The Taint of Midas Read online

  The Taint of Midas

  Anne Zouroudi

  For Will, with love

  Contents

  Epigraph

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  About the Author

  By the Same Author

  Dramatis Personae

  The rich poor fool, confounded with surprise,

  Starving in all his various plenty lies:

  Sick of his wish, he now detests the pow’r,

  For which he ask’d so earnestly before;

  Amidst his gold with pinching famine curst;

  And justly tortur’d with an equal thirst.

  At last his shining arms to Heav’n he rears,

  And in distress, for refuge, flies to pray’rs.

  O father Bacchus, I have sinn’d, he cry’d,

  And foolishly thy gracious gift apply’d;

  Thy pity now, repenting, I implore;

  Oh! may I feel the golden plague no more.

  The hungry wretch, his folly thus confest,

  Touch’d the kind deity’s good-natur’d breast;

  The gentle God annull’d his first decree,

  And from the cruel compact set him free.

  ‘The Legend of King Midas’

  Ovid, Metamorphoses, Book XI

  One

  Blind eyes bear no witness.

  At the hilltop, a breeze stirred the branches of the pine trees, and twenty hives were cool beneath their shade. All were painted yellow, their legs and edges picked out in red, and each bore a number on its side. And on each hive roof, a painted eye stared up towards the sky – a woman’s eye, exotic like the kohl-rimmed eyes of yashmaked faces, the whites very bright, the irises brash blue. They were the eyes of hieroglyphs in Egyptian tombs – but these eyes watched the living, not the dead. They kept a vigil, warding off the Evil Eye: one for each hive, deflecting the badness of ill-wishers from the bees.

  The breeze carried the scent of the summer sea – salt, wet rock, the soft decay of marine debris – and on the water far below the swell peaked in light foam. Close inshore, a speedboat left a wake of white; far out by the distant islands, a small yacht raised its sail.

  At the hill summit, amongst the stones that marked the outline of the ruin, even the turquoise-tailed lizards took shelter from the sun. The depleted spring was just a trickle, though the trough where the waters collected was always full; damp from splashing there, Manyiatis (an ageing, ugly dog) bent his head round to his flank, tugging at the burrs stuck in his coat.

  Ants ran amongst the breadcrumbs on the tabletop; wasps settled on the fish bones on the plate. Gabrilis Kaloyeros had sat too long at lunch, time slipping by whilst he indulged in memories. Still, all must be in place by 5, and nothing was ready; each day he found it harder to keep moving. An ant tickled the liver-spotted skin of his hand, traversing the ridged veins and arthritic knuckles to where, above his wrist, the bruises coloured like aubergines (the bruises came from nothing, from the lightest knocks and bumps) had still not healed.

  He rose unwillingly from his chair, and leaned a moment on its back until the breathlessness passed. Above his head, the vine shading the verandah was full of grapes, but with no Maria to hold the ladder steady, climbing up to cut them would be madness. So, like the fox in Aesop’s fable, he told himself the grapes were sour, and made his way inside.

  The house was small – a single room – but Maria was gone, and without her care nothing was as it used to be. Dead flies floated in the chamber pot he used at night, and in the heat the stale urine stank. His clothes lay rank and dirty in the corners until he put them on again unwashed. Though he’d lit no fire since spring, the fireplace was filled with wood-ash and soot-falls, and mice were nesting amongst the winter blankets stored beneath the bed.

  His baseball cap lay on the tangled sheets. The cap had been a gift when the professor last visited, and when it was new, the Post Office insignia – the letters ELTA, and a stylised head of Hermes in his winged helmet – were bright on its blue cotton. The blue was faded now, and without Maria’s washing, salt-marks from his forehead’s sweat lined its inner rim. When the professor gave Gabrilis the gift, they’d had a drink from the bottles the professor had brought up from his vineyards. Laughing, he’d waved his hands over the hat: installing charms, he said, protection from the idiots on the roads. And then he became serious, and made Gabrilis promise he would wear it every time he went out on the highway. I’m a superstitious man, he said, so humour me, old friend. The promise was an easy one to keep; the cap was easy-wearing as old slippers. But the memory of that evening was from years ago – seven summers at least had come and gone – and the cap’s peak had lost its stiffness, the stitching in the seams was loose and ragged. The professor had been gone too long, this time; sadly, he’d find – if he returned – that the news here in Arcadia wasn’t good. Everything was changing for the worse; the olive groves they used to walk were being felled, so the land could be turned over to a new, more profitable crop: foreigners. This small place, though, remained untouched; the professor, with his interest in the ruins, would be glad, at least, of that. And the bees were doing well, the honey yield improving year by year, so if he came this summer he could judge between the orange flower and the thyme. But there’d be no Maria to serve him her yiouvetsi; that she’d passed on was more bad news to break.

  He pulled on the cap, and hitched up his drooping trousers from hips to skinny waist. He’d lost his belt again, not noticing it slip from the chair-back under the table, and without his glasses (they, too, had disappeared, and, like so many things he lost, seemed unlikely to be found) he couldn’t pick his belt out from the shadows.

  Outside, he made his slow way down the path through the trees. The day’s heat was at its height, filled with the shrilling of cicadas. Close to the hives, the roar of bees was loud, and he listened as he passed to check the swarms were well. The bees in turn showed their interest in him; they crawled across his back and on his chest, flew gently buzzing round his head and face, and he, untroubled, wafted them away.

  Below the last of the pines – where the path met the steep track up from the road – was level ground. Here, Gabrilis kept his tricycle, a heavy, antique contraption acquired for a handful of coins at the war’s end. The wicker basket on its handlebars was stacked with tins of honey, the hand-built, two-wheeled trailer at its rear was emptied and ready. He wheeled the tricycle to the high wire fence put up to keep out goats, but at the gate his hands would not be steady, his eyes would not hold focus, and he struggled to fit the small key to the padlock. The lock clicked open at last, and he stepped into his garden, on to the terraces where the watermelons and cantaloupes grew.

  The professor claimed the terraces were ancient, used centuries ago for vines and wheat, and when he spoke of how it was, his words were eloquent. As if he’d seen with his own eyes, he painted pictures of the temple in its glory, the hillsides cultivated and fertile, and a prosperous town where there was nothing now but scrub. Under Gabrilis’s care, the level, orderly rows were flourishing again, the plants’ great leaves providing shade for healthy, heavy fruit. At the terrace ends were piled the stones cleared from the soil; most were the rough rocks of the hillside, but amongst them, smooth as eggshells, fragments of marble showed the stripe
s of mighty pillars or the remnants of skilled carving: leaves, fruit, petals, and on one a woman’s face, without a nose but still beautiful, set high up on a fence-post to watch the passing boats. Sometimes his digging turned up artefacts: terracotta beads with flakes of pretty glaze, a tiny statuette without its base, a beckoning marble finger, finely made and long as a man’s hand. Everything Gabrilis found he’d shown to the professor, but at the question of museums, the professor laughed. They are relics of this place, he said, and here’s where they should stay, so they wrapped the pieces carefully in straw and oilcloth, and buried them in a hole behind the spring.

  The sun was blazing, and its heat was intense; the stains of sweat spread at Gabrilis’s armpits, and on his bony back his shirt was damp. The watermelons lay fat amongst their foliage, their green, cream-mottled skins fresh on the powdery dirt. He bent, and rolled one side to side to gauge its weight; judging it ready, he reached down amongst the prickling leaves and, with a kitchen knife, sliced through the stem. He wrapped his arms around the melon, and heaved it to his chest, labouring with it to the tricycle and laying it carefully in the trailer.

  But as he went to cut a second melon, Manyiatis struggled barking to his feet.

  Listening, Gabrilis heard what had disturbed Manyiatis: the pop and snap of stones beneath a vehicle’s tyres. As the sound grew louder, Manyiatis’s bark grew bolder, and he limped a few arthritic steps towards the track; but Gabrilis whistled, and ordered silence, and Manyiatis, wearied by barking, was glad to sit.

  Around the bend in the track, navigating with care around the pits and potholes, a sleek new car appeared, its silver gloss dull with chalky dust. To maintain its air-conditioned coolness, the car’s grey-tinted windows were tightly closed; an orchestra playing Skalkatos on the sound system was muted behind the windows’ seal. The car stopped; the engine and the music were switched off. With the noise gone, the cicadas’ rhythmic shrilling seemed intense.

  A young man stepped from the car. He smiled, but his eyes were hidden behind dark glasses, and Gabrilis thought of flies’ eyes, which seemed sightless but saw everything, from every angle. The young man’s shirtsleeves were rolled above his wrists, his collar was open at the neck, his buff-coloured trousers held a knife-pleat even in the heat. He seemed a handsome man, but as he drew close to Gabrilis his flaws became clear. With not a touch of tan, his skin was pale as an invalid’s, and where a man his age should be muscled there was flaccidity and fat, so his chin – which could have been noble – appeared weak, and an older man’s soft stomach spilled over his trouser-belt.

  Attempting another challenge, Manyiatis gave a single bark and trotted growling after the young man. But the young man’s stride was quick, and Manyiatis, noticing the coolness of the tricycle’s shadow, gave up and lay down there instead.

  The young man reached the fence, and shouted a greeting through the wire.

  ‘Kali spera, kyrie! How are you, Mr Kaloyeros?’

  Gabrilis squinted, and focusing his cloudy, red-rimmed eyes, recognised his visitor. He bent to a watermelon, searching amongst its drying leaves for the umbilical length of stalk and slicing it through. As he lifted the melon, heavy as a small child, into his arms, a bee resting on an opening flower took flight. Gabrilis made his struggling way towards the gate, where Pandelis Paliakis waited.

  Pandelis spoke through the fence, as though the old man was imprisoned.

  ‘That’s hot work,’ he said. Sweat was beginning to glaze his forehead. ‘Perhaps you’d like to talk in my car. It’s cooler there.’ As he spoke, on the breeze he caught the old man’s smell, intense and musky sweat strong as a billy goat’s, and his smile faded.

  But Gabrilis shook his head.

  ‘I don’t have time, sir,’ he said with regret. ‘Unfortunately. Hot or not, I’ve work to do.’

  He passed through the gate, and dropped the melon into the trailer with the first.

  ‘Then I’ll be brief,’ said Pandelis. ‘There’s bad news, and there’s good. The bad news is, as we expected, a compulsory purchase order is to be issued on your land. The good news is my father’s agreed that, as our family’s affected by a similar proposal, we should file a joint action to fight the town council. I’ll be handling the case, as I explained the other day. So I’ll just need your signature to say I have the power to act for you – I have the papers in the car – and I’ll get on to it straight away.’

  ‘It’s a bad business,’ said Gabrilis, ‘when land you’ve lived on a lifetime can’t be called your own. I built that house myself, over fifty years ago. I built it with these hands, every last brick and every plank of wood.’ He offered his palms to Pandelis; their lines were dark with dirt, the nails were black and broken. ‘I haven’t a daughter to leave it to, that’s the pity. A daughter would take care of me, now I’m old. You’ll have daughters, I’m sure.’

  ‘I’m not married.’

  ‘You should be. You’re old enough. Your mother should arrange it. I’m not so old I don’t remember how it goes. There’ll be some young lady you’ve got your eye on, isn’t there?’

  But Pandelis seemed not to hear the question.

  ‘I’m confident the council’s case is flawed,’ he said. ‘Please don’t worry. I have every confidence we’ll win.’

  Gabrilis looked up at him with tearful eyes.

  ‘What I don’t understand is why they want my land. It’s only good for farmland – you can see that – and it’s hard work, even then. What do they want it for? It’s not much use to anyone but me.’

  A bee landed on Pandelis’s forearm. His face creased with worry, and he swiped it away.

  ‘I believe,’ he said evasively, ‘they want to build a phone mast. It’s the elevation.’

  ‘But I don’t have a phone,’ said Gabrilis. ‘Never thought I needed one. Maria always wanted a phone. I don’t know who she thought she was going to be ringing up.’

  In Pandelis’s trouser pocket a mobile phone trilled. He took it out and glanced at its tiny screen, then flipped it open.

  ‘Yes? . . . Not now . . . Tomorrow. I said tomorrow . . . No . . . No, I haven’t forgotten . . . I’ll call you later, OK?’ He slipped the phone back into his pocket. ‘Lawyers,’ he said. ‘They drive you crazy. Look, my father says you’re not to worry about the money. There’ll be nothing for you to pay. He tells me we have a family connection. Your sister’s husband was my father’s second cousin, I believe.’

  In puzzlement, Gabrilis frowned.

  ‘Which sister does he mean, sir? I had three sisters. They were all younger than me, and I’ve outlived them all. Now is that a blessing or a curse? Diana was the last of them alive. What was her husband called?’ He couldn’t remember, but Pandelis was in any case walking away. At his car, he took a sheet of paper from the glovebox, and a silver fountain pen from his calfskin briefcase.

  Gabrilis leaned on the handlebars of his tricycle. His breathing was laboured, his colour was high. Pandelis came to his side, uncapping the pen and pointing to the line where Gabrilis should sign.

  ‘I’ll be all right in a minute,’ said Gabrilis. ‘It’s the heat that takes it out of you.’

  ‘Just there,’ said Pandelis. ‘I’ll date it for you later.’

  Gabrilis didn’t read the document, because he couldn’t; his eyes were bad, and anyway, he wasn’t a reading man. He held the paper on his palm and made his mark: not quite a signature, but a scribble he had perfected for such times as these.

  Pandelis took the paper, blew on the ink to dry it and recapped the pen.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘Everything will turn out in our favour. If nothing else, we’ll stretch it in the courts. Four years, my record is so far. Let’s see if we can beat it.’

  ‘Four years,’ echoed Gabrilis. ‘That’s a long time, at my age. God may not grant me another four years.’

  ‘I’ll let you know when there’s news.’

  Pandelis turned away, but Gabrilis touched his arm.

  ‘A mome
nt before you go. Would you mind just helping me with one small thing? Will you cut me a few grapes off that vine? Just a few. They’re lovely fruits, and the wasps are getting the best of them. You’re welcome to cut some for yourself, of course. Take some for your father, with my compliments. It’ll only take a minute of your time.’

  Pandelis looked up towards the house, where the vine spread wide over the verandah, and glanced anxiously at his watch. He hesitated. Then, removing his sunglasses, he smiled.

  ‘I’m late already, and my father will in any case be angry,’ he said, ‘so I suppose five minutes more will make no difference. And – who knows? – a few grapes might sweeten his temper.’ He laid a hand on the old man’s shoulder. ‘We must be quick, but show me the way, and I’ll cut them for you. But I warn you, I’m not much of a climber, so promise me you’ll hold the ladder steady.’

  Gabrilis watched until Pandelis’s car was out of sight. Picking out a third melon, he wondered if he should have said that there were papers. Whether they’d help the case or not, he wasn’t sure; he could produce them if it seemed that they were needed.

  In the meantime, he’d keep them safe, in their hiding place with its formidable guardians.

  Down on the coast road, the horizon was unstable as a mirage, rippling in the super-heated air. At the edges of the softening blacktop, the surplus tar was sticky liquid; here and there along the carriageway, the hot tarmac swelled in domes like buboes. Before the road improvements, this journey smelled of thyme and sage-brush. Now the stink was chemical, of melting pitch, burned diesel and the fumes of car exhausts. When the road was poor, the traffic travelled slowly. There was no need for caution now; the way was smooth, and from airport to resort took only half the time.