The small prison cell in the middle of our minds
My new neighbour had hosted South Africans before and was very sorry for me, writes Darrel Bristow-Bovey
Iam on the small island of Milos at the moment and the chap who lives in the next house is named Christos. I met him when he brought around a gift of fine white grapes that he’d harvested from his own vines, dewy and wet and decorated with a sprig of three vine leaves.
Christos has a nice villa with a good garden overlooking the periwinkle-blue bay of Adamas. The economy has been hard on him, as it has been hard on all Greeks, but he’s philosophical about it. He has a room on his property that he rents out to visitors, and that’s helped him through the lean years. Christos’s passion in life appears to be plotting and predicting the movement of the wind. Oh, he’s a fiend for the wind, but for a man of Christos’s precision and love of order, the wind is a cruel mistress. He produced a map and drew a flight of small arrows to mark for me the direction the wind usually comes from (the north), and then the direction it’s outrageously, inexplicably coming from now (the south). Then he sketched out different scenarios for possible variations in wind direction in the next few days, until the island was covered in a crosshatching of meteorological arrows.
But the fact is, he said, shaking his head disapprovingly at the map, it’s very difficult to predict the wind. It’s like asking his eightyear-old son to choose what he wants for supper next week — even if he knows now, by the time the day comes he has changed his mind.
He asked me where I’m from, and when I said South Africa, Christos became very concerned. He leant forward and patted my wrist. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I promise you, my hand on my heart, you are safe.”
This was puzzling. Sometimes when people hear I’m South African they are interested or suspicious or sometimes — New Yorkers, mainly — just blankly indifferent, but I’ve never before met someone so instantly solicitous. I needed to get to the bottom of this.
Christos has had two sets of South Africans staying with him. The first set was black. “You understand?” he said anxiously, rubbing his arm. “Black.” I assured him that I understood.
They were three women, he told me, and they stayed for three weeks, and once they’d checked in he barely saw them. They always seemed to be in the room, cooking strange things he couldn’t quite identify. He tried to invite them for ouzo or a meal with his family, but they wouldn’t leave their room, and this puzzled and worried him for many months until he met his second set of South Africans.
They were a young, married couple, and they were white. “Like you,” he said, tapping my arm. I nodded solemnly. That is white indeed.
On the first night, the husband came to find Christos to tell him there were no bars on the windows and only a very flimsy latch on the door. Anyone, said the husband accusingly, could just kick it open. Christos explained to him that there’s no need for a lock at all. No-one on Milos locks any door. He leaves his car keys in the ignition overnight. There’s no crime, he explained. He vaguely motioned northwards. “Maybe on Mykonos there are criminals but on Milos there is zero crime! I guarantee it!”
(It reminded me of the first time I visited the island of St Helena in the South Atlantic. They also had no crime, and just one small prison cell in the middle of the town where drunk citizens could sleep it off rather than try to walk the winding mountain roads home. But everyone was very concerned that times were changing. Just last week someone stole a blouse off Mrs Thomas’s washing line. “It’s television,” someone told me. “The young aren’t used to it.” TV had arrived in St Helena for the first time, two years previously: the crime wave of Mrs Thomas’s blouse was caused by M-Net.)
But despite Christos’s guarantees, the husband wasn’t soothed. He thought Christos might be trying to pull a fast one. That night there was the sound of pushing and scraping from their room, and then again in the morning. The young couple were there for a week; every night they would push the heavy wardrobe across the floor to block the door, and back again to unlock it.
Christos has helped Syrian refugees on the run from a war zone, alone in the world with nothing, running towards an uncertain future, and none of them had been quite as wary and closed off as those two sets of South Africans with money. He looked at me with very kind eyes, trying to imagine the trauma I must have experienced. He was very, very sorry for me.
And I thought about my fellow South Africans, and the cells we put ourselves in and the cells we carry around with us. I ate one of his grapes and looked out across the sea and wondered when the wind would turn.