by Cate Kennedy
He’s flush with drink as usual and, as he tears at the tape, lacquered strands of his hair swing up. He pulls another swath of brown paper free. The delicate half-turned face of Rosa Parks, her placid eyes as if seeing through the dark, through me.
Arthur looks over and spots me here in the window. He’s walking toward me, along the dim lit path, Rosa Parks under his arm like a rudder, for luck.
As he opens the door he sees what I have swaddled against me, wrapped in the jacket. He smiles as he puts my painting down.
‘Who’s this?’ he asks.
‘Moses,’ I whisper.
Tears cradle in my eyes as Arthur reaches to pet the white face that cranes from my arms, from his coat.
He kisses the cat on its dusty head. ‘It’s going to be okay,’ he says.
A Greek Tragedy
CLAIRE VARLEY
It starts as a romance and ends as a tragedy. There are tears, there is hubris, there is a damnation and regret. It is, after all, Greek.
It ends as a tragedy…
A young woman hears her grandfather crying in the room next door. In the still, cool night his words are a pained murmur of whispers and wails. She doesn’t understand the language but can translate the heartache. It is the early hours of the morning. It is his birthday. He is old. He is eighty. He is weeping.
It starts as a romance…
He never noticed her until his brother, Stavros, did. They were sitting on the porch eating grapes, watching the sun set on another humid Cypriot day when Stavros drew his breath.
‘You see her, Christos?’
Christos frowned at his brother.
‘See who, Stavros? Mama?’
Christos shook his head impatiently.
‘No, not Mother, Christos, the girl.’
Stavros looked around.
‘I don’t see any girl, Stavros. You’ve been staring at the sun too long.’
‘Bah!’ Stavros cried, ‘Your eyes! That girl. Across the street. In the blue dress.’
Christos squinted.
‘Yes, I see her. In the blue dress. Elias’s daughter, I think it is. Why am I looking at her?’
‘Because,’ Stavros whispered,’ she is beautiful. ‘That is girl I will marry.’
Christos grimaced and looked at his younger brother, laughing.
‘Marry? Not even seventeen and already you’re ready to marry?’
‘Not now,’ Stavros shuffled his feet impatiently, ‘soon. Soon I will marry her. Soon.’
The next morning she woke to the sound of movement in the kitchen. It was early but already he was up, moving about the house, unloading the dishwasher. She could hear him grunt to himself, coughing up a lifetime of smoking. She heard a softer grunting and knew her grandmother was up too, most likely sitting at the kitchen table working through her procession of medication. This one for the arthritis, this one for the diabetes, this one for the nausea caused by the last two. There was a loud metallic clatter followed by cursing. He must have dropped a pan. He was always doing that these days as his eyesight faded and his capacities declined. She threw off the blanket and sat up.
Now that Stavros had shared his secret love with someone, he started confiding in Christos more. In the mornings on the way to the orchard he would list her endless qualities and perfections. As they worked, picking the grapes from the vines, he would shout across to Christos the things she did that made him love her; the way she did her hair, the way she picked flowers for the old women in the village, the way she sometimes smiled at him showing her dimples then blushed and looking away. And each afternoon as they walked home, Christos found himself becoming more and more enchanted with Elias’s daughter. When Stavros recounted tales of her kindness, Christos’s heart soared. When he joked about her good nature, Christos laughed too. So by the time Stavros pulled his brother aside and asked him to deliver a letter to her declaring his love, Christos was dying to finally talk to her in person.
‘Of course, Stavros, of course. I’ll do it next chance I get.’
After she showered she joined them in the kitchen.
‘Morning, Yiayia. Hronia Polla! Happy Birthday, Papou.’
She leant over and gave him a kiss on the cheek. He grunted and motioned to the fridge.
‘You want some toast and haloumi?’
‘We also got baked beans,’ her yiayia added.
‘Not this morning,’ she replied. ‘Just coffee. I don’t want to eat too much because there will be so much food tonight.’
‘Tonight?’ The old man looked confused.
‘Yeah, tonight. Your party. Everyone’s coming around, remember?’
‘Party?’
‘Yes, Christos, the party,’ her yiayia said, shaking her head. He doesn’t remember these things. He has trouble sleeping at night and forgets what he’s doing in the day.
‘That’s okay, Papou,’ she smiled, kissing him on the top of the head, ‘I remember. I’ll make sure everything is ready.’
The old man nodded, looking at the lines in his hands.
Christos left the house early and walked briskly down the street. Once he was round the corner he pulled the letter out of his pocket. It was written in careful, loving letters that had taken Stavros hours to get right. Christos glanced over his shoulder then ripped the letter in half, then half again. He kicked at the dirt on the ground making a shallow hole and then buried the letter, stamping hard on the ground to flatten it again. He would tell Stavros it had blown away in the wind and was lost to the sea. Christos wiped his shoe carefully across the grass to remove the dirt. He looked around again, straightened his jacket, smoothed his collar and continued on his way. When he got to Elias’s house, the girl was in the front yard pulling out weeds. Christos paused for a moment and drank in her beauty. She froze, sensing his presence. Seeing Christos, her face burst into a wide, dimpled smile which she quickly covered with her hand. She stood as he approached.
‘Kalimera,’ Christos smiled and stuck out his hand.
‘Good morning,’ she replied, glancing over her shoulder.
‘My father isn’t here,’ she continued nervously, ‘and my mother wouldn’t like it if she knew I was talking to a man. Well,’ she looked him up and down, ‘a boy,’ she said and giggled, her cheeks flashing red.
Christos pretended to be angry.
‘Eighteen,’ he mock-frowned, ‘is a man.’
Christos couldn’t help smiling. She giggled, glancing over her shoulder again.
‘Really, my mother wouldn’t like it…’
‘I’ll go, I promise. I just wanted to stop and make sure you were aware that you are the most beautiful girl in the village, that’s all. I wanted you to know that you have the kindest heart and the most enchanting nature. And I wanted to know when I can see you again. Hopefully,’ he added, ‘ for longer.’
She looked at him thoughtfully.
‘Syntoma,’ she replied softly, ‘soon.’
She spent the morning tidying the small lounge room and vacuuming the carpet. She found a plastic bag full of photos under the dining table and sifted through the stained sepia shots looking for familiar faces. There were some of her mother and aunts as children, some of her grandparents standing smiling before the house, their clothes hinting of the past. Judging by the photos, life seemed to start when her grandparents married.
‘Yiayia, where are all the photos of before?’
‘Before what, darling-mou?’ her yiayia asked.
‘Before you and Papou got married.’
The old woman shifted in her seat and massaged her wrist.
‘Not many photos from before. We didn’t have a camera back in my village and your papou had no money either. Also,’ she winked, ‘not much to take photos of in the those days. Everything was in black and white then!’
And she chuckled at the joke she had told time and time again.
When Stavros found out he was silent, accepting. He simply nodded when Christos told him about the secret meetings between
he and Elias’s daughter and promised not to tell anyone.
‘Etsi itan grammeno,’ he had whispered, ‘That is the way it is written.’
Stavros’s blank eyes did not meet his older brother’s as he agreed to cover for him the next night while Christos snuck off to meet with her.
‘Stavros,’ Christos gushed, ‘she is the most amazing girl in the world! So clever and funny and kind.’
That night Christos had put on his best clothes and crept out into the heavy night to find her. It was her papou’s Name Day celebrations and everyone would be busy so no one would notice she was missing. Christos waited by the side of the house stamping his feet impatiently. He felt like every moment away from her was a waste of time and was drawing to an end the minutes and seconds left in this world that he could spend with her. When she finally arrived he gasped.
‘What is it?’ she asked.
Christos was silent for a moment.
‘You look so beautiful tonight.’
She blushed beneath the moonlight and held out her arms. Christos took them and his heart felt like it would stop forever just so he could stay like this for all eternity. He stared into her eyes and felt the world start to turn again.
‘I can only be quick,’ she said.
‘Then I will be quick,’ Christos smiled. ‘One day,’ he continued, ‘I will marry you.’
He heard her quick inhalation of breath.
‘But first,’ he went on, ‘I have to go away and make some money so that I can give you the life you deserve.’
This time her gasp was louder. She stared at him for a moment and then nodded.
‘Where will you go?’
‘I have an uncle in Australia so I will go there. He will sponsor me and give me work. And then, when I have made my money, I will come back and marry you.’
He could see tears welling in her eyes. He drew her closer. Inside the house people had started to sing. Cries of hronia polla, ‘many years’, rang out into the night. Her face against his neck was warm and wet with tears. He pulled her away from him and looked into her red eyes.
‘You say your papou is almost eighty, huh? Pretty good for an old man. I hope I have a party like this when I’m eighty. And then you and I can dance and celebrate a long, happy life together.’
She looked deep into his eyes.
‘You promise me?’
‘Of course I promise you. I’ll go to Australia, make my money and then I’ll come back and marry you.’
‘When?’
‘Soon. I will marry you soon.’
Their family was big with countless cousins so she had searched the house to round up all the plates and cutlery she could. Some were hidden in strange places like in the back of a cupboard in the spare room and in the liquor cabinet. A lifetime of accumulated possessions crammed into a small suburban house meant that things seemed to find storage space wherever space could be made. She had found a set of plates with a beautiful intricate border of what looked like grape vines.
‘These plates are beautiful, Yiayia. Where are they from?’ ‘Which plates?’
‘She held one up.’
‘Those? They are your papou’s. From Cyprus. His brother sent them when we get married. They are grape vines like the orchard your papou used to work in. Lots of grapes in his village.’
‘It must be beautiful there. Has Papou ever been back to his village?’
‘No, he no go back. Too much money for tickets and too much work here. No holidays. No time.’
‘Did his brother ever come here?’
‘No, too expensive. He never come here. Only your papou. And now, everyone is too old to fly.’
When he arrived in Australia everything was so different. The people, the city, the language, the weather. The smells were different and the way things tasted. Here he wasn’t anything, just the wog who waited tables in his uncle’s cafe. He tried to learn the language and the alphabet but everything was so unfamiliar and strange. He would practice his English with the customers in the shop. Some would laugh, some would encourage him and some would not even realise he was trying to speak English.
‘Try harder, Christos,’ his uncle would tell him, ‘you in Australia now. Look at Vicky, how good her English is.’
And he would motion to Vicky, the daughter of a neighbour, who worked in the cafe, too, and who would smile and giggle whenever Christos looked at her. But whenever Christos looked at her, he thought of no one but Elias’s daughter and longed for the day when her next letter would arrive in the mailbox. When her letters did arrive, written in his language, it was like a bullet from home entering his heart. She would tell him about the weather, about the orchards, about the people in the village. She would tell him about the growing tensions toward the British and how everyone was talking about enosis, union with Greece. She would tell him what she had been doing, what she was feeling, what she was dreaming about. And she would ask him when? When was he coming back? When would he marry her? And in the hastily-written letters he scribbled during his smoking breaks or in his small room at night, he would always say the same thing. Soon, soon, soon. When he had enough money. Soon, soon, soon. But over time he grew to understand this new country and love the freedom and opportunity it offered him. His plan changed. He wasn’t going back to his country with the tension and the limited future it held for him. He would bring her here. Which meant more money to pay for her sponsorship and sea passage. And soon, soon, soon, became a little further away.
When everything was ready, inspired by the discovery of the bag of photos that morning, she decided to create a photo board of her papou to celebrate his eighty years. She scoured the house for pictures that chronicled his life and marked his achievements and successes. There he was with his first car, a rusty old thing that he beamed proudly beside. There he was with his first-born child, her mother, delighted despite so badly wanting a son. There he was with his second born, another daughter, her mother clinging to his legs, still beaming. And now here he was with his last-born, her youngest aunt, resigned to the fact he would have nothing but women in his household. And other pictures of fishing trips, family holidays at the beach, him standing in front of his own cafe holding the lease up proudly. A photo of the family huddled in front of the new television set, fascinated and enthralled. Then photos of weddings, grandchildren, graduations, Christmases; the coloured memories of a life lived. She lined the pictures across the perimeter of the lounge room, guessing their order. At one stage her yiayia had wandered in to watch the television and stopped to glance at a photo.
‘The trip to Bateman’s Bay,’ she remembered, holding the photo close to her face.
She looked around the room at the rest of the photos.
‘So many memories, eh?’ she mused and sat down to watch the television.
When she finally wrote the letter demanding he return or she would no longer wait, he was ready. He hadn’t told her yet that it was she, not him, who would be moving. He wanted it to be a surprise. He wanted to have everything ready. He wanted to have a small decent apartment ready for her arrival, full of beautiful things for her to marvel at. He had found somewhere near his uncle’s cafe that he could afford to rent and dreamt at night about the things he would buy to fill the rooms. That night he sat on his bed and carefully wrote the letter asking her to join him. He chose his words carefully, describing in detail what life would be like in this new country, in the apartment he would rent. Then he described the cafe he would lease and the house he would buy and the children they would have and the wonderful life they would live up until they danced together at his eightieth birthday.
The next day he put the letter in an envelope, sealed it with a kiss and sent it to her. Soon, soon, soon.
When she had finished arranging the photos, she sat by her yiayia watching television. The Greek news was on and she didn’t understand a word they were saying. There were lots of pictures of angry people and crowds gathering and adamant-looking men in suits and then it cu
t to a story that seemed to be about the Greek national soccer team. She got up and wandered around the house looking for her papou. She found him out in the garden staring at his tomato plants.
‘Papou?’ she called out from the doorway.
He didn’t notice her.
Each day he waited for her reply. The days turned into weeks. The weeks piled up. Still he waited for a reply to his letter, never knowing that the letter had never left Australia, and had, when the mail bag burst on the docks, blown away in the wind and drowned beneath the fierce waves of this foreign sea. He waited while his heart grew tenser and tenser and his nights longer and longer. Each shift at the cafe lasted an eternity until he finished and could rush home to see if there was any mail awaiting him. And one day, many weeks after he had posted his letter, there was. Written in a foreign hand, Christos opened it excitedly. It must be from her father, accepting Christos’s marriage proposal! A photograph fell out. Christos looked at it stunned. He read the letter. He now realised it was written in his brother’s hand. He looked back at the photograph. There she was, beautiful in a white gown, her face an unreadable mask. And beside her, beaming, was Stavros.
She tried again, louder.
‘Papou?’
He still didn’t notice her or didn’t want to notice her. He was picking at a tomato plant, pulling off the dead leaves. He had kept a garden since before she could remember and her childhood memories were full of grapes pulled off the vine, pomegranates cracked open and shared with cousins, and juicy olives pickled in his garage. Gradually, the older she got, the sparser the garden grew. Difficult things like the grapevines gradually gave way to more easily cultivated plants like the tomatoes, until his garden was almost nothing but a sea of tomatoes. He now grew so many he had to wander the streets every couple of days knocking on the neighbour’s doors and leaving behind plastic bags full of tomatoes. He had worked so hard on the garden and these days it seemed like a sad reminder that he was old and growing older still. She left him alone in the garden and went back into the house.
