by Sara Alexi
‘You okay?’ Juliet asks.
‘Fine.’ Sophia sniffs as she draws her hands down her face.
‘Fine but crying.’ Juliet sits in one of the wicker chairs. The way she does it, slowly and consciously, invites Sophia to sit too, and she sinks gratefully into the sofa. It gives more than she expects and she rolls backwards, her feet lifting from the floor.
‘Oh.’ The shock is followed by a laugh. ‘Deep, isn’t it?’ She wriggles to sit up and a cat winds around her ankles. ‘Hello, cat. Has it got a name?’ she asks, but she is not ready to lift her face yet. The tears are wiped away once more.
‘That one’s Aaman.’
‘Amen?’
‘No.’ Juliet chuckles. ‘Aa-man. It’s a long story.’
The cat jumps onto Sophia’s knee and turns around twice before sitting down and tucking its head and tail in.
‘So that’s it. You are part of the family.’
Sophia tentatively strokes the cat.
‘Can I ask you something?’ says Juliet.
‘Of course.’ Sophia looks up now, her countenance open, ready to be of help.
‘How old were you when you joined the convent?’
‘Thirteen.’ Sophia strokes the cat again.
‘Just a child!’
‘Well, I was only a novice. I lived there and helped with the chores and went to church and Sunday school.’ Sophia leans back, allowing her spine to bend, her uprightness gone.
‘Still, very young even to leave your mama.’
She shrugs. Juliet seems to wait.
‘I had four sisters and no brothers. On a small island, that’s a problem.’
‘Oh, where are you from? Not from round here?’
‘Orino Island.’ She looks up at the same sun that shines there too. ‘It never occurred to me that it was a problem. It was a bit of a squash, I suppose, but even that was just how it was. Vetta, Sotiria, Angeliki, Sada, and me. Do you have any brothers or sisters?’
‘No.’ Juliet is very still.
‘It was fun at times.’
‘Orino Island is so beautiful. The first time I went there, I didn’t believe there were no cars or motor bikes. But once you see how the houses are built on that steep hill above the port and how narrow the paths are between the buildings, you realise that only feet or donkeys would work. Did you live near the port or higher up? Everything is counted in the number of steps to it there, isn’t it?’ Juliet asks.
‘About halfway up the town, past the point of counting steps, I’m afraid.’ Her stroking of the cat becomes mechanical and her eyes glaze over slightly as she speaks. She hasn’t really thought about home for years. Too far away, perhaps. Too removed from her reality. Vivid pictures return now and the sound of laughter of her and her sisters.
‘The house was traditional. You know, where the sleeping rooms have double doors, one leading into another. I suppose they don’t build them like that any more. That’s how ours was, upstairs anyway, the four rooms in a line. Vetta had the far end room, Sotiria had the next, then the room that had a door to go down the outside stairs was Angeliki’s, and then the largest room, I shared with Sada. I say it was the largest room because it had Mama and Baba’s old double bed which Sada and I slept in, but it was no bigger than the other rooms.’ She gives a little laugh. ‘The trunks with our clothes were downstairs.’ Her hand pauses over the cat’s ears, and it wakes and lifts its head to meet her touch, encouraging her to continue stroking. ‘Our room led to the inside stairs that went off and round at an angle.’ She uses one hand to vaguely indicate the setup. ‘I think it was added on to the main house at some point. We would drive Mama crazy running up one set of steps and down the others, chasing each other in circles.’ She takes a deep breath and lets it out slowly before gaining some energy to say, ‘But you don’t want to hear all this.’ She hasn’t talked like this for, well, a very long time. It certainly was not encouraged at the convent and, after a while, it seemed sort of pointless. No one was ever going to meet her sisters and she wasn’t going to go back. It was just a dream, a distant sweet memory, a contrast to her reality, and after a while, it was as if she lost her will to think of such things.
Juliet, who has been sitting listening without moving, now sits up a little and crosses her legs.
‘When I first came to Greece, years and years ago, I fell in love with the place. It took me a long time to make the move to live here and I often wish I had done it sooner so I could have seen so many of the ways people used to live that are disappearing now. Like your rooms that led one into another. So many of the old houses have been pulled down to make way for the new. In Saros town, I have seen timber-framed houses with hand-made bricks that must have been hundreds of years old just bulldozed down in a couple of hours so profit-making flats could be built. I can see the need to make a living, but I think one day Greece will regret it.’
‘I don’t think much will change on Orino Island. They have strict rules about what can be built and what can be changed. But I imagine, behind closed doors …’
‘What was the point of the double doors?’
‘I have no idea, just communal, I suppose. We would leave them open and talk to each other although Vetta, being the eldest, would often close hers.’
‘Where did your mama and baba sleep?’
‘Oh, we had two daybeds downstairs, but they were up first and last to bed, so I never really saw them sleep. Except, sometimes, Baba would fall asleep under the tree in the garden if he had been out all night.’ Sophia looks from one of the pomegranate trees to the next. It’s nice talking about her family, remembering her closeness to her sisters before the convent, the love, the laughter.
‘What did he do?’
‘Fisherman. Not the best job with five girls. I mean, it’s a useful job if you have a growing family, I think a day did not go by that we did not eat fish soup.’ What she would give for a bowl of her mama’s fish soup right now. She was too nervous this morning to eat breakfast. ‘But it does not make much of a living and they struggled to find us each a dowry.’ She looks back to the cat on her knee. The sun has found its way through the leaves and Juliet shifts her chair a little, back into the shade.
‘There, you see, dowries. For me, it’s hard to imagine anyone, let alone someone younger than me, having a dowry.’ Juliet uncrosses her legs, stretches them out. Her full skirt hangs between them.
Sophia notices grey hairs hidden in the blond, the slight sagging to Juliet’s face and ever such a tiny hint of a jowl beginning to form, but she cannot age her. She could be anywhere between forty and fifty, maybe even older. How do you tell?
‘In the end, they only needed three. For Sotiria, Angeliki, and Sada,’ Sophia says.
‘Of course, with you going into the church, but what about … Sorry, I have forgotten her name.’
‘Vetta. She’s the oldest. They did have a dowry for her, and she had her own chest of linen and so on. She dreamed more than any of us of being married. I think it was partly to get away from us all.’ A mischievous smile accompanies this last sentence.
‘She was the person in the house who did the sewing and mending. She learnt how to make lace and put edges on things.’ She wrinkles her nose. It is not so much a look of distaste but of lack of comprehension. ‘Anyway, they found a boy and made arrangements and the introductions and within weeks, from being a happy person she gained this gloom, a lack of life. I found it scary. She spent as much time in her part of the house as possible with the doors closed.’ She grows still. Maybe talking this much about her family, things from the past is not such a good idea.
‘You know, I don’t think I have talked this much since, well I don’t know when. All these memories are just flooding back like they happened yesterday.’ Admitting it makes her feel more easy.
‘Well, you are starting a new life, so I guess you will be adjusting. You have only so much experience from which to judge things. It’s a big change. Are you hungry, by the way? I have fres
h bread from the bakery and some feta. We could pick a tomato or two.’ She stands and goes inside, from where she calls, ‘I have local yoghurt and olives. That will be enough, won’t it?’
‘Sounds fine.’ Sophia has to wriggle to get her weight forward enough to stand up from the sagging sofa. The cat gives a look of disgust and jumps onto the chair Juliet was sitting on and lies with its legs overhanging at one end and its head lolling over the other. ‘Where do the tomatoes grow?’ At the end of the house, by the gate and up against the stone building next door, some plants grow in lines, bamboo sticks here and there, and as she gets nearer, she sees the tomatoes between some beans that do not look like they are doing very well. ‘Got them,’ she calls back. The vegetable plot faces the end of the house, and beyond opens into a garden. There is a pergola creaking under the weight of thick vine stems next to an area of lawn surrounded by an abundance of flowering bushes, geraniums, and more tropical blooms. A passion flower vine covers part of the back fence. Fruit trees are dotted at random on the lawn, offering shade, and a gnarled and crooked olive tree in the centre has a curved bench around it.
‘Did you find the tomatoes?’ Juliet calls from the front.
‘Oh yes. Coming.’ She picks and pockets as many as she thinks they will need and returns to find Juliet has laid the table on the patio. ‘Beautiful garden.’
‘It was a mess when I moved in. Some help getting the vegetable plot in order would be very much appreciated, though. The beans are very sad.’ Sophia takes the tomatoes from her skirt pockets. Juliet takes them inside and returns with them glistening wet. They sit down to eat.
‘So what happened to Vetta, then?’ Juliet asks, tearing off some bread.
‘She shut the doors to her room and refused to come out. There was a big fuss about what to do with her. To cut a long story short, she ended up hiding away in Baba’s net storage room by the port, to get away from the pressure, I suppose. She’s still there now; she turned the top into her home and the bottom into a shop and she sells her lace. Never married.’ Vetta always knew her own mind, she was the strongest of all of them. Mama and Baba found more suitors, and with one, it even looked like a match could be made but after walking out with him, it was all over. Her lace-making grew in complexity, she was asked to make things for other peoples’ weddings, and as time passed, it seemed her business became more important than her desire to be married.
‘And your other sisters?’
‘Well Sotiria was the looker, always in front of a mirror. She married a man from Athens and lives in America now. Angeliki loved to cook and she married the son of a taverna owner. There were only a couple of tavernas on the island in those days, so it was good business then and still is today. Now their sons are the waiters. Angeliki is still doing as much of the cooking as she can. And Sada, well Sada married Aleko, a fisherman like Baba, but not like Baba.’ She crosses herself three times. ‘He drinks, he smokes, the front yard of their house is a tangle of nets that need repair. He goes fishing only when the bills that need paying press him and Sada, and poor Sada takes comfort in a Czechoslovakian piano player from the jazz bar, and everyone knows it except her husband, who is mostly too drunk to care.’ Sophia stops talking to bless the food. Juliet pauses in her eating but does not close her eyes.
‘So just the three dowries,’ Sophia says with a smile.
‘And then there was you.’ Juliet passes her an earthenware dish of yoghurt.
‘Yes, and then there was me.’
Chapter 20
‘Yes, and then there’s me.’ Sophia’s voice is quiet. She puts the yoghurt down and does not look up from her food, pushing an olive around her plate with a chunk of bread. After a moment or two, she lifts her head. ‘Your garden is amazing, I saw a peek of it when I was picking the tomatoes.’
Juliet seems to melt into her chair. ‘It’s my oasis,’ she replies and the talk turns to plants and soil. When Sophia uses technical terms in Greek, Juliet takes out a notebook, asking her the meaning and scribbling it all down. Their plates empty and their talking slows. The cat jumps onto a chair and begs for crumbs from the table. After a final heavy sigh, they both push their chairs out from the table, laughing because it happens in unison. Juliet stands slowly and offers to show Sophia her room.
‘It’s off the sitting room here.’ Juliet lifts the latch and opens the wooden door. It is a simple room, with a single bed, white sheets, white walls, and a cupboard set into the thick stone wall. It is not so different to her convent cell but there is a jar of flowers on the bedside table and a framed, brightly coloured print on the wall. It is more friendly somehow, lived in.
‘There isn’t anywhere really to hang your clothes; that’s the only problem. Only a hook on the back of the door here with a coat hanger,’ Juliet says. The coat hanger, of shiny wood, has a little bag hanging round the hook. She reaches out to touch it. ‘Do you like lavender?’ Juliet asks. ‘It grows by the gate and last year, I dried a load and made those. Pretty, aren’t they?’
Sophia leans forward to smell it. ‘Lovely.’ Sada made little bags like that and put them in the chests. It seems everything is bringing back memories of her life before she entered the convent. She takes a breath as tears prick.
‘I am going to lie down for a bit. This time of day gets way too hot for me to do anything. Do nuns take a mesimeri sleep?’
‘We have a quiet time in our cells. I know I used to sleep.’ Sophia keeps her eyes busy looking around the room, holding back the tears, the emotions, the memories, the waste. She crosses herself at her thoughts.
‘Right then, see you later. There’s a portable electric fan you can take from the kitchen and there’s a plug by the bed head if you want it. Let me know if you need anything else.’ She heads across the sitting room to a corridor that leads into what looks like an older part of the house.
As it happens, Sophia does not see Juliet until much later. The best solution to the tears stinging her eyes, the emotions bubbling to the surface, the lurking horror to think the years have been wasted is to close them. When she wakes, there is no sign of Juliet. The double doors to her bedroom are closed and so, leaving a note, Sophia sets of for the village square, to work. She took the morning off for her move but must be back for the late afternoon shift.
Few customers venture out in the heat and the afternoon is slow. Across the road, a group of farmers are bantering with Stella. Along with her voice, there is a new noise and after focusing in on the sound, Sophia sees an air-conditioning unit that was not there yesterday. She is pleased for both Stella and Mitsos. They work hard and it must be so hot by the grill. The farmers’ laughter grows wilder and louder as the afternoon changes to evening and as the day begins to cool, more villagers emerge. Mitsos spends most of his time behind the grill listening and mopping his brow. From her doorway, Sophia can see him smiling at Stella’s words, occasionally turning his head sideways, presumably to look through the interior adjoining door when Stella says something that particularly amuses the farmers. Everything in the way he moves and listens and turns his head betrays his admiration, his love for Stella.
How wonderful it must feel to have someone love you like that. Sophia folds her arms across her chest. To have this empty yearning, this fidgety drive not lurking, sitting, waiting to be ignited by a thought, or a dream, or a word. The feeling has become so much a part of her, sometimes she no longer notices it until her shoulders ache and the realisation comes that she has been tensing her shoulders to her ears, or her jaw is sore and only by opening her mouth can she unlock the stress she has been holding there. To feel at peace, truly content, what that must feel like! Something she never ever found on her knees or in church no matter how much she concentrated, or if she did, it lasted a fleeting second, just long enough to make this hollowness feel worse when it returned.
Mitsos must have sensed her staring. He looks over to her and smiles. She smiles back, her hand lifting to wave but not quite making it. He laughs and turns his head, hi
s attention back on Stella.
At the far end of the square, a priest crosses the road to the corner shop. His long black robe hanging from his rounded stomach, he rocks his weight from foot to foot, leaning forward to climb the few steps to the doorway, pressing hands on knees. The sisters would fuss so when a priest came to visit the convent. There would be a flourish of cleaning and polishing, biscuit baking and a general alteration to their routines. For a while, she was quite excited by such visits, the anticipation of something different. In more recent years, she resented the change in routine, the jolting out of the meditative state that carried her through her days.
It feels like a dream of years gone by but in reality, that was her life just hours ago. Now she is just an ordinary citizen. The thought makes her eyebrows raise. An ordinary citizen. It doesn’t sit properly. It’s a nice idea, but she feels far from ordinary. Ordinary people live full time in ordinary houses doing ordinary jobs. She is never going to manage that. There seems to be a skill to being social that she just doesn’t have anymore. It exhausts her to think what to say at the right time and then remember to say it loud enough for people to hear. She can imagine spending a lot of time on her own in the future.
Back at school, she was social. She would speak out all the time. She didn’t have to think, she just did. It was the easiest thing in the world. But then again, maybe it was not the best thing. Maybe Mama was right, maybe that was the problem. Maybe if she had thought more, many things could have been avoided.
Speaking before she thinks. Twenty years in a convent has ironed most of that out.
A car stops by the shop. It’s cooler inside, where she makes the driver a frappe and puts a cheese pie into a paper bag, his change on the counter. He leaves it behind as a tip, says he has just got a job, grinning, his legs jiggling as he walks, expending the energy of his excitement.
