The Jesus Man

by Christos Tsiolkas

  —Where were you today?

  Artie sat down and looked first at his Nonna, then at his father; Her face told him nothing.

  —Perth.

  —What the hell for?

  —I took Nonna to church.

  —What church? The Papa was sponging underneath his arms. His gaze was firm on his son.

  —Don’t know.

  —Bloody Greek, eh?

  —Yes, Greek.

  Papa turned on the old woman.

  —Shut up, you cow.

  —You shut up.

  Everyone looked at Mama, even Johnny was startled by her raising her voice at Papa. And, immediately aware of her error, she softened her voice.

  —She wanted to light a candle, for her brother. Leave her be.

  Papa stared hard at his wife. She slowly walked over, touched his cheek. He smiled and began whistling.

  —Not my problem. It’s the boy who had his day wasted.

  Papa put on a clean shirt, prepared for a night of drinking. He left and the whole house seemed to breathe more contently, to settle peacefully with the setting sun.

  Sleep was shattered by the sound of a bashing door, the loud curses of the Papa. Joseph sprung out of bed and moved to the door.

  —What’s happening? whispered Artie.

  —Dunno.

  They listened.

  The Papa was screaming for the Nonna to rise. Then he was screaming for Artie. The youth looked nervously at his older brother. Joseph opened the door and they walked into the hall.

  The Papa, drunk, a belt in his hand was standing over the tumbled body of the Nonna. Mama was crying at the old woman’s side.

  —Please Joseph, please. Stop.

  —Papa?

  Artie felt the blow, his face was fire; he fell across the wall.

  —Where did you go today?

  —To Perth.

  —Where else?

  —Nowhere.

  —Who did you see?

  Artie hesitated.

  —Who did you fucking see?

  —No-one, he screamed back. Another blow. He could hear Sophia and Therese sobbing. In the front room, Johnny was howling.

  —That’s not what O’Malley told me tonight. He told me my son, and Papa spat, he told me he saw my son drinking with the abos in a park in Perth.

  —I didn’t.

  —Don’t lie, you fucking cunt. Italian.

  —Stop, screamed the Nonna. Papa kept his eyes on Artie.

  —To your room, he ordered. Artie did as he was told. The Papa turned to the old woman.

  —You did this to him, right, you hurt him. He spat on her. If you ever see any of those filthy black bastards again, I’m going to skin you alive. ‘Cause that’s what those abos deserve and you’re no fucking better. He tugged violently at her hair, snapping her head forward.

  —You don’t poison my son. I’m not going to let you.

  He pushed her away. She fell moaning on her daughter.

  —Understand? he ordered in Italian.

  —Understand! he repeated when she did not reply.

  —I understand.

  He walked out and the old woman crumbled in her chair. The Mama dropped to her knees shuddering. There were three sounds: the lash that whistled then cracked as it tore at flesh; the exertions of Papa’s breath; the sobbing of the frightened girls. The Nonna clenched her fists, fear had collapsed her face.

  —Stop him! My God, stop him!

  —Be quiet, her daughter shouted. This is all your fault!

  Eventually the hatred stopped. The Papa walked into the kitchen, his hair wet, his hands shaking. Two drops of blood on his shirt. He was already doubting his virulence, shaken by his son’s ferocious will not to collapse. Artie had not made a sound. Nonna climbed to her feet, pushed hard past him and ran into the boys’ bedroom.

  Joseph was under the covers, looking across to his younger brother who was staring hard into the dark through the window. The blood was a trickle from Artie’s nose to his chin. The Nonna approached him, her hands in prayer, crying softly. She curled herself around him and began a wailing.

  She fell on her knees and apologised. She screamed her apology and it was in Greek and it was in English, it was Italian and it was Turkish. There was just the word, an infinite repeating.

  Sorry, my Thanassi, I’m sorry.

  But Artie was not in the room. He was above it, watching the tiny brother and the distraught Nonna. Artie flew up into the ceiling, and through, through into the sky. And in the sky he was travelling across the ocean, he was flying, driving a chariot and he was no longer Artie and this was not his bed and this was not his room and this was not his people. This was not his home.

  He left Western Australia that year, left his family and his apprenticeship. He took his Nonna with him. They travelled across the desert and he found work in Port Augusta. But there too, a port town, blackfellas on the street, he was reminded too much of Fremantle. They moved further east, to Horsham, to Ballarat. There he buried his Nonna and sent a telegram home. It was only himself and a priest at the funeral. He ordered a simple white cross, the words—her name—in Greek. As her body descended to earth, around him the wind and the birds, he found himself at last alone. You were wrong, Nonna, he prayed, there is no God. And Jesus was just a man who wept and pissed and shat and came. Just like me, Nonna. It was me, not God, not Jesus, not the Virgin, it was me who loved you, Nonna. He shamed himself with the force of his grief. He drank himself into a stupor, into unconsciousness that night.

  Years later, in Melbourne, he was invited to a barbecue and Maria’s soft beauty reminded him of loss and reminded him of the joy he had felt in escaping, in fleeing, in taking his Nonna away from the harshness of his Papa’s house. He promised Maria his protection, the only gift he knew to offer. And he did not turn back on his word. He changed his name back to Stefano—at Maria’s insistence. He filled his home with Greeks, offered a room to Spiro and to Yiota so that Maria would not be alone; he built her a new house in the suburbs, nursed her through the terror when the colonels took over Greece, her father thrown into prison. He did not wince, did not reject her when she began to scorn him and lash out at him, as she slowly realised, her children now Australian, she could never again return to Greece. And he never struck her once. Not once. Maria, Dominic, Thomas and Luigi. His grandchildren. They—not Greece, not Italy or Australia—they were the only home he wished to know.

  He returned to Fremantle twice, each time to assist in burying one of his parents. His duty done, his respect shown, he returned to Melbourne, returned to a city where he had a wife and he had children, where there was laughter and where there was hope. Where there was no desert and no lazy ocean; no black bitches to disturb your dreams.

  Greece, 1991

  The first thing Maria did on arriving at the ancestral birthplace of her father’s people, far up in the eastern mountains of Greek Macedonia, was to climb off the bus, get on her knees and crawl to the Church of the Prophet Elijah. The small church, tiny and carefully tended by the few remaining old women in the village, was perched high among the poplars, two kilometres above the village square. Maria made the journey supported by grieving, the wailing and the tears of her sisters and her cousins. Behind them all walked her frightened youngest son. Lou, on seeing his mother’s knees shredded and weeping blood, himself began to cry and attempted to stop this insane work. But he was ordered away by his mother. She had made this journey, after decades, to repent of her sins. And to plead with her God that her son’s suicide, his sins, would not deny him God’s grace.

  —Fuck God, is all that Artie said when both the Churches, the Catholic and the Orthodox, refused to bury his son. We don’t need those fucking poofter priests.

  But for Maria the knowledge of her son’s eternal loneliness filled her with bitter agony and shame. A trail of blood led up to the church on the mountain. Through this sacrifice she hoped to make a bargain with heaven.

  Lou, who cared nothing for eterni
ty, who only understood that his brother no longer existed, thought his mother, the grim priest, the weeping women, he thought all of them mad. Athens had shocked him with its thundering noise and sweating heat. This medieval torture only accentuated his difference.

  Alone, silent in the back of the church, he refused to pray. His mother was spread on the stone floor. A white-bearded old man stared down gloomy from the icons. Lou concentrated on the rhythm of the chant, not understanding a word. He was the one person, apart from the priest, not crying. Lou was beginning to understand that he might not be European.

  Lou was happiest when he was alone with his giagia. Only from her did he sense respect. For his cousins he was nothing but an Amerikanaki, a faux American, without a point of view and too immersed in pop culture. As for his uncles and his aunts, they all sniggered at the atrocity of his Greek. He slipped into silence and into observation. Only his grandmother listened to him. They spoke a language that was half gesture and half sound. The ideas and emotions conveyed had, by necessity, to be simple, not abstract. The cousins offered complicated theories and philosophies as to the reason for the war on their northern border. His giagia, remembering the civil war she had lived through, only said, My child, my child, war is always bad.

  And Lou, who had spent a lifetime witnessing the sterility of the slaughter on the television news, could only agree.

  He had not been prepared for Greece. That he now understood. The Athenians described their city as chaos, and the word in Greek was pronounced house. This made perfect sense to Lou. He discovered an insistent beat emerging from the cacophony.

  His mother warned him to cover the tattoo on his arm, but Lou refused to acquiesce to her ideas of shame and honour. She pointed to his flesh, the golden snake wrapped around his arm. What will people say?

  —I don’t give a fuck what people say.

  His vehement opposition to propriety had become an ideal after the death of his brother.

  He wore the tattoo, openly, proudly, throughout Greece.

  They did not spend a night in the village. The family had long disbanded, moved across the country and across continents. Only a few old people remained, those abandoned by kin. They eyed Lou suspiciously. He had learnt quickly, in Athens, that a smile and the beauty of his young face would appease their distaste for his foreignness, but the madness of his mother’s flagellation had left him ill-humoured, even hateful, towards the stoic archaic villagers. He was glad to pile back in the bus, with his mother and relatives, and leave the Church of the Prophet Elijah behind.

  They stopped in Thessaloniki and in this city Lou first experienced the joy of travelling. He was entranced by the city’s history and he wandered up to the castle overlooking the bay, thinking how beautiful it was. He drank ouzo and watched the people. He forgot the pain of witnessing his mother’s sacrifice.

  He detested her commitment to religion. He doubted it was faith. He had always suspected that her piety was only an attempt to order the extremities of exile, a repetition of ritual that in moments made her forget the dislocations wreaked on her soul by migration. Since Tommy’s death, the rituals had become imperative.

  —House, he whispered to the Thessalonikan night. Chaos music.

  Somewhere, in a cafe below, a radio was playing REM’s ‘Losing My Religion’. In competition was the mellifluous sensuality of ‘Fool’s Gold’. If he closed his eyes, he could still be in Australia, on a couch, at a party. He wished he was stoned. When he returned to Athens he would find the courage to ask his cousins where to score.

  Maria and Lou argued when he refused to go back to Athens with her.

  —I want to travel a bit, on my own.

  They argued but he won. He knew that because Maria could not expunge a sense of guilt over her son’s suicide, a guilt Lou understood, she was no longer prepared to battle her children as viciously, with that fierce determination she had when they were younger. Tommy’s death had finally eradicated her youth. Not only through the greying of her hair, the encroachment of wrinkles on her still vibrant face, but through an understanding of the immensity and scale of the past she had lived.

  —Go, she said finally and turned away. Lou grabbed her and kissed her neck softly. He did not wish to hurt her. But he felt no compulsion to do her bidding any more. Maybe he never did. The Greek youths around him were certainly more sophisticated, more erudite, more confident than those he knew back home. But they were still shadowed, wherever they went, whoever they were with, by family. Lou loved his family without commitment. He loved and he knew he was loved. He could see no reason to obey.

  He wanted to visit the island of Cos, where his great-grandmother came from. Maria had returned to Greece to seek the solace and forgiveness of the saints. Lou, not a believer, was seeking an answer to Tommy’s extinction in the stories of the past.

  On the day of Tommy’s funeral, a tall slowly weeping elm at the cemetery had been studded with the thick black shadows of the crow. The birds had observed the burial. All the Stefano men had noticed. Artie and Dominic were overwhelmed by a shattering fury. Not Lou. He stared at the birds, glad for their distraction. The descent of the coffin into the soil sickened him. Maggots and worms, decomposition. The knowledge of the castrated Tommy. Lou’s eyes were wet. The tree, the birds, the sky, everything was ashimmer.

  Maria too had noticed the crows and for the first time she too experienced a terror. She mentioned it, later, sitting crying in her chair, her face a darkness beneath the veil.

  —The crows, did you see them?

  The men shuffled uneasily. She looked straight at her husband.

  —See them? she insisted.

  Artie nodded.

  Maria groaned and fell to more loud crying. Lou stood up, weaved past the mourners, walked to the shop. A black suit, black tie. The clothes, the grief, the sociality of burial, all this had made him weary. The short walk he had taken around the block, simply passing rows of brick veneer and hedge, was a respite. He had felt almost hippy. There had been a moment when it was happiness, a drizzle on his face, the smell of lawn. But as soon as he’d experienced the joy, he’d remembered the day. And again all there was was Tommy.

  Greece, never having known Tommy, felt safe. Lou watched a drunk girl take off her slippers, run up the steps to the top of the castle. She looked down and grinned at him. He grinned back. She ran after her boyfriend, then turned once more. Lou looked away.

  After the funeral, when they were all back home, Eva had prepared a light meal. Maria had refused to eat. Her daughter-in-law slipped a pill into her coffee and the Valium soon took effect. Artie put her to bed, returned, and they put on the television; the children laughed at the animation and it was a relief.

  Dominic hugged his brother tight, kissed the top of his head. Lou wished to sink into him. They pulled apart. Dom was crying. Lou hurt to see the tears, a rare vulnerability. Eva was shaking as she kissed him goodbye. The television was throwing harsh light through the room. Lou was alone with his father.

  —Dad. A pause. Dad, are you all right?

  Artie was staring at the motion of light on the TV screen. He was thinking of his dead son, the crisp almost metallic inviolability of the corpse. He heard Lou repeat his question.

  —Just thinking about things, Lou.

  —Mum okay?

  —Yeah. She’s sleeping.

  Lou flicked the buttons on the remote. He settled on a documentary: wild carnivore birds attacking the maggoted hide of a zebra.

  —Your mum’s a strong woman, Lou. I’ve always known that. He leaned forwards in the armchair, towards his son. But we’ve got to look after her for a while. She doesn’t have anything else, Louie, it is just you kids.

  Lou realised that his father had been as shaken by Maria’s despair at the funeral as he had. His father spoke, and it was true, they were sharing the same thought. It scares me that she was babbling on about the crow bulishit, today. She’s always laughed at it before.

  —What is the crow, Dad?
Lou pushed another button. An American comedy—‘The Cosby Show’.

  —Turn it off! It was a harsh order, then Artie’s voice mellowed. Please Lou. Artie walked over to a shelf and picked up a small framed photograph. Lou turned down the volume on the TV but the images still played. His father handed him the photograph.

  —Your great-grandmother, Louie, she’s the one to ask about the crows.

  A scrap of black and white, a small woman, all in black. The hard sad face that had always alarmed Lou as a child. A stern face.

  —She looks so tough, Dad.

  —She had to be. Lou felt the love in his father’s voice—and the defensiveness. She had to be, son. She was just fifteen when she sailed from Turkey. And ended up in Kalgoorlie. Louie, you can’t imagine Kalgoorlie. A strip of two lousy streets in the middle of the desert, in the middle of fucking nowhere. Every kind of scum came to Kalgoorlie. My grandfather came to find gold.

  Lou glanced at the advertisements, the cheerful colours of the television.

  —They say that my grandfather had a previous wife, that he killed her.

  Lou swung round.

  —I don’t know if that’s true, Louie. My Mama says it isn’t true and I could never ask my Papa. But Nonna knew. She told me that this dead woman was the crow. Her husband told her nothing, but she said that from her wedding night the crow would not leave her alone. She says the blackfellas told her. Told her that her husband had killed their sister.

  —And she believed them?

  —Nonna hated my grandfather. Artie took the photograph from his son. He was smiling.

  —Nonna was always friendly with the blacks. My father hated that. His smile vanished. He stood up. I’m going to bed, Louie.

  Father and son hugged, holding on tight to one another. Lou could hear tears in his father’s voice and he did not dare glance up at him.