The Rebirth of Pan | Page 6

and his discretion became known and accepted things.
Everyone became used to the state of affairs which was after all in no
way remarkable.
When his neighbour, Pappa Andros, the local priest, asked him about
his visitors he was careful to refer to them always as "Agios"--"the
holy", a word in common use for saints and gods alike. Pappa Andros
did not press him. He was a local man, and the gods had always had
their sandals from Ithyka, for longer than anyone could count. There
was a tale that it was here that Ag. Hermes had run down Ag.
Hephaestos' runaway cow, and Hephaestos, coming up behind, had
taken the hide from the creature, dead of exhaustion. After pondering
for a moment he invented both leather-working and tanning, and taught
the crafts to the ancestors of the islanders, who were crowding round,
interested in this new thing. Whether one called them gods or saints it

was much the same.
The priest had grown up, as all the islanders did, hearing the stories of
how Ag. Pavlos went around Greece converting the gods. Some would
bow a knee to Christ and some would not. Those who would not Ag.
Pavlos cast out to exile, and those who would became saints. Pappa
Andros knew that such stories were frowned on in the seminary in
Athens, and by those bishops who complained that their church had
never had a reformation and was still riddled with pagan superstitions.
He had been too slow and too shy to speak up then and ask whether
something was a superstition if it was true. That slowness and shyness
was probably why he was back in his home town dealing with its
problems as well as he could, and not in Athens or Thessaloniki at the
heart of church politics and the affairs of the world.
He was well content with his life. He had joined the church to devote
himself to Christ and to Ag. Nikolaos. He knew Ag. Nikolaos had been
Poseidon. When the people said that he would one day be Poseidon
again when the world was reborn he reproached them, but not with any
sense that they were really wrong. He could not take birch twigs dipped
in holy water and cast out the spirits of sloth, idleness and malice from
the houses of his people if he did not believe as they did. So they
trusted him and came to him with their problems and not to Pappa
Thomas in the big church of Ag. Paraskevi. This sometimes caused bad
feeling with Pappa Thomas, who was young and well educated and a
great believer in logic and progress.
"Don't encourage them," Pappa Thomas would say. "It's the
twenty-first century, not the fourth! We're in the European Community.
This is the modern age. We have electricity. Computers. Everything is
changing and going to be different. Just because we are out of the way
we must not get left behind." He would frown sternly at Pappa Andros
whose little house had neither electricity nor computers, and who did
not find this century all that different from those which had preceded it,
in the important ways.
Pappa Andros was getting old and his belly under his big priest's beard
was getting big and loose, and he liked to laugh. He still loved Christ

and his saint, and he loved his people. He could cope with their oddities.
Choosing not to dispute with Yanni the reality of the gods or saints he
shod was just one among many things that made perfect sense in his
daily life. It only seemed strange when he found he could not talk about
these things to Pappa Thomas or to the bishop, when he made one of
his rare visits to the island. He got on well with his flock, including the
taciturn Yanni. He appreciated the discount Yanni gave him when he or
his wife needed a new pair of sandals. He didn't think the matter of
making sandals for the gods was worth mentioning to his superiors.
So it was that when Yanni invited him to dinner at Stellio's taverna he
made nothing of it and agreed cheerfully, taking it for a bit of
neighbourly kindness. He enjoyed his food, and he enjoyed eating and
drinking with his friends. He didn't suspect anything strange until he
arrived and found every important person and every single shoemaker
from the island of Ithyka waiting for him.
Stellio's taverna occupied the ground floor of a large cream-painted
rectangular house near the centre of the town. Upstairs, where Stellio
and his large family lived, there were many balconies jutting under a
red tiled roof. Downstairs was one single large room, the taverna. One
end was the kitchen, with the big open fire, little stoves,