The House That Held the Return

There is, in certain families of the Greek diaspora, a piece of furniture that nobody uses and nobody will part with — a table, a chest, a framed photograph of a house that no one alive has lived in. In Helena's family, in Melbourne, it was a sketch. Her grandfather, who had left Cefalonia in nineteen-fifty-two at the age of nineteen and had not returned, had drawn it, over the course of a long retirement, in biro, on the back of a placemat. It showed a house on a hill above the sea, with olive trees, a cypress, a terrace, and — in the corner, in a careful hand — the words to spiti mas. Our house.

Helena, who is an architect and who had grown up with the sketch on the kitchen wall, decided, at forty, to build it.

## The grandfather

Yiorgos — Helena's grandfather — had been, in Cefalonia, the son of a stonecutter. He left because the island, in the years after the war, had nothing for a young man who wanted to build. He went to Australia, where there was a great deal to build. He became, over fifty years, a contractor of some substance in Melbourne. He built other people's houses, and his own house in a suburb with a Greek church, and he drew, on the back of a placemat one Sunday in the late nineteen-eighties, the house he would have built on the hill above Skala if he had stayed.

The sketch was not architectural. It was a wish. The olive trees were larger than the house. The cypress was as tall as the sky. The terrace was drawn with a table on it, and six chairs, and a line that might have been the sea or might have been the horizon, and that Yiorgos had drawn, Helena always thought, with a particular care.

He died in Melbourne. He had not been back to Cefalonia. He had described the island to Helena, in pieces, for thirty years — the smell of the thyme on the hills above Skala, the way the sea changed colour in the afternoon, the particular silence of an olive grove at midday — in a way that, she realised only after his death, was a kind of architecture. He had been building the place, in language, all his life.

## The hill

Helena bought the land on her second visit to the island. It was a hectare of olive grove and cypress, above the village of Skala, with the view of the sea that her grandfather had drawn — wider, in reality, than on the placemat, because reality is wider than memory, but recognisably the same view. The olive trees were the ones he had drawn. The cypress was there.

She did not build the sketch. The sketch was a wish, not a plan. What she built — and this is the part of the story that matters — was a house that a stonecutter's son, returned, would have built for himself if he had been given fifty more years and an architect's granddaughter.

## What we built

We built a house of the island's limestone — the hard pale stone that Yiorgos had cut, as a young man, in his father's yard above Argostoli. The walls are two feet thick. They hold the heat of the day and give it back to the night, and the house, in August, stays cool without air conditioning for most of the afternoon. The staircase is marble — the one gesture of overt luxury, and deliberate, because Helena's grandfather had always, in his stories, mentioned the marble stairs of the old Cefalonian houses with a particular reverence. The floors are chestnut, the island's timber. The walls are lime-washed white. The palette is four materials, and the discipline of the design is in what was left out.

The principal room opens to the sea through wide patio doors. The terrace holds a table and six chairs. The pool, set apart, meets the horizon in a way that, from the kitchen window at certain hours, the water and the sea are a single plane.

## What returned

Helena moved in, alone, in the spring. She had the sketch framed, and hung it in the kitchen — not as a design document, but as a portrait. She found, in the village, an elderly stonemason who had known her great-uncle. She found, in the parish register, the baptismal record of her grandfather. She learned, from the stonemason, the Cefalonian word for the particular quality of light that falls on the olive grove at six in the evening — a word that does not exist in English, and that her grandfather had, in his thirty years of description, never quite managed to give her.

The house is called, in the village, to spiti tou Yiorgou. George's house. The sketch, on the kitchen wall, is the same sketch, but the olive trees around the real house are larger now than the ones in the drawing, and the cypress is taller than the sky, and the line that might have been the sea or might have been the horizon is, Helena has discovered, both.

Some houses are built for the living. Some are built for the return. The best are built for both.