Harley and the Holy Mountain
Chapter One
Arfa, what would you say to me biking up to Mount Athos?”
“The Holy Mountain? All those monks? Have you been drinking ouzo?”
“Me?”
“It sounds like one of your ouzo ideas. Breathe out. Yup.”
“I’m serious.”
“How far is it?”
“Not sure. Five hundred miles?”
“You’ll fall off. What about poor Harley? He’s as decrepit as you.”
“Nonsense. It’ll do us both good. The open road.”
“You’re too old for a mid-life crisis.”
“An end-life crisis then.”
I take this wifely encouragement on the chin, one of them anyway, light the lamps and lay the table on the terrace under the vine. Arfa is her nickname. When offered wine she used to say a modest ‘just arfa glass’ until she decided it was too much trouble refilling it twice as often as everyone else. I fetch a bottle of Shed from the fridge. Instead of a chateau on the label it has a photo of the concrete shed where it was made. €2.50 for a litre and a half, cheaper than water. A couple of glasses and I hope Arfa will come round to the Athos idea. She brings out plates of green beans, creamy feta, octopus stew, a salad of cucumber and tomatoes still warm from the vine where they had been growing an hour ago. We watch the moon come up, applauding when it clears the hilltop, our tradition since the children were little. I fill our glasses.
“About my idea.”
“Which one?”
“Biking up to Athos.”
“The ouzo idea. Why would you want to do that?”
“To take Father Makarios his books.”
“Hmm. That’s a flimsy reason. Why don’t you mail them?”
“They might get lost in the post.”
“Getting flimsier.”
I try another tack.
“To explore the Greece I don’t know while I can still remember where I’ve been.”
“What do you expect to find?”
“Dunno until I find it.”
“Hmm. It sounds like one of your frolics.”
“I might climb Mount Athos.”
“You? With your knees?”
She laughs. The moon smirks. Crickets snicker. I should never have asked. I should have just gone.
“Hmm. Promise me you’ll wear a helmet.”
If you look at a map of Greece you will see in the north what looks like a stunted hand with three fingers sticking out into the sea. The top finger is the peninsula of Mount Athos. It is a ridge fifty kilometres long and ten kilometres wide rising to the bare summit of the Holy Mountain before plunging down to the sea. The ‘Autonomous Monastic State of the Holy Mountain’ is a self-governing state within the Republic of Greece. It has been famous as the spiritual home of Orthodoxy for a thousand years and notorious for banning women.
I have been to Athos before. The first time was out of curiosity. The second out of fascination with a community that is glibly described as a throwback to medieval Byzantium. It is more accurate to say that the monks live in the modern world but according to a philosophy that predates modernity. I have been twice more in search of understanding, of what I haven’t yet discovered. The strange beauty of the place promises mystery, in the ancient sense of truth beyond comprehension. And the books for Father Makarios? I met him on Athos last year. He is from Moldova and spent two years in college in America, so speaks fluent English. We got on well for the short time I was at his monastery. He gave me a crucifix that he had carved himself.
“Father, what can I send you from London?”
“Thank you. I got everything I need.”
“Please. There must be something.”
“Well, I guess there’s one thing. My favourite author is English. I have some of his books but I’m missing a few.”
The mind flipped through the canon from Shakespeare to Dickens as he was a favourite in Socialist countries along with Jack London and Rabbie Burns.
“I’d be delighted to get them. Who is it?”
“Pelham Grenville Wodehouse.”
I felt my eyes pop and my jaw drop.
“My mom was corresponding member of the Russian Wodehouse Society. I like Jeeves and Wooster best. Top hole. Real funny and not a tad of wickedness in them.”
Harley
Harley is a twenty-year-old Yamaha 50cc step-through. In motorcycle years that would make him about my age. Why don’t I get a bigger bike? 50cc is the most I can drive on my ordinary licence and I’m too wimpish to get a motorcycle licence. Besides, Harley matches my temperament. Happiest on the flat, coasts downhill, weak and wheezy uphill. We rarely go faster than 40kph/25mph. Sometimes we are overtaken by bicyclists. On steep hills a brisk walker would leave us behind. Greek slang for such a bike is papaki, a little duck.
It’s a good idea to give him a check-up before we go. Zervas’s motorcycle workshop is on the main road into Aliveri, the closest town to our village. A row of bikes line up against a rail outside like horses outside a cowboy saloon, a couple of fancy thoroughbreds but mostly old hacks like mine. Inside is a knacker’s shed of wrecks and parts, tackles and jacks, pipes and cables, tins and drums, fragrant with rancid oil, petrol, rubber and grease, and in the middle of it a mahogany desk with a penholder, calendar and a clickety-clackety Newton’s cradle made of steel nuts. Zervas is getting on for fifty, wiry and cheerful. A shock of salt-and-pepper hair and a week’s worth of salt-and-pepper beard meld into the salt-and-pepper complexion of men who work with machinery. His overalls match the workshop floor. His hands are surprisingly clean. He must wear gloves to work.
“Hello. What do you want?”
“Full service. Brakes, spark plug, everything.” My automotive vocabulary runs out at this point but he gets the message.
“When was the last service?”
I am thrown back to childhood and a creepy confessional, peering through mesh at the shadowy cheek of one-legged Father Mallarkey asking how long it has been since my last confession.
“Fifteen years…”
Zervas stares at me, a damned soul.
“…but I only use it in the summers so it’s half that really.”
As mitigation goes, it doesn’t travel far. Zervas winces and grunts and shrugs and tells me to come back in the afternoon.
Harley’s colours are Byzantine blue and cream, picked out with chrome and rust. It’s called a step-through because, like a scooter, you don’t have to cock your leg over the saddle to get on. It’s not a moped as it does not have pedals. The engine is a four stroke, I know because they don’t put oil in with the petrol like my two stroke weed-whacker. They put it in a separate hole – I say ‘they’ because I leave technical things to specialists. That’s all I can say about the inner workings of the machinery as the rest is a mystery…
