Escape to Ikaria Page 6

  We had talked about us sharing the work at the monastery, and she was happy to milk the goats if I was working with Datsun Jim or Stelios. It would fit well into her daily routine, before she took up her schoolteaching duties. The more work the better, and Ros knew how to milk goats as she had often milked Frieda, our house cow, back at Dyffryn; she was looking forward to it.

  ‘Life here has a beautiful simplicity,’ she said. ‘So uncomplicated, the children not glued to a television screen, happily amusing themselves in the natural world. I’m so glad we came,’ she said, hugging me, ‘especially after Pa’s death.’

  I hadn’t told Ros we had spent all but fifty pounds of our capital and unless there was a dramatic change in my rate of pay I would have to get in touch with Jack. Luckily in amongst all the news from home in my mother’s last letter, she had given me his telephone number.

  We spent hardly anything on food, but when we needed to buy medicines they were expensive, having to be imported from Athens. The pharmacist in Aghios kept talking Ros into trying his recommended remedies for those minor ailments that children get, like sore throats and runny noses; everything, of course, was written in Greek, so we never knew what we were taking. But we trusted him. He looked the part, with a white coat and a pair of smart horn-rimmed glasses, and, after all, it is by their appearance that you judge people.

  And the children were growing out of their clothes and shoes. At least with the weather warming up every day they could run around in flip-flops. Life is cheaper when the weather is hot. But razor blades were dear, so I only shaved twice a week. With a few days’ growth on my chin I already had the dishevelled look of an Ikarian.

  When I met Stelios he was sitting on the side of the boat with his head in his hands, deep in thought. Beside him in a plastic bucket were bottles of retsina and some bread and fruit. He half acknowledged me, raising an arm, but that was it. I tried to get his attention by asking if Theo was coming with us, but all I got was a dismissive wave of the hand. Eventually I said, ‘You’re not in a good mood this evening.’

  ‘Yeah, yeah, I’m all right,’ he said.

  ‘Are we going fishing?’

  ‘It is the weather, maybe not so good.’

  ‘Is there a storm coming?’ I asked.

  ‘I think if we go early and put the nets down we can shelter until it blows out.’

  ‘Do we have to take the risk?’

  ‘I need the money. There are repairs I have to do.’

  He lit a cigarette. ‘In case it gets rough I will tie a rope around you.’ I wondered whether he was being serious. He then inflated a rubber dinghy with a foot pump, telling me we would row to shore once the nets were down.

  ‘Do we have life jackets?’ I asked, thinking of Ros and her sense of foreboding. I tried to shrug off any apprehension, telling myself that Stelios knew what he was doing.

  ‘Of course we have life jackets,’ he said, ‘in the cabin. Take one later and put it over your oilskin.’

  In the fading light, we moved through the water, the twilight spilling its blood-red colours into the ink of the night. The sky filled with stars, luminous and sparkling over the Aegean. We soon lost sight of Ikaria, the sea not even rippled, but like a dark plain that we surged through, the only white water breaking over the bow. Stelios started to sing a reflective song that seemed to suit his mood.

  He increased the revs and the boat thudded against the water. We were now without landmarks and the night embraced us. I was filled with a nervous excitement for what lay ahead. I’d put on an oilskin jacket over a thick pullover; my eyes wept in the biting air. Not a wave ruffled the surface, and I could stand easily without having to cling onto anything. Ahead in the darkness I could see distant pinpricks of light. I realised we must have been at sea for at least an hour as gradually they became houses, lit high up on the cliffs of Samos. Here we let down the nets and watched them sink beneath us.

  Stelios pulled the dinghy close beside the boat and told me to get in, passing me the bucket of food and retsina, a bag of fish and a bundle of twigs. A breath of wind swept across my face as we rowed quietly to a small sandy cove, where the eddying currents caused waves to swell and carried us effortlessly to the shore. For some reason I felt we were breaking the law, that we were up to something illegal and at any moment we were going to be discovered. I suppose it went with the night, the silence and being under cover of darkness.

  In the moonlight, we found a sheltered spot beneath the cliffs. Although we had enough twigs to start a fire, Stelios sent me off to look for wood. It seemed an impossible task in a stony landscape without a tree to be seen, until he pointed out a half-demolished hut up on the headland that must once have housed some livestock, where I found a couple of half-rotten planks.

  He lit our fire in a circle of stones, then laid barbunia across a wooden grill. As they cooked, he turned them with two sticks he’d sharpened with his penknife.

  We drank retsina and I felt an elemental connection to the things around me: the air, the water, the fire, the smell of grilling fish. I watched the gentle rocking of the boat some fifty yards from the shore, a single beam of light shining from the mast. We ate the barbunia between our fingers, Stelios staring intently into the flames, as if his own thoughts danced before his eyes. He talked about Theo and how since he had fallen in love he couldn’t think straight. He wasted his time talking to girls sitting on the harbour wall, and didn’t have the courage to tell the one who had stolen his heart how he felt, so he showed off to them all.

  ‘It is no good. He shouts at his mother and has no interest in work.’

  ‘It’s something we all have to go through,’ I said, a rather lame response, but I didn’t know what else to say.

  ‘On Ikaria the girls want husbands and marry boys before they have become men.’

  He paused and lit a cigarette, ‘Of course, he thinks it is love,’ turning to me with a knowing smile. ‘Yes . . . and then after they have children the woman gets fat and the man becomes miserable, so he plays tavli and drinks ouzo.’

  ‘Theo is no different from any other man, Stelios. Let him live. You’re sounding too much like an older brother,’ I said.

  ‘Well, maybe you are right. I only tell you because it happened to me.’

  Then, as if to cheer himself up, he laughed, a self-deprecating laugh, and stamped out the fire, singing ‘Pende pano, pende cato’.

  What I should never have done, as he rowed us back to the boat, was put my hand on his shoulder and say, ‘It looks as though we’ve been lucky,’ meaning there would be no storm that night. Stelios knew better than to acknowledge such a remark. And within five minutes I regretted it. In the far distance a flash of jagged lightning split the darkness like cracks of light fracturing glass. We hurriedly brought up the last of the nets and put the catch in the hold as the storm blew closer. The sea began to rise up like great watery hillsides, and Stelios grabbed a rope and tied one end around my waist and the other to the mast.

  I hadn’t got a life jacket on and couldn’t get one now. Stelios was holding the tiller, trying to steer the boat into the waves, but they broke over us, such a volume of water that I thought the boat would break in two. We lost the dinghy, which tumbled away across the sea, blown out of reach like a child’s toy. I was being thrown across the deck and couldn’t make my voice heard when I shouted to Stelios, wanting to know what the hell I was meant to be doing. As I tried to make my way towards him, a great wall of solid water swept me over the side and hurled me into the sea. I had gone overboard.

  What went through my mind at that moment was not fear or panic but the need to keep myself afloat, which I did by managing to do the breast stroke and keep my head above water. I was still secured by the rope and could see the light swaying chaotically on the mast. At times I seemed to be just an arm’s length from the boat, then suddenly I would be sucked backwards, carried upwards and find myself looking down on it. Stelios grabbed the rope and began pulling me in, his legs braced o
n either side of the mast, hauling me ever closer. I grasped one of the tyres, but I hadn’t the strength to climb back on board. At last Stelios managed to get hold of my oilskin and somehow heave me over the side, rolling me like a sack of potatoes on to the deck, and then dragging me to the hold. He untied the rope and closed the hatch over me as I crouched, shivering, gasping for breath, my arms around the engine, hugging it for warmth. And that’s where I spent the next two hours, my eyes on a level with the words embossed on the little plaque, Made by Listers of Derby. I hugged that throbbing motor all the way back to Aghios Kirikos, put my back against it, lay on top of it, wrapped myself around it. God, I thought, I’ve become emotionally attached to an engine. That dark space I now inhabited was my little bit of England. Sloshing around me were the spilt contents of the catch, a graveyard of fish, the octopus tangling up in each other, performing a macabre dance on the other side of life, the squid slithering from side to side, the barbunia the colour of sunsets, their scales glittering in a splinter of light. What was going on above me in that other world, I had no idea.

  Stelios had enough to do without looking in on me. I felt as though I was living in an aquarium. What my body had gone through I didn’t really know, but oddly I had moved from numbness to feeling extremely cold. I vibrated with it and couldn’t close my mouth. I had also lost my grip and had no sensation in my feet, as if they had walked away from me in search of a better life. I had become the individual parts of myself, no longer a physical whole.

  When everything stopped sliding all over the place I knew we’d survived the night. But I never let go of that motor, not until it slowed and shuddered to a stop and I could hear voices which must have been coming from the quayside.

  Then Stelios lifted the hatch. Piercing light shone into the darkness and the salt in my eyes suddenly burnt furiously. It was too painful to bear and I shouted to Stelios ‘Nero, nero’ and he came and poured fresh water all over my eyes and face, a whole bottle of it.

  If Ros had been there I’m sure we would have been heading home on the next ferry. That clairvoyant wife of mine who had seen it all happening. I asked Stelios if he could get me some dry clothes.

  ‘I cannot go home like this.’

  ‘Hey, we have made it, be happy, you have your life! Come, here you are,’ he said, passing me a bundle someone had brought from his pick-up.

  All around us on the quayside were fishermen who had not ventured out into that angry sea. It could well have been a biblical scene, the wise welcoming back the foolish. It was one of those moments when I wished I could understand every word being said. Did they think Stelios was a fool? I would never know. But then those same fishermen started to unload the catch and maybe that was what they always did: helped each other out.

  In some of Stelios’s clothes that were too small for me I said goodbye to him. I could tell from his look that he was waiting to hear me say ‘never again’ and that I’d be on my way with a final ‘thanks for the experience’.

  But I didn’t. Instead I said, ‘Will we go out again this week?’ and he threw his arms around me and said, ‘You know, I see it in you now, a man whose strength lives inside him.’

  As he handed me a bag of fish, he asked, ‘Will you tell your wife?’

  I had to think about that. ‘Not all of it, not in the way it happened.’

  ‘She would not let you come again?’

  ‘Were you frightened, Stelios? Tell me the truth.’

  ‘Oh, my friend, I did not have time to be frightened,’ and he laughed, that laugh that rolled like the sea.

  Ros was waking when I walked in and fell into bed beside her.

  ‘I’m back,’ I said, ‘back from the sea, and yes I did fall overboard.’

  Better to say it quickly and flippantly and get it over and done with. I just told her I was in the water for a few seconds with a rope around me.

  ‘Thank goodness you were wearing a life jacket! I was so worried when I heard the wind get up in the night.’

  It would have been an outright lie to say anything about the jacket, but when you know how someone is going to react, and that the whole truth will cause them anxiety, life has taught me it’s best to give a watered-down version and sprinkle it with a little humour. Ros was quite happy with my fisherman’s tale, even laughing occasionally at my lighthearted story. I leant over and gave her a kiss. She had no idea how relieved I felt to be home.

  ‘You smell of diesel and seaweed,’ she said, sniffing my neck. ‘And whose clothes are you wearing?’

  Then Sam burst into the room. ‘Dad did you bring home some barbunia? I love barbunia,’ he said, and then Lysta appeared at the door.

  ‘Well I don’t. I’m a vegetarian.’

  I told Lysta we’d heard enough of that now, so instead she told me how the previous evening Seth hadn’t been able to go to sleep, because a bat kept flying around the room. That probably explained why he hadn’t surfaced yet.

  Ros told them it was time for school and they left me to sleep. Because of the warmer weather the classroom was now outside, so I closed the shutters and slipped away into some deep-sea dreaming.

  I could have gone on sleeping; Ros tried to wake me but it took all my children jumping on the bed before I realised we should be going to the monastery that morning.

  I quickly got dressed and we all went down to the taverna where Spyros was waiting for us. We told him our plan about working for Sister Ulita: that Ros and I would share the work. He was delighted. ‘If you knew how many have let her down.’ And so we all walked up to meet the nun, who greeted us with a warmth that overflowed into joy as we introduced her to the children, who each in turn received her blessing. Was it just us, or did every visitor to the monastery get such a welcome?

  Ros loved the whole atmosphere of the place, calling it the ‘Garden of Eden’, and when Sister Ulita took us to see the goats Lysta was won over immediately. We walked through the gardens, Sister Ulita naming in Greek every tree we passed. The little church she showed us could seat no more than two dozen people; there was a gold-encrusted cross on the altar and painted icons of the saints staring down from the whitewashed walls, while the bright sunlight illuminated the stained-glass windows. We could imagine what a relief it would be to escape into this cool sanctuary in the hot days of summer.

  We drank tea in the shade of the cypress trees in the courtyard and tasted her homemade sweet bergamot, which the children loved.

  ‘How do you say in Greek, may we have some more, please?’ asked Lysta.

  ‘Boroume na echoume ligo perissotero, parakalo?’ said Spyros, which Lysta tried to repeat, until she got completely tongue-tied.

  Then we got down to earthly matters and Spyros explained our plan. Sister Ulita listened intently, nodding her head with a broadening smile, and finally clasped her hands and sighed, recognising that we had reached an agreement. While Spyros translated the happiness she felt, she went back to the kitchen and returned with jars of fresh yoghurt and honey and some more sweet bergamot for Lysta. She told us it was all from the monastery and for us to take home.

  A couple of days later, as we were lying in bed, both of us waking from a good night’s sleep, Ros suddenly asked, ‘So what is our financial situation at the moment?’

  We’d never arranged it, but throughout our marriage most of our serious conversations had taken place in bed, either just before sleep or first thing in the morning.

  I was taken completely by surprise this time and didn’t have an immediate answer, because she’d never asked such a direct question about our cash flow before. Whenever we’d needed something, she would ask whether we could buy a sofa, a carpet, or whatever it was, and I would reply that I’d check the bank balance. That was when we were farming, of course, but all the cash we had now was in a money belt so I could hardly say I didn’t know.

  Ros’s question brought into the open a situation I had hoped would be resolved without involving her. My problem was Datsun Jim and the two and a half tho
usand drachma he owed me. I’d asked him when he was going to pay up several times. It was always avrio and I’d had enough of it, so I’d told him I was resigning from my position of cement mixer. He didn’t know the word resign, so I said, ‘Finito, I’m finished,’ which again he didn’t understand. I looked through my phrase book but couldn’t find an appropriate translation and ended up using the German, kaputt, which to my surprise he recognised.

  ‘Please, you wait a little longer,’ was his response, and I told him that was exactly what I had been doing. He told me again the money was on its way from his brother in Detroit. What choice did I have? If I walked away I doubted there was any chance of ever seeing it. So I didn’t resign and said I would work for one more week, for which he gave me another of his awful hugs, which I always tried to avoid, because the smell of him lingered.

  That was the situation I was in; all of my own making, I knew. What was I going to say to Ros, looking at me so optimistically?

  ‘Why do you ask?’

  ‘Well, if we can afford it, I was thinking we could go to Samos for a weekend. It’s not that far away and it would be nice to visit another island.’

  ‘That’s a lovely idea . . . an extremely lovely idea . . .’

  ‘But?’

  This was the difficult bit, when I had to sound convincing but not over elaborate, otherwise I’d dig myself deeper into trouble.

  ‘I’m just waiting for Datsun Jim to settle his account.’

  ‘Settle his account?’ said Ros. ‘He doesn’t have an account. He pays you in cash.’

  ‘That’s true, but he’s waiting for some money to arrive, and as soon as it comes I can see no reason why we shouldn’t have an exciting weekend in Samos. I hear the wine is very good.’

  Ros gave me a look that said it all. ‘We haven’t got any money, have we? How much does he actually owe you?’