I was looking forward to an easy day hacking plaster from the inside walls. We hadn’t moved in yet, but I could make myself comfortable now that I had a proper house with a roof and floor and doors and windows. I bought a double gas ring from Haralambos and salvaged a metal table from his yard. Elpida gave me a chair and a few pieces of crockery. I could make filter coffee instead of the inch of sludge that Yannis served. I took a jug of it with half a loaf of sweet bread and some fruit to the top step outside the front door that served as a veranda-for-one. It was a delicious morning, warm and fresh. In the pure Greek light the view had the unnatural detail of a Canaletto, as clear in the distance as close at hand.
I was on my second cup and wondering what a third Cretan peach would do for my heartburn when a quaint procession made its way along the path. At the head sauntered Barba Vasilis, leading by a rope one of his yearling lambs, a fat male. Then strutted ruddy-faced Ajax the butcher, carrying a large canvas bag. At the rear plodded Spiros the carpenter, sucking his yard-brush moustache. I waited for them to say the first kalimera, which is the duty of the passer-by, and then offered them coffee. Ajax shouted that they were too busy.
‘Kein’ Zeit, danke, viel’ Arbeit.’
I poured myself another cup. Barba Vasilis led the way to the old olive tree beside the little church and halted with the lamb. It stood patiently, its large, dark eyes worldly wise. Spiros tethered the donkey. Ajax dropped his bag on the ground and opened it. He took something shiny out of the bag and nodded to Vasilis. With practised skill they scooped the legs from under the lamb. A bleat turned into a gurgle as Ajax slipped the knife into its neck and sawed briefly. They stooped over the animal, holding its kicking legs at arm’s length so that blood would not spurt over their clean shoes while Spiros pulled on the rope around its crimson neck. The donkey was indifferent and carried on grazing as if nothing had happened.
I froze, the coffee cup halfway to my lips. I closed my eyes and opened them again, but it was not a hallucination. I waited for revulsion or nausea or shock to strike – instead all I felt was boiling resentment that they had done it in the middle of my breakfast. I focused my anger on the red-handed butcher. Didn’t he have a yard down the hill where he could do this sort of thing in private? Why did they have to do it in front of our house? Our church? Outrage turned to squeamishness. I wanted to run away and hide although the deed was done, but my legs were trembling and I forced myself to sit there to watch what they did next.
Ajax went back to his canvas bag, while Spiros untied the bloody end of the rope from the neck of the animal and used it to lash the hind legs together at the hoof. He slung the other end over the strongest branch of the olive tree and with Vasilis’s help hauled the lamb up until its nose was a foot off the ground. It dripped dark blood into the spreading pool on the grass, food for ants and worms and other underground things. Ajax made a small cut in a hind leg next to the rope and pushed the rubber tube of a foot pump into the incision. There was a fat little Michelin man on the pedal and I loathed him for smiling. Ajax pumped and the carcase swelled. Air filled the scrotum to the size of two beach balls. During the killing the men had been solemn. Now the tension was gone they talked and joked.
‘Hey, Johnny, don’t you wish you had a pair like that?’ shouted Ajax.
The pumping became more difficult. With popping and tearing sounds, the skin came away from the flesh underneath. When the carcase was the size of a bullock, Ajax stopped pumping and with his knife split the belly from scrotum to breastbone. The air rushed out with a sigh that echoed over the hillside and announced that the lamb was truly dead. There was no terror any more. It was just meat.
I put down my coffee and joined them to watch what Ajax did next. The intestines were greenish white and the liver and lungs a delicate, luminous purple. There was little blood, even from the heart. It had all soaked into the ground. There was a raw, metallic smell, vaguely familiar. I tried to ignore the slurp as the knife did its work and listened instead to the breeze in the olive trees and the scrunch of the donkey grazing. Ajax cut the large intestine at both ends, tugged it out and threw it on the grass. Spiros snapped a twig from the branch above him and wound the gut around it from the stomach end, forcing out the contents, first in black nuggets and then in green slime. At home a woman would do the job again more carefully, squeezing the tube between her fingers and washing it in plenty of water. It would be made into soup or wound tightly on a spit around other pieces of offal to make tasty kokoretsi.
Ajax carefully cut out the liver and kidneys and sweetbreads and heart and testicles and other delicacies and put them in a black garbage bag. He tossed the stomach on the grass. His bare arms were bloody to the elbows, but his white shirt, blue jeans and shiny black shoes remained immaculate. As he worked he whistled softly to himself. He took a small knife with a wide blade and cut through the skin at the hooves and joints. Starting at the hindquarters, he peeled it off like a glove. Loosened by the pump, it came off easily. The membrane underneath was creamy white. When he got to the head Ajax hacked off the twisted horns with a cleaver and with a final yank pulled the skin off the nose. Black, bulbous eyes stared down at the ground from the narrow head. Blood dripped from the nostrils.
Spiros finished rolling the guts and put them in the garbage bag. Vasilis picked up the stomach and threw it over the stone wall into the next field where it burst, spilling out yellow grass. Ajax untied the rope and lowered the carcase onto the ground. He chopped off the hooves with a cleaver. He wiped his knives and his hands on a clean patch of grass, finishing off with a rag from the bag. His hairy forearms were still flecked with dried blood and under his fingernails was dark red. I imagined those arms around Eleni, those hands exploring her. I also considered his proficiency at cutting throats with knives.
‘Hard work,’ I said, surprised at my own equanimity. ‘Now come and have some coffee.’
‘Dank’ schön. Zu viel’ Arbeit.’
Ajax went off to fetch his pick-up, parked down the track.
‘Spiros is marrying his daughter on Saturday,’ said Vasilis, ‘he needs a lot of meat. Ajax is best man. Spiros, did you give Johnny an invitation?’
Spiros looked blank. He had not given me an invitation, nor had it apparently crossed his mind. I was too embarrassed to ask whom she was marrying. He wiped warm blood and fat and excrement off his hands and untied the donkey, leading it away so that Ajax could reverse the Datsun closer to the carcase. There was an aluminium box on the back, which Spiros opened. It already contained two carcases and lumpy black garbage bags. They heaved the third inside, head flopping, and slammed the door. The Datsun lurched down the path, followed by Spiros on his donkey. With a wave of his stick Vasilis went to find the rest of his flock.
Under the olive tree flies swarmed where blood glistened on the grass. The stomach in the next field writhed with them. I picked up the dainty little feet and threw them over the wall. I jammed the twisted horns into a crack in the olive trunk so that it looked as if they grew there.
I had never seen a life taken before. Less than half an hour ago this had been a living, breathing, sentient being. I waited to feel more than a mild distaste for what had happened, but nothing came. It was in the order of things. The animal was a passive participant in something incomprehensible to it. It deserved its fate simply because it was there. Anger against the men who did it drained away with the blood on the ground. They too were passive participants, although they wielded the knives and ropes. What troubled me most is that although I was an unwilling observer, I felt guilty for myself as if something in what I witnessed touched a shameful and repressed desire. And I hated Ajax for whistling.
Back at Barba Mitsos’s that evening, a large envelope was waiting for me. Inside was a printed invitation to the wedding on the following Saturday of Spiros’s daughter Antigone to Haralambos, the builder’s merchant.
‘Haralambos. She’s marrying Haralambos.’
‘So?’ asked Elpida as she dolloped fresh cheese onto a square of muslin.
‘But Antigone’s so young.’
‘He did well. She might be a virgin even if she’s got those things in her ears all day. She’s got the hips for children. Spiros is a fool, but he’s respectable enough. He’s given her a good dowry, a field of fifteen olives and the chicken house in the old village and an apartment in Athens. It’s rented to Lebanese. Good money.’ She tied the corners of the muslin into a knot and gently squeezed the pulpy mass into the sink.
‘And Antigone? What does she think?’
‘Eh. She made a good match. He’s a good man. He had the only Mercedes in the village until Ajax came back. He’s been abroad. He knows things. Whatever he got up to on his travels, there’s never been any scandal about him in the village. He’s been married. He’ll know how to handle her.’
‘But she’s only eighteen and he’s older than I am. There must be twenty-five years between them.’
‘So much the better. She’ll still be in her prime when he gets old. By the time she loses her looks he’ll be too old to chase other women.’
‘I hope he likes rock and roll.’
‘He’ll soon knock that contraption off her head.’
‘She wanted to live in Athens.’
‘He’ll knock that silliness out of her too. Look what Ajax did for Eleni.’
Then something else occurred to me. ‘Ajax is their koumbaros.’
The koumbaros is much more than best man. For a start, he pays for the wedding. For the rest of their lives he and the koumbara, in this case Eleni, are family, like godfathers to the couple, as close relatives as brother and sister.
‘They are repugnant.’ I meant to say ‘rivals’ but Elpida caught the sense, no doubt pleased to have collected another bon mot from the foreigner.
‘Eh, they both think they’re big men. And big men stick together.’ She crossed her fingers, slimy with curd. ‘Besides, they’re family. Haralambos married Ajax’s sister. She died when her sun-touched son was born. That’s why Haralambos left to work in Arabia. He came home when old Dionysos his father died and took over the hardware store. It’s time he married. He has no one to look after the house.’ She edged past me to the back door and hung the ball of cheese on the branch of a walnut to ripen in the air.
I was depressed and angry, I hoped because I deplored the men’s treatment of women, but I suspected because I wished I could be the same.
‘What did Barba Mitsos do for you, Elpida?’
She laughed. ‘What did I do for him you mean? He came at me with a stick once and I flattened him.’
The only drawback to Haralambos’s eligibility, which had already put off the families of two potential brides, was his son Dionysos, Ajax’s nephew, whose stepmother the new bride would become.
‘Dionysos is no problem. Don’t worry. Antigone did well,’ said Elpida, washing cheese slime off her hands.
Haralambos came to do the plumbing. It had to be done before the walls were plastered and the basement floor laid. He was keen to show that he had worked abroad for foreign companies and knew the proper way to do things. It was so refreshing that he did not need cajoling and persuading and begging and bribing like the others but came on the day he promised. He arrived in a tipper truck with Dionysos riding behind the cab. He made no effort to involve his son and behaved as though he were invisible. I joined in the conspiracy to save them both embarrassment. I felt so sorry for them and thanked God for my own children.
Dionysos did not seem to mind. He chewed a crust of bread and watched while I helped his father unload the copper and the plastic pipes. He stood over us like a fussy clerk of works while we dug a trench from the basement to the hole that Zenon had dug. Haralambos laid pipes along it from the bathroom and the kitchen and I was glad to see that he used levels and lines and not innate craftsmanship to get the falls right. Then we put down pipes from where my water tank would be to the house. When the trenches had been filled he installed the plumbing.
We worked hard through the morning with a break at noon for bread and cheese and finished by three o’clock, the end of the working day. We sat on a bag of cement under the olive. Dionysos lurked in the shade of the almond tree, watching us. I poured whisky.
‘How will it be to be married again?’ I asked.
‘A man has to have a wife.’
‘You were lucky to find her.’
‘Eh, luck. You go where the wind takes you. She’s a good girl. She’s young but she’ll be a good woman.’
He leaned back against the tree and sipped his whisky. He nodded to the little church. ‘You know that Ajax’s uncle murdered his wife’s lover? He waited for him outside that church and shot him in the head. He would have killed her too, except they stopped him in time.’
‘What happened to him?’
‘He was unlucky. The judge made an example of him. He got four years.’
‘That’s not much.’
‘Too much for what he did.’
‘Who was the lover?’
‘The saddle maker. The father of Adonis. His wife Maria sings at the funerals. She lives just along the hill.’
‘That’s terrible.’
‘It was. Everyone had to go to Aliveri to get their saddles mended. Then Barba Vasilis took over the business.’
‘Does that sort of thing happen now?’
‘He was the last. But who knows? You never know what the fates have in store.’
‘It wasn’t fate. They could choose. The saddle maker did not have to sleep with Ajax’s aunt. Ajax’s uncle did not have to kill the saddle maker. They could choose what to do.’
‘Eh. Eros drove the saddle maker. Nemesis drove the butcher. They had no choice.’
He finished his drink, stood up and clapped me on the shoulder as if he had delivered the clinching argument. I let it go. He got into the truck and drove down the hill. Dionysos scampered onto the back and sat with his legs dangling over the edge, looking at me. I waved goodbye to him but he did not wave back.
As the crow flew mournful Maria, mother of Adonis and widow of the murdered saddle maker, was my closest neighbour. She and Adonis lived in a stone house almost as dilapidated as mine along the hill but reached by a different mule track. It was as if she lived up there in disgrace, spending the days in atonement for her adulterous husband, growing vegetables and flowers in the flinty soil of her narrow terraces, rarely to be seen in the village but only in the cemetery at dusk where she sat over one grave or another, gently crooning. She made grief her life’s vocation and with her sobbing voice and talent for improvisation was much in demand for funerals and exhumations. She earned a living from performing the daily graveside rituals on behalf of relatives who lived too far away to carry out the duties themselves.
Now that Haralambos had laid the pipes, I needed a concrete cistern for the water to fill them. On a hot, hazy day I found Dimitris the builder repairing an old diesel pump in his yard. He looked worried. For twenty-five years I have never seen him look anything else.
‘It’s got the gut ache like me. I’ve got the gut ache all the time. And diarrhoea. Chronic diarrhoea for five years. The doctor gives me Librium and kaolin. Do you get gut ache?’
‘Often,’ I said and ran through a few ailments whose Greek names I knew.
The fastest way to a hypochondriac’s heart is through symptoms. Within half an hour we were sipping ouzo and eating salt anchovies – good for the gut ache, brings it on a treat – and discussing the merits of bulldozing the houses in the old village and building something nice and modern. The artist in Dimitris looked down on crude work like building cisterns and messing around with old stone. He loved to render walls and finish them off square and shiny with marble dust or pour bright-coloured marble floors from a can and ride a polisher over them. He looked pained at the work I wanted him to do and rubbed his stomach.
We went through the ritual of negotiation. I knew all the techniques by now: cajoling, flattery, breaking off, walking away. I haggled all morning and as usual ended up agreeing to the price he asked in the first place.
It took two days to build the tank out of breezeblocks in the highest part of the field behind the house. Adonis hefted the blocks and mixed the cement. I rendered it myself and roofed it with Ellenit covered with leftover tiles. It held two tons of water, which Aristotle the hydrologist delivered with his tractor and tank. Now I could plant olives and almonds and mulberries and vines.
Anxious not to make a mistake and deprived of gardening books, I asked for advice.
‘Dig the holes three metres apart and fill them with manure, so they get a good start,’ said Barba Vasilis.
‘Two metres at most so they share each other’s shade and no manure so they don’t get lazy,’ said Barba Mitsos.
‘Three metres and just a little manure,’ said Spiros.
So much for the collective wisdom of country folk. I planted some close together and the rest far apart and some with a lot of manure and others with little and the rest with none and they have all done equally well.
I spent a week bribing Dimitris with promises of Lomatil and Kaopectate from England to start the plastering. I was dreading the ordeal of badgering him yet again when one morning I heard a tractor. It was Zenon towing a cement mixer behind his digger. Following him was Dimitris in Haralambos’s tipper loaded with sand and cement. I ran out with refreshments and indigestion tablets in case they went away again.
Within an hour the mixer was chundering and Adonis was caked white with dust and running backwards and forwards with raw sand and cement and buckets of mortar, while Dionysos stood chewing his crust and peering into the revolving drum for the secrets of the universe. Inside the house Dimitris and Haralambos worked together with cloths tied round their heads and mouths, tossing trowels of rough plaster at the walls and smoothing it off with careless swipes.
While the mixer was there they built a bathroom in the basement, installed a kitchen sink upstairs and laid stone floors.
It did not seem right to install a cheap eastern European bog from Haralambos in our old stone house. Nothing at all would have been authentic or, if we were going upmarket, a Turkish squatter over a pit in the yard, but we decided that our bowels should move with the times. We made a family outing to the Sacred Way and tracked down a fine Royal Doulton suite. We drove it as far as the cemetery and then Arfa and I lugged it over the fields in the middle of a thunderstorm illuminated by lightning.
For ten days Dimitris and Haralambos started at half past seven and worked until noon. After bread and cheese and a few glasses of wine they began again and worked until the heat of three o’clock. When they went home I cleared up after them and used the leftover cement and plaster for jobs of my own. My hands were soon wizened with cement where they weren’t weeping from blisters as big as saucers.
In one of our lunch breaks it came out that Dimitris was a cousin of ruddy-faced Ajax. His mother was Ajax’s aunt and grew up in my house. To postpone getting back to work, I encouraged him to tell me about his family.
‘You know the man who built your house? He was my great-great-great-great-grandfather. He wasn’t Greek. He was an Albanian. We all are. My parents’ first language is Albanian. You find us all over Greece. We came here under the Turks. We are mountain people from Epirus in the north round Yannina. The Albanian speciality is mules and horses. In our language we have six different names for a mule. As far as the Turks were concerned, we were the animals. They moved us from field to field wherever we gave the best milk. That place doesn’t give enough taxes, eh, plant some Albanians. So they sent my ancestor Yannis here. He was a giant and a good man. He and his brothers built all the houses here. They were the best saddle makers on the island.
‘The time came to take back our own from the Turks. There was no fighting here because what could we do on an island? So we sent our best men to the Morea. Now the Pasha of Aliveri had to send mules and saddles to Athens for the Turkish army. He rode up here one day from the seraglio down by the lake with his men and found old Yannis sitting on those steps where you are sitting now. He was about seventy years old but he was still strong. The Pasha was a bastard like all of them. They never got off their horses so they could always look down on the Greeks. He said that if he didn’t have twenty new saddles by sunset the next day he would impale the old man. You know what impaling is? A sharp pole up your arse. Twenty saddles. One saddle takes a week to make. But what could Yannis do? He prayed to the Virgin and then gathered all his relatives together and anyone in the village who could help and he gave them all jobs to do. But he kept the tricks of the trade for himself and his eldest son so they had to do the difficult work themselves.
‘They worked all through the night and all through the next day with the Virgin helping and all they could think of was the pointed stake. At sunset the Pasha rode up with his soldiers. All the saddles were ready and he took them, without paying of course. Our people were overjoyed. Old Yannis had cheated death again. The old man went to bed and died in his sleep of exhaustion. It was his fate to die that day whatever he did.’
‘It wasn’t his fate,’ I said. ‘He chose to make the saddles. He could have gone into the mountain with his gun. Anything.’
‘He was a dead man whatever he did,’ said Haralambos.
‘Anyway,’ said Dimitris, ‘that’s not the end of the story. You’ve seen our saddles, haven’t you? We hammer in five brass nails so the heads make the blessed crucifix. Before the Pasha arrived Yannis gathered all the old women and told them that he was not going to put the crucifix on the saddles for the unbelievers. Instead, he wanted to put the evil eye on them. The women did it in the church over there. Those saddles were cursed by Aghios Ioannes himself. But the Pasha didn’t know and he put them in a galley along with other supplies for the army and sent them off to Athens.
‘The ship never arrived. It was captured by Bouboulina. You know Bouboulina? From Spetse. She was a woman but the fiercest of all the admirals. She took the booty and sold it to the Greeks. So what happened to the accursed saddles? Of course the Greeks noticed straight away that they didn’t have crosses and nailed them on and had them blessed by a priest and that took away the evil eye. But one of her customers didn’t because he wasn’t a Christian. He was a crazy Englishman like you. You know who it was?’
‘Tell me.’
‘Lordos Byron. He sat on Yannis’s saddle and in six weeks he was dead of a fever. He was a dead man whatever he did.’