by Peter Helton
Neo Makriá looked as though it prospered without the aid of the tourist euro. All its houses looked freshly painted. At the edge of the square stood a bright yellow kiosk, illuminated by a crown of coloured light bulbs. The kafénion, a traditionally men-only cafe, as I had learned on my language tape, had three men sitting at tiny tables outside, their backs to the wall. They looked very convincingly like the three from the cafe in town, down to the knitted tops and worry beads sliding through their fingers. Only these three were drinking ouzo, a clear aniseed spirit that goes cloudy when mixed with water.
It was a mild evening. Children on tiny bicycles chased each other round the square, lapping a hopelessly outpaced kid pedalling furiously on a tricycle. At one end of the square some kind of ball game was in progress. Adults were going about their business, strolling, chatting in small groups and, above all, watching me.
I made for the kafénion. The proprietor, Dimitris, an energetic thirty-year-old with a moustache and a five o’clock shadow, spoke English.
First things first. Was there any food? He could rustle up some bread, cheese and olives. Otherwise, why didn’t I try the psistaría? He even took me the hundred yards to the establishment.
‘Is there a guest house in the village where I can get a room for tonight?’ was my next question.
‘How long do you want the room for?’
‘Just for one night. I’m going a bit further tomorrow but I have had enough of driving for today and, besides, the van’s run out of fuel.’
‘We have a room. I tell my wife. Come back to the kafénion after your meal.’
The psistaría – the grill – was a simple affair with yellow Formica tables and those chairs made from painted iron hoops and multicoloured plastic bands; it was run by two young men. They were doing good trade over their battered counter in front of a long charcoal grill on which rows of tiny pork kebabs on wooden skewers were being basted and thick metal skewers held sizzling pieces of highly seasoned lamb. I knew they were highly seasoned because I watched one of the men throw extraordinary amounts of pepper and salt at them. I ordered a couple of souvlaki pittes and sat down at one of the yellow tables outside with a large bottle of Henninger beer and felt myself relax a little. For a while I simply sat and enjoyed the village scene in front of me, the smells of the charcoal grill, the simple flavour of the beer; stationary pleasures. The food arrived soon, morsels of grilled pork with tomatoes, onions, parsley, yoghurt and a dollop of spicy sauce, all wrapped in soft pitta bread, held together with greaseproof paper and a napkin. As soon as I had finished the first I ordered two more.
While I tackled my second lot of souvlakis, one other foreigner arrived at the grill: a broad-shouldered, silver-haired man in his fifties with a fleshy, richly veined nose.
He stopped at my table on his way in. ‘Are you here for the birds?’ He had a surprisingly high voice for a man his size.
‘The birds? You mean birdwatching?’
‘Yes,’ he said impatiently. ‘Aren’t you? Most people who come this early are twitchers. But you’re not?’
‘Not really, no.’
He gave a resigned nod. ‘That’s a shame. I was going to ask you if you had seen any Egyptian vultures yet. I haven’t seen one yet this year and I’m getting a bit worried. No use asking the locals; they don’t seem to be interested at all.’ He snorted with disapproval and disappeared inside. When he came out again with a bottle of fizzy orange, he chose a table well away from me; obviously, we had exhausted our conversational potential.
Neo Makriá, I noticed on my way back to the van, had invested in crazy paving in a big way. Every little alley I could see had been freshly paved, in dizzying 1970s fashion. I checked on Derringer inside the motorhome. He briefly looked at me from the bench where he lay curled up, then settled back to sleep. ‘You and me both.’ I grabbed my bag and headed towards my bed.
At the kafénion Dimitris insisted I drank an ouzo ‘for welcome’ before he led me the five steps to the house next door. His wife, Irini, spoke little English, so it was Dimitris who showed me to my room. It was a small attic room with irregular, whitewashed walls; woodwork and floorboards were painted blue. It had a single bed, a chair, a chest of drawers and smelled of fly spray.
I hoped no one else in the house wanted a shower that night because I stood under the blessed stream of hot water for a very long time, trying to iron out some of the aches and kinks I had acquired on my journey. I finished towelling my hair in my room while looking out of the small window at the square. The village had quietened down now. I could see the van from here. Just then the birdwatcher strolled up to it. He stopped, looked around him, then peered through the side windows at the interior, shading his eyes with both hands against the glass to do so. Then he quickly walked out of sight.
Dimitris assured me that Greeks didn’t go in for breakfast much; a coffee first thing in the morning had to suffice for most. Despite this, he managed to find freshly baked bread, butter, thick slices of mortadella, yoghurt and honey, as well as cups of instant coffee for me. While I turned my attention to these offerings in a patch of early morning sunshine at a table outside his cafe, a boy on a scooter was dispatched to the nearest petrol station to fetch a couple of gallons of fuel in a jerry can. Dimitris was a quiet man in the morning and didn’t ask me any more questions. Last night I had finally had the sense to get my story straight: I was on a two-week holiday. What could be simpler than that? Now I unfolded my map and showed him where I was heading: the end of Alexis’s inch-long biro squiggle.
‘Ano Makriá?’ He looked surprised, but his frown was quickly replaced by a smile. ‘Ah, you like to be painter, yes?’
‘Erm, yes, very much,’ I said truthfully.
‘Ano Makriá.’ Dimitris gave a knowing shake of the head and scratched his already stubbled chin. ‘Is not a good place, I think. There is no nothing there, no . . . fertilities?’
‘Facilities?’
‘Yes, that word. Bad road in winter. Much rain and then perhaps no road in winter. Is crazy there. You can be a painter somewhere elsewhere. With facilities.’
‘OK, I’ll bear that in mind. So how do I get there?’
Dimitris sighed as though I had defeated him in serious negotiations, grabbed my map and folded it impatiently. Then he walked off, eventually disappearing between two houses. He returned two minutes later with a seven- or eight-year-old boy on a small bicycle who would be my guide.
Derringer looked even grumpier than usual, despite the can of baked squid I had bought for him at the grocer’s. ‘Cheer up, cat; this is the last leg, nearly there.’
The Greek kid was very excited by his appointment and sped away along the narrow road, pedalling frantically. I followed at a careful distance in the van, since the boy looked over his shoulder every five seconds, each time wobbling dangerously. Not far beyond the last houses of the village we turned off on to a rutted dirt track between terraced olive groves. For a while the track remained level as it twisted between the dense groves of tall, ancient trees, then began to rise into the hills. The kid still pedalled like mad, but when the track rose more steeply, he had enough. He stopped and let me overtake him. As a farewell, he gestured up the track with a fishtailing gesture, said something incomprehensible and turned his bicycle around.
‘Evcharistó – thank you’ was all I managed before the kid hurtled back down the track through the dust cloud the van’s wheels had kicked up.
The track climbed first up, then down again and wound itself around the mountain just above sea level. To my left, the turquoise of the Mediterranean came into view, quite close now, but I was concentrating hard on the potholes and the crumbling verge that was all that stood between me and the rocky shore below. The well-tended olive groves had fallen behind and been replaced by unloved-looking trees, badly maintained terraces, fallen walls, the odd roofless stone hut and the remnants of wooden shelters and lean-tos. Here and there the winter rains had washed out the ruts worn by vehicles and
filled them with grit. I had little confidence in finding Morva or anything much at the end of this track. What if it simply petered out somewhere without the space to turn around? Just as I began to wonder whether it was possible to reverse all the way back to Neo Makriá, the track took a sharp turn and the view opened out into the sun-baked dead end of a narrow valley, not much more than a notch in the mountainside.
The terraced groves of olives that rose up its sides looked sunken and neglected and were profusely overgrown. Among the wild vegetation that had claimed the valley stood a deserted, half-ruined hamlet. There was a church to my right, its open tower without a bell. I could see about ten or twelve houses with their outbuildings, all showing varying degrees of decay. Only two or three were wholly without roofs; the others looked like complete houses while giving a definite impression of desolation. There was no doubt that the village was uninhabited, abandoned, deserted.
Not wholly deserted, though. Just then I heard the unmistakable bragging of a cockerel and, turning in that direction, discovered a thin twirl of smoke rising from the chimney of a low but sprawling farmhouse. It stood on the edge of this ruination, surrounded by terraces that looked marginally less wild than the rest of the place.
Of course, another indication that there was life in the place was the moped, the small Honda motorbike and the little Ford parked at the end of the track. Here it turned into what had once been a cobbled village road, now a ruinous sea of stones that couldn’t be negotiated by any type of vehicle other than a tank. Beside it, a narrow footpath had been trodden through the wild grass and flowers.
Matilda bounced unhappily over the bumpy terrain under the stand of unruly holly oaks, where I left her next to the car. Journey’s end. As I got out, Derringer shot through the door and disappeared at a gallop into the high grass.
For a moment I stood at the start of the ruined cobble-road and looked with a painter’s eye, adjusting my palette. With my back to the cars, I could see no evidence that the industrial revolution had ever happened. There were no telegraph poles, cables or electric lanterns, not even an old radio aerial left on a roof. The houses were built of dust-grey stone, the roofs tiled with terracotta weathered to the palest ochre. The wood of the sheds and outbuildings had bleached to silver like bones in the sun. But that didn’t mean I would have no need of brighter colours on my palette because an astonishing profusion of wild flowers in every shade of yellow, pink, blue and purple drifted through the unchecked growth that covered the ground between the many trees.
A half-hearted call after Derringer produced no results. I could hardly blame him for wanting to escape from what for him had become practically a prison van. I took the goat path towards the house with the smoking chimney. It stood on the far side of the church in its own compound of crumbling walls, towered over by a venerable mulberry and shaded by fig and walnut trees. Nearly all the other trees in sight were olives. As I entered the courtyard, a few chickens scooted into the lee of a wall among piles of new bricks and sacks of cement half-heartedly covered with tarpaulin. The house itself, consisting only of ground and first floor, looked solid and was definitely lived in. Near the front door stood a long wooden table shaded by vines and the fleshy foliage of an enormous fig tree. A multitude of oil and feta tins with their backs to the wall had been planted up with bright herbs and electric geraniums. The open door was nothing but a black rectangle in the strong morning sun.
‘Hello the house!’ Nothing happened; not even the hen pecking crumbs off the table reacted. I stood in the door, letting my eyes adjust to the low light within the building. What I feared most at this point, of course, was a Greek guard dog that would jump out and, in the absence of its owner, consider it his job to thoroughly savage me.
The door led straight into a whitewashed room. Its windows were small – to keep the heat out in summer and in during winter – and its main feature, apart from two spartan sofas and a few bookshelves, was a large black wood burner with ten feet of convoluted stovepipe that disappeared into the wall between a small painting and an oil lamp. A few faded rugs dotted the uneven stone floor. The rest was the type of I’m-a-busy-painter clutter I recognized from home.
The door to the next room was ajar; a faint scratching noise came from there.
‘Hello?’ I gingerly pushed the door open and found myself looking into a small painting studio. I was pretty sure I was in the right place now, though the few examples of work on the walls, mostly watercolour sketches of nature subjects, didn’t look like her work. One wall was entirely taken up by shelves crammed with enough drawing and painting materials to equip an art shop. The scratching sound came from a small brown hen pecking persistently at half a biscuit among some empty mugs on top of a plan chest. A door on the far side led into a kitchen. I went to investigate. It’s what PIs are supposed to do.
It looked as if it had survived intact from the 1930s: a small solid-fuel oven, presumably the source of the smoke I’d seen rising from the chimney, a three-ring hob running on bottled gas and a large stone basin with a cast-iron water pump. I pushed on the handle of the pump; it gave a faint gurgle.
‘In Greece it’s considered polite to ask first.’ Morva’s voice, full of schoolmistress disapproval, made me turn guiltily. She had drawn herself up to her full five foot two and was standing in the door brandishing a billhook. ‘Oh my god, it’s you. It’s you! Chris, what are you doing here?’ We hugged by the sink. ‘I can’t believe you finally got yourself down here. I can’t believe you found me.’
‘Were you lost?’
‘Oh . . . well, you know . . .’ She made a vague gesture with the billhook, which looked old but sharp. ‘It can feel a bit remote sometimes, yes. It isn’t really. Well . . . I still can’t believe you’re here, and just when . . . And you’ve still got the long hair and everything.’
I wasn’t sure what ‘everything’ meant, but apparently I still had it. Morva looked as if she still had everything too, though she had acquired enough lines in her face to prove she’d been busy while hanging on to it. She wore her hair long and a bit wild and had allowed the grey to take over.
I pointed at the billhook she was holding. ‘Were you on your way to a peasant revolt or did you intend to prod me with it?’
‘Oh that.’ She dismissed it with a shrug and leant the murderous-looking object in a corner of the nearest window. ‘You know the kind of thing: speak softly but carry a big stick.’ She took a small long-handled saucepan off a hook above the cooker, spooned coffee and a little sugar into it, then added water from a fire-blackened kettle. ‘So, tell me all. What brought you down here now? What time did you land?’
‘I drove down, through Italy, in an ancient motorhome.’
She set the pot on to the gas stove, opened the valve on the tall red gas cylinder and lit the ring. The gas caught with a low bark. ‘Really? Dan and I did that all those years ago when we first moved down. We broke down in every country on the way.’
‘Is he around?’
‘Sweet Daniel? Ran off with an Australian waitress half his age. Half my age, more importantly, I suppose. Shacked-up Down Under now. Three years ago.’
‘Not so long, then.’
‘I think I’m over it. But that’s how I ended up in this weird corner. Here comes Margarita, my latest acquisition.’
A girl pushed through the door, sideways because of the two enormous jute bags she was carrying. She was just over twenty, I guessed, and had startlingly thick black eyebrows that knitted together in the middle. She heaved the bags, which emitted an earthy root-smell, on to the table and the two women immediately started a conversation in Greek from which I was excluded until Morva made a quick introduction. ‘I just hired Margarita yesterday, from the village down the hill. She’ll cook and has agreed to help around the house, too. Long may it last.’
‘You must be doing well if you can afford a cook.’
‘Ha! On the contrary. I’m practically ruined and need the cook to give me time to earn the mo
ney to pay her. Things are a bit tricky at the moment. I think I leapt before I looked when I bought this place.’ Eyebrows lifted high, wide eyes momentarily staring hard at nothing.
‘It does seem a bit . . . out of the way, I must say. How come you moved here of all places? It’s one hell of a trek if you find you forgot the milk.’
‘It’s one hell of a trek if you remembered it.’ She set the little coffee pot and two tiny cups on to a small tray. ‘Let’s have it outside and give Margarita some space. And then I’ll tell you all about it.’
Outside, the day was hotting up, yet in the dappled shade of the courtyard it seemed everything a refugee from an English winter could hope for. All around us the fresh leaf on the trees and the intense colour of the flowers made me forget winter ever happened.
There was nothing at all unusual in Morva’s tale of middle-aged marital break-up until she said, ‘And then I met a rich Greek-American with a rambling old farmhouse to sell. I’d been getting quite desperate. I just couldn’t find enough work, any work, and I wasn’t selling nearly enough paintings to survive much longer. So I thought I’d run painting classes. I soon found that the kind that pay you a living I just couldn’t run from the place I had in Corfu Town. And then I got talking to this bored-looking guy at a local exhibition in town. Giorgos, except he preferred to be called George. His parents had emigrated to the States; his father had made a lot of money – he didn’t say how – but they still owned this.’ She nodded the back of her head at the house. ‘And he’d come back to see what should be done with it and probably to look for his roots, as they do. Only, of course, everyone else from this village had long moved away, too. No one has lived here for a quarter of a century. The government refused to cough up the money for a real road – not enough households to justify the expense – and without it – well, you saw. The nearest school is too far away and, anyway, there’s practically no water here. I don’t think George had ever been out of New York before. He took one look at the place and found that what his dad had described as an idyll was a ghost village with zero tourist potential. He sold it to me so cheaply that at first I thought it was a joke, but it was all above board. I now own a half-ruined farmhouse and about a hundred neglected olive trees in an otherwise deserted village halfway round a mountain.’