One Cretan Evening and Other Stories by Victoria Hislop

the world and he hummed quietly as he walked.
    On the opposite side of the road, in the narrow space between the little table and the kerb, an elderly couple walked slowly to their usual café. The man set the pace with his careful steps, leaning heavily on his stick. Perhaps in their nineties, and both no more than five foot four, they were tidily dressed, he in a crisply ironed, short-sleeved shirt and pale slacks, she in a simple floral cotton frock with buttons from neck to hem, and a belt around her middle, a style of dress that she had worn for perhaps five decades.
    All the seats in every café that lined the promenade on Niki Street faced out towards the sea so that customers could sit and watch the constantly animated landscape of people and cars and the ships that glided noiselessly in and out of the dockyard.
    Dimitri and Katerina Komninos were greeted by the owner of the Assos café, and they exchanged a few words concerning the day’s General Strike. With a huge percentage of the working population effectively having a day’s holiday, the café would have more business so the owner was not complaining. Industrial action was something they were all used to.
    There was no need for them to order. They always drank their coffee in the same way and sipped at the sweetened, muddy-textured liquid with a triangle of sweet pastry, kataifi, between them.
    The old man was deep into his perusal of the day’s newspaper headlines when his wife patted him urgently on the arm.
    ‘Look – look, agapi mou ! There’s Dimitri!’
    ‘Where, my sweet?’
    ‘Mitsos! Mitsos!’ she called out, using the diminutive of the name shared by her husband and their grandson, but the boy could not hear above the cacophony of impatiently sounded horns and the groan and grind of engines being revved at the lights.
    Mitsos chose that moment to look up from his reverie and glimpsed the frantic waving of his grandmother through the traffic. He darted between moving cars to reach her.
    ‘Yia-yia!’ he said, throwing his arms around her, before taking his grandfather’s extended hand and planting a kiss on his forehead. ‘How are you? What a nice surprise . . . I was coming to see you today!’
    His grandmother’s face broke into a broad smile. Both she and her husband adored their only grandson with a passion, and he in turn bathed in their affection.
    ‘Let’s order you something!’ said his grandmother with excitement.
    ‘Really, no, I’m fine. I don’t need anything.’
    ‘You must need something – have a coffee, an ice cream . . .’
    ‘Katerina, I’m sure he doesn’t want an ice cream!’
    The waiter had reappeared.
    ‘I’ll just have a glass of water, please.’
    ‘Is that all? Are you sure?’ fussed his grandmother. ‘What about breakfast?’
    The waiter had already moved away. The old man leaned forward and touched his grandson’s arm.
    ‘So, no lectures again today, I suppose?’ he said.
    ‘Sadly not,’ responded Mitsos. ‘I’m used to that now.’
    The young man was spending a year at Thessaloniki University, studying for an MA, but the lecturers were on strike that day, along with every other civil servant in the country, so for Mitsos it was a holiday of sorts. After a long night in a club, he was making his way home to sleep.
    He had grown up in London but every summer Mitsos had visited his paternal grandparents in Greece, and each Saturday, from the age of five, he had attended Greek school. His year in the university was almost at an end, and though strikes had often meant missed lectures, he was now totally fluent in what he thought of as his ‘father’ tongue.
    In spite of his grandparents’ pressing invitation, Mitsos was living in student accommodation, but made regular weekend visits to their apartment close to the sea where they almost overwhelmed him with the fierce devotion that is the duty of the Greek grandparent.
    ‘There’s been more industrial action than ever this year,’ said his