by John Mole
Arfa went back to Monastiraki for the real thing, flat terracotta bowls of oil with long trailing wicks, but they were as much use as glow worms. So we skipped forward a couple of millennia to oil lamps with mantles and glass chimneys. They gave a lovely amber glow and soft shadows, fine for doing nothing by but a strain on the eyes for reading or picking the bones out of a grilled fish. Camping gas lamps were safer to carry around and more practical, although they gave off a harsh light and a disapproving hiss. A good compromise was a big gas lantern made to hang from the trestle in the bows of a boat to lure fish into the nets.
Our landlady in Athens made us a treasured gift, a little table from the taverna that her father used to own. She said that Lawrence Durrell and Melina Mercouri ate there, although she had no recollection of their stabbing festive forks into the same dish. The table was too small to eat off and the top was hatched with knife cuts, so I doubt if it had been physically touched by celebrity. ‘Look kids. You know Gerald Durrell’s brother Larry? They cut up his cucumbers on this table.’
We needed chairs, so we trooped off to see Leonidas the chair maker, whose workshop was on the road to Kimi. It was an elegantly proportioned two-storey house with a pitched tile roof and a wrought-iron balcony. The ground floor had been knocked through for a workshop and the family lived above. His premises had no advertisement or signs, except for a large heap of old chairs in the yard and a three metre high hammer and sickle carefully painted on the wall facing the road.
Leonidas was a stocky man of about sixty. All of him, his clothes and skin and eyes and lips, was grey except for a shock of liquorice-dyed hair. He wheezed like a bellows from a lifetime of inhaling sawdust and tobacco. His wife had one characteristic so striking that it eclipsed everything else, an overshooting upper jaw with an overhanging pointed top lip like a tree-browsing mammal’s. Their daughter had not inherited this feature. Instead she had one of her own, cross-eyes. She was in her thirties and apparently no longer considered herself marriageable. She wore long-sleeved denim dresses down to her calves and, by the look of her bob, had taken against professional hairdressing.
True to his convictions, Leonidas had Russian machines to saw and plane the silky wood into struts and dowels and gently curving legs. A taverna chair, like the yellow one that Van Gogh painted, is made of nineteen separate pieces of wood. Only six are straight, the dowelling rods that connect the legs under the seat, handy for putting your feet on. The rest are curved, some of them in two planes, in other words front to back and side to side, like the legs. Leonidas spent the mornings turning planks into components and the afternoons assembling them. The scraps were fed into a pot-bellied stove lit winter and summer to warm a crusty brown saucepan of glue, homemade from bones. When he had mortised and glued the frames and whacked them tight with a mallet, he squinted at the legs and, without testing or measuring, sawed one leg to size in a couple of cuts of a handsaw and plonked the chair on the floor. It stood perfectly square.
The seat takes four metres of rush rope. In the mornings the women stripped the feathery outside off heaps of cream-coloured rushes and plaited them into rope on a horizontal spindle turned by a wheel with a handle. In the afternoons they sat and wove them round the frame into a seat. The last operation was to paint the wood with thick yellow varnish. While they worked they munched green chickpeas straight off the stalk and listened to music on the radio. I never heard them talking to each other. A miasma of depression hovered over them. It could have been caused by fumes from the glue, dyspepsia from raw chickpeas, the decline of the Soviets or cheap white plastic chairs hawked by gypsies from painted trucks.
Leonidas admitted that his main business, furnishing tavernas and cafés, was suffering. A giant press could whack resin into a mould in ten seconds. Lo and behold, a one-piece chair. With arms too. Leonidas’s chairs didn’t have arms. If you wanted to rest your arms in the café you pulled over another two chairs.
‘Would it be better under Communism?’ I asked.
‘Bah. Who uses hammers and sickles these days? It’s all plastic and typewriters.’
His chairs have done excellent service ever since. Ten years ago Leonidas, his wife and daughter, their house and piles of chairs outside all burned together in a fire allegedly started by the glue pot in the middle of the night. By then there was no demand for chairs made from nineteen pieces of wood and hand-plaited rushes.
Moving in was an anticlimax. There was still so much to do. It was like being billeted in a barn. We were disappointed, irritable and tired.
The weather had a lot to do with it. The end of the school term in Greece almost always coincides with the first great heatwave of summer. From sunrise to sunset the sun was livid, the sky gauzy blue, the air milky with heat haze and dust. In the morning you woke up soaked in sweat. You stepped outside and were bludgeoned by the heat. It was too hot to work, to walk, to eat. You tried putting clothes on, taking them off, wiping with wet towels, wiping with dry towels, showering, not showering, hot drinks, cold drinks, and it made no difference to your sticky, gritty skin and sweat-stung eyes. In the afternoon you lay down on sodden sheets with outstretched arms and legs like Leonardo’s man in the circle and shrank from the touch of another fevered body. Telling each other how hot it was passed for conversation.
When the sun went down it was little better. Earth and stone radiated heat and concrete was worse. At night it was too hot to sleep until the cool hour before dawn. In the airless silence you heard the slightest sound, a black beetle inspecting the melons, a mouse creeping down the chimney, a gecko patrolling the wall. Dawn was the best time to get up. The heat crept up on you and was more tolerable. If you woke up when the sun was high you were already soaked in sweat. You stepped outside and were bludgeoned by the heat …
It was too hot for the beach. The children slumped on their beds with Asterix and Tintin and the Hardy Boys and Gerald Durrell until they were overwhelmed by desire for ice-cold water. They slouched to the little gas fridge and flung it open hoping for a miracle, jugs of frozen sherbet, lemony sorbets, crushed ice. But it could not cope. Powered by a little gas flame that forced coolant round the pipes at the back, it gave off more heat than cold. The ice tray with twelve tiny cubes never had so much as a glazing of frost. Bottles of water stayed resolutely chambré. The children crashed on our bed with tragic sighs and moans.
Arfa and I took to tepid Double-Os, ouzo and orange juice, a recreational beverage that we improvised out of desperation one evening when the wine ran out. The aniseed went well with the metallic tang of carton juice. Booze helped, but you paid for it in more sweat and lethargy.
In the morning the children lay quietly on their beds, hoping that their parents would think they were still asleep, knowing that if they got up they would have to do unpleasant things like wash their faces and lay the table.
They yearned to be young Durrell with an interesting family and cute animals and funny adventures. He didn’t have insects chewing his mattress and rats running up the walls, wasn’t chased by hornets and stung by wasps, never trod on thistles or sea urchins with spines that had to be dug out with a needle. He never had thirst or hunger or sunburn or fever or vomiting or squits. He didn’t have to lug stones and mix cement, wash his clothes and sweep the floors. The Greeks he knew were funny and spoke English and didn’t pinch his cheeks and pull his hair and spit on him. He wasn’t annoyed by his brothers and shouted at by his parents. Life was never bo-ring. And he was never sent down to the village in the heat to buy breakfast.
Reality, in the lovely shape of their mother, banged open the door.
‘Morning, sweeties.’
‘Good morning, Mummy. Is it time to get up? Oh goodee. It looks a lovely day. Is there anything we can do to help? Shall I lay the table for breakfast?’
In your dreams, Mummy. She wasn’t greeted with so much as a grunt. But revenge was sweet.
‘We need bread for breakfast.’
She was rewarded with a collective groan. Sa
distically, she took her time selecting the victim.
‘Kate … I think it’s your turn.’
The three boys punched the air and hissed ‘Yessss!’ Kate pulled the sheet over her head, willing herself to be spirited to Corfu where Gerald had no more to do than brush crumbs off the tablecloth and had a proper mother, not the wicked step variety. Resistance was pointless. She could string her parents along indefinitely but her brothers poked and prodded and needled and taunted, so that within minutes she was trudging down the path, squinting against the heat and clutching a limp and sodden drachma note in her sweaty little fist.
The simple act of going into the baker’s and saying dio kila parakolo, two kilos please, was the least of the burdens of office of the breakfast fetcher. The big challenge was to avoid villagers by dodging into doorways and slipping round corners and scurrying down lanes and waiting until the shop was empty before sidling in. The smallest penalty for being caught was a barrage of Greek and, especially if it was an old lady, a cheek pinch.
Occasionally someone, often canny Barba Mitsos, would buy them an ice cream or a Coke, which they would brag about all day to the others. But mostly they dreaded generosity. Melons heavy as cannonballs, paper bags of eggs that halfway home made crunching noises and leaked yolk down their shorts, armfuls of spinach or beans crawling with caterpillars, soft fruit buzzing with wasps, cheeses dripping milky brine down their legs and onto their sandals. The gifts also meant that they could not carry the piping hot loaves at arm’s length but had to tuck them under their arms like hot poultices for the long trudge home in the blazing sun.
Kate had a bad morning: hair bedraggled, cheeks aflame, T-shirt sodden, sweat rash under the arms, loaves dented in half, two enormous watermelons, one of which had split, dribbling juice and pips down her legs, just in case any wasp had trouble finding her.
She dumped her load in the kitchen and shuffled to the fridge for a cold pack. It was tepid, but it was better than nothing. Crook-backed, hands dangling histrionically round her knees, she shuffled back to bed to recover with Durrell in his Corfu idyll.
Bread was one of the few things we bought. We never had to buy the makings of a Greek salad or a potato omelette. We fried our neighbours’ aubergines and courgettes in oil from olives they grew a hundred metres down the hill. We dressed their spinach and greens in lemon and garlic or, better still, skordalia, garlic purée stiffened with breadcrumbs and oil. In their season there were apples, apricots, pears, pomegranates, peaches and figs for the fruit bowl. We had melons piled like cannonballs in the coolest corner of the kitchen. In the fridge we had the choice of wine from half a dozen different barrels.
Most of the time we had no idea who had given us these things. We opened the front door in the morning and fell over them. We rarely paid for coffee or ouzo in Yannis’s café if any of our friends were in there. In her fish taverna in Limanaki, Kyria Sofia often plonked down an unordered can of wine and jerked her thumb at another table. When we ate in the company of Greeks it was unheard of to split a bill and impossible for us to pick it up. Even if we made arrangements with the waiter before we sat down, one of the Greeks would gabble very fast and undo them. They expected none of this to be reciprocated or even acknowledged with more than a nod of the head or a raised glass. It was heart-warming and also embarrassing, but there was nothing we could do. It has been the rule in these parts for thousands of years. We were strangers and that was the end of it.
We tried to reciprocate. When we went abroad we brought back shortbread in tartan tins and Christmas puddings in basins and toffees in double-decker buses. Arfa drew the line at haggis as bringing Britain into disrepute. For a time, when whisky in the duty-free was cheaper than in Yannis’s café, we arrived like bootleggers. But it felt more like payback than true generosity.
There were three levels of catering we could be invited to. The first was when you weren’t invited at all but happened to be around at a mealtime. This was pot luck and could be as few as half a dozen dishes. Something fishy like octopus or anchovies in brine, a couple of meat stews, a vegetable or two, feta and salad.
The next level was to be invited to meze. Although this means appetiser or snack, you were ill-advised to make dinner plans for afterwards. It consisted of the above plus two or three specially prepared dishes, perhaps a spinach and cheese pie, chunks of roast lamb, spicy sausage, stuffed tomatoes and peppers. ‘Ah, tapas,’ sophisticated readers may say and they would be right about the variety but misled about the size of the portions. A better comparison is an all-you-can-eat buffet.
Finally you might be invited to a trapezi, a table. This was like a meze but with even more elaborate dishes. It was where you got delicacies that took hours to prepare like papoutsakia, little shoes, courgettes halved lengthways with a lemony béchamel filling, or imam bayaldi, whose prosaic translation in Zorba’s cookbook as ‘baked stuffed aubergine’ evoked nothing like its literal sense, the imam swooned. You were well advised not to make dinner plans for a day either side of a trapezi, an all-you-can-eat-and-half-as-much-again buffet with someone else heaping your plate.
Those who believe that first courses are hurdles in the race to dessert will be disappointed by a Greek meal. In summer there will be seasonal fruit, but generally there are no puddings or coffee or After Eights. These come first. The traditional welcome when you go into a house at any time is a glass of water and a spoonful of jam followed by a sugary coffee. (Arfa reversed the order to take the taste away.) A variation on the jam was vanillia, Kate’s favourite, a lurid white sticky sugary putty tasting of face cream. She kept a big pot of it under her bed.
For more mature palates ouzo was on offer – but only to the men. It was immodest for women to drink in public. Arfa was prepared to respect most norms of decency, for example by always wearing skirts and not trousers in the village, but here she drew the line. She chipped in with ‘Yes please and John will have one too.’ They didn’t seem to mind. Foreign women were assumed to be hussies.
Greeks bearing gifts
‘Maam, Daad, they’re coming they’re coming …’
‘Who? Who?’ shouted Arfa, sitting bolt upright in bed, jerked out of deep early morning sleep.
‘Hoo Hoo … Hoo Hoo,’ yelled Harry and chuff-chuffed around the bed pulling an imaginary whistle.
‘Hoo Hoo Hoooo,’ hooted Kate, who wanted to be an owl when she grew up and practised swivelling her head over meals.
‘Hoooo Hoooo,’ howled Jim, who tried to frighten the little ones with werewolf stories and gave himself nightmares.
‘Hoo Hoo, Hoo Hoo, Hoo Hoo,’ grunted Jack, sticking his tongue under his lower lip, scratching himself under the arms and doing bow-legged two-footed jumps round the room.
‘Who?’ I grumbled.
‘Don’t you start,’ she said and went bleary-eyed to the door to see what had stirred up the menagerie.
The doors of our little church were wide open. Out of them came Roula’s shriek, audible three fields away, and Elpida’s laugh and other voices I could not identify. A cloud of dust billowed on the threshold, chased out by a yellow straw broom. Up the path from the spring came Antigone and two other women carrying armfuls of flowers. They filled vases on the iconostasis and made a wreath for Ioannes’s icon.
Other villagers came up the path on foot, on donkeys and in vehicles. The Greek flag was run up the olive tree. The air was blue with exhaust and white with dust. Haralambos ran a cable from the battery in his pick-up to power a busker’s amplifier for the PA system. Squeals of feedback and the Greek equivalent of ‘wanoofree wanoofree’ echoed around the old village.
Papas Konstantinos arrived with Ajax the butcher in the red Mercedes. Eleni carried a carpet bag with his vestments, which he put on in the privacy of the sanctuary behind the iconostasis.
From a table beside the door, Elpida sold dog-eared black and white postcards of Aghios Ioannes and candles for the icon inside. The church quickly filled up, so most of us milled outside, the keen o
nes crowding to the door to see and the rest chatting and smoking on the fringes like Irishmen outside Sunday mass. Ajax worked the crowd like a cocktail party, gleaning information and doing deals. Haralambos achieved the same result by sitting on a wall and letting people come to him.
The liturgy dragged on, with incense and chanting and signs of the cross and lighting of candles and kissing of icons, punctuated by the deafening thumps of Konstantinos slapping his microphone. When we westerners pray we join our hands, close our eyes, kneel, hunch up and put our hands over our faces to close up our bodies. Our God is inside us, his universe inside our heads. When Orthodox Christians pray they keep their eyes open. They hold their heads up and open up their senses to the universe. Their God is outside in a real world. The liturgy and the music, the no-nonsense ceremony, the annual resanctification of a place where once a goat-god lived and was embodied still in the form of shape-changing Aghios Ioannes was a living timeline to ancient times. At last two old women came out with round, flat loaves that the papas had blessed. We all scrummed in to grab a piece, although there was plenty for everyone. It was flavoured with sesame and cinnamon.
Our house was as much an attraction as the church. We invited the papas up for coffee and left the front door open for people to wander in and out and comment and criticise and wish us kalo risiko. Arfa fussed round them with coffee and Coke and a tin of duty-free shortbread, while I did the manly thing with worry beads beside the papas. The children disappeared up the hillside to avoid spits, pinches and speaking Greek.
Elpida took it upon herself to give our visitors the tour, praising the view and the quiet and the fresh air up here on the hillside and pointing out the lack of electricity and the holes for the rats and how impossible it was to keep clean. Leaving their coffee undrunk, for it was foreign filter and not proper Greek coffee, they went back to the chores in their own houses leaving behind, without any fuss or expectation of thanks, bags of tomatoes and peppers and cucumbers and aubergines and cheese and eggs, so that our kitchen looked like a harvest festival.