The Slap

by Christos Tsiolkas

  ‘Please come to the house.’

  He nodded. As he moved along the line, the young people shook his hand firmly. They did not know him but understood that it was important he was here. All his doubts melted away. He was glad they had come.

  The sun was still shining when he stepped off the back steps of the church into the carpark. An old man in a jacket but with no tie was smoking a cigarette. The man’s face was as wrinkled as an acorn, and his neck was scarred a deep raw pink. A worker’s face and a worker’s neck. His grey hair was cut very short—Manolis guessed that it was the number one on the barber’s clippers—and he had the good fortune to not have gone bald. The man looked across at him and smiled sadly. Then, with a quizzical squint in his eyes, he walked over, breaking out into a grin.

  ‘Re, Manoli?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You damned cocksucker.’ The grin had now spread across his whole face. ‘You don’t remember me?’

  Manolis desperately tried to recall who this might be. Panicked flashes of names and faces entered his mind. But nothing concrete, nothing to hold on to. Koula had come up beside him, wiping her eyes.

  ‘And this must be my Koula.’

  His wife offered the stranger a nervous cold nod of her head, but suddenly she dropped her handkerchief and squealed. ‘Arthur!’

  The old man hugged her. He winked at Manolis as he peered over her shoulder. ‘My gorgeous, gorgeous Koula. Why did you marry that loser instead of me?’

  Manolis slowly crouched and picked up his wife’s handkerchief. As he touched the wet cotton he remembered the man. It came to him immediately, cleanly; sweaty nights dancing at the clubs in Swan Street. Thanassis—Arthur—his shirt would always be drenched at the end of the night. Manolis tried to recall if there was a family connection between Thanassis and Thimios. Second cousins? That did not really matter. What mattered was the friendship they had shared.

  Manolis shook the man’s hand, he could not let it go. Thanassis finally pulled it away. ‘You’re going to rip it off, friend.’

  Koula smiled up at him, and then looked around at the people milling around the carpark. ‘Where’s Eleni?’

  ‘Who knows?’ Thanassis laughed at Koula’s bewilderment. ‘We divorced years ago. I think she’s in Greece now.’

  Manolis could not think of anything to say. Koula cleared her throat. The last of the congregation was leaving and the pallbearers were preparing to carry the casket. Thanassis stepped on his cigarette butt.

  ‘Are you going to the burial?’

  Manolis shrugged and looked at his wife. They had not decided on what they would do after the service. But they had to go to the house. They had promised Paraskevi that they would go to the house.

  Koula answered for him. ‘No. Let them bury Thimio in peace. But we are going to the house afterwards.’

  Thanassis nodded sadly. ‘Good. I’m doing the same.’ He dropped his arms across Koula and Manolis. ‘Come on, I’ll shout you a coffee.’

  He took them to a small café in the middle of brick-veneer suburbia. The place was run by a Persian family; thick woollen rugs adorned the walls, photographs of 1950s Tehran and Qum were hung between the gaps. Thanassis led them through the dark interior, out behind the kitchen to a small courtyard. Three weather-beaten, cheap aluminium circular tables were propped up tight next to each other; the seating consisted of rickety unbalanced benches, the paint peeled back to reveal the dark hard wood underneath. The café sat on a crest of a small hill and the city loomed in the distance behind the low palings of the fence. Stretched out between them and the city skyline there was an ocean of red-tiled roofs, the soaring spindly foliage of gum trees and elms, little islands of green now and then puncturing that crimson sea.

  The coffee was excellent, strong and bitter. Thanassis smoked and talked openly of his life. Manolis was reminded that the man had always been a braggart. One of his sons, Thanassis explained, was a lawyer. The other son—Manolis could not remember if he was the eldest—ran a restaurant in Brighton. Thanassis’s wife had had a breakdown. Slowly her mind had become diseased to the point where she could not leave the house, all she wanted to do was stay in bed. Koula made appropriately distressed ejaculations, but Thanassis raised his hand to dismiss them.

  ‘Don’t waste your pity on her.’ He then suddenly banged his fist on the table, upsetting Koula’s coffee. Thanassis, apologising, called out to the kitchen. ‘Zaita, bring us a cloth.’

  He continued with his story. ‘I paid for the best doctors, I had her in the best hospital in this city. The money I spent on that bitch. But nothing could cure her. She came back from the hospital unchanged. She just lay around the house all day, doing nothing. I’d come back from work, after working like a damned heathen slave all day in the factory, and she would not have lifted a finger. The house was dirty, the bed unmade, nothing cooking on the stove. The house stank. It stank, I tell you. What man can live like that?’ His gaze moved between Manolis and Koula, as if daring them to contradict him. ‘What can you do with a woman like that?’

  They were interrupted by the young waitress who silently wiped the table clean. She was petite, dark, Oh God, oh God, she was luscious thought Manolis. If only he were still a young man.

  Koula ignored her, she was smiling sadly at Thanassis. ‘A woman who cannot look after her own house is not good for anything,’ she declared. She patted Thanassis’s hand. ‘We’ve become spoilt, Thanassis, we don’t know how good we have it.’

  Manolis stifled a laugh. They were flirting with each other. Thanassis had always been a manga, the most hopeless adulterer Manolis had ever met. As a youth the man had been cocky and his burly frame, sly grin and lazy, roguish eyes had always turned women’s heads. Manolis experienced a pang of ancient jealousy, then it quickly disappeared. The waitress brought Koula another coffee and Manolis thanked her. The girl smiled, a smile sweet and indulgent. I’m just a grandfather to you, aren’t I? Just an old papouli. Age, bitter, invincible age. What a monster it was.

  ‘So I sent her packing.’

  Koula was obviously shocked by the rude, dismissive contempt in Thanassis’s voice. Manolis felt a surge of fury. Eleni had been a decent woman, demure, a bit of a coward. She should never have been given to a man as worldly as Thanassis. The marriage had been a mistake. She was not perfect; her worst fault was that she had a spiteful tongue. She had been a gossip, even when they were young. But she was obviously sick, suffering. He didn’t believe Thanassis’s talk of the best doctors and the best hospitals. The bastard had always been tight with his money.

  ‘What about the children?’

  Thanassis cocked an eyebrow at him. ‘What about the children? I took them.’

  Koula gasped, then quickly looked away. Thanassis laughed and lit another cigarette.

  ‘Come on, people, of course I took the children. She was crazy, mad, I tell you. I locked her out of the house. I wasn’t going to allow that animal to poison my children with her lies.’

  Koula’s brow was set in fierce censure. Manolis could not meet the other man’s gaze.

  ‘Listen,’ Thanassis sensed their disapproval, ‘I let her see them. Of course I do. I’m not an evil man. They see her all the time, they’re always back and forth to Greece. But I couldn’t leave them with her. No, that was inconceivable. I did the only thing I could do in the circumstances. I raised them myself.’ His eyes flashed, his face hard. ‘What do you think I should have done? Been a martyr, sacrificed my happiness, stayed with the cow?’ Thanassis sneered. ‘Fuck that. There was only one Jesus Christ and he suffered for all of us. I’m no martyr, I love life too much, and unlike the fucking Christ, this is the only life I know I will have. There’s no Heaven, there’s no Hell. This is it. The maggots and the worms have already started on Thimio and we’re not far off from that fate ourselves. I’m not apologising for what I did.’

  You did it, Manolis thought to himself, you took the plunge, you dared the opprobrium, the scandal. He looked across at
Thanassis and they exchanged a wry smile.

  Koula realised that something was being communicated between them that excluded her. When she spoke her voice was smug, cold. ‘Of course, you did what you needed to do. But you can’t deny it, the children always suffer when it comes to divorce.’ Her lips were pursed, tight, she had straightened her back: a vision of propriety, of piety and moral rectitude. Manolis asked himself yet again how he could break her unrelenting sense of conviction. Had she forgotten the long, poisonous years in between youth and age, the years of argument and spite and disillusion and despair?

  Thanassis answered for him. ‘Shit happens.’

  The cocky English phrase of their children made them all laugh. Koula bit her lip, and blushed. She hadn’t forgotten.

  She touched Thanassis’s hand again. ‘Arthur, you smoke too much.’

  Thanassis winked at Manolis. ‘Friend, that’s another thing I like about being a single man again.’ He grinned mischievously at Koula. ‘No bloody women telling you what you should and shouldn’t do.’

  Koula raised her hands angrily in frustration. ‘Come on, Arthur, you know I’m right. Give it up. Enjoy the time you have left. Enjoy your grandchildren.’

  Thanassis’s answer was tender. ‘I should have married you, Koula, you would have made me happy. I’m sorry that cocksucking prick got to you first.’ He slipped his hand away from hers and he knocked a fist hard against his chest. ‘Black death will take me, I know, and it will begin here.’ He blew out a long, exultant spiral of smoke. ‘What can we do? Black death takes us all.’

  Thimios’s house was crowded when they finally arrived, the guests all sitting quietly in the lounge room. A young girl answered the door and led them into the house. It was a comfortable brick home, the walls not long ago painted a fresh coat of white, bearing photographs of grandchildren, weddings, baptisms, a few mementos of Greece: a raised bronze engraving of the Parthenon, a small print of a black and white shorthair cat reclining on a white wall terrace above the sapphire sparkle of the Aegean, an outlandish koumboloi, a set of worry beads, each pinkish bauble the size of a plump apricot. The interior was like dozens of Greek homes that Manolis had been in, but nothing about the house reminded him of Thimios, the friend from long ago. The house was full of plush, oversized, intricately upholstered furniture; all the photographs were in heavy, ornate gilded frames. Thimios’s tastes had always been simple, sparse. What did you expect, he scolded himself, the unadorned apartment of a bachelor? This is a grandfather’s home. The young girl took them into the lounge room.

  Paraskevi was sitting in the middle of a long, tall-backed rococo couch, her sisters either side of her. When she saw Koula and Manolis she jumped to her feet.

  ‘Come on,’ she ordered Koula. ‘Come sit with me.’ One of the sisters obediently moved along to make space. Manolis and Thanassis stood awkwardly in front of the television.

  ‘Athena,’ ordered Paraskevi. ‘Get some chairs for your uncles.’

  Manolis went to assist the teenager but she dismissed him with a simple wave of her hand. ‘I’m okay.’

  Papouli, he thought, I’m just an old man. She came back from the kitchen, a chair under each arm. Gratefully, Manolis and Thanassis took a seat. The girl sat on the floor.

  ‘This is my granddaughter, Athena.’

  He could see Thimios in her face. She had her grandfather’s high brow, his sharp cheekbones, his small, round mouth.

  Koula also appraised the girl. ‘Are you Stella’s daughter or John’s daughter?’

  ‘I’m Stella’s child,’ Athena answered, then she blushed. Her Greek was awkward.

  ‘We were all great friends,’ Paraskevi explained, holding tightly to Koula’s hand. ‘We were the best of friends.’

  She turned to Manolis. ‘What happened? How did we drift apart?’

  Those questions were asked countless times that afternoon. As more of the mourners arrived at the house, Manolis felt as if he had entered the Underworld and was lost among the Shades. Except that he too was one of them. What happened? Where have you been? Where do you live? Are your children married? How many grandchildren? There was Yanni Korkoulos, who had owned the milk bar in Errol Street. There was Irini and Sotiris Volougos. Koula had worked with Irini in a textile factory in Collingwood and he had worked with Sotiris at Ford. Along with Thimios, he and Sotiris had got drunk the night the junta fell, and went to the brothel in Victoria Street. Emmanuel Tsikidis was sitting in an armchair across from Manolis. His wife Penelope had died two years ago, he told Manolis, from the ‘evil disease’, cancer. First her stomach, then her lungs. They chopped so much out of her she died a skeleton. Next to Emmanuel there was Stavros Mavrogiannis, a still refined countenance, but gone to fat. His hair was thick, jet black. He must be dyeing it. His Australian wife Sandra had gone completely grey and, unlike the other women in the room, did not bother to hide it. She was still a fine-looking woman. They had seemed like goddesses, the Australian women, when they had first seen them as young men: tall, slim, blonde and Amazonian. What had happened to the Australian girls? Now they were all fat, bovine. Sandra was still graceful, straight-backed. She had surprised them all in the seventies by learning word-perfect Greek.

  At first conversation was stilted, everyone conscious of Paraskevi’s grief. They asked after each other’s children and grandchildren and then they were unsure what else to talk about. The past loomed enormous, insurmountable. Paraskevi’s children, her nephews and nieces, had come in to greet each new arrival. They were polite, sad, of course, but they drifted back into the kitchen, sitting around the polished blackwood table, involved in their own conversations. They were still young men and women, far removed from death, and so soon they could not help laughing, telling their jokes. The grandchildren were outside, the youngest playing hide and seek, the older ones playing footy. Athena and Stella would come in from time to time with fresh coffee, tea, drinks, cashews and pistachios to nibble. Manolis wanted a beer but he knew it would be improper to ask for such a celebratory drink. Instead, he took a whisky off the tray. From the kitchen, in English, they could hear the kids discussing travel. One of Paraskevi’s nephews had just returned with his family from Vietnam.

  Katina, Paraskevi’s eldest sister, shook her head. ‘I told them they were crazy,’ she said in a low voice. ‘I thought they were out of their mind taking the children there.’ She tapped quickly on her breast, then crossed herself. ‘The disease, the poverty. They had no right to take my grandchildren.’

  Thanassis made a loud rude noise. ‘Nonsense. It’s a beautiful country. I went last year.’

  Sotiris Volougos leaned back in his chair, a suspicious look in his eyes. ‘You’re playing with us.’

  ‘No I’m not. I went. Great food, good people.’

  Katina chuckled. ‘Did you eat dog?’

  Thanassis shook his head, then laughed. ‘Katina, I had dog in Athens during the Occupation. I don’t mind dog.’

  The women all shrieked in horror. ‘Did you really have to eat dog during the war?’

  Thanassis nodded his head slowly at Athena. ‘And not only dog.’ He made a retching sound that shocked them all. ‘I still sometimes wake up with that vile taste of snake on my tongue.’ He turned to the women on the sofa. ‘Vietnam is a great country. Beautiful. I lived like a king there for ten days. Everything is cheap. Of course there is poverty, of course. But they’re a proud race. I went down those holes where they hid from the Americans. They were living like rats. And you can still see where the bloody Americans bombed them, where they destroyed whole villages and towns. They really fucked them up the arse.’

  Paraskevi grunted. ‘And who haven’t the Americans destroyed? Look what they are doing in the Middle East. It’s the same thing.’

  ‘Sure, sure,’ answered Thanassis. ‘But the Vietnamese defeated them because they were united. Unlike the idiotic Arabs—the English set them amongst each other a hundred years ago and they’re too pig-ignorant to see it. If they were uni
ted they could conquer the world.’

  ‘Bullshit.’ Sotiris used the English expletive and then continued in Greek. ‘America is not going to let anyone conquer the world except themselves. They’ll blow all of us up before letting anyone else get the upper hand.’

  ‘I blame that cocksucker, Gorbachev.’ Thanassis leaned in, excited. He took a cigarette from his shirt pocket.

  Paraskevi raised her hand. ‘Outside.’

  ‘In a minute.’ Thanassis rolled the cigarette through his fingers. ‘If that animal hadn’t dissolved the Soviet Union we’d have someone standing up to the Yanks.’

  Emmanuel laughed. ‘Come off it Thanassi, that’s ancient history, that’s like Homer and Troy. No, let it go, the Americans rule everything. ’

  ‘They destroy everything.’ Paraskevi undid the clasp from her veil, swung her head and let her hair fall around her shoulders. ‘No one dares to do anything to them.’

  Emmanuel shook his head. ‘That’s not true, that lad, that Arab, he managed to bomb New York.’

  ‘And good on him.’

  Katina frowned. ‘Paraskevi, you’ve just lost a husband. Think of all the widows who grieved in New York.’

  Paraskevi made a loud squishing sound with her lips. It sounded like a fart. ‘Katina, are you serious? With all the suffering in this world you want me to care about the damn Americans?’ They all burst into merriment at the joke of it.

  As the afternoon wore on, they fell into argument, and the stiffness, the forced politeness all fell away. Athena fetched more drinks and Manolis drank more whisky. Koula clucked her tongue loudly and tried to catch his eye but he ignored her. The conversation moved from politics back to their own lives, but this time with a frankness that had not been there before. The wine and the spirits had loosened tongues, but so had something else, a stepping back into the past: they were reminded of a camaraderie that was so exquisite, so cherished that only drawn together in grief over their friend’s death could they admit how much they had missed it, how intense their longing for it had been. Conversation returned to the children and the grandchildren, as it always does, conceded Manolis, amongst people as old as us, but this time the men admitted to disappointment, to failure. Tales of divorce emerged, as did curses over a child’s laziness or his selfishness or her stupidity. Wrong choices in partners, jobs, in life. Disrespect was a consistent theme, as were drugs, alcohol. The women fell silent listening to the men, their faces closed, concerned. At first they refused to admit to any doubts about their offspring, saying nothing except an occasional warning to their husbands. Shut up, Sotiri, it’s not Panayioti’s fault he married that sow. There is nothing wrong with Sammy, he just hasn’t met the right girl yet. Not another word, Manoli, Elisavet did not bring it on herself. It was Sandra—of course, it would have to be the Australian—who came over, stood up next to Thanassis, and joined in the conversation with the men. She did not, however, speak of disappointment with her children. She stated plainly that sometimes it was hard with Alexandra, sometimes it was hard having a child who was schizophrenic.