Signs of a Struggle

by Tony Kaplan

  “I will come with you,” Calliope says decisively. “I did not do my job as a social worker. It has also been on my conscience.”

  “We will come too,” says Antonis.

  “And you, Nektario,” Calliope says, pointing an exhorting finger at her husband, “You tell for Mavro - one day you will make a fine statue for his boy’s grave.”

  55

  Hektor lies propped up on a mound of pillows, his hands folded on top of the bed-clothes, his eyes closed. Even though the window is wide open, there is the cloying smell of old poor people that inhabits the room like a phantom. When we enter, Stavroula is sitting by Hektor’s bed, one hand tentatively resting on the covering. She withdraws her hand when she sees Mavros. Michalis is standing at the foot of the bed, his arm protectively around Xanthe, his face scribbled with uncertain emotion. Hektor opens his eyes and looks alarmed to see us, then he shuts his eyes and sighs, and murmurs a resigned, “Kala. Teleiose.”

  Antonis turns to me and whispers, “He says, good, it is over.” We wait respectfully for him to continue.

  He opens his eyes again and his impassioned look is directed at Mavros. “Mavro,” he croaks and signals for him to come closer. Tears appear in his eyes. “Signomi, signomi,” he splutters. “Sinxorese me. Parakalo.Parakalo.”

  (Later, Antonis will help me understand what happened. I shall record it as best as I can, fitting the words I will have translated later, to the drama I witnessed in that room.)

  Hektor is asking forgiveness from Mavros. Stavroula looks alarmed. “Don’t say nothing, Hektor!” she hisses at the old man in the bed, his face now drenched in silent tears as he clings to the hand of his old adversary.

  “I must, Stavroula. I cannot go to my grave with this knowledge. It has been burning away at my insides for so many years,” Hektor says pleadingly. He tries to make her accede, but she turns her head away. Hektor’s look is pained, tender. “I must,” he says. He wets his lips with a pale tongue. “Mavro… Mavro, Michalis is my son. I am sorry I could not tell you this when you married Stavroula. She was pregnant with my child. Please forgive me. Please understand. I thought it was for the best. Michali, I am so sorry I could not name you as my son before. It could not be done. It would have brought shame to your mother. You should have shared what I had. You would have been a good brother for Christo. But now Christos, my Christos, is…” He trails off into silent weeping. Then he forces himself to go on. “Ai! He is gone. He will never know you as a brother. My poor boy. But now, Michalis, all the family’s companies will come to you. I give it to you. The Poseidon, the construction company, all for you. You are my son. Take it, take it.” He sweeps all this to his reclaimed son with a tired gesture. His watery eyes try to draw Michalis in. Michalis, dumbstruck, clutches Xanthe tightly.

  Hektor waits for some response from Michali, his forehead wrinkling, begging for some small sign of appreciation, some gratitude... some recognition at least. He wants somebody to carry his name forward, someone to benefit from all he has built in his life. Christos is dead. Michalis is now all he has. Michalis, who will now be a very rich man indeed, is paralysed by incredulity. He is only just beginning to come to terms with having a father, come back from the dead. Now he is gaining another. At the expense of his best friend’s death, the friend he now finds was his brother. He will bury him as family.

  Hektor turns away, dispirited. He looks to Mavros, imploringly and then to Stavroula. “Stavroula, you must tell then about the other one,” he says, offering her his hand, his palm upturned - a supplication.

  The old lady reaches for his hand. Her face clouds over. “I don’t know what you are talking about,” she says calmly. “You are ill. You don’t know what you are saying.”

  He lets go of her hand and closes his eyes again, his expression one of deep sorrow. “Please, Stavroula, I cannot go to Heaven, I will not get to Heaven, with this on my conscience.”

  “Poor man, his mind is now confused,” Stavroula says, turning to Michalis. Her look is meant to convey her sympathy, but her voice is poisoned with harsh dismissal.

  Michalis scans her face and sees her dissimulation as thin as gauze. “Ma, please,” Michalis implores her.

  “What? You want me to make up some crazy story just to please him?” Stavroula shouts, her pitch rising with disdain. An edge of fear.

  “Tell him, Stavroula. For God’s sake tell the boy what we did!” Hektor’s voice cracks with pain; he is wild eyed with agitation. “Tell him, or I will, Stavroula,” Hektor says.

  Michalis lets go of Xanthe and goes to stand right in front of her. “Ma? What else are you hiding? All my life you have hidden this from me – that this man is my father. Now you must tell me everything. If you want me to forgive you, you must tell me everything. What is it he wants us to know? What is it he wants me to know?”

  “Tell him, Stavroula!” Hector croaks weakly.

  “Tell me!” Michalis shouts desperately. “No more lies!”

  Stavroula looks from her son to her erstwhile lover, and back again, her chin lifted imperiously, her back rigidly erect, holding her poise. Only her dark eyes flit, from one to the other. She is weighing up the odds. She contemplates the lined face of the old man who had loved her as a girl. Hektor’s eyes blaze with anguish. Her son, whom she had had done everything to protect, for whom she had given all, is glaring at her as if he is seeing her properly for the first time – the horror in his eyes, the accusation… She cannot hold his fierce stare. She looks away. She sees Mavros, eyes narrowed, a calmness, a sense of inevitability about him. She looks again at her son, at his unrelenting fury.

  And then it’s all over. Her shoulders slump. She suddenly looks much older, tired. She affects a look of patient sympathy for the old man in the bed… an expression of compassion and irony, which morphs into disdain and then hardens like molten metal cooling into contempt. She shakes her head.

  Her voice, when it comes, is chillingly measured. “The other one,” she says, “he wasn’t right in the head. He was an imbecile. Why should he have had what was mine? - we had so little.” She turns on Mavros. “Why did you want my money, my land? You called yourself a communist, but you were as greedy as all the others. Pigs, all of you. I wanted my son, my Michalis, to have what was mine – to have what was ours. But that bitch,” she hisses venomously at Calliope, “said it would all go to Eleftherio. What would he have done with it? We would all have been poor.” She looks at Mavros, defiant again. “How did I know you would come back? I thought you had been executed. That is what your comrades told us.”

  Mavros holds her glare. “What happened to the boy?” he asks in a level voice, even though it must be taking enormous effort to hold back his rage.

  Stavroula looks at him enquiringly, tightening her lips. Xanthe is watching her fearfully. Hektor whispers, “Tell him, for God’s sake, Stavroula.”

  Stavroula scans our faces. She finds no succour. She braces her shoulders back – she thinks about continuing with her defiance… and then she is too tired of it all. The secret she has carried with her for thirty-five years is too heavy to carry any longer. And what for, now? “I poisoned him,” she says. “I wanted Eleftherios to be dead and gone. It was better that way.”

  Xanthe gasps and buries her face in her father’s chest.

  Mavros just nods. I think he knew all along what had happened to his son.

  Hektor’s voice is thin but insistent. “I helped her with the body. Because I loved her. I felt I owed her. I had promised to divorce my wife and I didn’t. I took the boy’s body to the construction site.” The old man’s voice tumbles from him. “The supports for the bridge, they were hollow steel mesh columns, cages for the cement. I turned on the cement mixer, mixed the cement myself and I poured some into the mould. Then I threw the boy’s body down the shaft and poured more cement on top. His body disappeared,” he wails, his fist thumping the bed. “May God forgive me!”

  Hektor’s body rocks in anguish and then his face contracts i
n on itself, contorted with pain and horror. He clutches at his chest. “Oh, God,” he rasps, his face drained of blood, his lips turning blue.

  “Get the doctor!” Antonis shouts urgently to no-one in particular. When no one responds, he rushes out to get assistance. Hektor stays upright, holding his chest, eyes tightly shut against the pain. Stavroula looks at him dispassionately. For her, it is as well that he should die for what he has made her disclose. Their secret should have gone with him to his grave.

  Mavros steps forward and places a consoling hand on the shoulder of the dying man. Hektor opens his eyes and he looks at Mavros with an expression which could pass as love. He and Mavros hold each other’s gaze. I see the forgiveness that Mavros gifts his adversary of old, that Hector drinks in like sweet water on desert dried lips; I see the soft shadow of compassion between the two old men, two fathers who have lost much-loved sons.

  ****

  We are standing outside the hospital later, Antonis and I, having a cigarette, as the night settles. Antonis has formally arrested Stavroula and she has been taken to the police station to give a statement, after which Antonis has instructed that she is to be allowed home on police bail. Mavros has gone off with Calliope. He will stay with her and Nektarios for the time being – he will not be under that same roof as the woman who killed his son.

  Before she was taken away, Stavroula decreed that her right to the land on which The Seaview was built, which had reverted to her ownership after Mavros had been absent for five years, was to be for Xanthe. She did not want her son to be afflicted by the bad fortune of having obtained the property by the death of another. She said haughtily, that she wanted the tradition of land being passed from one woman to another down the generations to be continued. She said it as if this had been a good and fitting resolution, that something good had come from something bad. (Or perhaps that had been my charitable imagining of her offering.)

  Mavros did not oppose this. He had no wish to have anything further to do with Stavroula and her family. He had got what he had come for.

  56

  One thing to do before I return to Agia Anna. Antonis will be stuck in Agia Sofia with paperwork. For him, the body in the bridge case is now solved. Soon he will return to Athens. I head off to the pedestrianised street behind the restaurants on the waterfront where all the shops and bars for tourists jostle for small margins. I leave tomorrow on the last flight. In the morning I will see Agapi and let her know my decision.

  It is seven a.m. and all the shops are open the traditional hours – they close for the heat of the afternoon and re-open at six. I want something for Eleni, Agapi’s mother and of course something for Agapi. The little girl I am sure would love something pretty to wear – she seems to have so little and her clothes are functional and cheaply bought. But I am not sure of her size and don’t want any disappointment on her part to mar my last hours with her mother. The children’s shop is the first one on my way – they sell toys as well as clothes. Maybe a doll – don’t all little girls like dolls? But then what kind of doll? – I am ideologically opposed to Barbie – I’m sure she votes Republican – but the other dolls on sale are seriously retro – and quite fierce looking and unlovable. A soft toy? – cuddlesome, but a bit lame. A child mannequin, with blonde curls and exquisite blue eyes, so lifelike it is faintly macabre, grabs my attention. The dummy is wearing a spectacular silver and gold fairy dress. Eleni would look enchanting in that. If it fits. Maybe a dress after all – she can change it if it’s not right. I size it up and it looks about right. It’s very reasonably priced. I take it.

  What for Agapi’s mother? I go into a narrow shop selling hand-embroidered cloths and shawls, lacework, votive candles and badly painted vases and ashtrays depicting mythological events. I pick out a tablecloth which is in a basket of sale items, reduced now because it is the end of the tourist season and the owner wants to get rid of her excess stock. I am to be the beneficiary and in turn can afford to be beneficent to the old lady. The owner asks me who the gift is for – the tablecloth is a popular gift for a bride, she tells me. When I tell her it is for a dear old lady, she chuckles lasciviously and says the old lady will be charmed – it will make her feel young again! She insists on wrapping it in tissue paper and fastens onto it a stick of cinnamon and a sprig of wild flowers “to bring her luck and good health”.

  Now something for Agapi. I find a jewellery shop two doors down. The window is filled with garish gold and silver and diamante pieces, but inside at the back, in a glass cabinet, are necklaces, ear-rings and bracelets which are more to my unsophisticated Camden Market taste. The first to attract my attention is a spectacular pendant in turquoise and ornate silver, but also contending is a more subdued but equally stylish amber necklace with matching ear-rings. But what I see in my mind’s eye as I imagine my lover’s face are her green eyes. I know I will want something that will glorify that aspect of her beauty, something in green. Then off to one side I see the large green garnet, cut into an ovoid, held in a filigree of silver vines, on a chain of delicate silver. Perfect. Not cheap, but so right, I splash out. I want my gift to her to be splendid.

  I must restrain my excitement and anticipation of their responses and put off dispensing the gifts until tomorrow. I’ll see Agapi later tonight and tell her I’ll come to her home in the morning. My plane leaves at four.

  57

  Tonight is my last dinner at Yianni’s tavern. I could go to The Seaview, but this would be an imposition I feel – they should not be made to serve after what has happened today. Stavroula will not be at her post at the kitchen entrance keeping guard. Perhaps I’ll have coffee there later, so I can see Agapi.

  As I take my place at my usual table, (how I’ll miss having a “usual table”), Yiannis sidles over, plonks down the bread basket and cutlery and utters his catchphrase, “Unbe-lieve-able!” with aplomb. He has had the news from Soulla’s cousin in the hospital. “A terrible thing for their family. A tragedy. In Greek, in Ellenica, ‘tra-go-dia’. You think the old lady she will go to prison? She very old. Soulla say ‘Yes, she must’. Soulla was like for Eleftherio. Me, I say maybe.” He shrugs. “Michalis is a rich man now. For me, I would not like this money. Good lucks to him. I am happy also for Xanthe. She is new owner next door.” He sighs. “But for you, something to drink? For to eat, we have today very good, very fresh red snapper – to grill, with fried potatoes and maybe some tzatziki – I make today with lots of garlic – you like garlic?” he asks. I tell him I do. “Okay and maybe a Greek salad. Psomi. Arketa. Enough,” he says, wiping one hand over the other, to denote “end of”. Sounds fabulous. I realise I am now inducted into a love of Greek cousine. I like that. I will now, in my home, cook the food of my father's homeland. I feel my father in me. I feel my father coming home.

  “Tomorrow I leave,” I tell him.

  He looks devastated. “Oh, my friend, why so quick you leave?”

  I tell him I have to go back to my job in London. “Okay,” he says, “Then for you, from me, I bring for you a bottle of very good wine from Kypros. Beautiful,” he says, smacking his lips. “I will drink with you a glass.” He goes off at pace, calling out to his wife and signalling to Bobby to bring two wine glasses.

  I will miss this family. They have become like family to me. I love their casual generosity, their unaffected warmth and humanity. I will miss Soulla’s cooking, for when the red snapper comes, it is cooked to perfection, skins crisp and flavoursome, the flesh moist and yielding, served on a bed of greens, inflected with aniseed and strands of seaweed, perfectly complemented by the excellent white wine Yiannis has gifted me, with which we toast the wonders of Greece.

  58

  The next morning, I am up early. I swim and shower before setting out for Agapi’s house. The day is blue and warm, the sea tranquil, impervious to the dramas of the day before, as if such tragedies are only as significant as one tide. High tides and low tides, the sea is eternal. I carry my bundle of presents under my arm, feeling a lightn
ess of being, a munificence. The time has come.

  Agapi is waiting on the path for me. She steps towards me and opens her arms. I take her in my arms and feel her soft body yielding, smell her scent. We walk in silence to her home. I have told her I have presents for her mother and for her child.

  Her mother is fussing over the stove when I enter the house. She turns to me and mutters away in Greek, something which Agapi finds scandalous. I smile in return and hand her the gift wrapped in fine tissue paper. The old lady looks shocked that I am offering her a gift. She points at herself, to make sure the gift is for her and when I smile and proffer the package to her, she wipes her hands off on her apron and licks her lips, her eyes gleaming. Eleni comes out of her room to see what her grandmother is so excited about. She watches as her grandmother fastidiously unwraps the tissue paper (Agapi tells me her mother will save the paper as something precious) and finds inside the embroidered table cloth. She holds it open and her eyes shine, she shakes her head in wonder. Then she comes to me and has me bend down so she can kiss me three times.

  “Three kisses,” I say, amused by her excess.

  “This is the tradition,” Agapi says. “French and Italians, two kisses, Mythos, three kisses!”

  I hold out the package for Eleni. “For you,” I say. The little girl wriggles with shyness, then approaches cautiously. Once the package is in her hands, she unwraps it with all the delicacy of a dog attacking a rabbit. She can’t wait to see what she has got! Then she goes still when she sees the gold and silver cloth. Carefully, she unfurls the dress and holds it up, her brow wrinkled. She looks to her mother, who smiles and signals for her to go and put it on. She needs no encouragement – she races into the room she shares with her mother, hastily sheds her pyjamas and watching herself in the mirror, climbs into her new dress. She checks herself, front on, then side on, smooths down the folds and then comes back into the room where we are her audience, her face a picture of studious attention. She is worried that if the dress is not seen to be right, it will be removed from her and returned to the shop. Perhaps she thinks it is just to try on, not to keep. But as soon as we cheer and her Giagia has chirped, “Poli oraia, Elenaki!” her face widens into a glorious grin and she does a swirl which causes the dress to sparkle in the morning light. Her joy, that she has never owned anything as glorious, pricks my eyes. I want to sweep her up into my arms, but she keeps her distance, now with a serious look, a germ of vanity denied. She is, I sense, worrying now that she has something which, if it is damaged or taken, will devastate her. Ah, well…