Back to Delphi

by Ioanna Karystiani

  The five lads, a bit awkward with the girl students, a bit stiff with the effort of keeping their tongues from straying to unseemly expressions, courteous, filling the girls’ glasses and emptying their ashtrays, ages up to twenty-eight, all of them likeable, the more talkative among them were Panos, very tall

  V

  and handsome, Asimos, rotund and green-eyed, Manousos and Michael, brothers, Cretan through and through, they improvised a couple of limericks, too, about the value of education and the beauty of the dames, the girls felt properly appreciated as women and got tipsy and rambunctious.

  The fifth one spent the night virtually silent, bar a here’s to your health, and a long live here and there. Viv, faithful to her principles, first off noticed and jotted down his defect, the youth would suddenly jerk about for a few seconds for no apparent reason. Then she took in his slight smile, full of sweetness, and had the thought that it’s nigh impossible to be matched with someone unless you like their smile. Finally, as she had made up her mind to be attracted to enigmatic types, she studied his gaze, full of stories, though they didn’t make it to his lips, who knows why, the beer glass was the only thing that made it there.

  He was the construction team’s youngest, twenty-year-old Fotis, with his shiny black hair, the cleanest hands and the best ironed shirt.

  After the tavern, they went for drinks and political songs, some among them sang a little, touched each other up a little and paired off a little, if only for that night, eventually Fotis, glued to his seat for three hours nonstop, turned to Viv and asked for her phone number.

  She didn’t have one, she said, but a short while later, as they were coming out of the boite and dispersing, she called him and handed him a piece of paper and a pen to write his, if he had one.

  He did.

  She was going to her village the day after tomorrow, should she see him or not the next day, Monday came round, should I see him should I not see him today, she wondered, but the very next thing she knew was she’d jumped in with both feet, she called him at seven and met him at eight.

  On the way, moreover, to see him, as she crossed a main thoroughfare in the slight summer breeze, she noticed that the tree leaves were twirling on their branches on both their sides, as if to remind her of the inevitable downside of all things.

  JU «A.

  - On April 21, 1967, the junta arrested both my father and mother, that’s how the date started, with Fotis slowly unraveling his family credentials, pausing for a sip of coffee and a drag on his cigarette.

  He might have thought that Viv was with the student movement and they had political misadventures in common.

  The description of that morning, with their small dog barking enraged at the invasion of the house by the five members of the Secret Police, whom everyone knew perfectly well, the fritters turning to charcoal on the gas stove, and himself running out of the toilet without flushing, numbed Viv somewhat and contributed nothing to the anticipation about what was to

  IOANNA KARYSTIANI

  - 9 4

  come next, all the more so given that one or two couples at nearby tables, perfectly carefree and completely in tune with the mellow evening, were rejoicing in sweet nothings, my duckling, you doll, you gorgeous thing, and so on and so forth, at the advanced stages of flirting.

  - They carted them off, dumped them in the car and disappeared, Fotis went on, not omitting to turn red in recounting that he went back and flushed the toilet, got out of his pajamas and into his short trousers and put a semblance of order in the disarrayed home, drawers ripped open, mattresses overturned.

  That image, of a shocked boy who is putting to order a ransacked house and all the rest that followed, finally got Viv’s attention because, in a different manner and for different reasons, the unbearable loneliness of childhood was to her familiar and unforgettable.

  Fotis Kolevas was left completely on his own at twelve. In town lived only his two much elder sisters, Kiki, twenty-six, married to an employee of the electricity company with two babies already, and Melpo, twenty-two, just married to a teacher and pregnant. They declined to take him in, their husbands were against it and they brooked no opposition.

  An aunt from his fathers side also refused, for years she’d kept her distance, not wanting to rub shoulders with the communists, to avoid repercussions for her own family, his godfather likewise, a jackass whose second wife had spent a lot of money and energy to consolidate relationships with the wives of powerful locals, and the neighbors lay low as well, those were times when most everyone was shitting bricks expecting mass trials and concentration camps to crop up everywhere and death verdicts.

  The terrified boy made the parcel with the blankets like he had been told and took it to the prison barracks that same morning, they received it with scowls, sent him away with a shove, he did the rounds of the homes of relatives, heard every-

  - BACK TO DELPHI - 95 -

  one’s miserly excuses for not putting him up, I’ll lose my job, they’ll start watching me too, I’ve unmarried daughters, my husband has a heart condition. Each hoped that the next one along the line would do it. He finally went back home and spent the day hugging Gagarin, who was barking disconsolately.

  The next day was spent pretty much the same, it was Lazarus Saturday, and the one after that, Palm Sunday, the whole of the Holy Week and Easter and ten more days after that.

  In the tin box with the painted kumquat there was some change, in the fridge there were seven eggs, yellow cheese, apples and two bottles of ginger beer, in the kitchen cupboard there was rice and pasta, on the shelf sugar, coffee and tahini. Tahini? Viv interrupted for the one and only time, as if that was the most memorable thing in his story.

  The twelve-year-old Fotis, prideful and angry, did not go out in the neighborhood to ask for loans, he shared the food with the dog, cooked for the first time in his life, washed his clothes twice, watered the potted plants five times, drank endless coffees and stayed up through the nights, he just couldn’t sleep and was afraid into the bargain of having dreams even worse than the terrible days he was going through.

  His mother came back the Sunday after Easter, he found her on his return from school at the grocer’s across the street having a fight on the phone with her daughters, then swearing at the neighbors, bitter words in every direction, if they kept me for a year, you, would you still have left him on his own? Was there no pity in your hearts, these holy days, for a little kid? You mongrels!

  She buried him in her arms, rained kisses on his hair, called him her little man, told him the good news, too, your dad is fine, he’d been sent off to a desert island in the Northern Aegean with good company, each one of the men on the ship

  IOANNA KARYSTIANI

  - 9 6 -

  with him was the best, they all knew each other from previous times of trouble.

  Those two spring weeks riled Fotis inwardly, not just because he was left alone, in a rehearsal of orphanhood, but mainly because he was abandoned by his sisters, his brothers- in-law and everyone who had been around him till the age of twelve.

  So he chose to grow up alone, not to let his sadness come to an end or his anger, not to spare any forgiveness.

  Now, he had lost both parents for good, had been out of touch with his sisters though they did chase after him, when it was too late, being themselves chased by guilt, that is how he completed his story, spoken in a soft Corfu accent and with the full stop, he relaxed in a smile, maybe a Corfu smile as well, wide and unstinting.

  This was a strange attempt at kicking off an idyll, or even an exploratory meeting. Fotis, more comfortable now, patted down his shiny hair with both palms and asked for her story, or whatever she chose to tell him, come on, it’s time I heard your voice, he prompted her.

  Vivian Sotiropoulos didn’t start on her family’s politics, they didn’t really talk about that stuff much, she was only now realizing that the family in Alonaki were leaning to the right, not so much because they feared communism b
ut because they feared what its supporters were being put through. She wisely avoided the drama of the tropical poverty and the arctic muteness of her childhood years, she delved into things with greater entertainment value, starting with something someone from the Ionian islands would probably be familiar with.

  She remembered that at the village coffee shop, when the radio tuned by accident into an opera, the grown-ups chortled and the younger ones brayed, arias and screams were one and the same to all of them, until the cafe owner’s wife, distressed by the ordeal, grabbed the closest stick and chased the chil-

  ---- BACK TO DELPHI - 97 -

  dren out, shut up because my heads about to split in two, find something pretty on the radio to sing to, if you must.

  Viv herself was not part of the braying, she was sitting across on the sidewalk, she made her position quite clear, by herself as usual, she added meaningfully.

  She hit the mark with the opera, Fotis’s communist dad, a tailor of furniture fabrics by profession, in the princely city of Corfu with the velvet-covered living rooms, when not in prison or exile, never failed to attend a choir of lyrical singing, to catch up for his many absences.

  However, now, the young girl had to volunteer something more personal and so, in a while, as they were walking down Fatision St. without paying attention to the shop windows, in an uncoordinated, yet almost comradely step, she did.

  She couldn’t pronounce the “r” till she was six, mothel and fathel, ailplane and tlain, tlee and load. It was one more reason, she made no mention of the others, that she was a child of few words, she was inwardly counting the words with “r” in them, and they were too many.

  She was afraid to speak spontaneously. At nights, she made sentences without V’s and the next day she served them up out of context, the postman is fine, the dead feed the things that live below.

  When, finally, the V’s entered her mouth, thankfully just as she went to first grade, for at least three years, all day every day, she whispered to herself, for her own pleasure, difficult, complex words, drenched in V’s, rarely, railroad, repertory, rhododendron. As she was relaying all this for Fotis’s sake, she wondered at her own volubility, at the fact she was, for the first time ever, taking so long to reach a full stop.

  At a square near Omonia they each had a souvlaki and they must have been inwardly in agreement that a good time was had because, while they didn’t make out or kiss, and their good night was accompanied by a simple handshake, with no rub-

  IOANNA KARYSTIANI

  - 9 8 -

  bing of fingers, they said let’s keep in touch and they both meant it.

  Their meeting, three hours from beginning to end, had integrity.

  The day after, the bus brought Viv to her native land, wrecked roads, wrecked villages and wrecked people in the treadmill of life.

  She ascertained that she’d probably missed the dust of the dirt road in front of the house, she’d probably missed the drenching of the village in sheep piss.

  She attributed her placatory mood to Fotis, she thought that even soldiers at war every so often need a ceasefire and considered it a temporary mood, just till she was firing on all guns again.

  The neighbors welcomed her awed, they thought the world of the medical profession, especially the elders who only had a rudimentary education, had lost people on the way to the hospital and suffered on an average from three different ailments each.

  At the table, her mother served pasta and her father, overcome with pride, was sipping the food and chewing the wine.

  The thirteen-year-old Xenia, who had brought home straight A’s from her first year in high school and was cashing in on her diligence by going out every chance she got, came in fairly late and didn’t give Viv a moment’s rest with her prattle, unless they had the money to send her to English and French language classes, she wouldn’t clean out the bird shit in the chicken coop anymore, unless she became an actress as well, she wasn’t going to become a pediatrician, unless she fell madly in love, she wasn’t going to do all of the mad things she dreamed of doing for the sake of the future heartthrob.

  The following days and weeks were spent on futile missions of nostalgia and civility, a coffee here and there with the classmates Petra and Niobe, a day’s work on Sunday memorial serv-

  - BACK TO DELPHI - 99 -

  ices, where the local women, in the permanent employ of the dead fathers, fathers-in-law and husbands, kept on as servants of their tombs.

  The two-month period from July to August passed her by in a hurry, the summer slipped through her fingers with the exception of the few times she went swimming with Xenia, with the now ripe breasts, perforce taking on the role of chaperone, and then she could let herself relax a bit with the gurgle of silliness on the beach, adolescents in the waves, kiddies on the pebbles, dirty words bubbling up, eroticism boiling over.

  She had seven phone calls with Fotis, she called Athens when she went down to the township of Aigion on her father’s errands, Farmers’ Insurance Fund, Farmers’ Bank and pesticides for the crops.

  The carpenter had no time for holidays, he wasn’t the partying type anyway, he mustn’t have let it rip even once in his lifetime.

  They were suited in that, as well. Fie was her age, too, and Viv, encumbered by her parents’ age difference of twenty-four years, chalked that one up in her deliberations in order to conclude that the boy did interest her.

  In the seven calls, rather brief and certainly proper, she had dared ask him if he thought she was too short, if he minded that he wasn’t in school, as well, if he was seeing anyone else and who was ironing his shirts.

  People, she contemplated, often hesitate to ask something face to face because they can’t control their expression as they put the critical question in words, they think that their eyes, their whole demeanor, might be saying something else. That’s why they leave any number of volatile issues for the phone, best to struggle with the wording and tone of voice and leave their facial expression in reserve for another time.

  Fotis Kolevas did not think she was too short, didn’t have a girl, did his own laundry and ironing, envied her for being a

  medical student, theiucky thing!, and as for himself, he wasn’t planning on spending the rest of his life knee-deep in sawdust.

  His answers made her think that she had miscalculated and had missed out on the expression of his face as he answered her honestly and directly.

  And she did miss his gaze, she was hankering for it, no question about that.

  The punching kiss took place forty-something days after Viv’s return.

  In the space of six weeks, with both of them on Athenian soil, they only met three times, a quick ice cream, a couple of awkward exchanges, the affair was going bad against their will. The need to study for the two courses was the pretext, except not from her side, from his. Don’t you neglect study for the sake of merrymaking, there’ll be time later, he would say to her, but he seemed to doubt the possibility of a relationship with a future woman of science who wasn’t Rhoda, laying on her back and harvesting in succession the sweat of an entire workers’ union and then thinking nothing of it.

  Rhoda, Dora, Martha and Eleftheria passed all classes with A’s and B’s, Viv got one D and one F.

  Now, the lecture halls only ever rarely saw the petite brunette who was starting to be attracted to the idea of behaving insensibly, getting rid of prudence, finally striking a fatal blow to her own best interest to breathe freely for a bit, cutting herself loose from the circle of doctors. She was resisting ever more robustly her incorporation into student life, the aim of graduation, clear-cut aims in general.

  And that tentative young man was to her taste, not only because he was familiar with life’s obstacles and had no intention of circumnavigating them, but mainly because he was so confused and inspired no trust in her.

  On the November night when they made love for the first, second and third time and destroyed the springs of her alu-

  minum
camp bed, Fotis again came up with a couple of his fathers communist ditties and seemed to be irresistibly attracted to the thought of Siberia, perfectly distant and frozen.

  His descriptions, loaned from the lyrical, now dead, tailor, humid loneliness, colorless steppes, interminable expanses with conifers of the deepest dark, dead colors, rotten apples and leaves, gray-black, eroded wooden planks on the fences, rusty tin sheds, factory floors in the midst of snowstorms, the bell of the freezing northerly tolling day and night, all indelible impressions from three months spent there in ’46.

  Under the cheap blankets, with their exhalation visible in the cold room, the couple reached a joint conclusion as far as the vast and frozen continent was concerned, melancholy crossroads to confuse you, unknown townships to exile yourself to, forests to get lost in, snow to bury yourself under.

  Viv slept like a bird, sweetly lulled by the male breath against her neck and the sound of the bathtub from upstairs as it emptied and the water was sucked in big gulps down into the sewers of Kypseli.

  A year followed of love and roses and much absenteeism from the second-year classes, studying by force, pitiful grades. Viv had now discovered the use of the lower limbs, opening them up in welcome to the warm, male body.

  In March 1977, the pregnancy was certified, all this time they’d done nothing to avoid it, they were drawn to the inevitable. And in May, while everyone was taking out the short sleeves and the bare-backed dresses, Viv wore the heaviest of all garments, the wedding dress.

  Vc Vc *

  On the night she turned fifty properly, Vivian Koleva had finished her tea with two slices of bread and tahini, but was far from finished with yesteryear, with all the basics of before. She

  dipped the teaspoondn the jar, she needed a few more spoonfuls of this emblematic pulp with the worst of colors, that stuck thickly in the palate and blocked the gullet, in order to complete at a run her life’s exposition.