by Sara Alexi
‘That was low,’ Christos says.
‘You brought me here to see that?’
‘No!’ Christos sounds incredulous and pulls her hand. ‘That!’ he says, and points to a small island off the coast that can be reached by a narrow walkway. All along the causeway, fishing boats and small tourist boats in many colours are moored. On the island itself is a whitewashed monastery with a double bell tower and a tall cypress tree. She has seen many images of the place: postcards, television documentaries, pictures in magazines. She has always wanted to visit this idyllic spot, and Christos knows this.
‘Oh!’ Rallou exclaims. Further out is another island, one she has also seen in pictures, which is covered with lush, dark-green trees. The sea is such a light hue, almost white in places, and everywhere it glints with the sun.
They pause at the door to the church. She can hardly believe she is here.
‘Before we go in,’ says Christos gently, ‘tell me, how did you want our lives to be?’
The question pulls her up short. She is on the spot now. She knows that what she wanted, what she had dreamed of, was not really possible with three children, but it is the only thing that, given the choice, she would change now.
‘To travel more,’ she says, and just the thought energises her.
‘Maybe also to have our own house?’ Christos sounds slightly surprised by her answer.
‘To have a house at all.’ The energy she so briefly felt dissipates. ‘Having a house is not a dream, is it? That is one of the practicalities of life. We need somewhere to live, but what I want is to travel.’ Rallou takes a deep breath, exhaling it slowly. There is so much tiring work ahead of them. She is a yiayia now and no longer young. She thought her life would be easy by this stage. The thought of her granddaughter tweaks a smile from the corners of her mouth, but the rest of her thoughts pull it back straight.
‘So, we light a candle and we make a prayer, and let’s see what we can do,’ Christos says, both her hands in his as he leans forward to kiss her. For a moment it is just a kiss, but then Rallou, in fear of all that is to come, holds on to that kiss as if it will save her and as she does so she allows herself to slow down and actually feel. Feel his lips, feel the softness, feel the love being shown, feel the care transferred, and she is twenty again, young and free and in love, and she kisses him back with such abandon and passion she shocks herself and suddenly pulls away.
‘Oh, sorry!’ She looks around her, conscious of who might have seen.
‘I’m not.’ Christos is smiling again, and he pulls her back in and kisses her with the same passion. She almost lets go again but this time she is aware they are in a public space. He laughs gently as he pulls away, with nothing but kindness and love in his eyes.
They go into the church, which, even by the standards of someone from Orino Island, is very small. They wait for a tourist to leave, who apologises on his way out.
They are alone. Christos offers her a candle.
‘One for a house,’ he says, guiding her hand to light it from another that is already lit. She pushes the candle into the sand. ‘And one for travel.’ He takes another and lights it and passes it to Rallou, who pushes this one, next to the first, into the sand in the brass tray. There are at least twenty other candles already burning in the tray of sand.
Christos neither crosses himself nor says any sort of prayer. Rallou crosses herself but it is a reflex without any real significance. Candles have become wishes to her, but maybe wishes are prayers and prayers are wishes? Who knows where one starts and the other ends. With his hand over her shoulder, Christos leads her out and they take a short look around the monastery before making their way back across the causeway.
On the island once more, Rallou turns back the way they came, but Christos leads her into a taverna with tables so close to the sea that if they took one more step they would be swimming.
Rallou’s heartbeat quickens.
‘Christo,’ she whispers harshly.
‘What?’ He mimics her tone.
‘I only have enough euros for somewhere to stay tonight and to get back home. The money I had for food went on the taxi to the hospital.’
‘I thought you said you came by bike?’ He is laughing as if everything is a joke, and Rallou can feel a muscle by her eye begin to twitch.
‘Look, all that is just details. I got the taxi because I hurt my leg, but the important thing is we cannot afford to eat here.’
‘Ciao, what can I get you signora, signore?’ A red-waistcoated waiter has arrived. Rallou tries to stand but Christos puts a restraining hand on her arm.
‘First we have some wine, no?’ he says to Rallou, ignoring the Greek waiter’s forced Italian.
‘No,’ Rallou hisses.
‘Yes,’ Christos says. ‘Half a kilo of red.’
The waiter does not need telling twice.
‘Christo, I have taken everything from the bank account and I do not get paid till the end of the month!’ Rallou can feel a panic now. ‘We have only the clothes we stand up in. Not just here, but in the whole world, and we have no house to return to.’ She pauses for breath. On the table between them in a vase is a bunch of small blue flowers, of the type he once gave her, but these are not wilted, and they make her want to cry.
‘Christo, we cannot eat here. We do not even have enough money to stay somewhere tonight and get our tickets home.’
‘But you lit a candle, didn’t you, and made a wish?’
Chapter 29
The tiny blue flowers are bent over, their heads wilting towards the tabletop. Rallou lifts a few with her fingertips, but the stems have no strength. Leaning against the vase is a photograph of her grandchild. Over a year old already. She strokes the image of the baby’s little face.
‘Fiorella,’ she murmurs. A name acceptable in both Italy and Greece, Natasa and Anikitos told her. On the back is a print made with Fiorella’s hands and feet in pink paint. Natasa has printed the date they made it followed by Fiorella, 1 year old.
A whole year! How can a whole year have passed since Corfu? But then again, how have they managed to achieve all they have in one year? Christos has never stopped; he has been relentless: sanding, filling and painting, and attending to all the little details. To Rallou, his talents seem without limit. Where did he, this self-confessed uneducated mountain man, learn all these skills? She asked him that very question as she watched him assemble the solar panels that would be mounted on the roof.
‘Oh, here and there.’ He dismissed her question in an offhand manner, but she could see the corners of his mouth trying not to twitch into a smile. ‘When I work on other people’s houses, I watch. If I see someone doing something I can’t, I watch. It’s the best way to learn.’ And smiling more openly now, he continued with his task and, when he thought she wasn’t looking, the smile gave way to a satisfied grin.
Rallou goes into the bedroom and looks at her half-packed suitcase again, and takes out the jumper she put in only a few minutes before. The knitwear is hung back in the wardrobe, and a waterproof coat takes its place in the suitcase. But the coat is bulky, and now the lid won’t shut, so she lays it on the bed and leaves the room. On the stove, the onions are transparent and the garlic is giving off a rich, warm, homely smell, but without even tasting the tomato sauce she knows it needs oregano, which she will collect fresh from the pot outside.
The smooth wooden boards of the balcony feel like silk under her feet. Christos spent hours sanding them. The soil of the bougainvillea in its pot outside the door is slightly damp, and the plant does not need watering. Beyond this is a swinging chair, another of Christos’s surprises. He made it from packing cases and used the old well chains to hang it from the stout wooden beams over the veranda.
‘What did I come out for?’ Rallou asks herself; unable to come up with an answer, she sits on the seat, and seconds later her legs are tucked up under her, and she relaxes to the gentle rhythm.
From this angle the hamlet is mostly hi
dden by trees but here and there the corner of a tiled roof can be seen, or the glimpse of a whitewashed wall, or a bright dot of colour where washing has been hung. Above the hollow, on the brow of the hill beyond, she can see her baba’s house standing sure and majestic, and she can see her baba, coming around the corner of the house, picking up the apron on his way. He ties it carefully around his waist and goes down to the chicken shed. He has had quite a little trade in eggs since the earthquake. So many people moved back to Korifi whilst their houses in Orino were being repaired, and more of them than anyone would have imagined have stayed. Life up in the hills is slower, they say – less stressed, perhaps; consequently, repairs have been made to the old houses, solar panels have been installed and new furniture has been brought up.
Rallou and Christos had no choice. On their return to the island it all looked even worse than Rallou remembered.
She reaches her foot over the edge of the swing to push herself a little, following Baba’s steady progress to the hut. He has so much more of a bounce in his step these days.
For some reason she had it in her mind that at least one of the walls of the Orino town house had remained standing, but on their return to the island they found it was absolutely flat. Few houses had suffered so bad a fate, but it is also true that very few had been so badly maintained.
‘So much work!’ she had sighed, leaning against Christos, who had gone quite pale.
‘Indeed,’ was all he said.
But that work was never to be done. Christos’s cousins had insured the house, but the policy did not cover damage due to earthquakes and so no money was available to rebuild the house. This did nothing to stop the old arguments, however, and opinions were divided as to whether it would be better to sell the property – or, now, building plot – immediately, or to wait for a few years and hope that its value went up. It seemed that not a thought was given to Rallou and Christos or where they would live. There was nothing for it: they would have to stay with her baba, temporarily at least. Christos would have to spend the next few years doing up the family house in Korifi. It was one thing to visit her baba and be able to choose how long to stay and when to leave, but living there with Christos? At the time, she braced herself for the possible discomfort that was to come. Her main concern was that the men would not get on, that she would have to play diplomat between them.
She shakes her thoughts away and watches her baba, who has the eggs now and is walking towards the village, kicking his legs out to the side so his thighs do not hit the eggs in the pocket of the apron. When he reaches the stunted pine he stops. He sits and places the eggs in a basket in the shade there, covering them with a bit of netting and some leaves. Next to the basket is a tin for the coins that the villagers will leave when they take the eggs they need. He will not be able to see her at this distance; his eyes are dimmed with age. But she waves anyway.
‘Oregano!’ She jumps up and hastens to stir the pot, to stop it burning, and then gathers handfuls of the fresh leaves. The onions have just caught but not enough to spoil the sauce. They will have pasta tonight, ‘pasta Fiorella’, a new speciality of Rallou’s, devised with her granddaughter in mind.
With a last stir she ponders the pictures framed on the wall: new frames, new nails, in a newly painted wall. She smiles, glad they recovered what they did. How many hours did they spend sifting through the rubble of their flattened house in Orino town for trinkets and mementoes to patch their lives back together? Christos was never far from her in case she found something else that made her cry. It’s true that they recovered more than she had expected to: her passport, for example. Christos did not have a passport, of course, but they found both their identity cards, which were pretty much unscathed. Also, a lot of her yiayia’s bed linen was recovered, much in need of a soak and a good scrub.
‘Good,’ Christos said with one of his teasing smiles as she hugged them to her chest. ‘Another thing we do not need to buy,’ he added, as if finding them was of no emotional consequence. She threw a small piece of rubble at his feet as if he were a barking dog, and he laughed and sidestepped it before returned to his sifting, chuckling to himself. They found more than half the pictures from the walls intact, the ones of the children anyway, and the others they made little effort to find. Rallou found the kitchen drawer in one piece, still safely containing many of the children’s drawings. They even found all but one of Natasa’s medals.
‘Enough,’ Christos said finally, and she agreed. They had been lucky, and had salvaged a lot, but they agreed that they could not spend the rest of their lives scraping through the dust trying to live in the past, so they walked away. It was a strange feeling – walking away and not even knocking on Harris’s door. At one time, at any other time in her life, that would have been tantamount to sacrilege. She has not spoken a word to her sister since her return and that is the way she wants to keep it, at least for a while. She has not told her baba her reasons, but he knows. She knows he knows. It is something he must have been waiting for all these years. Now, his own silence makes a lot more sense.
Turning off the bubbling sauce, she touches the wilted flowers again. The sun streaming through the window intensifies their colour. Every day, so far, he has brought the bright blue flowers home, a reminder of Corfu. He has never forgotten, whether he is working down in Orino town or up on the hills.
That time seems so long ago now. Rallou snaps a packet of spaghetti in two and lets the pasta slip into a pan, ready for later. The sauce looks amazing and smells even better. It is richer than she used to make it. She takes her time over it now, uses more tomatoes, lets them reduce down.
Once the food is ready for later, she goes out into the sunshine.
Things have been so different since Corfu. So many truths came out after they lit their candles in that church.
Her sandals are by the back door, and she slips them on.
She had her confessions to make and, it turned out, he had his.
Chapter 30
‘Here.’ Christos put his hands in his front pocket and pulled out a curled and scrunched handful of euro notes. Rallou’s first reaction was relief. The waiter, in his red waistcoat, returned with a jug of red wine and took their order. ‘Enough to drink, eat, stay somewhere and get back home.’ Christos spoke with such confidence. She didn’t want to ask where he had got the money. In that moment it didn’t matter, she was just grateful he had it.
She in turn pulled out her few euros and they created a little pile in the middle of the table on the blue-and-white cloth.
‘Ah, you see,’ said Christos, ‘we also have enough to get you a new blouse.’ It seemed nothing could quench his enjoyment of life. Over the years he had not changed. This was what had drawn her to him when he was in his twenties and this was how he was even now when there were hairs of grey mixed in with his dark curls.
As she sat there with the sun in her eyes, Christos against a background of blue sea, his hair lifting in the slight breeze and his muscular forearms a testament to his years of manual work, she recognised how consistent he had always been, and with the recognition came the sudden and overwhelming awareness of how capricious she was in comparison. In fact, she was guilty of more than just a whimsical fickleness; she simply didn’t know who she was. She had no core, no real sense of herself.
She took a napkin from the holder, more for something to do with her hands than for any other reason, but when the paper was laid on her knee she began to shred it, tearing off little strips as her thoughts engulfed her.
Back in her early twenties, in Athens, Paris and London, she had known who she was. Even in the early years of her marriage to Christos, the question had never arisen. But shortly after that time, everything about her became a little hazy. What was all that business with Toula? She was a lovely, kind woman, to be sure, but why had Rallou just gone along with everything she said, and even allowed herself to be passed to Ilias and then from one hotel owner to another in such a passive way, as if she could n
ot think for herself? It only took a moment’s thought to realise that the island was too big for that approach to finding someone to work. But she had gone along with it instead of thinking. Even at Patra it had taken a free ticket to persuade her to get aboard a boat. What on earth had happened to her? Thirty years ago, of all her peers on the island, and not just those up at Korifi but of all of them on the island, she was the only one who had the spirit to take off to Athens and beyond.
As these thoughts percolated through her mind, it was the napkin that became the discreet evidence of her anxiety. Christos remained unaware of her turmoil, enjoying his wine as he flipped through the menu. When he tired of that, he studied the fish in the water just below where they were sitting, which fought in a writhing mass for lumps of bread thrown by the tourists at the next table.
Maybe it was the demands of having three children that had drained her of her boldness, her life’s vigour, her kefi.
Rallou opened her mouth to try to awaken Christos to what she was going through, to ask him to help her make sense of all she was feeling, but she hesitated a moment too long. Then a man and a woman with a young child sat down at the table next to them. The mama was all smiles and their immediate appearance was that of a happy family. The mama pulled out a chair for her offspring and the girl sat down, but there seemed to be some reluctance in the child’s movements. If her family had been able to afford such a luxury when she was the girl’s age, Rallou thought, she would have relished such a treat. Maybe this was a spoilt and ungrateful child; she certainly wasn’t smiling like the mama was. Maybe this child would drain her mama of her kefi to such a point that she would lose her sense of self in twenty years’ time.
At that point the mama looked over, perhaps sensing Rallou staring. Rallou smiled to show she meant no harm and then gave a little shrug as if to say, ‘Ha, children, what can you do?’ and then smiled even more broadly to show that she too had had children and that she understood.
