by Sara Alexi
‘My dad he sees her and he gets to know her and he is brave enough to marry her.’
‘Er, sorry, why did he need to be brave?’
‘She was gypsy.’
‘So?’
‘So, so? Gypsies are not the same as not gypsy. The people, they do not like gypsies. They think they are dirty and they steal. Some are dirty and some do steal, but not all. Gypsy have a heart like anyone else and they hurt like anyone else. I know.’
‘So by marrying your mum, what happened?’
‘Nothing. They have me and they are happy. We are all happy till I have to go to school.’
‘I love school,’ Abby butts in.
‘You do not love school if you were gypsy, they throw stones at me.’
‘No!’
‘Yes! But then along came Stavros, who, can you believe, was good-looking then and he say he will marry me and then the people my age stop talking because I am married to a Greek and they respect him, just because he is Greek.’
‘My dad has just married Sonia, she’s Russian. Everyone is saying it was not a good idea. Now he doesn’t want me to go to school so I can help with the new baby when it comes. But why should I? It is their baby, not mine.’
‘Better than school,’ Stella says.
‘Not for me. I want to stay on and do my A levels and then university. But Dad says “what’s the point”.’ Abby draws out the chair next to Stella and sits down.
‘Even I know the point of education and I did not like school. But if I could go to a school with no peoples I would have loved it, I love to learn things. I learn English.’ She laughs and her head rolls back. She uses a supporting hand to aid it back to upright.
‘I love learning too. Mostly maths, but I quite like computers, and geography. Besides, babies don’t do anything, I would be bored,’ Abby responds
‘I wanted baby once,’ Stella breathes.
‘Haven’t you got no children then?’ Abby says, then reruns the question in her head to sort out the grammar but decides it doesn’t matter, Stella’s English is far from perfect anyway.
Stella shakes her head slowly. ‘He cannot have them, he says it is me, but I think it is for the best.’
‘I’m not sure I want kids,’ Abby muses.
‘Someone to look after you when you are old,’ Stella says.
‘I’ll find a nice old people’s home, better than being dependent on someone else. Where was your dad when he died?’
‘At home, here, well just up there.’ Stella lifts her hand and indicates a general direction. ‘When he died was not so bad. No, it was bad. But after he dead then it worse. My mother was alone. Her gypsy family come. Some stayed, some took things. Siga siga, slowly slowly, as we say in Greece, they took everything. First the small things, my Mama’s picture frames and her aprons. Then some men who said they were uncles come, two stayed in the house. They have her cooking for them and they just put their feets up.’ She says ‘put-their-feets-up’, as if this is a new phrase to her that she has just learnt.
‘That must have been hard on you.’ Abby knows what it is like to have interlopers in her house taking her mother’s role, the mother she never knew.
‘I was not there, I was married with Stavros, living in his village. Every time I come the house was a little more empty, my mother was a little more tired and the men are little more bossy.’
‘Is your mum still there?’
‘No, she died also, after they have taken from the house everything and left. I went back once and the kitchen table and chairs are gone. My mama was sitting on an olive oil tin. One of the men was sitting on a, how you call it, big square thing to makes houses, you know, grey, put them in a line then another line …’
‘Brick, breeze-block?’ Abby enjoys the challenge of trying to think what it is.
‘Maybe, I do not know. Anyway that time I go to the toilet and the toilet seat is gone. This was in the house of my Baba, not the apothiki of the cheese factory. And the shower snake is gone. I go to ask her where I will find paper for the toilet, and through the half-open door I see the man who said he was uncle smack her on the face and walk out.’
‘Oh my …’ Abby does not finish her sentence, she cannot imagine how scary that must have been. She’d like to think she would have defended her mum but then the man could turn, and then what? ‘What did you do?’
‘I ran to her, she had tears on her cheeks, she held my hand so I could not run out after him. I ask if he has done it before and she says no but I did not believe her. So I stayed.’
‘What, like the weekend?’ Abby thinks she would have defended her mum, whatever the cost.
‘No, I just stayed until Stavros came to find me and then he stayed. We had oranges and olives and I had Mama’s job in the cheese factory because we needed money and they said she was a good worker. And then she died.’
‘That’s sad. My mum died before I met her,’ Abby says.
‘Yes, that is very hard.’ Stella rubs her neck as she talks.
‘I don’t know. I never knew her.’ Abby feels a pricking in her eyes and her breathing rate increases. ‘More water?’ She gets up to distract herself from what she is feeling.
‘Yes, please, and push the fire a little and turn the chicken.’ Stella stops rubbing her neck. She rubs her arms instead, as if she is cold.
‘These sausages look like they’re done. Shall I take them off?’ But Abby doesn’t wait for a reply. She moves them to the side of the grill to keep warm and turns the chicken.
‘Why your dad say you must not have these Alpha levels?’
‘A levels. Because I want to take them to go to university, but now you have to pay to go to university and Dad cannot afford it, so he thinks it will be a waste of time and that it would build my hopes up for no reason.’
‘But education is not a waste, never.’ Stella looks at Abby very seriously. Abby wants to give her a hug but instead puts the tongs down and fills their glasses. Stella still seems to be shaky.
Abby is about to go across to her when two boys walk in, not much younger than Abby.
‘Dyo giro, parakalo.’
Abby stares at them blankly and wonders where her phrase book is.
‘Say “Yia”,’ Stella prompts.
‘Yia,’ Abby recites.
‘Yia,’ one of the boys says. The other grins.
‘They want two giros, I’m coming.’ Stella takes hold of the table edge to stand.
‘I’ve got it, tell me what to do.’ Abby holds her hand up, palm facing Stella.
This idea seems to tickle Stella. She laughs gently. ‘Two pita breads on the grill with some oil.’ Abby follows the instructions. The pitas sizzle and she plucks them off and piles them high with meat and tomatoes, tzatziki and onions. She attempts to roll the first one, and it is satisfactory. She is better with the second.
‘Dyo evro,’ Stella calls. Abby puts out her hand; ‘dyo’ she understands, two euros. She wonders if that is each or together but as each boy offers her two euros she presumes it is for each. They leave with happy smiles, one looking behind him for a last glimpse of Abby. She wonders how old he is, maybe her age.
Chapter 8
Stella sits alone in the remains of the heat. Loose limbed, looking up in the dusk to spot the first stars, she rubs the bruises. She wonders if she will go home tonight.
The last of the farmers have just left. As usual hers is one of the last shops to close. She takes a sip of ouzo and puts the glass on the floor by the leg of her chair.
The orange glow of light flicks off in the pharmacy leaving a pause of dark. A harsh bare bulb switches on, visible in the window above the shop. The noise of the television bounces off unadorned walls. The curtains are drawn, eclipsing the strip of light, muffling the sound. Stella continues to sit, listening. Shutters close, echoing around the village. A dog’s bark is answered by another.
Vasso emerges from the kiosk and stretches. She took Abby to her home to settle in a couple of hours ago; the poor girl was e
xhausted.
Vasso’s yawn is interrupted by a last-minute customer wanting cigarettes. His scrabble for change is waved away. The till is cashed up, he can pay tomorrow. She chains the metal shutters to the front of the free-standing drinks fridges, slots home the wooden panels over the windows of her kiosk and calls goodbye to Stella. She turns off her central lights, darkening the whole square. The moon bright in the clear sky, the stars sharp dots in the inky blanket enveloping the village. Her silhouette hurries towards her home, and sleep. She will leave the porch light on when she goes to bed to illuminate Stella’s path to her own house, next door.
Stella levels her hands in front of her, fingers splayed, and stretches with her own, loud, yawn. As her eyes open she rotates her limbs inwards to show the matching bruises on the backs of her arms, angry, shocking. A knot forms in her throat and she blinks tears from her eyes.
The lights go off one by one before the metal-framed glass doors clang shut at Theo’s kafenio. There is a sound of farmers talking, sharing last thoughts before wishing each other goodnight. Theo stacks the chairs that remain in the square, scraping them across to the lamp-post as he chats.
The same scene is played again and again, night after night.
With her thumbs under her jaw bone, Stella rubs the tears from her eyes with the pads of her fingers and sniffs. Over the past seven years, sitting outside her souvlaki shop, she has witnessed this curtain call, the finale to the sequence of events of village life at the close of the day, the continuity of events implying security.
But … She doesn’t feel safe any more. It only took thirty seconds. The smell of jasmine grows momentarily as a gentle breeze stirs the air and lifts the heat from her limbs. She picks at her dress to unstick it from her legs. She wants to lie down, become lost in sleep, but she cannot face her own bed. The process of getting into it will involve too much talk, or worse, heavy silence.
The voices outside the kafenio grow fainter. Theo, an outline, whose bushy hair bobs as he goes round the side of his café and opens a door which leads to his bachelor rooms above the shop, looks around before he steps out of view and, seeing Stella, waves good night. How different life would have been had her brief dates with Theo, all those years ago, become more. The age difference then had seemed unsurpassable. Theo, the same age as Mitsos. How time changes things.
She lifts her hand in acknowledgement, but he is gone and she lets it drop. Everything’s the same as the evening before but all now unreachable, untouchable. Stella’s focus is on a more compelling, immediate, reality.
She feels a tightening in her chest as questions collide, contending for precedence until one dominates. The foremost question: what if it happens again?
She looks around the square. With both Theo and Vasso gone she is totally alone.
There are no lights left in the centre of the village apart from those behind her in her own takeaway and only one of these remains on, a low-watt glow.
Stavros’ shouting she is used to. Fists thumped on tables, even punches through door panels have been known, chairs flung across rooms, crockery broken, all common-place. The menace is there daily. But now it has overflowed onto her. Even if he never touches her again the trust is gone, the perceived safety shattered. He is no longer the Stavros she loved, although, even after the event, when she caught his eyes twinkling (for Abby), a smile on his lips (again for Abby), she was reminded of the Stavros she had married. The surge of loneliness and overwhelming sadness that rose from her stomach to her chest had taken her by surprise. She had nearly been sick.
Even in her sickness she could not lie to herself. The moment his grip tightened to pain he had granted her permission to let her suppressed feelings flow. But it was neither fear nor hate that gushed with her adrenaline. It was undiluted disdain that contorted her thoughts. A sad little man. A little man with the power to hurt her.
She takes another sip of ouzo.
A distant dog barks. It is answered by one behind the houses on the opposite side of the street. This starts another howling and for a short time the village is blanketed by the dogs’ choir until one by one they quieten down and nothing can be heard but the cicadas rasping their loneliness in the heat of the night.
A light comes on over the bakery and goes out again. They will be up in a few hours. Stella finishes her drink and stands. She stretches, sways slightly, steadies herself, and turns to lock up. The glass is left on the pavement by her chair.
Inside the shop the grill is reduced to ashes. She checks (again) that the chip cooker is off and screws the top back on the litre bottle of lemon sauce. Someone has left a tip of a euro on the counter. She leaves it and extends her arm to turn out the light.
The bruise does not shock her so much as enrage her, drawing to her attention the empty, gnawing, panic feeling at the bottom of her stomach from which the ouzo has only just taken the edge. It reminds her of why she was sitting out in the dark drinking in the first place. How dare he take away her safety?
The mark is turning yellow in the centre.
She lifts her other arm into the light, displaying a twin bruise, in the same position, the same colour. Twisting her chin over her shoulder to see down her back, she can just make out the edge of discolouration on her shoulder blade, where she hit the corner of the wall earlier but hadn’t noticed for the pain of her head on the coat hook. The twist hurts her neck. She switches off the light; the dark feels better. The moon her only illuminator, she steps back into the street and locks the door.
Tears are forming before she is even aware she has felt the emotion: delayed fear. Her throat constricts and her body spasms in the first sob. Emotion overcomes her. Her lungs feel tight and she gasps for air, sending further spasms across her chest, her shoulders twitching in response.
The night absorbs the scene, the darkness a cloak, allowing her privacy. Silently she shudders and heaves until her energy is drained. The feelings subside.
But the thoughts remain. There is the hint of a belief that she deserves this. Worse things happen to ordinary people. Why should she be spared? She has no status to say she deserves better treatment. Her gypsy legacy tells her that perhaps this is just her lot in life, as it was her mother’s. Accept, don’t fight the tide, was her mother’s motto. Be insignificant and they leave you alone, she had said. Thinking like that makes this incident an unremarkable event. Her life, which until this incident she thought she had moulded as well as she could, suddenly seems pointless. Her future, whatever future she has, is distorted by fear until it is so twisted it feels impossible that it exists at all. She can see no way forward, no way out. Another wave of sobs rises unbidden but this time she sucks in air, lifts her chest and denies herself the comfort of succumbing.
She stands for a moment, preparing to go home. Across the square the cold light of the moon contrasts with the warmth of the breeze. The heat wave Greece is experiencing feels like August has come early, when shops will close and people will not move in the heat of the day as the temperature saps all energy and lays low even the most energetic person. But that is not yet.
With the thought of the future her head rises and her lips form a thin line. Determination invigorates her and she begins the unsteady walk home.
Alcohol-fuelled feet take her, haphazardly, to the crossroads at the far corner of the square. She turns left by the corner shop and up to the paved area by the church. No children play there at this hour but a ball rolls silently, blown by the soft breeze. For a moment there are two balls. She presses her eyelids together. Focus returns. The lane will take her towards the edge of town but she turns left again between the houses covered with bougainvillea. The path narrows and wriggles between whitewashed stone homes glowing in the moonlight, plots of spring onions and lettuce, plastic tables on porches with chairs leaned up against them at angles, so cats cannot sit.
She passes Vasso’s house where Abby and Vasso will be safely asleep by now. She puts her hand out to steady herself against her wall and gains
some stability. She pats the wall as if the stones themselves are her friends. On to the final lane before the village opens onto the orange groves. She and Stavros rent the last house. Vasso’s outside light helps her to see the way. Stella murmurs a ‘thank you’ for her friendship.
Stavros, too, has left the lights on outside. The narrow porch is cosy in the warmth of the electric light, creating its own frame as its illuminating fingers stretch out to reach the leaves of the bushes on one side and the wall across the lane at the other.
A stark bulb is also on inside. Stella swallows. He may still be awake. She would like another shot of ouzo before she goes in. A shadow passes the window on the inside. She cannot face him.
She turns on the spot, trying to hold her determination intact, and walks quickly back down the lane to the church. She has no idea where she is going, just away. She staggers across the open area in front of the church, her legs wobbling, wishing her limbs more nimble, her mind more clouded. She tries the doors of the church but they are locked so she sits on a wide stone-slab seat to one side and rests her head on a carved stone pillar. She is warm now but she knows an hour before dawn the temperature will drop and her thin sleeveless dress will offer her no protection. She looks at her thin legs and despises how small she is, her tell-tale tan, her dark hair, which she shortened to her shoulders years ago to cut ties with her culture.
The moonlight does not enter the church doorway, and with the dark, and the length of the day, her eyelids close and allow her mind to escape for an hour or two in sleep.
The cold comes like a thief, sucking the warmth through the ground from the stones she is lying on before leeching the air and replacing the void with a nip of northern temperatures. The cicadas fall silent.
Stella’s eyes are the last part of her to awake and she finds she is shivering. The cold has sunk into her bones, and despite her lack of rest her body needs to move, to chase away the shivers. She stands, her eyes closing again, and walks half asleep along the lane out of the village. It is too early for work, and she would rather go anywhere but home.