It's All Greek to Me!

by John Mole

  The wooden packing case was now a heap of planks in the middle of the road, leaving a shiny steel box on the truck. One side bristled with pipes and wires. Two men fitted straps around it, while a third stood at the controls of the crane behind the cab and the fourth set out the supports on the side of the truck. With advice and encouragement from the crowd, the crane took the strain. The straps creaked as they lifted the shiny box into the air. The operator shouted and pulled his levers, the crane turned on its axis and the box swung slowly over the shop.

  The crowd was suddenly silent, as if a coffin was being unloaded from a hearse. Eleni watched it come towards her and Ajax shoved her out of the way. An old Cassandra in black muttered her opinion to everyone and no one.

  ‘It’s as big as his whole shop. He’ll drive the other butchers out of business. That thing can take all the meat the villages can produce in six months. His father built that shop. What would he say? They all come back from abroad with big ideas. See where it gets him … it’ll bring him no good.’

  Snakes or no snakes, there was no chance of getting my money back. It was already spent. By the time we got out of the village it was too late to go to the beach. We drove home in silence, the children hushing each other as they could sense their parents’ black mood. Finally Kate dared to voice the question on all their lips.

  ‘Daddy, why didn’t you buy somewhere nice?’

  ‘It will be nice. I promise.’

  All Greek to me

  Those were more leisured times than now. Even ambitious young professionals were expected to go home in the evening, take weekends off and use their full holiday entitlement without blighting their ‘careers’. If you were not ambitious you could take country reassignment leave, sick leave, public holidays, study leave, unpaid leave and any other time off you could wheedle without having to resign, which is what I did. It gave me a long summer to do up the house and decide what I was going to do with my future. The rest of the family were to stay in Athens until the end of the school summer term and come out to Evia at the weekends.

  At first I felt awkward and embarrassed with our new neighbours. The standoffishness of my race was made worse by the suspicion that they were laughing at me for buying a ruined goat shed. It was tempting to take refuge in feelings of British superiority, although I disliked myself for it and hoped it didn’t show. My primitive Greek made my English reserve even more tongue-tied. Some people in the village had a few words of English or German, acquired when they had been sailors or Gastarbeiter. The shape of my head being more Teutonic than Anglo-Saxon, their usual conversational gambit was ‘Deuts?’

  Greek is a wonderfully rich and expressive language, which makes it one of the harder of the European tongues to learn. The active vocabulary is much bigger than other European languages. The constructions and the different endings are not easy to master, especially if you are an English speaker. Reading the paper was a particular challenge. The first barrier was the Greek alphabet. As well as letters we only come across in maths and American fraternities, the sound values of some familiar letters are different. I still have to think twice when I come across ΝΤΕΙΒΙΝΤ ΜΠΕΚΑΜ or ΡΟΜΠΕΡΤ ΡΕΝΤΦΟΡΝΤ.fn1

  You might think from the conversations so far that my Greek was pretty good. This is writer’s licence. If I recorded them accurately you would have as much trouble understanding what I said as other people did. And what they said to me I could only guess at half the time. For the first few months I went round in a linguistic fog. Often I only realised what someone had said minutes or even days or weeks afterwards. So the dialogue is not exactly made up but more approximate than it should be in a work of nonfiction.

  As an example of what it was like, take my attempts to find somewhere to stay in the village until I made the house habitable.

  ‘Ask Ajax,’ said Yannis in the café, ‘he owes you a favour. You took that place off his hands for good money to spend on his cold room.’

  Heartened by this I went into the butcher’s shop, where Ajax’s wife Eleni was engrossed in dealing with a cow’s head on the white marble counter. Behind her were the shiny steel doors of the new cold room, bought with my money.

  ‘Good day. How are we? Are you well? Is your family well?’ she recited.

  ‘Good day. Well, thank you. I am looking for a tomato,’ I replied.

  She stared at me. Her eyes were green and wide, almond shaped and upside down like those on a vase painting or the prow of a trireme. She shook her head, but in Greece this doesn’t mean a refusal. It meant she didn’t understand. Tossing her head back with a disdainful ‘tut’ would have meant ‘no’.

  ‘Tomato,’ I repeated, stabbing my forefinger into my chest. ‘I want a tomato.’

  Eleni shrugged her shoulders, raised her pretty eyebrows and put down her cleaver. She symbolically gathered together the contents of her shop and arrayed them on the counter before me. There were pieces of dead animal in various stages of dismemberment, but I failed to see what they had to do with lodgings. I spoke louder and slower, as though I were dealing with a half-wit.

  ‘I – want – a – TOMATO …’

  She replied eloquently but too fast. Although I picked out a few words like vegetable and winter and greengrocer, for the underlying argument she had lost me. She pouted like a starlet when she spoke, which I found distracting but I didn’t know which flustered me more, that or her extraordinary eyes or her bloody-minded foreigner’s way of refusing to be helpful. I tried pidgin.

  ‘Tell – I – where – find – tomato.’

  She shrugged again and said nothing. It was very irritating. Clearly, she was being deliberately unhelpful. Why? Did she have something against the British? She wore jeans and a white, loose-fitting T-shirt speckled with blood. It had baggy armholes and I could see her bra, which was embroidered with pink roses. She caught me staring and I pretended I was really looking at the icon on the shiny metal door behind her. Appropriately, it was a saint holding a lamb in his arms. Probably about to slit its throat and flog it off by the kilo. Eleni turned to a rack of knives on the wall beside the counter and picked out a cleaver.

  I wasn’t going to be put off. One of the first lessons of life in Greece is that everything is difficult and nothing is impossible. If only I had appreciated the subtle difference in pronunciation between domata, meaning a tomato, and domatio, meaning a room I might have had an easier time, but the embarrassment of that discovery lay in the future and I persisted in my efforts to find a cheap, clean, quiet tomato. I pillowed my head on folded hands.

  ‘Here. Me. Bed.’

  I hoped that is what I said. The word for bed is dangerously close to the word for necktie. But in any case, she was concentrating all her attention on the business with the massive cow’s head that lay on the counter between us. It was dehorned and skinned. Blood trickled from its nostrils and the yellow tongue lolled wantonly from the corner of its mouth. Its lidless eyes stared back at me as if it were alive in a different world, more knowing and more terrible.

  With the thumb of her left hand Eleni explored the top of the skull like a phrenologist. Her long fingernails were carefully manicured and painted a delicate pink and I imagined them stroking Ajax’s scalp. She raised the cleaver and with a sharp thwack split open the cow’s skull. She put the cleaver down on the counter, forced her slender fingers inside the crack in the bone and pulled it creaking apart. I wished I was somewhere else, but I made myself watch her scoop out the pinky-yellow brains in her bare hands with a slurpy sucking sound. She dumped them with a splat on a pile of plastic paper and wrapped them up. I felt sick.

  ‘Why did you come here?’ she asked as she turned to the knife rack for a short, curved blade.

  ‘I need a tom …’

  ‘No, I mean here. The village. Why do you want to live here?’

  I had prepared several monologues for such questions. They were beacons of clarity in the rest of my Greek, although they got me into trouble because people assumed
I was more fluent than I really was. Trying not to sound like an estate agent, I enumerated the various attractions and advantages of the area.

  ‘Bah,’ was Eleni’s response.

  With the curved knife she cut out the succulent cheeks and wrapped them in paper printed with pictures of laughing cows and sheep and pigs, little icons of happier times. She prized open the jaw, cut out the tongue deep inside at the root and laid it on the marble like a giant yellow slug.

  ‘Foreigners don’t come here.’

  ‘An English lord came here 200 years ago. He visited the Turkish pasha of Aliveri in his seraglio down by Lake Dystos.’

  ‘Turks,’ she hissed as she picked up the cleaver and drew the flat side slowly across her throat, leaving a smudge of bright red blood on her neck. I was shocked and it must have shown, because she laughed.

  A girl of about ten came into the shop. Her hair had been hacked short with the help of a basin and her dark blue cotton dress and sandals were too big for her. She gabbled something to Eleni, too fast for me to understand, and held open a green plastic bag. Eleni leaned over the counter and dropped in the two halves of the skull, followed by the other bits and pieces. Money clanked on the marble like a cracked bell and the girl left, lugging the heavy bag on her right hip. A baleful eye looked out through the transparent green plastic. Eleni wiped the cleaver and the curved knife on a bloodstained muslin rag and put them back in the rack on the wall.

  ‘Foreigners come here looking for buzzards,’ she said.

  Or it might have been gypsum. Or gypsies. Were we talking ornithology, geology or anthropology? They were equally likely. Speak-Greek-in-a-Week-with-Accompanying-Cassette was no help.

  Ajax saved us from further cross purposes. He charged in from the back room like a bullock released from a pen. He was not his normal friendly self. His dark eyes were blazing and his black, curly hair flopped over his ruddy forehead. He stabbed a finger at the counter and snatched up a muslin cloth.

  ‘This place is filthy,’ he snarled.

  A string of ripe expletives followed that I did not understand but desperately tried to memorise. Eleni was obviously used to such displays of temper. She nodded in my direction and spoke very quickly with her hand over her mouth like a girl in a playground sharing secrets. Annoyance turned to puzzlement.

  ‘Johnny, good day. How are we? Are you well? Is your family well? What do you want?’

  ‘A tomato. Sleep. Zimmer. Schlafen.’

  ‘This is a butcher’s, not a hotel,’ he replied. He said something to Eleni and she stifled her giggles in her hand.

  ‘I want a tomato to live. I fix house.’

  Ajax shrugged his shoulders and spread his hands, still holding the muslin cloth, as if he was about to give me a wipe down.

  ‘There’s no hotel. Kein Hotel. What can we do? Why don’t you try Aliveri? Or Limanaki? Kyria Sofia has rooms.’

  ‘It is too far. I want to stay here..’

  ‘But you will be very comfortable. There are beautiful hotels, not expensive. Spessial. Vairy chip.’

  ‘I have no money for hotels, Ajax. You have my money.’

  ‘Ach so.’

  ‘Have you a tomato in your house?’

  Ajax frowned and flicked his moustaches. ‘Tut mir leid. I don’t have any room, my friend. Kein Zimmer. Eleni is very busy with the babies and the shop and my mother and my sister-in-law are coming any day from Stuttgart. Why don’t you ask at the café?’

  ‘I ask yesterday. Yannis tell me ask you.’

  ‘Ach so.’

  ‘Haralambos has a big house,’ said Eleni innocently, earning a sharp glance from Ajax.

  Haralambos was the distinguished-looking man who had stood up to Ajax in the cafe.

  ‘He lives on his own. Ask Haralambos. I hear he’s a friend of yours.’

  ‘Wait,’ said Ajax, ‘there’s no need to ask Haralambos. Let’s go and talk to Barba Mitsos. He has a big house and no family.’

  He came round from behind the counter and took my arm and we left the shop in a cloud of aftershave and sweaty polyester. I looked back at Eleni, expecting a little smile or some other gesture of complicity, but she was busy wiping down the counter.

  In half an hour it was arranged. Barba Mitsos the melon farmer and his wife Elpida would rent me a room until my house was habitable. Barba is a rustic term of respect for old men, like gaffer used to be in English. Given the custom of naming first-born sons after their grandfather, it also helps to differentiate the generations.

  Barba Mitsos was in his seventies. He was short and bandy-legged, with a bristly crew cut of white hair. His face was ruddy and veined and he had bright blue eyes that shifted from side to side as he spoke, wary of spies and predators. This mannerism made him look canny, although it was probably shyness.

  The seasons were marked by his hats. At the beginning of winter he bought a new trayaska, a cloth cap, and in the summer a straw republika, a fedora. It was spring and we were still in cloth cap season. Trayaska is a Romanian word that dates from the first Balkan Games in Athens in the 1920s. The Romanian athletes wore caps. Their trainers wore fedoras. They had a double act when a Romanian won a medal. The athletes threw their caps in the air and shouted trayaska, which means ‘long live …’ The trainers threw their fedoras in the air and shouted la Republika. Since then trayaska has meant a cap in Greek and republika a fedora. In bad weather Barba Mitsos wore a montgomery, a duffel coat named after the field marshal on the same principle as cardigan and wellington. With his zaketa, poukamiso, panteloni, kaltsa and bota, he was entirely clothed in foreign loan words.

  Elpida was short and bandy-legged like her husband, but plumper. She was always dressed in black except for the traditional yellow scarf of the island. She wore the scarf out of custom and to conceal her baldness, which nature had compensated for with a luxurious growth of hair on her chin. In church she officiated as candle snuffer. Her job was to pluck handfuls of slender caramel sticks from the front of the icons, blow out the flames and toss the candles into metal boxes underneath to make room for fresh ones. Her hands glistened with wax and the sleeves of her dresses were singed brown at the cuffs.

  Their house was next to the church and had been one of the first to be built in the new Horio. It had bright green stucco walls and a pitched roof of Ellenit, large panels of corrugated asbestos cement painted red to look like tiles, until it washed off leaving blotchy pink stains on the grey. The small front garden was overgrown with fruit trees, lemons, peaches, apricots, walnuts, quinces. Breezeblock walls were topped with ten-litre margarine cans planted with herbs and flowers. The kitchen was at the back and opened onto a dirt yard with a goat pen and an olive tree hung with round cheeses left out to drip and dry.

  In the best room at the front, where I was to live, was a sofa bed upholstered in pink Dralon to match the cushions on the purple leatherette armchairs and the flowers on the electric-blue curtains. A mottled brown flokati rug decorated the marble floor. On the white marble mantelpiece were souvenirs of coach tours to Yugoslavia and Bulgaria and photographs of children in Australia. In the corner of the room an electric lamp with a small red bulb burnt in front of an icon of a saint holding a lamb.

  Elpida was not from Evia but from an island further east, near the Turkish coast. As a girl on her way to America with her parents, she had been snared like a migrating bird. The ship put into Aliveri with engine trouble. The church on the quayside was celebrating its patron saint and there was dancing in the afternoon. Elpida outshone the local girls with her beauty and her dancing and before the ship was repaired by engineers from Athens her parents had married her off to handsome Mitsos, a stonemason. They were glad to get rid of her without a dowry and to have one less mouth to feed in Chicago.

  They need not have worried. The ship went down with all hands off the Canaries. Mitsos’s family thought that he was mad to take a girl without a dowry. ‘Her luck is good enough for me,’ he said, when news of the shipwreck reached the island. She h
ad dressed in black ever since because her parents had no graves and their souls still wandered.

  ‘England?’ she said. ‘Po-po-po. How long does it take to get here from England?’

  ‘About three and a half hours.’

  ‘So long? Like here to Aliveri on a donkey.’

  We discussed the relative advantages of the two modes of transport before passing on to the usual interrogation of how much I earned, what I paid in rent, if I was married, how many children I had and whether they were from the same woman.

  As well as being a good dancer, Elpida was a good cook. For lunch on my first day we had meat balls, keftethes. They were not the usual tourist taverna offerings, lumps of clay swimming in sump oil. They were light and fragrant and melted like truffles in the mouth. With them was rice flavoured with goat’s butter, fresh wild greens dug out of the hillside and dressed with lemon juice, creamy feta sprinkled with oil and dusted with rigani, crusty bread, wine from Mitsos’s barrel …

  I was not her only guest. Every day she loaded up a tray and put it to one side, covered with a cloth. When she had finished eating she took it over the street to the apartment of young Doctor Solomos, above his surgery. Newly qualified doctors have to spend a year or so in a village after graduation before they can specialize in a hospital or set up a practice in the city. I once suggested that the poor lad might like to join us for company instead of eating alone.

  ‘In the kitchen?’ exclaimed Elpida, shocked. ‘But he is the doctor’ – which established my own place in her social hierarchy.

  Canny Barba Mitsos grew all their vegetables, kept enough sheep and goats for meat and milk and cheese and yoghurt, had enough chickens for eggs, picked his own olives for oil and made his own wine, with plenty left over to trade for what he didn’t grow. His main source of income was growing melons in the drained bed of Lake Dystos. When I first went to stay with them he was busy scattering cantaloupe and watermelon seeds on the waterlogged ground. In June he sprayed them with insecticide. In July he cleaned out channels to irrigate them with lake water. In August dealers came up with trucks and loaded the fruit up.