Chapter 5 The Dakos Explanation
Priya arrived on a Saturday with a notebook, a very good rolling suitcase, and the particular expression of a travel journalist who has been sent to write about a "hidden gem" and is already suspicious of anything too picturesque.
She is my best friend of eleven years and she was supposed to be somewhere entirely different — Thessaloniki, I thought, or possibly the Peloponnese — but her editor had added the northern Aegean islands to the piece at the last minute, and Priya's idea of telling me this was a voice note that said surprise, I'm coming to your island Thursday, I've booked the ferry, also I need the good coffee spot sent at eleven-fifteen on a Wednesday night.
This is how Priya operates. She writes for a magazine I've read on trains for years (it was the sort of magazine that ran pieces about interesting things in interesting places, as opposed to the sort that ran pieces about the best luxury spa in the Maldives, and was therefore a magazine I actually wanted to read rather than just having on my coffee table as a statement).
She was here for two nights, officially, to research a piece on "secret islands of the northern Aegean" for a September issue.
She said secret islands with the careful irony of a person who is aware that publishing something in a national magazine immediately decommissions its secrecy.
"Does that bother you?" I said. "The thing where the piece makes it not secret anymore?"
"Two nights," I said.
"Possibly three," she said. "Depends on the food."
"The food is excellent."
She looked at me. "You've been here a week."
"I work at the taverna."
This landed the way it always landed with Priya, which is to say she tilted her head with the expression of someone who has found an unexpected thread in a story and intends to pull it. "You work here? You didn't mention that part."
"I mentioned it via voice note."
"I don't retain information from voice notes unless you flag it. You know this about me."
"I said, and I quote, 'I have a job now, it's fine, I'm fine.'"
She considered this for a moment. "I'm buying you a drink later and you're going to tell me everything."
I found that I didn't mind this. I'd been on the island for six days and I'd talked properly to Derek and superficially to Petros and, in monosyllables, to Lex, and Priya had been nine hundred miles away and I'd been keeping things bottled in the specific British way where you tell people you're fine via voice note with such conviction that they believe you.
"Fine," I said. "Seven o'clock. After service."
* * *
The dakos disaster happened at half eleven.
In retrospect, I was too confident. Five days in and I knew Petros and the German family and the couple from the villa up the hill, and I'd stopped having the table-number problem (mostly), and I'd started to feel the rhythm of the kitchen in a way I hadn't in the first week — the calls between Lex and Theria, the particular sound of the pass-through sliding open, the timing of when to put an order in and when to wait. I was, I thought, getting competent.
This is when the universe sends you a test.
A couple arrived at table nine just before noon — their first time on the island, English, late forties, matching walking shoes, the kind of people who do research before they go anywhere. The woman had a small notebook with a list of things to try.
"We saw this mentioned," she said, pointing at the chalkboard. "Dakos. Is that local?"
Here is where the disaster began. Because I knew what dakos was — I knew it very well, I'd been bringing Petros his dakos for ten days, I'd watched it made at the pass-through, it was barley rusk with tomato and feta and herbs and it was delicious.
What I was less certain about was precisely where in Greece it originated, and I was operating under the impression — formed where, I genuinely can't tell you — that it was a specialty of this area.
"It's a local dish," I said, with the confidence of someone who has no idea she's wrong. "Very traditional to the island. The Aegean islands use barley rusk in particular — it's a Kaliroi specialty."
She wrote this down in her notebook.
Her husband nodded with the satisfaction of a man who has received correctly sourced information.
I went back to the pass-through.
I was aware, peripherally, that Lex was at the pass-through. I was not aware — I was very consciously not being aware — that he was watching me through the window over the counter. I put the order on the pass-through clip and turned to check on table three.
"Table nine," Lex said.
I turned back. He was looking at me. Not aggressively. Not with any expression that could be called anything other than neutral. And yet his eyes had stayed on her for exactly two beats longer than neutral required.
"The couple with the matching shoes," I said. "They wanted to know about the dakos."
"What did you tell them?"
"That it was a local specialty. Traditional to the island."
A pause. Very brief. "It's Cretan," he said.
I stared at him.
"Cretan," he said again. "From Crete. Not from here. The Aegean islands use it, yes — but it's a Cretan dish. Not a Kaliroi specialty."
I looked at table nine. The woman was still writing in her notebook.
"How bad is it," I said, and it wasn't really a question.
"They mentioned on the phone this morning that they write for a food newsletter." He said this with absolute calm. "About two thousand circulation."
I died, briefly.
"I'll email the editor," I said. Because what else do you say.
"I already have the email," he said. "I can send it if you'd like."
I looked at him. "You'd do that?"
"It's a simple correction. Better to address it directly." He took the order from the clip. "The dakos is still excellent. The correction won't reflect badly on the taverna."
He said the taverna and not you, which I suspected was intentional and was possibly the kindest thing he'd done since Monday.
"Thank you," I said.
He was already back at the stove.
* * *
I told Priya about it over wine at seven, sitting on Derek's terrace because Derek had tactfully gone to visit Spyros about a plumbing matter and left us the string lights and a bottle of local white.
"He's already dealing with the newsletter," I said. "He'd looked up the contact before I'd finished the sentence."
"He's watching you," Priya said.
"He's managing the taverna's reputation."
"Also he's watching you."
I topped up my wine. "He corrected me. Again. That's what he does."
"He corrected you quietly, took the problem away, and is fixing it himself instead of making you apologise to the table," Priya said. "That's not correction. That's — actually, what's the word. It's cover."
"He runs a tight kitchen. He's not going to let a newsletter go out with wrong information."
"Margot." She looked at me. Priya had a very direct gaze, the kind of gaze that had, she'd told me, conducted forty interviews and could tell when someone was using facts as a hedge.
"He just — he made you a laminated card.
" She looked at me with the particular expression of someone who has heard the word just used as a minimising agent and is deciding whether to say something about it.
"He makes systems."
"For your specific problem."
I looked at the harbour. The string lights were on at the taverna — the late customers finishing up, the warm yellow glow across the water. Somewhere in the kitchen, Lex was probably closing down service with the systematic efficiency I'd already come to recognise as his natural register.
"He's very aggravating," I said.
"Mm," said Priya, in the tone of someone who had drawn a conclusion and was filing it.
"He told me the dakos thing like he was reading a weather report."
"And yet he's handling the fallout."
"He handles everything like that. Quietly. Before you've realised you needed it handled."
Priya picked up her wine. "Interesting," she said.
"Don't say interesting like that."
"Like what?"
"Like you're putting me in an article."
She smiled. It was the smile of a woman who was absolutely putting this in an article, though not in the way I meant.
"I was going to say that you're talking about him the way you talk about systems you've figured out," she said.
"The way you explained the carbon copy pads to me just now, and why you'd been using the wrong layer—"
"I haven't mentioned the carbon copy pads."
She raised an eyebrow. I had, in fact, mentioned the carbon copy pads in passing, because I'd discovered two days ago that there were two layers and I'd been retaining the top copy and sending the kitchen the bottom copy, which Lex had apparently been working around without mentioning it, because the point was not the copy, the point was the order reached the kitchen, and — I hadn't meant to go into detail about the carbon copy pads.
"The point is," Priya said, "you're interested."
I refilled my wine.
"I'm also leaving in two weeks," I said.
Priya looked at me with the calm precision of a woman who had noticed something I was trying not to say. "You haven't booked a return ticket."
"I'm going to."
"When?"
"Soon."
She nodded slowly, the way she'd nodded when I explained about Dominic and Greenpath — not pitying, just making a note. "Tell me when," she said. "I'll celebrate with you."
She left the next morning, two nights exactly (three meals at the taverna, a morning walk up to the headland church that she took notes during, and a two-hour conversation with Derek about the island's history that she also took notes during, because Priya's idea of a personal conversation was to give it her full professional attention, which I was learning to experience as warmth rather than scrutiny), because she had three more islands on her itinerary and a word count due Monday.
"I'll come back," she said at the dock, while Michalis did his nautical preparations without paying any attention to us. "The research needs more depth. Very thorough journalism."
"You ate every meal at the taverna," I said.
"Research," she said, and kissed me on the cheek and boarded the ferry.
Michalis, casting off the forward line, glanced up once as she came aboard. Priya, for her part, became immediately and thoroughly absorbed in finding her boarding card. This was unusual. Priya always knew exactly where her documents were.
* * *
Lex sent the newsletter correction. He mentioned it the next morning at the pass-through — not as a victory, just as confirmation. "The editor responded. She's updating the piece. I sent her the regional origin information and a photograph of the dish."
"A photograph."
"She asked. We have good photographs." He went back to his mise en place. "The piece runs in September. They'll say 'authentic Aegean preparation of the Cretan classic.'"
I stood at the pass-through and processed this. "You turned my mistake into a feature."
"The dish is genuinely excellent," he said. "The information was simply more precise now."
This was, I thought, looking at the back of his head, either the most infuriating or the most impressive thing I'd encountered all week.
I went to take Petros his dakos.
"He corrected you," Priya had said. "That's not correction. That's cover."
I looked at the laminated card in my apron pocket. At the harbour with the morning boats. At the awning, still latched from Thursday.
I was leaving in two weeks. I was definitely leaving in two weeks.
I squared my shoulders and went back to the tables.
I did not think about Priya's face when she said interested.
I did not think about the eight days I'd been here and the return ticket I kept meaning to look at.
I thought about the tables and the herbs and the carbon copy pads and the ways in which I was, slowly and embarrassingly, learning to do this job that I had decided I needed to do, for reasons I was no longer examining as closely as I had been in week one.
I had said two weeks.
It was possible, I was beginning to think, that two weeks was not quite enough time to get properly good at the tables.
Two weeks was also not quite enough time to: understand the full geography of the island (I still hadn't been to the north part, with the ruined monastery Derek had mentioned on that first walk from the dock), eat all the things on the menu, identify what exactly was in the small pots of preserved things on the shelf by the kitchen door, or have a conversation with Lex Stavros that went any further than brief and transactional, and I was — purely from a curiosity standpoint — mildly interested in what it would look like if one of those conversations went slightly further.
This was not a reason to extend my stay.
It was an observation. A very minor observation about a person I worked with, and the fact that I found his particular combination of precision and quiet competence — combined with the forearms, and the way he corrected me without once implying I should have known better — to be, in a neutral, professional-curiosity sense, interesting.
Priya, on the phone that evening, had said: "You've described his hands again."
I had said: "I was describing how he does the prep work."
She had said: "Yes. His hands."
I had said: "Priya, he is the person doing the prep work. Describing the prep work involves describing him. That's not a thing."
She had said, very quietly, the way she said things she was confident about: "It's a thing."
I had not dignified this with a response. I had changed the subject to the harbour light. Priya had let me, which was its own kind of answer.
This was the practical reason. The only reason. This was all it was.