Lunch With Menelaus

A few years back Jennifer Barclay, my good friend, trusted editor and dauntless companion in outlandish adventures in the Greek countryside, suggested Lunch with Menelaus as the title of a book I might consider writing. Like all my great works, this volume remains to be completed. Research, however, continues apace with new experiences, of varying shades of colour, added every time I step foot on the island of Tilos, which was once my home and now serves as a much-loved and endlessly diverting staging post on my ceaseless peregrinations around southern Europe.

My latest adventure with the eponymous hero of our projected tale began on a mild Wednesday night in early October. Hot on the heels of a demanding slog around the wild and featureless stretch of coast between the monastery of Agios Panteleimon and Eristos Beach, I had arrived at ‘The Kastro’ taverna in Megalo Horio intending to meet some friends, only to find that my friends were nowhere to be seen. As I fruitlessly scanned the tables – most of which were unoccupied – my attention was caught by a person frantically waving from the rear of the terrace located outside the taverna doors. Turning my gaze in that direction I immediately beheld a familiar figure – portly, dressed in jeans and a thin cotton shirt, with a characterful, deeply tanned face bisected by a devious grin and topped by a mop of unruly hair which the sun had bleached to an eerie shade of yellowy-white. Scattered across the tabletop in front of the figure were a handful of empty green bottles, which in my experience spelt trouble.

Not sure what to expect I made my way over, passing several tables of locals with whom I exchanged cheerful greetings.

‘Katse, re,’ said Menelaus as I came up. Sit down.

I did as he suggested and soon managed to secure a beer. After my epic walk, it was just what the doctor ordered and, as I glugged it down, I began to relax. Menelaus, meanwhile, and as per usual, bombarded me with questions. Where had I been? What was I doing at Kastro? Where was Jennifer? And Lisa? Keen to be amenable, I tried to answer as honestly as I could.

Soon Menelaus’s status in the Skafi Valley came up. I’d asked him how he’d got his name, which despite its august overtones was rather unusual in this corner of the Aegean. He’d told me the story years ago but, typically, I’d forgotten all about the policeman from the Mani who’d been stationed on Tilos in the late-1940s and, at the bidding of Menelaus’s father, had become the boy’s nonos, or godfather. Well, I assumed it was at the father’s request, but truth be told Menelaus wouldn’t tell me. Not now, not here, he seemed to say, glancing at the table beside ours where old Pandelis and Nikitas were downing glasses of ouzo, as if there were a major secret involved.

‘I’m there every day,’ Menelaus said suddenly.

‘Where?’

‘Skafi, re.’

‘Oreia,’ I said. Beautiful. It was as good as an invitation, all that remained being to establish a date.

We settled on the following Saturday. Menelaus said he was going to prepare sikoti, liver, in my honour, which needless to say had me champing at the bit. My enthusiasm increased further when he added that he also had some very good wine, a blend, he elaborated with a grin, of red and white.

The weather changed on Friday with a wind blowing up out of the south and a brief fall of raindrops peppering the garden late that night. By Saturday the sky had cleared and conditions were once again hot, although clouds lingered around the mountaintops and overnight the light appeared to have changed, with the vivid blaze of late summer having given way to a soft autumnal glow that bathed the parched brown fields and mountainsides in a mellow golden radiance. My boot soles raised clouds of white dust as I tramped up the path to the village; here I stopped at the supermarket and, just to be on the safe side, bought one of those plastic water bottles full of cheap red wine. Then it was off to Skafi, the way leading through walled fields overlooked by brooding mountains and filled with desiccated yellow thistles and an assortment of other equally wiry plants burned to a faded palette of golds and greys and khakis and russets. Turpentine trees dropped sheaves of newly burnished leaves over blue patches of shadow and goats roamed forlornly. A rich cache of aromas, distilled from the countryside by months of unrelenting sunshine, wafted on the warm air.

Just past the head of the valley, within view of the distant beach and, beyond, across a twenty-kilometre strait of the purest ultramarine sea, the blue-tinted cordilleras of the Turkish coast, I reached my friend’s enclosure. This consisted of a handful of dusty fields enclosed by rusty wire strung from wobbly metal posts and secured by a high steel gate that, except for its down at heel condition, would not have been out of place in a military compound. It took me almost five minutes to pass through this structure, after which I was required to negotiate a star chamber of smaller enclosures built of timber palettes, each containing a number of goats.

Standing in a field scattered with enormous ribbed orange melons, dribbling water from a hosepipe, Menelaus shouted directions. When at last I’d made it through the final gate and, passing an enormous chicken coop inhabited by a vast brood of clucking, stuttering, twittering and raggedly befeathered creatures, came to where he stood, I asked him what he was afraid of.

‘I’m not afraid,’ he replied. ‘The fences are to keep the goats in, not bad people out.’ Then he said, ‘You’re late,’ which is what he always says, because I invariably am.

Turning off the hose he led me into his apothiki, a rough and ready concrete shed tucked away under a ledge of rust-red rock shaded by a capacious turpentine tree. The place had been cleaned up since I’d last seen it and given a fresh coat of whitewash; the smell of new paint hung faintly on the air. Georgic implements in various states of repair hung from hooks in the walls. Battered wooden shelves contained an esoteric collection of stained coffee cups, tarnished glassware and other odds and ends. I sat, as I always did, on a single bed facing an old formica-topped table, it’s surface cluttered with jars of pickled things, tins of food and bottles of questionable-looking liquids. Prominent among the latter was a large plastic container full of cloudy wine, which Menelaus proudly declared to be his own blend of red and white. He’d bought a bottle of each at the supermarket, he said, and mixed them together. I didn’t bother to ask what mad impulse had prompted this course of action (which actually isn’t that unusual among Greek wine makers).

Instead I watched with interest as, in his simple, unhurried way, Menelaus assembled our meal. First he deftly sliced tomatoes, onions and cucumber into a chipped enamel bowl. To this he added a handful of shrivelled black olives before liberally dusting his creation with salt and dousing it with half a week’s ration of olive oil. The oil was rather more yellow in hue than I would have liked. But before I could become too bothered about this my host removed a container from a blue plastic shopping bag and, popping the lid, displayed for my admiration the main course for the day: an impressively large collection of dark, leathery bits of animal that I didn’t need to be told was liver, presumably harvested from several of Menelaus’s own unfortunate goats that had been slaughtered, at an unknown date, less than five metres from where we sat. Scattered among the liver were a number of small, desiccated morsels that, after some scrutiny, I eventually identified as kidneys.

I can’t say that my mouth exactly began to water at the sight. I can eat liver, but in my experience a little of it goes a long, long way and here before me on the table was a sufficient amount, to my way of thinking, for a year’s worth of meals (each, ideally, spaced at intervals of several months). Menelaus, clearly, took my astounded silence for approval because his weathered and magnificently hewn face lit up with its trademark grin as he said, with unabashed enthusiasm, ‘Kalo, eh?’ Good, in other words. The best I could manage in reply to this was a weak nod of agreement accompanied by a murmured, ‘Nai, oreia.’ Yes, beautiful.

It was at this point, requiring support, that I reached for the bottle of wine I’d bought. Menelaus’s bushy grey eyebrows went up at my obvious rejection of the house cuvee. However, when I motioned the bottle in his direction he didn’t deign to refuse, grudgingly holding out a battered-looking teacup that may well have pre-dated the Greek War of Independence, the interior of which was ominously stained with the detritus of several lifetimes of brews. For my own use I was provided with a dusty wine glass in the shape of an old-fashioned goblet, salvaged from god alone knew where, that I hastily and shamelessly filled to the brim. I won’t claim that my hand actually shook. It didn’t. But I was nonetheless heartily glad of that wine. We each picked up our receptacles and, knocking them together as our eyes met with a suitably meaningful look, voiced a perfunctory ‘Yeia mas,’ To our health, before laying siege to the drink.

The wine was poor but it gave me the injection of courage I needed to deal with the liver. Of this much lauded commodity I transferred a modest amount to my plate, not forgetting to add, at my host’s insistence, a couple of shrivelled kidneys. In addition I took plenty of salad, hoping, I think, to establish some kind of culinary détente; while across the table Menelaus erected upon his plate a small mountain of liver and kidneys over which he glowered much, I imagine, as Polyphemus once did over his victims in his celebrated cave.

Yet before going any further, my host remembered that he’d forgotten the bread and, leaping to his feet, he took from a plastic bag hanging from a rafter a three-day-old loaf. Originating from the bakery in Livadia, specimens like this were stale the moment they left the oven. Subsequently Menelaus liked to hold onto them for a while to further enhance their granite-like properties. Using a large knife and not without considerable effort he sawed from the loaf a number of doorstop-sized pieces, which he casually deposited onto the tabletop between us. Each piece, I noted, landed on the stained formica with a resounding thud.

Once all was in readiness, things became quite festive. The icons of saints Michael and Ekaterini looked benevolently down on us from the wall above the table. In the yard the demented clucking of hens was augmented, the moment we started eating, by the piteous whining of a female cat and her quartet of hungry kittens who had arrayed themselves upon the step outside the door. Accompanied by this fanfare we ate in a companionable silence broken only by Menelaus slurping his wine or volubly masticating a particularly tasty piece of liver. Now and then in order to be sociable I reached across the table with my glass and tapped it against my host’s stained and battered cup. ‘Yeia mas, Yianni mou,’ Menelaus invariably replied, raising his head momentarily to gulp from the cup before returning to the single-minded demolition of his meal.

I dealt with my food rather more circumspectly. Needless to say this was looked on with disfavour. Menelaus was also unimpressed when I refused a second helping, saying, ‘Fai, re!’ while thrusting the container, still half full of goat bits, underneath my nose. Eat! I replied that I had eaten and was now ‘yemato’, ‘full’, whereupon Menelaus returned the container to the table in disgust and said I should eat some bread.

‘I don’t eat bread,’ I said, refilling my glass. 

‘You don’t eat bread?,’ Menelaus said, clearly exasperated, as if now he’d heard everything. ‘Why not?’

‘Why not? Because I don’t.’

‘Bah!’ he said.

It was the final word.