The Memory Stones

by Caroline Brothers

  ‘I’m not telling you what to do, Ana, and I don’t underestimate for one second how difficult this must be. But haven’t you already made your choice? You came to Greece in the first place because you had chosen a field dedicated like no other to the quest for knowledge about the past. We both know how hard it is to establish any ground we can safely say is solid, even with all the material evidence in our hands. Yet this truth about your life is within your grasp, and your response is to turn your back. What wouldn’t I give to run a DNA test on the bones that might have been Heracles’s, if that could prove it was him. But we can’t, and it’s too late, and it may never be possible to draw a line in the Aigai dust that says: “This is Heracles. A dynasty ended here.” Your identity, on the contrary, can be proved, and that depends on no one but yourself.’

  ‘It’s not cowardice, Anastasia, if that is what you are saying.’

  ‘Then what do you call it, Ana?’

  ‘Love. Loyalty. Gratitude. I owe everything to Victor and Bettina. I don’t think I could live with the guilt.’

  ‘You have no idea how the truth will make you feel, either on the first day you hear it or over time.’

  ‘That’s just it,’ Ana says. ‘I don’t want anything to change.’

  ‘But it already has, Ana.’ Vasilis sits forward in his chair. ‘Have you stopped to ask yourself why Victor and Bettina are never telling you the truth? Have they ever offered to help you find your family? Have they made any attempt, even now, to explain?’

  ‘They are probably trying to deal with their own crisis.’

  ‘That’s what I mean,’ Vasilis says. ‘So stop running away from yours.’

  She finds Anastasia on the beachfront, drying off after her morning swim. Ana comes and sits beside her on pebbles that are still chill from the cool of the night.

  ‘How are you feeling?’ Anastasia says, making space for her on her towel.

  ‘I’m fine.’ Ana looks up and manages a smile. ‘How was the water?’

  ‘Glorious – you should go in,’ she says. She can tell by looking at her that Ana hasn’t had much sleep. Then, after a pause: ‘I’m sorry if we lectured you last night.’

  ‘You didn’t lecture,’ says Ana. She is picking out small round stones and tossing them into the water that has finally recovered its calmness after the storm. ‘What I feel, what to do – it moves around so much. Sometimes I wish I could just go to sleep until the whole thing has gone away.’

  ‘I thought you’d already tried that,’ Anastasia says.

  ‘Well, maybe I should give it another go.’

  Anastasia shakes her head. ‘And miss out on this, another week of life?’

  Ana gazes out over the water at the headland, at its mother-of-pearl reflection, at the distant island floating in the morning mist. It’s as if, until this moment, she hasn’t been able to see it, that her eyes have been shut to its beauty, to the depth of its peace.

  ‘You’ll have to forgive Vasilis for being a bit sharp yesterday,’ Anastasia says. ‘He cares about you as much as I do. I know he didn’t mean to sound harsh.’

  Ana gives her a rueful look. ‘It’s okay,’ she says. She casts another pebble into the water, listens for the hollow sound it makes. ‘He is probably right, I know.’

  ‘I think you scared him a bit when you swam out so far the other day – both of us, in fact.’

  Ana swallows. ‘I’m sorry,’ she says. ‘There was so much . . .’

  ‘I know, Ana. But you’re our guest, and if anything had happened . . .’

  Ana feels ashamed. She hadn’t considered anyone else. She hadn’t even considered the risks.

  ‘This is your life, Ana,’ Anastasia continues. ‘You mustn’t be so reckless with it again.’

  They let the silence linger, broken only by the plop-plopping of Ana’s stones. One of the beach kittens stalks through the grass and over the shingle, weaving through the A’s Ana has made with her knees.

  ‘You know I have a daughter just a few years older than you,’ Anastasia says after moment.

  Ana starts. ‘A daughter?’ Anastasia has never mentioned her before.

  ‘Michaela. There is a picture of her when she was smaller, in the study. She’s not Vasilis’s; she’s from my first marriage, a long time ago. She’s twenty-six now. Her father took her to America when she was eight years old and decided not to bring her back.’

  Ana stares. ‘That must have been terrible,’ she says.

  ‘I tried for years to bring her home, but it was hopeless. The courts here couldn’t do anything . . . These days she’s got some boyfriend and they’re both mixed up in drugs. She doesn’t return my calls. I went over once to visit her, but she refused to see me.’ Anastasia pauses, staring out to sea. ‘Even now, not a day goes by when I don’t miss her. I don’t think I’ll ever stop missing her; I don’t think any mother ever does.’

  For a long moment Ana is silent. She doesn’t know if her real mother ever missed her.

  And in that silence, everything that’s happened slowly settles, and with it, every thing that’s been said. And though it runs counter to all she has ever been taught, to all she has strived to do, to everything instilled in her for as long as she can remember, Ana lets the tears come, lets them fall.

  The waves trip on the beach and rake the kelp along the headland. Far above them, high enough to see as far as Africa, a seagull hovers with wings outstretched, its face turned into the wind. The barren slope of the mountain towers as it has for millennia over the blue-grey sea.

  She cries and the tears keep coming and Anastasia sits with her arm about her without speaking or trying to stop her, letting her weep.

  Later, when Anastasia is chopping mint leaves in the kitchen, Ana asks her a question that has been on her mind all morning. Anastasia hugs her and gives her assent.

  At the end of siesta Ana hitchhikes into town. She catches a ride on a rattling truck that is carrying crates of cucumbers down to the port.

  From the Internet café halfway up the rain-rinsed hill, Ana sends a message.

  ‘Dimitri,’ she writes. ‘Please come.’

  14

  Mexico City

  August 1999

  Whose hands are these?

  It’s when I’m washing the glasses in the kitchen, the slanting light opaque through the steamed-up window, that I notice them, as if for the first time seeing them, these unfamiliar, old man’s hands.

  Hard-nailed, they are, and marbled with purple filaments, and dappled with faded watermarks on skin that shades to jaundice where the knucklebones pull it taut.

  I lift these hands from the soapsuds, turn them into the light.

  The mark is still there, the polished indentation. The ghost of Yolanda’s ring.

  On the back of my hand, the fine bones work like hammers inside a piano, the sinews tugging like strings.

  Once, they were the hands of a surgeon, I think to myself, their capabilities precise. They were the hands of a husband also, once; of a father, an adolescent, a boy.

  And they have done what was in their power. They have made mistakes and tried to rectify them. And in the course of a lifetime they have tried to do some good.

  But there are things that have been beyond them. They have tried to salvage sight where it was failing; they have tried to help the almost-blind to see. But where sight was most badly needed, they failed to make anything visible, and there are broken things they will never be able to mend.

  There is no help for it, I tell myself. It is not enough to want something, to strive for it over all my remaining years. What we have lost can never be recovered. What I want, what my granddaughter wants – these things will never be reconciled.

  And so it comes to me, a slow acceptance like the sun’s reluctant slide into the ocean, that the two of them are gone from me forever. That in losing Liliana, we have lost Graciela, too.

  How did she die, my daughter? The things I’ve heard about and read about, the things that Inés spo
ke about: these things must have happened to her.

  She was tortured: with wires, with electricity. She’d have been chained, brutalised – God help me – probably raped. But allowed to live, until she had given birth. Then, within days, the Pentothal injection. Shoved into an aircraft. Pushed.

  I stand there a moment, leaning on the draining board, swaying with the certainty of her death. The ending must surely have come years ago, yet over all this time I’ve held on to her; it was I who was unwilling to see.

  The water vanishes. The wine glasses steam and drip on the rack as the sunlight shifts, clouds over.

  And I find that I am weeping, my tears mixed with the steam and the fog on the window. Irretrievably, inconsolable as a child. Over the glasses, over my failure as her father. Over all that was beautiful in her. Over her abbreviated life.

  15

  The Aegean

  Early September 1999

  Ana spots him the minute the crowd from the afternoon ferry sweeps onto the pier. Through the clouds of exhaust from the impatient trucks she sees him before he sees her, his face still pale from the English summer. And suddenly, his luminous smile.

  Through his T-shirt when she hugs him she can feel the warmth of his body; she remembers his height as he stands beside her, the Dimitri smell of his skin.

  ‘You’ve cut your hair,’ she says, suddenly nervous, saying the first thing that comes into her head.

  ‘Special occasion,’ he tells her. ‘Hey, I’ve even given it a wash.’

  ‘Don’t tell me – you finally got rid of the Aigai dust.’

  ‘At last! And I binned that bandana, too. The new look is more London sophisticate – what do you think?’

  She takes in his sandals, his T-shirt and jeans.

  ‘It’s not all that different,’ she says, a little dubious.

  He laughs. ‘I knew you’d be impressed.’

  He is here, she thinks, beside her on the jetty in the ordinary sunshine; she picks up his rucksack to anchor her heart to the earth. But quickly he takes it back from her and swings it over his shoulder, leaving her to grapple with her heart on her own.

  They stand awkwardly before the taverna where Ana first asked for directions, waiting for the bus to reverse. In term time it also does the school rounds, crossing the island with adolescent hieroglyphs etched into its carapace of dust.

  ‘The summer hasn’t been too bad to you,’ Dimitri says as they sink into a seat by the door. He is looking at the tan on her skin that has turned her green eyes bluish, at her flyaway hair lightened by the sun and the salt.

  She isn’t sure he is right, but now isn’t the time.

  ‘Welcome to my hideout,’ she says.

  Anastasia has left a note of welcome. Vasilis, she says, is planning to cook this evening, but they won’t be back till after dark.

  Dimitri goes for a swim in the opaline water, then stretches out on the sand. Beach grit sticks like sesame seeds to his ribcage that rises and falls as he breathes.

  Ana sits beside him in the rays of afternoon sunshine, watching the bay transform itself into colours she cannot name.

  ‘Thank you,’ she says, ‘for coming all this way.’

  He turns his head to look at her.

  ‘It’s great to see you,’ he says. ‘I got your message and left as soon as I could get a flight – though I’m intrigued what the mystery might be.’

  She hasn’t yet explained why she wrote, all the reasons she needed him to come.

  ‘There’s one thing, though,’ he continues before she can answer. ‘On the flight over I realised I should have asked you.’ He props his head on his elbow. ‘How’s Lucky Luke these days?’

  ‘Lucas?’ she says. She thinks about him with a pang, and flushes. She hasn’t spoken to him yet, but needs to – they haven’t communicated since their one brief email exchange. Over these past few weeks of turmoil she has come to realise that the person he believes he is in love with bears little relation to her self.

  ‘I don’t know about Lucas,’ she says. ‘I think that he’s in love with some other girl.’

  They talk for a long time. Against the starkness of the island, in the calm of the early evening, she tells Dimitri everything that has happened: the reasons she had for coming here; the decisions she has to make.

  He listens gravely and without interruption to all the things that she says.

  When she has finished he gives her a look she cannot interpret, and then he extends his hand.

  ‘Swim with me,’ he says.

  They wade out into waist-deep water, then swim to the edge of the bay, then float in star formations staring up at the sky. The sea is still as a lake and the sun, as it slides behind what might be clouds or islands, gilds their faces with copper light.

  When they are close to shore again they both stop swimming. She feels his arm as it slides about her waist.

  ‘Hello, sea goddess,’ he says.

  She feels the smoothness of her skin against his skin, like silk, warm against silk.

  He scoops up a strand of seaweed with drooping pendants and drapes it about her forehead. Its clamminess sends a frisson down her spine.

  ‘There, you see. Emeralds. I bring you offerings from my dwelling in the deep.’

  She rolls her eyes, then tries to glimpse the knobbles he has used to adorn her, but all she can see is a blur of rusty green.

  ‘And there I was, thinking you dwelled in London,’ she says.

  Her heart thumps loudly against her ribcage; she dares not look down at the ripples it must be dispatching across the Aegean.

  Seawater beads the hollows of his neck, his shoulders. Her fingernails are pale as moons against the brown skin of her hands.

  ‘I remember you,’ he whispers, to her, to the mountains, to the listening breeze, as he kisses her, and pulls her back to him where she is drifting, both of them trembling now as he holds her, close in the shivery sea.

  Their footprints have long since dried on the terrace when the car pulls in across the gravel, its one good headlight greeting them with its permanent wink.

  Anastasia hugs Dimitri like a son and Vasilis embraces him like a long-lost friend.

  ‘It’s been too long,’ Vasilis says, pleased to have another man around.

  He discovers a tray of ice in the freezer and they pour measures of the vodka that Dimitri has brought them into the tallest glasses at hand. Vasilis retrieves the chair that he has borrowed again for his workshop, and flicks off the dust with an expert switch of a towel.

  Dimitri is sitting so close to her that Ana can feel the warmth of him, the fine static hairs on his arm.

  Anastasia is telling them how they’d driven Vasilis’s mother over to Agios Georgios for a baptism, in the mountains on the inland road. The chapel was so small that only the priests could fit inside it; the congregation had to stand with the baby on the pine needles outside.

  Then she and Dimitri talk a little about London, and Ana, dislodging the kitten that adopted her on her first morning, goes inside to give Vasilis a hand.

  She has instructions to fetch some rosemary from the bush she once trimmed flowers from next to the gate. At the top of the path she turns and stands a moment, inhaling the night aromas, watching the lights of a tanker glide by on the now-black sea.

  She can just make out the ancient pottery midden, the table for phantom seafarers, the place where the silvery log lies sunken among the pebbles on the beach. She can hear the breeze in the bamboo stand where Vasilis buried the black-and-white cat that once sought sanctuary there. She sees Dimitri and Anastasia, their faces lit up brightly on the terrace, and Vasilis emerging from the kitchen with an oversized bowl in his hands. The windows of the house glow golden in the darkness, like the bridge of a sturdy ship.

  Things are shifting inside her, falling at last into place.

  The night is still warm so they eat outside with the hurricane lamp hooked up to a nail in the wall. Ana feels calmer than she has in weeks, thanks to D
imitri and the vodka and the sea.

  Anastasia wants to turn in early. She makes up a bed for Dimitri in the living room in case he needs it, and leaves an extra blanket on the chair.

  The sheets on Ana’s bed are cool against their limbs as they lie there, salt-skinned, messy-haired, half-awake. They’ve left the window open and the mosquito coils are smouldering and the bed is all tangled with legs.

  ‘It’s really you,’ she whispers, not daring to believe he is there.

  They speak in subdued voices, no louder than the breeze in the pines.

  They doze and turn, restless, unaccustomed this night to the presence of the other in their sleep. He wakes with her breath on his neck, her arm across his ribs, and lies there silently, thinking.

  ‘Ana,’ Dimitri says, searching for her again in the last languid hours before dawn. He can see the line of her hip, the curve of her shoulder, the three raised crosses at the back of her ear where she’s swept up the weight of her hair.

  She turns to face him. It’s as if she has been waiting for him a long time, already awake. She turns, and moves under his hands.

  He’d go anywhere she asked him, he realises, this green-eyed girl he found in the Aigai dust.

  He will help her; they’ve discussed it; isn’t this what researchers do? They will call Madrid and Buenos Aires, find out more from the newspaper in London. There must be people in Argentina who can help.

  He dreams and wakes, and listens to the unfolding of the sea. It is not yet daybreak, just something preparing to alter in the quality of the light, when he whispers to her again.

  ‘All these things you’ve told me about your family, about your known and unknown parents.’ He hesitates. ‘It’s okay, Ana. It’s just your story. It’s just what happened to you.’

  She looks at him, a thousand things in her eyes.

  He puts his finger to her lips. ‘You will still be you in the end.’

  He is stroking her hair now, soothing her, ironing away her questions with the slow even movements of his hand. He is aware of her need for someone outside all this to lean against, for some intimacy of her own to draw courage from, with the ground in constant motion beneath her feet.