‘We also examine the bones for evidence of deadly wounds such as injury from a bullet or by a sharp object. The genetic analysis of the bone constitutes the key for the correlation and the identification of the bones with the DNA method.’
‘He is too clean! Too neat!’ Yiayia said, pointing at him with her chin, with no sign of remorse, as though he was not there to listen. ‘Never trust men who are too clean ... too neat.’
The man cleared his throat, shifted his weight from one leg to the other, rotated his watch around his wrist, cleared his throat again, as though to add something. But he didn’t.
I guess he was used to relatives’ odd behaviours when they came face to face with what was left of their loved ones, after the passage of forty, sometimes fifty years.
‘Yiayia!’ I reprimanded her, elbowing her softly.
She looked at me briefly, reminding me of the respect I ought to show her. I smiled an uneasy smile and budged. She sucked the air behind her teeth and shook her head in disapproval of my improper behaviour. She growled and turned the other way.
I focused on the bone again. It looked ridiculously small and … fake. As though it had never been part of a human being – a human being whose cheeks dimpled every time he smiled.
‘So, young man, you’re telling me this is my husband?’
She gave him an icy stare with her glaucoma-hazy eyes. Her index finger pointing at the bone trembled a little bit, but she managed to control it after a few seconds as she blurted out the words:
‘This is a freaking bone!’
Yiayia had always had her way with words – sharp, precise, colourful sound, punctuated by heavy friction.
At moments dense with emotion she would choose monosyllabic words and allow you only to stare at her back while she kneaded fluffy dough or washed the dishes after big family meals – her scrawny shoulders working rhythmically.
‘And, Yiayia, what was Pappou like?’
Her small fists are pressing fiercely against the dough.
‘Tall.’
‘And, tell me, Yiayia, did you – ’
The back of her hand runs on her forehead.
‘Yes.’
‘And, what about now, Yiayia, do you – ’
She places her palms on the lip of the sink and glances at the sky.
‘Yes.’
* * *
A freaking bone with a plastic label and a code number.
The air was thick with the scent of disinfectant gel and sweat. The air-conditioning was running. Its continuous hum was interrupted only by a high-pitched shriek when the swing mode forced the flaps downwards. The canned icy air gushed onto Yiayia’s head, pushing away, momentarily, a tuft of white cotton-candy hair from the crown. The repetitive movement of the tuft of hair keeping tempo was funny, but nobody laughed as we would have done under a different circumstance. Now, nobody laughed.
Too many bones lying around. That’s what did it – too many bones. The voids of the orbital cavities sucking us in. Bones, so diligently arranged to form full skeletons, complete with their skulls and jaws, long beautiful femurs, thoraxes with the right number of curvy ribs.
All we had was a bone. All Yiayia got was a freaking bone.
The young man looked sincerely sad, almost apologetic, as though it was his fault.
‘Unfortunately, in some cases, bones were removed from their original mass graves ... and buried elsewhere, or …’ he hesitated, ‘they were thrown into the sea.’
Yiayia lifted the tips of her walking sticks a few inches from the ground and walked out of the room with extraordinary ease.
Her doctor had suggested a walking cane when her arthritis had got worse. We bought her two. But she never managed to use those ‘damned sticks’ to her assistance. She always held them up when she walked, as though she hadn’t had enough burdens to lift. She soon discovered other uses for them. She used them to point at things she wanted, at people she detested, or she brought them down on our behinds when we were little kids – thankfully not anymore. And they soon became some sort of a necessity, like a placebo. Or an extension of her arms. Or an unfit addition to her mutilated self.
‘I tell you, he is still with that actress! With that whore,’ she hissed as she walked to the exit. Her voice flew over our heads in search of a corner to nestle, in the vastness of the room.
Back in the day – in the day of the war in 1974, when my Pappou, a young man of thirty-five, went missing – Yiayia, a woman in her late twenties with her belly swollen with a baby – my mother – was angry at him. OK, maybe not just angry. She was pissed. He had vanished. As though an evil spell was cast upon him and pouf … he vanished in thin air. She refused to ask about him or look for him.
Back in the day – in the day of the war – other women would cry for their missing husbands. Not my Yiayia. Other women would hold their wedding pictures to the cameras of the international press and TV crews. In the pictures, women were wrapped up in layers and layers of white lace, and their husbands in cabana pants, smiling dorky smiles at the requests of wedding photographers. Others would hold a portrait snapshot of their loved one with the face turned to a forty-degree angle from the camera, smoking away, their eyes half closed as though they were drowsy on some sort of cool Seventies drug. All these, back in the day of the war. And in the days, and months, and years that followed the war.
Yiayia never –
Yiayia refused –
He had run away with ‘that whore’ Elizabeth Taylor.
Yiayia was convinced.
* * *
Pappou was working as a waiter in one of the hotels in Famagusta. Back in the day – the day before the war – when Famagusta was a tourist attraction for the likes of Brigitte Bardot and Raquel Welch.
Pappou, unlike most Cypriot men, was tall and blond, with eyes the colour of the sea that darkened or went pale according to his mood. He easily passed for a Hollywood actor. That’s why that ‘whore’ put a spell on him and swept him away from her – from Yiayia who was like any other Cypriot woman – dark and crudely shaped like a pear.
Mother was not raised to wait for him, agonise over him, make up scenarios about him being held in the dark depths of a prison somewhere in Turkey. She was not raised to wake up, drenched in sweat, with the misty tail of her dream gracing her with borrowed memories of a father she did not get a chance to know – his smell or the way his lips curved when he smiled. My mother’s father, Pappou, had run away with a Hollywood star. They moved to America and lived happily ever after in her luxurious villa, with a butler and a gardener taking care of acres and acres of lush lawn. A life sprinkled with sparkles, my Pappou led.
Only hate could be stronger than pain. Only hate could fill the horrendous void of vanishing into thin air. The vacuum of not knowing. And Yiayia was nurturing it for decades – for herself and for us.
So, Mother was looking for her father in the black and white backgrounds of Hollywood movies. She saw his face, many times. She was convinced. She once asked Yiayia if Elizabeth Taylor was some sort of a second mom to her. Yiayia spanked her and sent her to bed on an empty stomach.
Sometimes, at birthday parties, over bowls of crème caramel and Paris-on-ice, Yiayia would forget herself for a brief moment and she would silently count the years. ‘He would be fifty years old, fifty-one, sixty, seventy, seventy-five.’ Then she would fall quiet again, and if the quietness around her was too much she would remind us: ‘He left me! ME! With a baby on the way … for that fat whore!’ And everything would fall back into normal.
In 2006, they started digging them out of the ground – them, with their dorky smiles in their wedding pictures, them, who exhaled cigarette smoke at the sound of the camera’s shutter, them, whose skulls were crushed or punctured, and their bones were mixed with the bones of sheep and donkeys whose swollen carcasses decayed and suffocated them with their worm-infested slow return into nothingness. Bones in socks, and boots. Vertebra after vertebra of crushed spines. Rows and ro
ws of angry teeth. Her rage at him swelled and oozed like pus from an infected wound.
‘He is with her! With her, I tell you! In AMERICA!’
They were dug out of shallow graves by the banks of rivers and water reserves, out of olive tree orchards, out of the yards of mud-brick houses, and out of old water wells. They were among us all this time. Deep in the ground in the parking lot across from the cinema, or right below the surface, with the knee caps mistaken for smooth pebbles on the shore, their teeth scattered in the gravel.
On the day of the funeral, Yiayia sat next to the coffin – a small coffin; the size of a baby’s crib – and sent us out of the room. She closed the door behind her. All we could hear was her muffled words with lots of shs and chs. And after that, for a long moment there was silence.
The bone in its small coffin was escorted by soldiers to its proper grave, in a proper cemetery, with a proper tombstone and a proper marble cross with his name on it and a proper date of birth and a proper date of death.
At the funeral Yiayia did not cry. Pappou was still in Hollywood, among stars and sparkles. Her arthritic hands clenched on something small against her bosom. Something tiny.
Avocado
For Gordon Rohlehr
Kendel Hippolyte
Saint Lucia
i woke one morning and the Caribbean was gone.
She’d definitely been there the night before, i’d heard her
singing in crickets and grasshoppers to the tambourine of the
oncoming rain.
A childhood song. i slept down into childhood.
i woke blinking in a null glare without sunbeams, with no
winkling motes,
all things bright and 20/ 20 visible in neon but unilluminated.
And though the finches, doves, bananaquits, tremblers, grackles, mockingbirds
sang to each other still, the music ended when their singing ended.
Not like the day before when what they sang were motifs in an overture,
a maypole reeling and unreeling of ourselves and other selves of nature
swirling out into a futuriginal symphony of civilisation entitling itself Caribbean.
i thought: she can’t be gone. If she is gone,
what is this place? With her gone, who am i?
If she is gone, who braids the fraying fibres of memory into accord?
Traces the beach footprints of our children back to the first tracks of the Ciboney?
Who plaits the scattered flowers of islands and sprigs of continent into a votive wreath
cast in appeasement on the ocean restless with the unrestituted dead
to sea us into the altering calm of Sunday mornings, trees in surplices of light
and the allaying litany of the waves’ asking and the sand’s assenting?
i thought: She isn’t gone, just hidden. i’ll go find her.
And so i went looking.
i went first to the beach, of course, remembering
how she loved fluidities, the wavering margins of the sand and water,
the way that wind could soothe into the stinging of the sun’s rays –
the original elements, she’d said, dwelling within themselves while intermingling.
But at the beach, the barricades of deck-chairs, ramparts of pastel walls
blocked any wandering. A non-pastel guard, though, told me he’d glimpsed her
walking off between clipped hedges that closed after her into a maze,
tatters of madras hanging where there used to be hibiscus.
There had been rumours of hotel managers trying to hire the sunlight,
contract the hurricane into a breeze for gently fluttering brochures,
draw columns of strict profit margins permanently on the sand;
and the Caribbean, sensing the intimation of quick, crab-like hands crawling
to get underneath the white broderie anglaise of her skirt,
withdrew herself
the way the sea, clenching herself into a tidal wave, withdraws.
i left the beach, wondering my way back towards a town still struggling towards a city,
looking for her, as i used to, in an unexpectedness of roadside flowers,
a sudden glorying of croton plashing against a low grey house,
a slump of cane leaning into the road, just so, beside a shack.
And it was strange, their way now of receding from me while remaining.
Into the town, following the fadeout track of a child’s footsteps into memory
or perhaps trailing the under-scent of hot molasses, her history’s black sweat,
i dipped into the volatile conviviality of rumshops, their ricochet of dominoes,
cracking reports of man-to-man talk, the slam of coins on counter,
brawling laughter half an inch short of a fight, the bottle tipping, rum-settling everything –
the rituals exactly as they were when i was nine and she’d walked the whole neighbourhood.
i asked the rum acolytes – who unbowed their heads from drinks and dominoes and swore
she’d just been there, just! They asked me where she’d gone!
i left them in a spluttering fusillade of words about who’d seen her last
and stepped into a Saturday morning of a market hopscotched with vendors,
their come-to-me calls criss-crossing in a birdflight chattering,
their seasonings, vegetables, fruits set out in clusters – breves,
crochets, minims
of aubergine, pomerac, thyme along the staves of foodpaths – and i thought:
Surely, somewhere within this kente-tartan-madras self-arranging medley,
this market women melody within sound and smell of the hot pepper sizzling of Accra,
i will find her? And, tell you the truth, there was one moment:
A woman, sitting thighs akimbo, the cascade of her wide blue skirt
falling towards the plenitude she’d gathered from her hillside garden
from the abundance of her country where land is still the earth,
called out to me, one hand holding the green orb of an avocado:
‘Solinah friend! For you.’
And then the ceremonies of thanks, gracious inquiries, regards, ‘Ba-bye.’
And somewhere in this intermingling, though i didn’t know, the moment:
between her fingers loosening from / mine tightening around
(both of us holding, neither of us quite owning, in that strange interval)
what she was giving me, what i was accepting, in that green present
which i received really only later that day when i’d stopped looking
and realisation ripened like a fruit or vegetable or whatever people call an avocado.
i left the market and the moment without knowing
where my feet were going or should go or if there was a where
that i could go to in the certainty of finding her.
i walked, all i could do was walk.
The streets still knew each other’s names, met at corners, exchanged views –
St Louis gossiping with Coral, Marchand Road turning to Riverside,
joined in one conversation till Mary Ann, then Brazil, interrupted –
but fewer people heard them; their chat, their names, dispersed to whispers
in the snarl of vehicles revving further north to Rodney Heights, to Cap Estate, to NY 00001 …
i stood at a crossroads, squinting at an oncoming rush of cars wearing wraparound dark glasses,
trying to see into them in case someone had taken her for a ride.
i failed. Too fast, too loud, too tinted. Not just cars. The whole thing.
i kept walking:
past the downtown, quick-change, wannabe boutiques with glitzy accessories,
the young women inside clickety-jangling glass beads, ankle chains, slave bangles,
themselves accessories of the unravelling tawdry evening dress of empire;
i passed the cave mouths of the games arcades, their gnash and screeling in a dimness
juddering with the silhouettes of our children transmogrified into Ameritrons;
i recognised my son’s friend; his eyes clicked; de-recognised me; i kept walking.
The slow lemon light of the hours after work, accumulated weeklong,
slid down the sides of buildings drained of meaning on a Saturday afternoon;
incipient growth of evening shadow on the façades of stores, banks, offices;
the crick of faces loosening their rictuses; the after-sound of slackening footsteps
going home. And something still undone, unfelt. Missed. Where was she?
And if in truth she had gone – the centuries of her civilising presence, in the air like sea salt,
the cascade of good years like grains of rice pouring from cup to pot, generations
of her mothering, neighbouring, villaging, lend-hand, raising up, lifting up
our eyes higher than empty hands closing into tight fists to scratch an itch of silver,
if after all this, she had gone, what wider absence was there left to know
except the sky-wide absence of our not even knowing?
So now – walk home? Sun winking red, last minutes of battery life … Walk home.
Same house. Yet not. It too has receded into the elsewhere of the intimate distance
with the crotons, the cane stalks near the shack, the greying flower-flecked road,
into the infinitesimal distance between longing memory and a wanting present.
Open the door. Walk into displacement. Sit at a kitchen table. Stare
at a half-curled hand of bananas, some knuckles of turmeric, straw basket clutching tomatoes …
The wisp of a remembered argument – Is tomato a vegetable or fruit? –
reminds you of the avocado in your backpack. The gift from her,
a woman whom you didn’t know and who did not know you but you both knew
Solinah.
So Many Islands Page 15