Chapter 27 Barba-Nikos
In late August the island returned to itself.
The meltemi died down. The ferry went back to once a day.
The tourist numbers dropped — not gone, still a good August tail of couples and families and the people who knew to come in the second half of the month when the crowds had thinned and the light was better — and the quality of the air changed, something in the temperature of it, less vertical than it had been in June and July, more slanted and golden and deliberate, like it had stopped rushing somewhere.
The kafeneion's outside chairs got used earlier in the morning, because it was cool enough to sit outside in the morning again.
Barba-Nikos was on his bench at precisely the same time each day.
The Aegean Overlord had colonised the step outside the kitchen door and Lex navigated around him with an equanimity that suggested they had reached some form of arrangement that was not put in writing but had the force of a binding contract.
I was learning Greek.
One word per morning. Lex chose each word specifically to be useful during service, which meant the first ten words I learned were: parakalo (please), efcharisto (thank you), nero (water), alatopipero (salt and pepper, which I had to ask him to repeat four times because it kept rearranging itself in my brain into something that sounded like a pasta dish), logarismos (the bill), allagi (change), tin ora (the time), oxi (no), ne (yes), syndromitiki (reserved, as in a reserved table — I was not expecting to need that one, but apparently I did).
"These are very operational words," I said, on day ten.
"You work in a taverna," he said.
"I had been hoping for something more — atmospheric. Thalassa. Fengari. Words for sea and moon."
"You don't need to tell people the moon is the moon during service."
"What if a customer asks?"
He looked at me with the expression I had privately categorised as Lex Processing A Margot Tangent, which was a specific expression involving a slight adjustment of the jaw and a quality of patient attention that suggested he was giving the tangent serious consideration while also being fairly sure it wasn't going anywhere useful.
"Tell them fengari," he said. "And then ask if they've decided on dessert."
I filed fengari in my brain next to alatopipero. It seemed like the kind of word you could use in multiple situations.
* * *
Nikos took a shift on a Thursday.
This happened without announcement, which I had come to understand was how Nikos did most things — he arrived in the kitchen at nine, quietly, with the quality of a man who has decided to do something and is doing it before anyone has the opportunity to suggest he shouldn't.
He went directly to the prep counter. His hands knew exactly where everything was.
He was methodical and careful and slower than he'd been, Lex told me later, than before, but not much slower, and his knife work was still precise, the kind of precision that lives in the hands independently of whatever the rest of you is doing.
Lex stood at his own counter and did not watch, exactly, but had the shoulder posture of someone who is tracking something in peripheral vision while pretending he isn't, which I have learned is a specific mode that means: I am paying close attention to something that matters to me enormously and I'm not going to say so.
I came through at half nine with invoices I did not actually need to deliver right then.
Lex glanced at me.
I handed him a clean cloth — he didn't need it, but it gave both of us something to do with our hands — and said: "Service?"
He took the cloth. "Service," he said.
Nikos looked up from the prep counter, glanced between us, and said something in Greek.
"He says you're early," Lex translated.
"I am always early now," I said.
Nikos made a sound that was either approval or commentary. With Nikos, the sounds cover a lot of ground and the distinction isn't always obvious. He went back to the prep.
I stayed for the service. It was a lighter Thursday — lunch only, no dinner — and we were short on tables because Lex and Nikos between them had decided, without consulting me, that this particular Thursday would run at three-quarters capacity, which I interpreted as them protecting Nikos from an overly demanding first shift back, though neither of them would have said this directly.
(Translation: the Stavros family communicates love primarily through logistics. I find this extremely relatable.)
It was a good service. Nikos worked the kitchen without drama.
At one point he and Lex fell into a rhythm at adjacent counters that was so clearly old and familiar that it made something in the room settle, like a sound becoming the right note.
I watched it from the pass-through and didn't say anything. Sometimes things don't need saying.
* * *
Theria told me at the end of that Thursday service.
We were in the back courtyard, closing down the chairs, the end-of-shift work we'd done enough times now to do without talking about it. She picked up a chair. I picked up a chair. The courtyard had the late-afternoon light, the wall going warm yellow.
"I'm going to take the Athens job," she said.
She said it simply, the way she says things she has been deciding for a while: just the fact, no prelude, no request for a response. The deciding was done. What remained was just the saying.
"Okay," I said.
"I put in the paperwork yesterday." She stacked the chair. "They want me to start in October. I'll finish here at the end of September."
"Are you happy about it?"
She considered this with the seriousness the question deserved, which I appreciated. I didn't want the automatic yes that people give when they're doing something brave and don't want to admit it's frightening.
"I think I'm terrified," she said.
"That's different."
"Is it?"
"Yes," I said. "I arrived on this island three months ago with the wrong bag and no return ticket. I was terrified the whole time."
She looked at me. "Was it worth it?"
I thought about the kitchen at half seven on a Friday morning. The particular quality of the light at that hour. The way certain decisions stop feeling like decisions and start feeling like facts.
"Ask me when you have an answer of your own," I said.
She smiled — her real smile, not the service one. "I think I might know someone in Athens," she said. "In the hotel group. Someone who might show me around."
"Michalis's cousin?" I guessed.
"Michalis has a lot of cousins," she said. "It's very useful."
She picked up another chair. I picked up another.
We closed down the courtyard in comfortable silence, the way you do things with people you've worked next to long enough that the silence doesn't need filling.
She was going and she wasn't gone yet and there was, I thought, something in that particular position — the known departure, the time still remaining — that was its own kind of gift.
* * *
Barba-Nikos made me coffee on a Friday morning.
I was early to the taverna — I was always early now — and he was on his bench outside the kafeneion, and he looked at me as I passed, and then, without my asking or expecting it, got up and went inside and came back with two small cups.
He handed me one.
We sat on the bench. The harbour was doing its early-morning thing — flat water, the fishing boats in, the ferry still dark at the dock.
The first light was the same pewter-pink it had been the morning I walked to the headland, three weeks ago, though now it was tinged with something warmer, the slight shift in the quality of it that told you summer was beginning to let go.
Barba-Nikos drank his coffee at the pace of a man who has an appointment with nothing and is keeping it precisely.
I drank mine. We watched the harbour together.
There was a cat on the dock wall — not the Overlord, who was presumably already outside the kitchen door, but one of the others, doing the thing cats do in the early morning when they have the world largely to themselves and feel no particular need to share it.
A fishing boat was making its way in from the open water, slow and steady.
I had been on Kaliroi for nearly three months.
Twelve weeks, roughly. Eighty-four days.
Approximately two thousand and sixteen hours, though I had not been counting (I had now counted, to make a point to myself, though the point was unclear).
I had arrived with the wrong bag and no return ticket and a postcard that had been in my wallet for six years.
I had dropped an octopus, mis-described dakos provenance to a food newsletter, learned the plastics recycling codes, named a cat, found a supplier problem in a napkin margin, and — as of approximately forty-eight hours ago — decided to stay.
Barba-Nikos refilled my cup from a small pot he'd brought out.
He said something.
I held my cup and said, honestly: "I'm sorry, I don't — den katalavaino, I think is the phrase—"
He made a sound that was, I was fairly sure, confirmation that this was the correct phrase.
We sat with it for a moment, him not speaking Greek at me and me not speaking Greek at him, which was a curiously comfortable way to have a conversation.
Lex appeared at the end of the lane, on his way to the taverna. He looked at the bench, at the two cups, at Barba-Nikos and me sitting side by side in the early light, and something in his expression shifted slightly — not surprise, something quieter than surprise, more like recognition.
He came over. Barba-Nikos looked at him and said something. Lex was still for a moment.
Then he translated: "He says: she's one of ours now."
I looked at the harbour.
Barba-Nikos drank his coffee. He had the settled quality of a man who has said the thing and is content to sit in the aftermath.
"What does that mean?" I asked. "One of ours."
"It means he considers you to belong to the island," Lex said carefully. "To the place." He looked at me. "He doesn't say it often."
"Has he said it about anyone else?"
"Elena," he said. "When she married my father. He told her: you're one of ours now. She said she'd known since she arrived." A pause. "She was from Samos. She came for a holiday. She met my father. She didn't go back."
I looked at my coffee.
"That pattern," I said.
"The island does this," he said. "To certain people. People who are—" He stopped. Tried again. "People who are already looking for the right place when they arrive. The island just shows them."
Barba-Nikos said something else.
"He says," Lex translated, "that the coffee will get cold."
I drank my coffee. It was very good — the proper Greek coffee, the kind Elena had been making me from week one, which I had now completely stopped thinking of as an acquired taste and thought of simply as coffee, the way you stop noticing that your default has shifted until someone points it out and you realise that the shift happened quietly, without announcement, sometime in the middle of an ordinary afternoon.
* * *
That evening Theria said goodbye.
She was staying two more weeks — until the end of the month, until the season properly wound down — but she'd handed in the paperwork and it felt like a goodbye, the specific flavour of goodbye when someone is still present but has also begun, quietly, to leave.
"When I come back—" she started, at the door of the taverna, end of service, with her bag and her jacket.
"I'll be here," I said.
"Obviously." She said it in exactly the way she'd said it all summer, the Theria-obviously that meant: yes, we all knew this, you were just the last to arrive at the information. She smiled. "I'm not worried about the taverna."
"You're worried about Athens."
"I'm terrified of Athens," she corrected. "But you said that was different."
"It is," I said.
She smiled again — the real one — and walked down towards the harbour, where the ferry was still lit from the evening run.
I watched her go.
She had arrived the summer before I did — she'd told me this in the first week, in the easy way she tells most things, as if the information is available to anyone who wants it and she sees no reason to make it scarce.
She'd arrived meaning to stay six months and had stayed three years.
She'd been going to Athens the entire time, in the way you can be going somewhere for years before you actually go.
I thought she'd probably known since I arrived that she was nearly ready.
My arriving had given her something to hand the taverna to.
Not me specifically — the idea that the front-of-house could be handled by someone who wasn't her.
The idea that she could leave and the thing she loved would still be there.
She'd texted me that morning, actually — forwarded something from the hotel group HR department about start dates and what to bring to the induction, with a voice note attached that was forty seconds of her saying the words "induction day" in an increasingly incredulous tone, and then: "Margot.
They have an induction day. With a lanyard.
" She'd sent a second voice note three minutes later that was just: "I'm going to be fine.
" A pause. "The lanyard might be a problem. "
Michalis was probably fine too, for what it was worth. Though I wasn't going to say that to anyone.
The word felt different in my mouth now. Obviously. More like a fact, less like a reflex. More like: I will be here because I have decided to be here, rather than: I will be here because I haven't decided anything else. The difference between them was, I had discovered, enormous.
Lex appeared beside me in the doorway.
"She'll be all right," he said.
"I know," I said. "I'm not worried about Theria. Theria will be excellent at Athens."
"What are you thinking?"
I looked at the harbour. The evening ferry. The water going dark in the late light.
"That obviously is a much better word than I gave it credit for," I said.
He looked at me with the expression that means he is following the logic and finds it, on balance, reasonable.
"Yes," he said. "It is."