by Sara Alexi
She was furious. It was one thing to be all close and act like they did when they first fell in love all over again, but it was quite another to think that she could go back to living rough in his derelict hovel like a teenager. She could not stand the mess and the dust again. Their house in town might have been in need of some repair, but by the time it fell down at least they had reached the point where no walls needed plastering, no floors needed digging smooth to lay tiles.
But just she was ready to speak, when she knew without a doubt that they were heading for the old house, he turned to her.
‘You remember lighting the candle in that church on Corfu and making your wish?’ he said, and she looked at him sceptically and then up at the house. From the outside there was something different about it, but she couldn’t quite put her finger on it. ‘Well …’ he continued, pushing open the gate, and she saw the newly painted window frames, with glass in every space! On the roof was a solar panel for hot water, and the yard was brushed clean. He opened the door and she squinted in the dark. ‘Wait,’ he said, and ran around the side of the house, out of sight, and in a minute or two she heard a rattling hum that signified a generator starting up, and the shadows inside the house burst into light.
‘Oh!’ She had actually squealed. The bulb in the hall was bare, but it was bright! The kitchen was all new, with new cupboards, new sink, and new drainer. It all had the touch of Christos. The corners were shaped by his hand, the tops of the cupboard doors were arched, the supports for the shelves were curved. It was all carefully and beautifully hand built. She ran from the kitchen to the small bedroom that used to be his. This was now a bathroom, and in what had been his parents’ bedroom was a new bed. ‘How?’ was her first word, and she turned to Christos with love so strong she hardly knew what to do with it.
‘Well, you know the olives you thought I hadn’t picked, and the income we never made, and the days I would spend away …’
Chapter 36
‘Vasillis knew.’ Her baba is chuckling. The goats are closing in on them again, and this time Rallou picks up the smallest pebble she can find and throws it at the hooves of the nearest goat, which gambol away, taking most of the others with it, their bells clonking and white tails bobbing. The sun is growing hotter, and above the scrub the air shimmers.
‘And he didn’t say either,’ she says.
‘I think when Christos started he thought it would take a much shorter time than it did. I think we all did. But the months turned to years, as they do, and at what point should we have betrayed his secret, spoilt his surprise?’
‘Well, I think Vasillis should have, the night I stayed at his house after the earthquake when I thought I had no home to go to!’
‘Do you? Do you really?’ her baba asks, and she snorts a laugh at herself and shakes her head.
They watch the goats, and the blue of the sea, and the shadows that track the day across the barren landscape, and then they wander back down the slope; the animals follow them, stopping to eat a little more before running again, frightened to be left behind, until every last one is back in the enclosure.
‘Baba, can we talk about Harris?’
He does not speak. This is the silence she has known from him for so many years, but she waits.
‘What would we say?’ He sighs, suddenly sounding his age. ‘I mean, really, Rallou, what would we say?’
He has a point. She knows, he knows, Harris knows and, judging by the way Stephanos treats Harris, he knows too.
‘We can change nothing, and Harris has suffered all her life, and will suffer for the rest of her life. It’s too much punishment for a child who was out of her depth.’ He speaks quietly, gently, and Rallou can hear the blame he heaps on himself. There are no more words and Rallou knows they will not mention the subject again.
‘You want a coffee?’ he asks, heading for the house.
‘Sure, do you want me to get water?’
‘No need.’ He points to a line of freshly dug earth. ‘Christos put some pipes in, from the well up there. Clever fellow, that husband of yours. Clever enough to catch you, at least,’ he adds, and dodges into the kitchen. It’s partly why she loves him. His generation was one that didn’t display or talk about their feelings but, even though it goes against his instincts, he still lets her know. It makes her feel so valued.
With the coffee on the table between them, they sit and stare out across the sea. Other islands, in the distance, appear to float on a line of hazy white. Rallou traces the road on the mainland opposite, which zigzags up over the purple hills, and tries to judge whether it is the route to the village, which is now partly her village, and the thought broadens her horizons, gives her room to breathe.
‘You know he didn’t keep back the olive money to do up the house, don’t you, Baba?’ she says casually.
‘If it wasn’t for the house, what was it for, then?’
‘Another surprise. He was just waiting till the house was finished so he could tell me at the same time. He spent maybe a year’s worth of olive money on the house, out of the three he saved. We still have the rest.’
Her baba laughs. ‘It doesn’t surprise me. He’s a cunning old fox, that one. So go on then – what is the second surprise?’
‘It’s for us to travel.’
‘You are going to America again?’ He stops looking at the view to face Rallou, the skin around his eyes all puckered and wrinkled with his smile.
‘Well, the olive money allowed us to extend that stay, but that was mostly the kindness of Lori and Ted.’
‘How are they, by the way?’
‘Very well. You know they made up a room for me in the house in town? I couldn’t have continued to work for them from up here without it.’
‘It is a bit far to come and go in a day, but not as hard as it once was.’ He looks down towards the chicken shed; next to it is a new hut, made of old doors from the village, with a tarpaper roof. Rallou identifies it as more of Christos’s handiwork. In front of the hut is a fenced enclosure, much larger than the space that the chickens have to roam around in. A barrel, cut lengthways and supported by stones to stop it from rolling, has become a trough for water, and another line of freshly dug earth tells the tale of how it is filled.
From behind the hut a sound begins to emanate. It is a drawn-out cry, the exhalation of big lungs. The inward suck is no more than a squeak, the second, outward cry is louder, surer, and then the inward breath gains resonance as Dolly ee-aws to remind them she has not been fed.
‘Apparently Yanni’s mama is hassling him to buy yet another donkey,’ Rallou says. ‘Sophia told me.’
‘Mercedes and Suzi are not enough?’
She shrugs.
‘Such a kind man.’ Her baba breathed out the words, to himself, not really spoken for her to hear. ‘Such a kind woman.’ He pats her hand. ‘He knows she would not have survived without your care.’
It was a mutual decision between the three of them. After Dolly was seen at the boatyard she disappeared again and then turned up at Korifi. Baba fed and watered her and tethered her ready for Yanni’s next visit. As it turned out, Yanni heard the news of Dolly’s survival as soon as he returned to the island, and came straight up to find her, arriving out of breath, and kissed and stroked the animal. Her baba had ushered Rallou inside, to give the man a little privacy. After a while they had gone back out to find Yanni inspecting her wounds.
‘She can’t work for a while. Not like this,’ he declared.
‘What does she need?’ Rallou asked, stroking the animal’s neck. She felt she knew Dolly so well now. It was Dolly who had begun her awakening, showing her how she could get lost in the care of another being, how she had for years lost herself in the care of her children, being overly protective in a bid to ensure that no harm could possibly come to them. That had been easier than facing the memories she had suppressed for so long.
‘I think she just needs rest and then a light work schedule for a while.’
And so it was decided that Dolly would stay up at Korifi. ‘She will be company for me,’ Rallou’s baba said, and Yanni said that he would collect her when her wounds were healed sufficiently for her to make the journey along the ridge to his home.
Some months have passed since then, and Dolly accompanies Rallou into town now, which will build her muscles.
It has made her and Christos realise that they will need a donkey of their own, but until that time they have Dolly.
‘Shall I feed her?’ Rallou says.
‘Just let her out, she’ll come up here. I have her food just there.’ He points to a second barrel next to the chicken feed. ‘Where’s Christos today? Does he have work in town?’
‘Ah, no – well yes, he has popped down to see Vasillis. They will know today how much they will get for the olive oil.’
‘Big day then?’
‘Depends on what the prices have been like. Oh, he must have heard us – look, there he is.’ Christos’s figure appears far down on the track past the chicken coop, Arapitsa trotting by his side. ‘I’ll see you later, Baba. Come for food tonight?’
Her baba doesn’t answer, just waves an acknowledging hand, and stands to greet Dolly who is approaching, neck bent, head down, ready to receive a pat and a scratch. As Rallou passes she tenderly pats Dolly’s rump, but her eyes are on Christos. She meets him where her baba’s track splits off the main dusty road.
‘Hi,’ she says, her stomach, even after all these years, turning in on itself as she studies his face. The perfect face.
‘Hi, yourself.’
‘So?’ she asks.
‘So what?’ he teases.
‘Oh, come on, is it a good year or a bad year?’
‘Well.’ He stretches the word out. ‘Enough to go to see Natasa in Bari.’
‘Oh.’ The disappointment is evident in her voice.
‘Then we can visit our son in England, or our other daughter in Australia.’
‘Oh! It has been a fairly big year then?’
‘Or both! Or Peru, or India, but …’ He pretends to be serious now, as if to give her a warning. ‘We cannot quite afford Hawaii.’ He laughs
‘Both! Are you serious?’ But his grin tells her he is both serious and rather smug.
‘So, where is it to be, my princess? Where shall we take each other?’ His long arm dangles over her shoulders, pulling her in, kissing the top of her head.
They turn to pass along the ridge to take the back way to their house and she looks to the sea, first on one side of her island and then on the other, and then right to the end of the finger of land that stretches out in front of them, to the ocean that reaches all the way to Libya and Tunisia, and beyond. All there, the whole world, just waiting.
She takes his arm. He stops to turn her towards him and he kisses her.
‘Or we could just go somewhere very close, but very romantic,’ she suggests. He kisses her again. ‘Santorini, or Monemvasia, perhaps.’
He kisses her again before saying, ‘We will go. Where do you fancy the most?’
Also by Sara Alexi
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About Sara Alexi
Sara Alexi divides her time between England and a small village in Greece. She is working on her next novel in the Greek Village Series, to be released soon!
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PUBLISHED BY
Oneiro Press
Being Enough
Book Seventeen of the Greek Village Collection
Copyright © 2016 by Sara Alexi
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organisations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.