Mykonos, before the tourist assault

I won't pay

Today I got fined. It was my own fault really, but still, I felt the blood rush to my head when I saw the piece of paper folded under the strap on my moped seat. Silly cops! OK, I shouldn’t have parked my Suzuki on the pavement – but it wasn’t the first time I’d done that. And fair enough, it may have been a bit provocative to park my black engine right next to the National Bank of Greece, but why then had nothing happened to it last time, when I had let it stand at the exact same spot for 9 days in a row?

Greek police clamp down on traffic violators – as if I didn’t know that, as if I do not tell that to the tourists in the bus, every other day or so. 65 euros up in smoke. Unless… for one, I am registered as the legitimate owner of this vehicle. They do not have an address, but they do have my phone number. And my Greek tax number. How bad can that be? Bad enough to evict me, to put me on the first plane out? What if the paper hadn’t been put so tightly under that strap? What if some local yokul thought it would be funny to take it off my saddle and let it blow in the wind? Or what if the wind, today’s strong wind that is, simply blew it away?

Stuff it – I won’t pay.

Delos, 2 April

So damn good

Pandelis is late again. He always is, and I know that. So why don’t I accept it today, why am I fuming with anger? Everyone knows Pandelis is slow, even the locals do. So why don’t I fire him, like I did with Nikos? Because I paid Pandelis 1000 euro in advance, for one. Nikos was easier to send away, I paid him 25 on a daily basis. And he was ok as long as it came to demolishing things, but he couldn’t even build a straight wall. The trouble with Pandelis is that he is so good. So damn good.

“Let it go, let it loose”, I tell my dad whenever another disastrous football result comes through from Holland – Lucky Ajax made the Champions League Qualifiers by using every back door available. I do not care any longer about the Dutch football results – that’s one hurdle behind me. But it seems that there are still quite a few ahead. As far as I can see, Pandelis is not working on a new roof, as we laid out in our handwritten contract, no: Pandelis is cementing a dozen more hurdles on my track towards Full Integration On Samos.

But this time I do not swallow my disappointment and frustration. It’s Monday morning 8.30 and I‘ve been waiting for over half an hour. Saturday night, Pandelis had told me he would be here so we could discuss how to finish the roof. The previous month I accepted all his excuses – father in the hospital which made him mentally unfit to work on the roof, family over for Easter whom he had not seen in a year, Albanian workers running out on him, rain, a drizzle, hard wind, rain again, work on one of his own houses which somehow got prioritised overnight – oh well, I could have known all of that in advance and anyway, I wasn’t going to explode in a raging fit, after all I am not one of those lunatic nitwits you see on TV, heading off to Spain to do up an old farm and open a Indian restaurant there, without knowing the slightest thing about Spain or Spanish. I know Greece qnd I speek Greek, full stop. But what Pandelis tells me on this Monday morning somehow is too much to swallow. With a low sleepy voice he says: “I won’t come today, it’s the first of May.”

True enough, it’s Mayday and here is Pandelis, who runs a small enterprise that survives on a handful of illegal Albanian workers, giving me the old syndicalist routine. All workers unite! I tell him the truth – on the phone, that is. I am giving him the speech I have oh so carefully prepared over the last two months. My Greek is fluent and fast. Words like trust, contract and apology come out wonderfully well. I won’t get an apology (I ‘ll get it the next day – he is really always late), and I decide to ride to his house, where I call out his name even before I ring the bell. He opens surprisingly fast, dressed in a baggy grey boxer short. Broad shoulders, big belly, 28 years old. A young woman’s head peeps around the kitchen door behind him. Lush curly hair, one bare shoulder. Mayday, wave your banners, you salt of the earth. My adrenaline level rises even higher. I tell him that because of his delays, I am now paying for a hotel. He asks me in a quiet voice how much I pay. I tell him. He reaches over to a small box behind him and hands me the amount. “Normally I’ll be there tomorrow”, he says. “Not normally, I want to be sure”, I answer. “You can be sure”, he says.

He dutifully shows up the next day. One week further, the roof is still not completely finished. I look up to the top of my house and sigh. A two-month delay, and no telling when it’ll be over. But the tiles, at least those in place, look good. So damn good.