by Naomi Holoch
And indeed I do see a level field, and behind it woods going up in flames, and there is the smell of fire in my deepest night. I see the dark outlines of shapes that, unused to nights full of life, dance awkwardly to the rhythm of the young flames. When the fire begins to sing its tireless melody, I imagine that you are there, singing beneath the ironwood trees, in the embrace of delicate flames.
If I silently slip down from the column in the quiet dawn and kiss the left side of the grave marker, I’ll find my way to the iron-wood trees through all the tall grass. That is what you told me: “Come when it’s the third new moon in the seventh year, when the graves open, but only at the time of the black new moon, and I’ll lead you to the ironwood trees. You are the only one to know this. Then you walk down the stone path three, four, or five steps to the black violet patch; don’t worry about the darkness, for you know about the light under the ironwood trees.”
Now I’m the only one who knows this. I walk along the stone path in the midst of tall poplar trees—do you still remember how they were cut down during the last autumn of your life? Now I slither past motionless, familiar faces. You didn’t tell me about these lost seekers for the black new moon. How these blind eyes beneath the ironwood trees turn back, ignorant that their seventh year is past. The wild flame should have reached their eyes.
Why then do I have this sense of strangeness, of not knowing, when the stone path, bordered with poplars, brings me before the familiar woods? The branches of the old ironwood trees are so densely intertwined that they could silence birds by strangling their beaks. The steel eagle on the gate latch pecks at the cold from my numb fingers. Where has your call brought me? Where then is the dance during the black new moon, where are the musicians, the singers with their hoarse throats? I know about the light under the ironwood trees. I cry out these untrue words into the cold. And at that moment I hear a warm crackling, and a swirling wind drives the branches and the foliage into the tight clutch of the fire. The iron gate gives way and I am embraced by the passionate rustling of the brown-yellow leaves. Now I also hear the smothered song, the disorderly clatter of dancing shoes and the clanging of gold goblets. Perhaps it only seems so to me because of the seductive odor of the juices pressed out through thin spigots from the overripe fruit of the trees. I am intoxicated. This certainly cannot be a productive night.
Still, I manage to reach the ruins beneath the ironwood trees, to dance on the floor of the old castle. Now I can dance into the old memories, alive, trembling in the fire of dead names. Who will make me dance, who will rest hands on my breast if I do not catch sight of you? See their deformed hands that grasp me in the wild dance. So it is said: Bitter are the hands of the dead names. They touch one and then full of fear startle away, and their black tongues crawl into one’s face, because the warm blood of one’s skin burns on them. But their eyes remain unmoving: they gaze far, far back into one, back to the time when one was still a child and without shame burrowed into the earth with one’s teeth. “Don’t look at me in the name of Death!” Thus one yells out to them but in vain. One remains small for them, even when one is no longer small, and perhaps never was. Are you blind, combing all the spiderwebs from their hair?—they are still asking this, before their hands heavily sink down the length of the body.
But I am not concerned about them, where after all young women with bared breasts dance, and the dancers become ever more lively and offer sweet wine from heavy trays. Should one take wine from these dead hands and drink to these dead eyes? Or should one be shattered from within, beneath these empty gazes? The young women offer wine to me too; it seems as if I were drinking from their breasts; is the magic of this intoxicating wine my fate, will I perhaps see you now?
The skeletal girls and boys—I drink to them, while I gaze at your face mirrored in the gold goblet.
But how blameless this wine is, this wine born of violets from your weary grave! Burning blood again and again shoots into my veins, my legs, and already I dance, surrounded by the mutilated dancers. I perceive all the madness of their percussive rhythms and hum the seductive song of the fire. The flames burn, they burn deep into the horror of my heart. They are many times too hot for me but can hardly warm the white limbs, the magic, and the blood of the unskilled dancers.
How goes the dancing beneath the ironwood trees? Why am I blinded by your look? You yourself gave me violet wine to drink and sent me bare-breasted girls, so that they might steal the sword from my head. Perhaps here where I am bewitched I can now give myself up to the dead-limbed pleasures; blindly and wildly I touch the open flesh wounds and with bony fingers lift the gold goblet to my ashen lips. Surely you don’t believe that I, like the others, will stuff dry earth into my joints in order to be able to dance into the dawn? I do not forget it, I can never forget it. The temptation of wine cannot keep me far away from the rosy drops.
Now horror overwhelms me. I am afraid of the dead hands and the stinking mouths that, toothless, have wedged themselves into the young trees. I want almost not to see them, your wedding guests, who throng onto the dance floor. Through their torn clothing I recognize their crooked bones and their mangled flesh. You don’t know how you can reach them, to grasp them, to crush these decaying beehives, to cut through their wrinkled necks until the yellow death-juice brims over the madness in their eyes. Now I am not allowed to curse you.
Not here, not amid the dead-limbed ones. The heavy wine flows from my mouth and eyes. Who knows, perhaps I am already crushed to pieces or tired of life and already have lain for many new moons on the gold-yellow foliage near the castle floor. Not far from what once existed. And already mouth and eyes brim over with yellow juice. But I never open my eyes. What if I really see you only as a mirror image in the gold goblets? If I should go blind, then let it be only on your wine. I want never to rub it from my eyes.
Now I cry. Bitterly. A heavy smell surrounds me, and it cannot be the wine, I am already lying next to your violet grave. It will be a morning of horror, a dawn of powerlessness. Let my body collapse to the ground. But when I wake and look into the white pain, I will make the sign of the cross on my face, in the morning of the new moon; I will pour the pitch of black trees into my mouth and will burn out my eyes with glowing coals. Because you no longer hear the salt of my tears.
Translated from the Slovenian into German by
Elisabeth Vospernik; translated from the German by Nora Reed
Elena Georgiou
Cyprus is the land of origin for Elena Georgiou, a poet and teacher who after many years in London is now living in New York City. In writing about her story “Aphrodite’s Vision” (1996), Georgiou said, “The Cypriot part of my consciousness seemed to take control of my creativity.” In this story, Georgiou, capturing the experience of her blind narrator, creates a strong sense of place through character and action, rather than through visual description. The poet has written a story where language becomes a form of sight and a direct entry into a sensual world.
APHRODITE’S VISION
WHEN the flames leapt out of the oven door and burned my eyes many women came to console me by telling me their bad-luck stories. I was twenty-two and unmarried. Before the accident my parents began putting the word about that they were ready to find me a husband. But when the accident left me blind, all three of us knew this would make arranging a marriage almost impossible. We had no land or money to make up for what my parents and the families of the single men saw as a liability.
And I was pleased to be a liability. The word fell off my tongue with a lilt that meant I had the freedom to sit with my legs open like a man and not have to wonder if marriage was going to come along to close them. I began to sit for hours. My legs, open. My ears, open. But my mouth, shut.
Losing my eyesight kept me quiet for at least six years. During this time I sat outside my father’s store and listened to conversations. I listened to the sounds of people’s sentences and their choice of words. I listened to the silences in between their words, and the s
ilences after their words stopped. I listened to the footsteps of the people who had been conversing. I felt how quickly or slowly the air moved when they walked away from one another. Eventually, I was able to tell by the sound of the footsteps, and the touch of the air, if these people would meet to talk again. How their conversation would sound the next time they met. What kind of words they would choose. What kind of sentences they’d make. And what kind of silences they’d leave. It was as though someone had taken the eyes from my face and relocated them inside my body. My feelings now had the eyes my face could no longer use. It was with these inside-eyes that I saw Efthalia.
Efthalia didn’t come to console me or tell me a bad-luck story. In fact, she hadn’t come to tell me anything. She came to ask my father if he would put new soles on the bottoms of her shoes. I could feel she knew at the time that she didn’t have the money to pay for the new soles, so I watched with my inside-eyes to see how she was going to get her shoes back once my father had finished working on them.
My father was the kind of man who always asked people for a fair amount of money for the work he put into his repairs. He didn’t raise the prices when he saw someone walking to his store in shop-bought clothes and he didn’t drop the price when he saw someone walk away from his store barefoot.
Efthalia came to pick up her shoes when my father was eating his lunch and I was taking care of the store. She read the numbers on her ticket to me and I walked toward the third box on the left, behind the counter. I gave her the shoes and held out my hand to receive the money. In silence, she used her finger to draw a heart in the palm of my hand and then I felt the air move as she rushed out the door.
“Efthalia came for her shoes,” I said before my father had time to notice they were missing. “I gave them back to her for free.”
“Why, Aphrodite? Why would you do such a thing?”
“Because I could feel the skin in the palm of her hand had cracked.”
“And?” my father said, waiting to hear the rest of my explanation.
“And what?” I said, trying to avoid the sharpness in the sound of his voice.
“What have the shoes she wears on her feet got to do with the cracked skin in the palm of her hand?” His voice pleaded for an explanation he could understand. I spelled it out word for word, trying to accommodate his plea.
“I gave her the shoes for free so she could use the money to pay for olive oil to soften her skin.” It frustrated me to have to explain myself as much as it frustrated my parents that I didn’t explain enough. I was sorry I had to be bad to my father in order to be good to Efthalia, but today I could feel she needed my goodness more than he did. I had no regrets.
My inside-eyes followed his eyes following me as I went to sit outside. I could feel every nail he hammered into the sole of the shoe he was working on, which is why I shouted back into the coolness of his workspace, “I know how to find the way to her house.” He pretended not to hear me. “I can go and ask her for the money, if you want.” He said nothing. “I’m going,” I said, holding on to the wall to steady myself down the two steps that took me to the pavement. I could feel the air change as he walked quickly to catch me.
“Where are you going, all by yourself?”
“I can do it.”
“Come back and sit down. Please. Sometimes, Aphrodite, I think you do what’s good for strangers even if it means you’re not going to be good to yourself. And that’s not being good. That’s being foolish.”
“I’m not being foolish. Just because I don’t have sight doesn’t mean I don’t have sense. And Efthalia is not a stranger. I’m going to her house to ask her to bring you the money, when she has it. That way, I can be good to her and I can be good to you.”
“Come back and sit down.”
“No. I’m going.”
“Sit down.” There was a sound in his voice I found hard to argue with. I sat on the pavement and felt the afternoon sun on the back of my neck. My father returned to his hammering and the sound faded into a quiet silence allowing me the space to daydream. I turned my body around so the sun could shine on my face and started to trace the heart Efthalia had left in my hand. I repeated the shape for a little while and then used my fingers to explore. I realized this was the first time I’d used my hands to feel my body. It surprised me that I could have sat still for six years and not touched myself. I wondered why I hadn’t used the time to feel the shape of my neck, or the width of my wrists, or measure how much of my breasts my hands could hold. I sat by the roadside and measured my wrist by making a circle around its circumference with my thumb and forefinger. I felt under my chin and down my breastbone. And, instead of going inside the house to cup my breasts in my hands, I walked away from the store to Efthalia’s house.
Efthalia was the kind of woman who enjoyed the feel of words so much that even when she couldn’t turn a one-syllabled word into a two-syllabled one my ears felt as though she had. So when she asked me onto her veranda with the word welcome, I felt as though she’d said much more.
“I haven’t come for the money,” I said as I sat outside the doorway to her house.
“Would you like some almond cordial?” she said, ignoring my words but acknowledging my presence. I listened to her meander through the rooms that led to the kitchen and then shouted, “I said, I haven’t come for the money.”
“And I said, would you like some almond cordial,” she called back in a sing-song voice.
At school, Efthalia was the only girl in my class who didn’t say nice things to the twins who had a piano in their house so they could invite her home to play. I thought it was because she didn’t like pianos or didn’t like music, but I was wrong. Not only did she like music, but it was so connected to her body that if she walked along the street it was impossible for her to hear a radio pouring out of someone’s house without stepping in time to the music. Efthalia found another way to be invited to play the piano. She waited until the twins came to her. And that was how life was for Efthalia: a series of waiting times linked to a series of getting times. That’s how I knew she was waiting for me to tell her what I was doing at her house if it wasn’t to ask for the money. And because I knew she was going to wait for me to explain, I promised myself I’d wait for her explanation first.
Making promises to myself and taking risks were two things I didn’t do when I had sight. But, now, I feel I can take risks without having to fear losing anything. Life will make the loss into a change. And the change will be an in, or an out, an up, or a down, or even a circle, but the important thing is life goes on and there’s nothing I can do to stop it, or predict it.
Yes, on occasion, life can leave me feeling as if I can direct it, but this feeling is always fleeting. For example, when I woke up this morning I said to myself, Today I am going to begin writing songs in my head. I want to make songs that tell a story so that the people who listen to them will have something to do with their minds. And I want to fill these songs with music that will flood into peoples’ bodies until they have no choice but to move. But when I left my bedroom and walked into the front of the house, life took the straight line in my head and threw all my plans out the window. Why? Because Efthalia came into our parlor-turned-storefront and drew a heart in the palm of my hand. What’s more, my inside-eyes couldn’t find an explanation for why she had.
I know, I know, you’re probably asking, but what about the cracked skin and what about money for the olive oil. I made that up, of course. That’s how I know it’s not true when my father says that sometimes I’m good to others at the expense of being good to myself. My father thinks he knows everything about me, but he doesn’t.
Thinking you know everything about your child is a mistake that many parents make, but I can understand how the mistake is made. What I don’t understand, though, is how people can think they know everything about someone else’s child. For instance, I’ve heard many people from our town talk about Efthalia. They feel sorry for her. “It’s a shame,” they say.
“A young girl like that with no one left alive to arrange a marriage for her.”
I was never told directly how Efthalia’s parents died, but I recall catching the end of one of my mother’s arguments with my father, on a Sunday morning. She was using their death as a way to get my father to go to church with her.
“You know, if Maria and Demetri had spent less time drinking together and more time praying together then perhaps they wouldn’t have met their end by slamming their bicycle into the rear end of a truck. Twenty-two years old, they were. Both of them. Maria had just given birth. Her forty days weren’t even up yet. I don’t even know what she was doing out of the house!”
“Saturday night is the one night I get to myself and you’re going to take that away from me?” My father always responded to my mother’s goading with words that created feelings of guilt. In fact, both of my parents argued by using words that created guilt rather than raising their voices at one another.
“Sunday is the one day I get to stay in my bed and snore to my heart’s delight without having to feel your fingers digging me in the ribs.” My father usually won the arguments simply because, for my father, guilt was just a tactic he used to get his own way, whereas feeling guilty was something my mother took seriously.