by Polis Loizou
Or he might go back to his first hotel, the promise of that time spreading out like a blanket. He might return to his daughter’s birth if only the memories attached to it were good. Eva’s mother was a person he’d rather forget. When they met as students in Athens, she had shown just one of her sides: the one full of life. The one who blazed with art and politics, and ambitions to open museums, heritage centres. But the birth of Eva had exposed her for what she was: a kept wife who expected her husband to do all the work. Who wished only to lie on the sofa, shop, eat, anything but what she’d been promising the world for years she would do. Her wit fomented to sarcasm, her beauty shrivelled to a permanent grimace. The more his businesses and status grew, the more she demanded, the more she sniped. Aristos had no patience for people who didn’t help themselves. It was one thing to dream and another to wake up and go.
He’d been charmed by Darya’s simplicity. Physically, she was a queen. But her dreams were small, her needs basic, stability her only request. A result of her upbringing, no doubt, the attitude he’d encountered in many Slavic people: be grateful for what you have. He would give her a life, and all she had to do was be there for him, at his side, grateful.
Aristos ordered a lot and ate large portions. He devoured books and information. His companies swallowed others. But when it came to sex, he had never had much of an appetite. In the Army, the men talked about their girlfriends and the things they had done to them. At school, the other boys laughed like donkeys at a dirty song about a Turk with huge breasts and, weeks later, at a picture one had found in his father’s desk. In these moments Aristos mimicked the expected behaviours. But in truth, women didn’t interest him. He remembered the immense guilt he felt when his father had died, the relief. The man had pestered him, relentlessly, when he was soused. Where’s your girlfriend? The zivania on his breath poking him, too. When I was your age, I had dozens. According to village gossip, he’d still had them. But Little Hippocrates contemplated everything other than girlfriends. When talk spread about the butcher and a young bricklayer, Aristos worried he himself might be homosexual. He felt the shame of it during confession, and the priest was stern. The years came and went, but he never felt a moment’s desire for another man. He decided he was simply abnormal and would have to learn to hide it.
His first wife was a virgin when they married. In the lead-up to the wedding, he let her mind fill in his story. He’d tried sex one night with a prostitute, in a crumbling flat in the red-light district, but he hadn’t enjoyed it. His friends in the other room were having much more fun with theirs. He tried it again with his wife because now he had a goal in mind: to father a child. From that point on, his wife assumed he had a mistress or two, and he let her believe it.
Darya had understood at once what he was. Perhaps because she was so in touch with her own desires, she could detect the absence of them in others. The miracle was that it didn’t faze her. It was almost as if it was what she wanted; for someone to leave her alone.
He couldn’t risk losing her. They were made for each other.
✽✽✽
The power was out. They lay in bed, sheets pasted to their limbs. Perhaps it was a good thing. He would only have dreamt of death, as had become the norm in the past few weeks. Every couple of minutes, his wife’s sighs would soar above the noise of crickets. She was unused to the Mediterranean heat, still. A pine in the desert. Yet she raised the heating in her car as if forever in the grip of a Siberian winter. Would she ever acclimatise to his country? He recalled her first experience of an earthquake, her confusion when the ground slid beneath her feet. It made him smile.
‘We’ve got so used to the air conditioning,’ he said into the dark.
Nothing.
‘In the village, in the days before we had electric fans, we used to go outside when it was too hot. We’d go out and sleep under the stars.’
This time she made a noise; an acknowledgement but also, he was almost certain, a sound of pleasure.
A shift in the mattress, the sound of bedsprings and cotton. Her silhouette rose before the moonlit curtains and slid through the room, to the door, and out. He leapt out of bed and followed, a pain thumping in his chest.
He found her outside, by the pool. She lowered herself as if to sit by it, and that’s when he realised his wife was naked. With the merest whisper of a splash, she slipped into the water. Her head came up again, hair like ink, like henna, on her skull. And she let a big breath out to the night. Was that a laugh? Relief?
He walked over to her, and she turned at the thud of his heavy steps. He couldn’t make her face out, but the stiffness of her neck, her body, was that of an animal guarding its territory. She stood still. Slowly, he removed his own underwear, and again he heard a sort of laugh. No, not a laugh. It was a mixture of disbelief and delight. He went to the steps and gingerly climbed into the pool.
She didn’t come to him, and he let her keep a distance. For the next few minutes, they only bobbed in the water. Occasionally, she would dip her head below the surface and rise again, beautiful. Why not tell her so?
‘Beautiful,’ he said in Russian. It was one of the few words he knew.
He could’ve sworn she was smiling.
Five
He never replaced the maid. When he rang, the agency informed him that Mrs Ioannidou had beaten him to it, to say she no longer required their services. Stunned, he hung up. If this was what Darya wanted, why did he feel this flush of anger, this embarrassment? Let her clean the house then. Let her throw his kindness in his face. More money saved.
Truth be told, his wife seemed happier without the maid. She even sang to herself as she gathered freshly laundered clothes and sheets and pillowcases into her arms. She forewent the dryer entirely, choosing clothes-pegs outside. She washed the plates and forks by hand instead of using the dishwasher.
This was almost his mother’s ghost toiling away at the sink, in that tiny house of many summers gone. He approached her, wrapped his arms around her, and rested his head on her shoulder. She flinched but stayed. She would have to be watched.
✽✽✽
The temperature climbed. He suggested they rent a holiday home in the mountains till the autumn. The freshness of the woods might appease his troubled wife. Not to mention she could put some distance between herself and her daily worries, whatever they could be. People always spoke of how curative the mountain air was, perhaps there was some truth to it. At the very least the serenity would calm a stormy head.
The treatment seemed to work. He’d found a cabin in Platres, in whose panelled rooms the sound of water was always close. Their neighbours were invisible. Nights were filled with the whistling of wind and the flapping of batwings. Darya’s movements had begun to lose that recent edginess, which had made her walk as if stitched together limb by limb. Her scowl had almost vanished. She was smoking less, again.
‘I’m so happy here,’ he said, prompting her.
She said nothing back, but her expression was one of agreement.
At times he would find her staring at a corner of the living room, lost in the empty space. At other times a sadness would cloud her eyes, and he assumed she was thinking of that little white kitten. Let her have a stray if it would help her get over the other one. As long as it was here in the country house, where the fresh air would diffuse the smell. Yes – he should buy a house in the mountains. People with far less money had done so, why hadn’t he?
She made dinner, stews with potatoes. Not exactly appropriate for the end of summer, but she devoured them. For the most part, they ate in silence, and he found himself longing for Orestis’ company, his presence in the kitchen, the boy running his finger along those printed-out recipes with that furrowed brow that haunted his face. Who could’ve known those days would die so young? Aristos never spoke a word of this to Darya. It might annoy her. Then where would they be?
It had been weeks since they’d seen Orestis. As far as Aristos knew, Darya hadn’t called on his serv
ices. Knowing him, the boy would be growing agitated. But there were other men for her and other prospects for Orestis. In many respects, Darya’s loss of interest solved the problem of the boy’s transition from wife’s lover to daughter’s suitor.
Orestis was likely to be his heir. Sometimes the thought came as a shock as if it was new. Aristos tried not to think about the two women sharing the one man. This was especially difficult where Eva was concerned, spoiled and sheltered and innocent as she was. But it wasn’t as if they shared him in the same way, on the same level. Physical closeness and emotional connection were different states of being. One woman communicated with Orestis through his youth, the beauty of his flesh, while the other spoke to him in dialect, she communicated with words and gestures in shorthand. Eva was linked to him through a past, both personal and social, rooted in the geography and history of their motherland. It was why parents insisted their children marry within a community; the foundations of a relationship were already lain, not to mention the traditions that would never be negotiated, never bargained away. Other than him and Orestis, the women had no link to each other. It went without saying that many would be scandalised by the arrangement, and it would damage the Ioannidou reputation for generations to come if it was ever found out. But was it immoral? Of course not.
As if his peers were in any position to claim a moral high ground. How many stories had he heard during and since the island’s rise from the ashes of war? So-called Christians praying for others’ ruin so they might succeed. God willing, they would say of their future fortune, while docking the salaries of their employees or cutting corners in health and safety as if there were any other purveyor of fate than them. They called Russian women whores but had no qualms about ogling them in strip bars, or gave a thought to how the women got there in the first place. One of his own cousins had hired an Arab contractor for his garage extension, then called the police to report him as an illegal migrant.
If a young man was sharp enough to invest in his body and earn some extra income from hiring it out, then that was a sign of nous. And if Aristos earned a percentage of that through his mediating hotels, that was good business. After all, what was society, from business to friendships to sex to the Church to councils and town planning, but investment and reward, plus interest?
‘I’m going to Munich next week,’ Aristos told his wife between sips of stew.
She nodded.
‘And I was thinking that perhaps we might go together sometime.’
‘Again holiday?’ she said, which made him laugh.
‘Or maybe something more permanent…’
She didn’t quite register that word.
‘I don’t know if I want to stay in Cyprus,’ he explained. ‘I like Germany, I like Germans. I think you feel the same…’
Over the course of his sentence, her eyes widened. She nodded, to show she’d understood, and a smile hovered around her mouth.
He’d caught her. She’d been about to leave. He knew it.
✽✽✽
Aristos didn’t speak with Orestis again until the wine festival. Thousands of people gathered in the park, around the sculpture of the wine-grower. How many of the younger generation had ever seen a man actually dressed like that, with a waistcoat and vraka? Orestis and Eva walked around the Municipal Garden hand-in-hand beneath the light bulbs strung between the trees, their friend Paris with his hands in his pockets at their side.
At first, the latter man was reticent and watched Aristos as if assessing a predator. But as the evening wore on and the plentiful booze filled their systems, the vegetarian poet began to thaw and yelled his political commentary over the music and song. Their Communist president alighted different fires in each. Orestis looked concerned that they might come to blows but Aristos was having a great time and even slapped Paris on the back for a game well played. He’d missed that ardour of youth; the belief that human nature had the capacity for change. Together they toasted the future of Cyprus, with wine from Ayia Mavri.
Aristos raised his voice over the noise. ‘This is from my village.’ There was a pain in his heart after that, a pain that didn’t leave for the rest of the night.
The youths reminisced about the Zoo next door.
‘Remember the lion cubs? What were they called—’
‘The darlings! Of course, I do, I took photos with them like a superstar.’
‘Of course you did. You probably drugged them yourself.’
‘God have mercy, Paris! Can’t a little girl hold a lion cub without wondering if the zookeeper doped it up?’
‘As if it would’ve bothered you.’
‘E, true. I’ll probably wear them to your book launch.’
They talked about his poetry. Aristos was impressed, though the book was doomed to earn little.
At some point in the night, Eva asked her father about Darya.
It was the first time she had ever enquired after his wife and, if he wasn’t mistaken, called her by her name. He was almost too surprised to reply. ‘She’s unwell, sadly.’ And, seeing that the excuse had registered as lazy, he prepared to expand on it.
Eva cut him off: ‘I noticed she doesn’t drink.’
Aristos’ shoulder seized. ‘To be honest,’ he said, ‘she doesn’t like to see drunkenness.’ He recalled that gesture she’d made of her father drinking. ‘There was a lot of it where she’s from.’
Eva narrowed her eyes and lit her cigarette. He didn’t know if he ought to be suspicious.
Orestis looked from father to daughter, seeking a moment to connect with Aristos.
‘A!’ said the older man. ‘Toffee apples. I haven’t had one in years. Who wants one?’
‘No thanks,’ Eva said in English, her preferred language to express disgust. ‘It gets stuck to my teeth.’
Paris also passed on the offer.
Orestis accepted and followed him to the stand. Around them were men with bellies bulging under old T-shirts, faces red with drink and laughter. Children ran around, playing Catch among the tables and chairs. Some of them belted dialect with mighty lungs – Provincials, his first wife would’ve called them with a sneer.
Orestis laughed at what they overheard.
‘What? Don’t you like the Cypriot tongue?’ Aristos asked with a smile.
‘We learned proper Greek,’ said the young man.
‘It’s in there somewhere, too.’
Aristos asked the vendor for two apples. Orestis put up his hands to decline.
‘Eat it, son,’ said Aristos. ‘Drop the diet. As my grandma used to say, you don’t want to die hungry.’
Orestis faded. ‘How’s Darya?’
No answer that would satisfy the gored bull. No answer full-stop. ‘She does what she wants,’ he said.
Orestis’ eyes dropped to the ground. How beautiful he was, a different sort of man. The Ancients used to dazzle their opponents. They combed their hair before a battle, to be perfect physical specimens in glittering armour. They instilled the dread of awe in their enemy. Sex was a power. Nothing weakened a man more than an attack on his ego, his libido. Even the Church understood this; its promotion of a sexless existence wrestled guilt into subjugation. God for your impure thoughts, a perfect trade. Money, property, land for your place in Heaven. The boy had finally learned to use his beauty to his advantage, to look beyond himself. That evening in Mykonos, when they strolled past the clubs and bars full of gays, Orestis had absorbed the stares of others and projected their energy to make himself known, wanted, feared. Desire and intimidation were cousins. A man assumed to be well-endowed was a threat, an other male equipped to steal the lessor’s property. That’s why the stories persisted about Africans and Arabs. A potent assault force.
One of the boys in the barracks had earned himself the nickname Sterling. The others tried to joke about his gift from God, but humour was a thin mask. It was hard not to be entranced by his gift in the showers. Not that it had saved him once the Turkish bullets flew.
Ho
w far from the Ancients they had come, to remove even the beauty from war.
Orestis turned, looking caught. Someone called Aristos’ name. He racked his brains to identify his neighbour Katina. He’d spent enough time with the woman so as not to require more of it but still failed to see the reason for Darya’s hatred of her. Loosely attached to Katina was a teenaged daughter, who tapped on her phone and couldn’t look less interested in what the adults were saying. To Aristos’ surprise, the woman squinted and pointed at Orestis. ‘You’re the nephew.’
In an instant, Aristos understood. ‘A! You’ve already met.’
‘E,’ said Katina. Then she turned to Aristos. ‘I saw your wife the other day, in that music shop in Ayia Zoni. I was driving past and saw her from the window.’
‘Music shop?’
‘Yeah. I didn’t know she could play the piano.’
‘My Darya? She doesn’t play.’
‘God as my witness, it was her.’ Off his baffled expression, the woman decided not to push the point. ‘E, OK, maybe I didn’t see right.’
‘Or she has a twin,’ said Orestis.
‘God have mercy,’ said Katina.
They bade her goodnight and walked back to the others. A man with a coffee-stained voice was crooning Hadjis, Aristos’ favourite. He’d seen him at the Kourion back in the ‘90s, or was it ‘80s, with Marinella. The bittersweet melodies, the yearning guitar, none of it took his mind off what Katina had told him.