How Greek Is Your Love

by Marjory McGinn

  Angus pulled a face. “Did you get a reg number for the scooter?”

  “No. It’s a crap old thing. Don’t think it had number plates.”

  “If you see him again, get a good description. Take a photo with your mobile. We’ll report it to the police. God only knows what he might have done if that dog hadn’t barked, eh?” Angus dragged his teeth over his bottom lip. “I’ve been hearing things around the village, reports of followers of the far-right party that’s gaining a foothold here because of the crisis, and there’s a few of those thugs down the Mani. Seems to be a favourite haunt in this part of Greece. Well, it’s always been a wild region, that’s its charm, but it’s also a place where cowboys can find easy refuge.”

  “You’re trying to frighten me now. You and Elpida. I bet he was just a bored thug, looking to cause some trouble.”

  “The fact that you’re an expat would wind him up. Watch your step. I don’t need to remind you these are difficult times.”

  “No, you don’t.”

  It was just my luck to decide to settle here during this era of Greek history, when the country was enmeshed in an economic crisis, with spiralling debts, crippling austerity measures and heading into a social upheaval, the progress of which no-one could quite predict.

  I took a plate of leftovers from the fridge, the meatballs I’d made the night before. I tipped half into a bowl.

  Angus glanced at me. “Lunchtime already?” he said, corralling his papers briskly into a rough pile on the table.

  “Not quite. I forgot to mention that the thug threw a rock at that dog and his head’s bleeding. He’s also starving. He’s in the back garden.”

  Angus moaned. “Oh, no, you’ve not brought that mangy critter here. I just hope it’s not the grey one with the clarty fur always hanging about the bins.”

  I nodded. “That’s the one, but I have to feed him at least. The poor guy helped me and I think he might need stitches.”

  Angus sighed. “Whatever! Just don’t bring him into the house. Leonidas won’t care for that.”

  I imagined he wouldn’t. Leonidas was very clean and particular about things, as you’d expect a doctor to be, and his own house next door, Villa Ambelia, was immaculate. Angus had not lost the sense that he was still the landlord of our villa, which is how I’d met Leonidas Papachristou when I first came to Greece the previous year and stayed with Angus – and never left, to be precise. But Leonidas had never acted like any kind of archetypical landlord and was generous and mostly easy-going. Stray dogs might be pushing it, however.

  I went out the back door into the garden and set the bowl down before the dog. He gulped the food. I’d never seen a pile of meatballs disappear that quickly, not mine anyway. I bent down and looked at the head wound. It was still raw and a bit deep. On the other side of his head above the brow I saw the greenish bloated body of a tick. I winced in disgust, wondering how many other ticks and critters he was hosting. It would have been easier to let him out the front gate and leave him to his fate. These street dogs were tough. He’d survive. Then I heard Myrto next door in her yard, raking about, shouting at goats. She had 15 or so going manic in their pens, kicking over buckets, their bells chiming out sweet nonsense. It gave me an idea.

  I set off, with the dog following me. The gate to Myrto’s farm compound was unlocked, the open padlock hooked over a spar in the metal gate. She was still shouting at the goats until she saw me arrive with the dog. I knew that Myrto, with her kind heart and rural acumen, would know exactly what to do with a stray.

  “Shoot it, Bronte!” she said vibrantly after I told her about the incident on the road. Myrto was forthright, that’s why I liked her. She’d spent some years in Australia, where she moved to with her Greek husband before returning to her farm in Marathousa alone after Fotis died in a car crash in Sydney. It had been a difficult marriage, and the second one for Fotis, who had been cunning and profligate, and his son Hector even more so. All this had given her a different spin on life. She was a battler, but was chilled in her outlook, and amusing too.

  “Yep, Bronte, shoot the bugger, and I am the one that does it. We live near the bush in Aussieland and I shoot pesky kangaroos. I can shoot a filthy skilos, no worries,” she said with her charming take on the Aussie ‘dialect’. I had always loved the way she mostly spoke in the present tense, as if everything that had happened, or could, was taking place that minute. It gave life a cracking immediacy.

  “You’re joking, I know. You love animals.”

  “Best thing for this boy, Bronte,” she said, having given the mutt a cursory inspection. I told her a bit more about the creep on the scooter, thinking that would make her more sympathetic.

  “Yep, shooting is good and if I see that malakas who pushes you over, I shoot him as well.” She descended into a long diatribe in Greek, with plenty of colourful oaths. That much of Greek I recognised, at least.

  “Seriously, Myrto, I think I need to take the dog to a vet to get his head wound looked at.”

  Her eyes widened. “Look, he’s okay, my girl. He’s tough. No need for some doctor who charges you rip-off money. The dog goes off on his own a few days and in no time he’s better, back on the roads again.”

  “I’d still like to get him looked at. He’s riddled with ticks, and God knows what else. But I need to wash him at least.”

  She palm-slapped her forehead, hard. “Wash him, panayia mou!” Holy mother! She poked the toe of her welly boot at his flank and pulled a face. “He stinks, that’s true.”

  “We can do it here, with the hose and some soap. Just clean him up a bit so I can get him into Angus’s car and take him to a vet. There’s one just down on the seafront.”

  The dog was looking at us with huge, unbelieving eyes. The kind of look we all have when the day we end up with isn’t exactly what the rosy sunrise promised us. And that was pretty much my day as well now.

  Myrto gave me a strange, sad look. “Okay, Bronte, the dog’s a bit cute but if you’re gagging for a dog companion, I can get you a nice puppy. I know people with pups for sale, not this vromiko, filthy thing. You might as well waltz with a poxy goanna than take this one.”

  I laughed, as I often did at her bizarre Aussie expressions.

  “I can’t have a puppy right now. And I can’t keep this one either, but I’ve heard the local vet works together with an animal rescue centre in Kalamata. Maybe they can rehome him.”

  She pulled a face. Despite her Aussie years, like most rural Greeks she still saw dogs as working creatures, not things to be pampered or rehomed. Myrto would just say that in the crisis people were struggling to keep their homes, never mind dogs looking for new ones.

  “Look, Myrto, let’s get started with the washing. Maybe one bucket of warm water to begin with and then I can hose him.”

  She sighed and finally gave in, picking up a length of rope from a nearby midden heap of disparate objects, the kind you often see on rural farms in Greece. She tied one end of the rope about his neck and the other to an olive tree, but not the same tree her donkey Zeus was tethered to. That would never do because to Myrto there was nothing so precious in the world as Zeus, a proper working donkey with a stout wooden saddle.

  Myrto disappeared into her house and returned with a bucket of warm water, a bar of soap, a big sponge and disposable gloves for me, showing that some of her rural edges at least were bevelled slightly. While I lathered away at the dog, he was compliant, good natured for a stray, or was it just that the meatballs had becalmed him as well as the promise of more?

  His matted hair would have benefitted from a good clip but he looked better already, the fur fluffing out, and he smelt better as well. I washed out the head wound and it started to bleed again, but not too much. The tick had survived though and Myrto eyed it up. She was wearing a casual jacket with lots of pockets that I was sure were full of rural salves and unknown implements. She whipped out a small plastic hook and twisted the tick out of the dog’s head in one deft movement, then
dropped the tick on the ground, swivelling her welly foot over it, hard.

  “Thanks, Myrto.”

  “Don’ thank me, Bronte. This boy will have dozens more, for sure.”

  With that in mind, I was sure she’d refuse when I pleaded for her to keep the dog in her compound just for the night. The vet would now be shut for the afternoon. Angus wouldn’t want the dog and Leonidas wouldn’t either. I was seeing Leonidas in the early evening. He was at his villa for the weekend before returning to Kalamata for his first surgery on Monday morning. All week I had been dreaming of this evening and nothing, not even the scrappy crusader, was going to spoil it.

  Myrto put her hands on her hips and pursed her lips at the dog. “Okay, I keep him, but only because I like you, Bronte. I put him under the house where Zeus sleeps at night but he better not annoy my donkey or there will be megalo, big, trouble.”

  “Thanks. I do appreciate it,” I said, touched by her offer and the fact that letting a stray dog share the same hallowed space as her beloved donkey, named after a Greek god, was no small thing. And neither was our friendship, possibly one of the most unusual in my new Greek life.

  Myrto lived on the first floor of her old stone house, accessed by the front steps. Underneath was an enclosed area, like a ramshackle stable, with a stout metal door with a window in the upper half shielded by a row of metal bars, so that animals could have some air at night in summer. She had a stall for the donkey at one end. The dog would sleep, I imagined, at the other. I planned to come back later with more meatballs, and that would be him sorted for the night. For a scrappy waster, he would be on his best behaviour – I hoped.

  I didn’t have time to mull over this a minute longer and legged it out of Myrto’s farm compound without a backward glance. I needed to shower and get ready for my night out with Leonidas. That was the only kind of hot animal attraction fizzing in my mind at that precise moment!

  Chapter 2

  The heart of the Spartan

  “I’ve missed you this week, Bronte,” said Leonidas, leaning closer into the table, an errant lock of his curly black hair flopping down over his brow, as it often did. It was one of the things that always made me feel crazy with desire when I was with him.

  We were having dinner at our favourite taverna in the small sheltered cove of Kitries, down the coast. The table was right by the water’s edge with a view across the gulf. I felt happy, as I always did when Leonidas was back in the village for the weekend. I was doing most of the talking, about my week in the village, but I didn’t mention the creep on the scooter or the stray dog. That would have spoilt an otherwise perfect night. Leonidas was indulging my chatter, gracious as always.

  “You always have such interesting things to tell me about your time in Marathousa. You make me see village life from a more entertaining angle,” he said smiling, his dark eyes crinkling lightly at the corners. He reached over the table and stroked the back of my hand. I stealthily glanced at my watch. We’d barely ordered our meal and yet already I was calculating how long it would be until we were back in his villa for the night. I’d have been happy to skip dinner and have Leonidas instead. But I was also content to let him talk for a while about his working week in Kalamata, in his slightly formal English, which was one of the things I also found endearing about him.

  The old cliché about absence quickening the heart was true in my experience. Leonidas had a busy surgery in the centre of Kalamata and an apartment nearby, where he stayed during the week. On weekends he habitually came back to Villa Ambelia, his village house. His grandfather had built Villa Anemos first when the family moved down from the mountain village of Platanos, on a nearby peak of the Taygetos, seeking an easier life. He later built the second house next to it, Villa Ambelia, for his elder son Grigoris, Leonidas’s father, when he got married. Ambelia means vineyards and it had been the grandfather’s ambitious plan to have small vineyards behind both houses to produce his own wine. Although olive trees were eventually planted instead, the name had stuck, to honour an old man’s fantasy perhaps.

  Decades later, when Grigoris moved to Kalamata to live and Leonidas started his medical practice there, he took over Villa Ambelia, renovated it and used it as a weekend retreat.

  Angus was renting Villa Anemos when I first came to Greece. When I decided to stay on it was natural for me to live there with him, even though it was an old place by now and earned its name. Anemos is the Greek word for ‘wind’ and during the winter, the raw easterlies from the snow-capped Taygetos peaks would claw through the old terracotta pantiles. During the past winter, Leonidas had the place renovated and it was now a comfortable house, if a little small, but at least I could keep an eye on Angus after his health problems the year before when a heart attack had narrowly been averted by hospital treatment in Athens. It was because of his ill health that he’d first summoned me from Scotland on a few weeks’ leave from my job as a feature writer on The Alba newspaper in Edinburgh. Then a few weeks had grown into a few more.

  Angus had surprised all the McKnight family when he announced at 60 he was taking redundancy from his teaching post to spend a year in Greece. It seemed to my mother Marcella and my sister Shona that he’d lost his mind, going off on a crazy mid-life odyssey, and that he’d return when the money ran out. But he didn’t. He stayed for 10 years and later he and Marcella separated. For that decade, while Angus led his dream life in Greece, I had a thorny relationship with him, and negotiating a long leave from work to help him with his problems had ramped up hostilities. The timing was also bad, with The Alba perishing after a harsh takeover, but there was no-one else to help Angus. Shona had two young kids and a full-time job. But once in Greece, Angus and I had become reconciled.

  The most compelling reason, however, for throwing in my job and settling in Greece was Leonidas.

  “You’re looking suddenly thoughtful, agapi mou,” he said, tapping the back of my hand lightly. I liked the Greek for ‘my love’. It sounded robust when he said it. “I fear, Bronte, I am talking too much.”

  “Not at all. And anyway, I’ve done plenty of talking myself. But I’ve got some news I forgot to mention. I have a new commission. I’ve been asked by a Scottish newspaper to write a weekly column about life in Greece. I’ve even written the first one, to be published quite soon.”

  “That is fantastic, Bronte. I’m proud of you.”

  The column had come out of the blue when a rival paper to The Alba had contacted me to ask if I’d write the weekly piece for its Saturday magazine.

  “So, I assume your first column will be about the crisis,” Leonidas said, finishing the last of a plate of calamari and sipping his wine.

  “Hard to avoid it, really,” I replied. “Sadly, it’s what most people associate with Greece these days.”

  Greece had been in crisis since 2010, with debts of around 300 billion euros. The EU had offered a bailout package of 110 billion euros, but in return, it had forced on the Greek government a raft of stringent austerity measures.

  “I believe you will never run out of things to write about in Greece, especially now,” Leonidas said. “Things are getting worse. There are many new taxes that working people are struggling with. A property tax put on the electricity bill so people cannot avoid paying it. Those who don’t pay have their electricity cut and go into debt to the company. People are becoming angry. Just the other day I heard …” He stopped abruptly and looked at me, pressing his lips together.

  “What did you hear?”

  “Oh, nothing, my love. I won’t talk about it now.”

  “Something serious then?” I said, becoming more intrigued.

  He nodded, twisting his wine glass by the stem. “I will tell you another time. And you may want to write about it one day.”

  “Perhaps,” I said. But I wasn’t planning to focus only on gloomy subjects for the column. I would also chart the frustrations of a foreigner’s life here, the cultural differences, and the funny and banal, weaving in a few village chara
cters. But I imagined that, like most Greeks, Leonidas wouldn’t see the funny side of life here at the moment, the way a foreigner might.

  Leonidas asked for the bill and when it arrived the waiter brought a complementary plate of new-season strawberries with a pyramid of thick yoghurt in the middle drizzled with honey. We ate them, watching the sun shimmying lower behind the opposite peninsula, leaving a golden trail over the water.

  “Did I tell you that my aunt Thekla is moving back to Marathousa, to her village house? She is tired of Athens and the upheaval of the crisis. She thinks it’s not safe there any more.”

  He bit into a strawberry with his perfect white teeth, a trickle of juice staining his lower lip. He licked it off with a flick of his tongue and suddenly I wasn’t interested in his aunt and looked sheepishly at my watch again, but he seemed to have a mind to tell me more.

  “She and her husband Kostas have retired. They had a clothing shop in the city. Very successful and now they are comfortable. He likes the city lifestyle and does not want to leave. Not yet. He fears he will be bored in Marathousa, as they have only ever come back for holidays.”

  “She wants to live there on her own?”

  “She has many friends in Marathousa and some cousins and in-laws and so forth,” he said, waving his arm around to encompass the archetypical extended Greek family that I was beginning to understand the importance of.

  “What will she do?”

  He shrugged. “Whatever women of her age like to do: gossip, embroider, make cheese pies, go to church.”

  I gave him a mocking look. “You don’t have much opinion of older women and the breadth of their interests, I see.”

  “Oh, I respect them, believe me. They are indestructible, like the Parthenon itself, but their lives are run on certain lines. There are rules. You will find out in time.” It sounded like a good-natured warning.

  While Leonidas’s father Grigoris and the family had originated many generations back in Sparta, hence Leonidas’s name, inspired by a great Spartan warrior king, Thekla was from his mother Eleni’s side. I well remembered that this branch of the family was more clannish and tough and came from the area further south called the Deep Mani, where feuds were rife. I wondered if the aunt would be equally troublesome. Surely not, but for some reason the breeze that was starting to funnel its way across the gulf had a colder undertone to it with all this talk of Thekla.