Chase the Morning

I slumped onto a high-backed wooden settle, trying hard not to jolt my head or my arm, and stared around at the room. I’d seen touristy Greek bars trying for this kind of look. Now I realized what they’d been imitating. Here, though, the bunches of dried herbs and sausages dangling from the rafters, hams in sacking, huge slabs of salt cod, octopi looking like mummified hands, bloat-bellied wine-flasks with crude labels of dancing peasants, and shapes less identifiable, weren’t plastic; their fragrance hung heavy on the air, and the faintly trembling light of the lanterns that hung between them gave their shadows a strange animation. They were real lanterns, oil lanterns; you could smell them, too. I glanced around, and saw no sign of switches or power points anywhere on the walls; and come to that, the outside lights had been lanterns too. Their light was strictly local, and bright only in the centre of the room; the tables there were empty, but from the more shadowed ones in the corners I could hear the low buzz of voices, male and female, and the music of glasses and cutlery well wielded.

A tray clattered on the table in front of me, a bottle full of some pale liquid and a little narrow-necked flask of the same, no glass. A squat, rounded little man with the face of an amiable toad leaned over me and grunted. ‘On the house, friend! Anyone who takes a crack at Volfes does us all a favourrr!’ He had an accent as heavy as the spices in the air, heavy and guttural. There was a rumble of agreement from the shadowy depths of the room, and I was astonished to see the glint of glasses being lifted.

‘You should’ve seen him, Myrko!’ enthused Jyp. ‘They’d got me down, got my little sticker away, and he comes for ’em with a goddamn great iron bar! Three of ’em, and he fells two, the third gets a crack in before I get my blade back and open him up a bit! Went for ’em baldheaded, he did, just like that!’

Myrko nodded soberly. ‘Wish I had ssseen it! That was bravely done, my lad. Now get that down you, it’s for drrrinking, isn’t it? Sovereign rrremedy!’ I grasped the little flask gingerly, and tilted it to my lips. There was a trick to the shape of it; it shot the whole lot at the back of my throat. If you want to know what it felt like, tie a plum to a rocket and fire it down your gullet, preferably during an earthquake. I breathed out heavily, expecting to see the air glow, and Myrko poured me another while the flask was still in my hand. Suddenly the chill inside me lessened, my shivering stopped; I felt the blood pulsating in my veins, and the pounding in my head became bearable. I downed the second flaskful, and let him fill another before I held the bottle to see the label. ‘Tujika’ I said, with sudden understanding. ‘Slivovitz. But about three times as strong as any I’ve tasted before!’

Myrko grinned, looking ready to catch a fly any moment. ‘Sbliwowitch, yess, if that’s what you want to call it. Rrreal upland stuff, best this side of the Karrpatny. Hoi, here’s Katjka!’ I blinked. Out of the aromatic gloom a girl appeared – quite a girl. In that gaudy costume she went with the decor of the place; she might have stepped down off one of the wine labels, a picturebook peasant girl from somewhere on the upper Danube. Perhaps not a girl; a second glance put her in her late twenties. And perhaps not a peasant either; the embroidery on the flared red skirt and black stomacher was just too gilt and gaudy, the cut of the white blouse over her full breasts just a little too low, too strained. Her blonde hair looked natural, but the face beneath it was lean and foxy, not quite pretty, and the deep hard grooves either side of her mouth betrayed the kind of experience peasants don’t usually come by. Apart from that astonishing cleavage her eyes were the best of her, wide and grey and anxious.

‘What is it?’ she demanded urgently, her voice startlingly deep, her accent less noticeable than Myrko’s. ‘Who’s hurt, Jyp? Oh –’ Before anyone could answer she had swooped on me, clucking like a mother-hen and cursing the others for not calling her sooner. She had my anorak off my shoulders so swiftly and gently I hardly felt a twinge, and the buttons of my shirt seemed to fly apart as her nimble fingers flew down my chest; she slid that off too, leaving me shrivelling with embarrassment. But if anyone was staring I couldn’t see them, and there was no change in the buzz of voices; anyway, it didn’t seem to worry this Katjka girl. She pulled my head down to rest between her breasts without the least inhibition, and when Myrko came puffing up with the hot water she’d sent him for she began to clean and search my throbbing scalp with incredibly delicate fingers, and smooth on something pungent and seaweedy from a jar. ‘Relax …’ she crooned, but on that particular pillow it was both difficult and only too easy; in the end I just accepted the situation, and sagged.