Chapter 6 Hands
By the second week of June I had acquired, in no particular order: a working knowledge of which tables got afternoon sun and which got the wind off the harbour, a personal relationship with the oregano (dried, hanging from the kitchen beam, in enormous bunches, a scent that had begun to define the hours between eleven and three), and the growing suspicion that I was not, in fact, leaving in two weeks.
I was not examining this suspicion. I was simply allowing it to exist in the way you allow a slightly concerning noise from your boiler to exist — noting its presence, not yet taking action.
The second week was different from the first in ways I was only beginning to catalogue.
I knew where things were now. Not perfectly — Lex occasionally still corrected me on herb names, and I had recently discovered that there were two different olive oils in the kitchen and that using the wrong one for the wrong dish was a matter of some significance (he'd explained this with the same patient deadpan he brought to all corrections, and I had written it on my arm in pen and then felt slightly absurd but also had not forgotten it).
But the spatial logic of the kitchen was beginning to make sense to me in a way the first week hadn't.
Taverna Stavros had a rhythm. It was a rhythm with Lex at its centre — not loudly, not in the way of someone who needed to be seen leading, but in the way a clock keeps time.
The kitchen's decisions moved through him.
The timing of the lunch shift calibrated itself around what the kitchen was doing.
Even Elena, who ran the business and could silence a table of eight with a single lifted eyebrow, oriented her front-of-house management around the signal that came from the pass-through window.
In sustainability consulting, I'd spent seven years analysing the way energy moved through systems. Supply chains, organisational structures, resource flows.
You could tell a lot about a system by finding its load-bearing node — the point at which, if you removed it, the whole thing would shift.
Taverna Stavros's load-bearing node was obvious.
This was not a complicated system to map.
I found this interesting in the way I found a lot of things interesting that I was not examining.
The herbs were what gave me trouble.
Not their use — I'd learned those fairly quickly, or at least I'd learned enough to ask specific questions rather than general ones, which was its own improvement.
The trouble was the Greek names. I had a handwritten list in my apron pocket (alongside the laminated recycling card) but the handwriting was mine from a harried moment at the end of service on Tuesday, and in the kitchen light it looked like several varieties of gibberish.
"This," Lex said, on a Wednesday, and pointed to a bundle hanging near the back door.
We were in prep. Morning service was still an hour off, and he'd told me to start familiarising myself with what came in from the farms — there was a delivery twice a week and I'd been tasked, for reasons that were never explained, with sorting and hanging the fresh bundles.
I had a reasonable theory that this was less about the herbs and more about making sure I could identify them before I started using them confidently on tables, which was the kind of pedagogical strategy I respected and did not say out loud.
"Thymari," I said. Thyme. I was fairly confident about this one.
"Yes." He moved to the next one. "This."
"Rigani." Oregano. Easy — it smelled like the air.
"Yes." He moved along the row. "This."
Rosemary. I hesitated. It was definitely not the thyme and not the oregano but my handwritten list was offering me three candidates.
"Dendrolivano," he said, before I'd committed to an answer.
"I was going to say that."
"You were going to say 'the piney one,'" he said. He wasn't wrong. "Dendrolivano. Write it down."
I extracted my list from my apron pocket.
My pen was in my other pocket. I reached across the prep counter for a pen I'd spotted earlier, near the spice rack — and he reached for something at the same moment, the flat fish spatula hanging from the rail, and for a moment our hands were both suspended in the middle of the prep counter, six inches apart, navigating the same small space.
I am not going to make this into something significant.
It was a standard kitchen moment; kitchens are small and people reach past each other all the time and most of these moments do not warrant parenthetical reflection.
I am aware of this. (I am very, very aware of this.
I would like everyone to know how aware I am.)
Both of us pulled back fractionally at the same time and I reached for the pen via a slightly different angle and he reached for the spatula and I knocked the sprig of thyme I'd been holding.
It fell to the counter.
He picked it up.
He handed it back without looking at me. Without a word. The way you'd return a dropped pen, the way you'd pass a salt cellar — a basic exchange between people working in the same space.
There was a moment where I was very aware that the kitchen was small and that he was taller than he appeared in the pass-through window and that his hands were, as Priya would later confirm when I described this, "very distracting in a calm and sensible person.
" I had not described it this way at the time.
At the time I'd thought: competent. This had been my first assessment, on the dock, and it continued to be accurate.
I wrote dendrolivano on my list with unnecessary precision.
"Continue," he said, and went back to the stove.
I continued. I was fine.
* * *
I met Nikos Stavros at noon.
He appeared from the taverna's back entrance — not the kitchen entrance, the one near the water tank and the storage shelves — moving with the slightly measured pace of a man who had recently been not particularly well and was working around it without making a fuss, which I would not know for another week.
"You must be the new girl," he said, in Greek-accented English that was warm and completely unhurried, and extended a hand that was large and brown and had the texture of someone who had spent a significant portion of his life outdoors.
"Nikos Stavros. Father of the chef. Generally unnecessary around here but kept on out of sentiment. "
"Margot Bellamy," I said, and shook his hand. "I'm only temporarily incompetent, I think."
He laughed — a proper laugh, unexpected in its volume, the laugh of a broad, heavyset man who had spent decades being cheerful at a high register. "Lex said you were sensible. He doesn't say that about most people."
I looked through the kitchen window. Lex was doing something with a bowl of something and either hadn't heard this or was making a decision not to acknowledge it.
"He mostly tells me what I've done wrong," I said.
"That's how you know." Nikos sat down at the corner table, which appeared to be his regular position — the chair had the comfortable familiarity of somewhere a person had been sitting for a very long time. "He ignores the people he's given up on. Has he ignored you once?"
I thought about it. He had not, in fact.
He had corrected me approximately eleven times in ten days, on matters including but not limited to: the dakos, the olive oils, the carbon copy pad layers, the specific orientation in which one places a glass on the table for a right-handed person vs a left-handed one (this had prompted a follow-up question from me, which he had answered with the air of a man who had prepared a brief), and, this morning, dendrolivano.
In none of these instances had he been unkind.
In none of these instances had he prefaced a correction with anything resembling you idiot.
He hadn't been warm in any obviously demonstrative way either — he wasn't effusive, he didn't offer encouragement or tell me I was doing well when I was.
He simply corrected what needed correcting and moved on.
It was, I had come to understand over ten days, a form of respect.
He was treating me as someone who had come to learn the thing properly, not to be reassured that they were learning it.
I had not said this to anyone because I wasn't entirely sure it was a safe thing to have noticed.
"Not once," I said.
Nikos made a satisfied noise. "Good."
Elena arrived with coffee — his coffee, her better coffee, which she set down in front of him with the automatic coordination of a person and a kitchen operating as a single unit, without his asking or her announcing. He received it the same way.
"He hasn't been off the island in four years," Nikos said, apropos of nothing that had been said in the last several minutes. He was looking at the harbour.
I looked at the harbour too.
"I didn't know that," I said.
"No reason you would." He picked up his coffee. "He came back when I was ill. Gave up the restaurant position in Thessaloniki — good one, I think; he didn't tell me much. He came back, he said for a season, and then the season ended and he was still here."
I didn't ask why. I didn't know why I didn't ask — it wasn't that I wasn't curious.
I was, in the particular focussed way I'd been curious about a lot of things since I'd arrived, the way curiosity works when you have nothing else to do with your brain.
I just found that I didn't want to ask Nikos about it.
As if asking Nikos would be getting it secondhand.
I noted this and filed it away under things I am not examining.
"He's good at running it," I said instead, which was both very true and completely noncommittal.
Nikos smiled. "Yes," he said. "He is that."
* * *
Elena appeared from the interior at some point while I was thinking about this — she had a quality of appearing, rather than arriving, as if she'd always been slightly present at the edges. She set down a small glass of something cold at Nikos's elbow and then looked at me.
"The lesson," she said, in English, inclining her head toward where Lex had returned to the kitchen.
"Herbs," I said. "And dendrolivano."
She made a small sound that managed to contain both good and that's a beginning and several other things simultaneously. Then she went back inside.
I sat with my water and thought about systems — the visible ones and the ones running quietly underneath.
That evening I walked back to The Blue Door with the afternoon light going gold on the harbour and thyme — dried, dendrolivano, the piney one — still on my fingers from the hanging bundles. I'd washed my hands three times before service and the scent had apparently decided to stay.
Derek was on the terrace with a book. He did not look up, but he pushed a small dish of olives across the table in my direction, which I had come to understand was his version of asking how my day was.
"Good," I said, and took an olive.
He turned a page. "You're not even flinching at the afternoon shift anymore."
"I know where the tables are now."
"You knew where the tables were after day two. You stopped flinching."
I sat down. The harbour was doing the thing it did at this hour — the light flattening, the boats darker, the bougainvillea going from aggressive to merely emphatic.
"His father said he hasn't left the island in four years," I said. This was not something I'd meant to say out loud. It appeared my internal editorial process had quietly clocked off for the evening.
Derek looked up from his book. He had the expression of a man choosing his words with care. "Lex? Yes."
"He came back when Nikos was ill."
"He came back," Derek said, with the slight emphasis of someone not going further, "and he stayed."
"Why?"
"Not my story to tell." He picked up his book again. "The island keeps some people. Has its reasons." He turned a page. "Ask him, if you want to know."
I thought about Nikos at the corner table, looking at the harbour. He came back when I was ill. The way he'd said it — matter-of-factly, not as complaint or tribute, just as geography. He came back. He stayed.
There was a thing, I was learning, about places that had been in families for a long time.
They had a different relationship to staying.
Not sentimental — or not only — but structural.
The place and the person arranged themselves around each other over time until the arrangement became the thing itself.
I looked at my hands. Thyme and olive oil. The last of the afternoon sun.
I was not going to ask him. I was going to wash my hands very thoroughly when I got inside and have an early night and not think about any of this in a way that required examination.
"More olives?" Derek said.
"Please," I said.
We sat with the harbour going dark around us, and I had an early night, as planned, and if I thought about flat dark eyes and dendrolivano and a man who had come back and stayed and not once ignored me — well.
I washed my hands very thoroughly.
It barely helped.