Crying Blue Murder (MIRA)

by Paul Johnston

  Mavros had been waiting for the question. ‘I’m a writer,’ he replied. He’d used the lie in the past. It was an easy one to carry off because he knew enough about the business from his mother, and he’d met enough writers to last him a lifetime.

  ‘What do you write?’

  ‘Stories, novels.’

  ‘Anything translated into Greek? Anything I would have heard of?’

  ‘No to both questions,’ he said. ‘I’m not one of those famous writers you read about in the newspapers, the ones who are on television and radio all the time. I’m a professional struggler.’

  The archaeologist laughed. ‘To struggle is good, comrade. I was a communist when I was young, so I learned that lesson well.’

  Mavros’s throat went dry. Although he’d never had much to do with the communist youth organisations, Eleni was old enough to know about his father. She might even have been to the old family house in Neapolis. He changed the subject. ‘How do you get around on Trigono? Have you got a donkey?’

  Eleni looked disappointed at the direction in which he’d steered the conversation. ‘No, of course not. You don’t have to become a peasant to live on the island. I have a motorbike.’

  Mavros felt disappointed himself. He’d been hoping Trigono hadn’t been taken over by the two-wheeled contraptions that had done so much to ruin Athens, and so far he hadn’t seen many. The riders were probably keeping clear of the funerals.

  The noise of the street door opening and closing came down the corridor. Eleni sat up and glanced around as if she was suddenly searching for an alternative exit.

  Rena appeared, her head bowed. Mavros thought he heard a sob. She looked up and caught sight of him. A smile flickered across her lips but it died when she saw Eleni.

  ‘I hope you don’t mind,’ Mavros said. ‘I invited—’

  ‘My house is your house, Alex,’ Rena interrupted. She held her eyes on the archaeologist for a few moments and then nodded at her coldly. ‘So,’ she said in Greek. ‘What do you want here?’

  Eleni stood up, her cheeks reddening. ‘Excuse me, Alex,’ she said, avoiding the other woman’s eyes. ‘I don’t think I’m welcome in this house. Thanks for the camomile.’ She gave him a crooked smile. ‘Maybe I’ll see you at the Astrapi. I come in most nights.’ She walked towards the passageway, stepping round Rena when the house owner didn’t move. The door slammed after her.

  ‘Poutana,’ Rena said in a loud voice. Whore.

  Mavros went over to her. ‘Is there something wrong?’ he asked disingenuously. ‘I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have—’

  Rena raised a hand and took the black scarf from her head. ‘You don’t know…you didn’t know,’ she corrected herself, her brow furrowed. ‘That woman, she is not good. She makes…she makes sex with people she should not.’

  Mavros could see how disapproving Rena was. That probably explained the looks Eleni had got from the old women outside, as well as why she had hung back from entering the cemetery. He wondered if she’d been involved with the boy who had drowned.

  ‘Makes sex,’ Rena repeated, her face suddenly cracking into a smile. ‘I mean makes love.’ Then she gave a bitter laugh. ‘But I do not think she understands anything about love.’

  Mavros gathered up the cups and took the tray to the kitchen. So that was Eleni’s reputation, he thought. What was the widow Rena’s?

  She followed him and nudged him out of the way. ‘In my kitchen I do everything, Alex.’ She glanced at the tray. ‘You give her chamomili?’

  He nodded, embarrassed at having been caught looting her stores.

  ‘It’s all right,’ she assured him with a shy smile. ‘It is good for bad women.’

  ‘Rena?’ he asked as she started to run water over the cups. ‘What happened outside the cemetery? Why was the old woman you were with stopped from going in?’

  She gave him a questioning look then shook her head. ‘No, no, that is private business. You are xenos, stranger. You should not have come to the…what do you call it? Burial?’ She made a hash of the vowels.

  He nodded slowly at her. ‘No, you’re right, Rena. I shouldn’t,’ he said, turning and walking out of her kitchen.

  Before he was halfway across the courtyard her voice rang out. ‘But don’t worry, Alex,’ she said, smiling at him tentatively. ‘I forgive you.’ Her face turned stern again. ‘If you stay away from her.’

  Mavros shrugged and went into his room. So much for the simplicities of rural life. There seemed to be more happening on the small island than in most suburbs of Athens.

  Kyra Maro was sitting at the table in her front room, thin arms crossed and fingers digging into the cracked skin of her elbows. Rena had just left, after bringing her bread and bean soup before going to beautiful, lost Nafsika’s funeral. Maro didn’t feel able to follow the second procession, even though the dead girl’s family had never shown open hostility to her. She knew that everyone in the village preferred her to keep out of the way. The entire island would weep for Nafsika, given in marriage to the death spirit Charos rather than to a living bridegroom. She would hear the sighs and the bitter crying through the panels of her door. Soon Nafsika would be in the ground, covered by the black earth and close to the boy she had died with.

  My poor Yiango, she said to herself. You were a sweet child when you were little, but darkness came over you before the day of your death. Rena told me things about you that made me weep.

  The old woman went back to the scene at the cemetery gate, her brother Manolis barring the way with his arm raised, the empty sleeve of his best shirt dangling at his side. She should have known that he would keep her out, stop her from fulfilling her family obligation to Yiangos. Manolis was hard, he’d always been like that, even before the catastrophe that came over them during the war. He would never forget or forgive. And he’d made his son Lefteris in his own image, a wave-lashed island standing out among weaker men, his character formed of stone. Neither of them spoke much, but other people understood what they wanted from the will in their eyes and the set of their limbs. They were harsh men who allowed no leeway. Yiangos hadn’t been like that when he was a child; his mother, Popi, had managed to protect him. God knows at what cost to herself. The wretched woman often had bruises on her face and bald patches where hair had been ripped out of her scalp. But Lefteris had eventually brought Yiangos round. He worked on the boy’s softness and made him do exactly what he wanted. And what was Lefteris doing now? She’d heard the women talking under their breath. He wasn’t mourning his son. He was already preparing the trata that had brought death to Yiangos so that he wouldn’t miss any fishing when the autumn season began.

  ‘Ach, wretched family,’ she said aloud. ‘We have all been crushed by the bitter fate that has dogged us for decades, even the innocent young.’

  The old woman leaned forward and buried her face in her gnarled hands. In years past she had felt foolish about talking to herself, but she had little choice. Until Rena started looking after her she had been alone; for many years she had spent the evenings reading and educating herself because she had no company. Her family had thought she was flighty, even before they shunned her. She had always lived in her own world, kept her thoughts to herself and tried to lose her pain in the collections of poetry and folk tales she had devoured when she could still make out the letters.

  Maro looked down at the plate of fasoladha on the table. Rena was good to her. She didn’t really understand why. Perhaps it was because they were both outcasts. Rena suffered the sharp stares of the married women who suspected all widows of lusting after their husbands and sons, but that was the least of her problems. She had no real family on Trigono, she was a xeni, so maybe that was another reason why she had taken Maro on as a duty. God knows there could be no idea of gain in Rena’s mind. Maro had nothing except the contents of her tiny house and the few strips of stony ground on the slopes of Vigla that, for some reason, the widow had volunteered to work. Poor Rena, she thought. You should find yoursel
f a man, you should go back to your own island. Trigono will grind you in the mill as it does all who live here, native or foreign. Trigono is death to all human hopes.

  Maro stood up and walked unsteadily to the bedroom.

  ‘So, Manoli,’ she said quietly, remembering what her brother had called her outside the cemetery. ‘You think I’m a strigla. Maybe I am. In the folk tales strigles are old women who turn themselves into owls and drink the blood of helpless children. Not only that. Strigles can bring about the deaths of the unfortunate children’s parents. Do you really believe I could do that to your precious grandson Yiangos? Do you think I want to kill you and my own nephew, Lefteris? Maybe it would be better for everyone if I could. Because you are the guilty one, you are the one responsible for the pain that has fallen on this family.’

  She sank down on the bed, her eyes filled with tears. ‘What am I saying?’ she groaned. ‘They hate me but I don’t hate them. I should, after everything they’ve done to me as well as to the only two I ever really loved in my life. But hate doesn’t bring them back. The only thing that calls them, that keeps them with me, is the love that I still have for them.’

  Maro got down on her knees and pulled the box out from under the bed. She opened it and, moving her eyes constantly to the photograph in the icon niche, she lifted out the blackened skull. Inaudible words were streaming from her lips, tears running down her wrinkled cheeks. Then she reached over to the small bedside cabinet and picked up a small wooden box. She placed the small shrivelled objects she took from it carefully around the skull in a circle.

  And waited patiently for the pomegranate seeds that in ancient times had been sacred to Persephone, Queen of the Underworld, to bring her beloved ones back across the river of lamentation.

  Mavros didn’t want to be in the village while the second funeral took place. Rena was looking so down that he kept his questions about Rosa Ozal to himself. Eleni’s mention of the Kambos, the inland plain, and the grandeur of the southern massif had piqued his curiosity. He wanted to explore the island, as well as start earning Deniz Ozal’s fee— he had rung his bank and confirmed the transfer of funds. According to the guidebook there was an asphalt road that ran down the east coast for six kilometres to the beach resort of Ayia Marina. He didn’t like the look of the hotel blocks and tourist cafés in the photos, but it was possible that Rosa Ozal had worse taste than he had, so he decided to start the search for her there. If she’d come back to the island, maybe she had her reasons for staying outside the village this time. He was pretty sure that there would be some staff on duty despite the funerals. He exchanged jeans for shorts, noticing how white his legs were beneath the hairs, and went outside.

  About twenty metres beyond Rena’s house there was a small yard enclosed by a low wall, a new stone-built box of a building to the rear. Through the leaves of a well-watered fig tree, Mavros could see an engraved plaque stating that the Public Library of Trigono, built with a generous donation from Panos Theocharis, had been opened by the local prefect a couple of months earlier. He was about to walk on when it occurred to him that he might find books of local interest there. Going up the smooth marble steps, he remembered what the villagers were caught up in. The library was unlikely to be open when everyone was attending the funerals. Then he saw the key in the door.

  The interior of the building was cool because of the thick walls and the closed shutters. Turning on the light, Mavros looked round the sparsely filled shelves. Either the local people were avid borrowers or funds had run out. There were more children’s books visible than adults’. Someone had taken the setting up of the library seriously as there were handwritten labels on the ends of each shelf stating the subject matter. Although there was a section marked ‘Local History and Culture’, the only book in it was a lavishly printed study of Trigono’s churches published by the diocese on Paros. He put it back after a few seconds, the air of devotion that rose from the volume stifling him.

  There was a pair of rectangular wooden boxes on a table under the window, the word ‘Catalogue’ written in red on their upper surfaces. One series of cards classified the library’s books by author name and the other by subject. There were four other books in the ‘Local History and Culture’ section, all in Greek, their titles, authors and publication details neatly inscribed. Three were religious studies concerning the island’s experience of the Byzantine, Venetian and Ottoman empires, but it was the last one which caught his attention. It was entitled Trigono 1941-1943: Endurance and Resistance, written and apparently self-published by one Andhreas S. Vlastos of Paros in 1999. According to the card there were six copies of the book in the library. Either it was very popular or the catalogue was wrong, as it was conspicuous by its absence from the shelves. Mavros glanced around for a register of loans. There was no card or digital strip in the book he’d looked at so presumably the librarian kept a handwritten record. He caught sight of a leather-bound book on a shelf by the door and went over. Running his finger down the pages, he soon ascertained that no one had borrowed the book. He twitched his head in irritation. The war memorial with the name erased from it had piqued his curiosity. He noted down the details of the Parian author’s book then put the register back and went outside, telling himself to stick to the job in hand.

  The problem was that it was now past midday and the sun was blazing down. Walking six kilometres in this heat was the kind of thing that only demented foreigners did, especially as the light wind was blowing on to the far side of Trigono. He wondered if there would be a bus. A quick perusal of the roughly painted sign at the parking space on the outskirts of the village told him that he had a two-hour wait, and even then he wasn’t convinced. His experience on Zakynthos had taught him to beware all signs concerning transport even under normal circumstances, when there wasn’t potential disruption by general mourning. There was a car and bike hire place at the end of the track that led to the Bar Astrapi, but it was closed.

  Mavros decided to try hitching. The road snaked away into the haze, its black strip separated from the sea by rocky uncultivated land and, about fifty metres to his left, by the dusty tamarisks that marked the edge of the beach. After a few minutes he came to a junction with a signpost pointing towards ‘Psili Ammos Beach—Rooms, Bar and Souvlaki House’. He made a cross on the margin of his map to remind himself to show Rosa’s photo there on the way back and kept going. So far not a single car or motorbike, not even a donkey, had passed in either direction.

  The southern hills rose up sharply, the ridge between them standing against the blinding blue sky like a great fortified curtain. The wall that followed its contours reinforced that impression. Mavros was amazed that at some time in the island’s history the locals had transported stone up to the windswept saddle, presumably to separate grazing land. It was a magnificent, almost surreal achievement—and all for a few goats. To the south-east the white patch of buildings that made up Ayia Marina danced in the heat like a mirage. It was then he realised that he hadn’t brought any water with him.

  He cursed under his breath. In Athens there were refrigerated cabinets attached to almost every kiosk, but in the Cyclades you obviously needed to plan ahead. He considered turning back but dismissed the idea. According to the book there was a beach called Makroyiali about halfway to Ayia Marina that had a café.

  Shortly afterwards he heard the noise of an engine. He turned his head and saw a silver Suzuki four-by-four that glistened in the sunlight. It stopped when he stuck out a thumb.

  ‘I thought I recognised you,’ the man in the front passenger seat said. ‘You were in the bar last night.’ He gave Mavros a tentative smile.

  ‘And in the kastro above Rinus’s flat this morning,’ the female driver added, her voice markedly less friendly than her companion’s. ‘Well, get in then. We’ll melt if we stay here for long.’

  The fair-haired man stepped out and collapsed his seat to give Mavros access to the back. ‘It’s Alex, isn’t it?’ he said with a smile.

&nb
sp; ‘Thanks,’ Mavros said. ‘Yes, I’m Alex. I’m afraid I don’t know your names.’ He had picked them up in the Astrapi, but he didn’t want to reveal that he’d been listening to their conversation with Aris Theocharis or to the one with the barman Rinus in the kastro.

  ‘I’m Barbara,’ said the woman as she pulled away. ‘He’s Mikkel. Where were you going? It’s dangerous to walk in this heat if you’re not used to it.’ She glanced at his legs. ‘And I can see you’re not.’

  ‘I was going to Ayia Marina,’ Mavros said, glad that he didn’t spend his weekends on the beaches of Attiki and the neighbouring islands like many Athenians. The smog kept even the exposed parts of his skin unburned and the lack of tan fitted in well with his cover story.

  ‘Oh, you don’t want to go there,’ Barbara said firmly. ‘It’s a horrible tourist trap. If you want a beach, Makroyiali is much nicer and it’s empty at this time of year. It’s nearly a kilometre long. The name means Long Beach.’

  ‘Does it?’ Mavros said, letting the woman hold sway. The low profile the man was keeping suggested that she was used to running conversations. Close up, her appearance was marginally less severe than it had been under the lights of the bar. Her hair was pulled back from her face, emphasising the prominent cheekbones and an incongruous button nose, and her body, sheathed in an expensive-looking long-sleeved blouse and linen trousers, was amply proportioned. ‘Do you live here?’ he asked. ‘You seem to know the place very well.’

  His remark brought a satisfied smile to Barbara’s face. ‘I should do,’ she said, driving over the carcass of a rabbit. ‘I’ve lived here for over ten years. All year round, unlike the other foreign homeowners.’ She announced this as if it were a notable achievement. ‘Even the Athenians who’ve built houses here only come at Easter and for a few weeks in the summer.’