Back to Delphi

by Ioanna Karystiani

  Viv, still a wreck from the three years of mire treading, went apeshit, from the second or third day, a changed person. She was in seventh heaven with the stammering, curly-haired kiddies, then six and five years old, for the first time ever she adored childish prattle and childish cheating, she stood per-

  fectly still while they pulled her ears and spattered her with lipstick and taught her English singsongs, she told them with pleasure stories she made up, applauded with even greater pleasure their joyous screams and made them mountains of french fries.

  It was a good break from the bleakness, Greece, the old folks, and it lasted just as long as it should, three weeks later she was replaced by a student from Rhodes.

  The return trip, over the Atlantic and all of Europe, was a ten-hour shriveling of her heart over the many “donV’s doled out to her own child by herself and by Fotis. Linus had been preparing since he was a wee thing for his mind’s somersault.

  For the two days in the summer of 2003 that the Canadian denizens stayed over, Viv was practically silent, out of fear, it doesn’t take much for a blunder to happen.

  The little ones didn’t understand why the knives and forks of the grown-ups stayed put next to their untouched pasticcio, why when they told their aunt she, too, should make some kiddies, Dad got in a huff and said not to talk while eating, why they didn’t take her with them at the museum and why, at home, their mom and aunt held each other’s hand like they used to in Canada but when Daddy turned up, they let go as if they’d been doing something wrong.

  End of stay. Viv wouldn’t forget in a hurry the two nights she spent with them, cleaning their reading glasses thoroughly and feeling as if she was hatching them in her bosom, with kisses on their cheeks and noses.

  After that, a repeat performance in Alonaki, the grandmother was to take down the one and only remaining photograph of Linus, at seven months at his christening, and to spread word that her son-in-law was recovering from pneumonia and that’s why they didn’t want visitors to the house and let there be no offense if he didn’t drop by the village coffee shop for a drink and a chat with the local men.

  After they left for Zakynthos, Viv’s mother had called, probably to ascertain from her eldest daughter’s voice if she’d been able, finally, to take all that pressure, though, of course, no question was put straight out, she said she’d just brought in a load of freshly cut peppers from the orchard and they’ve stunk up the kitchen, that her granddaughters are a joy to behold, that she went with Xenia and held a small memorial at the grave.

  In a call several days later, she added the rest, that the doctor put the small plot with the reeds up with the real estate agent, he had no intention of bringing the family back to Greece again, he needed to protect his daughters and his wife, Xenia had taken the situation very hard and the visit did her no good, he was going to have her put on medication. The phone call ended with a sigh over her second daughter and the phrase, that was the end of her, then.

  Many nights then, and ever since, Viv Koleva thought about her sister, mixed in with the other accoutrements of her every sleeplessness, Linus, walls, Yukaris, money, but no longer wondered about the reasons why, nor did she expect relief, she had acquiesced to the oncoming march of calamities, to life as one long death rattle.

  What a birthday, her fifty years uncelebrated, tahini instead of a bloody cake or even a couple of Christmas walnut-and- honey pastries from the bakery. And it was still only eleven- thirty.

  Time, may it be cursed for all eternity, is plentiful at night, same as the weird light that turns on of its own accord, automatically, and searches out everything that does not breathe under the light of day.

  In the past, she wouldn’t have minded if there was only the night, forever and a day, she had in her record about ten starry skies spent kissing someone and as many again calm in solitude.

  Things, though, had changed radically since ’97. She couldn’t stomach the night, she didn’t have the stamina for her mind’s scaling the heights in the small hours, following on her sons heel in the boulevards of his heroics, the time when a black shoelace suddenly shows up and she freezes like a hare caught in the headlights of an oncoming truck.

  Also she can feel it in the air that its high time, too, for the r’s to rise up from the trenches, and rush her, ever willing to enhance her discomfort and pilfer her distress.

  Come right along, then, there’s a nice sorfa, here’s some nice tarhini. And they do come, another ten minutes of uproar.

  In the wake of that, she looks at her hands, arms, elbows, wrists, palms, fingers and begs them to move, to get her up, put her to doing housework and keep her madly busy till dawn.

  As she got up to throw the glass jar and the tea bag in the rubbish, the phone rang, the only one who remembered her, Canada.

  At first a chorus of mother and daughters, happy birthday, dear Auntie, they were late calling because they’d been out Christmas shopping, then kisses, then the two sisters on their own. Xenia asked her again how many years ago her period had stopped, scolded her again for not having had a pap smear and a breast scan, encouraged her again to take up computers, empathized once more about her having been left behind in the phase where one goes through life in her house slippers, confused her again with her high tech kitchen, reassured her that, thanks to the antidepressants, she'd regained her good cheer again, told her she had the leading part in The Shepherdess ' Lover , with the local group of thespians and, after she’d said all that, she cried about it all.

  That’s as much as poor Xenia was good for, her own troubles, if that, she wasn’t up to much more, Viv couldn’t count on her sister, not even for something as small as this from far, so very far away.

  Who or what would take her place in a time of need?

  There was no one and nothing on the horizon.

  In the grim dark of December 2005, as she rounded half a century of living and was taking her turn in the slide of old age towards the final pit, she sounded an alert.

  The other one as alone as can be. And stupefied. And fainthearted. And a walking corpse. This is an alert, all right, reinforcements are wanted, new ideas are wanted, a new direction is wanted. She had to think ahead. Come up with a solution that did not depend on people, in the absence of people. But in order for the mind to jump to a different orbit, some kind of fuel is necessary.

  For a start, she thought she’d spend some time sowing warm and bright colors in her mind, even by force of will.

  So she started skydiving, bomber fashion, the blinding snows of Siberia. The pale blue froth of a large corps de ballet. The red posters of Fotis’s comrades. The yellow tide of spring daisies spilling over the fields down in the Peloponnese. The blinding outburst of October on the elk tree forests, up in Hepeirus.

  And all those waves of beauty ushered her into the Alonaki of a time without a criminal record. She let herself remember Linus’s naked little body turning turquoise on the beach at Akoli, at dusk on the road her child and his bicycle turning orange, at the dead of noon in the harvested fields of the village, always her precious boy running with the cocker spaniel, lying on his back, a golden pup that dug the dirt with his little hands and spoke to the sun in his incomprehensible code, zdup-zdoop and khrup-khroop.

  _

  The Shovel

  F uck her and throw her away. That’s what she needs. She’s wearing the clinging low-slung pants in order to shove in our faces the top half of her ass and the bottom half of her belly. On the straps of the blouse are hanging bits of back, bits of tits and tanned shoulders that shimmer and flash whenever the lights from the shops are reflected off the broad that’s passing by.

  This one loves to suck and fuck and get splattered in cum. She walks and she sizes men up and counts in how many men’s trousers the telltale stain shows, endless back and forth on the sidewalks to turn us on just so we can’t concentrate on anything.

  The twenty-year-old Linus Kolevas was selecting the phrasing and gradually shaping the speech
es—his private monologues—on the spring and summer nights of 1997, as his breath was knocked out of him by the dirty cunts that took the streets by storm, in their white heat, grenades with the safety catch off, ready to explode and tear to pieces the males who ran after them salivating and trembling, with their minds already moving rhythmically, in and out, in and out of their heads, until the final explosion, their skulls in shreds.

  He was following at a distance of three meters one who was wearing tights, whose ass was quaking at seven on the Richter scale, then left her to follow one with two frisky braids, Hey, little rabbit, where is your rabbit hole , she was in a hurry, had a date with Mr. Rabbit a bit farther off, within five minutes the

  next target showed, wearing half a skirt, her thighs like a schooner in high sail, her shoulder bag whistling, the heels lying in wait in her sandals for the guy who’d grab them and suck them dry.

  He wanted to hunt down all the partridges that had been let loose in the dark, and pluck them for good, so as to rid the night of the shadows that impaled themselves in his eyes and froze up the blood in his veins, so as to reintroduce order on the sidewalks.

  There were moments when he would lose control, break into a sweat and turn white, stumble and groan. They lasted as a rule for five, ten, fifteen minutes, the women caught the danger signals and had the time to step up to areas with other pedestrians, families and couples, and he had the time to become himself again and get back home, having erased the damned quarter of an hour from the evening, eat his mince steaks and devote himself to some movie on Star Channel that’d already started, American cops taking bribes and cars flying over bridges.

  His mother would collect the tray with his plate and, ostracized by his persistent silence, would disappear in her room, leaving the door half-open and inelegantly calling out the news during the ad breaks, the tax commandoes are zeroing in on gas stations, the prime minister and his ex-wife are fighting it out over the villa in the northern suburbs, some group has gone berserk and is slaughtering civilians in Algeria and this is the fiftieth anniversary of the beginning of operations on the rock island of Makronisos, your grandma was in exile there, you know which of the two.

  It would be almost dawn by the time he went to sleep and getting on to noon by the time he woke up in the empty house, Viv was away at the shop and he could easily not study, not so much as think about exams or computers, and even more easily crawl on his belly in the black pits of his mind and enshroud himself in darkness, hugging the dead Buddy.

  His mother always treated him like the dog, Linus, and she would slap her thigh to call him to her in order to cut his nails, Linus, here’s your chocolate wafer, and she’d throw it on the blanket and he would eat it and return the wrapping paper in his teeth, she put his boiled rice in a pale blue plastic bowl the same color and almost the same design as the dog’s, she arranged for the boy’s and the dog’s inoculations on the same day, she stroked them at the same spot, the back of the neck, never long enough, and she was probably a bit afraid of dogs and children, he could see it in the quiver of her eyelashes when, startled, she would take a couple of steps back.

  When he was little, he would hear her on the phone, shop, kid, dog, laying out her troubles to his godmother and, ever more troubled with the passing years, say wryly, I’m off to feed the two beasts.

  He would see her sitting at the table with envelopes, receipts and paper bills, you’re always counting money, he’d speak to her, no yakking, kid, I’m insanely busy, she’d answer, but it’s really, really late, he implored, be quiet so I don’t lose count and get in trouble, she ordered and he was quiet, same as his little brother Buddy, a dog that was forbidden to bark.

  He was quiet all his life, that’s what his father and mother had asked, they raised him with motions of the hand to be silent, not so they could talk among themselves, but so that each could think alone of everything he or she had saved up for the other, a tension, a coldness, a hostility he wasn’t even allowed to temporarily interrupt, let alone dispel, he would be watching on television some film with Roman emperors, she’d be putting the price tags on the dollies for the shop, he would be filling his palms with sequins then emptying them for three- hour stretches, she would be starching shitty stuff made of tulle, he would stuff by force the batteries into the twirling dancers, she would polish two stupid candlestick holders, he carved a piece of wood, she looked murderously at the shav-

  ings, he spent half the night brushing the Russian hat, gazing at the wall, he hung on to the bottle until he’d drained the last drop, he was at the balcony afterwards, chain-smoking and putting out the butts in the potted plants.

  One time, when his mother was away at the shop, some woman named Kiki came by the house, the same Kiki who had phoned a few days previously and who his father had hung up on after saying, I have no sisters, ever since I was twelve I’ve made it my business to forget about you, for your own sake, Kiki, don’t make me remember you again.

  When the bell rang and his father answered the door and saw her there, something came over him, I’m not going to lend a hand in your making peace with your conscience, Kiki, you are welcome to suffer some more, be my guest and torment yourself, go back and take it out on your suckass husband, he was yelling at her, she was standing on tiptoe and looking at little Linus over his shoulder, please, let me in, she was saying over and over again, her pleas in vain, Foti, you’ve had too much to drink, Foti, you’re drinking, her last words, he sent her away.

  Afterwards, he took Linus in his arms, hugged him so tightly to himself that it hurt and told him a story about a dog, the only true friend not only of kids but of grown-ups, too, who didn’t get along with other grown-ups, he’d had Gagarin who danced all the time and leapt high in the air like a bird and he wished he still had him, only dogs deserve immortality, and he even promised to give him a fluffy puppy for his birthday.

  That was Buddy, a two-month-old black cocker spaniel who was also raised without being heard.

  Sometimes, his father took them both out to the butcher’s, the small-goods shop, the liquor store, the walk of the silent trio. If Mom wasn’t home, they went back straight after. If she was, he would drag the kid and the dog on, doing the rounds of five or six blocks, steps of muted anger, as if he didn’t want

  to go back any time soon and Linus, to give himself courage, and keep from crying, memorized the numbers of the shops, 44 for medicines, 67 flowers, he didn’t dare say he was going to miss his favorite TV show, Bolek and Lolek, he had managed to follow it even with no sound, so as not to disturb.

  He was growing up and had no firsthand experience of what it means for a child to shriek, had never turned blue from crying, had not once heard his own voice trying how far and loud it could get, but he was intimately familiar with exhalations, whispers, internally spoken words, drunken “go-to- helT’s, with talk that started out loud and veered off or was switched off mid-phrase, the obedience to silence.

  That’s what he was taught, and got used to, and kept up, scoring with a soft fabric ball into a plastic hoop across from his bed, sometimes he got ten out of ten but never once broke out in a self-congratulatory yell, making do with silent applause and the tail wagging of Buddy as his fan and audience, not a squeak out of him either.

  Silence was the largest thing he could imagine, wide as the Sahara, tall as Mt. Everest, deep as the Atlantic.

  When his father died he was in third grade. There were no other orphans in the class and he felt distinctive, important, grand. The bell would ring for the end of classes, mothers waiting at the front gate, he paid those no attention, but if there were a couple of fathers out there, he didn’t leave them out of his sight, he minutely scanned them for their unattractive traits, yellowed fingers, red noses, but he fancied them, too, figuring out their ages, heights, watching the way they held their children’s hands.

  How is it that you can fear and hate someone so much and yet be mortally afraid they might die and, once they’re dead, instead of
letting them sink away into forgetfulness, need them in your mind all the more, the sadness constantly growing and the fear never going away at all?

  Thin drizzle, fifty or so umbrellas, dark suits and dark coats in the world’s whitest neighborhood, a row of marble houses at St. Anthony’s, at his dad’s funeral, some familiar people, some not, everyone pushing through the rest to get near the boy, bend down and stoke his head, Linus shook it off annoyed, he didn’t want to be touched, be spoken to, be distracted.

  He was wedged in between the diggers, with eyes riveted on the two shovels that dug with difficulty into the frozen earth and ears diligently saving up each and every zdoop and ghupp as the dirt was loaded, every fraap and khraff as the dirt was emptied into his dad’s grave. At one point one of the diggers leaned his shovel against the nearby cypress tree, took out some tissues, used up three to blow his nose, then zealously rejoined his colleague, the shovels again paired up.

  The shovels, which ever since a cold Wednesday in February 1985 never left his thoughts. Nor did his mother’s dry eyes, she had never cried before, didn’t cry at the cemetery, didn’t cry afterwards. And in forty-one days, which is to say, the very next day after the memorial service, she took off the black blouse. Eight-year-old Linus was terribly hurt by her beige shirt.

  He almost told on her to his black-clad grandmother while the two of them were eating the last of the boiled wheat-and- pomegranate mix. He checked himself, he didn’t say it, after two days the old woman and Xenia went back to the village because Grandfather had taken a turn for the worse, a heavy cold and delirium, Viv grabbed him, took him to the National Historic Museum, made a stop in front of the headdress of the revolutionary hero Kolokotronis, another in front of the heroic Lambros Katsonis in the uniform of a Russian fleet commander and, that same night, she rolled her sleeves up and made a plan of action to deal with the new situation, disorganization is deadly, she said to herself out loud and she repeated it, in those exact words, on her phone call to Rhoda late that evening.