The Couple In The Supermarket
His shirt was partway unbuttoned and my eyes were forced to meet a chest full of long, silver hairs, matted down in the heat on his oily chest. Two gold ‘orthodox’ chains hung around his neck with bright gold crosses hanging from them. One was more intricate than the other, displaying Jesus Christ hanging limply on the Cross. He was balding and his thin silver hair had been strategically combed over from the top of one ear towards the other, failing to camouflage his enormous balding scalp — as he’d hoped.
He was talking to my husband about some citronella candles he’d chosen for our mosquito-infested apartment and I listened and smiled as I watched the old man explain, in slow and broken English, what to do with them.
He seemed disinterested but patient as he spoke.
His round belly protruded so that it brushed my husband’s arm whenever he made a hand gesture. No doubt an intrusion of Nathan’s personal space but one that I knew he would politely ignore so as not to offend.
The old man must have been in his seventies. He made me feel homesick for my Papou (Greek Grandfather).
As I approached from the back of the store — I’d been hunting his shelves for Vegemite with no success — His wife came into my view and my attention shifted to her as she busied herself behind the cashier’s desk. She was listening to Greek music, humming quietly as she arranged cigarette packets on the shelf. I felt warm and safe in this moment. These strangers felt ‘homely’ and I wanted to stay and watch them go about their day for as long as I could.
When we laid out all of our purchases in front of her, she greeted us with the standard Greek pleasantries:
Hello, how are you?
I responded in perfect Greek:
Good thanks and you?
A response well practiced with my Yiayia and Papou (Greek grandparents) back home. Whenever I had been lazy and simply replied: “Good / Kala” Yiayia would scold me, shaking her head and finishing off the rest of the sentence for me in Greek: “GOOD THANK YOU AND YOU!?”. She’d wait till I’d mimic the same back to her before moving on with her morning.
I smiled momentarily at the memory.
Ahhh, you speak Greek then?? The old man beamed at me.
He’d come round behind the counter to bag our purchases as his wife scanned each item. An efficient team. Their faces now lit up, a newfound interest in the two tourists who had stumbled into their shop first thing this morning.
A little, my father is Greek I smiled, sheepishly in response.
The old man launched into a series of questions. Excitedly asking me where my father was from. A question, I had learned, that is of the utmost importance to other Greeks.
Mitilini I replied
Ahhh, Lesvos eh? He regarded me.
Nai / Yes I answered, nodding.
He gestured to my husband, standing beside me, and asked me if he was Greek too. Or maybe Italian, is he? He couldn’t pick it.
Nathan is naturally darker than I am. Tanned, bronze skin. In stark contrast to my milky white — with just a hint of oliveness. I had the potential to be as dark as him but it’d been ice cold for the past four weeks of our trip and I’d been living in jeans and bomber jackets.
I switched to English and answered that we were Australian.
He didn’t understand the word and I had to repeat it in Greek:
AF-STRA-LEZ-IKA I said, and they both threw their heads back in unison, lifting their eyebrows in surprise: “Ahhh, afstrlalezika”
(ahhhh, Australian!?)
He paused. Regarding us, I could tell his mind was bursting with questions he wanted to ask. His eyes glinted with interest. No one in Australia treated tourists with such interest.
He fired a paragraph-worth of dialogue back at me. He smiled, expectantly and I stood silent, like a deer in headlights while they waited intently for my answer.
He kept talking, his pace had changed and it was sounding less like the familiar dialect I’d grown up with and more like scrambled garble. Greeks talk quite fast and for an amateur, it can be very difficult to keep up
Sensing my confusion, his wife cut him off. She tapped his broad, hairy chest with the back of her hand to interrupt him, while keeping her eyes fixed on me and said in Greek:
“Slow down, slow down. You’re speaking too fast for her.”
*I can understand and comprehend better than I can talk back
My brain clambered around for the right words. I desperately wanted to learn more about them but my vocabulary was limited. I kicked myself that I couldn’t have real, meaningful conversations.
I should have listened harder in Greek School, I thought. I was more concerned, as a 9-year-old, at catching Aiden’s attention and strategically positioning myself next to him for dancing so he’d be forced to hold my hand.
When I felt the silence had dragged on too long I sputtered out: “Yes, I can only speak a little Greek” ashamed.
He regarded me, paused, and thought about his word choice some more, then repeated the same paragraph in a more simplified and slow-paced manner. He was determined to figure out this young, Australian couple.
They seemed so genuinely excited to know more about us. I explained that we were on our honeymoon. That Greece had been the last stop in our six-week vacation and that we’d “saved the best till last”. Their faces beamed with pride by my last comment.
Thankfully, they knew enough English that we could get by for a few more minutes while the wife bagged up our candles. I felt myself willing her to slow down so that we could stay lingering here together.
It was a curious feeling that had never come over me before while we were traveling. Perhaps it was because we had been away for almost 6 weeks at that point and I was starting to miss my family. Perhaps it was because they made us feel like we weren’t just invisible tourists. Perhaps it was the soft explosion of early pregnancy hormones swarming around inside of me, making me feel overly emotional and needy. Whatever it was, I carried their crinkly, smiling faces with me for the rest of the day while I conjured up an excuse to go back and buy something so I could see them again.
Thanks for reading! I post daily content over on instagram if you’d like to hear more from me over there. PS, My NEW substack profile is now over here.
x Bec
