How Greek Is Your Love

by Marjory McGinn

  I interrupted him. “Myrto told me she’s got a scorpion phobia.” I told him the story about Thekla and the olive harvest and how she went crazy when a scorpion fell from a tree onto her head. Angus laughed merrily.

  “We’re on the right track then. So, here’s the plan. Panayiotis has another Greek friend, whose house he’s helping to renovate, and it’s got plenty of scorpions – in the garden, and the house, big beige ones – so Panayiotis is going to transfer a few across to Thekla’s place. She’ll go doolally. Maybe it’ll persuade her to go back to Athens.”

  “You don’t want to kill her though, surely.”

  “She won’t die, even if she got bitten. In Greece it’s usually no worse than a wasp sting, but with her, the fear is all up here,” he said, tapping his head.

  “How will this friend catch the live scorpions?”

  “That’s it, you see, they won’t be alive. Panayiotis will kill the ones he finds and he’ll bring them over to Thekla’s house concealed in a box or something and kind of plant them in the walls and pretend he’s killed them there. And he’ll bring Thekla out and show her. Dead scorpions everywhere!” Angus was cackling now.

  “Is this what you sit and dream up with your friends in Kalamata? How to frighten old Greek women?”

  “You’re not going soft on her now?”

  “Not at all,” I muttered, a vision in my head of Thekla slinking into the Sunday lunch with Phaedra still fresh in my mind.

  “Okay then. I’ll give Panayiotis the signal to start gathering the little blighters. Yes?”

  I found the idea amusing, and troubling at the same time.

  “Okay, go for it! Dead scorpions, how bad could that be? But don’t kill her, for God’s sake. She doesn’t deserve that. She’s not the psychopath Rose West.”

  Not yet. But for me, the main problem with Thekla was that she confirmed what I already knew about Leonidas’s family, that on the mother’s side, whose forbears came from the Deep Mani, there had been a devious family member implicated in some of the worst betrayals of allied soldiers who escaped down the Mani after the Battle of Kalamata, when the Germans put a bounty on their heads. It showed there was bad blood in his family – and Thekla was up there with the worst of them.

  “And don’t give her a heart attack either,” I added. “Leonidas won’t thank me for that and just when things are beginning to thaw – kind of,” I said, glancing at the red roses on the table.

  “So, you’ve made up. Good, good,” he said, skulling a lot more red wine.

  “I don’t know if you can call it that – yet. It’s me really, still festering about that damned lunch. It’ll pass but there’s another problem brewing as well. He’s not well pleased that Eve has been seen out and about with Angelos. My fault because I brought her to the lunch.”

  “More than out and about, Bronte. I saw the way Eve looked at him that Sunday lunch. Po, po, po!” he said, in the Greek manner, waving his arm around. “If lust had legs, hers were doing the London Marathon.”

  I laughed, wishing I’d seen that for myself, but I’d been too busy chasing Zeffy around the garden and arguing with Leonidas upstairs.

  “So, I take it you’re not going back to Scotland?” he asked.

  “I don’t think I ever said I was. It was your suggestion. I don’t know if I could now anyway. I’ve burnt all my bridges.”

  “Great. They were probably old shoogly bridges anyway. Better off burning!”

  Why wasn’t Angus this crazy and diverting when I was young? It would have made life more interesting in reserved Stirling, where we lived. There were so many times, living with Angus in Greece, that I doubted I really knew him properly when I was growing up. He was so different now to the way he’d once been as a teacher and family man. Occasionally he seemed like a stranger, an entertaining one mostly, and sometimes he actually scared me with his reckless spin on life.

  We had spent a fair bit of time together when I was young. In my teens Angus used to take me hill walking in Scotland, up the baldy hills he missed so much, and we’d had great times, hiking about in our waterproofs, sometimes having to stay over in bothies, old sheds set up to shelter ramblers in stormy weather. Maybe it was me who hadn’t tried hard enough to see what constituted my own father and what an interesting character he always was. Now I was getting the measure of him. For him at least, Greece had been an epiphany, to use a Greek word, and had changed his life.

  “I admire you for coming here and assimilating as well as you have, Angus. I know now how hard that must have been,” I said.

  “You know, what would help you is to learn the language properly. The council has started up free classes again and there’s a teacher coming to the school down on the coast road a couple of times a week. I think if you could talk to Greeks more, really integrate, you’d be less overwhelmed by the culture.”

  “You’re probably right. I’ll think about it. But if a really top gig were to come up in Scotland in journalism, I suppose it might be hard not to consider it, shoogly bridges or not.”

  “You’re kidding, right?”

  “Yeah, of course,” I said, winking at him.

  Chapter 22

  Elpida goes large

  On Sunday morning, Leonidas decided he wanted to make the church service in Marathousa by 9am for the last hour and for me to go with him. He’d never taken me to the ordinary Sunday service before, unless I particularly asked to go, thinking that perhaps I would find it too tedious, as other foreigners often did. However, occasionally I liked to go to church, as it was a rare chance to see Greeks in their own private world, engaging in rituals that were timeless, unchanged in over 500 years.

  I guessed it was another gesture designed to seal our warm reconciliation of the previous night. We’d gone out to dinner as he’d planned, talked a lot, drank a bit and retired early to Villa Ambelia to finally forget the Easter fiasco, which would simply have to be filed under ‘things I didn’t understand about Greek life and Greek men – but would one day’.

  When he parked the car near the plateia, the sound of the chanting in the church of the Anastasi was fanning out over the whole village through the loudspeaker pinned to the front wall. I liked to think it was the cheeky Orthodox way of getting sleepy heads out of their beds on Sunday morning.

  In church, Leonidas sat on the right, in the men’s section, where I was surprised to see Angus, already seated. Angus was generally not an early riser on Sunday but then I realised this was not just an ordinary service but a memorial service as well for a villager who had died 40 days previously. There was a table set before the iconostasis with vases of flowers and a black and white photo of a severe-looking old man. I sat on the left with the other women.

  After all these months, and the week of Easter services, I was no closer to grasping what went on in the church but I enjoyed the theatricality of it, the chanting, the incense. There was something here to engage all the senses at once. Several times I glanced over at Leonidas. He looked solemn and it was hard to imagine that an hour earlier we had been rolling about in his bed.

  My mind was sobered by a glance at Thekla, sitting on one of the high-backed wooden chairs along the wall beside some of the other village matrons. She caught my look and gave me an unblinking stare. I wondered what infamy she was plotting against me now. Could it rival a slew of scorpions? The thought of it made me smile to the point where it threatened to become a chortle, the nervous expression of having to be serious in church when the mind is jumpy.

  Leonidas glanced over and caught my moment of levity, giving me a curious look, then a wink. I looked away and fixed my mind on the young priest, someone new, with a neat black knot of hair above the nape of his neck. He was striding with agile steps in and out of the sanctuary at regular intervals, meaning there was much standing up and sitting down by the congregation. It was making me sleepy, until Myrto arrived with Angelos. She sat beside me and squeezed my arm, giving me a broad smile. I liked Myrto a lot. She was consider
ed slightly eccentric by the other Greeks, only because of her decision to farm alone and her years spent in Australia. That had given her a certain wisdom and broadness of vision that perhaps the others lacked.

  Angelos sat next to Leonidas and together they looked like handsome brothers. At least Angelos hadn’t brought Eve. Unconsciously, I turned and looked behind me just to make sure she wasn’t dawdling in, over-dressed in a glamorous retro outfit. But she was nowhere to be seen.

  After the service we trooped to the kafeneio for coffee, as was often the custom, particularly after a memorial service. The family of the deceased and friends congregated around several tables in the shade of the tall plane tree. Leonidas, Thekla, Myrto, Angelos, Angus and I sat at two tables further towards the edge of the plateia.

  Elpida had briefly visited the church to light a candle and kiss the icons by the door. She was still wearing a black dress and a gold cross around her neck. She looked elegant in her own way: her hair more brushed and a tiny smear of lipstick. Today there was no time for her usual chat. Coffee was ordered but before she left our table, we saw a few men walk in off the road and head for a table further back in the plateia.

  I froze when I saw that one of the two Greek men was Dionysos the creep. The third man seemed to be Derek the expat. I bent over the table towards Angus and identified Dionysos. Now he knew what the creep looked like. I then whispered the same in Leonidas’s ear.

  “Really?” he said, turning his head to see for himself.

  We watched the men sitting down, talking loudly, cockily. Dionysos looked pointedly in our direction and tried to stare me out. I felt Leonidas bristle. Elpida left us and walked quickly towards the newcomers. She flew into a loud tirade in Greek, which caused everyone to stop what they were doing and listen. The group of men tried to ignore her, so she started shouting and pointing to the road. Perhaps for the benefit of the other few expats present, or for ours, I don’t know, she ended the tirade in English: “You can leave my kafeneio now, we don’t serve fascists in this village. Go!”

  Elpida’s outburst earned a few gasps from the other church party but there were a few mutterings of approval, it seemed, when the interlopers got up. With surly looks, the men slouched slowly back towards the road. When they were nearly level with us, Leonidas got up. He looked angry and I feared for what was going to happen. Angus shot me a warning look. Thekla was tutting.

  Leonidas approached Dionysos and had a sharp exchange with him, which was dignified but left no-one in doubt he was not impressed with the man or his band of brethren.

  The expat Derek looked scruffy in old jeans and dirty T-shirt. “This is ridiculous,” he said loudly, looking towards our table, and Angus in particular, as if appealing for someone to back him up.

  “Don’t look at me, Derek. I don’t like fascists either,” Angus said loudly.

  As they left, Dionysos strafed us all with a toxic stare, me especially. I was glad the men had been challenged. Now these people were exposed, but a knob of anxiety sat in my stomach.

  Leonidas returned to the table and sat down. Angus patted him on the back. “Thank you, Leo.”

  “What did you say to Dionysos?” I asked him.

  “I told him the village doesn’t welcome supporters of far-right parties, and not to come back. And that I don’t welcome him harassing you, or anyone else in the village. If this continues, I told him the police will become involved. I doubt Dionysos took much notice though. These people have no shame. And worst of all, there seems to be an Englishman involved with them. I don’t know what he hopes to gain from that and from antagonising people in the village.”

  “Most of the expats here don’t like Derek much either. I’ll be keeping an eye on him, don’t worry,” said Angus.

  Elpida brought our coffees, and glasses of ouzo, on the house. But it was we who owed her much more for firing a salvo at the sinister trio. I wondered then who the other Greek was. Someone else from Glika Nera?

  “I won’t have these people in my kafeneio. I will tell everyone in the village to throw them out of their shops, and have nothing to do with them,” she said.

  “Bravo, Elpida,” said Angus.

  We stayed a while, and the ouzo was particularly welcome after the heated exchange. I noticed that Angelos was quiet and Leonidas too was looking thoughtful. It wouldn’t be long until I found out why. Thekla and Myrto got up to spend time with some of their friends at the other tables, while Angus wandered over to a group of men inside, watching the TV, to have a few more drinks, I didn’t doubt.

  Leonidas, Angelos and I strolled back to Leo’s car parked along the road. Leonidas and Angelos were talking all the way but as we reached Leo’s four-wheel drive, the chat became heated. Then they seemed to be arguing. I heard the word ‘Eve’ several times, blipped out like Morse code, and Angelos stormed off towards his parked truck to drive back to the farm compound.

  Leonidas drove home in silence. So, a tranquil morning at church then. I thanked him though for confronting Dionysos.

  “I had to do that, agapi mou. I won’t have Dionysos threaten you again, or your dog.” Then he said nothing more until we were back at the villa.

  “Are you going to tell me what all that was about with Angelos?”

  He took off his jacket and put it neatly over a chair and sat down on the sofa, running a hand firmly through his hair.

  “I am sorry you had to see that argument. I let my temper get the better of me. The problem is, Bronte, that I hear from some villagers – who, let us be honest, like to gossip – that my nephew is still seeing that woman Eve. They don’t try to hide it. So I challenged him about it and it turns out they are becoming more serious. They are lovers now, I think. This will not help his life at all.”

  Oh, Eve! What was she doing?

  “Leo, it’s just a phase he’s going through. I don’t think they’ve actually …. not yet.”

  “Oh, and you can know that?” he said, with an arch look.

  “I speak to her a lot now. She’s never said anything like that. She has to go back to London soon, anyway. Just be patient.”

  He looked exasperated and tugged on his bottom lip with his teeth. “I know you must be thinking, what is this to me? I’m not his father but I promised my brother Mihalis that I would help Angelos, and you know how he was drifting before, because of the crisis. Buying some of Myrto’s land and giving Angelos the task of running a small olive oil operation with Myrto was supposed to give him something to do, and to learn. It won’t be forever. One day, he’ll get a real job. He’s a smart boy, but this …. this thing with your friend is not going to help him, especially with people talking about it.”

  “Who is talking?” I asked, as Thekla popped unbidden into my mind.

  “It doesn’t matter who told me – a few villagers who know our family well – but in the end everyone in the village will know. The trees have ears, as I tell you often,” he said, with a wry smile. “Can you talk to your friend,” he said emphasising ‘friend’, reminding me that this was my fault. I winced. “She might listen to you. I can’t get Angelos to be sensible. He’s infatuated with her and wants me to mind my own business.”

  “Does his father know about it?”

  “No, not yet, I’m sure. But he will go mad if he does. Mihalis has his own troubles in the crisis. He’s an accountant but with all the new taxes that are levied and the fact everyone must file a proper tax return now, his work has become more complicated. You know – Greece and bureaucracy. My brother is working day and night. He’s very stressed. He doesn’t need this too.”

  I admired Leo’s concern for his family, but in the great scheme of things I couldn’t see Angelos’s love affair as a major drama.

  “Leo, your nephew is having a moment of madness, that’s all. Didn’t you when you were young?” I said, trying to smooth it all down with some feminine logic.

  I couldn’t imagine that Leonidas, with his good looks and his prospects, would have escaped the attention
of some dangerous women in his youth. He shrugged my comment away and went to the kitchen to make coffee, or maybe just to calm his mood down. In the months I’d known him I’d never seen him as angry as he’d been that day. I felt sympathy for the issue he’d raised, yet I was also exasperated. We’d just gone from being more or less reconciled over the weekend to being thorny with each other again.

  I followed him into the kitchen, where he was leaning against the cupboards, staring out the window. He looked miserable and I felt sorry for him, thinking about what Angelos had told me: about Leo’s patient who’d committed suicide. These weren’t the best of times, clearly.

  I squeezed his hand. “Thanks anyway for what you said to Dionysos in the kafeneio. I appreciate it.”

  “In the end it probably won’t make a lot of difference. These people don’t care what anyone thinks. In fact, it might make him more vindictive. But we have to stand united in the village against these thugs. They are trying to win support all over Greece. I fear we will head back to the 60s and 70s and the era of the junta.”

  I’d heard Angus mention this fact, no doubt something that his café cronies in Kalamata mused over constantly, ramping up political gloom between them. However, I didn’t think it was something that Leonidas would fear.

  “About Eve, Leo. Don’t worry. She is behaving like a giddy teenager. She’ll snap out of it. But I will talk to her.”

  “Good. Thank you, Bronte. I have too many other things to worry about these days.” He didn’t have to say more, I saw the anguish in his lovely dark eyes.

  “I do understand. And everything will be fine, I promise,” I said, stroking his cheek.

  He kissed me sweetly on the forehead, like you might a misguided child, then he went to the bedroom to change out of his Sunday clothes.

  Chapter 23

  Girls allowed

  “Darling, I think I’m in love!” trilled Eve.

  Shit, shit, shit, no!