IT’S FRIDAY, TEN PM. Dimitris, Elias and I have just met George, who’s come bustling up Acharnon Street from his language school, and after the obligatory handshakes and kisses we head for the taverna on Filis Street. Taverna ta Spata is painted over its green door – green for a taverna that cooks meat, blue for fish – but everyone knows it as Babi’s. Babi comes from a village near Spata and tonight, as every night except Monday, he is open for business. Ten o’clock being early for Friday night habitués, the taverna is only half full and we therefore have several tables to choose between. I suggest one near the back wall, Dimitris then proposes one in the middle, Elias indicates his preference for one nearer the exit, and George, after a good deal of speculative consideration, finger under chin, eye in a fine frenzy rolling, decides that we should sit at a table close to the barrels.
Ah, the barrels. There are four of them, racked up on sturdy shelf beams that run from the far end of the inner wall to the opening beyond which, in the kitchen, Babi’s mother and (sometimes) a cousin prepare and cook food that has, nearly all of it, come from Babi’s home village, where his family has lived for generations. The barrels are enormous: wide and deep enough, I think, to drown whole armies of Clarences, and they contain the best retsina in the world. It, too, comes from Babi’s native village, and because we are trusties, as soon as we arrive one or other of us is permitted to fill a copper jug from whichever barrel Babi gestures towards and to collect glasses from the high counter separating the kitchen area from the rest of the taverna. It may take some time before Babi is free to come to our table, but we are not required to wait for drink. And so we clink our filled glasses, bang them on the table, wish ourselves and everyone else good health, and take our first sips.
‘Tonight, it is very good,’ George announces, his voice blending surprise and gratification, as though the retsina might have been other than wonderful, which it never is. I love the slightly salty, brackish flavour, and when I hold it up for inspection the wine’s honey-yellow seems filled with Greek sunlight. And so cheap! A litre jug costs about forty drachms, which translates to something like fifteen pence. ‘A man might drown in claret before he would be drunk on it,’ Dr Johnson famously said. I have no intention of becoming drunk on retsina, but I sometimes feel I could swim in a sea of it and not count the cost. And certainly before the night is done we will have re-filled our jug more times than anyone, including Babi, can count. Not that this bothers him. When the time comes to pay, he will write out our bill on a corner of the paper tablecloth, make a guess as to how much we have drunk, tear the bill off and with a flourish lay it down in front of one of us, usually accompanying it with a last half-litre of wine. ‘To brush your teeth,’ he says. I never know whether the amount we pay is an accurate reflection of what we have eaten and drunk, but do know that it seems hardly to vary between evenings when we have ordered little and those when we have stuffed ourselves, but I would willingly pay far more than I ever do for the joy the taverna unfailingly brings me.
As now, when Dimitris is trying to tell us a joke about a professor and a frog. ‘So the professor, he cut off the frog’s last leg and he say “jump” but the frog he does not move. And the professor he tells his students, “so you see, when we cut off all a frog’s legs he become deaf”.’ I think it quite a good joke but George is not listening. That Babi has not yet come to tell us what he has on offer this evening, but is instead loitering to talk to the occupants of other tables, causes George some concern. ‘Grub before ethics’ – George would modify Brecht’s motto to ‘grub before anything.’ Now, as Babi heads in our direction, George relaxes. Babi arrives at our table, shakes hands with each of us, then announces, ‘Tonight I have…’ and there follows a long list of salads, vegetable dishes, pasta, meat – chops, steaks, stews – delivered with a suave assurance that we know better than to interrupt. Once he has finished, there is much discussion as to what each will have for second plates, the first plates – salads, vegetables – being communal. I rarely bother with the details of ordering: whatever Babi chooses to bring will suffice. Anyway, he never writes our orders down, and although he rarely makes a mistake one of us has occasionally to make do with, say, a pork steak rather than the stuffed aubergines. The friable corn bread, with its aroma of dill seed, that, like the retsina, comes endlessly to the table, the knowledge that we can sit here for hours without being pestered by waiters routinely anxious to clear used plates (‘everything to your satisfaction, sir?’), the sense that the evening will proceed at a pace whose rhythms are not determined by external considerations – this is paradise enough.
Now George is leading us through an account of the previous day’s gastric discomforts. ‘At college,’ – the academy where he teaches each morning and for which he routinely leaves home at six-thirty – ‘I was feeling a little hungry. So I had some bars of chocolate and a cheese pie. Then, when I got home, father had prepared some pasta which I ate, although I was a little hungry still so I had another pie. Then, I had a siesta. Then, when I woke, I ate the rest of the pasta which father had put in the fridge. Then my stomach started to ache’ – he rubs his belly vigorously – ‘so I drank a little brandy.’ He tilts his head back, and pours invisible drink down his opened mouth. ‘Then I went to the frontisterion’ – his own language school – ‘but I was still a little hungry’ – more palpating his belly – ‘so I sent one of the boys out for a pie. Then, when I got home, I had a steak and then my stomach felt bad again so I had some more brandy.’ A sigh and a shake of the head. ‘I don’t know. Perhaps I should see a doctor.’
As he says this, food begins to arrive at our table: a large bowl of Greek salad, a plate of small cheese pies, one of green beans, another of fried, thin-sliced courgettes, two of chips, and at once George takes up a fork and begins to stab avidly at the pies while Dimitris and I, picking more sparingly among green beans, courgettes, and fried cheese, hear out Elias’s story. It concerns Elias’s attempt to convince his class (like George, Elias teaches at the Academy) that the ancient Spartans, though on average no more than five feet high, each carried three hundred pounds of armour and weaponry into battle with them. ‘Imagine,’ he says to me, ‘so strong, those men.’ A pause. ‘By the way, John, how do you know when an Englishwoman wants you to take your hand off her thigh?’ For Elias cannot understand why Englishwomen aren’t as free with their sexual favours as all his friends assure him they’ve found them to be. Why else, after all, should such women come to Greece? On a previous occasion he has told me, in puzzlement, that he had a few days earlier fallen into conversation with an Englishwoman and that he was sure she was interested in him. So he asked for her telephone number, but instead she got him to give her his, and promised to ring him. ‘But she has not done so,’ he said. ‘Perhaps she has lost my number.’
‘Perhaps she has,’ I said.
And now, as other plates arrive, and as Dimitris cuts his steak into pieces and out of natural generosity and hospitable intent offers each of us a morsel – ‘this is very delicious’ – and George prongs a lamb cutlet, and Elias the karkarias, slim in electric-blue shirt and too-white, too-tight trousers, picks reflectively at his food – I can look at my companions and around at other tables which are being taken by couples, groups, whole families from babies to the ancient of days, and, aware of the constant wash of talk and laughter, of the aromas that pass us as Babi brings armfuls of food to waiting customers who are also, for the most part, friends, can raise my glass in yet another toast to everyone present tonight and think truly that there is nowhere else I would rather be, and wish that my English friends and my family could be here to share in this earthly delight.
It was Pauline who’d spotted Babi’s taverna. Not long before she left Athens, and nursing her broken wrist, she’d been wandering the backstreets near the flat on Acharnon Street when she came upon a whitewashed single-storey building, one of the older sort that still survive in Athens among all the ghastly and not so ghastly apartment blocks. Taverna ta Spata, 120 Filis Street, wasn’t yet open for the season – like many tavernas at that time Babi’s closed during the summer – but, noticing that the door was ajar, she peered in. A man was sweeping the floor, another was unstacking chairs, and she could hear a clatter of pans coming from what had to be the kitchen area. A tap on her shoulder and she turned to find herself confronted by a burly, middle-aged man with grey eyes and what could have been a broken nose. He looked like a genial ex-pugilist, would in earlier times have been called a fine figure of a man, and although she didn’t then know it she was looking at Babi. Might he know when the taverna planned to open, she asked in English, and in English the man replied, ‘October.’
‘You’ll have to try it’ she told me when she returned from her walk, ‘it looks your sort of place.’ I knew I could trust her. Some fifteen years earlier, when we arrived in Beeston, that part of outer Nottingham where we still live, Pauline had been cycling up a side-street when she’d passed a small pub called The Royal Oak. As she would later do at Babi’s, she took it upon herself to peer inside, then came back home and told me about it. ‘It’s your kind of a pub,’ she said, and it was. From then on, at all events until the policy of the brewery that owned the pub dictated it be gutted and turned into a ridiculous barn of a place, The Royal Oak became my version of The Moon in the Water. The beer was always well-kept and the two front rooms, bar to left, lounge to right, were home to ‘plain ordinary folk’ as well as a gaggle of wondrous eccentrics. Among my favourites was one known as Sheffield Tommy, a very short man with a battered, shiny face, two inverted commas for a nose, and a fine line in porkpie hats, who according to his own account had fed Churchill a meal from his desert canteen when the war leader had visited the Eighth Army – ‘“Burton”, Churchill said to me, “Burton, if we had more like you this war would have been won by now”’ – and who, when he received his weekly wages for dishwashing chores at the university, spent them out on Friday nights in The Oak, where he entertained the punters to endless renditions of ‘Roses of Picardy’, ‘I Believe’ and ‘There’ll be Bluebirds over the White Cliffs of Dover’, performances which despite his undeniably resonant bel canto, failed to delight successive landlords, all of whom nursed a belief that if it weren’t for the likes of Sheffield Tommy the pub might cater to the carriage trade. Fanatics have their dreams.
Not that these dreams led to any broadening of the pub’s drinks policy. Beer and basic spirits were on offer. If you wanted anything fancier, you went elsewhere. I once took to The Oak a friend who had on his arm a home counties girlfriend. What would she like to drink? She asked for a sherry. ‘Sherry?’ the landlord of the moment yelped. Then, recovering his poise, ‘What kind of sherry? Red or brown?’
Yet in earlier times, the pub had made much of Saturday lunchtimes, when the nearby lace factories finished for the weekend. Workers coming off duty donned black bow ties and bowlers and made for The Oak’s small back room, known as the Snug, where they downed Guinness and oysters. That routine, along with the lace factories themselves, had ceased by the time I made The Oak my regular watering-hole, but still on Friday nights a man in a white coat carrying a wicker basket would go from room to room selling shellfish brought straight, so he said, from Grimsby. And there would be an air of gaiety about the place that was intensified not merely by Sheffield Tommy’s singing but by the appearance of various other entertainers, most notably an old man who came in mid-evening accompanied by his wife, and who for his party trick would at random pick up someone’s half-filled glass, order someone else to hand over a coin, throw the coin into the glass and then beckon it to come out, which it unfailingly did. For an encore he would borrow a lit cigarette, remove his cap, put the cigarette in his cap, invert it, and the cigarette would crawl out from underneath and come to rest on his cap’s peak. It was the most spectacular feat of legerdemain I’ve ever witnessed, done in full view of people crowded all around, and, beyond drinking the contents of the glass he had borrowed and smoking the rest of the cigarette, he would take no reward. The coin was always returned to its owner.
Years later, when I met him one day in the street, he explained how he used cat gut with a dob of glue, and he showed me the callus on his finger about which the cat gut was wound. His wife was dead, he told me, and he himself now suffered from arthritic joints and could no longer work the trick, but he seemed remarkably un-self-pitying.
Simple Simon was also without self-pity. Not much taller than Sheffield Tommy, Simon wore a succession of brightly-checked sportscoats that were far too large for him, had a grin as wide as George Formby’s, and invariably arrived in the pub with a suitcase full of clothes – shirts, socks, underwear – which he insisted a friend had given him to sell. ‘He’d be here himself, but he’s indisposed.’
Simon rarely managed to sell much before the arrival of a policeman put an end to his trade.
‘Thought I might find you here, Simon. What you got in that suitcase?’
‘I’m just going on holiday, officer.’
‘You are indeed, Simon.’
And off Simon would go, to be detained for a few months at her majesty’s pleasure, sometimes in Lincoln Gaol, more often at the Open Prison at Oakham, where he contentedly helped look after the garden and in season played football – ‘If you’re ever sent there, John, ask to play in goal. Gives you time to look around, there’s some smashing scenery’ – and kept an obliging eye on more troubled inmates. ‘You get some right weirdos, ones that don’t know what’s good for them. Tryin’ to scarper, can you believe it?’
The pub also played host to Dennis and Doreen, a couple who after their day’s work, he as brickie, she as general char, made straight for The Oak, aiming to arrive as the doors opened for business. Once inside, they would stand silently at the bar until each had downed a third glass – Dennis drank pints of Guinness while Doreen’s tipple was rum and coke – at which point they would become suddenly and in Dennis’s case confusingly eloquent. Dennis spoke in tongues. At all events, nobody had the faintest idea what he was talking about, not even Doreen, who simply ignored him. Not that it mattered. If a remark was addressed to you as you stood at the bar waiting to be served, you had simply to agree or, if it seemed more appropriate, nod in grave silence.
‘Hoo hammer sill untro wilter.’
‘Dead right, Dennis. Couldn’t have put it better myself.’
This went on until, towards the end of the evening, Doreen, skirt now hitched high over laddered stockings, chose to canter unsteadily from room to room in the fond belief, so legend had it, that she was providing her audience with a plausible imitation of Old Mother Riley. The conclusion of her nightly ritual was the signal for Dennis, who had by now downed at least eight pints of Guinness and resumed his silent reign, to keel rigidly over, from which prone position he would be lifted onto the shoulders of his mate, a woman far stronger than her stick-like figure suggested, and hauled from The Oak while conversation proceeded as usual. ‘Same time tomorrow night,’ Doreen would shout, as the front door swung shut behind them both. ‘Aye, see you,’ Chris, or Derek, or Norman, those successive landlords, would call.
Imagine Dennis and Doreen at Babi’s. Well, why not? At his taverna they would have sat and eaten their fill, whereas The Oak, as with most spit-and-sawdust pubs, provided no more by way of evening food than whatever filled cobs were left over from the lunchtime trade, plus pickled eggs rumoured to survive within the murky liquid that filled a large jar standing for years on the bar until someone finally threw it out. But would Dennis and Doreen have wanted to eat at Babi’s? Most assuredly, yes. Because all were welcomed at Taverna ta Spata, the farmer and the clown, the poorest he and she. You might desire or be able to afford no more than a glass of retsina and a piece of bread, but you would be received as hospitably as anyone ordering plate after plate of the taverna’s fresh-cooked food.
‘What’s posh?’ my friend Matt Simpson asked me in rhetorical wonderment when, years later, he sat with me at a backstreet taverna on Aegina and watched as people at neighbouring tables applied cheap tin utensils to food that was served on cheap white plates, and poured retsina from cheap copper tankards into cheap tumblers, all the while exchanging friendly banter with the taverna owner and his family and talking and laughing unconstrainedly as they ate, often wandering from table to table to greet friends or renew acquaintance. Some of the clients may have been wealthy, others were undeniably poor. But all were equally welcome, nobody was made to ‘feel out of place’, to use the phrase that tells you so much about the codes of speech, of dress, of behaviour, that infect our still class-ridden society.
‘What’s posh?’ Not Babi’s taverna, for sure. The first time I was there, a middle-aged, distinguished-looking man, dressed in check sportscoat and grey trousers with well-polished black shoes, made his way to our table and, speaking some words I didn’t understand, shook hands with George, then with me. He was carrying an attaché-case, and from his lean, keen-eyed face, the trim but ample moustache and neatly cut hair, I judged him to be a fellow teacher. After some minutes’ conversation with George he opened his attaché-case and George opened his wallet. The man was selling lottery tickets.
There were occasions – not many, but there were some – when I went to Babi’s alone. On such occasions I’d take a book with me, intending to while away the hours in contented isolation. But my plan never worked out. Always, I would be summoned by the occupants of a nearby table and invited to eat and drink with them. To have said that I preferred my own company would have been impossible, inconceivable. If I wanted to be on my own, why come to a taverna? And as I didn’t want to affront or insult Greek hospitality, I did as I was asked to do. In his novel Father Dancing, Nick Papandreou remarks that there is no Greek word for isolation. Not true, but I can understand his point. Isolation or solitariness is undesirable, it implies a failure of hospitality, since nobody can wish to live in isolation. It follows that nobody can or should be left to their own devices. Greek friends were appalled when they heard from me of old people in England being found dead in their own flats or houses, sometimes weeks after they had died. This happened not infrequently during the prolonged cold spell of the winter of 1984–5, usually because the gas or electricity supply had been cut off, or because, fearing they hadn’t the wherewithal to pay, old-age pensioners would simply not risk using the only means they had to keep themselves warm. ‘Such a thing could not happen here,’ George said, and I thought of the old woman who was to be seen, every Sunday, sitting on an upturned orange crate in the street where he lived, waiting for the dinner which people took it in turns to bring to her.
Kindness to strangers operated not merely in tavernas and on the streets of Athens. Whenever in later years I went for an early morning swim from Aegina’s town beach, my hopes of finding and keeping a spot to myself were always scuppered. Early morning was the time when a group of old ladies would come down to the beach. Later in the day would be too hot, and anyway they had household duties. ‘The Hattery’ I called that group of ordinary dames, because of the amazing varieties of straw boaters and bonnets they always clamped on their heads before venturing into water which at seven-thirty a.m. was so unruffled, so pellucid, that it seemed almost a vacancy, an absent element. The sea up to their necks, they would carry on the conversation they had started as they shuffled out of their dresses and into vast swimsuits, and, my own swim done, I would sit on what I hoped might be the isolation of a patch of wall I had chosen for myself, gazing towards the island of Angistri as it began to assemble its rocky, wooded outline from out of the morning mist. But then, their conversation-in-the-sea momentarily suspended, the Hattery would wade cumbrously ashore, take their towels from wherever they had draped them, and gather all about me, the conversation now resumed without let or hindrance. They rarely if ever greeted me, but they knew better than to leave me on my own. An Englishman, I might have thought they were being intrusive. They knew they were being hospitable.
Hospitality at Babi’s stretched to include the various entertainers who during the course of an evening were allowed to wander among the tables, into whose pockets were stuffed drachm notes by the diners, and who, before they moved on to other tavernas, were invariably invited to drink a glass of restina and taste whatever food took their fancy. There was, for example, a semi-blind man with a wicked grin who brought with him a white-painted violin across which he scraped a bow while singing and whistling as though in accompaniment to some tune he was playing, although there was no tune because the violin was without strings. There was also a man of indeterminate age – he looked impossibly ancient but George said that he was no older than his own father – who failed to make forks and spoons disappear up the sleeves of the heavy overcoat he always wore, no matter what the temperature. Unlike Tommy Cooper, who after all really could do tricks, this man couldn’t. Or if he could, he never did. The laughter and applause he got came from displays of incompetence so absolute that you felt they must be rehearsed. George disagreed.
‘But he always fails to do exactly the same tricks,’ I said.
‘That’s because there are no other tricks he can’t do,’ George said.
Blame it on the retsina.
You could also blame retsina, or something stronger, perhaps – ouzo? raki? – on the woefully inadequate performances of a singer-guitarist who would from time to time stumble into the taverna and perform for half an hour or so, seemingly indifferent to applause that was sympathetic rather than enthusiastic. I must on one occasion have betrayed my irritation at his far from skilful playing and at his cracked voice, at the thin, undifferentiated drizzle of words, because Dimitris explained that the man, down-at-heel, with grey hair that hung in greasy strands over his ears – unusual, given that Greek men usually took great pride in their hair – had once been a successful, much-sought-after performer, but that under the junta he had been persecuted for his left-wing opinions, had been on more than one occasion arrested and beaten up, that work had been hard to come by – ‘nobody dared employ him’ – and that he had perhaps not surprisingly found solace in the bottle.
‘Some of these people who clap now,’ George said, ‘informed on him back then.’
‘What, people sitting at these tables?’
‘Sure.’
I looked around me at the crowded taverna. People were smiling, some with their hands high above their heads as they applauded the guitarist.
‘So they clap to ease their guilty consciences.’
‘Oh no,’ George said. ‘It is not so simple. They were one thing then. Now it is different. Most of these people will not have really been friends of the bastards, but they had to survive. It is something Greeks know how to do. We learnt under the Turks. We are good at it.’ And he told me that in the late 1960s, as a national serviceman in Crete, he was sent for by the commanding officer of the camp where he was stationed. ‘I was very much nervous, because, you know, he may have heard something I said that was disrespectful. There were informers everywhere and sometimes they would make up stories if they didn’t like you or thought you were against the junta. Just to get you into trouble and earn themselves some praise. But thanks be to God, the general wanted to see me about another matter. You see, I spoke English and some French, so he asked me to work in the post room.’
‘Really? Why?’
‘As a censor, a spy. I was to open letters and inspect them for any bad remarks about the junta and tell the general if I found evidence for a plot against the colonels.’
‘And what did you say?’
‘I said yes. If I’d said no I’d have been arrested.’
‘Not nice.’
George shrugged. He was taught, so he explained, to steam open letters and then re-seal them. ‘Of course none of the soldiers wrote in French or English. They were poor country boys sending notes to their parents and sweethearts. Most of them could hardly write. “I am well, I hope you are. I love you.” Sometimes I wrote their letters for them. They would pay me what they could – food, a bottle of wine. So I would open and read my own letters.’ George paused, giggled, then said, ‘there was a sergeant who had to overlook my work in the post room and he could hardly read. Sometimes, when I came across one of my own letters I would tell him that this was a particularly good one: you know, loyal. Then he would ask for the name of the soldier and the soldier might be rewarded.’
‘How?’
‘As we all were: with food. A bottle of wine.’ George shook his head at the comic absurdity of it all. ‘Anyway, everybody knew their letters were opened so nobody would risk saying anything dangerous in them. If you wanted to speak what was on your mind you waited until you were with friends you could trust’ – here George thrust out his tongue and gripped it between thumb and forefinger before releasing it with a flourish – ‘and then you talked.’
‘So it was all a waste of time.’
‘Oh, no.’ George speared a morsel of lamb cutlet. ‘I was taken off parade-ground duty and I was allowed to visit home more often, and besides sometimes there was some extra…’ He made a large scooping gesture with his right hand before thrusting it into his trouser pocket.
I looked around. It being a Saturday night, Babi’s was full to bursting, and among those who crowded round the tables to eat, drink and laugh with their families and friends, were some, so George insisted, who ten years previously would have been in the pay of the colonels and yet who were now rubbing shoulders with others the junta had harmed, including the broken-down singer at present shuffling between tables, pausing at some to drink, at others to allow coins and notes to be pushed into his coat pockets, and shaking hands with all.
It was too much for me. ‘Damned if I understand it,’ I said. ‘You’re telling me that this poor man is shaking hands with people who did him damage, right in front of our noses. Why doesn’t he hit them?’
And again George said, ‘It is not that simple. You did what you could to help,’ he added, to my mind mysteriously, although, when on a future occasion I heard someone else say the same thing, I began to understand something of the labyrinthine ways Greeks found to steer themselves and others to survival under Papadopoulos and his thugs.
Because Babi’s was always so crowded on Saturdays, from time to time we’d try elsewhere. One place we briefly took to patronising was called The Taverna of the Three Brothers. It was rather more up-market than Babi’s, with parquet flooring and wood-panelled walls rather than concrete and distemper, and the cutlery, made of steel, unlike Taverna ta Spata’s cheap tin utensils, didn’t bend. Most of our group claimed to like going to the place, although George and I were less enthusiastic, not so much because it was at least as crowded as Babi’s but because whereas at Babi’s people came to eat and drink and meet friends, here people came to see and be seen. The women typically wore fur coats over expensive dresses, the men had on tan or biscuit-coloured suits, and both men and women flashed gold at neck and wrist. Here, we were among but definitely not of the fashionable. We were not, therefore, among those who could expect any favours from the brothers. No fetching our own retsina, no friendly deliberation over dishes, and certainly no possibility of reserving a table.
This became a problem. We’d arrive at our usual time of ten o’clock, all the tables bar one would be taken, and we’d have to stand about, sometimes for the best part of an hour, before space could be found for us. ‘Us’ meant George, Elias, Dimitris and sometimes though not always his fiancée, Aleka, and Manos and Fotini. I suspect Manos in particular, anxious, solicitous, and entirely well-intentioned, felt that The Three Brothers was a more seemly place for a professor of English to be seen eating his Saturday meal at than Babi’s, with its higgledy-piggledum, its charivari of sounds and smells, its joyous sense of carnival. But of course it was precisely that I loved, as I did not love the crowd who gathered here, drawn not by food and drink – inferior to anything Spata could offer – but by the lure of seeing the national basketball team, a bunch of well-muscled, tall and ‘haughty athletes’, who regularly dined at the taverna on Saturday nights because among them was the son of The Three Brothers.
The team ate for free but by doing so earned the taverna fame and, no doubt, a moderate fortune. At that time, basketball was a major sport in Greece, the national team one of the best in Europe; and their guaranteed presence at The Three Brothers was enough to draw many to the place. You knew when the team was about to make its entrance from a sudden tightening of the atmosphere. The customary raucous conversations would dwindle into whisperings, women took out compacts in order to adjust make-up, twiddled with their hair, re-settled fur coats across their shoulders, and each time the door opened everyone craned or half-stood for a better view before falling disconsolately back if, as sometimes happened, the newcomer turned out to be a chance would-be diner. A quick shake of the head from one of the brothers and out into the night the luckless man would go.
And then, finally, the door would open wide, and slowly, in single file, came the gladiators. As one by one they entered the applause would start, growing from hesitant hand-claps to unabashed cheers as they marched the length of the taverna to the large table reserved for them, where the brothers waited to greet them, to shake hands, to have their cheeks kissed. People stood to watch, women flashed their eyes – ‘me first, Kingsley’ – and then, with the team finally seated, the taverna could return to its usual hubbub of sounds.
Beautiful, lofty things, those sportsmen, answering to some need for hero-worship that is deep in the Greek psyche, as in most. I thought of the time, some months previously, when I had been taken to the National Theatre for the opening night of Heartbreak House, directed – very badly as it proved – by Jules Dessin. A few minutes before curtain up, and with most of the audience in their seats, there was a sudden stir, followed by clapping that quickly swelled into a storm of applause. Two men stood framed in the entry to the stalls, one thick-set, his fleshy face topped by a mass of dark, wavy hair, the other slight, frail, stooped, with a thin, gingery beard. Who were they? Theodorakis and Ritsos, my companion explained. Afterwards I was taken backstage and there got to shake Ritsos’s hand. I too have my heroes.
Our visits to The Three Brothers went on for several more Saturdays, but always there was the irritation of having to wait for a table to become free before we could be seated, followed by the further irritation of slow and perfunctory service and frankly inferior food. One night, as we stood dully in line, I suggested that matters might be improved were we to arrive at the taverna half an hour earlier. My remark was greeted with cries of amazed approval. Of course, of course, that was what we must do. The next Saturday I arrived at The Three Brothers at the earlier time we had agreed. The rest arrived half an hour later. We had an unusually long wait for a table. After that, I insisted we went back to Babi’s.
One mid-week evening George and I were there on our own when Babi came to our table, a smile on his lips and a sheep’s skull in his hands. ‘A special gift for you, Mr John.’ He prised the skull apart and shook the contents onto my plate. I didn’t greatly care for the look of the white mush but George at once got busy on it, and while he did so Babi produced from his apron pocket a scrap of paper which looked to have been torn from a newspaper and gave it me to read. ‘FOR SALE. United Distilleries Scotland wish to dispose of four hundred barrels, formerly used for storing whisky.’ That was the gist of it.
‘Mr John,’ Babi asked, ‘where in Scotland is this United Distilleries?’
‘Not a clue. Probably somewhere near the top, but I really don’t know.’
‘But you can find out?’
Yes, I said, I could find out. But why did he want to know?
‘Because I want to buy these barrels.’
Babi? Buy four hundred whisky barrels? Why? What for? What with?
As though he could mind read, Babi reached down inside the top of his apron and produced the most enormous fistful of drachm notes. ‘I have money,’ he said, ‘I go to this place, I buy these barrels, I make more money. You find me the address of this place, that is all I want.’
I did as he asked and forgot all about it.
The following week Babi was missing from the taverna for a few nights. ‘Babi, he gone to Scotland,’ was all one of the brothers told us.
But by the weekend he was back, and in expansive mood. ‘Mr John, for you, something special.’ And a large piece of Danish blue cheese was put before me. He then sat down with us, a thing he rarely did if, as now, the taverna was busy. A grin that, were it on anyone else’s face I would have thought of as smug, widening his stubbly cheeks, he told us of how, the previous Monday, he had left Athens on the first morning flight for Heathrow, had from London boarded a commuter plane bound for Edinburgh, and had finished his journey by train and taxi, arriving at his destination early in the afternoon. ‘So I see the barrels which I like very much and I argue a little about the price, you know, and then I buy them.’
Argue a little! Like all Greeks Babi was an habitual haggler and though I never found out how much he managed to have knocked off the asking price, it would have been enough to satisfy his pride and yet accomplished with such skill as to leave the other side feeling they’d got the better of the bargain. His journey to Scotland, he explained, had been plotted for him by ‘a cousin’ – of course – who worked for Olympic Airlines. ‘And he has some cousins in Aberdeen. A nice town. So I stay there on Monday night then I come back to London where I stay with another cousin, a very nice lady, and I do some shopping, you know, and then I come home.’
Two questions occurred to me. In the first place, how had Babi paid for the barrels? Greeks seldom had large bank accounts and almost never wrote cheques. There were of course good reasons for this. In addition to distrusting the banking system – banks regularly went into liquidation or simply vanished into thin air, taking their clients’ money with them – the Greek ‘black’ economy meant that nearly everyone dealt in ready cash, which couldn’t be traced by the tax inspectors. ‘Greece is a poor country full of rich people,’ was how it was once put to me, and while I knew people who were genuinely poor and heard of others who were poorer still, it was certainly the case that nobody ever declared their full earnings. They didn’t tell their friends and they didn’t tell officialdom. And anyway, payment for services rendered was often in kind. A form of barter economy survived in the Greece I knew then. In Babi’s, for example, you’d often find men, sometimes alone, more often with their families – electricians, plasterers – who had done work for the taverna and were being paid in kind – that is, by a week of free meals, or as many as were thought fit repayment for the work rendered. True, from time to time Babi would peel off some notes from the vast roll that swelled his apron front and press them into hands that weren’t so much open and waiting as discreetly available. But I noticed that when he did this, neither he nor the man whom he was paying ever looked at each other. It was as though there was something slightly shameful about a cash transaction, something not quite honourable.
Babi probably kept that vast roll of drachm notes under his floorboards. But I couldn’t see British businessmen accepting payment in ‘fat and sweltering’ drachms. Nor, as it turned out, had they. Babi had changed drachms to pounds before leaving Athens and, once the deal was concluded, handed over the due amount in crisp Bank of England notes. I never found out how much he had paid but it must have run well into the thousands. I thought of him travelling alone to the north of Scotland, his pockets stuffed with cash. Had he not been worried he might be jumped? But then I looked at his muscled arms, those massive shoulders. You’d have to be a brave or extremely foolish dip to take on Babi. Before I could put my second question, he left us to deal with other customers.
But several weeks later I got the answer. I was working in my flat one afternoon when the phone rang. ‘Mr John, you are at home. Good. I want you to come with me, I have something to show you. In half an hour exactly I come to your flat. We are going to take a trip in my car. OK?’
‘OK,’ I said.
An hour later – ‘I am not so late that it matters, you agree?’ – we were making our way across Athens in Babi’s old Cortina. He was in an unusually good mood, singing a succession of rembetika songs, banging on the steering-wheel with the flat of his hand, throwing his head from side to side, refusing to tell me where we were going or why. Then, brought by a route I had failed to recognise, I saw that we’d arrived at Piraeus.
Babi swung the car across the two-way traffic and drove, more slowly now, along the concrete concourse that ran the length of the immense waterfront. We passed ferries, large and small, a few being loaded up, more standing idle, for this was out of season; we passed smaller craft that regularly plied between Piraeus and Aegina, and which were on the water at all times of year, we passed what could have been a mine-sweeper, in urgent need of a fresh coat of paint to cover the streaks and splodges of rust showing through its gun-metal grey, we passed a clutch of fishing boats, and then, right at the end of the docks, we came to a small container ship.
Babi stopped the car. ‘This is what we come to see,’ he said, motioning me to get out. We walked towards the ship and as we came near, Babi called out, ‘Nikos, Nikos.’
A man appeared in the prow of the ship. He was wearing a white-topped cap and dark-blue coat with brass buttons and gold-edged lapels. He shouted a greeting and waved to Babi, then pointed to two of the containers stacked high along the deck.
‘My cousin,’ Babi said, and his guttural voice was suddenly thick with emotion. ‘He is a sea-captain. He bring the barrels for me.’
I’ve no idea how many barrels Babi kept for himself and how many he sold on, but both Dimitris and George were convinced that the trip to Scotland had resulted in a whacking great profit. Old whisky barrels were much prized by taverna owners, because the impregnated wood was, it seemed, perfect for giving an added flavour to even the finest retsina and also for ensuring it remained good to the last drop. No doubt about it, Babi had struck gold.
‘Well, good for him,’ I said. ‘Many more deals like that and he can retire.’
They looked at me as though I were mad. Retire? the look meant, and what then would Babi do?