Chapter 28 One More Summer
Three weeks later, the island returned to itself.
It does this every September — I'd been told about it, by Theria and by Elena and by Barba-Nikos in one of our non-verbal bench conversations that I had retrospectively decoded with Lex's help — but knowing it was going to happen and being here for it were different things.
The tourist season wound down the way a long piece of music winds down: gradually, then all at once, and then you're in the quiet and the quiet has its own texture, different from the summer quiet, fuller somehow.
The ferry went back to once a day. The meltemi had long since stopped.
The kafeneion's chairs went back to the inside arrangement for the first time since May.
Barba-Nikos nodded at me on Monday morning.
A proper nod. A nod that meant something. I did not make a big deal of it. (Internally, I made a medium-sized deal of it. Externally, I nodded back, which was exactly the right response, and went to the taverna.)
* * *
I filed the formal account with the regulatory body on a Wednesday in August. The reference number is still in my email.
The process, as of mid-September, was ongoing in the way these things are ongoing — bureaucratically, slowly, with occasional requests for additional documentation that I produced because I had kept everything, because I am constitutionally incapable of not keeping everything, which had been a professional liability at Greenpath and turned out to be, after the fact, rather useful.
Lex teaches me one word every morning.
The system has evolved. The first ten words were operational (service vocabulary, the bare minimum).
The second ten were slightly broader — omorfi (beautiful), geitonias (neighbourhood), meno (I stay, or I live, or I remain, depending on context and conjugation).
The third ten have become, I'm not entirely sure how, mostly to do with food, because it turns out that when you are learning Greek from a man who cooks for a living, food vocabulary expands naturally and rapidly.
This morning's word was μ?νω — méno — which means to stay.
Or to live. Or to remain, depending on the context and the conjugation and the particular weight you put on the word when you say it. Greek, I have learned, is a language where a single word can carry multiple meanings without any of them being wrong. You hold them all at once.
"Méno," I said. Trying the shape of it.
"Yes," he said.
"Why this one today?"
He looked at me, briefly, the way he looks at things he has decided in advance and is now simply delivering. "It seemed appropriate," he said.
I considered the word.
Méno. I stay. I live here. I remain. I am staying.
"It's a useful word," I said.
"Yes," he said. "For service." And then, a beat later: "And other things."
(I filed this under the ongoing list of things Lex Stavros says that appear simple and keep expanding the longer you sit with them. The list is now long enough to require its own document. I have not made the document. I am keeping it in my head, which feels like the right place for it.)
We had the word lesson while doing prep, which is how the word lessons have evolved — no longer a formal thing, a handed-over word and a definition, but something that happens in the rhythm of the morning, between the tomatoes and the accounts and the herb checks and the first coffee.
It had become, I realised, the structure of my mornings.
Not a routine, exactly — more like the grain of the wood, the thing the day follows without thinking about it.
* * *
I rang my mother on a Sunday in September, which is when I always ring her and the one thing from my London life that has transferred entirely intact to the island. She picked up on the second ring, which she always does, and said: "I was wondering when you'd call."
"It's Sunday," I said. "I always call on Sunday."
"I know," she said. "I meant about the other thing."
She is, my mother, very good at knowing what the other thing is without being told what the other thing is.
It is occasionally alarming. I have always assumed it was just her, and I have been revising this assumption over the past few weeks in light of what Elena said on the ferry, and what Priya had been able to see from Dalston, and what my grandmother apparently knew thirty-four years ago when she sent a postcard to a place she thought someone specific might need to find.
It runs in the family. I am apparently the last to find out.
"I filed the complaint," I said. "With the regulatory body. The Greenpath thing."
A pause. Then: "I always knew," she said. "I knew when you called me from that taxi. After the partner meeting. You said it was a misread and your voice — I knew from your voice."
"You didn't say anything."
"You weren't ready to hear it."
I thought about Elena on the ferry. About the postcard on my wall. About the particular experience of arriving somewhere before you know you've arrived.
"Are you all right?" she asked.
"Yes," I said. "I'm all right."
"Are you happy?"
There is a difference, in my mother's delivery, between all right and happy. All right is fine. Happy is the one that matters to her.
I looked out of the window of my room above the taverna. The postcard on the wall. The harbour doing its September thing. The Aegean Overlord asleep on the windowsill with the philosophical composure of an animal that has fully sorted out its living situation.
"Yes," I said. "I'm happy."
She made a sound that was not quite a sob and not quite a laugh and was entirely characteristic of her. "Good," she said. "That's what the postcard was for."
I did not immediately have a response to this.
My mother has a tendency to say things that require a sit-down after the call ends.
I sat down on the edge of the bed and held the phone and let the September light come in through the window, and thought about postcards and thirty-four years and the particular stubborn patience of people who love you and wait for you to find your way.
"Mum," I said.
"Yes?"
"Thank you. For keeping it."
"Of course," she said, in the tone of someone who has been keeping it for exactly the reason it needed to be kept, and would like me to know this without making a fuss about it. "I'll come and visit in the spring."
"Yes," I said. "Come in spring."
* * *
Priya came back in mid-September.
The September issue had run by then. Three people from Brighton had booked the Blue Door.
Derek was quietly delighted and had sent Priya a card with a photograph of the harbour, which Priya had photographed and posted to her newsletter, which had created a secondary loop of enquiries that I chose not to examine too closely on the grounds that small islands can only absorb so much love at once.
Her text arrived on a Wednesday afternoon: ferry at 5. definitely not looking at michalis from the top deck. very professionally here.
I showed it to Lex. He made the sound.
Michalis, tying off at the dock, looked up when Priya came down the gangway.
Priya, for her part, was looking at her phone with great professional focus.
She had her journalist face on: attentive, observational, interested in the documentary record.
The documentary record happened to require her to stand approximately four metres from Michalis and discuss the ferry schedule for a feature that was, she had told me, technically regional but with broader implications.
"The island does this," I told Lex, quietly, watching from the harbour.
"Yes," he said. "I know."
"To certain people."
"People who are already looking," he said.
We watched Priya discover that the ferry schedule required her to talk to the person who ran the ferry. Barba-Nikos, who had appeared beside us at some point without either of us noticing, said something.
Lex translated: "He says: another one who came for the summer."
"That worked out all right for some of us," I said.
Barba-Nikos looked at me. Then at Lex. Then he made a sound that I was, by now, competent enough at decoding to identify as the closest thing to obviously that a man of his particular economy of expression is likely to produce.
Priya, at the dock, had put her phone away.
Michalis was talking. She was listening with the focused attention of a journalist who is genuinely interested in what someone is saying, which is different from the focused attention of a journalist who is professionally pretending to be interested, and I have known Priya long enough to tell the difference.
"She doesn't know yet," I said.
"No," Lex said.
"She'll work it out."
"Yes," he said.
We stood in the harbour light, which was the particular September light — golden and unhurried and slightly elegiac, the light that knows the summer is done and is making the most of itself anyway — and watched Priya discovering something about herself that she would, when she was ready, tell me about over coffee, having first spent approximately six weeks telling me she was absolutely certain it was nothing.
I was fairly sure it was something.
The ferry docked. Priya came down the gangway with her bag and her camera and the slightly-too-deliberate air of someone who is definitely not looking for a reason to be here.
Michalis, tying off, looked up. That was all — he looked up — and Priya, who had been looking at her phone with great professional focus, looked up at exactly the same moment.
The harbour between them, the September light, the island returning to itself after the summer.
The island does this. It catches people when they arrive, if they're willing to be caught.
I watched from the harbour, Lex beside me, and thought: yes. Exactly that.