- To three people.
- And you’re still being punished.
- I strangled a girl, Mom.
His voice shook, his hands did also. That phrase of his put things in their precise place and, woe! it seemed like it would spoil everything. The five-minute silence that ensued was unavoidable. With utmost effort, Viv Koleva gathered her thoughts and resumed control.
- You wouldn’t hurt anyone now.
- Who knows that?
-1 know it.
- I’m afraid.
- I am not anymore.
- Yes, you are. You have the pestle and a kitchen knife in your bag. While I am in my cell, you can have your peace of mind.
It came like a blow and she again lost control. The only thing she wanted at this moment would have been to take the two pieces of iron and, like a fakir, swallow them in front of him as if they were marshmallows. Before even wondering what her son felt when he’d found them, what she herself feels for having being caught red-handed and whenever it was
agreed that she left her bag unattended, he helped her out, saying that yesterday, when he was after the car keys, he stuck his hand in her bag, it was the only time she wasn’t clutching it to herself with suspicious persistence, she’d left it sitting on a chair in her room.
He doesn’t miss a thing, he observes everything, his mother thought that the endless hours he sat isolated in his cell and shut off in himself had trained his antennae to peak, radar-like performance.
Right now, however, she needed some comeback, something impressive and to the point.
- Enough already with the old stories. With that shoelace you also tied up the top of your sack. Full to the hilt since you were twenty. There’s no room for more.
He didn’t even turn around to look at her, his gaze fixed steadily on the open horizon, again in the direction of Alonaki.
The talk moved along more slowly, more bitterly, with pauses.
- A day will come when you’ll be ready to come out from there.
- They’ll be waiting for me at the gate, she with her mother and father, and the others.
- Think other thoughts. Imagine different things. Don’t you want for this to be over at some point in time?
- No. I’ve found my hell and I’m O.K.
- We’ll go live far away.
- There is no far away. I won’t be wanted by those on the outside, not anywhere.
He was right. People, almost all of them, are more or less punishers, whether voluntarily or not, whether courageously or cowardly, in secret or in the light of day, deluded or perfectly composed. But in cases like her son’s, everyone was absolutely adamant. Viv had thought of this a long time ago, finally the hard cases and the life-timers, the prison’s ancients,
are the scum, they’ve sold tons of heroin, slaughtered people, they don’t fit in with those outside, but they work things out fine in there, among themselves.
Linus was no star in the criminal underworld, hadn’t killed a rival lover in a moment of rage, hadn’t appropriated public funds, his actions were of the kind which forgetfulness doesn’t include in its plans.
Was she able to change the subject urgently?
She had no lyricism to spare on Apollo or the masterful nature of Fokis. The water kept them bound to the subject at hand, they couldn’t play at being flies flittering from one plate to the next with the leftovers of a mundane conversations cut short.
He took it up.
- A barber’s razor is on the prowl outside, ten feet long, a spear-blade, and it shears to the root every good feeling that grows. The yards are strewn with rotting leaves and stems. That’s why everyone’s abandoned you.
He was stammering, both their lips blue, half an hour in the cold water, they were shivering.
They got out, dried themselves and sat, not too close, ten feet apart, with eyes fixed on the sea.
No dolphin on show. The waves lapped at their feet, the breeze tossed about dried lumps of weeds and the sun, increasingly hotter, danced around the shape of the rocks guarding the bay.
- Is there a planet for me and for you? A place where they’ll have us?
His question dictated the answer too, negative.
Inwardly, Viv Koleva agreed with that as well, the mass rapes of thousands of women by deranged soldiers during wartime are silenced or erased or amnestied, world history both of the past and of today, look at Yugoslavia, look at Iraq, full of such feats, but a disturbed twenty-year-old in peacetime is worthy of stigma, not pity and forgiveness.
Do we always forgive someone and then love them or do we love them first and then forgiveness follows?
Viv pondered this for the hundredth time, a question that filled her increasingly with shame because it did not refer to some strangers in a general, abstract way, but to her own child, the one and only, no matter what he was. Her terrible a fate it was to struggle to love what everyone else abhorred. Hard if not impossible. It’s not as if there were organizations of rapists’ mothers with presiding members giving speeches at gatherings, ladies and gentlemen, we are fighting mothers, and suchlike, in truth she and the few like her were solitary duellers with no prize, no laurel wreath and no praise.
She breathed deeply or sighed, didn’t know which of the two it was that came out of her. She turned and looked at him. The German woman’s flattery would have him be handsome and a gentleman.
Eventually, the Delphi epic was about to end with the envious Apollo doing away with yet another Linus, after that mythical singer, her son, a relic at thirty, that’s what she was seeing before her.
And if the regular relics, the Charioteer and the ancient treasures, had been too much for him, these days weren’t lost, she thought, the news about the victims had been communicated, the snitching had been divulged, that’s what outing permissions are for, you can’t say things like that in front of the square of glass. Then, in addition, Linus remembered what the sky is, what is a mountain and the sea, at least he heard a thrush, smelled wild jasmine, touched apine bark, observed lizards, saw dogs, sat in a bamboo armchair, had a meal on a tablecloth, felt the shovels of the Albanians, ever since he was a kid he had that thing about shovels. Moreover, he put on a pair of swim trunks, went in the water, saw a seabird.
Had he seen a crab? A seashell?
She looked around her, got up, kicked at some seaweed, walked on, overturned pebbles, no crab or seashell.
Then Linus struck again.
- Let’s be off. We’re going back. And forget about me, don’t come anymore. Make me this gift of saying good-bye.
- I will not leave you, let me hope in something, even blindly.
- You have served your sentence enough. I pardon you. His mother’s chest was in an uproar, a tempest, her heart
was apt to leap out.
Ah, Linus, if only, but it’s not up to you.
Whether one is or isn’t a lover of antiquity, the immortal marbles are unparalleled, whether one is or isn’t a nature lover, one is taken with the cascades of roses and the philharmonics of the finches, surrenders to the siege of the red bush and the intoxication of the sage.
Sunday brought out into the countryside buses and private cars, scooters and racing bikes.
Steak houses, canteens, ancient temples, monasteries, rural churches, cypress groves, flatlands with silver-leafed olives, silken fields and beaches crowned by precipices, all these were targeted by the hordes of leisure.
May’s crazed in action, all out to burn gas, sun themselves, lay siege, indiscriminately consume.
Mother and son with minimal right to beauty, and none whatsoever to carefreeness, felt like thieves laying hands on others’ property.
They stopped at a parking spot with a view over half of Greece, our beauteous homeland, perfectly perfect, destined to live on into the ages, like Viv’s theology teacher used to say in high school.
Time to throw out the milk pie and the spinach pie; forgotten in the back seat of the Fiat, they’d started to stink. Viv also
shoved the kitchen knife and the pestle in the bag with the spoiled food, there was no chance she could drive with the weapons in the car now that her son had seen them and, to be sure, after what had been said earlier. With a couple of decisive motions and a couple of poisonous stares, Linus took the armaments out of the plastic bag and returned them to their previous place. He was as thin as a rake, had grown old and a hunchback, but the gaze ejected from the recesses of his eyes was perfectly intact, the good old rage there for all to see.
- Sunglasses, she told him, deftly putting hers on, waited for him to put his on, you never know what might come up, and got out. While approaching the bin, careful not to step on the surrounding refuge, mementos from visitors strewn around like votive offerings, two buses slowed down and coupled in the parking spot.
Middle-aged folks poured out into the bushes for a joyous pee or for group photos with a priest in the middle.
Viv recognized him and was taken aback. The prattling man of the cloth who had visited her then, at the apex of that frenzied summer, hardly believing his luck to get a shot at the choicest of choice sins. Then ten years had hardly made a difference for him, unlike her, because his eye did fall on her but with the extra pounds and the dark glasses she didn’t remind him of anything and a good thing it was. If he went up to her, asked her questions, discreetly gossiped to his parishioners, it’d be the end. She gathered from their spirited chatter that the high point of their excursion would be a feisty pilgrimage to the monastery of the rocker monks, over towards Nafpaktos.
She went back to the Fiat in a hurry and started the engine.
What followed had on it the stamp of the end.
Last looks to the open sky, last shared meal, last trip together, last hours of mother and son sitting side by side. The Delphi migration was over, they were repatriating to familiar grounds.
The scarce words of the incomplete five-day outing gradually became scarcer still, almost none at all, a process of making ready for the son to go back to the listlessness of the cell, the deadliness of silence, the morose inaction.
What if the sea had freed them to have a flowing conversation, they again became what they were, veterans of wordlessness both, the old rule at the kitchen table or the living room had been nerves or grumpiness, sighs or dry coughing, lips pursing or eyebrows raising, the persistent silences of chastisement or intimidation or anger.
The silences of the present were different, they signified subjection.
The two intervening phone calls didn’t count, Viv Koleva was purposefully repeating everything she was being told, an echoed conversation and the illusion of dialogue, if a brief one, inside the mute Fiat.
So, then, the old bird clad in black, with the turtle-jewel, thirty years a widow, was concerned that her deceased husband would have despaired waiting for her in the other world and would say of her, such indifference! And the mummies at Exarchia said that the Bulgarian had left them and gone away, the grandpa sounded lost and tearful.
It was almost seven, nature was turning to caramel, the sun was descending, Athens was coming ever closer and Viv, too, was rapidly approaching her familiar chores, tending to the abandoned churches of old age, her clients half-burnt candles on the stands, scorched and olive-soaked wicks in the oil lamps, but also, to be sure, a coffer for her expenses.
She didn’t head straight to the jailhouse of Korydallos, making instead for her house. She wanted to get the keys to the old
couple’s apartment and the already purchased wedding bonbons, she would drop by to check on them later, give them the honey and the bonbons from the alleged wedding at the village.
When she parked close to her building, she communicated with her son by means of a single look, she couldn’t leave him alone in the car. He followed her in, a faithful dog.
Linus would see the layout for the first time. Viv raised her eyes to the apartment block, noticing in a second that the walls were covered in soot, three tents were derelict, the penthouse balcony with the grey perpendicular rails only had two pale blue ones at the end, someone left off painting, in old Tiger’s balcony the Ukrainian had hung to dry two moth-eaten African carpets with embossed lions.
No one loitering around, they went up to the apartment at their leisure. In the ten minutes they stayed, just enough for Viv to drop off the terrible weapons and the dirty laundry of Delphi, wash the salt off her face and find the keychain and the rest, Linus was, after many years, again inside a private home, his mother’s latest base, the household of the illegal carer of the elderly.
The narrow two-room apartment had no family photos, knickknacks or the paintings he had known, it was a stock- room with piles of Pampers, antiseptics, oxygen cylinders, chlorines, douches, a wheelchair folded behind the door, and the ironing board out with creased white robes, the white robe is good for the elderly, they feel reassured.
Viv read in Linus’s look his impression from all this. She scanned the room with his eyes, this is where my unlived life is flowering, she thought. Was it the right thing, bringing him up? Would he by any chance think she got him up here to rub her decadence into his face?
He spoke to her in the car.
- Should you now maybe go to those old folks the Bulgarian left?
In ten minutes they had parked, he followed her obligingly, they went up to the third floor, she would introduce him as Takis again, a distant nephew, and nothing more said, she never did allow for too many personal questions.
She unlocked and immediately the fetid smell hit them.
Wallowing in shit, the two old people were soaked and paralyzed on the shitty bedclothes. They were more embarrassed than relieved by the unexpected visit, Death forgot about us and so has God, the grandpa stammered and, crushed, told them the whole story. The fruit yogurt had upset his bed-ridden missus and she’d had diarrhea all night long. She dirtied their bed and, so that she wouldn’t feel bad, after he had smeared himself all the way to his neck in his failed attempts to move and clean her, he had stayed by her side, hadn’t left for one minute, holding her in his arms and saying whatever thing he remembered, old-fashioned songs and the story of Tito and the atrocities of dictators the world over.
Their son was gone with his family to their in-laws in the Peloponnese, they hadn’t called him so as not to piss off their daughter-in-law again, the couple were fed up with their longevity and their problems, now this, then the other, and were constantly fighting. The Bulgarian had come in the morning, sleepy and tired from her night shift, she saw the state of things, had said many things in Bulgarian and left slamming the door.
They spent all day unable to think of something practical to do, their will turned over to whatever the Good Lord had in store.
While she soaped them from head to toe, one by one, changed them, doused them with cologne, calmed them, made the beds, put the place in some order, aired it, washed the old man’s shitty walking stick, rinsed the dirty linen three times and left it in the bathtub soaking in detergent, one whole bloody hour, Linus was sitting in the small hall. He went into their bedroom when his mother called him, come over here
and let me introduce you to two collectors’ items, Mrs. Maria, Mr. Marius, this is my nephew Takis, we were at the wedding in the village together.
Against the clean white sheets, I’ve turned them into angels, she said to him. The old woman sized up the newcomer thoroughly, asked him to come closer, she wanted to touch the young hand, hold it in her own for a bit.
- Your aunt is the angel, young man, not us, she told him, noticed his prematurely gray hair and shook her head with understanding for his troubles, she could imagine as far as being laid off from work or a love affair gone sour, there was no wedding ring on his finger.
She made the sign of the cross over him with her free hand and seeing Viv looking at her watch and nimbly collect her things, she let go of Linus’s palm after handing him his tip in words.
- Bless you, my birdie, and when the time comes may you find someone to make yo
u happy.
The old man seconded, good luck to you in life and a good heart, a good heart is a talent.
- All right, now, you need to eat something solid, no honey and bonbons tonight, some tea and dry toast, Viv called and with her bags in hand, she made for the kitchen.
- I think the toast bread’s finished, says Grandpa.
- I’ll go and get some. There’s got to be a mini-market open.
- Not you, my girl, let your nephew pop out. Why don’t you go, now there’s a good boy. We’ve worn your aunt out with everything that’s happened.
But Viv Koleva brooked no objection.
- Takis is staying here.
You dragged me through the streets with the swollen gums,
seeing and hearing shovels quake, pavements creak, the dead giving birth.
Why did you cut down the branch I tied the noose to?
Why did you get the Albanians to drag me out of the railway lines?
You’ve provoked a domino effect of crazed looks that weigh megatons and chase after me night and day, for years on end. You've shoved two tapes in my ears playing continuously the zdoop.
Bloody hell, turn the fucking tape recorders off, I’m buzzing inside and out. And get your machinery to work backwards, the dirt to lift off of my father, go back into the shovels, the shovelfuls go in reverse and the lumps end up on the pile to the side of the grave. And resurrect him, make him rub his eyes, sit up, then jump out niftily and call Linus, Buddy, we’re off, and the three of us go for our long walk, and make that walk never end. Tell me, in what clothes did my mother bury him? I couldn’t have asked. I rummaged inside the wardrobe secretly but it wasn’t just the two suits missing, the trousers and shirts and jumpers were all gone, it had been some time and she’d given them away somewhere. I chose in my mind a grave uniform, a blue pair of shorts and a red top, same red as your cape.
Linus Kolevas was talking to the Virgin Mary in a low voice, under his breath. His mother had gone out for toast bread, locking the door behind her just in case. With no jailer, no handcuffs, he was free to do harm again or to split by jumping from one balcony to the next, but he, completely tamed by the miracle of the shit and the present delight of the old folks, considered them his own people, inmates in the cell of prolonged old age.
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