Chapter 17 What Eirini Said
Ihad been carrying something since Friday night and I was doing the British thing with it, which is to fold it very small and put it in an inside pocket and carry on as though the pocket is empty.
The something was two words — próvlima, den méni — and my name, heard in a corridor in a language I didn't speak, in a context I didn't have.
I had not resolved it. I was not going to resolve it today.
Today Priya was arriving on the ferry, and I was going to be completely fine, and the pocket was not something I was going to mention.
Priya arrived on the Wednesday ferry with a new notebook, a sun hat she'd already lost the price tag from, and the expression of someone who had been thinking a great deal and was going to do something about it.
"Right," she said, on the dock, before she'd even taken her sunglasses off. "How are you?"
"Fine," I said. "Good. Honestly."
She looked at me for a moment. "You look different."
"I'm tanned," I said.
"No." She tilted her head. "Not tanned. Something else." She picked up her bag and slung it over her shoulder. "Take me to the taverna. I want to see him."
"He'll be in the kitchen," I said. "It's lunchtime. He won't come out."
"He'll come out," said Priya, with the confidence of someone who had never worked a lunch service.
She was right, as it happened, but only because Theria came out first and recognised Priya and called into the kitchen, and Lex appeared in the pass-through for approximately four seconds, assessed the situation, said something in Greek that Theria seemed satisfied with, and went back to what he was doing.
"I see it," said Priya.
"You see nothing," I said. "He was there for four seconds."
"Margot." She sat down and opened her menu. "Four seconds was plenty."
I ordered the fava and a water and spent the next forty minutes explaining to Priya about the napkin and the supply chain and the Friday waterfront evenings and the carbon copy pads and ine diki mas, and Priya listened and ate her dakos and said "yes" and "go on" and "and then" at intervals, which was her at her most useful — she had a gift for listening to people describe the plots of their own lives and not telling them the ending.
"There's someone I want you to meet," said Priya.
"A woman in Ano Kaliroi. Kyria Eirini. She's been on this island since before the war — she was born here, she knew Elena's family, Giorgos's mother was her neighbour for forty years.
" Priya pulled bread from the basket. "I interviewed her for my island permanence piece.
She said the most extraordinary things. She has a cat named Hera. "
"Is this a walking excursion?"
"Loosely," said Priya.
* * *
We walked up the switchback road the next morning in the early cool, with water bottles and sensible footwear and the working agreement that this was research.
"This is research," I said.
"Very interesting views," said Priya.
Kyria Eirini was four feet eleven inches and approximately ninety years old, with white hair and the eyes of someone who has watched a very great deal and decided what to keep.
She looked at me for slightly longer than was comfortable, then stood back to let us in.
The house smelled of chamomile and oregano and collected time.
A cat appeared from behind a chair and sat down.
"Hera," said Priya.
Hera was not impressed.
We drank tea that had a definite opinion about your constitution. Eirini asked Priya something in Greek and Priya answered. Then she looked at me directly.
"She wants to know how long you've been at the taverna," said Priya.
"Eleven weeks," I said.
Something brief from Eirini.
"She says that's about right. She can usually tell within the first two weeks which ones are going to stay. She says you were harder to read. You were carrying something. It made you look like you were still deciding."
"I came for the summer," I said. "That's — I don't know how long I'm staying."
Eirini looked at me and said something deliberate.
"She says you've been being very careful with something."
"Right," I said.
Eirini was quiet for a moment. Then one short, precise sentence.
"Careful people sometimes miss the summer," said Priya.
I looked at my tea. Then I looked up. Eirini was watching me with the expression of someone who has been watching people arrive and leave for eighty years and has long since stopped being surprised by how long it takes them to do the obvious thing.
"That's fair," I said.
She said something else, slowly.
"She says you're already here. You just haven't told yourself yet."
I held my cup in both hands. Outside there was the sound of someone somewhere doing something domestic — a shutter, a broom, Ano Kaliroi at its own pace. An island going about its business entirely indifferent to my schedule.
"Right," I said.
* * *
On the way down, Priya said: "She said one more thing."
"Tell me."
"I'm going to tell you," she said, "when you're more ready for it."
I stopped walking. "That's not how translation works."
"I'm doing it anyway." She kept walking. "She wasn't wrong about the other bits, was she."
It wasn't a question.
I walked the rest of the way down with the view spread below me and Priya beside me, and I thought about careful and summer and already here and said nothing about any of it, which was possibly itself one of the things Eirini had been referring to.
* * *
That evening I did the Thursday dinner service.
It was a busy one — high season had settled in properly now, the island thicker with people than it had been in June, all the tables full by seven and the terrace overspill working until the kitchen ran out of the prawn dish and Theria had to go round explaining apologetically to four separate tables.
Lex was in the kitchen. I was on front of house.
This was normal. The rhythm of it had become completely ordinary to me, which was the thing I'd stopped being surprised by — that somewhere between the first hopeless shifts and the Friday waterfront evenings, I had apparently learned the job.
I knew the tables. I knew which couples had a language issue and needed patience.
I knew that the elderly German man at table six wanted water before anything else and would not ask for it.
I knew that the Athenians at table twelve were there for the octopus and there was no point recommending anything else.
I knew which children needed distraction while their parents translated the menu.
This was what usefulness felt like, I'd started to think.
Not the abstracted version I'd been practising at Greenpath, the kind that existed in reports and projections and the careful language of impact assessments — but the concrete kind, the kind where you remembered something about a person and acted on it and the action was immediately, observably useful.
It turned out I was quite good at the concrete kind.
I'd always been quite good at it. I'd just been doing it in an office before, and the office had not been particularly grateful about it, and then the office had dissolved and the gratitude with it.
At the end of service, I stayed to help with the outdoor chairs.
This was not my job. It was Lex's, or Giorgi's, or whoever's turn it happened to be. But I went out to the terrace and started stacking the chairs in the order I'd seen them stacked, and Lex came out the side door with the cloth and stopped.
He looked at me.
"I'm learning," I said.
He nodded once, in the way that meant he'd filed this under reliable information, and went to the other end of the terrace and started stacking on that side.
We stacked the chairs. We didn't say anything else. It was the first evening in eleven weeks that I'd stayed past the moment I was technically needed, and I was aware of this, and I did not examine it.
Careful people sometimes miss the summer.