It's All Greek to Me!

by John Mole

  ‘Our health,’ we chorused and swigged the whisky down in one gulp. Three other men came over with empty glasses. I watched with irritation as a second expensive bottle was fetched and passed round from table to table. News spread and men came in from outside to drink the health of the foreigner who had paid good money for a goat shed. Women in yellow scarves stared through the plate glass, tossed their heads and walked on. Children ran up to me, giggled and ran away again. I felt my face getting more and more flushed with drink and self-consciousness as I fended off the same remarks over and over.

  ‘What did you buy up there for?’

  ‘There’s no electricity.’

  ‘There’s no water.’

  ‘There’s no road.’

  ‘It’s full of snakes.’

  ‘Aren’t you be afraid to be alone up there?’

  ‘Aren’t you afraid of the cemetery?’

  ‘You paid how much? For a heap of stones?’

  ‘Why didn’t you buy mine? It’s a proper cement house down here with a kitchen and a bathroom.’

  In my faltering Greek, sustained more by cheap whisky than competence, I explained that it was a beautiful place and a beautiful house and that where I came from people liked to restore old things rather than buy new ones. But the principle of gentrification was lost on my listeners. In the end I shrugged off their questions with a vacuous smile and spent the rest of the evening swapping reminiscences about Melbourne with Aussie Alekos and Liverpool with Yannis, who had been a merchant seaman, even though I had been to neither city.

  Meanwhile I caught the taste of the whisky and drank lots of toasts and got Yannis to open a new case of Highland Crotch. I drank through the buzz of befuddlement into perfect clarity and out again into the blissful confusion of true intoxication. The dreadful ‘What have I done?’ nagged less and less and finally evaporated by the time the last of my new neighbours staggered home and left me sprawling on five taverna chairs, one for my bottom and one for each limb, drifting in and out of what the sober observer takes for sleep but is in fact a whirling maelstrom of light and colour and rushing noises. I was conscious of Yannis tiptoeing gently round me, probably assuming that I was indulging in the British national pastime and would soon get to the next stage of looking for a fight or windows to smash unless I was allowed to sleep it off. The only other customer by then was an old lady watching Ben Hur.

  I awoke with a start when Yannis turned the television off. It was about midnight. The part of my brain responsible for foreign languages had also closed down for the night. I managed to ask for the bill by scrawling in the air. Yannis slowly arched his head back and tutted. It had already been paid for. Since that night I have often tried to treat my Greek friends to coffees or drinks or meals in the taverna, but have never succeeded. The bill is always settled before I ask for it.

  Next morning I found myself stiff and cold on the back seat of the mini. My head was pounding and I felt bloated and sick. An acrid taste started at the back of my nose and flowered into a pungent smell that filled the car. Goats with yellow scarves and black moustaches lurked in the dream space just beyond my blurred vision. I scrabbled at the door. There were no colours in the world yet, only shades of grey. I clambered out, bent double, willing my stomach to overcome the waves of nausea starting at my trembling knees, welling into my belly and burning their way into my oesophagus. I forced myself upright. Cramp in my back and legs was absorbed by the sensation of a cleaver burying itself in my skull down to my eyeballs. With a moan I slumped on the car. My forehead splattered into something wet on the roof and I hoped it was dew.

  I stood like this, body locked upright, arms dangling, head in a puddle of unidentified moisture, until the various painful and miserable sensations found some sort of equilibrium. Among the symptoms was a terrible thirst. Moving slowly, head up and knees bent, I groped for a half-empty bottle of water, which had been rolling around behind the front seat since the end of last summer. I poured the dregs into my mouth and down my chin and over my shirt front.

  ‘What have I done?’

  The inescapable answer was that I had spent our money on a ruin on a Greek island because of the view from the window. I had also drunk too much cheap whisky. No wonder I moaned. Hard on the heels of the moan came another voice, familiar but not mine, an English voice, stern and full of moral fibre.

  ‘Pull yourself together,’ it said – which, as best I could, I did.

  Breathing as deep as I dared, I set off to inspect our property, along the concrete road to the cemetery and up the mule track. On limp sausage legs it was slow going and punctuated by interludes of unpleasantness. My desert boots were soaked and I couldn’t stop shivering.

  By the time I reached the ruins the dawn had ripened into reds and golds. A fine mist blurred the plain and the tops of the mountains were wreathed in cloud. The corrugated cement roofs of the village below glistened with dew and pools of water lay bronze on unfinished flat roofs. Birdsong filled the echoing cavities of my throbbing head.

  The only other sound was from the shuffling, chomping goats shut up for the night in the ruins of houses. They browsed in the rubble, penned in by fences of brush and thorn and wire, hard and knotted horns twisted back towards stubby tails. They softened the ground with acrid yellow urine and pounded in their shitballs with cloven hoofs. Bulbous dugs and swollen vulvas swung under matted hair. A bitter, rotting smell hung around them in the damp air. They stared at me with evil eyes as I stumbled past.

  I trudged up to the house, our house now, and picked my way through the squalor of the yard. I climbed the stone staircase, struggling over the sprawling fig, and untied the rusty wire that held shut the door into the main room. I pushed too hard. It fell off its hinges and crashed into the void below. Holding my breath against the stink of goat, I stepped gingerly in, fearing the worst, that the vision of yesterday was an illusion.

  It was still there, a glimpse of a perfect Greece, waiting for the figures to be painted in.

  I sat down on the cold stone at the top of my stairs in defiance of haemorrhoids and in a turmoil of nausea and apprehension. The sun came up and burned away the mist and cloud. By eight o’clock there were signs of life down in the village, buckets clanking, pigs squealing, sheep bleating, chickens squawking. Vans with grainy loudspeakers broadcast news of fresh mullet and fat sea bass with potatoes and onions to go with them. A man with a bouzouki banged on about love. The church bell urgently announced the start of the morning service: bong-bong-bong/bong-bong-bong/ bong-bong/bong-bong/bong-bong-bong.

  I knew what I had done. But what was I to do now? I had minimal Greek, minimal building skills, minimal funds. It was madness to rebuild an old stone house with no electricity, no water and no road. My options were one, to go back on the deal and try to get my money back from Ajax, or two, to run away and pretend it had never happened, or three, to make the best of it and spend the rest of the year doing up the house. The first was the most unrealistic, as I could never imagine Ajax giving me my money back. The English voice, stern and full of moral fibre, would not hear of running away. So that left the third option, to make the best of it. But first I had to face the ordeal of breaking the news to my family.

  I stumbled down the path, chilled to the bone and exhausted to the marrow, and headed for the car. As I drove out of the village, Ajax and Dimitris the builder, yesterday’s worried-looking witness, were measuring the front of the butcher’s shop with a tape and writing the numbers down on a pad. I felt too embarrassed to stop and say good morning.

  I waited until the next village to phone home. When my beloved asked where I had been all night and why I hadn’t phoned, I pretended I couldn’t hear, said ‘Hello?’ several times and hung up. Lines were often bad from the islands.

  Panic

  When I got back to Athens I was in the doghouse for staying out all night without phoning home. It was a less serious offence than it would be today, now that we have mobile phones and digital exchanges. In th
ose days an island village usually had only one phone, normally in the café, and the chances of getting through to Athens first time, or indeed any time, were slim. As I had been to drop off some papers and collect a bank draft at a shipowner’s house in Kimi on the island of Evia, it was assumed that I had been detained for an evening’s entertainment.

  This doghouse was a luxury kennel compared with my lodgings when I announced that I’d bought a ruined house on the way back home. Actually ‘announced’ is not the right word. ‘Nervously let slip’ would be more accurate. I prefer not to elaborate on the various stages of our dealings over the next few days – disbelief, anger, recrimination, the raking up of old sores, bitter silence and so on – but I can say that they gave lasting strength to our relationship, like a thick scar is stronger than the skin around it.

  When the initial storm died down, I had to convince the children that they were not going to spend the rest of their lives in a hovel, that they would not have to scratch for their dinner in the weeds on the mountainside and that they would not have to learn Greek – despite our efforts they reflected the resistance of the British community to grasping the language. The bribe was that we could have a television as soon as we had electricity. Until now the condition had been that we would have the box when all the children could read. As we kept adding to the brood, the elder ones were getting restive. The main issue with their mother was convincing her that this was not a unilateral decision but that through some psychic bond underlying our relationship we had taken it together. So it was a tricky few days before the weekend, when I could take the family to Horio and show them the paradise I had found for them.

  The general mood in the camper could best be described as sullen and was not improved by the walk up the mule path from the cemetery, where we parked. Little legs that could racket round the house and garden all day suddenly became tired and tender bodies that fried happily in the noonday sun by a paddling pool became insufferably hot. The children whinged and moaned and Arfa scowled.

  However, all this was nothing beside the general dismay when they beheld their new island home. I viewed it through their eyes, as I had seen it when Ajax the butcher first brought me up. I relied on the opportunities for mischief afforded by the countryside to bring the children round. As for Arfa, my best hope was that she would be as enchanted by the view out of the window as I was.

  ‘Before you run away,’ I begged, ‘please look out of the window.’

  Blinking back tears, Arfa scrabbled up the stairs through the fig tree and teetered on the joists, breathing through her mouth. I held my breath too.

  ‘Toad, it’s wonderful,’ she said at last. ‘It’s like a painting.’

  ‘It’s more than a painting. It’s real. Imagine waking up to this every morning. It’s the Greece we always dreamed of. There are gods down there and nymphs and satyrs and shepherds dancing.’ I am embarrassed to report these words and even more embarrassed to recollect that I meant them.

  ‘But there’s so much work.’

  ‘Not really. A roof, a bit of carpentry round the windows, a wooden floor. We don’t want anything fancy.’

  ‘Like electricity, you mean.’

  ‘If you have electricity you have televisions and dishwashers and ironing boards and things that wink and bleep. With electric lights you can’t see the stars. For once we’ll live the simple life. Like people have lived since the days of Homer.’

  ‘I’m not having an outside toilet.’

  ‘All right. We’ll have an inside toilet.’

  ‘A proper one. Not a hole in the ground.’

  ‘All right. A proper sit-down with a flush.’

  ‘Can you do it? I can’t help. I’ve got enough to do.’

  ‘A piece of baklava. I promise. I’ll make us our own little Arcadia.’ I gave her a passionate hug.

  Jim was standing on the steps behind us. ‘Wow!’ he said, ‘Wowee!’ He ran off to the others, who were testing different ways of flicking goat droppings at each other.

  ‘What’s the matter with him?’ I puzzled. Arfa shrugged. We soon found out. The four of them rushed up, skipping and whooping.

  ‘Is it true Dad? … Is it? … Is it?’

  ‘Is what true?’

  ‘We’re going to have our own Arcadia?’

  ‘Sort of. Just a small one.’ There was more general whooping and cavorting.

  ‘Can we have the thing with silver balls that goes round and round?’

  ‘Yeah, I won fifty pee on that.’

  ‘And the rifles where you shoot ducks …’

  ‘Can we have foopball with men on skewers?’

  And so they rhapsodised. Like the thing you roll coins into, where a pusher shoves them into a heap on the edge of a shelf and if they fall down you win, it took a long time for the penny to drop.

  ‘I think they mean the amusement arcade Granny and Grandpa took them to last summer,’ clarified Arfa and left the rest to me. I took a deep breath.

  ‘Sweethearts …’

  I had to watch four excited, happy faces pass through the stages of disappointment from puzzlement to gloom as I explained that the Arcadia I meant was not a fun house but a wild and beautiful place in the mountains of southern Greece and the setting for poems about shepherds written by the Roman poet Virgil. These days Arcadia meant any beautiful place unpolluted by modernity where people led simple lives at one with nature and made their own fun dancing round the maypole. I did my best, but fun house it wasn’t.

  We spent the rest of the morning exploring the hillside and gradually the mood improved. There was something for everyone. We discovered more glorious views, gathered armfuls of wild flowers, petted donkeys, climbed trees, threw stones, chased frogs and generally convinced ourselves that Dad might get a reprieve after all.

  We came across a cave and Arfa told the children about Pan, god of the shepherds, who has horns and a tail and goat legs and invented pipes made out of seven reeds tied together. He has caves all over Greece. I took the risk of bringing up a ticklish subject again by saying that his ugliness made the other gods laugh so much that he ran away to Arcadia, where he chased the nymphs and played his pan pipes and went to parties with equally ugly little forest gods called satyrs. He causes the irrational terror that mortals sometimes feel in lonely, desolate places, which is where our word panic comes from.

  At lunchtime we swept goat droppings from the bottom steps of our new house and, with stern warnings against collecting them for ammunition, necklace beads or ersatz Maltesers, sat down to eat our picnic. We had scarcely started to tuck in when from under the stone that Arfa was sitting on emerged the head of a snake, with bright eyes and a flickery tongue, followed by the rest of its sinuous black body. Even making allowances for exaggeration, it was a good eight feet long and as thick as a man’s forearm. I don’t mean my weedy forearm, but one belonging to a proper working man. It didn’t slither or wind or snake but poured vertically up the wall to the window above us, where it disappeared inside.

  We were frozen to the spot, cheese and tomato sandwiches fixed in whatever situation the moment took us. Arfa’s teeth were chomped down on hers. The only thing that moved was a trickle of juice from the corner of her mouth. The boys were the first to speak.

  ‘Cor.’

  ‘Cor.’

  ‘It’s a bore contractor,’ said Jim.

  ‘Nah. Cobra. Deadly poisonous,’ said Jack.

  ‘Nah. Chokes you to death and swallows you whole,’ said Jim.

  ‘Even someone as fat as Dad?’ asked Kate.

  ‘It goes for girls first. Straight up their bottoms and eats them from the inside.’

  It was time to intervene before the wide eyes and trembling lower lip of their sister, not to mention their mother, turned to panic.

  ‘That’s absolute rubbish. Unless you’re a frog or a mouse, the big black ones are totally harmless. They’re very shy. They run away as soon as they sense a human being. In ancient Greece it was very lucky to have a
snake living in your house. You put out milk for them. Bit like a cat really. It’s the little thin green ones you have to watch out for, but they live up in the hills, not down here …’

  By this time I was shouting, because Arfa was already halfway down the path to the cemetery with a child under each arm.

  ‘Wait. I’ll get the money back. I promise …’

  When I caught her up at the camper I knew it was useless saying anything. I had seen that grim, distant expression before.

  ‘Beach?’ I suggested with forced cheerfulness.

  ‘Will there be jellyfish?’ said Harry.

  ‘Yeah, poisonous ones,’ said Jack.

  ‘Nah, giant squid,’ said Jim.

  ‘Will there be giant man-eating octopuses?’ said Harry.

  ‘Only sea snakes,’ said Jim.

  ‘There’s sharks in the Mediretanean. It’s true,’ said Jack.

  ‘They like girls best,’ said Jim.

  We weren’t going anywhere. Down in the village it looked as though there had been an explosion in Ajax’s shop. There was a ragged hole where the front should have been. A flatbed truck with its own hydraulic crane blocked the road. A queue of cars and pick-ups and tractors had built up on either side. Those stuck at the back klaxoned a medley of raucous tunes until their drivers gave up and came to watch. On the truck was a large wooden crate about two metres high, five metres wide and ten metres long, which four men were dismantling with crowbars. A crowd had gathered to give advice and criticism. Among them was my cobber Alekos.

  ‘Gidday, maite. See where he spent yer money? He needed the last instalment for his German freezer. Youse turned up at the roite toime.’

  Ruddy-faced Ajax stood in front of his half-demolished shop in shirt-sleeves, with his hands on his hips and his belly swelling importantly over his belt. His beautiful wife Eleni stood next to him, her dark hair loosely pinned up for work. She hugged a knee-length cardigan to herself, not for warmth but as if she were trying to pull something more impenetrable around her.