Something Will Happen, You'll See

by Christos Ikonomou

  Tonight he talks again to Lena about the mysteries of the human body and of sleep and dreams.

  And then he tells her about Dr. Cohen’s rabbits.

  At an international conference on longevity in Melbourne, Australian professor of alternative medicine Mark Cohen announced that the rabbits he and his team pet every day at the lab live sixty percent longer than the rabbits they don’t pet.

  Lena stirs a little and murmurs something then stops. It must be a dream, Vassilis thinks and counts to three, since the average dream lasts between two and three seconds. But it might also be the cold. It’s been almost a month that the heat’s been turned off. The whole apartment building ran out of petrol, the tenants don’t have money to pay the monthly fees. For the past month the tenants have all been squabbling. Apartment buildings. Cold, damp, paper-thin walls. Walls that might as well be paper. Noise from people during the day noise from things at night. Doors closing, taps running, televisions on full blast. Noise. An endless hum in the night. In the other house it was different. The other house was a house with everything a house should have. And now it’s gone. But he doesn’t talk about that to Lena. He doesn’t say anything about the house that was lost or the job that was lost or the life that was lost.

  He gets up out of bed holding his breath. Very slowly and carefully. It seems to him that it takes a whole hour to stand up from the bed. And another to walk out of the bedroom because the floor squeaks. It growls like an animal that’s had its tail stepped on. From the bedroom to the kitchen is another hour.

  It’s like going from Chania to Souda Bay, Vassilis thinks.

  In the kitchen he lights a cigarette and cracks open the window to let the smoke out. November. It’s windy again tonight. And cold. He smokes and feels cold and thinks how nice it would be if he had some tsikoudia tonight, a drop of wine, something. He smokes and remembers that uncle of his whose wife locked him in the house so he wouldn’t go to the tavern and he sat there and drank all of her perfume. They’d fired him from his job two years before he would have been eligible for retirement. That’s when things took a turn for the worse. He found work wherever he could, even delivered souvlaki on a motorbike. And no one could believe a man could become a drunk in his sixties.

  He smokes and strange thoughts pass through his mind.

  He smokes and looks at the eucalyptus trees on the street below, how the branches come together and part in the wind. He smokes and counts the streetlights on the street across the way that seems to vanish into the sky. Sky Street. He keeps saying they should go there one evening in the car to see where it starts and where it ends and count the yellow streetlights from up close but Lena says no.

  I don’t like that street, she says. The way it ends so abruptly. We’re never going to go there, you understand? Never.

  He smokes until the cigarette burns out all on its own and then he opens the tap in the sink just a smidge and throws his cigarette butt down the drain. He checks the burners on the electric stove one by one. He makes sure there are no candles burning, makes sure the toaster isn’t plugged in, or the water heater left on. He makes sure the danger of a fire is negligible.

  Lena has her hands crossed over her chest. As soon as he lies down beside her she opens her eyes.

  What happened, she asks. Why did you stop?

  I thought you were asleep. Sorry.

  Don’t stop. Talk. So I can hear your voice.

  She closes her eyes. Vassilis turns over onto his side propping himself on his elbow and looks out at the lights on the street that climbs up the hill. Then he bends over Lena and starts to stroke her ears. Slowly and gently with circular motions he strokes Lena’s ears. It’s the first time he’s ever done that. The first time. He can hear his heart beating. Lena makes a cooing sound and in the darkness he thinks he sees her lips trembling. But it could just be his imagination. Except she’s definitely cooing – and it’s the only sound that doesn’t frighten him. The only sound in the night that pours a drop of sweetness into his heart.

  And then he starts to talk again.

  For Poor People

  LOSING YOUR JOB is like breaking a limb.

  The afternoon when they fired us I went down to the port. By foot from Korydallos like a hunted man Halkidona Maniatika then straight down Thermopyle to Agios Dionysios and the dock where the boats for Crete come in. I went like a hunted man because the day seemed frightening somehow a day in July and the place black with heat. There was a strange light that day black and harsh as if some curse had changed the shapes of things and made everything unrecognizable houses roads cars everything unrecognizable as if you were a stranger in a strange land and all the people had vanished and all you saw was a frightened dog every now and then licking the water that dripped from the air conditioners overhead that shuddered and panted and I kept walking and looking up at those air conditioners and saying up there it’s another day another country a cool day in a country that sleeps cool and full and scared. I kept going but it wasn’t easy it was as if something had broken inside me and I kept thinking about what Aris had said while emptying his locker and folding his uniform and gloves and the khaki work belt and all his stupid clothes he had to wear on the job folding them all slowly and carefully as if they weren’t dirty stained work clothes full of holes but the clothes of some person who had suddenly died and left them all behind and someone else who was still alive had to gather them someone always has to do that someone always has to gather the things of the dead because the things the dead leave behind are the last bits of rope binding them to this world and some living person always has to untie those last bits of rope because no man is an island right we’re just boats.

  That’s what Aris said.

  Losing your job is like breaking a limb.

  • • •

  I had a place down at the port. A place all my own, like a second home, a rickety wooden bench over by where the trucks headed for Crete sat and waited to load. I sat there too every evening, winter and summer, for hours, and watched the ships coming in and out of the port and the people and cars and trucks embarking and disembarking. If I had anything to drink I drank and sang, always the same song, always “Sittin’ On the Dock of the Bay” – Otis Redding is just the thing for someone spending his hours down at the port, at the dock, where the sea meets the land, where everything is both together and apart, where people come together or part, like sand and waves, sometimes calm and indifferent and sometimes with a terrible roar and passion. Even if I was sober I still sang the same song, always the same song, and it bothered me that I could never get Otis’s whistling right, not once, not a single time, drunk or sober – I sing like a bald crow and whistle like a pelican, as Aris used to say. If the weather was nice I would stay and watch the sunset. I watched the sun and the light from the sun falling on things, the last rays before the sunlight disappeared, I watched the light from the sun slip slowly over the ships and the warehouses and over the apartment buildings that lined the port over the people drinking coffee on their balconies or smoking or watching television or driving or walking or running to catch the bus and over women hanging clothes out to dry on the tops of buildings and children hiding behind sheets which were white or printed and pretending to be ghosts and shouting boo and frightening their mothers. Over the sparrows and the turtledoves that cooed and flapped their wings and drank the water that dripped drop by drop from the solar-powered water heaters. And the things I saw were more beautiful and hurt my eyes more than what I thought I was seeing, because what I thought I was seeing was fire. A fire that burned the world from the inside, without flames or smoke, a fire that burned the world silently and secretly and punishingly. Aris didn’t believe any of it, didn’t believe that the birds drank water that dripped from the water heaters or that I saw fires burning without smoke or flames, but one Christmas Eve – the last Christmas I remember it snowing at the port, and when I went down and saw my bench from a distance it was buried in a pile of crusted snow and I thought it
looked like a huge delicious Christmas cookie covered with powdered sugar, or like an unborn snowman waiting to come into the world, waiting for someone to turn him into a proper snowman, with a pudgy body, a round head, and a carrot for a nose – that Christmas Eve Aris bought me a present with part of his Christmas bonus and gave it to me as we were getting off work. It was wrapped in shiny red paper with Saint Vassilises and flying sleighs pulled by reindeer without antlers. When I tore the paper and opened the box I saw a pair of goggles like the kind welders wear, a big pair of goggles with orange protective plastic and very thick lenses.

  He grabbed me by the shoulders, hugged me, kissed me next to my ear. He smelled of tsipouro and smoke and work. His eyes shone in the frozen light of day.

  For the port, he says. For you to wear when the fires come so your eyes don’t burn. How do you like them? Try them on. Aren’t they great? Do you like them?

  He had a firm grasp on me, wouldn’t let go.

  Merry Christmas. Merry Christmas, and here’s to many more. Here’s hoping the bad times are over.

  Then he stepped back and pretended he was holding a microphone and looked at me and started to dance and sing.

  Your fireproof eyes have shattered me

  I’m shattered by your fireproof eyes

  Everyone gathered around and watched us drunkenly and clapped and laughed.

  That Christmas Eve at work, at a spare parts warehouse in Korydallos, amid laughter and songs with the snow outside covering the world and the world glistening white and cold and harsh as a marble threshing floor.

  • • •

  That’s why I noticed her at first. Because her hair seemed to have caught fire and be burning without smoke or flames. After the initial shock, I put on my special goggles which I always had with me, hanging from my belt loop, and thought how she deserved to burn up entirely – though she had beautiful hair, thick and golden like a halo – she deserved to burn because she was sitting on the wooden bench, on my bench, my second home. I didn’t like it. It wasn’t right, wasn’t how things should be. It was like coming home from work and finding a stranger with her feet up on your sofa. The way she was dressed wasn’t right either. It was the middle of July and she was sitting there in an overcoat, black pants, and boots. I stopped a ways off and watched her, devoured her with my eyes. She was sitting cross-legged, wrapped in her coat, hands in her pockets, staring through half-closed eyes at the water. And through my special goggles I saw the sun reddening her hair and saw the wind mussing her hair and told myself that I was seeing a tree whose trunk had been blackened by fire and the fire was climbing higher and burning the tree’s thick branches and tender leaves. And right away I gave her a name. I called her the lady with the little coat, because as everyone knows if you give a name to something foreign to you, if you name the thing that’s foreign your fear of the foreign recedes. It didn’t matter that she was too young to be a lady and didn’t look at all like a lady or that her coat wasn’t little but a regular overcoat, black and heavy, down to her knees. It’s still what I called her. The lady with the little coat. Because I needed to give her some name. And because she didn’t have a dog.

  • • •

  Losing your job is like breaking a limb.

  At first you don’t feel anything, Aris said, the break is still fresh and it doesn’t hurt. The pain and the fear come later, when the wound cools. When you remember the rent and the bills and the help wanted ads in the paper. The phone calls each morning, the harsh voices on the other end. Sorry, someone else beat you to it. Call again tomorrow. Send us a resume and we’ll see – these days they want a resume for a job moving furniture. The pain and the fear come later, Aris said. Aris, who got tossed out onto the street with me like cigarette butts without an explanation, just a phone call. Aris, who said he didn’t know what he might do tonight – I might hang myself with my belt, he said, or go down to Faliro and drown myself in the sea. We’ll see. I haven’t decided yet. Depending on my mood. If I had a gun it would be easier. Once and for all, no messing around. The poor guy had taken it to heart, even though we both knew it was coming, we’d known for a while. It was just a matter of time, as they say. You guys in the warehouse they’re going to cut your heads off svin svin svin with a laser, the jaundiced guy over in accounting had been telling us. Svin svin svin, he said to Aris whenever they ran into one another in the hall or the cafeteria. Svin svin svin – and he’d laugh. He was right, the bastard, they threw us out just like that, no laser just a phone call. They called in the morning and by noon we were out on the street. And then something strange happened. As we were leaving, Aris stopped for a drink of water from the spigot by the entrance. July, the middle of the day, incredibly hot. But when he turned on the spigot – it was one of those big garden spigots, with the nozzle turned upwards – the water jumped out at high pressure and hit him in the face and almost knocked him to the ground. I’d never seen anything like it. He jumped backwards as if he’d been shot. He stumbled, gave me this awful lost look. Soaked from head to toe, water dripping from his hair and his collar and his arms. He looked at me and didn’t say a word but his eyes spoke and spoke and spoke. I’m fifty-two years old, they said. With a son in the army and a daughter at the University of Crete. And their mother working four-hour shifts at the supermarket. And credit card debt. And now you and I are out of a job. And I’m fifty-two. So what’s going to happen now? What do we do now? Can you tell me that?

  I went over to him, grabbed his arm, took him to the bus stop. When the bus came he got inside and our eyes met through the window. His mouth had run out of words, but his eyes said all kinds of things.

  I don’t know if my eyes spoke, or what they might have said to Aris.

  • • •

  I sat at the very edge of the dock where the cement made a corner with my legs hanging over the inky blue black dark red water with its film of petrol and bubbles and trash. I looked at the lady with the little coat. July, forty degrees in the shade and she’s sitting there wrapped in her overcoat as if she were living in some other season on some other day in some other world. I looked at the ships and water and seagulls diving from up high and they looked back at me with their bloodthirsty yellow eyes. I tried to see everything, to smell and hear everything – the wind and the waves and people’s voices and the hum of the engines. Not to pass the time but so it wouldn’t pass, because time isn’t medicine, it doesn’t heal all wounds, on the contrary, time is the worst doctor, as that Trypes song goes. I looked at the enormous ship, the Lissos, which was about ready to put out to sea and was swallowing people and cars and trucks into its dark belly. I looked at the lady with the little coat who was watching the ship and I said to myself she can’t be traveling anywhere and she hasn’t come here to see anyone off and I said to myself it just isn’t normal – but what else that day had been normal? And then I saw them lowering a big hose from the side of the ship and the water gushing out of it into the sea and I thought about Aris again. How he’d jumped back when the water hit him, how he’d stumbled weakly, how he looked at me when the water slapped him in the face. And I said for sure he wouldn’t hang himself with his belt tonight or go down to Faliro to drown himself in the sea. I said for sure he’d be sitting on the sofa smoking and drinking tsipouro without anise and watching television. Because he’d told me plenty of times. If you’re down or have something on your mind, he said, just turn on the television. It’s the best medicine, just take it from me. TV. For people like us, for poor people, there is no other medicine.

  • • •

  When the ship left its moorings, when the dock emptied of port officers and passengers and cars, when the waves from the wake stopped slapping the thick tires that lined the side of the dock, the lady with the little coat got up off my bench and went over to the edge of the pier and perched on a mooring bollard. She sat with her hands in her pockets and looked at the ship vanishing off to our right. A pale face, she hadn’t spent much time in the sun. She sat there until
the ship disappeared and the smoke from its funnel and the long foamy wrinkles ships leave in their wake as they steam away. Then she kneeled in front of the bollard and pulled three cans of spray paint from her pockets and shook them vigorously and started to paint the black metal of the bollard. It was something else to see. Something else, really. How she moved her hands so deftly and gracefully, switching cans, stopping to correct something then continuing her work hunched over, silent and engrossed – I only saw her raise her head once and look off into the distance in the direction of where the ship had gone.

  When she was done she rubbed her hands on a cloth she pulled out of her pocket – who knows what else she was hiding in that little coat – and then stood up tall and took two steps back and looked at the bollard cocking her head to one side and then went back to the bench. I waited. I waited for some time to pass trying to be discreet about it. Then I stood up and walked toward the bollard, feigning indifference, looking at the sea with my hands blocking the sun from my eyes, as if I were waiting for a ship that would take me to where I wanted to go or for a ship that would bring me someone I wanted to see. I was expecting her to have painted something really special but all I saw when I went over there was something that looked like a child’s drawing. A yellow smiley face with black eyes and very red lips. It was no work of art or anything but I kept on staring at it and wondering: What was it, what did it mean? What did it mean to paint a little yellow person – it wasn’t a man or a woman either – with an enormous red smile on a mooring bollard. What was it, what did it mean. The woman on the bench was also staring at the bollard – she paid no attention to me, like I wasn’t even there, though I was actually standing right in front of her wearing my welding goggles with the thick lenses and orange protective plastic. She had wrapped herself in her overcoat with her hands deep in her pockets letting the breeze muss her hair which now that the sun was disappearing behind the apartment buildings had lost its shine and grown darker around the edges like a halo in an old icon. It was like coming home after work and finding a strange woman sitting on your sofa staring silently at a painting she’s made on the opposite wall. And my mind went again to Aris. If he’d been there he would have gone over and talked to her for sure. For sure. He’d sit next to her and offer her a cigarette and start asking all kinds of questions and talking to her in his calm gruff voice.