“It’s Richard,” I said quickly. She took a step forward and a look of recognition swept across her face. She suddenly became very animated, her eyes lit up and she lifted her free arm to touch me.
“Richard, oh, Richard,” she exclaimed. And I stepped forward so that she could touch me. She passed her hand over my chest and on to my face. “Hah! Richard! Richard!” and she chuckled. But there was something else in her voice, sadness? Regret? Nostalgia? I was right to have picked up on it as her following words were, “Where have you been, my son? The light has gone from my eyes and this town!” and then she cried. The tears came from deep within her, and she reached out and grabbed my arm. “Come, come in!” she said, turning away from me now. I followed her to the kitchen, where she made me a coffee; she knew by heart where everything was, and then she told me to carry the cups outside to the table beneath the tree. “You will have to read your own cup,” she chuckled.
‘“Amalia, who is the girl with red hair?” I asked, holding my breath, waiting for the answer. And she laughed again.
‘“You know who is already,” she said. “She your daughter!”
‘I put my face in my hands and sat there for a while, finally building up the courage to ask the next question. “Marianna?” and then Amalia’s face dropped, and she shook her head.
‘“She dead, Richard, she poison by snake.” At this my heart came into my throat. The name Marianna seemed to echo around me. I felt as though the darkness of the evening had mounted in on me, I began to sweat and loosened my collar and tried desperately to compose myself.
‘“Dear God,” I said and reached out instinctively and held onto Amalia’s hand. She must have felt my pain for she held it just as my own mother once had when I was a little boy. She held it tightly and then reached over with her other hand and placed it on top so that my hand was nestled between the soft skin of her palms. I did not move, I allowed my shoulders to relax and, in the safety of her hands, my life flashed before my eyes. Her hands were warm and enveloped my sadness. The more the years of loneliness seared through my veins, the warmer her hands seemed to become. And she allowed me to sit there like that while the evening fell upon the town and my life.
‘The next day I went back to the taverna and took a seat at one of the tables that overlooked the hills. I noticed a few men on other tables looking up from their newspapers or conversations; one man even threw some change on the table and left the taverna. The man behind the bar watched him leave and came to me with his pad. He smiled at me, which I was not expecting, and spoke to me warmly. “Anger make people react in many way,” he said, and then welcomed me and told me that his name was Mihalis and that he was the owner of the taverna and that he welcomed all guests. I thanked him for his kindness and ordered a drink, at which point I must have looked over at where the girl sat beneath the tree. He followed my gaze, and I looked back at him and told him quickly that I wanted a warm Zivania and a bowl of nuts.’
The rain starts again and another red bus rumbles past. Richard looks out of the window; across the street the man in the brown suit has just stepped out onto the pavement, he sneaks a look around, walks with his head bent past two shopfronts, then shakes his shoulders, takes the self-aggrandising stance of a successful businessman and walks off.
‘His wife thinks he works late every night,’ says Paniko. ‘My wife thinks I don’t.’ Richard takes the box of cigarettes from the table and offers one to Paniko. Paniko shakes his head.
*
Adem lies on his back on the floor of a deserted house. He is not on night attack tonight. This is the first time he has lain down in four days. The priest’s shoes are by his side. He can smell the leather. When he closes his eyes he sees Engin’s grey face and open eyes. He cannot sleep. There are other soldiers in the house, all sleeping soundly. The dissonance of snoring and deep breathing and the crickets is unbearable. He stares out of the open window at the sky. The night is thick. There are no stars tonight. Adem holds the little red Bible in his left hand that is straight by his side. He fingers the leather and the embossed letters on the front. He feels the edge and tries to imagine what lies within these thin pages. He brings the book up and rests it on his chest. The smell of dusty corners and candlewax drifts to his nose. It feels as though he is holding the Qu’ran.
All he wants is a chance to continue his search, but the small house is brimming with sleeping soldiers. If he moves someone could wake up. Just then there is a noise from the room on the left. A soldier emerges like a shadow in the night. From the type of soft noise, Adem imagines that his arm is raised and that he is rubbing his eyes. Possibly a nostalgic image of peaceful nights in another place. The soldier steps lightly, barefoot on the white flagstones, and reaches the kitchen. He fumbles around and uses the grey square of light from the window as a dim guide. Adem hears water poured and drunk and then the soldier makes his way back. A few other soldiers move a little, and one soldier suddenly jumps mechanically and shouts ‘Stop or I’ll shoot!’ Most of the snoring stops abruptly. One soldier laughs, and the walking soldier, who has now stopped in his tracks, says, ‘It’s just me, Asad, go back to sleep.’ There is some shuffling and mumbling, but no one says anything, and a few moments later the snoring resumes and Adem is left to look at the square of charcoal sky.
He imagines her again as she was then. First he sees white fingers and a round shoulder. Then, that red hair in flames about her collarbone. Then, those invisible lashes and mirrorlike eyes that always reflected the world in a peculiar blue haze, distorted by what lay within. Then he hears that locked-away laugh, and words and thoughts that were hidden from the rest. He remembers the ridicule and the name-calling and that stone body they had created. The dry eyes and stiff walk.
One of the soldiers to his right mumbles something about eggs in his sleep. Adem feels irritated. He feels trapped. He looks again at the square of sky and decides that his next step will be to search the houses of prisoners. He knows there are definitely three, all guarded by soldiers. He will be on guard tomorrow night. He will find her. And just then, with the smell of dust and candles and leather and the coal-like darkness and the never-ending chattering of the crickets and the snoring, he drifts off to sleep, to the world of darkness and fireflies and soldiers, beyond.
Day 3: 22 July 1974
It is early afternoon, the next day, and Koki and Maroulla sit side by side on two chairs in the garden of the prisoners’ house with trays on their laps; they are picking small stones out of some lentils that Olympia had found in the larder. Suddenly moving across the garden is a chicken followed briskly by Maria. She has decided that today they will eat their own food; they will not touch the scum that the soldiers bring. The chicken flaps hysterically as Maria rocks from one foot to the other and moves, if one were to remember her arthritis, at an unnaturally high speed. But she has strong lungs and a strong heart and better still, a strong will, which she will insist are all on account of the olive oil and lentils and black-eyed beans and raw onions and good chunks of white bread. She has the shoulders of a bull and certainly the bloody-mindedness, as her husband would have said. In her old age Maria had actually become even more bull-like, as the neighbours agreed. Her shoulders had broadened, her moustache had deepened, and as the children of the town insisted, the hairs on her chin had lengthened. It was true. She could kill animals with her bare hands, and not just chickens or rabbits, which was common amongst some of the older women, but rams and cows and pigs and even snakes. She owned a gun, for the most challenging animals. Maria lifts her dress and her knees higher and stomps around the garden. Maroulla giggles at how funny this old lady looks, and Koki nudges her gently.
In a few seconds Maria captures the chicken so that it flaps manically in her tight grip and she walks to the front end of the garden where she has already laid out, on a garden table, a tray, a towel and a knife. ‘Well, you’re a chunky one, aren’t you?’ she speaks to the chicken. ‘They must have fed you well. Now you’ll feed us wel
l.’ She cracks a smile, bends down, breaks the chicken’s neck and then rips off its head. Then she releases it and allows it to flap in a frantic frenzy until it finally subsides to the ground and twitches slightly. Blood has splattered on her arms and she wipes them with the towel from the table.
Sophia is on a small stool collecting lemons from the tree at the front of the garden. The dog watches her with its head on its paws. Once Sophia’s apron is full, she secures it under her arm and climbs down from the stool and goes into the house. The dog follows lugubriously. The house is cool and grey compared to the garden that glows yellow with sunlight. Elenitsa can no longer hold her child. She lies in the bed, on her back, with her eyes half shut. Olympia sits beside her, with the little boy in her left arm and a damp cloth in her right hand, which she uses to dab Elenitsa’s forehead. The room is consumed with a pungent smell of sharp alcohol. There is a bottle of pure spirit on the floor which Olympia has used to clean cuts and gashes on Elenitsa’s face and arms and some on the delicate skin on the inside of her thigh. Elenitsa has endured the pain without crying and has not spoken a word since stumbling back through the garden late the previous night. Now the room is quiet; only a cockroach scuttles in from the heat and stops by the chair where Sophia sits peeling the figs. From the porch doors the song of the cicadas bursts in with the immense light. The bed is on the other side of the room, embalmed in silvery shade. Olympia bends a little to her right and dips the cloth into a bucket of water by her side. The excess water drips back into the bucket and the sound trickles gently round the room like a cool river. ‘Thank God and the saints that we have this,’ says Olympia, looking up at the ceiling, as though she expects to see them there. They are lucky to have a well at the bottom of the garden, which Maria had discovered last night. ‘This we can have!’ she had said. ‘It is a gift from God.’
Maria comes in from the garden holding the dead chicken by the feet. She finds a large bowl in one of the kitchen cupboards and sits on the table to pluck it. She instructs Sophia and Maroulla to collect branches and old twigs. Sophia leads Maroulla out and they walk about within the confines of the garden, filling their aprons with twigs and their arms with larger branches. When they have collected enough they put them all in two large piles where Maria lights two fires. Maroulla and Sophia then sit on the floor and play with marbles, while the dog lies beside them, watching, and, every so often, looking towards the back of the garden, sniffing the air.
Having searched Elenitsa’s bag, Costandina heats up two large pans of water and, before doing anything else, she sterilises the baby’s bottle in one and then mixes the powder with some water to make the milk. She takes the bottle to Olympia, who feeds the baby, and then returns to the fire and puts the chicken in one pan and the lentils in the other. On the floor, with her knees bent to the side, Maria sits protectively next to the chicken, flicking the firewood with a long stick. Costandina mixes the lentils. As the day dies, the prisoners become engrossed in preparing the meal and they perform each task with the soft touch of familiarity; they mix the lentils, find vegetables in the garden, add lemon and rosemary to the chicken and with trays on their laps and knives in their hands, they chop and dice, cut and slice. They sit on chairs around the garden, doing the things they had always done; and perhaps it is at this time, these moments when the world spins back to a near-normality, that the emptiness appears in its truest form.
Soon the only light comes from those crackling flames, and into the house drifts the smell of wood and smoke and home-cooked food. Elenitsa has fallen asleep, and the baby is now tucked safely in a bundle of quilts in a wicker basket that was probably used to collect fruit.
When the meal is ready Olympia takes the basket with the baby and reluctantly leaves Elenitsa sleeping on the bed as everybody gathers round the fire. They sit in a circle and pass around their plates. Maria distributes the chicken evenly and whispers a prayer before they eat. They all bend their heads and thank God for the food they have before them. Suddenly a hot breeze blows and the fire crackles and rises. Orange light moves across their faces. Koki’s headscarf is unable to contain her curls any longer, and as another red wind blows it flies off before she can lift her hand to secure it. Her hair explodes into the dark night, surging luminously about her. Costandina stares at her fearfully. ‘God is telling us that red devils do not deserve to be fed,’ she says, hardly audible against the wind. The others look up. Koki feels their eyes burning on her face; that menacing look of hatred she had become so accustomed to, a look so full of ignorance and fear. Koki’s anger flows in her veins with her blood, but this time she does not reach up to hold down her hair, she simply sits there staring at the fire ahead. She is expressionless with her porcelain-doll-like face, but in her glassy eyes, there is a glint of something wild. The others stare upon her, transfixed, frozen, stone-like, as though they have set their eyes on the face of Medusa. Maroulla looks around, and then jumps up and walks about the garden. She finds the headscarf flapping on a bush. She returns it to Koki. Koki looks up at the little girl’s warm eyes and takes the scarf.
‘The food is getting cold,’ Koki says in a cool voice, and the others immediately pick up their knives and forks and begin to eat without looking up again.
Once they have eaten, the women clear up and sit inside watching the fire that still flickers outside. Now that the expectation of the meal is over they are even more aware of the soldiers’ blinking lanterns at the back of the long garden.
‘They haven’t brought us bread tonight,’ says Litsa.
‘They probably smelt the chicken,’ replies Olympia.
‘The barbarians would kill us just to get the chicken from inside our gut,’ says Maria, passionately, removing a piece of chicken from her back tooth and wiping it on her skirt. Sophia’s eyes widen with fear and for a moment she stops stroking the dog.
‘Is the dog Greek or Turkish?’ she asks.
‘Well, it—’ begins Koki.
‘Turkish,’ interrupts Olympia quickly. ‘All dogs are Turkish and all cats are Greek. Dogs eat cats,’ she concludes, and immediately Sophia stops stroking the dog.
‘What do they teach you at school?’ Olympia stares at Sophia, and Sophia timidly shrugs her shoulders and then says the word ‘enosis’. In the far corner, Litsa sighs irritatedly, but covers it with a cough. Olympia raises her eyebrows approvingly. ‘And Koutalianos, the Captain of Saint George, and Dighenis the hero and the EOKA leaflets, and Gregoris Afxentiou, who sacrificed his life like Jesus … and Kolokotronis who fought for the Greek war of independence against the Ottoman Empire,’ Sophia adds with an air of certainty, boasting her knowledge with a stretched neck and straight back as though she were in class. Sophia waits for the schoolmistress’s approval. Olympia nods. She is pleased.
‘Our heritage is Hellenic,’ Olympia adds. Costandina, who is sitting beside her, nods incessantly. Olympia looks specifically now at Sophia and then at Maroulla. She instinctively avoids Koki. She continues, ‘A child belongs in its mother’s arms.’ She looks momentarily at the sleeping baby and then at Elenitsa. ‘Safe from intruders and danger and false love.’ The other women, even in the dark, instinctively follow her gaze. There is another long silence, when the dog whimpers slightly and rubs its head on Sophia’s knee, but the girl pushes it with her elbow.
‘When I was a teenager,’ continued Olympia, ‘I learnt that we had two enemies. The British colonialists, who would not give us independence,’ she pauses, while Maria nods her head agreeably and grunts, ‘and the Turks, who wanted to divide our fragile island, who wanted, from then, to cut us in two.’
Koki shifts uncomfortably in her chair. This time, some of them look at her. She feels compelled to remain silent. Litsa, who is plaiting her own hair into pigtails, suddenly leaves one undone and stands up. She paces around the room, and then stops by Olympia.
‘Why?’ she asks. Olympia looks up at her in the darkness with a confused look. ‘Why did they demand partition?’ persists Litsa and looks
down at Olympia. There is a long silence. Olympia cannot answer; the breadth of her knowledge is restricted. There is something about the question which makes the humidity in the room seem thicker.
‘It is not a question of why,’ says Olympia, this time with a change of tone; a slight tremor in her cricket song. A miss-beat in the heart of her convictions.
‘Of course, it doesn’t matter,’ mutters Litsa. Olympia nods, but she is pressing her body uncomfortably into the back of the chair so that she is as far away from Litsa as physically possible without having to shift the chair or stand up.
Koki looks at the gold cross between Olympia’s fingertips, reflecting the firelight. It glows as though it is burning. Koki puts her hand to her chest. She begins to feel the anger again. That scalding, disconcerted, variable anger. Who could she hate? What side of the line was she on? She feels split; caught on barbed wire. Unwhole. For falling in love with the enemy and giving birth to a hybrid, as the neighbours would have said. She thinks about her life since; the abuse and violence and hatred from her own people. She is the Whore of Babylon, adorned in purple and red, with a gold cup in her hand filled to the brim with the filth of her ways. She is the mother of the abominations of the earth. She gave birth to the Antichrist. Suddenly her complexes force her to tie the headscarf tighter round her head. She reaches behind for the knot, unties it and fumbles nervously to fix it. Her hair slithers through. Pokes out for some air. Strangely, like snakes’ tongues. Silent though. And desperate.
A Watermelon, a Fish and a Bible Page 14