It's All Greek to Me!

by John Mole

  With a shawl wrapped tight over his head, Papas Konstantinos looked like a surly prophet. At key moments he shouted for silence, swatted the microphone with his hand and tried to look stern. Although he officiated Ajax was the master of ceremonies, nudging everyone into place and giving them their cues. At his bidding the bride and groom exchanged rings. He and Eleni held the stefana over them, wedding crowns like white halos connected by a ribbon, and switched them and planted them on their heads. The papas led them in a dance hand in hand round the little altar while the rest of us sang a chanting, lilting hymn and pelted them with rice. Children liked this part the best and aimed for tender parts.

  After the service was over we queued down the aisle for gauze bags of sugared almonds and milled around outside. Haralambos stood with Ajax to greet their relatives with manly hugs and clouds of cigarette smoke. Antigone stood a few yards away with her mother and Eleni and other women to receive chaste kisses, envelopes of money and the ritual congratulation: ‘May you live’. I couldn’t decide if her uncharacteristic modesty was tradition or boredom.

  The wedding feast was on the forecourt of the garage on the main road just outside the village. The villagers were proud of the new illuminated Shell sign, which showed that they were European. It belonged to Haralambos’s cousin Haralambos – first-born of two brothers, they had automatically been named after their paternal grandfather. It was the largest expanse of concrete in the village and still the tables spilled out into the road. The pumps were decorated with paper flowers and white garlands hung from the canopy. Two wine barrels were set up between the pumps and the office. The band was installed on the hydraulic inspection ramp and an open patch of concrete in front of it was spotlit for dancing. The tables around it were planks on trestles covered with paper tablecloths. When we arrived they were already laid with plates of crumbly feta and big, salty anchovies.

  We sat down and salads were brought and slices of spanakopita thunked down like bricks on our plastic plates. I drank steadily from two-litre plastic Pepsi bottles of tart, fruity wine, enough not to mind when the lamb was served. A flock of sheep had been slaughtered under the village’s trees, chopped into chunks and wrapped with potatoes in aluminium foil, to be sent to Dimitra’s bakery in flat tin trays. Still alive yesterday morning, it tasted a bit like the carcase smelled, metallic and raw although it was well cooked.

  Arfa and I had the children between us. On my other side sat Aussie Alekos: ‘Cawn’t stend the crick’t b’t the rugby’s a grait gaim.’ When we had exhausted Australian sport and English football hooliganism, he dished the dirt on the guests, starting with our host, the garagiste Haralambos.

  ‘Bastard’s a sly-bag. Scoots off to Athens when he was a kid and ends up delivering fuel oil to people’s houses for one of the big companies. Say you order some oil, there’s always some left in the hose when it’s finished filling. Counter’s at the truck so the customer pays for it. End of the day the company thinks the whole load’s sold, but there’s still some left in the truck from the hose. What does the bastard do? Offloads it in his own truck and sells it to his own customers. Twenty yeers he builds up his business. He sells it to the oil company he works for and builds this place with the money. Bet the dodger runs the same scam when he fills your car up.’

  Around us was the dark. We sat in a pool of brightness from the forecourt floodlights, the giant yellow shell above us beaming its ancient pilgrim message into the blackness. The stars had disappeared and been replaced by moths zipping through the glare like meteors. By the time the band began to tune up, the paper tablecloths were sodden with wine. Silver foil and plastic plates blew in a fluttering breeze and underfoot was thick with soggy bread, paper cups and crawling children.

  It was hard to know when the band finished tuning up and when it started playing. The tormented wail of an amplified violin cut through the hubbub like cheese wire. An electric bouzouki played the soundtrack to a nervous breakdown. The trilling clarinet, its bell wrapped round the ball of a microphone, aroused a secret and unwanted excitement, like pulling wool through front teeth. Drums and an electric guitar gave body to the din. A man sang a mournful dirge full of trills and quarter tones more evocative of a funeral than a wedding, a threnody for sheep and women and anchovies and children and men and chickens and goats and all living creatures who copulate and die for reasons of which they have no inkling.

  With the crash of a tambourine the song broke into a frenetic rhythm, the three lead instruments gambolling up and down a Doric scale and the others keeping up with a frenzied, deafening beat. Out of the darkness ran sun-touched Dionysos in a white shirt, white trousers and white shoes. In the spotlight his face was white too, his hair brushed down in a black cap pulled tight over his head. There was a girlish look about him, with his slim waist, delicate arms and soft features that sat badly on his stocky hips and bandy legs. He raised his arms and began the most exquisite parody of a Greek dance. He bent his knees like a man adjusting himself at a urinal, shuffled, waved his hands and stumbled over his feet. He kicked the air and pirouetted into the bandstand. He tried to slap his feet and hit his calves instead.

  ‘What’s the matter with that man?’ asked Kate.

  ‘He’s pretending to dance like an English tourist.’ It was the best I could come up with.

  Dionysos took a white handkerchief from his pocket, flapped it as though he was waving goodbye and with his other hand on his hip led a chain of invisible dancers – as graceful as he was clumsy since they were light as the air itself – round and round the floor, in and out of the tables and the petrol pumps, faster and faster. His face was solemn and unsmiling, in contrast to the audience, who were laughing. A few were stony-faced from pity or embarrassment.

  Someone came out onto the floor and popped a flash at him. Little children shrieked and aped him at the edge of the pool of light. His father, Haralambos the groom, sat bolt upright and smiled a fixed smile. His new stepmother Antigone turned her face away from the dance floor and talked animatedly to her koumbaros Ajax. Of the bridal party only Eleni watched the boy, her eyes welling with tears.

  The band finished the song, truncating the music with a savage chop. Dionysos made a low bow to mocking applause, but showed no sign of leaving the floor. The bouzouki started a steely, complicated riff and Haralambos stood up, still smiling with his mouth, although his eyes – fixed on the clarinet player, anywhere but his prancing son – were full of anger and embarrassment. Slowly and with dignity he walked up to the boy with one arm outstretched to take his hand. Dionysos skipped to the other side of the floor. Haralambos had no choice but to follow him.

  Dionysos jigged and pirouetted while his father tried to corner him like a frightened goat. They skipped to one side and then the other, arms out sideways, improvising their own dance to the feverish music. Finally Dimitris the builder, who had been clapping and egging them on, gave Dionysos a shove with his foot that sent him sprawling into his father’s arms. Haralambos gripped his wrist, still smiling. Dionysos was immediately docile and let himself be led away by his father.

  I slipped away from my seat and followed, curious to see what punishment would ensue and determined to intervene if the lad was made to take stick, to eat wood, as an English traveller might stop a man beating a donkey. But Haralambos was not such a man. Once outside the ring of tables he shook the boy off and without a word waved him away into the darkness. He returned to his bride while Dionysos, with no backward glance, stomped off into the night, knees bent and elbows crooked. Hidden in the shadows I watched until his white shape disappeared.

  ‘Pore little bagger,’ said Alekos when I came back to my seat. ‘Should’ve bin strengled at berth.’

  The proper dancing began. First were the ritual wedding dances for bride and groom, parents and close relatives. It was Ajax’s job to lead them and he was a good dancer despite his bulk, light on his toes. He came into his own in the dowry dance, leading them out of the garage office with sheets and towels an
d blankets draped round their shoulders. Eleni was the best dancer. She seemed to move less than the others, gliding as though her feet hardly touched the ground, insolent in the careless grace with which she bent her slender neck, swivelled her hips and tossed glances over her shoulder.

  After the formal wedding dances came the free-for-all. Arfa and I were dragged onto the floor by Elpida. Despite her bovine bosom and elephantine hips, she danced like a young girl. I copied her, curtsying and swivelling and tripping and confident that I was doing a great job and not letting the side down. By not trying too hard Arfa did much better, her subtle movements evoking the dance rather than performing it.

  ‘You dance like Dionysos,’ said Jack when I sat down for a breather.

  ‘Was your wedding like this?’ asked Kate.

  I thought back to our own wedding reception in a tent on a lawn on a wet Saturday afternoon.

  ‘Just like this, sweetheart,’ I said.

  We put the children to bed in the camper and danced until dawn, jigging and shuffling and fortified by great swigs of the Pepsi bottle. The bride and groom left without ceremony, slipping away in the white Mercedes for a night in Halkida. When we left the dancing was still in full swing, Ajax in the thick of things, jacket off and sleeves rolled up, roaring with laughter and chivvying those sitting down to join in.

  Et in Arcadia ego

  It was high summer. Strident pink oleanders defied the flinty heat while other mountain flowers were gone and the grass grew golden yellow. You looked for shade not colour, especially in the middle of the day, when sleep was the only escape from heat.

  Fig trees look good but their pale, translucent green is reptilian and sinister and the rustle of their leaves is harsh. The broad fingers they hold over the eye of the sun let in stroboscopic spots of light like needles in the retina. Elpida said never to sleep under a fig tree because it gives bad dreams. Never sleep under a cypress either. The spiky dark trees are old and damp and cast little shadow when the sun is high. Their roots spread among the dead and give them shelter, but they are not meant for the living. It is best not to sleep under a plane tree because it sucks your water. Almonds shrink your balls and give poor shade. Holly gives you gall stones. Olives are good, except they toss about too much if there is a breeze. The best for a luxuriant and dreamless sleep is the silky shade of a mulberry.

  We had unseasonal daydreams about fireplaces. The original one had collapsed in rubble on the old floor. One evening, on the way to the café, I saw Ajax on his balcony and asked his advice. We sat on white plastic chairs arranged so that we could admire the emerald green patch of gazon, corralled by its neat white picket fence. Up the hill the roof of my house caught fire in the rays of the setting sun, blazing like a beacon across the plain. Spiros’s scarlet doves wheeled above it as if they had risen from the flames.

  The back door opened and the twins toddled out to greet their father. They were in blue T-shirts and shorts padded out with disposable diapers. Ajax swept them up one in each arm, jigged them up and down, sang a song and danced round and round, until one of them puked mixed vegetables down his shirt front and the other burst into tears. He guffawed, patted their heads, sent them back to their mother and mopped himself down with a paper napkin from a holder on the table.

  ‘Fine boys, may they live for you,’ I intoned.

  ‘Thank you.’

  Eleni brought a tray with a bottle of Auld Reekie, a carafe of water, several glasses and an ice bucket decorated with cocktail recipes. She put the tray down and went back to the kitchen.

  ‘Eleni, stay. Sit down with us,’ said Ajax, ‘You needn’t run away like a Greek wife. Pretend we’re in Düsseldorf. Johnny is a foreigner. The world has changed. Come, Eleni, you have this glass.’

  She sat down and helped herself to a glass of water. Ajax poured whisky and served the ice Greek fashion, adding it with a spoon afterwards.

  ‘To our health,’ he said, clinking his glass against mine and tossing it down in one gulp.

  ‘Eleni, where are the mezedakia? Come on. Don’t sit there. Open some of that Bavarian smoked cheese. And the Leberwurst. Johnny, you must be sick of feta and olives.’

  Eleni went inside obediently. Ajax poured whisky into tumblers this time.

  ‘A lovely lawn,’ I said, for want of anything better.

  ‘Schön nich’? We have to drag this place into the future. Look at us, stuck in the old ways. But take us out of here and put us in Chicago or Melbourne or Düsseldorf and see what we do. You know the Pap test for women? He came from Evia, from Kimi. His name was Papanikolaou.’

  ‘You just need opportunity.’

  ‘Not opportunity, Johnny, brains. It’s all done with brains.’

  ‘And luck.’

  ‘Bah. Luck is what you make it. Do you think our ancestors trusted to luck? Luck is an excuse for failure. Guck mal das Licht. The light of Greece.’ He pointed upwards over his head out of the darkness gathering on the ground and into the empty sky, luminous blue. ‘Isn’t that right, Eleni?’ he asked as she came back with a plate of delikatessen cut into cubes and two forks. ‘Eleni, get yourself a fork, come on.’

  Ajax stood up and lumbered down the steps to turn on the lawn sprinkler. I took the opportunity of a break in his chain of thought to mention fireplaces. He urged me to get a ready-made fireplace in a new shop called Rustikana outside Aliveri. There were several designs, all copies of French château fireplaces, with flues and throats and traps and controls, manufactured under licence in Salonica and guaranteed not to smoke.

  ‘He is my cousin. I will get you a good price. Spessial,’ he said.

  ‘Sorry,’ I said firmly, ‘What’s good enough for the village is good enough for me.’

  ‘But we all go to Rustikana.’

  I went round all the ruined houses in the old village measuring and sketching fireplaces. With bribery and flattery, I persuaded Barba Mitsos the melon farmer to take up his mason’s hammer again. The design was very simple. The sides were built up a metre or so in stone, a large piece of chestnut was laid on top of them to support a mantelpiece made of stone and the whole lot was plastered over. It was large and open for cooking and a roaring log fire in winter. It looked simple, elegant and well-proportioned, as if it had been there for ever.

  ‘You have a house now. You have a hearth,’ said Barba Mitsos, hiding his pride behind a little smile.

  There was no fancy funnel-shaped gather or bend in the flue. The smoke went straight up the chimney. That was the theory. In fact it went everywhere except up the chimney. I spent two days burning rubbish and twigs and logs trying to make it work. I raised the hearth and screened the front and extended the chimney and put a cowl on top, all without success. The smoke billowed and hung in the roof or crept along the floor to the windows.

  ‘What did I tell you?’ said Ajax, smugly. ‘You should have gone to Rustikana.’

  ‘But why doesn’t it work? What did they do in the old days?’

  ‘We had black faces and red eyes. The smoke killed the bugs so we didn’t mind.’

  The fireplace did have one fan. Ajax brought his great-aunt Iphigenia in the pick-up to visit. She was born in the house at the turn of the century, the eldest of seven. She rocked from side to side on bandy legs like a toy cow walking down a slope. The stairs were an ordeal, sideways, one step at a time, sighing with pain at every step. She waddled into the room and stood in front of the hearth, gazing into my smouldering debris, and mumbled to it as if the rest of us were not there. Her warty, hairy face creased around her cataracts and tears ran down the craggy wrinkles like flash floods in a desert riverbed. Then she started a lament for her past in the same style and cadences as mournful Maria at a graveside.

  ‘Ai, ai, the pies we had, spinach and cheese and meat and the kid roast or done in a stew with onions and the grilled chops and the liver and the pork done on the grill and tender casseroles with celery and herbs and the hare with crushed garlic and the quail baked with aubergine …’ />
  By the time she had gone through the menus of her youth we felt quite peckish. She looked round the rest of the room and struck her flaccid breasts.

  ‘Ai, ai, the times I remember. See that hole in the wall where the stone is missing. We put the eggs in there to keep cool. We hung hams and sausages on the wall over the fire to smoke. I slept outside on the step in the afternoon and in the evening we got the mattresses off the chest and laid them out and slept here, me by the window because I was the eldest …’

  And so she rambled on, seeing the house as she knew it as a child, feeling that the years in between had never been, a ghost haunting herself as she lay on the step outside, dreaming restlessly about what her future held. As she sang she worked her arthritic fingers as if she were trying to grasp something, clutching greedily at the air by her side. She fell silent, wiped the tears from her face with her faded yellow scarf and looked at us as if we had suddenly appeared in her past like aliens from another world.

  ‘Kalo risiko,’ she said to us, ‘may you and your children live long here and well. May the Old Ones keep you safe and the Virgin smile on you. Keep the back window shut at night. There’s a terrible draught.’

  She waddled out to the pick-up shaking her head. Three weeks later she died.

  Basking in memories of his youth and strength while he built our fireplace, Barba Mitsos took on the job of lining the cesspit. Dimitris the builder said that a concrete lining was good enough, but Barba Mitsos disagreed. The theory of the cesspit was that the water seeped through the stones while the solids fermented and dissolved. With a concrete lining there would be nowhere for it all to go.

  It was hard to find people to work with stone the old way. I could patch up the walls of the house myself, fitting stones into the holes by trial and error and knocking up grey mortar mixed with pebbles to fill in the cracks. But lining the hole that Zenon’s digger had made was not a job for an amateur.