Chapter 13 The Island Feast
The annual blessing of the olive grove was, Elena told me on Tuesday morning, a very serious occasion.
"You help with the wine," Elena said.
"Of course," I said, taking the laminated card. It joined my collection.
"Father Konstantinos will come at six. The blessing is before seven. The feast begins at seven-thirty." She looked at me. "You understand?"
"Completely," I said, in a tone that I hoped conveyed both competence and the complete absence of any awareness that I was, as usual, slightly in over my head.
Lex was at the prep counter. He did not look up, but I had the distinct impression that he had heard every word of this exchange and had formed a view about it.
* * *
The olive grove was on the hill above the harbour, twenty minutes on foot up a track that started between two houses and then became something that I would generously describe as a path and a less generous person might describe as the general direction of up.
Half the island was already there when I arrived.
The grove was — I have tried several times to write this in a way that doesn't sound like a postcard, and I have failed, so I'm going to commit to it: the olive grove was ancient and silver and full of afternoon light, the trees growing at the particular angles of things that have been growing long enough to find their own logic, their roots visible above the ground like things that had decided, at some point, that there was nothing to hide.
The grove smelled of warmth and dust and something green and specific that I was going to say was olive trees and acknowledge that this was circular reasoning.
Petros was there, talking to a man I didn't know about something involving soil, and he raised a hand at me in the way he'd started doing, as though I was a regular feature of the landscape that warranted acknowledgement. This felt, I realised, very good.
Derek was there in his best linen. He had brought a hat.
Barba-Nikos was there. He ignored me.
I had, by this point, started to find this reassuring.
* * *
The wine was the local wine, which was produced on the island in quantities that I had learned to think of as 'considerable' once you adjusted for the fact that the island had a population of roughly four hundred people who had been making wine here for a very long time and had, over the years, developed strong opinions about how this should proceed.
The bottles were already arranged on a long table near the far edge of the grove when Elena directed me to them.
There were a lot of bottles. There was also a very good corkscrew, which Elena placed in my hand with the gravity of someone placing an important instrument in a trained professional's care.
"You open the wines," she said.
"How many?" I asked.
"As many as are needed," she said, which was, I had learned, Elena's consistent answer to any question about quantities, and meant something like this will become clear as it happens, and you will be fine.
I positioned myself at the table and waited for further instruction.
Father Konstantinos arrived at six o'clock.
He was a tall man with a very grey beard and the sort of presence that suggested he had been managing the expectations of a small island community for several decades and had developed a tranquil serenity about most things.
He swept through the grove doing the blessing, which was beautiful and entirely in Greek and lasted about twenty minutes, the olive trees watching the proceedings with the philosophical patience of things that had been here before the church and would, in all probability, be here after.
The feast began. The grove filled with the specific pleasant chaos of approximately a hundred and fifty people who had known each other for most of their lives all trying to eat and talk at the same time.
* * *
The moment with the cork happened at seven forty-four.
I know this because I had just looked at my watch — not for any particular reason, just one of those idle glances — and I had just registered seven forty-four, and then I had reached for the bottle that had been open longest, which had been sitting in the afternoon warmth, and I had looked at the cork.
The cork was a very fine cork. It was also — I can see this now — a cork that had expanded, in the warmth, to a degree that rendered the phrase "give it a good firm pull" somewhat optimistic.
I gave it a good firm pull.
(For the record: I am quite strong. I am not enormously strong, but I am competent at physical tasks and I gave it a committed pull. This is relevant context.)
And then a firmer pull.
And then — the thing is, I had, by this point, invested quite a lot of effort in this particular cork, and effort has its own momentum, and —
The cork gave.
It gave suddenly, and with considerable conviction, in the direction that my efforts had been directed, and the wine went in the other direction, which was the direction of Father Konstantinos, who had turned at that precise moment to say something to Elena — to Yiayia Elena, who had moved to stand near the table, which was why he had turned, which was entirely my fault in a chain of causation I was going to spend the rest of the evening thinking about — and Father Konstantinos, who was in his robes, was in the path of approximately a third of a bottle of local red wine at a velocity I would prefer not to estimate.
There was a pause.
Father Konstantinos looked down at his robes.
He looked up.
He looked at me.
He said something in Greek that I did not understand, but which Elena translated for me the following morning as: "Well. I suppose that's one way to anoint someone."
He then laughed. He had a very good laugh — deep and warm and the laugh of a man who has, over a long career, found the alternative to laughing at things to be fairly unrewarding.
The people near us laughed. The people near them laughed because the first people were laughing, and then the information travelled and the laughing spread through the grove like the meltemi, which has no beginning and no end but simply arrives and is.
I stood with the empty corkscrew in one hand and the near-empty bottle in the other and my face performing the expression of someone who has made a decision to be absolutely fine about this.
"Oh," I said. "Oh, I'm so sorry, Father, I — the cork —"
"The cork," said Father Konstantinos, in excellent English, "was clearly not ready."
"Father, I am so — your robes—"
"Are a colour," he said, "that has always benefited from a little more warmth. Do not distress yourself."
He was being extraordinarily gracious. I was aware of this. I was also aware, in the peripheral-vision way I had developed over the past six weeks, of Alexios Stavros somewhere behind and to my left, and the particular quality of stillness that indicated he had been watching.
* * *
He found me at the edge of the feast twenty minutes later.
I had retreated — not fled, retreated, which is a dignified word for a dignified act — to the outer edge of the grove, where I was standing with a very small glass of wine that I had obtained from a different bottle, opened with appropriate caution, and was drinking with the focused attention of someone who has decided to be very calm about everything.
I heard him before I saw him. The grass. The particular way he moved, which I had also catalogued without entirely deciding to.
"Was it a good wine," he said, "at least?"
I turned. He was standing with his own glass, in the light of the lanterns someone had strung between the trees, and his face had the expression I had started to think of as his actually-amused expression, which was not the same as any other expression, and which I had, privately, been attempting to provoke since approximately week four.
"I didn't get any," I said. "I gave it all to Father Konstantinos."
"Yes," he said. "I know. I heard from three separate people in the first twenty minutes."
"How does it sound? In the telling."
He considered. "The consensus is that the cork flew approximately two metres."
"One and a half at most."
"There is some debate about the distance," he said. "No debate about the direction." One corner of his mouth. "Father Konstantinos is telling it very well. He's developed a sound effect for the cork."
I pressed my lips together. I was absolutely not going to laugh. "He's all right, though? His robes?"
"He's had those robes for fifteen years. He considers the stain an improvement. He told my yiayia that he intends to wear them to the next three services without washing them, as a conversation piece."
I looked out across the grove, where Father Konstantinos was, in fact, gesturing at his robes while talking to a group of people who were laughing. "He's going to tell that story forever."
"Yes," said Lex. "You have given him a gift."
He poured wine into my glass. Not a small amount — a proper amount, a glass of wine from a bottle he'd brought from the table without my noticing. He was, I had realised over recent weeks, very good at producing the thing that was needed without making a production of producing it.
"Thank you," I said.
"The blessing is important," he said. "The feast is for the island. Being part of an island's story — even through a cork — is not the worst thing."
I looked at him. He said things like this and then moved on to the next thing without seeming aware that they were the kind of things that landed. Or possibly he was aware and simply wasn't fussed about it. I hadn't fully determined which.
* * *
We stood at the harbour's edge later, when the feast had wound into its later stages — the music from somewhere at the waterfront, the lanterns in the grove above us, the island settling into the particular quiet warmth of a summer evening that has been done well.
I'm not sure when it happened, exactly. One moment I was aware of him at a conversational distance; then somehow the distance had become the distance of two people who are standing next to each other, which is a different kind of distance.
The harbour below us. The water doing what the water always did, which was exist very clearly and without apology.
"Is it always like this?" I said.
"The feast?"
"The island. In summer. This — " I gestured, slightly imprecisely, at everything.
"Mostly," he said. "The tourists change it a little. But the island is underneath. It's always there."
I thought about the postcard in my wallet. The handwriting I'd known since I was eight years old. A place to be found when you're ready.
"I've been thinking," I said, carefully, "about the invoices. The supplier rotation. If we put the August projections onto the revised model—"
"Margot," he said.
I stopped.
He was not looking at me. He was looking at the harbour.
"The model can wait until Thursday," he said. "It's a feast."
I looked at the harbour too. Someone was singing, faintly, at the waterfront below.
"All right," I said.
We stood there. The music continued. I was very aware of him beside me, and the warmth of the evening, and the fact that I had not booked a return ticket, and the fact that I was not going to think about any of those things right now.
I had not expected to feel so specifically at home at a feast where everyone spoke a language I'd managed about thirty words of. But I did. And I did not look too closely at the reason, because the reason was standing next to me.
We stayed until the lanterns in the grove began to gutter, and then made our way back down the hill in the dark, and at the bottom of the track we went in separate directions, and I walked back to The Blue Door and sat on the terrace in the dark for a while, and Derek, passing through in his pyjamas for a glass of water, looked at me and said "good evening?
" as though uncertain what he was seeing.
"Good evening," I said.
He went back inside, diplomatically.
I sat and looked at the dark harbour and the dark sky with the stars doing what stars do on Greek islands in July, which is be slightly unreasonable about the whole thing, and I thought about the wine in my glass and the harbour's edge and someone standing next to me in a way that had felt, for a little while, entirely right.
I was, I noted, still not booking a return ticket.
The data was becoming rather difficult to ignore.