And he remembered being, finally, alone and naked with Elpida. She had wanted to please him, but had no clear idea of what was expected of her. When she had seen the size of his member, she had been afraid, and penetration had been difficult, and very painful for her. She had cried, afraid that she had failed him and that he would send her back to her mother’s house in disgrace; embarrassed and unhappy, they had fallen asleep, two strangers left alone to make the best of it.
She was standing here, next to him, and when he glanced at her she gave him a little smile. But his face remained sombre. He had seen his brother smile at her, from across the nave, and he had seen the way she dropped her eyes, and lifted them, and returned his smile, with a warmth she did not seem to feel for him.
When the service was over and Grandpa had been carried up to the cemetery and laid in the ground, the men left the women to it. The women fussed and cried, worriting about oil for the candle glass, bickering about whose flowers would be shown to best advantage where. Grandma, hysterical, lay down in the dirt and declared she would never leave the graveside, never.
The neighbours wandered home. Theo walked slowly with his father and Uncle Janis down to the kafenion in the village, old Nikolas and a few others with them. Not Takis: no one had seen Takis since they had left the church. They said little; they were all miserable. Michaelis called for whisky; the waiter brought a bottle.
They drank in silence for a while, but when the whisky began to blur the edges of their sadness, they started to tell stories about Grandpa, of the way he had been, and the things he had done.
‘The old fool and his teeth,’ said Uncle Janis. ‘I’ll never forget that day. When his teeth got so bad they just had to come out, he let that idiot Thassis persuade him he knew how to fix them. Down he went to the beach, made a driftwood fire and gathered all the sea snails he could find. He heated the snail shells in the fire until they were hot and then he bit down on the shells with the bad parts of his teeth to burn the rottenness out.’
In chorus, they laughed the refrain, ‘The old fool!’
‘Aye, the old fool! His mouth was ruined! Sore and blistered for days. But he was too proud, or too scared, to go to Kos to see a dentist, so that was that. Pained him ever after, didn’t they? Spent his last years eating wet bread and paps. Bit of fish, sometimes. What did he used to say, Mikey? “Nothing that a bit of clove oil won’t cure.” The old fool.’
There was silence. Above the bar, a caged canary sang. Michaelis picked up the whisky bottle and splashed spirit into all their glasses.
‘A toast to him! A toast to the old fool, wherever he is!’
On into the evening they drank, until they had drunk themselves through cheerfulness and maudlin again. Theo’s head began to ache, and he wanted to leave; and yet, reluctant to go home, he stayed. Through the open doorway, he watched a woman make her way down the street. Her hair was long, and full; he watched her until she turned the corner, out of sight. On and on they sat, keeping company, sharing memories, until they heard the roll of thunder overhead, and it began to rain.
It’s still raining; it’s pissing down. We’re sitting in the house. We’ve been sitting in the house for three days.
Nothing changes. The years all start the same and end the same. This one limped round to another winter just like last winter. Next winter will be no different. These old stone houses are cold as death. The cold gets inside you, under your skin, chills your bones until they ache with it. We wrap ourselves in our coats, wear them all day, inside and out. We can’t change our clothes; it’s too cold to undress, and our clean clothes are damp, stinking and rotten with the mildew. There’s nowhere dry enough to air them. Where the bedroom walls back on to the water cistern they’re crawling with fusty grey mould. We all cough from damp-filled lungs. The rain runs in like it owns the place. It comes under the doors; it comes round the window-frames. The carpets are all rolled up in the middle of the room. There are wet towels everywhere, soaking up the water, adding to the damp. Every hour or so, Elpida fetches a bucket and wrings out the towels. Her hands are red from the work, chapped and cracked, split between the fingers. Without the carpets, the wind whistles up through the cracks in the floorboards, rattling the glass in the china cabinet.
In the mornings we put up with the cold; I lie on the sofa with the blankets from the bed piled on top of me, watch TV, smoke. Elpida cooks, winter food. Boiled cauliflower. Lentils. Chick-peas. Fried eggs. Stuffed cabbage. Oranges. I dream of meat, a thick beef stew, maybe roast lamb. But when it rains, we don’t work; when we don’t work regularly, there’s no money for meat. When she’s not cooking, Elpida makes work for herself, cleaning everything she can think of: the light fittings, the chair legs and, between cloudbursts, the street outside. She runs to the baker’s for bread. Me, where can I run to?
In the afternoons, when Panayitsa comes home from school, we go to Elpida’s mother’s. The TV’s always on but no one ever watches it because someone’s always babbling on about nothing: how the woman next door let her kids go out in the rain and how she never sweeps the street in front of their house; whether the women are going to the festival at St Katerina’s tomorrow; will the ferry bring fresh vegetables. I smoke a lot, drink a lot of sage tea. Sometimes, Elpida switches on the electric fire (but only one of the two bars) and we all pull up a chair and huddle round it – me, Elpida, mother- and father-in-law, Panayitsa and Elpida’s grandmother, the mad, miserable old crone. My mother-in-law doesn’t understand anything about electricity except that it’s expensive. She unplugs the fridge at night to save money. If there’s a break in the rain, her father goes out in the yard, burns some sticks in a brazier and brings in the hot ashes, so before long we can’t see each other for smoke. Eventually, if we wait patiently, night comes. We go home, Elpida and Panayitsa go to bed, together, for warmth. I lie on the sofa under my blankets, freezing in the dark, smoking, and I wait.
If I went out, where would I go? The boredom makes me die inside; nothing to do, nothing, nothing to do.
Yesterday my mate Short George was passing, so I chewed the fat with him for a while. He and Tall George are going to Kos for a few days for a change of scene. I used to go with them, before I was married. We used to have some good times: go to a nightclub, drink in the bars, ride all over the island on our motorbikes. Have a change from home-cooking. Go to the cinema, look at the shops, maybe buy some new clothes. Find some girls, sometimes.
I’m a married man now, a serious man with a family. That life is over for me. What could I do?
I just wished him a good journey.
Four
Because the house was neither here nor there – not at the quieter port, where the smallest boats came and went, nor at the village heart, where the streets were lively with wives and rowdy children – it was called the Half-way House. Along the lane a few souls passed: old men, bound to routine, ambling to valley allotments, to water gardens already soaked by overnight rain; occasionally a car, truck, taxi or lorry; on weekdays, at eleven, the postman, precarious on his scooter. And, once an hour, bald-tyred and rattling, the twelve-seater bus.
In summer, when the heat was overwhelming and no cooling wind blew off the mountains until the late hours of siesta, it was a good house, shaded by the overhanging eucalyptus on the road, the back yard given shelter by the olive grove and one vigorous vine which gave no grapes. But in winter, it was a trial. Wind drove the rain under the badly fitted door and around the unsealed window-frames; water pooled on the marble floor and on the tiled sills. She piled the sills with towels, which must be wrung out and then dried, somehow; she mopped the floor, repeatedly. But the water, once in the house, carried damp into the walls, where it couldn’t be mopped, or soaked up by towels; soaked up instead by stone and plaster, it festered there, revealing itself eventually as foul, black mould. It climbed the walls, and crept across the ceilings; the spores spread like infection into their clothes, the laundered bedlinen, the carpets and the rugs she’d made by ha
nd. And the damp made it always cold, and dank; on sunny days, they sat outside for warmth. No house – no home – should be like that. But their landlord was in Athens, and never came here; more importantly, the rent was very low. It would have to do, he said, for now. If they were thrifty, before too long they’d build a dream house of their own.
Andreas hawked the cream of his catch on the mainland: the spiny-backed German fish, two good-sized snapper, peachy pink, the slender, silver bream and the ugly John Dory, the clawless local lobsters which had crawled into his traps, the urchins and the oysters he had gathered. Some of what he made, he spent on necessities – fresh stocks of ice, loaves of fresh-baked bread. He prepared his nets and lines to make his final casts, and, when all was in order, he set sail in the direction of home.
The ocean was his element almost as it was the fishes’. Under power, he steered the boat to rock over the gentle swell, or head-on to meet the rising giants, the wakes of ships and ferries. Where there was land – islands or islets, he knew them all – he ran her in close, to take advantage of their shelter; where there was no land, without reference to his compass his course was straight, as if the ruts between the waves were roads that he knew well. When it was time to halt, he remembered where the rocks would hold his anchor, and where it would drag useless across the sand, and let him drift; he remembered where he’d had success, the tiny coves and inlets where the catches had been good, and there he set his nets.
And he knew his quarry. He knew the habits of each species: the times they liked to feed, the weather that they favoured, the depth that they would swim. He knew which bait would be their downfall: a sugar-coated slice of shrimp, a luminous, squid-shaped lure, a crumb of bread or ham. It was, to him, a contest, which the smartest of them won. When the fish stole the bait, and got away with it, he cursed them. But, often enough, there was that weight on the line, that vibrating and tugging which told him he might win, if he was fast enough, and hauled in the fish thrashing and frantic, before it shook itself free.
He pulled them in and held the jerking, slippery, panting creatures to force the hooks back through their bony lips. His callused hands absorbed their slimy oils; the big fish bled, and spattered him with blood through gasping gills. This sharing of their fluids was, he believed, crucial to his skill. And every day he fished, he ate of them – raw urchins from the shell, sardines grilled on a fire, a tin of mackerel – and the acids of his stomach broke down their bones and skin and melded them with his. This way, he said, he shared their essence, and made their secrets his.
His life was with those sea-bred creatures. He shared their spirit, and their gift of silence. In another life, he’d choose to be a merman.
On Saturday, early in the morning, whilst she still lay in the warmth of the bed, Andreas came home. A key rattled in the lock, the door opened and quietly closed (she left the bed; the room was cold; she pulled on socks and slippers). A chair scraped across the kitchen floor, his striking lighter rasped, he coughed (she found her robe; bobbing before the mirror, she smoothed her bed-wrecked hair). As the smoke of his cigarette reached the ceiling, she was at his side, holding his hand, smiling at his smile.
He kissed her lightly, with salt-dried lips; his long-unshaven whiskers scratched her cheek. He looked a wild man, windswept, sunburnt, filthy. His eyes, so swollen and pouched from broken sleep they were only slits, were sore and red. And body, breath, clothes, he stank: sweat, oil, onions, piss. And fish.
‘Hello, wife,’ he said, still smiling.
‘Welcome home,’ she smiled back. ‘I’m glad you’re here.’
She made him tea, and fried him eggs, and as he ate, he told in brief the tale of his travels – where he had sailed, what he had caught, the ones that got away – and as he spoke, the stink rose off him like a miasma.
When he had eaten, he fetched the wooden barrow from beneath the vine. They walked together, companionably, in silence, down towards the sea, passing the verges where he used to gather her posies of shy, mauve cyclamen and bright, white marguerites. But he didn’t think of posies, not today.
At the jetty, he tied the boat in close, and loaded up the barrow. The polystyrene boxes dribbled clouded, scale-filled meltwater; within the boxes, the last of his catch – whitebait, bony sardines, petrol-blue garfish, long and thin as tubes, and grey mullet (which would go cheap; the people didn’t like it) – lay blank-eyed on chips of ice, discoloured and matt from their dissolving.
In the tiny cabin, she gathered up the blankets and the pillow from the plastic-covered mattress where he slept, and spread them on the wooden engine-casing to dry. The boat rocked gently with the movement of the sea; it swilled the bilge water beneath the deck like claret in a goblet, releasing its bouquet: spilt diesel, fish guts. She picked up his one plate – its rim held a clear imprint of his dirty thumb – his cup and bowl, the knives and fork and spoon, the empty water bottles and the beer cans, the tin of corned beef he hadn’t eaten, the remnants of a stale loaf, the peel of an apple.
She used to ask him, sometimes, to take her with him; she viewed his life romantically, as one of exploration.
But he, knowing the truth, objected.
‘It’s man’s work,’ he said. ‘You’d find it too uncomfortable.’ (And women at sea were bad luck. They talked too much, and felt the cold. They were nervous when the sea was rough, and prone to sickness.)
Now she understood the facts, and straightened out the mess and never asked. His life away from her was squalor, and survival.
‘I’ll be home for lunch,’ he said, and he trundled the barrow off along the seafront, calling to the women as he went, ‘Fish! Fresh fish!’
Irini watched him go. The women appeared in the doorways, brandishing their purses, flirting with him for first pick and extra weight. She saw him smiling, shyly, pleased. He pulled off his woollen cap and ran his hand over his baldness; but when one of the women, laughing, reached out and touched the smoothness of his head, the jealousy she sometimes used to feel just wasn’t there.
Around the bay, on the terrace of the café, the four chairs at Nikos’s table stood forlornly empty.
Irini headed home alone.
She was pleased to have an occupation. She made him pasticcio, fat, hollow pasta baked with rich meat sauce and cheese. He spooned in his food like a man starving, ripping lumps of bread from the loaf, wiping clean the plate. Beneath the table, one of his gifts to her – an octopus – slithered in a bucket, waiting to be beaten to a soapy pulp on the courtyard stones. His second gift – a leopard-spotted moray eel – lay on a platter, stiffly coiled, in the refrigerator, the hook still through its upper lip, a length of bright-blue nylon line attached.
‘I had to cut the bastard loose,’ he said, ‘before it took a finger.’ He feared these snake-like fish: a year before, when one had sunk its teeth into his palm it had not let go until he smashed its skull with a spanner. Turning septic, the painful wound had stopped him working for ten days. On the back of his hand, the scars remained, small dents in a jaw-shaped, curving ridge.
His gifts were meant to please her, and she tried to be pleased, but there was gutting, and beheading, and skinning, and beating, and boiling, and frying to be done, before she could enjoy them. Money for new shoes, she would have kissed him for.
He pushed his empty plate away, and pulled a roll of banknotes from his pocket. He counted them on to the table. He had done well.
‘Pass me the tin, wife,’ he said.
She took down the biscuit tin from its place upon the shelf. Giving her ten thousand drachma, he forced the roll into the tin, already stuffed with notes.
‘You haven’t taken any while I’ve been gone?’ he asked, and she lied. No.
‘Because,’ he said, ‘it won’t be long before we’ve enough to buy the land. And then we’re halfway there.’
He hadn’t given her enough. He never did. He didn’t know the price of meat, or milk, or oranges. It didn’t matter. The tin was always there, when more was ne
eded.
Andreas pulled the crust from a small piece of bread and, lifting the birdcage from its hook, carried it outside. He hung it beneath the vine where the sun was warmest, and, taking a crumb between thumb and finger, offered it through the bars to the silent lark.
‘Come on, Milo,’ he coaxed. ‘A treat for you, a song for me.’
Cautiously, the bird watched him; then, hopping along the perch, it picked the bread from his fingers.
‘Good lad,’ he said. ‘That’s my boy.’ The bird took another crumb, and another. As Andreas walked back inside the house, the bird lifted its head and began to sing.
Neither pleasure, nor distaste, but disinclination: she felt the inconvenience of undressing, at this time of day, and anticipated the discomfort of nakedness, in the damp chill of their bedroom. But the duty was hers, as much as preparing his food or ironing his clothes; it was a common enough bargain, her compliance for his money.
He did his best; he tried to make himself a temptation, lying ready but casual on the bed, his erection pushing up, ridiculous, beneath the towel around his waist. The bathroom had restored him to domestic humanity: his beard was gone, his nails were scrubbed, his hair was slick and flat, and all around him hung the sweet scent of soap and his cologne.
She found a smile, and put it on; she wore it as she stripped herself of clothing. He opened his arms, and she went to him, pressing against his clammy skin. He pulled the blankets over them, and pressed his mouth on hers, pushing his tongue between her teeth.
‘Wife,’ he said, releasing her. He was smiling in his pleasure, in his gratification-to-come; it was the same smile she had seen an hour before, when she had served him with his pasta. He whisked away his towel, and, fumbling with himself, pushed into her. She winced. He grasped her breasts – his hands were cold – and began to pump. Whilst his pumping was slow, and grinding, she watched the wall; as his pumping gathered pace, she matched him with the movement of her hips, to hurry him along. He took his time, but she was determined, and, before he had intended, gasping, his face screwed up in a chimp-like grimace; he was done.
The Messenger of Athens Page 6