The Messenger of Athens

by Anne Zouroudi

  ‘Why didn’t you?’ asked the fat man.

  Andreas glanced at the whisky glass just out of reach, and at the coffee cup before him. He picked up the coffee, and drank from it.

  ‘My mother makes bad coffee,’ he said, ‘always too sweet. Irini made good coffee. Just so.’ He let his head roll back, and stared at the ceiling where threads of cobwebs dangled.

  ‘So why didn’t you shoot him?’ the fat man asked again.

  ‘Don’t think I didn’t want to,’ said Andreas. ‘I thought about it, night and day. I thought if I caught them together, I’d shoot them both. When I was fishing, it’s all I thought about: killing him. There’s nothing noble in why I didn’t do it; it was cowardice, saving face. If I’d shot him, everyone would have known that bastard was screwing my wife.’

  There was silence. Andreas lowered his head and rubbed at his eyes with the heels of his hands.

  ‘I don’t believe you,’ said the fat man, quietly.

  ‘Well,’ said Andreas, smiling. ‘That’s your problem, friend.’

  ‘I don’t believe,’ went on the fat man, ‘that there was nothing noble in your not seeking him out. I don’t think you’re a coward, Andreas. I don’t think you’d have shot him, but if you’d taken your fists or a stick to him, no one would have blamed you. I think there was something else.’ Andreas drank again from his cup, but said nothing. ‘I think you didn’t lay hands on him because you knew if you did, you’d disgrace her. You’d have had to divorce her, wouldn’t you? Send her back to her mother, bags packed.’

  Andreas laughed.

  ‘You got me,’ he said. His eyes were bright with tears. ‘Bang to rights. Guilty as charged. Pity me. A man – less than a man, a man without balls – who loved his wife so much, he’d take back another man’s leavings. That’s me. Poor fool that I am, I believed that if I waited around long enough, she and I could pick up the pieces. Only there are no pieces to pick up, are there? Pass me that glass now, friend.’

  ‘A moment more,’ said the fat man.

  He bent to the floor, and, unzipping his holdall, took out a small Ziploc bag of herbs – dried flowerheads, seeds, small twigs and leaves – which he laid before Andreas.

  ‘I said I wanted to help you, Andreas,’ said the fat man, ‘and I do. I believe – in spite of your attack on your wife – that you have a good and faithful heart.’ From the depths of his grief, Andreas sighed. ‘That heart is shattered, I know. Love has been cruel to you – almost impossibly so. Sometimes, the Fates cannot be excused, or forgiven. Your grief is unbearable to you, and so you seek comfort in a glass. That is natural. But drink will kill you, and I have something better. These,’ he patted the bag, ‘are herbs you will not know. I have gathered them on my travels. They will help you sleep, and calm your mind. Make tea with them, and drink a little – only a little – when you feel the need, when the pain in your heart is worst. And when you’re feeling able, go back to sea. Do your work, and wait for time to pass. You will find love again; you have my word. One day, you’ll tie up in a port not far from here, and she’ll be there. Not Irini; none of us can bring her back. But she would want you to be happy – loved – again. And you will be, Andreas. In time, you will be.’

  Andreas turned to him; the fat man put an arm around his shoulders, and for a moment held him close.

  ‘Courage, son,’ he said. ‘Have courage.’

  The fat man stood. Quietly, he left the house. In the street, the wind was freshening; behind the mountains, high banks of rain-filled clouds were swelling. Of the small boy and his mother, there was no sign. As the fat man pulled the door closed, a cockerel crowed; as its cry died away, from behind the door the fat man caught the sound of Andreas’s weeping.

  Twelve

  ‘Theo? Theo!’

  He broke off tracing the pattern on the kitchen tablecloth with his forefinger. Blue squares.

  ‘Have you?’ Elpida stood impatient at the stove, stirring; she had that look of whining ill temper he so disliked. From one pan came soft sizzling, and the savoury smell of onions browning in hot oil; from another, steam, and a low bubbling. Where his finger had traced out the squares, a fat fly crawled.

  ‘Have I what?’

  ‘Got any money?’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘Have you been listening, Theo?’

  He hadn’t been listening; his mind had been elsewhere. He had been thinking, planning, scheming. Turning things over in his mind. He had been dreaming, of the woman he wanted. Hard-core dreams. He had another hard-on he didn’t want Elpida to notice.

  ‘What do you want money for?’ he asked.

  ‘Shoes.’

  ‘You’ve got too many shoes.’

  ‘For God’s sake, Theo. Not for me. For Panayitsa.’

  He wanted no trouble. He leaned away from the table; sliding his hand into the pocket of his jeans, he pulled out all that was there – two thousand-drachma notes, and a few coins – and laid the money on the table.

  ‘Is that enough?’ He was impatient. This kind of trivia was anathema to him, these days.

  ‘No.’ She looked confused, and annoyed; he knew the price of shoes. What he was offering her wouldn’t cover a quarter of it.

  He didn’t want to be around her; he was restless in this house. He believed he was concealing it, but he was wrong. He hated to look at her, because she had changed for him, and he had lost sight of any qualities he had ever valued in her. And this kitchen, which he had known intimately all his married life, he saw with carping eyes – a long, low-ceilinged room ruined by faults. The pine-boarded floor sloped by so many degrees, he had – some years ago, on a day when they were happy – shored up the far side of the stove with wooden wedges so the saucepans as she cooked were on a level. Everywhere was cleaned, every day, because that was her life’s work; there were no spiders in the corners where the sunlight never reached, no dust gathering in the grooves between the floorboards. They lived with the scents of compulsive domesticity always in their nostrils – laundry soap, bleach, starch, the ammoniac stink of Brasso – and the irritating touches her mother had taught her: the showy ornaments and gaudy icons, the doilies of hand-crocheted lace on every surface. And there, hanging above the fireplace, the great buffed and burnished copper pans that had been her grandmother’s, symbols of the continuity of their line and of their calling. He thought them ugly. A memory came to him of Elpida polishing the pans, black-handed, proud, and smiling. He despised her for her pride now, and his guilty heart cringed.

  To him, the room stank of poverty and scrimping, of making-do. The flimsy curtains were strung on a length of fishing twine suspended between two nails knocked into the flaking plaster. The tabletop was a piece of wood sawn from a cast-out door; beneath the blue-squared tablecloth, the depressions cut to take the hinges were clear. The seats of the four cane-bottomed chairs had gone into holes, so Elpida had made cushions to cover the damage, cutting the covers from old clothes, stuffing them with the remnants of a torn bedsheet.

  He looked, and saw it all as a stranger would see it.

  Is this all we have? he thought. Is this all I’ve done?

  She said, ‘You can eat now, if you want.’

  He didn’t give a damn about food.

  ‘I’ll eat later,’ he lied. He stood, and took his jacket from the peg. ‘I’m going out.’

  ‘Why are you going now, when the food’s just ready?’

  He had no answer; he didn’t know. So he said, ‘I’m going to the bank.’

  ‘The bank closed an hour ago,’ she said.

  No answer. He was gone.

  She stirred the boiling chick-peas, caught one with a spoon and, popping it in her mouth, bit on it. It was soft. She turned off the burner. Outside in the street, she could hear Panayitsa’s shrieks amongst the others as the children played.

  She opened the door and called out, ‘Panayitsa! Time to eat!’

  But her shouting had no impact; the children yelled and sang and shouted as they
played on, into the afternoon.

  Outside, beneath the window, tyres scattered the loose stones and gravel of the unmade road. A car slowed, and stopped. Above the idling engine, a tape was playing, traditional music, rembetika, slow and sad.

  Elpida crossed to the window. In Theo’s space, a silver Mercedes was parked. In its time, it had been a showpiece; its upholstery was soft, red leather, its trim walnut veneer and highly polished chrome. Now, it was a curiosity, the kind of car tycoons drove in black-and-white, after-midnight movies. Elpida knew the car, and its driver. Everyone knew Michaelis Kypreos.

  Kypreos switched off the engine; the music stopped. The talismans dangling from the rear-view mirror – a turquoise-studded crucifix; a small, laminated icon of a rosy-cheeked madonna; a sachet of pot-pourri – became still.

  Elpida switched off the iron, kicked off her slippers and put on her yard shoes. A length of straw was stuck to one sole with drying chicken shit.

  Kypreos stood in the road, hands on his waist, looking up at the window. He was a big man, and ugly. Face like an octopus’s underside, the people said. They didn’t say it to his face. Kypreos had money, and influence. The people didn’t like him, but his money bought their respect.

  Kypreos began to shout up at the window.

  ‘Carpenter! Carpenter! Are you there, God damn you?’

  Elpida ran a hand through her lank hair and went out into the courtyard. As Kypreos strode towards her, she opened the door wide.

  Kypreos was the kind of man who was never satisfied; he always wanted more. He had made his money somewhere in Africa, and packed up and left when the region’s natives looked like winning their rebellion. In Africa, he said, he’d had a string of supermarkets; but the people talked about gun-running, and illegal interests in diamond mines. In Africa, he said, he had servants in his house. He had a mansion here, with gold taps in the bathroom; he slept (the people said) with his pretty young wife in a water-bed big enough for four. His wife, the people knew, was having an affair with a ferry-boat captain; but none of them had the temerity to tell Kypreos.

  Kypreos had invested in some land up the coast. He was going into the tourist business, building apartments for rent to a German company he’d done a deal with. Theo got talking to him and persuaded him to give him the carpentry work – doors, windows and shutters. It was a big contract; for Theo, a coup. But Kypreos had his own ideas about how much he would pay.

  ‘Listen,’ he said to Theo, as they discussed terms, ‘I’ll do you a deal. Finish the job by mid-March, I’ll give you 50 per cent on top of the price we’ve agreed. Finish after the first of April, I’ll pay you half. If you work fast, you’ll come out the winner.’

  They shook hands. Kypreos had clapped Theo on the back, and walked away, laughing, believing his money was safe – for when had anyone known any of these tradesmen finish a job on time? But Theo was smiling, and confident.

  ‘I’ve made up my mind to get it done ahead of time,’ he told Elpida. ‘I want to see Kypreos’s face when he hands over the cash.’

  From time to time, she’d ask him how it was going.

  ‘I’m working every daylight hour,’ he’d said. ‘I’m working like a madman to get done.’

  ‘Where’s Hatzistratis?’ Kypreos was always loud, but today, he was shouting. There was rage in his reddening face, and in his tight, hard eyes. ‘Where is the idle son of a bitch?’

  He stood too close to her; he smelled of fresh sweat, and warm leather, and the aniseed of ouzo. The neck of his shirt was unbuttoned too far, for a man of his age and corpulence; resting on the rise of his fat belly, a great, gold medallion embossed with the star of Macedonia hung on a heavy, gold chain. Kypreos told the people the medallion had been worn by Alexander the Great, and some of them believed him; the truth was, he’d had it made by a goldsmith whose brother owed him money.

  ‘He’s not here,’ said Elpida. ‘He went out, over an hour ago.’

  ‘Well, where the hell has the son of a bitch gone?’ shouted Kypreos. ‘Time is money!’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Elpida. ‘I don’t know where he’s gone. If you want to come in and wait . . .’

  ‘I haven’t time to sit around waiting for carpenters!’ roared Kypreos. ‘You can tell him if that job’s not finished tomorrow I’ll get someone else to do it. I’ve got the glazier waiting to go to work on the window-frames and half of them are still stacked up against the wall. He’s not even been near the place for four days. He told me he’d be finished three weeks ago. And you can tell him if the job’s not finished tomorrow, he’ll not get one cent out of me.’

  She left her shoes outside the kitchen door and, in stockinged feet, wandered to the parlour sofa, where she lay down. At her temples, a headache threatened. Kypreos’s words flew around her head, forming questions which had no answers. Theo hadn’t been there, working; when he’d said he’d been there, he hadn’t.

  So where had he been?

  And the money – he’d blown all that money. All the things it would have bought, all the worry it would have dispelled. Now, there’d be nothing. Not one cent.

  The pulse at her temples grew stronger, and an ache began, behind her right eye. If she’d known where he was now, she would have . . . killed him. But it was not the small voice which whispered of the possibility of betrayal, and faithlessness, which roused her; that, she preferred to ignore. He had lost them a winter’s worth of wages, and that made her angry – so angry, it kindled into flame a smouldering ember of rebellion which had long lodged in her heart.

  Eleni found her, still lying on the sofa, fingers pressed to the pulses in her temples.

  ‘Are you sick?’ she asked. She bent over her daughter and put a hand on her forehead, feeling for fever as if Elpida were a small child. Her mother’s hand was cold; Elpida could smell vinegar on her breath.

  ‘You don’t look well,’ said Eleni. ‘I’ll make you some tea.’

  ‘I don’t want tea, Mama. It’s just a headache. It’ll pass.’

  ‘Is it that time of the month? Tea will do you good. I saw your ironing, in the kitchen. I’ll bring it through here. Then you can stay where you are.’

  Elpida laid her hand across her eyes.

  ‘You don’t need to do the ironing, Mama,’ she protested. ‘For God’s sake, let it wait.’

  But Eleni didn’t hear her. She was already in the kitchen, making tea.

  ‘Why have you bought this starch?’ Eleni held up the bright yellow can and examined the small, white rectangle of its price ticket; the reading of small print was harder by the day, and, even compressing her eyes into a squint, the figures remained blurred. ‘I’ve told you not to buy this starch. Buy Evrika, I’ve told you. It’s much better. This stuff, the nozzle gets clogged up. And I’m sure it’s more expensive. Why pay more than you have to?’

  ‘I like the smell of that one.’

  Elpida sipped the green-scented sage tea. It tasted bitter; her mother had infused the leaves too long. The pain had moved to the bridge of her nose, and she drew her eyebrows together to relax the tautness in the muscles of her forehead, creating an expression of bad temper.

  Eleni rolled her sleeves up to her elbows. Elpida watched her bend to the plastic-lattice linen basket and take out one of Theo’s crumpled shirts, spread the wrinkled sleeve on the ironing-board and spray it lightly with starch. Eleni lifted the iron. The tendons in her forearm tightened, and the blue veins there and at her wrists stood raised along the bloomless, winter-white skin. Elpida thought her mother had a physique, a strength, which didn’t suit a lady – beneath the mottled fat (her mother was still gaining weight, despite the doctor’s instructions), she had a labourer’s arms. Elpida looked down at her own hands. They were chapped, and red; on her fingertips and the fleshy mounds of her palms, the skin was dry and hard, and discoloured brown from the juices of chopped onions.

  She listened to the quietness, to the sliding of the iron over cotton, the psst-psst of the starch spray, the hiss o
f steam. The steam released the freshness of laundry blown dry in the wind; it evoked nostalgia, memories of afternoon hours at home when she sat at her hated homework as Eleni ironed, and watched her.

  ‘Kypreos was here a little while ago,’ she said.

  ‘Oh yes?’ Her mother folded the shirt, deftly tucking the sleeves in behind the torso. She laid the shirt on the end of the sofa. It might have been slid into polythene packaging and sold as new.

  ‘He was looking for Theo.’

  ‘Wasn’t he at the building site?’

  Elpida didn’t answer.

  ‘Elpida?’

  ‘He hasn’t been there for days.’

  Eleni stood the iron on its base and took a small, pink T-shirt from the basket.

  ‘So where’s he been?’ she asked.

  ‘I don’t know, Mama.’ Elpida pinched the bridge of her nose, but the pain stayed the same. ‘Kypreos said if the work’s not finished tomorrow, he won’t pay anything at all.’

  Elpida pressed the T-shirt’s sleeves: right, left.

  ‘I thought that job was worth millions,’ she said.

  ‘It is. What should I do, Mama? If I say anything to Theo, he’ll yell at me.’

  Eleni lay the folded T-shirt beside the cotton shirt, and picked out a pair of red-striped underpants.

  ‘You leave him to me,’ she said.

  ‘Mama,’ said Elpida, ‘why do women have to get married?’

  She had dared to ask herself recently if she even liked him, or if he liked her. She knew exactly how he saw her: malleable, pliable – the creature he had made her. His method had been simple, and she had been . . . in love, or fearful? Each time she failed to please him, to anticipate his wants and wishes, he dragged a suitcase from beneath the wardrobe and laid it on the bed. His message was clear: please me, or go back to your mother. She could not let the family’s good name be smeared by such disgrace. She learned to do as she was told.