The Messenger of Athens: A Novel (15 page)

“Who’s that?” he asked.

Vassilis hawked, and spat on the ground.

“Lukas,” he said. “Let’s eat. When he gets here, there’ll be nothing left.”

The watcher raised a hand, and waved; the echo of his shout was indecipherable.

“Where’re your manners, Father?” asked Strathia. “Call him down.”

“D’you think there’ll be enough, if he comes?” asked Angeliki, doubtfully.

“For God’s sake, Mother,” said Strathia. “Andreas, call him down.”

Leaning on his staff, the figure began to pick his way down the hillside. His gait was uneven—not quite a disability, but a limp.

“No need,” said Vassilis. “He’s halfway here already.”

S
trathia handed Lukas a cup of wine, and he, glancing to where Socratis poked the fire, thanked her. He placed the cup between the insteps of his boots—thick-soled, black boots, scuffed, and dull with dust, bought cheap from a demobbed National Service soldier—and, lifting the patch which covered it, rubbed at his left eye with a dirty finger. He had acquired his flak jacket and khaki
trousers as part of the same deal with the soldier, but the trousers fitted badly, and were held up by a leather belt buckled tight around his ribcage, so the crotch of the trousers was too high up in his own. Because he wore the trousers so high, there was a gap where his shins showed pale pink scars between his trousers cuffs and the tops of his boots. In his solitary life, he took no care of himself, and had become too thin; he ate voraciously when food was offered, but spent too many of his evenings in the company of drunkards in the village ouzeri. He smelled bad, of his unclean self, and of his goats. But he was not without his vanity: he took pride in his hair, which hung in knotted, sun-bleached dreadlocks on his shoulders. His pride was that his hair was touched just once a year; he had one aunt who loved him, and every Easter Day, she was permitted to wash it, and cut half from its length.

He bent to pick up his wine, and drank, eyes lowered.

“Will you eat with us?” asked Strathia.

But Lukas declined.

“I’ve to be getting on,” he said. “I’ve twenty goats to water, up at Agia Anna.”

Vassilis broke the crisp-crusted end from a loaf, and bit into it, saying nothing.

“The goats’ll wait a while longer,” said Strathia. She offered him a bowl of olives, and the loaf from which her father had taken the end. “Eat,” she said.

Lukas broke a piece of bread, and took a handful of the olives. With a pair of tongs, Socratis lifted the roasted octopus onto a plate, and carried it to Angeliki, who placed it at the center of the gathering.

Socratis, grinning, slapped Lukas on the back. Lukas flinched.

“How’re you doing, Cousin?” asked Socratis. “Not married yet?”

Angeliki cut the legs from the octopus, and sliced its body; the inner flesh was starkly white against the red and black of its seared skin. Dousing it with lemon juice, she sprinkled it with flakes of dried oregano pulled from a bush.

“Eat,” she said. “Everyone eat. Strathia, call the children.”

“Leave them,” said Socratis. “They can eat later.”

For a few minutes they ate in silence. Irini watched Lukas tear off a hunk of bread and dip it in the octopus’s lemon-sharp juices, then smear a second piece with cod’s roe.

“So,” said Vassilis, “forty days to your haircut, Lukas.”

Lukas’s mouth was stuffed with half-chewed bread.

“I may not bother, this year,” he said. He put his hand to his head, and fingered one of the dirty dreadlocks.

“If it gets much longer, you’ll fall over it,” said Andreas.

“Come on, Lukas,” said Strathia. “Let’s have the news. What are they talking about, downtown?”

As she spoke, a faint blush stole across Lukas’s face. He reached for the wine bottle, and refilled his cup.

“I don’t know much,” he said.

“Sure you do,” said Andreas. “Come on. Fill us in.”

Socratis stood.

“I’ll put some of those prawns on the grill,” he said.
“It’s hungry work, listening to his monologues.” He wandered away to the fire.

“Well,” said Lukas. He speared the tip of an octopus leg with his fork, and bit into it. “You’ll know all about Manolis Mandrakis’s wife, no doubt.”

“Which Manolis Mandrakis?” asked Strathia. “Do you mean the house-painter?”

“Yes,” said Lukas, “the young one.”

Irini knew him. She knew his wife, too: a tall, thin, morose girl who provoked public disapproval by wearing trousers.

They waited. Lukas unwrapped the sticky halva, cut a piece and put it in his mouth.

“Well?” prompted Andreas.

“Well,” said Lukas, “Mandrakis caught her with the Chief of Police.”

Angeliki drew in her breath.

“Never,” she said.

“It’s true,” said Lukas. “He found them half-naked in the back of her father’s shop. He’s got that butcher’s next to the ice factory.”

Angeliki crossed herself, quickly, three times.

“Mandrakis didn’t dare lay a finger on that police scum, of course,” Lukas went on. “Just told him to get out and close the door behind him. Then he shut himself in with his wife and beat the shit out of her.”

There was silence.

“He’s divorcing her, of course. Her family are in a terrible state. The mother’s got heart problems; she got palpitations and had to have the doctor.”

“My God,” said Andreas.

“That son-of-a-bitch policeman wants sorting out,” said Vassilis. “Why didn’t Mandrakis get his brothers onto him? He’s got enough of them.”

“One of the brothers is a bar owner,” said Lukas. “Needs his drinks license. That bastard would have shut him down.”

As the afternoon faded, the wine bottles were emptied. The men drank ouzo, and talked; Lukas lay on his back in the shade of the chapel wall, sleeping. The acid of the food, the pickles and lemon juice, the dry wine, had given Irini a sharp pain in the stomach. She stretched out, feeling the sun on her legs and arms, and closed her eyes. She thought of the morose face of Mrs. Mandrakis, and imagined it pummeled, and bloodied; and she wondered if the girl had cried and screamed, or if she had submitted quietly to her punishment, knowing that no one would come to her aid.

I
rini, mindful of her duty, went calling on her mother-in-law. She went reluctantly, driven in Andreas’s new absence by a yearning for companionship. There was an awkwardness between the women (the story was an old one: no woman could ever be good enough for him), and she expected to be received, as always, coolly. But she had chosen her time badly. Her mother-in-law was unctuous in her welcome. She described Irini’s arrival as fortuitous.

“Come in, Irini,” said Angeliki, “come in. Your father-in-law is wanting some help.”

She was a tiny woman, fine-boned and fragile in her mind. For many years, the doctor had prescribed her Valium. The drug had left her vague, and forgetful, so the house was always littered with chores half-done: half the brasses polished, half the potatoes peeled, half the laundry ironed and put away, and often two trips in a morning to the baker’s to fetch the bread she had already bought. There was today a smell of scorching: at the stove, water boiling over in a forgotten saucepan hissed on the hotplate. In the yard, a goat was forlornly bleating.

Angeliki handed Irini a folded cotton apron and a plastic bucket.

“Put your apron on,” she said. “You’ll not want to get it all down your clothes. It makes such a mess, if you’re not careful. He’ll be ready to start. I expect he was waiting for me.” She placed her tiny hand in the small of Irini’s back and guided her through the yard door. Her touch was delicate but insistent, like that of a mouse’s paw. Irini moved quickly, to be free of it.

Dangling from the branches of a lemon tree, the goat was strung up by a rope tied around its back feet. An old billy, it stank of goaty musk and the piss which fear had drained from its bladder. Stretched out, its cloven hooves hung inches from the ground it couldn’t reach. It spun slowly at the end of the rope, a full turn clockwise, then anticlockwise, watching the earth through the black slits of its strange, yellow eyes. Its wretched cries were neatly spaced, like a pulse; it had perhaps been hanging there some time.

Her father-in-law crouched close by, sharpening a hook-tipped hunting knife on a flat stone wetted with spittle. Though the sun had no strength in it, his face was red, his sparse-haired pate and bald forehead moist; from beneath his shirt (the fabric strained across his dome-round belly) she smelled a similar goat-like musk: much milder, sweeter, but, essentially, the same. He scowled at her, as if not pleased to see her, but Irini knew he was indifferent whether she assisted, or Angeliki. To him, one woman was as useless as the next.

“Come to help?” he said. “Bring the bucket, then; let’s have the bucket.”

He pulled the sharp edge of the blade across the cushion of his thumb; it drew a stinging line of blood. Standing, he arched his back, complaining at the aching in his kidneys. He’d had trouble passing water this morning, he told her. He ought to see the doctor. Behind him, the goat bleated; it sounded like derision.

Irini felt the urge to comfort the goat, to stroke its head. What was the point? She gave Vassilis the bucket.

“Let’s get on, then,” he said. “Are we ready? Step away.”

He knew men who, at this moment of playing God, as the instrument setting the soul adrift, sending it back whence it came, would bless the animal, wish it God speed.
All mad
, he thought.
Faggots
. It was a beast, that’s all; he felt no more for it than he would for an orange he bit into.

The goat, sensing its time was here, began to bleat in panic. Irini gazed up into the branches of the lemon tree, focusing on the brilliance of the fruit, the gloss of the leaves, the structure of the branches. There was a light, tearing sound, and a splash of liquid in the dirt. The bleating became irregular; each wavering cry was interrupted at its middle by the goat’s desperate sucking at the air it couldn’t breathe. Soon, nothing.

Vassilis stretched, complaining, up into the tree and sawed, grunting, through the taut rope. The corpse dropped; warm blood spattered her shins and shoes.

“Fetch that tablecloth, Irini. Quickly.” He pointed to a sheet of blue-checked plastic by the yard door. She spread it where the blood was worst. Vassilis took hold of the forelegs and heaved the carcass onto the plastic.

Complaining, he knelt beside it. With the point of his knife, he made the first cuts at the inside legs, delicate incisions to separate skin from flesh. He sliced, carefully and shallow, down the belly. Then, tugging gently, he peeled off the pelt, expertly, in one piece, like tearing Fablon from its backing, revealing beneath a layer of creamy fat, bubbled with air pockets, crackling like static.

He handed the warm pelt to Irini.

“Hang it over there, on the line.” He waved a gory hand towards the washing line, where two white bed sheets hung billowing in the breeze. There was no line left, and Irini’s hands were too bloody to unpeg and fold the sheets, so she hung the skin over the lowest branches of the lemon tree.

“Bucket!”

She knelt beside him. He turned the flayed beast on its spine.

“Get the legs,” he said, “and hold it steady.”

But it was hard; the greasy flesh slipped under her hands. The goat’s strange eyes were still bright, but bulged in the stripped skull; its little teeth grinned a rictus grin.

Vassilis cut deep, from chest to scrotum, the stinking guts bursting through the incision as it opened. Irini let go of the hind legs to steer the guts into the bucket, but, one-handed, she couldn’t control them. They spilled like water; like live things, they slithered over the rim.

Vassilis swore, and cursed the goat. At his armpits, his shirt was damp with half-moons of sweat, and the smell of his musk was potent. He lifted the spilled guts into the
bucket, then plunged his hands into the body cavity, feeling around with the knife to cut them free, scooping out what was left—the gray ropes of shit-filled intestine, the spongy lungs, the beast’s still heart.

“You’re done,” he said. “I’d better fetch the saw.”