Back to Delphi

by Ioanna Karystiani

  Back to Delphi

  Back to Delphi

  BACK TO DELPHI

  Table of Contents

  BACK to DELPHI

  Back to Delphi

  Karystianē, Iōanna

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  Ioanna Karystiani

  BACK TO DELPHI

  A novel of mothers and their sons.

  Europa

  editions

  A stirring story about a mother and her son,

  Back to Delphi is the most recent novel by an author who is both beloved by readers and acclaimed by critics in her native Greece.

  Linos has been granted a five-day furlough from prison, where he is serving a life sentence for a series of violent crimes. Seeking a way to reestablish a connection with her estranged son, his mother decides to take him on a tour of Delphi. A few days spent in that magical place, she thinks, might distract him from his awful fate. She also hopes that this brief time together might be a chance for them to repair what, for many years, has been a damaged relationship. To that end she also intends to reveal to her son the truth about his arrest: she was the one who tipped off the police. In order to find the strength to make such a terrible revelation, she will have to sift through every one of her memories of the days leading up to his arrest.

  During their time together, as mother and son wander the magnificent ruins of Delphi, Linos’s mother is forced to ask herself to what extent she, too, is implicated in the crimes committed by her only son. To what extent is any parent responsible for the acts of his or her child? This is a return to the origins of Greek tragedy, a story about guilt and innocence, about the monsters that lurk even in everyday life, and about the complex and fascinating relationship between mothers and their sons.

  MAR 1 0 M3

  ALSO BY

  IOANNA KARYSTIANI

  The jasmine Isle Swell

  BACK

  TO DELPHI

  CONTENTS

  The Sacks -11 Tahini - 69 The Shovel - 127 The Shoelace - 185 The Wall - 269

  About the Author - 327

  BACK

  TO DELPHI

  The Sacks

  M ay - .

  Ourtside, the sun brehind clouds, a brutterfly. Inside, the lirving room with no carpet, the borxes, two ergg- plants in the platter, half a canteroupe.

  Anxious again. That’s why the invasion of the r’s into what she was looking at, the sun at dusk, the balcony, the floor, the household objects and what she thought of momentarily, having had nothing to eat since morning, eggplants and can- teloupe.

  For the best part of ten years she only cooked once a month, roast beef usually, and took it to Linus. On several occasions, he had refused to appear behind the square of glass and she took the Tupperware back to her place, didn’t touch it, the food was left in the fridge and forgotten.

  She never put on a pot or pan for herself, her place shuttered down for all visitors as well, never did she wine and dine relatives, never invited a soul over for as much as a coffee, she made do with bread and cheese, a tomato every now and then, a piece of fruit.

  A lack of desire for warm food, a voluntary deprivation of the right to pleasures, if negligible ones and, above all, frugality, for years she had not thrown out even a sprig of dried up parsley.

  Thursday, May 3, 2007, dusk.

  The wound up Vivian Koleva, who carried fifty-two years of weariness and seventy-eight kilos of sadness, shoved three

  IOANNA KARYSTIANI

  - 1 4 -

  white work robes in the washing machine; she poured a bit of the remainder of the plant food into the two pot plants, watered them, used a pair of scissors on the bits of the balcony tent that were frayed, called the Bulgarian replacement—the old woman’s all right—went to the bathroom, finally, is now all cleaned and spruced with cologne, she’ll go to sleep like a baby, she called the general’s sourpuss of a granddaughter, Annie, darling, go to the Public Health Fund tomorrow, because you are entitled to free creams and nappies for bed sores, we can hardly catch up with grandpa, third bloody phone call to Castoriani about the milk from Alexandria, you go ahead, my precious, and have two spoonfuls and I promise you I will pray to the Good Lord in churches high and low for your normal ingestion, there’s my career, right there, from tulle to turds, she thought.

  She didn’t feel comfortable leaving her clients in strange hands for all those days, she was hard pushed doing it, up till now she was always available, every minute of every hour, day or night, to rush to the side of those creatures with their mouths open like a pocket with a hole through which the money had fallen out, and their jaundiced eyeballs which at some time must have been like everybody else’s, as cool and transparent as an almond flower.

  She called the lovebirds at Exarcheia Square, spoke with the husband, be good, she asked of him, she also called the Cretan Methuselah, he had his improvised limerick all ready. Make of your life a song and a delight, for death has you in his sights , he wished her a good time at the wedding, and to give his best to her relatives getting married, and she thanked him in a way that pleased him, yes, my handsome, and when your time comes, I’ll make sure to yell out, shit on your grave. 1

  She finished with the clients but didn’t put down the

  1 A form of well-wishing, the Cretan equivalent of “break a leg.”

  - BACK TO DELPHI - 15 -

  receiver, she called the janitor of the apartment block for the utility bill, it’s not out yet, Viv, you the only one can’t wait to pay up, she also called Yukaris, everything’s arranged I’m telling you again, be there at seven in the morning, have no fear, Viv, just keep yourself in check and keep your eyes peeled.

  Yes, peeled all the way back, she thought and got up. She folded the clothing and underclothes in her traveling bag, prepared Linus’s knapsack, the hard part was laying hands on the new shoes, she set the two pieces of luggage next to the front door.

  She took out the wallet from her purse, counted the money again, eight one hundred bills, four fifties, change, the bank card, her two ID cards. She put it back in its place, in the two side pockets her sunglasses, the two ancient booklets, the three receipts folded in two, the four photos inside their envelope, some womanly tidbits and the small agenda with the useful phone numbers, few that they were, she knew them by heart. />
  She went to the kitchen and fetched the iron pestle and the cheese knife, put those in the bag, there was plenty of room for both, but in the end, she only kept the one, returned the knife to its drawer.

  She had bought the pestle up north, in Komotini during a three-day holiday, over twenty years ago, she never did make garlic paste or roe paste, she’d set it along with two more bronze ornaments, an oil lamp and an oil carafe, up on a high shelf, no time to dust, let alone polish them, they’d gone all motley. Though they were souvenirs of a happy outing, she would have gotten rid of those as well in the general household clean-out or while moving house, but they were saved every time by a high shelf.

  She went back into the hall, hung her purse over the two pieces of luggage and thought, not for the first time, that through all the years the coat hanger’s four hooks only ever bore her own clothes and knickknacks, her coat, her raincoat,

  IOANNA KARYSTIANI

  - 1 6 -

  her umbrella, her bags, the worn wraparound for the cool night shifts on the narrow balcony.

  From that position she now craned her neck and she gazed over her shoulder at her living room, a warehouse. The way things had turned out, there was no way she would lighten it up for the sake of appearances, embroidered curtains were out of the question as were flower vases.

  Where does one, at this point, find the courage to steer one’s life in a new direction, she thought and checked the time, nine in the evening, all set, now for the kitchen.

  She put on the boiler, dipped in the scalding water the same tea bag for the third time, as she was in the habit of doing since the year before last, took the cup with the watery liquid and a piece of bread and went to the couch. In a low voice, diligently she recited the memorized phrases, a sip, a bite, a paragraph, the Amazon battles on the six decorative panels of the Treasure of the Athenians, the famous Sphinx of Naxos raised on an Ionian pedestal.

  Possible questions: Who were the parents of the Sphinx? Typhoon and Echidna. Who were her siblings? Cerberus, the Lernaia Hydra and a coterie of other monsters. Very good.

  She leaned into the back of the couch, brought her pinkie gingerly to her upper lip, there was the familiar business fermenting there, she would see the new day with herpes again. The blood was leaping through her arteries like a frog, her head a peeled cabbage, her mind eaten away by the caterpillar, she could feel it crawling, sucking away, getting fat.

  She needed to give herself over to other thoughts, the mind cannot be emptied, it takes no days off.

  So, then. From the Baltic comes amber. Twelve feet below the surface of the water there are transparent stones, yellow, red, brown ones, with enclosed tiny leaves or insects from the distant past. The pale ones always fetch a better price, one thousand five hundred drachmas for a good piece.

  When the sea freezes over, the wild amber collectors drill holes and stick in hoses, the water pouring in at high pressure and dislodging the bottom layers so that the precious weightless sun stones are thrown up, that’s what they call them. The Poles of the Gdansk thread them into necklaces and put those on their babies. Rhoda, the maid of honor at her wedding, had brought them one, there wasn’t a place on earth she hadn’t been to, seminar after seminar, journey upon journey. And truckloads of fucks as well, a connoisseur of dicks the world over.

  Vivian Koleva’s mind wrapped itself around amber at ten, unwrapped itself at ten thirty, chased after other alternatives, fixed for a while on the cost of getting a car serviced, a round two hundred paid up front, seized on changing the electric water heater, another two hundred for the plumber’s fee, plus one hundred and eighty for the son’s latest expenses plus fifty for the wedding bonbons, and, painstakingly, by means of the expense accounts, she expedited time.

  Till two in the morning she didn’t stir from the couch, rigid in the same spot, scrunched between cardboard boxes and bags, next to the silent radio, facing the switched-off TV, pinned to the silence of her own apartment and the scratching sounds from the one next to hers. The seventy-eight-year-old neighbor, with full-blown Alzheimer’s, was struggling to let himself out the door to wander the streets. At one time a wealthy man in Africa, ivory and wild animal skins, then a business executive here, now with most of the big money whittled away, a widower, in the care of Juliana, a Ukrainian who, having grown tired of looking for him in the surrounding squares, put on security locks, hung the new keys around her neck and gave Tiger the old ones so he could scratch at the door, trying one after the other, again and again, for hours on end, days and nights, weeks and months.

  It was always an issue at the building residents’ meetings, Viv did not attend, from the first floor she could hear from the

  IOANNA KARYSTIANI

  - 1 8 -

  foyer fifteen or so irate voices berating the Ukrainian. Viv herself had grown used to the sound through the thin walls, like the woodworm eating through the furniture, a kind of company in her empty evenings when she got in from work, put her swollen feet up on the armrest of the couch and gazed at her belongings, piles of nappies, some fancy puff-sleeve outfits, leftovers from the Titi saga and a wealth of other objects, each hailing to a donator, the last that remained till she got rid of those ones as well.

  A pink opaline vase, enormous like a pregnant belly, from her maid of honor, now in service as a carryall for small change, tacks, paper clips and phone cards, the handmade Cretan chair, a wedding gift from coworkers of his, she didn’t use it because it gave her back pain, the Canadian lamp with the red leaf, turned upside down so the bump couldn’t be seen from the punch, hers, the day before yesterday, during a solitary outburst, and a couple of knickknacks, a cigarette case with Saint Sophia and a cat-shaped ashtray, bequests from a client’s heart failure, a fervent smoker who was bound to continue puffing away in the eternal pastures as well.

  The trajectory of the gaze was the same tonight as ever, a little like a routine check to make sure the evidence of a forfeited life was in place.

  Next door, the old man was getting his face slapped, the Ukrainian had a heavy arm, the night grew quiet and Vivian Koleva breathed deep. Before getting a blanket to throw over herself in order not to truss up the bed and waste time in the morning making it, she went into the kitchen, opened the cutlery drawer, trying one by one the sharp knives against her hand, the serrated bread knife, the razor sharp meat knife, she chose the small cleaver, took it to her bag, fitted it smugly in at the bottom, under the booklets, the tissues, the keys and the lipstick. Still, she didn’t go back to the couch, she stood right there on the spot with her mind working at high speed.

  - BACK TO DELPHI - 19 -

  Hold on, what if I stumble and take a fall and the contents of the bag spill on the floor, I’m done for, I won’t have anything convincing to say, thank goodness I thought of it in time— there, she hadn’t set up the five-day outing in every detail, after all. For a moment she thought of packing a plastic bag as well, so she could say that she intends to gather an armful of wild medicinal weeds, that get rid of white spots from the nails, wild oregano for dyspepsia, roots and herbs for cough medicine, on orders from her clients—old folks do require their elixirs and panaceas.

  But, then, she had to change the cleaver for a common knife, she’d take the watermelon knife with the nine-inch blade. To be on the safe side I might as well change the bag too, might as well take the old brown thing with the zipper and make sure it’s kept shut, she whispered to herself and then, while emptying the wide beige canvas bag, she got an even better idea. She went to the drawer and got a yellowing, uncut tome of Sikelianos from the terrible period when she had bought a dozen different poetry collections. There were three left, all uncut, thankfully, sometimes while rummaging for contracts, old bills or pens, she would stumble on the slim books, remember the accompanying circumstances, open one at random and read the beginning, the middle or the end of some poems. A few, the slimmest ones, she had read from beginning to end in fleeting moments, all forgotten now.

&n
bsp; In five minutes, the brown bag with the zipper all set, Vivian sighed and returned to the checkered couch, to cover herself with the checkered blanket, to stretch out for a few hours, get her strength up for the five-day sojourn. Her courage, too. Enough of it for two people. Herself, she was an old hand at endurance, with any number of sunny days to waste still before her, but he, faced with the spaciousness of May, might lose his marbles and start banging his head against the ancient ruins.

  The truth is that she had, in fact, entertained just such a

  IOANNA KARYSTIANI

  - 2 0 -

  possibility. Several times. Sometimes fleetingly, on two or three

  V

  occasions her thought got stuck there for days and nights on end.

  The first unbearable year, whenever the phone rang, rarely, her heart skipped a beat—they’ll tell me he’s hung himself, she steeled herself for the news from an officious voice, slightly softened and wavering for the occasion, with an imperceptible stammer and appropriately compassionate.

  She would grasp the receiver, glue it to her ear and, after putting it back down, she would virtually collapse in the armchair, deadened for ages, though the call may have been from the Express Service guy, asking when to come by for the renewal of the biannual contract, or from the diligent tenant of the office space in Pangrati, informing her that he’d put the rent in the bank.

  She had asked herself, certainly, if she was afraid of such a turn of events or maybe even, deep down, wished it—suicide brings out people’s pity and also acts as a detergent. It would be the only real end to their hell, an act of desperation and simultaneously of courage, of release when it’s all said and done, and of justice, too.

  The years kept passing, the hanging wasn’t eventuating, that awful feeling in her of mixed dread and expectation faded, until in recent months a plan had again asserted itself in her mind for their joint redemption.