A Self Effacing Man

by Sara Alexi

  ‘That’s quite a job.’ He whistles through his teeth. The injection of vitality the alcohol sends through his body makes the ouzo bottle call out to him, and he takes another gulp.

  ‘Now what? What else do I know? The person can write – that is clear, of course, and proved by all the letters, over the years.’

  ‘Ah yes, so, his age. He must be, well …’ He cannot imagine whoever it is being much younger than Maria. More likely, he is a little older. He cannot think of a couple where that is not the case. Maybe in Athens or somewhere like that, but not here in the village. Often there is five, ten, even fifteen years’ difference.

  The handwriting confirms this. It has not changed significantly, which suggests that the first letters were not sent by a love-struck boy but by someone who was already a man. Maria was around twenty when the rejection letter came and the anonymous lover’s first letter came about a year after that. So the person must be fifty or more.

  ‘Ha! The net is closing, my friend.’ He laughs, but the merriment dies in his throat.

  He taps his pen on the sheet of paper. He could make a list of every single man in the village over fifty who does not need him to write their letters. He turns over to a clean sheet in the notebook. For a moment this brightens his outlook – that list will not be very long. But then with a heavy sigh it occurs to him that whoever it is will not necessarily be a single man. He hopes he is, though, or else this anonymous lover has been playing a very unfair game. If that turns out to be the case, the letters he has recently sent are definitely going to meet with an accident.

  He taps his lips with the pen. He has a feeling there is something else that would help narrow down this list before he begins to write, but no inspiration comes.

  ‘What else do I know about him? Male, over fifty, can write. And the postmark shows he is local. But maybe he is from Saros!’ This thought deflates him and he puts down the pen.

  But wait! He looks up and out of the small window by the front door. ‘I remember he said he saw her at the church at Easter one year, and at a wedding.’

  Now, whose wedding was that? Petta and Irini’s? Yes, there have been no others for ages! Well, there was no one from outside the village around that day, not even any of the farmers from high in the hills who only ever seem to come down on such occasions. Oh yes, he is onto something and – hang on, didn’t he also say he saw her going into Marina’s shop on one occasion?

  ‘I believe he did.’ He rubs his chin. This really does sound like a local man, a man around the village.

  ‘Panayia!’ He swears as his nemesis suddenly becomes real to him. ‘It could be someone I know, someone I meet every day!’ A cold chill runs down his back and he stands to open the door to let some of the day’s heat into the thick-walled stone cottage. He looks down the lane and across to the papas’s house.

  ‘Well, that is one person I can rule out,’ he mutters to himself. There have been three priests presiding over the church in the village in the last few years. He smirks.

  A man he recognises by his bouncing gait walks past the end of his road. Cosmo raises his hand in acknowledgement to Theo, who waves in return and disappears out of sight, only to reappear again a moment later.

  ‘Cosmo, did a parcel come for me?’ Theo calls.

  ‘You will get a slip if it does,’ Cosmo replies.

  Theo waves and goes on his way.

  Twisting on his heel, Cosmo returns indoors. Theo was just being impatient. He knows he will get a slip so he can pick it up in Saros. Although, there have been one or two occasions when Theo hasn’t been able to close the kafenio and has asked Cosmo to sign for him at the depot in Saros. Cosmo has done that for a few people; he did it once for Stamatis when he had a twisted ankle, and he has done it for Marina, just because she asked. But mostly the villagers sign for and collect their own packages.

  Something is stirring in his mind, a little bright light is blinking, and he can feel an idea forming, pulling itself to the surface He is ready to grasp hold of it, if only he can catch it before other thoughts cover it over.

  ‘Oh!’ Cosmo reacts as the idea slips into focus. His eyes open wide at his own genius.

  ‘Could I? Could I do that and get away with it?’ he marvels. ‘If I had a form from the post office, who would not sign? I could get a sample of absolutely everybody’s handwriting. What could I say it was for? … A receipt for a letter, or to confirm I have delivered the post. No, that sounds bad for me … A petition for something, but then they might not agree with it. A petition to make me postmaster. Ha ha!’

  Cosmo opens the ouzo bottle again, with a resounding pop of the cork. He doesn’t drink often – or not very often, not every day, just when he is sad, or at happy moments.

  This is a joyful moment.

  ‘Now, what could I say?’ he mumbles. He could pretend there is a parcel in Saros and say that if they sign he will bring it to them. He turns the glass. But if there is no parcel, he’ll have to explain why … Which is fine if he does this just the once, but he will have to do it many times and these men will sit in the kafenio, it will come up in conversation, they will compare notes. No, that will not do; they will realise there is something amiss. Hmm, it’s harder than he thought.

  Identity theft? That’s a good one! It could be an EU directive that everyone’s signature must be on record to prevent identity theft. A giggle starts in the back of his throat. It sounds just like something the government would do. But the government would want a signature from every single person in the village, and that would be a huge task. Something that big is bound to get back to the postmaster in Saros. No, it has to be something smaller. Something local.

  He slugs back the last of the ouzo and pours another one. He knows from experience that the energy it is bringing him won’t last long; all too quickly it will change, turn into a sluggishness, and he will feel incapable of moving. He would never drink this much in the kafenio – too many eyes. And until his mama died he could never have drunk at home. She would not have tolerated it; after all, she didn’t want her son to die of a pickled liver, as her husband had.

  So the feeling is still novel, and it is accompanied by a rebellious element. But when he is this drunk, some of her words do ring in his ears.

  ‘It’s hereditary,’ she would say in an accusatory tone if she thought she could smell alcohol on him.

  These assertions made him look twice at her. It wasn’t so much that nothing he did could pass by unnoticed, uncommented on, which always kept him on his guard: it was the fact that even after the old man was gone she was still maintaining the pretence.

  He had an idea who his real baba was. Poppy had let something slip once, but when he pushed, she clammed up.

  Then there was another time, a bit later than that first event, when something else was said. Cosmo seems to remember it was a cold winter’s day, and that the wind was blowing the leaves in circles around the corners of the village square. It must have been some years ago, because this was before the days of parcel slips and he had a heavy delivery for Poppy. Obviously he delivered it first – there was no point in lugging it around the village. He pulled up at his own back door with the idea of dropping the parcel and then having a coffee whilst he sorted the day’s letters. What was it in Poppy’s window that had changed from the day before? A change to the window display wasn’t a common occurrence so it warranted comment.

  ‘Looks good, Poppy.’ He climbed from his bike and gestured at the clothes on the mannequin in the window. ‘Did you get them locally?’

  ‘A genuine nineteen sixty-one Anna Heropoiita. I got it more locally than you could guess,’ Poppy chuckled.

  ‘What’s so funny?’ he asked.

  ‘You don’t recognise it?’

  She paused for a second but Cosmo must have looked blank because she continued, ‘It was your mama’s, and she just gave it to me.’ Poppy was seated in her old chair on her doorstep, knitting, despite the cold.

  He stared in
astonishment at the pencil-skirted dress, the nipped-in waist and the red belt on the mannequin.

  ‘It’s hard to imagine one’s parents having their own lives, isn’t it?’ Poppy was doing her best to stifle her smile as she watched his face with amusement. ‘She said she had it bought for her. She’s told you about her month in Athens, I presume, just before she married your baba?’

  She had not, and Cosmo was quick to realise that if he said she had not then Poppy would seal her lips tighter than an octopus’s beak. Even though his head was shaking ‘no’, he forced himself to say, ‘We talk a lot,’ which was not true either. Mama talked a lot, there was no denying that, but without inviting a response from Cosmo. Putting it this way to Poppy felt like less of a lie, though, somehow.

  ‘Well, did she tell you it was her boss who bought it for her? I think he was sweet on her, don’t you? I always suspected he was the reason she came back. I think he pressed her, wanted more than just to buy her dresses.’ And she chuckled until she dropped a stitch and then started counting loops to herself to find her place again.

  He went indoors and asked his mama straight.

  ‘You never said you went to Athens for work. What made you come back?’ he asked, the moment he was inside so he wouldn’t lose his nerve.

  ‘Who have you been talking to?’ It was the look in her eyes that gave away her secret. He could almost feel her fear. It was odd to see his sudden power reflected there, and there was a side of him that wanted to keep her there, just to experience the new position.

  ‘You came back because your boss got sweet on you?’ As he said the words, his intention wasn’t to be mean – it was meant as a little tease, to keep the whole exchange a little light-hearted, perhaps, if she would allow it. He would have liked their relationship to be more like that. But he knew he also wanted to see that look on her face, that fear he was creating, a little longer.

  ‘He was nobody. Nothing happened. Who has been telling you this nonsense?’ she snapped, and the fear turned to anger, and that was it.

  That was what told him this man from Athens was his baba. She had always maintained he was a premature baby. She had even implied that this was why he was slow. But the truth, he had suspected, was that she had been pregnant when she got married, and not even by her husband!

  His mama never allowed him to speak about it again, and Poppy hardly spoke to him at all for a while, which only further confirmed that he was right. He had betrayed her trust. But surely he had a right to know who his baba was?

  The first few days afterwards were so difficult. It was all he could think about. The questions, the accusations, just tumbled one on top of another through his mind like waves of torture. Each new question felt like the paramount route of enquiry. Who was his real baba? Why did his baba marry his mama if he knew she was pregnant? Did he even know? Should he try to find his real baba? Is he like him at all?

  Then darker thoughts came. If he was abandoned once, by his baba, would he be abandoned again? This, he knew, was ridiculous. He was a grown man and the baba he grew up with was dead. It was most unlikely that his mama would abandon him now, especially now she needed him. But he recognised that he had become difficult to live with. He purposefully did the things that annoyed her the most. But the more he pushed her, the more she seemed to back down, and eventually he withdrew, said little, using his room at home just to sleep in as he spent more and more time at the kafenio and on his boat.

  After living like this for a while, he felt as if he put on an act when he did see his mama. He was trying to be the person he was before he knew the secret. She didn’t seem to notice the difference but he felt it, felt false with her, living a lie and lying to her like she had lied to him all his life.

  Then something odd happened – or rather, it wasn’t that something happened so much as he became aware of what he was doing. He was looking at faces. Not in the village, but when he went into Saros, especially around the bus station when buses came in from Athens. He would scan people’s eyes, noses, mouths. After all, one of them could be his real baba, and any one of the younger people could be his brother or sister. He became obsessed with seeing himself in other people. At one point, there was a need for one of the postal workers to go all the way to Corinth for something, and when everyone else shied away from the task he was quick to volunteer. For the duration of the journey up there on the bus, he studied the people in their cars on the motorway. Once in Corinth, at the bus station by the canal, he found he could hardly get himself to leave. Any one of these people could be a blood relation – they could tell him who he was, be a piece of his puzzle. But he never saw a face like his own, and soon after the trip to Corinth he began to go for walks, talking to his real baba as if he walked by his side. They discussed why he did not marry his mum – she didn’t want to – and how life would have been if they had been in touch as he grew up – much better, because he would have felt loved, like he belonged, important.

  This phase seemed to last a while and he felt himself resenting his mama for forcing his real baba away. Then he began to worry that she was feeling rejected, and after a time the imagined conversations stopped and he returned to being the devoted, observant son, and she found her dominance again and they were back where they started. This made him wonder if his real baba was slow – stupid, even – which would explain why his mama treated him as she did and why he was seen as ‘different’ at school. Round and round these thoughts would go, torturing him.

  So he stopped thinking. He took a look in the mirror, and as he stared he realised that his baba’s identity made absolutely no difference to his life or to who he was. The man who counted was the one staring back at him in the mirror, and that was not going to change, no matter who his baba was. After a while – a year or two, maybe – he thought no more about it, telling himself that one day, perhaps after his mama was dead and would not be hurt, he might go and seek his real baba. One day.

  He fills his glass again.

  ‘Thanasis’s name day!’ he says suddenly. ‘That’s it! January, not even a full month away. I will get him a card, get everyone over fifty to sign it. It fits! Those who are his friends will do it, and those who say they are not that close I will just encourage them to sign anyway! “Where’s the harm?” I will say! Brilliant!’

  And with this thought he gulps back the rest of the ouzo in his glass and notices that the energy he had in his limbs is quickly turning to lethargy. He missed his window of opportunity to do some job or other around the house, but what the heck! He has come up with such a brilliant idea.

  He grabs the bottle to pour himself his last drink before bed. It is very early to go to sleep and he has had no supper, but he can go to bed when he likes now, sleep as long as he wants, eat when he wants, drink when he wants. Besides, it is Sunday tomorrow. There is church, of course, and he should really try to make it. He has not been since the six-month remembrance service last month, but he has a choice in that too now!

  ‘Ach!’ He makes the guttural sound when he discovers the ouzo bottle is empty.

  ‘Gamoto!’ he swears, and he laughs because he has sworn and because he can swear, then puts the bottle in the sink, smooths his shirt front down. It is another new one. He bought it yesterday, and he derives a certain pleasure from carefully unbuttoning it, peeling it off, then folding it oh-so carefully and putting it on the back of the kitchen chair. As he stands to stagger his way to bed, it promptly falls on the floor.

  Chapter 15

  The television sits in a corner of the kitchen: a small portable thing with an aerial on top. How many times has he watched her fiddling with that aerial, moving it this way and that to get a better signal, or even getting him to take it outside, shouting, ‘There! Leave it there.’

  ‘How can I leave it here, Mama, when I am halfway across the road with my arm in the air?’

  ‘Don’t move … Oh, it’s gone again now.’

  For some reason the aerial has needed no wiggling since he t
urned the set on and tuned it in. What has been broadcast has been nothing but nonsense so far, but he is not actually watching it; he has only put it on for company. Families have been coming together for New Year all around the village. Previously, he celebrated New Year’s Eve with Mama and Poppy. Poppy plays a mean hand of cards and she has the stamina to play past midnight and well into the early hours. His mama would stay up as late as she could, pouring drinks, filling bowls with crisps, betting on who would win or lose each hand until she finally fell asleep in her chair, her mouth open, snoring gently. Finally, when Cosmo started yawning too, Poppy would gather her winnings, wish him a Happy New Year and sneak out of the back door.

  Last night, he stepped into the street to see the fireworks he could hear cracking over the village, but the houses either side of the narrow lane obscured his view of the sky and he saw next to nothing. He would have seen more from the square, but he found he wasn’t in a state of mind where he wished to see people, so he went back inside and opened the ouzo bottle. That was company enough, and by around twelve-thirty he was snoring.

  This morning it was a relief to wake up on New Year’s Day feeling quite refreshed and not a bit hungover. The new year holds promise for the future, but there is a heaviness in his heart, and he cannot remember where it stems from. Slowly it creeps up on him, a realisation of what he had not really forgotten: he is alone. The air is not enriched with the enticing smells of fennel and garlic, roasting onions and tomatoes from the kitchen. He will not sit at lunchtime with Mama and Poppy as they gorge themselves on a feast fit for a King. Last year, Poppy had him bring an extra table over from her house because there was not enough room on the kitchen table for all the dishes the women had prepared.

  The weather would always be mild, often sunny, and they would spend all afternoon on New Year’s Day itself and into the evening sitting around that table.