by Kate Hewitt
It shouldn’t hurt. She knew that. She’d been an art teacher at a primary school, for heaven’s sake, before her job had been axed because of austerity measures and the relentless budget cuts. She’d taught several classes of thirty children every day, except for the six weeks’ compassionate leave, not maternity, she’d been granted. She’d somehow got herself through all that without falling apart, so why did she feel so close to it now? Was it being in such a strange, new place, or having just remembered the funeral while in the little church at the top of the village? Or was it simply that the grief was always inside her, and sometimes it raised its head and sniffed the air, a crouching beast ready to spring and devour?
A teacher, a woman about the same age as Ava, came to the door of the school. She was dressed casually in jeans and a jumper, and her long, dark hair was pulled back into a ponytail. She was striking rather than pretty, with dark eyes and heavy, straight eyebrows, and as she stared at Ava, Ava realized it might look a bit suspicious to have a stranger lurking about this little village school. With a little grimacing smile of apology, she started down the hill, and as she turned, she saw the woman smile back and wave, and her heart lightened just a little.
5
Now
After she’d returned from her walk, Ava decided to drive to Lamia. Eleni had promised her that the power would be on by the time she finished her shopping; the older woman had also offered to help with the scrubbing and sweeping. Ava, in usual fashion, was both humbled and cheered, and Eleni brushed her stammering thanks aside.
“It is nothing,” she said, and in so firm a voice that Ava believed her.
It made her wonder what kind of community her grandmother had lived in. Had the villagers been close, helped each other with the demands of a harsh life farming this mountainous country, not to mention the challenges of the war? Had Sophia had friends, or even a boyfriend? She must have been in her early twenties when she’d left. Had it been hard to leave, or even heart wrenching? Had she missed anyone?
It was impossible to envisage. Ava could not fathom what life was like in rural Greece seventy years ago. Eleni had mentioned that the houses wouldn’t have had running water or electricity at that time; that was hard enough to imagine, never mind the customs, traditions, societal rules… It was a different world, an alien universe, and in her mind Ava peopled it with cardboard figures, girls in wide skirts and embroidered blouses, men in vaguely medieval-looking poet shirts and leather boots. Ridiculous. She had no idea what any of it would have really been like.
Sighing, she wished again she could ask Parthenope what she’d meant by that tearful apology, but she knew Eleni had practically forbidden it. After accepting so much hospitality, Ava could hardly go against her host’s wishes. Yet she had no idea how else to find out more about her grandmother’s life. The house held no answers, and there could surely be only a handful of people left who remembered the war, who had lived through it.
She let her mind drift as she drove to Lamia, the road winding through the steep hills, the pine forests giving way to a sudden, fertile plain and the whitewashed huddle of buildings; the town was clearly much larger than Iousidous yet still seemed quaint.
In the central square Ava strolled alongside stalls with a basket she’d bought on her arm, the sun warm on her face as she inspected ropes of onions and fat bulbs of garlic, baskets of shiny, plump tomatoes and lumps of feta cheese swimming in brine. She found a little stall on a side street that sold towels and bed sheets for a couple of euros apiece, and she bought a set of basic dishes in pleasingly thick white china. She visited a shop that sold furniture along with just about everything, it seemed, that you needed to do up a house. Pots and pans lay haphazardly stacked next to duvet covers, and a dozen plastic-framed prints of da Vinci’s Madonna of the Rocks leaned against one wall.
The shopkeeper didn’t speak much English, but somehow, with a combination of Ava’s hesitant Greek, his bits of English, and a lot of pointing and miming, she managed to buy a table, chairs, a sofa, a mattress, and even a fridge. She flinched a little at the price, doing a mental conversion to pounds, but she’d received a severance package from the school and she needed only a few things. The man promised to deliver the items later that afternoon, putting his hand over his heart and nodding vigorously, which Ava hoped was a sign of serious intent.
Satisfied with her purchases, she had lunch at a little café in the central square, eating crispy souvlaki and burning her fingers. By the time she made it back to her rental car it was mid-afternoon, and she was both tired and relaxed, humming under her breath as she drove out of Lamia and up the steep, twisting road that led to Iousidous. It felt good to be productive, to have actually accomplished something. Perhaps she could even sleep in the house tonight. The thought gave her a little leap of excitement, along with a pulse of alarm.
She was a few kilometers outside of the village, or so she assumed, when she heard a strange popping sound and then the car bumped and rumbled to a stop. She just had time to pull onto the shoulder, not that there was much of one, before turning off the engine and going to discover what had happened.
A flat tire. Of course. Her good mood burst, as fragile as a soap bubble. If she had been one of those calm, competent, capable women, she would have known how to change a tire. This wouldn’t have fazed her at all.
The sun beat down and the air was still and silent, the only sound the faint rustling of the wind in the pines high above. She felt like the last person left on earth. Taking a deep breath, Ava brushed a tendril of hair away from her face and strove not to panic. Even so she could feel the sharp little claws of anxiety digging into her skull, clutching at her soul. Two months after the stillbirth she’d been prescribed antidepressants, but the pills just made her feel woozy and sick and so she had stopped taking them, had insisted she could conquer her anxiety with a combination of homeopathy, yoga, and simple mind over matter.
She hadn’t conquered it, hadn’t even really tried.
Simon had been patient with her, she acknowledged now, even if it had been in a long-suffering aren’t-I-so-patient kind of way. But then he’d always accused her of panicking, of rushing into worst-case scenarios on very little evidence. She’d been the one to suggest they buy gold bars when the stock market plunged; she’d even, ridiculously she saw now, hoarded flour and salt after reading a book on the necessity of self-sufficiency.
“What,” Simon had asked her, smiling just a little, “are you going to do with fifty kilograms of salt?”
The book she’d read had insisted on stockpiling salt, and belatedly Ava realized that it was useful only if you intended to kill, skin, and preserve your own meat, hardly a possibility in urban England even if she’d been interested in such a thing, which she most certainly had not.
Yet even though she’d overreacted over those absurd things, she hadn’t when it had come to her child. After years of trying, fertility drugs, endless rounds of IVF, she’d been strangely, smugly complacent about her pregnancy. Why hadn’t she panicked then, when it had mattered? When so much had been at stake?
With effort Ava pushed the thoughts away. The point was she shouldn’t panic now, when she had a flat tire and no means of changing it, and she was on a deserted road several kilometers from her destination with no mobile reception.
It didn’t look good, yet what was the worst that could happen? She’d walk back to Iousidous, ask for Eleni’s help, and drive back with someone who could change her tire. Eleni probably could. She certainly seemed capable, and Ava doubted it would even surprise the older woman that she had never changed a tire in her life.
“It is nothing,” Eleni would say with a dismissive wave, and Ava would feel both grateful and pathetic. She wanted, she realized now, to do something for herself for once, and yet she acknowledged she didn’t even know how.
She heard the sound of a motor in the distance, and with a wary relief she saw a battered pickup truck approach. She stood back, unsure whether she shoul
d smile, wave, or make some internationally known signal of distress. SOS? Hadn’t she read something about putting a pillowcase in the window to indicate you were in trouble? It must have been some true-story drama in a magazine, yet who kept pillowcases in the car? Although, she realized ruefully, she actually had some in the trunk.
In the end she just stood there, looking, she was sure, abject and quite helpless.
The truck slowed to a stop, sending up plumes of dust. A man rolled down the window and poked his head out; Ava saw he was a bit older than she was, in his forties probably, with curly, dark hair going gray at the temples and serious, liquid eyes. He spoke rapidly in Greek, and Ava, feeling even more pathetic, gave a little shrug and spread her hands.
“Me sighorite—”
“You are English?”
Relief pulsed through her. “Yes—”
“And you have a flat tire, it seems.”
“Yes.” Another wave of relief. “You speak English—”
He waved his hand in a so-so gesture. “Some.” He sounded practically fluent to her, especially considering her own lamentable attempts at his language. “I could change it for you. You have a spare?”
Ava hadn’t even checked. Why bother, when she couldn’t change a tire herself? She tried to smile back. “I think so—”
“It is a hire car, yes? Let me look.” He pulled in front of her car on the shoulder; Ava saw there was a sulky-looking teenaged girl in the passenger seat of the truck. The girl crossed her arms and stared straight in front of her as the man got out.
“You are here on holiday?” he asked as he opened the trunk of her car. He raised his eyebrows at all the packages there, and Ava hurried to move them.
“Sort of,” she said, pushing aside a pile of sheets and a couple of saucepans. “An extended one.” She was not about to explain the complexities of her impulsive move to Greece to this stranger, friendly as he was.
“So it seems.” He opened the well of the trunk, and they both stared in silent dismay at the cavernous space where a spare tire should have been. “It appears you were not the first to have a flat in this car,” the man said.
Ava said nothing. She suddenly felt too tired and overwhelmed to speak, much less act. Fatigue from the plane journey, emotional exhaustion, panic—it all came crashing down and she nearly swayed where she stood.
“Don’t worry,” the man said and Ava refocused on his face. He was frowning, studying her in obvious concern. “I can give you a lift.”
“Oh—”
“That is, if you are not going too far?”
“Iousidous.”
“Just a few kilometers. I live right outside the village.” He held out one weathered hand. “Andreas Lethikos.”
“Ava Lancet.”
She took his hand, feeling a faint flash of something almost like comfort at the way his hand enveloped hers. It made her feel, bizarrely and momentarily, safe. “I’m sorry. I only arrived in Greece yesterday and I think the tiredness from traveling just hit me.” Among other things.
“Let me put your things in my truck.” Ava tried to help him shift all of her new belongings, but Andreas would have none of it. So she stood on the side of the dusty road and watched, feeling helpless yet again.
Finally he opened the cab of the truck and gestured inside. The teenage girl glared at her as Ava scrambled into the truck. She didn’t usually get in cars—or trucks—with strange men, but the presence of the sulky girl who eyed her with blatant suspicion actually made her feel safer, as did the wedding ring she saw on Andreas’s finger.
The girl spoke in Greek, and Andreas answered a bit sharply. Looking extremely put out, the girl moved over a few inches so Ava could sit rather awkwardly between them.
“This is my daughter, Kalista,” Andreas said as he started the truck.
The girl spoke again, and Ava wished she’d taken the time to learn more Greek; she couldn’t catch a single word. She tuned out of their rather tense conversation and rested her head back against the seat. She felt as if she could fall asleep right there, bouncing between Andreas and his angry daughter.
While driving back to Iousidous, she’d been buoyed by a fragile new optimism that had now, in the light of reality, blown away like so much dust. She didn’t just feel tired, she knew; she felt homesick. She wanted, suddenly and painfully, to ring Simon. To hear his voice, so steady and reassuring.
Not that she was going to act on that impulse. When she’d told Simon she was moving to Greece, just as when she’d told him she wanted to separate, he’d hardly said anything at all. His face had remained expressionless as he simply nodded and said, “If that’s what you want to do.”
Ava had wanted to cry out that of course it wasn’t, but all the things she had wanted were impossible now. A baby. A family. Simon smiling at her, his hand cradling her bump of a belly, his other arm around her shoulders. Instead, he stared at her with that awful blank look—indifference, really, was what it was—and shrugged twelve years of marriage away in the space of a second.
And so she had gone.
She realized that Andreas and Kalista had stopped speaking, and the silence in the cab of the truck was taut with suppressed tension. Tight-lipped, Andreas glanced at Ava. “I’m so very sorry, but my daughter needs to return home before I take you to Iousidous. She has homework for school, and I would like to help you move your things and change your tire.”
“Oh—” Ava said, struggling to sit up a bit. She had not considered the practicalities of leaving her car on the side of the road. If Simon had been here, he would have thought of it. He would have had a plan, and he would have executed it with the brisk efficiency that mostly gratified but occasionally annoyed her. “That’s very kind of you,” she finally said, inadequately. “Of course I don’t mind.”
Andreas nodded. “Thank you for your understanding. I do apologize.”
They drove in silence along the steep mountain road until Andreas turned down a narrow gravel lane that led into a prosperous-looking property; a five-bar gate opened up to a well-tended track that wound through the pine forest.
“What do you farm?” Ava asked as the truck pulled in front of a low, rambling whitewashed villa. It looked about five times bigger than her house in its downstairs alone, and its modern conveniences most certainly extended past a tottering gas stove and running water.
“Olives,” Andreas replied. “We make olive oil, although, long ago, before the civil war we had wheat fields as well. The Lethikos family has owned this farm for over a hundred years.” He spoke proudly, yet there was a slight edge to his voice and he glanced rather pointedly at his daughter, who shrugged and looked away. Ava’s curiosity was piqued, but she said nothing. “Would you like to come inside?” Andreas asked. “For a glass of water or fruit juice? It must have been very hot and dusty to sit by the side of the road. How long were you there?”
“Not too long,” Ava replied, although with the panic creeping up on her it had felt endless. “A glass of fruit juice sounds lovely, thank you.”
She followed Andreas into the villa and watched as Kalista disappeared into one of the bedrooms without a backward glance. The living room was airy and comfortable, with a huge stone fireplace taking up most of one wall. The windows were open to the veranda, pots of flowers and herbs lining the steps. Ava glanced in appreciation at the view of the mountainside dotted with the twisted trunks of olive trees. Far below she could see the white churning foam of a river.
“Visinada,” Andreas told her as he joined her by the window. He handed her the glass of juice and Ava murmured her thanks. “Made with cherry juice, a Greek specialty. I hope you like it.”
She took a sip; it was both tart and sweet. “Delicious, thank you.”
He nodded towards the view of the mountainside, the river foaming far below. “That is the Gorgopotamos. There is a railroad bridge across it, but the area around the river is a protected site.”
“Really? Why?”
“There
was a viaduct across it before the Second World War, very important for bringing supplies to Athens. The Resistance bombed it in 1942. Very…” He snapped his fingers, searching for the word. “Successful.”
“Goodness,” Ava murmured, and Andreas smiled.
“These things don’t seem so long ago to us. Nothing really changes here, as my daughter complains.” He paused. “I’m sorry for her—difficulty. We have been alone these last two years since my wife died, and it has not been easy.”
“I’m sorry,” Ava said, and meant it. She knew about loss; she could only imagine how trying it must be for a man to raise a willful teenage daughter on his own.
“And what brings you to Greece?”
“I inherited a little house in Iousidous from my grandmother. She was from this region, although she left after the war. When I learned about the farmhouse, it seemed like a good opportunity to come and try something new.” It was a tidy little speech, if a bit bizarre. Ava thought she could probably guess what Andreas was thinking. Why would a woman move to rural Greece on her own, with no obvious plan or job? “My life in England was at a bit of a—stopping point,” she explained, and then, since Andreas had told her about his wife, she added stiltedly, “I lost my job due to budget cuts, and my husband and I are separated.”
“I’m sorry. I don’t mean to ask so many questions. Your business is your own, of course.”
Ava nodded, although it didn’t feel as if her business was her own. She’d only been in Greece for twenty-four hours and already she was telling people things she hadn’t shared with many friends back in England, at least not easily. Even her best friend Julie had only been given scant details. And yet here she felt as if she’d fallen down a rabbit hole into a world where people didn’t guard their secrets or avoid looking you in the eye; they opened their homes and maybe even their hearts, and she could not help but respond—impulsively perhaps—in kind. Simon, Ava thought, would have shaken his head at the way she’d accepted Eleni’s offer to stay the night, and Andreas’s offer of a lift. He would have told her she was too trusting, too dependent, and perhaps he would have been right. Or maybe she’d been living with Simon’s stoic silence for too long.