The Daughter
Page 23
Strictly between you and me, I looked into buying a little piece of land myself, but it didn’t work out. I said to myself, what’re you going to do with the land, Raraou? It’s nothing but earth. I can’t for the life of me figure out what I wanted to do with it.
Another time, when some officer escorted me back to my place I refused to tell him where I live. So he opened my handbag looking for my ID card and my address, but he never spotted my age, the brute. And all the while I was waiting at the police station for the officer to escort me back home, the cop on duty keeps asking me my name and where I’m from. And it all came to me.
‘The place where I come from was a little girl name of Roubini,’ I say. ‘Who had a little garden under her bed and her best friend was a little chicken with bright coloured feathers.’
And then I understood right away why everybody loves and respects the earth, why they want land: the land is full of graves.
Nothing sad about that; why should it be sad? That’s the way life is: full of death. Nothing to be sad about, it’s a natural thing. Natural, like how my mother stopped speaking.
Doesn’t bother me one bit I have trouble remembering Mother’s eyes. Forgot which one of Fanis’s hands is the busted one. Can’t even remember the colour of his hair. Forgot how to be sorry. Makes me sad, a little. All the colour is running out of my sadness.
But what can you do?
Me, I remember my little pullet. I’ve got the trick now if I have a fit when people are asleep. Stick a hankie in my mouth and that way the neighbours can’t hear a thing, all right, so I learned it from the moving pictures, you’re going to say, but anyway.
That’s right, doctor. But I don’t have my fits anywhere near so often any more.
I got my little pullet to remember, doctor. With those bright-coloured feathers of hers, died of hunger in my mother’s house. She was the only friend I ever had. Turned and looked me in the eye before she fell over and died.
Me? Who will I look at?
No matter.
By now my little darling will be part of the earth.
And so will I. One of these days.
Maybe two or three centuries later, I say to myself, when my pullet and me will be nothing but dust without a care in the world (that’s what I hope), maybe one day the same soft breath of wind will raise us up and unite us in the air for an instant. Just for an instant, together.
End
About the Author
Pavlos Matesis is a prize-winning Greek playwright, novelist and translator, who has been described by Corriere della Sera as ‘the most talented Greek writer today’ and by novelist Alan Sillitoe as ‘a master of the art’. His fiction includes The Ancient of the Days, Always Well and Sylvan Substances. His novel The Daughter, an international bestseller in nine languages, has sold over 150,000 copies in Greece alone.
His plays include The Ceremony (winner of the National Theatre Award) and Nurseryman (City of Athens – Karolos Koun Award for Best Play of the Year), Guardian Angel for Rent, Roar and Towards Eleusis (the latter four plays published under the title Contemporary Greek Theatre Volume 2, edited by Theatre Lab Company and published by Arcadia in 2002).
Pavlos Matesis is also a noted translator into modern Greek. Classical authors he has translated number Aristophanes (commissioned by the Epidaurus and Athens theatre festivals), Ibsen, Ben Jonson, Molière, Shakespeare and Stendhal. A listing of contemporary writers he has translated includes Peter Ackroyd, Antonin Artaud, Bertolt Brecht, William Faulkner, Jean Genet, Eugène Ionesco, Frederico García Lorca, David Mamet, Arthur Miller, Joe Orton, Harold Pinter, Sam Shepard and Tennessee Williams.
Pavlos Matesis lives in Athens.
About the translator: Fred A. Reed is Canada’s foremost authority on Islamic Iran. His books include Persian Postcards: Iran after Khomeini, Salonica Terminus, Anatolia Junction and, with Massoumeh Ebtekar, Takeover in Tehran, the first eye-witness account of the takeover of the US embassy by Iranian student militants in 1979. He has reported extensively on Iranian, Balkan and Middle Eastern affairs for La Presse, Canada’s largest French-speaking newspaper.
Fred A. Reed ranks high among Canada’s literary translators. In 1991, his translation of Thierry Hentsch’s L’Orient Imaginaire won the Governor General’s Awards. Writers he has translated from the Greek include Giorgos Ioannou, Nikos Kazantzakis, Pavlos Matesis and Kostas Mourselas.
Also by Pavlos Matesis
Fiction
Aphrodite
The Ancient of Days
Sylvan Substance
Always Well
Theatre
Biochemistry
The Ceremony
Deposition
The Ghost of Mr Ramon Navaro
Her Highness’ Football Evening
Lower Civil Law
Wolf, Wolf
Exile
Nurseryman
Towards Eleusis
Roar
Guardian Angel to Rent
The Hum
Contemporary Greek Theatre Volume 2 (Arcadia Books)
Copyright
First published in 2002
by Arcadia Books Books, 15-16 Nassau Street, London, W1W 7AB
This ebook edition first published in 2011
All rights reserved
Originally published by Kastaniotis Editions, Athens as I Mitera Tou Skilou
Copyright © Pavlos Matesis 1990
Translation from Greek © Fred A. Reed, 2002
The right of Pavlos Matesis to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly
ISBN 978–1–90812–909–3