by Kate Hewitt
“I didn’t even know there was a Greek Resistance,” Ava admitted. “Or a civil war.” Her lack of knowledge embarrassed her, but Eleni, like with so much else, shrugged it off philosophically.
“Oh, yes, the Resistance was very strong, especially the communists. They hid up in the mountains, attacked outposts and gendarmeries. Some of the villagers helped feed and shelter them, and of course the Nazis did not like that at all. They burned whole villages to the ground for giving a bit of bread. By the end of the war, Iousidous was nearly ruined. It was a mercy there was anything left at all.”
“When did the civil war end?”
“In 1949. I was a year old.”
Nearly ten years of brutal, unrelenting violence and bloodshed. And her grandmother, presumably, had lived through most of that—although she’d left Greece, as far as Ava knew, in 1946. How had Sophia got out of the country? It surely couldn’t have been easy, with the end of the Second World War and the continuing Greek Civil War, and yet Ava had never given it a second’s thought. Again she felt that flicker of shame. She’d seen her grandmother at least once a month all through her childhood, had sat on her stiff, plastic-swathed sofa and never even thought to ask. All she remembered about those endless Sunday afternoons was being almost painfully bored, wearing a dress that usually itched, and wishing she could drink something other than the orange squash her grandmother made, which was always far too strong, a bit like the coffee she was now taking in tiny medicinal sips.
“And what happened to the village after the civil war?” she asked, taking another sip of coffee. The taste, it seemed, was growing on her. A little bit, anyway. She didn’t feel the need to wince.
“The economy was terrible, and young people wanted new lives in the city or even in another country. They left. It is understandable—even I left, for a time. Just about anyone who could, did.”
“So you haven’t lived here all your life?”
“I spent a year in England, working as an au pair,” Eleni said with a shrug. “Over fifty years ago now. It is how I learned my English.” She smiled, pouring herself a cup of coffee and settling in a chair opposite Ava. “But I came back to Greece after, and worked in Lamia. My husband, he was from the next town over. We both wanted to settle here. The young people want to leave, but I think, at some time in life, you need to go home and see what is there.”
Ava nodded, wondering when that time would be for her, if ever. Her only desire had been to leave home. Leave all the sorrow and regrets and memories. She wasn’t even sure what home was now. Was it the house in York? Simon? Or the hopes for their little family that she had long since lost? Perhaps home wasn’t something that could be found any more.
“So,” Eleni asked briskly, “what brings you to Greece?” She glanced rather pointedly at Ava’s wedding ring. “For as long a time as you say?”
Ava laughed shakily. Eleni sounded both disapproving and curious. She supposed she was traditional about things like a marriage, a woman her age in a small, remote village like this. “I’m separated from my husband,” she admitted, the words sounding strange coming from her own mouth. Even though she barely knew Eleni, after everything that the woman had done for her already, she surely deserved her honesty. “We decided we—we needed to take some time away from each other and see what happened.”
A rather innocuous way to put it, but Ava couldn’t manage anything more. When they’d separated a month ago, it had seemed so painfully final and yet so horribly ordinary. She had despised the stilted conversation as they navigated the prosaic details of a life apart, deciding in an awkward, diffident way which credit cards to cancel and whether to divide the furniture. It had been awful, worse somehow than the first conversation about whether or not to separate at all, the way they’d dismantled their joined existence like an old washing machine. Could you put such a thing back together again, even if you wanted to, or would it just stay a collection of jumbled, rusty parts?
“I don’t know about these modern marriages,” Eleni said, taking a sip of her own coffee. “My husband and I never spent a night apart until he died two years ago now. How can any problems be fixed if you don’t solve them together?”
“Sometimes you need a break from solving problems,” Ava said quietly. She stared down at her coffee, her throat turning thick with tears, her vision clouding. “Sometimes you need a break from how hard it is,” she added, then pressed her lips together before she said any more or broke down completely. Nearly a year later it was all still so fresh, so raw, so painful. When would it get better? When would she be able to talk about her daughter and her husband and the family she’d expected to have without feeling as if her soul was being ripped into ragged pieces? Soon, she hoped, even as she continued to cling to her grief.
Eleni reached over and covered her hand with her own work-worn one. “I am sorry. It is not my business to ask.”
Ava looked up and tried to smile. “No, it’s all right. You’ve been so good to me—”
“It is nothing,” Eleni said, releasing Ava’s hand and standing up. “But now, I think, you must go see what this house of yours looks like in daylight. I will have supper ready this evening. You will not be able to cook in that place until tomorrow.”
Fifteen minutes later Ava left Eleni’s house and strolled down the street towards her grandmother’s. Her own house. The sun was lemony bright, the sky hard and blue. She tilted her face up towards the warmth, enjoyed the feel of the sun on her face as well as the crisp, cool mountain air.
Iousidous did not look much livelier in the morning than it had in the lonely darkness of last night. A few shutters had been opened to the sunshine, and as Ava walked she saw one or two older women, wearing head scarves and aprons, stooped over in their small front gardens. She smiled tentatively at them but they only stared balefully back. Clearly this was not a place for outsiders. Ava recalled how Eleni had spoken sharply to her last night, until she had stammered something out about her grandmother. She wondered whether other villagers might warm up to her if they knew about Sophia. The women in their gardens, although elderly, did not look old enough to have been alive during the war. Would anyone, besides Parthenope, remember that time?
Ava pushed such thoughts aside as she came to the front of the house. It looked even more dilapidated in the bright sunshine. She was half amazed it was standing at all. The roof tiles were broken, the shutters falling from their hinges. At least the door opened with a little less resistance this time, and once more she stepped inside.
It felt different to last night, when it had been nothing more than a depressing-looking hovel. Now, in light of Parthenope’s confused memory of Sophia Paranoussis, Ava was acutely aware that this had been her grandmother’s home. She had been born here, had grown up here, lived and perhaps loved here. Yet the musty, near-empty room gave nothing away.
Ava wandered through the downstairs; besides the large living room, there was only a small kitchen and a bathroom, both seeming grudgingly tacked on at a later date, as well as a small side room that looked to have been some kind of storage area. The walls were rough and unfinished in that room, and the floor was just stones over packed earth, weeds poking through the cracks. The kitchen held only a stone sink and an ancient-looking gas stove. She’d seen a second floor from the outside, but it took her at least ten minutes to find the stairs on the outside of the house. Obscured by a tangle of overgrown vines, they were barely visible from the front of the house. Ava hesitated, debating their safety before she took a cautious step upwards. The rusted iron creaked underfoot but held, and slowly, grasping the railing, she made it to the second floor. The door at the top was locked, but it opened with some jiggling of the same rusty key she’d used downstairs. Ava took a step inside a dark, narrow corridor; two doors led off it. She peeked inside one bedroom, saw sunshine filtering in through the cracks in the closed shutters, touching an old iron bedstead with light. Ava took a step inside the room and her foot went through the rotted wooden fl
oorboards; she gasped aloud, imagining herself falling to the floor below, thudding on the stone as lifeless as a rag doll, but then her foot hit what looked like roof tile. She realized the bedrooms must have been added on later—built directly onto the roof.
Shaky with relief, her heart racing, she stepped back out into the hallway. The second bedroom was much like the first, but with two bed frames instead of one. Empty and silent, dust motes dancing through the air, the room revealed nothing. Ava felt a spasm of helpless frustration, for she could not even begin to envision her grandmother in this room. She could not remotely imagine what her grandmother might have said or worn, much less thought or dreamed. Her own ignorance made the room’s silence feel strangely like a reproach. Who was the woman who had lived here? What had her life been like?
Ava heard a car drive slowly down the village road, its engine sputtering a little, and the bleat of a goat or sheep in the distance. The entire landscape felt foreign, impenetrable, a world apart. Shaking her head, she stepped back into the dark corridor and then downstairs.
A door led off the kitchen into the back garden, now no more than a patch of weeds and a few twisted, stunted-looking trees. Ava sat on a wide, sun-warmed stone that served as a stoop, and rested her elbows on her knees. About twenty meters away the garden disappeared into scrub, which in turn led into dense pine forest. The hills in the distance were dark green with trees, and, with the only sound the wind, she felt very much alone.
She closed her eyes, tried to imagine the house not as it once had been, when her grandmother had lived here, but as it could be, with some scrubbing and repairs. She could find out whether the stove worked and buy a refrigerator. Perhaps Eleni would know someone who could repair the floorboards and whitewash the walls. With a few bits of furniture, it could at least be livable.
And to her surprise, despite last night’s difficult start, she realized she wanted to live here. For a little while at least. She still wasn’t sure what she would do, or just how she might manage, but she knew she wanted to try. The possibility made her feel peaceful—almost. As close to peace as she’d been in a long while, perhaps.
She heard a whisper in the grass and opened her eyes to see the scrawny cat from last night staring at her with lamp-like eyes. At least she thought it was the same one; in the darkness she hadn’t noticed the animal’s color, but she thought she recognized that unblinking stare.
“Sorry,” she said. “I don’t have any food. But I will later, if you come back.”
The cat let out a reproachful meow and then turned and stalked away through the weeds.
After a moment Ava rose again, locked up the house, and went back out into the sleepy street. She would explore the rest of the village, and then perhaps in the afternoon she would drive to Lamia for furniture and food.
Hardly anyone was about as Ava made her way up the hillside. In daylight she saw that Iousidous was really no more than one winding street that snaked up the hillside, turning in on itself several times, houses lining either side. For every house with a garden or car or some sign of life, there were two that were clearly uninhabited, as dilapidated as her grandmother’s or worse. Some were complete ruins, the roofs or windows missing, weeds growing in the great rooms, an air of forlorn emptiness shrouding them like a mist.
Halfway up the hill the ground leveled out to form a surprisingly pleasant square with a fountain in the middle. To Ava’s happy surprise she saw a café on one side of the square, no more than a small storefront with an awning and a few tables outside, but at this point she’d hardly expected Iousidous to have any businesses at all. She made her way over to the café and smiled at the stout woman sweeping the floor who gazed back in obvious suspicion.
“Do you speak English?”
“Enough.”
Ava wasn’t sure what that meant, but she widened her smile anyway. “Could I have a cup of coffee?” Perhaps the only way to get used to Greek coffee was to keep drinking it.
The woman nodded tersely and pointed to one of the tables. Ava was the only customer. She sat down as the woman disappeared inside, and then gazed round the square.
Besides the café, there was a little post office and a small shop that looked to sell basic groceries. The rest of the whitewashed buildings were either shut up or appeared to be homes, although Ava imagined that once—perhaps in her grandmother’s lifetime—the square had been bustling with activity and enterprise.
If she couldn’t imagine her grandmother in the house, perhaps she could imagine her here, young and vibrant, a wicker shopping basket on her arm, her hair dark, eyes bright.
Still it was impossible; she was imagining a made-up person, someone who might never have existed. The only grandmother Ava could imagine was the elderly woman from her childhood and adolescence, her dark eyes faded yet her chin still tilted proudly as she beckoned with one claw-like finger for Ava to fetch the tin of boiled sweets she kept on the top shelf of the pantry.
The woman came back with her coffee, and Ava thanked her. “Efharisto.”
The woman glanced at her, eyes narrowed. “You do not speak Greek.”
So much for her attempt at the language, Ava thought wryly. “No, not really.”
“On holiday?”
“Sort of.” The woman frowned, not understanding, and Ava explained, “I’m staying here for a while. In the Paranoussis house, at the first curve in the street. Do you know it?”
The woman still looked uncomprehending, and Ava gave her an apologetic little smile and a shrug. “My grandmother lived here.”
This gained no response either, finally Ava pointed at the coffee. “Efharisto,” she said again. “Nostimos.” Delicious.
The woman merely grunted and returned to her sweeping.
Ava sipped the coffee slowly as she gazed around the empty square. She wondered how the woman at the café made a living if she sold only one coffee a morning. Did any young people live here at all? The whole village seemed so silent and empty, as if it had been forgotten by time itself.
Fighting a sudden pang of loneliness, she slipped her mobile phone out of her pocket and glanced at the blank screen. No received or missed calls, but then the reception was patchy here. Someone might not get through. Who, Ava wondered as she put her phone away, was she hoping would ring? Her mother? Her best friend, Julie? Or Simon?
Simon always used to ring her to make sure she’d arrived safely somewhere. His diligence had annoyed her sometimes, made her feel as if he thought she was a scatterbrained child, yet now, sitting alone in the empty silence of this square, she found she missed it. For a moment she craved the comfort and security of knowing someone wanted to hear from her, knowing she was missed and maybe even loved. The phone was as silent as the house had been, revealing nothing. Simon probably wasn’t thinking of her at all.
After she’d drunk and paid for her coffee—deciding that two cups a day of Greek coffee was at least one more than she needed—Ava continued her walk through the village and up the hillside. She walked along another snaking street of houses, and then past a small modern building that looked to be a school.
Then the road turned sharply once more and she was suddenly at the top of the hill, with a tiny blue-domed, whitewashed church perched on its rocky summit, a scrubby patch of grass and a few plane trees out in front. The pine-covered hills stretched all around her, a vast, undulating blanket of dark green, and in the distance she spied the crystalline sparkle of water, like light reflecting off a mirror.
She turned towards the church and saw that one of the wooden doors had been left slightly ajar. After a second’s hesitation Ava slipped inside, her eyes adjusting to the dim light. The air smelled of beeswax and incense and she saw that the church was just one small, empty room, devoid of any chairs, with some peeling but brightly painted icons on the walls, and two ornately decorated wooden screens in front, hiding the altar from view. She stood there a moment, breathing in the unfamiliar yet weirdly comforting scents, amazed to find herself i
n such a strange place: a little church on top of a hill in the middle of Greece. How had she got here?
Perhaps she could picture her grandmother here, standing with the other villagers, head bowed, listening to the priest chant the Mass. She wasn’t quite sure what a Greek Orthodox service looked like, although she had a vague recollection of semi-Catholic practices, yet with a more culturally ethnic feel. She realized she didn’t even know what—if anything—her grandmother had believed.
And what did she believe? The last time she’d been in a church had been for her daughter’s funeral. The casket had been tiny, the size of a bread box, white with silver handles. Stony-faced, Simon had carried it in his arms and placed it on the altar, like some kind of awful sacrifice, before the service had begun. At that point, only three days after her labor, still bleeding, her empty stomach sagging, her breasts full and aching with milk that hadn’t dried up yet despite the pills she’d been given, Ava had felt too numb to cry, too shocked even to process what was happening.
Yet when the minister, some round-cheeked balding man whose parish they happened to live in, took the casket in his arms and headed out of the church, Ava had cried out. It had been an ugly animal sound, more of a growl than a scream, and utterly instinctive. Simon had drawn her quickly to him, and Ava thought he would have put his hand over her mouth if she hadn’t jerked away again. He was embarrassed, and she was in agony. She felt as if she had drunk poison, as if her insides were writhing in a desperate and tortured denial. This can’t be happening. She had wondered if this was what dying felt like, but knew it wasn’t, for she kept relentlessly living, on and on, and surely that was the greater tragedy.
The smell of the incense was making her dizzy, or maybe it was just the memories, but either way Ava knew she had to get out of the church. Letting out a breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding, she headed back into sunlight, and down the hill.
She walked slowly, feeling tired now, the sun surprisingly hot overhead for the middle of March. As she passed the low concrete building she’d assumed was a school, schoolchildren spilled out of its doors, dark-haired children shouting excitedly in Greek, the girls in red-and-white checked pinafores, the boys in red jumpers and flannel trousers. She slowed to a stop by the fence, watching them play; the youngest ones couldn’t be more than five or six. In their red uniforms they reminded her of apples, glossy and brimming with health and vitality. The children barely took notice of her, yet Ava ached as she looked at them.