The peach pit proverbs

The heat in Kaisariani clung like a second skin, a wool blanket of oven air. From her fourth-floor balcony, Myrto Zervou fanned herself with a week-old sports newspaper, her eyes, two chips of obsidian, scanning the concrete canyon below. Always in black, a monument to her Nikos for fifteen years, she was as much a part of the neighbourhood’s architecture as the crumbling plaster and tang of jasmine.

Inside, her son Aris, thirty-two and smelling of sawdust and honest sweat, was fixing the leg of her kitchen table. Again.

“It’s the weight of the world you put on it, Mana,” he grumbled, not unkindly. “Plates, pots, your suspicions…”

“My suspicions have better foundations than this table,” she shot back. “And they’re lighter.”

Her reverie was shattered by a sharp, theatrical cry from the square of Agios Georgios below. “Aman! Shameless! In the house of God!”

Myrto leaned over the railing. Below, outside the small bakery, old Mrs. Lembesi was wagging a bony finger at a young couple. The boy, thin as a reed, had his arm around a girl with hair the colour of fresh honey. They’d been holding hands. Maybe, Myrto squinted, there had been a quick, furtive kiss. A crime worthy of the Spanish Inquisition, apparently.

“Animals!” spat Mr. Karas, the retired policeman, from his kafeneio chair, not looking up from his backgammon game. “No respect.”

The couple, flushed with a mixture of shame and defiance, retreated, their lovely afternoon in tatters. Myrto’s mouth set in a thin line. This was the third such “reprimand” this week. A new wave of moral fever was sweeping the plateia, and it stank worse than yesterday’s fish.

Later, her daughter Mary called, voice taut with worry. “Mana, did you hear? They yelled at Tasos and Eleni today. For a kiss. Eleni was in tears. Since when is love a public disturbance?”

“Since boredom became a profession,” Myrto muttered. “Leave it with me.”

The mystery, however, took a darker turn that evening. A rock, wrapped in a crude note, was thrown through the bakery window. The note read: “FILTH BREEDS FILTH. CLEANSE OR BE CLEANSED.” The bakery was owned by the parents of the honey-haired girl from the square.

“Vandalism now!” Aris declared, putting down his drill. “I should go down there.”

“You should finish my table,” Myrto said, already tying a black headscarf under her chin. “A rocking leg is a bigger treachery. It attacks when you least expect it.”

She descended into the twilight streets. Her investigation was not of the fingerprint variety. It was conducted at street corners, in queues at the greengrocer, over offered sweets. She listened to the outrage, the gossip, the performed disgust.

She noted that Mrs. Lembesi, the most vocal critic, had recently taken in a boarder, a nephew from the village, a severe young man who stared at passing women as if counting their sins. She noted that old Karas, the ex-cop, had started playing backgammon with a new, fervently religious friend from the cathedral, a man with eyes that never smiled. And she noted that the attacks, the reprimands, the rock, only happened after this friend appeared.

The adventure peaked two nights later. Myrto, claiming her legs ached, sent Aris to the pharmacy. She then stationed herself in the shadows of the plane tree in the square, a small, dark statue. Just before midnight, she saw a furtive figure slip from the side door of the church. It was Karas’s friend. He moved not with pious purpose, but with the slick guilt of a fox. He didn’t go home. He went to the electrical box that controlled the streetlights on the far side of the square.

As he fumbled with the lock, Myrto’s voice cut through the dark, loud and clear as a bell.

“A thief who steals light is afraid of what might be seen in the dark.”

The man jumped, whirling around. “Who’s there? Old woman, go home! It’s not safe!”

“You’re right,” Myrto said, stepping into the dim glow of the one remaining light. “It’s not safe for those who play at being saints while planning sins. What’s in the bag? More rocks? Or perhaps the tools to leave young lovers in the dark, where you can frighten them more?”

Sweat gleamed on the man’s forehead. “You don’t understand! This neighbourhood… it’s become immoral! We must shock them back to purity!”

“Purity?” Myrto scoffed, advancing. “You mean fear. You and that foolish Karas, who misses having people to arrest, and that lonely Lembesi, who misses having a man to control. You stir the pot so you can taste the soup.” She quoted an old proverb, her voice like grinding stones: “The donkey calls the goat ‘horned.’”

Flustered, cornered, the man dropped his bag. It clinked with tools and a can of spray paint. The mystery wasn’t a crime of passion, but of pathetic irrelevance, a plot by the bored and bitter to feel powerful again.

The conclusive end came the next morning in the bright, unforgiving sun of the plateia. Myrto marched straight to the kafeneio where Karas and his friend were having a nervous coffee. A small crowd gathered, sensing drama.

“Congratulations,” Myrto announced, her voice carrying. “You’ve caught the immoral ones.”

Everyone leaned in. Karas paled. His friend stared into his cup.

“You have caught three ghosts,” she declared. “The ghost of your own uselessness,” she pointed at Karas. “The ghost of your loneliness,” her finger swung to a cringing Mrs. Lembesi, who had come to see. “And the ghost of a faith so small it fits in a bag of tools for cutting wires.” The final stare pinned the “religious” friend. “You want to cleanse filth? Start with the envy in your own eyes.”

The crowd murmured. The accused men spluttered, but under the collective gaze, their authority, built on whispers and disapproval, crumbled like stale bread.

That evening, peace had returned. The young reed-thin boy and his honey-haired girl walked through the square, hand in hand, unchallenged. From her balcony, Myrto watched, a satisfied glint in her eye.

Aris brought her a small glass of retsina. “Case closed, Sherlock?”

She took the glass, sniffed. “The case was never about kissing, agori mou. It was about a neighbourhood forgetting that life, not death, should be the loudest noise. A little love,” she said, taking a sip, “is just life refusing to whisper.” She looked at the young couple below, now sharing a slice of peach from the bakery, laughing. “And that is a mystery even an old woman can solve.”

End