The Doctor of Thessaly Read online

  He placed the lamp in the sandbox where the one candle he had lit dripped creamy wax, its thin form bending in its own heat. Crossing to the doorway, concealing himself behind the heavy door, he put his eye to the hinged edge and looked out into the courtyard. His view through the crack between wood and wall was restricted; but though he saw no one, the courtyard gate was not how he had left it, but ajar.

  Adonis considered the distance between chapel door and gate; he had almost done his duty here and could avoid sinister company by making a run for it, jumping on to his scooter and riding away. But the scooter was temperamental and might easily let him down, and so he decided it would be better to make himself known, to be overt about his presence. With this in mind, still hidden behind the chapel door, he called out.

  ‘Is anyone there?’

  He listened to a silence which was deepened by the dropping of the wind; and the silence lasted until he was convinced the visitor was supernatural and his calling out had frightened it away. But as he was asking himself whether this was good or bad, someone passed the chapel window and came into the range of his restricted view.

  He knew the visitor; he recognised the stature of the man, his raincoat, his unusual white shoes. And yet Adonis was still afraid, because he had no idea where the man came from or what his business was in town; and when strange events happened – and the blinding of the doctor was certainly strange – it seemed quite possible that a stranger might be responsible.

  He regretted, now, that he had called out, and drew himself back into the space behind the chapel door and looked across to one of the icons; but there was no help in the empty, painted face. He crossed himself, and closing his own eyes tight like the most naive of children hiding, he waited, breathing as low and as quietly as he could.

  Whilst he stood, eyes shut, it seemed to him that nothing moved; but a gentle click close by surprised him into opening his eyes.

  The fat man stood before him, a gold lighter in his hand burning with a steady, blue-based flame.

  ‘Kali spera, Adonis.’ The fat man’s expression was serious, and Adonis found no comfort in being addressed by his own familiar name. ‘I’m glad to find you here.’

  From the racks beneath the sandbox, the fat man took a slender candle and applied his lighter to the wick. The string burned away quickly, disappearing in a wisp of smoke, and with the excess gone, the flame grew steady. He held the candle close to his face, and moth-like, Adonis’s eyes were drawn there. The light of the flame gave empty depths to the fat man’s eyes, and Adonis thought of the pool in the mountain cavern where his cousin worked in summer. There, the tourists sailed on boats and the boatmen told them the water’s depth could not be measured, that the pool went down and down right to the earth’s core; and as the boatmen shipped their oars and let the boats drift, the tourists would go quiet and shift their handbags and their cameras to safe places on the bottom boards and pull their children close. But Adonis knew the secret of that pool. The truth was, the water was only three feet deep, and it was the light – or lack of it – that made it bottomless: lack of light and the visitors’ own belief, because, told that the pool was bottomless, they saw what they expected. And Adonis told himself that what he saw now was nothing frightening: not empty eyes like the doctor’s had been, but everyday eyes made otherwise by tricks of light.

  The fat man smiled, and moving the flame away from his face, held it instead to each wall in turn, casting more shadows on the saint’s many faces.

  ‘Just pictures, nothing more,’ he said. ‘It’s the habit of Orthodoxy to venerate pictures. The saints, you know – some were extraordinary people, of course, but many in life were quite ordinary and got pushed into sainthood by martyrdom. Some suffered extraordinarily unpleasant deaths. Does that make them worthy of a halo? It’s a very rare man who deserves other men’s worship. Why are you here?’

  The question was unexpected, and asking it, the fat man looked hard at Adonis. His sternness made Adonis nervous, and nerves often made him stammer; and so, although he wished to answer, he didn’t dare, because he knew the words would be misshapen and malformed, hard-set and clinging to his tongue like barnacles, refusing to take flight like the free birds they should be.

  The fat man was patient, not pressing for his answer; but when Adonis eventually managed to speak, the words that came were irrelevant.

  ‘You’re supposed to make an offering for the candle,’ he said.

  The fat man smiled.

  ‘You mean, pay cash,’ he said. ‘Here. Let me show you something.’

  He crouched, and touched the old stones which made the chapel floor. Holding the candle close, he ran a fingertip along a line carved in the stone.

  ‘Look,’ he said. ‘Here. And here.’ The lines were unmistakable but faint, worn away by centuries of feet. ‘Do you see this inscription? That lady on the walls is an interloper, an intruder. She and her servants have no more than squatters’ rights. This place belongs to someone else; there’s a much older claim than theirs.’

  Fascinated, Adonis crouched beside the fat man to read the ancient lettering. When he spoke again, his stammer was forgotten.

  ‘What does it say?’ he asked. ‘Whose building is it really?’

  ‘Hard to say, for certain,’ said the fat man. ‘There’s an “A” there. Apollo, Asclepius, Aphrodite. Someone, anyway, with better credentials than your Johnny-come-lately nun.’

  He laughed. ‘Don’t tell your mother I said so. She’d have me shot as a heretic. It was she who sent you here, no doubt, to light the lamps and do the honours.’

  Adonis traced the lettering with his fingertips as the fat man had done, trying to make sense of what was there; but there seemed no sense to be made.

  ‘They’re just fragments,’ said the fat man, standing, ‘perhaps relaid from some temple which once stood here.’

  Still crouching, Adonis said, ‘She tells me to come every day, but I don’t.’

  The fat man waited for him to continue, but when Adonis said no more, the fat man spoke instead.

  ‘This place has an atmosphere, hasn’t it?’ he said, looking around them. ‘I expect it makes you afraid.’

  Adonis stood.

  ‘Mother says too many things frighten me,’ he said.

  ‘What are you afraid of?’

  ‘Dogs. They bite. The sea, when it’s rough. And I don’t like the dark much.’

  ‘Are you afraid of me?’

  ‘No.’ As he answered, Adonis lowered his eyes, and the fat man laughed, knowing it was a lie.

  ‘No need to be afraid of me,’ he said, ‘not if you tell the truth. It’ll be dark soon. Let’s step outside, and you can show me where you found the doctor.’

  With no deference to the icons and no cross-making, he twisted his candle to stand upright in the sandbox. Leading the way outside, he crossed the courtyard to the wall which faced the sunset, and stepped easily up on to the stone bench to look over it; but except for the first lights of the town down by the sea, there was little to see in the dusk.

  ‘I’m too late for the view,’ he said. ‘No matter; another time. Where, exactly, did you find him?’

  He climbed down, and followed Adonis around the chapel’s far side. Again, the fat man stepped up on to the stone bench, and looked out over the chapel’s surroundings. There was only the rutted track and the scrubland running down to it – nothing, it seemed, to interest him.

  ‘Did you come to light the lamps this morning?’ Still standing on the bench, he was imposing, perhaps intimidating; and, as if aware of this, he jumped down on to the courtyard before Adonis answered.

  Anxious to be truthful, Adonis shook his head.

  ‘No,’ he said. A little ashamed, he avoided the fat man’s eyes. ‘My mother told me to light them, but I decided not to. I was late. And I don’t like this place. People say bad things of it.’

  ‘You mean ghosts,’ said the fat man. ‘Creations of people’s imaginations. A ghost story’s so
much more romantic than a creaking floorboard or a draught on the back of the neck. They build the stories on memories; they take a grain of truth, and let it grow to the size of an orange. The human mind distorts what it remembers. But these stones –’ he tapped his foot ‘– might be different. They might remember things without embroidering. They might have memories, I think.’

  ‘Do you think so? How could they?’

  The fat man laughed.

  ‘You’re right – how could they? But if they could . . .’ He laid a large hand on Adonis’s shoulder. The hand was warm, unaffected by the evening’s chill, but its weight was uncomfortable to Adonis because he was unused to being touched. ‘The stones would tell us tales, if they could. And they’d tell the truth, for sure; rocks would never dissemble. My job would be very much easier if stones could talk. But since they can’t, I must rely on you – and do you know, Adonis, I trust you in the same way I would trust a rock.

  You are a truthful lad, it seems to me; so tell me, if you weren’t going to stop and light the lamps this morning, what changed your mind?’

  Adonis shrugged at the obviousness of his answer.

  ‘His shoe. He threw his shoe over the wall. It landed in front of me and made me jump.’

  The fat man laughed. A gust of evening’s breeze lifted his coat, and taking his hand from Adonis’s shoulder he thrust both hands into the raincoat’s pockets to keep it flat against his thighs. Adonis felt suddenly cold; for warmth, he wrapped his arms around himself, like a straitjacket.

  ‘That was ingenious,’ said the fat man. ‘Our doctor is a clever man. So you stopped, and you helped him.’

  ‘I fetched him water first. He asked me to.’

  ‘Good lad. Show me where from.’

  Adonis led him around the chapel, and pointed to the well.

  ‘There. I found a bucket in the kitchen.’

  ‘Which is where?’

  ‘Through there.’

  He pointed to the battered kitchen door. The fat man glanced at it briefly, then looked around and frowned.

  ‘Where is the bucket now? Did you return it to its place?’

  Adonis, too, looked around.

  ‘I don’t remember. I don’t think so. I think I left it there, where he was lying.’

  The fat man seemed thoughtful.

  ‘What did you do next?’

  ‘He bathed his eyes, then asked me for his bag. He wanted medicine. He needed an injection. I did it for him.’ His pride showed in his voice; but the fat man’s thoughts had moved on.

  ‘Where was his bag?’

  ‘Outside the gate. Left there with his bike.’

  ‘Show me.’

  Adonis led the way to the gate, and through it pointed to where bag and bike had been.

  ‘The bike’s not there now,’ he said.

  Again, the fat man frowned.

  ‘Neither is the bag,’ he said.

  Returning to the kitchen, the fat man clicked open the latch and went inside, sniffing at the damp and glancing up at the ceiling’s cobwebs. Beneath the stone sink stood the empty yellow bucket.

  From the doorway, Adonis looked on uncertainly.

  The fat man pointed to the bucket.

  ‘Did you put this back here, Adonis?’

  ‘I don’t think so, no. The doctor needed help. He wanted me to phone for an ambulance. There wasn’t time.’

  ‘There wasn’t time,’ echoed the fat man. ‘Of course there wasn’t time. Someone has been here, and tidied up. Tidied up, and helped themselves to his motorbike.’

  ‘The bike had fallen over, or someone threw it down. I told the doctor; I thought it would be damaged. It was a good bike, powerful, but I took him on my moped. I’ve had no practice, riding a bike like that. So we went on my moped. It didn’t matter. We had to go slowly anyway, because he was in pain.’ He, too, sniffed, realising something was different from the last time he was here. ‘Coffee,’ he said. ‘It smelled of coffee. There was a flask. It’s not here now. It was on the table, there.’

  The fat man looked to where he pointed, and once more at the empty, yellow bucket.

  ‘Who has been here? Who else might have been here, Adonis?’

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t want to get anyone into trouble.’

  ‘There’ll be no trouble for anyone who deserves none, you have my word on that. But someone has been here, and may have seen something which will help me find the doctor’s attacker. Maybe the same someone knows the whereabouts of the doctor’s motorbike.’

  ‘It was a Yamaha, 500cc, a silver one. I’m going to have a bike like that one day. I’ll bet a bike like that could do two hundred easy, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘I expect it could; more, probably. You want a bike like that, Adonis, but I don’t think you came up here and took it, did you?’ Vigorously, Adonis shook his head. ‘But it seems that someone else did. You know the difference between right and wrong; you know it’s wrong to steal. But someone else doesn’t know the difference quite as well as you do. Someone seems to have just come and helped themselves.’

  ‘He wouldn’t do that.’

  ‘Who wouldn’t?’

  ‘I don’t want to get anyone into trouble.’

  ‘There’ll be no trouble that isn’t warranted. And of course I would never mention your name. You have my word on that.’

  ‘He wouldn’t take it anyway,’ insisted Adonis, ‘but he does come here, sometimes. He comes for water, like me, or for shade, or to get out of the rain. He never lights the candles, though.’

  ‘Who is he?’

  ‘They call him Orfeas. He’s a shepherd. He’s got more sheep than me.’

  ‘And where will I find him?’

  ‘He has a house in town – it was his mother’s house. But don’t look for him there. He prefers his mountain place; he has a cabin. I’d like a cabin like that, for summer at least. You can live wild, with the animals. But mother says she’s not dragging up there every day to feed me.’

  ‘You can’t blame her for that. And it’s a lonely life, up there in the mountains. The life’s too quiet for most; those that choose it generally have good reasons. Come on, it’s time to go. You won’t want to ride down in the dark.’

  ‘I don’t. The lights on my scooter aren’t very good.’

  ‘Follow me, if you like. I’ve kept you here; I’ll see you get back safely.’

  Somewhere, an owl screeched. As Adonis pulled the chapel gate closed behind them, the bell over their heads moved in the rising wind and the clapper touched its side, giving the ghost of a ring.

  ‘There are storms to the north,’ said the fat man to himself, ‘but not for us. No storms for us, just yet. Fetch your scooter, Adonis, and follow me to the road. I didn’t bring my car up this rough track.’

  The fat man led the way, walking quickly along the track in the direction of the road; and on his moped, Adonis rolled along beside him, weaving amongst the stones to keep his balance, staying close to the fat man to keep the shades away.

  Eight

  When the fat man reached the town, darkness had fallen. Reversing the Mercedes up to the kerb he’d parked at that morning, he locked the car and made his way along the side street to the square. The evening was cold; the house doors were closed, the windows lit by lamplight and the flickering images of television.

  At the kafenion, the fat man closed the door behind him as he entered, and called out kali spera to Evangelia, who stood below the birdcage at the counter’s end, trying to provoke the cockatoo’s interest in a dish of sunflower seeds. Around a table, four men were laughing; but as the fat man laid down his holdall and removed his raincoat, their laughter died away. There was beer and whisky on their table, which was littered with the empty pods of broad beans; a saucer of salt was dinted where the men had dipped their shelled beans.

  Two of the men, the fat man knew. The grocer looked his way with bloodshot eyes, then returned his attention to his glass of beer, whilst the postmaster, leaning over an ashtr
ay already half full of butts, drew on a burned-down cigarette and blew the smoke out down his nostrils. A third man ran a hand through his thinning hair, patting its long strands into place over a prominent bald spot. The fourth – somewhat older than the others, almost elderly – had dressed with care: a watch chain dangled from the breast-pocket of his European tweed suit, and there was a shine on the leather of his outmoded shoes.

  The fat man looked from one man to another. The man with thinning hair split open a bean-pod with his thumb, and tossed the raw beans into his mouth, one by one, as if performing a party trick. As the postmaster stubbed out his cigarette, the elderly man picked up a briarwood pipe and knocked its bowl against the leg of his chair until black ash dropped on to the floor tiles.

  ‘Kali spera sas,’ said the fat man.

  The men at the table did not respond. Evangelia dropped a sunflower seed on to the floor of the birdcage, and beckoned to the fat man with both hands.

  ‘Kali spera, kyrie,’ she said. ‘Come in. Come in and sit.’ She waddled towards him, pulling down her dress over her wide backside, re-fastening a cardigan button which had popped open over her stomach. ‘Here, sit.’ Her plump hand touched the back of a chair at an empty table. ‘What’ll you have?’

  ‘I wonder,’ said the fat man, ‘if there’s anything to eat?’

  She considered; her expression was doubtful.

  ‘I’ve nothing in,’ she said, ‘and the shop’s already closed.’ She inclined her head towards the grocer, whose eyes stayed on his glass. ‘I’ve eggs, and cheese, if you want an omelette.’

  ‘That would do very well,’ said the fat man. ‘And ouzo, with a little water.’

  In no hurry, she crossed to the men’s table and cleared it of empty bean pods. Behind the counter, she unscrewed the cap off a dusty bottle and poured a long measure of ouzo into a tumbler.

  The four men now sat in silence. The fat man folded his arms and smiled across at the postmaster, who, disconcerted, reached for a fresh cigarette.