It's All Greek to Me!

by John Mole

  Some parties go off better than you hoped. The food turns out like the recipes promised. The drink is just right and doesn’t run out. The guests are on form and play off each other like a chamber orchestra. Everyone enjoys themselves. You don’t mind clearing up the mess afterwards because you have been wonderful hosts.

  That rarely happened to us and this evening was no exception. In every way it was the opposite of the above. Food for the gods? It was the dinner party from Hades.

  ‘Everyone looked like corpses under that camping gas. You should have hung up oil lamps,’ said Arfa, as we lay in bed later, unable to sleep for chagrin and embarrassment.

  ‘We’d have set fire to the tree.’

  ‘Is that why you didn’t put out mosquito coils? It was like the Bavarian slapping dance out there.’

  ‘The smell puts you off your food. It’s worse than a Body Shop.’

  ‘Poor Antigone. Her thighs must be raw.’

  ‘Serves her right for wearing that outfit. She looked like the strippergram.’

  It started off all right. Arfa had invited some for eight and I had invited the rest for nine, but it didn’t matter because they all arrived at sunset, as they would have whatever time we’d said. They came dressed up and with gifts of embroidery and brightly coloured liqueurs, sowing seeds of apprehension that they might be expecting a grander occasion than we had prepared. They toured the house and talked about the old days and pointed out what the builders had done wrong.

  We men then went outside to the table under the mulberry. Arfa let me play the Greek male and be waited on. It wasn’t for my honour but hers. In Greece women control the home and letting a man interfere means that he is not under the thumb as he should be. I had put on dark trousers and the shirt I saved for weddings, a short-sleeve white polyester plissé. The others wore similar, so we sat round one end of the table like a waiters’ convention, sizing up each other’s pot bellies. We were all slicked back and scented with the same pungent cologne that Aussie Alekos the barber pushed on all his customers.

  Ajax won the moustache competition, with handlebars so preposterously sculpted that they looked stuck on. Spiros the carpenter was runner-up, with his festive yard brush embellished with blue pencil and the relics of meals and spangled with golden sawdust. Barba Mitsos’s was pure white in the gaslight and looked as if he had been quaffing cream. Barba Vasilis favoured the dyed brown hairy caterpillar. These days my own contribution would be called designer stubble. It was designed by mosquito bites that made shaving a torment.

  ‘Ruddy Pimm’s,’ I said.

  ‘It was your idea. A taste of England, you said.’

  The bottle had been lurking at the back of the cupboard for years, a relic of duty-free delusion along with other failed attempts at stylishness, like my panama hat and Arfa’s parasol. Biting his lip in concentration, Jack carried out the tray of glasses and gingerly set it down like Ganymede on his first day at work.

  ‘We drink this in England in the summer,’ I said. ‘It’s very traditional.’

  ‘Is it warming?’ asked Ajax, who had heard about our weather.

  ‘It’s gin with quinine and herbs. The mixture is a secret.

  Only six people in the world know it.’

  ‘Why is it a secret?’ asked Haralambos, sniffing his glass. ‘Who else would want it?’

  ‘Then you add Sprite and the other things.’

  They picked up their glasses and peered and sniffed and poked at bobbing cucumber and fished out bedraggled mint.

  ‘Our health,’ I said and took a swig. They took the tiniest sips.

  ‘Shall we have a whisky?’ I ventured.

  With synchronised twists of the head, the vote was unanimous. In the kitchen Arfa had a similar experience offering Pimm’s to the women. They asked for coffee instead. Elpida made it, in case they were given foreign filter stuff.

  They came out to join us. For our taste of England Arfa had put on Laura Ashley, but without the complementary white cardy, de rigueur in its native habitat. If she was an English rose, Eleni was a Greek lily, tall and graceful in a cream dress falling in loose folds from a flounce under her bosom. Her blue-black hair was carelessly swept up in a chignon. Antigone glittered in lamé, sequins and silver-flecked gauze. Elpida wore black except for a yellow Evia scarf to cover her bald patch. Her moustache scored higher than mine.

  ‘So quiet up here,’ said Eleni. ‘You can’t hear anything.’ This was true, since the hiss and pop of the gas lamps drowned out everything else.

  ‘Aren’t you afraid to be so near the cemetery?’ asked Antigone.

  ‘There are no vampires in our village,’ said Elpida. ‘We are good people.’

  ‘Eh, don’t you believe it,’ said Vasilis, ‘there are still some who’d eat your liver. Dead or alive.’

  ‘Bah,’ said Mitsos.

  Your Greek vampire, the vrikolokas, is a different breed from Bram Stoker’s variety. They are partial to human liver, which they cook with their hot breath. The remedy is to dig up the body, if exorcism fails cut it into small pieces, and if that doesn’t work burn it. Anybody born on Christmas Day or not properly baptised or excommunicated or dying a violent death runs the risk of becoming a vrikolokas.

  ‘Or if a black cat jumps over your corpse,’ said Spiros.

  ‘Or if you marry a koumbaros, Granny used to say,’ said Antigone and giggled and glanced at Ajax. As small talk went it was a change from the weather.

  For special occasions such as this, Arfa had invested in a jar of deluxe loganberry conserve from Harrods. (How much? For a pot of jam!) She scooped out spoonfuls and passed them on saucers to the coffee drinkers, who took little tastes for politeness and pushed them aside.

  ‘It needs sugar,’ said Elpida, ‘you should put more in next time.’

  ‘I didn’t make it,’ said Arfa. ‘It’s from Harrods.’ But brand recognition was not a consumption influencer in Elpida’s consumer profile.

  ‘Eh,’ she said with a twitch of her moustache, ‘I thought so. Shop-bought.’

  They didn’t think much of our other delicacies either. Our great innovation was to fry almonds in olive oil with salt. Our neighbours thought of them as sweet not savoury and put them in honey cakes or coated them in hard white sugar to be given out in little net bags at weddings and baptisms. Although those who tried them liked them fried, we ran up against the ultimate sanction: ‘Eh, we Greeks don’t do it like that.’ They had a religious attitude to food and drink. Anything other than strict Orthodoxy was heretical.

  They were baffled by thin strips of ham wrapped round cubes of melon and impaled on toothpicks. They carefully unpicked them and threw the melon away. No one even tried the last of our stash of smoked oysters. As for the little round cantaloupe stuck all over with feta and pineapple cubes, it might have been voodoo for all they found it appetising. They ate only the crisps and the olives.

  ‘Barba Vasilis, how’s your wife?’ I asked.

  It was a standard question when he came past the house with his flock and the standard reply was ‘Well, thank you’. This time I might have asked if his bowels had moved today. He flushed. Barba Mitsos scowled and discovered a fascinating knobble in the mulberry branch above his head. Eleni’s lovely eyes blazed at me, Elpida rearranged her bosom with folded arms and Ajax and Haralambos seemed amused, like boys seeing a classmate getting into trouble.

  ‘She’s fine,’ said Vasilis and turned his attention to the bats flitting in the half-light.

  What had I said? I had put my foot in something, but I had no idea what. As the evening wore on I noticed that Vasilis and Mitsos never looked at each other. When one spoke the other frowned and sighed and looked away. I felt the creeping chill in the stomach familiar to hosts who unknowingly invite sworn enemies to their party.

  There were other dynamics. Antigone made a display of doting on her new husband Haralambos. She served him the hors d’oeuvres first, although this could have been interpreted as malice. She refilled his
glass and his plate after every sip and forkful. Every so often she stood up, went round behind him, draped herself over him, nuzzled the back of his neck and fed him choice morsels. He reacted with quiet gratification, so quiet that it was hardly noticeable. He sat upright and dignified and carried on with the conversation as if she were just a breath of breeze round his shoulders. Ajax the butcher paid her more attention, smiling and glancing up at her as she played the infatuated young bride. Meanwhile he ignored his own wife, Eleni. She talked babies with Arfa and helped her with dishes and condiments. Elpida talked to everyone and as she had grey hair was ignored.

  ‘Time for the first course, darling.’

  ‘Good idea, darling.’

  ‘Shall I carry it out for you, darling?’

  ‘You sit there, darling.’

  ‘Don’t drop it, darling.’

  ‘I won’t, darling.’

  I heard the crash over the hiss of the lamps and ran to help. It wasn’t really serious because she’d washed the kitchen floor that morning and prawns have gritty bits in them anyway. They were giant specimens complete with heads and feelers and little hairy legs on a bed of chopped lettuce and smothered in bright pink cocktail sauce with a garni of shredded pineapple. I was proud of the sauce, which I had improvised out of yoghurt, a precious bottle of Heinz ketchup and a dash of Worcestershire sauce I hoarded for Bloody Marys. It tasted just like Sainsbury’s. Lacking this benchmark of excellence, our guests carefully wiped it off with paper napkins. They threw the shells to the family of feral cats gathering in the dark outside the pool of gas light. Their yellow and green eyes in the blackness reminded me of reflector studs on English roads – as they are called Catseyes it wasn’t a great imaginative leap.

  In Greece all dishes are served at once, so we immediately served the main course before they panicked that there was nothing else to eat. I insisted on bringing out the big round earthenware pot, as I was less likely to drop it. If only I had. Arfa and Kate had laboured all morning, peeling potatoes and mashing them with Neo Vitam margarine and rendering the fat off Ajax’s frozen lamb mince and dicing onions and carrots and opening tins of peas and mushroom soup and dissolving stock cubes and grating Greek gruyère for the topping. It had spent the rest of the day at the baker’s.

  Arfa hammered the golden crust with a serving spoon. It sounded as if she were calling us to order. She smashed through the carapace and discovered with relief two layers of different consistencies of mush. She dolloped it out for the children to hand round while I spoke about its culinary heritage, including such subtleties as the difference between shepherd’s pie and cottage pie, which hinges on the inclusion of carrots. In spite of its cultural credentials, our guests looked on their dinner with dismay. I thought of the old story of a Frenchman in Scotland faced with his first plate of porridge. ‘Am I to eat this’, he asked, ‘or have I eaten it already?’ They picked and poked and threw choice morsels to the cats’ eyes while the family scoffed it and had second helpings.

  ‘So how is life in England?’ asked Haralambos, warming at last to the theme of the evening. ‘How much do you pay for rent?’

  In England our dinner-party conversations were dominated by London house prices. In Greece they were dominated by London house prices plus the price of everything else from Pampers to petrol. Our friends were fascinated by the retail price index. Arfa and I took little interest in this sort of thing – hence regular crises in the household budget – so we made up the answers. Our guesses were even more distorted by having to convert in our heads pounds into drachmas, gallons into litres, pounds into kilos.

  ‘Po-po-po,’ they said at each new piece of misinformation.

  ‘Johnny, your life over there is very different,’ said Haralambos and they all tutted and shook their heads, whether out of pity or envy I could not say.

  To lighten the mood we brought out dessert. I insisted on bringing out the big round earthenware pot, as I was less likely to drop it. If only I had. Arfa and Kate had laboured all morning over flour and Neo Vitam margarine and sugar and various soft fruits. It had spent the rest of the day at the baker’s.

  Arfa hammered the golden crust with a serving spoon. It sounded as if she were calling us to order. She smashed through the carapace and discovered with relief two layers of different consistencies of mush. She dolloped it out for the children to hand round. The crumble had the same consistency as the mashed potato and the fruit had coalesced into a brownish, minced-meaty colour with carroty-looking lumps. Our guests looked at their plates with dismay.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ I said, in case they thought they were in the grip of a horrible déjà vu, ‘it’s not the same. It’s sweet.’ But not sweet enough for a Greek tooth. They picked and poked and threw choice morsels to the cats’ eyes while the family scoffed it and had second helpings.

  ‘English cuisine was a great success,’ said Arfa with a shudder. ‘Did they eat anything?’

  ‘Bread. Their own cheese and tomatoes. Thank God we made a Greek salad.’

  ‘I should have done something different for pudding.’

  ‘Noo, darling.’

  ‘Pity we had no custard. They’d have been really impressed.’

  ‘What was with Barba Mitsos and Barba Vasilis?’

  ‘I asked Eleni in the kitchen. She said that before he met Elpida, Mitsos was nearly engaged to a girl called Despina. All they had to agree was the dowry.’

  At that time engagements in Greece were far more significant than in the West. It was often the engagement that was consummated rather than the marriage and to walk up the aisle in a dress that billowed over the front was no disgrace. On the contrary: it showed that the marriage would fulfil its primary purpose.

  ‘So then he met Elpida in Aliveri when her ship broke down. They got married in a rush and left Despina in the lurch. Big dishonour. There was talk of her becoming a nun. They even doubled the dowry. Then the Italians invaded and Vasilis married her just before he went off to the war.’

  ‘Didn’t want to get killed before he …’

  ‘Whatever. Anyway, Mitsos broke a leg or something and came back early. Despina had to stay out of his sight for Vasilis’s sake. She’s been a bit funny ever since. Now she never comes out of the house.’

  ‘And Vasilis blames it all on Mitsos. But that was forty years ago.’

  ‘In Crete they’d have been murdered by now.’

  ‘Then cack-handed foreigners invite them to the same dinner table. They’ll never speak to us again.’

  And so we dissected the corpse of our evening. I didn’t mention how lovely Eleni looked and how Haralambos couldn’t keep his eyes off her either, as we had had enough ego bruising for one night. Lying in bed, dropping off to sleep, I thought of our little bubble of light and Englishness under the mulberry tree and great emotions swirling round in the dark outside, looking in at us with the cats’ eyes of Furies.

  Off to Turkey

  August is a gentler month. The Greek holiday season traditionally finishes on the fifteenth of August, the Orthodox Feast of the Dormition, when the All Holy One fell asleep. Catholics call it the Assumption, when Our Blessed Lady was taken bodily into heaven. After Easter and Christmas, it is the most important feast of the calendar and like them marks a change in the seasons. Around this time the first grey clouds since April appear in the sky, with rain showers and perhaps a storm. Other signs are trees by the roadside hung with goggle-eyed carcasses and bloodstained fleeces. Pious Greeks fast and abstain from meat for fifteen days beforehand. The Dormition is the name day of anyone named after Our Lady – Mary and Panayotis, Despina (which means Virgin) – and anyone who doesn’t have a proper saint’s day, like Aristotle and Pericles and Ajax. Name days are more important than birthdays, a reason to feel special and eat cake.

  We still went to the beach every day, if only to wash off the building grime. Usually we didn’t go as far as Limanaki harbour but turned off down a steep rutted dirt track to the lovely bay of Klimaki, which me
ans little vine. It was a perfect crescent of white sand between two rocky horns with a gently shelving beach, clear water and a few jujubes for shade. It faced east, so that early in the morning the sea was molten silver flowing straight from the sun and in the evening a sheet of lapis lazuli stretching to the Anatolian horizon.

  For foreigners and Athenians, Klimaki was hard to find along the potholed dirt road from the village. Locals used to come occasionally to bathe, but now most of them had showers at home. Being fishermen, few of them were interested in swimming. In spring you would sometimes see a fellow pottering round the rocks on the horns of the bay with a trident on the end of a long pole baited with a bit of white rag. The trick was to flutter the rag in front of holes in the rocks and when a squid came out to play, stab it. But in summer the water was too warm for squid and they went deeper out to sea, so we usually had the beach to ourselves. The children racketed around and screamed and fought in the water without embarrassing their parents.

  So we were disturbed one morning to see a procession of donkeys and a cart towed by a tractor coming down the steep track and onto the beach. A dozen riders and passengers got down and hobbled over to the water’s edge, each one carrying a shovel or a back hoe. They were old, bent and lame. The women were all in black with yellow scarves round their heads and faces. The men wore white shirts buttoned to the neck, baggy jackets and wide-brimmed straw hats. They lined up in a row, parallel with the water’s edge and far enough away from it that they were on dry sand. With their tools they dug shallow pits like an execution party digging their own graves – and there were some among them who would remember such incidents in their lifetimes. They took off only their shoes, sat down in their pits and buried themselves up to the waist, looking out to sea.