“Let’s get something to drink, maybe some mineral water”, Blue says and nods to the attentive waiter at the Café RoLoi. “Soda, parakalo! Dio sodes.”
“I like this place”, Pomander says and leans back in his chair. They’re sitting in comfortable low chairs facing the port and the fishing boats, just beside the church and the large clock tower.
“You know that this café used to be the Katsikas Grocery Store”, Blue says.
”Really?” Pomander looks surprised. “Maybe I thought that one was located at the other side of the port, hmm… very interesting. That place was a real hangout in the 50’s and 60’s. I read a biography on George Johnston and Charmian Clift, you know the Australian author couple who lived here, they seemed to spend a lot of time at the back of that Grocery store, where the place in some strange way turned into a simple bar with chairs and a couple of tables.”
“Leonard Cohen and his Marianne were there a lot too”, Blue says. “I read that the grocery store of the Katsikas brothers was the place all the writers and the poets and the artists got together on the island fifty years ago”, Blue continued, “and Göran Tunström, the Swede who got the Nobel Prize in Literature, was here a lot too.”
“This is just perfect”, Pomander says. “This was the missing piece in my puzzle. I’ve been thinking about having a fixed place at a café here in the port, a place I go to every day to open my mail. And where my friends will know they can find me for an hour or so, after one o’clock each day. Almost like an office, where people can leave messages and mail for me. For a while I had that system in Stockholm, at the Opera Bar”.
“Café RoLoi will be my new office”, Pomander states. “You are the first one to know. I will be holding forth at the Katsikas Grocery Store!”
“And by the way”, Pomander goes on, “Tunström was Swedish but unfortunately he never got the Nobel Prize. It’s hard for Swedes to get a Nobel Prize…”
“It’s good that I’m Greek, isn’t it”? Blue says.
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