Signs of a Struggle

by Tony Kaplan

  Next, some receipts - no doubt to be claimed later as expenses, and then - and for some reason, it startles me - a photo of Lucy and me next to the canal. I remember her asking a passing couple - Japanese tourists no less - to take the photo of us. I’ve not seen it before. I angle it to the light and stare into it, deciphering our expressions, inviting the wash of memory to surge in. Not a great picture of me. But she looks radiant... triumphant, clutching my arm - a woman who has got her man. I bask in the warmth of this remembered intimacy, then I wonder why this photo is not on top? Why is Wim’s photo above it on the pile? Is Wim around? Is that why she is avoiding me? Did he pitch up before me and persuade her to go off and do some photo-journalistic take on whatever this “great” story she is onto, and now she’s embarrassed she’d contacted me? Maybe it would be prudent to check up on his whereabouts when I eventually get online. Has she gone Wimsical? Has the competition got there ahead of me?

  3

  Yiannis tells me that the only internet access in Agia Anna is at the other restaurant, “the new one” Yiannis spits out, like “new” is the worst curse word in the hood. Unless I want to go into the port town, Agia Sofia – they have the internet. Internet connection for the village had been held up, Yianni tells me - the communists on the municipal council have objected to the work being done by an Israeli company. The Mayor is a PASOK man who will do business with anybody it if means a favourable deal, especially if there are enticements.

  “Nikos Angelopolis,” Yianni pronounces with mocking grandeur, “Our Mayor. A big shot. PASOK. He is say no rousfeti,” (Yiannis rubs his forefinger against his thumb to indicate money changing hands) “but is lots rousfeti, believe me. He control everything. Everybuddy here in Agia Anna they love him because he is bring for them the new road. So now the tourist busses can come with tourists from the Port, from Agia Sofia, for day trips, and everybuddy will get rich. Hmph!” he says dismissively. “Now everybuddy is fight. Look what that one has built next door. ‘Modern’, he says, the tourist will want ‘modern’. Everything clean. The furniture from Sweden. The food – only what is quick to prepare it. No love. No tradition. No… in the heart.” He beats his chest and shakes his head, gravely disappointed.

  “So what you wunt to eat?” he asks grimly, his mood darkened by the thought of his neighbour. “You wunt try the stuff-ed vegetables? Stuff-ed with riso - solo. Soulla she put in her own spice. Is popular,” he says, holding his pencil tip to his order pad. “You wunt?”

  “Yeah, okay,” I give in without a fight. He writes it down with a flourish. We settle on a bottle of retsina to drink – the taste of the pine goes well with the spices in Soulla’s vegetables apparently (cumin and fennel, he tells me, after he’s checked with Soulla and found the translation in his frayed Greek-English dictionary, which he displays to me proudly). I write this down in my notebook. I collect recipes from places I’ve visited. I love cooking. I suppose I picked up the habit from having to provide meals for my mother and sister after my dad died. My dad had done most of the cooking before and took pride in the meals he produced for his family. I suppose I am like him in that way. My mum was rubbish at cooking, and once she had succumbed to the bottle, she had no interest in eating, and an only sporadic inclination to look after Irini and me. Cooking for me was survival. Irini was little; she was always hungry. That she had hot meals was mainly down to me. Not that Irini ever thanked me. Our mother remained as thin as a child until she died.

  “So why are people fighting?” I ask, as he puts down the bottle of retsina, a glass, a basket of cut bread and my knife and fork wrapped in a red paper serviette.

  “The people who will make money are those with land next to the sea. The kapitalistes will want the land for hotels, restaurant, fancy apartments. You will see. Once the new road gets to here, lots of peoples will come, Germans, Dutch, from Norway. They will want to buy places, make hotels. Those with land near the sea will get the top prices.”

  “Do you own this land?”

  “Yes,” he said and grins. “I own. On this island most of the land is own-ed by the womens.” He sees my surprise and is amused. “We have to be nice to our womens here,” he says and chuckles. “They are the rich ones. Us poor men have nothing other than what we have got in our trouser! This piece of land Soulla’s father gave it me to marry his daughter. He thought it was worth nothing. That is also what he thought of his daughter’s husband!” he laughs as one who has had the last laugh. “Soulla has farmland in the valley. Before was worth a fortune. Now is worth nothing. I’m now got the good property. Soulla! Soulla!” he shouts and gets up suddenly, to tell her to do something urgently it seems, but maybe just to lord it over her.

  Yianni’s and Soulla’s tavern, To Meltemi, is empty. Yianni and Soulla will stay open anyway. I think of all the food Soulla must have prepared for the evening customers that will go to waste. Their business is probably mainly lunches I surmise, but I feel a sadness for these two hard-working old people. Maybe it’s the rebetika music, mournful, muted and indistinct, coming from a worn cassette tape player – they haven’t even graduated to cds yet – that is getting to me. So much tragedy in the voice of the female singer, those sinuous Middle Eastern minor scales… My father never played Greek music at home. Yet, this music touches my soul. Is it in my blood? Or is it the retsina? I am on my second glass.

  Beyond the rebetika, the music from the taverna next door, insinuates itself onto the still, warm night air - smooth jazz, discreet background music for discerning Northern Europeans. Yianni’s neighbours, I notice, are doing good business. Their clientele on the neat balcony are all smart-casual and mostly blonde. Greek holiday makers have long since gone back to work and taken their children back to school; it is already too cold for the Italians, Yiannis tells me, as he returns and sees me looking over at his neighbour. “It is only the Germans who stay in late September,” he says, “but is the best time now – the wind, the meltemi, has die down, the sea is still warm and the nights they are cool so zleep with no mosquitoes,” he chuckles. He puts down my plate, with an enthusiastic “Kali orexi! Good appetite please!” He backs off and then hovers, beaming, waiting for my response to his wife’s cooking. I do not have to dissemble. The stuffed peppers, especially, are fantastic, and he is right about the retsina. The pine complements the aniseed beautifully. He is delighted and goes to tell Soulla I am enjoying my meal. He comes back with Soulla in tow. She looks at me hopefully. “You like?” she says. I am effusive in my praise. Soulla smiles modestly and then she puts a motherly hand on my shoulder. “Is good you eat,” she says tenderly. I miss my mother who died six years ago. Soulla has a warm maternal glow that melts me. Soulla must be the same age as the sister my father infrequently spoke about and who is still in Athens, as far as I know. Is she small like Soulla, I wonder, kind like her? I have never met this aunt of mine.

  Yiannis is pleased to have me as his only customer and wants to make it worth my while. He wants my regular custom. He senses in me an ally against his competitor next door. Already he is worried I will go next door for the internet connection and I won’t support him. But he doesn’t like being upstaged by his wife, “Go” he tells her, and ushers her back to the kitchen.

  He comes back with a pack of cigarettes, and two glasses of Metaxa brandy – “On the home,” he pronounces generously. Yiannis is knowledgeable and garrulous in equal measure, and is happy to… no, he is obliged to explain the intricacies of land rights on the island, and how come “womens is pull the string”. Not that he agreed with this – but that is the way it is. He is philosophical. He has, since he was a boy, had an interest in the history of the island, he tells me. He wishes he had been a scholar, but he had to leave school at thirteen to help his family. But he tells me proudly that he has read many books. Mostly, however, he gets his knowledge from listening to the old people, to the stories they tell. He will tell me about land-ownership on the island to prove to me, he says, that “History is walk like a man drunk from bad wi
ne.” He gestures this, his hand a snake slithering through time.

  Yiannis is a good story teller, and as he is talking, the brandy is going down and is being refilled without any prompting, I have the thought that I could file a series of stories for New World Order about life on the island. I resolved to talk Marsha into it the next day. Maybe she’d let me take extra leave days in lieu. The apricot brandy is mellifluous. The night is warm. The scent of the wild jasmine is enchanting. The sea gently laps onto the shore. I could spend more time here. I could force myself (ho-ho). Especially if things go well with Lucy. If Wim hasn’t beaten me to it. The bastard! Lovely Lucy, who has brought me to this lovely island… I pour myself another shot… I am definitely drunk already… maybe I should have asked….

  Yiannis waves for me to keep pouring. “On the home! Drink!” he says emphatically. His story gets on to his neighbour. “The mother of next door,” he says, “It is her land. Stavroula. It was come to her from her father. He bought it when he was come with his little girl, with Stavroula, to the island - refugees from Smyrna. 1921. They killed all the Greeks. You know about Smyrna?”

  I did, as it happens, read about Smyrna in my book on Modern Greek history. Smyrna, where the Turks routed the over-reaching Greeks in the early 20s – the last battle of the First World War. The King had dismissed Prime Minister Venizelos, the hero of independence, who had favoured compromise with the Turks and had offered land for peace. The King put his Generals in charge and went to war. The cosmopolitan Greek citizens of Smyrna, in their thousands, had to flee certain massacre at the hands of Ataturk. I had seen photographs of the insanely overcrowded boats, the dark hollow eyes of people who’d had to leave everything behind.

  “Her father, he had a bit of money. His wife she die with her family – bloody Turks! But he got out with his baby daughter and they come to this island. All the land he could get was land next to the sea. He bought it from Soulla’s father who did not wunt it. It was just a field - sand, stones, bushes. He pay too much for it – Soulla’s father he was not a nice man. What they could grow? He paid out the last of his money to buy a fishing boat which was leak-leak, and then it sink. Finish.” One hand slaps the other clean, one way then the other. “No boat. No money. They was living like poor people. He was ashame-ed. He died during the war, poor man, and left Stavroula, as a young girl, with nothing. Nobody wunted the land. She was not from here and she have nothing to give a husband’s family for him, no proika - how you say, ‘dairy?’”

  “Dowry?”

  “Nai, no dow-er-y,” (he articulates the word torturously) “- so nobuddy want to marry her, even although she was hardworking woman. Boy-o-boy, she was work. Strong like a man. A nice-looking woman. But poor-poor. There were those that took advantage. There was, for a time… somebody… but no, that came to nothing.” He pauses, thinking to digress, but then changes his mind, and goes straight on. “Everyone thought she would end up a women with no child.

  “And then Mavros he come to the island – Gregorios, but everyone called him Mavros because he was have dark skin, like from Africa, but Greek. It was in the 60s, 1963 I think. ‘63 or ‘64. Stavroula, she was forty-two… maybe forty-three. He was a bit younger. A nice-looking man. She look after him for her cousin who was bring him here. They fell into love. Everyone was happy for her. Everyone, before, maybe they felt guilty, maybe they were sorry for her. So, when Mavros took her for his bride all the people in the village was happy. But she never forgive-ed the villagers who don’ help her father, and she blame Soulla for the price Soulla’s father had ask-ed for the land - she was find out later her father he paid much too much for such a piece of land where nothing would grow.

  “They left in about 1970 – Michalis, he own the next door – was just zmall boy. They went to the mainland. Stavroula made a business, sewing, materials, then clothing... export, import. Stavroula is...” He taps his head and nods, his downturned lips denoting respect for her business nous. “Michalis he was have big business in Thessaloniki, factory, I don’ know what. They come back a few years” (he shows me ‘ago’ with a gesture - behind, in the past) “when they found out the land was worth something now, with all the tourists. To revenge on Soulla, they build-ed their restaurant right on top of us, right onto the beach, so now you cannot even see the sand to other the end from here,” he says, his indignation darkening the small veins in his cheeks. “Stavroula would be happy to see Soulla go out of business, for Soulla to be poor like she was be. Now her son, Michalis, he has got lots money, she make like she is queen. Like the old Queen, the King’s mother, Frederika, the German bitch! Soulla she was used to be sorry for Stavroula. Not no more. Now they don’ zpeak.”

  He knocks back the last of his brandy. “But what I was say… the ones who was have the best land, the ones who was used to be rich, now they are poor – and the ones with the land next to the sea where nothing will grow, they are the ones who now have the money. This is history, my friend. Historia. So is why the people in the village fight.” He shrugs and smiles modestly at his own wisdom.

  I look over at the tavern next door. I see the owner - at least, I think that must be him - a large man with waves of blonde hair, scurrying to and from the kitchen, peremptorily bossing the young waitresses, one of whom comes with her tray to the table nearest where I am.

  She is looking down, a slight frown darkening her forehead, the ringlets of her lustrous copper hair falling across her face as she clears the table of its debris. Prominent polished cheekbones and a bold Greek nose, her hooded eyes downturned in thought. A strong face – a face with a story to tell. As she stands up straight to wipe her hair out of her vision, she notices me watching her. The tiniest of smiles arcs one corner of her full lips. She averts her eyes, loads her tray and walks away purposefully.

  There is, on the warm night air, the smell of figs and jasmine.

  4

  The next morning, I go down to Yianni’s for a morning coffee. I am stiff from sleeping on the couch at Lucy’s. I had to sleep on my side with my legs bent. I thought it would be too presumptuous to sleep in her bed. Definitely embarrassing if Wim is around.

  “Hey, Yianni!” I call in greeting when I see him laying tables, turning chairs the right way up.

  “Geia sou, Dhomas!” he answers, pleased to see me. “You want coffee? Loukoumades?”

  I agree to coffee and the doughnuts dipped in honey, which is what loukoumades turn out to be.

  “The body in the bridge,” he says seriously as he puts my coffee down, “The hand is opening a little. Now is black. Is maybe the sun. They found in...” (he shows me with his hand, the fist opening) “a … badge, for how you say… for the jacket…” he taps his chest.

  “A lapel-badge?” I guess.

  “Nai. The flag of Cuba. The Communists think they know who it is,” he says and wanders off. I sip my coffee and gaze at the mirror surface of the water which, at this time of the morning, is aquamarine and turquoise all the way out to the deep channel where it shifts into an Indian ink blue. The sheen is mesmerizing. What would Lucy’s interest be in a body in a bridge? She is into environmental stuff, not murder mystery crime reporting. Intriguing.

  Yiannis is gone a good ten minutes. He comes back with a mop and bucket, and begins cleaning the marble floor energetically. As he gets to me, he asks, “Lucy - she come back?”

  “No,” I tell him. “Listen, could you call the hospital for me? Maybe she is there? Is there more than one hospital on the island?"

  “No, is only the one. Soulla!” he calls out, and I hear him speaking imperiously, importantly, to his wife in Greek. Soulla is evidently the one who is good on the telephone. As I sip my sweet coffee, I hear her shouting into the phone what I judge, by the intonation, are questions.

  “Lucy!” she shouts. “Lu-cy.” Then she turns to Yianni and asks him something. He comes to me urgently. “What her name is? Lucy what?”

  “Discombe,” I tell him, Lucy Discombe. D-i_s-c-o-m-b-e,” I spell it out
for him.

  “Discomber”, he shouts out to his wife, who shouts it at the receptionist or nurse, or whoever is at the other end of the line.

  There is a pause Soulla shrugs with her eyebrows, as in ‘what can you do, you must wait’. Then she straightens. I straighten too. News? Soulla shakes her head at me, letting me see she is sadder about this than I am disappointed. She replaces the receiver. “Nothing,” she says. Then a thought strikes her. “That is good,” she says cheerily.

  I suppose it is. I suppose I should try the police too. “Yianni, I’m sorry, but could you also call the police station? Ask them.”

  “What for you say ‘sorry’? Of course I do this! But police? Mmph,” he snorts, “they do nothing.” But he sees the look in my eye and shouts for his wife again. She calls the police in the main town, then has to hold. She shakes her head. “What they do there all day? They got nothing to do.” Then she speaks to someone. Her tone is sharp. She is insistent. But frustrated. She puts the phone down. “They can give no informations over the phone.”

  “So there is information?” I ask.

  “They didn’t say to me,” she says. “Tickets for the parking. That’s all they know how.”

  “You must go in to the police station,” Yiannis says. “I am go into the port at eleven o’clock for shopping. You want to come in the van?”

  “Yeah, sure. Great. Thanks,” I say, as I count out the coins for the coffee and doughnuts. “Now I must go next door and see if I can get internet,” I say.