The Canadian

The Canadian comes to us with blue-black eyes and a forehead like the cliffs of Santorini. We think that he is Greek, but the Canadian is quick to correct us. He is Jewish, and he is standing in my doorway, and he wants to know the way to Giorgos’s taverna.

Yianni looks the Canadian up and down. “Who are you,” he says, “and how have you come here to this island of Chios?” Yianni has just lit a new cigarette, and he had been on the cusp of telling us where Magda found her missing cow when the Canadian approached us. Yianni does not like to be interrupted by strangers.

In a voice as dark as honey, the Canadian says, “I have come from Montreal,” and he takes off his hat and bows a little stiffly. He is very tall, and when he straightens, his head brushes the lowest tendril of my wife’s bougainvillea growing over the doorway. We notice a thick blue notepad sticking out of his pocket.

Panos eyes the notepad, and he glances in my direction. “I see,” he says. “And what will you do here?”

“I have come to work for Giorgos,” he says. “But I am a poet.”

We stop and look at each other, Yianni, Panos, and me. All the foreign boys who come to be waiters for Giorgos tell us they are poets. We do not know how Giorgos finds these boys, but we are always very gentle with them, and we tell them that Greece already has many thousands of poets, good ones, who have been working diligently for thousands of years, and the poet-boys ignore us and we watch them closely and they do not write any poetry anyway.

So when the Canadian tells us he will work for Giorgos, we feel just a little bit guilty. Should we warn him? We debate this after we give the Canadian directions and he walks away.

Panos thinks we should. “He was so polite to us, so courteous,” he says. “Remember the way he took off his hat and bowed to you, Yianni, as if you were an elder? They must be very courtly in Canada.” Panos is an idiot. He has a stupid wife and seven stupid children, and he used to work in a shipyard until they dropped an anvil on his foot and made him lame.

“We owe him nothing,” Yianni says. He takes a long drag off his glowing cigarette and throws it to the ground as if it disgusts him. “He is a xénos. And I am tired of these false student-poets. They are only after our daughters.” (He is right there: the last not-poet we caught half-naked in a hayloft with Toula’s youngest daughter.)

“But it was different with this Canadian,” Panos says. “He said he was a poet in the way a man says he is a fishmonger or a barber. He said it, and we did not laugh at him.”

Panos and Yianni both turn to me now. This is normally the point in the conversation at which I am expected to speak. You might say I’m the arbiter.

I take my cap off its hook on the wall. I tell them that I think we had better go see how the Canadian does.

When a new boy comes to work for Giorgos, we always go down to watch. The same thing happens every time. The boy comes to us from London or Pittsburgh or New York, where he is studying law or finance or something where you never get dirty and you never learn how to sweat. He will seem too confident as he greets us, and by the time he brings us our orders his shirt will already be soaked through with sweat.

But when we come to Giorgos’s taverna, the Canadian is solemn and dry. He smiles, but only with his eyes. “Good morning,” he says, and he shows us to our seats. He brings us water glasses with dignity, as if the weight of those glasses means something to him, as if it is a gift to hand us this water.

I look around at all the empty tables. We are probably the only customers the Canadian will see all day. Nobody likes coming to this side of the island—the lonely side, by the factory that we closed down after the war. Giorgos was in America then, and he does not remember the war or the factory, the bodies that we buried there.

And that is the other reason no one comes to Giorgos’s taverna: nobody likes Giorgos. We didn’t like him when we were children and he was the boy who threw sticks at our goats. Our mothers clicked their tongues at him, and our fathers shook their heads. “He is a strange boy,” they said. We all shook our heads when he left for America, and we shook our heads when he came back. “His uncle never should have left him that taverna,” we all said to each other. “He is as good as a stranger to us, a xénos.”

But the Canadian does not know any of this, or if he does, he pays it no attention. He does not know that when Giorgos first came home, all the girls on the island went sniffing after him with their long tanned legs and their lipstick and their Essence of Rose, the perfume they had been saving just to snare a rich husband. (I asked my sister about this once. She said rich men like the scent of roses because roses are best cultivated by a hired hand.) The Canadian does not know we thought Giorgos was rich, that we knew he had been a janitor in Detroit but we knew even janitors are rich in America. And the Canadian was not there when Giorgos’s grandmother told us that he had lost all his money in the American casinos, and he did not see her put her head in her hands.

Perhaps it is for this reason that the Canadian is not sweating when he pulls out the blue notepad. It is creased and worn and looks like it has been with him since boyhood. Panos nudges me. “Look!” he whispers. “He is writing us a poem!” But the Canadian just stands there with raised eyebrows and a poised pen, waiting for our order.

There is a pause. “What would you like?” the Canadian says.

Panos is staring lazy eyed off into the harbor. “Maybe something about the ocean,” he says. “Or my wife.” This elicits a groan from Yianni. The only person dumber than Panos is Panayiota, his wife. Whenever she gives you Pascha bread, you know the bottom will be black as tar, because she always forgets she is baking it.

We hear Giorgos grumbling in the kitchen. Giorgos never gives us Pascha bread, because he thinks that Pascha bread is dried out and embarrassing. Last Pascha, he told us that when he has children, he will give them plastic eggs with candy on Easter, just like American children get. He told us he will have some children as soon as he pays his debts and gets off this stupid island.

Yianni rolls his eyes. “Just bring us three orders of oktapodi,” he says, and he crosses his arms. The Canadian bows at the waist and walks away.

We sit back with cocked heads and folded hands. This is usually when it gets good. This is when Giorgos will find some imperceptible fault with the waiter and will begin to berate him. Giorgos most often begins with a comment on the waiter’s handwriting. “What is this?” he will say. “What have you written? Surely you have strapped a pencil to the toes of a rooster!” (Giorgos is an idiot, but he has a nice imagination.)

The Canadian steps into the kitchen, and Giorgos begins. “What is this you have written?” he cries. “I would need four eyes to read it! Do you see more than two eyes in my head?”

Yianni nods approvingly, and Panos squirms in his seat. I lean forward. Usually, this is where the real insults begin. Usually, the foolish not-poet will be stunned and embarrassed and will try to cover it up with rage. “How dare you speak to me this way!” he will say. “I am almost a lawyer!”

And Giorgos will laugh at him. Giorgos will laugh so deeply that it will shake the pots and pans and every once in a while one of them will go clattering to the floor. Giorgos will laugh so loud and so long, and we will know he is about to begin The Speech. (This is the real thing we come for, because the truth is that Giorgos’s oktapodi is not very good.) Giorgos has delivered The Speech so many times that we can all recite it from memory. Sometimes we recite it in the evenings, on our porches, glasses in hand, because we like the ways our wives jiggle when they laugh.

The Speech always begins the same way. “You insolent boy!” he will say. “You are not a waiter! You are not a man! You are a Louse, and I Shall Now Rise Up And Wash You From My Hair!” (When we do this part for our wives, we actually rise up from our chairs and pretend to wash our hair, and we do an angry little dance and we stomp a little, spilling our tsipouro by our ankles. This makes our wives laugh harder, and it makes us wish we were a little younger and a little less fat so they would want to make love to us again.)

And the wounded waiter will come out from the kitchen, red-faced and beaten. His head will be hanging low. He will look at us, and he will not say anything, and we will all know that he will be on the next ferry to Athens, and he will call his father and tell him he doesn’t want to be a poet anymore. He will take off his apron and toss it toward the tables, where we all will try and catch it. We’ve done this so many times that we have a running bargain: whoever catches the apron eats free. Panos has caught it seven times. (Panos is an idiot, but he is very good at catching.)

But this Canadian is different. We do not know what he will do. We lean forward and listen. We hear nothing but the bleating of Giorgos’s goats and the grumblings of our bellies.

And then we hear the Canadian speaking very softly, so softly we have to strain to hear him. “I am very sorry,” the Canadian is saying. “Let me help you read it.” Yianni chokes on his water, and Panos has to slap him on the back.

We can only imagine Giorgos’s face at this time. He must be boiling, must be bewildered. He must be savoring the words on his tongue that he shall soon spit out at the Canadian.

We wait for those words, but they do not come. Later, Panos tells us he thinks Giorgos said thank you, but we will never know for sure. In a few moments, the Canadian comes back with our oktapodi. His mouth is a tight-drawn line, but his eyes are still smiling. Somehow, he knows he will win. Somehow, he knows we are watching him too. Does he wink at us? Panos is sure of it, but we do not believe him.

The meal is over, and we go home for our naps. I tell my wife, Eleni, what has happened, before I fall asleep. “You are delirious,” she says, folding laundry. “Rest.”

But I cannot rest. I think of the Canadian and his tight-drawn mouth. Is he sleeping too? Is he considering what to say next to our Giorgos? Is he writing a poem about one of our daughters?

I watch Eleni as she folds the laundry, and I wonder what the Canadian would write about her. I look at her hips, and I see nothing special, a little plumpness, even, but then I think of the Canadian and I think he would see those hips and say that they are ripening, would say they are like tomatoes on the vine, would say they are pulling him toward her like a towrope.

When it is time to go to dinner, our wives tell us that they want to come along, and our daughters. Our sons say they are too busy, but we know that they are jealous of the Canadian, and we know they will be watching from behind the vines that wrap around the taverna. We are getting jealous too.

When we arrive at the taverna, the Canadian looks happy to see us. He is freshly shaven and his hair is combed. He begins serving us as if he has served us all his life, carrying six platters of oktapodi here, eight glasses of ouzo there. He is telling us tales of Montreal, of playing basketball as a boy, and we are all laughing until our faces turn purple and our wives take out their handkerchiefs to dab their eyes. They have never looked so elegant. Yianni is so impressed by the ladies and their dabbing that he takes his wife’s hand very tenderly, as if handling a ripe persimmon, and he kisses it. Magda blushes. “He has not kissed me in fifteen years,” she says. We all laugh, because we all know this is not true.

We are making such a ruckus that Giorgos pokes his head out of the kitchen. When he sees us all assembled, his eyes bulge out of his head. He coughs and grows very pale.

Giorgos steps back into the kitchen. He clears his throat and calls the Canadian very loudly and with ceremony, like he is a doorman summoning a duke. We fall quiet. The Canadian gives us a nod and walks away.

We are leaning forward to listen. Panayiota leans too far and falls out of her chair, and Yianni shushes her. “Christos kai Panagia,” he yells. “Be quiet!”

We hear Giorgos begin. His voice sounds tender, plaintive even, like a father to a spoiled but beloved child. “We are busy, my boy, so busy,” he says, “and I need your help here in the kitchen, and I look around to find you, and what do I see? You are telling stories to the customers. You are entertaining them. This is not what I need, my boy. I need you to come carry their food, and you leave me back here alone . . .”

We hear him grow quiet, as if he has become unbearably tired. “I am sorry, Giorgos,” the Canadian says. Giorgos says thank you, and this time all of us hear it.

There is a pause. There is a clatter. We jump. “He has killed him!” Panayiota shouts, and this time all of us shush her.

But no, the Canadian emerges again, carrying platters of coffees. “With compliments from Giorgos,” he says.

We glance at each other. From Giorgos? From the man who never gives us Pascha bread?

We accept the coffee, and we sip it slowly. We do not want to go home. A couple of the sons have joined us. One of them says this is like the movie houses in Athens. Another says it is even better. The Canadian sits with us sipping coffee too. When he has finished and begins collecting the cups, everyone looks at me expectantly.

I take a deep breath. “Our daughters are still hungry,” I say. “And our wives want dessert.”

The Canadian nods and disappears again. When he returns, he says he can bring us rice pudding. “It will take Giorgos thirty minutes,” he says. Now both his mouth and his eyes are smiling.

Yianni and Panos and what feels like the entire village turn to me. I look out into the night. It is as warm and welcoming as Eleni’s bosom, and I look at Eleni, and her eyes are tender. We all nod in agreement, and we order forty-two bowls of rice pudding.

While we wait, Panos gets out his bouzouki and plays. This night has no stars, and it has become so inviting that the rest of the sons come out from behind the vines and they listen. We can smell the sweetness of the pudding drifting out to us from the kitchen—anise and cinnamon—and the blooms of bougainvillea. Magda’s daughter sighs. “I think I am in love with the Canadian,” she says. Panayiota’s daughter says she is in love with him too.

It is too bad he is a xénos, we tell them, a stranger. It is too bad. After thirty minutes—or is it an hour? is it a day? we do not know—the Canadian comes to us with trays upon trays of the pudding. Giorgos is with him, carrying the rest. He is grunting from the weight of the bowls. He is smiling and humming a song no one knows.

We sit with our mouths open like cows, and Giorgos hands us the fragrant bowls, his smile obscured by steam. He is even greeting us by name—“Kalispera, good evening, Panos! Te kaneis, Yianni? Is your mother still sick? Ti kaneis, Magda? Is your sister well?”

We are too shocked to speak. We stare. Giorgos stops handing out the bowls and stares back. The Canadian stops moving, too. He is waiting. But Panos rises, and he limps over to Giorgos, and he takes him by the arms, and he kisses him on both cheeks. He plays his bouzouki, and before we know it we are dancing, and Giorgos is leading the line. The Canadian is in the back of us with folded arms. He is watching.

Read more from Issue 16.2.