The Memory Stones

by Caroline Brothers

  There is a gate in the fence and they go through it, and come to a hillock of sand. Vasilis prods it with his sandal until part of the surface subsides.

  ‘These ones, by the way, aren’t mine,’ he says, exposing a midden of pottery shards. Sea-eroded, some bearing faint traces of brushwork, terracotta fragments lie tangled among the grass roots, baking in the cobwebby sand.

  ‘I didn’t think you’d been around that long,’ she says, kneeling. Lozenges of Hellenistic pottery slip between her hands.

  He smiles. ‘It’s all just rubble now,’ he says. ‘And in winter, the sea is coming up. You can see how damaged everything is.’

  ‘How long do you think it’s been here?’

  ‘Well, I did consult an expert,’ he says. ‘Anastasia is saying the reddish ones probably go back to the first century. But given how broken everything is and how the sea has got to it, it’s not a significant find. Which is a bit of a relief, to say the truth, as I’d rather not see this crockery ditch turn into one of your digs.’

  Ana smiles in turn and picks out a few more pieces. They are brittle, and light as cuttlebone, and clink like pieces of glass. She arranges them like a crossword but none of them, either by shape or line or thickness, bears any resemblance to its neighbour; they are fragments that belong together but do not fit.

  ‘Actually, nearby there is what I am thinking was an ancient kiln,’ Vasilis says. ‘They’d have had a small workshop close to it. And, of course, the forest for getting fuel.’

  Ana starts; the ceramic pieces slide from her knee and land like miniature mileposts in the sand.

  ‘They turned their pots right here?’ she says.

  ‘A little further over, not far. In fact, because of all the rubble, I am thinking this is the place they were throwing away the ones that came out broken – you know, like landfill, for holding the sand in place.’

  ‘When did you find it?’

  ‘I don’t remember finding it – we’ve always known about it. The house has been here many years. My mother, my mother’s mother, even her grandparents, they knew.’

  ‘That long?’ she says.

  ‘That’s not so long, when you are talking about Greece.’ He laughs. ‘Keramikos – of course it is a Greek word. But it is coming from the most ancient version of the language, from the language of the Mycenaeans, maybe eighteen centuries before now.’

  Ana feels light-headed. It’s as if, after the cave in Argentina, she is poised on another fault line, as if the past is sliding forward to meet her, here, on this sliver of coastline, on this shelf between the mountains and the sea.

  The ancient jigsaw pieces don’t connect, not directly, not to each other. But they connect with something larger, some continuity that has Vasilis making ceramics in the same place as these forgotten craftsmen, its long lines reaching backwards down innumerable generations, to some horizon that keeps beckoning her to turn.

  ‘Deep down you know, don’t you?’

  A voice from her unconscious, rising up through her sleep.

  ‘You know it’s true. Otherwise you would never have fled.’

  She jackknifes awake. Whose thoughts are these, whose words?

  She is bathed in sweat. The sheets cling to her limbs and her tongue is like cloth in her mouth.

  The window scrapes softly as she opens it and leans into the cool night air. The sea’s slow breathing soothes her till her heart aligns with its rhythm and smoothes the ragged edges of her thoughts. A breeze that’s scarcely a breeze creeps into the room, lifting the dampness from her skin; it turns her shaking into shivering till she stills it with a blanket from the chair.

  Inside the house there is the sound of creaking as someone turns in their sleep. Outside, a rattling of pebbles, the furtive tread of a cat.

  Slowly her hand travels to the side of her face, slides back the weight of her hair. Then gingerly, half afraid she’ll find them tender, she allows her fingers to search for the cross-shaped ridges, trying to read what they say.

  What comes back to her is the gravity of the judge’s voice.

  ‘Ana, those three crosses behind your ear . . .’

  Rigid as a mast, she’d sat there listening.

  ‘. . . it was your mother who put them there.’

  She’d understood the truth of it immediately; it had hit her in an explosion of light. Not the mother she had grown up with. The mother she had never known.

  The revelation had disabled her senses: blinded her, rendered her deaf, amnesiac, mute. Against its incandescence, she had turned her back and fled.

  Gently she allows her fingers to caress the scarring, the triangle spaces between the ridges, this place on her that her mother’s hand had touched.

  Outside, she can see the darker shadow of the mountain where it drops into the water, and above it, stars like perforations in the sky’s great dome, letting in the light.

  Deep down, she thinks, she knows, she has always known, and doesn’t know how she does. But through the wrought emotions and torn allegiances she feels it, knows she is somebody else’s daughter and understands it profoundly, like something inscribed in her bones.

  10

  Mexico City

  August 1999

  Daniela has her diary open among the coffee cups on the living-room table and is flipping through the pages weeks ahead. Outside, the trees are dripping; the rain has stopped as suddenly as it started and the city has a rinsed-out feel.

  Last week, we had another earthquake, a small one, though in Puebla it brought down some buildings and the dome of a church. Now I can hear the scrape of the doorman’s ladder as he drags it across the hallway, covering up the cracks in the walls with what he calls his anti-seismological paint.

  ‘Carla says they can come over in mid-December. She’s got some time off then in any case, and Arturo will be on sabbatical – it’s just Santiago they’re not sure about.’

  ‘Does he know Mateo’s coming after all?’

  ‘Yes, she’s told him. But reading between the lines, I suspect there might be a girlfriend on the scene.’

  ‘Well, maybe he could bring her,’ I say.

  ‘I’ll suggest it. But they’re only students, remember. They’re not going to have much cash.’

  ‘They know, don’t they, that if they can cover the flights from Paris, they wouldn’t have any expenses once they were here?’

  Daniela nods. Hugo and Cristina have arranged for us to borrow the house near Acapulco over Christmas, and Daniela is starting early, hoping to get everyone to come.

  I know she is doing all of this for my sake: as distraction from discouragement, to stave off my despair. And I go along with it for her sake, though my heart isn’t much in anything these days.

  What I want is a single thing: some sign – the merest indication – that Liliana is all right.

  ‘It’s Pauli I feel a bit sorry for,’ Daniela is saying. ‘For a fourteen-year-old, it won’t be much fun on her own.’

  ‘Hmm,’ I say, already drifting.

  ‘Osvaldo?’

  ‘Pauli . . . oh, yes,’ I say. ‘Well, if Hugo and Cristina come to visit us, maybe Cristina will bring one of her nieces along.’

  I think of all Paulina’s drawings in the memory book, the annual birthday cards. She had wanted so much to find her missing cousin. She has long since considered Liliana to be the sister she’d never had.

  It torments me now to think of Liliana: the shock, perhaps the harm we might have done to her, the starkness of the way she was told.

  I still don’t understand why the judge couldn’t have sent the police round to take a genetic sample from her home. Surely a toothbrush, or a hairbrush, would have yielded the material that could end the uncertainty . . . But Teodoro had insisted it couldn’t be done that way. Liliana wasn’t a suspect; no sample could be removed without her consent.

  Soon I will have to explain it to Eduardo, to Yolanda’s family: that although we nearly found her, it went wrong at the crucial moment;
how improbable it is now that we will ever welcome her home.

  Once a week, hope flickering, I telephone Teodoro. Once a week he tells me the same thing.

  No, she has not made contact with the judge.

  No, there is no indication of how she is.

  No, there is no sign she has done the test.

  11

  The Aegean

  August 1999

  Anastasia has to run some errands, and send some emails from the main town on the island where the Internet connections work. There are cash machines, and pharmacies, and a cybercafé if Ana needs them. Or she could just come along for the ride.

  Ana feels a shiver of apprehension. She should go; she should check her messages; email Lucas; perhaps get in touch with her parents. Part of her would like to see the island. But she is still ambivalent. She isn’t sure she is ready to reconnect.

  In the end she decides not to make a decision: to go, but to see how she feels once she’s there.

  Vasilis is trying to extricate himself from the ever-tightening circles that the cat-with-a-limp is tracing around his feet.

  ‘Sorry, my friend. Today you have to stay and guard the fort,’ he says, shaking off the loops like coils of rope and then, because the lock on the door is broken, swinging his legs through the jammed-down window of the car.

  Sliding across the gearstick, he winds down the side window in order to release the passenger door that cannot be opened from inside. Ana ducks and swivels onto the back seat’s peeling vinyl; Anastasia clears a space in the front among the work boots and the wood blocks and the stones.

  ‘Ballast,’ Vasilis says by way of explanation, in response to the look he gets.

  He apologises for the missing handle that prevents him from closing his window; Anastasia lends Ana a scarf to stop her hair from whipping her eyes in the wind.

  The engine turns over three or four times before kicking to life in a rolling start down the hill.

  In the coruscating heat, the island billows around them like a sail. The road hugs the coast at first but then veers inland, passing the rump of a squat, white chapel that looks as if it’s been moulded out of clay.

  Ana closes her eyes as the car labours up the foothills. Light strobes the inside of her eyelids as they pass through a forest, its shade aromatic with resin. The new pine leaves are citrus-green against the scars of last year’s fires.

  She is not thinking; she is tired of thinking. Let the world flow around her like a current around a river stone.

  On the far side of the forest they burst onto a plain where the crumbling walls of a ghost town were returning to the rocky land.

  ‘There are ancient sites in this valley, too,’ says Anastasia, turning in her seat. ‘A while back they uncovered a sanctuary to Demeter, on a rise in the potato fields.’

  ‘You know what the give-away sign was?’ Vasilis says, peering at Ana through the crack in the rear-view mirror. ‘Whenever you see a Byzantine church that is incorporating chunks of marble, you know where they got it from.’

  Anastasia laughs. ‘It’s true,’ she says. ‘They carted off all sorts of ready-made pieces: column capitals, lintels . . . Of course you still have to locate your sanctuary, but once you get your eye in, and start looking at the land the way the Ancient Greeks did, it’s not hard to lay down an exploratory trench as soon as the harvest is in.’

  The island, Vasilis explains, is shaped like an apostrophe; now they are above the curve of it, looking down from a saddle in the hills. A pause in the Mediterranean, thinks Ana, punctuating the wind-squalls on the waves.

  ‘Which way is Athens?’ she says.

  Over the broken windscreen wipers, Vasilis orients her through a latticework of insects. ‘It’s over that way, about five hours by boat.’

  ‘You can’t see it yet, but the port is down to the right,’ Anastasia says. ‘There is also a coastal road, a surfaced one, that takes you there via the town up ahead, but this route is more direct.’

  The afternoon ferry is pulling the island towards it like a dragnet, hauling the inland traffic down to the port. Ana can see how the ferryboats impose their rhythm on the days and seasons, animating the waterfront tavernas, signalling the hour with their foghorns, alerting those with rooms to rent that it is time to hurry down to the pier.

  The road sweeps down, then up towards the town that clings to the side of a mountain. At its highest point, a ruined fort tilts perilously over the Aegean; sun-bleached houses huddle in its shadow below. Even from afar, Ana is struck by the way they cleave to impossible gradients; another earthquake would shake them into the sea.

  The car hiccups to a halt under a eucalyptus tree that is tattooed with elongating hearts. A pair of mongrels squabble in the dust as Vasilis does a half-twist out of the driver’s window, then walks around the front of the vehicle to let his passengers out.

  They have arrived at the end of siesta. Grandmothers shuffle into courtyards to pluck herbs for the afternoon’s cooking. Children lunge at alley cats, or lurch on plastic tractors over cobblestones outlined like hopscotch games.

  Vasilis is going to see his mother. Anastasia has brought her laptop so she can email from a café in the platia, but first she accompanies Ana on a tour of the streets.

  Under grapevines, in the lanes in front of their houses, women chat on folding chairs while geraniums burst like supernovas from plump ceramic pots. Backgammon counters race across boards under the cafés’ fluorescent lights.

  ‘Come and meet us back in the square when you’re done,’ says Anastasia, leaving Ana by the cybercafé door. ‘You’ll see us outside at the restaurant I showed you. We’ll probably stay for dinner, if you’d like to, so don’t feel you have to be in any rush.’

  Ana hovers on the doorstep, watching Anastasia retreat down the uneven cobblestones, and is suddenly overwhelmed by reluctance to step inside.

  Bent double, patting the white stonework the way an actor might search for an opening in a backstage curtain, a shrunken old woman shuffles her way downhill. Ana watches, and waits until she passes, then steps back into the street. She will walk for a while, she tells herself, before pulling back any curtains of her own.

  She can feel her calf muscles stretching as the town’s main artery carries her uphill. The Blue Note Bar and the Aeschylus Café give way to hardware stores stocking everything from nail varnish to paint. Soon the flagstones twist around silent houses; hibiscus bushes and trellises peer over head-high walls.

  Patchwork kittens loll beneath a citrus tree in the patio of a derelict house. One of them, in white and ginger camouflage, is losing a battle with a lemon that he is trying to bat away. He presses his belly to the concrete when Ana tickles him on the forehead, flattening his wingnut ears. His dandelion fur is soft as pollen, light enough to blow off in the wind.

  The afternoon hangs torpid between the houses and Ana is sweating with the climb. A donkey stands immobile beside a cement mixer, its panniers overloaded with bricks. Bandy-legged widows rummage for pegs in courtyards hyphenated with washing.

  Soon, the street becomes so narrow that Ana has to turn sideways to fit between the buildings; it leads to a square the size of a handkerchief beside a church with its back to the sea. From above, the houses she has walked through fit together like an Escher drawing: their roofs are also footpaths; their arches also bridges; their façades also steps.

  Above her looms the scaffolding of the ruined fortress, and a seabird holding its own in the scudding breeze. Between the houses, she glimpses the bay fanning out from the foot of the cliffs and, far below on the beachfront, stick-figure barmen sweeping a disco floor. Jaunty as cocktail umbrellas, a row of parasols studs the curve of the shore.

  The afternoon ferry retreats towards the horizon, trailing its smudge of smoke like a tattered flag.

  Beyond the church there is one final corner, where the last house huddles against the rock. Ana rounds it, and is almost felled by the onshore wind that strikes her with such force she can hard
ly breathe. Gasping, she sways on the ledge overhanging the clifftop, while the harridan wind wheels about her, clawing at her hair and clothes. Her stomach drops, and the world falls away beneath her; in the yawning gulf of blueness, all distinction is lost between sea and sky.

  And on the crest of that wind, in the crush of its speed, the things that she has been holding at bay rush back at her; the chasm on which she is standing, between cliff and heave of water, brings the same vertigo as the judge’s words. There is the same velocity, the same sense of things collapsing, the same sense of impossibility at what she is being asked to do.

  She stands there, hesitating, on the edge of the azure world. And suddenly she sees herself plummeting, past laden donkeys and playing children and black-clad women pegging out the laundry: a female Icarus plunging into the sea. She could do it; it would be that simple. Just lean into the wind.

  But instead, she inches away. She moves step by tiny step along the rampart. Her mouth is dry and her hands are frozen in spite of the pulsing heat. She reaches a tree at the end of the ledge and clutches it, and lowers herself onto the sun-warmed stone.

  And as she rests there, head and heart both pounding amid the dazzling light and the wind-rush, she comes to a decision.

  She will not do it.

  She will not do the test that the judge has ordered.

  She won’t untangle the double helix.

  She will not use her body as evidence to condemn the people she loves.

  There is one booth free at the cybercafé when she gets there, in the corner at the back beside the door. She’ll just check for any messages, she tells herself; she does not even have to reply.

  It’s been weeks since she has looked at her email; the screen takes a moment to open, then judders as the messages rain down.