A Marker to Measure Drift

by Alexander Maksik

  Jacqueline braces for Katarina’s hand on her shoulder, but it doesn’t come, and when she turns around to face the girl, she finds her still in her chair with her elbows on the table, cheek in one hand, glass in the other, watching Jacqueline.

  “Yes,” Jacqueline says. “They were together. We were all together.”

  She can feel the vast dark space at her back.

  “All?”

  She nods and returns to her chair and slumps down. She is so hungry. She shouldn’t have drunk so much so quickly. She’s never had her mother’s tolerance, and now on an empty stomach, now after not drinking for so long. She tries to remember the last time she drank alcohol.

  “Once,” Jacqueline says, “a long time ago. I was a girl. Very young. Ten years old, maybe. We were on vacation. The Canary Islands. Not so far away from here. We were sitting by the pool and I ordered a Coke from the waiter. When it came, it tasted strange, but I thought it was just the way Coke tasted there and so I didn’t mention it to my mom until I’d finished most of it. They’d brought me a rum and Coke.”

  Katarina smiles. “You were sick?”

  Jacqueline shakes her head. “I don’t remember. I just thought of that story.”

  The ice in the bowl has turned to water.

  Jacqueline knows that she has not answered Katarina’s question. She can hear it hanging in the air. The wind blows the bouzouki music away. And then there is Petros striding toward them, carrying a tray. He lays all the food out on the table. He names each dish as he puts it down.

  The plates surround the hurricane lantern. Most of it she doesn’t recognize, but the stuffed peppers she does. She thinks of that meal.

  Of that table.

  Its shade.

  Of that man so long ago.

  She recognizes the peppers and the skewers of meat. She looks at it all and then up at Katarina, who is smiling at her.

  “Eat,” she says. “Please.”

  Be polite, her mother says.

  Petros returns with a bottle of wine and two glasses in one hand, a bucket of ice in the other. “Askyrtiko,” he says, pours them each a glass, twists the bottle into the ice, and leaves them.

  “Askyrtiko. A local wine,” Katarina says. “Very good.” She raises her glass. “Ouzo,” she says and smiles.

  “Ouzo, Katarina.”

  In a single sip, the cold wine washes the dull sweetness from her mouth. And they begin to eat.

  Jacqueline starts with the skewers of lamb, which are seasoned heavily with thyme. She feels her eyes well up. She closes them and continues to eat, the tears in the back of her throat combining with the meat.

  There is her mother.

  She opens her eyes.

  There is Katarina.

  There is one place, there is another.

  There is the radiating sky, there is the moon.

  “Good?” Katarina asks.

  “Oh. Beyond that. Far, far beyond.”

  “I like the way you eat.”

  Jacqueline laughs and cuts into a pepper.

  Easy, her mother says. Easy. You will make yourself sick.

  Jacqueline obeys. She takes a breath, sits back, and has a sip of wine.

  Katarina’s question remains suspended.

  “Where is your father?” Jacqueline asks.

  “My father? He’s in Skopje.”

  “Skopje?”

  “Macedonia. We are from Macedonia.”

  “It’s part of Greece?”

  Katarina smiles. “It is two things. One is a part of Greece. One is a country. Mine is a country. You see? I don’t know yours and you don’t know mine.”

  “You’re not Greek?”

  “No.”

  “Macedonia,” Jacqueline says.

  “Yes. We are Macedonian. The summers I come to work.”

  “And Petros?”

  “Greek. A friend of my father. For years a friend. Since I am a girl.”

  Jacqueline finishes the pepper, sits back, and drinks more of the wine.

  “When do you go home?”

  “September sometime. We will see with Anemomilos. And will see with the reservations here. I’m working here too sometimes when it is full.”

  Jacqueline nods. She is still drunk, but the speed of it, the wildness, is gone. She’s calmer now. Slower. The rage has passed. She softens. She’s becoming melancholic.

  “September,” she repeats. “And what month is it now, Katarina?”

  The girl laughs and looks up from her plate, but when she sees Jacqueline looking at her she stops laughing. “You don’t know what month is it?”

  Jacqueline could pretend. Of course I do, she could say. Of course. It’s just that here we lose track of time. Here on vacation. One cloudless day after another.

  “Jacqueline?”

  “No,” she says. “I’ve lost track of time, Katarina. I’ve lost track completely.”

  “It is July. It is the very end. The very end of July.”

  Jacqueline nods.

  She sees her cave.

  She feels its damp stone against her hands.

  She feels the cold wind blowing across the beach in Málaga. There are the carbon clouds barreling toward her, the rain coming again.

  “You are a very strange woman, Jacqueline.”

  Jacqueline smiles and looks away. She can feel those eyes on her.

  “I’m sorry, but what’s happened? I don’t understand. What is it?”

  And again Jacqueline sees what she can do to her. Katarina the wondering and expectant child. The abandoned child, whose mother has forsaken her, mourning on her summer island.

  You think you are so different? her mother says. You think you are so weary. So hardened. Look at yourself.

  “What is it,” Jacqueline repeats.

  “Yes,” Katarina says. “Please.”

  “Katarina,” Jacqueline says as if she’s speaking to a little girl.

  Coward, her mother says. Coward. Weakling. Just like your father.

  Already the girl has drawn back from the table to protect herself.

  Coward, her mother says.

  “Katarina,” Jacqueline says again, this time not as the start of a sentence, but as if she’s considering the beauty of the name. She pulls the bottle from the ice bucket, pours herself some wine, and empties the rest into the girl’s glass.

  “My father worked for the government. He was loyal and he was blind and he was stubborn. He was handsome and he was charming. He was very smart. That’s what he was like.” She blurts it all out fast.

  He was an idiot, her mother says. Tell the goddamn truth if you’re going to tell it, she says, drunk and slow.

  “And he was an idiot,” Jacqueline says. “A little boy.”

  Katarina picks up her wineglass and watches Jacqueline intently.

  “He kept us there too long. There was a war. There is a war, for all I know. He kept us there too long and the soldiers came and they were the wrong soldiers. They weren’t the ones he expected. The ones to protect us. We lived above the city and they came up the hill. Everyone had left. Our guards, our driver, our maid. They’d gone to hide or they’d gone to fight for the rebels, but they’d gone. So the soldiers came up the hill laughing, Katarina. They came and they cut through the fence like it was made of paper. They came up the hill and walked onto our lawn. They walked up the hill and through our fence and onto the lawn. A man and a group of boys. The boys carried rifles and machetes. They were dressed in T-shirts and shorts and rubber sandals. But the man was dressed like a soldier. He wore pants and boots and a red beret. A beard. There was a girl too. There was a girl. A tall girl with terrible eyes and rotten teeth.

  “My sister was on the lawn. By then we never left the property. We were waiting for it all to pass, my father said. We were waiting for things to calm down, so that we could go back to our business, he said.

  “So my sister was on the lawn walking around on the grass the way she liked to do. There was a cat. She’d started to feed
an orange cat. A stray.”

  Jacqueline stops here.

  Slow down, her mother says. You can breathe now and again, JaJa. Take your time.

  Her mother was standing in a doorway. Jacqueline can’t remember which. She was leaning against the frame with that wry expression on her face. She was holding a glass tumbler against the outside of her thigh, fingertips around the rim, nails painted pink.

  Slow down when you tell a story, she says. Slow down.

  Jacqueline nods. The sweating glass makes her mother’s skin shine.

  Jacqueline finishes her wine and goes on.

  “My sister was out there on the lawn when they came up.”

  “What was your sister’s name?” Katarina is very still.

  “Saifa.”

  “I have three brothers,” Katarina says.

  “All those men.”

  “Please. I’m sorry to interrupt. Go on.”

  “The cat was gone by then,” she says and looks down at the cold food. The enthusiasm she felt only a few minutes before is waning. For eating, for the story she has begun to tell.

  “Please,” Katarina says.

  Go on, her mother says.

  She draws a breath and continues.

  “The cat was gone by then. When the boys cut through the fence and they came onto the grass, I was inside. They stood there looking around, smiling. No rush. Looking around like they were thinking of buying the house. The man with the beard, though. Did I tell you about him? I can’t remember.”

  Katarina nods.

  “He didn’t smile. He passed the boys and crossed the yard and walked to my sister and took her by the throat with his left hand, the hand without the pistol, and marched her backward into the house. Right through the door where I was standing in the living room. He backed her up inside so that she was standing right next to me. Then he stepped back and looked at us.

  “My sister was pregnant. Did I tell you that? She was enormous.”

  “No,” Katarina says. “No.” The girl has stopped moving. She has her hands on the table, one on top of the other.

  “Yes. She was pregnant. Pregnant and no idea who the father was. Was. Is. I don’t know. She always loved boys. She could never stay away from them. Not like me. I liked mine one at a time. And for a long time. And very few of them. Not that it did me any good. Maybe a little better. Maybe a lot better. Here I am with you, right? But Saifa, she liked to swim in them. From the time she was a girl. They made her drunk. Even when she was five years old. She was pregnant. That’s the point now.”

  She pauses and for a moment she can’t get a breath.

  Katarina reaches across the table, and squeezes Jacqueline’s forearm.

  “Let’s have more wine, Katarina. Please. Let’s have another bottle.”

  “Yes. I will ask.” And before Jacqueline can stop her, the girl is up from the table, and with all the plates she can carry, is crossing the pool deck.

  Shameful, her mother says. You could offer to help. Do something other than sitting here keeping yourself company. You and your self-pity. Get up and bring the rest of these plates.

  Jacqueline begins to move, but it is too late. Katarina is returning with Petros, who follows with a tray under his arm, a bottle of wine in one hand, a bucket of ice in the other.

  “You remind me of someone,” Jacqueline says.

  You are drunk, her mother says.

  Katarina translates the sentence into Greek and Petros smiles, but says nothing.

  Jacqueline doesn’t know who he reminds her of.

  There is a full bottle of wine and the table is cleared. The two women are alone again.

  “Who does he remind you?”

  Jacqueline shakes her head. “I can’t remember,” she says and raises her glass. “To Petros.”

  “Ouzo,” Katarina says and gives her a weak smile.

  The moon hangs above Nea Kameni, casting its light over the seething volcano.

  “I will be very drunk soon.”

  “Me too.”

  “It’s been a long, long time since I was drunk. It feels good, Katarina. It feels very good.”

  “You say my name very often, Jacqueline.”

  “Because it is a beautiful name, Katarina.”

  Katarina looks at her and smiles with such joy and sincerity that Jacqueline has to look away. She does not want to tell her story to this girl, this girl who can smile like that, who has the capacity for such brightness. But that’s not right. She does want to tell her. She wants to tell the story more than ever now. But is telling it an act of violence? Is she using it to destroy the girl? Or is there some other reason? Why tell it otherwise? She has forgotten the reason for stories. For conversation. Perhaps she has never known the reason for them.

  Perhaps, her father says. Perhaps.

  She drinks more of the cold wine. The water looks so much like metal now that it stops being water. All the caldera is a sheet of finely cut metal.

  You will end up like me, her mother says. If you continue to drink like this.

  I don’t have your tolerance.

  No, her mother says. You are like your father that way.

  “Is it true?” Jacqueline asks. “Is the volcano still alive?”

  “Yes. You can go there and climb it and look inside and see.”

  Jacqueline nods.

  “And there are places to swim. You can go and swim where the water is very warm and you can put some clay all over the skin. It is very good. We can go together if you like to.”

  “One day,” Jacqueline says.

  “Good.”

  “Are you afraid it will erupt again?”

  Katarina shrugs her shoulders. “We all know it will happen one day. Or another earthquake. We are not a permanent place.”

  Her mother raises her eyes.

  We are not a permanent place.

  Jacqueline begins again, “ ‘Where is your father?’ the man said. Saifa lowered her head then. She just let it fall as if she’d gone to sleep all of a sudden. And me? I shrugged and didn’t say anything. I didn’t say anything until the man kicked Saifa in the belly and she fell over my father’s reading chair and onto the floor. When he did that, I told him. I said, ‘He’s upstairs. Stop now. Stop now. Go get my father. Leave her,’ as if I were in charge. The man looked at me and smiled for the first time. And then as he was smiling at me his boys came into the house. They wandered in with that same dazed look on their faces, like they were lost, or had woken up in some strange land. They came in and then behind them there was that tall girl and then the house felt very small with all those bodies spreading out in the living room. And then into other rooms. They were like oil flowing through the house, all of them so calm like they were half-asleep. And I kept worrying that one of them might not see Saifa, that one of them might step on her. That’s how stupid I was. How far away I was from the world. That if they stepped on her it would be some kind of accident.”

  Jacqueline can smell the boys. They reek of sweat and cologne. Or perhaps those were the others. The boys on the side of the road. And for a moment she cannot remember which road that had been, or which boys. There were only the boys and the road and their cloying cologne. But then there is the rifle barrel and Bernard and his camera around her neck, and the strap cutting into her skin. So, she is able to sift through and organize it and return to where she was, so that she is ready to go on.

  Jacqueline drinks more of her wine and then continues.

  “I could feel the boys all around me. They were quiet. Like people in a museum. Wandering around, stopping and starting. But all the time I was facing the man. He was the pivot point. I knew that I should keep my eyes on him, that everything would begin there. Maybe I should have turned away. Maybe I should have gone to my sister. Knelt to take care of her. Knelt to the man. But I didn’t. I stayed facing him, waiting for the next thing to happen. The two of us were still and all around was the slow motion of those boys. And then the girl. She brought my parents dow
n the stairs and into the hall. It was a wide entryway with marble floors. And she brought my parents down. My mother said, ‘You will burn in hell,’ and I turned away from the man and he and I, we both looked over and there were my parents, standing side by side, and the tall girl with the yellow eyes standing behind them, holding two pistols out away from her body. The guns were at the ends of each of her straight arms. A barrel at the back of each of their heads and the girl was looking past them directly at the man with the beard. She was smiling at him. A tall girl with yellow eyes and a few rotting teeth smiling at a man with a beard in a red beret who was standing in our living room.

  “ ‘You’ll burn in hell,’ my mother said again, but all the anger had gone out of her voice. She said it now as a matter of fact. Quietly she said it. All this time my father was looking up at the ceiling. Not like he was praying, but as if he were trying to remember something he’d forgotten. “ ‘Minister,’ the man in the beard said then.”

  Jacqueline turns from the water and looks at Katarina. “My father was a finance minister. For the government.”

  The girl nods.

  “Would you like me to go on? I can stop if you’d like. There’s no reason to tell this story, Katarina.”

  Katarina looks at Jacqueline but doesn’t speak, and for a moment Jacqueline thinks she will ask her to stop. And then she is disappointed. She isn’t sure why she should be disappointed, why she wants to tell it, and while the two of them sit looking at each other with the wind blowing harder, Jacqueline drinks more of the wine and tries to work out why she wants to continue. What is the reason for telling this story to this girl? Earlier she’d wanted to do her harm, and that was one reason to tell it. But now she feels no desire to do her violence. She looks at her and she wants only to take her in her arms and kiss her hair and tell her that she is sorry for her loss, sorry her mother has died, that surely she knows what her mother was like, that even if she doesn’t believe in God, or in heaven, or any of that garbage, her mother was there, in memory, in her, in the things Katarina says, in the way she treats people, in her conscience, in that voice that moves her through the world.

  That is how she exists.

  And in this way there is God. In this way there is no real death. In this way, Katarina, there is no real death.