The Way It Breaks

by Polis Loizou

  Only one part of Darya’s mansion seemed inviting: a small corner turned into a shrine, filled with icons of saints, gold leaf on slabs of wood, the Virgin Mary at the centre. Draped over her icon was a red-and-white patterned fabric he didn’t recognise as Greek or Cypriot.

  Darya led them to a well-stocked bar by the kitchen. She poured him a whiskey and Coke, saying, ‘My husband drinks zivania.’ Orestis wasn’t sure what to say to this. She poured herself an apple juice.

  ‘Where is your husband?’ He had the notion it made him sound manly to ask.

  ‘Dubai,’ she said, a full stop. Then she sat down next to him on the black leather sofa, her arm draped over it. He tried not to look at her body. He’d forgotten how well her features hung together. Those black eyes. The sharp nose and jaw. And how piercing her scent was – bergamot. She was a woman who could have any man, so why was she renting one? He filed the question away, to bring out when it felt safe to ask. ‘You are free this weekend?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Good.’ She lit a cigarette.

  He had half a mind to pull it out of her mouth and kiss her, pin her down on the sofa. He suspected she would like that.

  ‘You live alone?’

  ‘No… With my father.’ He stopped before My grandmother is dead.

  ‘OK… OK.’ And she took a sip of her juice. Her fingers were trembling.

  This was his job: to put her at ease, to please her, as he would any guest at the hotel. ‘Have you been in Cyprus a long time?’

  Her eyes moved in a way that suggested she was leaving the answer out of her answer. ‘Yes. It’s not so bad.’

  ‘Not so bad? This is the island of Aphrodite, the island of love!’

  His ironic tone made her smile. ‘I lived in Berlin before. City of sex, more exciting.’

  ‘I’ve never been,’ he said. ‘But my friend Paris says it’s the best city in the world.’

  ‘A!’ she said, with a short laugh. ‘Not Lemesos?’

  He could have kicked himself for not bouncing off her ‘city of sex’ remark. Instead, he made a comment about his friend, like a teenager. So now he smiled what he hoped was an attractive grin. ‘You speak German?’

  ‘Of course. Your English is very good, I think.’

  ‘Thank you,’ he said. Hers was heavily accented. ‘And you speak…’

  She smiled, not unkindly. ‘Belarusian.’

  ‘And Greek?’

  All of a sudden, she transformed into a Cypriot; she indicated her middling knowledge with a hand gesture and frown, saying ‘a little’ in Greek.

  He laughed.

  ‘Not so good,’ she said. ‘But I learn.’

  This might be all it would be. Today they might only sit and talk in this vast sitting room, topping up their drinks at the bar. These women were lonely, weren’t they? Sometimes all they wanted was a person to talk to.

  Then Darya clinked her empty glass on the coffee table. Her eyes went blank. ‘You want to swim?’

  The change of subject stumped him. ‘E… I have no…’ But he couldn’t think of the English word for swimming trunks.

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ she said, with only the suggestion of a smile.

  He’d wanted this. Prayed for it.

  There must have been an indoor pool in the house somewhere. Maybe a top-floor jacuzzi to mask his sweat. But, taking hold of his hand, she led him out to the garden, where the flagstones covered what would have been a yellow field of snakes.

  ‘Do not worry,’ she said. ‘No one can see.’ She put on her sunglasses.

  He looked around to make sure, pulse revving in the silence. All around them were family homes. But all had allowed themselves the luxury of spreading out, unbothered, over the hills, so if he was seen by anyone it would be at a distance of a hundred metres or more. They might make out a naked man, but they’d never know who he was.

  Darya waited by the pool. ‘You have not done this before,’ she said.

  All of it, none of it, Lefteris’ life. ‘No.’

  The relief was empowering. A charge rippled upwards from his feet. What the hell. He unbuttoned his shirt, thinking of things to calm him. There was a regular at the gym, a broad bald man with a massive beard who must’ve gone daily for hours. Orestis saw him every single time, no matter when he arrived. The man would take his post-workout shower, then stand dripping on his discarded towel. With all the time in the world, he would slide his briefs on, having first arranged his clothes and sprayed his deodorant. Orestis tried to channel him, that ease with his own body. But the cellist’s room had been private, curtained, and on the yacht, he’d undressed in the dark. Here it was broad daylight, the heavens glaring. And Darya’s eyes were hidden behind Ray-Bans.

  He decided to act as if she wasn’t there, reduce her to a voyeur in his private sunbath. His shoes and socks were still on his feet, which thank God he realised after unzipping his chinos. In a gap between one of the stone arches and a wooden beam was a swallow’s nest. Poking through it, a small head. If both his socks were off before the swallow flew out—

  He gasped. To see the bird fly off, to feel the wafted air of its wings, was a pure delight. He was a creature of this earth, a product of it. His client was waiting. Trousers discarded, underwear the last patch of clothing left, he paused. From above his own head he watched himself as he walked up to the pool. And he saw himself stretch his arms before him, bend at the waist, and dive. The woman stood speechless. Summer dress flapping in the breeze, she stood by as he swam laps in the pool. Let her wait. Who was she, anyway, this foreign wife making a cuckold of his compatriot? This kept woman who’d grown used to having things her way; who’d landed a man with the means to give her everything. He felt a twinge of hatred as he swam past her, a blurred and refracted back of a man in the water. He would show her. He would fuck her till she begged for it. She was no better than he was. Finally, he swam to the ladder and, with all the time in the world, climbed to the surface. His shorts were drenched. He had her total attention. Fixing his eyes on the Ray-Bans, he took her by the hands. He guided them to pull down his soaking trunks and set him free.

  They spent the rest of the day in the bedroom. In the light, he could see all of her: freckles on her shoulders, a sprinkling on her breasts. The small scar on her abdomen like a pale burrow, stretch marks on her waist. Shoulder blades sharp as gravestones. For a while, he forgot her role of adulteress. He couldn’t understand how her husband failed to keep this woman satisfied, how he was able to leave her alone on this island, or tire of that arch of her back, or those parted lips as her eyes fogged with want.

  The answer was simple: he must’ve been bad in bed. Orestis was not.

  As he lay sprawled in the sheets Darya watched him, matter-of-fact. She not only took in his body; she was also analysing his face. The features of his head: his forehead, his nose, his ears. As if she was trying to place or memorise him. He was caught halfway between liking the attention and feeling unnerved by it. Something warned him not to see her again. He brushed it off. Whatever was attracting him to Darya, it existed on a level he’d yet to plumb.

  ‘You please me,’ she said. She was sitting up, having stretched to the dresser for a pack of Marlboros.

  The ugly bloom of smoke filled his nostrils, stung his eyes. But he knew his rights, and they didn’t include telling her to quit. ‘I like pleasing you,’ he said.

  She gave him a sideways glance. ‘You must come to me. Often.’

  He must have misunderstood. What she was suggesting was too good to be true. A trick of the universe, a dormant cruelty waiting to strike. The Russian for thank you came to mind, but of course, he mustn’t say that.

  ‘How do you say “thank you” in Belarusian?’

  Amused, she told him, and he repeated it.

  In return she said in Greek, ‘You’re welcome.’

  She asked if he could stay until the morning, in a way that implied there was only one correct response. He nodded. In his mind,
he turned over the myriad excuses he might give his old man for not spending the night at home.

  ✽✽✽

  If the Mercedes Compressor overtaking from the left was stopped by the traffic lights, everything would be all right.

  Red.

  He ought to have thought of something better. For everything to be all right was too vague a wish. Incredibly, things were all right. May they continue to be. He slowed to a stop by the Compressor. Its windows were tinted. He sat looking straight ahead, confident that the stranger in the Compressor could sense his accomplishment. It was something you gave off, invisible as pheromones. Now it exuded from him, without effort: sex with an older woman; a good job; money filling his overdraft, soon to seal it for good. He would see to Darya and she would see to him. Sometimes all it took was a different attitude for one’s life to click into place.

  While his aunts felt attacked by the Eastern women, these vampires, who always seemed to be swooping in to steal something, Orestis was benefiting from one. Darya had come along and given him a future. Better than that: she’d given him access to the true Orestis, the man who’d been languishing in the dungeons of a lesser one. It thrilled him when she bossed him around (On the floor, stubbing out her cigarette in a crystal ashtray, eyes like embers) and it drove him wild when she bowed to his commands (pushing her head towards the wall, bending her over her husband’s desk).

  Amber.

  Green.

  The Compressor was already a distant smear on the horizon.

  He paused. Before driving home, he would pass by his uncle’s taverna. He made his way to Enaerio. As the cluster of buildings drew near, he slowed the car. On the outside tables, a handful of tourists sat picking at dips and pitta. From another, a waitress he’d never seen was clearing plates before all the diners had finished. He shook his head. That was once his life, and it did nothing for him to witness it. He’d expected a feeling of elation, superiority, certainty, but all he’d got was a sensation like a ball of lead in his heart.

  He drove towards the house on the seafront near the Zoo. He’d always liked it as a child. He was captivated by its overgrown garden and its wooden shuttered windows. Kids in the playground used to say the place was haunted. It belonged to a widow who lived there alone, afraid of ghosts. Looking at it now, all he saw was an ageing bungalow, a pre-War house whose creeping ivy told of its survival. It had borne witness to English soldiers, to the coup and the Northern refugees of the Turkish invasion, to the Arabs that fled here in the Eighties and Nineties from their own wars, and the businessmen formerly Soviet, formerly Communist, now swimming in coins like that cartoon duck. It shook its head at the crowds stumbling and singing from the Wine Festival every year across the road.

  He’d told himself as a child that he would own it one day, that sad haunted house by the sea.

  How simple were the dreams of children.

  PART II

  One

  Darya was getting used to the staring. It was a national pastime, what choice did she have? With her colouring, she’d assumed she’d blend in with the locals, but something was obviously marking her out as foreign. Paler skin? Telling herself it was admiration or envy hadn’t worked. Aristos had tried to be charming in those first few months. He’d claimed it was her magnetism forcing people to turn their heads. Over time she’d turned it into a game to predict which women would eyeball her at the supermarket checkouts – one time a mother of four chastised the cashier for allowing Darya to go first, never mind that she was ahead in the queue. She was also learning to shrug off the name-calling. ‘Russian whore,’ the occasional codger would murmur as she walked past a coffee shop. ‘Going to her cabaret,’ he’d say to his friend. Little did this dog know, and he might piss himself if he did, that his single insult packed two punches. But that’s what they assumed she was: a whore and a Russian. It didn’t matter that she knew she was neither. It burned her heart a little every time she caught the neon sign of a gentlemen’s club, winking suggestively over the roofs of buildings and cars. Because it wasn’t Cypriot, or Greek, or even Turkish women being ogled in those dreary establishments. It was women like her, former Soviets. Women she might easily have been, had the wind not blown a certain way on a certain day.

  She parked the Lexus at Debenhams, formerly Hermès, formerly Woolworths. It struck her how long she’d been in Cyprus. The past wasn’t a thing she dwelt on, but it came rushing at her now, in the noise carried from the sea a hundred metres away. A sight she’d never dreamed would become routine; palms and sandy beaches transposing the silver birches of the woods back home. Rolling fields soared into actual mountains here, so high for such a small island. And between her motherland and current address had come the ruined chic of Berlin, her time with Frau Friedel in that apartment above the unwashed café. There had been bakeries and night clubs and strolls in the Volkspark Friedrichshain, where she’d spent many a lonely evening watching lovers and joggers circling the lake. In Cyprus, she had found some comfort in the similarity of the dominant faith to that of her homeland, at first.

  She rubbed her crucifix. Though Orthodox as well, the churches here were different. Instead of golden domes on top of tall white towers was beige brick capped with terracotta. Easter was equally important, but instead of babka, there was flaouna, which she’d grown to look forward to. The services and even the priests were familiar, but their language wasn’t hers – Christ is risen, met with Truly he is risen, but not the way she’d grown up hearing it. It made the sentiment feel less real. At least they also dyed eggs – not to mention the game of striking two against each other to determine whose was toughest. So many Easter mornings she’d spent with Maksim, cracking each other’s shells. That number of mornings was finite, it always had been. If only she’d known it then.

  Enough. It did no good to wish time bent.

  She carried her yoga mat rolled up in her arms like a baby. As she passed a tourist shop, the owner came out from behind his spinners of gaudy magnets and postcards to gaze at her. Men were at ease with their stake in things, they had no need to consider their rights. If they deemed a woman’s body in the public domain – which, if visible, it was – then it was their right to admire it. As a member of society, she’d forfeited her right to control the opinions of others. If to them she was a Russian whore, then to them that’s what she was. She knew her own truth, and it would only ever exist inside her. The moment she arrived at this conclusion, during an afternoon’s meditation overlooking the North Sea, was one of the happiest she’d known. A weight took flight and left her. There was only the here, the now, the self.

  The feeling of distraction carried on through her yoga class. Fellow students were moving their limbs too close, breathing too hard, sweating too much. The seafront and cars in the sunlight were too bright in the window, they made her eyes blink and water. And her mind, instead of emptying itself, was filling up.

  Orestis. She’d never encountered that name before. Every breath and stretch came with a memory of him, his hands, his biceps. But it was more than a question of physicality. Something about him compelled you to watch, like flames in a fireplace. Yet his vanity threatened his beauty. It made him too obsessed with his flaws to enjoy his attributes. When they slept together, she sensed that it wasn’t only her enjoyment that was turning him on, but her enjoyment of him. Yes, he could still stand to trim some fat here and there, but he was close to human perfection. In this country, this city above the rest, she’d seen many a beautiful body in the sunlight. Locals were conscious of their looks in a way that even the West-Germans hadn’t been. Aphrodite had found her island, and sunk her claws in deep.

  In the hours they’d spent together so far, Darya and Orestis had explored their bodies, but they were still so new to one another that she’d focused on details at the expense of the bigger picture. If he walked into the room with a yoga mat and a pair of sweatpants, would she recognise him? In her mind he was a chest beneath a white shirt, tucked into a pair of chinos. He w
as an arm around her when she woke, a heat along the length of her back. The brush of stubble at her thighs. A mouth and its breath. He was a voice enquiring about her inner self; about the fields and forests of Belarus, and the languages she’d made her own. Maybe he was why she’d started giving in to nostalgia. She’d managed to go years without thinking of draniki and pork stew, or the kopytka her mother made, yet this morning she’d woken with a wild hunger for it all. She sated herself by recalling their taste. She felt them on her tongue, teeth and throat. And she banished the memory of Maksim by turning the TV up, flooding her head with the Greek patter of the morning talk show host and her ditzy celebrity guests. Darya had even started to recognise some of them.

  Maybe this thing she’d started, this thing with the boy, was a mistake.

  It wasn’t too late to stop.

  The class was over and left her with nothing. As she rolled up her mat the teacher touched her arm, gently, to speak with her. Darya flinched.

  ‘Are you OK?’ the girl asked in English. Skevi, a young Cypriot of British descent who mixed her honey-blonde hair with pastels. A pleasing effect. This woman, whom she paid for an hour’s peace and contemplation, was the nearest thing to a friend. Aristos had introduced her to several Eastern-bloc wives and girlfriends of colleagues — mostly Ukrainians, the occasional Russian — but she was content to limit their acquaintance to a simple hello at the supermarket. Some of the other girls from the ships had settled in Paphos, they’d lost touch. She had only spent time with the Swedish woman and the German on the yacht that night, they’d probably never meet again.