The Way It Breaks

by Polis Loizou

  The island was pulsing. Lit-up restaurants and cafés bulged with bodies and music. Tourists swarmed the cobbled streets past white-washed houses with blue doors and shutters, potted flowers of coral and pink. In the distance, those famous windmills rose from the hills. Souvenir shops sold magnets, icons and replica vases of three-thousand-year-old porn, comical erections, postcards of feline orgies. People spoke of Mykonos as if it was Soddom, and the island winked at its own bad name.

  Eva took pictures. She showed a preference for the painted windows and the cats that sprawled on their sills. The crowded square enraptured her, as did whatever she spent most of her time trying to capture but which, judging by her expression, remained elusive. You couldn’t catch life. Moments were more than split-seconds, feelings more than a single moment.

  An art shop caught her eye, rammed with paintings, oils and sheet copper embossed with hairline patterns. The proprietor sat on the steps in a brilliant skirt, her turquoise ring and earrings casting back light. On the step by her folded leg was a spread of oracle cards with pictures of angels. This was for her, nobody else. In the window was a sign, on which Darya recognised the words yoga and reiki. The woman looked up. She would speak to her. But as she mustered the words another tourist arrived, an Englishwoman enquiring about the paintings, saying lovely and unique, and the moment was snatched away.

  She joined the others in a tourist shop, where Eva was choosing between souvenirs for her mother. A silk scarf or a blue clutch bag, why not both? Orestis bought a little wooden boat with the word MYKONOS painted on its prow.

  ‘For your father?’ Darya asked.

  He smiled. ‘For me.’

  They paid and left. Darya noted that the others had dropped their dialect to put on the accent and rhythms of Greece. Easier for the men, whose jobs required them to buff their edges daily. Despite her schooling, Eva struggled to reign herself in, to keep that native tongue from poking through her mouth.

  Orestis teased her about it when they’d left the shop. Together they cackled at anecdotes of fellow Cypriots, always someone’s friend or cousin, who’d translated literally from dialect. Orestis’ eyes creased, dimples deepened, more with Eva than they ever had with her. It wasn’t only their age, their upbringing. It was something that ran through them. But what was language, and dialect, when bodies and souls became one in the dark? Orestis’ face had expressed itself to her in ways that Eva could only dream of. What of his hazy look of seduction; what of his reddening cheeks when he was too aroused to catch his breath; what of the relief of his release; what of the way his lips looked fuller as he finally exhaled; what of the smile that came after that?

  He pulled his phone from his shorts to call his father, a man who must be closer to her own age. She wondered what expressions and inflexions he made with him, what sides he showed that he didn’t show Aristos. How different Orestis was when he was naked, someone else again when clothed.

  They went down another cobbled street. The scent of roses and the noise of local voices. A flight of steps led up to the turquoise balcony of a two-storey house, on which stood a slender man in nothing but a pair of white briefs. He leant on the rail, smoking, staring into the distance. Noticing them, he glanced down. His eyes moved around the group till they found Orestis. Orestis slowed his pace. From behind, she watched his posture adapt to the other man’s gaze. Shoulders fell back, chest pushed out. Man as bird. And as they passed the balcony, its owner put his cigarette to his lips without taking his eyes off the body below.

  The cool air made her arm hairs stand on end.

  ‘Darya,’ Eva swivelled back to say. ‘You know what means poushtis?’ And her face was vicious with delight.

  ✽✽✽

  The ship would depart the next day. Some of the passengers stayed to revel in the island’s night-life. Middle-aged Englishwomen flirted with barmen and waiters, roared with laughter over their cocktails. Hundreds of young men gathered in bars for beer in bottles and shots of ouzo. They tossed them back with a flex of tanned bicep and a flash of midriff. She could take her pick of these stags. She wouldn’t even need to pay them. (Aristos – Aristos wouldn’t need to pay.) A few of them appraised her but most only had eyes for each other. Eva could barely contain her glee. She slapped her Daddykins’ arm, Look! ‘E, OK,’ was his response. ‘That’s the way it is here.’

  Darya had seen gays before, but not so many in a single place. Unnatural. The white crosses of churches stood stark against the night. Many of these peacocks cast a glance at Orestis, which he pretended not to notice as he strutted past. A pretty one raised his eyebrow and took his straw in his mouth. If he was willing to pay, would Orestis accept? Would the price be higher? She remembered his Godless words – he saw himself as a thing without a soul, a vessel or tool to do and to use, to affect and enjoy. Or perhaps only viewed. Yes. He’d be happy to spend the remainder of his life as a statue in a museum, a temple, where people could pay to come and worship him.

  By the time they sat down to dine al fresco, the straw seat of the wooden chair rough against the backs of her thighs, her face was burning. Aristos ordered a bottle of red. When it was brought to him he sipped it, shook his head, asked for another, sampled it, and finally nodded. He poured out a glass for each of them. Darya downed hers in one.

  It was mostly the men who did the talking, football and politics, the EU, Angela Merkel and Greece. Eva was strangely quiet, limiting herself to expressing how good the pizza was and how pretty the island looked at night. But then she turned to Darya. ‘You do yoga, don’t you?’ She only ever spoke to her stepmother in English, so what was this Cypriot dialect now – not to mention this detail of Darya’s life? The wine stood up from the girl’s breath.

  ‘Yes,’ Darya replied in Greek. ‘I have a teacher.’

  ‘I’m thinking of starting,’ Eva said. ‘Does it really do you good?’

  Darya nodded. ‘I feel better.’

  ‘I have a lot on my mind.’

  Darya didn’t know how to phrase what she wanted to say, so again she nodded. And then she took a gamble: the girl’s hand was on the table, she put hers on top of it. Eva didn’t respond. Nor did she remove her hand.

  Eventually, Darya did so herself. ‘You… photographs.’ She mimed clicking a camera with her index finger close to her eye.

  ‘I like it,’ said Eva. ‘It relaxes me. Do you want to see?’

  She reached down to fish her camera out from her handbag. Rolls of fat at her shoulder straps, she really ought to watch herself. When Eva reemerged, she angled her camera towards her stepmother and flicked through the recent shots. No pretend admiration needed; Eva was good.

  ‘Look at this one, the shadows and the light,’ the girl was saying and proceeded to give a brief commentary that placed each photo in the context of the day. She had not been taking pictures of flowers and sunsets. She picked out details, composed stories. In Tinos, she hadn’t taken photos of the miracle church as much as the pilgrims heading towards it. A middle-aged woman with patchy brown hair looking up with a mixture of fear, awe and hope. The effect was so intimate that Darya became one with the stranger. Maybe feelings could be moments, maybe they could be captured. ‘I’m very good at people,’ Eva said.

  And she flicked along to the image of another stranger: Darya.

  Her cigarette paused in the air. Eva had photographed her while she watched the artist with her angel cards laid out on the steps. The experience of it returned. It was all in her face, and inside her now, again.

  ‘You have a good face,’ said Eva, cigarette aloft.

  Darya knew she ought to stop looking at the photo. ‘You make good photographs.’

  ‘Take,’ Eva corrected. She drew on her cigarette and added: ‘Yes, I do. I have a lot of talent, but I need to go further. I need to get a better camera, enough of this kiddy one.’

  Darya wouldn’t have known the difference.

  ‘You can have my Zenit,’ Aristos said.

  ‘Keep it. It’s all
about digital now.’ She grinned at her father, winked. Then, ‘You know who else has a good face?’

  Orestis brightened.

  Eva lifted the camera while he posed, jokingly but perfectly, in his open blue shirt and tight white vest, and she clicked, clicked, clicked.

  Yes, please, somebody document it: the beauty of him. So that people in the future, his grandchildren, could see how precious he was. So that when he was dead there would continue a snapshot of his prime. She finished the wine in her glass. Of course, there were those other photos – taken by her husband in half-lit rooms, pictures that could never be seen by anyone. Darya had felt unsure, then obedient, then potent in those moments, in charge of someone’s interest. She had never held Aristos’ attention so completely. Eva’s photo, on the other hand, had exposed her for who she truly was. She’d forgotten to look over her shoulder. May as well be dead, shot in the back.

  Enough. She looked away from them all. On the floor was a chunk of chicken a tourist had tossed, for three stray kittens to run and fight for. The wind blew strands of hair into her face, it was too much for the clips. As soon as they got back to Cyprus she’d chop it all off.

  When the waiter brought the bill, Orestis insisted he pay his share.

  Aristos batted him down.

  ‘Why you want to pay?’ Darya heard herself saying. ‘You know Aristos will pay, this is how it is. My husband will pay for you.’ That teacher tone.

  For a second, Orestis had looked hurt. But then the charm crept over his face. ‘I feel bad,’ he said. ‘But I promise: one day I’ll repay you.’

  Eva blinked as if something had fallen. Then she dragged on her cigarette, looking at all three of them as if that something had fallen into place.

  ✽✽✽

  Back on the ship, they had a nightcap at one of the bars. Orestis chatted to a Filipino waiter, somehow they’d become acquainted. He whispered to the others in Greek that the man was a qualified doctor. ‘This is the best he can get here,’ indicating the bar, the ship. What about her, had he forgotten? Or was this his way of reminding her? The best was sometimes the only.

  When the others had turned in, she went to Orestis’ cabin. He opened the door as if surprised there’d been a knock. She removed the belt from his shorts and tied it around his eyes. Here was a joy reserved only for her. She made him kiss and lick his way up her legs and under her dress, and she held his head there. He tried to remove his boxers but she wouldn’t let him. ‘Please,’ she instructed him to say, in Belarusian. And ‘Please,’ he would parrot back. Then he said it in Greek, and she knew he meant it. When she finally allowed him to, he entered her. She slapped him. She dug her nails into his back, she wanted to be inside him. Her finger slid between his buttocks and his face was seized by a delighted shock. He turned her over then, pressed her face into the pillow, and was more forceful than he’d ever been.

  Men were so feeble after their violence. Orestis lay there, wincing, depleted, as she patted his chest. Only part of the room was lit by the ghostly face of the moon in the porthole. Only part of him.

  ‘You are beautiful,’ she said. She didn’t know if she was speaking of his looks. She hardly knew if she meant it as a compliment.

  Orestis was taken aback. Then contentment stole over his features, he looked at peace. They lay together for a while, not talking, simply staring at the cabin ceiling, rocked by the infinite sea. The ship’s engine thrummed below, closer here than in her suite.

  ‘Eva likes you,’ she said.

  He took a moment to answer. ‘Yes, I know.’

  ‘You sleep with her?’

  ‘No. No!’

  He would think her jealous, so she took a different path. ‘Why not?’ And she added in Cypriot dialect: ‘She has big boobs.’

  Orestis laughed, surprised. ‘You’ve learned the basics.’

  ‘Of course.’

  He propped himself up on his side to look at her as nobody had. In awe. With satisfaction. That she was who she was. And this being, this Adonis… he was hers.

  But she couldn’t help her mind, her tongue. His words in Tinos, outside the church – surely there was more than just a face here, more than the sum of moonlit parts. There was an energy, a spirit, a thing that could project itself and leave imprints, like the tracks of a deer in the woods, after all flesh and sinew and marrow dissolved.

  ‘Why you don’t believe?’

  ‘Believe?’

  ‘It makes me sad.’

  His expression dimmed. ‘When you were talking about God,’ he said, ‘what did you mean, you know? You know what? How?’

  She should have stayed quiet. ‘It’s OK,’ she said, waving away the discussion. ‘It’s OK.’

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘not It’s OK — what?’

  ‘Why it matters? It doesn’t matter.’ Her fingers reached for his naked leg. In Tinos, feet planted on the ground on an island, she felt a longing to tell him. Now, drifting in the middle of the sea, there was only fear. ‘It doesn’t matter.’

  He let the silence fall again. And at last, he spoke. ‘My grandma used to see saints.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘She told me she saw Ayios Nektarios once. And the Virgin. They appeared in front of her, to tell her she would be OK.’

  ‘She was ill?’

  ‘Yes, but I mean— just… in life. She would be OK in life.’

  A pause.

  ‘Did you see something? Is that how you know?’ And he looked at her as if he himself wasn’t proof enough of God.

  ‘No,’ she said. And she heard herself groan into the dark room. Maksim was up there, past the ceiling and the decks and the stars. ‘I had brother.’ She was so startled by her own words that she was silent, for an age. ‘He died.’

  ‘I’m sorry. How?’

  Nobody had heard this, nobody since Belarus. But Orestis was hers. He was the only one who could hear it, who would. ‘You know Chernobyl?’

  He furrowed his brow and nodded.

  ‘My brother was in Army. They make him and other boys go to Chernobyl after… fire. After explosion. Factory was in Ukraine, but close. Belarus was…’ She felt his name clog her throat. She had to push it out, set it free. When was the last time she’d said that name aloud? How much power could there be in consonants and vowels? ‘His name was Maksim.’ Her eyes burned. Itched. ‘He and other boys, they clear mess in Chernobyl, but the… soil, the things, the air… Everything poison. Maksim got sick. Very sick. And afterwards, he died.’

  Her father had cried as he kissed the shell of a boy in the hospital bed. Darya herself had leant in to kiss her brother’s hollow cheek, and been entranced by the whiteness of the little hairs there. A piglet’s skin. She recalled the shame of her thoughts.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Orestis said, and he was wiping tears from her cheeks that she hadn’t even known were there.

  ‘It’s OK. It’s OK.’

  That’s what the authorities had said. It was OK, nothing to worry about.

  ‘No,’ said Orestis. ‘It’s not OK.’

  He kissed her, softly. He kissed her mouth, her cheeks, her forehead.

  She wanted to say more, but what could she say? In what vocabulary, Greek or Russian, Cypriot or Belarusian, limited or limitless, could she express why Maksim’s death meant the presence of God? Why the punishment for abandoning her loved ones was to live like this, a body that looked alive but was sleeping inside.

  She was a bad person. She deserved the existence of God.

  Eleven

  How different Mykonos looked in the daylight, like a hibernating bear. They drank frappés at a café, all smoking except Orestis. Aristos ordered a confection of semolina custard and filo pastry for them to share. Of course, Eva took her frappé sweet. Darya bit her tongue.

  Orestis excused himself to make a phone call to his father. ‘The old man will be worried, even if he doesn’t show it.’

  His father had been told this was a trip with friends, by plane and ferries and sleeping on a
cquaintances’ sofas; an expense Orestis could afford with his recent pay rise. All the same, his father had raged about the waste of money, when he should feel blessed that his son was calling home.

  ‘How are your parents?’ she asked when Orestis returned.

  It took him a moment to recover from his confusion. ‘It’s only the old man and me now,’ he said. ‘I don’t really speak to my mother.’

  Eva grimaced.

  Aristos swooped in to alter the mood. ‘The memory I have of your father is from one of Eva’s parties at the Harmonia – you were eleven, possibly twelve. It was carnival time, and he came to pick you up dressed as a gangster.’

  Orestis’ smile was out of politeness. Anyone would have known.

  The ship set sail in the afternoon. Lethargic from all the food and sun, they retired to their cabins. Even Orestis, for the first day since they embarked, forewent the gym. Aristos fell asleep as soon as he lay down, but Darya struggled. As the minutes piled up, she became more conscious of the heat, her limbs, the sheets, the bed, the pillows. She deconstructed every sensation until the very notion of comfort was lost. It was no use, tired as she was she would not sleep. She left the suite, and Aristos to his slumber.

  She found herself walking through the corridors, where uniformed girls worked in near silence. They wheeled their trolleys, whispering in Russian and Polish. They cleared the sick bags waiting outside cabins. Eventually, there was a lounge, where Darya sat on a barstool and ordered a mocktail. There was the barman Orestis had chatted with, the Filipino doctor. Should she say hello? Of course not. The grenadine syrup in her drink made her wince, but the piano in the background soothed her. Carried her thoughts away. There came the intermittent static of walkie-talkies from the hips of white-suited officers sitting in leather tub chairs. Reality. Jobs. Money. It was all so mundane. Why could the world not exist on pleasure and beauty alone?