The Taverna Antonis had a special atmosphere. I felt at home there in spite of the brick-heads, but then there were brick-heads everywhere now. I'd stopped worrying. At least Alessandra was on my side. So was Alexis. So was the entire village. After Alessandra breezed out, I decided to stay a little longer. It looked like the perfect place to spend an evening with my fellow villagers, the farmers and shepherds and in spite of it being the middle of August, outside the wind was whipping around the mountaintop making us squash together to keep away its unexpected chill. I drank hot fresh tea and felt great. Before I left Cornwall, I thought I'd miss my books but there were books all over the village; in the cafés or kafeneia as they call them in Greece, and even some down at the washing well. There were even some in English. I turned the pages of the Helen of Troy I'd picked up there. I was enjoying becoming reacquainted with my Greek and it helped me understand more of what I heard.
On a table near the window, a game of cards was under way. The men played with all the vigour and false confidence they could manage just for a chance to stay in the game. In fact, it was no different from the banter and the braying down in my local at home. It wasn't about winning or losing, it was the being involved, the act of being together around a table.
On the wall opposite hung a large painting of a Greek Orthodox bishop holding up a large cross in defiance of a gang of soldiers. In the corner it read, Germanos of Patras - The Battle for Independence - 1821. Occupation, wars, depopulation and population exchanges; more and more I realised the sacrifices that had been made by the people of Greece to win freedom from oppression. In that room, I heard the names and noise, the laughter and argument in a language that might have jangled down through at least thirty-four centuries of defiant struggle.
The couples on my left clinked glasses in celebration. They had just arrived from Athens. One, swathed in corduroy, was called Ariadne. She called her partner Theo. His moustache was waxed to fine points like that of Salvador Dali. The other woman called her man Talos. Her name was Despina and she was much older than him. He was in his twenties, droopy Custer-type moustache hiding his boyish face. His golden fleece fell onto his shoulders. Despina may have been pregnant.
'What do you mean, unsophisticated? Growing up here gave me confidence. I saw my life as an empty page and I could do anything I wanted. A woman has a right to try everything. I became a model. Yes, the colour of my jacket is unusual, I know that! It's purple amaranth and I wear it for my village in the knowledge that no other woman on the whole island has a designer jacket like this whatever the colour.' They were already quite merry.
Then the door flew open and a man fell in carrying a Lyra, like the one Alexis played. He was another Michalis. Outside several brick-heads straggled past, making crying noises until they drew level then howled a juvenile howl to their friends inside who promptly got up, paid their bill and left. It was the playground and the bullies again.
Michalis ordered a drink and squeezed onto the chair next to mine. Zacharias carried a tray to our table with beer for the musician and a small glass of raki for me. He winked, 'For you, from me. Tonight we have the rehearsal for the festival music.' This variety of unaccustomed drinking was becoming a habit! Michalis and I clashed glasses. I took a sip from my nearly empty cup.
'Yarriba!' he yelled and began to tune his instrument. I think he'd been sampling his nectar somewhere else because there was a distinct air of madness about him. A famous bouzouki man from the capital was here too. On his bouzouki case was the name Thanasis and everyone smiled, referring to him as, The Master. They made a great fuss and gave him lots of attention whenever he played the slightest riff. If I'd been expecting wonderment and vitality from that room, I'd hit the right note because it was there by the barrelful.
The evening wore on, the room heated up and the mood was delirious, you could almost dip your bread in the atmosphere. The women were singing to their men and the men were not embarrassed. I stared through the window at the lights from a plane cruising through a mucus-coloured sky and wondered why it all seemed so surreal. Then Despina slipped across to where I sat, smiling like a ripe apple, 'You are not from here?'
'No,' I said. 'England.'
'Ah, I know England. I pee all over England.'
'I don't think I understand.'
'Oh, yes. I have my uncle there. I pee to see London. I pee to Liverpool. I pee to Bristol. I pee all over. I like…but too much wet.' She noticed my book. 'What does your Helen book tell you?'
'It tells me of a passion for a life lived deep, but not long.'
'In Sophia, every day we live deep, we have no other way,' she returned to her table. Then from across the room she raised her glass to me and smiled, 'to River Deep Sophia.'
The mood was cranked up a level when in stepped a man carrying a weird instrument looking like a suede bag with an 'L' shaped flute sticking out one end. I'd never seen anything like it before. The man was Aristethes, the teacher, so I nodded, and raised my cup to him, delighted to see him there. Zacharias topped it up. Someone shouted 'Kirie Tsambouna' and I thought that was his surname, but they were greeting his instrument and when he placed it on the table, the other musicians bowed before it, pretending to worship, laughing.
'Good evening to you, my friends. My heart is happy to see you all again and I see my passenger friend from England also. Hello Mr. Godfrey. You see, I know you now.'
Over by the window, an argument was growing. Theo and Talos were glaring at each other as Ninou and Zacharias tried to calm them down. 'So what did you say, Theo?'
'I was trying to make him understand that all our young are leaving and the families are fading away. Soon it will be the eve of the festival and Sophia, our beloved mother, is in danger of dying. Every year her children, himself included, return from every corner of the world to pay their respects and although they do what they can to keep us alive with their money and time, we have to face the facts. Things are critical now. There are wolves at the door and we must rid ourselves of their howling. They are choking us. He thinks we should listen to the wonderful Hellenic Organisation for Tourism, in Athens.'
Talos jumped up, 'All I said was that the organisation has made a concrete proposition that will save the village, but for it to work we will have to make compromises.'
'Compromises? These proposals will kill everything that makes us proud and cause our valuable traditions to disappear forever,' cried Theo.
'Damn the politicians. I spit on them,' said the meditator from the corner. He never said very much but when he spoke he meant what he said.
'What is it? What do they say? Tell us,' said a voice in the corner.
'They suggest we present the village as having the most technologically advanced displays of cultural and historical interest in Greece,' said Theo.
'What does that mean?' asked Aristethes.
'It means we become a virtual attraction.'
'We already are.'
'But this is different. We will be organised by computer all the way from Athens. It is the future,' said Talos.
'Never! Why, Sophia will become a charade. A mere display. A living lie! What about our traditions? What about our future? What about our heart and soul? We have worked hard to travel so far for nothing,' yelled Theo.
Aristethes lowered his voice. 'All this is true, my friends, but I don't think we have a choice. Though the good earth is rich, and can provide for everyone, we have lost the way. Greed has poisoned men's souls. Anxiety, avarice and violence are evident everywhere in our so-called technologically sophisticated cultures, but no one seems to think of the children. There is more to life than increasing its efficiency. Machines that should give abundance have left us in want. Our knowledge has made us cynical, our cleverness hard and unkind. We think too much and feel too little. More than technology, we need humanity; more than cleverness, we need kindness and consideration. Without these qualities life will be violent and everything that makes us essentially Sophian, will be lost.'
Ariadne buried her face in her boyfriend's hair. Despina sighed. Theo slapped his shoulder and Talos nodded in agreement. It looked like the evening was over before it had begun but Aristethes took charge. With a foot on a chair and his Tsambouna in his arms he blew a note, long and loud and a little off key. 'So shut up, you mongrels, you'll wake the babies.' And with that the river ran deep and we all jumped in to be swept along in the surge from the Lyra, Lauto and the Tsambouna as the music grabbed us by the shoulders and pulled us into the roaring waters of gladness and abandon. I joined the choir and stamped and clapped and started shouting 'Yarriba!' along with everyone else. The musicians were assailed with encouragement until the final flourish of the tune and the split second of silence that followed. A burst of cheers and laughter and wild excitement filled the room until Aristethes raised his hands for silence, 'Let us hope that something will come to us soon, in the meantime it is the festival time.' He unpeeled some money, 'Zaki, a bowl of raki, please.' Everyone began talking at once and over the hullabaloo, Aristethes turned, shot me a wink and stood up with Markos to play, 'For Lambrakis.' Right away the music blew away any doom and sent fireworks round the room.
Theo must have noticed me looking through the window because he came over and offered me a piece of his orange, 'Everything under control?'
'Oh, yes. Thank you.'
He spread his arms and looked bemused, 'But why?' Then he threw back his head and gave such a laugh he almost drowned out the musicians. He squeezed onto the edge of my chair. 'Pantelis Lambrakis. I knew him, yes. A good man. A true rembetis.'
'How did you know who I was?'
'I guessed. You have his posture. You have his eyes. Anyway, Zaki told me.'
'So you knew my father?'
'Did you see the blackened tree stumps on your way up the mountain?'
'Yes, why do you ask?'
'We used to make some money from logging and farming. A couple of years ago there was a huge, evil fire sweeping up the mountain from the devil knows where. No one knows how it started but we had suspicions. Anyway it raged for several days and we had nothing to stop it. The mayor was away and no one knew what to do so Pantelis, a musician and our guardian, had to choose. Either stand and fight the fire and maybe save the trees, or lead the people to Faria and let the fire eat the forest. It was not easy for him and he was troubled, but when we felt the burning air on our faces, when our eyes began to sting, when our children could not breathe, he knew. He organised all the villagers and guided us across a little-known isthmus to Faria and to safety. Then the men made a deep ditch to separate us from the flames and chopped down what was left of the trees. The coppice and the woods were sacrificed but at least we had our homes. Pantelis was the last to leave the village. A true rembetis, our guardian man.'
'Now we have to sell his home.'
'How do you sell a shrine? Tell me! Pah! A comfortable house with magnificent views should not be hard to sell, my friend but you must be sure the buyer is honourable. You heard Aristethes. The village is in terrible danger and if the wrong person slips in...', he drew a finger across his throat.
'Will you have a drink with me, Theo? I don't want you to think I don't respect your sentiments. We would never sell the villa to anyone from outside.'
'OK. But first - the dedication,' his whisky bubbled in the glass. 'A little wheat for the festival, a little wine for the remembrance, a little water for the dust.' He knocked back the fire and slammed his glass down for Zacharias to refill. I put my hand on top of mine, and smiled, 'No thank you Theo, I am completely content.'
Wild eyes looked into mine and he whispered, 'That is because you have come home, my boy.' He clinked our cups and sat down. Our conversation turned to the lives of the Mangas, the machismo and the rituals, the ironies and contrasts. Of how the Mangas drifted in and out of jail steeped in drugs and greed and how they made the music called Rembetika. He talked about the frenzied rembetis, the dancers back in fifties Piraeus,
'They were so crazed those men, they would bite into their glasses and slash their thighs and forearms without uttering a sound. The songs were written by the rembetis for themselves and each other. Some had lost their roots. A rembetis was a man who had a sorrow and who threw that sorrow right out of his body.'
I nodded, 'I know about this from my father. He played me the music and that's what I listen to when I need some meaning...' I trailed off.
By midnight I was yawning like a cat. Theo was in control of his women, or maybe the women let him control them, it was hard to tell. Image was everything. Turning to the window, I gazed past my reflection into the darkness and shook my head in happy disbelief. We were there, together, late that night in a mountain kafeneion, half of us strangers, seduced by plaintive melodies and angry clashes of Arabic, Turkish and Slavic themes until it fired our blood and led us deeper into ourselves than anything had before. The shepherds insisted I share their raki making me a little unsteady but glad to be with this whole gang of howling musicians. This was my home and I wanted to eat it. I knew if I were to die there and then - at least I would have lived. But I decided it was time for me to leave and sent a smile around the room to salute a life well lived.
'Raki is part of my name and my life,' my father used to say. 'It is the workers' perk. Made from the dregs after making the ouzo. It has no colour and tastes of fire. It can loosen your tongue and colour your day and even knock your block off. Some say it can induce blindness. So let's have another and may the devil take my eyes.'
I left Aristethes unconscious, sitting upright, head back, mouth ajar, catching flies. And then, just when I thought life couldn't get any better, I opened the door to a full moon raging in the sky, defiant and blazing and dancing on the waters of the ever ancient sea.