by Polis Loizou
✽✽✽
Her name was Darya. At first, this bothered him, because an elderly teller at his bank had the same name, but he cast the thought aside. Belarusian Darya was also older, overtaking him by fifteen – maybe twenty – years. But she lit a fire in him with her own.
After sex, his first taste in a long while, Orestis felt conflicted. Part of him wanted to spend more time with this woman, if only not to appear rude. The rest of him couldn’t face returning to his father’s house in daylight when there might be customers or uncles to detect his shame. Other guys did it all the time, but Orestis never had and wasn’t ready to confront his old man with a new persona. There would be other mornings, he promised himself, to sit on the sunny deck of a yacht, making breakfast and conversation with people who lived free of strings; other mornings to linger in a perfumed bed. Darya understood, no hard feelings. Like other East-Europeans he’d met, she was practical and didn’t show much emotion. But she climbed on top of him again before he went, and told him she liked it.
Walking back to his car, he was struck by this otherness. The sun had only dimly begun to rise, which made the jetty, the boats, the St Raphael resort look paused. In all those rooms, all those bodies who weren’t him, living lives that weren’t his… Even he was a different Orestis now, one who’d stepped through to a different world.
He got into his battered little Honda and sighed, wishing Darya back on his lap. Before setting off again to the flaking plaster of his dad’s garage, he counted out the euro the Belarusian had given him. All those notes fanned out in his hands: that was how much he’d pleased her.
Twelve
For his uncle Andrikos’ birthday, the family held a lunch at their summer house; an extravagance they could afford back in the Nineties when they lucked out at the stock market weeks before it crashed. Thanks to auntie Lenia, they’d made some wise investments that allowed them to hang on to the house. For most of the year the four-bedroom, four-en-suite property sat empty, a hot topic for Orestis and his father. They rehashed their opinions on every drive up and down the mountain to it. Content to let his old man drive – not that anyone else would’ve been allowed to – Orestis sat back and watched the view through an increasing density of pines. Ears popping, the sun diluted by his shades, a driver at his side, he felt like someone approaching Lefteris. He would never work a regular job again. He’d say goodbye to the Harmonia, the tourists, the small talk with colleagues, for good. On the other hand, the hotel boosted his ego. Yiorgos had noted his ability to liaise with other departments, his ease with the other managers. The assistant manager, the dark cloud at his interview, was rumoured to be leaving soon, and Yiorgos hinted that some of those duties might be passed to Orestis. More duties, on a day like today, was precisely what he didn’t want to think about. The increase in wages, on the other hand…
Andrikos sat in his camping chair in the garden as his wife and sisters-in-law fussed around him. That old baseball cap sat on his head, shielding him from light if not dirt. Andros was over by the spit, watching the chunks of lamb as they slowly turned. Kostas, naturally, went to oversee, having taken his can of Coke from the outstretched hand of a niece.
‘You look good,’ said uncle Andros, slapping Orestis’ back.
Orestis gave a bashful smile.
‘He spends all day at that gym,’ his father said.
‘So when do you work?’
‘At night,’ Orestis replied.
‘I want to move the old fridge from the garage later,’ Andros said.
‘Sure.’
‘Re! You don’t think those are real muscles, do you!’ said Andrikos with a throaty laugh. ‘It’s an illusion, he’s wearing a costume like the Spidermans at the carnival.’
Orestis left the smoky air to hug and kiss aunts and cousins and in-laws on the veranda.
In the kitchen, Auntie Maria yelled over the din of her cooking. ‘My dashing young man!’ And she squeezed his cheeks the way his grandma used to. He wondered if she’d ever done what Darya had done. Then he blinked the thought away. The women chopped tomatoes, cucumber and feta into a salad, lashed it with olive oil, popped black-eyed beans out of pods and sliced lemons. Whereas Orestis had never paid attention to their kitchen chores before, today he found himself watching closely. He enquired about ingredients and quantities.
‘Good!’ Maria said. ‘A man who’ll cook for his wife.’
Auntie Lenia asked, ‘How many girlfriends do you have?’
‘None.’
‘None?’
‘Nobody wants me, auntie.’
‘E… What can I say? They’re all dizzy from their phones and laptops these days,’ she said. ‘But find someone before you get too fussy.’
‘Dashing young man like this,’ Maria said, ‘you think he’ll have a problem finding someone?’
‘That’s what I’m saying, he must be fussy!’ She turned to Orestis and wagged a finger. ‘Don’t be. It gets harder the older you get.’
‘I’m not fussy,’ he said with a grin. ‘I’ll take anyone.’
A flicker in his auntie’s eye made him catch himself.
‘Just please promise me,’ Maria said, stirring a casserole, ‘that you won’t be one of those Cypriots with a Russian. I can’t abide them leaving their wives for Russians.’
Orestis bristled.
‘Agreed,’ said Lenia. ‘They’re all sluts.’
Darya’s small pert breasts against his chest. Her fingers squeezing.
‘Come on, auntie…’
‘What else are they going to take? Our land, our businesses, our men. The things you hear about their ghettos in Paphos, pe…! They’ve taken over. Before you know it we’ll be giving them our twelve points in Eurovision.’
A beast of a laugh from Maria, her cheeks already glossy from the steam of the casserole. ‘E,’ she said, ‘as long as they keep the Turks away…’
‘That’s something, at least. Just keep them off our boys.’
To shift the topic, Orestis said: ‘Better them than Englishwomen, right?’
His aunts blinked and shifted a little. Both smiled kindly.
‘Listen,’ Lenia said in a softer tone. And he noticed for the first time how thick her hair was. ‘Your mother had her faults. She was wrong for what she did, but she isn’t a bad person.’
‘I know,’ he said. And he looked down at her I LOVE CYPRUS apron, with its map of the island, the sketches of Aphrodite and the Kourion. Ammohostos written as Famagusta. I know, he’d said, making both the aunts look happy with him. But how could he possibly know?
They took the food outside. Orestis allowed himself a bit of lamb and salad but no potatoes. When his aunts protested that he hadn’t eaten their food, Andrikos yelled in his husky voice that they were trying to make him fat, then tell him he was too fat and he should stop eating. Orestis gave in to some of his cravings and helped himself to strips of pitta that he dunked in the tart tahini. After lunch, Pavlos arrived. Not three years ago, his lateness would’ve been down to late-night clubbing and daytime sleeping. These days it was down to work and training. Orestis still struggled to align his old cousin with the current one. It didn’t seem plausible that a man could truly change. He felt a renewed closeness with him as they stood side by side at the mountain edge of the garden, watching Pavlos’ remote-controlled helicopter spin away towards the faded peaks. At the other end of the lawn, the younger kids gathered around Andrikos and found everything he said to them hilarious. Orestis wished that his dad was like that. He looked over at his old man, there on the veranda with Lenia and Maria, their daughters and their husbands discussing real estate, and was surprised to find him looking back. A smile on his face. And something approaching pride.
✽✽✽
Almost a week had passed since Darya. During that time, he’d spent every shift at the Front Desk with only half his mind on work, the other half on her sturdy frame. Aside from the images in his head, there was the constant reminder in Yuri and Svetlana’
s accents. Not to mention the slender wives and girlfriends of VIPs, who with their Marc Jacobs handbags and white-framed Ray-Bans took the lobby, corridors and poolside flagstones like a catwalk. One glance at his position prevented a second. Only his regular, the widow from Lebanon, flirted back. At times she trod close to the edge of taking it further. Orestis dreaded she might overstep.
Once again, the beach was missing Lefteris. He was the conduit for Darya or women like her. Without Lefteris, the portal to that life was closed.
He began to dissect that night on the yacht. She’d seemed to enjoy herself. She’d coolly assessed him, but only in that manner of East-Europeans sizing up a person’s personhood, not a man’s manhood. In that regard, he knew from his Army days that he was all right. She hadn’t shown interest in the brands he wore, despite the obvious quality of her short black dress. He autopsied his technique, and with a grimace recalled that he’d come too soon on the first go. On his second she’d orgasmed, he was sure. The third time, he’d done all he could for her. She had wanted him. She’d told him she liked it. She’d paid him more than he’d ever been paid for a day’s work.
There’d been an intensity with the Belarusian that he’d never felt before. As if they’d been split parts of a single object, the proverbial saucepan and lid that had found each other. He could still smell her, taste her. Those fingers on him.
In the meantime, he kept his payment in the box of a Nintendo 64, where there was no chance his father would come across it. What an idiot, when his bank account was hungry for that money, he ought to have deposited it. Yet the idea of spending that wage, to dilute it to digital figures on an ATM screen, made him cold inside. Instead, he kept it in the console box and took it out every night before bed. The notes at his fingertips like Darya’s hair, like the skin of her calves. He’d stuff them away in that box he’d had since he was twelve, when the fantasy of a woman was as intangible as the smoke from her mouth, out on the deck, floating off to the dark sea.
After the drought came rainfall. Orestis was eating his salad of pulses, looking out at the waves, when Lefteris walked towards him on the sand.
‘Where were you?’ Orestis asked, mad at himself for sounding so pleased.
‘I spent a few days at my parents’.’
That simple phrase – a few days – was a punch. To some people time was a valley that rolled peacefully on; to Orestis it was an escalator, leading up and up to a sheer drop.
‘I got a message from Darya,’ Lefteris said, peeling off his V-neck top. ‘She liked you. She wants you to go to her place on Friday night, while her husband is away.’ Grinning, he tweaked Orestis’ nipple through his shirt and gave him a wink. ‘We can’t always choose them.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I didn’t know she was the friend.’
‘Whose friend?’
‘Darya. I didn’t know it was her you would be getting.’
Orestis frowned. ‘Why? What’s wrong with her?’
Lefteris’ expression was of amused surprise. ‘Nothing,’ he said, altering it. ‘She’s beautiful. You wanker. You’re going, right?’
Orestis left a pause. ‘Yeah,’ he replied with a shrug. ‘Why not?’
The swimmer regarded him, a strange smile on his face. Then he waded into the sea, swam out deep enough to dunk his head, and whipped up an arc of water with his hair. He waved to Orestis as the employee went back to his day job, his lunch break finished.
✽✽✽
When he next met up with Paris, they shot some hoops in a public court. Beyond the concrete slab rose yet more concrete — refugee council blocks, offices for businesses now dormant. Their only mark of beauty was the sunset-reflecting windows, scattered like rose petals across their facades.
Paris dribbled the ball, then leapt off the ground in that effortless way of his. His dunk was a whisper through the net. Orestis’ steps were heavy, his own dunks a clash of board and pole.
‘I’m being promoted,’ he said, after another dunk from Paris. ‘Kind of. They’re giving me assistant manager duties.’
‘Bravo.’
Paris had dribbled the ball around him and leapt up to get another shot in.
Orestis almost said her name. Darya. How reckless he could be right now, how easy it would be to spill this secret. There was the thrill of dangling over a precipice; a mere push would change everything, forward or backward, it didn’t matter – adrenaline was in the state between.
A dog barked, rough, low. It was pressing its face to the wire fence, past which walked a triad of schoolgirls. Orestis hit the ball away from Paris and, seizing it with both hands, tossed it at the net from centre court. It hit the board, the ring, then finally fell through. He lifted his tank top to wipe his face. Paris turned to chase the ball, which was skimming its way along the concrete towards the laughing girls.
Later they went for coffee. It dawned on Orestis that Eva had got more scarce, and not through a lack of invites. He tried not to feel either way about it. The era had simply passed, as others had. Her distraction with people on the lower rungs of the social ladder could only last so long. The last time they saw her, she’d brought along a friend with bleached hair and emerald contacts who set down her handbag on an empty seat with the Fendi logo facing the room. The women had spent most of the night chatting only to each other about mutual friends and going off to the bar alone. ‘You went and became a model again,’ Eva had said to Orestis. Despite the zing of the cranberry and vodka on her breath, her voice had lacked its usual spark.
Without her, they were free to go to an untrendy spot for a decent coffee. Beneath their table was a pile of old board games, and they settled on Monopoly though neither of them cared for it. Paris smoked with one hand and rolled the dice with the other. He moved his terrier piece along, saying, ‘Why are we playing this capitalist shit?’
‘When they make one for Communists, we’ll play that.’
Paris narrowed his eyes, amused. ‘Take it easy, Eva.’
The name hung in the air.
‘I have some news,’ Paris said, at last, having drained his cup.
‘Did you read it in the coffee?’
Paris smirked. He tilted the cup to indicate the dregs. ‘Yeah, look here where there’s a big dick. It tells me I’m seeing you tonight.’
‘What else?’
He took a drag from his cigarette and leaned back. ‘I’m publishing a book. Poems.’
‘Bravo, re.’
By the swivel in Paris’ expression, Orestis’ reaction had been more of a comma than an exclamation mark.
‘What’s it called?’
‘Ananke, after the mother of the Fates.’
‘Never heard of her.’
Paris let the dice drop on the board. ‘She was the goddess of necessity, compulsion, inevitability. The world began when she and Chronos intertwined as a serpent and broke the egg of creation to create the sky, land, and sea.’
Orestis waved the air away. ‘Pe! I won’t understand a word.’
‘What are you talking about? Everyone understands poetry.’
‘We didn’t all go to England.’ He stopped himself. Bitterness was ugly. In any case, the night on the yacht, the older women waiting to pay him for a good fuck, it was all sitting in his pocket.
Paris only laughed that low chuckle and stroked his beard. ‘You don’t have to go that far for poetry,’ he said. He leaned forward and recited in dialect a tongue-twister with a dirty finish.
It was such a shock that Orestis’ laugh went off like a gun. Paris leant back, content. The waitress came and took another order, and both men caught the way she’d checked Orestis out. Paris glanced sadly at his friend’s white shirt.
✽✽✽
He shouldn’t have brought the Honda into Darya’s neighbourhood. Kaloyiri wasn’t a place Orestis was ever invited to. Mansion after mansion looked down on him from its slope. Some of them were traditional, simple, beautiful, others mad with modernity. He pulled up outsi
de an equal mix of the old and new, as much glass as concrete, whose flashy effect was supported by sturdy features from days long gone. By the cobalt rectangle of the swimming pool was a sequence of stone arches, topped by a roof of wooden beams. The garden flagstones held enormous clay pots and vines curled around poles, as in a village inn.
It had occurred to him, before he switched off his car, to park in another street and walk. It seemed a smart idea, and he was sure his discretion would impress the Belarusian. But how would he explain himself if a neighbour should happen to see him? He could always pretend to be a lawyer, or insurance broker, an acquaintance of the husband he’d never met. And therein lay another issue: what was the cuckold’s name? Orestis’ heart beat faster, and it was all he could do to walk casually up the steps to the large front door.
To his surprise, Darya herself answered. He’d expected an Asian maid, as was the norm for these types. Every Sunday the Molos was crowded with Filipino cleaners dressed up for the Catholic church. It was a relief not to have to explain himself to yet another person he’d only just considered. There he’d been, congratulating himself on discretion when so many potential traps could mark him out as an amateur.
‘Good afternoon,’ said the Belarusian, a small smile on her lips. And when she let him into the house, Orestis wished Lefteris was with him.
Darya wore a long white summer dress, which bared her arms and shoulders. Her hair, dark as a Cypriot’s, was pinned up. It was as if she’d woken on a sweltering day in August instead of a mild one in May, whose morning had brought a welcome drizzle to wash the dust off traffic lights and railings.
‘Do you want a drink?’ she asked in Greek, before turning her back to leave the hall. He followed her through a series of rooms, each wider and more useless than the last. Rich people loved to exhibit empty space; blank square metres where there ought to be signs of life. The only exception he’d seen so far had been Paris’ family home, where bookcases covered the walls, vinyl records and artwork patching up any blank spots. No wonder his friend was a poet.
