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I reach up to the bamboo shelf suspended from the twisting olive-branch beams and, finally, take down the box of dog biscuits. Good-O, the label says, over a picture of a happy spaniel. I open it and bite into one of the brown cardboard-textured rings. It tastes like cardboard steeped in fat – spaniels are so easily pleased – and I spit it out. But my stomach continues muttering, and obediently I pour a handful of biscuits into a pot. Together with chopped onion, tomato paste and pepper, they boil down to something one might almost eat in dim light. But as I nibble gingerly at the tip of the spoon and the alarmed reviews flood back from the taste buds, everything becomes clear. In addition to having no money and no work, apparently I have no food. It's time to go.
My one-roomed olive-picker's hut, or thimonia, is in a terraced olive grove on the side of a little valley overlooking Vathi Bay. The wobbly metre-thick slate walls are whitewashed inside and out and pocked by deep, irregular alcoves. Golden branches support a slate ceiling topped with a thick layer of earth and a thin skin of cement. Narrow green doors punctuate the long front facade and tiny windows each side-wall. A small blackened hearth fills one corner and a double bed one end of the narrow room; it wasn't far into my first night on the lumpy horsehair mattress that I understood the purpose of the rubber mallet left by its side. There's no electricity, no gas and no plumbing. Water has to be drawn and brought indoors from either the cistern, built roomlike onto one side of the hut to collect water from its flat roof, or the rock pool, fed by a little waterfall, nestled in the groyne of the valley a hundred metres up the dry creekbed. The lavatory is a pick and shovel leaning on a just-distant-enough olive tree. Later, lying sleeplessly in one of the newish hotels in the port on the eve of my departure, I stare nauseously at the dead straight line where walls meet, and at the sterile expanse of flat white ceiling, desperately missing the living, story-telling spirit of my wobbly home, for such it has already become after just a month or two.
Winter, though, is proving tougher than imagined. With December the fortunas have rolled over the Kyklades, fierce storms that scour the mountains and howl down the valleys, whipping the olive trees back and forth and dropping the temperatures to near freezing; New Year's Eve will leave an ethereal coat of snow on the olives and beaches. The little hearth has performed well enough until now, but in the wild crosswinds the inadequately kinked chimney inhales instead of exhaling, blowing the smoke of any fire I dare light under it back into the room and forcing me, coughing, spluttering and weeping, out into the cold: I can be warm or I can breathe. A kerosene heater, assuming I could afford one, would be out of the question in the small space. So as winter sets in I find myself huddling fully dressed in bed at midday with a fat yellow votive candle burning, sipping tea, contemplating the shadows flickering among the beams, listening to the rustle of mice in the roof and the growling of my stomach, tapping my pen on a blank page and wondering what to do.
For two months now I've been a labourer on the one project in town, a small house being built by Kosta the painter in supposed secrecy, for reasons deriving from two locally unappealing aspects of his personality. First, he's an alcoholic, given to wheedling money or drinks out of many while drunk and snubbing them while sober, or being found asleep, on mornings after, in people's lemon trees or on the altar of the nearest chapel.
In this sober, religious and gossip-monitored little society there are harsh penalties for moral transgression, case in point being the old fellow, often to be found sitting alone in one taverna or kafeneon or another: apparently he'd taken unwelcome liberties with a female tourist many years before and been shunned ever since. Kosta, not being quite in that category, and thanks to his status as an artist, was more quickly forgiven, at least by some; occasionally he was met with a mystifyingly cold eye.
What was more he is, and as far as most Sifniots were concerned will always be, German. His real name is Wolfgang, but after discovering and settling on Sifnos in his teens, and with the war even fresher then than it still is in in local memory, he adopted something more indigenous. It never really took. Instead of Wolfgang the Allemanios he merely became Kosta the Allemanios. (Germany was still named for its barbarian ancestors; states might come and go but in the local view, peoples were forever.) He remained on the fringe, acutely aware of it and always bearing in mind the fate of Kurt.
Kurt was another German wanderer who'd fallen in love with a pleasant patch of land just across the valley from my thimonia. He tracked down the owner and struck a deal. No fool, he first went to the island council and confirmed that nobody would object to the sale. No, Kirios Kurt, he was told, of course you can buy this land! He paid the vendor, obtained a deed, drew up a modest little two-room spitaki and took the plans back to council. Ah, they said, you want to build on it? Po-po-po! Why hadn't he said so? Didn't he realise that that land was covered in sage and thyme? And that bees fed on this sage and thyme? And that these bees were owned by local farmers for the purpose of producing the beautiful Sifniot honey? And that the economic wellbeing of not only these farmers but of Vathi, Sifnos and all of Greece depended on the income from this honey? Ochi! It was out of the question! Understanding that there had never been any chance of being allowed to build anywhere on Sifnos, Kurt gave up his island dream, packed his bags and left, never to return. As we cleared Kosta's site of sagebrush he hauled it off to a huge kerosene-fueled bonfire, and danced around it screeching 'Burn, bloody sage, burn!'
He'd been trying to build his house for years, but every time he thought he engaged labourers to come down from Apollonia with their mules and get started, they would fail to show up: the weather was looking dubious, Yorgos's wife had gone into labour, Lefteri's mule had gone lame – a new excuse each year. And then, this year, a miracle: after the tourist season ended and the Chryssopigi had ceremoniously circumnavigated the bay, blowing its horn while the villagers came out on their balconies to fire shotguns and bang pots and pans together in farewell, Kosta observed with mounting relish that five foreign backpackers, impecunious as any of their kind, had stayed behind. He made an offer and, despite not having working visas – their reason for secrecy – they accepted. Kosta would have a house after all. But he had no intention of applying for a building permit: for all he knew the island council was a hive of cold-eyed rudeness.
Any faith in secrecy was, however, soon shattered. Strolling one day through a village an hour's walk away I overheard two building labourers, men I'd never seen, chatting as I passed. 'Who's that?' 'An Afstralos. He lives in old Tsalikis's place in Vathi, and he's working on Kosta's house.' After the initial shock I felt honoured to have got away with so unadorned a description.
Well, we consoled ourselves, at least there was Vathi's winter isolation. No roads reached the village, the summer ferry had disappeared and now access was only by private boat or one of the donkey-tracks over the hills. We joked about donkeys appearing injun-like on the ridge with flashing lights strapped to their heads, and Kosta mounted guard from his temporary hillside home, armed with binoculars and a walkie-talkie which was employed mainly to exhort us to work faster; the rule, it seems, was that if you could get the roof on you could keep the building. (On the other hand, two-storey houses incurred lower land-tax than one-storeys, so many a house sported steel reinforcement bars poking through the roof, in eternal preparation for the sadly delayed upper addition.) Yet we knew that, had anyone really wanted to reach Vathi, it was, Poseidon permitting, just a twenty-minute police-boat trip from Kamares.
What really protected us was socioeconomic reality. No sooner did the tourist season end than all the families who offered rooms for rent began converting its proceeds into more rooms: every self-respecting male owned a kaloupi, a mould for making concrete blocks from beach sand and river rocks. But taking advantage of nature's infinite resources in this way was now unaccountably illegal, so building permits joined the list of modern inconveniences best politely overlooked. Any overly diligent inspector would be forced to confront not only the likes of Kosta but possibly their wife's cousin too, and then there'd be no end to it. We were utterly safe, and we relaxed.
My daily thousand drachmes covered not only a week's rent but a few day's sustenance, and I quickly understood that this was how life should be: a week or two of work followed, as we waited for clay building blocks to arrive from Kamares or our freshly poured concrete lintels to cure, by another week or two of well-funded fishing, socialising, bay-watching and hill-walking.
Once a week I would do the gently spectacular but rugged two-hour walk over the hills to Apollonia, to collect my mail and do my shopping. Vathi's sole 'shop' offered little more than potatoes and toilet paper, and I'd bring Kiria Kate, the short, round, blackclad shopkeeper, bars of rich Ion milk chocolate, whose red wrappers she'd caress speechlessly, eyes ashine with childlike wonder.
One day I found a box at the post office, wrapped in brown paper and tied with string, from my mother far away. Sitting at an outdoor kafeneon table to open it, I quickly attracted a small crowd. One man wanted the string, another the brown paper and another the stamps, triggering a short dispute about whether ownership of the paper conferred ownership of the stamps. I adjudicated in the negative. Finally the box was open and there, atop an assortment of other delicacies, we beheld several pairs of new underpants. I could almost hear the whoosh of my adjudicatory powers being withdrawn.
So the second time I received an unsolicited parcel I lugged it, unopened, together with my usual load of bread, cheese, salami, cabbage, tomato paste, tinned sardines and Ion, back across the mountains to Vathi and the privacy of my hut. Wheezing in exhaustion, my fingers grooved and throbbing from the string, I pried the box open to discover, in addition to tinned asparagus and a passionfruit, the hefty box of Good-O. It was, a note helpfully explained, for Tourista – a peripatetic spotted hound who, like Henry Miller in Paris, kept a roster of houses he could rely on for a meal, and whom I'd made the mistake of mentioning in my letters. He hadn't been around for a long while.
But it had been three weeks since the professional roof-pourers had been summoned from Apollonia, and it seemed that the curse of Kurt might be kicking in after all, and that Kosta might be left with four forever roofless walls. My little stash of hundred-drachma notes dwindled and finally just disappeared. Huddling in bed, unable to afford even a few potatoes or a loaf of bread, again and again my gaze wondered enviously to the happy spaniel.
I scrape the toxic goo into the garbage, and look around. Yes, this is home. But homes are for leaving, and why wait? My escape fund is intact. This very night I can enjoy a good meal in Mangana's taverna and Harry and Varvara's soft spare bed in Artemonas, and in the morning catch the ferry to Piraeus. I shove my few belongings into my rucksack, prop it by the door and, already excited, hurry down the dry creekbed to the village to say my goodbyes and take a parting photograph of the bay.
Manolis is nowhere to be seen but Kate is in her shop, sitting in the cavernous gaslit room with Taxiarchis monastery's whitehaired janitor, Kiria Dho, and a short, silver-stubbled man introduced as Kirios Yorgos. Their chairs are drawn up in an arc on the concrete floor, and I draw up another, around a wide terracotta bowl with a pattern of holes cut through it, set on a terracotta pot. In the bowl a pile of glowing coals exudes a comforting aura of warmth without so much as a wisp of smoke. Periodically, as the coals die and ash seeps through the holes into the pot, Kate goes to her almost permanent cooking fire in the kitchen hearth and brings back a fresh bowl of embers. I sit looking at the brazier speechlessly, my eyes quite possibly ashine with childlike wonder. So this is how it's done.
It's the latest in a series of low-tech epiphanies. Such municipal water supply as exists doesn't extend to Vathi, and one of my first tasks as a labourer was fetching water from the well, in this case a deep hole in a nondescript patch of weeds, covered with a sheet of corrugated iron. A galvanised bucket lay to one side, tethered by a long rope to a bracket in the well-wall. I dropped the bucket in, heard a satisfying liquid smack and drew it back up, hand over hand. Empty. How was I to make sure the bucket didn't land on its bottom again? I dropped it upside down. Smack. Empty. How could I ensure the rope didn't jerk the bucket upright on its way down? I turned the bucket upside down, coiled the rope carefully onto its underside and dropped it. Sploosh! But only half a bucket of water. Not bad for a suburban boy, I thought, and repeated the trick until my plastic jerrycan was full. I say, that took you a while, was the gist of my greeting back at the building site.
Days later I happened upon Kiria Dho, eighty-five years old, reed thin in her black mourning weeds and heavy boots, her white hair pulled back into a severe bun, bent over the well behind Taxiarchis as she drew her daily two pails of water. She dropped the bucket in. Sploosh. She waited, tugged the rope gently, then drew up an obviously heavy load, hand over hand, until a brim-full bucket emerged. She filled one of her pails, refused my assistance with an upwards jerk of her chin, without further ado dropped the bucket back in and retrieved it, full again. After she'd teetered indoors with a full pail in each hand I examined the bucket. A small, smooth creek stone had been bound to one side of the handle with a strip of cloth. If the bucket landed bottom-first, the weight was just enough to make it list over and sink. So that's how it was done.
'Poss to leni' I say, touching the tip of my boot to the brazier. What's it called?
'Afti? Mangali.' Kate shrugs: as any fool knows.
I look into the glowing coals with a pang of regret: I won't be around long enough to enjoy the glow of my own mangali. But before I can announce my departure Kate notices the camera slung over my shoulder and demands to be photographed, Dho and Yorgos nodding agreement. The proud tanned faces etched by hard lives, the warm eyes, the severe clothes – both women in black, Yorgos in brown and grey homespun – the mottled, flaking white walls, the lumpy sacks of potatoes, all thrown into dramatic chiaroscuro by the bright, softly hissing gas lamp, make up a living Rembrandt. I raise the camera to my eye, but as Yorgos takes off his cap and Kate brushes her apron clean, and all three stiffen into the stern poses found in nineteenth-century sepias, I realise I've run out of film. How can I tell them? With as much conspicuous finger movement as possible I pretend to take the shot, and after a moment's narrow-eyed doubt they relax into shy smiles, as if alighting from a guiltily enjoyed ride at the fair.
'Panigyri apopse,' says Yorgos, gesturing through the wall to the mountains behind the bay, where on clear days the tiny white fleck of Ayos Nikolaos monastery can just be discerned against the absurd blue sky. Today must be Saint Nick's name-day, and tonight there'll be a communal celebration, consisting, like all panigyria, of church service, free meal and, likely as not, hours of music and dancing. All are welcome, even touristas. There are said to be three hundred and sixty-five churches, chapels and monasteries on the island – one is rarely out of eyeshot of at least one – each with its saint and its name-day and its panigyri on one scale or another, another cycle of festivity around the weddings, baptisms and national holidays that leaven the island's austere, traditional life. 'I'm going up soon, I'll take you.'
'Efharisto poli, kirios Yorgos,' I venture in my broken Greek, 'but I have to leave tonight.'
'Leave after,' he says bluntly.
It can be done. If I leave the monastery by midnight I can still come back for my pack and walk to Kamares by morning. One last authentic Sifnos experience before leaving. Yorgos finishes his coffee and we leave, he leading his mule up the wide, worn slate steps, me following in the hoofsteps of the well-fed animal.
'Vlepis,' he says every so often, stopping to indicate the steadily expanding vista of terraced farmland, 'Look. I made that.' I understand him to mean the terraces and their drywalls, and that this is all his land. He's telling me about decades of backbreaking labour, and the expansion of his family's fortune.
We arrive at a whitewashed stone hut, newer and less handsome than my own, but looking grandly over the bulging, bellylike foothills and a western Aegean darkening under the dimming sky. He shows me into a dingy low-ceilinged room decorated with red woven rugs. Half a loaf of bread, some tomatoes and a bottle of olive oil adorn a rough table, and a small, faded pastel of Jesus bethorned hangs on one wall. A side room is packed with bound blocks of hay.
'My house,' he says. 'I made it.'
After parking his mule in a stone corral he leads me the rest of the way up the mountain in silence, the sun setting at our backs and the air turning peach and cyan around us. On the horizon the black peaks of Milos and Kimolos jut into a blood-orange band of sky. The icy wind whistles softly, ruffling the dark water below and relaying a faraway goatbell klonk. With the first stars gleaming in the indigo we reach the monastery, a chapel flanked by a row of green-windowed cells and a dining hall, relics of the days when there were more than two or three monks on the island. A Greek flag snaps against the sky.
Dozens of people from all over the island have already arrived by the relatively level inland route. The service is underway and the papa sings on unperturbed in his Judaic minor key as latecomers, Yorgos included, bang coins loudly into the silver plate by the door, announcing both their presence and their generosity. At a smaller service in a church in Artemonas I've seen a stray cat leap onto the papa's lectern and sit squarely in the middle of the Bible from which he was singing. Without missing a beat the priest scooped up the skinny creature and draped it over his shoulder, stroking it as he sang for the rest of the service. There's no cat tonight, but the same casually inclusive spirit prevails, the motley congregation, including the odd stray foreigner, standing on the rough flagstones, hats in hand, in a casual arc around the papa in his black cloak and stovepipe hat, the wall of icons glowing golden behind him in the candlelight, his baritone rising just enough to set the vaults of the chapel, and perhaps of a few skulls, reverberating with higher meaning.
Afterwards, waiting for the call to dine, a tall retired ship's engineer engages me in conversation, his eagerness to practise his English overriding his uncertain feelings, apparent from the behaviour of his eyebrows, about the holes in my brown woollen jumper. I discovered the frayed old thing in a chest under the thimonia bed and, having blithely arrived without winter clothes, decided it had been left there for my use.
'Apo pou iste?' he asks.
'Afstraleeya,' I say in my best Greek.
'Australia!' he continues in English, 'I have been there many times. Milvorni?'
'No, the west.'
'Ah, Fremantle! I have been there many times!'
'Well, Perth.'
'Perth? What is Perth?'
A bell rings, and moving into the dining room we settle at long tables adorned with bowls of fresh bread and olives, bottles of local wine and aluminium jugs of water and retsina. Immediately a squad of women in aprons emerges from the kitchen with steaming bowls of revithia, the island's hearty chickpea soup, thick with onion and olive oil and accompanied by fat slices of lemon to be squeezed in just before consumption. Then come platters of battered cod, boiled potatoes and lahanosalata, the winter salad of raw cabbage, lots of salt and the usual generous splash of olive oil. Remembering my abortive lunch and listening to the wind picking up outside, I think about my sugarcube house and Kate's smokeless mangali, and wonder if I'll be leaving after all. Yes, I will. I have no food, no money, no work, no choice. I tear off a piece of dense crusty bread and plunge my spoon into the lemony bowl.
Adrianou, Vathi's resident violinist, a petite version of Henry Fonda with a dashing silver moustache, begins playing what seems to be his single if endlessly malleable tune: do-re-mi fa-fa fa-fa fa-mi-fa, do-re-mi fa-fa mi-mi re-do-re. As the papa beats the rhythm on the table with his wineglass, a short, round woman suddenly stands up on her bench and, leaping over the table, runs towards the kitchen, brushing people aside as she goes, not to attend to some emergency only she can see but to join the dance. A reserved and dignified old man sitting opposite me suddenly slams his empty retsina-glass decisively on the table, stands up, peels off his jacket, rolls up his sleeves and goes to join her. By now Adrianou is standing on a bench, hunched into his instrument, with the papa swaying beside him as people stuff hundred-drachma notes into the former's pockets and flip brass coins at the latter. A teenager leaps onto the bench and, pressing his finger to the papa's lips, shouts 'Have some PASOK!' – the ruling Socialist Party. Spitting and gagging, the priest jumps down to give chase amongst the laughter. Adrianou never misses a note.
I sit back, unable to contribute to the conversation and recognising only a few faces: Yorgos, a couple of shopkeepers from Apollonia, a bus driver from Kamares, one of the mulari who ride down to work on Kosta's house occasionally and, less happily, a sullen ginger-stubbled man I first encountered in Manolis's kitchen.
As the holidaying Athenians who own most of Vathi's houses went back to work and the tourist season faded out, the village had turned into a ghost town of half a dozen old souls and the occasional overstaying traveler. The tavernas started closing, first Andonis's pretty waterside place at the north end of the bay, from which one could stare down at the sea urchins waving gently from the rocks, then the rather touristy establishment overlooking the beach, and finally even Andreas's unadorned little room where one could, in absolute desperation and at the cost of fending off relentless demands for a work visa for whichever country you were from, find a warm beer and, if truly desperate, a plate of spaghetti uncomplicated by sauce, cheese or even olive oil. Manolis was the last man standing.
He, too, took down the coloured lights over his courtyard and stacked away his tables and chairs but, except for the one night of the week when he went to stay with his wife in Apollonia, he never closed. All through winter, from about six o'clock, after he'd done his full day's farmwork and taken his precious half-hour off to sit by the water with a coffee and a cigarette, contemplating the bay and, I always felt, deeper matters including his great good fortune, anyone could wonder into his long whitewashed kitchen and find him peeling patates for chips, chopping lahano for a salad, slicing two-day-old bread and getting ready to cook up a big pot of lentil soup or bake a freshly plucked katopoulo or deep-fry some sardeles,. It was the place to come for company, to escape the wind and solitude of the hills or sea, to eat and talk or just to nurse a coffee while others ate and talked. Shepherds from the hills or fishermen off their boats would appear suddenly, wild-haired, at the door, the latter often bearing a bucket of catch to exchange for Manolis's expertise at the stove. A few fish would go into the pot for a soup and the rest would be fried, huge helpings handed to its providers and the rest dished up on a central platter for all to enjoy. This was common: some mornings, a fisherman would row in from his boat after a night anchored in the bay and hand Kate a bucket of fish. After a long argument over his refusal to be paid she'd give half the bucket to her friend Dho, throw a fish to the nearest cat, and waddle indoors to clean her share, one short cut breadthways across the belly turning the fish into a pouch to be briskly emptied with a finger.
I'd sit at the far end of Manolis's green marble-patterned formica table, listening to what for a long time sounded like ferocious arguments about politika or money but which turned out, once I'd acquired a few words of Greek, to concern far deeper matters.
'Cats,' someone might venture. 'Cats are useless.'
'Cats?' Manolis would counter. 'Cats are kalos! Poli kalos!'
Every side of the proposition would then be enthusiastically analysed for as long as necessary, or possibly longer.
And one cold windy night I found the ginger man, humbly dressed, uncombed, unshaven, looking fifty though perhaps thirty, with a loud, rough, guttural voice and a tendency to kick his skinny, cringing dog, ensconced in Manolis's kitchen with a cup of coffee.
Some Greeks, I've read, give their dogs the names of enemies so they can shout 'Get out, Mehmed!' or 'Ochi, Benito!' But Manolis loves his fat old Arapina, a shorthaired black and tan in the island mould, greeting her each morning as he would an old friend, chatting to her as he goes about his work, or chatting as much to her as he ever does to anyone, and sharing the bay view with her at day's end. He has a special way with cats, too; he really does think they're good. 'Afti ine kalos', he'll say, This one is good, and prove his point by vigourously thumping the big marmalade tom's back while it braces itself, donkeylike, for this strange but clearly familiar token of its master's affection. Even Manolis's dour, black-moustached brother, Antonis, who handed over a black and tan pup with the macho name of Tarzan to soft old Kosta to raise for him, made no objection to his being rechristened with the soothing baby-word Pra-Pra and spoiled rotten. 'Ella, Tarzan,' Antonis said on reclaiming him months later, but years on, Kosta would only have to call 'Pra-Pra' and a portly black and tan mutt would shimmy across the square for a bodywagging reunion. And there is Iraklis, a short bald man with a big longhaired Collie, the only one on the island, at his master's side even on labouring jobs, its coat always lovingly brushed and shining.
But this fellow was the other sort, and I took a dislike to him. Manolis told him I was an Afstralos who was working on Kosta's house, and he looked at me suspiciously and shook his head: the world was just too strange. His father, he said – he pointed to the hills with his chin – was sick with stomach-ache, and he'd come to ask o Manolis, as he addressed him formally, what to do.
'Give him tea,' said Manolis sagely.
'Tea? Where can I get tea?'
'I have some,' said Manolis. He got up and went to a drawer, came back with a Twinings English Breakfast teabag sealed in its red paper sachet, and handed it over. The shepherd's son accepted it gravely, turning it over and over in his hands.
'Efharisto, Manolis,' he said tremblingly, as if about to burst into tears. He turned it over some more. 'And what do I do with this?'
Manolis took it back and, holding it up before the man's face, tore it open. The teabag plopped out, dangling on its little noose in mid-air. The ginger man recoiled, throwing his chair back with a horrified gasp as if confronted with the blackest art. Manolis remained serious.
'You put this in hot water for a minute or two,' he said. 'Not for long or it will be too strong. Then you take it out. Keep it, you can use it again, maybe twice. Give your father the drink with a little honey.'
'Ah, efharisto parapoli, o Manolis!'
They went back to shouting happily at each other. Having pegged me as a xenos, the shepherd took no further notice of me, except when during a lull in the debate he suddenly turned in my direction and threw his mouth open in a silent roar. I stared, perplexed, until I realised that he was showing me the complete absence of teeth from his head. He closed his mouth, turned back to Manolis and resumed shouting while I stared into my coffee, shaken not by the unappetising sight but by the childlike pride.
Watching him now, however, his face impassive but his eyes darting, his mouth opening not to roar or sing but only in curt response to his neighbours' attempts at conversation, it occurs to me that he's grown a complete set of teeth. They aren't false: who would deliberately create, let alone wear, such a yellowed and snaggled set of dentures? But it's the same face, the same voice, the same look of someone who kicks dogs, comes down off the mountain only when his father is ill and has never seen a teabag. Twins, I conclude, and it dawns on me that Yorgos is their father.
Now the gathered panegyrists begin singing in the mantinada style, taking turns to improvise long, heavily melismatised rhyming couplets to the violin's melody. I can't understand what they're singing but their faces tell the story, sometimes joyous, perhaps about grandchildren born or letters received from sons overseas, sometimes clearly not. When the twin's turn arrives, after some reluctance and much encouragement he closes his eyes and begins pouring forth an indecipherable tale of misery, his lined face and rasping, unmelodic voice contorted in release as the violin keeps up its propelling, sanctioning, suddenly sombre tune. After several agonised couplets he comes to an abrupt halt and takes a swig of retsina, and while someone else takes up the song as if nothing has happened, and perhaps nothing has, one or two at the table silently raise their glasses to him. He stands up stiffly and, accepting the leader's handkerchief, joins the dance.
Meanwhile the storm has grown wild, the roaring and shrieking of the wind through the leaky windowframes challenging the music and making some people nervous enough to leave. Finally word goes around that those who've come by the overland route should leave before it gets worse, but those who've come up from Vathi shouldn't attempt the downward climb. A dozen of us are trapped for the night. No sleeping arrangements are on offer, and we gather in the main hall by a regal hearth where huge logs are blazing. Even so the cold becomes increasingly bitter as the long night wears on, and I find myself cowering by the fire with Adrianou.
'Apo pou iste?'
'Afstraleeya.'
'Ah,' he nods. 'Poli krio!' Very cold. He karate-chops the air several times for emphasis.
'Not Austria. Afstraleeya.'
'Afstraleeya?' He nods thoughtfully, and points vaguely northwards.
'Is it that way?'
'Ochi. That way.'
His brow wrinkles.
'Far?'
'Very far.'
'Zesti?'
'Yes, hot, like here.'
He grins.
'Ehis eliades?'
'No, we don't have olives.'
His forehead rewrinkles.
'Den ehis eliades?'
'No olives.'
He stares at me, unwilling to believe anything so bizarre. (He's right, as it turns out. Afstraleeya has eliades.)
'But... do you have lemons?'
'Oh yes, we have lemons.'
'You have oranges?'
'Yes, we have oranges.'
'Figs?'
'We have figs.'
'Eggplants?'
Somewhere after tomatoes I go off and try to sleep, stretching out on a bare wooden bench or curling up on the slate floor by the fire, listening to the wind and thinking wistfully of fruit and what I'm going to do in the morning. The Piraeus ferry is out of the question now and there won't be another for a week, weather permitting. I'll have, literally, to eat into my reserves and hope for the best. Perhaps the roofers will come and Kosta will have some work for me. Anyway, I haven't said goodbye to Manolis.
As light creeps through the windows the wind drops away. The papa rings the six o'clock bell and one of the previous night's cooks go outside for an apronful of freshly picked sage, which she boils into a lightly flavoured, pale yellow tea and hands around with hard biscuits. Just as I'm getting ready to leave, the ship's engineer comes out of the kitchen and hands me a big plastic bag full of food: five loaves of bread, fried fish wrapped in foil, some boiled potatoes, a tin of revithia – enough for a week or more. I've said nothing about my little woes, but the holes in someone else's jumper have spoken, or misspoken, for me.
'Parakalo,' he says. Please. 'It is from the Tsurts.' It is, of course, from him, but he acts brisk and businesslike, and avoids my gaze.
The dawn is translucent pink, a half-moon lingers overhead and a soft wind rustles the sage and thyme bushes. I have no idea which way we came up but, lighthearted with the good weather and my providential supplies and the milk of human kindness, I strike off down the mountain towards the sea, feeling I have all the time and not a care in the world. Quickly losing the goat-track, I spend two perfectly happy hours clambering over drywalls and down ravines, thistles plucking at my trousers, thyme and sage releasing heady clouds of scent and flocks of sheep bleating in surprise as I wade through them, every so often stopping to savour the sun on my back and the view down to Taxiarchis's ice-cream domes never quite melting into the silky bay.
My heart leaps as I glimpse the familiar mass of the sugarcube through the olive trees, and back inside my reprieved home I set about renewing my tenancy. I store away my treasure of food, empty my backpack and stack my clothes neatly back into their alcove, remake the bed with a few reinvigorated blows of the mallet, sweep the floor, break up and drag in some windfallen branches for the fire and, finally, for acrowning touch, look around for something to use as a mangali. In the tiny storeroom next to the cistern, among rusting picks, spades and junk, I find the perfect thing: a mangali. I've noticed it before but only registered a battered, blackened bowl, unfit for any human use I could conceive of.
A couple of nights later, after a meal of fish and potatoes in the warmth of my own home, I go down to Manolis's kitchen for a coffee. Outside, some dead branches have been set on fire and, sure enough, inside is a large metal mangali full of glowing coals; the secret is out. Kosta huddles over it, nursing a half-glass of retsina – any more is unseemly, regardless of how many half-glasses one drinks – while Manolis peels onions at the sink.
'Kalispera, filos!' Manolis shouts with a twinkle in his Cretan eyes. Good evening, friend. He keeps talking, and I think I hear the name Tsalikis, the old man who owns my abode. Finally Kosta translates: Tsalikis wanted me to pick his olives.
That Tsalikis should know of me isn't too great a surprise, given the conversation overheard in Plati Yialos. I'm a known quantity now, carefully charted on the map of island society. Perhaps my lack of bad repute has filtered back to Tsalikis, together with news of my involvement in Kosta's house and my threadbare appearance at the panigyri. It's a point of pride among his generation to own olive trees, and even more so to pick the olives and turn them into ladi. To leave a grove laden or have to buy oil is to lose honour, Tsalikis is getting on, he has no one to pick his olives for him – and here I am.
'He would give you sixty per cent of the oil,' Manolis goes on through Kosta.
I think of the grove. The two terraces below the thimonia house a dozen trees, and half a dozen smaller terraces stripe the hill above that.
'When would he want it done?' I ask.
'Siga siga.' No hurry. 'Yanuarios.'
'What would I do with the oil?'
'Sell it.'
'To whom?'
'A shop. Maybe Vellis, he buys from everyone.' Vellis owns the island's one small supermarket, perched on the winding road between Apollonia and Artemonas.
'Who makes the oil?'
'Yanis the potter has an olive press. He'll take some oil for himself, send Tsalikis his share and give you the rest.'
'How do I get the olives to him?' Yanis's compound is tucked into the southern head of the bay, almost two kilometres from the village over rough, sometimes non-existent paths. Manolis, by now seated with us, leans over the brazier and, with bare fingers, calmly picks up a dying ember and turnes it red-side-up. I gawk. He does it again.
'Mulari,' he finally pronounces. 'You bring them down bit by bit, in a sack, to the little house I have over here.' He gestures out the back, and I think I know the tiny thimonia he means, smaller than mine, sitting in the middle of what I now realise are, in addition to the other bits I know of, his fields. Manolis is turning out to be quite the land baron. 'Someone will take them to Yanis by mule.'
'And how do I get the oil to Vellis?'
'Any fishing boat will take it to Kamares. All you need is a little sample to take to the shops in Apollonia, and if they like it they can collect it from Kamares.'
The roofers are nowhere in the offing, and the idea of picking olives, in solitude and at my own speed in my own olive grove on my own Greek island, with at least the possibility of reward – who knows what sixty per cent of a grove might come to? – seems a very fine idea.
'Taxi,' I say, and so, finally, begins my career as an olive-picker.
I've already been introduced to the art by Manolis himself, when, during a lull in Kosta's building work, he offered me two days' work picking two of his many, widely-distributed trees. This seemed a long time for just two trees but, needless to say, Manolis knew of what he spoke. The olive's small size and dense distribution through the tree make it tricky to pick. More importantly, anyone who bites into just one beautiful, glossy, black but unripe olive learns forever how important it is to tell ripe from unripe, and how difficult. The customary solution to both problems is to shake or beat the tree, making the riper fruit fall off, and pick it off the ground. Patches of bamboo or reed are grown all over the island for use as beaters, and giving the trees a good but harmless whacking involves a certain childish delight. The simple-sounding step of collecting the fallen fruit, however, is both more time-consuming and less pleasurable.
On more methodical islands a circular plastic cloth is spread under the tree before thrashing, with the fall simply folded up and poured into bags or boxes. But Sifnos favours the more traditional way. From October through January men, women and children can be found dotted among the groves, contorted into every possible position as they scrabble among the dry grass, goat dung and yellow scorpions, picking up olives as fast as they can, transferring handful after handful into a dinaki, a large square olive-oil can transformed, by removing its top and nailing a wooden handle to one side, into a hod for everything from fruit to concrete. The patch of earth within a stationary picker's reach can take twenty minutes to clear, and people squat, sit on little stools or cross-legged on the ground, kneel, go down on all fours or lie on their sides in the attempt to spare their muscles, but nothing works for long and there are always a few pickers limping around trying to revive feeling in their legs or kneading the smalls of their backs and cursing i diavolo. A big old tree can take two people a day to pick. Manolis's two trees, tucked behind a nondescript building near Taxiarchis – another branch of his empire – were modest in size, but prolific. He joined me occasionally throughout the first day, crouching silently on bent knee, eyes focused on the ground, teaching by example and pausing only to hand me an occasional olive.
'Afti,' he'd say, dusting off a wrinkled black one, 'is good to eat.' He mimed putting it into his mouth and I obeyed: faintly bitter but soft and tasty. He passed me a reddish-black one. 'This one is best for oil.' Then a hard, glossy black one. 'And this has oil, but is best for salting.'
'Kirios Tsalikis's olives,' I ask Manolis hopefully on the night of Tsalikis's offer. 'Are they for oil?'
'All of them. He wants a lot of oil.' I give quiet thanks: I won't have to try distinguishing one kind from another. Manolis smiles.
I spend much of the next few weeks contorting under my olive trees, alternating between fierce concentration on the area under my gaze and, when I pause to look up, renewed marvel at the beauty of my workplace – the trees shimmering green and silver in the wind, the glimpse of bay and monastery in the distance, the twitter of birds, the distant sound of goatbells – and awareness of how little I miss the supposed pleasures of city life. So many things, said Socrates in the marketplace, that I don't need. The movies, the restaurants, the fashions, the cars, the shops, the things, are daily reconfirmed as mere compensations, unsuccessful at that, for everything I have here. Sometimes I have to forsake the olives for camera or notebook or, newly conscious of how soon I might feel obliged to leave, to take off into the hills and look out over the seemingly perfect world into which I've stumbled, wondering if I have the courage not to reject it. Even so, gradually the hessian sack fills, two dinakia on this day, four on that, and I walk it down to Manolis's empty spitaki and spill the contents onto the concrete porch. Here the red and black and brown and purple and tan pile grows, untouched by human greed, until one day the last tree has been picked and it's time to see Yanis.
I find him in his pottery, a windowless bayside building below his relatively large house. He sits at his kick wheel, a round man in his fifties, the daylight funneled through the one open door turning the simple surroundings and rows of traditionally shaped pots into another painting, perhaps a Vermeer this time. I enter nervously, wondering where and how to start.
'Yasas! Poss pas?' he says heartily. How are you going? Two months ago I helped fire his houselike, two-storey kiln, its upper chamber big enough to take half his annual output, the fire chamber below needing a hill's worth of scrub, cut and ported by the likes of me, to kindle the day-long firing.
'Theleteh i Lemonia?'
I don't know: do I want a lemonia?
'I gaidouri,' he prompts. The donkey.
'Ah, neh, neh!' The grapevine has done its job.
He finishes the pot he's throwing and takes me around to a slate-walled fold where a large, grey, female donkey with a round belly, black bristlebrush mane, sloe eyes and a muzzle as white and sharply drawn as if just hastily withdrawn from a sack of icing sugar, stands gazing out over the bay. One long velvet ear twitches apprehensively.
'Orrea ine, neh?' he asks, looking me in the eye for a second. Beautiful, isn't she?
I agree with equal gravity.
'Taxi,' he says, accepting that I'll treat her respectfully.
He fetches a blue timber saddle and straps it over Lemonia's shoulders. It has a flat top where a rider might perch, and in place of stirrups a narrow shelf on either side. He shows me how to load her safely. First, take a solid stick or plank and wedge it between the ground and one shelf. Then rest the load on that shelf and secure it. With the wedge still in place, fasten an equal load on the other side, only then removing the wedge. Neglecting the wedge will stress her spine eccentrically and dangerously. I take her rope halter and tug softly. Both ears cock forward as if to beg my pardon indignantly, and she shuffles her feet uncertainly. 'Ella, Kiria Lemonia!' Yanis cries, and gives her rump a gentle shove. Her instructions clear, she placidly follows me back to my mound of olives.
Once a day for the next few days we walk back and forth around the bay. Where possible I follow the beach or the clear if rugged track, but here and there the route fades into the rocks. On my rare visits to the south head I've simply struck out through the scrub, sure of eventually finding the path again, but when, at the first such spot, I take a step in what seems a reasonable direction, the rope tightens behind me. Turning around, I find Lemonia with her head lowered, blinking at me in a finger-drumming sort of way. I tug gently. She shuffles her feet but won't move.
'Ochi', she says wearily.
'Ochi?' I say.
'Not a chance, pedi mou.'
I contemplate the ground with a sigh. Now that I look at it, the rock I'd set my foot on might be a little high for a short-legged grey-haired lady with two sacks of olives on her back. Well, this one over here is a bit lower, a bit flatter. What if I... The rope slackens as Lemonia steps forward. So that's how it’s done.
So it goes, Lemonia patiently showing me the way until I don't need showing and we're free to walk along in silent partnership, the master letting the novice lead the walking meditation, each playing our role to the best of our abilities while Maya dances around us, green water lapping on one side, knobby hills looming on the other, finches twittering in the fragrant oregano, a kaiki sputtering away from the Taxiarchis mole on its own ordained path.
'Ola?' says Yanis as I dump the last sack. That's all? We're in another dim building in his compound, this one housing a massive stone wheel on a rimmed circular platform. A heavy timber shaft disappears through the roof, where Lemonia, presumably, will spend days turning it and the stone in circles as the olives give up their juice below. Lemonia nods in the doorway. Relieving her of the blue saddle, Yanis says he'll let me know when my oil is ready.
And one day it is. Summoned back to the mill, I'm presented with one big aluminium drum, and one small glass jar, of gold-green olive oil. My olive oil. I made it. Well, I helped.
'Ine taxi?' I ask. Is it okay?
'Taxi ine,' Yanis says warmly.
A few days later a fishing boat agrees to collect me and my barrel from Yanis's beach and take us to Kamares. It's early morning and they're heading home after a poor night of setting nets. In a what-the-hell spirit they trail a heavy hundred-metre line off the stern, one huge baited hook every ten metres or so. Towards port they reel it in and I watch patches of vivid electric blue race towards us just under the surface: fat bullet-like albacore have taken the hook, their fluorescent backs turning merely metallic on being hauled from the water. There is one for each crewman and one for me, but with a long way to go before home, I reluctantly turn it down. Abandoning my drum on the quay – there's no question of it being touched – I board the little grey bus up to Artemonas as the boat crew wave me good luck. Half an hour later, in the gloomy recesses of his appetisingly smelly store, Vellis listens to my stumbling sales pitch and swishes the sample under the light. His expression gives away nothing but the seriousness of doing business.
'Ella,' he finally says, and sets off among the labyrinthine pathways of Ano Petali and Apollonia with me in mystified tow. Finally we arrive at a hole-in-the-wall shop where a gaunt man in thick eyeglasses sits behind an array of test tubes, coils and Bunsen burners. He pours some of my oil into a flask, and after an interminable series of silent measurings, heatings, stirrings and other prestidigitations gravely announces, 'Pende.' Five.
'Po-po-po,' says Vellis, shaking his head. 'Pende?'
Oh my god, I think. Pende?
'Neh,' the alchemist confirms. 'Pende.'
'Po-po-po,' Vellis repeats in case I've missed the point, and offers me 70 drachmes per kilo.
I've been told that reasonable oil should fetch 150 drachmes per kilo, perhaps even more, a figure that would not only replenish my reserve fund but see me through part of the winter. 70 drachmes would repair my reserve and give me a little leeway, but what would happen after that? Still, who am I to disagree with an alchemist? Even kindly Yanis has judged the oil to be taxi rather than kala, let alone orreo. Pende. Perhaps I haven't picked the olives correctly. Will I really storm off to another shopkeeper, who'll probably turn out to be Vellis's brother-in-law, in search of an extra ten drachs? Po-po-po-po-po.
'Taxi,' I say, and accept my wad of banknotes gratefully.
It's almost dusk, and faced with a two-hour walk to Vathi I opt to drag Harry and Varvara out for lamb-with-eggplant at Mangana's taverna. A full house is egging on I Kamaki, the harpoon, a slightly oleaginous young potter so named for his success with the blonde touristas, to show off his skill at the syrtaki, which he gladly does, alternating flamenco-like brooding with balletic flurries of heel-slapping. (Not a plate is smashed.) Finally, replete and content, I strike out for Vathi, enjoying the cold salt air, the light of the full January moon painting a watery path to Naxos, o Galaxias streaking the void above and the massive earth-god hills reassuringly oblivious to my passage, or existence, below.
On the crest overlooking Vathi I pause to gaze down on the moonlit village that I know I'll soon be leaving. There is Taxiarchis, there Kate's shop, there Kosta's completed house. There is Yanis's compound, there my thimonia in its valley grove and there Manolis's kitchen, his light still glowing. I also know I'll be returning.
'Pende?' Manolis scowls. 'Pende is good! 70 drachmes! That Vellis is kakos! Poli kakos!' The fishermen sipping beer at his table nod angrily.
But that's how it's done. As any fool knows.
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