Afternoons in Ithaka Read online

  Beyond the iron gate

  The apple falls under the apple tree

  Greek proverb

  Beyond the iron gate, the dirt road extends out to the little church on the hill, and then to the next village and beyond, winding its way further and further inland. The mountains ahead envelop me like a blanket of undulating green: solid, feminine, unmovable.

  ‘Se psychoplakonoune,’ Theio Spiro said about the mountains. They crush the psyche. I marvel once again at the Greek language and its ability to pin down emotion so eloquently. The word is at once simple, dark and poetic.

  I wonder if my father felt the mountains pressing on him, hemming him in and trapping him. This was his home. Here he had free rein to wander the dirt tracks, to climb up trees and daydream in the fields; here he ran from his mother when she berated him. I wonder if the village became too small for him; if the mountains bore down on him as they do on me now, so formidable in their solidity.

  The bell of Pappou’s goat tinkles as he leads it up the hill towards the cemetery, where it grazes on a fresh patch of grass. I sit on the tree stump where Pappou chops wood. I am aware of my body’s warmth on the cool wood. I feel my breath sink deeper into my belly, move down through my legs and into the earth below. With each breath, I imagine roots extending from my spine into the trunk, pushing deeper and deeper: past the rocks and the worms, past tree roots and coins slipped from frayed pockets, connecting me to this patch of earth. I feel fertile, fecund, my rounded hips and bottom connecting with the wood below me.

  ‘Spirithoula, ela na fame.’ Come and eat.

  I come out of my reverie, and look up at Yiayia squinting into the sun down at me from the veranda. I stand, surprised that I am not tethered to the stump, and make my way up the stone steps. Yiayia links her arm into mine and leads me inside, past the bedroom with the single lumpy bed, the herbs hung up to dry and the plastic bags filled with miscellany, and into the kitchen.

  The goat curd that Yiayia made earlier this morning is ready. I look at the creamy mass in a colander in the sink, where a trickle of thin white milk streams onto the blue and white tiles of the basin. Yiayia added pytia, rennet, to the boiled goat’s milk Pappou brought in this morning, and soon after drained the curds through a muslin cloth to make a soft, ricotta-like cheese. Yiayia also makes a harder cheese for grating over pasta, which she hangs in a muslin cloth from a rafter for several weeks.

  Yiayia sprinkles some sugar over the ricotta and watches as I taste it.

  ‘Mmm, oraio,’ I say. It’s nice. The goaty taste may take a bit of getting used to, but it’s fresher and creamier than any shop-bought ricotta I have ever tasted.

  She is pleased, happy that I am willing to try everything, that I ask questions about how things are made.

  ‘Your mother did a good job with you, bless her,’ she says.

  We spend the day pottering around the home. We go down to the upoyeio, where she has stocks of olives and oil, pasto (pickled pork) and wine. It is dark down there and she has to stoop; her hands are deft, expertly scooping out olives from a clay urn, pouring wine into a carafe in the half-light. We have the olives with bread, the fresh cheese and vlita, amaranth, a green leafy vegetable from her garden. We drink wine from little glasses. The table is silent as we eat, just as it is at home. Dad doesn’t like us to speak while we are eating; he says it is bad manners. But when we finish, my grandparents are keen to find out every detail of our lives in Australia. They ask about everyone – mostly about Dad, Mum and Dennis, but also about other relations who have moved to Melbourne from the village. I tell them as much as I can, and they hold on to my every word. They are hungry for news that is not constrained by the cost of a long-distance phone call.

  After we wash up, we lie down for a siesta. Yiayia is anxious that I will be cold, and offers me another itchy goat-hair blanket to add to the three already covering me. As she takes it from the pile of neatly folded homespun blankets piled up against one wall, I remember with a smile one of my father’s stories. As a young man, he found a gap between these blankets; he reached in and pulled out a wad of money his mother had hidden there. He helped himself to the notes over many months, buying cigarettes and other essentials with the family savings. When my grandmother found out, she was livid. Dad got a beating but was not remorseful.

  I lie awake, still unused to sleeping in the afternoon. I’ve been one week in the village and have slowed down, lulled by the rhythms of eating, tending to the animals, helping Yiayia in her garden, occasionally going to visit someone. I can feel my body rounding out with the constant offers of food (‘We don’t want you to go back to Australia and tell your parents you were hungry!’). I feel a strange sensuality and oneness with my body, which for once is not distracted by cerebral city pursuits.

  In the late afternoon, Pappou heads out to pick up his brother, who lives up the road, so that they can go to the cafeneion in the village square. Yiayia lets out her hair. She combs it, tantalising stroke by tantalising stroke. I have to look away. There is such an intimacy in the way she touches it, a blatant sexuality that is so at odds with her lined face, her fleshy, dark-clad body. She plaits it expertly and twists it around her head. She washes it once a week with the special soap she makes herself, and never cuts it. It comes down to her waist. I sense it is her one vanity in an otherwise unadorned existence.

  As she combs, she starts to tell me her woes in a long, uninterrupted stream, rocking a little from side to side. Her voice is hypnotic; it moves and sways like a song.

  ‘Your father was my first-born. I will never understand why he left, all the way across the world. It’s not as if his family was there – all his sisters and brother stayed here. It’s that Tellis, huh, the priest’s son no less, who took him away from me. “Come to Australia,” Tellis said. “There’s money to be made. Away from this place.” I still can’t forgive him for that.

  ‘I was an only child. My father died in the war with Albania in 1912, and my mother was pregnant at the time. I married when I was just sixteen; I had your father when I was seventeen. I was so proud. I didn’t get to enjoy him very much when he was young – I had to work the fields every day. My mother raised him, and when she died, he was heartbroken.

  ‘He was cheeky. He used to run riot in the village, run off when he was supposed to be helping with chores. He relied on his sisters, who worked hard.

  ‘When we sent him to Kyparissia to study, he would barter the bread I sent with him for cigarettes. When he brought his washing home, I found condoms in his pockets. Another time, Tellis rigged up his mattress in his room, with flour on the top of it. When I walked in, it all collapsed, covering me in flour.

  ‘But he was so smart. He would put an exercise book in his pocket, a pencil behind his ear. He didn’t study hard, but he did well. We sacrificed so much for him to study, helped him to get a good job in the police force and, in the end, he gave it up for Australia.’

  I watch Yiayia’s gnarly fist push into the air with emotion. I sense her grief at the loss of her son, still fresh after twenty-five years. I am surprised to hear about this side of my father: a rabble-rouser, a wanderer. It suddenly occurs to me that he keeps a tight rein on me perhaps because I remind him of himself. I am always challenging him, straying dangerously from the hearth. It’s a revelation.

  Pappou comes back. Yiayia lights the fire and we sit around it until it burns down. When the dark blankets the mountains and the little inland villages twinkle like stars in the distance, we take ourselves off to bed, the smell of the fire and goat’s cheese trailing behind us.

  Fig-sap ricotta

  Traditional cheese makers have long used natural coagulants to make cheese, from rennet (made from the stomachs of young calves) to nettles, thistles and mallow.

  Homer, as far back as the 7th or 8th century BC, knew that the juice of figs coagulated milk: ‘Even as the juice of the fig speedily maketh to grow thick the white milk that is liquid but is quickly curdled as a man stirreth it, ev
en so swiftly healed he [i.e. Paieon, physician to the gods] furious Ares.’ (The Iliad, Book 5, 902–904)

  Aristotle (384 BC–322 BC) provided a recipe of sorts for the making of cheese using fig-tree sap: ‘The juices flowing from an incision in green bark is caught on some wool. The wool is then washed and rinsed into a little milk, and if this be mixed with other milk it curdles it.’

  Finally, in modern times, the New England Cheesemaking Supply Company (www.cheesemaking.com) was inspired by the ancients to provide a more detailed recipe for home cheese makers using fig sap. They can’t guarantee it will work every time, but they say you’ll have fun trying.

  Ingredients

  A few freshly cut figs

  4 litres of milk

  Honey or sugar to serve

  Method

  Put on rubber or latex gloves (the sap from figs can cause serious allergic skin reactions). Cut a few figs from the tree in the morning. The fig sap (sometimes known as latex) will seep from the tip of the fig. Squeeze a few drops directly into your milk or, if the sap is really running, rub it onto a piece of sterilised cloth and rinse this out in the milk. Alternatively, you can stir your milk with a branch cut from the tree.

  Let the milk sit for up to 12 hours at room temperature, checking it periodically for the ‘clean break’. When the curd breaks cleanly around your finger or knife, and does not knit back together when you remove the knife or finger, it is ready to go.

  Drain the curd over a muslin cloth atop a colander for a few hours until all the excess liquid has gone. Serve with figs and a sprinkling of sugar or honey.

  Sinaisthisi

  Whoever holds their tongue saves their head

  Greek proverb

  Her blue eyes flash and her black hair swings. She gesticulates wildly.

  ‘I love him so much, Spirithoula mou; how long can it go on? Sotiris and I have been living together for over a year now. If my father finds out, he’s going to shoot me, literally shoot me. Sotiri’s own mother says to me, “Get pregnant, trap him,” but what if he leaves me?’

  The question is rhetorical. I haven’t yet met Sotiri, Natasha’s lover. What I do know is that Sotiri is as slow in asking Natasha to marry him as he is in getting ready in the mornings. His family trades in oil; they have old money, and live in a genteel house up on a hill outside of Kalamata. Sotiri will ask my excitable cousin to marry him only when he is ready.

  I’ve spent the last few days with Natasha in her parents’ village home, with its bright geraniums and rose bushes out the front and prolific vines and fruit trees out the back. Her mother is Mum’s older sister; Natasha, in her late twenties, is a few years older than I am.

  We have taken up where we left off when we first met when I was seven: she leads passionately and I try to keep up, in awe of her energy. She speaks quickly, moves quickly. She walks around the garden in this house where she grew up, re-potting plants, cutting off a bud here, pruning a rose there. She works in the bank in Kalamata now, but her hands are solid, fleshy, the hands of a girl at home in the village. She smokes cigarette after cigarette, talking between puffs.

  ‘You know Freud, he was right about the Oedipus complex. I think Sotiri is in love with his mother. I can never compete with her. But I want to have babies, Spirithoula mou, set up home.’

  Although Natasha shares Sotiris’s bed in his mother’s home, she has told her father that she stays in Kalamata with her sister. If her father were to find out about her living arrangements, I wouldn’t put it past him to shoot her. He is known for his violence and his staunchly traditional views.

  Natasha is all feeling, sinaisthisi, a new word I have learnt from her. I love her passionate use of psychological language. It’s such a contrast to the practical Greek of my own parents. She loves it that I take it all in like an obedient student. We sit in the front room while her dad is out in the kitchen watching television. After each cigarette, she waves her hands to clear the air; he mustn’t suspect that she smokes. I smile wryly at her artifice. I am all too familiar with hiding things from my parents.

  For someone so articulate about her sinesthimatiki zoi, her emotional life, I am surprised at how resourceful Natasha is when she engages in the daily rituals of her life here. We top and tail the string beans her mother brought in from the field this morning, and sauté them with onions, garlic and a generous helping of olive oil. When they have softened, she adds a few cups of grated ripe tomatoes, zucchini pieces and potatoes, and turns down the heat to let the meal cook slowly. She does all this with a sure hand. She reminds me of my cousin Kathy back home.

  The smell of the beans fills the house. Everything in the pot has come from my aunt’s fields. I can’t wait to eat, but of course I must be patient; my aunt will be back from the fields after two o’clock.

  Yiayia, my maternal grandmother, calls out from the bedroom. She needs her bedpan. Natasha takes it to her, then expertly empties its contents into the toilet when Yiayia has finished. Yiayia has been in bed for many months now, unable to walk with osteoporosis.

  When my aunt returns, we sit around the table together. Natasha eats with passion, wolfs her food down. While her hands are fleshy and strong, the rest of her is lean and angular, all nervous energy.

  When Natasha returns to work in Kalamata a few days later, I decide to go on to Petalidi, where Mum grew up. My mother’s brother Nikos is living in the family home with his two girls and I’d like to see him; I want to decide for myself what to make of him, after all I have heard.

  Mum’s village is large compared to my aunt’s; a couple of thousand people live there, most within a kilometre of the sea. The village is surrounded by farmland.

  When I get to the small stone house on the incline away from the water, I recognise it immediately from our trip here when I was a child. It has whitewashed walls and an ornate iron door. But now it looks grimy, unkempt. My uncle, Mum’s youngest sibling, comes to the door. He hugs me awkwardly, as if he is not used to touching anyone. He looks like an older, plumper version of my brother.

  We walk through the front room and down a step into the cool, dark kitchen. I marvel that seven people once lived here. My mother used to sleep in the same bed as her sisters, and she reports that it was the happiest time of her life.

  My uncle’s daughters were babies when I last saw them; they are in their mid-teens now. My first impression is of a plodding solidity. I wonder how we will go, sharing this small space over the next week.

  After I’ve put my bag down, my uncle potters about, preparing some olives and bread. He apologises that there is no meat. He is fasting.

  ‘What can I do, Spirithoula? My wife left me. I have to fend for myself now, and look after my girls when they are staying with me.’

  I look at the girls. They look embarrassed. I’m not sure what to say.

  He goes on. ‘How is your mother? My sisters?’ The martyred tone remains.

  ‘They’re okay. They send their regards, hope you are well.’

  ‘I’m not so well. I have my problems. I have nowhere to live now, no thanks to my sisters. This house stands empty. It’s rightfully mine. They need to do the paperwork.’

  ‘The paperwork’, ta hartia, is something I have heard much about. My grandfather died without leaving a will. In keeping with Greek law, the property didn’t pass to his wife, but to his adult children. And now these ‘children’ need to agree on what to do with the family home. My uncle claims it was promised to him, the only son. He has tried repeatedly to get his sisters to sign it over. But their husbands won’t agree. This stalemate has been going on for many years now. I knew the subject would come up, but I didn’t expect it to happen as soon as I was in the door.

  ‘Mum is happy to sign over her part of the property, but my other aunts can’t. Their husbands won’t …’

  ‘It’s your mother’s responsibility to get them to sign. She’s the oldest.’

  I back down, unsure how to proceed in the face of my uncle’s anger. I am surprise
d at the immovability of these old-fashioned cultural mores, this sense of masculine entitlement, sanctioned by law. My uncle was the favoured youngest child, the long-awaited son born after four girls. Everyone in the family fulfilled his every whim. Now, he’s not happy that he has to compete with his sisters’ husbands in far-off Australia.

  The girls and I spend the week eating fruit from the abundant trees, brushing one another’s hair, talking, while my uncle visits his mates at the cafeneion and rummages around the kitchen, mumbling. The garden is overgrown and the sense of neglect is starting to creep into the house – the unused rooms, the dust collecting in the corners. I go down to the shops for supplies, visit a few family friends from Australia who now live back in the village. Mum’s goddaughter hugs me like a long-lost sister: ‘Oh my God, Spirithoula, it’s like I’m back in Australia seeing you! Tell me the news, I want to hear everything …’

  I am restless. My cousins are not articulate; their life has been protected, even more so than mine. I feel sorry for them. My uncle won’t let me take them out to the amusements that are running each night on the foreshore. He takes us to church every few days. He talks about moving to Agion Oros, the monastic community where only men are allowed. He spends long stretches of time there.

  ‘Spirithoula!’ he shouts one afternoon while we are sitting at the kitchen table. Some family friends have come to visit.

  ‘Ti, Theio?’ What, Uncle?

  ‘You’re crossing your legs while you’re eating. It’s blasphemy.’

  I’ve spent the week listening patiently to my uncle rant about my mother, about women, about his homelessness. I’ve tried to reason with him, to placate him. I have tried to mediate a solution, patiently as my mother would have done. But to no avail.