by Nadia Marks
‘Did you want to catch the sunrise, or couldn’t you sleep either?’ he asked as he stretched his body on the smooth rock beside her.
‘Couldn’t sleep,’ Anna whispered, flushing with embarrassment at the memory of her earlier thoughts. ‘What about you?’ she carried on for something to say. ‘When did you come here?’
‘I didn’t go home after we left the taverna last night. I love the beach at dawn,’ he said and then fell silent.
For the longest time they both lay on the rock side by side without saying a word. The seagulls and the crashing waves were the only sounds. The heat rising from Nicos’s body made her head swirl. He was so close she thought that if she touched him she would burn her fingers, which, at that moment, she longed to do more than anything else. Instead she lay perfectly still, barely breathing.
*
Anna felt embarrassed and foolish. Nicos had been nothing but a friend ever since they met and she had no reason to think he saw her in any other way. Shifting slightly away from him she tried to regain control.
‘We underestimate the power of sex, Anna,’ an old friend had said to her once in the midst of a heated discussion about a Greek politician who was involved in an inappropriate sexual relationship.
‘We are rational beings, we have control,’ she protested, but the friend shook his head in disagreement.
‘There are some things that are beyond control, Anna.’
She knew about the power of Éros and its consequences; although she’d married Max pretty young, Anna had had a small share of it, but this was the first time it had hit her so unexpectedly. It was like the thunderbolt. It seems that when you have been targeted by Aphrodite’s baby boy you are done for, even if it’s only for a while. At that moment, lying next to Nicos with a sting in her heart, she wanted to keep Cupid’s little arrow lodged there forever. I’m such an idiot, an old fool, she kept thinking; burning up with desire at my age and for a man who is oblivious, and what’s more in love with someone else. She desperately wanted to say something funny, something flippant to break the spell. Unable to move she continued to lie there with her eyes tightly shut until instinct made her open them again and she saw Nicos leaning on one elbow, staring at her face. A troubled look clouded his eyes, a frown edged between his brows.
‘What is it?’ she said, alarmed, springing up to a sitting position. ‘What’s wrong?’
‘Oh. It’s nothing . . .’ he started, but then stopped.
‘What, Nico? What’s the matter?’ Anna said, surprised to see him reaching out to her. She moved closer and put her hand on his arm, their bodies nearly touching. ‘Do you want to talk about it?’ she said, encouraging him to open up.
‘No, Anna, I don’t think it will help.’ He ran his fingers through his hair, took a long deep breath and exhaled slowly. He didn’t have to tell her. She was quite certain of what was eating Nicos up, and what had provoked last night’s ‘lone lament’ of a dance. She’d heard it often enough from people in the village and, no matter how much Anna didn’t want to hear about his love for another woman at that point, Nicos was her friend, and if he wanted to confide in her, which apparently he did, she felt duty-bound to listen.
‘How long has it been since you last saw her?’ she asked, tightening her grip on his arm to let him know she understood. ‘Do you miss her terribly?’
Anna had no idea what effect her questions would have on him or what his response would be, but his reaction was definitely not it. He simply gave her a look that could only be described as a cross between astonished, bewildered and amused.
‘Who is her?’ he asked, looking quizzical, a smile starting to play on his lips. ‘Who are you talking about, Anna?’
‘Erm . . . I don’t know,’ she said, confused, embarrassed and lost for words. ‘Your Viennese girlfriend?’ she blurted out and wished she’d kept her mouth shut.
‘What?’ he asked, breaking into a broad smile now, the deep furrow vanishing. ‘Where did you get that idea from, Anna?’
Mortified, like a child who gets the facts wrong and feels humiliated, Anna flushed with embarrassment. Apparently what she’d just said had nothing to do with Nicos’s mood, and adding to her discomfort he seemed to find it rather amusing. That’s what you get for listening to village gossip, she scolded herself. The legendary Viennese trapeze artist she thought was most likely a figment of the overactive imagination of her Auntie Asimina, who had nothing better to do but weave stories around people she didn’t know.
‘Well . . . it’s just . . . it’s just . . . what they said about you when we first met.’ She stumbled on her words and wished she could stop talking but realized it was too late. ‘They said you have a broken heart so you live on the hill alone . . . to forget.’
‘I see. What exactly did they tell you I was trying to forget?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said, sounding idiotic, feeling even worse, and desperate to put an end to the conversation which Nicos seemed to find entertaining.
‘It’s funny how people like to fantasize,’ he said, laughing, and started to roll a cigarette. ‘I suppose I asked for it. Keeping myself so separate from the village was bound to fire up the imagination.’ He lit the roll-up and passed it on to Anna before starting to make another one for himself.
‘Anyway, she was not Viennese. Ava was German. From Berlin. She danced with the National Ballet of Hamburg and I met her when I went to work there ten years ago.’
Anna could not begin to imagine what her face must have looked like, but going by what Nicos did next she was sure it must have been a picture of confusion and embarrassment.
‘Don’t look so upset, Anna,’ he said. ‘Village gossip is not your fault.’ Then, in an uncharacteristic gesture, he lifted her hand to his lips and gently kissed it. ‘This is what living on a rock in the middle of the Aegean is like. Get used to it, I have.’
I should have known better, and I should never have believed their fanciful stories, she thought. If only she’d listened to Manos; he’d warned her it was all village tittle-tattle.
‘Anyway, I haven’t seen Ava in seven years, that’s plenty of time for a broken heart to heal, don’t you think?’
Anna didn’t dare say anything else for fear of making herself more ridiculous. She held on to his arm, the back of her hand pulsating from his kiss, and just waited to see what else he might tell her.
‘So there it is, Anna,’ he said at last, stubbing his cigarette out on the rock. ‘My heart is not broken and if it aches it is not for Ava.’
A pang of jealousy hit the pit of her stomach with the thought that Nicos’s heart was aching for someone. She was feeling conflicted by their conversation. She was more than pleased that Nicos was talking to her, taking her into his confidence after all this time, but on the other hand she had no appetite to learn who he was in love with. She waited a while before responding to his comment, anxious that she should not say the wrong thing again.
‘So who is the lucky woman then, Nicos?’ she said, bracing herself and trying to sound cheerful.
‘Do you really want to know, Anna?’ he replied, ignoring her attempt at light-heartedness. The vertical line on his forehead appeared again.
Did Anna really want to know? Probably not, she thought; but it was too late. She should never have asked the question if she didn’t want to hear the answer.
‘If you want to tell me, yes,’ she replied reluctantly.
Nicos took a long deep breath and fixed her with a searching look.
‘The trouble is, Anna,’ he said, almost in a whisper, ‘it’s not that simple. The problem is . . . it’s you!’
What Anna had missed more than anything from all the months of physical distance and rejection from Max was to feel cherished again. The sense of that blissful merging into one being that comes with making love; that loss of self, time and place, and the feeling that nothing else mattered. All the time Anna was in Nicos’s arms a single word spun around in her head: surrender!
&
nbsp; At long last, after all this time of feeling unloved, her body was responding and surrendering again to the joys of sensual pleasure, physical contact.
Neither of them could tell how long they had lain in each other’s arms on that rock, but going by the sun’s position in the sky and the intensity of the heat it must have been a while. Suddenly an overwhelming array of conflicting feelings – pleasure, passion, shame, desire – washed over her, making her feel wretched. They seemed to hit her like a water-jet, paralysing her with fear. What did I just do? her brain screamed. It was one thing, she thought, to engage in a little erotic fantasy and another to be totally consumed by raw, penetrating sexual desire and act on it. Abruptly Anna jumped up, grabbed her things and started to run away from Nicos. She ran and ran and didn’t stop until she got to her Thia Ourania’s house at the edge of the village.
8
She didn’t know what made her go there. Maybe it felt like a sanctuary, a refuge. The safe place of her childhood, the last place where temptation, adultery and carnal desire would reside. She called out for her aunt to let her in, pounding on her door, but there was no answer. Probably visiting Alexis as usual, she thought, and walked round to the garden in search of some shade.
Heart thumping, drenched in sweat and gasping for air, she sat under the shelter of the lemon tree to calm herself. She didn’t want to go back home, she wanted to go inside her aunt’s house and be on her own, something she hadn’t done since arriving on the island. Being alone, Anna was reminded, is not a Greek concept and to actually want solitude signals a problem. A solitary Greek is a sorry Greek. Alone is usually mistaken for lonely and to leave someone on their own for too long means to have failed them. But right then, all she wanted was to be away from the usual crowd, she needed her own space. She needed to gather her thoughts.
Anna found her aunt’s back door key under a pot of basil. She always kept it there – in her absence she’d let herself in many times. The door opened straight into her kitchen. Inside it was deliciously cool, dark and soothing, and a tantalizing smell of vanilla and cinnamon hung in the air. She must have been baking biscuits, Ourania’s famous koulourakia, to take to her cousin for his early morning coffee, she thought, and imagined them both enjoying their breakfast at that very moment. It felt safe and calm in there. Anna’s heart gradually started to regulate its beat again. She poured herself a glass of cool water from an earthenware jug her aunt always kept on the kitchen counter; a touching old island habit which she still observed. A white linen cloth – its edges weighted down with tiny beads and shells – lay over the mouth of the jug to keep the dust off.
‘I love the earthy taste the water gets when it comes from the jug,’ her aunt explained when Anna asked why she didn’t keep the water in the fridge. ‘It makes me think it came from the old well.’
Sitting at the kitchen table in the cool darkness she started to play back like a film in her head what had happened earlier on the rock with Nicos. Anna could smell him on her skin, her body ached and throbbed from his touch. She breathed in the heady, musky scent, the smell of sex, and her head started to swirl again. She remembered reading once, when she was young, that Marilyn Monroe never washed after sex because she wanted the smell of sex to linger on her skin. Now she understood why. A delicious pain travelled from the pit of her stomach to her gut, making her double over with its force. She could hardly believe what had happened to her. She’d just made passionate unbridled love that engaged all her senses, in the open air for the first time in her life. It was the sort of sex that she hadn’t experienced in years and the power of it hit her like a bullet.
Anna poured herself some more water and with glass in hand went in search of her favourite room. It was not only her Thia Ourania’s sewing room but also the play-area for two generations of children. Nothing much had changed in almost forty years. It looked just as it always did when Anna was a little girl. Her aunt’s old Singer sewing machine was still under the window, at its feet a big basket piled high with a rich variety of embroidered textiles and fabrics. Next to that were the cotton reels and yarns her aunt had neatly arranged in order of colour. At the other end of the room, in a corner, was a big box jammed full of old toys, and above that, four shelves laden with all kinds of books, mainly Greek myths and legends. On those shelves lived nymphs and gorgons, gods, heroes and villains, who came alive year after year, to spellbind, amuse and often terrify the children. Next to the bookshelves stood the big red wooden dressing-up trunk, which dominated the room along with the sewing machine. The trunk was a treasure-trove. Once opened it would unleash a fantasy world that had no limits to the childish imaginings. Its contents had the power to transform any child into whatever it wanted to be. The moment Anna laid eyes on it, a kind of calm washed over her. For the first time that day she ceased being a woman in crisis and became a time traveller. She sat cross-legged next to the trunk, and with trembling hands opened its lid. A musty smell emanated from it and in an instant she was engulfed by the past. The deeper she dug into the trunk, the deeper the memories. She pulled out dressing-up outfit after outfit, which her aunt had lovingly preserved: the cowboy suit Manos always insisted on wearing, which caused endless fights with the other boys, the clown costume Thia Ourania made for one of Anna’s brothers, a beaded waistcoat, leather belts, scarves and hats all came tumbling out. Old lace and silks for the girls, bangles and headdresses and a princess gown, pink and sparkly, which the girls took turns in wearing. Anna inhaled their musty smell, hugged them tight and soaked them with tears; their young voices echoed around the room like ghosts.
The last time Anna was alone in the house with her aunt she told her of how she missed those voices. It was now Anna’s turn to feel bereft. In that room surrounded by her past, she wept not only for her lost self, but also for her children’s lost childhood. Those innocent little beings that she unconditionally loved and showered with a thousand and one kisses every day of their infancy, had gone forever. They had vanished into the ether to morph into sulky adolescents with grown-up voices. Yet, more than anything, she thought, it was their childish sounds that would always stay with her, and it was their voices that would reverberate in her head forever. Anna remembered her mother telling her once that she believed motherhood was all about loss. ‘First terrible loss for a mama,’ she’d said in her strong Italian accent, ‘comes when the baby leaves your body. But this is the life and we must accept it.’
As the memories raced through her head the tears kept pouring out of her. Anna cried for everything that had been lost. For her aunt’s lost youth and life of solitude, for her mother who was lost forever, and her father who was lost without her. Anna cried for Max who was slipping away from her and the love they were now both in danger of losing.
An image of Nicos drowning her in kisses flashed through her mind. How did she ever end up in this situation? She had just committed adultery, which made her no better than Max, so why wasn’t she feeling guilty or ashamed of what she had done?
What Anna felt was a huge sadness. In all their time together, being unfaithful to Max had never crossed her mind, she loved him and was perfectly content with her life, but his betrayal had left her bruised and disillusioned and now she too was pulling away. Over the years, she often considered the question of sexual betrayal, a subject of discussion with girlfriends. Her belief was that it didn’t necessarily have to destroy a marriage but it was something that could be worked through. So as much as Max’s affair pained Anna, she would have liked to be true to herself and forgive him. But it was his declaration of love for the other woman and his doubts about her that broke her heart. Could she ever forgive him and could they ever find a path to unite them again or would the distance between them carry on growing for ever?
Finally, sitting in the stillness of her aunt’s house, surrounded by the relics of her childhood, Anna stopped crying. There were no more tears to shed, she’d used them all up. She hadn’t cried that much, and for that long, since her mother died
, and even then she had tried to keep herself in check for the sake of others.
In the course of her emotional voyage she had practically emptied the dressing-up trunk and was now surrounded by its ragbag of contents. Rummaging around to make space for their safe return, Anna’s fingers stumbled on a hard object which she quickly pulled out to inspect. A distant memory of a highly coveted jewellery box which her aunt kept on her vanity table made her girlish heart skip with joy. The box was wrapped in a white linen cloth held together with a yellow satin ribbon tied into a neat bow. Although it was old and fraying the ribbon still retained its golden brightness as if betraying the treasure within. With eager hands she undid the bow and started to unwrap the box like a baby in its swaddling clothes. The legendary jewellery box Anna remembered well was made of a black lacquered wood, so shiny you could see your face in it; the box which was now lying naked on her lap was of a reddish brown wood and intricately carved with exotic African scenes. This was altogether a very different box. Disappointed but at the same time curious at what it might contain, she lifted its lid.
To Anna’s surprise, instead of a long forgotten childhood treasure, inside the box was a pile of old envelopes held together with the same fraying yellow ribbon as before. It didn’t cross her mind, not even for a second, that perhaps she shouldn’t be looking in that wooden box, or that it could contain something private belonging to her aunt. Anna simply took it for granted that it held yet more mementos from her past. She lifted the bundle to examine it, assuming that the letters must be the ones she and her brothers used to send as children to their aunt from London. For years their father insisted they write regularly to her in Greek.
‘She loves you and wants to know your news from England,’ he’d repeat over and over when they protested. ‘It doesn’t cost you anything, but it makes her very happy.’ He’d struggle patiently with them for hours over these letters, which Anna realized years later was Alexis’s attempt to teach his children his language. When she was young she resented the task, but as an adult she never stopped being thankful for his persistence. Once more that day emotion rose up to choke her, and she braced herself for yet another journey into her past.