Among the Lemon Trees

by Nadia Marks

  In those days by the time a girl reached the age of fifteen she was considered ready for marriage. Even if Ourania was still at school and not fifteen yet, the offers for marriage were already starting to come in. The custom at the time was that if a girl agreed to a proposal of matrimony, the marriage would not take place until the bride was old enough. If both parties agreed to the match, this was called giving the word, which meant they were both spoken for and considered betrothed.

  Not a month went by that a third party acting as a go-between – the so-called proxenia – didn’t come knocking at the Levantis’ door with offers. Ourania was quite a catch. In fact all the Levanti girls were desirable brides; good family, nice girls, with a sizeable dowry. But according to the cultural code the older girl had to give the word first before the others could take their turn. Ourania would not even listen to marriage talk and would run out of the room covering her ears when her mother brought news of a fresh proposal.

  ‘All she cares about is school and books,’ Chrisoula told her concerned husband, who, in reply, reminded her that it was she who had been so keen for their daughters to be educated.

  ‘Yes, for two or three years,’ she replied, shaking her head in despair. ‘How could I know she’d want to carry on?’ Turning down good proxenia, Chrisoula thought, was bad luck; it was like closing the door on the face of good fortune. ‘School is fine, but so is finding a husband,’ she carried on. ‘Besides, there are the others, they need to take their turn; we have five of them to marry off, Andrikos, and luck doesn’t come knocking all the time.’

  ‘I would rather die than be someone else’s wife, Lexi,’ Ourania told him in tears one day as they walked by the seashore while they waited for the bus home. Calliope, who by now was the only one privy to the sweethearts’ secret, was sitting on the beach reading a book while the two took a stroll. ‘Besides, I’m too young for marriage. I want to finish school first and then I want to marry you.’

  The sisters were as close as twins and had an implicit trust in each other, so when the time was right Ourania had had no hesitation in disclosing her secret to Calliope.

  ‘No one else must ever know!’ was the younger sister’s wide-eyed alarmed response when she first found out.

  ‘Don’t worry, Calliope mou,’ Ourania reassured her, taking both of her hands in hers, ‘you are the only one I would ever trust.’

  ‘Do you really love each other?’ Calliope asked with a worried expression.

  ‘Yes we do! And some day we will marry. I know we will!’

  ‘How could you ever do that?’ Calliope asked again with a sharp intake of breath. ‘You will never be allowed!’

  ‘I don’t know how,’ Ourania replied, ‘but we’ll find a way; so long as I have you with me and Alexis, everything will be fine.’

  With an anxious heart, Calliope pledged to keep her sister’s secret safe and that she would do everything in her power to keep it that way.

  3

  As the two cousins grew older they found that the journey to school was no longer sufficient to sustain their passion. Basking in each other’s proximity as they sat together on the school bus was not enough. But with Calliope willing to provide cover, it was sometimes possible to escape the watchful eyes of the family and be alone.

  ‘It’s an unfair world,’ was their mantra, ‘why did we have to be born related?’

  In the meantime, the offers for Ourania’s hand were still coming in, although now people were starting to wonder what was wrong with the striking young beauty who had no interest in marriage but only cared about books.

  ‘I’m still young,’ she told Alexis one day when they managed to sneak away and hide in the hollow of a tree to kiss. ‘I can still keep them at bay, but for how long?’

  ‘You mean there might be a time when you have to accept someone?’ he whispered and pulled her closer to him.

  ‘Never!’ she cried. ‘I told you, Lexi, I would rather die than marry someone else. If I can’t be your wife I will never marry. They can’t force me.’

  ‘I’ve been thinking,’ he said, ‘that the only way for us to be together is to elope.’

  ‘Yes! You have to steal me, we can run away to another country where the rules are different,’ she agreed enthusiastically.

  ‘People do it all the time.’

  ‘I know!’ Ourania’s eyes flashed with excitement. ‘My father’s uncle stole his girl because everyone thought she wasn’t good enough for him, and they went to live on the mainland. No one saw them again.’

  ‘We’ll do the same. I will leave school and get a job and save enough money, and then one day I’ll come and get you and never come back.’

  ‘Then when we are settled we’ll send for Calliope. Otherwise they’ll marry her off too, to someone she doesn’t love.’

  The idea that once a match was agreed by the family, a girl would be expected to marry a man she hardly knew or loved, and would be forced to lie in his bed and give her body to him, enraged Ourania. There were other things too, mainly about the way they lived, that Ourania now started to question. Her love of books, which went further than the school curriculum, was allowing her glimpses into a world beyond the island’s small horizons.

  ‘I won’t abide by their barbaric customs,’ she’d told Alexis, referring to the age-old custom of proving a bride’s purity after the wedding night. The ritual required that after the first night the groom would appear at the bedroom window to proclaim his bride’s virginity by beating his chest like a Neanderthal and firing three shots in the air with his hunting-gun. Then, as if that was not enough, the blood-stained marital sheet would be hung out of the window like a flag of victory for all to see.

  ‘People on this island are still living in the Dark Ages. I won’t have some man shouting to the world whether I’m a virgin or not!’ Ourania said with fury.

  ‘You won’t have to!’ he said smiling. ‘You’ll be marrying me!’

  ‘When we make love it will be no one’s business but ours,’ she told Alexis, and a thrill rushed through his veins with the thought of making love to her.

  Then finally, one day in early summer, while walking on the beach after school, Ourania took Alexis by the hand and with a mischievous smile reminded him that soon she was going to have her fifteenth birthday.

  ‘If they think I’m fit to marry at fifteen, then I’m fit to be yours forever,’ she said and kissed him.

  They planned everything. Calliope was going to pretend to be ill and would take herself to bed, which she shared with her sister, and ask for Ourania to keep her company. Once night fell Ourania would climb out of the bedroom window and run to the deserted beach to meet Alexis before the full moon could betray them.

  ‘Hurry,’ Calliope whispered, her heart in her mouth as she held the window open for her sister. ‘Be careful,’ she whispered again, but Ourania was already running into the night and to Alexis’s arms.

  The two sweethearts had talked and talked about how it would be and they were prepared for their first night of love. Alexis, who by now often made little trips to the city on his own, had furtively visited a barber’s shop and purchased, for the first time in his life, a condom. Their lovemaking was as awkward as any young lover’s first attempt but tender and sweet as they let their instincts guide them. Afterwards they lay in each other’s arms, closer than ever before, and pledged their love forever.

  Later that summer, other secret love meetings were to follow and each one was better than the first. Apart from being Ourania’s ally, Calliope was also her best friend and confidante. Late at night as the two sisters lay together in the same bed she would ask Ourania to tell her about the mysteries of sex.

  ‘It’s like two bodies becoming one,’ Ourania told her.

  ‘Did it hurt?’ the younger sister asked after the first time, with fear in her voice.

  ‘Like a red hot poker,’ Ourania giggled, ‘but I didn’t care. It was worth all the pain. You’ll see, when you fall in love you won
’t mind either.’

  Tales of excruciating pain experienced during firsttime intercourse had always frightened the young girls, not to mention the terror induced from stories about childbirth. For every bride-to-be, the joy she felt on her wedding day was also marred by a sense of dread of what was to follow.

  Although the age difference between them was small, Calliope looked much younger than her sister. Shorter and delicately boned, she was less womanly, less mature-looking than Ourania. Her hair, the colour of chestnuts, was a mass of dense curls that framed her intense little face, and her huge brown eyes seemed to carry the troubles of the world. Since neither Ourania nor Alexis appeared to be particularly anxious about anything, lost in their own universe of bliss, Calliope was often fearful for them.

  ‘What if you get found out?’ she’d whisper in her sister’s ear when they were together in their bed. ‘What will they do to you?’

  ‘Don’t you worry, my sister, they won’t find out, and if they do, we have a plan,’ Ourania would whisper back, alluding to their talk of eloping.

  The two lovers managed to continue their clandestine meetings for most of that summer, but once they returned to school things changed. The workload had increased and every evening they had hours of homework. Alexis had a talent for mathematics, whereas Ourania had a problem with numbers and needed his help. When she spent time going over homework with him in his room, concentration would prove a problem and the desire to touch each other was beyond their control. It was on such an evening, knowing that they had the house to themselves, that temptation proved too much.

  The light had started to fade and the room was getting dark. Alexis had turned on the reading lamp on his little desk but it only faintly illuminated the books in front of them. The heat that emanated from their bodies was intoxicating; Ourania’s lips seemed redder, fuller and moister than ever; her hair smelled of rose water, and her dark eyes glistened in the semi-darkness.

  The mere brush of Alexis’s thigh on hers made her breathless and heady. The atmosphere was electric. They knew it was risky, they knew it was madness, but they couldn’t help it. They fell on each other and rolled, for the first time, on the softness of a bed. Oblivious to the world, lost in each other’s bodies, nothing else mattered, and nothing but the sound of their lovemaking reached their ears.

  Deaf to the world, they didn’t hear Alexis’s mother, Aphrodite, return home. They didn’t hear his door open just enough for Aphrodite to glimpse inside the room and almost buckle over, as her knees gave way beneath her, at what she saw. Nor did they hear her walk away, the back door creak open, or the rustle of leaves in the yard as she stumbled out thinking there had been an earthquake and the roof had fallen on her head.

  ‘Panayia mou,’ Mother of God, Aphrodite murmured, with fear in her heart as she crossed herself three times. ‘What did I just see?’ She put her hand out on the wall to steady herself and very slowly sat down on a small wooden stool by the back door. The unacceptable image she’d just witnessed made her dizzy, blurring her vision. Aphrodite sat motionless; she took a deep breath of autumn air that smelled of firewood, and held it in for a long while before letting it out slowly. ‘Panayia mou. How? When did this happen?’ she murmured again, and crossed herself once more. What she had just seen on the bed, in the twilight of the room, was a calamity of huge proportions, for which, she started to think, she must accept some blame. When the two youngsters were first thrown together on their journey to school she had great reservations; now she was blaming herself for not raising stronger objections.

  When Chrisoula first suggested that Alexis was to be the girls’ chaperone, Aphrodite had been concerned. She knew that a man’s desire is a hard thing to master and her boy was a hot-blooded male like any other. She’d been surprised that Costandis didn’t share her apprehensions, and she had told him as much!

  ‘Ourania is a beauty and I’ve seen the look in our boy’s eyes when she is around him.’

  But Costandis didn’t listen. ‘Don’t blaspheme, woman,’ he bellowed at her. ‘The boy loves her like a sister, they’ve been together since the cradle.’

  Since no one else seemed to share her worries, Aphrodite stopped thinking about it and said no more. But she knew her boy, she knew him well, and now she realized she had been right, and she should have spoken up more, acted on her instincts. And why, oh why, knowing this, did she go out and leave them alone? She should never have left the house, she’d always made sure she was around when the cousins were there; that was her fault too.

  Consumed by fear and guilt, she wondered what was to be done now? Carnal relations between cousins was a grave sin in the eyes of God, not to mention the shame and the disgrace it would bring to them all. Theirs was a good family, a family with reputation and standing in the village. Such things didn’t happen to them – incest – the mere thought of the word, because for her that was what it amounted to. The thought made her cross herself three times again. Aphrodite sat out in her back yard, not daring to go back inside, long enough for the rosy evening light to fade and the first stars to appear on the inky sky. She sat long enough to decide that no one must ever find out about what she had seen. She would talk to no one except Alexis himself. She must hurry and do it as soon as possible, because whatever this thing was, it had to be stopped.

  But Aphrodite was not to know that putting a stop to what had begun would be the hardest thing she’d ever had to do in her life and that it would break her heart.

  That night, Aphrodite spent sleepless troublesome hours praying to the Holy Virgin for guidance about what she must do. Before she went to bed she lit a fresh candle in front of the Panayia’s icon, a little shrine in the bedroom, and burned some olive leaves and incense.

  ‘You are a mother. You have a son,’ she prayed silently in her bed to the All-Holy Mother of God. ‘Show me the way and forgive them their sin, they are too young, they don’t know what they are doing,’ she begged.

  The next day she got up before sunrise, still lost in thought and prayer, and busied herself with making the breakfast and food for Alexis’s lunch. By the time her son and husband were up she had decided she must act quickly and speak with Alexis as soon as he returned from school. She needed to be alone with him, away from his father or anyone else. No one must hear what she had to say to him. She spent an anxious day counting the hours for his return, and then, when the time came, she wrapped herself in her shawl and walked to the square to wait for the bus.

  Seeing his mother waiting, a solemn dark figure at the bus-stop with a grim expression on her face, Alexis was overcome with a feeling of dread. He knew all too well the dangers of the sea and how many fishermen drowned each year. This was a scene from one of his childhood nightmares that had plagued him all his life. Each day when he said goodbye to his father he wondered if he’d ever see him again.

  ‘What is it, Mother,’ he said, leaping out of the bus before Philipos had a chance to pull the hand brake, Ourania jumping out at his side too. ‘Where is Father?’ he asked anxiously, an invisible hand twisting his gut.

  ‘Your father is fine,’ was her abrupt reply, ‘I want to speak with you.’ And looking at Ourania she added, ‘Alone!’

  Alexis sat silently at the kitchen table listening to his mother’s words. The colour drained from his face, his mouth was dry, his knuckles were white. He wanted to block out everything she was saying to him. He didn’t want to hear any of it.

  She spoke seriously and sternly; someone he didn’t recognize. His mother had always lavished love and tenderness on him, cherished his every word and never chastised him. This was an altogether different person from his soft and gentle mother. He had never seen her like this, unyielding and stern.

  Finally, leaning his elbows on the table, he took his head in both hands, and shielding his face from his mother, he spoke.

  ‘I cannot live without her.’

  ‘You can’t live with her.’ Her reply came back quick and sharp.

  ‘I lov
e her!’ he responded, his throat tight as a fist, shocked that his gentle-mannered mother could be so hard.

  ‘It makes no difference, Alexis. Don’t you see? You have no option.’

  ‘Please, Mother, you don’t understand,’ Alexis begged. ‘I want to marry her.’

  ‘Alexis, my son,’ she said, her voice softening a little, ‘this love of yours is a sin in the eyes of our God and the eyes of the world; it cannot exist. No priest will marry you and you will be outcasts, your children will be born monsters. The same blood runs through your veins. Your fathers are not only brothers they are twins! Do you hear me?’

  ‘She is NOT my sister,’ Alexis shouted and covered his ears.

  ‘Listen to me, Alexis, she is as good as a sister to you, and you know it. There is no other way, you have to stop it now, before it’s too late.’

  ‘Then, if there is no other way we’ll run away together. It might be a sin here, Mother, but there is a world out there that doesn’t think so.’

  ‘God is everywhere, Alexis. He sees.’

  ‘We will go away,’ he carried on, ignoring her. ‘Or I shall go away, and send for her. We will be together, one way or another, whatever you all say; away from here, away from your shame.’

  ‘Alexis, shame will follow you wherever you go if you make this union. What must not be, cannot be, no matter how much you want it.’ Aphrodite’s eyes filled with tears now. She loved her son like nothing else in the world and the last thing she wanted was to see him unhappy or to lose him. ‘With time you will get over it, you’ll see,’ she told him. ‘You are both so young, you have your whole life ahead, you are just infatuated; together we will find a way.’