by Nadia Marks
She started to pull loose the yellow ribbon.
9
There have been many times when Anna was grateful for the hours her father spent trying to teach her his native tongue, but never, ever, as much as on that fateful morning in her aunt’s house. The words that leapt out at her like flames from those old musty letters had nothing to do with the writings of four young children to their maiden aunt, but everything to do with the scorching passion of a young man for his lover. The wafer-thin paper was yellowing with age, the ink was blue and the writing was the work of a calligrapher. Those were not words scribbled in haste; it was the hand of Éros that guided the pen that wrote them. The letters were arranged backwards in chronological order, with apparently one of the earliest to be received on top of the pile.
2 May 1937
My beloved, the letter began,
Every day that passes I miss you more and more.
This is torture, a life sentence. How can I live away from you? I will not survive without your love, your burning kisses. Each night before I sleep I look at the sky. I sit on deck and gaze at the stars and think of you, my love, my life. I imagine you are doing the same and that we are united once more for a moment on a distant galaxy. I love you, my Ourania, you are the sky and the stars. You are my whole world.
I go to sleep with your name on my lips, imagining you are in my arms, in our hideout on the beach. My life is empty without you. I kiss your mouth a thousand times and long to feel your soft skin once more next to mine . . .
As if in a trance, Anna read on. Letter after letter continued in the same desperate passionate tone. Letters mainly of love, loneliness and longing. Brief accounts of life on board a ship, descriptions of distant ports and cities.
Each letter was dated, they spanned over two years, from around 1937 to 1939, and always began with ‘My beloved . . .’
. . . Today our ship docked in Cardiff, which is the capital of Wales in the United Kingdom. After the beauty of the Mediterranean, this city seems so grey and unfamiliar. Oh my love, how I wish I could show you all the places I have sailed to. Venice is exquisite, by far the most beautiful place I have ever seen. You would not believe your eyes if you saw it. Can you imagine a city that has instead of roads, canals, and instead of cars, boats? People go from one place to the other by what they call a gondola. Italian people are friendly and many of them remind me of our people. The language too seems familiar, and I’m picking it up quite easily; many workers on the boat are Italian.
The buildings look like the palaces in the fairy-tale books you used to read when you were a girl. I bought you a postcard so you can see a picture but we didn’t have time to post it so I will keep it and show you when we are together. How I long to hold you in my arms again, Ourania mou. What wouldn’t I give to have you in my arms and make love to you till sunrise? The mere thought of you is more intoxicating than the bellyful of wine we are allowed to consume when we dock in some foreign port. But we have to be patient. This time will soon come for us.
There were so many letters in that little bundle. Most of them were well over three or four pages long, and all full of colourful images, love and desire. Lost in the story Anna wished to devour each and every one. Finally, right at the bottom of the pile, she came across a lone single page with just a few words on it. She held her breath while she read.
Sept. 1939
My beloved,
My heart has been broken in a thousand pieces. I feel bereft and more unhappy than I know how to express. I will pray every day that you might change your mind and still want to come to be with me, but I have to accept your decision. I respect your courage and bravery. You are a wonderful, remarkable girl, Ourania mou, and you will always be my love.
My only regret is that I will not be there to support you and protect you all from this war that has broken out in Europe at this time. My heart trembles for your safety. Please take care, my beloved.
I love you now, and forever . . . till we meet again,
L
The rollercoaster of emotions got the better of Anna and once again her tears returned. She was gripped by a sense of gloomy curiosity. Apart from the date, none of the letters gave any detail as to where they came from or from whom. The language was sensual and lyrical, the love, desire and yearning for Ourania genuine. Who was this passionate young man with the broken heart? Each letter was simply signed off in a beautifully scripted L. Who was he and what had become of him? Why had her aunt put such an abrupt stop to the affair? What had happened to all that love and lust she ignited and why did she end it?
The fact that her aunt had at some point in her life been struck by the thunderbolt and had felt that vault of electricity pass through her body pleased Anna and saddened her at the same time. Ourania had apparently been deeply in love, yet had chosen a life of solitude; all that had remained from this love were those letters. How could such strength of feeling vanish? Does time really cure everything? Anna’s brain was a scramble of questions. The only consolation to this story was that at least the two lovers had been able to spend some time of passion together no matter how brief before parting. For over sixty years her aunt had preserved the memory of her love affair, a memory of fierce longing and sensual pleasure, locked away in a wooden box like a faded photograph or a lock of hair in a silver locket.
Anna was completely engrossed in this story of tenderness, desire and separation. By now her hands were trembling, her throat was dry, yet she was perspiring profusely; her heart pounded so hard she could hear its frantic beat. She knew she had to stop reading but couldn’t. She felt like a cheat, or even worse, like a thief, but kept on. Suddenly a sound outside the window made her jump so hard it sent the letters on her lap onto the floor. Anna started scrabbling around in a frantic effort to gather them, and in her haste knocked over the glass of water next to her. Now she was not only drenched in sweat, but water too. What if her aunt had returned? What if she found her sneaking like this, betraying her trust? How could Anna ever look her in the eyes? What would she say to her?
With a superhuman effort, adrenalin working overtime, she managed to put letters in envelopes, tie yellow ribbon, wrap swaddling-cloth, and place the wooden box back into the trunk in minutes. Shaking with nerves and exertion Anna started to clear up the room, preparing to face whoever was outside. She waited, barely breathing, but nobody came; it had probably been a stray dog circling the garden. Finally, shaken, exhausted and emotional, she left the house.
Head swimming, she walked in the blazing heat to collect her scooter, which in her earlier haste she had forgotten at the beach. Anna needed to talk to someone, but who? Manos? Would he know about their aunt’s secret? If not what would she say to him? Possibly his mother knew, but if that was the case Anna was sure everyone else would have known by now, including her. Also, knowing her Thia Ourania’s relationship with her sister, it was doubtful. Anna thought that her own mother would have been a more likely confidante than her Aunt Asimina. But if her mother had known would she have also told Alexis? Anna couldn’t imagine that either; even if her mother knew, she was fearlessly loyal and would never have betrayed Ourania’s secret. Full of unanswered questions, Anna found herself heading up to Elia. The only person she wanted to see was Nicos.
She found him at the back of the studio feeding his chickens. This time he wasn’t plugged into his music so as soon as Anna called his name he responded.
‘Anna mou!’ he shouted, dropping the enamel bowl full of chicken feed, sending the hens into a pecking frenzy round his feet as he rushed towards her.
‘I thought you’d run away from me forever,’ he whispered, scooping her up in his arms, and covering her in kisses. Anna could feel the shape of his arm muscles under his shirt, the rough bristle of his chin on her face. Desire started to rise in her again. His lips travelled from her mouth to her throat and, cradling her like a baby, he carried her into the house and onto his bed. Without a word he started to undress her. Sand, salt and sweat still
on their skin, they tasted of the sea. His body hard and heavy on top of hers blissfully blocked out any rational thoughts she tried to hold on to. Nothing mattered; she felt that she had no past or future, just the here and now. Anna shuddered in anticipation and once more the delicious rush of sexual energy ran through her veins. As they rolled around on the softness of the bed, under the white haze of the mosquito net, she gave herself up to pleasure for the second time that day.
‘Perhaps he was killed in the war,’ Nicos said over the deafening mid-afternoon noise of a million cicadas who’d taken occupancy in the tamarisk tree just outside his bedroom window. This time Anna didn’t run away. She stayed willingly and lay languid in Nicos’s arms until their breathing returned to normal and their hearts resumed their regular beat. This time she couldn’t tear herself away from him; she lay enveloped in the milky blur of the mosquito net, his head resting on her thigh, damp tendrils of his hair spread across her belly.
‘That might also explain why she never married,’ he said again, caught up in her aunt’s story.
‘It’s so sad, Nico. So much love, so much passion. What happened to it? It’s very unclear from the letters,’ Anna said, stroking his face, sadness clouding her vision again. ‘There was obviously so much love between them yet she renounced her love and ended up living her life alone.’
‘I keep telling you, Anna, this is a small island with a handful of small-minded people; even now. Can you imagine how it must have been then?’
‘But they were so young and if they were so in love, why couldn’t they be together? What made her forsake him? From the last letter I read it was Ourania who stopped the love affair.’
‘Perhaps he had to go away before they could marry and since they were so young this would have been frowned upon . . . or he couldn’t marry her. What if he was already married to someone else . . . like you, Anna? Don’t you see? In that kind of society if they’d been lovers she had no option but to keep it a secret.’
Once, a few years ago, when she spoke with her aunt about love, marriage and children, Anna had assumed she’d been deprived of all three.
‘What one has never had, one cannot regret losing, Anna,’ she told her niece and as always Anna marvelled at how wise and philosophical her aunt was being. The thought that this wonderful woman had lived a loveless life had troubled her a great deal but now in the light of the new revelations Anna hoped that she had only been alluding to marriage and children and had not missed out on love and passion. It’s all very well to say, what you haven’t had you don’t miss, Anna mused, but how can a person feel fulfilled if they have never tasted passion, which is the absolute essence of life?
She ran her fingers through Nicos’s hair and started to overflow with joy and gratitude for the passion this man so unexpectedly lavished on her.
‘I want to know what happened to them, why they parted,’ Anna told Nicos, with a sudden pang in her heart at the thought of separation. Now, like her Thia Ourania all those years ago, she too had a secret lover, and a secret which Anna had to protect.
‘If you really want to know what happened to your aunt you might have to ask her,’ Nicos replied. ‘You never know, Anna, she might finally want to talk about it. Especially to you.’
10
It was almost dusk by the time Anna got back to the house. The sun had already set the sky on fire and the sound of birds settling for the night surpassed the deafening midday noise of the cicadas. She parked her scooter at the side of the house and breathed in the heavenly scent of jasmine which had started to infuse the early evening air. Anna never ceased to be astonished by how this tiny, delicate, modest white flower can exude such a powerful aroma. She was sure the ancient Egyptians must have modelled their painterly representations of stars on the simple jasmine. Each drawing of a star appears to resemble the shape of a single flower, a whole plant like a constellation. During the day when the sun is high in the sky it’s as if he steals the bashful jasmine’s thunder so it retreats away, it holds back. But when the sun begins his descent and the sky turns to ink, then the jasmine flower explodes with a scent so beautiful that merely breathing it in is never enough.
The sound of singing and laughter coming from the garden intrigued Anna, and as she walked through the gate she was greeted by a heart-warming sight, a scene of love and friendship. Her father and aunt were sitting round the table under the klimataria, a bowl of ripe red grapes freshly picked that morning in the centre, drinking wine from a carafe and singing along to an old melody which was spilling out from the house – a Greek song, but with a Latin refrain, a song from the 1930s and ’40s, the popular music of their youth. Anna had heard these tunes, tangos, waltzes and serenades, countless times. Her parents loved them, and over the years she had sought to buy new recordings so they’d have a collection of tapes and CDs instead of their old records.
‘Annoula!’ her dad shouted, enthusiastically clapping his hands as soon as he saw his daughter. ‘Come and dance with me! I’ve been trying to get your aunt to but she won’t.’
‘Why not, Thia?’ Anna asked, glad not to be reprimanded for once for being so late. Dropping her beach bag on a chair she took the hand of her father, who was already up and ready for a dance.
‘My knees hurt, that’s why,’ Ourania laughed, and sat back to watch the two of them waltz around the table. Anna felt like a little a girl again in her father’s arms. He had taught her to waltz and tango under this very vine to the sound of these very tunes during their summers on the island and it was here Anna had watched Alexis and Rosaria dancing together, demonstrating intricate moves for her benefit. Fighting back the tears, she held tight onto her dad and wondered how much more emotion she could take in one day.
That night she was quite prepared to lie awake tormenting herself, like the night before. Instead she fell into a deep continuous sleep. When she came to, the next morning, she was unsure if the events of the previous day had actually taken place or had been an elaborate dream. Did she really do all that yesterday; make love on a rock and then again once more with such abandon? Was that really her? The scent of sex still lingered faintly on her skin. She ran her hands over her body as if to check that her limbs were still the same, still hers, but nothing seemed to betray what had gone on twenty-four hours previously.
Anna got out of bed and stood in front of the full-length mirror on the old wooden wardrobe. After such intensity shouldn’t some physical mark have been left on her body? Shouldn’t she at least have grown a pair of wings or something? Taking off her nightdress she started to examine herself further. Apart from a few bruises from rolling around on the rock and Nicos’s strong embraces, she looked like the same old Anna. She stood looking in the mirror for ages trying to imagine what Nicos saw to like in her. She realized that she’d stopped looking at her body like that years ago. When younger she’d kept a close eye on it, made sure it was in good shape; that was probably because she quite liked what she saw then. Now it was always such a disappointment. What, she wondered, had happened to that lovely young woman that was Anna?
Just because what she saw wasn’t to her liking any more she assumed that perhaps no one else would like it either. Max obviously didn’t, otherwise why did he do what he did? Suddenly Anna was looking at herself with a new pair of eyes. Admittedly what reflected back was a far cry from the young nubile body of long ago; it may no longer have the lustre and smoothness of youth but it was still her body, still healthy and robust. A body that was still functioning perfectly well and still capable of giving and receiving pleasure; which, apparently, a man younger than herself liked well enough to make passionate love to, even if her husband didn’t.
She continued to gaze at her reflection and wondered what Nicos saw in her. She was often told she had good legs and she knew she had a small waist, or at least she had when she was young. Her mother always said that she took after Alexis’s side of the family and that she inherited her Thia Ourania’s smile, but all she ever saw these days w
as a tired middle-aged woman.
As she looked in the mirror Anna decided that perhaps all those hormones released while making love might have had some positive effect on her, because in the soft morning light, with her deep suntan and minus her glasses, she didn’t look so terrible. She always maintained that the only possible upside of having to wear reading glasses – yet another reminder of the ageing process – was that when not wearing them the blurring effect made everyone looked so much better. The only consolation to the fact that Nicos didn’t need glasses and most likely had twenty-twenty vision was that his eyes were shut all the while they made love. The memory triggered another thought which nearly made her buckle over with laughter: if her teenage self or even her twenty-something self had ever imagined what she’d been doing at her advanced age, they would have both died with embarrassment. She remembered how at that age she dismissed anyone over thirty as past it. Do we ever get past it, she wondered; does the body ever give up on sex?
Suddenly the loud ringing of the telephone made Anna jump out of her naked skin. It vibrated through the house, shattering the early morning peace and making her feel anxious. The phone hardly ever rang there and if it did, it was always for an emergency. Who could that be? She stood pinned to the floorboards as if paralysed, her heart pounding. It carried on ringing for ages until finally Alexis picked it up. Anna strained to hear what he was saying but it was impossible. His hushed tone filled her with panic. Who could be calling so early in the morning, and why was her father speaking in a whisper? Grabbing her dressing gown she ran into the living room.
‘Here she is! She is awake after all!’ Alexis said, raising his voice to its normal pitch again. ‘Good morning, Anna. It’s Max,’ and giving her a big smile he handed her the receiver.
