The Nature of Work, Part 2

Read Part 1 before starting this new adventure into a 5-part historical fiction work.

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The Widow

Perhaps forty, a woman dressed in the dead black of widowhood, dark curly hair tied behind in a fillet like a classical dancer, she appeared and smelt of sweat, no doubt from the climb, but also perfumed soap. The mule was tethered to the usual tree.

“Where’s Spiridon?”

“Gone, Father.”

The rich timbre of her voice unnerved him. “When is he back?”

“Never.”

“Dead?”

“As good as. The army took him. I’m his aunt.”

She heaved the bag of provisions onto the step. Yannis slid it further in.

“Daughter,” he said sternly, “it is not fitting you come here. Please send another nephew if you have one.”

The hint of a smile played around her lips. 

“You prefer boys,” she said. And seeing his startled look: “As messengers.”

“Indeed.”

Apart from the rustle of bougainvillaea leaves and the repetitive song of a mistle thrush, a thick silence descended.

Yannis said, “However, you must convey my order for tools. Hammer, crowbar, and bolster. You know what a bolster is?”

 “A kind of pillow. Is your bed not comfortable, Father?”

 “It is not a kind of pillow. In this case, it is a kind of cold chisel.”

 “I understand. Hammer, crowbar, bolster.”

Yannis felt suddenly hot, though the mist was chilly. Was it the way she spoke the words? Was his task now dauntingly real? The woman seemed to read his mind.

“Whatever work you’re planning, Father, I don’t think you’re used to it. At first it’ll seem awkward. You’ll have to keep nagging yourself. But one day it’ll seem natural.” The tips of her ears turned pink. “Sorry, I should know my place.” 

“Your words are welcome.”

Which he regretted saying because she added, “Patience is by far the main thing. But I suppose they taught you that in seminary.”

Yannis smiled thinly. “Your name, my daughter?”

“Anastasia. Goodbye, and God bless, Father.” 

She bowed and walked away, repeating, “Hammer, crowbar, bolster; hammer, crowbar, bolster…” as if reciting a psalm.

The Dust (III)

Yannis’s dreams were often full of people, sometimes on pilgrimage to unknown destinations to which the party were trying to agree, sometimes being rescued by him from fire or wolves, carried on his shoulders as he waded through muddy pools.

One night he dreamt that he roamed the corridors in darkness and found an ancient monk lying on a mattress in an alcove lit from above. There was no visible source of light and Yannis saw that the monk smiled showing uneven teeth. The old monk raised a withered hand in blessing, his watery eyes twinkling.

Waking, Yannis longed to be back in those purposeful dream settings when the sense of them faded.

He had to face the day in tiny stages like Achilles and the tortoise, pushing pack the covers, opening one eye then the other, twisting to bring his ankles over the hard edge of the bed then sit upright to place his feet in contact with the floor which, even in summer, was cold, but being wooden at least slowly drank the heat from his body.

At least through the shutters he could hear the cheerful sounds of birds and could smell the cypresses in the courtyard and anticipate making coffee and think that a man with all these things must be happy. Must indeed be happy.

The Soldier

“Good coffee, Father,” he said.

“Good. Thank you, my son, for the tools.”

The tools lay on the refectory table. A crowbar, the straight part wrapped in brown paper, the curved part naked, black like a raven’s beak. If it had turned to a snake, like Aaron’s rod, it would hardly be more magical. Beside it another work of art: an elegant bolster in red painted steel.

“Honoured to help, Father.”

He looked from Yannis to the tools with raised eyebrows, as if expecting to be told what they were for, but Yannis sat in silence. The task was secret. 

“Sorry if my arrival shocked you,” the soldier added.

Yannis smiled. “Tall, black moustache, uncompromising stance. I thought a Janissary had come to ransack the library.”

The soldier scowled and twisted his lips in a sneer.

“Were you in the Smyrna landings?” Father Yannis

“I was.”

“You must have seen terrible things.”

The soldier shrugged.

“The massacre at Izmit made a deep impression on me,” Yannis noted.

The soldier drew himself up, as if to attention, and said in a quiet confident voice: “We avenged every Greek the Turks killed. When we packed them into their mosque, they thought Allah would send rain to quench the fire.” He smiled. “Do you think he did?”

His uniform was very neat. Yannis tried to imagine it covered in blood and smoke. 

The soldier took his leave.

“Tell your cousin, Anastasia, that Father Yannis sends his blessing. No, wait, I’m not authorised to bless. Tell her – his affection.”

“I will.”

Admiring the tools while back at the refectory table, Yannis had a sudden vision of the burning mosque. The soldier’s tone of voice had made it sound so reasonable. Now Yannis felt as though a shroud of ice, not fire, had wrapped around him.

The Sacrifice

Yannis’s first attempt on the floorboards was a frustrating failure. He tried hammering the bolster between the long edges, then when that was unsuccessful, he worked between where the boards joined end to end. The oak was unbelievably solid. He tried to convince himself this was good — the builders had glorified God by making the monastery as sound as possible.

No use. He found himself hitting wildly, in danger of smashing his fingers, shouting obscenities, then becoming even more distressed when the boards began to split at the edges. Even with the bolster — pictured as a slim red woman in a wide skirt — hammered in as far as her waist, no amount of leverage on her head would raise the timber.

Remembering what his grandfather taught, and to apply what he learned at school in physics to real life, he hammered in the straight end of the crowbar for more leverage. But because he had nothing to act as a solid fulcrum, he simply crushed the edge of the adjoining plank.

He rested in the exhaustion of despair. Coffee or prayer? Discipline, Yannis! To paraphrase the muezzin: prayer is better than coffee.

Before the ikonostasis, he had a mini-revelation. Jesus was sacrificed to save everyone from hell. This was seen as holy, not unfortunate. So one plank could be sacrificed — destroyed completely — to save him, Yannis, from the hell of hopeless work.

Having shattered one plank to create a gap, he could attack the underbelly of the next, and any damage from bolster or crowbar would be on its underside. As some divines preserve what they claim is a fragment of the True Cross, Yannis kept by his bedside a splinter from that first sacrificial timber.

The Robe

Yannis found that physical work does indeed send a chemical to the brain creating contentment. Clever of God to arrange, though not outweighing his murderous attributes.

The main irritants were (1) Yannis’s robe which tightened against his knees when kneeling, and (2) his pectoral cross which swung forward when he bent. After a light lunch of hummus and horiatiki salad, he went to the Katholikon, said a prayer of contrition, and divested himself of those holy symbols. His hat he had already abandoned.

If a pilgrim arrived unexpectedly, they would be shocked to see a tall, wiry-bearded man in a string vest, striped boxer shorts, homemade knee pads, and increasingly battered sandals, his face shiny with perspiration.

Each Thursday morning, Yannis rose early, showered, and put on his robe and hat to greet Anastasia who had still found no male replacement. Then, when she left, he enjoyed the freedom of deshabille, on warm days even without his vest.

When he took a break and sat in the courtyard, he enjoyed the blessing of the sun on his bare skin, not suspecting that this sensual pleasure might weaken his vows. But he had told himself to live one hour at a time. The future was a blank.

The Naming

One day, daunted by seemingly endless expanses of floor, Yannis colonised his world with names, as did Adam in Eden. He called the lavatories Athens in revenge for the capital’s hard buildings and echoing streets and the row of high-level cisterns the Acropolis, so now he could clean Athens like some Heracles.

The cell wing was dubbed Oceania, his own cell Tahiti, which gave him a sensation (from a novel left by some pilgrim) of lush rotting vegetation, sadness, and social decay. This suited him so much that his bedding went unwashed for months and the smell became familiar and reminded him that he was an animal.

The other cells were remote islands rarely visited, identical but for the end one whose damaged casement faced north instead of east letting in a fan of dried leaves. It contained an ikon of Saint Panteleimon which looked like a moai statue, so this cell Yannis named Easter Island.

The refectory and kitchen were the Americas. Yannis set out to massacre the hordes of mice and cockroaches. (He had noticed food disappearing from the larder, including tins, which surprised him.)

The deep well in the kitchen under its round wooden cover was the Atacama Trench. The chilly Gatehouse was Antarctica, the Katholikon, obviously Palestine, the library Egypt in homage to Alexandria, and the guesthouse, imbued with the hard-to-imagine lives of pilgrims, was dubbed mysterious Asia Minor.

The Horror

To Yannis, history had always meant punishment. Not just because the past was full of burnings and beheadings (and he knew the present was no better), but because of Mr. Papamikhail and his cane. To fail a history test was to watch as he opened the glass-fronted cupboard where he kept his instrument.

Yannis had to support the right hand with the left and wait for the swish of air and the sting. But now, history was no longer a word; it was the scent of earth exposed after centuries, a mixture of dung, spices, fresh air, and rotting leaves.

Rammed earth like the floor of his grandmother’s cottage, but, unlike hers, the base for a series of oak runners, roughly trimmed to a rectangular cross-section and laid at intervals to support the planks nailed down to them. The gap between boards and earth excited him. This was where the document would be.

But picturing old Father Apostolis coming to sack his domain, Yannis had a sudden disturbing thought.

If Apostolis ordered his monks to lift a floorboard there would be signs of damage, especially as they would be panicky.

No sign of damage was visible on any floor in the monastery unless hidden under a kitchen cabinet, bookcase, or chest, which meant he now had to abandon his hard-won routine to perform the backbreaking work of moving heavy items.

And, in the Library, there was no doubt that he would be sidetracked by some volume whose spine had not appealed but whose exposed body might. All with no certainty that his labour would not be in vain.

He sat in the courtyard hoping the sun’s rays would calm him by bringing his attention to his body, but, on the contrary, Yannis was further disturbed by realising he had no sense of the true character of Father Giorgos. He reminded Yannis of the Evviote peasant who sold his father the disastrous smallholding. Father Giorgos seemed too coarse and worldly for an archimandrite.

Yannis even recalled how the stress of the interview had prevented him registering that one of Giorgios’s upper incisors was broken and his nose was pitted.

Perhaps when the Archimandrite claimed his predecessor, Father Dimitris, had retired, he had, in fact, murdered him. Perhaps this search for a manuscript of spiritual revelations was really for hidden gold or silver, which the impostor would seize, once found, and leave him dead.

Yannis made coffee and tried not to let the little aluminium pan amplify the tremor in his hand. But he found the feel of the wooden handle oddly soothing and the thought of who had fashioned it. This break in his speculations led along a different track: If on investigation he found no damage, it could mean the document was placed as the floor was laid.

Instead, it was likely to be found in the oldest parts of the monastery, and perhaps in parts still under construction at the time.

Yannis suddenly laughed, reassured by the coffee. He accepted this break from routine and could now decide whether to start moving cupboards, etcetera, or resume the usual work, concentrating on Asia Minor and Easter Island.

Yannis thought of those who laid the floors. In the dead silence of the monastery, the only sounds were the plaints of rooks like the voices of ancient masons.

“Yes, Yannis, look at our work. Generations of you monks took it for granted. Always the way with hidden labour, eh? We sweated in summer heat and shivered in icy mist, sawing, shaping, digging, and barrowing, proud of our skill (unlike you). Afterwards, if we were not too tired, we could go home for sex with our wives (unlike you).They looked like Anastasia.”

A twinge in his loins disturbed him. Impatiently he emptied the coffee dregs into the compost bucket and, with flexed muscles, strode purposefully in the manner of Father Giorgios towards the nearest cabinet and heaved it from the wall.

Read Part 3, Part 4, & Part 5

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