Back to Delphi

by Ioanna Karystiani

  In order to decide on a destination and stay during the five days, she had used up eleven Sundays, January 7, 14, 21 and 28, February 4, 11, 18 and 25, March 4, 11 and 18, venturing in her dilapidated blue Fiat at one point in the direction of Nafplion and surrounds, towards the mountainous Akrata and Dimitsana, at another in the direction of Evia, towards Calam- baka and Mt. Pelion, in order to oversee the environs, appraise the landscapes and hotels, spy on the people and their doings, and in covering several hundreds of miles, she had checked out the sharp turns thinking that, even unintentionally, due to the

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  shakes she might get at the right spot, she could lose control of the steering, smash into a rock, send them tumbling down over and over till they ended up in pieces at the bottom of some gorge.

  Once she was back on to a straight piece of road, she would pull over for a while and bang her head on the steering wheel at her leisure, there was nobody watching, so she owed no explanation and no apologies, afterwards she wore a bandanna low on her forehead to cover up the bruising and the scratches.

  Scented pine forests, verdant fields, hillsides with olive groves, orchards with citruses which she had no right to peruse with pleasure, years now with not a half an hour of ease and recreation.

  No company, either. She could barely muster the courage herself to think directly of events in themselves, the routine, strictly, of consequences, the unfinished business of each day, the duties concerning the probably grim and hopeless future, how could she possibly share the burden, how could she voice the details required by third parties in order to get their fill of someone else’s consternation and how stoop to the mercy they would halfheartedly offer?

  On account of the creature, about whose misshapen form she still wondered out of what bellows and what anvil it had emerged, she’d had four changes of address in a decade, increasingly smaller, increasingly cheaper, from the four bedroom at Kato Patissia, to the three bedroom in Kypseli, to the two-and-a-half bedroom in Ambelokipi, to the two bedroom in Gyzi, a Spartan life in aged apartment blocks, not wasting money on herself and not bonding with butchers, hairdressers and supermarket cashiers, so that they wouldn’t single her out and start getting intimate, what and how and whence, so, too, that she wouldn’t feel the need to lay her load down somewhere, wouldn’t let some half-word escape, wouldn’t blow it.

  Her scarce sleep, that strange sensation of her bones being constantly cold, dated back to then.

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  The poplar across the way signaled dawn, at dawn birds give their art form their all, warbles like piano scales and chirps like plucked guitar strings.

  She got up before the alarm clock went off, sore and stiffnecked, folded the blanket, washed, pasted on the Cyclovir, had coffee, put on a colorful chemise to fool him and herself, loaded herself up with all the bits and pieces and was out in the street at five to six.

  World of the morning. She walked around the back of the block, where she was parked, tried to unlock the car with the house keys, in the manner of her senile neighbor, the two hours she anticipated the special process to take with all the checks and signatures, were baffling her in advance, her anxiety over the five days which were now a fact was peaking, she broke out in cold sweat.

  She put in the things in order, the luggage in the trunk, in the back seat the bag with the two Tupperware, treats of milk pie and spinach pie, snacks for the trip, she collapsed into the driver’s seat like an empty burlap sack and started up awkwardly, she was in a hurry to get cigarettes and water and then be done with the bureaucracy and the procedures, put some urgently needed distance between herself and the buildings, highways and rows of cars because she suddenly got the idea that today, now, on her way to Linus, she might have her first car crash ever, all upset in this beehive of one-way streets, crossings and street blocks, she might bump into a car in front, veer into the oncoming traffic, even worse, hit some pedestrian and lay to waste all these months’ preparations.

  To pace herself and calm herself down she turned to her subject, the Sphrinx of Narxos, raised on an Iornian pedestal. Damn you, r’s, until the age of six she said warter instead of water and she never did ask for mandarins or strawberries though she liked them, there were r’s in them which could go wrong, she only ever had apples though she didn’t care for

  them and in her small hand she always held a lemon, those ones didn’t have any bloody r’s. Now, here they all were, a barrage, blasting their way into all the needed words.

  She gave up on the r’s, took consecutive deep breaths, if nothing went wrong, in a couple of hours, tops, she could get some comfort from the straight lines of the national highway and the poppy fields.

  After all, how hostile can flowers and grasses be?

  Feckless world.

  They were her mother’s last two words early yesterday afternoon, in the short phone call where, apart from the high note at the finale, unexpected from the measured lips of seventy- five-year-old Stavroula Sotiropoulos, and Viv’s thank you for the parcel with the spinach pie, the exchange was familiar, safe and beside the point, end of the season now for wild winter cress and radish, come tomorrow the old woman would be gathering charlock and grapevine shoots, waiting for May to end so she could collect rose petals for the making of rose- sugar.

  For the two of them to pick up the phone once every fortnight or so, sometimes the one and sometimes the other, they needed an alibi: I called because, while cleaning out the wardrobe, I found the knitted shawl you said had been stolen, because the sleet scraped the bark of the lemon tree, because the plentiful rain has given us some nice sow thistle, on the mother’s part, I called in case you want me to send some vitamins to help with your memory, in case you need to hire an Albanian to dig up the garden for you, on the part of the daughter.

  For them to meet once every three years, always in Athens, for two days at most, the alibi had to be airtight.

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  The daughter never did ask, come, I need you, I am harrowed by loneliness, the old woman would arrange it tactfully, either because she needed a new prescription for her reading glasses, or because she had a buzzing in her ears and needed to come up to the capital, as if there weren't eye doctors and ear doctors half an hour away by bus from Alonaki to the city of Patras, they were both careful not to draw attention to the big city where solutions to ordinary problems could be found.

  Viv Koleva no longer went to the village, how could she? And in 2001, when her father had sat like a vegetable at the intensive care unit of the University Hospital of Rio for twenty- eight days until encephalitis decapitated him for good, she hadn’t dared show up at her native parts, she might be nursing strange old men but not her own, she sent some money and a pair of pajamas, she called the head of the intensive care unit, but absent she remained even from the funeral.

  Had she gone, the leading part would have been hers even though it was the afternoon of September 11, with the sixty or so relatives and villagers following the coffin screaming themselves hoarse at each other and on their cell phones about the planes that fell on the Twin Towers, same thing over the freshly dug grave, with the priest among the interested parties, naturally, and as for the consolation coffee afterwards, there too, not a single word about the all but forgotten dearly departed, everyone glued to the cafeteria’s TV, speechless before the fiery hell, the clouds of dust, the deranged Americans and Bush at the kindergarten.

  Had Viv been there, her presence would have probably overshadowed both al-Qaeda and the President of the U.S.

  She didn’t go the village but she did buy a wreath which she hid under a blanket in her car, took up to her place in the dark and stayed up the night dislodging one by one the white carnations from the frame and hurling them at the window, the

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  screen of the lifeless TV and the carved wooden chair, till she was left fingering the purple rib
bon, For my father, Vivian.

  Two weeks before her fortieth birthday, with the wind screaming at the highway, she went in her car to the village, alone, secretly, climbed the iron gate of the cemetery and spent half an hour by his side, plucking the withered flowers from the two wreaths laid out on the grave, her mother’s and her sister’s, and struggling to remember his hands, his shoulders, his chest, his mouth and his voice, everything a blur inside her head except for his eyes, always, whether near him or far from him, she could not put those aside. As a child she was scared of them, so huge, so black, later they kept getting smaller and more faded, washed over and over in life’s laundry. One wondered, what happened to those eyes in the summer of 1997? And what about afterwards? His eldest daughter knew not, she had been away. High time for me to pass on to other hands, had been his last words and everyone in the village had heard of the thing he’d said and was in agreement.

  You have now, Viv told him and got off the flower petals and the dirt, she didn’t want anyone to see her car nearby, the village to get a whiff of her nightly escapade. Her mother had sensed it the next day when she went to light the oil lamp, she told her on the phone, I saw your traces, no, you didn’t drop anything, that’s not what I meant. She was like that, her mother, she drew out of thin air the words and deeds that couldn’t be spoken of.

  Yesterday’s call had most certainly not to do with the charlock, but the anticipated five-day trip, even though it didn’t get mentioned even in passing, what with the smell of fresh lime paint in the kitchen and the toilet and the smack with the slipper to the tomcat for trampling the herb patch.

  Driving in the blue Fiat, Viv brought to mind her aged mother hugging the most precious object in the house of her childhood years, the bucket. With it, she drew water out of the

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  well, in it she stuffed the leeks she unearthed from the garden,

  V

  that was where she put the wild radishes from the fields, that’s what she used to step on and reach the frankincense on the shelf with the icons, that is what she turned over to sit on in the courtyard of an afternoon, to have her coffee.

  For Viv Koleva the sadness of her great grandmother, her grandmother—she had heard of their fortunes, as well—and of her mother, was her female dowry. It grew with the passing years and the colorless trivia of poverty, it swelled like a river that, from time to time, dashed her progenitors onto sharp- edged banks, their lives spoken for like every woman’s of their time, though her it hadn’t washed upon some turn but dragged her on through life, until in 1997 it drew her out into the open sea, far from any shore of salvation or respite.

  Had she put in the small suitcase his camera, an expensive gift from his godmother at fifteen? No, she’d forgotten, she had probably decided his lordship would object.

  This is what he’d say, Viv Koleva imagined the whole thing, she had to be right about some part of it. What exactly do you want to photograph? The wonderful landscape? Your wonderful son? Do you want to be able to show left and right what nice holidays the two of us had together? You want to give grandma my photograph to feast her eyes on? You want me to pose on my knees plucking a daisy? Lie in the fields on my back? Hug romantically a tree trunk? Give me instructions, Mom, and I’ll do whatever you say, so you can get the desired effects.

  She decided, play it by ear, if he was tame, they’d buy from the tourist shops one of those cameras that only take a film with twelve frames, so she can have something afterwards to look at of an evening. Plus, in case her plan worked, he too would have use for a nice series of photos from which to draw inspiration in future times.

  Athens had been left behind.

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  To the left and right furniture dealerships, exhibition halls, factories of bathroom accessories, spare car parts, striptease palaces, garden furniture, Asopos Steel, Monyal, Fourlis home appliances, vacant lots, vacant hillsides and enormous advertising billboards, pieces of land in sixty no-interest installments.

  It was nearly ten.

  There’s pies in the bag at the back, she said. And water, she added after a bit.

  Linus on the passenger seat showed no signs of interest, he was leaning back with his dark glasses hiding his eyes from the front and the sides, like a hostage’s blindfold.

  Earlier, on this day unlike the rest, she had noted his eyes, had well and truly scrutinized them, very hollow now, as if they had moved farther back, half an inch deeper in their sockets. His whole look was terrible, the look of someone wounded, someone irredeemable. His cheeks pale and lifeless, as if run over by a bulldozer. Most of his hair gray already, grayer than hers, its blond light gone out, and not thick, either, like it used to be, its bulk listless, with no vigor to it, no spring.

  She thought for a moment of caressing it, of turning her hand into a skullcap and cupping the back of his head, she didn’t dare. It seemed strange to her that she could, if she wanted to, take his hand, she’d do that later. Still, she couldn’t help making up two or three pretend awkward movements with the gearstick, just so as to momentarily brush his arm, live, cold and perfectly white, hanging down from the short- sleeved black T-shirt.

  When earlier the two found themselves side by side, with nothing separating them, they didn’t hug, didn’t kiss, they didn’t touch, either. They walked towards the car keeping a distance of six feet between them, with her leading the way, him falling in step behind.

  Silent from the very start, constantly the cigarette, he’d

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  smoked ten already. She suggested music, she had brought

  V

  along a load of CDs, she had paid up at a central music store for half a shelf-load of new hits, he didn’t as much as cast a glance, only made a vague gesture which probably didn’t mean later, but, leave me in peace.

  Viv let ten minutes go by and, because she considered that every initiative was on her and that she ought to take some, she turned on the radio, searched through the stations, dialed past the high rhetoric about politics, Putin and bonds, drew away from some testimonials about the Sea Diamond’s wreck a month earlier near Santorini, skipped jingles for air-conditioning and bank loans, hesitated slightly before an island tune of the kind that evoke pure joy for the duration of three minutes, though even a ten-second happiness would be an unrealistic ambition for those two, and finally latched onto a local station, a dynamic woman’s voice, Sleep, Persephone, in the earth’s arms, never show yourself again on the world’s balcony , etc. They, too, were now heading toward an ancient lookout.

  - Ah, nice, she said very softly, with some anxiety, but before the song was done, Linus abruptly pressed the button, silence again, a silence that was fearful despite the sunny day with the myriads of golden points of light shimmering on the expanse of cool crops, with joyous swallows dovetailing and the fallow fields studded with wildflowers, their playful colors surrounding the car and the scents traveling alongside them.

  Spring, yes, but Viv’s innards were two scoops of rotting yellow leaves and her mind a hand-grenade with the safety catch drawn, ready to blow up the Fiat in front of the Vlachakis egg farm, on the eightieth kilometer of the Athens-Lamia national highway.

  Does he not want to see and to listen? she pondered. Does he not want his fill of buildings, streets, movement, hills that go up and down, rhododendrons and wild thistle, such nice sights to edify his way of thinking? Does he not want to avail

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  himself of the generous possibilities of the numbered days ahead?

  He might be afraid that all that will only make for a more difficult return, she thought.

  That, too, had crossed her mind, last year, the first time she arranged for time off work but didn’t use it, she changed her mind at the last minute, there were too many things she had been scared of. This year she did find the courage, though here she was, feeling like sighing and not d
aring. Her heart was beating furiously, she was driving at a hundred and twenty pulses per minute, she was a veteran of palpitations and, because of her work, could calculate them without even touching her wrist.

  - Porppies, she burst out suddenly.

  A forceful gust of wind was ripping the flowers off their stems and in the fields to their right a small red storm was rioting with thousands of red petals swirling against the May sky.

  - Poppies, she corrected.

  Linus didn’t blink an eye. The wind died down, the spectacle ended.

  At eleven on the dot her cell phone rang. Yukaris.

  - Much traffic?

  - Middling.

  - Can I talk to him?

  - Later.

  - Everything all right?

  -1 think so.

  - I’m glad. Make good use of it. Seize today, do not trust the morrow.

  - What are you implying?

  - Me, nothing. It’s Horatio who says so.

  - Spare me, for once.

  She didn’t tell Linus who had called, he didn’t ask, only lit up another cigarette.

  - I bought you a carton, she told him almost sweetly, deter-

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  mined to keep up her morale, if one of the two had a right to fall apart, Linus was first in line and she would try by hook or by crook for that not to happen, but if in the end the meltdown did take place, she would do all she could to reverse the situation at any cost.

  She had never slapped another person, had never raised the neighborhood with her screams, had not been driven berserk by any savage thought, or act or situation, to the point of tearing out her hair and beating her breast, nothing had thrown her off track, she knew that she didn’t have the facility of most people to become sad for a while and then get over it, smash things up every now and then and get back to their normal self afterwards with no consequences, she was permanently immersed into pure blackness, weary but also experienced and enduring, and, above all else, obligated to remain upright so she could help out the creature she was now dragging willy- nilly through the countryside.