Back to Delphi

by Ioanna Karystiani

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  At school, she didn’t trip over herself for a word of praise from the teacher, she didn’t whisper incessantly with the other girls nor did she fight with the boys and at home she never cried asking for something, she never stole sweet quince from the tall shelf, she didn’t even have a favorite dish or a favorite rosebush or chook from the pen.

  They told her, go feed the chickens and she did, sweep the yard and she did, come here, and she came, get out from under our feet and she went, wash your hair, she washed it, go to sleep, she slept.

  She did not plead, she did not quarrel, she did not negotiate, only silently complied with what the others decided, her elders and the grown-ups. The latter, in obeisance to their permanently bleak finances, credit at the grocer’s, debts to the tax office, loans from the bank and lists of sums loaned to each other, had their work cut out for them whenever deadlines loomed, and, with the chronic fatigue of poverty, were relieved with the thin little creature that asked for absolutely nothing, an easy child, they sometimes said.

  Only someone paying proper attention would have been puzzled and would have wondered, but no such person was around.

  Besides, the grown-ups interacted exclusively among themselves, whether at their work or in the great feasts, three or four times a year, when they wandered in large groups from house to house. The men would start with an obligatory reference to issues of importance, each of them had to decide on three great tragedies, one for humanity, everyone agreed on the Second World War, one for Hellenism, here opinions were divided, half in favor of the Asia Minor destruction, half in favor of the civil war, and one for their lives, which is where the disabilities from old war mines were brought out, the birth of a sick baby, a knife wound over the boundaries of a plot of land. At the second round of drinks, they put their sorrows aside and hung

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  from the lips of Theopisti, that old bag of bones with the sexual jokes and the fully perfected masculine cussing, also a local legend on account of her spunk to throw rotten eggs at every manner of politico.

  Her foxy spiritedness was a league apart from the placid minds of the rest, but in order for her to lay out her goods and thus take the weight off her fellow villagers’ sacks of sorrows— she was the one who’d initiated them in this theory—the family men had first to get rid of their children.

  And they did send them off, finish eating the butter cake now and off you go. In those times, people lived extremely tamely and Theopisti’s raciness was the only godsend reprieve.

  At school young Vivian’s ear caught from a distance the words cunt and prick, two boys were saying them, the one with the harelip and the priest’s son, except she wouldn’t go near her precocious fellow students to find out how the combination of those two fills out women’s bellies and brings about babies.

  Her sister was born when she herself was in the third grade, old enough to be assigned a host of duties, rock the baby so she goes to sleep, wash her bottom and, when later she walked, make sure she doesn’t burn herself on the woodstove, doesn’t eat dung, doesn’t fall in the asbestos.

  The little Polyxeni, little Xenia to her godmother, plain Xenia at nine, at her own request, with movies as her adopted religion and the actress Xenia Kalogeropoulou as her favorite saint, was one more domestic problem, as she peed herself until the age of five, spat the tahini on her blouse, and was willful about any number of things, the pretty face and the games with the kittens, notwithstanding.

  Besides, regarding her grandfather, too, gray-eyed, a good singer in the church and generous with his blessings, the only thing she singled out was the large hairy mole between his brows, regarding her father who, despite his years, had a deer’s

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  tread, she directly saw his fingernails, black from the tar and mud, and as for her mother, instead of admiring her very long blond hair or, at the very least, her patience of an evening when she rubbed the dirt off a tubful of spinach in order to bake a pie, she persisted in unmercifully staring at her swollen ankles and the ash-colored cracks on her heels.

  Growing up, she fine-tuned her predilection for the unsightly details, the unflattering aspects and generally the bad side of things.

  Out of an entire green pine forest, her eye was drawn to the nests of larvae. Out of an orange grove in bloom, she spotted at once the torn chicken wire of the fence. Out of an entire mountain, her gaze singled out the dry turd at the base of a rock. At her teacher’s doorstep, for trick or treat, she looked inside and instead of seeing the pleasing arrangement of the furniture that was the woman’s dowry, she picked out the thick dust on the wooden surfaces. At Theopisti’s windowsill to deliver the eggs, instead of relishing the extremely vocal goldfinch, her eye circled the hole in the curtain. Small wonder, then, that marriages of many years, in her mind, were marred by the man’s one and only slap on the woman’s cheek, her mother had been the recipient of one such, singular but effective, and as for the local chieftains, priest, policeman and mayor, they were deemed useless by her on account of losing their step on one or two occasions, at a wedding dance.

  She wasn’t, then, the kind of girl people would go out of their way to include in their company, she usually made her way solitarily with, occasionally, the rare, tolerant persons who didn’t take her cold demeanor as an insult, and didn’t interpret her temperament, closed-off and inaccessible to small joys, as arrogant, a thing which could on no account be justified by her family’s social standing or by her looks, there was nothing about her that was exemplary, no pair of sea-blue eyes or blond braids, she was just a brunette in everything, like most others.

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  At fourteen she made up her mind that since, as a child, she hadn’t happened to be the recipient of plentiful and gratifying endearments and, since her cheeks hadn’t been covered in layers of kisses and caresses, she wasn’t going to spare them, in turn, for others.

  She knew that she herself somehow kept others at bay. She did it so that she wouldn’t be crowded into the crammed space of their heavy lives. And the others never fought to keep her close by, maybe because they knew deep inside that their thousands of worries didn’t make up attractive days for a secretly sad little girl, maybe because on top of it all, questions were the last thing they wanted.

  Only because things aren’t spoken, it doesn’t mean they don’t exist. Every person puts up a fight for silence.

  In high school, there were another three silence fighters, Petra, Niobe and Eleni, all of them creatures blurred since birth, of mediocre looks, mediocre students, the broken stems in the verdant bouquet of the class. They didn’t actually socialize, they communicated with rare but telling looks, maintaining the dignity of isolation.

  Once in a while they exchanged a few words, those necessary for agreeing that there was no reason for them to be happy. In time, they restricted themselves to even less, and in their senior year they even replaced the good mornings and hellos with nothing, nothing, which was just perfect as a leitmotif. They were starting to be preoccupied with the drama of the body.

  With the first indispositions of love, which boosted her breasts, rounded her bottom and lighted up her skin, Viv started the fight to not give in to the black eyes of Apostolis, then, to the perfectly spelled secret notes of Theodor and, later still, to the persistence of Michael with the irresistible blue jeans, who used to trail her to and from her village to the township, where the high school was, and pressed her for a night

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  meeting at a place where the grown-ups would never turn up, the cypress grove by the cemetery

  She had unfailingly noted the jug ears of the first, the pimples on the nose of the second and the small, girly fingernails of the third, yet there were now unprecedented issues at stake.

  Sometimes she felt sorry for the boys, melting away with desire. And sometimes she herself melted, whic
h was a strange and worrisome thing, that uproar of the blood in the veins, but she did not feel sorry for herself, on the contrary, she felt satisfied when she would at last manage to impose her will over her body and concentrate again on the theory and exercises of physical chemistry.

  Prudent, she heard around her the pronouncement of father, mother and the rest of the adults. She didn’t much care for the title but at least they let her be.

  Nevertheless, the struggle of very prudent girls against fervid boys turns out to be an uneven match around fifteen, sixteen at most.

  It was then, Christmas of 71, that Viv tasted the kisses of a George, which were not as fulfilling as those of the next George down the line, when she was seventeen. So from time to time, she would kiss and make out a bit but mostly she studied the despicable physical chemistry so she could get into college, which bore no attraction in itself but that was what most high school graduates did, at least once they sat through entry exams for some school or other. Certainly, it had already been said, at least three or four times, for the sake of you becoming a doctor, I’ll gladly sell the old vineyard, words spoken of an evening by her father, who was pushing sixty-five, worn out by the sun and the bad prices of grapes.

  Her mother was silently consenting and pushing her with her eyes, as if to say, make sure you get out, make sure you save yourself.

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  She barely understood how it happened that she was study- ing to be a doctor. Maybe in order to see what it’s like doing your parent a favor, maybe because it was much harder than lawyer and teacher and she wanted to provoke, maybe because she got it into her head to take up wounds and traumas in case she could become absorbed in the wager of life against death, maybe the intensity of the subject would nurse a strong interest.

  She was only an adolescent and she needed a way to make it through the rest of living, the many years that awaited her. She would leave the house and the village too. She had finally had enough of the people, the dogs, the chickens, the dirt roads, the fields, the weeds, the tahini.

  She didn’t make it on the first go, still, the need for extracurricular study brought her to the capital. Athens was decked with cars and apartment buildings, these were missing from the village and such differences did initially made an impression on the rural guest.

  If I don’t cook for my Kostas for one day, I will kill myself, Aunt Zoe was yelling all in tears, her father’s sister, a cop’s pensioner widow, whose base of operations was the kitchen of her three-bedroom at Kato Patissia.

  Kostas was the thirty-five-year-old only son, who was obliged, the unfortunate, to drop in daily after work and pick up the Tupperware or the pot and take it to his wife, who was disgusted with the whole scene.

  For the entire year, the aunt’s daughter-in-law never once showed up. And through the whole year, at the top of the charts of the three-bedroom apartment was neither the junta nor the uprising of the Polytechnic, but the aunt’s anxiety about properly stirring the egg and lemon sauce for her Kostas’s stuffed lettuce leaves, making sure her Kostas’s pilaf didn’t turn muddy, her Kostas’s fish soup did not congeal.

  Viv hung on until the exams, passed them and immediately made it plain to her father that enough was enough.

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  The old vineyard went for two hundred thousand. Athens swallowed up another small vineyard with second rate yield. All that was left was a small useless stretch overgrown with wild reeds somewhere near the sea, nobody ever went there, just stones and mosquitoes.

  The still few land buyers at the time secured for their country homes spots on golden beaches right by the sea without bogs of dirty water nearby, it wasn’t easy to fool them. And I get the mosquitoes as my dowry? asked eleven-year-old Xenia. The doctor will see after you, old Sotiropoulos answered, evading his responsibilities and simultaneously feeling, for the first time in his life, optimistic, such a grand thing having a scientist daughter.

  The last dusk at the village, after preparing the trunk with the sheets, the blankets, the cracked wheat fermented in milk and the icons brought by the village faithful for the one-bedroom of student life, was spent by Viv in the grove of tall, thick reeds with the half-forgotten George especially drafted for the occasion, the rest, young and older, were away due to the call to arms, it was the time of the coup against Makarius and the Turkish invasion of Cyprus.

  The nineteen-year-old Viv was embarrassed to go to university a virgin. And she wasn’t about to let the boys of Athens in on the news that, in this particular arena, she was lagging behind. The Greek junta fell, let’s get the junta of virginity over with as well, she gave her guest the specific instruction.

  George, with a serious cough though it was August, did the needed thing expediently, heroically and with gusto, though he was just coming out of pneumonia and, on top, had again bottomed out at school, not to mention he hadn’t decided what was next, the army, Australia or Canada.

  The definitive farewell was, of course, bloody but also very easy. Both of them were already thinking of something else.

  Next day at the bus station, Viv’s back and hips ached from

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  the stones and there were dozens of mosquito bites on her

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  arms.

  She scratched all the way to Athens.

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  Kypseli, 51 Eptanisou St., underground single flat in a twenty-year-old apartment building, Viv’s first introduction to the concepts of light wells and communal backyards.

  A fold-up bed, a fold-up table, two fold-up chairs, a small bookshelf with four planks, secondhand wardrobe, secondhand fridge and gas cooker with two elements in twenty-six square meters, where the bedroom, kitchenette and small bathroom hugged tightly, long overwhelmed by the heavy smell that accumulates at the bottom of things.

  After she finished mopping and made the bed, set on the bookshelf the only photograph she had taken with her, of eleven-year-old Xenia in shorts with a kitten, she made herself a coffee and sat to appraise the effects of her housekeeping, medium, as for the reek of mildew, that was a waste of effort, it reemerged triumphant as soon as the chlorine evaporated.

  She thought that her nostrils had been trained by village life, moldy mattresses and sheets stiff with sweat, dirt roads that stank of sheep piss and donkey dung.

  She took up imagining her days and nights within and without the apartment, cramped inside, discomfited outside.

  She had confirmed the thing that she had been suspecting since last year when she was studying nonstop, without allowing herself to waste precious hours in mental meanderings and luxury questions. From the very first day she set foot in Athens, nothing caused her to feel enthused or scared or even puzzled, just an enormity, an unwieldy heaping of bulky shapes with no coherence, unconnected architecture, unconnected thoroughfares, unconnected people, a vast junkyard of unconnectedness.

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  That suited her. She would be living in a city that wouldn’t upset her, wouldn’t introduce new issues in her life. She would study, she would read, she would circulate with no need to seriously heed her surroundings.

  When she left the village, she knew there was no chance she’d miss it. When she first saw Athens, she knew there was no chance that it might ever feel like home. Steadfast to her principles, trained in locating defects immediately, she didn’t remember, till the age of nineteen, having ever been attracted to anything at all on first sight and unconditionally, she was stocking up on reservation and objections about all things, she foresaw and simultaneously prepared, almost methodically, the disenchantment lying in wait in the future, whether near or far.

  The fact that she’d managed to get into medicine was a victory, but victories do not make everyone feel better or even make a discernible difference.

  Up until then, she had heard many people after some important event, a debt that was absol
ved, a lucky lotto ticket, the undoing of an ill-omened engagement, the end of an army service that tested them to the end of their endurance, being released after months of hospitalization, relay to relatives and to anyone listening that, the next day, I woke up a different person.

  Sipping her first coffee at her flat, Viv analyzed the popular figure of speech and determined that nobody can escape their previous life and, especially, themselves, the skin is marked by scars visible and invisible, the shoulder is eroded by one’s sack of dirty laundry and by trials, stolen sweat, poisonous words, sterile land, caresses that were never given, dreams that faded, oaths that proved false, guilt that festered with time. That’s how she had learned to see people, laden with their sack wherever they went, in the street, the shop, the coffee house, the train, the church, the tavern even, half-full on the backs of the younger ones, overfull on the backs of the middle-aged and the elderly, some bodies bent at a right angle to the ground.

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  With the last sip of coffee she admitted, nevertheless, that the power of the expression, I woke up a different person, was not ever going to diminish, and calculated that in the course of a lifetime, a person will claim to have woken up a different person at least one hundred times.

  Later, the first night on her single camp bed, with a wind that was driven mad by its inability to escape the stolid city, she thought of the wind in the village, which moved the darkness, the clouds, the pines and the grapevines and, listening to the banging of her next door neighbors’ bathroom window that’d been left unlatched, to an empty bottle rolling back and forth on the first floor balcony above her and to the flapping of the derelict tent of the apartment across the way, she again resumed her ruminations on her new day-to-day, walls, faces, itineraries, activities would change but, inside of her, since she didn’t have the gift of longing, since no sweet anticipation fermented her bloodstream, she would be preoccupied with much the same things, an excessive mistrust towards everyone and everything, a lack of motive to see the world more charitably.