The Messenger of Athens

by Anne Zouroudi

  But there was nowhere we could go, nowhere I could take her. The spies had every angle covered. I could have gone to her house whilst her old man was away, climbed through the bedroom window, but I was afraid. And I didn’t want it to be that way. I had this idea of romance, this twisted notion of honour, that it shouldn’t be something sordid, cheap, one eye on the clock, the other on the door. I dreamed of long, lingering love made in comfort. I wanted a vast, soft bed made with white sheets. I wanted to take my time. God knows I’d waited; I’d waited so long, and I wanted to savour it. Like fine wine, a gourmet dinner, I wanted to relax and taste and enjoy her, sleep it off afterwards with her in my arms.

  There seemed to be no answer, no solution – no no-risk solution. And I wasn’t sure – not completely sure – what I wanted to happen next. I wanted the best of all worlds. I wanted to keep my wife and child, and I wanted free access to my loving mistress. But I was never stupid enough to believe it would be that way. I’ve known enough philanderers come to grief on the rocks of discovery to know for sure my have-it-all preference was not in the realms of the possible. I needed to make a decision. I was going to have to choose.

  Here’s the punch-line. The joke is, my hesitation, my indecision, my cowardice, my fear of being caught, my inability to dive in and be damned with the rest, my need to be smarter than them, meant I got caught before the sin was even committed. I, poor fool, never tasted the full sweetness of the forbidden fruit. I never had her. I was technically innocent, guilty only of very serious intent.

  I had been thinking about Aunt Sofia. The night before my brother came for me, I dreamed of her. I dreamed she was in a meadow, a walled meadow. It was spring, a glorious day, and the meadow grass was green, and sweet; I could smell it, in my dream. Aunt Sofia was picking wild flowers; she held a bouquet, all purples and blues and pinks, scented and fabulous. She looked happy, not like she does in life; in life, she always seems unhappy. She was singing to herself, and I wanted to go and join her, pick myself some flowers in that fresh, enticing meadow. But the wall around the meadow – a stone wall – was as high as my shoulder, so I needed to find the gate. I began to walk around the outside of the meadow, looking for a way in. All the time I was calling to Aunt Sofia, ‘Aunt, Aunt, show me the gate.’ But she couldn’t hear me, or paid me no attention. She just went on gathering flowers. I went round and round and round the meadow, but I couldn’t find a way in.

  I couldn’t say why, but it felt like a bad dream. It had made me nervous. It had put Aunt Sofia in my mind as I threw scraps to our scrawny chickens.

  Aunt Sofia was widowed young. I don’t remember Uncle Stamatis; he was long gone before I was born. The story was he was lost in the high seas of the Bay of Biscay. It was a story never questioned; mention Biscay, and see the fear in the eyes of the old sailors as they cross themselves.

  Then, one night in summer, some years ago, my father sat drinking with old Uncle George. And as they drank, they talked, and I heard something to make me understand that our family’s fable about poor, drowned Uncle Stamatis was no more than a myth.

  Great Uncle George wasn’t much of a drinker. He said it gave him a headache. But that Easter, he’d done some work at St Vassilis, and one of the priests there had given him a couple of bottles of their old wine. Uncle George had decided this evening was the time to drink them, and my father had been given the honour of joining him. It’s a fine wine they make over there, mellow, and rare, only a barrel or two a year. And Father and Uncle George gave it its due; they sat there some hours, drinking, and talking.

  I was sitting in the courtyard eating some of the black figs Uncle George brought with him. They were halfway into the second bottle, when Uncle George made a joke about Aunt Sofia. Sofia the Widowed Virgin, he called her. Perhaps, he said, they should get Stavros, the simpleton who all the men say is hung like a donkey, to go and sort her out. Perhaps, he said, Stavros would succeed where Uncle Stamatis had failed. Who wouldn’t have legged it, he said, from a frigid old witch like her? My mother came running out of the kitchen then, and told the old fool to shut his mouth, but I’d heard enough by then to work it out for myself.

  It had passed me by for years: Aunt Sofia was the skeleton in our family’s closet. To me, she was a melancholy woman, who came and sat each day in our house and said next to nothing. She was my mother’s sister, but a stranger would have taken her for my grandmother. She was, to me, like an old, grey-whiskered dog which, though it’s past working and expensive to keep, still no one has the heart to take out the back and shoot. Put it out of its misery. She looked like that was what she needed: to be put out of her misery. She was an inconvenience to us all, but it was my mother’s duty to take care of her. That’s what I believed. They said she was a little touched. Sometimes she’d have a ‘turn’, when for days at a time she’d do nothing but cry, silently. We learned to ignore her; we lived our lives round her, waiting for when she’d go home. There was talk, only once, of the Leros asylum. My mother slapped that idea down. She wouldn’t be tainted by the disgrace of insanity.

  But it was concealing disgrace which had ruined Sofia. Her husband had deserted her. She couldn’t keep her man. He took off and left her to fend for herself.

  So my family dressed her up, in her prime, as something respectable: a widow. For the elderly, at the end of their lives, the restricted life of a widow is no hardship. For the young, childless girl that Sofia was, it was cruel. Dressed always in black, barred from social activity, shut up alone for much of the time in that old house high up in the village; all this out of respect for a man who didn’t deserve it and who she knew, all the family knew, wasn’t even dead. For over thirty years she played her part, and lived with the knowledge that he might, one day, come back to the island and expose her to ridicule and shame. They made her guard the family honour when they could have demanded back her dowry and had the marriage annulled for non-consummation. As a virgin, she might have found another man willing to take her on and gone on to have children, a daughter to care for her, and grandchildren for her old age, the pleasure of their weddings and baptisms. All that, they denied her.

  So maybe it was sixth sense that made me dream of Aunt Sofia, because that’s what my brother brought news of that morning – scandal, and my own disgrace.

  He watched me for a while with that superior, insolent look on his face which always makes me want to punch him. He considers himself above such low, domestic chores as feeding chickens. Mr Free Spirit, old Fast-and-Loose. They’ll get to him, and I’ve heard it’ll be sooner rather than later; my mother has her eye on someone for him, and he doesn’t even know it. He lit a cigarette, but I recall he didn’t offer one to me. I didn’t speak to him, and I thought he’d go away.

  He finished his cigarette and dropped the butt in the dust, grinding it out with his foot.

  He said, ‘What have you been up to, then?’ He had a sly look on his face, but then, he often did.

  I didn’t take his meaning at first. I thought he was making a casual enquiry, so I just said, ‘Not much.’

  ‘If you call screwing Andreas the Fish’s wife not much.’

  It came like a smack in the mouth, a broadside. His crudeness was no surprise, but it made me angry. He is that kind of man, but his disrespect to Irini stung. He reduced her in a sentence to the level of a fast fuck, when to me she was . . . everything.

  But there was worse. They’d put our names together, and the storm was breaking. I had to know what evidence they had against me, but I was too smart to ask. I needed to know who’d been talking. I wanted to know who knew, or thought they knew. It would be useless to protest I hadn’t slept with her. I was guilty, at the very least, of being seriously involved with another woman. I wanted to know exactly how deep in the shit I was. I wanted to know if her old man knew, and if he was coming after me.

  I knew my face must have said it all – I’d felt the blood just drain away, like water tipped out of a bucket – so I made an effort to recompose
myself, keeping my head down, pretending to look for eggs in the stinking chicken hut.

  And whilst I had my head down, I decided my reaction would be no reaction.

  ‘Is it right, then?’ he asked.

  ‘Is what right?’ I turned and looked him in the eye.

  ‘About you and Andreas the Fish’s wife.’

  I laughed. ‘Where do you get this shit from?’ I asked him. ‘Now piss off, before Elpida hears you.’

  ‘Father’s waiting to talk to you.’ He smiled, pleased to be the bearer of bad news. He might have been lying, so I ignored him.

  ‘At the house,’ he said, ‘now.’

  I barged him with my shoulder as I walked, all unconcern, into the house. I told Elpida I had some business to take care of and that I would be gone for a short while. Of course she wanted to know what business, so I ignored the question. Takis followed me out to the truck and got in the passenger side. I lit my cigarette before I got in, because I didn’t want him to see my hands shake.

  As we drove up to my mother’s house we didn’t speak. He volunteered nothing, and he was the last person I would ask.

  They were waiting for me. My father was there, of course, and Uncle Janis, and Pappa Philippas the priest and, to my surprise, Uncle Louis. My father, Uncle Janis and Uncle Louis were all sitting at the table, looking serious and smoking. They had empty coffee cups in front of them. Pappa Philippas’s coffee cup was full, but he had a half-empty glass of whisky beside it, poured from a bottle in the middle of the table. As Takis and I walked in, he took a large slug of spirit. Aunt Sofia was sitting in her usual place, in the corner, behind the door. My mother was in the kitchen; I couldn’t see her, but in the awkward silence I could hear the clatter of crockery and saucepans. And for the first time I could ever remember, she didn’t come to greet me, or call out my name. That made my heart sink. It told me things were bad.

  My father stared at the table and said, ‘Come in, son. Come in and sit down.’ He didn’t want to look at me, but Uncle Janis did; he gave a sort of shrug, which said, ‘You’d better do as he says, but this is nothing to do with me.’ He poured more whisky into the priest’s glass, then held the bottle up, offering a shot to me. I shook my head, and sat down near my father. Takis sat over by the window, smirking, waiting for the party to get under way. My father coughed, and flicked ash off his cigarette. He must have been thinking hard about where to begin. My mother had stopped rattling plates. The kitchen was silent.

  My father said, ‘What’s been going on, son? We’ve heard you’ve been sleeping with some woman.’ His choice of words was polite, and unnatural for him – out of respect, I suppose, for Pappa Philippas and the women. If we’d been alone, he’d have spoken plain.

  ‘Says who?’ I sneered. It was an uninspired and childish response, but then, they were treating me like a child. They were all looking at me. I knew my face was red, partly in indignation and outrage – how could they treat me this way? – but mostly out of embarrassment. Having my supposed sexual encounters aired before my family (especially my own mother) and the village priest was mortifying, like a nightmare where you’re running around naked, and everyone else is clothed.

  My indignation was at the hypocrisy of all these men, with the possible exception (though not necessarily, by any means) of Pappa Philippas. All of them had had women on the side. My father had had two that I knew about; Uncle Janis had had more than I could count. And Uncle Louis knew that I knew about his sexual adventures; his liaisons at the army camp were common knowledge. Did he think that I’d forgotten the occasion when I caught him with his pants unzipped, behind the bakery, and that boy walking away, still counting his money?

  But how could I challenge them, remind them of their misdemeanours? My mother was eavesdropping in the kitchen. And yet I was confused. They all knew themselves guilty on multiple counts of the crime with which I was charged. So what was special about my case?

  My father said, ‘Uncle Louis saw you kissing her.’

  Ah. The truck behind us on the road. I glared at Uncle Louis. He was fiddling with the handle of his coffee cup. No point in further denial.

  ‘Well?’ I asked him. ‘And if you did, why didn’t you keep your big mouth shut? What brings you tittle-tattling up here? What the hell has it got to do with you?’

  He looked pained, and patronising.

  ‘It was my duty,’ he said. ‘The honour of this family is at stake.’

  This was too much.

  ‘The honour of this family?’ I looked round the table at each of them in turn.

  ‘And in what ways do you fine gentlemen uphold the honour of this family when it comes to screwing around?’

  My father looked at me coldly. Then, there was a bark of laughter from Takis by the window. My father spun round in his chair.

  ‘You,’ he yelled, ‘get out! Get out of this house until I say you can come back in it!’

  Takis pulled himself out of his chair, indifferent and smiling, and slunk out the door. My father had handled him badly. He would be on his way, even now, to his friends to pass on this juicy titbit of gossip.

  Uncle Louis hadn’t finished.

  ‘When I saw you with that woman,’ he said, ‘I was not alone. Anna was with me.’

  No more needed to be said. Anna, his wife. My wife’s cousin.

  I was suddenly more frightened than embarrassed or angry, afraid of what would happen if word reached Elpida’s ears. I was afraid of the tears and the scenes, of the long, wakeful nights with my wife sobbing beside me. I was afraid of the dressing-down from my father-in-law, and the sulky silence of my mother-in-law. I was afraid of the whispers as I passed people in the street. I was afraid of the loss of standing, and of losing face, and of having nowhere to run.

  ‘Has she said anything?’ I asked.

  ‘Not yet,’ said my father.

  So I didn’t hesitate.

  ‘What do you want me to do?’ I asked.

  My father had it all planned, had his words – so melodramatic – all thought out.

  ‘Swear,’ he said, ‘on the life of your daughter, and on the blood of Christ, that you will not go near that woman again, and we will protect you.’

  So I swore. It was the easy thing, and an act of pure cowardice. Pappa Philippas moved his attention away from his whisky glass long enough to hold out his hand and I kissed the ring on his finger to seal the oath. They had got me, and nailed me down, in under three minutes.

  In those early hours of discovery, my feelings for Irini simply evaporated. I was grateful to be free of them, and of that dreadful lust. Fear is a great antidote to lust. I believed I would easily forget her, and she me. We had, after all, been playing only a harmless game. At that moment, I never wanted to set eyes on her again.

  But as I left my mother’s, as I walked to the truck on legs that felt like water, someone called out to me. It was Aunt Sofia.

  ‘Theo! Theo, wait!’ she called. I was impatient with her. I wanted to speak to no one; I was hoping the earth would open up, and swallow me.

  ‘What is it, Aunt?’ I asked. She was clutching at my arm, and looking into my face.

  ‘Theo, listen to me,’ she said. ‘You must listen. Think about what you’ve done, what they’ve made you do.’

  My pride made me stick up for myself.

  ‘I’ve done nothing I didn’t choose to do,’ I answered.

  ‘Theo, look at me,’ she said. ‘It’s too late for me now. But you can learn from my mistake. Some things are worth fighting for, son. If you love this woman, don’t let them make you give her up. Stand up for yourself. Take her away from here. Just go, Theo. Step into the ring, son, and fight for her.’

  I looked at her. I heard her words, I suppose, but not what she was saying. And then I said a terrible thing. Here’s where the lying started in earnest. I patted her on the shoulder and I said, ‘Don’t worry yourself, Aunt. The woman is nothing to me.’

  I thought then she was going to cry. So I turned
her gently around, and said, ‘Go back inside, Aunt, before you catch your death of cold.’

  It didn’t matter, in the end, what we had decided, or what protection I had been promised as we sat, men of the world, around that table. Word was already out. Too many people knew too much. Takis had been talking, naturally, but the blame may not lie exclusively at his door. Any one of them – my father, my uncles, the priest – might have found the weight of such a gem of gossip too heavy a burden and felt the need to unload it, in confidence, and not to be repeated, to some acquaintance. And Anna, Louis’s wife, was likely to have spread the word on their side of the family, in the guise of a selfless act of duty.

  It started the next morning. Men I barely knew to wish ‘good morning’ approached me in the street, and, like conspirators, took me by the arm and whispered, ‘Is it true, friend, you’ve been with Andreas the Fish’s wife? What was she like?’

  I’d push them away and laugh. I told them all the same thing: much as I’d like it to be true, it wasn’t. If they believed me (and some did), they’d look disappointed and walk away. If they didn’t believe me, they’d wink and slap me on the back, call me a randy dog. In their eyes, I’d joined the ranks of the real men, the screw-arounds who used women as they were meant to be used, the serial philanderers who dared, the insatiable adulterers with too much lead in their pencils for one woman to handle.

  My life became a misery to me. I wanted to run away from it, but I had nowhere to go. Every time I had to walk in the house, or my mother-in-law’s house, I felt sick with dread that the news might have penetrated the citadel, that the real horror and trouble was about to start. I was unable to behave naturally because I couldn’t remember what natural, unworried, unguilty behaviour was. If Elpida didn’t smile at me when I walked in, I would probe and probe to find out why, irritating and annoying her. She became suspicious. As she pointed out, until recently I was totally indifferent as to whether she was smiling or not. I tried, unsubtly, to dissuade her from going out – to her relations, even to church. The churches were the most dangerous places of all. All those wagging tongues, gathered together there in one place. She went, against my wishes, and I paced the house until she returned, asking myself what the chances were that all those sharp, malicious women would be able to resist telling Elpida what they’d heard. Any one of them might have told her, one or two out of misguided friendship, the rest out of spite.