by Sara Alexi
Sara Alexi
BEING ENOUGH
oneiro
Published by Oneiro Press 2016
Copyright © Sara Alexi 2016
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organisations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
Also by Sara Alexi
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Chapter 1
At this time of year there is an exquisite sense of anticipation, the thrill of the summer to come. Soon there will be days that are so hot there will be no choice but to be lazy and life will all but come to a standstill. The cool of the winter has quite gone and now the days are deliciously warm, making every hour a pleasure.
Rallou stretches and yawns. Under her bare feet, the terracotta tiles on the veranda of the old stone house are still cool from the night. Later in the season they will be warm to the touch, and, in the height of summer, too hot at midday. The house stands just a little apart from the village, if the cluster of houses that surround her can be considered as such. The hamlet is named O Topos Sta Synnefa – The Place in the Clouds – and it is as far from the sea and from any other houses as it is possible to get on the island. The locals refer to it simply as Korifi – the summit.
Rallou screws her eyes up tightly and stretches her hands above her head. Although she has slept well and has had time to reflect, anger still bubbles in her thoughts, her chest, her stomach. There is no doubt about it, she was right to do what she did. Her arms drop limply to her sides and her eyelids open. The land falls away from the house, both to the north and the south. In front of the house the long island stretches a finger into the sea. From one corner of the veranda she can see the Mediterranean in three directions. Its flat surface is freckled with pale-blue islands that float undisturbed as the water burns softly orange and silver in the early dawn.
When she walked away she hadn’t planned to come up here. She needs to be at home; there are chores that need her attention. The washing, for one, needs taking off the line, and the dough she left to rise overnight needs baking into fresh, warm loaves. But after what was said she could not have stayed.
Exhaling loudly, hands on hips, she acknowledges that at least she is lucky enough to have such an amazing place to run to, and there is no denying the beauty that surrounds her.
Rallou smooths her hair with both hands, and her fingers interlink on the back of her neck. Her head drops back and her vision is filled with the blue of the sky, a seagull high, high above her, so small that at first she takes it for a plane. Then she drops her head forward and contemplates her own bare feet. Her little toenails need cutting. They grow faster and are thicker than the rest, and more so with each year that passes.
But her nails will have to wait. Right now she will brush her hair and put on her shoes, and spend the day happily helping her baba with the things that need doing. This is not the first argument she has had with Christos. They have been more frequent in recent years and each seems worse than the last. But this one doesn’t feel like the others. It feels like it could, in fact, be the last. But if it is, what more could she have done? She has been more than patient. Even if only half of what Harris has implied over the years is right, he is lucky that she has stayed this long.
‘Stop it,’ she says to herself. Dwelling on who said what to whom is not going to help. She must give herself time to settle, assess.
With a last glance out to sea, Rallou turns and goes back into the dark of the house, and as her eyes adjust she brushes her hair in front of the mirror that is so old the silver has mostly turned to black. The wooden veneered surround has rippled with age and the catgut twine has stretched so she has to bend her legs slightly to see all of her face at once. There was a time when this same mirror was too high for her to use. She brushes down the other side of her face.
The eyes that stare back at her look tired, and there are lines at the corners. Below her chin there is a hint of the jowls to come. But it is not a bad face for a woman of her age. Her hair is still thick and shiny, and the arch of her eyebrows has not dropped. Her mouth still has a pleasant upward curl to it. But yet she sees a sadness – or is it fear? – hidden there. ‘You’ve missed your chance,’ the face in the mirror states, but not unkindly. ‘Perhaps,’ Rallou agrees.
But the chance for what? To travel more widely? To learn new things? To have interesting conversations? What exactly has she missed? What is she yearning for? Or does she just need love?
She waits but no answer comes. Out through the open door, across the sea towards the mainland, a wooden fishing boat putters into view, moving with no great hurry. The fisherman will know every inch of this stretch of water between the island and the mainland, and every knot in his net. If the fishermen, who do nothing but fish and drink coffee, can be content on this island, then why can’t she?
Turning from the view, she resolves to distract herself with action.
The patched and darned apron hangs on a hook at the corner of the house, just as it has always done. The ties used to go twice around her when she was a child, but, after three children of her own, all fully grown now, the strings are just long enough to tie a tiny bow. The rock that weighs down the top of the feed barrel has worn smooth and shiny. With a scoop of feed in each pocket of the apron Rallou replaces both the wooden lid and the stone weight and wanders to the coop that stretches away down the hill and around the trunks of a couple of hardy pines. It is not hot enough yet for the cicadas to be calling, but she knows that it will not be many more days before, amongst the pines, their serenades are deafening.
Most of the hens are crowded in anticipation around the chicken wire gate, the frame of which she fashioned during a visit last year, tying and nailing together a branch, two old and split chair legs and a piece of driftwood from the beach below. Or maybe it was the year before?
The sun glistens off the birds’ backs: rich reds, shiny whites, warm creams. The cockerel displays a rainbow of petrol colours on its sickles and under its breast feathers, contrasting sharply with the red of its saddle and neck. He is at the front.
The stragglers come running at the sight of the apron, their claws curling into limp balls as they lift from the ground, talons splaying wide again as their claws hit the dust, trying to gain purchase on the compacted soil.
‘Has it all gone already?’ Rallou asks them, referring to the abundance of green that shoots up in the large enclosure every spring, only to be eaten or trodden by the chickens and browned by the sun before summer has even really arrived.
The birds cluck in unison; a dominant black one pecks a small white one on the head, and the second cockerel is at the back, skinny and lean compared to the hens.
Inside the pen she throws the feed as if she is sowing corn, steadily walking the length of the enclosure to give all the birds a chance to eat their fill. The thin red chicken with the limp is still there, and it hangs back. It has learnt that if it does so it will get a little pile of corn to itself. Rallou is familiar with her baba’s capacity for favouritism.
The corn is all gone but the pockets of the apron remain open, sagging with age. They have used this method of taking the corn from the barrel by the house to the chickens for as long as she can remember, and certainly from before she could tie the stings herself. Harris, her older sister by three and a half years, had shiny hair that would brush against her cheek as she bent and impatiently showed Rallou how to tie a knot and a bow. Later, Rallou taught little Evgenia. A sigh escapes her for poor little Evgenia, who lies on the hill under a mound of dirt and dust and pebbles.
Involuntarily she looks to the place
. A stone marks the spot.
‘Coffee?’ her baba calls from the porch, his hand shielding his eyes.
‘Just getting the eggs.’ Rallou breaks her stare and waves a hand.
The chicken shed, where the hens shelter at night, stands on wooden legs at one end of the enclosure, elevated to waist height to guard against predators. It is so easy to recall, as if it was just last week, the day that Yanni brought his two donkeys lumbering up the dusty track, each laden with wood. She, Harris and their brothers didn’t know who he was then and, after he had left, their baba explained that his family also lived up on the ridge, but far away to the east of the island, above the main town.
As it turned out, she and Yanni were the same age, but at the time they had not known this either, and Harris had so shamelessly flirted with stony-faced boy that Rallou, in shock at this behaviour, had felt the need to apologise on her sister’s behalf, muttering unclear words as he tidied the ropes.
‘Thank you,’ she said to Yanni as she drew water from the well for the donkeys and stroked their soft necks, being careful to avoid the even softer muzzles that hid long yellow teeth. ‘Sorry. She feels …’ But the words floated away on the breeze. She had no idea what Harris felt then; her ways and manners sometimes seemed odd around that time. But Yanni didn’t acknowledge that Rallou had even spoken, and once his donkeys had drunk their fill he left the way he had come.
Rallou remembers that, despite her embarrassment, the delivery of the wood provided a welcome distraction from the tedious routine of their lives, and it was followed by a week of excitement in which Baba sawed and nailed the wood, the construction growing all clean and new.
She lifts the lid of the nesting boxes that Baba built on the side of the chicken shed for easy access. The eggs, still warm, are placed carefully into the now empty pockets of the apron and then, walking carefully and slowly, she leaves the chickens to their breakfast and returns to the house. Her baba is bent over, trying to wedge a stone under one leg of the kitchen table to stop it rocking on the uneven floor.
‘Have you still not fixed that?’ Rallou asks rhetorically. He talked about making a wedge out of a piece of wood for the table at the end of last summer, then again in the winter when they took it indoors. And how many times has she had the same sort of conversation with Christos – things he has promised year after year to mend in the house, but never got around to?
‘I may not have fixed the table, but did you notice that I have painted the chicken shed?’
Rallou turns her head quickly to look. It is noticeably whiter than the last time she was up here.
‘Oh yes.’ She places her hands under the bulging pockets of the apron so the eggs do not knock against each other as she takes the two steps up onto the balcony.
‘Do you recall how we used to need every egg the hens could lay?’ Her baba is sitting at the little iron table on the veranda, and he waves at a cup of coffee as Rallou hangs the apron, eggs and all, on the doorknob. ‘And now I don’t know what to do with them all. I have taken to giving some to the Kaloyannis brothers.’
‘I thought the boatyard kept them too busy to come up here in the winter?’ Rallou takes a sip of coffee and sits on the other chair.
‘They come, now and again. Mostly to ready their house for the summer.’ He leans back in his own chair, the one with the fancier spindles in the back. The rush seat is worn and has been carefully repaired over the years, his handiwork improving with each mending now that there is no one on the island who cuts and weaves rushes any more. ‘Tolis trades them for fish for my supper now and again, and Takis takes them all the way into town when he goes, and sells them to Costas Voulgaris to use in the kafenio.’
Costas Voulgaris’s kafenio is on the water’s edge, and Rallou’s house is some streets back from there, in amongst the maze of houses that make up Orino town, stretching up the hill from the port and out on either side, around the harbour. There, her world seems small, and her days are filled with tending her home and keeping the big house for the Americans – cleaning windows, washing sheets, sweeping away dust.
‘Good boys, Takis and Tolis.’ Her baba muses. ‘Tolis, Takis, Costas and Yanni. Men now.’ He takes a sip of his coffee and watches the return of the small fishing boat. ‘Children of their own. Do you remember them when you were at school?’
His eyes moisten, and she presumes he is remembering her, aged seven, standing by her bed in her best dress – her only dress – with her little cardboard suitcase and her hand-me-down teddy. Her baba carried the case as Yanni, leading his donkey, called from the track that he was ready to take her down to Orino town where she was to stay with her eldest brother, some twelve years her senior, and his new wife. She had been so excited in the lead-up to her going but when the time came she did not want to leave.
‘You will be fine.’ Her baba had pulled her in for a hug and then he bent down and looked her in the eyes but said no more. Reflected in his wide pupils she could see her own terrified face and he pulled her closer and buried her face against his chest until she could hear his heart beat.
That’s what she wants now, for her baba to pull her in close, encircle her in his muscular arms and tell her it will be fine. But the arms are withered and his strength is almost gone.
‘So, daughter of mine, what is wrong? You cannot think for a moment that I believe this is a social visit. What has happened?’
Chapter 2
The coffee cup doesn’t make it to her lips before her sobs explode and her baba gently takes the drink from her hands and puts his arm across her shoulders.
‘Oh, Baba.’ She allows herself to wail like a child. He tightens his embrace and pats her far shoulder. Up here, away from her role of citizen, neighbour, mama and wife, it is safe to cry, to be small. She knew he would be deeply concerned at whatever was ailing her. But she is also aware that he has seen much of life: been through a war, lost his wife and one of his daughters, and witnessed the village on the hilltop slowly emptying of its inhabitants until now he is completely alone for too much of the time. There is nothing much that life can throw at him that he has not experienced before, and his grip around her shoulders is sure. She is glad of that, and it allows her wail to become a sob, to become a sniff, to become a wipe across her nose with the back of her hand. Her baba’s arm unwinds from around her and they pick up their drinks in unison and look out across the sea, creasing up their eyes against the sun.
A click-clicking signals the presence of a gecko, which runs across the tiles on the balcony, its back wiggling comically; then it pauses at the edge and curls over the side, leaving just the end of its tail showing.
Just thinking about Christos quickens her breath, saddens her. She stops looking at the gecko’s tail to resume her gaze out across the sea, where a fishing boat sits stationary near the shore of the mainland opposite. Set a little apart from the other houses of the village that have been built in the shelter of a small dip in the landscape, their house is on a rise and commands amazing views on all sides. The stone house has stood for generations, passed down the family. The veranda was added in her baba’s lifetime but her room, on the second floor, was her yiayia’s when she was a child, and again before she died, and it was her yiayia’s before her. The windows are small, to keep out the sun in the summer and the cold in the winter, and the tiled roof has so weathered with time that its colours merge into the landscape, so that, from a distance, it makes the place look roofless and deserted.
‘You are still working for the American family, yes?’ her baba asks. He thinks he is changing the subject, but for Rallou there could not be a more pertinent question, a more relevant lead-in to her describing to him exactly what Christos has done now.
But where to start, how to explain?
She could start by telling him that Christos did not come home two nights ago, but then how unusual was that? Often, when hunting for birds or snaring rabbits, he is taken far along the top of the island and cannot comfortably walk back th
e same day, and besides, the next day he would likely want to be at the same end of the island, so it is sensible for him to camp out some nights, especially now it is warmer. If he heads off west from the town, he often sleeps in his old family home, up here at Korifi, on the edge of the tiny hamlet, just a little way from where Rallou is sitting.
She looks in that general direction but the village is hidden in a shallow dell, at the foot of a steep hill that casts just enough shade to keep the houses cool for an hour longer in the morning. From where she is sitting on the balcony of her baba’s house, Rallou can see the terracotta tiles on the tops of some of the houses, but a group of pine trees hides the rest of the dwellings.
Although Christos stays in the house for a night or two when he is hunting, the house has not been lived in properly for years. As with most of the other houses there is no running water or electricity, and the last time Rallou went up to the village she found some of the windows broken and the back door rusted off its hinges. Nowadays it is little better than sleeping under the stars, except that the view would be of peeling plaster rather than the wonders of the heavens. No, she would definitely prefer to sleep outside. But she has not been to see it for four or five years or so, and it will be in a much worse state now. The sun makes everything crumble.
Besides, her baba has said that when Christos is up at Korifi he drops in to say yeia sou. So no, she could not start by saying that Christos did not come home two nights ago, because Baba would shrug his shoulders as if to say, ‘So what?’
Harris could probably explain it to him. When they were having coffee yesterday it all seemed so much clearer.
‘You want sugar?’ Harris was poised with her spoon over the briki, her floral apron over her below-the-knee floral print skirt.
