"A pickle," he repeats, one more time for clarity. His voice has no obvious affect. He may be preparing a long speech about forgiveness, or he may be about to beat me to death. I can’t tell, but I’m not very confident about his forgiveness. Christ is big on forgiveness, and if Megalos were wearing his Patriarch’s outfit that would be a bit reassuring, but he isn’t. There’s something very deliberate about what he is wearing now, some assertion in the thonged sandals and dirty nails on his feet, and I need to know what it is. The wall is not the wall of some Christian monastery but something older, more vigorous and bloody. Nikolaos Megalos, at this moment, could be posing for a portrait of "the headman considers" from any year between the founding of Athens and the invention of the cellular telephone. When political people here invoke the ethos of the villages, they are not only touching the ancient past, but also ghosting up against the nationalist resistance fighters in the White Mountains of Crete, and the sexy jackboot whisper of a militarised Greece. It is the soft-focus reflection of Cosmatos’s prejudice, fascism lite.