Under the Tongue

by Aules Persius Flaccus, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

The loudspeakers on Megalocharis started at six, before the light had properly reached the water. They were wired to the lamp-posts all the way up from the harbour to the church, and the chant came out of them a little behind itself, so that every word arrived twice: once from the post on the corner, and once, thinner, from the post further up the hill.

Fotini raised her shutter on the second word.

The shop was on Evangelistrias, the narrow street that climbs beside the avenue, one turning below the church. It was three metres wide and six deep. Candles hung on the left wall in bundles by height. The thin brown ones were twenty cents. The white lambades stood as tall as a man and were sold by the centimetre, ordered by people who knew their own height. Icons hung on the right. Behind the counter, on a board covered with blue felt, were the tamata.

The tin ones hung on hooks in rows. There were eyes, in pairs, and an ear. There was a heart with flames coming out of the top, a leg from the knee down, an arm, a breast, a pair of lungs like a moth. There was a baby in swaddling bands, a house, a car, a fishing boat with a man in it, and a sheep. They were two euros each, three with a ribbon. Below them a glass drawer held the silver-plated ones, at twelve and fifteen. Under the counter there was a wooden drawer that locked, and in it the sterling.

She stamped the tin ones herself, in the back room, on Manolis's hand press, from his dies. There were thirty-one dies in a biscuit tin. He had cut most of them in the eighties, sitting where she sat now, with his tongue between his teeth. The eye was his best. You could see the lashes. She could stamp a hundred eyes in an hour, and on the fourteenth of August she would sell them all.

Above the till she had a small icon of her own, a printed Annunciation pasted on a board, with an oil lamp in front of it. She lit the lamp. She crossed herself three times and said, aloud, because the door was open and Lefteris across the street was rolling up his own shutter:

"Panagia mou, health to everyone, and a quiet feast."

"Amen," said Lefteris, without turning round. In the glass of his door she could see his lips go on moving after the amen. She did not ask.

Then, under the tongue, with the lips barely parted, she said the other thing. It was hardly words, only the shape the words would have had: and let there be many of them. She had said it every fourteenth of August for fourteen years. She no longer heard herself say it, any more than she heard her own heart.

Every plaque on the felt was a part of somebody, somewhere in Greece, that had gone wrong.

---

By seven the first of them were on the carpet. From the corner she could see the strip of red running down the side of the avenue to the sea, and on it, small with distance, the people coming up on their knees. A young man in a football shirt had rolled his trousers above the knee. His knees were already black. Behind him came two women with folded towels tied round their legs with string, and then a girl of about twelve, with her mother walking beside her on the marble holding a bottle of water and an umbrella. The girl did not look up. Every few metres the mother bent and held the bottle to her mouth.

An old woman came in at half past seven, in black, with a handkerchief knotted at the corners. She wanted an eye.

"For my grandson. He's eight. One of his eyes turns in."

Fotini unhooked a pair of eyes and laid them on the glass. The old woman looked at them for a long time, then at the drawer of silver-plated ones beneath.

"Which does She prefer?"

"She doesn't look at the metal," Fotini said.

The old woman untied the handkerchief and counted out two euros in ten- and twenty-cent pieces, building little towers on the glass. Fotini counted them after her. It was all there. She put the coins in the till and the eyes in a paper bag, and the old woman went out holding the bag in front of her chest with both hands.

The sentence had come easily, because it cost two euros.

A young couple came at nine and stood a long time at the felt. The girl chose a baby, silver-plated, fifteen euros. The young man paid. All the while he looked out at the street, and when the girl took his arm to go he let it be taken without turning his head.

At half past ten the girl from the carpet came in with her mother. She walked stiffly, with her legs apart, like a child who has wet herself, and the knees of her jeans were grey with marble dust and dark in the middle. The mother wanted a leg. She looked first at the silver-plated legs in the drawer, and took out her purse and looked into it, and then pointed at the tin one on the felt.

"For the hip," she said. "She was born with it. They say an operation in October."

Fotini unhooked the leg. The girl had not looked at anything in the shop. She was looking at her own hands, which were black across the heels where she had leaned on them, and turning them over, as if they belonged to someone who had lent them to her.

"Three with the ribbon," Fotini said.

The mother paid three. Fotini tied a red ribbon through the hole in the top of the leg, with a double knot, so it would hang straight.

Lefteris had a better window than hers. He sold loukoumia as well, in white boxes, and keyrings with the church on them, and his sign said TAMATA – CANDLES – ICONS in red letters in Greek and in English. All morning he stood in his doorway with a cigarette and watched her customers go past his.

---

The man came in at twenty to one.

By then the heat stood in the street and did not move. The loudspeakers had moved on to a priest reading, and the reading came down the hill in pieces between the bells. He was perhaps forty-five. His shirt was linen and good, his shoes were good, and the key in his hand had a German badge on it. He kept his sunglasses on in the shop. His belt had a new hole in it, punched by hand. The leather had puckered round the new hole, and the old one, two holes further along, was shiny with wear.

He looked at the felt, not at her.

"Do you have one of a whole person?"

"Man or woman?"

"A man."

She had tin men from Manolis's die. They stood with their arms at their sides, like a gingerbread figure that has put on a suit. She laid one on her palm and held it out.

"Three euros."

He looked at it lying on her palm and did not take it.

"It's for a friend," he said, though nobody had asked. "He's in hospital. Something better."

Her hand had already gone down to the locked drawer. She noticed it when the key was turning.

The sterling men lay in tissue, three of them. The smallest was fifteen centimetres long, cut from sheet, beaten up from behind and chased on the front: a face, combed hair, the line of a jacket. It was a hundred and ninety euros. He picked it up and weighed it in his palm, moving the palm a little up and down, as people weigh fruit.

"Is there a heavier one?"

The largest was twenty-two centimetres long. Manolis had made it the year before he went into hospital and never priced it. She had priced it after. The figure had a tie, and fingernails, and the soles of its shoes showed at the bottom, as if it were standing on something. Four hundred and twenty euros.

He laid the two side by side on the glass.

"Does it make any difference to Her?" he said. "The size."

"Everyone gives what they can," Fotini said.

It was a true sentence. She heard it go out of her mouth clear and full, at the volume she used for the morning prayer.

He took the big one.

"Can you write a name on it?"

"On the back. There's no charge."

She turned the figure face down on the leather pad and took up the graver. He took off his sunglasses to watch, and she looked up to ask him the name.

The whites of his eyes were the colour of the beeswax candles on her left wall. Not the white ones. The others.

He scratched the inside of his forearm as he stood there, slowly, with four fingers, and went on scratching. The skin there was raw in lines.

She had seen that colour once before, on a pillow in the Evangelismos in Athens, in a ward where the window looked onto a car park. She had looked at it every day for five weeks.

"What name?"

"Kimon."

She cut it into the back of the silver: K, I, M, then the Ω, which is the hard one, with its two little feet. He talked while she worked, the way men do when they are watching someone else's hands.

"The doctors want to do tests," he said. "A scan. They want to put a camera down. I told them after the Panagia. First Her, then them." He laughed through his nose. "My wife says I'm a peasant."

He scratched his arm.

"It's the heat," he said, to the felt.

Something settled under Fotini's breastbone and spread, warm, like the first mouthful of coffee in the morning. She knew that warmth. It came with the big sales, at the moment the card went into the machine, and it had come now, a little before the card. The thought came only after it, like a clerk sent in to explain. A man with that colour comes back. Next August he comes back for a bigger one. Or his wife comes, in black, for a candle as tall as he was.

She put down the graver. On the corner the loudspeaker was between words.

"Go to them first," she said.

She said it to the back of the silver man, under the tongue, at the volume of the other prayer.

He leaned towards her over the glass. "Sorry?"

"Would you like a box," Fotini said clearly, "or a pouch?"

"A pouch."

She put the silver man in a blue velvet pouch and drew the strings tight. The card machine printed its receipt, which curled up out of the slot. He folded it once and put it in his shirt pocket, and the pouch in his trouser pocket, where it pulled the linen down.

"Thank you," he said. "Really."

He put his sunglasses back on in the doorway.

---

She watched him from the corner. He did not go onto the carpet. He walked up the marble beside it, past the people on their knees, slowly, the way a man walks up a slope who will not admit it is a slope. Halfway up he stopped in the shade of a pepper tree and stood for a while with his right hand pressed flat under his ribs, on the right side, as though he had remembered something he had left in an inside pocket. Then he went on up into the crowd at the gate and she lost him.

When she turned, Lefteris was in his doorway. He had seen the pouch, and how it pulled at the pocket.

"Good day?" he said.

"Glory to God."

She went in and put the receipt in the tin under the till with the others.

In the afternoon she stamped another hundred eyes. The press had a long iron handle, and the dies struck with a sound she felt in her back teeth. The eye was his best. She hung them on the hooks in pairs, still warm from her hands, and they went: to a man from Patras, to a nun, to a family of five from Cyprus, who bought a sheep as well and argued over it. At six a woman bought a pair of lungs and paid in exact change and said nothing at all.

At eight the bread ran out upstairs, and she left the shop to Lefteris's nephew for ten minutes and went down for a loaf.

The bakery was at the bottom of the street, by the kafeneio on the corner of the avenue, where the tables stand out on the marble under a vine. He was sitting at the end table, alone, with a lemonade and his phone face down beside it. He had taken off the sunglasses. In that light, with the sun gone behind the hill, the colour of his eyes did not show, unless you knew it.

He knew her before she knew he had seen her. He lifted the glass.

"It's done," he said. "She has it. A priest took it from me himself."

"Good."

"Sit down a minute. You've been on your feet all day." He pushed a chair out with his foot. She did not sit, but she did not walk on. "Do you know, I feel better? Since this afternoon. Lighter." He laughed, and pressed his hand under his ribs, and took it away again. "Isn't that stupid?"

There it was again, in front of her, on a little tin table, between the lemonade and the phone. She felt it the way you feel a step in the dark that is not where your foot expected it.

"It happens," she said. "People feel lighter."

That was also true. She had seen it a thousand times. They went up heavy and came down light, and then they went home.

"Monday I'll ring them," he said. "The boats are full until Sunday anyway, there's no getting off the island." He turned the phone over, looked at it, and turned it face down again. "My wife has booked me already. Wednesday. She's like that."

"Then Wednesday."

"Wednesday," he said, the way a man repeats the name of a station he does not intend to get off at, and scratched his arm.

The baker's girl was pulling down the shutter on the bakery. Fotini said she had to catch her, and caught her, and bought the last loaf, and when she came out with it under her arm he was talking into the phone, and he raised two fingers to her without stopping, and she went back up the hill.

The loaf was still warm. She held it against her side all the way up, and her side was warm where it had been.

At nine the courtyard of the church filled with people who would sleep there, on blankets and folding chairs, with cool-boxes and small children and grandmothers laid out like bundles. The loudspeakers went on.

She shut at eleven, counted the till, and climbed the stairs to the two rooms over the shop.

She did not sleep. She lay with the shutters open for the air and listened to the sleepers in the courtyard turning over, a child crying and being hushed, the chant that never quite stopped. At about two she put two fingers to the inside of her own wrist, as the nurses at the Evangelismos had done to Manolis every four hours, and counted against the clock on the wall, which she could just see.

Seventy-two. Then seventy-two again. It was as steady as the press. There was nothing wrong with her at all.

---

At half past five she went down to the harbour.

A grey warship lay out in the bay for the procession, lit along its rails. The quay was already full: coaches, police, men unloading crates of water from a van, a woman asleep upright on a bench with a plastic bag of bread in her lap. Fotini went past the end of the carpet, where it met the road and someone had weighted it down with stones, to the old steps at the corner of the quay, where the fishermen tie up. She went down them until the water was at the last step but one, and crouched.

The sea was warmer than the air. She cupped it in both hands and put her face into it.

Once. It ran down inside her collar. Twice. The salt got into her eyes and stung, and she kept them shut and did it a third time, pressing the heels of her hands against the lids, and held them there until the water had all run out between her fingers.

Out beyond the breakwater the horn of the first boat from Piraeus sounded, before the boat itself came round. Then the bow came round, white, and the decks were dark with people standing.

Fotini dried her hands on her skirt. The key to the shutter was already in her fist. She did not remember taking it out.

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THE END

Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem octāvum Kalendās Novembrēs (25 October 2026), ā Persiō Flaccō per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

Aules Persius Flaccus, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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