by John Clanchy
‘Well, Eleni,’ I say, in the course of the coffee break, ‘are you ready to read your story for us today?’
‘Oh, yes,’ she says, and I knot my fingers and pray that it will be something straightforward – some simple act of murder or pillage – after the agony that Maria’s and Shamila’s stories have put us through. I look at Eleni more closely and try to guess her age. She confounds me, but again I begin to worry. How old would she have been under the Colonels?
‘I will tell you today,’ she says, ‘how we live in Greece –’
Thank God.
‘And about my mother,’ she says.
Which sounds just about anodyne enough for the way I’m feeling this morning. Three days ago I found something in a drawer in our bedroom that should not have been there, and I’ve tossed and turned through each night since, worrying about how I could begin to talk to Philip about it. Because something else has also happened – or rather, has not happened – which means that I must.
And you, Mrs Miriam,’ Eleni says. ‘You have been in Greece, I think?’
Yes, I have been in Greece. Twice.
The first time was for six days – a honeymoon snatched between terms of teaching.
‘You will love the islands,’ Stavros had said.
Stavros, I learnt, had never actually travelled to the islands himself. Nor, on this occasion, did we. Though, strictly, I suppose, we did. The hydrofoil from Piraeus took all of forty minutes – ‘Why go further,’ Stavros said, ‘after such a long flight?’ And yes, the houses were white, the sea blue, the sky brilliant and, from our bedroom window at the Heraklion Hotel, we looked back across the strait to Galatas on the mainland, a full three hundred metres away.
Not that I saw anything much of Galatas, or even of the white houses on Poros, or the brilliant sky. Most of the six days was spent inside the hotel, most of them in one room – though in fact there were three rooms and a sunken bath – and mostly, in my case, stapled to the bed and waiting for Stavros to exhaust his missionary zeal, so that we could at least try something more inventive. I might just as well have waited for the Japanese to relinquish the Parthenon, or the British its Marbles.
Still I learnt something, even on that first trip. You can, I discovered – in the second-floor suite de luxe in the Hotel Heraklion on the island of Poros, two sets of rooms to the left of the main entrance and looking directly out across the strait to Argolis – fit exactly sixty-four plaster acanthus leaves, each measuring precisely eight centimetres across, tip to tip, along the moulded cornice of the ceiling running the length of the bedroom, and exactly forty-eight, widthwise, across a span of twelve feet … a grand total of two hundred and twenty-four.
This took me two days to discover and four to confirm. After a while the leaves tended to blur, or turn into onion domes, or even – on one occasion, when Stavros tired and lost his staple-gun rhythm – miniature bulls. Maths would have got me to the same answer much earlier, but I had done Languages, and the conversions from centimetres to feet were beyond me. Besides, I wanted to count each acanthus spear individually – if only out of solidarity with all the other women labouring in the classical world.
On the sixth day, four hours before the ferry left, I was released from the Heraklion, and fell in love. The island was mostly stone. Rocks, a few pines, some native grasses, low shrubs or heath – and a baking sun, so hot by midday that even the cicadas fell back into stupor and silence. But three miles from the cell of our room, on a plateau overlooking the island, we came on the ruins of a temple – Shrine of Poseidon, a sign said. The air here, amongst old trees, was fresh and clear after the stale, air-conditioned fug of our room. A breeze came up off the sea, and the blue limestone of the stoas and low walls glowed coolly in the afternoon sun. This, at last, was Greece, and I was, I convinced myself then and there, in love. I was also, I had no doubt, pregnant.
On the way back, through Piraeus, I met Mama Vassilopou-los, Yiayia Irini, who had come up from the village for the day to meet us. Meet me, the bride. Inspect. She came with Dimitros, Stavros’ brother – and his opposite – a smiling, elfin creature. Who charmed.
‘My sister,’ he said, and kissed me, while Stavros, locked hand in hand with Mama, stood and looked on, almost shyly at first. As if they were the newlyweds. ‘Come on,’ Dimitros said, ‘take coffee,’ and led me away towards Karaiskaki Square, with Mama and Stavros following in train.
Mama Vassilopoulos was as small as Dimitros, and I wondered where Stavros, a giant beside them, had come from. Genetically, that is. Years later, in their home village, I saw a photo of Stavros’ father, and the mystery only deepened. He was perhaps only forty in the photo, but small, burnt, already wizened, dressed in cheap plastic shoes, three-quarter socks barely covering his shins and a cotton shirt, and squinting, unsmiling, into a blinding sun.
‘How old was he?’ I asked Stavros. ‘When he died?’
‘Dunno,’ he mumbled. Not wanting to share anything of his family, or his inner world, by then. ‘Forty-nine, fifty maybe.’
‘Fifty –?’ I said, peering at the hollow cheeks, the gnarled, ropey hands. ‘What did he work at?’
‘The vines,’ Stavros flamed briefly. ‘For nothing. For shit wages. He was crazy.’
Mama Vassilopoulos, I learnt on that first visit, had no English at all. And few teeth. In fact that’s what I mostly remember about her from that time: her desperate need of dentistry. She couldn’t have been old either – Stavros, her eldest, was only twenty-six, after all, and Dimitros two years younger – and yet already the sides of her mouth were falling in, her cheeks collapsing. Was that the reason, I wondered, why she rarely smiled, indeed opened her mouth at all, even to her sons, just sat and watched, nodded sometimes when I spoke to her, made gestures with my hands, or when Dimitros brought coffee to the table – though it was Stavros who put sugar in her cup, stirred and put it in front of her. She nodded then, in approval – or recognition – I have no idea which. And went on watching. Until I became uneasy, and spent most of my time joking with Dimitros who was playful and attentive. To his new sister. While Stavros glowered and ducked his head to catch the few words Mama Vassilopoulos whispered to him – about me? – and helped her with her coffee and shortbread, almost to the point of consuming them himself.
‘How old is she?’ I asked Stavros on the flight back, but he was evasive and sulky. ‘How old is Meetera? What did she say about me?’ I wanted to know. But again he wouldn’t answer, and I wondered whether I’d failed some kind of test. Having no language in common with Mama Vassilopoulos, I had no idea what she’d thought, of me, of us. And the gloomier and more withdrawn Stavros became, the more I realized that the same was true about him as well. It was the fact that he was so different, so exotic, so far outside my own circle, that had drawn me to him in the first place. Stavros was an instructor – weights, fitness, swimming, polo – in the university gym, the son – I smugly told my girlfriends, who looked on, in envy, who warned, gossiped – of Greek peasants from a small village in Attica.
Greece at that time was a notion we were all in love with – its sun, its islands, its food, its olives and wine, its architecture, its men. Its Zorbas, its romantic men. Its visceral, authentic life, its peasants. But, behind it all, its men. Sex. Their sex. Which was the core of the life I had begun to lead with Stavros in Sydney, over the summer at the end of university – a life of beaches, of surf and naked sex. Above all, the taste of salt on hot skin – the perilous suck of that. Three months, and I’d lost my mind and could have lived on the beaches north of the city and been fucked, hourly, for the rest of my life. But –
‘You’ll have to help me,’ my mother had called me back from the beaches. From any thoughts I might be harbouring of escaping with Stavros. Living with him. Marrying him. ‘I can’t manage your father by myself.’
She wouldn’t let him go into hospital, even for that last week, wouldn’t think of it, when, deep down, all three of us knew he’d have been so much more
comfortable, even happier there. But that would have ruined her sense of her self – as martyr to her family, to her class and caste. And so she persecuted him with care and what passed in her mind – and, who knows, maybe even in his – for kindness. She did her duty by him, till the very end.
For the last two months of his life, I moved back home, saw Stavros only occasionally at nights when Dad slept and Mother could manage for a few hours by herself. Gradually the walls closed back in around me. When he died, without once in the final weeks saying Aloe Vera’, in his old joking way, I was aware he was taking his own tiny revenge.
Afterwards I prepared to move out again, but there was now the problem of Mother – how was she to live? where? Brian, my older brother, was no help. He’d escaped North long ago, and he scuttled back to his own problems there as soon as the funeral was over. The longer I delayed my own actual moment of departure, the more I fell into Mother’s power again, and the more my own will dissipated. ‘Poor Bill,’ she’d say, ‘poor Dad, I know how much he wanted to be proud of you. Make something of yourself, Miriam,’ she’d say. ‘For his sake.’ And the emotion of his death was still so strong that I almost believed her, and it took all the effort of will that remained to force myself to remember not the myth she was now busily constructing, but the years of humiliation, of belittlement. Of him, my father. And it was in a fit of anger and revolt over that – though the argument itself was about staying out all night – that I finally prised myself free. And Stavros was the lever. Without him, I might never have made it.
It’s only now, sixteen years later, in a second marriage, with my own children, and Mother herself dying, that I begin to gain some inkling of insight into Mother and Dad’s lives, their quarrels – about anything, and nothing. About money, about the people they saw or didn’t, about tastes in food or drink, about who washed and who dried – I knew they were always about something else but I could never see what lay between the lines, or understand the non sequiturs of their speech. As a girl, all I knew was that their speech made no sense, and yet it did to them – and always, I knew, Mother held the whip hand.
‘Hardly slept a wink,’ she would say one morning, apropos of nothing. And then if Dad didn’t answer:
‘A man?’ she’d say, full of scorn. ‘You? Call yourself a man?’
When in fact I’d not heard him say anything at all.
‘You’re not a man’s bootlace,’ she’d say.
And, finally, he’d sneak a look at me, and the humiliation on his face – though not its source – was so plain.
‘Vera,’ he’d plead. ‘Please. You know I’ve got to get up. To go in the night.’
Go, I knew, was code for toilet. But why he had to go in the night and what it had to do with being a man, I never understood.
Nowadays, of course, people talk about things, in ways they never did then. And I’ve begun to wonder. My father died of bone cancer. But where did it start – in the bone? The liver? Or was it the prostate? And was he impotent, and was that what it was about?
And whom should I pity most, then? Mother – so successful, she’d driven everyone from her? ‘Be something, Miriam,’ she’d say, ‘make something of yourself. For Mother’s sake.’ Or Dad? For his humiliation, his browbeatenness, the littleness of his life?
And anyway, I ask myself, can you manufacture pity, love even, through retrospective understanding? Or is sympathy the best anyone can hope for?
The second trip to Greece lasted not for six days, but nearly six years. And it wasn’t Stavros who drew me back there – to ruin his life and mine – but myself. When Laura was eighteen months I returned to teaching, and she stayed during the day with Mother. And it was that which drove me back to Greece. Not romanticism about Greece, or the Greeks – three years of marriage, and I’d soon got over that – and it wasn’t ambition for Stavros who was heading for thirty and starting, physically, to go to seed – married life had begun to suit him more and more, the less it suited me – and not for my own sake either but for hers, for Laura’s. I had to get her free. Before she was two, I’d begun to see how she was already being ensnared in a web of duty and propriety and tiny love. Even then, at eighteen months, as we taught her to walk, her first steps, out of Stavros’s doting hands, were always towards her, towards Mother – ‘Come to Grandma Vera, come to me, to Grandma’ – not to her mother, to Mum, to me. This terrified me. I was determined Mother would never have her. It would be much easier, I decided, just to leave. But where? Melbourne, Adelaide, even Perth – she’d have followed us to any of these. Greece, I thought, would be just about far enough.
It was too far. Three years there, and I’d produced nothing. No greater sense of freedom, no harmony with Stavros, not even – to her disgust – another grandchild for Yiayia Irini, and no speech, in English, from her. Any movement had to be from me, in Greek, towards her. Laura was our only bridge. Not only between her and me, but also to Stavros. Who had changed so much. Or rather changed back, reverted, so that I barely recognized him. He even began to object to me walking in the streets alone. Without him or Yiayia Irini. It was a source of shame here, he said. This wasn’t Sydney where women paraded themselves in the streets, on the beaches, barely clothed.
I couldn’t understand this change, how small Stavros had grown here, at home, where he should have been most confident, most serene. What had happened to the Stavros I’d known, the carefree Stavros of Bondi and Clovelly, of Bronte and Lady Jayne, who had himself worn the skimpiest of togs, who’d insisted I do the same, and who’d laughed and whistled – even when I was with him – at other girls on the beach? But for his belly, which now swelled with the cheap bread and oily soups of Mama Vassilopoulos’ kitchen, Stavros began to resemble more and more the one photo of his father in the house. I imagined him in fifteen years, in plastic shoes and three-quarter socks, shrinking even as I gazed at him. Something mortal had happened to Stavros.
It was partly simple things – the lack of equipment, the dearth of exercise after years of relentless gymwork. That, I now realized, and not Nature, had been the source of his muscles, his build. That, and something artificial – maybe steroids? – which he could no longer obtain. Yet it was even more than that that was wrong with him. Each day for three years he took the bus into the city and worked in a carpet factory – an unskilled labourer, which, outside a gym, was exactly what he was. And each night he’d come home depressed – I understood that, I was the same myself. But he refused to share it. He’d eat, mostly in silence, and head out to the taverna.
‘Stavros, do something,’ I’d try to encourage him.
‘What something?’ he’d say.
‘Anything. Set up your own gym. Start a soccer team. Talk to the school about it. Do something –’
‘What, here?’
‘Why not?’
And for a week or so his spirits would lift, and he’d go about, walking the streets of the village, his hands in his pockets, his eyes half shut and whistling through his teeth, as though he had a secret. But then, just as quickly his mood would fall away again because he could see no way of getting anything started. I even suggested going back to Sydney – now Laura was mine – but he wouldn’t hear of that either. He’d settled somehow for what was here, perhaps for what he’d been before he came to Australia. He’d lost all confidence, in himself, in me. And I was full of guilt because I knew it was me who was injuring him. Dimitros was one joy in this time. He came to see us once a month, and I could walk with him – a brother.
‘You are not happy,’ he’d say, without asking. ‘I will make you laugh.’
Stavros, I thought, had once made me laugh.
Dimitros had the spirit, the simple wit of a child. I loved our walks, he made me laugh. But then he began to come more often, it became difficult, Mama Vassilopoulos cleared her throat, and Stavros wouldn’t let him come again. And then all I had again were Laura, and the sea. Together they saved my life.
By now Stavros and I scarcely bothered w
ith sex. Either he was uninterested or, when occasionally he was, he stank so much of retsina and the smoke of the taverna that I wasn’t. We quarrelled, cursed one another – twice he struck me and I struck him back and clawed his face. Mama Vassilopoulos bathed the scratches, and shook her head, and – after the second time – Stavros took to sleeping in the middle room, Dimitros’ old room, between Mama’s and mine. He was torn, I think, and if he was going to make any move at all, I realized, it would not be towards me. Seeing this, I was less depressed for myself than sad for him, and for what I’d done to his life. And after another year of this half-death, half-life, we found we could begin to talk about it, and even about my going back. The struggle would be over Laura. But, I told him, I would never leave – he would never be free of me – without her.
I began to work. There was an army training base just outside the city, and three mornings a week now I was the one who took the bus and then the train, and went for the day to work. The army was modernizing for NATO, and the trainee officers were required to speak and to read English before they could command other troops. I was hired as soon as I applied, being qualified – but, much more importantly, being local and therefore cheap. The English school at the base was staffed from Britain – mainly British Council and other expats – and hiring a local meant none of the trouble of selecting, accommodating and paying British wages and expenses. But the money – given what we’d had to make do with for four years – was liberating. Two-thirds of what I earned, I gave straight to Stavros, hoping, even now, that he would find the energy, the imagination, to use it. He pissed it away against the wall of the taverna. I was sad at that, but that was his life now. The other third accumulated in a bank in the city, for Laura and me. For fares, for resettlement. For going home to Australia. Mother would have given me the money, of course, but that would have been a debt for life.
