The Black Monastery

by Stav Sherez

  It must be night-time, but he’s not sleepy. He has a hotel booked somewhere near the university but he can’t bear the thought of entering an empty room. Here people shove and press up against him and their warmth and bulk hide everything he doesn’t want to face.

  He pukes in the street. Two girls dressed up for the night cross the road, pointing and giggling at him. The alcohol comes rushing up out of the dark pit of his stomach and, with it, the secrets, the lies, the pain and memory. He thinks this will never stop. His stomach tightens and twists in agony. His throat bleeds and chokes. The vomit covers his chin and clothes but even after it turns from yellow to green to red, it won’t stop.

  He wakes up in the middle of the night, the curb his pillow, his own puke the bed he lies on. He stares up at the sky, wanting to see the splatter of stars, but there’s only the dim light reflected from high shuttered windows.

  They wake him with a kick to the stomach. He looks up and sees two young uniformed policemen. Their mouths are moving, but there’s no sound coming out. He reaches inside his jacket for his badge but one of the policemen kicks his hand away.

  When they find out he’s one of them, they take him back to the station, feed him bad coffee and force him under a shower. His clothes are ruined and torn. They find what they can in the squad room, and he thanks them through a head pounding with needles and the sound of blood vessels bursting. He sits in an interview room and stares at the wall. His back feels like elephants have walked over it. The numbness in his left arm is still holding strong, refusing the rush of blood and lymph.

  The policemen give him a lift to the university. The sun is dazzling, the sky a scream that goes on for ever. He walks up the granite steps in clothes that are two sizes too small and ill matched. He desperately tries to remember the Professor’s name, but it’s gone. He knows what he’s here for, but it all seems like another grand folly now. He’s never been as good a cop as he thought he’d be. Never been as good a husband or lover as he’d have liked. This case is just the ribbon, the crowning failure in a life full of them.

  * * *

  ‘Glad you could make it.’ Professor Pappageorgiou smiles and extends his hand. Nikos stares down at the gold chain around the wrist, the light reflecting off it, and excuses himself. He doesn’t make the cubicle but at least manages to puke in the sink and not all over his clothes. He rinses his face with scalding water, watches the blood bloom in his cheeks.

  ‘Sorry about that,’ he says when he returns.

  The Professor nods, smiles sadly, and pulls out a chair. ‘It’s perfectly OK, just tell me what you wanted to know.’

  TWENTY-THREE

  They walked in the scorching harbour sun, the light illuminating every fold and curve of Kitty’s skin. Despite being in the sun for several days, it was still white as a newly discovered statue. She put her hand in Jason’s. ‘This way we look more like tourists,’ she said. The warmth of her hand smothered him. He tried not to press too hard. He could feel her heartbeat in the swell and surrender of her palm.

  The old man stumbled a hundred feet up ahead, too drunk for them to be concerned about being spotted. For a moment, as they walked along the beachfront, he told himself they were on their honeymoon and strolling under unfamiliar stars. He looked at Kitty, nodded as she talked about what she thought the old man was hiding, but really he was looking at her eyes, the way they seemed to change colour every time she turned her head.

  ‘I want to find out where he lives. To ask him why he trashed my room,’ Kitty explained, her voice breathless and angry. ‘What he was looking for. What he said to Alexia to make her shut up. He’s drunk and alone, it’s as good a chance as any.’ Jason noticed how the violation of her work had affected her more deeply than the violation of her body that first night.

  They walked in silence up towards the poor part of town. As they ascended, the houses got shabbier, less looked after, the yards messier, the hum of air conditioners disappeared. They passed by small, badly constructed shacks and wind-flapping lean-tos. Goats, drunk on too much sun, lolling around debris-strewn dirt yards as if they were zombies. Statues of local heroes, Christ-like in their suffering and martyrdom. Walls pocked with bullet holes, history writ on every stone and turn.

  Finally, the old man came to a stop outside a squat one- storey house. He fumbled for his keys, dropped them, picked them back up and let himself in.

  They waited. Jason hoped she’d had enough. That she would turn back now. But he caught her smile as she approached the door. He was beginning to understand how she only seemed truly happy when in pursuit of this mystery. He watched as she pressed the dirty white buzzer perched like a full stop on the side wall.

  The old man opened the door, looked Kitty up and down. There was something military in his demeanour despite his obvious inebriation. A sickly yellow light spilled from inside and covered him like a sepia halo.

  ‘What you want?’ he growled. His breath dark and rotten with alcohol.

  ‘I wanted to talk to you.’ Kitty said and perhaps, for the first time, the old man connected her with the museum. He ignored Jason and stared at her. ‘Talk to me?’

  ‘I want my papers back. The stuff you took from my room.’

  The man’s face was as blank as the façade of the white stone wall behind him.

  ‘You know what I’m talking about,’ Kitty continued. ‘What did you say to the librarian when I was in there?’

  This time it registered on his face. Memory, shock and a flicker of fear. ‘I told her not to talk about such things, OK? It brings bad memories.’

  ‘They’re not memories any more,’ she replied. ‘If you haven’t noticed, it’s happening again.’

  The old man’s face seemed to collapse before their eyes. It was a disconcerting thing to see. As if all the years had suddenly caught up to him. ‘Leave me alone,’ he shouted, and they both flinched from the force of his words rushing out like a shower of hailstones.

  ‘Get away from here.’ He grabbed the lapel of Kitty’s dress, pulled her towards him. ‘What do you know? Come like this to disturb me? What the fuck you know what it’s like to lose a child?’ The old man sneered into Kitty’s face, but something he saw made him step back and let go.

  Kitty had turned white. Jason had never seen her like this before. He wondered if it was the old man’s assault, no less disturbing for his age. She raised her hand to her dress and neatly straightened her lapel. ‘You think you’re the only one who’s ever lost a child? What about the families of the murdered teenagers?’ Her words were flat and hard, like pebbles sanded by the sea.

  The old man looked at her silently. As if measuring for truth in her face. He finally nodded and stepped away from the door, gesturing them to come inside. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, as they walked past him into the hot, dark flat. His accent was heavy and broken but his English fluent. ‘You are right.’ He addressed Kitty. ‘When something bad happens, it is easy to think you are the only person on earth it’s happened to. That is perhaps one of the worst things that come from tragedy. We lose sense of our commonness. Pain separates us and tells us we are special. My wife…’ He looked down at the dirty floor, the peeled linoleum cracked and reaching into the air like tiny fingers. ‘She used to say that. She tried to believe this happens to everybody.’

  The smell of stale cigarettes and alcohol hung like mist in the air. Dust covered everything as if preserving it for better days. The furniture was old and much-used, faded and functional, made out of cheap, garish material.

  ‘Your son died in 1974 at the hands of the cult.’

  It hadn’t occurred to Jason, but Kitty had understood immediately.

  The old man nodded, sat down and picked up a bottle of brandy. ‘Yes. His name was Constantine. I’m Yanni.’ He disappeared into the kitchen before they could introduce themselves.

  The couch he’d sat on seemed older than the man, patched and repatched with different materials so that it looked like a psychedelic swirl, something
you were more likely to see in a VW camper van. There were photos of a smiling boy, framed and positioned in every corner of the room. None of his wife.

  The heat was terrible. Where once there had been an air-conditioning unit there was now just a hole in the wall opening up to a sliver of blue sky streaked with cotton clouds.

  The old man came back holding three glasses. He staggered slightly and sat down. He smelled of fish and diesel, a strange, repellent smell which also seemed to emanate from the furniture and floor of the flat as if it had taken on his scent after all these years.

  A small dog, silent until now, limped into the room. His eyes dropped, and he sat at the old man’s feet. The old man reached down and absently stroked the dog then poured himself a glass of brandy.

  ‘Yes, yes,’ he said, putting the glass down, coughing, downing what was left before pouring them some.

  ‘For many years no one wanted to know, and now that it’s all happening again suddenly it’s a thing of interest.’ He seemed to be less rebuking them than meditating on the fickleness of time and fate. There was no hostility in his eyes, only a faraway look, as if a part of him had never left the summer of 1974.

  Kitty took a sip of the brandy. Jason saw her lips curl, but she hid it well. ‘You think the two are connected?’

  Yanni’s shoulders lifted and seemed to hump up around his neck as he shrugged. ‘Of course they are. Any fool can see that. This island. The way the bodies were found. The centipedes. Anyone who tells you different is either a liar or an idiot.’

  Kitty and Jason looked at each other. Was he making a direct reference to what Nikos had said? Had he overheard their conversation at the café? Or were they starting to see connections and lines where they only wanted them to be?

  They didn’t reply, and Yanni didn’t elaborate. He stared at his glass, refilled it and drank it down. Wiped his mouth with his sleeve. He then filled the bottle cap, carefully trickling the liquid into it. He held it above the dog’s mouth. The dog opened his jaw, and Yanni poured it in.

  ‘It was your son they found out by the ruins?’ Kitty’s voice was softer, modulated, as if speaking to the victim of a recent crime.

  Yanni nodded slowly. ‘Him and his best friend. This is how it all started.’

  He began to tell them about the village back in the early seventies, his wife Rosa and Constantine, his seven-year-old son. It didn’t feel like he was talking to them, he didn’t make eye contact, and the story seemed rehearsed as if he’d told it to himself a thousand times over the intervening years both as solace and reminder of the life he’d once had.

  ‘The island was not like it is now. It was almost as if the events which occurred that summer changed things for good. It was a small fishing community before and then, it became this.’ He stretched his hand towards the door, and it was almost as if he liked living within these walls to hide, not himself, but the village and the outside world.

  ‘I had quit college when Rosa got pregnant and we moved back to the island. Once I’d wanted to be an architect, even studied for a couple of years, but as soon as the baby was on the way we knew food was more important than dreams and so we moved back. I began helping my father in his fishing boat. But things were bad. The fish were dying out, and every morning we would come back from sea with less and less, the fish all small and no good for selling. But we made out as we could and, when Constantine was born, I thought there would never be a happier day in my life. I was right.’

  He stopped to stir the ice cubes by shaking the glass. He stared down at the swirling liquid, his eyes heavy and hooded.

  ‘For my son I wanted better. I cursed myself for having taken the easy route, for coming back here, becoming what my father was. I was determined that Constantine would have a better life.’

  He stopped abruptly and looked at the hole in the wall. The sky had darkened and the clouds had disappeared.

  ‘What happened the day he went missing?’ Kitty had taken the old man’s hand in hers and held its trembling. It engulfed her palm.

  ‘He’d been on a church retreat for the weekend. He was always going on them. I guess it was the only place for kids to get away from their families. He was with his best friend, Yorgi. They were always together those two, but, you know, unlike other kids of their age they didn’t get into trouble. I never knew what they talked about but you could tell they were good friends from the unspoken sentences which always hovered between them. As if they knew each other too well to have to say anything.

  ‘So they were away for the weekend, and me and Rosa came down to the harbour to pick them up on Sunday morning but they weren’t there. The school coach disgorged all these smiling kids, sunburnt and full of stories they couldn’t wait to tell their parents, and we watched them get off the bus one by one, but Constantine wasn’t among them and neither was Yorgi.

  ‘We were disappointed but not alarmed. You see, once or twice before they’d decided to hike down from the mountain after the camping trip rather than catch the bus. I was always proud of him for that little measure of independence. The labyrinth was still open back then, and you know how kids love the mystery of dark places, the stories they tell each other about the ghosts which roam them? So we went back and prepared the Sunday dinner, knowing the two boys would be back by nightfall … kids are scared of the dark, no?

  ‘When darkness fell and they still hadn’t arrived, I went over to Yorgi’s mother’s house. She was distraught, and I calmed her down which somehow managed to calm me down, repeating those soothing phrases, they must have got lost … you know how kids are … we’ll check the labyrinth… repeating it until somehow I started to believe them too.

  ‘They found them a couple of days later.

  ‘I never thought a day would come when I would curse God and my own life so much. But it did. And the fact I survived it, managed to make it here to this century, well that was the worst insult. How could I live so long and my boy so little?’

  The old man buried his face in his hands, crying, then, abruptly, as if caught in some shameful act, he looked back up, and when he continued his voice was hard and lifeless.

  ‘God disappeared for me that day in 1974, and he never came back. I had to make the identification. To see him like that. Lying on a stretcher, a white sheet around him. He was smiling, can you believe that? Even dead he was still smiling. But what they did to him … that was when I felt God leave this world for good. The scars and mutilations. These are things I will never forget. They are as fresh to me as’ – he looked down at his glass – ‘as this …’ The glass shattered in his grip. Kitty jumped as it crashed and sparkled all over the floor. ‘Fuck you, God!’ The old man screamed. ‘Fuck you and your angels and your mercy which doesn’t exist.’ He began to tremble, a slight movement at first, which welled up in him like an earthquake until his whole body shook so much it looked as if there were two of him.

  Kitty moved across from the sofa and took his bleeding hand, put her arms around him and held him as he shook and cried and cursed the God he no longer believed in.

  ‘It’s OK. I understand.’ Her whispered words sounded so full of warmth and sympathy. ‘I’m sorry we made you bring it all back up. I’m really sorry.’

  ‘No. It’s not you.’ Yanni shook his head. Kitty poured him another brandy using her glass. ‘It’s all this happening again. When you said that thing at the door, I thought about them. These poor boys and girls. They have families too, no? They are going to spend the rest of their lives in the same place I have. I grew up with all these images of hell, of fire and perdition, but this is really hell, to outlive your own child, to never see them grow into what your dreams have laid out for them, to not see them make mistakes, grow up, become enchanted with the world … what could be worse than this?’

  The ensuing silence was answer enough. After a little while, he continued, ‘they locked me in jail that night. They didn’t want me out there when they went to arrest the cult. Thought I might do something crazy. S
ee these?’ He held out his hands, crumpled into fists. The knuckles were misaligned as if they’d slipped or had never been properly formed in the first place. ‘I spent that night punching the walls of the cell until the broken bones and pain made me pass out.’

  ‘How did you feel about the killers of your son never being brought to justice?’ Jason asked. He couldn’t begin to imagine what it would be like to live with the unresolved hanging over you, the never-to-be-resolved.

  ‘Huh? I didn’t feel anything. I was in no state to feel. Later when I went back home and talked to my wife, it all came rushing up. Justice, the police had told me, self-administered justice – but what good is justice when you can’t see your son play football, fall in love, hold the hand of his own little baby? What fucking good is thirty-five dead people against that?’

  He stared at them, but they had no answers. There was nothing to be said. Kitty looked away, through the hole in the wall and up at the sky. Her lips trembled like waves.

  ‘After that, things turned bad. Rosa slept most of the day and the night too. She wouldn’t let me touch her. She would read the bible in bed, silently mouthing the words to herself and touching her crucifix. She found God in the same instant that I lost Him.

  ‘She stopped washing and going out. I had to cook everything and clean the house when I came back from fishing. But I was happy with that. I needed things to distract me.

  ‘We separated a year later. We reminded each other of the thing which had been taken from us. We saw Constantine in each other’s movements and tone of voice. In the way an eyebrow curved or a dimple on a chin changed shape. She said God had cursed us, though what for she never made clear. She wanted to make amends to God, she said, and could only do that if she began again. She said she couldn’t bear to look into my eyes any more because they were Constantine’s eyes.’