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He walked along Danforth Avenue a few days before the Greek Easter and everywhere in the butcher shops young lambs hung upside-down, dripping blood onto the steaks and veal chops and grinning pigs' heads. The Greeks were out promenading in their expensive tailored suits with loud ties and pastel shirts (their word for suit was costume), and huge gold rings and cufflinks. The women displayed their shining children, screaming at them shrilly, then grabbing and hugging them so they couldn't breathe. The children stared in rapture at the bonbons and toy bunnies and lambs in the store windows, the red and blue and green eggs in baskets lined with doilies and silver paper. In one window there was an egg the size of a football, and a four foot high City Hall modelled in dark chocolate. In another, a horse made of jelly beans, a cake shaped like a bible, and another shaped like a Boeing 767 with AIR KANADA written in shocking pink icing along the sides.

He passed the Medusa Beauty Salon, the Trojan Horse Coffee House, then another meat store with more sacrificial animals - a counter full of slimy skinned rabbits lying on ice, their wild eyes staring into space. Then stores full of Kalamate olives and capers and sardines and feta cheese in huge stinky vats and bottles of golden oil. He went into a restaurant which had been an ice-cream parlour in days gone by and still had the old glittering chandeliers and high-backed wooden booths. Large jars full of Turkish delights and candy canes and horehound sticks lined the marble-topped counter. 'You speak Grik?' asked the girl who served him coffee, and when he said No, she turned away and revealed a wonderful Minoan profile. The owner was behind the long iceberg of the counter, washing sundae dishes and rinsing out metal milkshake containers. Faded ads for Orange Crush and Vernor's Ginger Ale adorned the walls; a big old juke box gathered dust in a corner, dreaming of Jimmy Dorsey and Les Brown and His Band of Renown. A solitary cockroach climbed into an ashtray and died.

'Haven't we met before?' he asked the owner. He asked everyone this.

'I don't think so. What's your name?'

'John Incognito.'

'I'm Spiros Ikaris,' said Spiros Ikaris. 'But when you talk to me you say Spiro, without the s, because that's how we do it in Greek. Your name in Greek is Yannis, but I'll call you Yanni, you see?'

Business was slow, so he came and sat with him in one of the wooden booths. Within five minutes they were talking politiks and religion, and Spiros was explaining how it was that Saint Paul had made his first great hit in Greece. 'We Greeks love anything new,' he said. 'Jesus Christ was new, so we adopted him. But we also love anything old. We have kept the pantheon, you know; the saints are really the old gods with new names. If a papas would hear me he would call this heresy. I don't care. I have thought much about such things. Life, I have learned, is God's great joke. We Greeks also love to laugh, as you probably know. But most of all we love miracles - did you know that?'

'Why did you come to Kanada?' Noman asked.

Spiros leaned back against the fragrant old wood and sighed. His eyes were closed; this was an old, old story. 'You who are born in freedom cannot know what we went through to gain freedom,' he said. He put seven spoonfuls of sugar into his coffee and went on. 'They cut off my brother's hands, they cut off my uncle's hands as they swam to the boats and tried to hold on ...

'I am from Smyrni, in Turkey. Where Homer was from. In 1922 the Greeks of Smyrni tried to escape the Turkish persecution. They swam to the British and French ships and tried to climb aboard. They cut off their hands. Men and women and children fell back from the sides of the ships without hands. I was small, I remember hands falling into the sea. Then somehow I was taken to Greece.
'You Kanadians, you haven't suffered. We Greeks are haunted by our dead. In Crete there's a place where the people of the village see the ghosts of horses and riders who died in battle rising from the morning dew. They call them the riders of the mist. There's nothing like that in this country. There are no ghosts here because there is no past. This country is a horse of a different colour, as you say. So why do I stay here, you may ask? I hate it yet I stay, I stay until my own country starts to turn to a dream in my head, and I say I will go back but I never do. Maybe I'm afraid that if I go back to stay, like some of my friends have tried to do, the truth will be so different from the dreams that it will force me back here to this cold, this emptiness ...'

'You still haven't told me why you came.'

'I came here to make money! I thought this city would be full of Indians and I would make banana splits and chocolate sodas for the savages. But the savages were men in bowler hats and women with little umbrellas, and later they were loud teenagers. Because my English sounded strange to them they made cruel jokes about me which they thought I could not hear. They said I was Greek, as though the word was an insult. In Greek the word for foreigner is xenos, which means outsider, which means you are a guest. Not so in this country; nobody is a guest in this country. Who then are the hosts - the trees ?'

'It's because nobody invited us,' Noman said. 'We're all foreigners here, we're all illegal immigrants.'

'That's crazy!' Spiros protested. 'You're not from another country.'

'I'm more foreign than you and I'm Kanadian. Maybe I'm the only real foreigner here.'

He's crazy, Spiros thought. Trellos. He brought some candies from the counter. Noman was totally unprepared for the shock he received when a butterscotch drop hit his tastebuds. His senses reeled and wave after wave ofdeja vu came over him. The past was glued onto the roof of his mouth and the lining of his nose; he knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that once long ago he had been in this place, reaching up to the high counter and having his hand filled with small peppermints like sparrows' eggs.

It all came back, the crazy delicacies of childhood, gobs of smells and tastes - caramel BB Bats on a stick, blackballs that turned your mouth licorice black as they wore down layer after layer to the final white which contained a horrible inedible seed, lurid red wax lips that you held between your teeth and were so funny that your friends peed with laughter when they saw you, coloured icing sugar in little triangular bags that you sucked up in a black licorice straw until you sneezed, very sweet little cone-shaped things dipped into something red and tasting like clouds, very tiny red hearts made of wicked cinnamon, so tiny that you had to throw about ten into your mouth at once to get the full effect, and small funny bananas two for a cent that tasted like nothing, and licorice pipes and candy cigarettes and ropes of hideous red licorice and grape popsicles and bubble gum and jelly beans and Smarties and root beer and ju-jubes and chocolate covered raisins ... 'I have Kanadian citizenship yet I am a foreigner,' Spiros said.

Noman looked up to the dusty chandeliers which seemed to be descending inch by inch to the ground. That's how they had looked when he was a child, he thought - like spaceships bringing a race of glittering beings to earth. He owed Spiros something for this wonderful memory.

'The kids never learned my name, they just called me The Greek,' Spiros went on.

'I was one of them,' Noman confessed. 'I remember now.'

'Were you? Well never mind.' Spiros reached across the table and tapped his arm. 'Listen, here's a joke. A Greek goes to a Chinese restaurant and the waiter tells him they have a special dish for fly-day. That's Friday, says the Greek, Friday. All right, Friday, Friday! screams the waiter - you stupid Gleek!'

Noman smiled distractedly. A wild feeling was overtaking him, a feeling from long ago, composed of a kind of madness, a kind of ecstasy, and a terrible kind of power.

'You aren't laughing,' said Spiros. 'That's because like all Kanadians you have no sense of humour. Ah, what a country. No ghosts, no history, no past. No humour, no mystery, no magic. Just this cold, this emptiness ...' He shuffled back to the counter and began to wash more sundae dishes.

Outside in the street the children still gazed at the red and blue and green eggs, the bonbons and cakes and bunnies, the ravishing and elaborate decor of Paskha.

Now Noman laughed.

'If I showed you something you have never seen before, something truly wonderful and beautiful - would it make you change your mind about this country?' he asked.

'I do not think that anything could do that,' Spiros said.

'You told me you loved miracles.'

'There are no miracles here. And no makers of miracles.'

But then Spiros heard a sound like the rustling of wind through dry bushes, and the wind released an aromatic dust that stung his nostrils, and when he raised his head to look into the mirror behind the counter he saw the huge horse, purple as the distant mountains of Crete at sunset, quiet as a night cloud, approaching the soda fountain on careful, velvet hooves.

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