by Sara Alexi
A Stranger in the Village
Sara Alexi
Published by Oneiro Press 2016
Copyright © Sara Alexi 2016
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organisations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental
Also by Sara Alexi
I hope you enjoy AStranger in the Village, book 2 of the Greek Village Series.
I’ve included the first three chapters of A Self Effacing Man at the end, to give you a taste of the next in the series.
Happy reading,
Sara Alexi
Chapter 1
The corner shop in the Greek village
Those present –
Marina, the village shop owner
Stella, who runs the hotel and local eatery
Juliet, an English woman who moved to the village
Frona, an older woman of the village who has lived in both Australia and America
Vasso, who runs the kiosk in the village square
Marina holds court in her corner shop. Stella, Frona and Juliet have all found somewhere to sit.
‘It’s like buying a pig in a sack. We don’t know what we get till we open the sack.’ Marina laughs.
‘I got lucky with my “pig”,’ Frona says, her shapeless black cardigan quivering as she giggles.
‘Thank God I got lucky second time around!’ Stella says, crossing herself three times and kissing her thumbnail as she shifts her slight frame, tucking one leg under her on the wooden chair. She is hemmed in by barrels of rice, lentils, pasta and dried beans, and by the komboloi hanging from a nail on the edge of a shelf, by her head.
‘Ah, but he wasn’t in a sack then, was he, your second pig?’ Marina’s face is red with laughing. ‘He was out in the daylight. You could see all of what you were getting!’ She dabs at the corners of her eyes with a tissue from up her sleeve.
‘My piglet was running around for all to see, so cute then, but I didn’t know he was going to grow to be a boar,’ Juliet says, but the joke does not translate well – it would have sounded so much better in her mother tongue.
But Marina, Stella and Frona howl with laughter anyway, the sound muffled only by the plethoric jumble of goods and produce that lines the walls of Marina’s shop. Fly swats, shepherds’ crooks, balls in plastic string bags and a variety of other items hang from the ceiling. The shelves on the three back walls sag with the weight of jars of honey, tins of dolmades, packets of tights, bottles of chlorine, and countless other things. The counter extends from under the window at the front of the shop, at right angles to anyone coming in through the door, its top overflowing with sweets, cigarette lighters, kolourakia, packets of nuts in colourful wrappers and a shiny set of scales at one end. The door, which is permanently open, leads out to the village square. On the pavement outside there is just enough space for a couple of drinks cabinets and a wire rack of locally grown produce.
At this time of year the sun does not have the intensity it will later in the year, but it is warm enough to lure Juliet out daily. She will step out for something as simple as a bottle of milk and then linger for hours simply because the sun makes everything delightful and the world has transformed from the grey of winter into a wonderful place promising the excitement of summer.
This morning she loitered to admire the yellow flowers blooming along the roadside, and the almond and cherry blossom creating splashes of white and pink in the gardens, announcing the arrival of spring. The whitewashed walls and houses reflected the bright blossoms that are appearing in their gardens. The sudden warmth makes everything happen more slowly: the household chores, the shopping for the evening meal, even the conversations. There is no rushing to get out of the cold, there are no clipped exchanges to limit the minutes spent with frozen fingers away from the fire. Instead she has the luxury of being able to take her time. She has been in the corner shop half an hour already and she only came in for one item. Her chair is beside a barrel of rice. Stella is behind her, near the back shelf, which is loaded with cleaning products.
‘And what are you girls gossiping about?’ Vasso stoops slightly, protective of her lacquered hair, as she steps in through the door, eager to join her friends. The shop is almost in darkness for a moment as she fills the door frame.
‘Pigs in sacks.’ Frona giggles, her eyes bright in the gloom. Her soft old skin pleats all the way up her cheeks as she smiles.
Vasso frowns slightly and looks at Frona. She is sitting under the television, which is permanently on with the sound turned down, and she is separated from Juliet and Stella by a set of low shelves piled high with bars of chocolate and packets of biscuits and crisps, set centrally down the length of the shop.
Marina pulls out empty wrappers from the box of sweets she keeps on the counter for children sent to buy things for their parents.
‘Husbands,’ she clarifies, not even looking up.
‘Ah.’ Vasso leans against the door frame, a content look on her face.
‘We were the lucky ones.’ Frona twists her worn wedding ring around her finger.
‘We were,’ Vasso replies. Her husband died young. Frona’s reached a good age but now she too is alone.
‘Very lucky.’ Stella looks down at her own shiny wedding ring and then gazes past Marina, through the window, to see if she can catch a glimpse of Mitsos over at the kafenio. She never talks of her first husband. It is as if he never existed.
‘But lucky or not I sometimes think that it might have been fun to have had the chance to shop around a bit. You know, try before you buy, to see what the variations were.’ The light in Frona’s eyes turns to a mischievous twinkle; Marina starts to snigger.
‘Did you not sample the goods at all then?’ Marina stifles her laugh, putting the collection of sweet papers into the bin under the counter and dabbing her eyes again.
‘Well, there was this one time, but I was so young I’m not sure if I knew what I was doing. Up under the pines over there.’ Frona nods to the open door, across the square, past Vasso’s kiosk and up past Stella and Mitsos’s house, where the trees on the hill are silhouetted against the deep blue sky. ‘We just had a kiss and a cuddle.’ Her face takes on a dreamy look. ‘He’ll be an old man now, wrinkly and grey.’
‘I wouldn’t have dared.’ Stella looks at Frona as if she will find something new in her features, something she has not seen in her friend before. ‘But then I’m not sure I ever had the opportunity …’
She trails off. Her childhood was not easy, since she is of gypsy stock, and her friends are aware of the struggle she endured. Schooldays were full of bullying, isolation and loneliness, and it was a source of much gossip in the village when she was married to a Greek!
‘Well, I am almost ashamed to say that I tried pretty much the whole shop!’ Juliet interjects and Marina stops laughing for a second to stare at her, then laughs even harder, Vasso joining in.
‘There was this one guy whose surname was Fiddler.’ She translates the words so the point is not missed. ‘Mark Fiddler. We, or rather I, tried to pretend we weren’t a couple but he had this really embarrassing and irritating habit – when he said hello – this was at school, you know, in a corridor, between classes – he would pat me on the shoulder, then his hand would slide down my back and ping! With a pinch and a quick twist of his finger my bra would be undone!’
Frona laughs the hardest, but they all suck back their mirth when a tall, broad-shouldered stranger comes in. There is a tense silence as he asks for a packet of chewing gum in a low, smooth voice, looking just a little nervously around the shop. Stella
stares at her shoes and tries to stop herself giggling. Juliet stares at the man.
‘Thank you,’ Marina says as he places the coins in her hand. The man thanks her in return and smiles, and the smile remains as he glances at each of them before he leaves, ducking through the doorway. As soon as he is gone their laughter bursts out uncontained.
‘Well, he was no pig,’ Marina chuckles, looking after the man, the grey at his temples silver in the sun.
‘Ah, but we all know you did a little trying before the buying, Marina,’ Stella says.
‘When the evidence is nearly two metres tall, I cannot hide it, can I?’ Marina stops gazing after the stranger and turns to look at the framed picture of her son on the wall behind her. It was taken when his son Angelos was just born, and he is cuddling the child. Next to him is Irini, who looks tired in the picture. That was over a year ago, just after the young couple were married. How the time flies!
‘You didn’t ever meet up with his father again, did you?’ Juliet asks.
‘No, he went into the army and his baba moved back to Athens.’ Marina is no longer laughing. ‘You know, I don’t even know his name. I called him Meli, because he was so sweet, and he called me his Melissa, his little honeybee. I knew him for just one night. What can I say?’
The four women become still.
‘I had a love.’
They all turn to look at Vasso.
‘You know, before I married.’
Marina and Stella gasp. Frona smiles.
Thinking back on this time, even after all these years, makes Vasso feel strange - the confusion of trying to understand the unspoken urgency that her girlfriends seemed to develop once they had left school, the odd way the boys she had always regarded as friends suddenly becoming tongue-tied or, worse, cocky and arrogant around that time. Of course she understands what it was all about now, but when she was younger it had been a bit of a mystery until that day she went to the post office. Then she had a very clear insight but it was one that had frightened her and no sooner had she met him than she was pushing him from her memory. It is only since her husband died that she has allowed herself to think of him at all.
‘He was from Saros town too, not from this village.’ Vasso hesitates, not sure whether to smile or not. ‘We had such a passion. He met me in the post office, and we went swimming together and held hands under the water.’ She sighs. ‘The army took him as well. I would have been married around the time he got out.’
‘I never knew that!’ Stella sounds almost hurt that such a secret has been kept from her.
‘Well, it is not something you brag about. My husband may be dead but I still respect him, and there is Thanos. He doesn’t want to know that his mama could have behaved in such a way.’ They all giggle again.
‘But, oh my, he was sweet, and tender. But, unlike with Marina’s man, it never got passionate enough to produce a child. I think we were too scared.’ She turns to Frona. ‘It’s funny to think of them as old men now, isn’t it?’
‘Does he still live in Saros?’
‘I’ve never seen him, so I expect he moved away–’
‘Vasso!’ Marina interrupts her and points through the window. There are three people waiting at the kiosk in the square.
Vasso leaps up and trots out of the door, the silver threads in her black cardigan bright in the sunlight.
‘Who would have thought?’ Frona says when she is gone. ‘Never would I have thought Vasso would have a secret like that! I wonder where he is now? She could do with some company.’
Stella watches Vasso going into the kiosk to serve, looking for signs that tell of her friend’s secret lover, but Vasso is the same as always. Stella’s view is interrupted by another friend coming into the shop, in an acid-green T-shirt dress.
‘Yeia sou, Ellie,’ Stella greets the girl. ‘Are you on your way?’ Ellie works on reception at Stella’s hotel down on the beach.
‘Yes, I go. What’s happening?’ Ellies’s Greek is heavily accented and not grammatically correct.
‘Pigs in sacks,’ Juliet says in English. Ellie’s eyebrows draw together and unwrinkle again.
‘Husbands,’ Marina explains. Her English is as accented as Ellie’s Greek. Ellie glances at her own engagement ring, the stone of which has slipped around her finger. She turns it to face up.
Chapter 2
Cigarette smoke curls up into the high corners of the kafenio. The walls, which were whitewashed many years ago, are yellowed with nicotine. The front corner of this masculine domain looks out over the village square and across the road to Marina’s corner shop, through tall, floor-to-ceiling windows that let the light flood in, making this the perfect vantage point from which to observe the comings and goings in the village. During the day, the circular metal tables nearest the windows are preferred, but in the evenings those at the back, around the pot-bellied stove, are favoured. As summer comes, that will change and customers will take tables and chairs over to the square in the cool of the evening. At night, Theo will chain them all to the telegraph pole on the square’s edge. He used to leave them out but one night some gypsies took the lot. But for now they are inside, the painted wooden chairs neatly tucked under the tables, four to a table, ten tables arranged in rows.
Theo stands with his hands on the counter, his eyes seemingly fixed on the village square. But he doesn’t see the view. From the inside, when the sun is at this angle, it picks up all the smears and handprints on the windows. He picks up a cloth with the intention of giving them a wipe, but then that would mean getting out the stepladder, which is out at the back, and the whole job starts to look too big for the moment and so he puts the cloth down again. The men, his customers, who are also his friends and who were once his school chums, are taking up four of the tables. At the one in the front corner by the two windows, with the best view, are Mitsos, Thanasis and Nicolaos.
‘This damned toothache!’ Nicolaos feels his jaw with one hand. His morning coffee sits untouched.
‘You want an ouzo for that,’ says Thanasis.
‘Too early,’ Nicolaos grumbles.
‘Not to drink, to rub on your gums,’ says Mitsos.
‘I am not a teething baby!’ Nicolaos lifts his head and looks at his coffee, but he does not pick it up.
‘Well, if it works for them why would it not work for you?’ Thanasis takes a sip of his own coffee, noisily sucking the bubbles off the top.
‘Just go to the dentist, it’s not so bad,’ Mitsos says, but his focus is on a bird that has landed on the roof of the kiosk over in the square. He cannot tell what type it is, and as he watches it flaps lazily off and over the terracotta roofs of the houses, climbing higher and higher, until finally it stretches out its wings and begins spiralling down very slowly, gliding on the currents.
‘What are you watching?’ Theo asks, peering up at the sky, following Mitsos’s gaze.
‘I need an ouzo,’ Nicolaos says.
‘Just a bird,’ Mitsos says.
‘One ouzo then.’ The kafenio owner straightens up, using both hands to smooth his hair down the back of his neck. He needs a haircut. It bounces with its own wiriness when he walks, and when the bounces tickle his neck he knows he needs a haircut. He pours the ouzo, fills a bowl with ice and looks around to see if anyone else needs anything.
‘Another coffee,’ Petta says. His chair looks comically small under him. He has broad shoulders, thick wrists and long, muscular legs that dwarf his surroundings. One of his feet jiggles continuously.
‘I’d better go and deliver the letters,’ Cosmo says, but he makes no attempt to move. He picks at the cuff of his shirt where his mama has darned it. The stitching is coarse and untidy. Her eyes are failing. A man should have a wife. His mama is not getting any younger, and it is not good for a man to be on his own. He wonders, as he tries to snap off a loose thread, if he has left it too late. It is not a new thought but one that pesters him daily, like a splinter that won’t work its way out.
‘
I’ll have another coffee too,’ Thanos says. He can see his mama, Vasso, inside the kiosk in the centre of the square, just a moving shadow behind the glass. She is up at dawn most days, tiptoeing around the kitchen so as not to wake him as she boils the water for her coffee on the little gas stove, and by the time she returns at mesimeri he will be in Saros, preparing the taverna for the evening. Most nights he is home long after she has gone to bed, especially in the summer months.
He has come into the kafenio out of frustration. He was sitting at home trying to think up twists on some of the récipes, ways to give his menu something just a little different from last year, in case tourists return and to keep the locals interested. The taverna is on the main strip along the waterfront in Saros; it’s a busy location but he is in competition with a number of other tavernas, most of which are well established. But he is fast gaining a reputation for good service and quality food. Still, it’s important not to get complacent. He was getting frustrated at home, wasn’t able to concentrate, and reasoned that a change of scenery would encourage new thinking; however, since he arrived all thoughts have left his head.
Theo balances the briki on the portable gas stove and lights a match. The smell of sulphur momentarily burns his nostril. He pulls his hand back hastily from the blue flame, blows on the match and puts it on top of a little pile of other used matches. He adds two teaspoons of sugar to the tiny copper pot of water and waits for it to dissolve and the mixture to boil.
‘Water, sugar, patience,’ he mutters to himself. That is the trick to making good Greek coffee: let the sugar really dissolve before adding the dry coffee powder, and that way when it boils the bubbles will glisten, hold the sweetness, soften the coffee granules so there is no grit.
Petta’s and Thanos’s coffee is served in tiny cups, each with a tall glass of water. Two men have come in whilst he has been making it and have seated themselves at the next table.