A Marker to Measure Drift

by Alexander Maksik

  She looked out over the caldera.

  Jacqueline and Helen walked together through Hampstead Heath, the two of them smoking cigarettes, drunk, days before they’d have to return to school.

  Helen ran ahead of her. She was turning now, her arms extended. Jacqueline could see her face. Cheeks red from the gin and the cold, Helen lowered her head and pawed the grass with her foot. She made horns with her fingers and squinted her blue eyes. Jacqueline pulled the white scarf from her neck and shook it. Toro. Toro.

  Her mother raised her eyes, but said nothing.

  She’d made a fool of herself. Weeping like that in front of a stranger, accepting free food again like a beggar. And with plenty of money to pay for it. She shook her head. She looked at herself at that table, crying, holding the napkin to her face. Idiot, she thought. Pathetic. She stood and crossed the walkway and leaned on the wall and looked down at a cruise ship moving across the water.

  Bernard had called her Jackie. She heard him whispering it, the French inflected emphasis on the second syllable. Ja. Key. He was the only one. “Jackie,” he said. “One day, you’ll come and live with me in Nice.” They were sitting together. She couldn’t remember where exactly, but she remembered a plastic table, plastic chairs. Some little restaurant on a beach. Somewhere out of town. She could see his slender fingers, could see his clean fingernails. He had a slim stack of Polaroids bound with a rubber band, which he’d removed and was now dealing onto the table. “Jackie, look,” he said. They were pictures of the beach in Nice, of cafés, of his ugly sister, of his happy friends. And then a series of photos of his apartment, which faced the sea and had a balcony with a metal table and chairs where he said they would eat breakfast together every morning, where they’d drink pastis in the evening before going out to dinner.

  He was trying to convince her then, to come and live with him. In those early days, before everything turned, including Bernard himself, and the country went even madder, and he’d become disgusted with it, and then with her because he was incapable of separating her from it, or her from them. He was trying to convince her to leave, to come live in his airy apartment on the sea, with its blue shutters and balcony, and the beautiful promenade below. “There you can go to university,” he said. “There you can do what you like.”

  Now she could hear his voice, but it was the voice of some other man.

  “I’ll be done here soon. They’ll bring me home. You’ll come with me. Our beaches are easier to sell.” He laughed. “Much easier to sell.”

  But this was early on, before he’d understood. This was when Ghankay’s crimes were abstractions to him, to them both. It was before he’d begun to leave the city, before he’d begun to travel, before he’d seen those boys training in the jungle. Before he’d seen them do the things they’d trained to do. Before he’d seen them tear the intestines out of living men and drag them through the dirt, before he saw them cut the hearts out of living men, before he saw them eat their hearts, their testicles. Before he saw them laugh, and paint themselves with blood, and pound their own intact chests and dance with the power, and fire their rifles in the air.

  Before that, he showed her photographs of his apartment in Nice with its great white bed and the sheer curtains billowing in the wind and he said, “Come live with me, Jackie,” and he put his charming emphasis on the last syllable of her name.

  And after, though he never said it, she was certain. She knew he could no longer separate her from them. It was all the same thing. Jacqueline, and her father, and Ghankay, and her mother, and the boys in the jungle coming closer, day after day. Coming for blood, coming for the city. She’d been a fool for returning home, a fool for staying.

  And there were times she thought he might be right, that there was no difference.

  He never said it, but she saw him look at her, and she knew. She knew, and she let him save her life anyway. In Sierra Leone, she let him guide her through the airport by her elbow, let him put her on that plane, let him clear his precious, fickle, and liquid conscience, let him wash his hands of her.

  Now, as she stood at the wall watching the great ship inch across the water toward the harbor at Fira, she could hear him thinking.

  I have done my duty. I have saved her life. I am free of her, of them, of that miserable, wasted place. I am free and I have done more than most men.

  She could see him standing on his precious balcony.

  She stood with him. She touched his hand and together they looked down on the promenade and across the sand and out to the bay and through the sea, past Cagliari and Bizerte, between Ragusa and Malta, past Crete to this cliff. To this wall, this worn marble path where she stood alone.

  To this island where she lived.

  SHE WAS RESTLESS and began to walk farther into town. She asked a man standing in front of a jewelry shop, spinning his worry beads, for the time. She asked without hesitation, without thinking, and he responded easily and without suspicion.

  It was a few minutes after noon. The time seemed to have been sucked away. It felt as if she’d been at the restaurant so long ago. She continued out to the fort, where she climbed over the ramparts and sat with her back to the wall. She watched the islands change color as they passed in and out of cloud shade.

  This is what you wanted, her mother said. Someone to see in the evenings. Someone to sit with.

  Yes, Jacqueline said.

  Remember the handsome men on the square? Remember the women, the children admiring your footwork? Your cup of coffee on its saucer?

  Jacqueline nodded.

  You remember all of that?

  Yes.

  Well, then. Why do you hesitate?

  Jacqueline didn’t know.

  You’re just like him, her mother said. She’d torn a hangnail and was now leaning against the kitchen counter, sucking the blood from her little finger.

  Jacqueline could see her so clearly. Head to the side, squinting in some combination of pain and concentration, her cheeks drawn up. No, not pain, that kind of sting didn’t even register as pain to her mother. It was irritation. A combination of irritation and concentration.

  You’re just like him, she repeated. He preferred the fantasy. Always. Both of you. You’d rather sit in the dark and wish. Stubborn, stupid, and blind.

  Jacqueline nodded.

  Do you know what I think, JaJa? I think he was surprised. I think he was surprised up until the very moment those boys arrived. Maybe beyond that. Maybe he was surprised until the very moment he died. Maybe he’s still surprised. That’s how stupid he was. Do you know what he said to me once? Him? Do you know what he told me? Fantasy is a kind of stupidity, he said. Fantasy is a kind of stupidity.

  “Fantasy is a kind of stupidity,” Jacqueline repeated. They were talking on the telephone. Jacqueline was in her room, looking out across the playing fields covered in snow.

  “Your father so loyal to that man. What greater fantasy in the world than the fantasy of Ghankay’s goodness.”

  “Yes,” Jacqueline had said. “Yes.”

  She could hear the ice in the glass.

  If you go and hide in your room, her mother said now, if you lock yourself away, or go on to one of those islands there, you’ll never forgive yourself. You’ll never forgive yourself and you’ll never recover, do you understand me? Never.

  Jacqueline nodded.

  Do you trust her?

  She did.

  Then you will go at six. You will go at six and meet her. You are not a child. You are not a little girl. You may not hide in your room. You may not.

  Jacqueline could see her mother furious, drunk, standing at the front of the house, her feet bare, dressed in her nightgown, panting, having just flung a glass at the back of her husband’s car, having missed entirely, the gate whirring closed.

  You may not, her mother said again.

  Some other night, a night that rose out of her memory, some night when Jacqueline had been crying, and her gentle mother sat beside her on t
he bed, holding her warm palm firm and sure against Jacqueline’s chest, firm just below her throat, pressing away the pain.

  Someone had been cruel to her.

  “Shhh,” her mother had whispered. “You’re better than that, my heart. You’re in another world, my love. Another stratosphere. Those people”—whoever they were—“they do not exist for you. Not for you. Not for us.”

  Jacqueline left the fort and wandered the village, browsing through postcards and magazines. She went into a shop that sold expensive strands of worry beads and held them in her hand. The saleswoman glanced up and then returned to her book.

  Jacqueline went into an art gallery that smelled of incense and looked at dramatic black-and-white photographs that did no justice to the island.

  She held cheap worry beads in her hand at a tourist shop and for a moment thought she might buy herself some. She loved so much the way they sounded in the evenings spinning over the shopkeepers’ knuckles.

  JaJa, her mother said sharply.

  Jacqueline sighed and returned them to the rack.

  She spent the day like that, like a tourist, a proper tourist on holiday, taking time from another life.

  Eventually she returned to the square, where she sat and watched people passing and the kids playing soccer and the two girls on their bench. She eavesdropped when the conversations were in English, and as the light changed, she returned to herself sitting at the table that morning with the napkin covering her face, making a fool of herself. She imagined packing her things, leaving her room, returning to Fira, or to some other town, or to a ferry for some other island, but by then it was too late and she knew she wouldn’t leave, that her mother was right, that the only thing to do now was to return to Anemomilos.

  And this was a kind of deciding.

  The afternoon drifted away from her. She moved in and out of reverie. She listened to her mother and watched Saifa on the sand. She looked across the table at her father and felt the pleasure of his attention, and she felt the pressure of Bernard’s thigh against hers, and as it grew later, she listened to the muted otherworldly acoustics of the caldera shell. She saw the shopkeepers standing stoic in their doorways spinning their beads over and over and over their open hands, the round old women minding their fierce children who chased the village dogs, and played soccer in front of the church.

  She watched a priest in a long gray beard and black robes, and a heavy cross around his neck traverse the square like a spirit and unlock the church doors and draw them open and disappear inside. For a moment she wasn’t certain if her eyes were open or closed, if the man existed in her present life or if he was of memory, or hallucination. But he was there gliding across the tiles, feet hidden by his robes.

  She closed her eyes and saw the restaurants and their tea lights sparkling, the handsome waiters pouring cold wine into delicate glasses, using round, water-smoothed stones to keep napkins from blowing out to the sea in which the moon cast its copper light. She saw all the perfect paths leading to all the white hotels spreading down the cliff, all the way down to the edge where it fell away too steep to build, and all their modest swimming pools incandescent, lit from within, kidneys and rectangles, glass beads of washed-out blue and green, and the old fort at the very end of the village and its low walls and barely a light there so that two people warm from the sun, hair still damp, might stand above it all in the dark and feel the wind cooling their skin.

  JACQUELINE STOOD UP and approached the two girls. They were turned inward on the bench, facing each other, sharing a cigarette, laughing, lost in their stories, and when they were aware of Jacqueline standing above them, they changed into adults and turned their eyes upward, adopting a collective expression of cool maturity.

  Jacqueline asked if they spoke English and when they said they did, she asked the time, and when they gave it to her—twenty minutes to six—she smiled.

  “Thank you,” she said. “Kalimera.”

  The girls laughed and said in unison, “Kalispera.”

  “Oh,” Jacqueline said. “I’m sorry. Kalispera is good evening?”

  “Yes,” they said again in unison, like a little choir, and smiled at her as if she were a child.

  She raised her hand and waved. “Kalispera,” she said and walked away to Anemomilos, where she paused a moment beneath the arbor before stepping onto the terrace, her vision sharp, her heart beating hard.

  Jacqueline had never been to the restaurant in the evening. The soft yellow light laid long shadows across the tables and cut through the shuddering trellis flowers. There were two women, both with loose gray hair falling around their shoulders, at one of the tables still in the sun. Otherwise, the place was empty. She thought of walking into the restaurant, but the prospect of entering that building to find Katarina was daunting, so she sat at her table and waited and watched the women with their eyes closed and the light cutting through their glasses of beer. There were identical red packs slung over the backs of their chairs.

  She glanced over at the building.

  Saifa moved across the lawn, feet hidden by her dress.

  The cat was gone.

  The cat had known better.

  And before any of them.

  Katarina moved across the terrace. She wore a light blue dress cut at the knee and brown leather sandals, and her hair down. She looked showered and bright and strode toward the table with an unfamiliar energy. In her right hand she carried a wide white scarf.

  Jacqueline felt humiliated again, and wished that she’d gone down to the beach and showered, put some lotion on her face, and rubbed her legs with olive oil.

  She could feel her muscles contract as if she were about to get up, turn, and leave.

  Stay where you are, her mother said. Smile. Breathe. This is what people do. They meet. They talk. They drink, they share food. They look at each other.

  Jacqueline nodded.

  Katarina stopped and leaned over to talk to the women. She touched one of them on the arm. The three of them laughed.

  God’s will, her mother said. This long path. This woman. All we’ve given up to be here. All the faith. In spite of yourself. In spite of me. Like it or not. You are what’s left of us.

  Katarina stood up straight. Her mouth was moving, but wind was taking all the sound away.

  You smile. You breathe. You speak. It is what people do, JaJa. Even if you can’t remember, it is what they do. It’ll come back, my heart. Trust me, my love. Trust me. Trust God.

  She nodded.

  Katarina turned.

  Jacqueline raised her chin. She drew in a deep breath. She smiled.

  “Jacqueline,” Katarina said when she was close enough. “Jacqueline,” she said again, fighting the wind, pushing her hair away from her eyes, tucking a strand behind her left ear.

  And Jacqueline rose up, straightened her back, and said, “Kalispera, Katarina. Kalispera.”

  She felt Katarina’s hand on her shoulder and then her cheek against hers.

  “Kalispera, to you. I’m impressed. Come on. We’re going now,” and Katarina pulled gently on Jacqueline’s arm.

  Then they were walking together across the terrace and across the street, and instead of turning toward town as Jacqueline had expected they would, they turned up the lava rock path, with its low, steadily rising steps and began to walk in the direction of the rose church. Katarina had hooked Jacqueline’s arm with hers and they moved together now. She knew that this too might be a kind of charity, the relentless enthusiasm of the philanthropist, but whatever it was she’d already begun to give in and there was unmistakable joy in this physical closeness, in abandoning herself to someone else’s control.

  Again she was being led.

  “So, you have learned Greek since this morning?”

  “Some girls taught me. Teenagers on the square today. So now I have two words.”

  “I will teach you the other two tonight.”

  Jacqueline laughed.

  To their right, all the hous
es and hotels lay below the steepening path on the cliff side, so that the view to the water from where they walked was unobscured and they could look down past the roofs and terraces and swimming pools and out to the still sea. The sky was turning pink and for a moment Jacqueline imagined all the tourists collected at the end of the village to watch the earth turn away from the sun.

  “Here,” Katarina said and brought them to a stop in front of a wooden gate painted white, each picket tipped with gray. A low orange light hooded in metal illuminated a vertical porcelain plaque fixed to the white concrete wall.

  “Look.” Katarina pointed to the smooth rooftop below.

  There were four dogs curled up together asleep.

  “In the evening they take the heat that’s left from the day.”

  The two women watched the dogs for a moment.

  “I met a dog here,” Jacqueline said. “But he disappeared.”

  Katarina opened the gate and they walked down a flight of wide steps, each of which was painted gray and edged in white.

  They came around a turn, and now Jacqueline saw a rectangular swimming pool lit green and sunk in the heart of a concrete terrace painted the same storm gray. There were five small empty tables around the pool, each with a lit candle in a hurricane lantern.

  Jacqueline exhaled in surprise.

  “Pretty, no?”

  “Beautiful,” Jacqueline said. “It’s a restaurant?”

  “A hotel.”

  She followed Katarina down.

  “Sit, please.”

  Jacqueline did.

  “I’m right back. I will go for our drinks.”

  Jacqueline, hypnotized by the place, nodded, and when Katarina had gone, she looked at the white candle guttering behind the glass, and then at the green pool, and out at the fading pink sky and at the water beneath it, a vast sheet of steel.

  She sat back in her chair and took a first full breath.

  You see? her mother said. God.

  “Shhh,” Jacqueline said aloud. “Shhh.”

  IV