The Way It Breaks

by Polis Loizou

  ‘Mr Ioannidou,’ said Thanos, though he’d already been permitted to use the Christian name, ‘I don’t know how to thank you. That’s more than I ever hoped for.’ His voice had been reduced to a fraction of its usual body, it was a mere breath.

  ‘Don’t hope for anything,’ said Aristos. ‘Want it. Then do everything you can to get it.’

  The manager conceded with a nod and a raise of his eyebrow. ‘But will I still be based at the Harmonia?’

  ‘If it suits you to use it as a base, then by all means. But someone else will take on your duties.’

  The manager didn’t blink. ‘Do you mean Orestis?’

  Aristos kept a casual tone. ‘Why not? He’s a strong employee, isn’t he? He’s coped well with assisting you, according to his performance reviews. He’s established good relationships with all departments. As far as I can tell, he also has the hotel’s interests at heart.’ He lifted his coffee to his mouth, cufflinks catching the light.

  ‘Yes,’ said Thanos. ‘He has an eye for quality. I knew it when I first showed him around.’

  ‘He gets it from his mother,’ said the older man.

  A mistake. The fool.

  Thankfully, Orestis had proved a boon to the Harmonia. The staff appeared to have forgotten his link to Eva, if they ever knew of it, and his tenacity was a natural path to a good career. The various department managers thought highly of him, even Tina. Plus, on several occasions, the guests had made a point of singling out his service. Aristos only hoped he hadn’t extended that service beyond what was appropriate. The thought had occurred to him before and he’d dismissed it, but now, with Thanos in front of him, and that expression on his face, it returned as a possibility.

  ‘In the next few months,’ Aristos continued, regaining his footing, ‘I’d like you to train him. He needs to be at your level before you start your new role.’

  ‘I’m not worried about him,’ said Thanos, voice low. But then he raised his eyes to give Aristos a strange smile. ‘He wants things and he gets them.’

  The older man sipped his coffee.

  ‘How long do we have?’ asked Thanos.

  ‘I reckon October, but I’m willing to leave it to you.’ He drained the cup. ‘As for your salary, it goes up today.’

  Three

  A woman was screaming and another was in tears. As he got out of the car the sound became clearer, and it dawned on him who the voices belonged to. Ice ran down his back. He had never heard his wife like this. The noise took him back to the village, where everyone’s business was broadcast to the street. His face burned with shame, here in this fine neighbourhood.

  Inside, Darya was yelling at the maid to get out. A clatter of broken English and Greek, then, between breaths, whispers to herself in her mother tongue. The maid was on her knees. ‘I need job,’ she was saying, the tears streaming into her mouth. ‘Please, madame. Not me.’

  Aristos shut the door behind him. ‘What’s all this fuss about?’ He kept his own voice level.

  On seeing him, Darya switched off, to glare silently at nothing.

  The Sri Lankan crawled to him. ‘Mr Ioannidou, please! I didn’t do this. I didn’t do this.’ Her Greek was lumpy with sobs.

  ‘Don’t worry, my girl,’ he said, lifting her up from the floor. He held her by the shoulders and spoke close to her face. ‘Whatever happened, let me try to sort it out. You go home. Go home and rest, it’s OK.’

  Did she have enough Greek to understand him? She stared at him, unsure if she should leave.

  ‘It’s OK,’ he assured her. ‘Tomorrow.’

  ‘Tomorrow,’ she repeated. Then she tried to catch Darya’s eye. Her mouth quivered. ‘I’m sorry, madame. Not me. Not me.’ The door open, she hesitated on the veranda. Then she turned, took a last look inside, and shut the badness in.

  ‘Darya…’

  But his wife was pacing the hall. ‘I fire her. She’s idiot.’

  The sight of her was unreal. That straight nose, those high cheekbones, all her edges were sharper. Face as red as if she’d been strangled.

  ‘What are you talking about? She’s good. You had no problems with her.’

  ‘No Filipino,’ she spat because she thought it was Greek for ‘maid’.

  ‘What do you mean, no maid? Who’s going to clean?’

  ‘Me.’

  ‘You!’

  ‘I clean! I like it.’

  ‘Darya, come…’

  She slipped from his grasp. She was walking away, too close to the wall, so close to the glass of the picture frame. Her whole head looked fit to burst, something swelling inside it. Rattling breath, shaking shoulders. Then she puffed, puffed, a sound from her mouth that in time he realised was crying. Her eyes began to stream, and she stood, pathetic, in the middle of the hallway, overcome. Her hands floated about her like seaweed in water, and at last, they came to her face.

  He approached her with caution. No longer spouse but suicide bomber.

  ‘What is it?’ he cooed. ‘What is it, my love?’ Gently, he put his hand on her. But she didn’t flinch or throw him off. She rolled into his hug and, clutching his arm, cried into his shirt.

  It was fine. She would be fine. Something had upset her, and she’d kept it inside. But she wasn’t a person who could let things ferment. She was used to expressing her passions. Now it was coming out, all the bile she’d felt, all the anger and bitterness, and she would feel better for it. His wife would be empty and clear once more.

  She spent the remainder of the evening in the garden. She’d taken a bowl of cat food outside and placed it on the paving. Aristos stayed in the living room, leafing through his newspaper. He would have to call the agency for a new maid. Pity, the Sri Lankan had been good. But Darya would refuse to see her again. Aristos had grown to resent his ex-wife for the way she treated the maids. The woman had changed when Eva was born, she had transformed into a face forever caustic and sniping. As far as Aristos was concerned, there was no adequate reason to be unkind to service staff, and he’d never have expected it of Darya. After all, she’d been a cleaner herself. He wondered if it had been a mistake to take her with them on the cruise. Perhaps it had brought back memories of her former life and blurred her place in the new one.

  Once in a while, he lifted his eyes to the window, where his wife was sitting on a patch of grass. She looked from the garden wall to the tree against it, to the ground. It was all she had done for hours.

  ✽✽✽

  There were even more cars in Cyprus than stray cats. He coasted around Old Town, searching for a place to park. Some vehicles had been dumped where there were no markings, while others blocked them in. Eventually, he found one of those cheap spots run by old men with husky voices who spent all day sitting under the sun in plastic chairs. En route to his appointment he saw a familiar figure: his wife, walking through the shadows of oaks. What was she doing here? A rendezvous with Orestis? Or perhaps she’d taken his advice and called Lefteris for another man.

  Aristos followed. It was only to check she was all right, God knew she never explained herself. What use were obvious emotions when their motivations remained obscured? That was no way to achieve anything.

  Her pace was unhurried. With a distance of ten-twenty metres between them, he tailed her through the old Turkish neighbourhoods, the minaret of the mosque serving as a compass. She led him through the British-Venetian network whose architecture he hadn’t stopped to admire in years. At best the majority of his compatriots were blind to it, at worst dismissive. Culture had barely scraped through that dreadful post-War period when historic structures were thumped down like cockroaches. It shamed him that he’d played a part in that, however unwitting, on those muscle-tearing construction sites of his youth.

  Darya passed government buildings with painted wooden shutters, and beneath the iron balconies of flats and offices. She ignored the tourist shops selling vulgar mugs and postcards and pens, cheap reproductions of classical sculpture. The better of them sold machine-ma
de Lefkara lace, for those turned off by the expense of the handmade. The paradox made his head hurt. People were content to spend thousands of euro on machine-made branded handbags, yet baulked at the idea of spending less on something that took more time, effort and talent to produce.

  A man sat on a graffitied bollard, stroking a cockatiel.

  A stunted beep, a screech of brakes and ‘Fuck you!’ said a man on his moped, for Aristos had stepped off the curb without even looking.

  He apologised to the man, eyes still on Darya. She hadn’t turned.

  If his wife was going shopping, she was taking an odd route. She turned past an old tailor’s, towards a pedestrian avenue of bars and restaurants, where people sat smoking and sipping frappés in the fractured sunlight under trees and awnings. The street ended at the Pantopoleion, its arched entranceways like giant gaping mouths. One swallowed her up. Aristos quickened his pace. So far he’d been walking casually so that if she turned and saw him he might greet her and marvel at the coincidence.

  It had been at least a decade since he’d last been in the Pantopoleion. It looked lighter than before, a new lick of yellow up its cavernous walls and a light green skin on its iron skeleton. Fresh fruit and vegetables in crates formed a circuit around the place, the food inside that giant mouth. Every so often, a stall selling honey, candies and local crafts. Evil Eye pendants hung from wooden stands. Necklaces, earrings and bracelets reflected the sunlight pouring in from up high.

  His wife passed a choir of woven baskets, the type his mother had used in the village. The departed woman would sit on the veranda with one in her lap, breaking pods and popping out the black-eyed beans. He could share this part of himself with Darya, together they might start afresh in their relationship, on the same step. Though she kept her past under lock and key, Aristos suspected a similar upbringing to his; rural and, if not destitute, at least more deprived than the average. It was the USSR – she would have queued for what was now readily available at convenience stores, she knew the meaning of gratitude. Or so he’d thought. After all, he’d assumed she’d be an atheist.

  Aristos’ mother had always made sure he had shoes. There were children in his class that walked along the dirt track from their homes to the school on bare feet, who laughed about jumping from cowpat to cowpat in the summer so as not to feel the burning earth. Though his mother was widowed young, his father came from a big, guilty family that never let her fall down the well of abject poverty. Their support earned her the trust of a village she hadn’t grown up in. She was, therefore, able on countless occasions, to defer payments on groceries or eke out grants and favours. One of her chief teachings was not to underestimate charm. She remembered the details of people’s lives, enquired after the health of their loved ones and kissed them on their name days. She identified what it was that mattered most to people, and stored it in her mind. If the butcher was flattered by reference to his strength, she made reference to his strength. If the baker wanted to complain about his wife, she listened and nodded. And if the priest required women to be humble, she confessed her worthlessness once a week. People always needed clothes, so she made them. The Seamstress, they called her in the village, with something approaching reverence. She taught herself new techniques, challenged herself, picked apart garments to see how a thing was achieved before putting them back together again, often better. An uneducated woman, widowed at thirty and having lost all her children but one, she’d survived on the merits of mind, will and people skills.

  Aristos checked his watch. Still a few minutes before his appointment.

  But Darya—

  He’d lost her. Perhaps she had spotted him, and run away. He remembered again their spat on the beach in Kos, the look in her eyes and the tremble in her voice that had never been there before. A woman possessed. And Jesus, it had angered him. All that he had given her, and for what? Nothing. How much can a person want? She had everything he worked for. Everyone else dismissed her as a gold-digger, especially Eva, then, but he’d always given her the benefit of the doubt. Because he knew when he first met her that there was something different there. Perhaps her own history, that Red blood beneath her pale skin. Strength was in her fibre. Her goals were humble, money not among them. He could take away the house, the possessions, the help – the absence of them would never make her search the garden in despair. None of it meant as much as that goddamned cat.

  There she was. Standing in the doorway. She simply stood looking outside, this way and that.

  What had he done? Forty years old she was, with the spirit of someone half that age and the restrictions of someone double it.

  But she needed him. He needed her to.

  She went across the street, to gaze into the dusty window of an antique shop. In it, the hallmarks of different people’s differing homes. There were old irons, the kind he remembered his mother pressing over skirts, steam billowing beyond the candlelight. But there were also shepherds’ crooks, which he’d never needed in his life. There were radios and televisions they couldn’t afford until after his Army service, after ‘74. There was a portrait of Queen Elizabeth II, like the one a neighbour hung on her wall when the Brits patrolled in the days of EOKA. Patterned trays and coffee cups with logos he recognised from long ago. None of them would mean a thing to Darya.

  She stood looking into a workshop next door. The elderly, olive-skinned artisan kept his focus on his moulds. He sat on a stool amongst effigies of limbs in wax; a hand, a foot, and what Aristos assumed was an elbow. Votives for church, in exchange for healing. Hanging to dry was a trio of half-formed babies. Embryos. Darya was staring at them.

  With a feeling like missing a step, Aristos realised how close he’d got. Time to go, or he’d end up too far to make his appointment in time. He glanced back at his wife and felt a coldness take shape in his gut like a snowball.

  Did his wife want a child?

  If so, she would not get one from him. And if it wasn’t his, it would be Orestis’. Or worse…

  The thoughts tumbled around his head, all the way to his solicitor’s office.

  Four

  The crackle of gunfire. Screams of agony, yells, instructions, stuttering breath and then relief. Beneath his boots, the red earth of the Northern territories, merging with the steps of the Central Library. Bodies strewn across the streets. Men without eyes, hanging out of open car doors. From a megaphone strapped to his truck, the nasal calls of a fruit seller. The statue of Archbishop Makarios, around his shoulders a cloak. No, not a cloak. A youthful corpse. Turkish eyes staring, getting closer. The mewling of cats gargling the air. Tangled together on the pavement, a tortoiseshell clash of fur slapping the blood with a myriad of paws. The young Turk’s eyes drained to white. The sound of life escaping, emanating from Aristos’ wrists, his hands thrust into the unknown flesh—

  He clung to the sheets, struggled to catch his breath. Had he woken himself? It was something he’d been able to do once; to recognise he was in a dream and turn himself away from the worst of it. But no; from the window came the dying rev of a motorbike in the early light.

  Darya lay beside him, still beneath the thumb of sleep. His wife, so detached from him now that his terror hadn’t registered. What would his mother have made of this marriage?

  Once awakened, there was little point in returning to sleep. Aristos got out of bed and went down to his study. From the bookcase, he picked a volume on the British Colonial years and set it on his desk. In the kitchen, as he brewed himself a coffee on the hob he heard the pat of bare feet on the marble. At the doorway stood Darya.

  ‘You wake,’ she said in Greek. Those tenses of hers.

  ‘Sorry, my love. Did I wake you?’

  She flicked her head up.

  When she began walking towards him, he waited for her to put her arms around him, as she once would have. Instead, she went past him, to slide the doors open and sit in her spot in the garden.

  ✽✽✽

  It felt unreal to have no meetings
to attend, no flights to catch. A new life. But he would not stay in the house, not with Darya’s mood growing over it like fungus. He drove to Enaerio, where he picked up an ice-cream cone with gargantuan scoops of rose and mastic for a stroll along the seafront. This could be his daily existence now: an endless holiday, just an old man enjoying himself. All that money, and all that planning for it, would finally count towards the present rather than the future. It wouldn’t be long before he died; the years had a way of sliding off out of one’s reach. Live while you’re alive.

  He kept close to the eucalyptus trees, in case he should spot an acquaintance. People were swimming in the sea. Not as many as there once were. Cyprus’ golden years were brief and gone. The dust of the civil war and the Turkish invasion had settled. The South had picked herself up, provided for her refugees, and raised her head to new prospects. First, the wealthy Arabs came, some of them refugees from their own wars. Then it was the wealthy Russians, after the collapse of a wall, of a whole system. And always there were English tourists, and Germans and whoever else sought the sun and sea.

  Aristos had never been a fan of the English. Not solely because of the general feeling against them back in the village – so clever, their soldiers luring children to their jeeps with sweets; who would shoot at them then? – but because he thought them an arrogant tribe. They had conquered the world and broken it up, poured their language into the cracks. And yet they acted the heroes. They showed no remorse for their Empire, nor any knowledge that they’d been aided by allies in the Wars. They saw themselves above; as a goal for others to stretch for but never to reach. And now, it pained him to think that Cyprus needed them.

  He would sell the Cyprus hotels, too. He had written them over to Eva in his will, but he would speak to her about it soon. All of a sudden he felt a rush: the urge to reach for something, hold onto something, go back to someplace. But how far back would he have to go for peace? To before ‘74, before the Army had recruited him to shoot at invading Turks? When they scrambled to the nearest crater, and huddled there because nobody would bomb the same place twice? To the protests, each of them pulsing with vigour and meaning? To the brief emancipation years, when the Brits were forced to let them go? To the years of EOKA, when Greek-speaking neighbours talked of rebels as if they were saints? To when he danced to Turkish songs at neighbours’ weddings? To those days in school when boys talked with glowing eyes about the teacher? To when he shared thick slabs of bread and cheese with the kids who had no shoes? To when he confused phi and theta in his alphabet?