The house on the cliff

“No, I assure you, I am not a priest. The beard is because…of circumstances. And the way I speak is the result of an old-fashioned education. I didn’t think it was still noticeable.” The sun must have been setting, because the light that struck the rocks surrounding us was gilding them with a golden glow. Where we sat, though, behind the great boulder of the Gate, the light was scant and turning grey. I didn’t like this time of day at the cave. The bats would soon be making their way out of the dark depths, stirring the air with the beating of their wings. Did the bats not bother him? “As soon as the gardener is gone, I’ll climb up.” “Are you afraid of him?” “Of course not! … Yes.” I blushed again. IIIIIII The gardener, who perhaps unfairly, had been for so many years, the protagonist of my nightmares. I will get to him, too. But let me start at the beginning. ANTHOÚLA’S STORY I am not a native Corfiot. I was born in Athens in the winter of 1934, in a private clinic on Sína Street, only a few blocks from our apartment, where I spent the first year of my life. I have no memories of that time. My earliest memories are of buzzards and seagulls swooping overhead, of the silvery branches of the olive grove as I pass underneath them on my father’s shoulders, both plump fists clenched tight in the thickness of his hair, of dogs barking and wild doves gurgling, the clucking of chickens, the smoke from the fireplace and Loxándra's warm embrace. We had been forced to move to Corfu. My father was a political exile, confined to the family estate on the island by the dictatorship of Ioánnis Metaxás. He was lucky. Other dissenting politicians and officers found themselves confined in earnest - to dungeons in Acronafpliá, or, at best, to remote and otherwise uninhabited islands, condemned to isolation and primitive living conditions. My father’s gentler treatment he owed to the dictator’s acquaintance, in youth, with my grandfather, the general Geórgios Velissáris, and to his snobbery and unwillingness to impose common penalties on the scion of “a good family”. When I say estate, I don’t mean to imply any great fortune. Such was no longer the case with us. There was quite a lot of land, mostly olive groves, but not the kind of land that translates to bountiful agricultural profits. The olive trees, planted on steep and chalky ground, were difficult to access, and