Greece, A Love Story

As the sky lightened, the ferry's other passengers began to stir, stretching and shuffling to the windows to squint at the fog. I realized I was the only tourist and the only woman on the boat. The others were old men in dark suits and caps, or young men in T-shirts and jeans. I smiled at an old man whose face seemed kind, but he grimaced and dropped his head, studying his feet. A moment later, the fog parted and our ferry stopped. We filed down a narrow ramp onto an empty stone pier. There were no buildings or cars or people to greet us, just the sounds of waves slapping against stone and a cranky gull squawking from a nearby rock. I followed the others along a road that zigzagged up the side of a dark cliff.

When I reached the top, my lungs heaving, the men had disappeared. I found myself alone, leaning against a low stone wall, looking at the kind of view that is so unexpected and wondrous that your mind takes a picture and stores it forever. On the other side of the wall, the cliff plunged hundreds of feet, disappearing into the sea, a glittering expanse of pink and violet that stretched to the horizon. To the left, perched like a dare at the cliff's edge, a jumble of buildings huddled together, shaped like children's blocks and white as clean teeth. I felt dizzy from a mixture of joy and vertigo.

"Dhomatio?" A woman waved to me from across the road. She looked like someone from a fairytale: the archetypal old-world matron, stout, square, and hunched, as if everything vital had been drained out of her. A shapeless black dress hung down to her ankles. "Dhomatio?" she repeated, waving me to come closer. This Greek granny couldn't mean any harm, I figured. As I walked toward her, I saw that she was rather young—barely forty. "Ella do, ella do" (This way, this way), she said, pointing toward town.

I nodded and followed her home to a plain, white cube attached to the side of a larger building that I figured was her family's house. She handed me a key and left. My little room was as plain and white inside as it was outside, with a door that opened to a tiny alley, rough wooden shutters for windows, and a cross hanging over the bed. Eager to explore my "slice of old Greece," I left and crept shyly around the town, enchanted by the white stucco buildings with bright blue shutters, the pink oleander that climbed walls and spilled over rooftops, and the streets, snaking haphazardly between the buildings, paved in large, smooth stones and designed far too narrow for even the tiniest car. I walked from one end of town to the other in less than five minutes, meeting six filthy cats, a boy leading a donkey, and three ancient men in dark suits whose eyes fled mine. Everything was going according to plan: It was the perfect little Greek island, chock-full of tradition and old-world charm.

"How long?" I asked.

He rolled his eyes. "One week? Two weeks? Nobody can know."

I had already walked around the town's ancient streets, eaten steaming moussaka at a rickety wooden table in the quintessential plateia, ridden on the island's only bus down its only paved road to its heavenly beaches—crescents of white sand lapped by gentle turquoise waves. I was ready to tackle another island.

I ordered another soda and cursed the strike, wishing there were other tourists to talk to. I hadn't had a conversation in three days. Everywhere I went, I saw clusters of men and boys—hunched over backgammon boards in the plateia, sipping coffee in the tavernas. When they saw me coming, they ducked their heads and fell silent. As for the women, the only ones I saw were the old-world mamas in long black dresses who served me dinner. Giddy from the afternoon heat, I mused that the island's young women had been placed under a protective spell that rendered them invisible to outsiders' eyes. I sipped my soda and imagined them walking by unseen, giggling and pointing at my short, blond hair, picking up my napkin when I dropped it at dinner, riding beside me on the bus to the beach. I wished one of them would appear and talk to me.

Suddenly, the taverna came alive: Rowdy and laughing, yelling in Greek, a group of young people filled the remaining tables. "Bires!" they called to the waiter. Soon their tables were covered in beer bottles and plates of calamari. I noticed they were all boys, with one amazing girl. She wore a shiny black bikini top and cutoff jeans. Her nails were painted silver. Her eyes were lined in thick black eyeliner. Her jet black hair was cut in a blunt bob just below her ears, with bangs cut straight across her forehead—just like Cleopatra. She turned to me and raised an exquisite eyebrow. "Why don't you join us?" It was my first experience of Katerina's charms.

Katerina told me she was from Thessaloniki, a city on the Greek mainland. She and Markos had fallen in love while working together at a bar on a neighboring island and decided to find another island and open their own bar. "I love this island the first moment I see it. It is beautiful. The beaches are perfect. The people are traditional, but they are good. It is the true Greece."

I looked around at Katerina's bar. As far as I could tell, it was the only bar on the island and bore little resemblance to what I thought of as "the true Greece." It was tiny—a single room I could cross in four long strides—but Katerina told me that they had modeled it after the big nightclubs in Athens: walls painted bright pink, lights tinted purple, a mirror behind a bar stocked with row upon row of expensive-looking liquors, and techno music played so loud it was like a second pulse. Markos tended bar. Katerina flitted between the bar and the sound system, where she donned headphones to queue up the next tape. She had changed into red leather pants and a silver halter top; a large gold cross hung between her breasts. In the far corner, a group of young men snickered into their beers, avoiding my gaze. "These local boys cannot speak English," Katerina said. "But they are sweet. I think they are a little afraid of you."

I told her about the boat strike. Her face lit up. "Wonderful! You can stay here and help me," she said. "I need another deejay."

After that, it was as if I had always been there. In the mornings, Katerina and I breakfasted in the shade of an olive tree in the plateia. She introduced me to the best yogurt I ever tasted, before or since. Made on the island by the old women, it was richer than homemade ice cream and had a slight sour tang that curled my lip. To offset the tang, we smothered it in honey. "It is the best yogurt in Greece," Katerina said. After breakfast, we went to the beach, where we exhausted ourselves swimming and sunbathing, then climbed a hill to an empty taverna that opened its kitchen just to serve us omelets, fried potatoes, and cold beer. In the afternoons, we parted to nap through the heat. At night, we met again at the bar, where Katerina appeared in another fantastic costume, glamorous as a movie star, regal as Cleopatra. She was the coolest person I had ever met. I found it ironic that I, the supposedly modern, savvy American, dressed so shabbily in my practical but plain wrinkle-free pants and T-shirts stained and misshapen from months of hand-washing in hotel bathroom sinks, while she looked ready for a fashion show runway. But she never seemed to notice the difference, instead treating me as if I were the glamorous one, as if she found my company irresistible.

I couldn't believe the life I was living. I barely recognized myself. On this little island, everything was light and fun—even me. It all felt too good to be true, and this began to worry me.

I turned my worry on Katerina. It seemed to me that she and Markos were living in a charming fantasy, having built a bar for a clientele that didn't exist. Each night, the customers were the same: their three friends visiting from Athens and the same four local boys. They must have been losing money. I rarely paid for my drinks, and Katerina was too generous to charge the local boys.

"This island is so quiet," I said. "Will there be more tourists later in the year?"

Katerina shrugged. "Maybe. Maybe not. Now, business is not so good, of course. But we think the tourists will come, and they will find our nice little bar, and they will like it! What is not to like? You tell me something you do not like, and I change it." She put down her drink and swept an arm, palm up, in front of her, presenting the room for my appraisal.

"I would change nothing," I said, meaning it. I loved this strange little bar where the music was too loud and I was the only customer. But Katerina's casual attitude made me anxious.

"How do you know that more tourists will come?" I asked. "What if . . ."

Katerina laid her hand on my cheek and shushed me. "Only God knows, right?" She clinked her glass against mine. "For the present, we live well!"

I looked away. "You know, I need to leave when the strike is over," I said. "The man at the ticket office said it may end in a few days." I would be sad to leave but was determined to stick to my travel plans, so I couldn't linger too long in paradise with Katerina.

"What is this 'keep on track'? " Katerina said. "Are you a train?" She grabbed my hand. "Come look at the stars with me, Sarah." We went out to the patio in front of the taverna, where we often sat, and shared a cigarette.

Katerina took a puff and squinted up at the stars. "If I get you a lover, then you will stay." Close by, in the darkness, a chicken clucked its disapproval. I giggled, thinking Katerina was joking. I should have known better.

My Greek Bill Clinton cut effortlessly around his opponent and sunk an impressive outside shot. The raven-haired boys went wild.

"That one? His name is Christos," Katerina said. "Okay. I take care of everything."

That night, Christos came to the bar for the first time. Later, he came back to my room.

"First, my first," he said, grinning. "Thank you."

I sat up in bed. Holy Zeus, he's a virgin. "How old are you?" Christos smiled up at me, brushing my shoulder with the back of his hand. "Seventeen."

I wasn't much older—barely twenty-one—but I was sure I had just broken some Greek law. This is where it all goes wrong, I thought. This is where I pay for living so carelessly. Then I thought of the Greek gods—disguising themselves as animals to trick their lovers, seducing other gods' wives, sleeping with sea nymphs. . . . This whole situation was so strange and dangerous and totally unlike me. And I kind of liked it. Christos looked me in the eyes and murmured something in Greek, over and over, like a song, until I lay back down and forgot to be afraid.

"I will stay a few more days," I told Katerina the next morning at breakfast. She licked the honey off her spoon and smiled, saying nothing.

From then on, I met Christos each night at the bar. I didn't fool myself that we were falling in love. He spoke so little English that our conversations were limited to a few words. I told myself he was with me because there was no one else; the local girls, locked up by their watchful parents, were completely off-limits. Besides, falling in love in Greece, thousands of miles from home, wouldn't make sense.

"What do you do all day?" I asked him one night. I had never seen him at the beach or eating breakfast in the plateia.

"Make house," he said.

"Oh—construction? You build houses?"

He nodded, then kissed me until I had no more questions.

A few days later, I saw Christos at work. It was a sweltering midsummer day. I was on my way home for a nap after a day at the beach. Christos was with a group of men, some young like him, but most of them middle-aged. They were all shirtless and wore long, dark pants, their faces boiled red by the heat. They walked back and forth, back and forth, hefting concrete blocks out of the back of a small truck, carrying them up a hill, then dumping them in a pile at the top. I shivered, despite the heat, imagining the rough concrete blocks cutting into Christos's gentle hands.

I told Katerina what I'd seen. "Yes, those boys work so hard here." She shook her head. "How lucky for Christos to have you at the end of the day!"

Her light tone frustrated me. This was serious. "Is that the only job for him here? Doesn't he go to school?"

"Christos? Maybe he will go to school." She shrugged. "Or maybe he will never leave the island and just build houses like his father. It doesn't matter."