He didn’t even try to hide them, he just left them in the desk drawer, she said, telling me how she had learned from the letters that he had asked the woman if she wanted to be the mother of his daughter and the woman had said yes. He wanted to take even my daughter away from me, she moaned, because she never raged, she acquiesced, unwillingly. The marriage was over, but she stayed, as poor people do, because she was still a student and they were subtenants, and their respective mothers were housewives, their fathers small-time tradesmen – hers used to manufacture combs made of bone and was now retired – they would have killed her if she had left an engineer husband and landed herself on them. What’s more, he claimed that he had never cheated on her, that she was imagining things (he threw the letters away as soon as they were discovered), that he had never even thought of leaving her, and everybody believed him, saying she was crazy. Her sister, actually her half-sister, her mother’s illegitimate child, was the most vociferous in defending the husband, son-in-law and brother-in-law as somebody you could only wish for as a partner, somebody no one in their right mind would ever leave.
And then that same husband went to Greece, to Athens, to work in a big American chemical plant that paid well, and she went with him, still mad at him, leaving the child with her mother, until she recovered. She invited me and my husband to Athens, for support, for company, because her husband worked from morning till night, except on weekends, and she would wander around the city on her own, still unsure if she should forgive him, although he’d already given her a fur coat and diamond ring and she drank the most expensive cognac and wine and spent money like royalty.
Of course you’re going, my delighted mother said when the invitation came and I was hesitating, not because of him, his illness was dormant, he looked healthy and wasn’t having any seizures, the second one had been the last. We don’t have the money for it, I said, the plane ticket is expensive. I’ll give you the money, my mother insisted, feeling bad that her daughter had never journeyed abroad, not even to shop in Trieste. My journey was my marriage, I thought to myself, a journey to the end of the night, I would joke, quoting the title of a French novel, I’d certainly had my fill of journeying, what else was there left to see except stage sets, but I let my mother get us the visas and pay for the tickets and take us to the airport and watch me board a plane for the first time, never having been on one herself.
And it was there, in Athens, that my marriage ended, I muse, dipping the bread cubes in drippings, one for me, one for the dog who is sitting and waiting, because we’re wide awake and alert when it comes to food, the dripping trickling off the bread cube onto the tablecloth, which absorbs it and turns it into stains, but who cares when there’s no room left for the mess to grow or spread, because it’s become an absolute. Which must mean the end of disorder since it has nowhere else to spread, and that must mean the beginning of order, I think to myself, waiting to see when this order inside me will spill onto the outside, the way the disorder did. It started in me and it will end in me, I say aloud, placing the greasy bread cube on the tablecloth, as if wanting to provoke it. The dog immediately jumps onto the table and snatches the bread, and I have an image of Irena’s little two-year-old little girl, opening the dog’s jaw with her two little hands, taking out the piece of candy it had snatched from her when they were playing, and putting it back into her own mouth before we could stop her, and nobody the worse for wear.
She never panicked over silly things, my friend Irena, and she certainly knew how to spend money. The day that we arrived in Athens, where the trees in the street were studded with ripe oranges and, amazingly, nobody picked them, she and her cheat of a husband with the menacingly gleaming teeth drove us to Piraeus, to the long broad seafront lined with restaurant after restaurant, and no crowds because it was winter, here it was spring, and standing in front of the restaurants were waiters in their white shirts and black trousers, napkins draped over their arms, smiling and trying to entice us to come inside, under the straw roofs, literally tugging us by the sleeve and showing us dead fish on nickel platters, each more magnificent than the last, telling us we can choose; no, says the cheat, tonight we’re having fowl, which I had never tried, and we ate ourselves to a standstill.
We spent the days strolling around the picturesque streets and their stalls, where everything was an explosion of colours and sounds, like having confetti constantly rain down on you, where skewered pieces of lamb, sprinkled with oregano, were grilled on charcoal in the open air and served in unleavened pitta bread with onions and tomatoes, known as souvlaki, and we drank retsina, a yellowy tart wine smelling of pine, in two-and-a-half decilitre bottles, and we ate mounds of nuts, putting weight on even Irena. We visited two-thousand-year-old sites, the Acropolis, the Parthenon, the Temple of Zeus, the Agora, we spent our days like that because we, obviously, had time, the three of us, because the cheat, obviously, had to make money. And we talked and talked, we discussed Irena’s marriage (ours we didn’t mention) and other important things in life, they being our only subjects, sober or drunk. The days slipped by, I kept expecting to run into Aristotle or Plato or Socrates in the street, or maybe Heraclitus, the best of the bunch, and was surprised when I didn’t, just as I was surprised how ugly Greek men generally were, short, stocky, lumpish and angry-looking, at least those in the street, they looked as if they wanted to beat you up.
To whet our appetite before dinner, when it was the four of us, and for the pure pleasure of it, we’d open a bottle of Metaxa, or for, those who liked it (not me), anise-scented ouzo, which when diluted with water turned milky white, and then we’d treat ourselves to all sorts of delights prepared by Irena, with meat, fish, cheese, vegetables, sauces of all sorts, and we’d drink the most expensive wines, lining up the bottles in front of the door, to the horror of the neighbours, Irena laughed. Or we would go out for a pizza the size of a small round table, each of us taking a quarter and stuffing ourselves. On weekends, the four of us always went on a road trip somewhere, to the Peloponnese and its groves of newly ripe oranges wherever you looked, hanging on the trees like Christmas baubles, and to Delphi with the Temple of Apollo on Mount Parnassus, nestled among the misty hills, with its two famous inscriptions, “Know thyself” and “Nothing in excess”, and you could spend days thinking about them before you realized that you would never know yourself and that you had too little, not an excess, of everything, of love, and happiness, and money, and fame, and even life, which is not forever. For a moment I imagined the oracle Sibyl sitting on her rock, in a trance, issuing ambiguous prophecies, one of which ruined King Croesus, I read, I loved mythology and fairy tales and stories, anything that wasn’t real, because “humankind cannot bear very much reality” as T.S. Eliot wrote, for himself and for me.
And it was here, in Delphi, on the ruins of the Temple of Apollo, while Irena was snapping pictures, irritating me no end because I didn’t like having my picture taken and I hated it when they would call me away to have my picture taken so that I couldn’t enjoy the ruins, that a story took shape in my mind in which my darling – good-looking compared to the average Greek, tall, slim, blue-eyed and with regular features – went off gallivanting during our stay (in the story, not in real life), met a pretty, young Greek girl in a café, fell in love with her, took her to a hotel and deflowered her. He continued to meet her in various hotels, until the affair reached the ears of her three brothers, all dark, short, moustached and angry, who found him and killed him in front of my eyes. In the middle of Athens, in the street, left to lie in a pool of blood. I can still see him there even today, lying on his back on the pavement, his throat slashed, blood everywhere, passers-by stopping to look, his unseeing blue eyes gazing up at the sky.
I couldn’t stop thinking about the story, no matter what I was doing, walking, looking, admiring, laughing, talking, drinking, eating, even at night it would be on my mind when I fell asleep, and in town I would look for the fatal girl who had destroyed him. And one day I found her, on the b
us, we were going somewhere, probably to a museum with ancient sculptures; she was of average height, her golden-red hair came to just under her ears, she had a fringe, a heart-shaped face and mouth, a splattering of freckles, big purple eyes, like Homer’s Hera, and a well-proportioned if pocket-sized body, as lovely as Venus.
That’s her, I exclaimed to myself, she’s the one who will take him from me and free me of the unbearable burden that he is, which is sure to break me. Only once did I let him penetrate me at night, halfway, I took pity on him, I’d say, and I hardly felt a thing, except that it was boring and I resisted, because now I could compare him with Mr. Handsome from around the corner, who had taken me to such heights, whereas he had become an unbearably heavy body.
One evening, towards the end of our stay, we went for roast lamb and a shopska salad to Plaka, the oldest part of Athens, swarming with people like an anthill, a riot of colours, the pungent smell of lamb fat wafting out from the taverns and cafés and the loud hawkers hoping to sell trinkets and phony antique pieces, two of which I bought, two slate blue ancient masks to hang on the wall, one for tragedy and the other for comedy, our life personified.
We’ve come to break some plates, said Irena when we sat down in the restaurant, which had live music, and to act like we’re in Zorba the Greek, and to dance the sirtaki, she said. Then she stood up, spread out her arms, and started to dance the sirtaki, one step to the right, one to the left, one leg raised, then the other, one step forward, one step back, then turn, humming the tune from the movie, which we must have seen four times and knew by heart.
And when we were good and drunk, Irena actually did start breaking the thick white plates that were waiting on the long shelf for just that purpose, although you had to pay for them, in other words, it was money thrown away, which brought a frown to the cheat’s face, as he began to bear his pointed, white teeth, saying “Enough”, every time a plate was smashed to smithereens on the floor. One more, and another, Irena shouted, I’d never seen her so bold before, this one’s for dead husbands, crash, this one for deceased husbands, crash, she kept shouting, smashing the plates until the cheat grabbed her arm, which was about to hurl another plate, and lowered it and the plate onto the table.
Then they got into an argument about culpability, she had never forgiven him and wanted us to judge him, even though he was footing the bill for our food and drink, which made all of it awkward and embarrassing, ruining everything. We returned home in silence, each of us caught up in our own thoughts, disagreeing with the others, and ourselves, and in the morning we all woke up with a headache, at least I did. As soon as I opened my eyes, I took a pill and jumped into the shower, at the wrong time, before our host who was in a hurry to get to work, and that only made me more nervous because I couldn’t just run out of the bathroom, I had to dry myself off and he kept shuffling from one foot to the other in front of the bathroom door, murderously baring his teeth, as I saw when I walked out. We were supposed to leave in two days time.
We returned home on Christmas Eve, with a present for Kostja – he’d married, after doing his military service, the only one in our crowd who did, the others were unfit, and he asked my husband to be his best man, which I figured included me as well – a cobalt blue clay tea set and colourful local rug blanket, in which we wrapped the oranges for Irena’s daughter. At the airport, the customs officers couldn’t have been rougher with the rug, I guess they thought we were carrying drugs or gold or who knows what, they simply lifted it up at one end and let it roll open, so that the oranges spilled out onto the floor, as if scattered by a bomb, and we just helplessly watched.
We barely managed to gather them all up.
XXIV.
My mother came from Plitvice to attend the graduation ceremony, his, of course, Danica insisted, there were tears, mounds of flowers from relatives and friends, mostly gladioli, white and purple, glamorous in cellophane, followed by a family lunch in a restaurant, one of the best in town, said Frane, who had taken charge of that side. Danica came in her new marshmallow white spring suit and dark purple blouse with a bow, and the guest of honour was wearing a new dark blue suit with a Russian collar, a present from Frane, as was the lunch of steak tartare, roast of lamb and bottles of red wine, costing the earth.
He looks so elegant, Danica sighed adoringly in the restaurant, looking back and forth between her son and me with her glassy eyes, seeing us together, squeezing my hand under the table and whispering into my ear that I deserved the credit for this success, she knew that, she would never be able to thank me enough, and I nodded and smiled, having nothing to say except that I was finished with her son, but I wanted to spare her that.
The news was that he might soon have a permanent, salaried job at the radio, where he was freelancing, at first it would be as a trainee journalist, then as an editor, like Leon, said Danica, elated. She overlooked the fact that an editor had to be a member of the Party, which would never happen because his father had suffered at the hands of these people, like his uncle in Dubrovnik, whereas Leon’s father had been a partisan commissar, recipient of a veteran’s testimonial, a big shot, as my mother would say, who made sure of his son’s well-being, both mental and political. Obviously I didn’t say that to her either.
A work colleague of hers who had gone up in the world, obtained a doctorate and gone to work in an embassy where she eventually had the power to find her son a job, provided a connection at the radio. Just let him graduate, and we’ll get him a job, she told me, Danica kept repeating, she’d never been so happy in her life, except perhaps when she married. If it works, I’ll make clothes for her free of charge for the rest of my life, she promised, because the colleague was another of her clients.
Also at the table with us was his cousin, the doctor, without his wife and parents who went straight home after the graduation ceremony because his mother was feeling unwell, it’s the heart, he said, not mentioning the non-appearance of the other woman, as if that was self-explanatory. Actually, we had never met his wife, it was as if he was hiding her. He was considered good-looking, although for my taste he was too tall and had an egg-shaped head, shaved almost to the bone, with small eyes and fleshy, chalk-white cheeks, plus, like all doctors, he was self-important, even when with his relatives. He asked my husband if he had had any more seizures, no, he and his mother and I said with one voice; he takes his medicine, I added, because I saw to that, the second seizure was the last, I said. All of us at the table looked at him hopefully, as if this was now leading to a miraculous recovery, and it was in his hands. But he neither confirmed nor denied such a miracle, he simply nodded, saying nothing, leaving the five of us hanging in animated suspension, neither here nor there, suspecting the fruitlessness of all these efforts, suddenly at a dead end with no place to go.
The situation was saved by Frane, that poor skeletal man in his grey, oversized suit, always the same, with his bald head and crooked yellow teeth, who raised a toast to his son’s achievement. He was already slightly tipsy, like the first time I ever saw him, and when he smiled his mouth twisted. He stood up and delivered a five-minute speech about the place his son had earned in society by obtaining his degree, and now, he said, all roads were open to him, except for those he closed off himself, he ended didactically, doubling over with a coughing fit of bronchial asthma. Danica jumped up to help him sit down, as if he couldn’t do it on his own, but he indicated there was no need, and his son looked down, rolling his eyes, trying to stop himself from laughing.
Everything will be fine now, my mother said the next morning in the dining room, where we were having our coffee, the layer cake that Danica had brought in my mother’s honour on the table, along with a bottle of plum brandy from Olga’s plum orchard, which she made herself every autumn, and we sold for her to people we knew in town, so she always gave us a couple of litres for free. He’d already left, for the radio, to discuss the programme, he said, which would have rung false had I cared, but I didn’t. My mother leaves tomorrow so j
ust be home in time to eat, I said, turning my head away when he tried to kiss me, although with a laugh.
Nothing will be fine, I said to my mother after he left, as soon as he finds a job I’m leaving him; my mother said nothing, shook her head, thought about it, weighed the pros and cons, heaved a sigh and dropping her hands in her lap said, at least wait until you graduate. Let him help you, a salary is a salary, she said, you’re going to be without the pension soon, you don’t have a degree and you don’t have a job, she added, displeased that somebody had exploited her daughter, and without any compensation to boot.
But it was useless, because I wouldn’t give in, I don’t care about reason or justice, he can go, I said, the sooner the better, I said, I want to be rid of him.
With his degree and job I don’t owe him anything anymore, I thought to myself, because I didn’t want to talk to her about what was owed, that was my story not hers.
At least wait until he brings home his first pay package, my mother yelled, she simply couldn’t take so much injustice, when you give you must receive, when you take you must give back, she didn’t say it, because it was inappropriate, but it was implied. God forbid that he should bring home his salary, I said, he might think that I’ll stay with him and then we’ll never be rid of him.
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