The silver Yamaha was there, in that same place; though not, this time, thrown carelessly on its side, but placed up on its stand, and close to the wall to shelter it from bad weather or hide it from the sight of passers-by. On the bike’s seat was a leather doctor’s bag.

  But where was Orfeas? Never allowing that his deductions might be wrong, the fat man entered the church. The lamps and the candles were out, their wicks cold. The kitchen door stuck with its swollen wood, and the few leaves that had collected at its foot were undisturbed. And yet, something had changed. Standing at the centre of the courtyard, he lowered his head, and seemed to think, deeply. Then his eyes moved to the bell hanging over the gateway. The bell was there; but the rope looped around the hook in the wall was gone, cut through with a knife.

  The fat man left the chapel and followed the track in the direction of Adonis’s flock. Around the first bend (and, from the chapel, out of sight), was a broad-limbed beech; amongst the spreading roots was the shepherd’s pack; and some feet off the ground where the tree’s trunk divided was Orfeas, straddling a crook in the branches, tying one end of the bell rope around the highest branch he could reach.

  Staying out of Orfeas’s sight, the fat man moved round the tree. Orfeas pulled at the rope ends to make the knot tight, then put in another knot and tightened it again. As he worked, he muttered; his face was red with strain.

  As quietly as he was able, the fat man laid down his holdall and the black case he had taken from Orfeas’s cabin. Clicking the latches on the case, he opened the lid. Inside lay a violin, its old wood mellow and golden, its strings loose on their pegs; in the case’s lid, the horsehair bow was fraying. Lifting out both bow and violin, he stood and positioned the instrument under his chin; putting the bow to the strings, he stepped around the tree into Orfeas’s sight, and drew the bow across the violin’s strings.

  The noise he made was awful, as offensive to the ears as squabbling cats. He scraped the bow across each string in turn, labouring from the instrument the most dreadful sound each string could ever produce; then he looked up at Orfeas’s astonished face and smiled.

  ‘Orfeas!’ he called. ‘Come down and show me how it’s done!’

  But Orfeas looked back at the rope, where the knot he was working on had grown to double the size of a fist. Tying in one last twist of rope, he pulled hard on the loose end of the coil laid on the branch, and, satisfied it was secure, he tossed down the coil, so it swung from branch to ground with length to spare, and its end landed at the fat man’s feet.

  The fat man scraped on, drawing more offensive sounds from the violin; but Orfeas ignored him, and, scrambling down from the tree, grasped the dangling rope, pulling on it with all his weight to test its security.

  The fat man played and played his dreadful music, until suddenly Orfeas snatched the violin from his hands, and prepared to break its back across his knee.

  But the fat man was too quick, and grabbed his wrist. Enraged, Orfeas glared at him. The fat man squeezed his wrist, tighter and tighter, until Orfeas’s anger turned to pain, and he gasped. He tried to shake free his wrist, but the fat man’s grip could not be loosened.

  ‘Leave me!’ he demanded. ‘What do you want here? Go!’

  ‘Give me the violin,’ said the fat man, ‘and I’ll release you.’

  Orfeas offered up his hand.

  ‘Take the damned thing,’ he said. ‘Here, take it!’

  The fat man did so, and released Orfeas’s wrist, which was marked like a Chinese burn where the fat man had held it. Orfeas rubbed at the redness.

  The fat man held violin and bow in one hand, and with the other, tugged to test the rope, as Orfeas had done.

  ‘So,’ he said, ‘your preparations are almost complete. You’re hoping for better luck this time, are you? Since your venture didn’t go so well last time?’

  ‘What do you want here?’ asked Orfeas. ‘Go and leave me; just leave me, please.’

  ‘Well, I’ll tell you what,’ said the fat man. ‘You give me a tune, and I’ll go.’

  ‘I don’t play.’

  The fat man raised a finger, and in admonishment waggled it from side to side.

  ‘Now I don’t think that’s true,’ he said, ‘and you’ll find me a man who has a particular passion for truth. If you mean you haven’t played recently, that might be true; but if you’re saying you don’t know how to play, that isn’t true, is it?’

  ‘What do you want?’ asked Orfeas again. ‘Can’t a man find any peace here?’

  The fat man plucked at a violin string. The noise it gave was hollow, and quickly died.

  ‘Peace, here?’ he asked. ‘There seems to be none. So people might ask why you insist on this place for what you intend. In fact, I shall ask the question myself. What is so special about this place, Orfeas, that it must be here you play out this melodrama? By the way, I should warn you that the science of hanging is quite complex, and to break your neck satisfactorily, you need a higher branch.’ He moved under the tree’s canopy and looked upwards into the leaves, then pointed. ‘That one there would do you better, though it’s a tricky climb to reach it, and you’d have to do an acrobatic leap from quite a height. What is your plan, to stand on a rock and kick it away? The problem is, if you use this branch here, your neck won’t break, and you’ll die slowly and painfully from strangulation. Am I right in thinking your original plan was to string yourself up from St Paraskevi’s gate? It would have been poetic, I grant you – your body swinging in the wind, framed by that charming archway and the bell ready for tolling overhead – but you would have suffered terribly, my friend.’

  The fat man put an arm round Orfeas’s shoulder as he had done before when leading him towards the hidden motorbike; but now there was affection in the gesture.

  ‘Listen to me,’ he said. ‘You are a romantic, a dreamer, a gentle man – but too often, romantic dreamers don’t get the girl, because some hard-nosed action man gets there first. Here, let’s sit.’ He coaxed Orfeas to sit by him at the tree’s roots, where the shepherd’s bag lay. ‘Is that coffee I can smell? Break it open, man, and let’s have a cup whilst we talk.’

  The shepherd’s hands were shaking and his lips trembled; his hands trembled too much to open his bag.

  ‘Allow me,’ said the fat man. Stretching out his legs as if they were about to enjoy a country picnic, he took the bag from the shepherd and undid the fastenings to take out the tartan-patterned flask. Unscrewing its cup and the inner cap, he poured warm coffee into the cup.

  ‘May I?’ He took a sip, pulled a face, and smiled. ‘More alcohol than coffee,’ he said. ‘What is this, Dutch courage?’ He passed the cup to the shepherd, who drank it down. The fat man screwed the flask’s cap back in place. ‘Enough of that,’ he said. ‘You need a clear head, whilst we talk. Why don’t you tell me what happened when you came up here that day?’

  The shepherd didn’t speak, and the fat man let him look into his own thoughts, and gather them. Behind the chapel, Adonis’s sheep were bleating; one of the year’s first bees buzzed past them and crawled amongst the petals of a flower. Still silent, the shepherd reached for his pack, and drew out a photograph whose edges were deformed and scorched from burning. He handed the photograph to the fat man. It showed a woman who was familiar to him: a younger Chrissa Kaligi.

  ‘She was mine,’ said the shepherd. His voice was hoarse, with the alcohol or with holding back emotion. ‘I asked for her, years ago, and her father said we had to wait. It wasn’t right for her to be married before Noula. I didn’t mind. I was prepared to wait. I loved her.’ He lifted his forearm, and drew his sleeve across his nose. ‘I had my mother to take care of, and the sheep. I was biding my time, and I thought she was too. I thought we had an understanding. I saw her often; after her father died, I did odd jobs for them, those things that are too much for women: chopping wood, a bit of painting around the house. Time was going by, I knew that, and we were
getting older, but I thought it didn’t matter. Noula didn’t mean to get in the way; she just never found anyone to ask her. When their mother died, I thought I would wait a while, and go and see them, talk to both of them and see what could be done. But that doctor put paid to all that. He got in quick, wouldn’t you say – that French bastard got in quick! Before I knew it, she was marrying him. I never had a chance.’

  ‘So what did you do?’

  The shepherd gestured upwards, at the tree branch and the rope.

  ‘What else was there to do? I couldn’t live with it; I couldn’t live with her being with another man. The night before her wedding, I drank a bit. All right – I drank all night, until I was the best part of sober again. And I decided I’d had enough, and I came up here to make an end to my sorry self.’

  ‘Why did you choose this place?’

  Orfeas pointed to the photograph which the fat man still held.

  ‘That was taken at the chapel,’ he said. ‘I took it the day she said she’d marry me. We said we’d marry there, because we liked the view. I’d been drinking, and the strangest things seem logical when you’re drinking. If I’d done the job at the cabin, I’d be dead now, and what’s the betting no one would have found me yet.’

  ‘So what happened?’

  ‘I came here early, with a flask of special coffee, to fortify myself. Dutch courage, as you say. But the drinking had made me thirsty, and I was going to get a drink from the well – though why it mattered being thirsty with my intentions, only God knows. But somebody was coming. I heard a motorbike coming up the track. I thought it would be Adonis, and I wasn’t in any mood for conversation. So I decided it was time for me to go. I sneaked out of the kitchen and shinned over the wall at the back.’

  ‘You left your flask behind.’

  ‘I thought I’d come back for it.’

  ‘You saw no one?’

  ‘I wasn’t here to see anyone.’

  ‘And when you came back?’