Break.up

by Joanna Walsh

  ‘What do they eat here?’ I asked you. We were in a bar somewhere I’d never been before but somewhere you had, and I was hungry.

  ‘What do “they” eat? Don’t be such a tourist.’

  ‘But I am a tourist here. Aren’t you?’

  ‘I know this place inside-out. I’m as much at home here as anywhere.’

  The café we were in looked a bit like this bar, like someone’s house, but it was dark, and we did not eat, and the dark came down early to expand our drinking time… But now I’m sitting at the table in Athens, outside, and it is still light although the sky has turned deep round the edges, and I am eating the fish, which is cheap, and drinking beer, and it is very good, so good that I am no longer pretending to be a woman alone: I am a woman alone. My default position – hunted – I have forgotten all that. I relax. It leaves me, perhaps, vulnerable.

  The waiter comes over. He says, ‘A man has sent you this drink.’

  The waiter says, ‘He wants to improve his English.’

  I look over to the man. He looks at me. He raises his glass. It seems there is nothing I can do. He comes over to the table. Greek, in his fifties, older, unless he isn’t. Heavy silver bracelets, heavy gold rings. He folds his fat across a chair. He says, ‘I like white women. Everything around me is black.’ He says, ‘my name is Christos, like Christ.’

  The gods here are so close to mortals, and goddesses are always being thrown over in favour of some girl. They’re not like the Roman gods, of whom things can be asked: Greek gods ask things of their worshippers. The only difference between them and humanity is that they’re in charge, and we’re not.

  ‘Pigeons,’ he indicates the birds in the square, ‘they are dirty birds.’

  Now everything in the square is dirty.

  ‘But the others,’ I say, ‘Doves. Ring-doves. We don’t have those.’

  The doves are rose-dun coloured, their shape longer and lower than English pigeons, with rings of white around their necks. Are they really ring-doves? I know the word. The ancient Greeks said the gods had their own language. They called things right. I put the word together with what I see. I would be happy for them to fit.

  ‘Yes,’ he says, not looking at the birds. ‘We have those too.’

  He says, ‘I lived in Bolton, Manchester. In England the people are not so open, and after twelve o’clock, everything is closed.’

  I say, ‘Your English is already very good. Were you there for work?’

  He says, ‘I was married to an English woman. One daughter. She is twenty. She comes to stay here, sometimes.’

  ‘Are you married now?’

  He says, ‘No. I am traditional. Once is enough.’ He says, ‘Why did you come here to this bar?’

  The ring-doves rise from the square through the tangle of telephone wires.

  Fly from me!

  We were in a bar, like this bar, small as someone’s front room, but in another city, and the dusk had come down early to expand our drinking time. A girl came through the door, with a man – older – and they sat at the next table. You said, ‘She’s pretty, but listen to her.’ You said, ‘Imagine waking up to that.’ I sat with you there – a non-fag-hag. ‘That girl,’ you said. ‘How old: eighteen? A student, you think?’ ‘Twenty-five,’ I said. You could not spot the crenellations of experience in her. I could see them.

  The door of the bar swung not only in, but outwards: forwards, back. Inside, outside. Would she cry out, during sex, in that voice? Would you mind then, or would it be only in the morning?

  The girl with no door on her mouth.

  Sophokles, Philoktetes (trans. Anne Carson, The Gender of Sound)

  You can chase your desire and, unable to touch it, you can have it disappeared. If you’re a god, you can turn flesh to wood, to grass, to gold but – watch out, Midas! – cut the reeds, and even nature accuses you. Few girls have doors on their mouths, and we are nothing if not natural, unless we’re not.

  Why did I stay with you in the bar that night? Why didn’t I walk out? Because, doorframed by my mouth, I found a home in our conversation. Dialogue is erotic, even when it’s not. I must have conversation, and the conversation must be ongoing, if I am to go on.

  The ring-doves wheel and settle in another part of the square. Christos looks at me until his eyes hook mine.

  ‘Where are you staying?’

  ‘By the station.’

  ‘It’s not safe there,’ he says. ‘You should watch yourself.’

  He wants me to be safe; he tells me I am not. I did not intend to drink two beers. He buys me a third. I am drinking out of politeness. I am beginning to feel not safe with him. I am beginning to feel drunk. Two men come over to our table. They speak in Greek, then he appears to send them away. They are also dressed in tracksuits and gold chains, gold as Midas. Unlike the ring-doves, I cannot put a name to the way they look – or I could, but am reluctant to make an error in translation. Christos has already asked me to look out but, being a tourist, I cannot read their look accurately enough to see.

  Christos says, ‘You are leaving tomorrow? You come for a drink with me later, a last drink in Athens, I will give you my number. There is a club. It is very nice, very clean drinks.’

  Christos takes my notebook, finds a page. His chains clank: I am blinded. The sky is black now. He writes a number. He looks at me, into my eyes.

  He does not give me back my notebook. I do not say yes. I do not say no.

  (Say nothing: to speak is to be punished: think of Echo, think of Tiresias.)

  He holds my notebook, and he looks at me.

  Then he presses it hard into my hand.

  ‘Now,’ he says, ‘go back to Plaka where you will be safe.’

  Athens

  Mayday

  Space × time. In each city I spend an evening arriving, a day mapping, a morning leaving, or preparing to leave. If I have an extra day inserted between the second and the fourth, the morning of departure, I begin to link up separate sites of the city, walking between them instead of taking the bus, the metro. Today, I’m leaving. I can’t stray far from my hotel. I walk to the station, twitchy for departure; unable to concentrate on the city I am in, already looking for the next.

  I have given up paying on the metro. The turnstiles are always open. There are no ticket checks. A white-tiled elephant built with EU money that the Greeks can hardly afford to staff. A guard patrols the platform, his uniform marked ‘private security’. I wait for him to challenge me but he is only interested in hassling a beggar. Outside the station the touts surrounding the cafés are unconvinced, unconvincing. They know the city’s civil servants are on half-salaries, that no one really expects to get paid.

  It’s May 1st, a day of protests. In front of the parliament in Syntagma Square I wait for something to take shape. Outside the building, the police are sitting, nervous, in armoured minivans, waiting for a mayday signal. They have guns, but their roadblocks are made of plastic ribbon, polite as velvet ropes in a live museum. No streets are blocked off. I have been kettled on demonstrations in England, pressed against the glass revolving doors of multinationals, scattered by police horses. In Athens someone lets off a firecracker and I’m the only one to fling myself flat to the wall in a time-slowed moment of real fear. Later I hear rumours of the expected violence but by then the protestors in the square are all gone. By the metro, a man sells wind-up toy soldiers to no one. They creep on their bellies across the pavement. A flock of pigeons takes flight.

  I go down to the demonstration and walk behind the black flag, half on the road with the protestors, half on the pavement. On the Bank of Athens’ facade, the capital’s name crossed out and BANK OF BERLIN scrawled above. The anarchists’ chant is a low humming like plainsong, then a sudden shout. They wear black in the heat. They have appropriate hairstyles, and they look like professionals. Some of them have home-made riot gear: bike helmets, pieces of wood shaped like baseball bats. Some protestors shower leaflets. No one picks them up. Some sp
ray stencilled slogans or paste bills. Others rip them down, minutes later. Water and bread vendors walk against the flow. No one buys.

  Events recede at different velocities. I walk back to Monastiraki market. There is no sign of the protests, but the army surplus stall has a sudden terrifying purpose. I go into the antiques market where there are stalls selling fake and real turquoise eye-charms, and fake-real or fake-wood dicks with bottle openers at the non-business end, as though their purpose might otherwise be in doubt. There are also real olive leaves, silver plated – garlands for heads and necks, Midas-halted by a desire to keep them, hold them.

  In front of a stall of antique toys, a woman swathed in white with a white-painted face, the imitation of a statue, wants to shake my hand. I make a gesture of refusal but she insists, silently. I offer it. She grabs it and kisses it, wetly, then presses a pack of tissues which – now we are linked by touch, by saliva – I must buy. I wave her away, too shocked to speak. I thought I was about to be part of a performance not designed to end in such an abrupt exchange. She expects money. She is the first person I have met here who expects money, and she has gone to such elaborate lengths to get it. She has reminded me what touch is like, reminded me that I do not like always to be in touch. Still silent, she mimes her disappointment. Her arms are spread toward me but her feet are rooted to the spot.

  Why do you fly from me?

  Because May Day is a holiday as well as a strike, I follow the path from the market up the Pynx, a green hill in the middle of the city. In a wildflower meadow outside the white-bellied observatory, groups of Greek twentysomethings with guitars picnic, form impromptu rebetika orchestras. Flat-profiled men from Greek vases, their torsos surging up from their legs with the perfect balance of centaurs, gather flowers for their girlfriends to weave into garlands. They could not do anything that is not beautiful. The grasses tremble and bob. Time stops. Or, rather, it never was.

  Everyone wants to hear less from me. Already I am talking as little as possible. If only I could say less – but books are made of words. I take out my notebook and write with a blunt pencil. I’d prefer to type, but to open my laptop here seems wrong. From here I have a bird’s-eye view of Athens, like Procne, like Philomel, a star’seye-view like Callisto. If I could arrange words in patterns, like a landscape, if I could do without sentences, if the linear could be laid out flat, if the algorithms worked…

  Echo shrank and died, but I will not die if you do not answer me. I will harden. Voice peeled back from flesh; her bones were turned to stone… It is sound that lives in her. An echo is part of the landscape, or is produced by the landscape. She is, and is not, nature.

  Meantime, an echo changes the meaning of what it repeats, cheats time, stops it, throws the story back, makes possible another solution in repetition.

  Echo in Ovid is staged as the instrument of the possibility of a truth not dependent on intention.

  Spivak, ibid

  There is a kind of ‘suspended’ time, writes Anne Carson in Eros the Bittersweet. It is the time you get at festivals, when things are speeded up or slowed down, sectioned into moments of significance, and each significant moment – however small – an echo of last year’s ceremony in words, or objects: a ritual; the same plastic-limbed fir-trees umbrella’d up (ornaments attached), the same spectacles-testacles-wallet-and-watch, the same Nam-Myoho-RengeKyo. This echoed time opens up possibilities outside the everyday. As does the sort of time that you get on holiday, and the kind you find at protests. And in love.

  Some Greek philosophers have already maintained that eternity is the moment.

  Badiou, In Praise of Love

  I lie back on stone. Above is a blank of light. I am not like the Greek lovers with their garlands. I am not from here.

  I’m at home here, as much as anywhere.

  Are you? How must it be never to find yourself a stranger?

  Here as much as anywhere…

  My eyes go white. In the very material afternoon I’m suspended between two nothings. It is delicious.

  8 Sofia/Boring

  May 2/3rd

  I thought getting to Sofia would be easy. The distances looked manageable. But I got to the station in Athens to find the direct sleeper train had been cancelled three months ago. I could see the stops clearly on the map, and the line that seemed to link them, but joining the dots proved more difficult. I’d assumed connecting would have been easy, or at least possible.

  Yesterday in Athens, the Larissa station was rammed with people sitting on bags, on suitcases, on the floor. I left my hostel at 11pm but the expected train did not arrive at 11.30, nor at 11.45, nor at midnight. The people on the platform grumbled to each other, and queued at the ticket desk to ask questions they knew had no answer, but it was still May Day, still a holiday, and none of them seemed truly distressed or in too much of a hurry to leave. The ticket clerk, overwhelmed by requests, sat his pretty un-uniformed girlfriend on the counter in front of him and gave her a spare mic. She giggled, and began to read out a list of delays, cancellations, and suddenly we were in the brightness of black and white, no longer everyday people waiting for a train in a station in Athens, but actors in a movie about everyday people waiting for a train in a station in Athens.

  I wasn’t bored. Even if I’d had to wait there all night, I could have waited, watching the beautiful screen, for ten more minutes, and for ten minutes more. I’d checked out of my hostel, which locked its doors at midnight: there was no going back. Besides, it was a holiday, and though the trains did not run, suspended time (ritual time, revolutionary time, party time) was still in operation. This time is the opposite of boredom, a time when everything goes as fast or as slow as you like, or when you like how fast or slow time goes – or when liking and time seem, for a moment, to be the same thing. Maybe this also happens when things go wrong: as order crumbles, something opens up, and there are moments people cut themselves some slack. At around a quarter to three my train arrived, not the sleeper, but a train with regular carriages that took me only as far as Thessaloniki nearish to the Greek/Bulgarian border. I lay in a corner seat and wrapped a scarf over my eyes to block the already rising sun.

  How do things stand concerning this horizon of time? How does time come to have a horizon? Does it run up against it, as against a shell that has been placed over it, or does the horizon belong to time itself? Yet what is this thing for, then, that delimits time itself? How and for what does time give itself and form such a limit for itself? And if the horizon is not fixed, to what is it held in its changing? Martin Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics

  From Thessaloniki I meant to continue by train but found the railway system collapsing: price rises, staff laid off. With more miming, more scribbles, more silent offering Euros and pointing to maps, I crossed the city by bus to the coach station only just in time to catch that day’s one connection. All morning the Sofia coach followed the railway. Ghost carriages, orange with rust and graffiti, clogged the track. By the roadside, hastily built petrol points with lean-to cafés: TRAVEL SHOP NON STOP. On the Greek border, solar panels on every house, solar panels and steel gates with barbed wire: the edgelands of self-reliance. Once over into Bulgaria my coach stopped almost immediately at a roadside bar, where the Euro stopped too. Having no Lev I could buy… nothing. While the other passengers ate, I smoked a cigarette next to a rancid swimming pool teeming with tadpoles and discarded beer crates, all the while watching the horse that had been put out to graze on the central reservation.

  In a field across the highway, a man tilled the soil with a horse-drawn hand plough. There it was again, the past turning over the present. He could only wait and hope for the future to take root. To choose to move on is privilege… probably. Other passengers joined me, breaking down their wait into hand-rolled cigarettes, another kind of ritual time – the preparation, the anticipation, as much the ritual as the act itself. There’s an extra pleasure in pleasures that are rule-bound, sanctioned only at certain times,
in certain places.

  The diners and smokers finished. As we climbed back onto the coach the air was full of sinister floating seeds.

  And suddenly there was a sign for Sofia. I’d been asleep. The railway was gone and we raced tram lines into the city, the coach shaking, I didn’t know why. Wait. Yes: we were on cobbles, the present rattling over the past.

  •••

  When does counting the days out become counting the days back? I’ve turned a corner, am beginning to feel the need to leave more quickly. Though I seem to have been travelling for some time, I’m not sure how far I’ve got. I’m bored with doing things. I no longer want new places. A friend emails, tells me to enjoy myself. This makes me angry. His vocabulary for what I’m doing seems a bit limited.

  In the breakfast room of my hostel loud pop and news play simultaneously from screens in opposite corners. I can hear a third strand of music from reception. I’m getting bored with hostels. I’m beginning to feel a revulsion at the going down for breakfast in the morning, never sure what, or who, I’m going to get. I am bored by my room, which is actually a gloomy apartment smelling of un-filtered Sopianaes, decorated in sinister moss-coloured apparatchik luxe, in the bathroom a snot-coloured circular bath with a jacuzzi, which I use to wash my clothes. I am bored by the corridors with carpeted walls and dusty dried flowers – those little obeisances to decoration, nervous attempts at friendship in a foreign language. In the breakfast room there are just two other people, a mother and daughter perhaps, the younger dressed plainly in jeans, the older smoking, dressed flashy and cheap and, at the same time, slovenly. There is something about the way she hangs around that makes her look itinerant. She is waiting for something but also ready to leave. It is this and not just her dress that makes her look like a prostitute.