That alone was what she excelled in and she almost fancied her prowess at swiftly burying new possibilities.
University was an ordeal, the classes reinforced her tendency to get distracted, the professors kept their distance and she let them, the students were bursting with the unforgivable self-confidence that they had the right and the guts to turn the whole wide world upside down, and she could not share in the absence of melancholy in their permanently excited faces, she could not find it in her to get in line with them with her fist also raised in the air.
Her own hands, Viv, when she wasn’t in the street where she kept them in her pockets, or wasn’t immersed in writing or housekeeping, she kept down. She had never raised them to ask, to smack, to applaud.
What’s more, one November Thursday, looking flabbergasted at about three hundred fists shooting up in the air in the Physiology Amphitheater, she thought for the first time that often, when she was alone, both at her village and here, in her room, in cafeterias, she would twist her fingers for long periods, as if winding a piece of twine, or, stretching the palms straight out, she would look at the fingers one by one as if counting them to find out their number and sometimes patiently rub with one hand the fingers of the other, as if she needed to lengthen and slim them down.
She had spent more than a few hours of silence and loneliness occupying herself with her upper limbs. When, in addition, in order to throw people off her scent and forestall any questions, she whitewashed her expression with an unfocused gaze, unmoving eyelids and a protracted smile, the inner tension found another bank in which to flow, it spilled out into her hands which couldn’t find a moment’s stillness.
The palms played the part of the face, the fingers the part of the eyes. It was with the use of her hands that she made it through the obligatory great protest march on the first year anniversary of the students’ slaughter at the Polytechnic. Everyone went, she couldn’t not go too, she thought about it and she did it, she joined the tail end of the march on Stadiou St., the bellowing from up front and around her and everywhere was searing the heavens.
Entwined in the enormous crowd, thunderstruck by the uplifted faces, by herself among strangers, with her hands in her pockets struggling to keep up to the day’s terrible rhythm, she poked a hole through the fabric, lost her key and her money, but she did cover a full five hundred meters, from before Syntagma Square all the way to the Parliament, at which point she desisted.
As for the rest, during the first months at uni, she frequently changed seats in the lecture halls and the labs, to avoid
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becoming familiar with those who made a habit of always sitting in the same place. That way she could be listening to the lecture at the downtown campus, the Old Chemistry Building, the New Chemistry Building, and simultaneously scrutinize at ease the crowd of freshmen, some of them lively creatures with the air of being born and raised in the capital, and others timid, bearing the marks of their native Hepeiros, Thrace, Crete, Cyprus, on their cheeks, their speech, their posture.
In the hours between lectures, she sometimes determined to sneak in among one of the groups in the hallways or the yard, just enough to get a first taste, but she was derailed by the phrases she plucked off the air, the groups of Athenians mainly spoke about political organizations, avant-garde movies, and abortions, whereas those from the countryside again dealt in politics mixed in with expectations and ambitions of all kinds and Viv just wasn’t up to either of the two.
All alone in her apartment building as well, after she had expediently checked out several tenants and had with pleasure given them bad marks, a family of three who meowed in succession, one of four who came in and out as one and barked in unison, a well matched couple of sixty-five, both extremely well versed in excerpts from the Bible, an unmarried cop with a nose like a dried-up meatball, covered in more than one hundred zits, who came down to the communal backyard on two Sundays to pick up underwear he’d dropped, a philosophy senior with a double chin like a bag of lard, who was waxing philosophical about her situation while frying frankfurters on a daily basis, and so on and so forth, not a single one to upset her because she couldn’t find something repulsive about them, or sad at the very least.
After a few weeks, she circumnavigated them with ease, a curt, good morning, at best, until she gave that up as well, none of them was capable of making her feel guilty over her disdain.
The physics and chemistry textbooks on the table, on the
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camp bed, on the chair, on the breadbox and on the laundry basket in the bathroom, circled her like snakes, bit her with their many unread pages, paralyzed and dragged her stupefied into a mental void.
The sum total of unfamiliar things in the first trimester that withstood her critique were, firstly, the taste of ham in a sandwich and, secondly, iced coffee, she saw three young girls order it at a fashionable bistro, so she did too, she ordered it again for four Saturday evenings in a row, and then she’d had enough of it.
The third relatively good thing were a week spent with her sister. At Christmas, in order not to go down to the village, which was preparing as one to welcome her as a doctor, she hosted the young Xenia, took her to the pigeons and the change of the guard at Syntagma Square, to the Royal Gardens, to the new multiplex of stores, on the electric railway, to a fun park with a Ferris wheel and bumper cars, to two movies, to a ballet demonstration at a neighborhood dance school, saw her eyes burn with passion, heard the words come out of her little mouth like a punch, Daddy is really old, several times and apropos of nothing, while enjoying a Chicago ice cream or while continually shifting the position of her colored hairpins, above the temples, behind the ears, then, at the top of the head, her hair dark and wavy, just like Dad’s.
Death was staking its claim on her, it had already tunneled into her mind and was doing its work, you could hear the crackling as it eroded, piece by piece, the child’s fragile sense of ease and safety.
Viv, to be sure, was now properly a grown-up and, for her, death’s address was at the morgue where she would be welcomed in second year by cadavers receptive to manhandling and vivisecting.
Her father’s age was prompting other observations, too, to do with the uniform of old age in general, dentures, baldness, the skin sagging, the bones corroded, the gaze slowing down in
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reverse to the rapid progression towards the end and her parents’ age difference, one over sixty-five, the other under forty- five, obliged her to think often that when the husband enters old age, the much younger wife must follow suit, she is drafted into old age urgently and as a rule, she obeys, that’s what her mother did. She was racing on the heels of her husband’s old age, she was fighting her robust arms, her still upright posture, her eyes which defied her will, their flashing and quickness would not be halted.
Mrs. Stavroula was commandeering her age, her pillow and her table, oiling and polishing the rifle of patience.
She would give herself a break by playing hooky from the house of an afternoon. She would stray out into the fields, farther and farther away, gathering edible weeds, more and more of them, which her family ate less and less of, they’d had their fill of them, boiled and steamed, as for pie, they were well and truly over that.
One night in a student winter, Viv had seen her in a dream, in her convict’s accessories of the black button-down house robe and the bucket, soaping money, then changing the water and soaping down the slimy surface of the broad pebbles down where the reeds were, changing the water again and carefully bathing a dozen naked male infants, including the Holy One, before it was a year old, intoning the while, poor women like us are given a goat’s horn as dowry when we marry, and we chew ever after on our trials as if they were milk and honey.
And you feed your daughters the same, Viv added next morning, before dawn, gazing at the policeman’s undershorts on the cement o
f the inner courtyard.
Fotis Kolevas’s first kiss was thrown at Vivian Sotiropoulos’s mouth like a punch and it made her gums bleed.
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- You are so soft, he told her after two minutes of silence, as he was caressing her elbows.
They were standing still in a minuscule park, a handful of trees, just enough for the necessary decor.
It was a Saturday evening and Saturday evenings, even with mild weather, even on dry land, bring on a sea storm in people’s inner hearts. Just previously, they’d had schnitzel, they had each downed two glasses of beer and, past eleven at night, they were walking uncertainly, zigzagging in the narrow streets of Kypseli, the kind of slow meandering of two people who expect something more to eventuate and are gauging the moment when they ought to take their chance.
The island carpenter Fotis Kolevas landed on the platform of Viv’s student days while her life’s second pale decade was about to expire and speared the girl with his clumsy kiss under October’s faint stars.
The Peloponnesian youngster had gotten through the first year with a passing grade in all her courses bar two, biology and chemistry, toughies that were left for September’s exam period.
The year had rolled by with heavy textbooks and mild unrest in the school, especially as she stood at the entry to the Physiology Amphitheater and listened to the rapid fire of arguments and counterarguments and more especially when, from the back of informal discussion groups, she watched the debates on all things political, shifting the students into two groups in her mind, roughly, the loud ones who considered, and probably worshipped as the country’s most significant events, the Split, the Asia Minor disaster, the Occupation, the Civil War and the dictatorship, and those less loud who passed over the tragedies with distaste and counter-proposed as watersheds, though without much conviction, the liberation, democracy, truces, ceasefires and peace processes, things in general that didn’t smart.
Herself a stranger to such passions, inclined towards per-
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sonal rather than collective failings, she had no place in the aforementioned rumpus and resorted to less boisterous gestures of collectivity, glances, how you doing, a wave, a nod, mainly with other girl students from the countryside, until she allowed herself, on entering or exiting the lecture halls, to walk a short distance, gradually getting longer, with Eleftheria, Martha, Dora and Rhoda, all pretty, none of them a knockout, and all of the same height, about five foot three.
By degrees, they turned out to be almost pleasant, almost charming, certainly intelligent and Viv could take occasional breaks of mundane interaction from the spectacular upheaval of her loneliness, the underground flat, mildew, silence, long faces and the cop’s boxer shorts and tank tops.
In January she went out with them for pizza downtown, in February for spicy meatballs in a central suburb, in March for shopping at the open air market of Monastiraki, where they bought corduroy trousers and sandals.
Each of them had entered the scene with an impeccable pedigree from Crete, Samos, Parga and Serres, armed with their families’ poverty, which they turned a la mode times five, sunless rooms were a la mode, loaning sums of money was a la mode, and so were the smoked pork and stuffed vine leaves from their villages, the halvah and lettuce pies and their hunger, too, for a boyfriend, industrious and romantic, just so they could refuel for their long hours of study.
The affairs faded very quickly because the boys were insatiable for adding notches to their belts, they competed for conquests, the times did not favor romance and the girls had difficulty adjusting to quick developments, the period of grace was six months.
During that period they had figured out a fair amount about the student crowds and their coats of arms. If someone entertained doubts, the others said he lacked coherence, if he expressed objections, he was branded a reactionary or a wuss.
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Every so often the students would ride on all-night political conversations, staying awake making dreams and listening to Theodorakis, they dismounted from the songs at dawn and left in couples.
The group of five attended, sometimes in full, others by proxy, on a few occasions only, as if by chance.
Martha and Dora had slept for two, three nights with members of the school’s Communist Youth party, Eletheria had been too embarrassed not to sleep with the rich and voluble liberal leftist who was raking the girls in, indiscriminately, truth be told, self-confidence crackled in his eyes and jingled in his pockets.
Rhoda was a different kettle of fish. Her lit teacher in high school, a lover of the arts and a progressive, had taken his vocation in earnest and produced, as a result, cultural devotees aplenty. The girl from northern Greece was one such. So she went to plays by Carolos Koon, listened to the composer Mamagkakis, read the poetry of Anagnostakis and was godless, except she had deified the working class with industrial workers first on the list of martyrs to social injustice and construction workers at the forefront of the class struggle, who were also her favored love interests. She had been with a builder, a painter and a carpenter and she exonerated them when they’d had enough and dumped her, she liked been rejected by a worker.
She spoke with awe about their banged fingers, their bubonic hernias and their lumbago, and with genuine admiration about asbestos, crushed rock and bricks, her chosen specialty was cardiology but you’d think her an expert in pouring cement, tiling, and hanging gypsum ceilings.
They are good people and they know how to live without hope, she said about all three, words from an old letter of her dad’s, a cog in the automobile industry of Munich, she mentioned him often.
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Viv’s score was.slight, a scrounger from Medicine and a whiner from Dentistry, ungraceful creatures whom she gave short shrift on day one without insulting them, they weren’t even worth that.
What did she think of all of last year’s and this year’s events, till very recently? The junta felt unreal, the liberation unreal, and so did Athens, the university, her interests, her socializing. Her way of thinking about life and putting her views into effect wasn’t enough, there were too many unfamiliar subjects, who was there to put them in order, how to define the priorities, how to ignore them.
At the end of March she skipped class ten times, hopping on bus routes in random directions, forgetting herself in her seat for hours on end, looking out at everything, continuously, and retaining nothing, absolutely nothing, as if her gaze pierced the asphalt, the apartment blocks, the stadiums, the factories, the billboards and the sky of Attica and travelled miles away to a safe and unimpeachable void.
In the evening, she would take the bus tickets from the back pocket of the olive-green corduroys, throw them in the bin with the loo papers and not remember where she had seen what, which place was which, how she had frittered away another whole day.
Rhoda was the only one who came looking for her. It was almost midnight when she rang her doorbell and as soon as she came into Viv’s hole, you crazy fool, you tell the owner of this place to install a phone line, so as not to scold her outright about her disappearance. It was the first visit, she’d asked for the address from the registrar’s office.
They stayed up the night. With small green apples and raki. After the first two glasses, they took an inventory of their melancholy. With the third, Viv enriched the talk with dark predictions about the future, not the vocational future but the rest of it. After the fourth, Rhoda, who liked things to be event-
ful and hated disappointing those who asked her, have there been any developments?, set out her program of resistance, she’d start tomorrow with some movies about which there was ongoing controversy and she’d follow that in time with travelling around the world. After the fifth, the half-drunk Viv traveled back to her childhood years, girls never omit this part, and was surprised to listen to herself pay retrospective attention to small things, su
ch as that as a child, she braided the quinces and pears and hung them up to dry, as an aperitif for the men’s winter drinks of tsipouro, and also how she spread ashes in the home garden, a trick to keep slugs away, they were blinded and retreated.
Equally half-drunk, Rhoda, the daughter of migrants to Germany who’d left her with Grandma at five, was enchanted by the rural life, it had been an omission not to fall for a retired farmer. After the last two shots they also found nicknames for themselves, Viv was anointed Sourpuss, Rhoda was Highbrow.
They fell unconscious in each other’s arms on the red woolen carpet. Ever since, on those Saturday nights when Highbrow wasn’t dragging some unfortunate house painter to Ionesco or Arabal, their bottle was waiting for another round in the championships of sorrow.
They kept control of their relationship, not too close, occasional allies against the hostile, solitary Saturday nights. They were aware, too, of the ludicrousness of their pronouncements, Sourpuss with her trials at Alonaki, the insect bites and the Georges, Highbrow parading her mottos, those who have one eye want a second one, those with a lightbulb demand a night to go with it.
At the end of June, after exams, all the girls, fed up with intestines, neurons and, mainly, the school’s invertebrates who accosted them for a free fuck and to sell them coupons for the political parties or to get their vote for the school elections, went out as Rhoda’s guests, with proletarian dates, handpicked
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by Highbrow for their manliness and forthrightness, she’d met them at a construction site downtown.
They did naturally talk about the Soviet Union, the Attila operation in Cyprus, the crisis in construction work and the demeaning wages, but also about the golden voice of Rita Sakelariou, the soccer team of Piraeus and the comedian Kostas Voutsas, while working their way through a whole lamb in a tavern off the Hill of Pnyka, the immortal working class were as liberal with their appetite as they were with their money.
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