The dark village secret

Dark Winter Night at the Village, With the Aunt

An aunt only by marriage. A taboo all the same.

February 1986. The village was hollowed out. No tourists. No vacationers from Athens. No young people. The old, tired, and broken were the inhabitants. The Peloponnese, dank, cold, wet – the iced winds off the Gulf of Kyparissia.

I’d arrived from Australia without cash in mid-January. The ‘plan’ was to base myself in Greece, find work on an island for the summer, get laid, take drugs, and cruise Europe. I was 24, with a BA from a mid-ranking university in Adelaide, a mid-ranking city.

The cold had lodged into my spine, and a week of constant rain made me feel slimy. Wet and cold. The streets, sort of, now mud-creeks.

Alone, eight days in my uncle’s vacation house, waiting for my grandmother to die. She lay in a decayed hospital in neighbouring Krestena – built in the 1960s and left largely uncared for, like the patients.

Waiting for her to die

The house was built on land left to my grandmother’s sister, whose death preceded her husband’s. He then sold the old village house to my uncle. I remembered it from 1967 to 1971, as a kid coming from Athens on summer vacations and Easters. It had no electricity, no indoor loo back then. Now it was a villa: two separate apartments, all modern appliances.

The village in winter was boring. So, I went daily to watch my grandmother die. She’d stare at me, gasping like a fish out of water, through a dirty oxygen mask.

It was Thursday when my uncle arrived again, with my grandfather, around 7pm. His wife, my aunt Anna, drove in around 8pm, on her own.

My grandfather had shrunk – his suit draped on him like someone else’s, his shoes like boats. He was shrinking toward death. His wife of sixty years lay dying in a third-world regional hospital. My friends in Athens were hanging out in punk and jazz bars in Exarhia, chasing heroin, the best of it out of Afghanistan through Turkey. Hash from Lebanon. A three-thousand-year-old trade. And I was here, in the fucking village, waiting for my grandmother to die. At least I had enough gear to get stoned every day.

We all sat around her hospital bed, my grandfather moaning in a slow, cyclical drone.

“Let’s go home, Niko,” Aunt Anna said. “Your uncle and grandfather can stay.”

We got into her car and lit cigarettes.

“They linger, don’t they,” she said.

My uncle had married late. No kids of his own. Anna had a daughter from a previous marriage, now in her thirties, married with two kids.

Uncle Pete had built a new two-storey summer villa. His mother was dying; soon his father would too. And I, his brother’s son from Australia, had unsettled Aunt Anna, who’d already prised my uncle away from most of his extended family. She couldn’t do that to me, the son of my uncle’s brother. We were too far away for it to matter.

My aunt was bad at pretending, nice enough, with a poorly hidden desire for me to leave sooner than I intended. She pretended to like me; the harder she tried, the less convincing she was. Peter, my uncle, was ‘one of the best salesmen in Greece for his time’ as they all said. A rep for Greek children’s clothing manufacturers and our family business, three generations. Money passed through; fuck-all stayed. He and his wife squandered plenty on gambling and affairs.

Uncle Peter, in his mid-fifties, was puffy, with a paunch. He’d slid into middle-class alcoholism. The renovated village house, a one-bedroom apartment in Athens, an ageing BMW, and $40,000 in black money – the salvage of forty years of work.

Faded glamour, cigarettes and Dallas

Anna and my uncle met in 1970 at the Patras Carnival and married in 1978. She was a one-time cabaret singer and carried yellowing newspaper clippings and black-and-white photos with her. In one, she was singing for Nikita Khrushchev; in another, for Gamal Abdel Nasser.

“I was an angel, a flower, a child, only twenty,” she said.

She showed me a photo of herself and Jayne Mansfield at a nightclub in Athens. At times she’d play her one recording, a single, or a videotape of her only screen appearance, in a 1957 black-and-white Greek film.

Anna had married Nestor Kalas, a modernist painter who’d peaked in the late 1960s – thirty years her senior. He still hung around, good for loans, and the father of her daughter, Dalia. Another five or so men, between forty-five and seventy, made up my aunt’s entourage.

Dalia had been married off at eighteen to an architect twenty years her senior and had a boy and a girl my aunt was obsessed with. The village house, in her mind, belonged to those grandkids.

We got to the house, hung our coats, and went upstairs. She brewed coffee and we sat by the fireplace while she slotted a tape into the VHS.

“I am sick of this – the hospital, your whining grandfather, your uncle who never stops talking. I haven’t seen Dallas for a week. Lucky my neighbour Maria taped the episodes I missed.”

She lit a cigarette. Rain began to dance on the windows, and the wind howled like death’s breath.

“JR, you’re amalaka,” she shouted at the TV. The fire cast a shadow across her face.

Dallas ended. She stood, yawned, and left for bed.

“Don’t stay up late. If your grandmother dies overnight, there’ll be a lot to organise.”

I lit a joint and put on the late news. Russians in hazchem suits, South African police shooting miners, a Billy Joel concert somewhere. I poured a whisky from my uncle’s bottles.

“Niko, come,” she called from the bedroom, “have a last cigarette, I can’t sleep.”

Fuck me, I thought. “Sure,” I said. I went in and sat directly opposite her, on a single bed parallel to her double. She lay on her side, head propped on her palm, elbow dug into the mattress.

A large breast slips out

Her left breast, large and wide, had almost spread completely out of her baby-blue nightie onto the mattress. When she leaned over to ash her cigarette, it threatened to roll out entirely. I tried not to look. It was impossible.

“Nestor was old,” she said. “They married me off as a child, but we had a good life, and we’re still friends.

“I sang in London, Alexandria, Moscow, Rome,” she said, flicking her cigarette.

“I met your uncle in 1971, in my thirties. I ran a cava, my singing was over. We smoked hashish, ate at the best restaurants, danced, went to the casinos. We played with ‘good people,’ not peasants.

“It was another time. Greece was different then, not like now – junkies and anarchists everywhere.” She reached over and stubbed out her cigarette.

I followed suit and stood to leave.

“Have you smoked hashish?” she asked.

I, an idiot, said “Yes,” and offered to roll a joint.

“Fuck it, why not. It’ll take my mind off the shit in my life. It’s been over twenty-five years since I had one. Why not?”

I had the Thai Buddha I’d carried up my arsehole all the way from Singapore.

As she coughed, her large, matronly breasts quivered.

Both of us stoned. Very. A bad idea, on every level.

“Your uncle looked like Jean-Paul Belmondo when I met him,” she said.

Her stories wound through boîtes, sunglasses, embroidered shirts, knee-high leather boots, and midi skirts.

“In 1972 – no, ’73 – Sicily... no, Naples... anyway, we had dinner with Alain Delon, who was shooting a film there. We were staying at the same hotel.

“Delon wanted me. He couldn’t keep his eyes off me and made a pass when your uncle stepped away from the table, but I was in love with your uncle then.”

Her fingers traced over her nipple, outside the nightgown.

Then, to my extreme discomfort and complete surprise, she exposed her breast.

“Not bad,” she said. “For a woman my age, they’re good, no?”

“Sure…” I said, gazing at it despite myself.

She took my hand and guided it there.

“Play with it. Lick it,” she said.

My tongue rolled around her nipple, saliva pooling over it.

Just between us

Aunty Anna pulled away. A strange interlude, the kind meant to stay behind closed doors. I was about to leave, meaning to finish myself off in private.

Instead, she leaned back, lifted her nightgown, and spread her legs. Her tummy, her dark, moist cunt, exposed.

“Look,” she said, sliding two fingers in, then three, gently prising open her vulva.

“Light me a cigarette while I touch myself, and you do the same. Don’t be embarrassed. This is stress release – between us.”

I did as I was told, pulled out my hard cock, and started stroking. Unable to hold back, I came all over her legs, belly, the mattress, even reaching the breasts flopped to either side of her.

Then an alien invasion: the bedside phone shattered the clammy sounds of masturbation and moans.

Death interrupts

My aunty picked up the receiver.

“When?” She put it down.

“Even in death, she fucks it up for me.” Aunt Anna was pissed off.

We dressed and waited for my uncle and grandfather, as though nothing had happened.

An hour later –

“They’re here,” she said. A coffin was tied to Uncle Peter’s car roof rack.

“Niko, help me take this off.”

We carried the coffin down; the lid slid, and my grandmother’s head tilted toward me. I jumped – her jaw was bandaged to her head.

We set it up for the vigil downstairs. Old people shuffled in and sat around the coffin as candles flickered and a priest prayed.

Upstairs:

“We have a lot of preparations for the funeral,” said my aunt.

Uncle Peter poured two whiskies, which we drank to my dead grandmother.

“She suffered. It’s better this way,” he said – relieved, sad, and worn.

In 2000, I revisited Athens, at forty. Aunty Anna was now in her mid-seventies, tormented by Alzheimer’s – emaciated and confused. Struggling to remember my name, she showed me the same yellowed newspaper clippings again, kept in her bag, which she held tight.

Aunt Anna died a year later.