‘She is not right in her memory. She thinks you are Dimitri,’ his theo said. He cocked his head. ‘You do look like Dimitri.’
Oliver was going to say that he had always been told he looked like his papou Yianni but then realised how stupid this sounded, so he just nodded and thought about the man who had shared his papou’s DNA and been erased from this world decades before Oliver was born.
Vespoula had been meant to marry Dimitri since they were both children. They were neighbours and best friends, and both were secretly excited when as teenagers they found out about the childhood matchmaking undertaken by their parents. But before they could marry Dimitri needed a job. They waited but work couldn’t be found. The war with the British was coming closer and closer to their village and Dimitri knew he would have to go join his cousins in the fight for independence. They found a sympathetic priest who married them in secret, and the next morning Dimitri kissed her goodbye and joined the rest of the young men. Not long after he was shot through the neck and died not far from the house that would have been theirs once the fighting stopped. When the fighting did eventually end, Vespoula moved into the house anyway. Refusing to consider other men, she wore her widow’s black every day for the rest of her life. One day they erected a statue of Dimitri in the village square and she visited it in the middle of the night. Kissing it and holding it, she promised that she would wait until the end of her mortal life so that they could be together in the endless time that began at the final human breath. And wait she did, as age and time ravaged her body and mind, and she awoke each morning cursing the sun that she was still alive. Every so often she thought she saw him, Dimitri, from the corner of her eye, at the edge of a field, in the shadows outside her window at night. But he never came to find her.
Not long into Oliver’s stay a group of old men in the kafenio had taken pity on this strange quiet young man who sat scribbling morosely into his notebook and looking like his dead uncle. They invited him to join them for cards and he had, hoping to stop his growing anxiety. Perhaps in their banter lay answers, or, at the very least, a story. One of them spoke a little English and introduced himself as Stavros.
‘When your papou was alive we are enemies, but now he is dead we are okay,’ Stavros said by way of introduction and smoothed his thick grey moustache happily.
Oliver soon learnt that when Stavros smoothed his moustache he was bluffing. The big overconfident smile was an unconscious giveaway that he was holding a handful of threes or fours. Stavros had hitched up his pants and pointed to the other three men at the table.
‘Spiro – he is a teacher. Panayiotis – he is the café owner. And Mikelis – he is a drunk. You will learn cards from him.’
Mikelis squinted at Oliver before patting the seat beside him unenthusiastically. Oliver sat down. He glanced at Mikelis, who smelt like he’d fallen into a barrel of beer. Mikelis gave him a fuzzy nod.
Mikelis’s dream had been to get an education and leave the village. He wanted to be a writer like the greats; to write a new Odyssey, like Homer, who his father had read to him as a boy. But Mikelis was an only son and tied to this land. Over the years as he worked the fields, he wrote in private great volumes of work – musings on the state of the world, tales of adventures, retellings of classics with his favourite TV characters in the main roles, and reams of Virgilian poetry, full of babbling brooks like the ones that ran through the village and grass that seemed alive as it danced in the breeze. To allow himself time to write, he pretended to exist in a perpetual drunken state, washing his shirts in beer so everyone would assume he spent his after-work hours passed out somewhere. When he was an old man he planned to put down his pen for the last time and hide his life’s work in a crate so that one day after his death it would be discovered and at last the world would revel in the glory of his words.
They played on in an amiable wordlessness punctuated only by the victorious cry of whoever took out each game. Panayiotis won most, then Stavros, then Oliver. Mikelis had won just once, after he fumbled his cards and the others saw he had a moderately good hand. They paused play while Panayiotis jumped up to serve a couple of lost British tourists who had stopped for directions and a bite to eat. Stavros shuffled the cards and cracked his knuckles as he looked Oliver up and down.
‘You not married, Oliver?’ he enquired, though it was more of a statement than a question.
‘No.’ Oliver shook his head.
Stavros made a conciliatory face and gave a shrug.
‘It’s too bad.’
Oliver nodded. ‘Yes.’
‘What you do?’ Stavros asked. ‘For work, I mean.’
Oliver considered the question. Maybe he should tell them he was a mechanic. That would save him an explanation. But then they might ask him to fix something, and he’d be in trouble.
‘I’m a writer,’ he said quietly.
Stavros set down his cards, impressed. ‘A writer!’ he said aloud, smoothing his moustache. He repeated the word in Greek. ‘Syngraféas?’
Mikelis’s eyes flashed for a moment. He glanced over at the strange young man who looked so much like the twins he had played with as a child, fishing and hunting and roaming the forest looking for adventure. A writer. Mikelis wanted to say something, to commend this young man for doing what he himself had always dreamt of. For a moment he considered his work – his life’s work – and the possibility of bequeathing it to the young writer, who could perhaps make something of it, but language and pride and almost seventy years of secrecy stopped him. Instead he gave Oliver a thunderous slap on the back followed by a pantomimic drunkard’s hug.
Panayiotis returned, but as play resumed a stunning young woman walked through the door. She had clear olive skin, thick black hair and enormous brown eyes that took up a great deal of her face. She looked like she’d stepped straight out of an ancient painting. Out of a stone carving. Out of history. Oliver’s heart lurched in his chest. She walked over to the refrigerator and took a bottle of soft drink, left some coins on the counter and walked back outside, where she sat at one of the plastic tables that lined the street. She looked back over her shoulder, caught Oliver’s eye for the briefest of moments and offered him the tiniest fraction of a smile.
Illeana had been born around the same time the village mines closed and the family lost their sole source of income. Her father struggled to find new work, eventually managing to make ends meet by travelling the lengths of the Troodos Mountains offering his services as a handyman. She watched her older brothers grow up and leave school only to find that there was no work here in the village and that opportunity lay only in the port cities of Lemesos or Pafos, or the capital Nicosia. So, like the rest of the village’s young men, they moved away, chasing opportunity. When the young people left, the village became a museum, preserved in time and declining in numbers with every death. Illeana was clever and breezed through school, all the while planning her big escape. She would win a scholarship to university. She would get a job on one of the big cruise ships. Anything to get out of the village. But she didn’t get a scholarship and her parents wouldn’t hear of their only daughter moving away to the city, so she waited and watched for her chance. When the strange young man arrived, she saw an opportunity. It didn’t matter to her if they were cousins or that she didn’t speak much English. She wanted out. Right out. Australia would do.
She threw pebbles at his window that night, brazen but uncaring. There was a thrilling silent kiss beneath the gibbous moon, then another, and another. By the second night Oliver had convinced himself things were turning around for him – he had forgotten his heart was meant to be irreversibly broken – and by the fourth he felt so peaceful he’d mistakenly fallen asleep in her arms by the river and awoke to a village delighted by scandal.
‘She is your cousin,’ Costa explained, momentarily enjoying the levity before burdening himself with the task of notifying Oliver’s yiayia of her grands
on’s embarrassment. But while Costa and the rest of the village were laughing, Oliver’s yiayia belonged to a Cyprus long gone, and took the anecdote as a chainsaw of shame to the branch of the ancestral tree she now oversaw. And soon enough there was the phone call that would see him on the next available plane to Melbourne to bury his yiayia.
The night before his flight there had been one moment, unexpected and unplanned, when Oliver had awoken at midnight with the dull thud of a headache and rifled through the drawers of his theo’s guestroom looking for painkillers. He lifted a bunch of papers that mocked him with letters he couldn’t understand, finding beneath them an old tattered photo. Tea-coloured marks stained the edges, creeping determinedly inwards to the centre, where a group of dark-haired people smiled jubilantly at the camera. He turned the photo over. There was a date – 1955.
He flipped the photo over again and looked at the image. In the middle of the group were two young men with familiar eyes staring defiantly back: his papou and Dimitri. The other people, who shared their eyes and strong jawlines, must have been their family. The photo would have been taken not long before his papou had left for Australia. Not long before Dimitri died.
Oliver searched the other faces but recognised none. He knew he was looking at the faces of his ancestors, of those who had come before him, but he did not really know anything about a single person in this photo. He ran his fingers over their faces and realised with a sudden chill that they were all inside him, all a part of him, their histories and genetic peculiarities running through the very structure of his cells. He felt he should cry but found himself smiling instead. He sat there alone in the moonlight in his theo’s guestroom, shamed by scandal and mourning the death of his yiayia, beaming to himself like a fool.
The next day the mountains were alive with the vibrant colours of wildflowers, waving goodbye to him as his theo drove him the one-hour trip to Larnaca Airport. The country of his ancestors burst with pinks and yellows and reds and Oliver was in ruins. He had come to Cyprus to discover who he was and where he was going and was leaving more uncertain than ever.
The morning of Oliver’s yiayia’s funeral was dappled with a Melbourne sun so radiant it seemed unfair considering the circumstances.
Alison was rummaging through her backpack tossing clothes onto the floor. She made a face. ‘I thought I had something appropriate in here, but the only black thing I have is this.’
She held up a strapless sundress that looked like it had spent several weeks damp and balled up in the bottom of her bag.
‘Do you think . . .?’
Oliver shook his head vigorously.
Alison hadn’t attended the trisagion at the funeral parlour the night before, which was for immediate family only, but Oliver had described to her later the horrible feeling of hovering over his yiayia’s open casket and kissing her forehead as the priest chanted prayers. It had felt like kissing marble, he’d told her, and Alison had wrapped her arms around him.
Now she shimmied into the crumpled dress and frowned at herself in the mirror.
‘OLIVAAAAAA! WE’RE GOING! OMIGAWD!’
They both spun around to see Vicky standing wide-mouthed at the door.
‘She can’t wear that!’ Vicky looked scandalised. ‘It’s the wrong black.’
As if on cue, Christina stuck her head through the door. ‘Oh no, that’s the wrong black.’ Then she disappeared from sight.
Alison glanced at Oliver and mouthed, ‘The wrong black?’
He shook his head ruefully. For Greeks, the wearing of black was a serious business. Wars had been fought and families split over the wrong hue worn at the wrong occasion.
Eventually the seven of them crammed into Mick and Christina’s tired Tarago, Alison swimming in an old maternity dress of Christina’s.
‘I only have the one funeral dress,’ Christina apologised, motioning to her own outfit, ‘And all the other blacks were wrong.’
Alison clung to Oliver’s side as they solemnly filed in through the grand wooden doors of the Greek Orthodox Church. It seemed that half of the elderly Greeks in Melbourne had dusted off their shadowy funeral outfits for the service. The black, Alison noted, was a consistent tone. Oliver led her into the ornate building and she copied him as he lit a candle then leant over a large icon of Mary and Jesus cased beneath plastic.
‘Kiss it,’ he whispered.
Alison bent forward. The plastic was smeared with the outline of a hundred previous kisses. She squeezed her eyes shut tightly and kissed the plastic. It tasted like lipstick and she gagged slightly.
‘Don’t actually kiss it, just kind of hover,’ Oliver whispered and Alison cursed his timing.
‘Oliver!’
Alison looked up to see a short, immaculately dressed woman bustling towards them. The woman cast a critical eye over Alison before burying herself in Oliver’s arms. Oliver wrapped her in a tight hug.
‘This is my mother, Katerina.’
Alison waited until the woman had uncoiled herself from Oliver and smoothed her dark hair back into the bun it had tried to flee. Alison stuck out her hand.
‘Hello, Katerina. I’m Alison. How are you?’
Oliver’s mother gave her a look. ‘We’re burying my mother today, dear. It’s not a great day for the family.’
Oliver touched her arm lightly, comfortingly.
‘Should we go sit down, Mum?’
Katerina nodded sternly, adjusting a pair of expensive looking glasses. ‘Yes. We’re up there with your father.’
Oliver took a step towards the aisle and Alison followed.
‘Not you, dear. Immediate family only. Sorry, but this is our way,’ Katerina explained.
Oliver swallowed a frown, surveying the busy church. ‘Who can she sit with?’
Katerina followed his gaze noncommittally. ‘She can go sit with Eleussa.’
Alison’s eyes bulged and she stared at the coffin at the front of the room.
‘She means my cousin Eleussa, not Yiayia,’ Oliver said quietly and pointed to a young woman sitting by herself towards the back of the church. Oliver’s mother arched an immaculate brow and nodded.
As she set off towards Eleussa, Alison heard Katerina admonish her son. ‘She’s wearing the wrong black.’
Alison didn’t end up seated beside Eleussa, though. En route she found herself seized by a tiny ancient woman, her face a sea of wrinkles, and guided towards a pew. The old woman didn’t seem to be with anyone in particular, and no one acknowledged her. For a moment Alison wondered if she had perhaps been wandering down the street and decided to duck in for the service. The old woman sat Alison down beside her and held her arm, softly stroking the back of her hand. It was almost inaudible, at the very edge of hearing, but Alison could have sworn the old woman was singing.
When Ourania was seventeen, her new husband told her they were crossing the world to make a new life in a new young country. A country that could fit fifty-eight Greeces within its borders but had a population barely big enough to fill its cities. ‘We’ll have a whole city to ourselves,’ he told her as they waved her family goodbye. Instead it was a room in the back of his uncle’s café and then a flat and finally a house in the suburbs where their family grew and grew. Money was always tight, so Ourania could never return home, but she called her family every week so that she never forgot their voices. Then life seemed to speed up, and one by one the faces that were still so young in her memory began to shrivel and fade in the photographs that arrived by post every Christmas. And at each death – separated by a life of living and half the world’s oceans – Ourania took herself to church and in place of her loved ones mourned the passing of strangers. Rituals were rituals, she told herself, and goodbyes goodbyes.
Two priests appeared from the back of the church and started singing in strong, proud voices as they entered the nave. Alison tried to pick out words th
at sounded similar to English. She became lost in the harmonies, following the priests’ voices as they rose and fell with powerful purpose. Suddenly there was a commotion beside her as her mobile exploded with movement. She had remembered to silence it but the vibrations against the wooden pew sent tremors through the church and echoed into the dome above. Alison fumbled with the zip of her bag and jammed the ‘end call’ button. Almost as soon as she’d replaced it, it sprang to life again. Mortified, Alison glanced at the screen. Her father. She looked up to a sea of curious disapproving faces and scrunched her nose in embarrassment as she rose and slid awkwardly along the aisle.
‘I’m so sorry,’ she whispered. ‘I’m so, so sorry.’
Red-cheeked, she hurried out the church door, which groaned shut behind her. Out in the sunshine she jammed the phone to her ear.
‘What?’ she hissed.
‘Alison?’ Her father sounded hurt and confused. ‘Where are you? We waited for the train three days in a row but you weren’t on any of them, and you haven’t been answering your phone.’
Alison immediately felt terrible. ‘I’m so sorry, Dad. I keep forgetting to call you back. I’m in Melbourne. I’m not coming home. I’m at a funeral and then I’m going back overseas, to the Solomon Islands.’
There was a pause as her father processed this new information.
‘Whose funeral?’
‘Oliver’s yiayia.’
There was another pause.
‘Who’s Oliver?’
‘A boy I met.’
‘What’s a yiayia?’
‘His grandmother.’
‘Ah. I see. Pass on my condolences then.’
She could hear her father ruminating on the other end of the phone.
‘Samoa, you say? Some of the young men who pick fruit at Gav’s farm are from Samoa.’
The Bit In Between Page 4