Landlessness

If it wasn’t for the thick groves of grape-vines, you would see the blue forever of the island sky. Cicadas fill our ears with their ceaseless symphony. And opposite me sits an old man, a geros, who despite the sublime heat sits in a full pinstriped suit beneath a tapered felt hat, serene and supremely calm. One leg is crossing the other, revealing a thick white sock protruding from a black brogue. On the table between us, which was draped with a heavy cloth of patterned Arabesque seeming to sigh with weariness, sits a half-empty glass of Coca-Cola. Every so often a stream of bubbles makes their hurried pilgrimage to the surface. Today is a Monday, during that long indistinguishable stretch of the afternoon particular to Mediterranean countries, when the sun is somewhere in the long reign of its tyranny. Time itself fades into the shade.

“Are you well?” I rasp, my throat dry. Suddenly the cola looks appealing.

“Very well. One big happiness,” he explains without irony. His features sit unperturbed, as if his face is unable to arrange itself in any other emotion other than that of calm stoicism. Perhaps that is the gift of experience.

A waiter emerges from the mill-stone taverna. He pauses besides our table, mutters a good word to my great uncle, and then places a miniature wooden plate piled with black olives, stockpiled like shrunken canonballs on a galleon’s deck. The oil on their skins glistens in the stray beams of sunlight.

“This olive,” my great uncle begins, the words seeping from his mouth, “is native to Cyprus. It grows nowhere else,” he says with finality. I nod. Without warning he continues.

“These are Verigo olives.”

“What does that name mean in Greek?”

My great uncle leans back in his wicker chair, the white wrinkles of his face momentarily illuminated.

“When the British arrived here – after they had taken over – the Englishman wanted to try our food, Cypriot food. So a man gives over a handful of our olives. The Englishman tastes one, then another, then shouts, ‘Very good! Very good!’. And he gives them to the other Englishmen. They all say ‘Very good!’” For the first time he breaks into a smile, the toothy grin of a child. “To us, it sounded like ‘Verigo’ and we thought it was the right name for the olives”

Against myself I laugh, the sound blending with the cicadas.

And when I put a single fleshy olive in my mouth, every cell on my tongue swells in a screaming chorus of gratitude as the fruit of centuries bursts asunder.