It's All Greek to Me!

by John Mole

  It was too hot for jousting, so the Knights of Evia sat in the shade of the wall.

  ‘This was probably where they kept Aghios Ioannes prisoner,’ I said.

  ‘Nah, we want to hear about knights, not religion stuff,’ said Jim.

  ‘Religion’s boring,’ said Kate.

  ‘Bo-ring,’ said the chorus.

  ‘Don’t you want to know how he was condemned to be skinned alive and put on a spit and roasted and torn into little bits with red hot pincers?’

  ‘Oh, all right then.’

  ‘He was born in Egypt about eight hundred years ago. He was made a priest by the Bishop of Alexandria and went with him to Constantinople. That’s what they called Istanbul before the Turks got it. While they were there the Crusaders arrived. They were Catholic knights from France and Germany and England. The Pope had sent them to throw the Muslims out of Israel, but they thought it was too difficult so instead they attacked Constantinople and set fire to it and massacred the Orthodox Christians.’

  ‘Why did they do that?’ asked Jack.

  ‘To steal their treasure. That’s why knights went on Crusades. Poor Ioannes was stuck in the Archbishop’s palace and he was likely to be killed by the knights too. So he ran down to the kitchen yard, where there were some sheep waiting to be made into dinner. He tied a sheepskin round himself and opened the back gate. He hung on to the underneath of a big fat ram and it ran through the burning streets to safety.’

  ‘Odysseus did that.’

  ‘Very good, Harry. And so did a lot of other heroes.’

  ‘Why didn’t the knights kill the ram?’ asked Jack.

  ‘They were busy killing the people.’

  ‘And they’re easier to catch. Especially the girls. Haleelaleeloolah,’ crowed Jim.

  ‘So Ioannes escaped from the city and tried to get back to Egypt. But he kept getting blown off course and having adventures. Finally he was shipwrecked on Evia. Round here was ruled by the Franks then. These were Catholic knights from France. After they ruined Constantinople they took over a lot of the Greek lands and tried to stamp out the Orthodox Christians. Ioannes knew what sort of people they were, so he ran up into the mountains in case they tried to stamp him out too. He lived in a cave and avoided other people. He kept a few sheep for milk and used to preach to them, like St Francis did to the birds and St Anthony did to the fish. If anybody came near he pretended to be dumb in case they betrayed him to the Franks.’

  ‘What’s betray?’ asked Harry.

  ‘Snitch, stoopid,’ said Kate.

  ‘So people crept up and hid in the rocks and the trees to listen. Then they found that if they wrapped themselves in skins and joined the real sheep, they could get closer.’

  ‘Was he short-sighted like you, Dad?’ asked Kate.

  ‘He probably knew.’

  ‘Why would they want to listen to a boring sermon?’ wondered Jack.

  ‘His sermons weren’t boring. They were probably funny. Egyptians have a great sense of humour. Anyway, he was the only Orthodox priest left and although the people told the Franks they had become Catholic, they were only pretending. So he got to be famous. His woolly congregation grew and grew. He started to do miracles. His speciality was club feet. Then someone snitched on him to the governor of the island. It wasn’t only against the law, but it sounded like witchcraft, dressing up as animals to go to mass. The Frankish priests in Halkida spread stories about pagan goings-on in the mountains at night. So the governor sent soldiers to arrest Ioannes and after a big hunt in the mountains they caught him and locked him up in this tower.’

  ‘I bet it wasn’t this tower,’ said Jack.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘You’re always telling us stories about places we know to keep us interested.’

  ‘Anyway, the governor said he should be treated like a sheep or a goat and hung up and skinned and put on a spit, except he was not to be killed first. They came to the tower to get him, but he had disappeared and in his cell was a live sheep.’

  ‘How?’ asked Jack.

  ‘It might have been a miracle. Or somebody might have bribed the guard to smuggle him out.’

  ‘Did they kill the sheep?’ wondered Kate.

  ‘I think they did, just in case it was still Aghios Ioannes in disguise. And then they put it on a spit and had a barbecue. But that wasn’t the end of things. For hundreds of years afterwards people heard Ioannes preaching to the wild goats high up there in the mountains. They dressed in animal skins and went to listen. They say it all died out when the Turks captured the island three hundred years later. They threw out the Catholics and gave Orthodox Christianity back to the people, so there was no need. But that’s why Aghios Ioannes round here always carries a baby lamb.’

  ‘Can you still hear him in the mountains?’ asked Harry.

  ‘Probably. If you listen hard enough.’

  ‘You tricked us, Dad,’ said Jim.

  ‘How?’

  ‘You said he would be skinned alive and torn to pieces.’

  ‘I didn’t. I said he was condemned.’

  ‘That’s a cheat.’

  Raising the roof

  Nektarios was the man to put a new roof on the house. I found him on top of the baker’s. His glossy hair was oiled and slicked back, as if he had just come out of the shower. Unlike most of the village men, he was clean-shaven every day. Nevertheless, his dapper appearance was marred by red-rimmed eyes and cheekbones etched with purple veins, for he was in constant struggle with a hangover. I called up to him. He shinned down his ladder and listened patiently to the speech I had prepared. He shrugged his shoulders, pouted his bottom lip and began a litany of reasons why he could not start work until the end of summer.

  ‘How can get my truck up that mule track … I have just got the contract for the cooperative in Drossia … I promised to roof a church on the other side of Aliveri …’

  I heard him out. It was part of the ritual. Ask a Greek tradesman to change a tap washer and he produces a score of reasons why it is impossible. It is to do with asserting dignity and independence, not being at someone else’s beck and call. Doing that person a favour in the face of overwhelming difficulty restores the balance of power. Knowing this doesn’t make it less irritating, however.

  ‘My brother has to have an operation and can’t help me … the Ellenit people are on strike … my mother has to go into hospital in Athens … my wife is pregnant …’

  Most Greeks hate to do anything alone. It frightens them. To live alone, to work alone, even to take a walk alone is a misfortune. But at the same time, they live on rivalry. One of the reasons they stick together is so there is always someone to get the better of. So I smiled and nodded and said I was sorry to have troubled him and it was OK because I’d heard in the café about a good roofer in Aliveri, who was short of work. It came out more like roof pimp than roof expert, but Nektarios got the message.

  ‘Bah. He couldn’t put the lid on a cardboard box. I’ll come up this evening.’

  At sunset I watched him pace over the fields up the hill, ignoring the path. He stooped to pick something up. When he arrived, red-faced and breathless, he pressed a wild orchid into my hand. He wore one behind his own ear, which gave him a raffish look. I put mine behind my ear too, which was not strictly appropriate as it means the wearer has been drinking and I usually saved my daily ration until nightfall. Nektarios pointed to the ruin of the house next door and laughed.

  ‘The stick I took in there. Po-po-po.’ I did not understand the phrase, literally ‘the wood I’ve eaten’, but the accompanying sign language was clear enough.

  ‘You lived there?’

  ‘Nine children. Parents. Grandparents. We had two rooms and one for the animals.’

  ‘Now there is no one.’

  ‘They are all still there. No one ever leaves. Not even the Old Ones.’

  ‘Who are the Old Ones?’

  ‘Eh. The Old Ones.’ He looked away as if he has already told me more th
an he should. He kicked a stone with his foot and it skittered down the rocky path towards the chapel.

  ‘Like the stones,’ he said. ‘They change their shape and they change their colour but they are always there.’ He put a finger to his lips. ‘Don’t tell the papas I said these things. Aren’t you afraid to be up here on your own?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Hearing things.’

  ‘What things?’

  ‘Voices.’

  ‘What voices?’

  ‘The voices floating in the air.’

  ‘What do they say?’

  ‘Anything. Except prayers. Prayers go up to heaven. The rest stays down here.’

  I was out of my depth. This was not the conversation I expected from a roof pimp. I had a nasty suspicion that my Greek was letting me down again and substituting the fantastical for Nektarios’s plain and practical words. But all I could do was press on.

  ‘Do you hear them?’ I ventured. ‘What?’

  ‘The Old Ones.’

  He shrugged like a man used to hearing things, which, given his fondness for the bottle, he probably was. He took the flower from behind his ear, tossed it away without a glance and began his inspection of the house. He walked round it, looking up at the roof, tutting and shaking his head. From the top step by the front door he shinned up the stone wall like a lizard. He took out his car keys and jabbed them into all the beams and rafters he could reach. His face had the lugubrious expression of the expert in search of the worst. I looked through his eyes and felt embarrassed. How could I have bought such a dump?

  Spanning the two longest walls were three vertical triangles of chestnut beams. Across them were laid horizontal rafters. On top of the rafters and at right angles to them was a layer of dry reeds, like bamboo, that made the ceiling inside. On top of the reeds were heavy split stone slabs, like slates. In time slates slip off. Wasps and beetles chew away the inside of the rafters so that they explode at a touch like puffballs. Water trickles down unprotected walls and washes away the mud and water between the stones. The roof falls in and the walls collapse and the thistles grow. Then along comes a foreigner. Dapper Nektarios clambered down and delivered the verdict.

  ‘You’ll need a cement ring round the top of the walls. You’ll need new beams, which you can get in laminated pine. You’ll need a chipboard ceiling. And you’ll need ten sheets of Ellenit.’

  Ellenit is corrugated sheets of asbestos cement, like on Barba Mitsos’s roof. Greece was one of the world’s biggest producers of asbestos and one of the last European countries to ban it.

  ‘I don’t want Ellenit.’

  ‘You don’t want Ellenit?’

  I tossed my head back with a disdainful tut to show that I was not a foreigner to be walked over. I knew that it was out of the question to replace the stone roof. The craft was lost. Each slab was larger than a concrete paving stone. The weight needs seasoned beams and skill in setting them up. Every fifteen years or so the stone slabs have to be taken off and turned over. But I refused to have corrugated asbestos.

  ‘Onions I want.’

  ‘Onions? You want onions?’ It was Nektarios’s turn to feel out of his depth. I would have said tiles but for a missing vowel, keramidia for kremidia.

  ‘Yes, onions. Not Ellenit. Onions.’ I was firm and not to be bullied.

  ‘Why not? You can have onions. And potatoes and garlic and whatever you like.’

  I hoped I had misheard. If not, Nektarios was barking mad. I felt uneasy at being alone with him in the gathering dusk and he probably felt the same about me.

  ‘And I don’t want chipboard for the ceiling.’

  ‘No, no chipboard. Certainly no chipboard.’

  That threw me. Where was the rhetoric? Where were the histrionics? It did not occur to me then that he was humouring the crazy foreigner. But I pursued my advantage. I wanted a ceiling of yellow reeds harvested from the lake and laid across the beams.

  ‘Squid I want.’

  ‘You want what?’

  ‘Squid. I want the ceilings made of squid.’

  This time it was an intrusive ‘ar’, kalamaria for kalamia, that made the difference.

  ‘You don’t want Ellenit and you don’t want chipboard. You want onions and you want squid. Do you want a roof or a meze?’

  I was sure he said meze. What the hell had meze, which means appetiser, got to do with anything? He must have been hungry, which is why he was beetling off down the path past the chapel without so much as a good evening. I put my orchid behind my ear and followed him to the village. These Greeks were very odd.

  I walked into the café twenty minutes later. It went quiet and everyone looked at me. I was used to this by now. Unlike most British, who don’t know where to look if they catch the eye of strangers, Greeks are happy to stare. At a table in the corner, Nektarios and Ajax the butcher and Dimitris the builder were sniggering at some private joke, so I didn’t interrupt them but sat down at a table on my own.

  Yannis waddled up to me, grinning all over his face, and took my order for an ouzo. As he walked back to the counter there was a guffaw from Nektarios’s table. When Yannis came back with the ouzo, instead of the usual cube of feta and an olive on a saucer, there were bits of tinned squid and onion. I dug in my pocket for change, but Yannis jerked his thumb towards Nektarios and company.

  ‘With their compliments.’

  There was another guffaw when I raised my glass to toast them and Ajax waved me over. I carried my saucer and glass and hoped that they were not going to share their joke because I would probably not understand it. Ajax slapped me on the shoulder.

  ‘Also mein Freund, you want tiles and reeds. But those old ways are difficult and dirty. The rats and hornets love them.’

  ‘They’re for barns and sheep pens,’ said Dimitris, ‘and the tiles never lie flat on the reeds.’

  ‘And who’s going to cut the reeds down at the lake and strip them?’ asked Nektarios. ‘The reeds are strong, but they move and leave gaps so the mortar falls inside the house. Up there you need everything tight shut, you don’t want to leave cracks for anything to get in.’

  ‘Ach Gott,’ exclaimed Ajax, ‘let the man have tiles if he wants them. I can get you some beautiful ones in Aliveri. French tiles from Romania, nice and flat. I can get you a good price. Spessial, sehr spessial.’ Ajax tried to look innocent, but when he sensed a profit his nostrils flared.

  ‘Bah, French tiles,’ countered Dimitris, ‘you want Roman tiles. My godfather in Halkida imports them straight from Italy. Very good price and easy to lay.’

  ‘Why not Greek tiles?’ I asked. Greek tiles are curved and tapered so that one end can fit inside the other. They are laid in rows alternately curved side up and curved side down so that they interlock.

  ‘Greek tiles?’ queried Ajax, ‘Warum?’

  ‘We are in Greece.’

  ‘What’s that got to do with it?’

  ‘They look paradisical.’

  ‘Paradisical?’

  ‘He means traditional,’ said Nektarios, who had tumbled to the secret of running a mental spell-check on anything that sounded bizarre.

  ‘So what?’ countered Ajax. ‘We don’t live in the past.’

  ‘They look beautiful,’ I ventured, struggling for a justification that they could not refute.

  ‘Um Gotteswillen. They are ugly. Greek tiles are never the same size and the colour varies even from the factory in Athens. The hand-made ones are worse. We’re not ignorant peasants here.’ He used the more contemptuous word vlachs, the nomads from the north. ‘In Germany they call them Mönch und Nonne tiles. Monk and nun.’ He rubbed his two forefingers together side by side and everybody laughed.

  ‘Don’t they make tiles on the island?’

  ‘Bah,’ said Nektarios, ‘there was a man down in Aliveri. He made them by hand so every one was different. His old kiln couldn’t make the same colour each time he fired it up. He went out of business. Serves him right. He should have modernised.
We like foreign tiles. They’re bigger and the red is brighter.’

  And they stuck out on the landscape like acne. They would weather after fifty years or so, but I didn’t have that long to wait.

  ‘Look,’ I said, ‘I want a roof that looks as if it’s been there a hundred years.’ They looked at me in amazement, but I pressed on. ‘In England we like things to look old. Old doors and old glass and old roses cost more than new ones.’

  ‘The old days are gone, thank God,’ said Nektarios and slapped his stomach. In Greece the old days mean poverty and hunger. Oxfam, the Oxford Committee for Famine Relief, was set up in response to famine in Greece in 1942.

  ‘He wants second-hand tiles,’ explained Ajax, his nostrils flaring. ‘I’ll find you some.’

  ‘Where?’ asked Nektarios, who was annoyed at losing commission on a set of new tiles. ‘On top of people’s houses? What do they do if it rains?’

  ‘You know there are enough tiles lying around on the island to cover Aghia Sofia and still have some left over. I’ll take him up the mountain. We’ll find plenty. We’ll go tomorrow. OK, Johnny?’

  ‘Eh,’ said Dimitris, ‘they have to be cleaned. Every one will have to be wire brushed by hand. It’s cheaper to buy new.’

  ‘He’ll brush them,’ said Ajax, ‘he wants to do something useful. Real work. Isn’t that right?’

  I nodded, relieved that he was on my side, although it sounded like an insult. I stabbed the last piece of squid and swallowed it whole.

  I arrived punctually at Ajax’s house at eight o’clock. He was still in bed. Eleni looked drawn and tired and smelt of baby milk. She was wearing a long, flowery house-coat and her hair was pinned up in an untidy heap. She told me to go round to the balcony at the back.