Back to Delphi

by Ioanna Karystiani

  That afternoon, as soon as the old woman left and the abrupt silence in the apartment foretold of yet another hard

  evening, Viv had approached Linus gingerly, in case he pushed her away violently, reached out her hand and stroked his hair as he sat there, gazing at her wrist. There were several white splotches, small ones like lentils and smaller ones like pinheads, she’d spent Sunday painting the railing and the iron table on the balcony

  After a while, he pushed her arm away.

  - I’ll go and shower, then get you some watermelon, she told him. This summer’s first, it turned out red and sweet, hail to the gypsy I got it from. It should be cold by now, I put it in the fridge in the morning.

  In twenty minutes when you come back, all freshened up, with the watermelon platter and two forks, your son will be gone, again without good-bye, that was what Linus decided that Sunday dusk and as soon as he heard the bathroom door close and the shower running, he got up.

  Spending Sunday evenings at home was fraught with danger. With the store shut, his mother considered she should make use of the available hours to point out his laziness, which she did unremittingly, but on that day she outdid herself for the sake of her mother, she’d fucked his grandmother’s Sundays as well. Poor grandma, for your own good, hurry up and die, get a heart attack, the old man could get it from you, too, you could both snuff it, better not be around when your grandson’s great hour arrives.

  Every piece of earth has its own sky, the old woman’s weird farewell comment, the elderly couple keep coming up with stuff like this, it’s their bread and butter, it takes two millstones to make flour, whoever doesn’t have old folks buys them, blood sings true, no end to that shit.

  He was hovering like a ghost that night over the familiar ground of his suburb, mountains of rubbish because of the strike and the blonde TV presenter loved by all of Greece screaming at him, Welcome to our show , chasing him from street

  to street out of the TV screens of the ground-floor apartments and him making his getaway and hurting mightily somewhere inside of him, one hundred meters down into his body. He leaned against a wall, took some breaths, thought about what his grandmother might be thinking about her daughter, he thought of her leaving in a cab, like a stranger, taking the bus for the village on her own, she would have arrived by now, she would have fed her old man tea and lies, everything’s fine in Athens, she’d be in bed by now, lying awake on her back.

  He tried to get himself to miss the village, the two mammoth rosebushes, his grandfather’s pride and joy, the fried eggs straight out of the chook pen, the strolling under the citrus trees and the frolicking on the beaches, he tried to be a thirty- year-old with his own job and car, a forty-year-old family man with a perfect wife, two perfect children and financially secure, all his efforts in vain, he didn’t have the infrastructure for good as others understand it.

  You can have your perfect lives and keep them, dear relatives, acquaintances and assorted fuckers, he was the plaything of evil, which at first drew him against his will but was slowly turning him into its lackey, he’d be walking the streets and his own piece of sky rained bile, his own piece of earth, the whole city, an ignominious stench, hey, godmother, why don’t you get pregnant yourself, Rhoda’s odious rodent.

  The next watermelons went uneaten as well, day in, day out, under the sweat of the hostile house, night after night under the dictatorship of summer, June ended, the immodest July in full deployment, full of female mercenaries of lust, tourists and locals with their lethal shorts.

  What did he have against those girls he didn’t even know? They might even not be real, it might be his imagination constructing the bodies and the flimsy clothing and pushing them at him in waves when darkness fell on the neighborhoods and night sank into his chest.

  Sunday, thirteenth of the month, a five-hour pointless meandering, with him buying water, cigarettes, ice cream, pissing in cafeterias or against walls, with his eye roving wherever a solitary female was to be seen.

  At ten at night he left the main street, crossed the next busy thoroughfare as well, went past white women and black women, young ones and old ones dillydallying at street corners and blocking the narrow pavements.

  He once again took to the narrow streets where there wasn’t a soul.

  - Your ID card.

  The cop appeared in front of him very suddenly, he must have stepped out of the patrol car that had pulled up a few feet back, the bored driver looked on, stroking the circumference of the steering wheel.

  Linus presented his ID, he asked nothing, nor was he asked, he remained still to be scrutinized and heard the two policemen say, he’s Greek, let’s go get a coffee and then get back out.

  The ID check took place at a remote intersection, the police car turned right, Linus continued to the left, unperturbed, with his backpack on his shoulders and hands in his pockets, in one, along with some paper bills, the green frog, which couldn’t care less about the money, hopped out and started its leaps in the air, with its owner’s palms for springboards, rhythmically, just like the juggling of the two shovels, and numbered too, he had counted the shovelings then, there had been thirty- seven, one every five or six seconds, he’d even noticed a long white worm squiggling in the dirt in one shovelful and a piece of yellow wire hanging off in another.

  The kiosk in the small triangular square was open, he paid for another two waters, drank one, put the other in his waistband, it fitted fine, he had lost weight. He turned into another side street, nobody, followed a pack of mongrels, became one with them, he barked at the black leader, barked at the gray

  second-in-command, they, too, barked at him, he whined at them, they whined back, he ran with them for three hundred feet, they got away, alone again, he walked along streets named after the school poets, Palamas St., Polemis, Filiras, Krystallis, his father’s favorite, Ritsos, was missing, you are a snob when it comes to poetry, Kolevas, that was his stupid literature teacher in high school, go take a hike, you moron, he made himself comfortable at somebody’s doorstep, the house was all shut and the garden dry, they must be on vacation, Mykonos has opened, Sifnos has opened, welcome one and all.

  Why not leave forever, somewhere far away, where he wouldn’t know anything or anyone? The unknown is fearsome but not painful. Fie lit a cigarette and went to the other side of the world, to Peru. He lit a second and was over in New Zealand, on the third he stormed the Sahara, on the fourth he swept over Siberia, every drag one thousand versts, he tunneled through the forests, lost himself in the tundra, burrowed in the snow.

  He was shivering again. Around him the outlines of buildings, trees, a few parked cars, were all flickering. A two-story house bumped into a three-story, a white apartment rolled into the garden next door, a dusty kindergarten bus was dancing with a stone fence, the poplars were sailing on the walls, the dead cigarette butts were swaying around his shoes. All those moving surfaces made him dizzy, the night’s motion destabilized him. His chest creaked, he felt his own heart come unsheathed and slide to the left and right, felt it scuttle across his belly. He heard his blood pumping forcefully through his veins, tumbling inside him with a whoosh.

  At sixty feet to the left a stray dog evaporated in some bushes, at eighty feet to the right a bicyclist was being pulled back and forth by an invisible string.

  He shut his frozen eyelids and inside the suffocating small space of his eyes, two holes half an inch across, the party started

  again, gorges flipping sideways, waterfalls overturning, vineyards barfing, lakes staining, quarries getting soggy, mud reeking, an orgy of foul smells that turned his limbs to stone on the steps of the strange house, an Armageddon of piss and shit that soaked his head, making it droop on his chest, as heavy as an iron barrel, dripping on his shirt.

  Why was this happening to him?

  He got the idea into his mind that he had no mind. The box at the top of his neck was hollow, there wasn’t anything there that might offer an explanation, might resist, whoever
felt like it could walk in, then walk out whenever, leaving there their kids, their horse, their cigarette butts, a head that was an unsecured place, a stable and a garbage dump.

  He took the fur shapka out of the backpack, caressed the soft fur, ill-suited to the summer of everyone else, perfectly suitable for his own freezing temperatures, the snowy Himalayas in his gut. He put it on crookedly, leaning to the left, so it at least kept one ear warm.

  He stayed like this for a while, alone, the dogs and the cyclist gone, no one in sight, no cars coming through. He pulled the plastic bottle out of his waistband, drank all of the water down and threw the bottle over his shoulder, heard it crash and roll a bit on the verandah of the house. Then he bent, undid his shoelaces, pulled them off, scrunched them up and shoved them in his shirt pocket and got up.

  •jl. ji~

  /V

  Stars, shadows, asphalt, marble bust, jasmine, Eva, win- dowpanes, locks, Papadiamantis St., mailboxes, meowing, street signs, uphill, church, downhill, lottery shop, Polydouri St., iron railing, shutters, watering systems, climbing plants, insects, panting, vertigo, the night is climaxing and I need to move cautiously.

  Linus, disoriented, felt like he was being watched from behind, not by cops or by a couple of unsleeping mongrels crawling along on the cracked cement and worn-out flagstones, but by the houses which turned towards him as he passed, the cypress trees which machine-gunned him with their cones and the closed kiosk which started following in his wake.

  His was a familiar face, they had caught sight of him in his previous night patrols and they were suspicious.

  He walked on, took a turn, turned again. Arched gates and more arched gates and, behind them, four- and five-story buildings. Their rooftops sixty feet up in the air, that should be enough, he estimated. He tried one, two, three front doors made of glass, they were locked. Maybe break one? It’ll be noisy. He picked out a wooden one, heavy and imposing, eight squares with brass hoops, his father could have carved it. He rang some bells, no one answered, they were probably away. The last one did answer. Who is it? A male voice.

  Linus made himself scarce, he saw from a distance two lights come on at the third floor balcony and a chunky guy in boxers leap to the railing, bend and scan the ground, call in an angry voice, who’s there at this hour? light a cigarette and patrol back and forth while he smoked it.

  He went farther up the street, cautiously. He saw himself climb on the balconies of all the penthouses, Linus times twenty, two dozen copies of him letting go, floating like feathers, waving good-bye to one another, a school of wind-borne Linuses on a reconnaissance flight, until they settled down on bushes, pavements and the asphalt to sweetly sleep for eternity on this never-ending night, night forevermore, everywhere and over everything, darkness recycling itself invincibly.

  He pissed on them and left them behind.

  Going to sleep wouldn’t help, on waking he wasn’t going to behold what he deeply wished for, a brand new city, buildings, streets, places and people that would not confirm his life to

  date, that would not carry anything over from yesterday and the day before and last year and the year before and ten and twenty years before that.

  Not again the number one question, what the percentage is of kindly souls and vile ones, and question number two, how many today are bosom buddies with how many

  He pressed a button in his head and everything went blank, the place emptied out, he walked on for some time in a void, a dot on white paper, a cursor on an empty screen. After a bit, he had the sensation that his shoes were sinking, his course on the bare expanse was a trek on the surface of gigantic, swollen gums that was taking him to an abscessed hill, the ugly smell of pus assailed his nostrils.

  He hadn’t had anything to eat, his stomach and innards a knot, two mosquito bites on the face, aching, skin irritations in the back of his neck and armpits, itching, unwashed hair, his scalp tingled.

  I’m going for my first swim, it flashed into his head, I’m going on holidays, right there and then Piraeus lay before him, it was Friday afternoon, two months previously, end of May. Cars and motorcycles in line for the ships’ holds, a crowd heading off to the islands and him, with no suitcase, yet another day of playing truant from his exams, the course was Information Systems in Private Business Administration.

  He didn’t have his father to say to him, this is one big water, like that time when they’d swum together in the sea of Akoli, he didn’t have a girl or friends to go with him for three days or three weeks or three months to an island, he bought a ticket to Paros, there, he was going to suck in a ton of seawater, till he reached bottom, riddled with problems as he was, suddenly, the sea bottom seemed like perfect freedom to him, weeds dancing, fish strolling carefree, a lovely documentary. He got on the boat, in the lounge fifty-year-old women on the decline were fanning their wrinkled necklines, on the deck horny

  teenagers were rubbing up against sickly sweet dorks, all the uncouthness of the pleased, he bent over the railing and threw up, yelled out, you motherfuckers, and got out in the nick of time before departure.

  So much for the refreshing sojourn, so much for swimming and plummeting into the deep of Paros, full steam ahead now for the homeland, where he would be welcomed by the money for the charnel house, Buddy’s collar without Buddy, the phone that didn’t ring, the house that wouldn’t cool down and, unfailingly, the stupid rituals that went on and on, every Monday night he would eavesdrop on the two hags, mother and godmother, mulling things over and over on the balcony, first subject himself, orphan prince, baby boy, sweet wee thing, one of a kind, ragamuffin, charmer, lazybones, good-for-nothing, wonder how many he’s done it with, mark my words, boys need to be pushed towards women or they turn queer, it won’t do for our pretty boy to gallop around at night without bit or rein, second subject how much garlic and how much onion in the summer diet of veggies in the oven, third the curtains, curtain rods and assorted accessories, fourth Marlon Brando and his lecture in Athens about the environment, fifth Highbrow’s announcements about the upcoming tragedies in Epidavros, sixth bonsai, which is to say poppycock in miniature, they identified completely in their disillusionment, his mother’s with the Magyar violin player, his godmother’s with a Kurd construction worker.

  He would slam the door and off he’d be, out again, alone.

  All night and all day he walked around delirious, sidewalks, train cars, buses, his ear picking out triumphant cries about the fucks of the century, about community funding and community programs, about graduate and postgraduate diplomas, about country houses and second country houses and, week by week, noting everywhere the decline of stamina, the sun more bent, the clouds discouraged, the darkness a burlap bag for the

  dried-up city, the neighborhoods with no pulse, the women without the guts to resist, swans that can’t be bothered spreading their wings, zebras that can barely drag their step along.

  The blue-purple abscess ready to burst, an evil inflammation covering everything like a lid, even over the ones already six feet under, even over the sovereignty of the dead.

  Where was he now? Who’s the jackass who’s printing those maps without gums? What irresponsible motherfucker isn’t sweeping up the stench?

  His shirt reeked. He unbuttoned it, took it off and threw it away, went back, took out the laces from the pocket, held them tightly in his hand, walked a bit and suddenly he stopped, his antennae were signaling.

  At sixty feet was an orange phosphorescent dress.

  The lucky one was walking through the night alone, in a hurry, was giving a solo performance at a slight trot, one-two, leaning to the right, pulled by the weight of two red plastic bags.

  The colors attracted him, a bird of paradise and the hair blond, hateful. He stood up straight, picked up his shirt, smoothed out the creases, made it presentable, in half a minute he was hurling himself onto center stage in the lead role, he found his rhythm and the pacing and forged ahead for the hat trick.

  The Shoelace


  T he victim, eighteen, had finished her shift at the ice cream parlor where she worked at shortly after midnight and had gone out with a girlfriend for a drink. She was found in a clump of trees off a main thoroughfare at five-thirty in the morning by three Albanians, a father and two sons, on their way to their daily wage. Round her neck a black shoelace was tightly wrapped. On the ground, next to her, were a small purse with her wallet in it, intact, and two red bags stamped with the name of her workplace, Alaska, in the one, packed ice cream cones in the other, two dirty aprons and a book with recipes for sweets. The police had sent out search parties to hunt down the dangerous murderer-rapist.

  That’s what they said on the TV before the sports news and Viv Koleva chalked the event up to merciless July with its mean heat waves, the infuriating stolidity of public servants, the shop’s drop in business and her brother-in-law’s outright refusal to discuss the possibility of Linus’s going over there on a trial basis, to change his surroundings and look for a more attractive course of studies, she’d pay for all expenses, naturally.

  - First, get him to settle down and finish his school, then let the army iron the rest of the kinks out of him, and then we might look at a visit to Toronto, Canada isn’t going anywhere. - But orphans don’t get drafted.

  Sir would not budge. He stated that it was the worst possible moment for him to take on a guest for two months, or even

  for one. At home, the two babies were continually hollering, and so was her sister. Viv hadn’t prepared the ground by first talking Xenia into it, her brother-in-law brooked no wheeling and dealing behind his back, he had a habit of turning rabid.

  She wasn’t even going to tell her sister about the phone call, Alifraggis’s tone and his nerves about his wife’s nerves disallowed her to make worse an already tense situation. The guy was a cannibal and a clown, Viv had a stack of evidence that her younger sister hadn’t fared well.