The Soviet Comeback by Jamie Smith (best ereader for academics TXT) 📕

smiling broadly at Elysia. His face was heavily aged, with deep creases scored across his forehead. Nikita could see a lifetime of laughter there, and great hardship too in the callused old hands.

As Elysia approached the bar and saw the old man’s smile she cried, “Pappoús!” before throwing her arms around him across the bar. He pulled back and held her face in his hands and landed two firm kisses on her cheeks.

Nikita stood there awkwardly, trying to look confident without feeling it at all. He knew enough of Greek from his phrasebook to know that ‘pappoús’ meant grandfather. Elysia turned and introduced the old man to Nikita in Greek. He smiled at Nikita and shook his hand, but there was a twinkle of cynicism there too. Nikita wondered if a black man had ever set foot in this back-street Skyros bar before. He suspected not.

“This is my grandpa, Theo. He doesn’t speak much English, but this is his bar. Anything there is to know about wine, he knows it.” She gestured behind the bar to the rows of wine bottles in racks.

If nothing else, Theo clearly knew the English word for wine, as his eyes lit up and he turned to pull a bottle of red wine out of the rack.

“Greek wine is best,” he said in a powerful and rich voice at odds with his small and wrinkled body, which made Elysia laugh. Theo spoke with her, pointing at the bottle before turning.

“Grandpa says that this is a special wine because it is made from only Agiorgitiko grapes which can be found nowhere but Greece.”

“That sounds great to me, but I can’t pretend to be a wine connoisseur,” replied Nikita, feeling totally out of his depth.

“Well then you’re in the perfect place to learn; Greek wine has more history than any other,” Elysia said with a tinkling laugh, as she again grabbed his hand and pulled him outside through the French doors. He looked at Theo, who nodded his head to him before turning his back to begin wiping down the bar.

Outside, the sun was searing despite it now being around five p.m. and Elysia led them to a table shaded under a grapevine. It was fairly busy with men dotted around, sitting on their own reading newspapers and sipping wine, and a group of women of all ages gathered around a table, sipping a bright red drink that Nikita couldn’t place. They were talking very loudly and animatedly, about what Nikita could only guess. Looking around the terrace, he could see it had been created in a traditional Greek style, with grapevines overshadowing half of the terrace, and in the other half small olive trees grew in large terracotta pots, with some of the scrubbed wooden tables shaded by rusting parasols. The terrace wasn’t large, but looked out to the harbour and the surrounding mountains. The sea was glistening and shifting gently, a vivid blue under clear sunlit skies.

As they sat, she placed down the bottle on the table. “I forgot glasses!” she exclaimed, rolling her eyes. “I’ll be back in just a moment.” As she left to wind her way back to the bar, Nikita noticed that all conversation had stopped and everyone was staring at him. He sat up straight and stared boldly back at them. What it must be like to be white and not always be the only black man in every room, he thought to himself. Nikita reprimanded himself for losing focus on the reason he had come to Skyros. It wasn’t to enjoy himself, but to carry out the assassination of a Russian double agent. He slipped into musing about the task he was here for, forcing himself to think of the gruesome murder he must commit. Not murder, he told himself. Not murder, but political assassination. He had to hold on to the difference.

As Elysia approached the table, she saw that everyone was still looking with judging eyes at the pair of them. Some of them looked positively livid.

“Ti?” she asked them all defiantly. A couple of them muttered to themselves but most of them turned back to what they were doing. “Ignore these people. They aren’t too used to black men in this part of Skyros.”

“Trust me when I say I’m used to it,” Nikita replied with a wry grin.

“I don’t doubt it. I don’t care though, and that’s all that matters,” she said matter-of-factly, with her chin raised and a half smile playing across her full lips.

Nikita couldn’t help but laugh. It was a strange feeling to him.

“Your face doesn’t look like it’s used to laughing; what’s your story?” she said, hitting rather too close to the bone.

“You’re not wrong, Elysia. But what I’m really interested in is your accent; I can’t place it. I can hear the Greek, but when you speak English it sounds pretty American, but not quite.” He picked up the bottle and began pouring it into both glasses. The dark red liquid was almost translucent in the bright sunlight.

She smiled. “Well, that would be because I am American actually.”

“You are?”

“Sort of.”

“You’re infuriatingly vague, you know.”

“This coming from the man who avoids questions about himself, only telling me his name and that he has a weird thing for statuettes of small black dogs.”

He said nothing, but smiled at her, staring intently into her eyes.

“OK Mr Intense, I’ll bite. My grandparents are all from Skyros, but in the forties my mom’s parents moved to Baltimore. There’s a big Greek community there; it’s even now called Greektown. My mom grew up as an American, but despite marrying my father, also from Skyros, she felt out of touch with her roots and wanted me to grow up Greek, not American. So she sent me to an international school in Athens where I got my weird Greek-come-American-come-vague-European-type accent.”

“That would explain it. So do