Back to Delphi

by Ioanna Karystiani

  Outside the sky had disappeared, darkness, black walls.

  Inside, in the yellow light of the table lamp, sitting quietly on a chair next to the mummified folks, he had noticed three

  shitty finger-marks on a small icon above the double iron bed. He took it down, looked for wet tissues, finally used two napkins from the pile on the bedside table to clean it. Then he spat at Mary, on her golden halo and on the palm upon her chest, polished the glass well with his T-shirt, holding it close to his face, looking for a while at her sweet, mild eyes, the Gioconda smile and the bright red drapes of her clothing, and he let loose, not out loud but with a torrent of whispers, he’d have spoken to her whisperingly even if it wasn’t for the two witnesses, who, in a state of advanced deafness anyway, weren’t in a position to make out the words. They were seeing the nephew Takis praying to Her Grace and were made to think about youth’s unrequited passions and requests for the coming to pass of future plans.

  They prayed along with him with their own steady requests, Virgin Mother, shelter under your care the world’s poor and deprive us not of our daily bread and then, quiet and a little puzzled, they watched the visitor’s lips chewing on a prayer with no end and spitting out cut up words and bitter syllables like pips.

  You’ve singled me out since I was eight years old, Linus kept up his list of accusations at Mary, instead of uprooting every vineyard, striking down every winery and breaking all the bottles, you spend your time submitting folks to tortures, you took my father, my dog, my grandparents. You let the girls make fun of me. You let that slut my godmother suck my dick. You saw to it that I destroyed creatures I didn’t know, in whose blond hair I saw and hurt myself, blond hair takes off years, it takes all the years off. Why did she have to say to me, I know you, I know who you are, you come and get cocoa milk and ice cream from the Alaska, you are the one who likes stracciatella gelato? Why did you have her ID me? She could live, at least she could have lived. You had me hiding in construction sites out in the suburbs. You didn’t let my mother become a doctor,

  make a good living, you let her become a snitch. Did you enjoy it? You’ve lost your son but in none of your pictures do you look as broken as her, your cheeks all aglow. Do you get herpes and psoriasis? Do you froth at the mouth with too many r’s? Don’t you hurt my mother anymore, she’s seen harm enough for ten lives.

  Now you’ve arranged for them to send Bessos to the inland prison and Aziz off to the island, so I’m left on my own, not even someone to share a smoke with. Did you enjoy that, too? You’re way out of our league, nobody can touch you. Your frankincense and your coals aren’t smeared with shit. Do you want me to light them for you, to fall on my knees and thank you that at least I didn’t reach the heights of a Hannibal Lecter?

  You’ve stuck a bad bug in my mind. It’s still there, I can feel it. I can understand myself hating, but you hating as well? Hating me since I was a child? How did you choose me? What’s this experiment of yours? And you still haven’t had enough? Hatred can be beneficial to everyone, provided it comes and goes, it lasts an hour or maybe a day or two, that’s enough to discharge the spleen and for everything fear messes up to be put back to order. Mine cannot be undone. The long razor that’s out and about can’t reach it. It’s left intact to rile me. I think everything is hatred, I call everything hatred and there are so many that I see looking with a vengeance for someone or something to hate, to hate a lot.

  Even though the meaning in his words was burning, there was no wrath or complaint, nor the intensity of a reminder or the ache of an announcement of novel, all-important evidence, it was all a repetition for the umpteenth time, he’d often said it in his head, so he had it virtually ready for the Virgin Mother too, and he spoke to her as an equal, seeing she fell into his hands.

  It was moreover a way of not staying entirely mute before the two immortals who, flat on their backs, didn’t take their eyes off him, alternately making a hand gesture urging him to

  say more, his faith and devotion were unheard of in a young man of these times, they were a first-rate surprise and a blessing in their dour monotony, a private vespers in their home.

  How could Linus Kolevas not oblige them? While his mother was away it was easier for him to go with the flow, to whisper those things and then some, thoughts, ripe already from long ago, carved out inch by inch, as solid as statues, one next to the other, a virtual antique bas-relief on the walls that surrounded him and closed in and in, year by year, day by day, night by night.

  The numbers alone of victims and victimizers since the world’s beginning were proof to Linus Kolevas that there is no God of mercy and compassion, kindness fell, falls and will fall from the sky as rare as an asteroid.

  The granny who stroked my hand is more of a saint than you, who can’t spend a single night where I’m going back to tonight. You’re merchandise, a plastic fake image who wouldn’t fetch more than five euros in the open-air market, these words accompanied the icon back to its place, on the nail above the two white heads.

  If all of the above wasn’t a prayer or a confession with or without a pardoning of sins, then what was it? Apology at the Court of Appeals, his retrial at last? And who the members of the court and who the audience?

  Everyone in their places, the elderly couple and Nana Mouschouri who started her deposition from the apartment next door, My love is somewhere , a television applauding the Greek participation in the European basketball league, a cat mewing on the balcony across, two Albanians in the courtyard waiting for a relative, who were saving him the chicken breast, limes, “kracor” and “bremie,” Linus half knew their language, he had picked up a smattering of others too, Arabic and Russian, at the language school of Korydallos.

  - All the bakeries were closed, I had to run up all the way to the kiosk at the square, said Viv holding up two packets of dry toast bread and breadsticks.

  She looked inquiringly at her son, the clients, the open window, the curtain, the coat hangers, everything under control, law, peace and order.

  She was paid on the spot by the old man, the money for her services as in the drawer of the bedside table, under the health insurance booklets and the pack of old Christmas and Easter cards, old wedding invitations and death notices.

  She remembered the thank you in the kitchen and called it out loudly like a cry so it would reach the half-useless old ears. She put on some water to heat and took down two cups, time was getting on.

  They weren’t expecting them at the prison tonight but Viv was now fearful of the moment of separation, so she might as well go through it earlier rather than later, get it off her in a jiffy, recoup herself for the return to the things she’d learned to manage.

  / /

  The birdie, to the old woman, vulture, to the many others, with the plucked and battered wings, before its mother returned it to its nest, asked her for a little ride, a zigzag course through the western suburbs spreading seaward.

  Leisurely idlers of the Sunday evening, the locals few, the migrants many, some walking, some sitting, young and old on doorsteps, crates of fruit and benches for people to eat, play, laugh, fight.

  The drone of Balkan, Asian and African languages was rising shrill above every badly designed square and every badly lit alley, the migrant tribes in full evidence. Today’s Athens bore no relation either to the city Viv Koleva, then Sotiropoulos,

  first saw at eighteen, or the one her son left behind at twenty. The foreign poverty had snuck in silently and with its sharp preeminence had asserted itself, block by block, street by street.

  Linus had again leaned his head backwards, outward at an angle, he both wanted to see and hear and he didn’t.

  He acted likewise almost systematically the previous days, even without sunglasses, his eyes turned to smoky lenses, for his mother to not be able to see what the weather was deep down inside him. May his blond bangs of yesteryear be damned, their gold overshadowed everything else and who would search behind it in case a few tears gave a time
ly signal that there was something wrong. It’s not like he was a girl, let alone a homely and spoiled daddy’s girl, the kind who bawl with frequency. Actions talk, yes, but man is not his actions alone, he’s also his thoughts, especially the ones that get stuck like oysters in the innermost recesses of his head and never stray from there to help fill in the puzzle.

  Viv was driving and every so often cast sideways glances at the repulsive, brutal, ill-starred pariah, her son. He had half an hour left.

  She wished she believed in God so she could ask for miracle here and now, to erase Linus’s actions or, at least, replace them with other ones. Let him have been a legionnaire war criminal, she would seek expiation for him herself at the island of Tinos. Let him have been a hooligan, she would make a votive offering of his club to Her Grace. Now, what could she deliver to the icon of Christ’s Mother? A shoelace?

  Enough with the religious acrobatics prompted by despair, the gate loomed before them.

  But there they were, having not only not taken a single photograph at Delphi, but she’d again forgotten to show him the four photographs. She turned the engine off, turned on the

  overhead light, rummaged through her bag, brought out the envelope, passed them to him one by one, all taken by Xenia in 2003, after her last visit to Greece. For four years she’d hesitated to show them to him, she brought them at visiting hours and took them with her again.

  In the first, Meg and Stavroula in white dresses, lying in the yard of the village like cats, next to five newborn kittens who are sleeping tightly wrapped together in a bow.

  In the second, the kids and Charidemos wearing the trial suit with his typewriter in his hands, the trio posing in the village square, next to the monument to the fallen.

  In the third, his grandmother and Xenia in between the two large rosebushes that provided the rose petals for the conserve, planted by Soritopoulos at the birth of each of his daughters so there would be sweetness in their lives. The entire photograph drenched in pink, it was a great art which that plant had of adorning itself with a multitude of moist buds like tightly bunched children’s hands and another as many widely unfurled roses like silk christening caps, a great art indeed, and, in their case, illusionary.

  In the fourth, Grandfather’s grave and the surrounding part of the village cemetery, lively little bushes everywhere, nature showing off. The path to his marble slab as straight as the crease in his trousers, and the cypress behind his cross dark green and thin like his old-fashioned best tie.

  As Linus was looking at them she saw them through his eyes, which rested insistently on the last one as if puzzled by the unaccountable beauty and the peacefulness of death’s landscape, everything laid out in perfect alignment, symmetrically and ecologically.

  She took them off him posthaste.

  - Well, well, look who’s back.

  At half past ten, the guards of Korydallos were surprised,

  here was one convict impatient to get back to the slammer before the end of his five-day break.

  At the last moment Viv Koleva outdid herself, pulled her son to her breast and enclosed him in her arms.

  She hadn’t hugged him like this since he was thirteen, seventeen whole years.

  He didn’t resist her, didn’t say good night to her, he was going back to his cell with head bowed yet relieved, as if returning to his homeland after a long absence.

  The makeshift awning where the visitors waited, across from it the gym facilities, the women’s prisons, the Third High School and Lyceum, all dark and quiet at this hour. Viv Koleva had gazed on them many times while patiently waiting for her turn to visit with the clean laundry and the fried beef in bags. She would be gazing on them more, she knew well what was in store for her. The poem was long and all the verses with a cutting edge.

  Twelve-hour spells of trekking the streets to counteract the ravages and the discontent of the old folks and then, parked in the two-room apartment, those sleepless nights jam-packed with energy, every night a noose, every thought a headlock, making it to dawn a triumph and, then, the same thing all over, sharpening her already sharp misery and then the guilt breaking through with a delay of fifteen, twenty, twenty-five years, about whether she had done all she could to save Fotis, and whether she herself pushed her son on the road to perdition, interpretations not worth a cent and remorse with no exchange value.

  She drove towards the city, stopped by three clients for a while, the Mrs. with the little turtle who was still waiting for the Bulgarian, the miserly ex-army guy who couldn’t offer you a glass of water without feeling deprived, Mr. Anthousis her most ancient, her bent and battered Parthenon who now, thoroughly destitute, was weaving together new couplets for his

  tombstone, I was done in by swimming pools and models and fast cars, the Health Insurance paid for it all, and now is out of funds , she left with them the bonbons and jars of honey, she took care of them, mollycoddled them and she pinched from them three five-euro bills as well.

  On her way out she called Yukaris, we’re back safe, not to worry, more details tomorrow.

  She was looking forward to her chair at her house. She wouldn't turn the TV on, she had cut it down a lot, just fluorescent stage sets and screaming and witticisms, there wasn’t a single companionable channel where they spoke slowly, in whispers if possible, like old poets on the CD with their collected works. A voice like that was what she needed tonight to give her courage and the strength for her wake of recapitulation.

  Of course, the recapitulation would bear no relation to a novel, let Sabine write her life story, let anyone who wanted to write books of the kind where their childhood is wrapped up in one hundred pages and in another one or two hundred the rest of life is shrouded, describing in overstated detail a room of ten by fifteen as if it stretched for a hundred acres, a divorce as if it were the Hundred Years' War, distending a mere sunset into a long-winded treatise and a mystery to be accounted for.

  No, absolutely not, and though Viv did hold on to the books the cruel-hearted cardiologist unloaded on her, whenever she opened one, she skipped those pages, concentrating always on the action and the strict lineage of basic events, the juice of each story is distilled in two, three pages at most and in her own, no matter if the writer embroidered to his heart’s content, embellished and beguiled, there was no way to ameliorate the nitty-gritty of the plot, three rapes, one murder, turned in by the mother, in jail for life.

  The synopsis of the book for the other side, three rape victims, one of these vilely murdered, her father’s death, two graves for her mother.

  She had entertained the thought, theoretically, several times, of going to see her, she imagined entering the house on her knees, with her sewing kit, that she sewed up the lining of her skirt, that she said, if you had killed my son at the trial I would have understood and better that he were in the grave rather than your child, but in reality, walking down the street she was always looking out for thin, white-haired women, so she had time to beat a retreat.

  A life that was plainly insulting and there was more to follow.

  Past midnight she called the Bulgarian, why, Stefka, why? Because she couldn’t take any more, that’s why.

  Then she dusted the sand off the two Delphi books and the uncut tome of Sikelianos, a Delphic Speech here as well, she packed them off to the drawer, washed off the salt in the shower, the herpes had passed, that was something, she put on a load of washing, made some tea, rubbed her ankles a bit, they hurt, like a retired ballerina’s.

  Dance is the prayer of the feet , she recalled the pronouncements of the old Rhoda about dance floors and cruising young men doing their proud, solitary dances like Japanese shadow warriors. Herself at a distance from all that, a magnet for troubles. So, then, chair and a cigarette.

  What is, finally, the zdoop? A code? A spell? An order to a dog? The growl of a prehistoric animal? The title of a comic book? A word from cartoons, like phew, yum-yum, yippee and wow? Why hadn’t she asked her son, again?

 
; Every story has blanks, some are common to all the participants in its plot. Each one, though, has a few that only he has noticed, that don’t add up for him alone no matter how he tries, if he does, which he probably doesn’t.

  In certain cases, some are well served by such blanks, gray zones which they guard by tooth and claw, terrified at the possibility that, if they were to be filled, the truth might be intolerable.

  Lighting another cigarette she thought about absolutely everyone she knew, most had their spells of fanatical gripping, one mishap was enough to knock them off balance.

  Why, what’s in your sacks, then? A bankruptcy, someone leaving for another country, coming to blows with the tax department, failure to qualify for a job, a mean mother-in-law, a neurotic boss, a Molotov-throwing kid, a fireplace that smokes out the living room, esophageal constriction, fear of heights, conjugal infidelity, stretch marks on the butt.

  Drop in and have a look at mine, and you’ll think yourselves lucky.

  Third cigarette, at first she despised it, then she sweet- talked to it, my little smoke. That smoke, drag by drag, filled her with mercy for everyone, the variety of sacks was endless, a military satchel filled with the wreckage of war and of peace, a fishing net that only ever caught the endless tide of contempt. She praised them all, the promiscuous and the drunkards, the switchblade-wielding bullies, the office bearers of impoverishment and those made arrogant by injustice.

  The world is a convoy of thousands of trucks loaded with sacks, people die and the sacks, virtually intact, are waiting to be shouldered by an unlucky descendant.

  The blameless in life are few with a light, silken pouch, the many are porters, no way to be spared the lugging of their sacks, some made of canvas, some hessian, sometimes with holes, patches, sometimes with bits of embroidery here and there. And every sack, a mailman’s bag full of letters with crimes indelibly inscribed, parcels stuffed with passions and little boxes with unwanted gifts.