Hard Word

by John Clanchy

  Work broke my depression, brought me back to life. Just having something to do – even though the students were hopeless, country boys plucked from the local towns to make up the numbers – that, and company, intelligent, cheerful, two other women teachers like myself, and Rex, quintessentially British, clever, disappointed – he’d come out to Greece expecting golden boys, not bumpkins, unwashed, with pimples on their chins – but such funny company, all of this brought me back to life. Mordant, ironic, Rex risked the sack every day:

  ‘Instructor, instructor,’ one of the boys would demand. ‘What is this? On womans, what is this?’

  Preparing materials in the room next to Rex’s class I’d peer round the door to see what was going on. This was the only time the boys came alive – when anything to do with sex was involved. They were totally repressed, by their families, by the church, the State, and now by army. And so, despite all their swagger and their obsession with sex, they were still amazingly ignorant at the same time. Like Stavros, in fact, who simply thought of his penis as a pile driver with a miniature atomic blissbomb on its end. By my second day of classes I’d learnt to wear mid-length skirts, so that the students wouldn’t spend the entire class retrieving dropped pencils from the floor. Whenever they could, they’d turn the conversation in class to issues of sex, no matter how remote. This was, I recognized, partly boredom with grammar and rules, with the frustrations of English, and partly the mischief of boys. But, beyond that, it was also a sad and genuine longing to know. They loved to hear the words – thighs, breasts … Even arms and legs would warm them on a cold day. I saw little harm or malice in it. Towards me, anyway. But Rex was a different matter.

  ‘What this, instructor?’ the boy repeated to Rex on this particular day. Through the crack of the door, I saw the boy had both hands inverted on his chest, the fingers spread like cones over his pectorals, his rounded wrists facing Rex. ‘On womans,’ he said, ‘what this?’

  ‘That?’ said Rex. They suspected him, they sensed his ambivalence towards them. They always had more questions of this sort for him than any of the rest of us. It was dangerous for Rex, though you’d never have known it. ‘That, young man,’ he said, ‘is arthritis.’

  ‘Arthritis –?’

  Rex got closer and closer to being reported.

  ‘Instructor?’ One of the boys had brought an English newspaper to class. ‘What this mean, what this birth defect?’

  There was a pause. Rex looked tired, hung over. For one second, though, his eyes lit up.

  ‘Ask your parents,’ he said.

  The inevitable occurred – though it wasn’t the complaint and dismissal we’d long expected. It happened off-base one weekend, at a taverna on the Piraeus docks where Rex had gone cruising. Drunk, he’d chosen the wrong bar, the wrong night. The wrong boy. A brawl had erupted. Rex was beaten up, his nose and cheekbone smashed with a barstool. He was lucky not to have been knifed. The Army and the Council covered, and he was shipped home.

  ‘Don’t be sad, Mirry,’ he said when I visited him in hospital. ‘We’ve had some good laughs, haven’t we?’

  But I was sad. He was a friend, one of only two males in the English school, and he’d made me laugh so hard sometimes I imagined I was the one who’d be sent home injured. He was a man, I liked him very much, and never once did his dick get in the way. Somehow – though I didn’t understand it then – all of that fitted together.

  Laura had her own separate life with Stavros and Mama Vassilopoulos, especially in the last two years when I was away so much, working in the city. I had at least – despite whatever other injury I had done them – maintained enough generosity to be glad about that, especially for Stavros. And in the end, I think it was this, my willingness to let her go to them, enjoy being separate with them, together with my promise that I would do the same again, later, when she was older – if that was what she wanted – that swung them to let me go. And Laura with me.

  ‘Well, Eleni,’ I say. Are you ready to read your story?’

  Eleni intrigues me. I’ve always skirted around the subject of Greece with her, because for me it carries such echoes of pain and sadness. Unlike poor Theo Kostas, I cannot place her, not by looks nor by accent. The North, obviously – one has only to look at her, the angularity of her features, the boniness of her face, the questing expression of the icon – to tell that. But where exactly, I have no idea. Just as I have no idea of her age. Twenty-seven? Her hair is jet enough for that, undyed, yet not a strand of grey. But her face, and the heaviness of her hips – has she had children? – say older. Thirty-seven? Forty? There is something very hard to catch about her. Her clothes are always neat, faultlessly pressed but practical, unfashionable. Sensible shoes on her feet. The only decoration of any kind she wears is a small silver cross at her throat. It’s shaped like an ankh with a loop in place of the upper limb. She has something – an air – I know I should recognize, but can’t. She’s neither beautiful, nor plain, and certainly not serene – in fact beside some of the Asian girls, she always looks slightly troubled, though again not in a frowning or worried way but always giving this sense of being in search of something. Questing is the closest I can come. She has no special friends in the class, though she often teams up, in work pairs or at any social event, with Hafize, the Turk, a combination one wouldn’t necessarily have picked.

  ‘Yes,’ Eleni says now. ‘I am ready.’

  ‘Good. Just take it easily then, and read at your own pace. It doesn’t matter how slowly you go. Listen carefully now,’ I say to the others. ‘Listen to Eleni’s story, and think of a question you might ask her at the end.’

  ‘I will tell you,’ Eleni begins, ‘my story today about my family, mainly about my mother.

  ‘My father left our home and the village and went to work in America when I was four. My mother and I stayed at the small farm we had, just outside Kozani, and we earned our living by selling goat’s milk, and some eggs and vegetables to the convent. For two years my father sent money from America every month and occasionally he wrote and told us where he was working – he was a butcher, and he worked in the slaughterhouses in the big cities, first in Chicago, then in Philadelphia and New York. I would collect the stamps off his letters, in fact I still have them today – the stamps and my mother’s and father’s wedding photograph. I have brought it with me here today. After that, he hardly wrote at all, and gradually he stopped sending money. Then a whole year went by and we did not hear from him at all. Mama said he had probably started a new family in America, but half the village was like that and we were happy enough, just the two of us together. Still she prayed for him every day.

  ‘Later, when I finished school, I worked half of each day at home, helping Mama with the animals and the garden in the morning, and in the afternoons I worked in the convent hospital, carrying and cleaning. By then I knew many of the nuns well, and they knew me. They spoiled me with special cakes and sweets they made especially for me, and I was happy there. When Mama got sick, some of the nuns came, in secret, in veils, to see her, even though they’d never left the convent for years. When Mama is taken from you, they said after that visit, you must come to us.

  ‘What happened to Mama was, she lost her mind. I don’t mean she went mad or crazy or that she raved and screamed or cursed Christ like some of the nuns I washed and nursed in the convent hospital. I mean her mind cleared, and she lost it. Her memory was stripped from her, and often she did not even know who I was, though we had lived every day together all my life. One by one her memories went, until she was like the clear spirit of a child again. She was very happy. Right at the end she did not even know who she was – she would look for hours in a mirror she kept in the pocket of her skirt, and sometimes point one finger at her image in it. Most of the day, if it was warm enough, she sat in the field behind the house with the goats and talked to them. The goats ate the corn out of her hands or her lap and licked her face. She made no effort to push them away.

  ‘When sh
e died, I entered one of the daughter-houses of the convent. I spent four years there. The life was strict, but the order was only half-closed and I still worked during the day in the convent hospital. Some nights I was so exhausted, not just from my work, but from fasting and denial and meditation, that I fell asleep and sometimes did not wake for the midnight prayer. I was less at peace there with Mama gone, and in four years I had still only put my foot on the lowest rungs of the Ladder. The top four rungs – Stillness, Prayer, Dispassion, Love – seemed so far above my head, I did not think I would ever see them, let alone have any chance of reaching them. And of these four, it was not actually Love I found that I longed for – though it should have been – but Stillness, esychia. If only, I thought, I could attain that, esychia – Stillness – silence, peace, I would be satisfied.

  ‘Mother Theodora, the head of our convent, had ascended to the very top rung of the Ladder. She was famous for her holiness, not just in the region but in every part of the nation itself. The other nuns would secretly lie face down behind the low walls of the cloisters as Mother Theodora meditated and walked, praying that the shadow of her grace might fall upon them. And yet, on her death-bed, when the older nuns gathered around her and pressed their claims and questions upon her – and I, even I, was there, nursing her to her end – ‘‘Tell us, sister,’’ they whispered, ‘‘what have you seen? Has the way been opened to you? Have you looked Christ in the face?’’ – because she should have. This was Climacus’ promise. That those who ascended to the top rung of the Ladder of Divine Ascent would find Christ, the Bridegroom, waiting, arms spread to greet them, draw them up to Him – yet, on her death-bed, our Mother, most blessed of all, was dejected and trembling and full of doubt: ‘‘Will my soul,’’ she cried, ‘‘pass through the impassable water of the spirits of the air?’’ And when I looked at the nuns’ faces, the faces of those who ascended in her steps, I saw that some of them wept, and some were full of terror.

  ‘After Mother Theodora’s death, I left the Order and came here, to Australia, where I know no one either. And where I wonder still why Christ’s charisma, His Divine Grace, should have been given to my mother, who could not even read or write, and not to my Mother in spirit, who had given her whole life to Christ, and yet at the end He had not come to receive her. Here in the hospice where I work, I still follow this question. I see my patients, in the instant of passing, I see the light that sometimes comes into their faces, and I ask: ‘‘What do you see, sister? Brother? Has the way been opened to you? Have you looked Christ in the face?’’

  ‘And it is true, I have found, that those who are most simple, those who, like my mother, have lost their minds, they slip away, in Stillness, while others are still angry and troubled and grieved – looking back, even as they go. And I pray to Christ to make me a child again.

  ‘This is my story.’

  ‘Thank you, Eleni,’ I say, and then wait for the clapping to stop. Already two hands are rising with questions, but for the moment I pretend I cannot see them.

  ‘Eleni,’ I say, not waiting for anyone else. ‘When your mother … lost her mind, when she forgot everything and did not even know who you were, how did you feel, what did it make you feel?’

  ‘I feel like …’ she starts, and I’m so transfixed and fearful about what she might say that I do not even intervene to correct her grammar. ‘I feel,’ she says again, searching for her words, ‘like my mother is vanishing in front of my eyes. And me with her …’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘We have lived together, my mother and me, every day of my life. I learn about myself through my mother. She knows some things about me that no one else ever knows. When she forgets them, they are gone, and that part of me vanishes with them. It is hard to explain … It is like this. When her memory goes, my mother returns to her own childhood. She lives there. But I am not even alive then. It is before I am born, so I stop to exist. She does not know me. Do you see?’

  ‘Yes,’ I say. ‘Yes, I do. Thank you, Eleni.’

  There are more questions, harmless ones about Greece, about life in the convent, about the Greek hospice she works at in Sydney. Time passes, and I call a halt.

  ‘Now don’t forget,’ I tell them as they prepare to leave. ‘Saturday at twelve.’

  ‘Aussie barbecue –’ Hafize says.

  ‘Yes. You all have a map, everyone has transport. Your husbands can stay home for once and cook for the children –’

  ‘Yes,’ one of them cries. ‘It will do him good.’

  ‘Is there anyone,’ I say, ‘who still has a problem – with anything at all? With transport? Babies – no one here has a baby? No, no,’ I say to Njala, my Lebanese student, who is six months pregnant. ‘I meant one that is already born.’

  ‘One that is out,’ Maria says, with gestures, and even the Asian girls laugh before they can get their hands up to cover their mouths.

  There is still one hand up.

  ‘Yes, Sorathy?’ I say. Her permissions have been approved – a cultural event, sponsored by the college – her transport arranged. ‘What is your problem?’

  ‘I can bring my daughter?’ she says.

  And, for once, at long last, I manage it. I don’t let my jaw drop. I don’t say, Daughter? But this is the first we’ve heard anything about any daughter, or We didn’t even know you were married … I’m almost proud to hear the calmness in the echo of my own voice as I ask:

  ‘How old is your daughter, Sorathy?’

  ‘She nearly two years.’

  ‘I can’t see any reason she shouldn’t come,’ I say. ‘We’d all love to meet her, wouldn’t we?’

  ‘Yes, oh, yes,’ they say, over the top of one another. ‘What is her name?’

  ‘She is My Huoy,’ Sorathy says, blushing now. ‘My mean beautiful, and Huoy mean flower.’

  How on earth, I’m wondering as I listen to this, has Sorathy got a daughter of nearly two if she’s been in detention in Port Headland for eighteen months, and then another year here in Sydney. And My Huoy –? It sounds more Chinese than Khmer.

  Later, as the class drifts out, I can’t stop myself from saying to Kossamak, the other Cambodian student, ‘I didn’t know Sorathy had a daughter?’

  Kossamak looks up at me and then lets her eyes travel around the empty classroom. ‘Sorathy,’ she says, ‘she not take her daughter out.’

  ‘Of detention, you mean? She lives in the Detention Centre with Sorathy?’

  ‘That’s right. She shame.’

  ‘She shouldn’t be,’ I say, simply to fill a space. ‘Why should she be ashamed of her daughter?’

  ‘Daughter have wrong eye,’ Kossamak says.

  ‘Wrong eye?’ I say, feeling totally lost.

  ‘Chinoise,’ Kossamak says. ‘She get her baby in South China Sea. From pirate.’

  ‘Oh, I see.’ And, stunned, I don’t even think of correcting her get to got. Especially when gat seems more appropriate anyway.

  ‘Eye wrong,’ Kossamak says again, pointing to her own perfectly oval eye. ‘Sorathy baby have fold here,’ she says. ‘Everyone know she Chinese or Vietnamienne, not Khmer baby at all. Not a boy,’ she adds. As though that might just have compensated.

  ‘Still, a child …’ I just manage, in my inadequate English. While she stands, as if expecting something more.

  Laura

  The movie was wonderful, and sad and funny and everything, and by the interval Philip was already feeling like Shakespeare and had fallen in love with Gwyneth Paltrow who was so beautiful I didn’t mind, and anyway after that he held my hand and I liked that, and I was glad he didn’t do it for the whole movie because your hand gets all sticky and then gets pins and needles and nearly falls off, but you don’t know whether to tell the person or just pull your hand away and stretch it secretly to get the blood back, which they might think is rude, or that you don’t like them. Anyway I was glad he held it after he’d said he liked Gwenyth Paltrow so much and not before, because I’m not sure ho
w I would have felt then. Philip was really nice and I like him a lot, and he was funny as well – the things he whispered in the film – which took a while to get used to because at school you usually only see him being serious and saying ‘School! ’ and that, and nodding while Mr Jackson, the Principal, talks to him for six or seven hours after assembly while the rest of us file out of the hall.

  After the movie we came home and had coffee just like Mum said, and it wasn’t a problem at all, and everyone laughed when I said ‘Philip, this is Philip,’ and Philip – my Philip – said later, ‘Your mum’s really pretty.’ And I could see he meant it and wasn’t just sucking up or anything, and I liked that, and I liked it even more when he said, ‘Like you, Laura.’

  ‘But not really like you,’ he said afterwards, ‘because you’re so dark and your Mum’s so fair and she has those strange eyes.’

  ‘They’re green,’ I told him, because sometimes it’s hard to tell with fluorescent lights, and he said he didn’t think he’d ever met anyone with green eyes. ‘But sometimes they’re more yellowy,’ I said, ‘depending on the light.’ And he said some people did that now with contacts, but I told him Mum’s were real.

  Mum and Philip left us after we had coffee, and we watched the late-night movie on TV – it was Casablanca – and I think they were watching it too because it’s a favourite of Mum’s, but in their bedroom, so we wouldn’t have to talk to them all the time and feel we were being supervised. Anyway, by halfway through the movie, Philip was falling for Ingrid Bergman and had forgotten all about Gwenyth Paltrow even though he was in love with her an hour before and Ingrid Bergman was only in black and white and lived last century, and I was starting to think Philip was the sort of person who would fall in love with anyone who was pretty, but then I realized I thought Humphrey Bogart was such a spunk and he’d been dead for centuries and centuries, and I stopped worrying.