The Unquiet Mind (The Greek Village Collection Book 8) (12 page)

‘I, of all people, know your history.’ Yanni pauses and looks him straight in the eye. ‘But you cannot use that as an excuse not to do what is right. If you do nothing, you are stepping on everyone’s toes in this village and then what life will you or your mama have when her friends turn their backs on her?’

‘Can I ask a question?’ Spiros says quietly. ‘What has the mayor got to do with this? I don’t really understand what is going on.’

‘I don’t think you understand how wide the mayor’s influence goes,’ Babis says, but with little assertiveness.

‘What has the mayor got to do with my house?’ Spiros asks.

‘You will, just a minute.’ Yanni answers Spiros quickly. ‘Babi, once you know something, you cannot un-know it. I know what I know and my conscience will not let me walk away. Too many people’s lives rest on this. We are going to the mayor. If you come, then you will be seen to be standing with us. If you do not, how will you be seen?’

Babis stands and throws his arms into the air. ‘You come over here and you poke your nose in where it is not wanted. You talk about rights and wrongs of something you don’t really understand and then you give me ultimatums like that. It was you, after all, who broke into Gerasimo’s office in the first place. Without opening the door for me, we would never know what we know. So if you go to the mayor, you will have to own up to breaking and entering. The judge in Saros is a friend of the mayor’s, and they will throw the book at you.’

‘He’s my uncle,’ Spiros says.

‘I broke into Gerasimo’s office?’ Yanni asks.

‘Yup! Up the bougainvillea and in through the window.’ Babis smiles now.

‘Onto a balcony?’ Yanni sits on the armchair, recalling dream-like images.

‘Yup.’ Babis opens another beer. ‘You want one, Spiros?’

‘No thank you.’ Spiros remains standing by the door.

‘You opened the door. I went in to change the numbers on the contract and by chance, I happened to find on his desk the proposal to the mayor from the German firm, and Gerasimos named as his legal representative. It just all fitted together. A quick flip through his address book led me to the surveyors in Athens. Gerasimo’s business card and a little legal pressure got me the information I needed from them, which was enough to make Gerasimos run. Which he has. His office is empty, his car has gone, opening up Saros and the surrounding area to me. The mayor, on the other hand, is a much bigger fish. But the bottom line is it was you who did the breaking and entering.’

‘You okay, Yanni?’ Spiros asks. ‘Does my family get to keep their home?’

‘So I say to you, you choose, Yanni. How do
you
want to be seen?’ Babis plugs the television back in.

Chapter 15

As the door slams behind him, he hears the coats falling onto the floor on the other side. His feet carry him away from the square, up the hill, wishing he was on the ridge, goats by his side. Sister Katerina said a lot about fear and denied that there were demons. It seems to him that fear gives life to demons. Since stepping on mainland soil, his fear of not being a good guest has taken solace in an ouzo bottle. He has drunk so much, his memory has failed him, he has fallen asleep in company and even broken into someone’s office. He has become involved in politics and the ways of the world that he has spent most of his life trying to avoid. He has been kidnapped, gambled his money for his freedom, and he has beaten up a defenceless old man who, in all fairness, had kidnapped him. While he has been busy doing all this, he has left his poor baba to cope by himself and, if she is not already, then very soon, his mama will be worrying why he isn’t home.

The problem isn’t how he will be seen; the problem is who he is becoming.

The houses are below him now, the road peters out into a path and the rough land leads up to a clump of pine trees that top the hill. A cockerel crows somewhere in the village. The vegetation thins and is replaced with a bed of pine needles that deaden his footsteps and add to the hush of the wind that whispers through the tree tops.

Is it because he is a solitary, reticent creature that he cannot be amongst men and carry out three simple tasks? Buy a donkey, deliver a parcel, and maybe visit an old friend. Is he such a fool, such a simpleton? Has he learnt nothing in his studies with Sister Katerina? What did all that learning give him?

He sits to look over the village spread before him, at the whitewashed walls and red tiled roofs surrounded by orchards of olives and oranges that spread as far as the eye can see, all the way to the foothills of the faded purple mountains that surround the plain. There, to his left, almost entirely hidden by the hill he sits on, is the sea lapping at Saros town, the sparkling blue that stretches a finger towards the village, making it the ideal spot it is. He drops his weight heavily to sit, leaning back against a tree, his feet pulled in, arms resting on his knees, his hands dangling. There are houses dotted across the plain as well as in the village and within each house, there will be a family, each most likely with a mama and a baba, and
papous
and
yiayia
maybe, and children who will get married and the cycle will go on, generation after generation. Even the most uneducated man manages to keep this cycle going.

What did all that learning with Sister Katerina give him? He knows now what it didn’t give him! It didn’t give him the peace he seeks. It was not the desire to speak foreign languages or to ‘better’ himself, whatever that means, that motivated him. In fact, he does know what it gave him because he has found the same thing in the bottom of an ouzo glass! It gave him an escape, a sense of doing something to avoid actually doing something, an anaesthetic. As long as he was learning, taking steps to decode Sophia’s poem, he had his excuse to remain a recluse. Withdrawing away, like a monk, on the top of an island rather than getting out there amongst men and finding himself a wife—and a life. Bottom line: He is nothing but a coward. Fearful and hiding.

No, the question is not how will he be seen but who has he become.

He is not proud.

A donkey brays and Dolly comes to mind. He sighs and takes out his tobacco. His fingers linger around the book, his heartbeat quickening. To be brave, fight his fears head on, how different would his life be? Would he have found Sophia already? Would he have talked to the woman in the navy skirt? Maybe his life would have been even more complicated.

How is he meant to know what to be reticent about and what to be brave about? Maybe that’s why there are social rules. Maybe they help?

Trying to help this village, surely that is something he needs to be brave about, put himself second. What does it matter how he is seen if the villagers keep their homes? But then again, what does he really know of the mayor of Saros? The mayor on Orino Island is shifty and out for himself, but everybody knows everybody’s business on the island; there’s not much the island mayor can keep hidden. But here, maybe the mayor is a bigger fish, maybe he will be able to just bury the whole affair even if they confront him with it. If that is the case, Babis will not come out of it at all well and then how will Babis and his mama cope? Perhaps keeping himself to himself is the best course after all. Perhaps he should just get his donkey, deliver the Sister’s parcel, and leave. Getting involved in other peoples’ business is never a good idea, maybe even seeing Sophia is a bad idea.

‘Oh why is it all so complicated?’ He stands. ‘I just want to be quiet.’

He looks down at the houses in the village, aware that getting rid of the mayor’s lawyer, Gerasimos, is not enough. Every last one of the houses will be declared unsafe, including Babis’. Every last one of them will be bought up cheaply by the company that fronts the mayor’s dealings. Then the whole town will be sold as a job lot to the German firm and turned into a walled holiday destination, boasting its own coastline. The mayor will get rich beyond his wildest imagination. The tourists will be bussed in like cattle and trapped in their individual holiday homes, herded to eat at the tavernas provided, drink at the kafeneios run by the organizers, buy their sunscreen at the German-run corner shop and the people who have lived there for generations will be displaced and forgotten about, all for the sake of this inhuman theme park.

Apparently, Babis said, the same German firm bought an onion field on the coast just outside of the village a while back, built a hotel on it, and are raking in so much money, it will fund the entire project.

One man’s get-rich-quick scheme of selling his onion field could be the downfall of the entire village.

‘Why do people not work for the good of the whole?’ he asks the breeze, which answers by lifting the ends of his moustache. He twists them to a point and then flattens his hair with a stroke of his hand.

‘And her house too, the woman in the navy skirt, where will she go?’ But the breeze does not answer this time. ‘It’s a business that relies on fear,’ he tells it.

He knows what Sophia would do. She did it for him. She stood up for what she believed in without a thought for herself. No fear.

Before he even realizes he has made a decision, he is marching back down the track to the road, to Babis’ door. With each step, his breaths come deeper, his movements more certain. He does not knock; he shoves hard with his shoulder.

Babis is sitting on the sofa, Spiros is still standing, but each with a beer in their hand.

‘You asked me a question,’ Yanni starts. ‘You asked me how I want to be seen. That was the wrong question, The question is “who do I want to be”.’

Babis stands and picks up a beer, opens it, and holds it out to Yanni. ‘Couldn’t agree more, my cousin.’ But Yanni is prepared for a fight and hardly hears him.

‘I cannot be the man who stands by and … sorry, what did you say?’

‘Exactly, my friend. I have thought it over and decided you are right.’ Babis tires of holding out the opened beer and turns to offer it to Spiros, but Spiros raises the one in his hand, so Babis puts it on top of the television. Yanni looks from Babis to Spiros and back again.

‘You’ve changed your mind quickly. What about your fear of the mayor and his friend the judge?’

‘The judge …’ Spiros begins.

‘Yanni,’ Babis says quickly, taking his attention, ‘it is every man’s duty to think of the people around him and the village he comes from. What a small sacrifice my career will be for the good of the people. Where would all these villagers go if this terrible scam were to bear fruit? It is my duty as a fellow villager, as man amongst men, as a lawyer for the people that we stop this plan right now.’

Yanni frowns and looks back to Spiros, who is shifting his weight from foot to foot, decidedly unsettled about something. Babis stands and steps between Spiros and Yanni. ‘When a man is right, he is right. There is no arguing with that.’ Babis lifts his beer to salute him.

‘What am I not being told?’ Yanni asks.

‘Oh look Spiro, a cartoon,’ Babis says and Spiros, with a turn of his head, becomes absorbed by the television. ‘Be happy that I have seen that you are right, Yanni. Not afraid of being right, are you?’ Babis asks. He should say something, but what should he say? Babis agrees with him. They will go to the mayor, so how come he doesn’t feel settled?

‘Come on then,’ Yanni says at last.

‘What, now?’ Babis looks back to the television where the match has started again.

‘I have a donkey to buy tomorrow and a nun to visit the day after and then I plan to go home, so yes, now.’ Yanni picks the coats off the floor and hangs them up again.

Babis takes a last look at the screen. ‘They are losing anyway.’

‘Spiros, you want to come?’ Yanni asks. Spiros takes a last sip of beer and puts the can down on an empty crisp bag.

‘Oh yes. We need Spiros.’ Babis laughs, but the sound is hollow and neither reaches his eyes nor his throat. ‘And we can get something to eat and have a little drink on the way.’ He pulls the door shut. ‘Or not,’ he mutters, looking at Yanni’s face, ‘if you are not hungry.’

Babis insists on calling a taxi, and the truck is left abandoned in the square. The road to Saros almost feels familiar now to Yanni, but as they pull into the town’s main square everything seems a little too big, the buildings large and made of cut stone, their doors too tall and ornate and there are many people, all who seem to be rushing.

‘His office is on the first floor.’ Babis presses the button to call the lift. Yanni walks past him and begins to climb the stairs, Spiros in tow. Babis hesitates and then runs up behind them.

To the left of a pair of ceiling-height double doors on the first floor is a brass plaque that reads
Mayor
. To the right of the doors is a neatly ordered desk and an empty chair, no secretary in attendance. Stuck to the double doors with sellotape is a piece of lined paper with a torn edge upon which is written, ‘Back tomorrow’.

‘Excuse me,’ Yanni asks a man with several files under his arm waiting for the lift. ‘Do you know where the mayor is?’

‘Same place as most people.’ He takes out an oversized handkerchief and mops his bald head and then the back of his neck. He is wearing a suit. ‘Up at the convent, for the open day.’ The lift arrives and he pulls the concertina doors closed behind him.

‘Thirsty work, this,’ Babis says.

‘We’ll go there then,’ Yanni states.

‘Where?’ Babis asks, a glint of hope in his eyes.

‘The convent.’ Yanni is already at the top of the steps. Babis’ smile fades.

Babis sits in the front and chats away to the driver. The road to Saros is now etched onto Yanni’s mind and the green of the trees and the watering systems under them, in the shade, is no longer a marvel to him. This time, he looks around the taxi itself, at the cluster of icons hung on the rear-view mirror competing with those stuck onto the dashboard. Saints to protect the journey, to give wealth, to give friendship, to protect his family. There is also a picture of a baby on the flipped-down sun visor, the corner of which lifts and drops in the breeze of the air conditioning. Despite the air conditioning, it’s hot inside the taxi, and a plasticky smell permeates. The orange groves give way to houses and they drive straight through the village square and out past fruit trees again. The road begins to wind up a hill and the cultivated land becomes scrub. Ahead, a high wall and a gathering of many cars, two buses, and a couple of donkeys suggest they have arrived.

The arched wooden doors set into the wall are open. Three steps take them into a great marble-flagged courtyard with a church in the centre. Around the edge of the open space, windows set into the walls suggest cells and corridors and the living area that must be behind them. There is a bustle of people and the few benches dotted here and there are crammed with women in ironed blouses, pleated skirts, and shoes that look like they have never been worn. None of these women seem relaxed. The men loitering around them lean on their crooks and look beyond the walls to the hills. Children run round in their frills and white, young mamas trying to calm them. Today, both nuns and villagers alike will celebrate the saint’s day that the nunnery is dedicated to.

A nun approaches them. Yanni swallows. He looks around and sees more nuns, coming in and out of a room opposite the church doors.

‘Welcome,’ the nun approaching them says as she glides past them, now addressing a priest in his long black robes and pillar box hat who came in behind them.

She could be here. She must be here! Yanni looks from face to face of the nuns, but they are too far away. He begins to walk toward the doorway that is the centre of all movement. Babis is crossing himself as he follows, Spiros behind him.

‘Yes, good idea, He is bound to be in there,’ Babis says, but Yanni is looking more intently from nun to nun the nearer they get.

‘Sorry boys, this sitting is full. If you wait, they won’t be long,’ a wrinkled face wrapped in a black
apostolnik
informs them. Yanni looks at her blankly. ‘Don’t worry,’ she says. ‘There is plenty of food for everyone.’

‘Do you know Sister Sophia?’ The words just come out, followed by the fear of the answer he will receive.