Back to Delphi

by Ioanna Karystiani

  Viv learned things about her husband she hadn’t known, that he gave generous discounts and extended the number of payments for those who weren’t managing, that he made gifts of doors to newlyweds starting up a household. The Cretans, as human beings and as party members, had their conscience burdened by their failure to pull him away from the road to perdition and were now seeking with their screwdrivers and

  wire brushes to repair the damage that God himself could not undo.

  They invited Viv to go out with them to a small tavern in Pireas, somewhere out of the way, their wives, comrades themselves, born and raised Cretans as well, from the mountains, at that, really wanted to. Viv didn’t. She had no right to entertainment, she ought to stay concentrated on her destiny, faithful to the consequences, cut off inside her four walls, not even a single painting anymore.

  In this game, people and things were taking part. When she got back to the apartment alone, she had the impression that the carved wooden chair ceased her conversation with the old checkered couch, the few bits of furniture and objects were quiet, some were afraid to take her on and others were in no mood for her. Wordless herself, along with her trable and her brookshelf, the r’s, especially at nights, a torrent spilling over everything.

  After that came the hours of the toasted bread. She sat in the small kitchen in her robe with the holes at the elbows, a five-year-old garment, who would see her, it would last through the winter just fine, and held before her gaze all through the night the piece of toasted bread on the plate, scrutinizing minutely the grains of rye, counting the tiny bubbles of the baking, gathering, subtracting and moving around the crumbs with her finger on the porcelain, until another heavy night was bloody well over and done with.

  She had learned to make her way under the threat of time, to defend herself with crumbs, she could give classes on that one.

  February, the offices were rented out. March, the branches budded. April, the two Easter buns came from the village. May, the mass media took up position, they’d sold out with the

  many-page spreads and the inserts about the deceased Karamanlis and the night-flower of Patissia promising merchandise.

  The day before the trial started, Viv Koleva watched television, two hours standing and unmoving as if she was at a crowded movie house. They can do as they please in the movies, they stab with ice picks, saw people up in pieces, take out fifty in one night and they get an Oscar.

  Then she slept like an ox for six hours straight and had a dream, again with an awful lot of trekking. She was walking along a dead-end alley, a labyrinth of low, old houses, like dentures with teeth broken off. She was looking for the disappeared Fotis, but she couldn't call out for him because she couldn’t for the life of her find the middle consonant to his name. She was consumed by the anxiety of completing the Fotis in order to call him and find him so she wouldn’t wander blindly on her own, but it was impossible because the t had gone missing from her mouth and from everywhere as if it had up and left this worldly existence.

  In the morning she recovered, girded her loins, fortified herself with a double coffee and set out for the courthouse.

  Her son took up his position and not on that first day, nor in those that followed, did he move his head or hands, did he flicker his eyelashes or cough or lick his cracked lips, he seemed like a taxidermist’s bird. His eyes looked twice as large as normal and his hair, much of it again, enough for two and three heads, looked like fake riches on his skeletal and twisted body.

  His mother had counted on his wreckage entering the courtroom well preserved inside a suit.

  Eighty thousand, expensive flannel and impeccable tailoring, dark blue with a white shirt and a black tie with diagonal gray stripes, so that he would appear civil before the judges but also before the victims and their relatives as well as the curious

  crowd and the reporters who had descended like crows in the hall of the Penal Court.

  - Put on a suit, for what? So that my victims take a liking to me? To show respect towards the ceremony? To feign remorse? For you to show me off to good advantage? So that people don’t think you a miser?

  These and then some, Mom, you’re throwing your money away, and, forget your stage coaching, and, best if you stayed at home, and, I don’t want you in there, God damn it, he had delivered them the day before, as eloquent as it gets, his spit flying, volleys of it on the floor, smashing his hand on his knee with a zdoop resounding at every punch and for the finale, dropping his head to his belly button and speaking to himself, I don’t know them, I don’t remember their faces, I don’t want to look at their eyes, I covered them with the shapka.

  Yukaris was listening to him patiently and a little abstractedly, he’d dealt with several tough cookies accused of every manner of transgression, there were other trials he had lost too.

  During the hearing, the solemn suit was absent but so was Linus himself, though he was present, as if the goings-on did not concern him, he was not surprised, he did not react, his reddened eyes fixed constantly on the bare wall opposite, every day on the same exact spot.

  Against her son’s will, Viv Koleva in dark glasses and clothes was every day at her post, in the back seats and to the side and usually alone, Manousos and Michalis had come along separately one time and for half an hour each, they had held her arm for a while and then they had split, on the pretext of the day’s wages, how to behave and what to say to her, how to listen soberly to all those testimonies and all the detailing by the consultants and the experts which bounded from wall to wall in the hall, imposing on the crowd sometimes a deadly silence and sometimes a susurrus of rage.

  Viv herself, with her head buzzing, made no effort to listen,

  to combine, to comprehend, to anticipate, on the contrary, she struggled to miss the salient points of the depositions, to not catch sight of the two girls, to avoid the spectacle of their parents, the mother of the dead Koula, as youthful as they come until last year, she had seen her photographs, now, within ten months, an old woman with sunken cheeks, dishevelled, snow- white hair spilling over the black clothes and unkempt, the ripped lining was hanging from her skirt.

  Scrunched up in her place, Viv Koleva was pressuring her mind to leave that place, go anywhere else, to the medical classes of the first year, to the scenes of Kurosawa’s Dersou Uzala in the boreal forests of Siberia, to paragraphs with fireflies in the lush fields of foreign novels, to the compliments of the famous choreographer Yannis Fiery who’d chanced into the Tutu once, when he saw a poster of one of his shows on the shop window.

  Her ear caught fleeting phrases from depositions and testimonies, although there were some instances where she didn’t miss a single word. I’d just said goodbye to my girlfriends, I’d shouted to them to celebrate my new, well-paid job, I was happy and wasn’t thinking of any danger, this from the first victim, I crossed through the park to save some distance, I was in a hurry to get home so my stepfather wouldn’t get mad and take it out on my mother again, this from the second victim, the third could not testify, she wasn’t alive.

  The details about the modus operandi took up hours and days, dozens of questions about the shoe in the mouth, the Russian hat, a headrest or a face cover for the victims, the blue hairpin, the torn up skirt with the side split, the pink panties, the pubic hairs in the mouth, the throwing up, the hemorrhaging, the bruises, the nipples, the nail-marks to the perpetrator’s neck, to his genitals, his shit-smeared underwear, the genetic material.

  This is where he faints, now he’s going to faint, Viv was

  waiting from her son to at last do something right, eventually it was three others who fainted, one of the girls, the mother and father of the dead girl, the latter twice.

  She was watching the accused as if seeing him for the first time, examining his shape, his apathy, his rigidity, not someone she knew, a stranger.

  In the taking of a human life apologies don’t count, there are no miracles, the dead cannot be resurrected. Still, with years, people c
an forgive on their own not just thieves and robbers but killers too, during a fight, a pursuit or for reasons of honor. There is only one unforgivable crime, rape. For all the women of the world, half the earth’s population, the rapist is an animal and will remain so for the rest of his life, the stain, even if he hasn’t killed anyone, never wears off.

  During the breaks in the trial, Viv listened to people comment on her son, a clear-cut killer, a sick bastard, scum, needs to be shot, hung at Syntagma Square, castrated, and some wondered where his villainous mother might be, she, also, ought to be toppled into some gorge, everything is the mothers’ fault.

  Reporters looked for her, too, she covered her face, refused, evaded them. One photographer pursued her all the way to the toilets where Viv sought refuge, she shut herself up in there for an hour, the nightmare in full throttle.

  All those days she didn’t turn the TV on, bought no newspaper, didn’t want to see, nor, certainly, to save any clippings. At nights her phone would ring several times, the indefatigable hounds of the media, just one statement Mrs. Koleva, her mother with a thousand sighs, Xenia, and, overwhelmed and terrified by the furor, Rhoda from Nevada, yet another medical conference, that was the cherry on the cake, impatient to be told what Linus had said up to now and what he intended to say in his defense.

  Linus made no defense speech.

  Menios Yukaris, without any great arguments that he could

  use as ammunition to shoot down in flames the evidence of guilt, didn’t put on a performance and he probably disappointed the court aficionados who only live for a good trial. He did his duty, fairly modestly, did not speak for very long, did not overstate his case, he wrapped up, within a quarter of an hour, the orphanhood, the trauma due to an alcoholic father, the past of the honest family, the unceasing struggle of the working mother who, let it be noted, did not proceed, as is common nowadays, to look after her own life by means of a second marriage, he improvised a small lie too, about how the unlucky Koula offended the masculine pride of the accused which is how the tragic end must be explained, and he interpreted the young man’s refusal to ask for the Court’s clemency, on the mitigating grounds of post-adolescent confusion and as acknowledgment of his responsibility, acceptance of the acts ascribed to him, and as silent amends. He made a little bit of a splash only toward the end, which was intentional, by revealing that in his private meetings with the accused, he had repeatedly expressed the wish that the death penalty would be reintroduced.

  Viv Koleva didn’t doubt it and she didn’t think it was such a bad idea, what kind of life could he expect, what kind could she expect herself. She was even thinking that a court of selfpunishment was needed, she would go of her own accord, the prosecutor of herself for ruinous acts of omission and the judge, too, giving down the harshest conviction, exile to some hell or other.

  She was rollercoastered by the proceedings and mainly by the unanswerable questions that had, for some time now, been jostling in her mind, do I love or do I hate my only child, did I ever love him, was my heart ever truly warm to him, did I mollycoddle him, my precious and my lovely, did I ache for him, can someone who hasn’t loved their parent really love their child?

  The nights promoted her to the highest echelons of sleep-

  lessness, they barely allowed for some ten-minute snatches of sleep, just enough for the nightmare to fit in that she was the white-haired mother of the dead Koula, who storms the place where the accused sits and strangles with her bare hands the killer and tormentor of her daughter.

  Linus Kolevas went in for life with no ifs or buts.

  The jurors’ decision was as expected and it was hailed by the audience with a mixture of applause and curses, may you rot in that cell, here’s your one-way ticket to hell, the other jailmates will do right by you, hope you die like a mongrel dog, hope you get cancer, all together like a marching war band striking a paean of hateful spleen against Hannibal.

  Viv and Linus looked at one another for seconds only.

  The son’s stare was hostile, so that his mother would never forget it. But the mother’s was no less so. In a way, the trial mainly concerned the two of them, they were the opposing parties, simultaneously accusing and defending. So they judged and convicted each other of the highest penalty.

  This was a just decision, too, and it was taken wordlessly, at the moment when the father of the dead girl raised up and held above everybody’s head, like a flag, a large framed photograph of his hapless daughter.

  Yukaris did not submit an appeal, Linus did not allow him, his refusal was staunch.

  Later that afternoon, Viv rolled into her chair as heavy as an old olive oil pot with all the muck at the bottom. As she could no longer think and could no longer bear bringing to mind her son’s face and looking at him even in her imagination, she brought to mind his toenails, precisely because they were the farthest away from his eyes and his gaze, especially that more recent one, the courtroom gaze, so she raced stricken to his nails, five little horns on one foot and five on the other, longish and a little curved, often with a small gray edge at the end when Linus neglected to trim them on time.

  She now wondered if the toenails were properly kept, if nail clippers were allowed in jail and if at night shoes were left inside the cell or just outside the metal door to air. She wondered how many have holes in them, if they steal each other’s shoes and if the guards mix them up as a joke. Straight after that, a more general question occurred to her. Was she so voluble in her thoughts when she was a little girl too, or was she as silent as a sphinx back in her village of Alonaki? She did not remember her little head prattling so, besides, what can a little kid have amassed in the space of seven, ten years, how could it be practiced in this dark, cursed art of holding its tongue, like they say, but then unleash it inside the mind and work it nonstop? Still, even now, in these trying times, Viv Koleva was not too sure that the echoes in the chambers of her brain were always those of her own voice and not the externally dictated elaborate pronouncements by some unknown overseer of her existence, observer, exhumer and judge, all in one.

  Life inside the head is always harder, more painful and long lasting, my head, she thought, will be concussing with the reverberations even after death, it will become a skull in delirium.

  Just then the doorbell rang abruptly, the sound hit her in the back as she sat, it jerked her upright, she stumbled, nearly fell over.

  This was Charidemos’s first visit. She heard the inarticulate cat like little cries behind the door, saw him through the peephole, let him in without a second thought. Her dumb, crosseyed and deaf-mute compatriot, the cousin of her schoolmate Petra, was holding in one hand the paper with the typed address of Vivian Sotiropoulos and in the other the tray with the first milk pie—in the years to come others would follow.

  His broken syllables had an immediate impact. They brought into the room the village with all of memory’s dung, the old voices tied into a knot, the old looks tied into a bunch,

  all of it together, the detritus sunk forever at the bottom of her life’s story.

  Unsuspecting of this particular home’s unhappiness and the hardships of the whole wide world, happy as a lark to have seen his mission through, Charidemos was pleased with the cold water and, later, the three pieces of toast, was ecstatic over the Queen Elizabeth Viv gave him and he cried with happiness when she dressed him with her son’s unworn blue suit.

  He sat on the couch like a debutant, back straight, palms folded upon his knees, well mannered and grateful, as was appropriate to the quality, the price and the kind of his attire, a formal, robust, manly outfit.

  Viv Koleva was looking at the retarded boy and couldn’t get enough of him. His saliva, the crooked mouth and black beady eyes trained on her, didn’t bother her one bit. When, eventually, he grunted his concern over the time, and picking up his doll, got up to leave, he had to take a taxi to the bus station and make the last bus to the Peloponnese, the directions for the return on a second note, the woman
hugged him tightly, stroked his head and even kissed him on the cheek.

  - Better if I had you as my son, she whispered, yet another verse out of the poem of her life which she had to recite bit by bit to the end, there were probably still many verses left, her sack was heavy. It was heavy, all right, because her sack was her son himself.

  ’

  The Wall

  T he old door of old people , a recent verse so that her life’s poem could draw on at length.

  It was a subject Viv hadn’t thought about before, despite her apprenticeship, via Fotis, to many kinds of wooden casings and frames.

  Old people, when they happen to be moved elsewhere, know they cannot start a new life, they carry along with them the old walls, saturated with everything that’s happened to them. Even in a newly erected building, in the most modern or renovated apartment, their door is old, not to mention it could easily be said that most of them, people of a humble and humiliated youth, have spent many decades waiting silently behind the world’s door.

  Viv now crossed those old doors daily in the exercise of her new duties, home care for the elderly who needed someone’s care and reassurance, especially before the terrible onset of evening.

  She had asked from Rhoda the one and only favor of introducing her to a couple of patients for a start and to provide relevant directions, she wouldn’t encumber her with the rest, she would read up, get equipment, look after things by herself.

  A few phone calls were made and the prize patients were located, Viv had said outright she preferred those over seventy- five, the more over the better, who wouldn’t set much stock by the reporters’ mongering, wouldn’t be into current affairs much and would not, at all costs, have large families, especially

  not nearby, she couldn't take the extra stares, the old wretched patients' stares were more than enough for her.

  Up until then, she saw old folks as the pedestrians of life, without money for taxis, no knees for buses, slowly doing the rounds—bakery, pharmacy, Social Health Fund—or resting on peeling, unhinged park benches like half-eaten bagels in a crushed paper bag.