Secrets Under the Sun

by Nadia Marks

  ‘Who is going to marry her if she behaves like a man?’ Ernestina protested to her husband. ‘She is a daughter, not a son, Franz – business is not for her. Your daughter would do better to learn about being a wife and running a home.’

  ‘She is as capable as any son, and cleverer than most men,’ Franz argued.

  ‘We are a good family and she has a good dowry and it would be better if you found her a suitable match instead of filling her head with ideas of business.’ Ernestina never stopped complaining.

  But Olga didn’t need, or want anyone to find her a husband. She was determined she would find him her-self and marry for love. Her mother might have been a God-fearing conformist but her papa had the metropolitan modern ways in his upbringing; his parents had infused his childhood with the spirit of adventure and he in turn had passed it on to his daughter.

  *

  Olga met Ivan, a dashing Hungarian violinist, during a masquerade ball at the Italian consulate on a chilly March night during the carnival celebrations. She was dressed as Mata Hari, and he as the Count of Monte Cristo.

  She was immediately captivated. Tall, broad-shouldered, with a mass of dark hair, he looked to her the embodiment of manliness. His eyes flashed through his black eye-mask and his even teeth gleamed as he smiled at her.

  He was equally spellbound and made his advance the minute he spotted her across the room, sweeping her onto the dance floor, certain that he’d never seen a more exotic creature than this Mata Hari.

  Holding her in his arms, his tight grip pulling her closer, he spun her dizzily to the strains of a waltz before sweeping her out to the cool air of the veranda. His breath on her neck burned with an intensity that made her head swirl, and when he bent down to kiss her, she gave her full lips willingly. Olga had been waiting impatiently for the thrill of sexual desire to visit her. That night she knew it had finally arrived: Aphrodite’s precocious love child had aimed his arrow well, piercing her with ease straight through the heart.

  The courtship was short, and before the month was out, Ivan asked Olga to marry him.

  ‘I am in love, Papa,’ she told her father once she had made up her mind to accept.

  ‘I just want you to be sure he is the man for you,’ he said with caution at the speed of the romance. ‘How much do we know about him, Olga mou?’

  ‘I feel as if I’ve known him all my life, Papa,’ she replied in all her youthful passion.

  As much as it pleased Franz that his daughter had made her own marriage choice, he would have preferred a more solvent son-in-law.

  Ivan had come to Larnaka a few years earlier with the visiting Hungarian National Orchestra to perform at the consulate, and as so many others had done before him, he found the island so agreeable he settled there. He joined the local orchestra and scratched a living by teaching music to the children of rich Europeans and Greeks.

  ‘I am sure he is the one, Papa,’ Olga told her father. ‘I know he’s not rich but he is an artist, and he makes me laugh – I feel so alive when I’m with him!’

  Franz could deny nothing to the ‘flower of his life’, as he referred to his daughter, and once again the Linser house was to hold a wedding celebration that would linger in local memory for years to come.

  Ivan was welcomed into the family home and as her mother and father had done before her, Olga continued living there with her new husband. Grandfather Josef lived long enough to see his dream come true: three generations under the same roof of the house he had built with so much love.

  A few months after Olga’s marriage, Josef insisted on a visit to the Temple of Apollo and the ancient city of Kourion in the south-west of the island. It had not long been excavated and was attracting much attention from scholars and amateur archaeologists like himself. Although by now automobiles had been introduced to the island, such a journey had to be made on a mule or horseback and would be long and hazardous for him to undertake at his age. The ancient city, built on top of a rocky outcrop some hundred metres high, had tombs cut out of it, with others honeycombing the surrounding hills. The journey from Larnaka would take several days and even though, by then, Josef had engaged a Cypriot companion for help on his expeditions, Eva was extremely anxious.

  ‘You are an old man, Josef – you can’t behave as if you’re still in your prime,’ she scolded him.

  ‘You don’t understand, my dear. This is no ordinary trip for me – this is a pilgrimage. As you know I am not a religious man, and this will be the closest I will get to a holy shrine. It is something I need to do before I die.’

  And so that is what Josef Linser did. He ended his days high up on a hill that rose out of the sea to brood dramatically over a bay, surrounded by ancient ruins and tombs, a stone’s throw away from the birthplace of the goddess of love, Aphrodite.

  Josef died as he had lived, in the open air on his beloved Cyprus, an island chosen by the gods, straddling the easternmost waters of the Mediterranean. He stood at the summit of the acropolis of Kourion, and feasted his eyes as the ancients had done millennia before on a vista that literally took his breath away. He thanked the gods for his good fortune at having lived and worked in this marvellous land, took a deep breath and perished.

  His death was a hard blow to them all, not least to Eva, who had imagined her husband was going to live forever, or at least outlive her, and could not imagine life without him.

  They buried him in the Catholic cemetery in Larnaka; on his tombstone was a quote by Zeno of Citium, Josef’s favourite philosopher, who according to legend had died much the same way, by holding his breath. The inscription read: ‘Man conquers the world by conquering himself.’

  Not long afterwards, Eva followed her husband and died peacefully in her sleep.

  Olga loved being married. Sensual and free-spirited, she relished the fact that now she could be made love to whenever she desired. Her previous flirtations with young men had been so furtive, so cautious. She had always wanted more but she had to play by the rules, had to be the chaste young woman. Why can I not kiss a boy if I want to? she asked herself, having no one else to ask. As an only child with no sister to discuss these matters with, and knowing that any girl with whom she was friendly wouldn’t entertain the idea of talking about such things, Olga had to rely on her own conclusions. Society didn’t tolerate strong-minded women and the injustice of the patriarchal world infuriated her. Now, as a married woman, she was finally sexually liberated and empowered.

  Ivan could hardly believe his good fortune. The union with Olga and the Linser family surpassed all his expectations. He had married into one of the wealthiest and most elegant families in Larnaka, and had a beautiful, clever and sensual wife. Yet there were times, Ivan thought, that perhaps Olga was too clever, too physical, too strong, too beautiful.

  The birth of their first daughter was an early obstacle in their marriage. Anita was born prematurely after a particularly difficult pregnancy. Olga insisted on working through most of it, even if her father was determined to keep her at bay.

  ‘You have a duty to take care of yourself and the baby, my girl,’ her mother had complained. ‘You have a father and a husband to help you … not that your husband is much use,’ she’d muttered under her breath.

  Olga’s pregnant body repelled Ivan. She was no longer his. He couldn’t bear the sight of her swollen belly, or to touch her. She was bereft. Gone were the sensual kisses, the caresses and nights of passion. After the first heady months of marriage, when their intellectual differences had become more apparent it was their physical attraction that kept their union alive.

  ‘You are insatiable, darling,’ Ivan had laughed, making light of his irritation with her demands. ‘A man can only muster so much sexual energy – we need to have a rest sometimes!’

  ‘But you are no ordinary man, darling, you’re a tiger,’ she’d purr and kiss him full on the mouth, as they’d kissed when newly wed, hoping to entice him.

  Once the baby was born and Olga’s body resumed its f
ormer beauty, Ivan’s attentions towards her increased and some of their old attraction for each other was restored.

  However, the final decline in their marriage came with Olga’s second pregnancy. Ivan was increasingly absent from the home and the family and indisposed to spending time with Olga, and would return from his nocturnal adventures once the household was asleep.

  After Olga gave birth to Sonia, her second baby girl, and had once again regained her figure – which childbirth seemed to enhance, making it more ripe, more womanly than the young body of their courtship – Ivan was nowhere to be seen. He was glad to reap the many benefits of marriage into the Linser clan – money, family and status – while contributing nothing in return.

  It wasn’t long before Olga reacted. His increasing absences, blatant lies and excuses of visits to his bridge club, which she knew were really visits to the cabarets and gambling dives of town, were becoming intolerable.

  ‘Where does he go every night?’ her mother would ask Franz. ‘He is a family man, not a bachelor, he has responsibilities; how can she put up with it? You should speak to him,’ Ernestina complained. ‘And what’s more, you should never have let our daughter marry him. He was never worthy of her!’ Of course Franz wouldn’t dream of doing any such thing without Olga’s permission. He knew his daughter would deal with it in her own way and for her sake he tried hard to conceal his disappointment in his son-in-law.

  Olga was furious but said nothing. She knew of the gossip and whispering around town but she kept her dignity and waited for the right moment.

  Ivan had now virtually given up his former work, and was spending his time and wife’s family fortune recklessly gambling and drinking.

  ‘I highly recommend marrying into money,’ he bragged to his drinking buddies, stuffing a handful of notes into a belly dancer’s cleavage while she shook her bejewelled breasts in his face.

  One of Ivan’s favourite dives was a newly opened cabaret/brothel reputed to have the most scantily dressed dancing girls on the island, and a secret room where men could smoke a hashish-infused nargile.

  One of those half-naked women was a dancer called Sotiria, whose eyes fell on Ivan the minute she saw him. That dive soon became his second home, and he spent night after night in the company of Sotiria.

  ‘You are my master and I’m your slave,’ she would whisper in his ear, topping up his nargile with hashish as he lay in a stupor on the Turkish divan smoking and caressing her naked body next to his. What Ivan couldn’t do with his beautiful clever wife, he was now more than willing and able to do with a whore who saw him as the way out of her miserable life.

  When after a few months Sotiria told Ivan that she was with child, he laughed in her face.

  ‘Away with you, woman!’ he shouted, pushing her off him. ‘You think I’m foolish enough to believe this is anything to do with me?’

  ‘I know it’s yours, but even if it isn’t, it doesn’t matter,’ she spat back at him. ‘If you don’t agree to marry me or at least look after me, I’ll tell your wife everything.’

  That night Ivan, in a panic at the prospect of being exposed and losing all he had, arrived home earlier than usual, and crept into bed beside Olga. She lay motionless ignoring his advances. He reeked of cheap perfume, tobacco and alcohol.

  She’d been building up to throwing him out for a while, and now the time had come. He had to go. She was far too proud to be humiliated this way; she didn’t need him, or any man for that matter.

  The next day she had a meeting with her parents. They summoned the locksmith and changed all the locks, then packed an old suitcase with what clothes Ivan had arrived with three years earlier and put it outside the front door. Neither his begging for forgiveness nor his threats for revenge had any effect. The Linser family was far too powerful to be compromised.

  From then on, whatever Ivan got up to was of no concern to Olga, or her family; he was now penniless and Sotiria’s blackmail no longer held any threat or currency to anyone. They never spoke to him again.

  Larnaka, 2010

  Anita paused at last. Her words had been spilling out, sometimes hesitantly, sometimes deliberately, sometimes in a rush of emotion, for what seemed like hours. In the room silence fell like an empty space. This time it was Marianna who broke it.

  ‘Are you saying … is it possible … ?’ she started, visibly shaken, her voice barely audible as if she was talking to herself. ‘Could it be … ?’ she said, louder now, looking around the room at her friends, who were as dazed as she was by the revelations.

  Anita breathed in, then sighed deeply. She reached for the young woman’s hand.

  ‘Yes, Marianna mou, that is what I am saying.’ The old woman looked at each of them and continued: ‘You see, we had no way of knowing for sure, but it became quite clear that your grandmother Sotiria was Ivan’s … my father’s lover and she had a child by him. It is almost certain that your mother was my half-sister. Katerina and my mother were quite convinced of it and after a while so was I.’

  The day Katerina went to find Marianna’s grandmother was the day she found out Marianna’s identity. Old Sotiria was more than happy to be rid of the girl and relieved to have her off her hands, but not before she made her claim known.

  ‘It’s about time your mistress’s clan with all their money and airs and graces took her husband’s bastard grandchild off me,’ she hissed at Katerina, not even bothering to get up from her knees as she scrubbed the floor. ‘They got away with it the first time around so I suppose this is something. Funny, though …’ she laughed unpleasantly, ‘a fine man your la-di-da mistress married. Maybe we were not so different after all, she and I – he left us both in the lurch, didn’t he?’

  Not long after Olga threw Ivan out, he disappeared and it was rumoured that he had returned to Hungary. No one saw or heard from him again, not least Sotiria, who conveniently found someone else to blame for her pregnancy. She claimed the father was the brothel’s owner, who didn’t really care if the baby was his or not: it gave him a good reason to keep Sotiria working for nothing in return for a roof over her head. Once the child turned fourteen she was put to work too, until she in turn gave birth to Marianna who was also destined for the same fate until Katerina and Olga rescued her.

  ‘That child has been a burden from the moment she was born.’ Sotiria continued scrubbing while she spoke to Katerina. ‘It was bad enough bringing up my own kid, but this little bastard is good for nothing. At least her mother had some talent and worked for her keep. This one, all she ever wants to do is read.’ Katerina couldn’t bear to hear any more of the old woman’s poison. It released buried memories of her own miserable childhood. She had to get Marianna away from her.

  ‘I’m not that surprised,’ Olga had said when Katerina returned with the news. ‘I wonder how many more children are out there that I don’t know about as a result of that man. It’s not the poor child’s fault to have been born into that misery. I have a duty to help Marianna.’

  ‘God bless you, Olga,’ Katerina replied and reached for her hand. ‘What would have become of me if you hadn’t helped me? Not a day goes by that I don’t feel grateful to you for rescuing me.’

  ‘The sins of the parents and grandparents should not be passed on to the children,’ Olga said decisively. ‘Now it’s time for you and me to help this child, Katerina mou – and who knows,’ she went on, ‘perhaps it’s true, perhaps some of the same blood as that of my own girls runs in her veins too.’

  ‘I do believe it’s true,’ Katerina said with conviction. ‘I always felt Marianna has a strong resemblance to Sonia, did you ever notice it? Or perhaps it’s my wishful thinking …’

  ‘It is more than possible,’ Olga replied, letting out a long sigh. ‘The man I fell in love with and married was a tramp. I chose badly, Katerina mou. Ivan was a cad and I was a foolish girl.’

  ‘You were so young, you weren’t to know,’ Katerina replied. ‘Everyone makes mistakes in their lives. Love is not a sin, Olga
– you were the one who taught us that. No one can pass judgement, only God can do that.’

  ‘If it’s true about Marianna, then it’s a blessing that the girl found us now; but even if it’s not, we will treat her as one of us.’

  Eleni, Adonis and Marianna sat motionless while Anita time-travelled them once again into a past about which they had known nothing.

  Adonis was the first to react. ‘This is wonderful news!’ he shouted, interrupting his mother’s flow as he rushed to envelop Marianna in his arms.

  Eleni jumped up too to join them in a group hug. ‘I always knew we were blood sisters,’ she said, tears streaking her face.

  ‘My mother considered you as her third grandchild, Marianna,’ Anita continued, ‘and when I go, this house will belong to all three of you equally.’

  ‘We must hope you won’t be going anywhere for a long time,’ Adonis told Anita and kissed the top of her head in a sudden surge of warmth towards her. Anita might not have been a very engaged mother, her limitations were many, but she wasn’t a bad person either. What she lacked in maternal instinct had been compensated for by Katerina. It was not so much that Anita had made no effort – she had been sweet and kind with the children, but that was all that she could manage. Later, in New York, when he was older and with Robert’s help, Adonis started to see that his mother’s weaknesses had been the result of her own unhappy life. Like her own mother she too had been unlucky in her choice of husband.

  He knew some of it, but not much. He was told little about his father, only that he had died and that he had been from the same mould as his grandfather, ‘Ivan the terrible’, as he was referred to on the rare occasions he was mentioned. The Linser women had a habit of not talking about the men who failed to thrive when they passed through the family.