Back to Delphi

by Ioanna Karystiani

  So, was he coming down or not? Didn’t he think of his mother at all and what she was going through for his sake? She was wrong not to have spoken to him about Cleovis and Viton, the two youths of Argos who reined themselves to the chariot and carried their mother a distance of sixteen miles to the sanctum of Hera. Were they jackasses, now? But wait, he wouldn’t have turned into a junkie, would he, and was upstairs shooting up right at that moment? You think? Had yet another disaster befallen them?

  Her heart started beating. She immediately moved farther along and raised her eyes to his window. He was in there, standing up, his head touching the windowpane of the closed balcony door, his eyes huge, trained on the Albanians.

  His day and her day would pass with a knot in the throat again, a knot that had nothing to do with ties. And which there was probably no way of undoing.

  JU Jl,

  / /

  It had been consuming her for ten straight years, she weighed it up this way and that, should she tell him or should she not, when would it be the right moment, how much longer to put it off, or had she better take it to her grave? And carry this weight all her life? Could she stand never getting it out? Was she able to make a final decision and forget about it? How do you support that? How do you delete something of such significance? And if she mustered the courage to confess it, how would he react? What if it made things even worse?

  Mythical peaks, rocks in the middle of nowhere, steep mountainsides, monotonous hills, distant plateaus. Flighty swallows and ivory skies, smell of dusk and universal reverie, the time when locals and visitors alike get immobilized on a chair facing the west and give themselves over to colors, fragrances and drawn-out cigarettes.

  The Kolevas, mother and son, were smoking in the balcony of her room at the pension. They’d almost finished their coffee wordlessly. Time was passing slowly and purposelessly, the only concrete thing awaiting was the duty of dinner somewhere, anywhere.

  - I turned you in to the police.

  The phrase was uttered in a low but clear and decisive voice and put an end to the decade’s prevarication.

  Linus, unaffected, kept on smoking, following with his gaze the swallows’ thick formations, as they were descending and distributing themselves to their nests.

  - It was me who told the police, Viv repeated her disclosure, changing the words and increasing the volume of her voice by a couple of notches, the neighboring balconies were vacant, there was no risk of eavesdroppers.

  Linus still attending to the swallows.

  - Did you hear what I said?

  - I’ve known all along.

  It was something his mother did not expect, she’d had the cops’ assurance of anonymity, at the trial her decisive contribution to her son’s arrest hadn’t come up, and in the intervening years there had never been any mention.

  - Who told you?

  - Nobody.

  - Someone must have.

  - There was no need.

  - Since when have you known?

  - Ever since then.

  - How did you figure it out?

  He turned and looked at her full in the face.

  - Does it matter?

  He was telling the truth, there are moments when you know there’s no chance the other could be bluffing, there are certain issues on which, when the time comes, nobody is going to cheat or lie, it just isn’t appropriate.

  Viv could barely breathe, she was fairly prepared to stand up to his gaze, relentless over her betrayal, to listen to a thousand curses and complaints about being a snitch and heartless, to get spat at or punched out. None of any of that, though. Linus’s eyes with no sparks of anger or lightning bolts of hatred, glued onto hers, were punishing her with their own disclosure that all these years he’d been meeting her behind the glass partition knowing it was her who’d put him inside.

  - You took the shoelace to them, he said quietly, you’d been saving it wrapped around your arm.

  He finished his cigarette, got up, my own mother snitched on me, he said to the swallows and jumped up and down a bit on the narrow balcony as if his knees had locked up, with Viv getting scared and pulling back, a crab into its shell.

  - I’m going, he said, and she didn’t stop him, let him go to his room alone, so she could also be alone to think, to carefully choose her dinnertime words, explain her position, tonight there was going to be a real conversation, things would be called by their name, with no detectivelike fishing around and baiting. A new beginning was ahead for the two of them, a new period with fewer secrets and hidden aces coming out from up their sleeves at sunset and blowing up the quarry of their lives.

  She lit a cigarette, leaned her head against the balcony’s lukewarm metal railing and looked inquisitively at her left arm. She couldn’t get over the fact that her son knew, yet never let on, all those visits and never a squeak. She tried to recall if in their monthly meetings, especially at the beginning, any vague

  reference had been made to the circumstances of the arrest, the preliminary questioning, the interrogation, and she had dissimulated like a ham actor, while he knew the truth. Was it, perchance, her mistake, and a fatal one at that?

  Who else was going to stop him before he did again what he had done and then some? She didn’t want for the questions to start again parading in her mind, she gave them short shrift, nor could she trick herself into organizing dinner, choosing the menu and the venue.

  To escape, she availed herself of her sense of duty, exemplary at her work, time to check up on her replacement. She called the Bulgarian woman, everything in order, still, she wanted to hear her cadavers with her own ears, she called the couple of Exarchia, she called the whiner downtown, the exarmy bachelor of the northern suburbs, the Cretan Methuselah who assured her he had no intention of dying in anyone else’s arms, let alone those of a Bulgarian, and devoted to her for the occasion, a verse he’d been keeping at the tip of his tongue for two days, God takes his time judging.

  So there’s a long road ahead, Viv thought looking across the valley.

  Mountains hunker down, peaks pull over to the side , Rotas, And I when I lift the cup off the table, a hole of silence is underneath, Ritsos, may our poets fare well seeing as she remembered them and their verses and the still uncut tome of Sikelianos in her bag.

  She drained the last of her now cold coffee with her mind twisting and turning forward and backward, to the summer of ’97 and the spring of 2007.

  In the old days and now, in the old days and now, in the old days and now, the words were her old folks’ bread and butter, just the thing for her case as well. She glanced at her watch, eight-thirty, took it off, went into the room and set it on the bedside table, time for a quick shower before going out. From

  the bedside table, isn’t that where she’d left them? the car keys were missing. She had a good look, not in her pocket, not in her bag, not in the two plastic bags with the pine honey she had bought, she looked all around, lifted the pillows, bent under the bed in case they’d fallen out of sight, no keys.

  She went out into the hallway and knocked on Linus’s door, no answer. With her heart racing wildly, she went back in her room and called reception, asked Sabine if her nephew was waiting for her at the downstairs hall, no, her husband had asked him to join him for the basketball finals, but Mr. Takis had left in the car and since the young man was off having a drive, why didn’t she fix them two drinks so the two women could sit and have a chat. Maybe later, said Viv, with the blood beating at her temples.

  Now that she was at a complete loss, she was out of bloody cigarettes.

  Where did he go? If he wanted just a ride, he would ask and she would happily agree and, of course, go with him, because Linus hadn’t driven for ten years and his hands and feet mightn’t manage so well, the steering, the accelerator, the brakes. But, after the stripping down, damned be the hour when she told him and he told her, there was no chance her son was in the mood for a relaxing ride in the car. What then? Did he decide to make a
getaway, live the glorious life of a fugitive? Did he have enough gas? Had he any more money apart from the two fivers she’d given him, to have, a grown man, in his pocket? And in which direction would he go? Was this prearranged? Were there others waiting for him? And what should she do? Inform the police so they got him before he went a great distance and could no longer be traced?

  She looked in her wallet, her money was there, but he must have surely pilfered her cell phone. She called her number from the room’s phone, heard it beeping outside on the balcony, she had used it a while ago to call her clients. She replaced

  the receiver and lifted her hands to her head, my Lord, he must be heading for some precipice, pressing down on the accelerator to end his life. She thought some pretext or other to borrow the German womans car. Would she catch up with him? Should she catch up with him?

  Ah, Charioteer, Viv Koleva was bitterly regretting the five day outing, trapped in the lime-sticks of Amphictyonia, not knowing what her next step ought to be because she didn’t know what his next step would be.

  Suddenly she felt her insides knot up and the terrible suspicion took root in her mind. This was it, that is where his permanently much promising, dark gaze pointed to, her son had gone out hunting.

  The small town already had several women tourists, some daydreamer was bound to be roaming on her own, relishing the May evening and the spring smells. Day before yesterday and yesterday and today, in the archaeological enclosure and at the museum and all over, there had been no shortage of pretty ones with pale blue eyes and pale blue shorts and golden bangs, an alarm kept sounding in Viv, she kept dragging her son away and occupying his attention with the things she’d memorized about pillars and statues, gods and demigods and all those who serially raped any virgin they took a fancy to without being expelled from Olympus and its environs.

  - Mr. Menio?

  She found him at a tavern by the sea, en famille.

  She reported to him briefly, telegraphically, I told him I turned him in, he said he’s known all the time, he stole my car keys. I realized twenty minutes later. He’s either escaped or he’s going to kill himself or he’s possessed by the old evil and is looking for a woman. He’s been gone one whole hour and, to be sure, doesn’t have a driver’s license, but that’s the least of it.

  Menios Yukaris said, fuck, we’re done for, he went on with things he’d said before, at first I thought that he was mad, then

  I thought you were, then both of you, you’d break all the psychiatrists’ records, now I think I’m the mad one for not giving up on you. Finally, he asked her to give him five minutes to think.

  Flow do five whole minutes pass? The first two and a half with a storm of sounds and images from the summer of ’97, shaved skull, zdoop against the wall, isolated parks, telephone booths and police stations. The next two and a half with zooming in on the inch-high letters and screaming headlines from the press fiesta. A very crowded five minutes, with space for it all, it landed Viv facedown on the bed. She had an impulse to give up once and for all. To pay for the pension and leave immediately on a bus, if there was one at this time, or a taxi. She would go back to her work and she would stop taking an interest, protecting, getting scared and suffering over that merciless spawn of her belly. She might leave Athens, go to work in Salonika as a carer, to Komotini as a factory worker, to Heraklion as a maid.

  She called Yukaris back, he was busy.

  Tonight, however, Saturday, May 5, 2007, she herself was solely responsible for the fate of the poor soul who would be pounced upon by her son, the one sick soul she couldn’t manage with an injection and some vitamins. In her waking, now, she again identified with the dead girl’s white-haired mother and started beating her cheeks as if they were drum plates, just like the other one had at the trial.

  She would go out to look for him in the darkened fields. The chances of catching up with him were infinitesimal but at least she wouldn’t remain impassive, she would have done her duty.

  She reached out to her bag, felt the heavy bulk at its bottom and stood up ready for everything.

  At the same moment she heard his door open in the next

  room.

  So he was back. She pictured him again dishevelled, his eyes caves again, his face again with nail-marks and dried up snot. Should she storm his room? With the pestle? Or maybe with the knife?

  In split seconds there was his shadow at her door. His hair was still combed, his appearance was orderly and he was strangely calm. He was holding two packets of cigarettes, her brand, and the bag from a local store, Apollo, like the spaceship.

  He put the cigarettes and the keys to the Fiat on the bedside table and then, immediately emptied the bag on his mother’s bed.

  Two black swimsuits, one a man’s, one a woman’s.

  Viv collapsed on the edge of the bed and he sat on a chair, bent over and unspeaking.

  When the cell phone rang, Yukaris, she praised the mellow evening, not chilly at all, a clear sky with a lot of stars, they were going out somewhere for chops, she wished him a quiet evening and a good night and she didn’t mind at all that the lawyer rang off with something not terribly apt, by Khalil Gibran, about the ox that loves its yoke and considers the forest elk and deer to be mongrel creatures and mighty strange.

  The nighttime breeze had molded the sand into pleats, unmoving little yellow waves that lay in the quiet morning. In places, pebbles, white, black and gray, the size of olive pips, created mosaics like the icons of a church wall that was shattered in a sea storm and was washed out on the shore in pieces.

  A seagull was following a ridge in the shallow water. In the middle of the bay, a rock rose gurgling like a hippopotamus diving to wash and quench its thirst. On the horizon a sail, a nail on the flat stretch of blue. Only thing missing was a dolphin, they’d never seen a live one.

  The water was very cold, but they felt obligated to have this swim, a forceful order still valid from the summer of ’97, the first one for both after ten whole years. They walked in to the knee, stayed for a while to get used to it before wading further in, they got wet by degrees, reaching their hands out to the short choppy waves that came their way, limping slightly.

  When they were in to the neck and washed out their mouths, it was impossible to not feel grateful.

  They had the impression that the sea had been expecting them all this time and was now showing its best side for their sake, what with its teasing breeze, its translucency, its aquamarine blue, like a fairytale.

  They had been up at dawn.

  Mr. Takis, isn’t it a shame you’re leaving earlier? Didn’t you enjoy my pension? Aren’t you going to write something in the visitors’ book, Sabine had said, who’d stayed up the night reading, as she was doing their bill and taking the money, to then go into a proper German assault, Mrs. Xenia, you do have something on your mind, now, don’t you, thoughtful all the time, always under a cloud, one might go so far as to say grumpy, and if you can’t enjoy life, then, why don’t you smarten up and become a writer, that’s what I say.

  On the way, mother and son, on the lookout for a small beach which, at the beginning of May, would offer privacy, hadn’t exchanged any words, the intensity of anticipating this haunted swim in the sea was keeping their mouths sealed.

  Their eyes, too, were virtually sealed as, within breathing distance of each other, they undressed down to their swimsuits, she didn’t want her son to see her scrutinizing and pitying his bony, gray carcass and he didn’t want his mother seeing him notice her flabby arms and thighs, resigned and prematurely aged at barely fifty-two.

  Immediately afterwards, Viv watched Linus draw farther away, place his hand over his eyes and gaze at a distance and

  westward, to the green mountains on the far side of the Corinthian gulf.

  He must have been thinking of Alonaki.

  In a short while, it would be about eight-thirty, they were swimming freestyle in opposite directions, not counting on how soaking in the numbing water ca
n work miracles and inaugurate changes of its own accord. Within ten minutes, the opposite directions turned parallel and given that silence had had its run, Viv decided to abolish it.

  - You could come out at some point. It’s possible to put in a submission for clemency and sometimes they get accepted.

  - I’m not meant for the outside.

  - Your director says to both me and Yukaris that you’re a model inmate, never get into any trouble.

  - Yes. I don’t hurt a fly. I’m being quiet again.

  - He said you also read some.

  - Two books, with no covers.

  - You mean poetry? I have Sikelianos in my bag. I have some at home I can bring, too. It’s useful after all.

  - It’s a death toll.

  - You’ve said in the past it’s all about repentance. People change, the young grow up and acknowledge their mistakes.

  - They’re no mistakes. They are crimes.

  His phrase jarred in the peaceful setting, but was true. Only the two of them in the isolated bay, there was no one to hear them, yet they spoke softly like aged couples in their room of an evening who say everything whisperingly, as if they conspire about the taste of the chicken soup, the buying of one hundred grams of coffee and the changes in temperature.

  A fairly good start to the conversation, the sea had unplugged his mouth, how well and rightly he does speak, Viv thought, his replies evidence that he’s got his reasoning back, therefore sane, as sane as anyone, there is no way this man could have been crazy in his life for more than two months, his

  madness, like that of many others, had picked up and reached its peak only in the summer of ’97, before even the psychiatrists got hold of him and correctly pronounced him compos mentis.

  - You’ve got it together now, only the others don’t see it because they’re not looking at you anymore, you no longer interest them. But you need to believe that your bad self was a one-off, during those two months, so long ago now.

  - I have been charged.

  - And you are paying.

  - I’ve done much harm.

  - And were punished.