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By Amanda Summer
Eighteenth Annual Solas Awards Silver Winner in the Most Unforgettable Character category
He is a man of bravado, of grand gestures. Of droopy eyes and hound dog expressions. Of large, breathless truths, which he reveals with the sweep of a hand, barely grasping his pre-dinner ouzo while maniacally arcing the air. He is a pharmacist, a lover of life…and my friend. And we met, more than twenty years ago, over birth control pills.
I had come to the Greek island of Ithaka, along with an international group of archaeologists, in search of the palace of Odysseus, the hero of Homer’s Odyssey. Yet I had no way of knowing the effect this epic tale, symbolizing one’s endless longing to return home, would have on me. Just out of grad school, oblivious to the pitfalls of handsome Greek men and a landscape that would come to speak to my very soul, I never bothered to ask myself: how much trouble could a young woman living on a remote Greek island get into?
In my case, a lot. That summer, I was swept off my feet by a man sixteen years my senior, a charismatic journalist, composer, and – married – mayor of Ithaka. Yet it wasn’t the passion of an affair that fueled me as much as another objective: I wanted to be Greek. Growing up as an army brat, I had been shunted around the world and never felt at home anywhere, yet here I finally was, on the island that epitomized it. The truly quixotic thing was that being with the mayor made me feel like I belonged on Ithaka. In my fever induced pipe dream, I briefly imagined becoming the first lady of the island. Gossip traveled fast: old village women in black tittered about me as I passed, and I was secretly pleased when I noticed some local kids had scribbled my initials in lipstick red alongside the mayor’s on the post of his whitewashed fence. Like any small town where everybody knows everybody else’s business, Kosti surely knew about my transgression, but he never chastised me. So he sold me birth control pills, over the counter, no prescription necessary.
That summer I first wandered into Kostis’ small, crowded store, it was not only birth control pills I purchased, but also sunscreen, ear plugs, and tablets for an anti-mosquito machine that warmed the pellets, no doubt releasing toxic chemicals into the air as I slept. His store was the size of a postage stamp, cluttered with pill bottles, tubes of cream, orthotic soles and shampoo. A phalanx of unpacked boxes piled up on the counter almost obscured his small, slender stature from his customers. The shop was not white or antiseptic, but patinated in a pale yellow. There was nothing surgical about it; in fact, it resembled Greece in the most perfect of ways – a country with dirt under its fingernails.
A lone image hung on the wall, an oversized, daguerreotype-like portrait of his father – imperious, staring and almost saintly in its position of veneration. Elderly islanders with a bevy of health complaints would congregate beneath its pensive glower, waiting for an audience with the pharmacist. Since the only island doctor was rumored to be a drunk, Kosti became their general practitioner, their father confessor, their priest. He administered their insulin shots. He was the one who mitigated their pain, dispensed the palliative.
~ ~ ~
When the dig ended, I cut off my affair with the mayor, for I had realized it was the island, not him, I had fallen in love with. Years later, when I visited with my husband, I was surprised to see the mayor patrolling the perimeter of our restaurant, waiting to catch me alone. When my husband returned to our pension for a nap, the mayor approached me. Removing his sunglasses, he insisted I remove mine. Searching my eyes with his intimidating gaze, he made it known that he did not like my husband coming to the island. He considered me, even after all these years, his property.
But Kosti welcomed my husband as if nothing had happened, as if I hadn’t – years before – been carrying on an affair with a married man. Now a mother, embedded in my new life attending PTA meetings and driving carpools, there was no more trace of my wild child past. And being treated to elaborate dinners, courtesy of Kosti, would become the sine qua non of my every return to the island.
The last evening of our visit we sat outside, at the edge of the harbor, at a place called Gregory’s. A quarter moon punctured a diorite sky and reflected off the surface of the water that pooled, still and black as chocolate, at our feet. Kosti, my husband, and our friend, Mary Lou, sat across from one another, sharing a private joke. A cat brushed against my bare leg while a fusion of waves lapped against the shore, and the jangle of metal halyards snapping against masts filled my ears. Across the bay, laughter came and then disappeared with the sporadic winds. Snatches of music emanated from bars, like tentacles spiraling out for a moment, retracting the next. Motorcycle engines blasted the night air.
The waiter flapped a tablecloth above us and floated it down onto the surface, securing it with rubber bands that snapped around the table’s flanks, prompting Kosti to begin his order. First out came tiny copper pitchers of house wine, apo bareli. Plates were set down, the ceramic cracking solidly against the wooden surface.
When it came to food, Kosti did nothing halfway. A platter of grilled steak and peppers was delivered, followed by zucchini blossoms stuffed with rice and ground lamb, slabs of feta dusted with oregano, and coins of fried baby eggplant. A roasted whole fish was set down, its eyes rheumy and staring blankly. Kosti, ever the master of ceremonies, rose to his feet, his knife and fork piercing the air like a conductor teasing out the notes of a Beethoven sonata. He dissected and parceled the fish like a surgeon, refilling our glasses with pine-scented retsina.
After dinner, our fists wrapped around small glasses of course brandy, he held forth with all the bravado of Ithaka’s premier pharmacist-philosopher. When asked what was his favorite season on the island, he said he couldn’t choose.
“April is when the almond trees bloom,” he went on to pronounce with the authority of a man whose internal rhythm is intimately synched with his beloved landscape. “In August, the pears and figs become so heavy they drop from the branches,” he said, his voice growing wistful and nostalgic. “September is the grape harvest and the time of the new wine,” he said. “And in November the olive presses on the island are working overtime,” he continued, regaling us with stories of the mellifluous liquid, pouring off the presses, caught by a slice of bread, still warm from the sun.
Momentarily slipping into his role of pharmacist, Kosti chastised Mary Lou for her Valium habit. His prescription for her anxiety was the island itself.
“Ithaka is one big tablet,” he would announce with a knowing glance, and then refill our glasses.
~ ~ ~
Years later, I traveled to Ithaka with my teenaged daughter. We had just finished working on a dig on the mainland and were taking a few days of well-deserved R&R on the island. On our last night, Kosti, as usual, insisted on taking us to dinner. The evening started with five appetizers for the three of us; multiple bottles of wine somehow made their way to our table, and dishes of grilled lobster, steak kebabs, taramosalata and crescents of freshly sliced melon were paraded from the kitchen with panache.
I was used to Kostis’ sense of bravado and majestic generosity, but our ferry was to leave the next morning at 6 a.m. and Elena was petulant and quickly becoming tired. Seated on a terrace overlooking the sea at one in the morning, trying to digest a meal that would choke an elephant and being shot deathly glances from my daughter, Kosti could see she was peeved, but nonetheless remained the sympathetic and ever-solicitous host.
“Bring her back when she is older,” he whispered to me gently. “She will be able to better appreciate Ithaka then.”
Returning with my son a few years later, Kosti didn’t take us to the usual seaside taverna. The island had become increasingly trendy in the interim, and boutique hotels were sprouting up with their own restaurants. Two friends joined us, and Kosti, surrounded by the ultra-modern blue and white décor, stood at the edge of the table, once again conducting the meal like a maestro, ordering the waiters to bring more atherina – fried, tiny matchstick fish he knew I liked – skewers of lemon-soaked lamb chops, shrimp baked in tomatoes and feta and bowls of a mouth puckering garlicky potato puree known as skordalia.
“Alec, you must try this!” he called across the table. Leaning over the half-eaten dishes he simultaneously handed my son a platter of grilled sea bream while topping off everyone’s wine.
As always, the conversation reached a fever pitch – Kosti had opinions about everything. If you asked him about politics, he would offer a magnificent Gallic shrug: shoulders pinching his neck, lower lip pursed, eyes rolled and palms lifted toward the heavens. “There is so much corruption,” he would complain, his voice growing louder as the evening passed. “We islanders have to pay the shipping company bribes to keep the boat coming to Vathy, and if we do not, they hold us hostage and stop service!”
When the conversation turned to less combustible topics, such as literature, he was quick to approve my favorite poet.
“Constantine Cavafy, malista!”
With dreamy, bedroom eyes, he encouraged me to recite his most famous poem;
“As you set out for Ithaka,
Hope your road is a long one,
full of adventure, full of discovery”
I started, then tapered off, preferring to return to our conversation and hear his deep voice ricochet about the room before spilling out the windows into the thick night air.
~ ~ ~
A sign taped to the pharmacy door said Kosti would be away for the weekend; my husband and I looked at each other, concerned. When we asked a nearby shopkeeper, she simply shrugged and gave us his home phone number. No answer there either.
I had come to Ithaka to finish a book and my husband had met me partly into my stay. Our plan was, as always, to surprise Kosti. Finally, one morning just before our final day on the island, we watched the lights in the pharmacy flicker on. Making our way through the canyon of stacked boxes, turnstiles, and plexiglass displays of cough medication and plastic pill dispensers, we spotted him in his white jacket, bent over the cash register. Seeing us, his face crumpled into disbelief, quickly followed by delight.
Sto spiti mou, afto to vradhi, he said, with a tone that there was to be no objection. Come to dinner tonight, at my home.
I had never been to his house, so we were stunned by the postmodern structure, complete with pool, cantilevered into the rock cliff just above the harbor’s entry. Before he married, Kosti had lived with his elderly mother in a house in town, one of many two story traditional structures just behind the harbor, daubed in pastel paint. During siestas, I knew he napped in the back of the pharmacy; so seeing a home right out of Architectural Digest was a shock.
Einai to oneiro tis Ranias, he offered casually, jutting his chin in the direction of his wife.
It is Rania’s dream.
While Rania lifted lids off pots in the kitchen, Kosti uncorked a bottle of red wine. Taped to the stainless hood above the cooktop was a photo; beaming proudly, Kosti gestured me over – there, plastered prominently in his kitchen was a shot of me and my son with Kosti and friends, taken ten years before during a visit.
Their twin girls had just left for college but their teenage son, Lefteris, joined us for dinner. Conversing in a mixture of Greek and English, we applauded the braised octopus, briny thin slices of fish roe pate and a rough spinach pie that emerged from the kitchen. When Kosti stumbled over an expression in English, Lefteris laughed and quickly corrected him. Launching into his magnificent shrug, Kosti delighted in his son’s ribbing and proceeded to fill our glasses with copper-colored pours of his best raki.
Before getting into our car, we hugged once, twice, then again before ducking into the seats. The night air was cold and quiet, but I could still see him in the doorway, his arm waving and framed by the golden light, as we turned the corner and headed down the mountain road.
~ ~ ~
The shop is brighter these days. The yellowed paint is gone, the black and white photograph of his father, the expression still severe but the image smaller than I remember, still hangs on the wall, high above the racks of eardrops, baby shampoo and boxes of humidifiers.
He is standing behind the counter, partially obscured by a stack of pharmaceutical boxes. I watch as he leans into a customer, a fringe of once black curls, now feathery gray, surrounding a baldpate that reflects the diffused light. The moment he notices me he stops what he is doing, rounds the corner of the counter and comes at me, as always, arms outspread, a smile crumpling tanned cheeks, eyes big as pools. After a long hug, he steps away, searching my face with a childlike curiosity.
“Posses imeras meneis stin Ithaki?”
I smile at the question – the same one he asks each visit: how long are you staying? As usual, it isn’t long enough. I am attending a writer’s conference and all my nights are booked, so I have only a few minutes to drop by the pharmacy. After another long hug, and asking me about Phil and the kids, I hand him a large shopping bag. Shoulders sagging, clearly disappointed I will be unable to meet him for dinner this trip, he stares into the bag for a moment, then a slight smile creases his face once again. One word passes his lips.
“Montana.”
Over the years, one of the things I have learned about Kosti is that he loves the American West. I think he secretly wants to move to a ranch and wear a cowboy hat, so the least I can do is give him the latter. I completely believe that he wouldn’t know the first thing to do on a cattle farm, except sit, poised on a knobby wooden fence rail and chew contemplatively on a hayseed. And stare at the sky. The infinite sky that is so completely different from that of Ithaka’s horizon, laced with cataract-blue mountains and dark, forbidding waters.
The same thing that Kosti yearns for in his love of Montana must come from the same place as my love for Ithaka. The Greek word nostos describes it as longing. But for what, exactly? Somewhere exotic, far away and so very different than where you come from…or a place that feels profoundly familiar?
Like Odysseus, some of us like to wander far afield – even if only in our imaginations – and sometimes our sense of what constitutes home and belonging can be found in more than one place – or person. In his dreams, perhaps Kosti sees himself astride a horse, herding sheep in the foothills of the Rockies. In mine, I imagine myself living in a converted windmill high on the slopes overlooking Ithaka’s seemingly endless harbor.
Now, when I return to the island, I have become used to the mayor no longer recognizing me when we pass in the street. But when I enter the pharmacy, I am received instantly, with a profusion of warmth, grace and camaraderie.
Turns out it isn’t the once dashing and possessive politician who makes me feel like I belong, like I’ve come home, and who has treated me to a set of magical evenings never to be forgotten. It’s the one behind the counter of a remote Greek island pharmacy: the romantic, wanna-be cowboy with the hangdog eyes, a munificent heart and a philosopher’s soul.
A person named Kosti.
~ ~ ~
Amanda Summer is an archaeologist and writer. She is on staff with the Iklaina Archaeological Project and the Pylos Archaeology Foundation. Her stories have appeared in The New York Times, Islands, Archaeology, and The Best Travel Writing 2011. She is also the author of 100 Places in Greece Every Woman Should Go.