70 Excavation

70 Excavation

By the time that he was five years old and Christos Sarrutakis was elected in place of Karamanlis, Iannis already knew how to say `Hello' and `Isn't he adorable?' in six different languages. This was because he spent nearly all his time at the taverns in his grandmother's care, being cooed over by pink and sentimental foreigners who loved olive-skinned little boys with black fringes over their ebony eyes, just as long as they did not grow older and come to their own countries looking for employment. Iannis delivered the baskets of bread to the tables, peering very charmingly over the tablecloth, and earned enough money in tips to be able to afford a teddy bear, a radio-controlled toy car, and a simulation in durable plastic of a World Cup football. Pelagia proudly introduced him to her guests, and he would hold out his hand confidently and politely, the very image of the perfect child that in more prosperous but less sensible countries was no longer to be found. His antique manners were a prodigious novelty, and he only grimaced when embraced and slobbered over by fat women with halitosis and adhesive red lipstick.

The reason for his continual presence at the Taverns Drosoula was that his father was building new holiday apartments with swimming pools and tennis courts, and his mother was reverting to as old-fashioned, pre-socialist feminism, that declared that a woman has equal rights to a man when it comes to capitalist enterprise. She borrowed money from her husband in order to open a shop, and conscientiously paid it back at five per cent interest over four years. On Bergoti Street in Argostoli she opened a souvenir emporium that sold reproduction amphorae, worry beads, dolls dressed in the fustanella of the evzones, cassettes of syrtaki music, snorkelling equipment, statuettes of Pan playing his pipes with every evidence of concentration yet endowed with a resplendent and

hyperbolical erection, owls of Minerva shaped in limestone, postcards, handmade rugs that were really made by machines in North Africa, porcelain dolphins, gods, goddesses, and caryatids, terracotta tragedians' masks, silver trinkets, bedspreads embellished with meanders, keyrings that humorously mimicked in miniature the motions of copulation, diminutive clockwork bozoukis with loose red nylon strings made of fishing line that played `Never on Sunday' or `Zorba the Greek', copies of Kazantzakis' novels in English, sombre icons with authentic patina depicting various saints whose names in Cyrillic were indecipherable and improbable, emollients for sunburned Britons, leather belts and handbags, T-shirts which proclaimed variations on the message of `My Dad Went To Greece, And All I Got Was This Lousy T-shirt', tourist guides and phrase-books, harpoon guns, paracetamol, beach-bags v hose handles became unstitched, raffia mats, intimate wipes, and condoms. Antonia presided over this eclectic emporium, dressed as always in clothes of sparkling white, sitting at the open till (in order to leave no clues for the taxman), with her thumb in her mouth and her long legs arranged about her in attitudes of sophisticated grace.

Shortly she opened other shops with identical stock in Lixouri, Skala, Sami, Fiskardo, and Assos, and, to salve her finer artistic conscience, she sponsored a potter who was to make genuinely beautiful garden equipment and ornament out of frostproof terracotta, in the classical style. She and Alexi visited Paris and Milan with the vague idea of opening a very expensive boutique in Athens, and these days Alexi contemptuously dismissed the arguments of those who wished to redistribute his wealth: `Between us Antonia and I keep dozens of people in employment. By enriching ourselves we enrich our staff, so don't give me any of that outdated crap, OK? What do you want? Do you want them all to live on the dole? And have you any idea how many people there are making the scuff that we sell? Hundreds, that's how many.'

Their son grew up contentedly in his grandmother's company, dabbling his toes in the astoundingly clear water of the port and mesmerised by its flitting and impulsive shoals of fish. In the evenings the reunited family would sit together in the taverns, sometimes before the rush but more usually after it, arguing both in Italian and in Greek, whilst Pelagia, already nostalgic for lanais' infancy, would say, `Do you remember the time when I was changing his nappy on the wall, and suddenly he peed, whoosh, and a great golden spout came out and landed on the cat? And how the cat ran away, and it licked itself clean, ugh, and we laughed so much we thought we would burst? Those were the days. It's such a shame they've got to grow up.'

And the little boy would laugh politely and wish that his granny would not embarrass him so much, and then he would go behind the wall and see how high he could spread the damp patch, leaning backwards from the knees and experimenting with the range and elevation of his interesting appendage and its wonderful golden spout. He had a friend called Dmitri who could pee higher than him, and he had some catching up to do before he took on any bets. He had a piece of chalk back there too, and he kept a score of all the beautiful foreign women who had kissed him on the cheek when they said goodbye at the end of their holiday. It was one hundred and forty-two, almost too many to imagine, and he could not remember any of their faces, only a general and blissful impression of shiny hair and big eyes, redolent scent, and spongey breasts that flattened against him fortuitously and then resumed their shape. In the evening, after he had been carried home at midnight, fast asleep in his father's arms, he would dream in a babel of languages about exquisite girls and the smell of moisturising face-cream.

When he was ten years old, in the year of the antithetical coalition between Communists and conservatives, Pelagia hired a bozouki player to entertain her guests in the taverna. His name was Spiridon, he was a charismatic Corfiote, and his exuberance was inexhaustible. He played his bozouki with such vibrant virtuosity that he seemed to be playing three, and he could induce even the Germans to put their arms about each others' shoulders and dance in a circle with motions of the feet like the impatient pawings of a horse. He knew exactly how to play a piece accelerando, starting very slowly and pompously, and gradually speeding up until all the dancers were tangled hysterically in each others' flailing limbs. He knew cradle songs and fishing songs, classical tunes and new compositions by Theodorakis, Xarhakos, Markopoulos, and Hadjidakis, and he executed all of them with perfect tremolos and extraordinary syncopated improvisations that were inclined to prevent his audience from dancing because it was even better to listen.

Iannis worshipped him, with his broad shoulders, huge black beard, his wide mouth that seemed to contain a hundred flashing teeth (including a gold one), and his repertoire of prestidigitatory tricks whereby he produced eggs out of one's own ears and made coins disappear and return in a flash of the fingers. Pelagia also loved him because he reminded her so much of her vanished captain, and occasionally her heart yearned for a time-machine to take her back to the days of the only real love of her life. She thought that perhaps the captain's soul inhabited the fingers of someone like Spiridon, for it seemed that even when players died, their vagrant music moved to other hands, and lived.

Iannis' secret desire was to become a harpoon, as soon as he was old enough. These `kamakia' were the young Greek boys who lived on a diet of perpetual sex, entertaining the unchaperoned and romantic foreign girls who arrived on the island in search of true love and multiple orgasms in the arms of any latter-day Adonis who agreed to sweep them off their feet. They considered themselves so indispensable to the tourist industry that there was even talk of forming a union to represent their interests. Charmingly and chivalrously they doled out beautiful memories and broken hearts, waiting at the airport after one girl had flown out in order to acquire another as she flew in. They hung about on their mopeds in fallow times, discussing the sexual hierarchy of merit amongst the different nationalities. Italian girls were best, and English girls were useless unless inebriated. German girls were technicians, Spanish girls uncontrollable and melodramatic, and French girls were so vain that you had to pretend to be in love with them from the very first. Iannis used to inspect his diminutive rod with its unpredictable and painful erections, and wonder if he would ever have an orgasm, whatever that was, and whether and when his particular harpoon would waken from its humid dreams and grow.

Iannis did not fad to notice that Spiridon was popular with the girls. At the end of every performance they would seize the red roses from the slender vases in the middle of their tables, and throw them at him. He noticed that Spiro would go round early in the evening, to remove the prickles from the stars, so confident was he of this floral bombardment. He also observed that Spiro was always having his picture taken with his arms across the shoulders of girls with shining noses, sometimes two or four of them at a time, and that on these occasions his grin spread from ear to car as his face radiated pride and happiness. Accordingly Iannis demanded one day that Spiro should teach him how to play bozouki.

`Your arms aren't long enough yet,' said Spiro, `it would make more sense to start with a mandolin. It's the same thing really, but small enough for you. You're ten now, and maybe when you're fourteen you should start to play bozouki. Look . . . ' he placed the instrument in the boy's lap and stretched out the left arm ` . . . your arm's too short and your hand isn't big enough to get round the neck. You need a mandolin.'

Iannis was a little disappointed. He wanted to be exactly like his hero. `Can you play mandolin?' he asked.

`Can I play mandolin? Can I walk and talk? That's how I learned. I am the best mandolinist I ever head, except for one or two Italians. In fact the mandolin is the instrument of my heart.'

`Will you teach me?'

`You might need a mandolin. Otherwise we might have to stick to theory.'

Petulantly lanais pestered his mother and father and his grandmother for a mandolin. Antonia removed her thumb from her mouth and said, 'I'll get you one in Athens, next time I'm there,' and needless to say, she forgot. 'I'll get you one when I go to Naples,' said Alexi, who had no idea when he would be going, or indeed why.

Eventually Pelagia told him, `In fact we have one already, but it's buried under the old house. I am sure Antonio wouldn't mind you digging it up.'

`Who's Antonio?'

`My Italian fiancé who was killed in the war. It belonged to him. You must have head about him a lot.'

Iannis pleaded with his father to divert some of his construction workers from one of his sites, was promised, and was then let down because of pressing schedules which were something to do with having a plane-load of tourists arriving shortly at a newly built complex whose plumbing was not even complete yet. Alexi was apoplectic with anxiety about it, and he snapped at his son for the first time in his life, only to hug him and apologise immediately

afterwards.

So Spiridon was dragged up the hill by the hand, and shown a ghostly and forlorn ruin overgrown with long clumps of desiccated grass and thorn, its broken stones just visible above the growth. All around it rested the silent and deserted remains of little houses that had all the appearance of regret and loneliness. Tilted steps led nowhere. A communal oven sat at a drunken angle, its cast-iron door seized up and rusted at the hinges, with laminating plates of scale ready to split away either in heat or frost. Inside was a colony of woodlice and the charred scarring of countless forgotten meals eaten by people long dispersed or dead. `Jesus,' said Spiro, gazing about him at the scene of tranquil desolation, `it wasn't nearly this bad in Corfu. Doesn't it make you feel sad?'

`It's the saddest place,' said Iannis. `I come here to explore, and when I'm angry, and when I'm unhappy.'

He pointed, `My great-grandfather died in there. I'm named after him. Grandma says he was the best doctor in Greece, and he could have been a great writer. He could cure people just by touching them.'

Spiro crossed himself, saying, `Mary preserve us.'

`I've found lots of things,' said Iannis, `but most of them are broken.'

A young brindled cat trotted away, its belly distended with unborn kittens. `She comes here to hunt for lizards,' said Iannis, pointing. `She's very good at it. She always leaves the tail, and it sort of writhes around on its own for ages. It's brilliant.'

`Look at this,' said Spiro, pointing to a huge old olive tree that had split down the middle, begun to rot at the bole, but was still exuberant with contorted black branches and small green fruit. `I climb in this one,' said lanais, `there's a branch that's really good for swinging on. That one there.'

`Let's have a swing then,' said Spiro, and Iannis climbed the tree to get there

whilst the former sprang upwards and hung. Side by side the two of them swung backwards and forwards for a few moments, aided by the elasticity of the branch, and then dropped to the ground, full of businesslike and manly satisfaction. Spiro rubbed his hands together and said, `Right, let's get working before it becomes too hot. Do you realise that this will be very bad for my hands? I probably won't be able to play tonight. Did you know that guitarists won't do the washing-up because it softens their fingernails? What a perfect excuse, eh?'

`I like washing up,' said Iannis. `It gets all the dirt from under your nails, and anyway, Grandma pays me.'

The two of them went through what had once been the door, and scratched their heads in dismay. There was an awful lot of rubbish. `It's not as bad as it was,' said Iannis apologetically, `my Dad came and took away all the tiles that weren't broken, and he took most of the beams for new houses. And Grandma came and dug out anything useful.'

Spiro took a stick and lifted out a pale and congealed prophylactic. `For God's sake!' he exclaimed. `Shitty tourists.'

He flicked it away over the scrub, and Iannis asked, `What is it?'

`Well, young man, it's what you roll over your pride and joy when you don't want children.'

`How do you go for a pee then? Do you have to take it off?'

`Yes,' said Spiro, sensing that if he was not careful he was letting himself in for some lengthy explanations, `you take it off. In fact you only put it on when you're at it, see?'

the innumerable green bottles. `We've got two days' work here,' he said. `I suppose we'll just have to get on with it.'

By the next evening there was a clear space in the middle of the old floor, and a dusty stack of broken stones and tiles one metre high outside the walls, along with snapped and rotting lengths of wood. There was also a pile of treasures which Iannis wanted to save; an ancient and smashed wireless with its red tuning needle permanently stuck on 'Napoli', a distorted pan with a jagged hole rusted through the bottom, a broken walking-stick with a silver top, an intact glass jar full of snail shells, a mouldy set of fat books entitled The Complete and Concise Home Doctor in English, a stethoscope whose rubber tubes had perished and whose bell was distorted, a photograph in a silver frame with a cracked glass, and inside it a picture of two funny drunks in strange hats with their arms about each other, and, in the distance, the tiny but marvellously naked figure of a lithe girl kicking up the water of the sea, also in a silly hat. He even found a complete photograph album, a little damp, its pages eaten away by insects at the edges, and brown water stains elegantly and delicately spread in undulating patterns across its pages. The first picture was inscribed `Mama and Papas On Their Wedding Day' and it showed in sepia a young couple standing very formally in clothes so old-fashioned that Iannis could not believe that anyone had really dressed like that. He went through them, sitting on the wall: 'Pelagia's First Steps' - a picture of a baby in a frilly bonnet, flat on its face, looking up with astonishment. He would show them to Grandma later to find out what they all meant. Meanwhile it was fascinating enough to have found a clasp knife with its blade locked by rust, a small glass jar containing a dried pea encrusted with something black and flaky, and a mouldy book of poems by someone called Andreas Laskaratos.

Spiro tried to get his fingers under the iron ring of the long trapdoor, but it had seized in its place and would not budge. Under the wood he slipped the blade of an old screwdriver he had found, but it bent like a piece of cheese and broke. He would have to go and borrow a crowbar, because no doubt the hinges were also rigid with rust.

`Why don't we just smash it?' enquired Iannis.

`Because we don't want to smash the mandolin, that's why. Nothing's to be gained from impatience.'

They stood looking at the door, scratching their heads, frustrated at being baulked after having come so far, and then became aware of a very big old man in a black suit and collarless shirt, a heavy silver stubble on his face, standing a little bent in the doorway. `What are you doing?' he asked. `O, it's you, young Iannis. I thought you were looters. I was going to give you the back of my hand.'

`We're trying to open this, Kyrie Velisario',' acid the boy. `It's stuck, and it's got something inside that we want.'

The old man shuffled inside and looked down at the trapdoor with his watery eyes. Iannis noticed that he was carrying a red rose. 'I'll help you to lift it in a minute,' he said, `but first let me put down this flower.'

He went back into the yard and placed his flower very carefully on the parched earth. `I normally do it in October,' he told them, `but I'll probably be dead myself by then, so I'm putting it there early.'

`What for?' asked Iannis.

`Young man, there's an Italian soldier down there. I buried him myself. A very brave man, as big as me. I liked him, he was very kind. I come every year and put the flower there to show that I have not forgotten. No one has ever seen me do it before, but who cares these days? We have different enemies now, and there's no shame anymore.'

`You mean there's a real skeleton down there?' asks lanais, wide-eyed with horrified delight, and secretly thinking that it would be ghoulishly exhilarating to try and dig it up. He had always wanted a real skull.

`Not just a skeleton. A man. He deserves his rest. We gave him a bottle of wine and a cigarette, and there's no scolding woman down there to annoy his bones and start tidying up when he only wants his peace. He's got all a man could want.'

Spire coughed politely but sceptically. `Don't trouble yourself with trying to lift this door, sir, I've tried it and I can't.'

`Give me your hand,' said Velisarios to Spire, `and see what kind of men there used to be in Cephallonia. Remember that I am seventy-eight years old, and think about what I must have been.'

Smiling a little patronisingly, Spire held out his hand. Velisarios enfolded it with his own and squeezed. Spire's expression changed from consternation to alarm to horror as he felt the bones of his hand crushing and making as though trapped between the atones of an olive press. 'Ah, ah, ah; he cried, sinking to his knew and raising his other hand in a gesture of desperate appeasement. Velisarios released him, and Spire stared at his hand, waggling the fingers and panicking at the thought that he might never play an instrument again.

Velisarios bent down slowly and inserted the tips of the fingers of one hand under the iron ring. He leaned sideways against the strain to put all his weight and strength into the feat, and with a sudden and gratifying rending and splintering of wood and old iron, the door flew upwards in a cloud of dust, torn from its hinges and split down four planks. Velisarios rubbed his hands together, blew on the tips of his forgers, and seemed abruptly to revert to being a tired old man. `Farewell, my friends,' he said, and shuffled his way slowly down the path to the new village.

`Unbelievable,' said Spire, still wringing his paralysed hand. `I just can't believe it. An old man like that. Are his sons giants too?'

`He didn't get married, he was too busy being strong. Did you know that Cephallonia was the original place where the giants lived? It says so in Homer.

That's what Grandma says. I'd like to be a giant, but I think I'm going to be average.'

`Unbelievable,' repeated Spire.

Everything inside that cachette that had been scaled up for nearly thirty-six years was in perfect condition. They found an antique handwound German record-player complete with a set of records and winding handle, a large and intricately crocheted blanket, a little yellowed but still wrapped and interleaved in soft tissue paper, a soldier's knapsack full of wartime curiosities, two bandoliers of bullets, a wad of papers written in Italian, and another wad of papers written in a beautiful Cyrillic script, inside a black tin box, and entitled `A Personal History of Cephallonia'. There was also a cloth bundle, containing a case, itself containing the most beautiful mandolin that Spire had ever seen. He turned it over and over in the sunlight, amazed at the exquisite purfling and binding, the gorgeous inlay and the perfect craftsmanship of the tapered sections of the belly. He sighted along the diapason and discovered that the neck was unwarped. Four strings were missing, and the remaining four were black with tarnish, lying loosely upon the frets where Corelli had relaxed their tension for storage in 1943. `This,' he said, `is worth more than a whore's memoirs. Iannis, you're a very lucky boy. You've got to look after this better than you love your mother, do you understand?'

But Iannis was at that moment more interested in the Lee-Enfield rifle with a barrel so long that it was almost as tall as himself. Excited and gleeful, he waved it about from the hip, striking Spiro on the backside, and going, `Bang. Bang. Bang.'

He pointed it up towards the tree and squeezed the trigger. The gun leapt in his hands with a terrible and heartstopping crash, the barrel cracked him in the forehead, and a shower of chips of wood sprayed from the branch above him. He dropped the cumbersome weapon as though it had given him a violent electric shock and he sat down abruptly and burst into tears of shock and terror.