Shut up. Fuck you and your Belgium too. Shut up.
He licks his lips then bites them and scans the area with his eyes. There isn’t a soul in the street and no one seems to be at home in any of the houses. He takes the keys out of his pocket and tries to find the right one. His hands are shaking. And his legs. He’s shaking all over. He takes a step forward with the key in his hand. The dog goes nuts. It growls, throws itself against the gate, bites the air.
Leben. It’s me. Calm down. It’s me, man. Did you forget me already?
• • •
He backs away from the gate and starts walking alongside the wall. As he walks he keeps his eyes raised, scanning the pieces of sharp glass glinting on top of the wall, looking for who knows what. He turns the corner and keeps walking. It’s just not fair. Alamanos told him the dog would be chained up. He’s sure about that – he remembers it clearly. But now the dog is loose and is barking and throwing itself against the gate and biting the bars like it wants to break them in half. How the hell is he going to get in there? It’s unfair. Unfair.
If only he had something to drink. Something to drink, to get his courage up.
He pulls the piece of paper out of his pocket and unfolds it and reads what it says. His hands are still shaking. They’re sweaty, too. If the temperature stays under 38 degrees he can water every other day. If it goes above 38 then he needs to water every day. If the alarm goes off he presses this button – the bitch wrote a huge list of this shit. Temperatures codes telephone numbers. But not a word about what to do if the fucking dog goes nuts.
Around the other side of the wall he finds a green metal door. He doesn’t remember Alamanos showing him that. He checks to see if it’s open but it’s locked. He looks again at the sheet of paper and then folds it up and stuffs it in his pocket. He tries one of the keys in the door. Then another. Before he can try a third he hears the barking getting louder. It’s close, right on the other side of the door. Then the dog stops barking and there’s another sound behind the door, a terrible sound, a sound like he’s never heard before.
He shudders.
He looks up and down the street. Not a soul. A thousand things are passing through his head. It’s unfair. It’s just unfair.
And then he kicks the door as hard as he can.
The pain shoots up his leg to his stomach and chest and throat. He hops on one leg and his eyes tear up with pain. Incredible pain. He thinks he hears something from behind the door, something like panting, but he isn’t sure.
Years ago he used to get it on with a girl from Nikaia. Olga. From a good family, she was a student at the nuns’ school in Piraeus. Her mother didn’t like him and made her break it off. And when they went on vacation – it was summer, August, same as now – he broke into her house one night. He’d been drinking all afternoon and at night he broke into the house with a bottle of cheap whiskey and sat on the sofa and imagined all kinds of things. He was drunk, blind drunk. He imagined that he had a pocketknife and slit open all the cushions on the sofa and then all the mattresses and pillows in the house. He spray painted the walls and the mirrors, clipped all the wires, slashed clothes and tore up books, broke trays plates knick-knacks. He imagined shoving a rag deep in the toilet and another in the bathroom sink. All night he drank and imagined. But in the end he didn’t do anything.
Except before he left he went into the bathroom and turned on the tap in the sink. That was all.
And now he’d like to do the same thing if he could. Go into the house and drink and then break things and tear things and leave the place filthy. He would piss in the fridge and cupboards and on all the beds. And the dog – he’d leave it for last. If only. If only he could do all those things and then run off to someplace far away. Forget the apartment the car his job and disappear like one of those black tornadoes you see on television that come out of nowhere, destroy everything, and vanish again. Only he doesn’t want to lose Effie. He wants for them to stand naked at night in that enormous house and pretend it’s theirs, pretend that they’re people who aren’t afraid or worried about money and work. People who have shaken themselves free from the meaning of life and from the creeping passion for things, things they don’t have and will never have. And peaceful and fearless they’ll let their bodies lean on one another and peaceful and fearless they’ll feel the dizziness that’s born of the union of bodies. That’s what he wants. The union of bodies.
He limps away from the door and limps along the wall. His foot has swollen inside his boot, his palms are shriveled, sweat is dripping into his eyes. And though he no longer hears any barking he knows that the dog is also walking along on the other side of the wall. And when he gets back to the gate Leben is already there and jumps up onto its hind legs with its front paws on the bars and starts barking again and biting the air. Foam like white blood drips from its mouth and there’s a crazed look in its dark eyes.
He looks at the dog. He looks at the sharp green glass on top of the wall. And above that the sky spreading itself endlessly out in the pitiless light of August.
I have something to say, he says.
But there’s no one there to listen.
• • •
He gets into the Nissan and rolls down the window and looks at the dog that’s stopped barking and is staring at him with its mouth hanging open and its ears pricked. It’s laughing at him. It’s watching him and laughing. It’s clear as day, the dog is laughing. A laughing Belgian sheepdog. Belgian shitdog. Belgian shit-eating dog.
He lights a cigarette and leans his head back. His foot is numb and has started to swell inside his boot. He can feel the pieces of broken glass on the top of his head but he doesn’t want to touch them.
He’ll wait. He’ll wait. Something will happen. At some point the dog will get tired and go off somewhere. It’ll get hungry, or thirsty, or go to sleep. And as soon as that happens, he’ll let himself into the house. And then he’ll do something.
He’ll wait. He’ll sit all night in the car and wait. He’ll wait for the whole night to pass. He’ll stay there all night and the next day and as many days as it takes. He’ll wait.
The swollen orange sun disappears behind the mountain. Night is falling. The glass on the top of the wall isn’t glittering anymore. A bird flies over the wall and vanishes as if the sky swallowed it up.
He’ll wait.
It’s still only the third of August.
Go Out and Burn Them
MARCH EIGHTH, a day of wind and no sun. Through the kitchen window I watch as my father hangs clothes in the yard. He lifts them out of the basin shakes them out and clips them to the line with clothespins. Since Sunday after the memorial service and the hassle of relatives coming and going he’s set himself to washing all of my mother’s clothes – he won’t leave a single stitch unwashed. Skirts shirts nightgowns. Winter and summer clothes. He’s even washing her underwear. I thought he was doing it to kill time, to keep himself occupied, so he wouldn’t think, wouldn’t remember. But now I see him hang a cream-colored bra on the line and then a pair of panties with a little kitten on the front wearing a red bow – I see him standing there for a moment caressing that printed kitten with his thumb and I don’t know what to say.
If only the kitchen had no window so I wouldn’t have to see.
• • •
When I got there we drank coffee and smoked a cigarette. We didn’t say much. How things are going at work, if I’ll be able to get some vacation time around Easter – that sort of thing. Then I asked about the recycling. The blue bins the municipality set out in the neighborhood and the bags they distributed for people to collect aluminum cans and plastic containers. Oh, that, he said. Keratsini, riding the wave of progress. Mark my words, soon they’ll be recycling people, too. Why not? After all, don’t they already treat us like garbage? I wanted to bait him a bit more, see what he’d say about what happened the other day, but he pretended not to know what I was getting at, he didn’t even mention it. At some point he pulled a
packet of stamped letters held together by a thick rubber band out of his coat pocket and laid them on the table.
I found these yesterday afternoon in the attic. I had no idea she had them hidden up there. I stayed up all night reading them. We were married forty-three years and she never said a word. Take a look if you like, it’s something to pass the time. They really threw me for a loop.
What kind of letters are they? I asked. Love letters?
He lowered his head and looked at me over his glasses.
No, he said. Nothing to do with love. All the love stuff I’ve put in the wash.
He ground out his cigarette in the ashtray, licked his finger and tapped a speck of ash off the table and flicked it into the ashtray, too.
If we’d gone to Germany we could have saved her, he said. You remember what the oncologist said. Put a hundred thousand in your pocket and go to Germany. Sure, a hundred thousand. As if he were talking about drachmas, not euros. He had no idea. And the banks haven’t caught on, either, have they? They should be giving out cancer loans. The way it’s mowing people down they’d be making money hand over fist.
What are you talking about, Dad? Have you lost it completely?
I know exactly what I’m talking about. It’s what to do that’s beyond me.
He stood up and emptied the ashtray into the trash, rinsed it and set it upside-down in the sink. Then he took the basin of wet clothes and the basket of clothespins and went outside.
• • •
I make more coffee then sit down and take the rubber band off the packet and spread the letters out before me. They’re mostly from the ’60s, but a few are even older. Letters my mother wrote to her parents in Crete. Letters from her brother Drakos to their father. Letters between the siblings – my mother was one of six. Other letters from friends and relatives. Most are difficult to read – the ink is faded in places or the paper has stains or little holes as if mice have been chewing on them. I choose one at random and try to make out what it says. As I read, I keep coming across little gems, unexpected turns of phrase of the sort people wrote back then in their letters, in the good old days when the postman brought actual mail and not just bills and ads and notices about unpaid bills.
November, 1963. My uncle Drakos writing to his family.
Piraeus 11/27/1963
Dear honored Father and cherished Mother and beloved siblings. I received your dear brief letter and was very happy that you are well as we are too. Well father thank you very much for the basket everything was very nice the greens had rotted so we threw them out and they are gone to the devil the myzithra was moldy but Lefteria cleaned off the bad part grace be to God we ate it already and wish there were more.
Well father how is the weather in Vatolakkos. We here grace be to God have had plenty of rain it’s been a harsh winter with lots of rain and everyone is sick with a cold Lefteria caught the Asian flu and didn’t go to work yesterday well father love and health that is what is most important in life.
Well father and mother we finally got jobs on the busses I’m a ticket collector and now that I’m full-time I don’t have to worry and everyday I thank the Virgin Mary for helping me I even get a day off every week and vacation.
Well father like all of Greece I was very upset about that great man of Democracy that man of freedom who was killed, all of Athens and Piraeus sigh with grief, every day on the bus all the people say what a pity and sigh these few things I write to you of that Sainted Man Kennedy.
I have good news also, I think we are headed for new elections. Well father you should know that the Center will win pay no heed to the newspapers that say Karamanlis has so much support those are photographs from 1961, they’re not real and you can be sure that THE CENTER WILL WIN.
Well father I ask you to please send some olive oil, here I have to buy it and it’s difficult I don’t have much money to spare it’s a shame for us in the capital to be asking like beggars for a little oil but if you can believe it I make 60 drachmas a day and spend 50 on food I work all day just to eat, this is all I write to you.
Mother please tell brother Stelios the hero of Olympiakos that when I come I’ll bring him a ball and a uniform but I want him to learn to read and write tell him no more wasting his time. Hello brother Stelios Cretan hero of Vatolakkos you’ll live forever and always be a fan of OLYMPIAKOS down with Panathinaikos Stelios my hero we beat Panathinaikos and from their grief Michalis and our uncle Giorgis didn’t eat for two days they were so heartbroken.
Well father I learned you have a rifle and go out hunting so send us please a fowl.
Well mother I will come at Christmas but before I come I will have to see the beautiful bride father take care that the girl is pretty and from a good family. Take care that nothing goes awry.
Dear father and mother if I had money I would send you 200 drachmas for a cigarette.
I write you these few things and send kisses to you all and await your response. Give my regards to the neighbors and to anyone who asks after me. I await your letter. Your son Drakoulis.
• • •
At the bottom of the pile I find several letters from America. My mother’s godmother had sent them from Nea Iorki, Broukli, Atlant Siri. It takes a while for me to figure out that the last is Atlantic City. They span just about a decade, from September 1958 to March 1967. As I flip through the pages Christmas cards and black and white photographs slip out from between the sheets, yellowed with age and of people I don’t recognize at all. I find an undated postcard, too, showing a big white ship, the Olympia, with three bands of color on its funnel: yellow on the bottom, then blue, then black on top. The blue band has a yellow emblem painted on it that looks like a star on a stem. On the back of the card are printed the words Greek Line – T.S.S. Olympia. Beneath, several lines that are almost impossible to read, as if they’d been written by someone with Parkinson’s.
My dear relations we borded the boat from America on March 12 eager to see you we arrived Lisbon today we have a terrible sea I am in bed all the time with injections to stop the vomiting the ships hospital is full of wounded people broken arms and heads Markoulogiorgenas’s girl broke her knee you wouldnt believe what we are going through waves like mountains hit our boat people cry and pound there chests I will write to you in detale from Athens when we reach there my husband Fotis regrets it he says Virgin save us that is all I write with love your koumbara Eleni Varipatakis.
• • •
It’s almost two. I get up and pour myself a tsikoudia, put a few pistachios on a plate. My father is done with the laundry and now he’s wearing these orange plastic gloves and has gone over to the building site across the street and is filling the municipality’s recycling bags with plastic cups and papers. It’s about your father, Dina said the other night when she called. He’s not doing well, child. He wanders around the neighborhood picking up trash from the street and throwing it in that cycling thing, whatever it’s called. Then this afternoon he tried to climb into the bin. Jesus Christ in heaven, child. Stefanos was coming home from work and caught him just in time. Barba-Tasos, he says. Hey, barba-Tasos, are you nuts? What are you doing, you’re trying to get into the trash bin? Stefanakos, your father says, any man who lets his wife die like that deserves to go out with the trash. They can pick me up and recycle me, maybe I’ll come out a more useful man. You hear that? Have you ever heard such a thing? Then he just sat there by himself and laughed. Child, things aren’t right with your father. They’re not at all right, and I’m telling you now so you’ll do what you can. Because he’s a good man who’s had a tough time and everyone in the neighborhood feels for him.
The wind outside is stronger now. My mother’s clothes are whipping around on the line. A blouse with embroidery on the sleeves, her green jacket, a flower-print dress with narrow straps. Clothes that look like they’ve never been worn, clothes that no one will ever wear again. A tin can rolls into the middle of the street. My father crushes it with his foot, tosses it into his sack t
hen goes over to the blue bin. He empties the sack and stands in front of the bin with his arms at his sides. I close my eyes. I wait. I count to ten. To twenty. When I open them I see him standing at the gate looking at me in confusion, his mouth half open.
• • •
The longest letter is from Atlant Siri, dated 4/27/61. It caught my eye right away not only because it was the longest but also because it was the only one in an envelope. A clean blue envelope tied with a red bow, like a package. Like a wedding invitation.
Dear Lefterio my golden girl I got your letter and was very happy and please forgive me for not ansering right away. I was happy about the progress our Vatolakkos has seen and all the things you’ve written about that have made your lives easier God willing next year my husband Fotis and I plan on coming since he wants to get to know Crete we will stay 2 or 3 months and then leave again.
And when I go to the fields where I used to look for radishes I can go by taxi now that they’ve built roads since these days I cant imagine walking Ive reached a weight of 180 pounds. Grace be to God we are all well write to me how the olives are doing is there a good harvest this year? How is everyones work going? Are the oranges selling well? Tell my dear relation your mother to please leave me one orange tree with some oranges on it unsold so if the Virgin wills for us to come we can eat fresh oranges which I have missed so much. And please ask her to plant squash in my garden and when I come I can gather the squash greens and cook them with black nightshade to eat because that is the only dish Ive been dying for here Lefterio since in America you cant find squash greens or nightshade either. They bring zucchini from California but by the time it gets here its so mushy it turns your stomach to look at it.
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