She scythes through the weeds of spam, deleting, deleting, trawling for the messages she should keep.
There are a dozen from Lucas.
‘Where are you?????????????????????’ he writes in the subject space, a chorus line of question marks expanding with each resend.
Several from Mónica at the Faculty, about a seminar she’d been planning to attend.
A warning from her bank in Argentina, after the airfare all but emptied her account.
One that surprises her, from Dimitri. She hasn’t heard from him since Christmas. She is aware of a rush of pleasure, and decides to keep the message from him till last.
There is a short one from her friend Camila, inviting her to a movie on a Saturday that has long since passed. And another, given her silence, asking whether anything is wrong.
She asks the bank not to close her account.
She asks Mónica not to count on her for the seminar.
She apologises to Camila and says she will be in touch.
Lucas’s latest one she opens, and closes, and thinks about. ‘Please ring’ is all it says. Though it sounds like a plea, she can tell how angry he is.
She doesn’t want to call. She isn’t ready to speak to anyone in Argentina, or tell anyone where she is.
But Lucas knew she’d had an appointment at the Palace of Justice. Lucas she cannot ignore.
She taps out a response. ‘I had to travel urgently. The judge said I may be the child of desaparecidos. I’m thinking what to do.’ She reads it back and knows it sounds surreal, and probably inadequate, but she wants it out of the way. ‘Don’t worry,’ she adds, and hits send.
She hadn’t expected his response to come so quickly. Succinct, in Times New Roman black on white, in twelve-point characters on screen.
‘Surely you don’t believe all that crap about the disappeared?’
She stares at it a long time. That, though expressed more crudely, is what she too had always thought.
It’s what was said in the circles they both moved in, in the apartment building they lived in, at the Tennis Club where their families spent weekends.
‘It was a war, for Christ’s sake!’ her father would roar, the house keys jumping on the sideboard as he thumped the arm of his chair. ‘There’s always collateral damage – just look at Iraq,’ he’d say to anyone who was listening, as the TV filled with pictures of Desert Storm.
She’d never really given it much attention. The subject didn’t concern her and in the end it bored her. The 1970s, with its bombs and its bad haircuts – it was all so long ago.
Of course, there were those students at university . . . everyone knew their parents had disappeared. Ana recognised a couple of them by sight but kept her distance; she felt awkward in their presence and vaguely embarrassed on their behalf.
And now? It is possible, she knows.
She gazes at the screen. She feels upset by Lucas’s message, and decides she isn’t going to respond. However this resolves itself, she senses he isn’t going to understand.
Then, a long way down, in a thicket of junk mail ads for surgery and pharmaceuticals, she sees a message she’s missed.
It’s an email from her father, a single one, dated two days after her flight. She takes a breath and clicks.
‘Ana, darling,’ she reads.
They got her note; they hope she is safe; they are worried about how she is.
‘So,’ he continues, ‘we found out what that judge was after: while he had you in there, he sent his “investigators” round to visit us. They showed up at the apartment and made your mother dig around for documents, then took her off for questioning. In my case, they had the audacity to turn up at work.’
So they know, she thinks. They’ve been told.
‘They are lying, Anita darling, you must know that. It’s all political, and these “human rights” judges have an agenda. Well, it wouldn’t be the first time, as you know. Don’t worry, we will fight it, believe me. Your uncle Ramón has put me in touch with an excellent lawyer; it will be most enlightening to see how they present their case.’
Ramón, her godfather, her policeman uncle who wasn’t really her uncle. She remembers those birthday games of Blind Man’s Bluff.
Her father is furious – she can hear his scorn in every line. And his fury fills her with relief. He will use his connections in the military. He will make all this go away.
‘You are our precious daughter, Ana: you always have been, you know you always will be. Do you remember the night we drove all the way back to the picnic ground to find that doll you’d put to bed in the forest? The fun we had on those weekends riding horses? That crazy kitten I brought home for you that used to fly out of the trees? I can’t tell you how much I love you, darling. You’ve always been your papá’s special girl.’
Shame shimmers behind Ana’s eyelids. Her instincts had misled her: she can’t have been adopted. How could she have thought otherwise?
‘Your mamá isn’t taking it very well, as is only to be expected, I suppose. If her health deteriorates any further, we’ll be laying that at that judge’s door, too.
‘She doesn’t speak to me much at the best of times, as you’re well aware, but it would do her good to see you. Perhaps you could go on one of your matinee outings again.’
Anxiety about her mother twists Ana’s heart with guilt. She had doubted them, she had abandoned them, just when they needed her most.
‘They will try to get to you, Ana, but you must be strong, the way I’ve always taught you. I know you will be; you’ve always been a good girl. We won’t let them tear this family apart.’
And he signs it: ‘Love always, your papá.’
Her eyes trail over her father’s message, then halt at his last words.
What’s that got to do with it, she wonders. Her being ‘a good girl’?
She looks at her watch – she has lost track of the time. She should get back to the square.
She is about to log out of her messages when she remembers the one from Dimitri. It is getting late, she needs to get going . . . It is sitting near the top of her inbox, dated only a couple of days before.
Hey Ana,
Haven’t heard from you in a while. How are things in BA? Hope you’re in fine fettle and the research into the Cave of the Hands is taking shape.
My news, such as it is, is that I’ve finally submitted the opus, which means defending in Dec. or Jan. I can’t wait till it’s out of the way. Now I’m looking for some sort of fellowship – assuming they pass me, of course. No idea where I’ll end up, but hopefully it’ll be some place with sunshine and ruins.
Anyway, your country’s in the headlines again over here. The mention of Argentina always makes me think of you – not that I need an excuse ;)
Send me a sign of life. Any plans to come to London? It’s not so good for star walks but it’d be great to see you again, and now I’m (nearly) free of the thesis I can take you on a tour of the sights.
Yours ever,
Dimitri
She smiles. So Anastasia hasn’t told him. He doesn’t know she is back in Greece.
Under a P.S. he has pasted a link to an article. ‘By the way there’s a Bielka in this,’ he’s added. ‘Presume it’s no relative of yours.’
She clicks on the link, and it opens to a page in a British newspaper.
Spain Seeks to Extradite 48 Argentines Accused of Torture, ‘Dirty War’ Crimes.
She doesn’t need to read beyond the headline to the list of names, the allegations, the acts.
Her mind lurches.
In the photograph, above the military uniform, she recognises his face.
From where they are sitting at an outside table, Anastasia sees her stumbling towards them, between the kids on bikes and the eucalyptus trees in the square.
‘Ana?’ she says, standing up.
Ana barely makes it to the washroom at the back of the restaurant before her stomach heaves.
In the mirror her fa
ce is ashen. Her skin is clammy and her eyes look black and out of all proportion to her face.
Night falls as they drive home hardly speaking, returning the way they came over the unsurfaced road.
As they climb the last rise before the house, the car’s one working headlight picks up a bundle on the side of the road.
Black fur, white paws, a dark slick on the side of the head.
Vasilis groans as if it were he who had been hit.
Anastasia puts her arm around Ana’s shoulder and helps her inside. Hungry, the Labrador lumbers over to greet them. The cats blink awake and stare with eyes that gleam from various lookouts around the terrace.
Through her misery and the chaos of her feelings, Ana understands why Vasilis doesn’t give them names.
The next morning she watches from her window. He wraps the bundle in a hessian sack and buries it behind the bamboo.
‘It’s my fault,’ he says, when he returns indoors. ‘I should have let her come.’
12
The Aegean
August 1999
Thousands of kilometres across the Mediterranean, beyond the plateaux and the wadis, beyond the caves of the swimmers and the herders and the dwellings of the djinns in the sands of the Libyan Desert, a vicious wind awakes.
On the island, the day starts hot and turns still hotter and the breeze cannot temper the heat. It is 30C before breakfast and the mercury keeps climbing. The fields of straw bleach whiter and the bamboo hisses ignitable in the wind.
By noon the sky is citric. Ominous as tanks, clouds the colour of sulphur roll in from fires on other islands. Birds fly like bullets to their roosting places and the last cicada falls silent as the wind picks up and smears the air with rust.
The kittens stare wild-eyed from where they’re hiding under the dinghy, while the sea-bobbing ducks make landfall and crouch among the rocks on the shore.
‘Sirokos,’ Vasilis says. The Sirocco wind, the fire-carrier, laden with Saharan sand.
The Labrador wedges himself between the barrels beneath the workbench. Vasilis rescues the goblets from the seafarers’ table and Anastasia goes from room to room bolting the shutters of the house.
In the villages and around the island, women are gathering up beach towels and dragging in children’s toys. The priest leaves the incense burners smoking beside the altar as he flaps through the emptying streets.
On the hillsides, the conifers creak and lean. Bees dock in their hives and ants stream down frantic highways to their nests. Underwater, sea anemones shrink into rock fissures. Further out, the bigger sea fish dive.
Light has acquired a new prism. Under a burnt-orange sky, indigo and green vanish altogether from the spectrum.
The Sahara settles on everything: rooftops, the windscreens of cars. Out on the clotheslines, forgotten bed sheets twist into orange cocoons.
At about 5 p.m. the wind shifts, and the sepia world turns dark. The sea churns. Fat drops pockmark the beach like vaccinations.
At the top of the town, rain patters onto the flagstones, then beats harder, sweeping up the dust in rivulets that lift the moths and the geranium petals and carry them off like spoils.
Everything now makes sense about the angle of the streets and the aspect of the houses; the rivulets become a cascade that nothing will obstruct. At the foot of the town, the cascade becomes a torrent as it joins the creek that’s swollen with the runoff from the mountains, dislodging whatever it encounters as it hurtles through the half-pipes to the sea.
The deluge has turned the world to darkness. Lightning cracks the sky like crockery. Thunder roars its fury in reply.
Hobbled, without shelter, the only creatures left outside are donkeys that stand where they’ve been tethered, blinking the streams of water from their eyes.
On a distant hill, a solitary cedar brandishes its limbs at the sky.
In her bedroom, under a shutterless window turned purple by the dark sky’s bruising, Ana’s nausea gives way to numbness and a premonition of grief.
Is this true? she thinks. Is this what her father did?
It is beyond her comprehension. It cannot be the same man.
Her heart recoils and she is full of fury. It fills the cavity in her chest where she loves him still.
Where did the newspaper get this name: the Wolf?
What does he know about her parents?
What is she to him – vengeance? An extension of the battle zone?
She is sliding. Beneath her feet is nothing. The earth is giving way.
The salt stings her eyes and her lungs are on fire and every stroke is a whiplash of anger. She wants to exhaust her body, to exhaust her mind so there is no room for any more thinking.
She listens to her breathing from the inside as she hacks into waves that have not yet subsided after the storm. The sea writhes brownly after the tempest and is still not done with its effects. Curtains of sand billow and evolve into pillars that glitter with mica. The columns part with a sigh as she cuts through them, the water sifting grittily in her ears. Under a pewter sky there is no measure of depth nor any sense of distance, the light itself unsure.
Between the heave of her breaths an image floats towards her, as if parting the shreds of seaweed that hang in the clouded sea. It’s an image from her childhood, from a story that has always puzzled her: a woman who, in turning, was turned into a pillar of salt.
So what, one last curious glance? But now she hears in it a warning against attachment, an urging to sever ties.
The saline water buoys her but the waves are higher now and striking without rhythm; she tries to shift direction in the deepening troughs. The headland, she senses, is somewhere to the right of her, but it’s been out of sight since she left the lee of the cove.
Suddenly another memory breaks the surface, released in her lashing of the waves. It’s a single word, and now it’s returned she remembers where she heard it, that it’s been hovering over her fitful nights like a warning pitched too high for human ears.
Represor.
It didn’t stay with her because she could make no sense of it. In that office in the Palace of Justice building, she couldn’t attach it to anything she knew.
But now, after the article Dimitri sent her . . . Torturer? The father she had always loved?
She crosses pockets of warmth and pockets of cold and works hard to fight off the chill. Every third stroke she tries to breathe but her hair has come loose and is now in her eyes, now over her mouth; she needs all her concentration not to flail.
The swell bears her up, then tosses her in its angry roll. She has lost her rhythm and is losing traction in the current that keeps on shifting; its drag on her means she cannot turn back to land.
Suddenly, above the roar in her ears and the wrench in her lungs, she hears something on and off again, something there and gone again, a motor and a sound like shouting, intermittent in the slapping waves. Then the hull of a boat looms over her and somebody’s hand is gripping her, hauling her in.
‘Ana, For Christ’s Sake!’ His eyes are wild, his face distorted; he is terrified he might have been too late.
In the bottom of the boat, on its metal struts, she lies coughing, she lies fighting for air.
She was half a mile out when Vasilis finally reached her and turned the boat to shore.
13
The Aegean
August 1999
She is sitting in the living room with Anastasia and Vasilis. Night falls earlier now; the lights are on indoors and the reflections in the windows blank out the terrace and the sea.
‘You can’t know what he was or wasn’t involved in, Ana,’ Anastasia is saying. She is trying to calm her, trying to help her absorb the possibilities gradually, unsure what she might have to face. ‘You probably won’t know for sure unless it goes to trial.’
‘Or you ask him yourself,’ Vasilis says. Anastasia shoots him a look.
‘How can I ask him these things?’ Ana says.
‘How can yo
u not?’ says Vasilis.
Anastasia draws her chair closer to where Ana is sitting.
‘You can ask him about your original parents,’ she says. ‘There must be something he knows.’
‘Though it is possible, if he has a lawyer, that he’s been told not to talk to anyone,’ says Vasilis.
‘Not even to me?’ says Ana.
‘Especially not you.’
Ana is wavering. Above all, she is worried about her mother – she still thinks of Bettina as her mother – and particularly about how she will cope.
‘Ana, listen to me,’ Vasilis says. ‘This mother of yours – Bettina – might well have been complicit. I find it hard to believe she didn’t know.’
Ana flinches and Anastasia frowns at his words.
‘She needs my support right now,’ Ana says, and then, with a surge of anguish, remembers that she cannot help.
‘Ana, may I ask you something?’ It is Anastasia, softness in her voice.
Ana turns.
‘You must take this with the love and respect you know I have for you. Would you listen to me if I asked you to stop thinking about Victor and Bettina just for a moment, and consider what this means for you?’
‘It’s not about me right now,’ Ana says. ‘I’m not the one who might have to go to court.’
‘I have to disagree with you, Ana. I would say that this is absolutely about you. It’s about the most basic truth of your existence, as it is for any of us – knowledge of where we come from, of who our parents are.’
‘I don’t think I need this information, Anastasia. I’ve got along fine without it until now.’
Anastasia pauses, then speaks slowly. ‘But now you know there is a question. There is a doubt, and that doubt changes everything. It will haunt you for the rest of your life.’
‘Maybe so, but I don’t think that allaying it should come at so high a price.’
‘All knowledge comes at a price, Ana. That’s why it’s worth striving for.’
‘Even when it affects other people? Even when it affects the lives of the people I love and who love me, who’ve given me everything I have?’
The Memory Stones Page 34