One Cretan Evening and Other Stories Part 2

Only a few hours later, as the light began to peep through the narrow slit between thick brocade curtains, she woke with a start and threw back the duvet. It was nearly eight o'clock and she had intended to be up at seven. The alarm had failed to go off.

In spite of the intense preparations that had gone on for so many weeks, her first thought was for all the things that remained to be done.

She stumbled, eyes half-shut, on to the landing and flicked the light switch. 'd.a.m.n,' she thought, 'of all the days for a bulb to go.' Almost tripping over the silk sash of her dressing gown in her haste to get downstairs, she discovered that none of the lights were working in the hallway either.

By the time she reached the kitchen, she knew that something was not quite as it should be. Without the hum of the fridge, there was a deathly silence, and the absence of the familiar glow of the boiler light confirmed her worse fears. The entire house appeared to have fused.

'Philip!' she screamed out. 'Philip! Help! Help!'

He was woken from a deep sleep by her cries. In his somnolent state he pictured her wrestling with a violent intruder. He had read earlier that week that the early hours of Christmas morning were a popular time for burglaries, given that beneath the average tree nestled several thousand pounds of mint-condition electrical goods. He took the stairs two at a time and found Jennifer safe, alone and brandishing the large torch from under the sink.

'The electrics . . .' she gasped. 'Something has gone wrong with the electrics.'

Philip's efforts in the fuse cupboard were fruitless and soon they discovered why. It transpired that the violent storm of the previous night had brought down a major power line and there was a widespread cut. When they braved the lashing rain and went out into the road they could see that every house in the village was in darkness. A recorded message from the regional electricity board was not encouraging. Power would be resumed 'in due course'. A forty minute wait on the line to speak to an operator only revealed worse news. There was little chance of the fault being corrected until after the Christmas break.

For Jennifer, news that the end of the world was nigh could not have been more devastating. At least for that her mother-in-law would probably stay away. Philip's efforts to calm her down did not go down well.

'You just don't understand,' she shrieked at him. 'This is not like any other day! It's not just any other meal!'

'Mum, Dad does realise that,' interceded George, anxious that his long-suffering father shouldn't take the blame.

'We'll find some way round this,' b.u.mbled Philip.

The two boys and their father stood, while Jennifer sat at the kitchen table, her head in her hands.

Philip had opened the back door and now stood on the terrace looking down the garden. The sun had broken through the clouds. He glanced back at Jennifer.

'I've had an idea,' he said. 'Come out and help me, boys.'

Barefoot, still in their pyjamas, they dutifully followed him across the soggy lawn. Jennifer stood at the window and watched them. It was a sweet sight. The three of them looked like sleep walkers.

For ten minutes they disappeared and while they were gone she went upstairs to get dressed, not in the new dress she had bought for the day. It seemed pointless now. When she came downstairs again, she saw that the barbecue had been wheeled on to the terrace and further down the garden a bonfire was being built with dry wood from the log store. Philip returned to the kitchen, smiling, his hands black, pyjama trousers soaked to the knee. He went to the fridge, took out a bottle of champagne, popped the cork and clumsily filled two gla.s.ses allowing their froth to spume on to the work surface. 'Let's have a look at that bird,' he said, taking a slurp.

'Birds . . .' said Jennifer.

'Oh yes, birds,' replied Philip.

Jennifer went to the fridge and removed the magnificent creation, placing it lovingly on the granite work top.

'This is what I propose,' he said. 'That we slice into this thing, marinade it in something or other and barbecue it in strips.'

'Strips?'

This was a man who had no idea how to switch on the oven but could do wonders with charcoal.

Jennifer took a long gulp of her champagne and felt it spread through her veins. She could feel her control of the situation slipping away. For the first time she could remember, she felt herself letting go of the reins. The sun shone on her back. It was like spring and she felt a sudden and unexpected surge of warmth for her husband. She watched as Philip clumsily hacked the precious meat into chunks and dropped them into a spicy marinade of his own recipe. The boys came in from the garden, marking the pristine floor with trails of mud. They set about wrapping two dozen potatoes individually in foil and buried them in the bonfire. By now Philip had rigged up an old metal ladder over the bonfire and the Christmas pudding began its long steaming process.

The family arrived on the dot of eleven. The mother-in-law, usually so nervous around Jennifer, seemed visibly to relax when she saw that her daughter-in-law was less tense than usual. The others were perfectly at home with the chaos and Philip's sister enjoyed the change to the formality of the usual routine.

'What can I do to help?' she asked, rolling up her sleeves, an offer she would never have dared to make in the past.

The champagne bottle sat on the table in front of Jennifer and her sons went to and fro. It was warm enough to sit in the garden and drinks were carried outside. The dog chased the girls round and round. Though he did not know it, on a normal Christmas Day he would have been left sitting in the car.

As the light began to fade, Philip declared that the meat was cooked. They all sat snugly under rugs at the garden table. Every sc.r.a.p of the succulent turkey, goose, pheasant and pigeon was devoured and by seven o'clock, a row of empty bottles stood in a line along the table, some of them holding candles and others now emptied of wine. There had never been a Christmas lunch quite like it. It was beyond perfection. Jennifer sat close to her husband, licked her fingers and smiled.

This story was inspired by the demonstrations in Athens that took place in late 2008.

Aflame in Athens.

IRINI HURRIED THROUGH the quiet streets of Plaka and the sound of her heels resonated off the smooth marble paving slabs. The exposed metal tips clacking on the ancient paving slabs grated on her ear but she had no time to visit the cobbler now. Trainers had not been appropriate today and these were her only pair of smart shoes and the only footwear that went with her neat green coat.

In this old part of Athens, racks of dusty postcards had been optimistically set down on the pavement, carried outside each morning by the owners of the shops who seemed unbothered that the summer tourists had now gone home and that they were unlikely to sell more than a handful each day. They were still resolutely hanging out their Parthenon T-shirts, posters with quotes from Aristotle and maps of the islands, and knew their expensive copies of museum artefacts would be dusted but not sold.

Irini enjoyed walking through this city. To her it was still new and she loved to get lost in the narrow streets that would lead her to the centre of Athens and its long, wide avenues.

It was her G.o.dmother's saint's day and she was on her way to meet her at one of Athens' smartest cafes, Zonars. 'Don't forget to buy her some flowers,' her mother had nagged down the telephone the previous night. 'And don't be late for her.' Even from hundreds of kilometres away in Kilkis, Irini's parents dictated the minutiae of her life and Irini, always dutiful, had done as instructed and carried an ornately wrapped arrangement of carnations.

The streets were quiet that morning and it was only when she saw several groups of police loitering, chatting, smoking and murmuring into walkie-talkies that she remembered why some of the main streets had been closed to traffic. There was to be a march that day.

The traffic had been diverted away from the centre in good time. It was uncannily peaceful. For once there was no impatient honking of car horns, no whining of scooters to break the silence and you could almost hear the paving stones breathe. The streets were rarely empty like this. Whether it was four in the afternoon or four in the morning, there would be queues of cars revving at the lights, impatient to get home. Only demonstrations could halt the Athens traffic.

By the time Irini reached her destination in Panepistimiou, one of the long avenues that led down to the main square of Syntagma, she could hear a low, distant rumble. She noticed the police stirring into action, stubbing out half-smoked cigarettes with the heel of a boot and picking up riot shields that had been leaning against shop windows. That almost imperceptible sound would soon turn into a roar.

Irini quickened her pace and soon the cafe was in sight. Pushing against the heavy gla.s.s door, she went inside. Oblivious to the ever-increasing noise in the street, well-heeled customers continued to drink their coffee, served by uniformed waiters.

Irini's nona, Dimitra, was already seated at one of the tables by the window, elegant in her red suit, heavy gold earrings and freshly coiffed hair. She was delighted to see her G.o.ddaughter. 'You look so well! So smart!' she cried. 'How is university? How are your parents? Are your grandparents well?' One question tumbled out after another.

It was only a few weeks since her term had begun and Irini was still forming her impressions, getting accustomed to this new life, away from her sleepy home town in the north and the tight control of a strict father who had dictated the details of her existence. She had not stepped entirely outside the cloister of family life, however.

'Why pay for some tatty flat,' her father had boomed, 'when your grandparents only live half an hour from university?'

For this reason, like many undergraduates, Irini was in an apartment which had been familiar to her for all nineteen years of her life, with pastel-coloured stuffed toys neatly lined up on her pillow and childhood picture books lined up next to her philology textbooks; every object, on every surface, including the small vases of silk flowers, was perched on a circle of lace crocheted by her grandmother.

It already stretched her parents' means to be putting her through university, so she had been obliged to admit this was a good solution. Her father had a government pension which meant that they were not hard up, but any savings had already been spent on giving his children all the private tuition they had needed after school. Like most Greeks, they were fiercely ambitious for their offspring.

It almost hurt to see her brother's graduation photograph in pride of place above her grandparents' electric fire, knowing that they would be so happy when they had another to place next to it. Her grandmother had already bought the matching frame.

'Why do you have so many pictures of us?' she asked one day as they sat at the mahogany dining table.

'For when you aren't here,' answered her grandmother.

'But I'm always here!' she replied.

'Not in the day,' interrupted her grandfather. 'You aren't here in the day.'

In that moment, she felt suffocated, strangled, by the all-encompa.s.sing security her family gave her.

'It's great,' she said now to Dimitra. 'I'm really enjoying everything . . . a little strange some of it, but it's good, it's good. I'm getting used to it all. My grandmother's dolmadakia are the best in the world.'

Every child was brought up to think that their grandmother's stuffed vine leaves were second to none and Irini was no different. They ordered their coffee metrio, slightly sweet, and small pastries, and chatted about lectures and the syllabus.

From their table by the window, Irini had a good view up the street and she noticed that a group of photographers had gathered outside Zonars. As the phalanx of marchers approached, their cameras flashed in the faces of those who led the march. They were hungry for the following day's front-page picture.

The noise from the street was m.u.f.fled by the dense plate gla.s.s that separated the customers of the cafe from the outside world, but there was a growing sense of threat as the close-packed group of perhaps a thousand students moved steadily closer and now pa.s.sed in front of them.

The procession had swept along with it a number of large s.h.a.ggy dogs. These strays and mongrels that roamed the streets, slept in doorways and lived off restaurant sc.r.a.ps were spinning around barking and yelping at the head of the crowd. A few had been adopted and were held in check by a metre of string, and the canine over-excitement lent chaos to the scene.

The waiters in Zonars stopped working to watch them pa.s.s. Their neat, retro outfits, and the tidy rows of gleaming tables seemed a world away from the shambolic crowd that walked by on the other side of the plate gla.s.s.

Young men largely formed the brigade of marchers and were almost uniformly in leather jackets, with unshaven faces and closely cropped hair. Their low voices chanted but it was impossible to make out what they were saying and the lettering on their banners was equally incomprehensible. On some of them the fabric was ripped, by accident or design it was impossible to tell, but it added to the sense of potential violence.

'Something to do with education reforms,' muttered the waiter in answer to Dimitra's question, as he scattered her change into a metal saucer on her table.

Irini felt slightly uncomfortable sitting here in this bourgeois cafe. She too was a student, like the people outside, but the divide seemed immense.

Dimitra noticed her expression change and realised that her G.o.ddaughter's attention had drifted away.

'What is it?' she said with concern. 'You mustn't worry about these demonstrations. I know they don't happen in Kilkis but they're a day-to-day occurrence here. These students are always taking to the streets, protesting about something or other.'

She gave a dismissive wave with her hand and Irini felt a gulf open up between herself and her elegant G.o.dmother. It seemed wrong to belittle whatever it was that the people outside clearly felt strongly about, but she did not want to argue.

It took fifteen minutes for the protesters to pa.s.s, by which time their second coffees were finished and it was time to leave.

'It was so lovely to see you and thank you for my flowers!' said Dimitra. 'Let's meet up again soon. And, don't worry about those students. Just keep your distance.'

As she leaned forward to kiss her, Irini breathed in her G.o.dmother's expensive scent. It was like being enveloped in a cashmere blanket. The elegant sixty year old hastened across the road and turned to wave.

'Ya.s.sou agapi mou! Goodbye, my dear,' she called out.

Irini glanced to her right and saw the tail end of the march still making its way slowly towards the government building, the chanting little more than a low humming now. For a moment she was tempted to follow but this was not the right time and instead she turned left up the empty street. Traffic diversions would continue for another ten minutes so she took the chance to walk down the middle of the road, placing her feet carefully along the white lines. Lights still turned from red to green, but for a few moments she was all alone in this wide avenue, completely and unexpectedly free.

Several times that week, her cla.s.ses were half empty as students took time off to go out into the streets. It seemed strange to her, in their first term of university, to waste all these lectures, but it was obvious to Irini when she first stepped inside the foyer that the politics on the street were as important to most of the students as anything they might learn inside the faculty building. Thousands of identical red and black propaganda flyers were posted on the wall, their endlessly repeated message almost lost in an hypnotic pattern.

'Why don't you come with us?' some of them asked her.

As far as Irini's father was concerned there was only one political party, only one view of the world, and to take sides against it, even in an argument around the dining table, took more courage than she would ever have. Communists were detested, anarchists despised. This was the view she had no courage to question, so when a huge group of her fellow students went off regularly and cheerfully with their makeshift banners, she could not join them. For them it was a way of life, pa.s.sing through the graffiti-daubed corridors where even the walls joined in the protest.

There were many days and nights, though, when marches and politics were forgotten and every student, whatever their views, ate, drank, danced and looked for love.

That Friday night, in a bar in the Exarchia district, Irini caught sight of a pair of pale green eyes. The low light accentuated their pallor. She smiled. It was impossible not to. A perfect face such as this made the world a better place.

He smiled back.

'Drink?' he gestured. The volume of noisy conversation in the bar was almost deafening. Irini and her friends joined his group and introductions were made. The boy's name was Fotis.

The evening pa.s.sed, with bottles gradually forming a gla.s.s forest on the table and smoke curling closely around them. Irini was happy to be meeting some people from other faculties, and even happier to feel the strong beam of this beautiful boy's attention on her. On a raised area in the middle of the room, singers and musicians came and went, their prodigious talent hardly acknowledged by the throng of high-spirited young people.

At four the bar was starting to close and Irini stood up to leave. She knew that one or other of her grandparents stayed awake until she returned and this p.r.i.c.ked her conscience. Out on the pavement, though, Fotis took her hand and Irini immediately knew she would not be going home that night. She was always urging her grandmother to believe that she was old enough to take care of herself and tonight she hoped that the sweet octogenarian would take those words to heart.

Close by in a crumbling apartment block, built well before the invention of the lift, Fotis, his flatmate Antonis and Irini climbed nine flights of stairs. The walls were covered with a pattern as intricate as lace, but on close inspection Irini saw that the design was made up of a thousand tiny letters. Just as at the university, even the yellowing walls of the landing screamed a political message.

Irini resisted the urge to look over the low banister rail down into the sickening depths of the stairwell and was relieved when Fotis opened the door to their one-bedroom flat where a trail of dirty crockery led from sofa to sink and the air reeked of stale ash. There was nowhere for the fumes to escape.

Like her, these boys were studying at the university. But there the similarity ended. Irini breathed in the scent of grubbiness, the aroma of this reality, this proper student way of life.

Fotis' windowless flat, with its low ceilings and dark paintwork, seemed far less claustrophobic than her bland if airy home. This struck her on the first and on every subsequent occasion when they strolled back to his place after an evening in the bar. It was always with Antonis that they walked home, three abreast with Fotis in the middle and when they got in, the routine was the same. Antonis would switch on the television and settle down in front of it, pulling his duvet out from underneath the sofa which would then become his bed and Fotis would lead Irini into his bedroom.

In the narrow confines of his bed, she was scorched by the blaze of his pa.s.sion. It was annihilating, wordless, and the muscularity of his slim body amazed her. This was more than she had ever expected from love.

Not once did she see Fotis during daylight hours. They always met up in the same bar which attracted a huge crowd most evenings and then returned to his dark apartment and unyielding bed. Unlike the bedroom in her grandmother's home, where a gap in the curtains let through a c.h.i.n.k of light to wake her, there was no window here. It was the coolness of sheets that disturbed her in the morning, not sunshine. The incendiary heat and sweat of the previous night had chilled the bed linen to icy dampness and the clammy solitude made her shiver. Fotis had gone.

The first few times she got up and crept quietly out of the flat, careful not to wake Antonis, but one morning as she opened the bedroom door, she saw him sitting at the small kitchen table. In these weeks of knowing each other, they had scarcely exchanged a word. Irini had sensed the possessiveness of an established friend and detected a whiff of hostility. It had made her unsure of Antonis and now for the first time they were alone together.

'Ya.s.sou . . .' she said in a friendly greeting. 'Hi . . .'

He nodded in acknowledgement and drew deeply on his cigarette.

Though it was still early, he had put on the radio and the tinny sound of a bouzouki tinkled away in the background. There was a pyramid of cigarette b.u.t.ts in the ashtray in front of him and pale ash sprinkled across the table top like icing sugar.

'Have you seen Fotis?' she asked. 'Do you know where he has gone?'

Antonis shook his head.

''Fraid not,' he said. 'Not a clue.'

Slowly and deliberately he took another cigarette from the packet in front of him and, without offering her one, lit up. He inhaled deeply and looked up at her. She had not really looked at Antonis properly before. He had the same beard and almost-smooth head as Fotis, but in other ways they were very different. She took in that Antonis was broader, rounder, and with a nose that seemed disproportionately small for his wide face.

'Right . . . OK,' she said. 'Bye.'

And with that, she headed out into the pale dawn and walked the few kilometres back to her own home, shivering.

Her friends quizzed her about Fotis, but there was nothing she wanted to tell them. All she knew was that the temperature of her infatuation for him rose by the day and the attention he gave her when they were together was new and overpowering. She accepted that a few days might pa.s.s without him contacting her, not even with a text message.

After one such gap in their meeting, she collided with him outside the university. He smiled his broad smile and took her arm.

'Irini mou, my Irini, where have you been?'

Disarmed by his friendliness, she felt herself melt beneath the warmth of his hand. As they walked to his flat later that night, he stopped to light a cigarette. In the dark side-street the bright flame of his lighter cast sinister dancing shadows across his face. It was ghoulish, macabre but no more than a trick of light.

The following dawn, she woke as before to find him gone. Once again, she found Antonis keeping vigil at the kitchen table.

'Don't either of you two need any sleep?' she asked Antonis, trying to make light of it. 'Are you insomniacs or something?'