A Separation(15)

Is it in use?

Oh yes, he said. He looked a little surprised. Of course.

I opened the car door. The drizzle of rain was instantly absorbed by the soil, which remained dry. Stefano asked if I needed an umbrella, he thought he might have one in the trunk. I told him I was fine, the rain itself was warm and not unpleasant. He shrugged and got out of the car. I followed him to the double doors of the church, which he pulled open, evidently nothing was locked around here. He stepped back and gestured toward the dim interior. He reached into his pocket and took out a packet of cigarettes, then said that he would wait outside.

I switched on the light—a single electric bulb came on with a loud buzz. It did very little to illuminate the interior. After a moment, my eyes adjusted to the darkness. It was true that it was a humble space, several rows of wooden benches, a simple altar and reliquary. The church was Byzantine, probably twelfth or thirteenth century, there was a large fresco on three of the walls. The faces on the fresco had been rubbed out and the effect was strange, a row of saints standing blind and faceless, rendered anonymous by a likewise unidentified hand.

More characters had been written across the wall inside in paint—they did not seem as if they had been written by the same person or persons who had defaced the exterior of the church, the paint was another color, more faded despite the evident lack of sunlight inside, the jumbled characters differently formed. From the entrance, Stefano smoked. I asked him what the graffiti said. Carefully, he ground out the cigarette before leaning over to retrieve the butt.

He entered the church, quickly making the sign of the cross before stopping in front of the fresco. This is from the civil war. He stepped forward and touched the wall. The Communists defaced the saints—literally defaced them, he said with a grim smile, you see—and wrote some stupid Communist propaganda. You can’t see all the characters, some of it is covered, but it says, he translated, United Front from Below.

He pointed to a row of characters, large parts of which had been covered. I saw that it was not a single piece of graffiti as I had initially thought, but two separate messages written at two different times, the first set of characters imperfectly blacked out and only partially covered by the second set. Stefano moved his fingers and pointed to the second set of characters. The army came and covered the Communist slogan and wrote their own slogan, Athens Is Greece. But you can see they did a sloppy job of it. So parts of the original Communist slogan are still visible, Uni— and —elow, if you read the whole thing together, it is nonsense, a nonsense phrase, Uni Athens Is Greece Elow.

He continued. They thought it wasn’t enough to paint over the old slogan with their own message, they also scratched their message into the stone, only they didn’t finish the job. I peered at the stone surface, it was true, someone had scored a few characters in—they only measured a few inches in height, much smaller than the sprawling graffiti below, which had been painted with a freer hand, after all it was much more difficult to carve into stone—and then abruptly stopped, as if they had been interrupted or perhaps decided it wasn’t worth the effort.

It is extraordinary, I said to Stefano, as a record of the conflict. He shrugged, the church is much older than this political argument, many centuries older, in another country it would have been cleaned up, there would have been money to preserve the church, to make repairs, but here?

I nodded. He waited a moment, as if to see whether or not I had any further questions. Then he turned and retreated outside. I stayed only a few minutes longer, I did not want to keep Stefano waiting—although I saw that he had already lit another cigarette, probably he would have been happy enough to wait, after all the meter was running on the fare. It was cool inside the church, a respite from the dry heat outside. I stood before the line of blank-faced saints, I had never seen anything like it. As we returned to the car I asked Stefano what else I should see, I had the rest of the afternoon and I wanted to tour the area.

You could go to Porto Sternes, it is not too far, a little way down the peninsula. There are some very nice ruins on the beach, of a church. They say that the entrance to Hades is located in a cave at Porto Sternes—the tourists like it, although it is nothing more than a cave, a very nice cave, a big one even, but still just a cave. I said in that case I thought I could do without, although I liked the association between myths and ordinary places, places you could go to, perhaps if my stay extended further I would go.

What has brought you to Mani? Stefano asked. It was a reasonable question to which I could not think of a response. For a holiday, in order to relax, I was taking a break, I’ve always wanted to come to Greece. When I didn’t reply he continued, Most of the people who come to the village do not leave the hotel, maybe they go to the beach or to one of the islands. They are never interested in seeing the interior.

As he spoke, we were driving inland, through a village. There were small single-story houses on either side of the road. The houses were built from concrete rather than stone, entirely charmless, it was true there was nothing much to see. Dogs roamed the street and the front yards were cordoned off by wire fences. In places, lengths of wire had come undone from the stakes. Plastic chairs stood outside the houses, warped and yellowed by exposure to the sun. It had nothing in common with Gerolimenas, an essentially picturesque village. This, rather than Gerolimenas, was the place where Stefano, and Maria, and Kostas, were from.

The driver was still watching me in the rearview mirror, he repeated the question—What has brought you to Mani? I had a brief impulse to reply in earnest—there might be relief in articulating my situation to someone, the purpose behind my visit, its perplexing duration, which was still undecided. Why not this man, essentially a stranger, one not obviously sympathetic, but also not unsympathetic? He might, for example, have driven Christopher at some point, he might even know where he had gone. But I did not. I said instead, without entirely knowing why, not even where the words came from, I’m working on a book about mourning.