Back in Horio, Ajax and I concluded the deal in Yannis’s café. This was an excellent example of New Aegean architecture, a grey concrete hangar painted lime green, inside and out, as far up as a man can reach with a brush and the rest left bare. The side that opened onto the square was glass with metal-frame windows and sliding doors.
Inside smelt of coffee and tobacco, resin and sharp cheese. One wall was lined with shelves loaded with groceries. Within easy reach were the cans, bottles and packets in daily demand. The further up the wall, the more exceptional were the goods on offer. Right at the top and out of reach mouldered the unsuccessful speculations of two decades, flyblown and caked in dust, for which there had never been nor was likely to be a requirement: tiny bottles of medicinal olive oil, humane mouse traps, windscreen de-icer, melon ball scoops. On the opposite side were a counter and a refrigerated cabinet for cheese and salami.
On the wall facing the door was a floor-to-ceiling panoramic photograph of a Swiss mountain glade with white cows and a chalet in the distance, a glimpse of a perfect world far from the heat and humdrum of Greece. Even people who live in places the rest of us daydream about have daydreams of their own. Hanging on the Alpine idyll were various official notices, a shelf with a bakelite wireless, a grainy sepia wedding photograph of a man and woman with solemn, frightened faces. High on the wall in the corner over the door to the toilets, a colour television was mounted; a score of children craned to watch Knight Rider. The middle of the room was filled with metal tables and wooden chairs, where unshaven men in caps sat hunched over tavli – backgammon – or cards, slamming down the pieces and slapping down the cards like gauntlets, while a few sat reading the paper.
Ajax led me like one of his doomed lambs to an empty table and told me to sit down. He looked around the room and smoothed his handsome black moustaches. He did this by joining the thumb and middle finger of his right hand under his nose and springing them apart across his top lip. It looked vaguely insulting, like flicking snot. He went over to two men in tweed caps drinking ouzo. He muttered to them and they stood up and shambled over. One was bald with a genial smile and a thick grey moustache like a yard brush. The other was thin and pale and worried looking.
‘This is Spiros, our carpenter. This is Dimitris, the builder. My friend Mr John is English. He’s a good man. I’m giving him our house up the hill.’
‘Why? Does he have animals?’ asked Spiros.
Ajax scowled at him and then winked at me as if we shared a secret. We all sat down and Ajax rubbed his hands like someone expecting a good meal. Under their watchful eyes I took the two hundred thousand drachmas out of my wallet. This was nearly five thousand pounds or eight thousand dollars in today’s money. Technically it wasn’t mine, belonging to a client I had been visiting, but I reckoned I was good for it as soon as I got home. I shuffled it quickly and covered it with my hand as I slid it over. Where I come from money isn’t to be talked about or flaunted in front of strangers. But Ajax snatched up the wad and counted it out loud, ceremonially, slapping the notes down on the table while the witnesses mouthed the amounts. It was all so public and embarrassing.
Yannis and his customers gathered round and two small boys pushed their way to the front. When Ajax finished he looked at them, stood up and stuffed my money deep into his shirt pocket. He reached across the table and shook my hand, gripping my shoulder tight with the meaty fingers of the left.
‘Danke schön. Und kalo risiko.’ The witnesses shook my hand too.
‘Kalo risiko.’
‘Kalo risiko.’
Greek has a formula for every event – weddings, christenings, buying a new dress, having a haircut, talking about children, going away, coming back, leaving a house, leaving home. Kalo risiko is for a new house. Kalo means good. Risiko means fate, but sounds ominously like danger.
‘What about the papers?’ asked a tall, handsome man with iron-grey hair who had been reading a newspaper.
‘Papers? What papers?’ Ajax smoothed his handsome black moustaches.
‘The contract.’
‘What contract?’
‘The sales contract.’
‘That’s for pig-brained lawyers. We’ll go to the notary in Aliveri tomorrow or the day after.’
‘And if something happens? You’ve got his money. What has he got?’
This is the bare bones of what they said, although they went on for much longer. In a classical Greek play by Sophocles or Euripides, Oedipus Rex for example, the main characters don’t so much talk to each other as make speeches to the audience. A chorus comments on the action and interrupts with its own ideas. It seems so artificial and unrealistic until you see an argument in a Greek café. They posture and declaim and gesture to the audience and bystanders chip in and repeat everything as if they were on stage in an ancient amphitheatre.
At first I didn’t understand what they were talking about, although I pretended to, nodding and smiling in the wrong places, while I tried to puzzle it out like a dialogue on my Greek-in-a-Week cassette. The main problem was that the word for a contract sounded like symbol. Symbol? What could be symbolic about buying a house?
Yannis went to his till and brought back his spectacles, a ballpoint pen and the blue exercise book in which he kept his accounts. He sat down at the table, tore a clean page out of the middle of the book and, with contributions and criticisms from the others, crafted a single sentence out of a score of subordinate clauses, recording the sale in perpetuity, for consideration given, of a property in the old Horio to John, father’s name Henry, employee, of England …
Ajax signed first, with a flourishing signature that filled half the page like a sultan’s firman, ornamented with loops and curlicues. There was hardly any room for my crabbed little squiggle. He folded the paper and ostentatiously presented it to me as if it had been his idea in the first place. I put it in the pocket where my money had been. He said that he had urgent phone calls to make, shook my hand, called me friend and waved goodnight to everyone except my champion, who went back to his newspaper with studied indifference, erect and dignified.
I didn’t know what to do now. My new neighbours milled around my table talking in low voices, obviously about me. I thought I should mark the occasion. I took a deep breath, clapped my hands and put on a cheerful expression.
‘So, let’s all have a drink. Yannis, a bottle of ouzo please.’
‘How about a bottle of whisky?’ asked Spiros the carpenter. ‘That’s what you foreigners drink, isn’t it?’
‘Swat the bloody Greeks drink when they get arfa chence,’ added a short, foxy-faced man in mangled Australian. ‘Gidday mate. Howa youse? The name’s Alekos.’
He gripped my hand and pumped it up and down, a cobber’s reunion. I was surprised by the wave of fellow feeling at hearing English, however distorted, after hours of unremitting struggle with Greek, so I did what Poms do in such circumstances: I recoiled. When we are abroad we take a holiday from social attitudes. We treat foreign peasants and workers and shopkeepers with the genial familiarity we would never use at home. But meet anyone with claims on Englishness and the portcullis of snobbery comes down again.
‘Hello,’ I ventured.
‘Twenty yeers in Melbourne, mate. Grate city. Better than this ocker dump.’
‘Really?’
‘Yep. Twenty yeers. Ended up with two supermarkets and an apartment block.’
‘Very interesting.’
‘Grate loife. People are more honest than these sly bastards too.’
‘Thank you very much. I’ve just bought a house from one of them.’
‘Don’ say I dint warnya.’
Spiros came up with half a dozen glasses and one of the implausible brands of firewater that you only find outside Britain with a name like Highland Crotch. It was still five times the price of ouzo. I knew they were taking advantage of a gullible foreigner, but what could I do? He poured for himself and the other two witnesses and for Aussie Alekos and me and we all clinked glasses.
‘Our health,’ we chorused and swigged the whisky down in one gulp. Three other men came over with empty glasses. I watched with irritation as a second expensive bottle was fetched and passed round from table to table. News spread and men came in from outside to drink the health of the foreigner who had paid good money for a goat shed. Women in yellow scarves stared through the plate glass, tossed their heads and walked on. Children ran up to me, giggled and ran away again. I felt my face getting more and more flushed with drink and self-consciousness as I fended off the same remarks over and over.
‘What did you buy up there for?’
‘There’s no electricity.’
‘There’s no water.’
‘There’s no road.’
‘It’s full of snakes.’
‘Aren’t you be afraid to be alone up there?’
‘Aren’t you afraid of the cemetery?’
‘You paid how much? For a heap of stones?’
‘Why didn’t you buy mine? It’s a proper cement house down here with a kitchen and a bathroom.’
In my faltering Greek, sustained more by cheap whisky than competence, I explained that it was a beautiful place and a beautiful house and that where I came from people liked to restore old things rather than buy new ones. But the principle of gentrification was lost on my listeners. In the end I shrugged off their questions with a vacuous smile and spent the rest of the evening swapping reminiscences about Melbourne with Aussie Alekos and Liverpool with Yannis, who had been a merchant seaman, even though I had been to neither city.
Meanwhile I caught the taste of the whisky and drank lots of toasts and got Yannis to open a new case of Highland Crotch. I drank through the buzz of befuddlement into perfect clarity and out again into the blissful confusion of true intoxication. The dreadful ‘What have I done?’ nagged less and less and finally evaporated by the time the last of my new neighbours staggered home and left me sprawling on five taverna chairs, one for my bottom and one for each limb, drifting in and out of what the sober observer takes for sleep but is in fact a whirling maelstrom of light and colour and rushing noises. I was conscious of Yannis tiptoeing gently round me, probably assuming that I was indulging in the British national pastime and would soon get to the next stage of looking for a fight or windows to smash unless I was allowed to sleep it off. The only other customer by then was an old lady watching Ben Hur.
I awoke with a start when Yannis turned the television off. It was about midnight. The part of my brain responsible for foreign languages had also closed down for the night. I managed to ask for the bill by scrawling in the air. Yannis slowly arched his head back and tutted. It had already been paid for. Since that night I have often tried to treat my Greek friends to coffees or drinks or meals in the taverna, but have never succeeded. The bill is always settled before I ask for it.
Next morning I found myself stiff and cold on the back seat of the mini. My head was pounding and I felt bloated and sick. An acrid taste started at the back of my nose and flowered into a pungent smell that filled the car. Goats with yellow scarves and black moustaches lurked in the dream space just beyond my blurred vision. I scrabbled at the door. There were no colours in the world yet, only shades of grey. I clambered out, bent double, willing my stomach to overcome the waves of nausea starting at my trembling knees, welling into my belly and burning their way into my oesophagus. I forced myself upright. Cramp in my back and legs was absorbed by the sensation of a cleaver burying itself in my skull down to my eyeballs. With a moan I slumped on the car. My forehead splattered into something wet on the roof and I hoped it was dew.
I stood like this, body locked upright, arms dangling, head in a puddle of unidentified moisture, until the various painful and miserable sensations found some sort of equilibrium. Among the symptoms was a terrible thirst. Moving slowly, head up and knees bent, I groped for a half-empty bottle of water, which had been rolling around behind the front seat since the end of last summer. I poured the dregs into my mouth and down my chin and over my shirt front.
‘What have I done?’
The inescapable answer was that I had spent our money on a ruin on a Greek island because of the view from the window. I had also drunk too much cheap whisky. No wonder I moaned. Hard on the heels of the moan came another voice, familiar but not mine, an English voice, stern and full of moral fibre.
‘Pull yourself together,’ it said – which, as best I could, I did.
Breathing as deep as I dared, I set off to inspect our property, along the concrete road to the cemetery and up the mule track. On limp sausage legs it was slow going and punctuated by interludes of unpleasantness. My desert boots were soaked and I couldn’t stop shivering.
By the time I reached the ruins the dawn had ripened into reds and golds. A fine mist blurred the plain and the tops of the mountains were wreathed in cloud. The corrugated cement roofs of the village below glistened with dew and pools of water lay bronze on unfinished flat roofs. Birdsong filled the echoing cavities of my throbbing head.
The only other sound was from the shuffling, chomping goats shut up for the night in the ruins of houses. They browsed in the rubble, penned in by fences of brush and thorn and wire, hard and knotted horns twisted back towards stubby tails. They softened the ground with acrid yellow urine and pounded in their shitballs with cloven hoofs. Bulbous dugs and swollen vulvas swung under matted hair. A bitter, rotting smell hung around them in the damp air. They stared at me with evil eyes as I stumbled past.
I trudged up to the house, our house now, and picked my way through the squalor of the yard. I climbed the stone staircase, struggling over the sprawling fig, and untied the rusty wire that held shut the door into the main room. I pushed too hard. It fell off its hinges and crashed into the void below. Holding my breath against the stink of goat, I stepped gingerly in, fearing the worst, that the vision of yesterday was an illusion.
It was still there, a glimpse of a perfect Greece, waiting for the figures to be painted in.
I sat down on the cold stone at the top of my stairs in defiance of haemorrhoids and in a turmoil of nausea and apprehension. The sun came up and burned away the mist and cloud. By eight o’clock there were signs of life down in the village, buckets clanking, pigs squealing, sheep bleating, chickens squawking. Vans with grainy loudspeakers broadcast news of fresh mullet and fat sea bass with potatoes and onions to go with them. A man with a bouzouki banged on about love. The church bell urgently announced the start of the morning service: bong-bong-bong/bong-bong-bong/ bong-bong/bong-bong/bong-bong-bong.
I knew what I had done. But what was I to do now? I had minimal Greek, minimal building skills, minimal funds. It was madness to rebuild an old stone house with no electricity, no water and no road. My options were one, to go back on the deal and try to get my money back from Ajax, or two, to run away and pretend it had never happened, or three, to make the best of it and spend the rest of the year doing up the house. The first was the most unrealistic, as I could never imagine Ajax giving me my money back. The English voice, stern and full of moral fibre, would not hear of running away. So that left the third option, to make the best of it. But first I had to face the ordeal of breaking the news to my family.
I stumbled down the path, chilled to the bone and exhausted to the marrow, and headed for the car. As I drove out of the village, Ajax and Dimitris the builder, yesterday’s worried-looking witness, were measuring the front of the butcher’s shop with a tape and writing the numbers down on a pad. I felt too embarrassed to stop and say good morning.
I waited until the next village to phone home. When my beloved asked where I had been all night and why I hadn’t phoned, I pretended I couldn’t hear, said ‘Hello?’ several times and hung up. Lines were often bad from the islands.