The Doctor of Thessaly Page 4

  The hammering stopped, and was replaced after a moment by a ratchet quickly worked. A bolt dropped to the floor and rolled towards the fat man’s galoshed feet; from under the car, a hand patted the ground, feeling for the bolt like a blind man.

  The fat man cleared his throat, and with his toe, moved the bolt towards the hand. The hand became still, and there was silence; then a voice called, ‘Tomorrow! I told you tomorrow!’

  The fat man’s eyebrows lifted as he smiled.

  ‘Forgive me, mechanic,’ he said, ‘but you told me no such thing. I have yet to commission any work from you.’

  On his back on a low trolley, the mechanic slid from beneath the car. His forehead was streaked in lines where dirty fingertips had pushed his blond hair from his eyes; the hems of his filthy trousers were laced into military boots. On his muscled torso, he wore nothing but an oil-smeared vest; feeling the morning’s chill on his behalf, the fat man shivered.

  The mechanic looked the fat man up and down, taking in his suit, his raincoat and his galoshes.

  ‘Kali mera sas,’ he said. He reached for the Fiat’s doorhandle and pulled himself to his feet, wiping his hands on a rag tucked into his belt. ‘Forgive me. I was expecting someone else.’

  ‘And I suspect you are not disappointed that I am not he.’

  The mechanic’s eyes narrowed, as if he were baffled by the fat man’s beautifully enunciated Greek, and he tilted up his chin, assessing him. His profile was handsome, but there were lines of middle age around his eyes and ridges of bad temper on his forehead.

  ‘Can I help you?’ he asked.

  The fat man had noticed the grime on the mechanic’s hands, and did not offer his own.

  ‘I am Hermes Diaktoros, of Athens,’ he said, ‘and I have a small problem with my car. The windscreen wipers have developed a mind of their own, and I would like them restored to my control, rather than having them operate on their own whim.’

  The mechanic crossed to the workshop door and looked out at the fat man’s car.

  ‘That yours?’ he asked. ‘Merc, is it?’

  ‘That’s the car in question. Actually, it belongs to my cousin.’

  ‘Let’s see what we can find.’

  He led the way to the Mercedes; reaching it, he opened the driver’s door and peered in at the walnut-veneered dashboard.

  ‘You don’t see many of these,’ he said. ‘What year is it – fifty, fifty-two?’

  ‘I couldn’t say,’ said the fat man, ‘except it’s elderly. My cousin’s owned it from new.’

  Pointing an oily fingertip at the odometer, the mechanic gave a low whistle.

  ‘There’s some mileage on it,’ he said. ‘What’s he done, driven it round the world?’

  ‘He likes to travel.’

  ‘So how come it looks so good?’ He stepped back to view the bodywork. ‘It could have come from the dealer’s yesterday.’

  ‘The car is his pride and joy, and he is a cautious driver. He works hard to keep it in perfect condition, and that is how I must return it to him. So this fault, although minor, must be fixed. It’s not a big job, I’m sure.’

  ‘It’ll be wiring.’

  ‘So can you take care of it?’

  ‘Pick it up tomorrow afternoon.’

  The fat man smiled.

  ‘I realise you’re busy,’ he said, ‘but I was hoping you could take a look at it now.’

  ‘Now?’

  ‘If you could. Of course I’d be prepared to pay a little extra.’

  The mechanic hesitated, and glanced towards the Fiat in the workshop.

  ‘I think,’ said the fat man, ‘a 25 per cent premium would be fair.’

  The mechanic held out his hand for the key.

  ‘You can wait up at the house,’ he said. ‘Tell Litsa I said it was OK.’

  The fat man removed his holdall from the footwell, and leaving three apples on the seat, picked up the bag of fruit.

  As he walked up to the house, the goat paused in its chewing and watched him with its devil’s eyes. The kitchen door was open, but the house was quiet. A linnet in a bamboo cage was silent in the window. The fat man knocked, and waiting on the threshold, watched the mechanic move the Mercedes to the workshop. The linnet dipped its beak into its feeding bowl, scattering seed but eating nothing. The fat man knocked again, but there was no response; and so he sat down on the step, and choosing the reddest apple from the bag, bit into it.

  The apple was down to the core when a woman entered the kitchen, fastening the ties of an apron. Short and slight, she was like so many housewives he had met: weary and work-worn, unremarkable and undervalued, her face tight with strain.

  The fat man stood, and tossed the apple core to the goat. The woman, preoccupied, began to place clean cutlery in a drawer. At his greeting, she turned to him, startled.

  ‘May I help you?’

  The fat man smiled.

  ‘Forgive me,’ he said. ‘I didn’t intend to surprise you. I’m Hermes Diaktoros, of Athens. Your husband is working on my car, and gave his permission for me to wait here.’

  She did not return his smile, nor offer any words of welcome, but indicated a chair at the kitchen table.

  ‘Come in, then,’ she said. ‘Do you want coffee?’

  Sitting, he laid the bag of apples on the table and his holdall at his feet.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘No sugar, if you please.’

  She lit a burner on the stove, and filled a kafebriko at the tap.

  ‘You know,’ he said, as she spooned coffee from a jar, ‘when I was talking to your husband, I didn’t ask his name.’

  Her back was to him; she gave her answer to the wall.

  ‘Tassos. They call him Tassos.’

  ‘And you, he said, are Litsa. It’s a pretty name.’

  The compliment brought no response. She put the kafebriko on the flame, and turned it high to hurry the coffee’s boiling.

  Through the window, the fat man watched the mechanic raise the Mercedes’s bonnet. Litsa took a cup and saucer from the dresser, and filled a glass with water at the sink, and as the coffee’s froth rose, filled the cup. Opening a tin painted with roses, she cut two slices from a home-baked cake, and laying them on separate plates, placed one before the fat man with a fork and a napkin, coffee and water. She carried the second plate to the house door.

  ‘If you’ll excuse me,’ she said, ‘I have to see to my mother.’

  She left him. The fat man sipped the excellent coffee; the cream-filled sponge cake was moist and sweet. Outside, a truck laden with straw bales turned off the road and pulled up alongside the Mercedes. The mechanic called out a greeting to its driver and laid down his pliers. Somewhere inside the house, a woman’s voice murmured. As the men outside talked on, the mechanic lit a cigarette.

  Finishing his cake, the fat man looked with interest around the kitchen. All was ordered and well kept: the floor was swept and mopped, the work surfaces wiped clean; the salad greens in the colander were freshly picked, and washed. On the dresser, a set of silver frames held family photographs: a boy and girl together, the boy with front teeth missing; a younger, prettier Litsa smiling down at a swaddled baby; a sepia print of a woman taken in profile.

  Outside, the men’s conversation ended in laughter. The mechanic sent the truck on its way with a slap to the rear, as if it were livestock; stalks of straw blew off the bales and settled golden on the oil-black dirt. The mechanic took up his pliers and bent again beneath the Mercedes’s bonnet.

  Litsa returned to the kitchen. The cake on its plate was only half-eaten.

  ‘I’m sorry to leave you alone,’ she said, ‘but my mother’s care is demanding.’

  ‘Is she unwell?’

  ‘Stroke. The first one, we thought she’d recover from; the second nearly finished her. Sometimes I think it would have been better if it had. She has no movement to speak of, and no speech. She relies on me for everything – feeding, dressing, cleaning . . . Lives change, don’t they
? As she cared for me, as a child, I now care for her.’

  ‘I’m sorry. It must be very hard for you. You have your own children too, I suppose?’

  ‘A boy and a girl, both at high school. Christos will be leaving soon. I wanted him to go to university, study for a profession, but he has no interest. He’s going to help his father in the workshop.’

  She opened a cupboard beneath the sink and scraped the uneaten cake into a bucket already half filled with table scraps. She rinsed the plate under the tap, then stood, arms folded, looking out of the window, her eyes on the road where it disappeared around the bend. The silence between them grew long, as if she had forgotten the fat man’s presence. When eventually she put her question, it was not out of interest in his answer, but a means of dispelling awkwardness.

  ‘So what brings you here, kyrie?’

  ‘Business,’ he said. ‘I travel a lot, in my work.’

  ‘And what line are you in?’

  ‘I’m with the justice department.’

  ‘That’s a good job. I wanted Christos to be a legal man. But does your family not miss you, when you’re travelling?’

  ‘I’m not a family man.’

  She regarded him now with curiosity.

  ‘That’s a shame,’ she said. ‘You look to me like a man who’d be a good father.’

  He smiled, apologetically.

  ‘Without wishing to offend your sensibilities,’ he said, ‘I didn’t say I’m not a father; only that I’m not a family man.’

  ‘Divorced?’

  ‘Never married.’

  She seemed not disapproving, but philosophical.

  ‘It’s the modern way,’ she said. ‘Each to their own.’

  ‘It was the ancient way, too,’ he said. ‘Not all modern practices were invented yesterday. My children are grown now. I see them, from time to time.’

  ‘You didn’t ever want to settle down?’

  For a moment, he considered the attractions of the setting – the domestic order of the kitchen, the home-baked cake, the photographs on the dresser, the old woman cared for in her illness – and he was slow to answer.

  ‘Sometimes,’ he said. ‘But if I am truthful, freedom suits me very well.’

  She wasn’t listening; instead, she watched the mechanic lower the Mercedes’s bonnet and let it drop the last few inches to secure the catch.

  ‘I think your car is ready,’ she said.

  ‘Excellent.’ He pushed the bag of apples across the table. ‘I’d like to offer you these. They’re from my father’s orchard; he says they are the finest in all Greece, and makes great claims for their restorative properties. Certainly, their flavour is exceptional. They’re excellent for invalids. Your mother might enjoy them, if you bake them soft with honey and some cinnamon. The English have a saying, you know: an apple a day keeps the doctor away. They may be right.’

  ‘They’re right in this case.’ Walking through the open door, the mechanic dropped the Mercedes’s key on the table. The prints of his boot-soles were dark on the marble tiles. Reaching into the paper bag, he picked out an apple, sniffed it, and took a large bite.

  ‘Very nice,’ he said, chewing. ‘Wife, coffee.’

  In silence, Litsa took an old newspaper from a stack beneath the sink and crossed to her husband; as he raised his backside, allowing her to spread the paper across his chair-seat, he winked at the fat man, and smiled. Glancing beneath the table, she saw his boots and the line of dirty footprints to the door.

  ‘For God’s sake,’ she said. ‘I’ve just washed this floor.’

  ‘For God’s sake,’ he said. ‘It’s just a bit of mud.’

  ‘It’s oil, and you know it. How many times do I have to ask you?’

  The argument was stale; she abandoned it, and lit the burner at the stove. She held up the kafebriko to the fat man, offering him a second cup.

  ‘If it’s no trouble,’ he said. ‘Your coffee’s very good. The coffee I had this morning was, I’m afraid, a little disappointing.’

  The mechanic took another bite of his apple.

  ‘Where was that?’ he asked.

  ‘The kafenion in the square.’

  The mechanic laughed.

  ‘Evangelia’s. Her coffee’s horse piss. And don’t, for God’s sake, think of eating there. Her food’s worse than her coffee.’

  ‘I’ll bear that in mind,’ said the fat man. ‘Though I’m committed to a bed there for tonight, at least.’

  The mechanic laughed again.

  ‘Drink plenty of brandy before bedtime, that’s my advice,’ he said. ‘Knock yourself senseless. The bed’ll be alive with vermin.’

  Litsa turned from the stove, where the smell of good coffee was rising once more.

  ‘Tassos,’ she said, ‘don’t be unkind. The woman has to make a living.’

  ‘Let her make an honest living, then; she’d find it would serve her better. Thin coffee and bad food draw no customers. For half a teaspoon of coffee powder, she keeps the whole town from her door.’

  ‘She has her regulars,’ said his wife.

  ‘And when they’re dead, what then? She’s plenty salted away, anyway, I’ll bet. She needs no pity from you.’

  The coffee was rising to the boil; as Litsa opened the cake tin, the fat man touched his plate in anticipation.

  The mechanic bit for the last time into his apple, and spoke as he chewed, pointing with his apple core to the bag of apples.

  ‘Your English saying’s not wrong,’ he said. ‘I’ve just been hearing all about our doctor, and he’ll be keeping away for a while. You’ll be interested in this, wife.’ Litsa’s back was to him as she cut more cake, and she seemed not to be listening, so Tassos looked instead at the fat man. ‘My wife and the doctor are close,’ he said. He gave an unkind smile and held up two fingers, crossed. ‘Like that, kyrie. Like that. Isn’t it true, wife, that we see a lot of the doctor at this house? We see an awful lot of him. Or used to. We’ll not be seeing so much now.’

  Litsa turned from the sink, red-faced: with anger or embarrassment was impossible to say.

  ‘He comes to see my mother,’ she said, ‘as you well know. Here.’

  She slammed down cake and coffee before the men. The mechanic dug a fork into his cake and placed a piece in his mouth, again chewing open-mouthed as he spoke.

  ‘Your mother’s no attraction, is she?’ he said. His eyes were back on the fat man. ‘Something brings him here, kyrie.

  Something brings him here more often than it should. But he won’t be visiting for a while. Someone’s taken against him, is what I hear. He’s blinded: some chemical thrown in his face. So his absence from his wedding is explained, after all. Seems someone didn’t like the man, my love. Not everyone thought the same of him as you.’

  ‘I think no more of him than of any tradesman,’ she said. ‘How is he?’

  ‘In hospital, and likely to remain so for a while.’

  ‘So who’ll care for Mother?’

  ‘She’ll be no worse off without him. She wasn’t dancing shiftatelli in his care, was she? Not that I saw.’

  Litsa was silent, though to the fat man, it seemed her shoulders were more stooped, as if some extra weight had been added to her burden.

  The fat man ate the last of his cake, and finished his coffee.

  ‘I must be going,’ he said. ‘What do I owe you?’

  The mechanic named a price; the fat man took out a pigskin wallet and counted a number of notes on to the table. The mechanic left one there and slipped the remainder into his pocket.

  ‘It’s all fixed,’ he said. ‘You’ll have no more trouble there.’

  The fat man picked up his holdall and took his key from the table. To Litsa, he offered a small bow.

  ‘My thanks,’ he said, ‘for your hospitality.’

  Tassos also stood, and offered a grimy hand, which the fat man took with reluctance.

  The mechanic followed the fat man to the door.

  ‘There’s money
on the table, wife,’ he said, over his shoulder. ‘Fetch me a paper when you go out.’

  ‘If you’d like a lift to the square,’ said the fat man to Litsa, politely, ‘I’d be glad to wait and drive you.’

  Lowering her eyes, she shook her head.

  ‘My son’ll take her, if she doesn’t want to walk,’ said Tassos. ‘I taught my wife to accept no lifts from strangers.’ He held out his arm to guide the fat man through the door. ‘After you, kyrie. It’ll be my pleasure to see you to your car.’

  Five

  Outside, the morning was full light, but inside, the stone-built cabin was as dim as evening, brightened only where small stones and dried, cementing mud had fallen from the walls, creating holes to let in spots of sun. When the wind blew, the corrugated iron roof – lashed down with rope and weighted with rocks – sang like the haunting dead, rattling its own percussion. There was no glass in the windows to keep out draughts, but shutters of hammered planks set on rusty hinges; the door – fetched from an abandoned house in the town – was a poor fit, held to (when he was here) by a single hook, and by a rock pushed up against it when he wasn’t.

  He hadn’t lit the fire; last night’s ashes were grey dust in the grate, the last heat and smoke long carried away by the wind. The blankets of the camp bed were unstraightened; the pillow was yellow with age and hard with matted chicken feathers, their points prickly through the unbleached calico cover. On the wooden table – an elegant, antique piece ruined with watermarks, cigarette burns and candle grease – the flame of a single candle flickered in the draughts; beside it lay an empty tin of sardines and a fork, the last of a stale loaf, and in a bottle, a few measures of the fiery tsipouro he distilled himself.

  Outside, a lamb bleated; a tethered dog barked.

  Seated at the table, leaning on his elbows, he studied a photograph. His beard was growing long, his hair the same; silver and grey ran through the black of both. His trousers were tied over boots whose leather was cracked and caked with drying mud; over his shirt and sweater, he wore a sheepskin jerkin, so rough cut and shabby, it seemed he’d stripped it from the sheep’s back and fitted it directly to his own.