by Rachel Cusk
Angeliki picked up the carafe and melancholically poured herself a teaspoon of wine, before filling my glass almost to the brim.
‘My husband is a diplomat,’ she said, ‘so we have travelled a lot, evidently, for his work. But it feels completely different to be travelling for my work, and to be travelling independently. I admit that I have sometimes felt afraid, even in places I’m quite familiar with. And in Poland I was very nervous, because there was very little there – including the language – that I recognised. But some of it, at first, was down to the plain fact that I was unused to being by myself. For instance,’ she continued, ‘we lived in Berlin for six years, but even going there alone, as a writer, it seemed somehow alien. Partly it was because I was seeing a new aspect of the city – the literary culture, which I was absolutely outside of before – and partly because being there without my husband caused me to feel, in an entirely new way, what I actually am.’
I replied that I wasn’t sure it was possible, in marriage, to know what you actually were, or indeed to separate what you were from what you had become through the other person. I thought the whole idea of a ‘real’ self might be illusory: you might feel, in other words, as though there were some separate, autonomous self within you, but perhaps that self didn’t actually exist. My mother once admitted, I said, that she used to be desperate for us to leave the house for school, but that once we’d gone she had no idea what to do with herself and wished that we would come back. And she still, even now that her children were adults, would conclude our visits quite forcefully and usher us all off to our own homes, as though something terrible would have happened if we had stayed. Yet I was quite sure that she experienced that same sense of loss after we’d gone, and wondered what she was looking for and why she had driven us away in order to look for it. Angeliki began to rummage in her elegant silver bag and presently pulled out a notepad and pencil.
‘Please excuse me,’ she said. ‘I just need to write that down.’ She sat writing for a moment and then glanced up and said, ‘Could you just repeat the second part?’
I noticed that her notepad was very orderly, like the rest of her appearance, the pages neatly written in straight lines. Her pencil was made of silver too, with a retractable lead which she screwed firmly back into its casing. When she had finished she said: ‘I have to admit that I was astonished by the response in Poland, really very surprised. You know, I presume, that the women of Poland are highly politicised: my audiences were ninety per cent women,’ she said, ‘and they were very vocal. Of course, Greek women are vocal too —’
‘But they are better dressed,’ said Paniotis, who had by now returned. To my surprise, Angeliki took this interjection seriously.
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘the women in Greece like to be beautiful. But in Poland I felt this to be a disadvantage. The women there are so pale and serious: they have wide, flat, cool faces, though their skin is often bad, presumably because of the weather and their diet, which is appalling. And their teeth,’ she added with a little grimace, ‘are not good. But they have a seriousness I envied, as though they had not been distracted, were never distracted from the reality of their own lives. I spent a lot of time in Warsaw with a woman journalist,’ she went on, ‘a person of about my own age and also a mother, who was so thin and flat and hard I found it difficult to believe she was a woman at all. She had straight mouse-coloured hair that went all the way down her back, and a face as white and bony as a glacier, and she wore big workman’s jeans and big clumsy shoes, and she was as clear and sharp and beautiful as an icicle. She and her husband alternated strictly every six months, one working and the other looking after the children. Sometimes he complained, but so far he had accepted the arrangement. But she admitted to me, proudly, that when she went away for work, which she often did, the children would sleep with her photograph beneath their pillows. I laughed,’ Angeliki said, ‘and told her I felt sure my son would die rather than be caught sleeping with a photograph of me beneath his pillow. And Olga gave me such a look that I suddenly wondered whether even our children were infected with the cynicism of our gender politics.’
Angeliki’s face had a softness, almost a mistiness, that was attractive while also being the reason for its careworn appearance. It seemed that anything could leave an impression in that softness. She had the small, neat features of a child, yet her skin was creased as though by worry, which gave her a look of frowning innocence, like a pretty little girl that has not got her way.
‘Talking to this journalist,’ she continued, ‘whose name as I have mentioned was Olga, I wondered whether my whole existence – even my feminism – had been a compromise. I felt it had lacked seriousness. Even my writing has been treated as a kind of hobby. I wondered whether I would have had the courage to be like her, for there seemed to be so little pleasure in her life, so little beauty – the sheer physical ugliness of that part of the world is astonishing – that I wasn’t sure, under similar circumstances, whether I would have had the energy to care. That was why I was surprised by the numbers of women who attended my readings – it almost seemed as though my work was more important to them than it is to me!’
The waiter came to take our order, which was a lengthy process, as Angeliki appeared to be discussing each item on the menu in turn, asking numerous questions as she moved down the list which the waiter answered gravely and sometimes lengthily, never becoming the slightest bit impatient. Paniotis sat beside her, rolling his eyes and occasionally remonstrating with the pair of them, which only served to make the process even longer. Finally it seemed to be concluded and the waiter moved heavily and slowly away, but then Angeliki summoned him back with a little intake of breath and a lifting of her finger, having had, apparently, a few afterthoughts. Her doctor had put her on a special diet, she said to me once he had departed for the second time and vanished through the mahogany louvred doors at the far end of the restaurant, since she had become unwell on her return to Greece from Berlin. She had found herself overwhelmed by the most extraordinary lethargy and – it didn’t trouble her to admit it – by sadness, which she had supposed to be a sort of cumulative physical and emotional exhaustion from so many years abroad, and had spent six months more or less incapacitated in bed; months in which she had discovered, she said, that her husband and son could manage without her far better than she might have imagined, so that when she got up again and returned to normal life she found that her role in the household had diminished. Her husband and son had become used to doing much of what had been her work around the house – or to having it left undone, she said – and in fact had evolved new habits of their own, many of which she disliked; but she recognised, at that moment, that she was being given a choice, and that if she wanted to escape her old identity then this was her opportunity. For some women, she said, it would be the realisation of their greatest fear, to discover that they were not needed, but for her it had had the opposite effect. She found, too, that illness had enabled her to view her life, and the people in it, with greater objectivity. She realised that she was not so bound up with them as she had thought, particularly with her son, on whose account she had always, from the moment of his birth, suffered an immense preoccupation, seeing him as uniquely sensitive and vulnerable, to the extent that she was unable – she now realised – to leave him alone even for a minute. Returning to the world after her illness, her son seemed if not quite a stranger to her then less painfully connected to her by every filament. She still loved him, of course, but she no longer saw him and his life as something she needed to resolve into perfection.
‘For many women,’ she said, ‘having a child is their central experience of creativity, and yet the child will never remain a created object; unless,’ she said, ‘the mother’s sacrifice of herself is absolute, which mine never could have been, and which no woman’s ought to be these days. My own mother lived through me in a way that was completely uncritical,’ she said, ‘and the consequence was that I came into adulthood unprepared for
life, because nobody saw me as important in the way she did, which was the way I was used to being seen. And then you meet a man who thinks you’re important enough to marry you, so it seems right that you should say yes. But it is when you have a baby that the feeling of importance really returns,’ she said, with growing passion, ‘except that one day you realise that all this – the house, the husband, the child – isn’t importance after all, in fact it is the exact opposite: you have become a slave, obliterated!’ She paused dramatically, her face lifted, her hands flat on the table top amidst the silverware. ‘The only hope,’ she continued more quietly, ‘is to make your child and your husband so important in your own mind that your ego has enough sustenance to stay alive. But in fact,’ she said, ‘as Simone de Beauvoir observes, such a woman is nothing but a parasite, a parasite on her husband, a parasite on her child.’
‘In Berlin,’ she continued after a while, ‘my son attended an expensive private college, paid for by the embassy, where we met a great number of rich and well-connected people. The women were of a kind I had never known before in my life: nearly all of them worked in a profession – doctors, lawyers, accountants – and most of them had a large number of children, five or six apiece, whose lives they supervised with amazing diligence and energy, running their families like successful corporations on top of the demanding careers most of them already had. Not only that, these women were as well groomed and well turned out as could be: they went to the gym every day, ran marathons for charity, were as thin and wiry as greyhounds and always wore the most expensive, elegant clothes, though their sinewy muscular bodies were often curiously sexless. They went to church, baked the cakes for the school fete, chaired the debating society, held dinner parties at which six courses were served, read all the latest novels, attended concerts, played tennis and volleyball at the weekends. One such woman would have been enough,’ she said, ‘but in Berlin I met quantities of them. And the funny thing was, I could never remember their names, or their husbands’ names either: in fact,’ she said, ‘I don’t recall a single one of their faces, or the faces of any of their families, except for the face of one child, a boy of about my son’s age, who was terribly disabled and went around in a kind of motorised cart which had a shelf for his chin to rest on, so that his head – which otherwise I suppose would have fallen forward on to his chest – was always propped up.’ She paused, troubled, as though seeing the boy’s face before her once more. ‘I don’t remember his mother’, she continued, ‘ever complaining about her lot: on the contrary, she was a tireless fundraiser for charities supporting his condition, on top of all the other things she had to do.
‘Sometimes,’ she said, ‘I almost wonder whether the exhaustion I felt when we returned from Berlin was in fact the collective exhaustion of these women, which they refused to feel themselves and so had passed on to me. One always seemed to see them running: they ran everywhere, to work and back again, to the supermarket, in groups around the park – talking together as easily as if they were standing still – and if they had to stop for a traffic light they would keep running on the spot in their enormous white shoes until it changed and they could progress again. The rest of the time they wore flat shoes with rubber soles, supremely practical and supremely ugly. Their shoes were the only inelegant thing about them,’ she said, ‘yet I felt they were the key to the whole mystery of their nature, for they were the shoes of a woman without vanity.
‘I myself,’ she continued, extending her silvered foot out from beneath the table, ‘developed a weakness for delicate shoes when we returned to Greece. Perhaps it was because I had begun to see the virtues of standing still. And for the character in my novel, shoes like these represent something forbidden. They are the sort of thing she would never wear. Moreover, when she does see women wearing such shoes, it makes her feel sad. She has believed, until now, that this was because she found such women pitiful, but in fact when she thinks about it honestly it is because she feels excluded or disbarred from the concept of womanhood the shoes represent. She feels, almost, as if she isn’t a woman at all. But if she isn’t a woman, what is she? She is experiencing a crisis of femininity that is also a creative crisis, yet she has always sought to separate the two things in the belief that they were mutually exclusive, that the one disqualified the other. She looks out of the window of her apartment at the women running in the park, always running, and she asks herself whether they are running towards something or away from it. If she looks long enough she sees that they are simply running around in circles.’
Bearing an enormous silver tray the waiter approached. He unloaded the dishes one after the other and placed them on the table. Having taken such trouble with the ordering of the food, Angeliki served herself only minuscule amounts, her forehead furrowed with frowns as she prodded her spoon into each one. Paniotis arranged a selection of things on my plate, explaining to me what they were. He said that he had last come to this restaurant on the eve of his daughter’s departure to America, when likewise he had not wished to be interrupted by acquaintances, of which, at this point, he had far too many in Athens. Sharing the food, they had reminisced about a holiday they once took along the coast north of Thessaloniki, from where many of these dishes originated. He held up the spoon and asked Angeliki whether she wouldn’t take a little more, but she half closed her eyes and inclined her head in reply, like a saint patiently refusing temptation. And you, he said to me, you have very little also. I explained that I had eaten souvlaki for lunch. Paniotis grimaced, and Angeliki wrinkled her nose.
‘Souvlaki is very greasy,’ she said. ‘Along with their indolence,’ she added, ‘it is the reason why the Greeks are so fat.’
I asked Paniotis how long ago it was that he had travelled north with his daughter, and he said that it was very shortly after he and his wife had divorced. In fact it was the first time he had taken his children anywhere on his own. He remembered that in the car, driving out of Athens and into the hills, he had kept glancing at them on the back seat in the rearview mirror, feeling as wrongful as if he were kidnapping them. He expected them, at any minute, to discover his crime and demand their immediate return to Athens and their mother, but they did not: in fact, they made no comment on the situation at all, not during all the long hours of a journey in which Paniotis felt himself to be getting further and further away from everything trusted and known, everything familiar, and most of all from the whole security of the home he had made with his wife, which of course no longer even existed. Yet moving geographically away from this scene of loss felt unbearable, just as sometimes, said Paniotis, people cannot bear to go away from the place where a loved one has died.
‘I kept waiting for the children to ask to go home,’ he said, ‘but in fact it was I who wanted to go home: I began to realise, in the car, that as far as they were concerned they were home, at least partly, because they were with me.’
That, he said, was the loneliest of realisations; and it was not helped by their arrival at the hotel where they were due to break their journey for the night, which was a most terrible place in a scruffy, windswept seaside town where a giant apartment complex had been half built and then abandoned, so that everywhere there were huge piles of sand and cement and great stacks of breeze blocks, as well as large pieces of machinery that appeared to have been simply left there mid-job, diggers with shovels of earth half raised, forklift trucks with pallets still suspended on their outstretched prongs, all frozen in situ like prehistoric monsters drowned in silt, while the building itself, an aborted embryo in a still-fresh swirl of tarmac, stood in all its spectral madness, staring with its glassless windows out to sea. Their hotel was filthy and full of mosquitoes, and there was cement grit between the sheets, and it amazed him to see his children bouncing and laughing on the ugly metal beds with their garish nylon covers, for up until now – sometimes by arrangement but often by mere chance – he and his wife had only ever taken them to places of beauty and comfort, and as well as being filled with the
dreadful conviction that his life from here on was going to be as luckless as the previous life had been fortunate, he felt the most terrible pity for the children themselves. He had booked one room for the three of them and eventually he got them to bed, but lay awake for many hours himself, sandwiched between them: ‘never,’ Paniotis said, ‘have I found a night as hard to get through as that one. And in the morning, however it came, we saw that the weather was bad, as it can sometimes be along that coast at Easter. It was already raining very hard, and was so windy on the shore, where the hotel looked out, that the spume was lifted from the water and blew away in great desolate sweeps that looked like phantoms crossing the sky. We should have stayed where we were, but I was so determined to get away that I put the children back in the car and started to drive with the rain hammering on the roof, hardly able to see where I was going. At points the road had been turned literally to mud, and as we climbed back up into the hills above the coast I saw there was an actual danger it might be washed away. On top of that, the children had been bitten very badly by mosquitoes during the night and had scratched the bites, some of which looked like they might become infected. So I needed to find a pharmacy, but in all the drama of the rain I must have taken a wrong turning, because instead of joining the motorway the road became steeper and steeper and narrower and narrower and the hills more and more desolate, until I saw that we were in a veritable mountain range, with enormous dizzying drops to each side and great wads of cloud around the peaks. The storm had caused herds of goats and mountain pigs to run madly over the mountainsides, and sometimes they came swarming across the road right in front of the car; and then, a little further on, the road was deluged from above by a river that had burst its banks and the children screamed as the water poured through one of the windows that had been left slightly open. The sky was so black by now that even though it was only late morning it was as if night had fallen; but up ahead, through the rain, I suddenly saw a building where there were lights. Amazingly enough, it was a mountain inn, just beside the road, and we pulled over straight away, jumping out of the car and running across to the entrance of the low stone building with our jackets over our heads and flinging open the door. It was a nice enough place, in fact, and we must have looked quite extraordinary to the people inside, the children covered in bleeding bites, all three of us unkempt and soaking wet. The main room was full of girl scouts, at least thirty of them, all wearing a uniform that consisted of a navy skirt and blouse, a navy beret and a knotted yellow tie. They were singing all together, a song in French, with one or two of them accompanying on small musical instruments. This bizarre scene seemed quite acceptable to me, after the awful seaside town and the storm and the mad goats; and in fact one of the things that happened to me on that holiday, and that I believe has not changed since, was that I began to feel for the first time that I was seeing what was really there, without asking myself whether or not I was expecting to see it. When I think back to the time before, and especially to the years of my marriage, it seems to me as though my wife and I looked at the world through a long lens of preconception, by which we held ourselves at some unbreachable distance from what was around us, a distance that constituted a kind of safety but also created a space for illusion. We never, I think, discovered the true nature of the things we saw, any more than we were ever in danger of being affected by them; we peered at them, at people and places, like people on a ship peer at the passing mainland, and should we have seen them in any kind of trouble, or they us, there would have been nothing whatever either one of us could have done about it.