How Greek Is Your Love

by Marjory McGinn

  So the rescuers set off, with Zeffy leading the way. When Zeffy got to the edge of the ravine and led the group down the narrow path, they feared the worst. Leonidas said he was afraid I had gone over the edge and was lying in the ravine. Adonis had been hopeful that I was sheltering for whatever reason in the infamous cave all the villagers knew about, though few ever made the tricky journey down to it these days. What they found at the cave took them all by surprise. No-one expected to see Dionysos there with a gun.

  Later I discovered that the friend of Dionysos had driven into the village but when he saw the patrol car he tried to bolt. Some of the villagers tipped off the waiting police officer and he went in hot pursuit down the coast road and managed to run him off the road into an olive grove. The friend was brought back to the village and interviewed. Several witnesses later identified him as a troublemaker from the same village as Dionysos.

  After I gave my statement, the two creeps were taken to Kalamata police station, where Dionysos was charged with abduction and the other man with lesser offences. With the statements from Angus and me, and several other locals, Derek was also to be interviewed, as the trio were thought to be involved in a slew of other misdemeanours.

  “I always knew Derek was a bad seed,” said Angus. “He knew what that pair were cooking up and was probably goading them.”

  Angus was even more convinced of that fact when I revealed Dionysos had implied that Derek had showed him copies of my columns, particularly the one where I’d mentioned the far right and the EPE.

  “Well, I can see exactly now what transpired. I never could understand why Dionysos had picked on you,” said Angus. “It worried me that it could be a sexual thing. That he might corner you one day – evil bloody numpty. But now I see what was going on. It was Derek who was feeding Dionysos a lot of hateful rhetoric about your newspaper articles. Derek, as I’ve said, is always looking at UK news online but he must have had friends in Scotland sending him newspaper clippings related to Greece, or scanning in items. Derek would have translated the columns for Dionysos and wound him up. So that’s how you were painted as the enemy of Greece – according to their cracked polemics. We probably won’t be seeing Derek for a while.”

  Leonidas looked slightly confused.

  “Angus, I can see how sick people like Dionysos will follow the mad beliefs of the far right, believing foreigners and migrants are enemies, but I cannot understand Derek, when he is a foreigner himself, how he could support these people.”

  “Derek was obviously a twisted individual when he was living in the UK, and very right-wing, and he’s just continued his beliefs here. He probably doesn’t see himself as a foreigner here.”

  “Then he is delusional, I am afraid,” said Leonidas, shaking his head. “And dangerous.”

  “People don’t change just because they’ve moved to sunny Greece, Leo. If I may quote your great poet Konstantinos Kavafis in The City: ‘As here in this small strip you spoilt your life, the whole earth felt your squanderings’.”

  “Well said, my friend,” said Leonidas, impressed with Angus’s scholarly bearing. “Some people seem to bring all their old prejudices with them to their new life in Greece.”

  And he was right.

  In the following days, Leonidas and I talked a lot about my kidnapping ordeal, and agreed that things would be better, and safer perhaps, if we spent more time together at Villa Ambelia, at least another evening in the week. Moving to Kalamata was not an option for me. Despite everything, I liked village life, and I needed to keep an eye on Angus. But in my heart, I wondered if we’d just be scuppered by the geography again, and our timetables.

  We rarely ever mentioned Phaedra and sought to put the whole thing behind us, but one day he innocently dropped her name into a conversation. He noticed that I flinched.

  “All right, Bronte, I see you still don’t believe that Phaedra won’t suddenly appear again in Kalamata. You still don’t have complete trust, do you?” he said, tipping his head to the side, trying to get the measure of my mood. After everything that had happened, and the fact Leonidas and I were again as close as we could be, Phaedra remained like a phantom between us.

  “All right then,” he said, in slight exasperation. “I will tell you something about Phaedra that I promised not to tell anyone. But now I see I must.”

  We were sitting on the balcony of his villa, sipping wine. It had been a hot day but an Ionian wind was now playing with the gulf, teasing the water into rows of white crests. An owl was hooting in the nearby olive groves. Too nice an evening to hear an awkward confession about Phaedra perhaps. But he had all my attention.

  “Go on,” I said, keenly.

  “Phaedra met me in Kalamata the day Angus took his picture. As I told you at the Easter lunch, she said she had a personal problem to discuss with someone she trusted. The truth is she doesn’t want to come back to Greece, as you imagined, and she doesn’t want me back either,” he said, with a wry smile. “She has met someone in England, not Greek but an Englishman, and she says she loves him.” He stopped a moment to gauge my reaction. I deadpanned it but I hadn’t seen that coming. Busy old Tooth Fairy then, not just content to mine molars.

  “Phaedra is worried her family won’t approve. Her father is very strict, very traditional. She is afraid when he finds out he will be angry. They are very close, and he always wanted her to marry a Greek from this region.”

  “Like you,” I interjected.

  “That had been the plan once, yes,” he said, with a flicker of impatience in his eyes. “But, can I say, she didn’t want me to tell anyone about this new relationship, not even you. She is very conflicted.”

  I shrugged, a good Greek one, a gold-medal one: arms out, shoulders to ears. “I don’t get it, Leo. She’s living in England. Her choice. It’s inevitable an attractive woman like Phaedra would meet a local rather than a Greek.”

  “Okay, it’s easy to see it that way, but she is worried that she will offend her family.”

  Offend her family? Dear Lord! I wondered then that if most of Leonidas’s family, and not just Thekla, knew about us, they too might be greatly offended if we became more serious. I had never met any of them. I don’t believe I’d even come close. Angus had once assured me that perhaps Leonidas didn’t want to do that too soon, that he wouldn’t want to scare me away, especially if the rest of his family were anything like Thekla. But now Leo’s explanation had opened up a fresh seam of doubts for me.

  “So, what’s Phaedra going to do?” I asked.

  “If she really loves this man she will have to go against her family and marry him.”

  “Is that what you told her?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good for her then, if she does,” I said, wondering what kind of woman needs the advice of her former partner about who to fall in love with. She couldn’t figure all that out without Leonidas?

  “Thanks for telling me this – finally. I just wish you’d told me the truth before. It would have made things easier, don’t you think?”

  “Yes, perhaps, but a promise is a promise.”

  “But can’t you agree it all looked secretive, suspicious. It looked like she wanted to come back to Greece, to her old life.”

  “No, Bronte it was your assumption only, and that she wanted to restart the relationship. I tried to sway you from that idea but I remember well you were very stubborn and walked out of the villa, saying you wanted a break.”

  “I did assume that was Phaedra’s aim, it’s true, but it was in the absence of the whole truth. In the end, surely it’s always easier to be completely honest,” I said, a bit too primly.

  “But I thought you would trust me. Trust that Phaedra and I meeting up was not something that affected you, or us. But I misjudged things, I admit.”

  Perhaps the lack of transparency had been a little bit of Greek machismo surfacing, I thought. A man not feeling he’s required to properly explain his actions. The woman having to blindly trust him. But I was g
lad to know my own instincts had been right. I always sensed there was a lot more to the Phaedra business than I’d been told.

  I think I would have been mad not to see that Leonidas and I faced a few storms ahead, no matter how much we loved each other. This business with Phaedra was just another cultural thing I didn’t seem to understand; the peculiar hold that family members and former lovers can have over Greeks when it seems illogical or clannish to outsiders. I also didn’t understand this extreme loyalty of the Greeks that to me seemed corrosive when you were not in on the whole issue. More worryingly, had Leonidas not trusted me with this top-secret Phaedra information? But in the end, I had to let it go, or there was no future here for us.

  “You look worried, Bronte.”

  “No, I’m just thinking.”

  “So that’s what thinking looks like,” he said, impishly, trying to ease the tension. “Look, apapi mou, sometimes I admit I am so absorbed in my own work and what’s going on in Greece that I forget how you must feel confused about the way we do things here.”

  “I am, agapi mou,” I said, in mock seriousness. About time he flagged that up, I thought. Then I changed the subject, though it was no less thorny.

  “Have you heard anything from Angelos about the affair with Eve? She hasn’t called for a while.”

  I had expected her to contact me after she heard about the Dionysos business. Everyone in the village knew and Angelos would have told her, surely.

  Leonidas blew air out between his shapely lips. “Don’t let us talk about them. I will get mad! I have heard they have been seeing each other somewhere outside of the village. You know, I think she takes him sometimes to Vathia. She rents a tower there, is that right?”

  “Yes, that’s where Angus and I found her after she went missing.” That little minx! The love tower – how appropriate. I had seriously hoped Eve was winding things down. Would I have to issue another threat?

  To use one of Angus’s favourite folky sayings: Might as well dig a well beside a river.

  On Saturday morning a week later, as we finished breakfast, Leonidas took a call on his personal mobile. He had a short conversation in Greek, in which I definitely heard the word skorpios, scorpion, several times. I was alert. He hung up.

  “I hope you don’t mind, Bronte, but Thekla is coming over to the house right now. She says she’s been bitten by a scorpion in her garden, so I better see to her. She has a thing about scorpions.” He smiled thinly.

  I hadn’t seen Thekla for a while and I had forgotten to ask Angus how the scorpion plan had been going, the one he hatched with a Greek friend to hide a slew of the critters around Thekla’s dry stone walls. Obviously, it had worked – but the scorpions were supposed to have been dead!

  When Thekla arrived, Leonidas ushered her into his library on the ground floor, where he sometimes saw patients. When he finished, Thekla came out looking pale and lemon-lipped, her big hair more limp than I’d ever seen it. Her arm was a bit swollen and she had a large plaster over the bite. Leonidas offered her coffee. She pulled a face and plodded off back to her villa.

  “Where was the scorpion?” I asked, feigning surprise.

  “In one of her garden walls. Apparently, there’s been a plague of them.”

  I was ashamed to admit I felt no remorse for Thekla. I was just keen to talk to Angus about the scorpion attack but had to wait until later when he came back from another jaunt to Kalamata. In any case, I was preoccupied with the evening that lay ahead. Leonidas was taking me out for a romantic sunset dinner at the Irini taverna, our favourite place on the coast, as a way to cheer me up after the recent drama with Dionysos and also to finally make amends, I thought, for the Phaedra business.

  It was late in the afternoon when I slipped back to Villa Anemos and found Angus in a jovial mood, sitting as usual on the back balcony, drinking beer.

  “I saw Thekla today. She had a nip from one of those pesky scorpions.”

  “Yes, I heard about it,” he said, his eyes lighting up with mirth. “It was nothing really.”

  “But you were supposed to use dead scorpions!”

  He laughed wildly, enjoying Thekla’s mayhem, and I admit it was blackly amusing.

  “My friend used the dead scorpions. After he sprinkled them around, he showed Thekla what he’d ‘found’. She went doolally, of course, saying he had to hunt them all down and kill them, spray the wall, bring in the Greek National Guard, that kind of thing. But anyway, one of them mustn’t have been dead, or else he didn’t banjo it hard enough. And as it happens, I was in the kafeneio this morning before I went to Kalamata and in walked Thekla with a plaster over her bite. She couldn’t wait to tell Elpida the whole story, very loudly. The place was hoaching, mostly with old guys, playing their backgammon and drinking ouzo. She had a right old moan about life in the village and why she thinks it’s not such a good plan to live here now when she has a lovely apartment in Athens: no scorpions, no power cuts, no water cuts, no foreigners.”

  He paused to gauge my reaction. I tried to be sensible but, in the end, I punched the air with my fist.

  “Then she said, ‘And in Athens there are no crazy men with guns kidnapping women. This village isn’t safe for us any more’. One of the old boys piped up and said, ‘Don’t worry, Kiria Thekla, no-one will bother to abduct you now’. A few other guys had a right old laugh over that, but Thekla didn’t see the joke, naturally.”

  “I can well imagine,” I said, appreciating this rural tableau. “So, is that it? She’s really leaving?”

  “Let’s hope so anyway, or else we’ll have to organise another scorpion infestation.”

  I felt relieved. While Thekla seemed like a harmless old crone on the surface I knew she didn’t have my best interests at heart, after the Phaedra incident. It was a piece of mischief. But I couldn’t help but smile, wondering what she’d say if she knew the Tooth Fairy was in love with an English xenos. Brilliant!

  Chapter 26

  Saints march in

  We were supposed to be heading off well before sunset to the Irini taverna to watch the sun sliding down in spectacular fashion behind the opposite peninsula. But before we drove to the coast, Leonidas said he had a whim to satisfy first and wanted to park the car by the plateia and walk up the back of the village to the small chapel of Saint Konstantina to light a candle. Ordinarily I’d have loved the spontaneity of this and the fact he said he also wanted to give thanks for me surviving my kidnapping ordeal, even if, ironically, it had happened not far from the chapel. I felt overdressed for a village hike. I’d decided to wear again the lovely dress Eve had given me and high heels. Leo was smartly dressed in a white shirt and black trousers, carrying a small backpack.

  “What’s the backpack for?” I asked, as I wobbled my way up the steep path at the back of the village onto the track leading to the chapel. It would be a miracle if I didn’t fall and twist an ankle, which is why at all times a woman should only walk on the wild side accompanied by a doctor.

  “You’ll see,” he said.

  As we trudged up the path, a Greek woman dressed in black came hurrying towards us with a cheery “Kalispera”, good evening. Leo exchanged a few words with her and then she was gone in the direction of the village.

  “You should have warned me to wear some sensible walking shoes, Leo,” I said, as we neared the top.

  “Sorry, apapi mou, I forgot. Nearly there, but I assure you it will be worth it. Look at the sunset already.”

  The sun was slipping down behind the hills on the Messinian peninsula. No matter that we’d probably miss watching the sunset now from our taverna table. But it was spectacular enough already, the sky a riot of purple and pink behind the long grey landmass.

  The chapel was ablaze with candlelight when we reached it, a golden glow beaming from each of its small windows. Leonidas pushed open the door and ushered me inside. I briefly shielded my eyes with one hand; it was as if the chapel was on fire. Many dozens of candles stood tall in the sandboxes and on sh
elves in front of icons. And the flowers! There were dozens of fresh flowers around the church in tall glass vases.

  “How beautiful, Leo. Is this a special saint’s day today?” I asked him.

  “Every day is a saint’s day somewhere in Greece, but not for Saint Konstantina, not today,” he said, smiling.

  “Is there a service of some sort then?”

  “Something else. You’ll see.”

  I felt excited by the prospect of ‘something else’. The biggest icon was dedicated to Saint Konstantina, in front of which candles burned, but there were many other icons as well – a celestial line-up of saints, their golden halos also reflecting the candlelight. All my senses were assaulted: the rich primary colours, the aroma of flowers, and incense, its pungent smoke wafting from small silver burners perched on window sills. It was ravishing.

  “I’ve never seen anything like this.”

  “I know,” said Leonidas with a grin. He put down his backpack and walked around the chapel beside me as I admired everything.

  “Who did all this?”

  “The village women come up here and do these things for special days.”

  So it was a special day. Leonidas was being particularly secretive.

  “We must be the first here then,” I said, thinking we should sit down and wait for the other villagers.