He gripped the tiller tight beneath his arm, and trained a torch-beam on the shoreline to gauge his distances; but the torch-beam found only water, and with no choice but to sail on blind, he gambled as he steered by wits and senses.
He wore no watch, and lost all track of time. The dark pressed in on all sides: ahead, behind, to port and starboard, there was no sign of lights, or land. The first wisps of panic entered his mind; the dog, becoming troubled, left his accustomed station at the prow, and lay down on his master’s feet.
Then, the hermit began to doubt that he was alone.
A memory possessed him – a room, a bed, a bottle – and his sense grew, that the man who had lain in that bed was here, now, in the boat. Afraid to look, and as afraid not to know, he flashed the torch beam to the prow.
No one was there.
The dog whined. The hermit kept the torch trained on the prow, as if its light could keep his fears at bay; and with his free hand, he dug deep into his pocket for the scrap of paper he had put there.
The paper was folded in four, and he didn’t trouble to read it. Wanting neither the paper nor the memory, he let the paper go, and in an instant it was carried away, lost in the dark. But the memory was different. Darkness was its friend, and helped it put down roots; and once the roots were strong, the memory began its virulent growth.
Death
Eleven
Winter had not finished with Vrisi. As the fat man sped away with Hassan, a fresh snowfall began – weighty flakes, at first, which fell grey through the air but became, on landing, white, and brightened the patches of gritty snow remaining from the last fall. Then, as the temperature dropped, the snow became a mist icy and fine as dust, and seemingly harmless; but this white powder blew into every cranny, and crept in under the doors, blowing off the roofs in ash-like clouds which flew wet in the faces of those passing, and quickly formed soft drifts of uncertain depths.
For three days, snow fell. Trodden down on house paths and steps, it froze into perilous ice, clear yet distorting as the glass in old windows. The housewives scattered salt, crackling the ice as it split; they hacked at it with their broom handles, and swept the shards away. The north wind grew in strength, until even the livestock shivered; the men carried feed heads down, half-deaf under the earflaps of trappers’ caps, with the cold burning their thighs through their trousers, nipping their finger-ends red through their gloves. The chickens remained in their coops, pecking at dishes of warm mash, the few eggs they laid frozen solid in their shells. Ducks slithered on the pond’s new ice; there was ice again on the water butts; icicles hung long from leaking gutters, and forgotten washing froze brittle on the lines.
The people stayed indoors, close to the fires, though the snow found its way down the chimneys, hissing as it dropped on the burning logs. Wrapped in their outdoor clothes, they ate pulse soups and broths, and the women warmed their hands on honeyed tisanes. The men kept glasses by their coffee cups and used alcohol to fight off boredom, until the pressure of being at home grew too much; then they went to the kafenion, where more alcohol led to risky bets on hands of cards. The more they drank, the more they lost; their curses grew angrier and bluer, ringing loud through the afternoons.
The roads were slick and treacherous, and, as the snow’s depth grew, impassable except on foot. For a day, they stayed that way, until the men rigged a makeshift plough to a tractor and ploughed the snow into roadside mounds, which grew higher with each day’s clearance.
During the night of the third day, the wind changed, and breaks appeared in the clouds; the morning which followed brought clear skies, and the thaw at last began. Snow slid from the roofs, and as it melted, revealed the buds of a new season’s growth. Vrisi’s spring ran fast with melt-water, which filled the pond where the ducks dabbled and dived.
But where the snow was deep, the thaw was slow; and where the banks of ploughed snow were in shadow, they lay, slowly shrinking, for over a week.
The phone rang.
Driven to bed by boredom and the hope of warmth, Frona lay the book she was reading on the blankets, and turned the bedside clock towards her to read its face.
The hour was not late, but as she went by the closed door, Leda’s room was silent. In Santos’s study, Frona answered the call.
‘Oriste?’
No one spoke, but at the end of the line, someone was listening: Frona was sure of it.
‘Oriste?’ she said, again. ‘Who is this?’
The caller held on a few moments longer, not quite silent, breathing with care, until the receiver was replaced and the line went dead.
‘Who was on the phone last night?’
Frona was clearing breakfast. Leda had eaten almost nothing, but had crumbled a slice of cake on to her plate. The peel of an orange lay on the cloth, along with several uneaten segments of the fruit.
‘I don’t know,’ said Frona. ‘A wrong number. Aren’t you going to eat that? Shall I ask Maria to cook you some eggs?’
‘I don’t want anything.’
‘Leda, please eat something. You’re making yourself ill.’ She took a chair next to her niece and, tenderly concerned, scrutinised her face, where the symptoms of insomnia were plain. At the neck of Leda’s sweater, her collarbones were unbecomingly pronounced, and her once slender wrists had become skinny. ‘Listen, kori mou,’ went on Frona. ‘Listen to me. We’re all upset about this business with your father. We all want to know what’s happened, and where he is. He was my brother, my only brother, and it’s a blade to my heart to think of his grave being desecrated in that way. But Attis has it in hand. With luck, the money will come through now, and life will be much easier for us. We’ll find a nicer place, somewhere near the park, somewhere nearer your college. And we’ll hire Attis’s investigator to find your father’s bones. I promise you, Leda, I won’t rest until he’s home where he belongs.’ She made crosses over her breast. ‘We’ll bring him home, agapi mou. You have my word on that.’
Leda turned away her face and closed her eyes. Tears squeezed between the tight-shut lids.
‘Don’t,’ she said. From the sleeve of her sweater, she pulled a handkerchief whose fabric was already damp from her crying.
‘Come here.’ Frona opened her arms, and Leda leaned into her embrace.
Frona kissed the top of Leda’s head.
‘I think it’s time we went back to town,’ she said. ‘Hanging round this old mausoleum is getting us down. Your father would never want you to take so much time off college; you know how he would disapprove of that. Remember what he used to say: talent has its place, but hard work pays the bills. And you have talent, Leda. One day you’ll be a lovely actress. But you need to work on your talent, not sit around moping. We must go home, and you must work, and make him proud of you. Make us all proud.’
Leda shook her head.
‘I can’t go,’ she said. ‘Not until he’s found.’
‘What can you do, here? Listen to me. The best thing I can do for your father is to take care of you, and that means looking after your best interests. And your best interests aren’t here. They’re in your life at home, with friends around you, not fretting and worrying about things we can do nothing about.’
Leda dried more tears with her handkerchief.
‘How can we go when everything’s gone so wrong?’ she asked. ‘It’s all so hard on you! Everything you’ve done for me, I didn’t know – I didn’t understand, when I was younger, how difficult it was for you. And now, when it should be easier, it isn’t! And I can’t sleep for thinking of him, wondering what’s happened. Where can he be?’
Frona stroked Leda’s hair.
‘We’ll find him,’ she said. ‘Attis will see to that.’
‘I don’t want to hire Attis’s investigator. I don’t think we should have strangers in our family’s business. And you rely too much on Attis. How do you know you can trust him?’
Frona frowned.
‘But I do trust him. I trust him because your fat
her trusted him.’
‘Did he? Are you sure about that?’
‘But our interests are the same, Leda; surely they are.’
‘You mustn’t trust him. Be careful what you say, and don’t discuss our business with him. Why are you so certain he’s not involved?’
Wearily, Frona sighed, and squeezed Leda’s shoulder as she released it.
‘Why should he be involved?’ she asked. ‘Kori mou, you think just like your father. You’re all imagination and fancy, as he was. We must trust someone, and who else do we have? We need to get out of here. I’ll call Hassan, and ask if he can take us tomorrow.’
‘Not so soon,’ said Leda. ‘I don’t want to go until he’s found.’
‘We have to go. I can’t be away much longer. I’ve accounts to prepare for several clients, and I can’t just abandon them. We don’t have your father’s money yet.’
Leda said no more, but rose, and walked out of the room. As Frona picked up the orange peel from the table, she heard Leda slowly climb the stairs.
In the kitchen, she laid the plates on the drainer. Maria wasn’t there. Frona lifted the lid of the saucepan on the stove, and stirred a simmering soup of beef shin and carrots.
The phone rang.
She ran to the study, and picked up the receiver.
‘Oriste?’
No one answered.
‘Speak!’ insisted Frona. ‘Who is this? Speak!’
But no voice spoke, though there was breathing on the line, controlled and quiet.
Intently, Frona listened, as if she might tell from the breathing whether the caller was man, or woman.
‘Speak!’ she demanded, again; but the caller replaced the receiver, and the line went dead.
Leda’s sleep, that night, was restless, her dreams peopled with sinister figures who pursued, and then eluded her; she hurried through dense pine forests on indistinct paths, encountering time and again a tall, well-dressed man she felt she’d met, and yet could not recall, who followed her down a road she didn’t know, and had no wish to travel.
The ringing phone woke her. Her room was bright with morning; the bedside clock showed after nine.
The phone rang on, and Frona – already walking to the village – was not there to answer.
The phone rang, and rang. Leda closed her eyes, determined to leave it; then the caller’s persistence concerned her, and she sat up in her bed, ready to answer. As she threw off the blankets, the ringing stopped.
In slippers and robe, she went yawning to the kitchen, where she took a cup down from the shelf, and dropped a sprig of sage into the kafebriko to make tea. With the last match in the box, she lit the gas.
The phone rang again.
But in the study, hand over the receiver, she hesitated: the memory of her dreams made her afraid, that someone – something – malevolent was on the line, and in the cold, she shivered.
The misgiving passed, and she picked up the receiver.
‘Embros?’
No one spoke.
Leda listened. Beneath the apparent silence, were the small sounds of someone’s breathing.
‘Who is this?’ she asked. Still no one spoke, and, frowning, she lowered the receiver towards its cradle; but as she was about to cut the call, she heard a voice.
She put the receiver back to her ear.
‘Oriste?’ she said.
‘Leda,’ said the voice.
The outlying churches and chapels had been neglected during the snow; so, when the road was safely passable and held no danger of slipping to old, slow-healing bones, a widow with a pricking conscience (and the intention to ask for help with a misplaced bank book) set out to light the candles at St Fanourios.
The warmth of kinder winds was doing its work, and on the road, the snow was all but gone, except for the deepest of the plough-raised banks.
The widow intended first to light the lamp over the glass-fronted shrine of skulls, who greeted her with their macabre grins of welcome. She struck a match; and as its flame flared, a spitting piece of phosphorous flew up. To avoid it, she turned her face away, and as she did so, her eye was caught by an object in a melting snow-bank.
She thought, at first, she was mistaken. She dropped the match, and moved closer to investigate.
There was no doubt of what she had found.
She made no close examination of her discovery, but called, ashen-faced, on the saint whose service she must now neglect, and hurried, almost running, down the road, through the village to the kafenion, from where a priest and a policeman might be called.
The men, at first, smiled behind their hands in disbelief and refused to accept her story; but when her tears began, the patron went to the phone. He dialled the number for the police, as she told them again what she had seen: a limb, the lower part of a leg, and a man’s foot with the shoe still on it, his trousers soaking wet with melting snow.
Midday, and the sunshine had brought the first bees from their hives. A grey police car drew up in the yard of the poet’s house; the two officers who climbed out slammed the doors, and put on the berets they pulled from their shoulder-tabs. As they approached the house door, their blouson jackets swung open to show holstered handguns.
Under a bush, a watchful cat crouched.
By daylight, the old place’s many flaws were plain; the drainpipe hanging loose from the wall, the untidiness of the overgrown garden, the dirtiness of the unwashed windows, all showed the owner’s neglect. The policemen took up positions on either side of the doorway, matching each other’s manly stances: feet apart, hands clasped over the groin.
‘What a dump,’ said the younger man, a recent recruit, called for the first time to perform this duty. ‘How do they live in a hole like this?’
His colleague was a veteran of the cities; he’d worked the squalid brothels and the dope dens, cleared out the dross from filthy squats, uncovered bloated corpses on the wastelands.
‘If this is the worst you ever see, you’ll die a happy man,’ he said, and rapped on the front door. In the pine trees, a jay cackled. The policemen listened; across bare tiles, footsteps approached them.
Leda opened the door, and the policemen moved forward to stand shoulder to shoulder before her. Seeing a pretty face, the younger man started to smile at his good fortune, then recalled the reason for their visit and assumed a serious expression, though his body betrayed his true thoughts with a blush which spread from neck to cheeks.
‘Kali mera sas,’ said the senior man, respectfully.
‘Kali mera,’ replied Leda.
‘Kyria Kalaki?’ he asked, though he knew full well she wasn’t; he’d asked about the house’s occupants in the village.
‘Despina Volakis,’ said Leda. ‘Kyria Kalaki is my aunt.’
‘Is your aunt here?’ asked the policeman.
‘She’s gone visiting,’ said Leda. ‘There’s only me in the house.’
‘No one else here at all?’
Leda’s expression grew puzzled.
‘Only Maria. Can I ask your business here?’
She looked from one policeman to the other; the younger man, in spite of himself, flashed her a smile.
‘Please, fetch this Maria,’ said the senior man. ‘And perhaps we could come inside.’
Leda frowned.
‘What’s this about?’ she asked. ‘Has something happened to Frona?’
‘Fetch Maria, please,’ said the policeman, and as if entitled he took a step across the threshold, so Leda, persuaded by his confidence, moved back to let them pass.
The senior man stood at the centre of the hallway, whilst his companion, smiling abashedly, took up a position behind him.
‘Is this about Maria?’ asked Leda. ‘Has she done something wrong?’
‘No, no, she’s done nothing,’ said the policeman. ‘If you wouldn’t mind . . .’
Leda left them. The two men looked around the hallway, taking in the ornaments and artefacts – the watercolours and sepia photographs hun
g in old frames, the chess set carved from olive wood on the dowry chest, the tusked boar’s head glowering from the wall. They waited. Somewhere, above the sounds of domesticity – rattling saucepans, an oven door closing – a clock ticked.
Leda brought Maria from the kitchen, the old woman wiping her hands dry on her housecoat.
‘I don’t have time for policemen,’ she was saying. ‘I haven’t time to chat to anyone, in the middle of cooking. Don’t offer them coffee, whatever you do. If you offer them coffee, they’ll never go.’
Her voice was loud. When she realised the policemen had heard her every word, she fell silent, but seemed indifferent to any offence she might have caused.
‘Is there somewhere we can sit?’ asked the senior officer, of Leda.
‘We’ll go in my father’s study,’ she said and led the way, pointing the men to the old horsehair sofa, herself standing with Maria before the fire.
‘Perhaps you’d like to sit yourself,’ said the policeman, indicating the poet’s chair at the table.
‘I’ll stand,’ said Leda. ‘So, what’s this about?’
The younger man cleared his throat and leaned forward over his knees, as if he were about to speak; but it was the senior man who said, ‘It’s about your father.’
The younger man looked at his feet, afraid to meet Leda’s eyes.
‘I’m afraid I have bad news,’ said the senior man.
‘Bad news?’
The policeman was a little rattled. In his long experience, families had usually, by this stage, got the message; an unexpected visit from the police was, in many cases, message enough, and for those who resisted the implications of their presence, the request to take a seat confirmed the worst. Never had it been necessary to say the words; women moved directly to weeping and wailing, whilst men jumped to the ‘how’ and ‘when’. But here, it seemed, he must be more explicit.
The Whispers of Nemesis Page 11