Zorba's Taverna: The Trouble With Goats and Mayors, page 7
“Pale like yoghurt,” she said. “Not like Zorba.”
And then he slumped forward.
It wasn’t dramatic. There was no gasp, no collapse. Only a slow, silent folding. Like a man who forgot how to sit upright.
Mary dropped her tray. Claude shouted something in French. Eleni called for someone to get ice, then clarified, “Clean ice, not from the fish bucket, please.”
Alex was already beside him, barking orders, checking his pulse, snapping at George to shut off the music and at Dimitri to stop shouting “IS HE DEAD?” quite so loudly.
He wasn’t. But in that moment – still, slumped, silent – the whole village held its breath. The air itself seemed to hesitate. We carried him into the back room and laid him on the cool tile floor. The old fan was ticking overhead like a metronome of concern. Someone fetched a damp towel.
Someone else ran for the doctor, who, as usual, was not at home. Last time we needed him he was halfway up an olive tree “supervising” a harvest. Before that, he was in the kafenio refereeing an argument about whether retsina counts as medicine. Today, he was found at the harbour, trying to find something for lunch which didn’t have tentacles. He asked if we had “tried water”.
We hadn’t. Yet.
Zorba was conscious, but barely. His eyes fluttered open briefly. He moaned something about the octopus being overcooked – which, given that there was no octopus that day, wasn’t a great sign.
Claude offered brandy. Maria offered prayer. Dimitri offered to carry him to the sea for “restorative immersion”, which was vetoed instantly by everyone, including the goat.
When the doctor finally arrived, he smelled like a fishing net left in the sun on a hot day, with a few suspicious scales still clinging to his sleeve and a plastic bag dripping steadily onto the tiles. He took one look at Zorba and said, “Mild dehydration. Bit of heatstroke. You people don’t listen, do you?”
“He’s Zorba,” said Alex. “He doesn’t do water.”
“Well, he does now,” said the doctor, and handed him a glass.
Zorba took it, sipped it, and made a face like someone had handed him a cup of betrayal. Then he drained it.
The diagnosis was simple. Not serious. But we had all been warned.
That night, the taverna was quieter than usual. The tables were full, but the laughter took longer to arrive. The chairs creaked a little louder. The fridge’s hum felt mournful. No one dared complain about the wine.
Zorba sat in his usual chair, wrapped in a light blanket, sipping a small coffee. He looked… mortal.
It was strange.
We’d all built something around him. A rhythm. A myth. A sense that he was the anchor: unchanging, unshifting, immune to time and bureaucracy and whatever nonsense the mayor tried to impose.
But now we’d seen the truth.
He wasn’t stone. He was skin. He was breath. He could fall.
And if he could fall, what else might tip?
Alex, uncharacteristically quiet, brought him a bowl of soup. She didn’t ask if he wanted it. She didn’t lecture. She simply placed it in front of him, tucked the napkin under his chin like a mother preparing a toddler, and sat beside him. No words. Just soup.
Mary brought bread – the soft one she makes for children and heartbreaks, rather than the crusty usual kind.
Even the goat sat quietly nearby, like a concerned niece.
Later, I found Zorba watching the sea again.
“Not today,” I said, sitting beside him.
“No,” he said. Then he added, after a pause, “But one day.”
I nodded.
“Not before dessert,” he assured me.
I smiled.
The sea shimmered. The chairs tilted. Somewhere in the kitchen, Theodora shouted about someone using the wrong oregano and the world felt if not fixed, at least familiar again.
And Zorba?
He sipped his coffee.
He watched the sea.
And he stayed upright.
Chapter Ten
Zorba’s Foundations
A Memory of Marble and Mud
Zorba was not a man for speeches.
When he sat, he sat in silence. When he smoked, he smoked as though the cigarette was telling him secrets.
But every so often, when the night was quiet enough and the sea was breathing slowly, Zorba would speak.
Not loudly, and not for long.
Just enough for you to remember that before any of us came along, before printed menus, before wine lists, before someone thought to write the words taverna experience, this place was his.
It was one of those evenings when the horizon glowed faintly, like an ember refusing to go out.
Alex had gone inside to stack glasses. Mary was sweeping. I was doing what I always do when I have nothing else to say: staring at the sea, waiting for it to answer questions I haven’t yet asked.
Zorba sat under the tin roof, one boot hooked over the other, a glass of tsipouro balanced on his knee.
He didn’t look at me when he started.
“There was nothing here,” he said, quietly. “Not a floor. Not a roof. Only mud. And the sea.”
I moved my chair to his table, knowing better than to interrupt.
“I built the first wall by hand,” he went on. “Stone by stone. The good ones I carried from the beach. The flat ones I stole from the old quarry. Took me all winter. My hands split open before New Year.”
He turned his palm over, as if he could still see the scars.
“I poured the first floor myself. No mixer. No help. Mixed the cement in an old fishing boat because that’s what I had. My neighbour said it would never set. It did. Hard as marble. Hard enough that if you fall on it, it remembers.”
He took a slow drink, his eyes somewhere far off.
“The first roof?” Zorba said, leaning back as though seeing it again. “I made it from driftwood and lies. Who knows where those planks came from – maybe the four corners of the world, maybe just the next village over. But somehow, they all found their way here.
I dragged them off the beach one by one, still smelling of salt and storms, nailed them into place with rusty nails and curses. Every gust of wind tried to take it. But I told it to stay. And it stayed.”
He smiled at the memory.
“Some nights, lying here on the bare floor, I could feel the roof creak like it was alive, as if it was still deciding whether it wanted to stay or go back to the sea. But it stayed. Because I stayed. And when the first rain came, it barely leaked.”
He gave a small shrug.
“By then I had already decided that if it did leak, I’d just sit here and get wet. Because this place was mine, and I wasn’t going anywhere.”
He looked up at the beams above us, and for a moment they seemed to stand a little straighter under his gaze. I felt it. That quiet, immovable certainty. The kind of stubbornness that builds tavernas and holds villages together. For a moment, I almost wished it would rain, just to see him keep his word.
“The first night I slept here,” he said, “there was no furniture. Only me, the sea, and one pan. I made beans over a fire outside and ate them with my fingers. The moon was so bright it turned the sea white. I thought, ‘If no one comes, this will still be enough.’”
He smiled then, not a warm smile, but one of recognition.
“They came,” he said simply. “Fishermen first. Then shepherds. Then strangers. And little by little, it became something. Not just a place to eat. A place to sit. To argue. To forgive. To remember that you are alive.”
He ran a thumb around the rim of his empty glass.
“When I handed it to you,” he said, “I thought it would be easy.”
He glanced at me, the faintest flicker of amusement in his eyes.
“Easy for me,” he clarified. “Not for you.”
And there it was, the thing beneath all his gruffness, all the sighs and criticisms.
He had bled for this place.
And then one day, he had let it go.
But he hadn’t left. Not really.
He still sat here, still watched, still judged from his chair like some reluctant guardian saint. And maybe he still wasn’t sure if handing it over had been the right thing to do.
The sea gave a long, slow sigh, as though agreeing.
Zorba reached for his cigarette case, and found it empty.
“Don’t make it pretty,” he said, standing. “Pretty makes people stupid. Make it honest. Honest lasts longer.”
He paused, one hand on the doorframe, and added, almost to himself, “And don’t make it easy. Things that are easy don’t stay.”
Then he left, leaving me with the stars, the taverna, and the weight of what he’d said.
I sat there until the glasses were stacked, the broom had stopped sweeping, and the moon had claimed the courtyard for itself.
I looked at the floor, the one he had mixed in a fishing boat. At the beams, the ones he’d convinced to stay. At the sea, the one that still brought strangers, still threatened to take it all back.
Alex and I had never really stopped to think about Zorba’s legacy, not properly. We told ourselves we were keeping the taverna alive for the village. A place to sit, to eat, to gather.
We hadn’t thought about what it meant to Zorba to hand it over.
The trust he had shown us was staggering.
It was, if we were honest, probably the highest honour we would ever be given.
And that night, sitting under the same roof he had built with his own hands, I finally understood.
What Zorba had given us wasn’t just a business, or a set of keys, or a pile of tables and chairs. He had given us something he had wrestled out of the mud and the wind and the waves. Something he had fought for with his back and his hands and his stubbornness until it stood on its own.
He had given us a piece of himself.
And it would outlast him, provided we managed not to ruin it.
That was the real weight of it.
And in that moment, I made the only promise that mattered:
We wouldn’t let him down.
Chapter Eleven
A Wedding and a Scandal
It looked like a wedding was on the horizon.
We had never hosted a wedding reception before. The closest we’d come was last year, when we put on A Name Day to Remember for Father Evangelos. That celebration had reached what Maria called “biblical proportions”.
The name day was supposed to host 150 people but somehow attracted exactly 150 plus everyone’s cousin, neighbour, ex-boyfriend, and that one woman who once bought a jar of olives and now thinks she owns shares in the taverna.
Father Evangelos had invited “a few friends from the mainland”, which translated to two boatloads and one distant cousin who turned up with a sound system and a box of fireworks.
The taverna and the lemon grove had been fully utilised for seating, along with the road, the beach, and, for a short but memorable spell, Dimitri’s fishing boat.
Preparations had been heroic. Three lambs were spit-roasted. Eleni produced 187 dolmades, each measured to regulation size. Theodora and Vassiliki baked with such fury that flour was still turning up in unexpected places a month later. The kitchen teetered somewhere between divine inspiration and full-blown emergency, with cooks shouting, arguments breaking out, and feta flying through the air like confetti.
By the end of the night we’d run out of plates, Dimitri’s tsipouro had been used as dishwashing currency, and Spiros was found asleep in the old bread oven, snoring softly like a man who had seen paradise and was unimpressed.
And yet it had been perfect. Chaotic, loud, glorious – a triumph.
But a wedding was different. Weddings had protocols. They had traditions older than the hills and more complicated than Greek tax law. With the possibility of a miracle occurring and Mary being so inspired by it that she agreed to marry Andonis. (Unlikely, but we had learned never to rule out divine intervention in this village.)
So, one day, we got lucky.
Someone else was getting married, and they wanted Zorba’s for the reception.
It was Maria who broke the news, of course. She burst into the taverna like a one-woman news agency, waving her notebook as though it had been blessed by the Oracle of Delphi.
“Manolis and Irini are engaged!” she shouted, loud enough to make the cats scatter and Katerina stop mid-chew.
The room froze.
Not because anyone was shocked that Manolis was getting married – though that was miracle enough – but because he was marrying Irini.
Manolis had been the village’s resident free spirit for as long as anyone could remember. Broad-shouldered, sun-browned, with his own boat and a way of talking that made even the fish lean closer. He’d never married, never been pinned down, and was widely assumed to have sampled most of the village’s metaphorical fruit basket.
And then there were the rumours.
The ones nobody said out loud, not in daylight, anyway, but everyone somehow knew.
Whispers that Manolis had once pursued Irini’s mother, back when both of them were still young enough to do reckless things and blame it on the moon.
Claude was the first to recover. He poured wine for everyone, including himself, and said, “Well. This will make for an interesting seating plan.”
“At least we know he’ll keep her in fish.”
“Or in trouble,” Mary said.
“Both,” said Claude cheerfully, as though offering a toast, and topped up his own glass.
Dimitri leaned back in his chair, a slow grin spreading across his face.
“Good,” he said. “A wedding with rumours is always a better wedding. Keeps the speeches short and the dancing long.”
By morning, the news had gone feral.
Maria’s Telios Tribune was out before breakfast – handwritten, photocopied, and already pinned to the wall of the kafenio by the time we arrived: “Engagement Rocks Telios: Fisherman Finally Nets His Catch.”
Beneath the headline was a sketch of Manolis’s boat with little hearts puffing out of the chimney and what might have been Irini dancing on the bow.
Maria had underlined the word finally three times in red.
By the second coffee, more theories had sprung up.
“They say she proposed,” whispered old Kyria Sofia, clutching her worry beads like she was holding back the wrath of Zeus.
“No, no,” her cousin interrupted, leaning so far forward his chair creaked, “he proposed at sea. Romantic. He spelled her name in sardines.”
“That would take a lot of sardines,” Dimitri said, walking past with a basket of bread.
Claude, who had come early purely for the drama, leaned back and smiled.
“Telios has been boring lately. Now we have a wedding and a scandal. Perfect.”
Spiros lit a cigarette, blew smoke over the page, and asked the question on everyone’s mind.
“What I want to know is whether someone’s inviting her mother. Because that will be a party.”
Theodora, already mentally arranging tables, said, “If her mother comes, she sits near the kitchen. That way we can keep an eye on her.”
Maria was halfway through suggesting that they keep the kitchen door locked when Irini walked in, head high, curls bouncing. Irini was in her late twenties, glowing like a lantern, eyes flashing, looking like a woman who had personally orchestrated this outcome and dared anyone to question it.
“He proposed!” she announced, practically vibrating with triumph. “Well, he proposed six months ago,” she added, rolling her eyes. “He’s only just worked up the courage to let you all find out.”
Theodora crossed her arms, her expression the human equivalent of a church bell warning of bad weather.
“He’s nearly sixty! He could have been your father.”
“He wasn’t,” Irini said quickly, before anyone could start doing the maths and ruin the moment.
Spiros exhaled smoke like a warning flare.
Maria scribbled faster, already composing the next issue of The Telios Tribune.
“Yes, I know,” Irini said before anyone could scramble for an excuse. “Yes, he’s older. Yes, people talk. And yes, I love him. Now, someone give me a coffee before I have to dance on this table to shut you all up.”
Claude, caught mid-whisper, slid a coffee towards her with exaggerated innocence.
“No one was saying anything,” he said far too quickly.
Maria scribbled “Irini threatens table dance” in her notebook and everyone started talking again, louder than before.
Then Katerina wandered over, nudged Irini’s knee, and bleated softly as if to say, Well, if you’re happy, we’re happy.
Claude raised his glass.
“To Manolis and Irini,” he declared. “May your marriage last longer than his reputation – and may the past stay politely outside the church.”
Everyone drank to that. Even Spiros.
By lunchtime, the village was divided neatly into three camps:
The Romantics – who thought it was a love story for the ages and were already planning what to wear.
The Cynics – who predicted disaster, scandal, or a fishing-boat-based divorce.
The Practical – who didn’t care as long as there was lamb at the feast and enough chairs.
And somewhere in the middle of it all, Manolis stood grinning as though he had caught the biggest fish of his life – and was quietly hoping it wouldn’t wriggle off the hook before the wedding day.
Chapter Twelve
The Dry Run
(and How We Almost Didn’t Survive It)
It began, as most Greek weddings do, with mild heatstroke, a crowd already whispering, and the distinct feeling that half the guests were only there to see if someone would slap someone else.
The service was held in the village church, which was whitewashed, sun-baked, and radiating the same energy as an annoyed aunt who had been dragged out of her house on the hottest day of the year.
