Back to Delphi

by Ioanna Karystiani

  It had been quite a trip that day, carrying ten kilos of armaments in the elevator, the car, through the parking lot, dragging them into the doll shop, sticking them into the small WC, in between a carton of detergents and the mop, and covering them up with eight roles of toilet paper in their packaging.

  The police chief called her at seventeen past nine, no client had walked into the shop in that time and she was wishing that nobody would, after watching her clock minute by minute she had even, at nine past nine precisely, turned over the paper sign on the glass door, Closed , had drawn the shades across the store windows, had turned off the standing lamp on the small table that doubled as a till and was pacing in the minuscule space, barely ten feet across, back and forth, as weary as if she had covered whole miles, as if she’d crossed the desert of a biblical destruction.

  - Mrs Korleva, everything’s fine, we thank you, you did the right thing. Let’s hope the young fellow is the victim of diabolic coincidences.

  - His cigarettes? Viv asked, she’d thought ahead about that, too, in the night of her second visit to the station she had left a whole carton, they’d give them to him a pack at a time.

  - Did he ask after me?

  -No.

  - Would he have known?

  - Not a chance. Please trust us.

  - What if he finds out?

  - He’s not going to, don’t worry, we know our job.

  - What does he think about his arrest?

  - That we had been watching him for weeks.

  - You didn’t hurt him? You didn’t flog him?

  - Most certainly not.

  - Shall I bring him fresh clothing?

  - He hasn’t gotten dirty. Later. We’ll be in touch.

  That was it, curt questions and answers, for the first instal-

  ment they didn’t §ay any more. The policemen had patiently heard Viv through in the night, after she handed the lace over, telling them a bunch of dumb things, that it seemed inconceivable to her that her child was sexually deviant, that once she even came across him by accident watching a porn video and he might as well’ve been watching a documentary on Charles de Gaulle, that her son has a fine upbringing and patriotism as well, given how distressed he was last summer by the incidents on Cyprus and the killing of Solomos Solomou, climbed on the flag post, cigarette in mouth and, given the laws of statistics, we may have before us a tragic story like the ones we see in the movies, extreme coincidences leading to the electric chair a man whose innocence isn’t proven until much later.

  Now, the hours passed with no news, for better or for worse. Perhaps, none of the victims recognized him, this might be the day when, finally, they caught the real guy with a dozen witnesses and a dozen pieces of evidence.

  So, Linus would turn up suddenly, pale and outraged with the misunderstanding and the hardship, swearing at the cops in earnest, she would join him, the this, the that, the scum, the imbeciles, drawing a wage to no good purpose.

  And he would surely tell her his story now in every detail, where he was on the damned night, where and why he’d shaved his head, where he’d lost the other lace, what happened to his shoes, who stole the fur cap from him, to what needy soul he had given his blue shirt, in accordance with ye who have two chitons, and so on and so forth.

  Late in the afternoon she was called by the central police office, went over, did not see her son, saw a police chief, and was briefed about the basics.

  Out of the seven women who had been called in for the identification, Greeks and foreigners, young and mature, whores and not, from older and more recent cases, six had said no, not him, no way, they insisted on someone larger, more

  muscular, shorter. One was not too sure either way, the telltale blond hair was missing but the eyes and the body type kind of matched.

  The identification happened in reverse, as if this was a joke, by Linus himself through a series of gestures, he wouldn’t open his mouth to courageously confess, he bowed his head every time silently confirming that yes, it was him at Lykovrisi, yes, it was him who had gagged the girl with his shoe in her mouth.

  The police chief seemed relieved and proud with the outcome as if it had been his own work and not the mother-judas’s.

  The interrogations had a long way to go, he was naturally not at liberty to divulge his planned course of action to Viv, he didn’t have it in him either, he said, to torment a mother by keeping her on the premises longer than necessary, despite the fact that both he and all the policemen that were coming and going, in uniform and out, scrutinized her and swapped among themselves glances which signaled they also thought her guilty over the upbringing and the negligent watch over her only son.

  Viv Koleva couldn’t see Linus yet, thankfully, it was the last thing she wanted.

  She wished she never did see him again.

  That same evening, under lock and key in her house, she didn’t pick up the phone to look for a lawyer. She wandered through the rooms, gutted by the police. Linus’s computer was missing, his wardrobe a mess, the poems spilt out of the bags onto the couch, Ritsos and Rotas on her bedroom floor, the cops had even looked under the beds.

  She lay down. At 35 degrees Celsius, the inside walls were burning and the sheets were lukewarm but, on them, her hands and feet were frozen, her outbreath a cold breeze, no sweating at all, her body a fridge, her body an obstacle. The body is to blame for everything, the head a mere fixture, the mind a pawn. Bodies with their autonomy and self-will are continuously preoccupied with themselves, finding fault with

  their shape, finding fault with the skin, the breasts that need rubbing, the shoulders that need polishing, the calves crossed in lust, the lower area churning, the testicles scheming, the male back in a show of strength, the female belly in search of a pump for the nine-month fiesta.

  She placed her palm on her cold stomach and struggled to understand what had gone wrong with that boy from the outset, from when she was pregnant, the mother’s belly is the cradle of every good thing, the cave of every evil, the headquarters of every future uprising, the coffer that holds the treasure or the ashes, the nest with the bits of thread and the sprigs that become the loom where the child’s sack is slowly woven as it grows.

  Pinching the skin and pressing down on her intestines which were making gurgling noises, hadn’t eaten all day, she tried to recall the frequency of throwing up, of bloating, the kicks, the foodstuffs, the constipation, the sweats, the obsessions, the nerves, the bad sleep, had she slipped, stumbled, overeaten, drunk too much, gotten too frightened and marked the baby ever since, as if she could turn Linus back into an embryo and wall him inside her womb again, an egg in her ovary, and perchance leave him there for good.

  How did the night pass, how did the day break, how did she drag herself again to the central offices to see from a distance, down a corridor, what she would not even be able to imagine in the past, Linus in handcuffs, an extraterrestrial thing?

  Her eyes got stuck there, it didn’t even cross her mind to look at his face, if from a distance, it was secondary, she was abstracted and riveted by the metal shining on his wrists.

  She felt that from that moment on, no other kind of unhappiness would ever make an impression on her.

  In life everyone has a poem they have to say. And Viv was

  saying hers, the one allotted her from birth, and she had to say the rest, too, all the verses till the last line.

  The jailing and the hearings, the trumpeting of the media, the chorus of the neighbors’ excelsiors, the ostracism up and down her suburb were now all past and she had made it through to their aftermath.

  The latest events became a whole armada sailing unsinkable in the ocean of the coming weeks, the coming months.

  Rhoda in a hurried phone call, she was over her head, ever so pressed for time, recommended a lawyer, a client of hers with high blood pressure who, it turned out, was dreaming of TV interviews where his pronouncements would be given due attention on the way to being appointed a parliamentary ca
ndidate with the New Democracy Party. At his very first appearance on a channel among pensioners and detectives, Viv dismissed him, she went at random in and out of a dozen small law firms and finally hired someone who was not, and did not wish to become, a TV star. Please pay mind, she was perfectly straight from the start, keep away from cameras and if some director or writer turns up wanting to turn us into a movie or a book, make it perfectly clear to them that we are not fond of playing lead roles in the arts, and just proceed with what needs to be done.

  Menios Yukaris, a small man of fifty-five, equipped with the armor of experience, four thousand hearings in all, asked her the difficult questions discreetly, not expecting an answer at all costs, drew inferences out of the half-finished sentences, correctly understood the content of her silences, and didn’t hold it against her that already from the first minute her eye had noted his threadbare carpet, the missing corner in the wooden border of his desk and the worn edge of the plaster frame of his diploma. Entirely focused on the matter at hand each time, a devotee of specifics and of essential words, he preferred all narratives and events to be succinctly expressed and to reach a

  relevant conclusion. Whenever he found himself in a tight

  V

  spot, he had recourse to some quote, Marcus Aurelius, Voltaire and Nasser were always on standby to lend a helping hand.

  Day by day, the amount of documents and notes from the hearings grew larger in his briefcase as did the list of his appointments. He briefed his client, gave her instructions, empathized with her predicament, he knew with all his years in penal courts that in every crime, along with the accused, society also tried the mother.

  In his eyes, Viv Koleva was an apple that had started to rot and her son a crabapple that had slipped through her hands and rolled on his way, leaving her holding the stem.

  The stem wouldn’t open his mouth, but in his own way, he didn’t deny the acts ascribed to him during the interrogation, he wouldn’t have defended himself even if they’d blamed every case on file on him. The police search through his computer hadn’t turned up any sex goddesses giving blowjobs or portraits of great womanizers or serial killers, no orgies or Satanist rituals, nothing but idyllic landscapes and information on steppes, taigas, tundras, bio-plantations, shamans, martial arts of ancient China, Braveheart and Irish methods of malt fermentation and drinking, there was a list found, too, titled Dates, where Viv recognized the dates of Fotis’s death and, Buddy’s death and the cops identified the dates of three rapes.

  The television, newspapers and assorted publications were having a field day with the case, a godsend in the summer media limbo. On-site reports, articles upon articles, interviews with sleuths, statements by feminists and specialist exposes about sexual perversions, orphanhood and the sinister underside of the city, were dedicated to the subject. In the scandal- mongering press Linus was a star, his picture was all over with an inch of block-out in lieu of blindfold across the eyes and the surname Kolevas in capitals.

  For his mother, time, which had flowed minute by minute,

  slowly and terribly, until the confirmation of his guilt, now was of no interest, it passed of its own accord, scattered in the courts and in the neglected house. The days had lost their cohesion once and for all, they no longer followed their established routine, the Tutu, decorative minutiae, the paying off of loan installments, cooking and housekeeping of the mind, their hours would suddenly break up in unexpected directions, like a shoal of fish whose unified swimming is disturbed by a stone thrown in the sea, scattering them this way and that.

  The events had her on the run from the lawyer’s office downtown to the central headquarters of the police on Alexandras Avenue, from the courts up at Kypseli to the tactical interrogations office in Omonia Square, from Annas to Caiafas, starting the day with help me, Christ Almighty, and ending with Mother of God, have mercy, because the way things had turned out, she did wish there was a God if only so she could tell him point-blank: since you made him in your image, you can now take over and do with him what you will.

  The hours were many, too, that she spent shut off in her home, she gathered them around her chair like cats that purred away the minutes and the seconds without her resisting such a prodigal waste of time.

  The shop closed, how to put in an appearance, what to explain to the other shopkeepers, how to face any mothers who might demand amends, we were bringing our little girls into the dragon’s lair, where to find the presence of mind for business deals, she went once and picked up the Queen Elizabeths, didn’t even open the cardboard boxes, merely kicked them into a recess. As for the new sign, she never did pick it up, despite the advance payment she’d made in hard cash.

  Her apartment building was unbearable and so was the neighborhood. The manager bumped into her at the entrance, she was going out, he was coming in, and far from saying even a cut-and-dried good day, his clenched body and stone face

  indicated she was no longer welcome at the five-story building with the twenty-two peace loving, Christian families. Next day, his wife came face-to-face with her in the hallway, took two steps back and turned about.

  The mini-market guy, who was usually a prime candidate for a chat, said not a word for the first time ever, not the silence of compassion or awkwardness but of disapprobation. He gave her the little net bag with the milk portions and the lighter, took the money, pushed her change across and then turned his back to her, ostensibly to arrange the soda drinks in the fridge.

  At the baker’s, too, as soon as she walked in, the owner, his wife, the Albanian worker, a filo pastry expert, and the clientele, all familiar faces, cut their talking short and stood about like pillars of salt. And what might they say? Well, hello, and aren’t you right on time, the spinach pie is just out, take a couple of pieces over to the boy to keep his strength up? Maybe pat her on the back and soothe her with a “God is great'’ and “It’s all going to be all right”? Maybe tell her, these things happen, my son, too, my nephew, my brother did the same? Nobody’s son, nephew or brother had done the same.

  Viv left without getting bread. Ever since, in order to get a few basics, just to keep herself going, she had to go out of her way, change grocery stores and mini-markets, make sure she did not become a target.

  She kept thinking the pavements would buck and throw her off, the trees would wither in her wake, the rubbish bins would overturn to cover her with shit-paper.

  The poem also included the page of the psychiatric assessment. Her son did not want to collaborate with the doctors, not even for his own good, as he had no interest in his own good or the future or anything of the sort. Viv didn’t like that stage one bit, nor did she like the psychiatrists’ eyes, like the rays of ultramodern CAT scans, cutting up people’s soul into slices. And that’s supposed to be a good thing, is it? Being emptied

  out like that, no bones made about it? Who are those who decide to do this monstrous, Peeping Tom job of undressing everyone else’s insides?

  Viv Koleva wouldn’t mind nearly as much going around buck naked, the saggy flesh and flaccid buttocks in full view, but she didn’t want her soul stripped down and poured out all over their desks. At the prearranged appointment with them she felt trapped, as if facing a terrible agency of power whose job was the retroactive lynching of mothers. The woman doctor in her smart linen suit and her colleague with the thunderbolt in his tie and his shoes shined to mirror-like perfection, seemed like interrogators whose questions were measured but who had in their eyes the assurance that eventually they’d find out everything they needed to know, nobody slips through their grasp. To be precise, in her mind the psychiatrists were an evolved version of inquisitors, same system, you’ll spew everything up, you’ll all break.

  We’re already shattered, for all time, Viv was thinking, experienced, ever since a wee child on a trajectory to contrition.

  The examination decreed that, overall, Linus Kolevas was of sound mind and in a position to be charged. In other words, not enough of a
schizophrenic nor enough of a manic-depressive. When his mother lost the vague hope of madness, she thought a lot about that one.

  She exhaustively scrutinized of her own accord her family and the family of Fotis, from what little she knew, everyone was all right in the head. She thought it through some more, and reached her own conclusions regarding the myth of the progenitors of the young man in detention being in fine health.

  Who wasn’t fit to be put behind bars? His bard of a grandfather, half his life spent making up songs, the other half in the nationalists’ prisons? His father, hankering for destruction, throwing back every type and brand of alcohol? Her father,

  who took as his wife a woman who could’ve been his daugh- ter? Her weeded out mother, all day, every day, in the fields kneeling before thorny burnet? Herself, a lifetime in the Sunday school of ballet and the dance classes of despondency?

  Her son had been assigned to manage their stock of ammunition and he had deployed it in the familiar, epic manner.

  The most revealing verses in her poem concerned the infamous family and a select assortment of close relatives.

  The rapes suited them down to the ground. With a small dose of exaggeration, or cynicism, that’d be the conclusion of a third party studying the way Viv’s relations treated her.

  The relationships with her father, her mother, her sister, her brother-in-law, the best woman at her marriage, shallow, with all the essence having fizzed out, were a net full of holes, they were waiting for the event that would bring them undone, the merciful blow that would finish them off, so that the list of cumbersome obligations could be crossed off.

  Her father, not even a phone call. Her mother, at his command, didn’t come from the village for even one day. Her sister and her brother-in-law dug themselves in, in Canada. And the bitch Rhoda, not a single visit to her godson, she asked Viv over the phone what Linus had recounted and had admitted to, the psychiatrists didn’t discover anything, did they, she sent a check for two hundred thousand and she disappeared.