“All the land?”
He ticked off his stubby fingers: Korbi, Stremi, Bourani, Moutsa, Pigadi, Zastena… all names of bays and caps around Bourani; and apparently this was another complaint against Conchis. Various Athenians, “rich people,” would have liked to build villas over there. But Conchis refused to sell one meter; deprived the island of badly needed wealth. A donkey loaded with wood tripped down the quay towards us; rubbing its legs together, picking its fastidious way like a model. This news proved Demetriades’s complicity. It must have been common gossip.
“I suppose you see his guests in the village?”
He raised his head, negatively, uninterestedly; it was nothing to him whether there were guests or not. I persisted. Did he know if there were foreigners staying over there?
But he shrugged. “Isos.” Perhaps. He did not know.
Then I had a piece of luck. A little old man appeared from a side alley and came behind Georgiou’s back; a battered old seaman’s cap, a blue canvas suit so faded with washing that it was almost white in the sunlight. Georgiou threw him a glance as he passed our tabib, then called.
“Eh, Barba Dimitraki! Ela.” Come. Come and speak with the English professor.
The old man stopped. He must have been about eighty; very shaky, unshaven, but not totally senile. Georgiou turned to me.
“Before the war. He was the same as Hermes. He took the mail to Bourani.”
I pressed the old man to take a seat, ordered more ouzo and another mezé.
“You know Bourani well?”
He waved his old hand; he meant, very well, more than he could express. He said something I didn’t understand. Georgiou, who had some linguistic resourcefulness, piled our cigarette boxes and matches together like bricks. Building.
“I understand. In 1929?”
The old man nodded.
“Did Mr. Conchis have many guests before the war?”
“Many many guests.” This surprised Georgiou; he even repeated my question, and got the same answer.
“Foreigners?”
“Many foreigners. Frenchmen, Englishmen, all.”
“What about the English masters at the school? Did they go there?”
“Ne, ne. Oloi.” Yes, all of them.
“You can’t remember their names?” He smiled at the ridiculousness of the question. He couldn’t even remember what they looked like. Except one who was very tall.
“Did you meet them in the village?”
“Sometimes. Sometimes.”
“What did they do at Bourani, before the war?”
“They were foreigners.”
Georgiou was impatient at this exhibition of village logic. “Ne, Barba. Xenoi. Ma ti ekanon?”
“Music. Singing. Dancing.” Once again Georgiou didn’t believe him; he winked at me, as if to say, the old man is soft in the head. But I knew he wasn’t; and that Georgiou had not come to the island till 1946.
“What kind of singing and dancing?”
He didn’t know; his rheumy eyes seemed to search for the past, and lose it. But he said, “And other things. They acted in plays.” Georgiou laughed out loud, but the old man shrugged and said indifferently, “It is true.”
Georgiou leant forward with a grin. “And what were you, Barba Dimitraki? Karayozis?” He was talking about the Greek shadow-play Punch.
I made the old man see I believed him. “What kind of plays?”
But his face said he didn’t know. “There was a theatre in the garden.”
“Where in the garden?”
“Behind the house. With curtains. A real theatre.”
“You know Maria?”
But it seemed that before the war it had been another housekeeper, called Soula, now dead.
“When were you last there?”
“Many years. Before the war.”
“Do you still like Mr. Conchis?”
The old man nodded, but it was a brief, qualified nod. Georgiou chipped in.
“His eldest son was killed in the execution.”
“Ah. I am very sorry. Very sorry.”
The old man shrugged; kismet. He said, “He is not a bad man.”
“Did he work with the Germans in the Occupation?”
The old man raised his head, a firm no. Georgiou made a hawk of violent disagreement. They began to argue, talking so fast that I couldn’t follow them. But I heard the old man say, “I was here. You were not here.”
Georgiou turned to me and whispered, “He has given the old man a house. And money every year. The old man cannot say what he really thinks.”
“Does he do that for the other relatives?”
“Bah. One or two. The old ones. Why not. He has millions.” He made the corruption gesture, meaning conscience money.
Suddenly the old man said to me, “Mia phora… once there was a big pane yiri with many lights and music and fireworks. Many fireworks and many guests.”
I had an absurd vision of a garden party; hundreds of elegant women, and men in morning dress.
“When was that?”
“Three, five years before the war.”
“Why was this celebration?”
But he didn’t know.
“Were you there?”
“I was with my son. We were fishing. We saw it up in Bourani. Many lights, many voices. Kai ta pyrotechnimata.” And the fireworks.
Georgiou said, “Yah. You were drunk, Barba.”
“No. I was not drunk.”
Try as I did, I could get nothing more out of the old man. I was on lunch-and-afternoon duty; so in the end I shook them both by the hand, paid the small bill, tipped Georgiou heavily, and walked back to the school.
One thing was clear. There had been Leverrier, Mitford and myself; but then others whose names I did not yet know back in the thirties; a long line. It gave me the courage to face whatever new was being prepared in that now uncurtained theatre over on the far side.
I returned to the village that evening, and climbed up the narrow cobbled streets that led to the back of the village; past warrens of whitewashed walls, peasant interiors, tiny squares shaded by almond trees. Great magenta sprays of bougainvillea flamed in the sun or glowed in the pale evening shadows. It was a sort of kasbah area of the village, a very pretty kasbah, with its cross glimpses of the plunibago-blue six-o’clock sea below, and the gold-green pine-covered hills above. People sitting outside their cottages greeted me, and I collected the inevitable small Pied Piper chain of children, who subsided into giggles if I looked at them and waved them away. When I came to the church I went in. I wanted to justify my presence in the quarter. It was densely gloomy, with a miasma of incense over everything; a row of ikons, somber silhouettes set in smoky gold, stared down at me, as if they knew what an alien I was in their crypt-like Byzantine world.
After five minutes I came out. The children had mercifully disappeared, and I could take the alley to the right of the church. On one side there were the round cylinders of the church apses, on the other a wall eight or nine feet high. The alley turned and the wall continued. But halfway along it there was an arched gateway: a keystone with the date 1823 on it, and above that a place where there had once been a coat of arms. I guessed that the house inside had been built by one of the pirate “admirals” of the War of Independence. There was a narrow door let into the right hand of the two gate doors, with a slit for letters. Above it, painted white on black on an old bit of sheet metal, was the name Hermes Ambelas. To the left the ground fell away behind the church. There was no way of looking over the wall from that side. I went to the small door and pushed it gently to see if it gave. But it was locked. The islanders were notoriously honest, thieves unknown; and I could not remember having seen an outer gate locked like that anywhere else on Phraxos.