Other less prominent councillors of the village sat nearby, listening to the verbiage and respectfully nodding their heads, like ducks feeding in the lake.
The old retired men representing the powerful hegemony of the village elders sat at the corner tables, playing cards for the right to take the pot, a few holey coins, and the next round of brandy. There were two men playing backgammon for the stake of a sugar-coated shortbread.
These men were widowers following the death of their wives after giving birth or from sickness or old age. They said very little to one another other than to complain that the dice had favoured their opponent in the last winning game. Fate had cast the shadow of death in their lives, and they were lonely.
Andreas went directly to the prominent table and asked to join them.
‘Young man, must we suffer! What do you want here? Take a breath, go home, and enjoy two weeks’ leave,’ directed Haralambos.
Andreas’s answer was direct and emotional. ‘I refuse to go home before one of you elders explains to me why our village has changed so dramatically under cover of darkness! I am anxious to learn what is happening to our peace here in the village.’
Garoutas replied, ‘You are too young to understand and too old to ignore. The change in our peace has not affected just our village. We are under siege from the north, and the country is in danger of occupation yet again. If you must be satisfied, I strongly advise that you take the reading material behind the counter secreted by Parades. Return it after you have absorbed the news to date. Please go away and torture yourself with knowledge.’
Andreas said nothing to him. Armed with their authority, he marched over to the counter. He demanded that Parades hand over the reading material referred to by Garoutas.
Parades spoke over Andreas and said to Garoutas, ‘I thought we had agreed that the youth was not to read the material left behind by Mavros. Is this an exception to that instruction?’
Everyone at the table nodded.
Parades reached behind the counter. Beneath a dusty hand-made quilt covering the contents of the secret knowledge, a stack of newspapers was exposed, and this was handed to Andreas without exception.
Andreas bundled the papers under his right arm and left. He did not stop to look at the papers. It was now lunchtime. He sped home with his heavy load.
Andreas encountered a tired Aspros, who wanted to know why his friend was not at school. He then asked what Andreas was carrying.
For the first time in Andreas’s life, Aspros was not important. Andreas said little more to him as he brushed his attempts to converse aside.
He wanted Andreas to join him at his home for a meal of broad bean soup peppered with vegetables and complemented with freshly made bread and olive spread, a meal Andreas ate with relish.
Andreas rejected his invitation and went directly home. Fortunately, there was no familiar soul at home to see what Andreas had brought into the house. The family was out, attending to their rural duties in the fields. Andreas hastily went to his bedroom.
Beneath the veranda and sitting room of the house was an under-room made specifically to keep safe the chickens and ducks at night. Every morning, the fowls were released into the front yard of the home. In the far corner were six wooden barrels of wine made by Andreas’s father from their yearly crop of grapes fermenting in the century-old caskets.
Andreas sat on the cane chair next to his small bed with its straw mattress. He placed his pillow, filled with straw and chicken feathers, behind his back on the chair in anticipation of the reading he was about to commence.
His bedroom was the smallest and the darkest. To illuminate the darkness, he lit the thick white candle left over from the last church service.
As a starting point, he identified the oldest newspaper and then arranged the balance of the papers in chronological order.
When that had been achieved, there were almost fifty weekly newspapers placed in careful order, commencing with the first week of March 1911. The print in some was beginning to fade. The last paper referred to the period ending the last week, being 4 February 1912.
The agitated flame of the candle had artificially shed light into his dark room to allow him to view the papers. He then realised that, until he had read all the news for the last year, he was in the dark.
The same darkness he was experiencing in the room he was sitting.
He needed to read, absorb and understand what had gone on in the previous year to provide some light on Greece’s current affairs.
He was unaware of what was ahead of him in his future as a citizen of the oldest civilisation in Europe.
The first newspaper’s headline read as follows:
Serbia has amassed its troops to meet its Austro-Hungarian opponents. The Austrian army has threatened invasion shortly.
As part of the family of the Balkans and our religious and historical ties with our friends in Serbia, we must act and act swiftly—parliament announced today.
His reading was interrupted by the relatively insignificant cacophony of his family discussing the work they had completed in the fields and what was left to do before spring was upon them.
Andreas hurriedly marked the pages of his reading with the feather of a dove he used as a quill for writing. The feather was now a bookmark.
He concealed the material under a loose floorboard beneath his bed, which he used to hide tobacco and cigarette paper from his parents when he smoked, and then placed the floorboard in its proper place with the others.
Andreas went to greet his family on their return. His mother asked why he was not at school, and he told her what had occurred that day.
His father barked that war was in the air. Andreas remained calm and uninterested in his remarks not to betray his true position.
The family sat at the table and thanked the Lord for their daily bread in grace. A prayer was said each and every time they shared a meal together as a family. The meal was a hearty serving of hot lentil soup with fresh tomatoes, spring onions, and herbs and spices.
The soup was accompanied with a salad of oil-soaked endives from the family’s garden near the stable, where they kept their horse and mule. The excrements of the animals were useful in providing the necessary nutrients for the growth of salad produce. In rural life, nothing was wasted.
The result—crisp lettuce and endives they enjoyed.
Andreas’s mother had baked karidopita (walnut pie) in the morning filled with fresh walnuts she had received in exchange for delivering the infant girl of the shepherd.
The shepherd was poor. The shepherd was as lean as the unfed nightingale that had injured its wing last autumn.
The dear creature had perched itself between the branches of the lemon tree behind the family’s home and was unable to fly south for the winter. There was no song by the nightingale, only an ordinary chirp that even the common pigeon could produce.
Andreas plucked it from the lemon tree in an attempt to save the bird. It died in his hands. He placed it in the steeple of the church near the bell so that when the church bell tolled, it always reminded him of the nightingale’s sweet song.
The walnut pie was dripping in fresh honey nectar and baked to perfection in olive oil. The pie had now taken the colour of the brown bear Andreas had seen in a picture book discussing the fauna of Macedonia.
When the meal had finished, his mother served each of her family members a plentiful serving of the walnut pie with a dollop of sheep yogurt she bought from Mrs Parades. Coffee was served with the dessert.
His aunt, who had joined them for dinner, turned her cup upside down on to the gold-trimmed saucer and asked if she could read the fate of Andreas’s mother from the cup.
Andreas’ father went outside on to the veranda to enjoy a cigarette. He deemed cup-reading as sorcery and rejected this pastime. Andreas knew that his father left the family’s com
pany because he disapproved of fortune telling and card reading but was willing to compromise his objections to the reading of the coffee cup because he respected his wife.
The coffee cup was turned upside down on to its saucer. It was allowed to drip its contents for about ten minutes. The thick residue of the coffee started to write her future as it dripped on the sides of the small cup.
Andreas’s aunt translated the brown mosaic left by the random course taken by the remaining coffee residue on the white surface of the cup.
‘Family, the cup has spoken,’ interpreted Andreas’s aunt. ‘It tells me that Andreas will be the last to wed. There is a woman with status as his companion. Do not fear her arrogance or his status. Andreas will be taken from us and live far away and be educated. He must take care of himself if he goes to war.’
Kostas respectfully interrupted his wife and Andreas’s aunt. He begged her to stop the nonsense, reassuring Andreas that the reading of cups was nothing more than after-dinner fun for the idle.
The tabled was cleared, and Kostas returned to the fireplace to warm his hands. ‘Have you had your fun?’ he said. ‘Now it is time to sleep, for there is more work to do in the afternoon. The animals need to be fed and the clothes washed.’
Andreas went to his room and fell into a deep afternoon sleep. That evening, there was a cold snap in the air, signalling a cool change. Andreas’ sleep was unsettled, and his rest unfulfilled. There was a heavy snowfall overnight.
The morning air was freezing. The snow had arrived in earnest. Nature’s white frozen cloth had bleached the green and stone-coloured mountains. The ice uncontrollably wept into the creek that then struggled to flow.
Andreas ran to the veranda, filled with excitement. He went back into the house and washed the sleep from my eyes. He could see in the worn mirror that his powder-blue eyes were tired and red.
Half-dressed, he raced down the track, past the stable. This path led away from the village towards the home of Aspros.
Aspros was glad to see Andreas and asked no questions. He knew Andreas was smart enough to offer a defence for his actions, and he was wise enough to know how cunning he was.
They loaded the shotguns and strapped them to their shoulders with dull leather belts. The friends ambled up into the mountains by foot towards another village. The snow was almost a metre in depth. An elusive hare ran past them before they could steady their firearms. It fell in the snow, wounded.
The sound of a gun discharging followed immediately. It was a distant hunter who had fired the successful shot. The hare was only a few metres away.
‘Should we take it?’ Andreas whispered cautiously to Aspros.
‘What I like to eat most is the hunt that belongs to others.’ Aspros chuckled.
They bagged the hare, and in order not to be seen, the friends strategically made their way back to Aspros’s home. The father of Aspros then prepared the hare. It was slowly cooked in its own juices, complemented with whole brown onions, oregano, thyme, and basil.
The taste was gamey, and the conversation that followed took the same flavour. The tale was that Aspros had mastered the demise of the hare by cleverly placing himself in the blind spot of the hare. Aspros said he shot the game about two hundred metres to its side.
The homemade wine they had consumed impaired any logic and made the story more unbelievable. Andreas corroborated the claim.
Aspros’s father well knew that the guns they had were accurate at 100 metres. Only an experienced marksman could have achieved the result put forward by Andreas and Aspros. He revelled at the tale.
That night, he would let the villagers know of their hunting skills at the Kafeneion. They extracted from him the undertaking to keep the tale secret so that the older hunters would escape any challenge to their skills and, more importantly, keep safe their pride.
He smiled at the boys and toasted in honour of Homer, the ancient storyteller, advising the boys that Homer had now been a tourist in his home.
The day 19 February came again. The darkness was now light. The celebration of the day of Aspros’s birth advanced the boys a little further in their life journey. This birthday was different.
The last ten days had been spent in the usual course except for not attending school. Each of Andreas’s spare moments were not idle. He occupied the passage of time by removing the floorboard, extracting the newspapers, and sacrificing sleep for reading.
One of the younger children was at the door. ‘Andreas, the teacher has arrived early. I have been sent to gather the children. Class will commence at nine o’clock. Be there,’ instructed the little one.
Andreas rejected the idea of a replacement for Mavros. There was none.
The new teacher did not know what Mavros had promised on his last night in the village. He had to start again. He now needed to persuade this new recruit that he had been chosen by her predecessor to advance academically.
Andreas hurriedly dressed, drank some warm sheep’s milk, and took a piece of bread to eat along the path to the main hall. He peered through the window at the class that had taken their seats. He was the last to take his place in the classroom, almost in protest against the new teacher.
Before taking his seat, Andreas heard a gentle female voice enquire, ‘Youth, before you sit, it appears your manners have temporarily escaped you. A gentleman of culture and status does not take his seat before a lady has taken her place. Are you divorced from your senses?’
Andreas glanced over his shoulder to identify the source of this gentle sound. In front of the chalkboard was the image of a beautiful goddess, directing her fairy-tale beauty towards him.
She was the one who had spoken.
He straightened his body, now facing the front of the class.
‘Well…’ she said to Andreas, ‘you stare at me without the courtesy of a response. Do we have a mute amongst us or a Hun?’
‘Neither,’ Andreas spluttered. ‘My ability to speak has been temporarily reduced.’
‘Might I be favoured with an introduction? What is your name?’ she said.
‘I was Andreas—Andreas Kapelis—the midwife’s son?’ he uttered illogically.
She said, ‘Children, we now know two important matters from Master Kapelis. First, if I accidentally fall pregnant during my tenure here, his mother will dutifully assist in my childbirth.’ The children began to laugh. Her ridicule of Andreas was perfect, and she continued. ‘The second is that he tells me that he was Andreas. Therefore, now he does not exist,’ said the teacher.
The children all broke into a youthful chorus of uncontrollable laughter that had never been experienced during the Mavros era.
She quickly said, ‘My name is Mademoiselle Peppas. I am your new teacher. I am from the town of Argos. I have been trained abroad in London. I intend to be your teacher until they replace me, I marry, or you leave the school for work or education,’ she announced.
The teacher was an exquisite human achievement of beauty. Her looks could be best likened to a mythical goddess or nymph. Her appearance was ethereal, simply exquisite. All the pleasing gifts that nature possessed had been bestowed upon her.
Andreas sat numbed in his seat. He then commenced to navigate every part of his teacher with his eyes. He felt that he was intellectually incapable of scrutinising her flawless features and beauty in one sitting.
Equally, his command of words and language were unfairly limited and immature to describe what he saw. He was simply too young to be exposed to this living record of perfection and then try to process what he had seen. His description of her was contaminated by the limits placed on any human spectator.
Only a diagram or photograph could evidence the fact she was the personification of a woman. She possessed milk-white skin without imperfection. Her regal mane was mousey brown that parted from left to right reaching in length to her tiny waist and hips. The wavy
brown hair swept past her right eye to frame her pointed chin and symmetrical face.
Like experienced jewellers, the gods had set upon the task of labouring and creating her intense gem-green and speckled blue eyes, which spoke without a word being said.
Her rounded lips moved with the ease of the north breeze that cooled the skin in summer. Above her upper lip, towards the right and below her pencil-thin straight nose, was the mark of permanent elegance, a beauty mark, to complete the artisan’s creation.
The beauty mark was a perfect touch of deliberate imperfection on her face.
With the brush of a master’s stroke, that brown beauty spot was placed ever so carefully on her face to compliment the facial expressions she unintentionally used to seduce her audience. Her slight, shapely figure tastefully supported her graceful looks.
She dressed in a fashion Andreas had never seen before. Even well-heeled relatives from Patras and Athens who came to visit the family did not wear such tailored clothes. The clothes were obviously from abroad, perhaps Paris or London.
After a glimpse of the obvious, the untrained observer would be inclined to register complaint that she was a young woman with arrogant pretension to taste and fashion. To those with the benefit of a charitable appreciation of nature and its beauty, she was the epitome of refinement and class. Andreas’s closeness with nature enlisted him to the latter class of positive critics.
This precious jewel enchanted Andreas. Today was the beginning of his desire to slavishly satisfy her wishes. Andreas’s only wish was that he was much older so he could court her with a view of marriage.
As she commenced the class, Andreas felt that fate’s courier in the progress of his education had confronted him.
The structure of her class was different to that of Mavros. She obviously had training that was both foreign and unknown to the Greek method of teaching.
Grammar and spelling were her forte. She made it clear that without proper expression, the control of language, and the knowledge of words and their meaning, one could not communicate.
Kapelis- The Hatmaker Page 9