The Pleasure Seekers Read Free Page B

morning sight in the village: large roasting tins filled with lumps of lamb surround by what seemed like a peck of potatoes, or huge round tins of stuffed peppers,moussaka, a pastichio, or anything else that needed an oven, being run down the steep steps from all over the village by little boys, mothers or grandmothers to the baker’s oven to be cooked in time for the midday meal.
    There was another grocer’s shop, smaller, which carried the foodstuffs Mr Katzakis did not; they had an understanding. A barber’s shop boasted one chair for cutting, three for waiting, and sold newspapers and Aspirin, shampoo and hair gel and spray, male and female unmentionables, and had the only pay telephone in the village. The barber was also the mayor. His was a minute shop squashed between one of the two best tavernas in the village, the Kavouria, and the carpenter and local boat builder’s shop. Next to that was the greengrocer who only opened when he had something to sell, and above him was the police station run by Manoussos Stavrolakis and his assistant. The other restaurant was not on the port but just off it in a tiered garden overlooking the sea. Three small coffee shops where nothing but coffee, ouzo or Retsina was served and backgammon and dominoes were played on wobbly old wooden tables completed the commercial life of the old port. You drank wine in the tavernas and brought your own bottle of spirits with you if that was your tipple.
    The largest of the three churches in the village was several houses behind Mr Katzakis’s and boasted a very pretty bell tower containing six bells that rang all at the same time. A stone and white-washed plaster palace for God and the village and all the surrounding villages too poor to have a church of their own, it boasted magnificent icons that drew connoisseurs from all over the world, goldand silver altar pieces, as well as a great many silver votives and candlesticks of considerable weight and size to hold the tall fat beeswax candles. There was also a priest, a powerfully influential man in the community and on the island, big and black-robed and heavily bearded. Everyone respected him, including two visiting monks from Mount Athos who appeared to be studying with him on a rather indefinite basis. They floated in their flowing black robes and crosses through the village, sat in the port at the coffee houses – inside in bad weather, out in good – dined in the tavernas on occasion and enjoyed the company of the foreigners in residence, altogether very much a part of the life of Livakia.
    The other two churches were small, modest and white, typical Greek Island churches with domed roofs. Twenty people would have packed them. They were dots on the landscape, hanging in precarious places high up on the cliffs above Livakia. There were breathtaking climbs to them, spectacular views from them. Someone made those climbs every sunrise and every sunset to ring each church’s single bell, and at different times of the day if the church had been opened by a believer there to pray, or mourn for a lost one, or merely to look at the frescoes and place fresh flowers below the painted and gilded portrait of a saint. The Cretans loved their saints. Thousands of such small churches, some very poor, others mini-Byzantine museums, studded the island. Byzantium had flourished there and was respected still, if not by all. Much too often thieves robbed such remote churches for Western dealers and art collectors.
    The sound of the church bells of Livakia was one of thejoys of living there. It had a special ethereal quality about it that had to do with the acoustics, the topography of the place. There was something unworldly, almost mythic, about the sound of those bells and the way it echoed over the village, resounded off the cliffs. Also the sound of the sea and the wind in Livakia had a deep and spiritual quality, as dramatic and eerie as the sound of the bells.
    There were no hotels. There were however