by Sara Alexi
‘So, I will wish you a good night,’ Juliet says. ‘Perhaps it would be best for me to have a quiet word with Marina too, you know, before you talk to her. Smooth the way as it were, clear the path, prepare her for any possible shocks.’ It is said lightly, with a giggle at the end.
He can tell that she wishes she had never mentioned Marina. If his meeting with Marina were to go wrong, she might blame herself. Well, he is fine with waiting. It will be easy for him to do nothing – after all, that seems to be what he is best at. But it is delicious to know that Marina could have been his love. So warming to think that the shy young girl might have grown into the curvy woman that Marina is today, with the mischievous glint in her eyes.
‘Perhaps, if you feel it is right, you could have a word with the other lady too?’
‘If the right situation arises,’ Juliet replies.
‘I understand.’ They shake hands again and then give the customary kiss on either cheek and wish each other a good night.
As he walks away he is not sure if it was he or she who lingered slightly on the second kiss, or indeed if it was his imagination. He turns to look at her once more but she has turned the corner.
To go to the hotel he will have to pass through the square again. He could have a coffee at the kafenio. He could be really naughty and go into the corner shop and buy something, although he is not sure what. But that would not be fair to Juliet, and he promised, so he must wait. There is time for all of that.
What he needs to do is think about work and a place to live. The buses into Saros, he has gathered, are very infrequent. Maybe he should hire a car for a day or two so he can get into the town when he likes. There will surely be a better chance of finding work in Saros.
‘So, that’s a decision then?’ he says to himself. ‘An early night and then in the morning hire a car from Aleko and start looking for work in Saros.’
He heads for the hotel.
Waking in the same room he stayed in before gives him a further sense that he is home. He stretches his limbs before sitting up, and then he pads to the bathroom, where he lets the hot water run over his face and down his shoulders, using a whole mini-bottle of shampoo in one palmful. The flow of water slowly restores his senses, and he recalls his conversation with Juliet.
‘Marina!’ He greets the morning with the word. Wrapped in a towel, he goes back through to the bedroom and catches sight of himself in the dressing table mirror. He sucks in his stomach and tenses his muscles. There is still evidence of a six-pack, and his biceps are tight and lean. He still has it! He relaxes his tense muscles and his skin hangs a little soft in places. Of his chest hairs, one or two are white. He runs his hands through his thick hair, trying to smooth away the grey at the temples. Then he smiles, and his reflection reminds him that life is what you make it: finding joy, being grateful, making others happy, and now, his own personal quest – finding love.
‘So Milto, welcome to the first day of the rest of your life! Now everything is different. You must stay open for things to come to you and you must not, on any condition, run, okay?’
He nods at the mirror. ‘Okay,’ he confirms.
Aleko is not surprised to see him.
‘Life has stopped surprising me now,’ he says. ‘I gave up being surprised when my wife had triplets five years ago at the age of forty!’ He laughs and hands over the car keys to Miltos.
‘Po, po, po! Triplets!’ Miltos exclaims, and he looks critically at the rusty vehicle that Aleko has assured him is safe, and reflects that at least the rental rate is cheap.
He only gets as far as the square before he notices the engine temperature is rising too rapidly. It would probably be wise to take a bottle of water with him, just in case the radiator is leaking. But for the meagre sum Aleko has charged, even if the car only takes him one way and stops working he will have saved money over taking the bus! Mostly he thinks Aleko just wanted it out of his yard, to give himself some room.
‘Kalimera!’ he greets Vasso in the kiosk.
‘And a good morning to you too. Is that Aleko’s old car?’
‘Just borrowed it to go into Saros.’
‘You are going now?’
‘Yes.’ Miltos smiles, the day is warm, the sun is bright, all is well with the world.
‘Good.’ She picks up the telephone receiver and dials. ‘You wait, I’ll come,’ she says to him and then turns her back, talking rapidly into the telephone.
When she has finished she turns back. ‘Right. Your change.’ She starts to count out coins and as she does so a young man, lithe, runs with little effort from the house by the side of the kiosk.
‘Ah, Petro, I will only be an hour or two. I am going to the market in Saros.’ With no further exchange she comes out of her wooden hut and Petros takes her place. She tidies the magazines as she passes, and the empty bottles that have been left by the drinks fridge. Petros sits slumped inside the kiosk and takes out his phone, holding it with both hands. His thumbs start working and soon he is lost in his digital world. Vasso turns to Miltos and points at the car.
‘Right, let’s go,’ she says. ‘You will be coming back, yes?’ She has given him no choice but he is not in the least put out by her presumption. A little amused, perhaps – and he looks with fresh eyes at this woman who can ask directly for what she wants. They climb in the car.
‘Maybe you can help carry some bags.’ She is smiling now and patting her hair. The coy looks she gives him tells him she is playing a game, pretending she is still young enough to flirt in such an obvious way, asking him to carry her bags. It makes him smile.
She drops the pretence just as quickly as she adopted it. ‘Ach, you men, you will do as you like.’ And she smiles to show she forgives him anyway. The smile is accompanied with a light tap on his knee. ‘But if you have a muscle to spare,’ she says, eyeing his biceps, ‘which you clearly do, then you can help if you like.’
She rests her hands in her lap and looks out of the windscreen and nods, indicating that the journey may begin.
Miltos grins and tightens his biceps as he puts the car in gear.
Chapter 36
The orange trees are a blur as the two of them speed their way to Saros. The car splutters once or twice on the way, and the exhaust backfires, making them both jump and laugh, but they arrive in one piece and Miltos finds a shady tree to park under by the laiki – the farmer’s market.
The market stalls themselves are lined up on either side of a main road in Saros town, which is closed to traffic for the morning. Each stall has its own tarpaulin roof of white, faded orange or pale green. Cars are parked adjacent to the road, on a patch of disused ground where the old train tracks still run, and self-seeded pine trees tower overhead, providing welcome shade.
From the car, the two of them can hear shouts and banter from the stallholders and shoppers alike. Miltos holds the door open and waits whilst Vasso takes her time to adjust her hair in the mirror. She accepts the hand he offers, stepping out gracefully. She is lighter on her feet than he expects and he makes a quick visual reassessement. She is a large-busted woman with good legs and shapely ankles. He catches himself and looks away before she notices. She thrusts at him a bundle of plastic bags that she has brought with her, and she leads the way amongst the stalls that are piled high with mountains of colourful fruit and vegetables. He accepts the role with some amusement and follows dutifully in her wake, watching her as she goes. She walks tall, and the way she moves is lovely to see.
The throng of people closes around them, and the sound of the stallholders calling out their prices and describing the exceptional quality of their wares dominates the general hum, which resonates under the canvas-covered stalls. Vasso, now almost lost in the colourful jostle of people, stops at a table that is piled high with tomatoes. Miltos follows, trying to keep up, watching her mannerisms. She picks up one tomato and her fingers make an impression on the surface; small dents on the smooth red skin.
‘They are very tasty,
’ the stallholder tells her, raising his voice above the clamour around them. A short lady wearing a black headscarf elbows her way past Miltos to get to the stall and grabs at a tomato. Her fingers break the skin and she discards it, pushing past again and off to another stall.
‘They are a little soft,’ Vasso replies and the stallholder begins to select them himself.
‘These are good,’ he says, holding out a handful, and Vasso takes them from his hand to feel them. Miltos cannot remember the last time he was in a Greek market. At one time he had a creased black-and-white photograph of his mama choosing fruit at such a stall, his little hand in hers, showing a time he could not remember. He wonders where the photograph has gone, or when he last saw it, or thought about it even.
‘Can you take this, please?’ Vasso fishes in her purse for change, and Miltos takes the bag of tomatoes off the scales. He feels in his bag for coins and pays the stallholder before Vasso has finished counting.
‘You didn’t need to do that,’ Vasso chides him as they push their way into the throng of people again, but she is obviously enjoying the attention. The next stall is piled high with artichokes, large and with long stems. She tests one of the stems to see how well it bends before selecting six.
Miltos takes this bulging bag. He can smell fish, and looks around to see a stall half covered in melting ice, water dripping onto the pavement.
‘Right, we need fish next,’ Vasso says.
Miltos watches where he steps, avoiding the fishy water. They pass stalls piled high with strawberries, a man scooping them into paper bags with a metal shovel, women waiting with hands that grab and pay; a stall of vine leaves, small piles of them with a stone on top to stop them fluttering away; an olive stall offering every variety imaginable. Towards the end of the pavement are smaller stalls displaying vegetables with the soil still clinging to them, fresh from some back garden in one of the villages surrounding Saros. Miltos and Vasso are near the harbour now. Maybe he can take her for a coffee, sit and talk for a while. He is exhausted from the bags he has been carrying but also flattered that she is taking it for granted that he can manage to carry such heavy loads.
‘I like to have something ready for Thanasis when he wakes – you know, a good meal.’ Vasso says, stopping at a stall displaying watermelons. She taps one to test its ripeness. ‘And Stamatis doesn’t eat much these days but I want what he does eat to be good,’ she says.
Miltos tries to disguise the brief frown that crosses his forehead. Had Juliet not said she was single? No, it was Stella who said she was widowed.
‘Thanasis, Stamatis?’ he asks, trying to sound casual but leaning in towards her to make himself heard over the din of the market. He can smell her perfume: something light and flowery. It suits her.
‘Thanos,’ she says, abbreviating his name, ‘is my son,’ and her face takes on such a young look. Her eyes sparkle and she chuckles to herself. ‘I have the pleasure of living with him and Stamatis, my father-in-law,’ she says. ‘They run a taverna together, but they never get a chance to sit and eat, it is so popular, and they are so busy.’
Her hips start to swing as she walks. ‘So I make them eat before they go. It may not be Spiros’s own amazing food but what I cook is nourishing.’ Her chin is lifted. ‘And they always eat it.’
‘And your husband?’ he says, even though he knows there is no longer any husband. He does not get any sense that she is lonely, though. Quite the opposite, in fact: she sounds as if she is very content with her life.
‘Ahh.’ It is a sad sound. ‘Spiros was such a good man. There was nothing he loved more than cooking.’
‘How long have you been alone?’ he asks, gently. They have stopped at a cafe just past the last of the market stalls, with chairs and tables arranged on the pavement. He deposits the bags around one of the tables and pulls out a chair for Vasso, and even before they are seated the waiter takes their order for coffee.
‘Occasionally,’ she says, ‘just for the briefest of seconds, it feels like I have been alone forever. But as soon as I feel that, he is there again, in my head and my heart, so close to me.’
‘Are you lonely?’ There, he has asked her.
‘Oh my lord, no.’ She crosses herself three times. ‘No, no, no.’ She repeats herself and he wonders if she is protesting too much. ‘For a while, when Thanos and Stamatis were in Athens, and it was just me in the house, then I was a little lost, rather than lonely. Now they live with me and I could not ask for more.’
He studies her face, unsure how to respond. She is a fine-looking woman – human, warm – and her voice always seems on the point of laughing, even when what she is saying is sad.
‘My friends in the village were teasing me the other day, suggesting I needed a new romance, which I don’t, but …’ She stops to thank the waiter for her coffee before continuing. ‘I thought about it for just a second and then I decided to surprise them all! Ha!’
‘You surprised them?’
‘People often think they know you, do you know what I mean? Just because they see you every day. But we all have secrets, so I let one of my secrets out and shocked them all. Ha.’
She laughs again, the sound of a mischievous child. She sips her coffee and then lifts her head to show him her coffee froth mustache Miltos laughs but a heat comes to his cheeks at her behaviour.
‘You like to shock, I see,’ he says. She takes the serviette he offers and wipes the froth away, laughing again.
‘I like to laugh,’ she says. Miltos smiles. She is strange one, with not the slightest hint of malice in her – nothing but softness and kindness but definitely different.
‘So, what was this secret you told your friends, and how did you shock them?’
‘Ah, well.’ She lowers her gaze for a moment, as if deciding something, and then looks him full in the face. ‘Why not!’ she declares, and he is quite excited by the fact that she has obviously decided to take him into her confidence. He can feel himself warming to her personality. She is more than just a pair of good legs.
Chapter 37
‘A while ago … No, let me start again.’ Vasso clears her throat. ‘Back when I was just a string bean of a girl, just seventeen, I saw this boy in the post office.’ She pauses but does not look at Miltos. She is watching a teenage gypsy with a child on her hip, begging for money. The dark-skinned, dark-haired woman wanders out into the road as if she is immune to the laws of physics, as if the cars could not impact on her, in her invisible bubble of agitation. Her technique makes the drivers slow and as they do she approaches their windows, hand held out.
‘In the post office of all places. Oh, the sight of him, and the way he stared at me,’ Vasso says.
Miltos is looking at Vasso, images coming into his mind, the past racing into the present. His deep ability to love, which he has suppressed all these years, surges to the surface unshackled, in boyish, free emotions. Vasso! Could it be that the girl of his dreams is sitting right here with him? His heart races and he wants to reach out and take her hand. Is it really true, is this the person for whom he has held back from other relationships all these years? Or is she talking about another post office, another boy? Perhaps it is best to take this situation very slowly. He interlaces his fingers on his lap, holds his breath and waits.
‘But my mama was with me so I could not speak to him then. But I saw him later, on his–’
‘Moped.’ Miltos cannot restrain himself.
‘How did you know?’ Vasso says sharply, looking up at him amazed, as if he has just performed a clever card trick.
‘Just a guess.’
He cannot stop looking at her. She looks nothing like the young girl he remembers from thirty years ago … But of course she would not look the same, any more than he looks as he did then.
‘Well, we hit it off, but I was going away to Orino Island to work and he was due in the–’
‘Army?’ Miltos says, wondering if he recognises the curve of her neck. Does she not recognise him
?
‘Yes, the army.’ Vasso seems to find his pre-empting her funny and she laughs again, but the focus of her eyes is not on the present. ‘So we only had two days together. We went swimming, we walked, we talked. Well, when I talked about this the other day, Stella could not believe it of me. She thought that Spiros was the only boy I ever kissed, but let me tell you, this young man, wow, he was quite a kisser.’
Miltos shuts his mouth, which has hung open of its own accord. He remembers it all: the post office, the chance meeting, the day swimming in the sea … and then his memory fails him a little, as there seems to be a jump ahead to the night, to that wonderful night on the beach when he fell in love and it changed his life.
‘There, I have shocked you too,’ she says, and her merry chuckling begins again.
‘What was his name, this fantastic kisser?’ He leans towards her.
‘Ah, well, you see, I never found out his name. We just called each other “my love”.’ She sighs and leans back in her chair, gazing towards the blue sky.
The throbbing in his temple increases and a cold shiver runs down his spine, making the hairs on his forearm stand on end.
‘My love, eh?’ He can hardly speak, his throat feels so tight, and his tongue sticks to the roof of his mouth. ‘And you spent the night on the beach, slept under the stars?’ He cannot hold himself back from that moment when his heart opened and he was in love.
‘Oh no! Oh my goodness, no. That would never have been possible, but we did swim in the sea.’ Her face takes on a dreamy look.
Miltos’s eyebrows gather. The pictures in his mind dance. He remembers their eyes meeting in the post office, and he remembers the night on the beach with the girl he loved. This is her: Vasso is that girl. But then she cannot be, since she is denying their night on the beach.
‘Surely, with such passion between you, you would have taken a night under the stars together – but I can understand you not wanting people to know that.’ He tries to make it easy for her. Perhaps she is just shy.