The Unquiet Mind (The Greek Village Collection Book 8) (3 page)

Chapter 3

The animals leap and push back through the gate toward the windmill, hurrying to be first inside the corral. Yanni secures the gate with the stone and strides down to the house. The chairs around the wooden table at the front of the house are empty. His mama and baba, even at this early hour, forced inside by the growing strength of the sun. A tempting aroma of rosemary and tomatoes drifts from the open door. Mama will be standing by the stove fed by a gas bottle, spoon in one hand, pan handle in the other, chattering away to Baba, who will not hear a word. Cooking is a practical excuse to be inside, in the relative cool when the temperature reaches its heights outside. The food she prepares will not be eaten until the evening brings a wisp of a breeze and the sun loses its strength, and only then will the outside table be laid. If work keeps Yanni in town, or fatigue lengthens his return journey up the endless hill, his food will be set to one side, kept warm, and when he arrives, both Mama and Baba will sit at the table to keep him company even though their bellies will be full.

The bucket is already at the bottom of the well. Yanni hauls it up, fills two waiting pails and, slowed by their weight, takes even steps back to the goats to pour the water into their troughs. How would life have been if the well had dried up along with the others? Maybe it would have just hastened the inevitable. They wouldn’t be living up here, and his life would have been different right from the start. He would probably have spent more days at school. In fact, that would have been guaranteed without goats to look after. He pours the water into the troughs and the animals drink greedily. He returns to the well.

He pulls the bucket up again, brimming with ice cold water. He trudges steadily back up to the goats and after decanting the last bucket, Yanni kicks the gate closed again.

Swinging the empty pails, he heads back down home. He should set off soon for town, but first he checks on the pregnant ewes that seem content in their low-walled enclosure behind the house. The enclosure always makes him smile. It is a standing summary of who, or rather what, has always determined his life. He thought, at the time of building the low walls, he was making a choice, having a say in his world. The naïvety of youth.

‘I will build a new room,’ he can remember saying, so proud, so young, around the time he knew Sophia, and he began to gather stones. Boulders for the base and smaller stones as the walls rose. ‘You will have your bedroom back,’ he announced to his mama, who just smiled. The house is made up of two rooms, the second of which is the only bedroom. It has no windows, just a space filled with a thin mattress on a wood-and-rope base and a curtain for a door. A room that became his the day he was born. It was not the greatest prize in the world to offer back to his mama. Besides, she and Baba seemed quite happy to sleep on a similar bed in the main room. But he was at an age when a room separate from her and Baba would give them all space and at that age, he felt the need for some privacy, too.

So he had begun. A few stones here and a boulder or two there, the walls began to grow, until, on returning from grazing the goats one day, he found his baba had topped the wall with wire fencing and herded all the pregnant sheep into the half-built room, its walls now tall enough that they could not jump out.

After the ewes gave birth, the lambs took over, and after that the kids, by which time the sight of livestock in the half-built room had become familiar and Yanni had the feeling that his separate dwelling would never be finished.

The following year, the ‘house-pen,’ as it was by then referred to, was whitewashed, even along the top where the next row of stone would have been laid, and Yanni let go of the idea that it might one day be a room of his own. Sophia had left the island by then and he lost, well, what was it, a spark, energy, hope? Besides, the animals must come first. Their welfare determined his life, just as they had determined the days he could attend school in the brief years it was available to him. It had to be that way. It was their livelihood.

He walks round the end of the house-pen, one eye checking the distended bellies of the ewes. The scoop for the barrel sits on its lid. The wide-bellied sheep bleat with anticipation. Inside the pen, dividing walls have been erected. Some of the animals are bullies who leave the others hungry. Yanni gives some grain to these large animals first, adding a calcium mix, before repeating the process for the others, the wide bellies gently pushing each other out of the way.

His mama rounds the corner of the house, bottle in hand, and she lifts one of the newborn lambs out of a separate corral and tucks it under her arm. This starts a frenzy of bleating from it and from the two that remain in the pen. These are the rejects, unwanted by their mamas. They were pushed away when they tried to suckle and had to be rescued before they starved.

He and his mama walk together, with no need for talk, to the house front. She smells of onions. Sitting with the lamb on her knee, its little hooves dig holes in her woolly skirt as it nuzzles and pushes the bottle she holds. In no time, the bottle is nearly empty and its actions grow stronger until it is sucking air. She pulls the empty container away and the lamb’s bleats fill with panic until she lifts it and gently takes it back and puts it into the pen with the others. They head butt each other and jump on the spot for a moment before she takes out the next and repeats the process.

Yanni knows that in a day or two, more will be born and soon after that, it will be time to make yoghurt. The thought is pleasing. Bread and yoghurt for breakfast. It reminds him that he must bring up more flour to make bread. The sack they have will soon be empty and he must fix the crack where his mother says heat is leaking from the domed bread oven that leans against the house wall nearest the well. Unless his baba has fixed it already. He goes to look at it.

His mother finishes with the lambs and returns, wiping her hands on her apron, which is already dirty from this morning’s chores. It will be washed and hung on the line by the time he comes back for lunch and a sleep at
mesimeri
.

Yanni smiles at her and heads towards his donkey.

‘You okay, son?’ she asks. He nods. ‘Going down?’ He nods again. ‘Can you get your father a coil of fence wire whilst you are in town? And we need more coffee. We only have Nescafé left.’

Yanni feels no need to answer. He would bring the town to her if she asked, but is glad that she would never ask. The mass of people is as unnerving to her as it is to him, and he cannot remember the last time she went down there, not her or his baba.

The wood and leather saddle creaks as he lifts it and places it on the donkey’s back. Suzi is sleeping in the warmth and she starts awake and then immediately drifts off again as Yanni fastens buckles, loops, and ropes.

‘What do you dream, my beauty? Of flat fields full of flowers and trees for shade, Dolly by your side?’ He stops to consider her. Her muzzle is greying.

‘Yanni, here, give her some more water before you go,’ his mama says.

The water splashes from the bucket into the bowl she has given him, from which Suzi drinks her fill.

Yanni deftly rolls a cigarette while her nose is in the water. When he is sure Suzi is satiated, he takes the bitless bridle and scans the ridge. There are two ways down. The way they came up last night, along the ridge a way, past the monastery where only eight monks now live. The old ways are fast dying out, even on the island. That way follows a paved track down through the pine trees. Or he can go the other way, down the compressed earth track which is quicker but steeper.

‘Don’t forget the wire and the coffee,’ his mama reminds him. His baba appears in the doorway, makes eye contact and nods.

The compressed track heads directly for the port and then straight down past the older monastery that has long since been re-designated for nuns. He will take it slowly, with Suzi finding her feet.

‘Did you hear me?’ his mama calls after him. He continues walking, raises his hand to acknowledge her without turning, and then bows his head as he lights the cigarette dangling from his lips as if it is windy, which it is not. There is not a breath of air. Just sun, heat, and lower down, the sound of cicadas.

The scrub and the weeds have not all turned brown with the sun’s heat even on this, the exposed side of the island, but it is only a matter of weeks before the moisture will dry out in this heatwave, the air will become even stiller, the insects’ calls will grow ever louder, and summer will suck everything to a crisp.

The donkey kicks up dust along the ridge. Yanni’s cowboy boots, softened with age, disturb little as he glides foot to foot with no hurry. The smallest threads of cloud hang very high up in the flat blue sky and Yanni walks for a while with his head tipped back, watching them shift and change, drawing on his cigarette without removing it.

When he reaches where the land starts to drop more steeply, he watches his step. Small boulders buried in the hillside make good footholds. Suzi, alert now, takes it even more slowly, her haunches dropping and rising as they make their way. As the path flattens a little, they become less vigilant again and then the convent appears in the dip; an ancient stone building the colour of honey built around a courtyard. A tiny domed church squats as the centrepiece, flanked by spears of cypress trees that spike the sky.

When Yanni was a boy, there were three nuns. Now there is only one, Sister Katerina.

He watches the building as they descend. The shutters are closed, with only the Greek flag, barely moving, indicating the possibility of life. The only change over the years has been the height of the palm and cypress trees within the walls, each year pushing a little higher. The position is spectacular, its foundations tucked in a dip, but the windows of the cells must boast a panoramic view of town and sea and the mainland beyond. Yanni has only ever been in the courtyard, the church, and the dining hall from where you can see nothing of the outside world.

As he draws closer to the large main door, there is the familiar smell of jasmine. Under a stubby tree, he loops Suzi’s reins on a hook that was hammered into the wall for that very purpose, Sister Katerina told him as a child, when he would swing from it himself. Yanni faces the door and turns the big cast iron ring, lifting the latch inside. He pushes it open with his shoulder. The scrubland is transformed within the walls to blossoms and roses, bougainvillea and dwarf trees. He has seen it many times before but still, it catches him unawares and he hesitates before crossing the threshold. The neatness and order attracts him but at the same time repels him. He feels he should wipe his boots every time he enters even though he is still outside.

Chapter 4

‘Ah, there you are.’ Sister Katerina’s familiar, gentle voice puts him at his ease. He does not reply but smiles instead. He uses one hand to twist his moustache at either end and looks down at the ground to avoid her gaze, shuffling his feet. The first few seconds in her company always have this effect. Her calmness, her grace take a moment or two for him to feel, well, if he is honest, to feel he can just be himself. Truth be told, he feels like this in everyone’s company but he knows that with Sister Katerina, his discomfort will be short lived.

Puffing, she straightens herself from bending over the flower beds and brushes her hands on her white apron, which she takes off as she walks across the courtyard, away from Yanni, who follows. They enter the cool stone building, with its low ceiling and dark wooden beams that support age-stained sticks packed with earth above, in the traditional manner. A long refectory table occupies the centre of the room with carved and uncomfortable-looking chairs standing stiffly down either side like soldiers, polished and waiting for nuns who will never come. Along the walls, at roughly equal intervals, are old, time-darkened icons but otherwise the room is bare, white, still. There is little the sister can do to make the room more homely. Up against a window, she long ago placed two wooden chairs on either side of a small, now well-used, table. On its polished surface is a vase of flowers.

With a gentle gesture, she invites Yanni to sit, which he does, slouching in the chair until he is comfortable, his initial unsettled feeling forgotten. They have sat many hours across from each other like this, Yanni deep in concentration, his cheeks burning as he tried to learn, at his request, the letters of the Greek alphabet. But after mastering more Greek than the average school boy, his passion to learn, instead of being satisfied, seemed to grow. His determination did not illicit any question from the sister, of which he was glad, for although he had a reason to learn, he still could not understand the pleasure it gave him. After a couple of years of short systematic bouts of study, her surprise registered when he asked if she spoke English. He can remember the look on her face; he had thought nothing could disquiet her until then.

‘I will have to reassess who you are, Yanni. I have made the common mistake of presuming to know you and yet here you are surprising me again with your desire to learn,’ was all she said. She didn’t ask why he wanted to learn English.

Over the days that turned to months and then years, Sister Katerina seemed to always be available whenever he wanted to learn. He’d pick up her list of shopping every few days and take it to be filled out by the supermarket when he went into town to hire out his animals. He brought her goods up to her on the way home. This would be the time when he would linger and conversations became lessons until, after years of patient repetitive work and much frustration for Yanni, who felt Sister Katerina must consider him slow, she sat back and said, in English, ‘Yanni, I have no more to teach you.’

Excitement played in his stomach as he drove Dolly and Suzi homewards that day. He could not wait to find a suitable place to pull the donkeys to a standstill. He called the beasts to halt halfway up and balancing, leaning against Dolly, he drew out the book that Sophia had given him and let it fall open. This long-anticipated reward, he had reserved until this moment. This was his big prize.

This was the day that he would read what Sophia had circled. Today he would understand the message she had left him.

He heard his heart in his ears. He swallowed and prepared himself, for good or bad, whatever the words on the page were going to tell him. But maybe, just maybe, the words would give him peace, help him to let go, return to the contentment of solitude he had before he met her.

He read, the words swimming in the excitement he could not contain. Then came the confusion and the heavy understanding that it made no sense as his heart sank and disappointment snuffed out his hope.

It began ‘thus’, a word that looked simple, but which he had never come across. And then ‘lov’st’. He had never seen such grammar. What was ‘wilt’ in such a context? Flowers ‘wilt’, but in this sentence, there was nothing to ‘wilt’. The words began to smudge behind unspilled tears and he closed the book and hid it away. He stopped carrying it for a while and Sister Katerina remarked on his lowness of mood some weeks later. He had tried not to let it show but in her graceful company, he could lie in neither mood nor deed.

She did not push, only supported in her compassion, and he surprised himself one day by confessing all: Sophia being in his class at school, her intelligence and uncreased clothes, her eager smile and her confidence. The teasing from the other boys that he received at first because of the smell of livestock, but later, when he had missed too many days of learning through lambing time, for being stupid. Sophia had stepped in, branded them all bullies in a way that no one could argue with, and bid him sit next to her in class. He had fallen in love. The boys teased all the more and he lost the confidence to speak up in class and then, eventually to speak in school at all. He avoided his peers and only spent time with Sophia. He confessed that he and Sophia had skived off school to play in the pine forest and he confessed the day she gave him the book and said she was going away as she stared at him in a way that he could only interpret as longing. She put the book in his hand, opened to the page she had marked, and he had looked down and not understood a word and when he looked up again, she had gone, running down the hill towards her home. The next day, she had left the island leaving nothing behind but the indecipherable book, which was the reason for all the learning and now a source of great frustration.

Sister Katerina listened as she always did, silently, attentively, and then she sat quietly.

‘May I see the book?’ she asked. Yanni held back the sacred tome from Sister Katerina’s outstretched hand. No human hand had touched it but his since Sophia had given it to him. She sensed his hesitation and withdrew her hand to her lap. Ashamed of his reluctance, Yanni laid the book on the table. It fell open at the page with the circled words. She leaned forward and studied the page before sitting upright.

‘Oh my!’ she exclaimed. ‘It is another language again … Shall we learn it?’

‘It is not English?’ Yanni asked.

‘Oh yes, but as different to the English that we have been learning as ancient Greek is to Modern Greek.

‘You know this language?’ he asked hopefully.

‘No.’ She smiled so sweetly, her eyes shining. ‘But we can learn together.’

Yanni feels heat rising to his cheek even now as he remembers, at that time, standing and leaving the sister without a thank you or a good-bye. For a while, he felt he had nothing to say to her. This new hurdle in his path seemed almost too great to climb. He stopped by for the shopping lists and dropped the things she needed back as usual until one day she asked him to go to the post office to check her mail. She had never asked such a thing before, but one shop or another, or the post office, it made no difference to him. A thick parcel was waiting. He glanced at it briefly to make sure it was for the nun and heard his own intake of breath. Both his name and Sister Katerina’s were typed on a label adhered to the brown paper. It was the second post he had ever received.

He remembered the first all too well. It was a letter around his eighteenth birthday and he can remember feeling intimidated by how official it seemed. His name written by hand and the postmark over the stamp, those printed black lines had intimidated him. Reasoning with himself did not help. Even though he knew his birth had not been registered and he would not be listed in any official office, he felt sure it was draft papers for his military service. He looked again and again at the flowery handwriting on the envelope on the way home, but always his eye was drawn to the stamp, the official-ness of the black printed squiggles over it. He stopped to open it several times but he never quite managed it, his fingers freezing, rigid.

He arrived home late that day to a concerned Mama.

‘Oh there you are,
agapi mou.
’ She looked years older when she worried. How much more worried would she be if he had to go away to the army for two years? He could never bring that amount of anxiety to her. He walked to her open-armed greeting and, with a sly movement, he let the letter slip from his fingers and down the well as he passed. He hoped and prayed nothing would come of it, and nothing ever did. In time, he forgot all about it until the parcel came for the sister and all those feelings of fear returned.

He hoped a mistake had been made and that his name should not be there at all. It filled him with fear. He stuffed it into the sack on Dolly’s side and tried not to think about it. A letter was easily lost but a parcel, and one also addressed to someone else?

The big, solid wooden door was open that day and she waited for him on the bench inside, amidst the pink roses, the orange bougainvillea, the purple wisteria, clusters of cultivated red poppies, and a many-petalled yellow flower he could never remember the name of no matter how many times she told him.

He handed her the parcel.

‘Thank you, Yanni,’ she said and he turned to leave, the colours of her garden too big a contrast to his mood to remain. ‘Stay a moment,’ she said, so softly he thought he might have imagined it. He hesitated. She remained unmoved on the bench by the tiny church in the courtyard and patted the seat next to her. He felt like a child as he sat.

She pulled at the package, but it wouldn’t be opened until Yanni offered his help. From his pocket, he took a small penknife that he used to clean the donkey’s hooves, wiped it on his shirt sleeve, and slit the string and tape that was binding the brown paper.

‘Look, Yanni, it has come, and we may begin our studies again.’ Her voice tinkled like water, a grin from ear to ear.

Yanni was surprised at that moment to realise that Sister Katerina derived as much satisfaction from teaching as he did being her student. Her smile was generous, encompassing, and her eyes were alive, the skin around them crinkling in her pleasure.

He looked at the contents of the parcel. Two books in her lap.

‘Look, a more comprehensive English dictionary and “Understanding and Explicating English Poetry”.’ She laughed, a laugh that fitted with the gentle, bright flowers of her garden. ‘We will need the one even to understand the title of the other,’ she said and laughed again. They began to study again and as they learnt, piece by piece, he told her more about Sophia and, over time, the situation became clear, allowing Sister Katerina to understand Yanni, the reason for the distant look in his eyes and her own place in his life.