by Sara Alexi
Chapter 6
The bees are busy, a group of them crowding the entrance to the hive, and one or two lazily flying around Rallou’s head.
‘How were the frames, did you need to do much repairing this winter?’ Rallou asks.
‘No, no – well, one or two, but it was pleasant enough, you know, sitting by the fire. It whiled away a few evenings when it was cold.’
Rallou feels she should ask about the winter evenings, whether they feel too long, and does he get lonely, but she is not ready for the answer. Last winter he came to them for a week or two, a journey taken on Yanni’s donkey that he said he would not repeat in a hurry, but he was quick to return to Korifi, complaining that the town was too busy, that he found it difficult to breathe.
Baba lifts the lid of one of the hives and they stare in together at the activity.
‘Have you seen those new hives with man-made honeycombs?’ Rallou asks. ‘With a turn of a handle the comb can split,’ she enthuses, and puts her hands together and then slides one down a fraction to demonstrate. ‘And the honey runs out to a central channel and then you just turn on a tap and out it pours.’
‘No!’ Her baba opens the lid of the next hive, which is not so active and in which there are fewer bees. He frowns.
‘So much less work and of course not so many bee casualties and disturbance.’ Rallou walks to another hive, noting that the lid is not quite on straight, but as she gets closer she can see it is empty.
‘Flew off,’ her baba says.
‘You should think about getting one of those new hives.’
‘Ha!’ he says gently. ‘Even Greece is importing cheaper GMO honey now.’
‘Don’t be silly, you cannot have GMO honey. Honey is honey.’ Rallou looks out across the sea. Today is definitely warmer than yesterday, and she will not be surprised to wake up tomorrow to the first sounds of the cicadas.
‘Yes, it sounds crazy, doesn’t it, but the world is a little crazy these days, I think.’ He would never insist he was right.
‘Tell me?’ Rallou is intrigued.
‘Well, when Yanni brought up the supplies last week he told me about it. So, what they do is, they modify the plants to produce more pollen for the bees. The bees can then make honey with less effort and the whole process is quicker and cheaper, so they can sell it at a lower price. But this is not quality honey. No rich wild pollen is being used, and, of course, the pollen of the plants they use is present in the honey, so you are ingesting it.’
‘Interesting.’ Rallou encourages him to say more, if there is more to be said. He takes the bait, enjoying the safe subject.
‘But, and here is the problem, they do not have to say that the pollen plants are GMO on the label of the honey. So people do not see the difference between that and, say, the honey I produce. All they see is cheaper honey.’ He stops walking and leans back, his hands on the small of his back.
‘I don’t really know what the fuss is about with these GMO foods.’ Rallou also stops. Perhaps they should turn back; she does not want to tire him.
‘So many ways,’ he says, and turns as she does. ‘They modify the plants to be resistant to things, like the weedkillers they use. So then they use as much weedkiller as they want with no ill effect on the crop, but, for example’ – he glances at her briefly – it is the look he uses when he is concerned that he is boring her, and she loves him for his thoughtfulness – ‘apparently the insecticides they put on GM corn can get into the blood, even to the baby, if a woman is pregnant. And another thing, the genes they insert into soy beans can cross into the DNA of the bacteria that live inside us. And that can’t be good, can it? Interesting man, that Yanni.’
‘Hmm.’ Rallou considers all he has said.
He smiles and she reaches out to take his arm as they walk on. He is not shuffling now, and his legs seem strong, as strong as he has always been.
‘Well, seeing as the chickens were kind enough to supply us with eggs again, shall we have eggs for breakfast?’ She will cook for him as if the years have never passed, as if he has not spent the last eighteen up here in semi-solitude.
‘It won’t be long before you have company up here,’ she says.
‘You are right. As soon as the sun warms up all that stonework in town and the stone flags begin to reflect the heat, those who still have houses up here will come scuttling back to the cool of the hills – and the men, no doubt, will linger for the hunting in the autumn. But, like every other year, when winter bites, they soon hurry back down.’
‘But you will be pleased to see your old friends.’
They have reached the back porch and Baba sits by the table, slumps a little.
‘Shall I make some more coffee before I cook?’ she asks.
‘No, water please, water would be nice.’ He sounds slightly out of breath as well. After a long drink he puts the glass down and smiles up at her.
‘The trouble is that the people who return are not the ones that left. Those my age do not bother to make the journey back up here so I never see my friends. Now it is sons of sons, and daughters of daughters. Some have foreign twangs to their voices. We are mostly an adaptable lot, us Greeks, and we have no fear of moving countries if it will profit our children, but my guess is that there are little ghost villages like this all over the country.’ He sits back and looks across at the twenty or so solid stone houses that nestle in the cleft on the summit. Rallou glances at the familiar sight and then turns towards the sea. The view is just breathtaking and it still surprises Rallou every time she focuses on it. The islands dotted one behind the other look almost like they have been cut out of coloured paper and stuck on, a hazy gauze drawn over them to blanch their colour, and there is a fine line of white that stops them sinking into the sea. Blue sea, blue islands, blue sky.
‘So, eggs?’ Her baba startles her into action.
Chapter 7
Rallou takes the apron, with its pockets still full of eggs, into the tiny kitchen. She is glad that her baba has succumbed to the convenience of the gas stove that sits on a little table in the corner. As well as making cooking so much easier, it also means Yanni will have to come up with a gas bottle every once in a while, check on him, make sure he is in need of nothing else. Whenever she sees Yanni and his donkeys going up or coming down the track behind her house in town, they nod their acknowledgement of each other, and if they talk it is always, and only, about her baba.
She tries to lift the large gas bottle, to see how full it is. It doesn’t move as she tugs; it must be new. The gas hisses and she strikes a match. As the stove bursts into life the flame catches the fine hairs on the back of her hand and they shrivel and turn black.
There is no fridge, and the icebox that stood in one corner of the kitchen rusted away some years ago. Now it stands outside by the entrance to the goat pen, a handy set of shelves for bits of twine, the hammer, a cup full of nails, medicine for the goats and endless other bits and pieces that might come in useful one day. The doors have been removed and used to block up holes in the chicken coop where mischievous paws have dug away for an easy meal.
In the kitchen, where the icebox used to be, is another of her baba’s contraptions. It looks like a pallet has been carefully altered, reassembled into a box, and sanded smooth. Once he would have had no time to sand it, but this chest has been made beautifully, and he has obviously taken his time over the finish. She lifts the hinged lid to reveal a polystyrene cool box. There is vague smell of fish.
‘You want feta in your eggs?’ she calls.
‘Have you seen it?’
‘What?’
‘The feta.’
Rallou looks again. The feta is sitting there in a dish looking – well, just like feta.
‘What about it?’
‘It is from Yanni. From his mother, actually. Sounds like she is going like me, soft in her old age. She didn’t want to kill a kid to use the rennet to make the cheese so she has found a way to use fig sap.’ He shouts a little, but
there is no need with the back door standing open. Rallou examines the feta again.
‘What, the white stuff out of their stems?’ She sniffs the cheese but it does not smell of figs.
‘Yes, that. It irritates my skin, and I come up in a rash if I touch it. Oh, you will remember, that time we went down near the shore, where that tiny enclosed inlet is.’
‘Oh yes, with the fig tree that overhangs it so you have to crawl to get to the water. You didn’t follow us, did you? It’s an amazing, tiny little cove. But I do remember your hands were as big as melons, and all red and scaly. Poor Baba.’ With this she steps out and kisses the top of his head. It may be white but he still has a good head of hair for an old man. Returning to the kitchen she sniffs at the cheese again. There is no evidence of its figgy component, but it does smell vaguely of fish.
The bucket is empty, so she takes it up to the well and back. When she returns she finds her baba trying to read the label of a medicine bottle.
‘Rallou, I cannot quite make this out – does it say once a day or once a week? It is for a goat.’
Rallou puts the bucket down and smiles. He has no idea if it says once, twice or every half hour: he cannot read a word. She takes the bottle from him.
‘No, it says mix three capfuls with water.’ She reads.
‘Oh, they will drink it?’
‘It seems so.’ She gives him the bottle back and takes the bucket inside. Christos was the same. Never a day at school, couldn’t read a thing. He hid it well in the first year or so of their marriage, and even if she had known it would not had bothered her in the least; many people of the island and most people in Korifi cannot read or write. But it seemed to bother him. Especially when the children got to the age when they were bringing home so much homework every day. To all appearances, the school expected more learning to go on at home than inside the classroom.
‘Rallou are we ever going to have supper?’ Christos would come in after a day on the hills to find her and one or more of the children at the table, books spread to cover the surface.
‘Can you not see we are doing homework?’ she would reply.
‘There is more to life than you can find in books – what they learn by playing will last a lifetime. When do they get to be children?’ With which, he would dump his canvas bag on top of whatever they were studying and take his temper to the bathroom where he would wash his face and neck and return to stand over them.
‘Well, are we eating?’ he would say and Rallou felt she must hold her tongue for the children’s sake. She knew that he would not act that way if he could sit and help them learn. It was almost as if he resented that she could.
Rallou breaks from her thoughts to find her baba is now dozing in the morning sun, his chin on his chest, arms folded in his lap, the bottle still in his hand. That will be how she will find him one day, maybe not with the bottle in his hand, but out here in the sun, eyes closed, chest not moving, and she will feel him and he will be cold.
‘Stop it,’ she tells herself and takes the water inside. ‘You are just being macabre because you are feeling negative. Anyway, the chances are you won’t be here when that happens and it will be poor Yanni who finds him, or Tolis, or Takis.’ She wonders how they will tell her.
‘Stop it!’ she demands of herself again and then wonders why she went to fetch water when she is going to scramble the eggs with feta. She is pleased to see that there is half a loaf of bread in the fanari, but she will have to make some tomorrow or the day after, depending on how much they eat today.
The kitchen has not changed much. The broad rough beams overhead support the canework that provides the bottom layer for the upstairs floor. A shelf runs around the room at head height. Long ago it was painted blue and has remained so ever since, but where it meets the plasterwork across the bowed front of the fireplace it is as white as the walls.
Outside, the cockerel tells the time, wrongly, but he repeats himself just to make sure everyone heard. The chicken cluck their scorn, or agreement – who knows which.
The main table, which stands in the centre all winter, is outside with the chairs so there is plenty of room for Rallou to move about. The gas stove is propped up on a circular metal table with three legs, under the arch of the fireplace. In the winter the table that is outside will come in, the round table will be crammed against it and the fireplace will become functional again.
She hates the fireplace. It would be better if it was modernised, or filled in. It is a reminder of both Mama and Evgenia.
‘Oh, stop it now! You are picking on things to make yourself miserable,’ she chastises herself. ‘But I am miserable.’ she moans, but then shakes her head and stands erect. This is not the first time that pointless negative thoughts have tried to pull her down. She watched Eleftheria go into a very dark place without even a fight, and she almost pulled Vasillis with her. Ever since then, Rallou has worked on a way to maintain a distance from such a possible spiral. She can’t remember where she read about it originally – some magazine perhaps – but so far it has worked, even on the evenings when Christos does not come home and she is alone, lying in the vastness of their empty bed. Then that motionless, spiritless place has seemed so seductive, offering a promise that everything will stop.
‘I am miserable, I am miserable.’ She begins her technique. ‘I am having the thought that I am miserable, I am having the thought that I am miserable.’ Pausing between each sentence to really give it impact, she focuses on what she is saying. ‘I notice that I am having the thought that I feel miserable. I notice that I am having the thought that I feel miserable.’ Then, with no warning, and flapping a tea towel in time with herself, she sings the word ‘miserable’ to a jolly tune she has heard on the radio recently. The word begins to lose its power and with it its effect.
‘There!’ she congratulates herself, putting down the tea towel and feeling slightly out of breath.
‘What?’ Baba mumbles, not quite awake.
‘Nothing, go back to sleep.’ She faces the kitchen again. The clock on the wall ticks out the seconds.
It was amazing how much silence their mama left behind: a silence that was filled by the ever-hungry Evgenia’s cries. Harris just could not cope with the child; she knows this now, but back then the baby’s screams were as if the sounds of her own heart had escaped, but with none of the relief. The silence her mama left felt as if it lasted for lifetimes. Her baba seemed to spend so much of his day away with the goats. Of course, life went on, and he could not neglect them, but perhaps he spent just a little longer than was needed with them. It was his way of coping, she realises now. Besides, she was so small then that it probably felt like he was away more than he really was. Her eldest brother had been spending a good deal of his time down in the town at that point, and after this unhappy event he very rarely returned. The other two brothers – well, they seemed to busy themselves with collecting the sap and tending the olives, and it felt as if each was retreating into his own sphere of silence and work. That left Harris, Rallou’s playmate. But she was gone too, replaced with a girl who looked like her but was full of the frustrations of trying to deal with a newborn baby, and struggling with the demands placed on her by her new role of mother, cook, cleaner.
‘Bring the wood. Fetch the water. Give me that towel, and go get the eggs. Have you fed the chickens?’ Harris would bark at her in a way her mama never had. It was mystifying and unpleasant, and she tried harder and harder to please her sister in return for just a little love, and this was at a time when her heart was already torn open and bleeding. It took her a long time to realise that it was an impossible thing to demand of a six-year-old, to look after a baby, because that’s all Harris was at the time. But then, how had it been for Rallou? She can hardly remember. All that comes to mind is the silence, and the space. She can recall looking out over the island and then beyond to the sea that went on forever in every direction, and the feelings were hard to understand. It was as if there was nothing to sto
p her falling off the edge of the world. And there would be no arms to catch her. Mostly she is grateful that she can no longer feel how it was inside her head at the time. She is left with an image of herself, so tiny, standing in the porch, small and powerless, the huge world around her getting bigger and bigger. She was three.
But, as time passed and three winters came and went, the silence of her baba and her brothers and the cries of Evgenia lessened, and the perimeter of the island shrank until everything once again became normal. It was a new normal, with less laughter but with more cuddles from Baba. But that normality seemed to last only a short time before Evgenia fell into the open kitchen fire and was burnt so badly she never recovered. They buried her little body on the hillside. It seemed the best thing to do seeing as they were so far from the cemetery, which was a day’s ride on the donkey.
Rallou stirs the eggs at they begin to congeal and the feta melts. At some point since she was last up here her baba has burnt the handle of the pan and it is sharp under her hand where the plastic grip has melted. Maybe she could remember to get him a new one, or find a way to bind it with rope.
Her brothers and Baba always maintained that she was the hardest hit by her sibling’s death, she and Evgenia being so close in age. But to her mind, whenever the subject comes up, it seems that hers is the dimmest of all their memories and so the whole incident has the aspect of a family tale rather than a reality she has lived. Losing her mama, on the other hand, left a hole that no one could fill. Harris, at the tender age of six, had no choice but to fill all the roles left vacant by their mama’s absence. All the roles except one, the one Rallou needed most. Harris cooked and cleaned and learnt to sew and milk the goats. She also learnt how to make cheese and she took care of Evgenia. But Rallou still needed the security of her mama, and she needed cuddles that Harris would not give. Nor would Harris cuddle Baba or her brothers. It seemed she only had time for Evgenia, whom she played with like she was a doll until the baby cried, and then she would get cross and lose her temper with her little sister and everyone else around her.