It's All Greek to Me!

by John Mole

  First I spent a day collecting stones and piling them at the rim of the hole. It is no fun collecting five-pound rocks in the heat if you are nervous about scorpions and poisonous centipedes. When the pile looked as though it would fill the pit and not leave room for sewage, Barba Mitsos said that he needed half as many again. Finally he was satisfied.

  At seven in the morning he came up with a hammer in his belt. He pushed his straw republika to the back of his head, rolled up his sleeves, downed an ouzo and climbed down Dimitris’s rickety ladder into the pit. It was my job to pass down the stones and supply ouzo and water every half an hour. Barba Mitsos rarely used the hammer. He hefted each stone a couple of times in one hand, scarcely looking at it but sensing its size and contour with his fingers before dropping it into place. He took a day to make a perfectly round dungeon four metres deep and three metres across that looked as though each stone had been cut to size.

  ‘What a pity to fill it with shit,’ I said as we admired it from the edge.

  ‘Bah. It’s only stones,’ he said, but again he grinned with pride.

  That evening I climbed down into the hole. It was cool and quiet. I sat on the floor until nightfall with my back to the wall, listening. I heard whispering that seemed to come from beneath my feet and round my head but was probably the evening breeze playing over the mouth of the pit. Above was a disc of pure blue sky. It blazed with sunset, darkened with twilight and then stars appeared and the twinkling lights of aeroplanes. Stiff and hungry, I climbed out and went down the hill for dinner.

  Two days later Dimitris covered the pit with old floor-boards, laid a rusty steel mesh on the lid and poured six inches of concrete on top. A tin can stuck through the mesh and the wood made a hole for the inflow pipe. When the concrete was set I covered my stone tomb in earth.

  Every day on my way to the village I went past the cemetery. A platoon of brooding cypresses stood sentry behind a whitewashed stone wall patched with cement blocks. In daylight it was not an attractive place. The marble work on the graves was crude and botched. The plastic flowers on all but the most recent had faded to white resin in the sun. Bits of brick and stone and rubbish were scattered on the paths. At dusk dark shapes scurried along the concrete road, flittering and twittering, women of the village on their way to tend the dead. Sometimes you saw husbands and sons and fathers among them, but mostly it was women’s work.

  At the head of each grave was a shrine with a lamp, a Pepsi or beer bottle of oil, a box of matches, a plastic bag of charcoal, incense in a screw of newspaper, a vase of plastic flowers and a photograph of the tenant. Many of the photos were old identification cards, wedding portraits or snaps taken at weddings and christenings long ago when the dead were young and handsome. It was not easy to match them up with the eighty- and ninety-year-olds you remember hobbling around the village. But that was how they still thought of themselves and how they expected to be again when they woke up on the day of resurrection we are promised.

  The women filled the lamps with oil and ignited kandili. They lit crumbs of charcoal in censers and sprinkled them with a few grains of incense to fumigate the marble while they gabbled prayers. Then they sat on the graves to chat to the dead and each other until sunset drove them back home.

  When they left the cemetery became an enchanted place. The lamps made a galaxy of stars against the blackness of the cypresses, the gentle west wind of nightfall whispered through the pomegranate trees, bats scribbled zigzags on the lucent sky and a little owl hooted from its perch. It was the moment when the souls of the dead came out to gossip and no living Greek would linger.

  Bereavement counsellors nod and talk of the grieving process and say what a good thing this all is, but they miss the point. The real reason, as any Greek granny will tell you, is that the souls of the buried are still lurking around, especially between Easter and Ascension when they pop back to their old homes and go to parties. If you believe that the souls of the dead are uneasy in their graves and will walk among the living if they are not comforted by light and helped into paradise with prayers, it doesn’t matter who does the job. Evidence that the grave rituals are more to do with the psychic health of the departed than the mourners is that if there is no family around to do the job, they will pay a professional. In our village I have already mentioned that this was Maria, the widow whose husband had been murdered by his friend the butcher.

  There were no more than about thirty graves and I wondered how a village so large could have generated so few. One morning I found out. The bell in the little church in the middle of the cemetery was tolling and Papas Konstantinos stood by a grave with a large group of people, mainly women. Those closest to the grave were dressed all in black, while the degrees of mourning decreased the further back they stood until those at the edge wore ordinary dresses. I assumed that it was a funeral, although I hadn’t heard of anyone dying. But they were not putting anyone under. They were digging someone up: Barba Christos, Eleni’s uncle, the brother of Barba Vasilis the shepherd and Athina, my reed lady of the lake.

  I sidled up and stood a couple of yards behind Vasilis and nobody seemed to mind. Eleni was opposite us, all in black, staring down at the grave. The marble cross and the shrine had been tossed aside and the musty smell of fresh, moist earth mingled with the incense from a censer perched on a neighbouring grave. Waxy-fingered Elpida was in charge and did the digging with the help of Athina, who had changed out of her flowery summer frock into black for the occasion. Mournful Maria was among the women, so I guessed we had a dirge to look forward to. The rest of us watched and chatted in low voices. When they got down to the coffin the moaning and sighing began and Maria let rip:

  ‘Tell us Christos what did you find down there in Hades?

  I found snakes plaited like a young girl’s hair

  One snake was bolder than the others

  He sat upon my chest

  He ate my eyes, which looked at you

  He ate my tongue, which sang to you

  He ate my hands, which caressed you

  He ate my feet, which danced for you my love …’

  I got a bit edgy. If you think funerals are not the best way to spend a sunny morning, you should try an exhumation. The worst part was not knowing what condition old Christos was going to be in. If he was a skeleton like the one in the science labs at school, I reckoned I could get through it without having to sit down. But if he was somewhere between the corpse and the skeleton stage, I might have to cover my eyes and peep through my fingers.

  Elpida dropped her shovel and pulled the corner of the coffin. It was rotten and crumbling and came away easily. She crossed herself, bent down and rummaged around as casually as if she were sorting melons. Then with a flourish that would have done credit to Hamlet’s grave digger, she held up the skull to moans of acclaim from Maria.

  ‘Oh Christos! Haros has eaten your body and drunk from your eyes …’

  With her hand Elpida brushed brown, scabby bits off the skull, which I told myself was dirt but might not have been. Christos’s jaw and teeth were still attached and she looked hard at them as if she was wondering whether to give him a smacking kiss. But she was more practical. She put in her fingers, pulled out a gold tooth and dropped it into her pocket. Athina scowled and nudged her and held out her hand. After a histrionic gaze of non-comprehension, Elpida took out the tooth and handed it over. Then they carried on with their work as if nothing had happened.

  Elpida wrapped the skull in a white cloth, which Eleni handed her, and tied it like a Christmas pudding before passing it to Athina. Athina wailed and clutched the skull to her breast, kissed it and unwrapped it and passed it to Vasilis, who was more manly with his low lament. He took a drachma note out of his pocket, licked it and slapped it on top of the crown like a stamp, before passing the skull to Eleni, who stuck on another drachma note. This was puzzling, as Christos should have paid his way across the Styx years ago. The skull was then passed round for hugs and kisses in the general congreg
ation and I was grateful that the privilege was extended only to relatives.

  Meanwhile Elpida was busy in the grave. Inevitably, as this was Greece, she got plenty of advice from the spectators: ‘Don’t break the ribs … hold the middle … hold the end … watch out for his gold ring.’ She worked her way methodically down the upper limbs and the torso and passed bone after bone up to Athina and Eleni and two other women, who were now in a huddle round a bucket of water, a packet of Persil and a couple of towels. They washed and dried the grey-white bones as they came up and put them in a black metal box with a hinged lid, layering them between sprigs of rosemary and flowers. The papas waved the censer around, but whether out of ritual or to mask the smell of decomposition I wasn’t sure. I started to relax. Like all Orthodox services it had the homely feel of household chores, very matter of fact and lacking the exaggerated piety I was used to in England.

  ‘Ah, Christos, you were an eagle and Haros shot you with his bow

  Where are you now, in the sky or on the mountain top?

  No, you are here in a little pile of bones …’

  When the box was full and Athina had checked Elpida’s work by grubbing around in the compost for the last little toe bone, she stuffed fresh rosemary and thyme on top of the remains. Someone handed a small brass urn to the papas and he seasoned the bouquet garni with a sprinkle of holy water. Athina tried to shut the box, but even when Vasilis thumped and pushed the lid it wouldn’t close properly. The top of the skull peeped up like a jack-in-the-box for a last glimpse of the sun.

  Barba Christos cleared up for me one of the mysteries of Greek cemeteries, the open grave. Bits of broken marble and trampled earth lie around the gaping trench. An empty packet of detergent, an old shoe, a scrap of cloth litter the bottom, a promise of resurrection or a reminder of the end of all things, depending on your conviction.

  Another mystery was the little windowless building in the corner of the cemetery. I always assumed that it was for bits of marble, barrows and spades and other tools of the gravedigger’s trade. In our cemetery it was a shack built of crudely mortared and skimpily rendered cement blocks topped with Ellenit. In fact this was the bone-house, to which we made a procession with Christos.

  It was like a left-luggage office, with wooden shelves floor to ceiling all round the walls. Stacked on the shelves and heaped on the floor were boxes of wood or metal, each about a femur wide, half a pelvis deep and a skull high. Their owners were identified by numbers stencilled on the shelves. Many bore the faded grave photograph of the occupant when they had more meat on them. Most of the boxes were painted black, but others were brightly coloured and decorated with gold crosses and initials made of gold paper. Some, like Barba Christos’s, were too small for the job and the skulls peeped out. Others were not up to the job at all and were broken, their contents scattered on the shelves and the floor. The bones were packed with dry and brittle flowers and herbs and yellowing white cloths with unpleasant brown stains. With lamentation and incense we found a space for old Christos, lit a few candles and left him.

  In the middle of the concrete floor was a square wooden table carrying a metal baker’s tray full of sand and bristling with nub ends of slender honey-coloured candles. Underneath was a brown beer bottle containing an inch or so of oil. More candle ends, kandili wicks, withered flowers, bottles and other rubbish littered the floor.

  Once the dead-and-buried are unburied and put in the bone-house, active mourning ceases. Their souls are with God at last. On Good Friday, or the feast of the saint who guards the graveyard, they may get a candle in the sand tray for old time’s sake, but it is generally accepted that they have left this world for good. Meanwhile their mortal remains moulder gently on the shelves, each one witness to the short story that was someone’s life. They even have the musty smell of the stacks in the London Library.

  That night at dinner Elpida was in a bad mood. She muttered to herself, glowered and banged the pans around. Barba Mitsos winked at me, man to man, and puckered his lips to signal that we should stay quiet and wait for the squall to blow itself out and not whistle up any more trouble. Some hope.

  ‘Johnny was there. He saw,’ she said, plonking a dish of sweetbreads in egg and lemon sauce on the table.

  ‘What did I see?’ I asked.

  ‘The toilet bowl.’

  With or without Mitsos’s nudges and winks, I had nothing to say to this. I was sure she said toilet bowl. She rabbited on a bit more about the offending sanitary ware and the disgrace to the family and how they should be grateful to her. I whipped out the dictionary and discovered that the word for toilet bowl also means pelvis. But I wasn’t much further forward. I defied Mitsos again.

  ‘What was the problem with the toilet bowl/pelvis?’

  ‘Problem? It was black.’

  ‘Bah. It wasn’t black,’ said Mitsos.

  ‘Were you there? Johnny, was it black?’

  ‘I didn’t see it.’

  ‘Bah. I did that family a big favour. If I had said anything …’

  ‘But what?’ I blurted.

  ‘Lust,’ she hissed. This word I did know from the magazine shelf of Kyria Anna’s kiosk.

  Elpida put down plates of spinach pie, Greek salad, fried potatoes and wild greens. Mitsos poured wine. We crossed ourselves and muttered grace, clinked our glasses for good health, passed round the bread and tucked in. It was delicious and distracted us from talk of lust. Elpida was in no mood for further explanations, so I waited until after the meal and she went out to feed the scraps to the goats and chickens before I asked Mitsos what it was all about.

  ‘We Christians dig up the bones of the dead. If they are white, the blessed one is with God. If they are black, he is unforgiven and has to stay in the earth another five years.’

  ‘Barba Christos had a black pelvis? That means lust?’

  ‘Bah. Christos was always too drunk to chase women. His bones wouldn’t turn black. He pickled them too much. He brought death on himself.’

  ‘He killed himself?’

  ‘Eh. He said he didn’t want an old picture of himself on his grave, so on the Dormition he had Ajax the butcher take a picture with his Polaroid. He posed in his best clothes outside his front door.’

  ‘So that’s why he’s waving. He was saying goodbye.’

  ‘He said he didn’t care about dying, which was lucky because he died five months later. Everyone said it was the evil eye.’

  Lying in bed that night I tried to figure out what had happened. The best I could come up with was that Elpida had taken a gold tooth out of Christos’s skull. She dropped it in her pocket as one of the exhumer’s perks. Athina told her to hand it over. This made Elpida angry. In retaliation, she was starting a rumour that Christos should have been put back under because of his sins. One public slight deserves another. It was the sort of thing that village feuds are made of, but the next day it had blown over.

  Weeks later I overheard a conversation in the baker’s about another exhumation. Someone’s granny was due for digging up and they wondered if Elpida now expected to be paid for her services, because Dimitra saw Barba Vasilis giving Elpida money when they were giving out koliva for Barba Christos outside the church. If my theory was right, this was to compensate for the gold tooth. Honour was satisfied and a feud averted.

  I think this was what might have happened. I lived in such a fog of misunderstanding that I might have been totally mistaken. The real story may have been completely different. Or there may have been no story at all. When you are an outsider it is easy to live in a parallel universe unrecognisable to those who live on the inside.

  ‘Why do they give out cod liver, Dad?’ asked Kate, as we waited for Kyria Sofia to bring the fried kalamari.

  ‘Not cod liver. Koliva. It’s food for the dead that they give out at funerals and after forty days and the other anniversaries. It’s a mixture of boiled wheat and sugar and raisins and pomegranate seeds. It tastes like muesli past its sell-by date. When you’re of
fered some you’re supposed to say “May God forgive.”’

  ‘Do you think they believe in all this stuff, Haron and stained bones and the rest of it?’ asked Arfa.

  ‘No idea. But they act as though they do.’

  Living in the past

  We were close to moving in. Outside was a building site, but the house itself had a roof, floors, walls and plumbing. We wanted to keep it as simple as possible, like a real village house and not a folklore museum.

  The back room was divided by big wooden cupboards cadged from English friends who were being posted back home. We bought cheap metal beds from Monastiraki, a flea market in the centre of Athens, and flock mattresses. The front room was divided by a half-height plastered wall into a sleeping area for the double bed and a living area. I stripped and sanded the lime green paint off a pair of sideboards from the Sacred Way and mounted a steel sink from Grecian-nosed Haralambos as well as the hob and the gas fridge.

  As we had no electricity, we were obliged to have authentic lighting. I told the children we were going to use Ancient Greek technology, lights such as Homer might have had. In Monastiraki I bought half a dozen little oil lamps. They were terracotta globes with a flat spout at the side and a little chimney on top for refilling them. We filled them with oil and put a cotton wick in the spout. Every time I lit the wick the flame went out. So we put the wick in the chimney and I told them that the spout helped the air supply to the flame. Every time I lit the wick the flame went out. We tried different amounts of oil and different lengths of wick, with no success. I showed one to Barba Vasilis and asked him how it worked. He told me to half fill it with water and blow through the spout and it would trill like a canary.

  ‘Eh, the old toys. These days the children have plastic things with batteries.’

  Normally the children would have got tired of something like that in a few hours but in this case they played with them for weeks, bringing the ‘lamps’ out to whistle when I was showing them something at a museum or walking round an ancient site.