The Nature of Work, Part 3

Before you get started, considering reading Part 1 & Part 2.

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The Flow

When the endless labour ahead tormented him, Yannis told himself to remember cycling up long hills when instead of looking ahead to the summit, he panted with desire to reach the top and freewheel down. He looked at the kerbstones and counted mortar joints, and when he rested, he found himself surprised at how far he had climbed.

So rather than study the floors yet to be lifted, he counted the growing stack of planks. He would have to nail them down again, which would mean ordering replacement nails. But if he left the floor open, Father Giorgios would see evidence of his struggle.

Spring mornings often held a sense of breathless anticipation, as if something exceptional would happen — though it never did. He remembered a line in a poem about things “appearing to have a significance they lack.”

When the weather was perfect — especially those June days when the sun burned off the mist, the air really was like wine and the sky like the pure heartbreaking blue of Our Lady’s robe. He felt bitter at having to work indoors and longed for storms and overcast skies.

Yet when that weather did arrive, the dullness sapped his energy. An autumn sky full of movement was best — rushing clouds like angel messengers, flocks of rooks like enthusiastic pilgrims — then he was energised by the flicker of sunlight through trees lighting the floors.

Some days, waking early, rising purposefully, he re-lived morning expeditions with his father to cut saplings for some project. They enjoyed the tang of sap, the rhythm of the two-handed saw, the grunts of effort as they kept time, and the laughter when one lost his grip.

Remembering the squalid mess around the farmhouse and barns, the annoyance of escaping livestock and embarrassed visitors, had wiped out positive memories.

The work began to flow. Yannis glided rather than walked. The rawness on his fingers turned to calluses, his arm and shoulder muscles developed tone, the fear of finding nothing receded and the task began to obsess him.

If he did find the document, would he be disappointed because his labours would end? If those labours were in vain would he gain the wisdom of that emptiness understood by the writer of Ecclesiastes, which he called vanity? In his prayers (in which he found himself making little jokes with God) he thanked Father Giorgios for the task and knew he could carry on.

The Thunder

The rain beat so hard on the windows and the thunderclaps were so loud that Yannis felt unusually alive. He delightedly rushed from room to room checking for open windows, and only as he passed the gatehouse did he hear frantic knocking.

He opened the door to a drenched Anastasia, whom he led to a guest bathroom and invited to strip and towel herself dry while he searched for something to cover her. Then he hurried outside to unpack the mule, making himself equally soaked.

He dumped the panniers and went to his cell — unhurried because the sensation was not unpleasant — where he took off the dripping robes.

As he towelled himself dry, he heard a scream from the direction of the guesthouse and girded his loins with the towel, rushed in that direction, and found Anastasia naked and trapped in the bathroom by what Yannis identified from the black serrated stripe along its back as a nanochentra or dwarf viper.

After a few seconds of hesitation, he held out his hands, which Anastasia seized. When he said, “Jump,” she obeyed with a surprising flexion of her legs and a vigorous forward spring, almost unbalancing him, but brought her clear and allowed him to shut the door on the snake.

The towel fell. They stood facing each other, hands still clasped at arm’s length, and a change came over his body which Anastasia could hardly fail to notice.

The Conversation

The companionship of a woman’s face, a handbreadth from his own – her breath somehow floral – and the utter peace after longing and exertion with the absence of desire and even guilt, amazed him. All traces of rain and thunder had vanished and the sun flashed on the guesthouse windows.

“How do you feel?” she asked.

“I think a Roman candle went off down there.”

Their laughter mingled. They looked into one another’s eyes. So what he had heard was true: there he was, in miniature, in hers.

Anastasia said, “What made you become a monk, Yannis?”

His gaze roamed over her hair as he pondered.

He said, “I used to watch my grandfather mend his nets in his little fishing village on Evvoia, radiating calm, his face lit by afternoon sun. Like a figure in a Renaissance painting, not a bland ikon face. When he brought in his catch in the small hours the village feasted on red mullet, sea bream, calamares, octopus…”

“Go on.”

“But Father hated fishing. We moved inland to a smallholding to raise goats. Everything was messy: the slaughtering, the cloying smell of meat, the gore and intestines on the floor, unpainted concrete that never scrubbed clean. The bloodstains were like maps of unwholesome islands.

“And outside, heaps of rotting hay bales, fag-ends of fence wire, a rusting trailer, even a goat dead of unknown causes like a sign of what awaits all beings.”

“So you longed for order.”

“Yes. Whenever I got leave from the seminary, I escaped to Evvoia to play backgammon with my grandmother who was bedridden from a stroke. When she died I thought I might administer last rites but arrived too late. The same when my grandfather died. His funeral was so crowded it overflowed to the very edge of the waves as if the sea he loved was chief mourner.”

“Tears, Yannis?”

“Tears, Anastasia.”

“‘Sorrow is better than laughter.’ Who said that?”

“Ecclesiastes. Good heavens, you know my favourite source of wisdom. But do you believe that about sorrow?”

“It’s like salt – you can have too much. When my husband died I felt I was in a crater. All you see is the rim, and the clouds linger too long or clear too fast.”

“But you climbed out?”

“Much later. I was shocked to see all around – almost within reach – had been pleasant trees, houses, churches, rock forms. Why had I failed to remember they were there?”

“What about your work?”

“After a year or so, I would often wake up impatient to get on. Breakfast porridge, melon, and coffee took too long. Chewing and drinking instead of sewing! But other times I would have to force myself to start, and soon weariness — of spirit rather than body — would force me to rest. 

“I was tempted to drink more coffee, but resisted, because I used coffee as a reward, and a half hour of stitching earned nothing. I sat in the old leather armchair like a figure of straw through which sombre thoughts rustled like rats.”

She smiled as if mocking her sudden eloquence. “Do you ever feel that, Yannis?”

Yannis sighed and stroked Anastasia’s arm in gratitude.

“Yes. When the work goes badly I often think of my friends from the seminary. Nikolaos is now in a prestigious monastery on Mount Athos. Theophanis has written a book praised for its insights on Saints Cyril and Methodius. Both have achieved the grade of Stavrophore, unlike me. I’m Sisyphus – a joke, a half-believer, a puppet, a squashed tomato – an apology for a man.”

“You’re anything but.”

“Thank you. Sometimes what I see in the mirror is a fraud, a theatrical device to disguise the deformity inside me. Sometimes I sit for hours and wait for this feeling to pass. Sometimes I cope by imagining I’m someone else. I put on my robes like an actor preparing for an entrance. But the eyes are somehow empty.”

Anastasia took his hand and squeezed it.

She said, “Do you ever wish, when you feel that emptiness, that an angel would descend while your soul is absent, take over your body, and make everything right? Sometimes I imagine the angel’s wary eye on me and think, ‘If I’m so empty, how have I deserved all this space around to fill with singing, the smell of frying onions, the tiny squeak as the needle goes through fabric?’”

“Or the loud squeal of nails pulled through timber,” Yannis added.

They both laughed. Yes, it was peaceful, all passion spent. Or was it?

“The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be.” And so it proved.

The Monk

Pouring coffee, Yannis turned from the stove and stumbled over something. A dog under a filthy blanket? It moved feebly. Yannis pulled off the blanket. A dog with a man’s head? A monster sent by the devil?

He forced himself to look and saw a man the size of a child, head too big for his body, bald apart from a few wisps of white hair which also sprouted from his chin reminding Yannis of a rotting peach with a halo of white fungus. Only the belt round a long garment full of moth holes, covered in grease stains, betrayed its origin as a monk’s robe.

The apparition turned its head to look up, like a mummy, skull covered in parchment, but the eyes seemed not to belong – dark brown, shining, fervent as if penetrating through the wooden ceiling, roof tiles, and mist, to gaze on the angels around the Throne.

Yannis said, “Who in the name of all the saints are you?”

With a horrid grin the creature croaked, “Ah, your question implies Fotis has an identity. For some time now he did forget.”

 “And?”

The creature tried to heave itself upright against a cabinet but gave up in a fit of agonising coughs.

“I am Brother Fotis. Of lower status than you, and closer—” He coughed again and drew long shuddering breaths, “to death.”

“No. I can look after you.”

“The Last Rites—” cough cough “—are all I want from you.”

Yannis carried him to a cell, appalled by the withering man’s lightness. He found him a palliasse, a blanket, and pillows, and then made porridge, which Yannis spooned into the slack mouth of the elder monk.

“How long here, Brother?” he asked.

“Many more years than you,” Fotis croaked.

“All that time? Where?”

“That cabinet has a loose back panel giving onto a small store room. Smile, Little Father! Be pleased to hear of an undiscovered realm! Fotis calls the store room Alexander Selkirk Island, off South America, of course.” He grinned.

Yannis scowled. “How do you know I call the kitchen South America?”

“From Yannis’s diary.”

“You read my diary!”

“Boring when not agonising. ‘God will never let me fail.’  ‘What says Ecclesiastes?’ ‘Do I label floors thus, or thus?’ ‘Ah, the warmth of Anastasia’s body!’”

 Yannis turned hot with shame. “Did you see us?”

“Saw and heard. Worry not, your filthy secret is safe with Fotis.”

The ancient monk laughed and had another coughing fit. Yannis ground his teeth, until compassion triumphed over anger and he brought him a jug of water.

“So why are you here, Brother?”

“Sequestered for similar doubts to your own, Father. See? We’re alike.” He looked down at his runt of a body, then up at Yannis’s well-fleshed one, and leered. “Who sent me? Father Nicholas.”

“The Archimandrite before Father Dimitris. Did Father Dimitris know you were here?”

He laughed. “Clearly not. Food deliveries stopped.”

Yannis remembered a visit from Nicholas at the seminary. Massively overweight, throwing heart pills into his mouth, spraying some fluid down his throat. He must have died suddenly without reporting Fotis’s existence.

“But what did you live on, Brother, before you were able to rob my larder?”

“Tinned food galore in a trunk buried in the grounds, no doubt hoarded in case of an invasion. Though I doubt whether tin cans were around in his day.” He laughed and blood trickled from his nose and ears. Yannis wiped it away as tenderly as he could. Fotis was suddenly asleep. Yannis checked his pulse and left him.

Read the rest: Part 4, & Part 5.

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