And just as quickly as the conversation began, it stopped, and the villagers went back to sorting through the vegetables. Mimi and I stood by the cart for a moment and pretended to admire the produce, and then we quietly slipped away.

At the top of the street, we stopped and looked back down.

“This is how life used to be,” said Mimi. “Simple. Uncomplicated.”

“Life has never been simple.”

“You know,” said Mimi, “it wouldn’t hurt if you tried to look at things positively every now and then.”

“Quiet,” I said. “The place is quiet.”

“There,” said Mimi. “Was that so hard?”

Not that the quiet was all that encouraging. While there were no cars and trucks rumbling up and down the streets, no emergency vehicles with their sirens, no loud music, neither were there any sounds of children playing or the voices of neighbours talking.

As we walked up and down the streets of Maletiani, the only sound was the wind.

“How about this?” Mimi stopped in front of a house with a grape arbour in the yard. “This look like your grandfather’s kind of place?”

Tomorrow the car service would take us back to Athens and the airport for our flight home. This was the one day I had to see where my grandfather was born, to close one of the unfinished circles of my life.

“Or maybe that one.”

I shook my head. “Not the way it works.”

“You’re a journalist,” said Mimi. “So, pick a house and make up a story about it.”

Mimi had a point. One of these houses was the house in which my grandfather was born and raised. The records at Kymi town hall had confirmed that. How many houses were there in the village? What was wrong with picking one and laying claim to it? The odds of being right were infinitely better than buying a lottery ticket or putting quarters into a slot machine at the casinos in Niagara.

“You stand in front of a house you like,” said Mimi, “and I’ll take a picture.”

I was about to explain why this was a bad idea when an old man came out of one of the houses and hurried towards us.

“Herete.”

Followed by a flood of Greek that I couldn’t follow.

The man was probably in his eighties. Maybe older. Short, powerful, the kind of man my grandfather had been in the handful of photos I had of him.

“Mavrias.” He waved a hand at an old stone house across the road, its door chained, its windows boarded. A wire fence and an iron gate guarding the property. “Mavrias.”

It took me a moment. “Mavrias?” I said, pointing at the deserted house.

“Nei, nei,” said the man. “Georgios Mavrias.”

“Mavrias,” I said. “Pou einai?”

“Ah, ah,” said the man, laying his face against his hands in a sleeping gesture. “Nekros.”

“Nekros?” said Mimi. “Is that like necropathy? As in . . . dead?”