It's All Greek to Me!

by John Mole

  The idea of buying a place in Greece had not come completely out of the blue. A few months previously we had held a family celebration on the balcony.

  ‘Do you know why we’re having this?’ asked Arfa, as a champagne cork blasted off into an olive tree.

  ‘Because you’re alkyholocs,’ said Jack, our eldest. He had started spoilsport lessons at school doing projects on smoking and drinking and sex.

  ‘Noo,’ said Arfa, dipping her fingers into a limpid pool of spilt bubbly and licking them.

  ‘It’s your wedding adversary,’ said Jim, our second son.

  ‘Anniversary. Right. Daddy and I have been happily married for ten years.’

  Four little faces stared at us, bright blue eyes, hair bleached blonde by year-round sun.

  ‘You’re not happily married,’ said Kate, our daughter. ‘When Daddy’s here you’re always arguing. You threw a pot of paint at him this morning.’

  More froth billowed out of the glass. Arfa and I were locked eye to eye, not knowing whether to gasp or guffaw. Banter was so much part of our conversation that we never thought how it looked to the children.

  ‘That’s not arguing, Kate. That’s discussing. And it was only poster paint. Anyway, ten years is a long time to live together.’

  ‘Daddy doesn’t live with us. He lives up there,’ said Harry, the youngest. He pointed up to the cobalt blue sky. Froth overflowed the second glass. Last week we’d had a conversation about hamsters and grandpas living in the sky with Jesus. Did he think I was dead too?

  ‘He means in an aeroplane,’ explained Arfa. ‘Every time a plane goes over they say that’s where you live.’

  ‘Sweethearts, Daddy and Mummy love each other very much and we all live together,’ I said, trying to sound convincing. ‘Here, let’s drink to that.’

  I poured froth into four plastic cups and topped up the two glasses and we clinked to wedded bliss, not very satisfactorily, as plastic does not clink well. All in all it was a muted celebration.

  Coddled in moonlight, jasmine and sentiment, after the children had gone to bed, slumped in canvas chairs, feet on the balcony rails, we gazed blearily at the olive trees and discussed our future without a trace of bicker or banter.

  ‘That’s it,’ I said, ‘I’m finished. I’m not going to be a stranger to my family. We’ll make a proper home.’

  ‘How will we live?’

  ‘I’ll write. Grow potatoes. Anything. I’m only doing this for the money. I’ll take a sabbatical, see how it goes.’

  ‘OK. I’ll start lawyering again.’

  ‘You’ll be out of practice.’

  ‘After dealing with four children and a Greek cleaning lady, judges will be a pushover.’

  ‘We might have to go back to London for a bit. Until we’ve got things sorted out.’

  ‘I don’t want to leave Greece. This is where we’ve been happiest.’

  ‘We’ll always have a home here. I promise.’

  So we decided that, as soon as we were transferred from Athens, I would take a sabbatical from my job travelling round the Middle East and we would buy a house in Greece that would always be our home, wherever we were living at the time.

  We went about looking for a house carefully and systematically. We had lively family discussions, in which we tried to reconcile the children’s vision with their parents’. On one side was a luxury villa with cable TV and a swimming pool and English-speaking children to play with; on the other a picturesque, whitewashed village house with blue shutters by the sea and near to the taverna. We made lists of islands and mainland villages, pored over maps and ferry schedules, planned weekend trips. The first pleasure of this house would be looking for it.

  Before I met Ajax the butcher we had been a few times to Evia, the island where Horio is located. It is less than three hours’ drive from Athens. It is a thinnish island just over 100 miles long, the second biggest in Greece after Crete. A spine of mountains runs along its length. On the eastern side of the mountain backbone is the swell of the open Aegean. The coast is rugged, with steep cliffs and few safe harbours. On the other side is the Gulf of Evia, separating it from the Attica mainland. There are lots of little bays and anchorages and the water, sheltered on both sides, is generally calm. Unless you knew otherwise, you could be excused for thinking that Evia is part of the mainland. The swing bridge across the Gulf of Evia at Halkida, the capital of the island halfway down the coast, is only 40 yards long.

  In classical times Evia was spelled Euboea, which means ‘good for cows’. You may come across people who are called Negroponte, which was the name of the island when the Venetians and then the Turks ruled it from about 1200 to around 1830. It is obvious if you have a smattering of Italian that this means black bridge, as I informed the family on our first visit.

  ‘It’s not,’ corrected Arfa, ‘it’s an Italianised corruption of Evripos, the channel that goes under the bridge.’

  ‘Wrong again, Dad,’ sang the chorus.

  ‘Thank you, darling. Would you like to carry on?’

  ‘No, darling, you’re doing beautifully.’

  You should know that between us ‘darling’ is more a provocation than an endearment.

  ‘The Evripos channel has been a wonder of the world for thousands of years,’ I continued, as we leaned over the railing of the swing bridge.

  ‘Why?’ asked Jack, the eldest, unimpressed.

  ‘It’s got trolls,’ said Jim for little Harry’s benefit, who had nightmares about Billy Goat Gruff.

  ‘The water flows one way and then the other. It changes once an hour sometimes.’

  ‘Why?’ asked Jack.

  ‘Nobody knows. There are no tides in the Mediterranean. It’s a mystery. Who knows who Aristotle was?’

  ‘He’s the caretaker at my nursery,’ replied Harry, quickly, pleased to have got the answer in first for a change.

  ‘He was also a famous philosopher. He was probably the most influential philosopher and scientist in Europe until the eighteenth century. And he was the private tutor of Alexander the Great.’

  As one of his given names was Alexander, Harry saw a second precious opportunity for glory, but as he opened his mouth his elder sister closed it again.

  ‘Shuddup. You’re Alexander the Titch.’

  ‘Some people say that Aristotle died here in Halkida. He was so depressed by not being able to solve the mystery of the Evripos that he jumped in here and drowned.’

  ‘Why?’ asked Jack.

  ‘Don’t you get frustrated when you can’t solve problems at school?’

  ‘Nah. Just go on to the next,’ replied Jim.

  ‘So why do you think the current changes?’ asked Arfa.

  ‘Oh Maam, just tell us. They do this at school. If you thought we knew you wouldn’t ask us,’ complained Jack.

  ‘Don’t you tell us, Dad. We don’t want an enslapedia,’ added Jim.

  ‘I don’t know why it changes. Nobody does. Even to this day,’ I said.

  ‘See, they gave up and moved on to the next,’ said Jim.

  ‘Evripos means fast current in Ancient Greek,’ added Arfa.

  ‘Fat lot they knew,’ said Kate and tossed an empty Smarties tube into the historic waters to bob aimlessly on the spot. After a lecture on littering, which was the word then for environmental awareness, we resumed our study of the mysterious waters.

  ‘It must be about to change,’ I said.

  ‘It’s not,’ countered Jack.

  ‘It’ll change. Just watch.’

  ‘How long do we have to watch?’ asked Kate.

  ‘It’s too hot,’ they all said.

  And so the process of broadening minds went on. If it sounds unrealistic, indeed it is. It would be much too tedious to include the sighs, groans, repetitions and interjections of stop it … (s)he’s annoying me … do that again and you’ll be sent back to the car … you don’t know where it’s been … wipe that off right now … (s)he pinched/hit/ slapped/poked/kicked/pushed/bit/s
cratched me … I’m hot/ tired/thirsty/hungry/bored/busting … take that out of your nose/mouth/ear/bottom and so on that enliven conversation in young families.

  The children were right, of course. It was too hot to wait for the enigmatic waters to turn, so we sat in the shade of a café terrace for ice creams and lemonade and toilets. Nevertheless, amid the slurping and kerfuffle and mopping and mess involved in these things, there was no escape from mind broadening.

  ‘You know Odysseus and Achilles,’ I said.

  ‘Yeah. We saw the cartoon.’ (There followed a simulated sword fight with sound effects and threats of ‘If you drop that ice cream I’m not buying you another’.)

  ‘According to Homer, over there is where the Greeks launched a thousand ships and set sail for Troy. It used to be called Aulis.’ I waved my cornet in the general direction of Halkida’s cement plant, the oil refinery and the dry dock, and they screwed their eyes up against the sun. ‘Who knows the names of any of the other Greeks?’

  ‘Helen,’ ventured Kate.

  ‘She was a girl,’ complained Jim.

  ‘She was the most beautiful woman in the world,’ Jack added.

  ‘Like you, Mum,’ said little Harry.

  ‘Creep,’ said the chorus.

  ‘She ran away to Troy with a handsome Trojan called Paris …’

  ‘We’ve been to Paris,’ piped up Harry.

  ‘… and her husband Menelaus started a war to get her back. It lasted ten years.’

  ‘Why didn’t they get a divorce? That’s what Stephanie’s mother did,’ said Kate.

  ‘What about other people?’

  ‘Aggy Nemanemanon,’ said Harry.

  ‘Right. Agamemnon. He was king of Mycenae and the leader of all the Greeks.’

  ‘And Hector,’ said Jim.

  ‘He was killed by Achilles,’ said Jim, which was the signal for the great battle on the plains of Troy to be enacted once again.

  Done

  Back in Horio, Ajax and I concluded the deal in Yannis’s café. This was an excellent example of New Aegean architecture, a grey concrete hangar painted lime green, inside and out, as far up as a man can reach with a brush and the rest left bare. The side that opened onto the square was glass with metal-frame windows and sliding doors.

  Inside smelt of coffee and tobacco, resin and sharp cheese. One wall was lined with shelves loaded with groceries. Within easy reach were the cans, bottles and packets in daily demand. The further up the wall, the more exceptional were the goods on offer. Right at the top and out of reach mouldered the unsuccessful speculations of two decades, flyblown and caked in dust, for which there had never been nor was likely to be a requirement: tiny bottles of medicinal olive oil, humane mouse traps, windscreen de-icer, melon ball scoops. On the opposite side were a counter and a refrigerated cabinet for cheese and salami.

  On the wall facing the door was a floor-to-ceiling panoramic photograph of a Swiss mountain glade with white cows and a chalet in the distance, a glimpse of a perfect world far from the heat and humdrum of Greece. Even people who live in places the rest of us daydream about have daydreams of their own. Hanging on the Alpine idyll were various official notices, a shelf with a bakelite wireless, a grainy sepia wedding photograph of a man and woman with solemn, frightened faces. High on the wall in the corner over the door to the toilets, a colour television was mounted; a score of children craned to watch Knight Rider. The middle of the room was filled with metal tables and wooden chairs, where unshaven men in caps sat hunched over tavli – backgammon – or cards, slamming down the pieces and slapping down the cards like gauntlets, while a few sat reading the paper.

  Ajax led me like one of his doomed lambs to an empty table and told me to sit down. He looked around the room and smoothed his handsome black moustaches. He did this by joining the thumb and middle finger of his right hand under his nose and springing them apart across his top lip. It looked vaguely insulting, like flicking snot. He went over to two men in tweed caps drinking ouzo. He muttered to them and they stood up and shambled over. One was bald with a genial smile and a thick grey moustache like a yard brush. The other was thin and pale and worried looking.

  ‘This is Spiros, our carpenter. This is Dimitris, the builder. My friend Mr John is English. He’s a good man. I’m giving him our house up the hill.’

  ‘Why? Does he have animals?’ asked Spiros.

  Ajax scowled at him and then winked at me as if we shared a secret. We all sat down and Ajax rubbed his hands like someone expecting a good meal. Under their watchful eyes I took the two hundred thousand drachmas out of my wallet. This was nearly five thousand pounds or eight thousand dollars in today’s money. Technically it wasn’t mine, belonging to a client I had been visiting, but I reckoned I was good for it as soon as I got home. I shuffled it quickly and covered it with my hand as I slid it over. Where I come from money isn’t to be talked about or flaunted in front of strangers. But Ajax snatched up the wad and counted it out loud, ceremonially, slapping the notes down on the table while the witnesses mouthed the amounts. It was all so public and embarrassing.

  Yannis and his customers gathered round and two small boys pushed their way to the front. When Ajax finished he looked at them, stood up and stuffed my money deep into his shirt pocket. He reached across the table and shook my hand, gripping my shoulder tight with the meaty fingers of the left.

  ‘Danke schön. Und kalo risiko.’ The witnesses shook my hand too.

  ‘Kalo risiko.’

  ‘Kalo risiko.’

  Greek has a formula for every event – weddings, christenings, buying a new dress, having a haircut, talking about children, going away, coming back, leaving a house, leaving home. Kalo risiko is for a new house. Kalo means good. Risiko means fate, but sounds ominously like danger.

  ‘What about the papers?’ asked a tall, handsome man with iron-grey hair who had been reading a newspaper.

  ‘Papers? What papers?’ Ajax smoothed his handsome black moustaches.

  ‘The contract.’

  ‘What contract?’

  ‘The sales contract.’

  ‘That’s for pig-brained lawyers. We’ll go to the notary in Aliveri tomorrow or the day after.’

  ‘And if something happens? You’ve got his money. What has he got?’

  This is the bare bones of what they said, although they went on for much longer. In a classical Greek play by Sophocles or Euripides, Oedipus Rex for example, the main characters don’t so much talk to each other as make speeches to the audience. A chorus comments on the action and interrupts with its own ideas. It seems so artificial and unrealistic until you see an argument in a Greek café. They posture and declaim and gesture to the audience and bystanders chip in and repeat everything as if they were on stage in an ancient amphitheatre.

  At first I didn’t understand what they were talking about, although I pretended to, nodding and smiling in the wrong places, while I tried to puzzle it out like a dialogue on my Greek-in-a-Week cassette. The main problem was that the word for a contract sounded like symbol. Symbol? What could be symbolic about buying a house?

  Yannis went to his till and brought back his spectacles, a ballpoint pen and the blue exercise book in which he kept his accounts. He sat down at the table, tore a clean page out of the middle of the book and, with contributions and criticisms from the others, crafted a single sentence out of a score of subordinate clauses, recording the sale in perpetuity, for consideration given, of a property in the old Horio to John, father’s name Henry, employee, of England …

  Ajax signed first, with a flourishing signature that filled half the page like a sultan’s firman, ornamented with loops and curlicues. There was hardly any room for my crabbed little squiggle. He folded the paper and ostentatiously presented it to me as if it had been his idea in the first place. I put it in the pocket where my money had been. He said that he had urgent phone calls to make, shook my hand, called me friend and waved goodnight to everyone except my champion, who went back to hi
s newspaper with studied indifference, erect and dignified.

  I didn’t know what to do now. My new neighbours milled around my table talking in low voices, obviously about me. I thought I should mark the occasion. I took a deep breath, clapped my hands and put on a cheerful expression.

  ‘So, let’s all have a drink. Yannis, a bottle of ouzo please.’

  ‘How about a bottle of whisky?’ asked Spiros the carpenter. ‘That’s what you foreigners drink, isn’t it?’

  ‘Swat the bloody Greeks drink when they get arfa chence,’ added a short, foxy-faced man in mangled Australian. ‘Gidday mate. Howa youse? The name’s Alekos.’

  He gripped my hand and pumped it up and down, a cobber’s reunion. I was surprised by the wave of fellow feeling at hearing English, however distorted, after hours of unremitting struggle with Greek, so I did what Poms do in such circumstances: I recoiled. When we are abroad we take a holiday from social attitudes. We treat foreign peasants and workers and shopkeepers with the genial familiarity we would never use at home. But meet anyone with claims on Englishness and the portcullis of snobbery comes down again.

  ‘Hello,’ I ventured.

  ‘Twenty yeers in Melbourne, mate. Grate city. Better than this ocker dump.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yep. Twenty yeers. Ended up with two supermarkets and an apartment block.’

  ‘Very interesting.’

  ‘Grate loife. People are more honest than these sly bastards too.’

  ‘Thank you very much. I’ve just bought a house from one of them.’

  ‘Don’ say I dint warnya.’

  Spiros came up with half a dozen glasses and one of the implausible brands of firewater that you only find outside Britain with a name like Highland Crotch. It was still five times the price of ouzo. I knew they were taking advantage of a gullible foreigner, but what could I do? He poured for himself and the other two witnesses and for Aussie Alekos and me and we all clinked glasses.