by Sara Alexi
THE UNQUIET MIND
By Sara Alexi
oneiro
Published by Oneiro Press 2014
Copyright © Sara Alexi 2014
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organisations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental
Also by Sara Alexi
The Illegal Gardener
Black Butterflies
The Explosive Nature of Friendship
The Gypsy’s Dream
The Art of Becoming Homeless
In the Shade of the Monkey Puzzle Tree
A Handful of Pebbles
Watching the Wind Blow
The Reluctant Baker
Part I
Chapter 1
‘Yanni, we cannot survive with just one donkey.’ His mama sits with his baba at the wooden table outside. She is picking out tiny stones and pieces of grit from a plate of split peas in front of her. An onion and a handful of dill wait inside next to a pan of water by the two-ring gas stove
‘We’ll manage, Mama.’ Yanni keeps his hands in the front pockets of his jeans and arches his back to stretch. ‘We have Suzi and the goats.’ He scans the small plain they call home. The ground is flat and bare, and even in the summer heat there is no rasping sound of the cicadas, as there is not a leaf or a twig for them to perch on. It is still, silent, peaceful. His gaze drifts along the east ridge, stark against the endless blue sky. His eyes are drawn, to the left and down, as usual, to the sea, flat like oil reflecting the early morning sun. A thin line of white ruffles the blue, the day’s first commercial hydrofoil on its way to the mainland. From this height, the vessel, packed no doubt with commuters and tourists, is as insignificant as an ant.
The uninhabited southern side of the island cannot be seen from here. In that direction, the landscape dips and raises again to the pine trees at the top. A brief stretch of the legs beyond that point and he could stare out, on a clear day, to see a hint of Crete, hazy in the far distance.
‘And the cheese,’ Yanni’s baba adds quietly, concentrating on twisting the ends of the rabbit snare he is fashioning out of a piece of thin wire, wiping his sweating hands on his dust-coloured trousers.
‘Yes, the cheese, that helps,’ Yanni agrees.
‘Suzi is old. You have said yourself that she tires quickly,’ Yanni’s mama continues, looking over to where the remaining donkey is loosely hitched to a post by the well. The animal’s head hangs down, eyes closed, ears twitching at flies. ‘And the goats and the cheese are not enough and you both know it. We would not have survived last year without Dolly.’
Yanni closes his eyes. A line puckers between his brows. He twists his moustache with his left hand. It’s a donkey man’s moustache which he has encouraged since the first sign of downy hair in his teens. It has now matured into a fine display. Maybe it would look more appropriate on a man twice his age, but he preens it as though it lends gravitas to his thirty-three years. His right hand reaches into the breast pocket of his loose shirt for his tobacco pouch.
‘Yes, she was a good beast.’ Yanni’s baba glances sideways at his son, his voice as quiet as a prayer.
Yanni lights his cigarette and sighs deeply as he exhales, re-pocketing the pouch next to the small book that nestles there. His mama is waiting for him to say something. He turns to take the wooden trough from where it sits by the front door and steps to the well.
‘Baba, tell him.’ The speed at which Yanni’s mama picks grit from the split peas increases, her movements sharper as she speaks.
Yanni’s baba says nothing. He catches his hand in the snare, pulling the wire tight.
‘No one listens to anything I say round here,’ Yanni’s mama states, standing, wiping her hands on her apron and then taking up the plate of split peas. She rolls a little from side to side as she walks, rubbing her hip where it aches. Lately she has complained the aching is stopping her sleeping. She ducks into the house. The two men remain silent, exchange a glance. She returns presently with a pale, sand-coloured shirt and needle and thread. ‘Yanni you need a donkey and a wife. There, I have said it.’
‘For the thousandth time,’ Yanni says quietly to Suzi, setting the trough of water in front of her. He pats her neck and the donkey responds with short snorts which dislodge some flies from her nose. After a moment, she lets her head drop to drink, curling her lips to suck in the water.
‘It may be for the thousandth time, Yanni, but until the day you bring her home, I will continue to say it. She could help me with the milking and the cheese. She could even go down with you maybe, help with the tourist trade.’
Yanni rolls his eyes. ‘You have no idea what you are talking about.’
‘I know a little female charm can work wonders in any trade.’ She winces as she stabs the needle into the shirt and withdraws her finger to suck on the wound.
Yanni’s baba lays his snare on the table and goes into the two-roomed stone house. His wife watches him go, shaking her head.
Behind the house, the ground is dusty and barren. From a low-walled enclosure come occasional soft bleating sounds. The little stone house and the walls of the enclosure are thick with flaking whitewash. The shutters of the single window in the cottage are painted a bright blue and stand open, allowing room for a large geranium on the sill, suggesting they are never closed. The scarlet flowers shriek against the pale surrounds, draining the colour from the aging terracotta roof tiles.
‘And grandchildren.’ She looks back at Yanni, who has his back to her, watching Suzi drink as he smokes. ‘Yanni?’ Her tone becomes softer. ‘We are getting old. We need some new life around here. Who will be your company when Baba and I are gone, eh?’
Yanni pats Suzi’s neck again and grinds the end of his cigarette into the dust. He looks straight at his mama as he passes her, but he doesn’t speak. Rounding the end of the house, he passes the sheep pen and heads up the incline in the direction of what is left of a crumbling, circular windmill. A tower of human sweat and struggle, a beacon to head home by after a day spent watching the goats at the far grazing ground. His ancestors built it, dragging stone after stone from the now-dry river bed. Stones worn round and smooth by water, demanding bucket after bucket of mud cement to bind them together, to hold them erect. Back in those days, there were several families living up here on the ridge at the top of the island, a community of farmers tending huge herds of sheep and goats. They grew their own food and even planted wheat on the high plateaux, and Yanni’s ancestors were the ones to take the step from grinding by hand to building the windmill. The mill that became the central point of the community. They were the family everyone would look to back then—his baba has so often told him. But then the river stopped gushing and tumbling over those rounded stones, the water seemed to just soak away until it became a stream, became a trickle, became a way for snow to melt into the ground until now, eleven months of the year it is nothing more than just another dry ravine. As the water dried up, the wheat failed, there was no water for the animals and one by one, the families left too. Yanni’s family have been lucky: even now, their well still holds water. Not as it was once—so plentiful they could share—but enough. If they are careful, they have water until the very last weeks of October. Then they pray. Today, the windmill, with its sails gone and the thatched roof slipped off into the dust, provides a makeshift shelter for the goats, and the insects tunnel holes in the mud mortar, making their own tiny communities and reducing the once-proud building back to the earth.
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Around the outside of the mill, a fence has been erected to contain the goats, patched and repaired more times than either Yanni or his baba care to recall. Yanni cannot remember a time when it was not there. The wooden stakes, one by one, have been replaced with metal rods, hammered into the ground with the boulders hauled from the river bed by their ancestors. The chicken wire between these stakes billows and sags where tiny hooves have tried to climb in expectation and excitement of freedom as Yanni or his baba come to release them morning and night. If you were to ask Yanni’s baba how many goats he has, he would reply, ‘Many’, and if you pressed him, he might wave his hands and shrug, ‘Many, many’, but ask Yanni and he would tell you, every year, ‘Never enough’.
They used to take turns to take the goats and sheep to graze. Now it depends on the old man’s energy. When he is not feeling too strong, it is hard on Yanni because twice a day, he must also walk down to the port. Once in the morning and again after mesimeri—siesta—when everyone wakes. It is a fast half an hour journey on the way down, but more than an hour back up, but there is no choice. Unless he makes the journey, Yanni cannot hire the labour of his donkeys to the people using the daily cargo boat that comes to the island. Everything comes by boat: roof tiles and toilet rolls, bottled water and scaffold planks, and it all needs to be distributed around the steep amphitheatre of houses they call Orino Town. A pair of donkeys can earn a modest living; three and you can be the breadwinner of your family. One, and there is not time in the day, nor energy in old Suzi, to do the number of trips necessary. Besides, the cargo boat unloads to whoever is there and you get paid by how much you haul. It is just basic maths that the more donkeys you have, the more you make.
But if he is lucky, in the mornings, he can convince tourists off the boats to let him carry their bags to their hotels, or even give the more adventurous ones from the daily cruise ships a ride. That is light work for his beast, it pays well, and more often than not, they tip well. The sort of work that can make you greedy, as he knows only too well. He has paid the price, and now Dolly is dead.
His baba comes out of the house in time to see Yanni kicking the stone that secures the gate in the fence around the windmill, and the goats tumbling from their enclosure, bleating their excitement as they jump and run towards the hills. The crude bells around their necks clonking and donging, a noise so familiar that it soaks into the hillside. Yanni settles into a steady pace as he strolls after them.
‘Leave him alone, Mama.’ Yanni’s baba picks his snare from the table and examines it. ‘The more you pressure him, the more he will resist.’ Taking up an axe leaning against the house wall, he looks around for a good-sized stone. As he moves with the axe in his hand, its metal head rocks loosely on its wooden handle. ‘You need to be a bit psychological. The more you tell him, the less he will want it. You need to be clever and find ways to make him think for himself that he needs a wife, make it his idea. Same with the donkey.’ Putting the butt of the handle on the dusty ground, he raises the stone and hammers the wooden wedge that has worked loose.
‘Psychological! If we left it to you men to think for yourselves, we would still have holes in the roof, half the goats we have now, and no donkeys at all. We would never have moved on from when we first got married.’
Yanni’s baba tests the axe head, which now resists. ‘Ah but it was so romantic lying in our bed looking up at the stars, just you and me.’ He nudges her shoulder as he passes. ‘You forget all that?’
She giggles and stops sewing, eyeing her husband from head to toe, seeing not the bent and aged man he has become but the Adonis she remembers. He takes the half-empty trough from in front of Suzi, whose eyes have closed again, and puts it back by the door, setting the axe in to soak, for the wooden handle to expand, tighten his repair. With the splash, Yanni’s mama breaks her stare.
‘Stop it. This is serious.’ She is telling herself as much as him. ‘We are going to struggle with the wage from one donkey and as far as a wife is concerned, he is not getting any younger and we most definitely are getting older.’
‘Yes, but Yanni is Yanni. He is content.’ Yanni’s baba stands for an idle moment. His son has taken the usual route to the hills at the back of the island. One or two of the white goats can just be seen dotted among the pine trees. The cicadas will be deafening up there. In a minute, he will see the tiny silhouette of Yanni as he leaves the trees, climbs the bald top of the hill, and sinks over the other side.
‘Is he content? He spent so much time with Dolly for company, I wonder what is going to happen now she is gone.’ She cuts a thread with her teeth and searches the garment for any other areas needing repair. Her needle digs in, begins again.
‘Sure, you build up an understanding when you work with an animal for years, and her death was so unexpected.’ Yanni’s baba dips his head into the house and reappears with a paper bag and a small tube of glue.
‘About time,’ Yanni’s mama says, looking at the broken pottery pieces that he pours from the bag onto the table. ‘You are just like Yanni. Everything takes a year and five minutes. Five minutes to do and a year to think about it.’
Yanni’s baba moves his wooden chair a little closer to his wife’s. She looks at him shyly and the corners of her mouth twitch into a small smile.
‘Didn’t take me a year and five minutes to marry you, did it?’
She wriggles a little in her chair as he leans into her, before she stiffens. ‘What will it take to make you think about this seriously?’
He stops sorting the pieces and turns to her, his arm over the back of his own chair. She in turn puts down her sewing and turns to face him. They look into each other’s eyes and he leans towards her and kisses her briefly on the lips. ‘There is hope, you know,’ he says as he pulls away. Her shoulders drop, the arch in her eyebrows flattens, she waits for his next words. ‘That boy spent hours talking to Dolly, up and down to the port. With the wind in the right direction, you could hear him mumbling away to her.’ His hand slides across to her chair back. His thumb finds her shoulder, her neck, her earring, which he plays with to make it glint in the sun. She nods her head. ‘She was his companion and now she is gone, there will be a hole in his life.’ He strokes her wrinkled cheek when he sees the look of fear for her son in her eyes. ‘He will want to fill that hole. It may drive him to another donkey. It may even drive him to a wife.’ His own wife’s eyes are locked in his gaze. ‘And he is an honest man.’ She nods again at his words. ‘He will only spend the money on another donkey. He would not take advantage.’
The old woman’s face brightens. ‘Take him, Baba, take him to the mainland, show him a little of the world, let him see the beautiful women on the mainland and show him how to buy a donkey.’
His hand drops from her face into his lap. He looks back at the broken pot awaiting his attention. ‘Ach, I am too old for that and I have been up here for too long to go amongst men.’ He cannot look at her as he speaks. ‘He is a man now. He does not need his baba to hold his hand.’
Yanni’s mama stands, the shirt in a ball in her hands, the needle lost amongst the folds. She throws it with force on the table; it lands softly. She stomps inside.
Chapter 2
Yanni kicks the stone that secures the gate in the fence around the windmill, unaware that his baba’s eyes are on him. One of the kids bleats at him, its front hooves rasping on the chicken-wire fence as it tries to climb out, its back legs trying to follow. The whole fence threatens to collapse, oscillating on the stakes that, over time, have rattled loose in the ground. ‘Take it easy. Slow yourselves down. Nothing is going to happen fast in this heat.’ Yanni rubs its stubby horns, the animal’s neck arching to reach his hand. This heatwave so early will make the animals more thirsty. They will put an even greater strain on the well this year.
Before the gate swings free of the stone, he ruffles his own sandy hair smooth. From this vantage point, the house looks cosy on the small flat plain. Beyond and down the hillside, the sea
stretches undisturbed to the horizon. The sunshine that glints on the waves is almost too bright. He looks away and rubs his eyes, his dreams still lingering. He had that dream again, dreamt of her, not as she was then, but as she would be now, a grown woman, with chestnut hair shining in the sun, a smile that makes the hairs on the back of his neck stand on end. Sophia. The muscles around his eyes wish to return to sleep. He wipes his whole face on his shirt in the crook of his elbow and then twists the ends of his moustache between finger and thumb. The action gives a sense of control.
With his back to the goats, he turns to his left, facing downhill. The town and the port itself are hidden from view by the pine trees below him but the water tanker is visible on its way into the port. Soon it will dock with much shouting and line throwing. Spanners wielded, pipes attached, stopcocks turned, and the daily water supply will be pumped up the hillside to a reservoir from where it can be delivered to the houses in town. The two thousand or so inhabitants, and the same number of tourists—do they know how much they depend on that water tanker coming every day to the island? It is low in the water as it arrives, weighed down by its dense cargo, and bobs lightly on the surface as it leaves. The water is brackish and not fit to drink but is used for bathing and watering gardens. Many houses have cisterns under the ground to store the rainwater that runs from their roofs in the winter, but there is rarely enough to last all summer. For drinking, there is only bottled water, litres and litres of it, carted to every house. Too heavy to be taken by hand, and so every person on the island depends on the donkey men.
The tanker disappears behind the pine tree tops into the harbour, entering the bustle of a different world. Yanni exhales, grateful not to be a part of it, glad of his solitude, his hilltop situation allowing him to stay on the outside looking in. Here there are no social expectations on him, no rules to govern him. His shyness around people can remain hidden. The goats settle around the gate, awaiting their imminent release. His feeling of gratitude for his solitude is cut short. He may yet have to be part of that world even if only briefly, face a trip off the island, go to the mainland. He shudders at the thought.