Back to Delphi

by Ioanna Karystiani

  out of the question not to care about you, so, then, dear heart, don’t you move a muscle, I’ll give you a miraculous massage and, while rubbing and caressing the swollen feet, she served up the rest as well, Linus who was feeding Buddy on the balcony heard it just fine, you and I raised that kid together, I’m speaking to you as a doctor, he needs to get over his timidity with the silly girlies, he needs to be rid of his inhibitions, find a man’s sure-footedness, I worry because I’ve been around and I see many boys at the critical age lose their sense of orientation, if you see what I’m getting at.

  The threat worked, it allowed them to make up and to reclaim the comfort of their old relationship, the grand dame arriving loaded like a mule with myrrh and frankincense and art and sweets and political news, all of it cream of the crop and, as such, to be unwaveringly subscribed to.

  One bloody Monday she went too far.

  Rhoda and her seventeen-year-old godson in his room, Viv had left them to their chat, about his future, what to study, what openings there were, she’d drop thirty dollies off at a dance school and when she got back she’d fry some choice hot dogs and lay those out in the platter along the cheeks of a calf head, the treats were a gift from the latest admirer of the elegant arch-slut, a pig farmer or something near enough from Thessaly, she had picked him up on an excursion she’d been to at the nearby lakes and she didn’t pass up the chance of getting to know the world of the animals.

  Her trip had been made in the middle of a bad spell, a sixty- year-old patient had died on her who reminded her of her dad, by his side she had again seen the eyes and heard the voice of the deceased, but, then, all the talk about cows and pigs had cheered her up and perked up her appetite, upon her return, the good godmother was of a mind to devour her godson himself, the kisses turned to savage bites to his neck and belly button, oh how cute, what awesome adolescent flesh, we’re hav-

  ing us an initiation, don’t be shy, lovemaking requires a free spirit.

  Later at the table, Linus wouldn't touch the goodies of the pork man, wouldn't answer to the two porkies, mother and godmother, who kept on his case, eat and talk and drink and speak and why don’t you go to parties and why don't you go out with friends, bars are great fun, you’re keeping yourself at a distance on account of your father.

  That hoover his godmother, now sucking in the beer as if dying of thirst and sucking on her cigarillos as if nicotine- starved, was reminding Viv, as if he was absent or deaf, how she had fought with albums of painters, and tapes of classical music and biographies of the great in general, to train the kid artistically, to kindle his spirit, to awaken hidden talents and, blind drunk by now, was answering in a child's voice, no, godmother, I don’t like it, no, godmother, that's scary because to be a great painter you need to have one ear cut off, to be a great musician you need to be deaf, to be a great poet you need to have committed suicide and to be a very good person, you need first to be imprisoned in snow and rocks.

  He left them when the drunk one starting checking her image on the underside of the spatula and the sober one observed, the blond hair hides your age, it does that, blond hair hides age.

  He went back to his room, got into the sleeping bag and pulled it over his head and was then thrashing on the bed, that single bed which only ever saw this kind of triumph, arms and legs quaking, chest and mouth in synchronized spasms, the grunts of high fever.

  - Do they dig into you?

  - They do.

  - Why didn’t you say so, I could take them back.

  - They’ll stretch.

  - How are they going to stretch if you only ever wear the Gestapo boots?

  - Leave off already with your shoes.

  - But why not change them and not waste good money?

  - Fifty, seventy, what’s my price as far as you are concerned?

  - Linus, you aren’t in one of your moods, are you?

  - Instead of the shoes, you’d better take me back and get a refund.

  - What’ll it cost you to stop talking nonsense? Have you ever heard of positive feelings?

  - You should have taught me those when I was young. You’re too late now, it’s not going to work.

  Linus in his blue-and-white shoes was playing back the memorized dialogue during his two hours of street roaming, doing his juggler’s walk, throwing up in the air and catching Buddy’s green plastic frog, first with the right hand then with the left, all wound up into mechanical motions, the fear burrowing in his heart also mechanical, as was the hammering of anger at his temples.

  He’d stayed up and then gone out before dawn, July deposited its heat everywhere though, to him, everything remained pale, blurred and cold like a November dawn lasting for twenty years.

  He searched for help in his pocket without leaving off his frog juggling, his hands still at the balancing act, his eyes still looking up but his mind to his wallet, not for money, which he hated, for his father’s mug, the face squashed against the small wooden frame he held in his arms, the mouth kissing the carved wood surrounding the lock, a smudge on his cheek, the picture of the guy who went off to get some peace among the cypresses leaving his only child to his own devices.

  Sometimes he fought desperately to remember him, he was

  only eight when he’d lost him, he hadn’t had enough life with him and he wasn’t old enough to clearly make out and hold onto the many sometimes strange impressions from the gestures and events which a child observes for the very first time.

  He remembered him coming into the house holding up high, like a lit torch, a paper funnel with roast chestnuts, he remembered him peeling a grape and feeding him, looking incensed for his lighter which he’d put inside the cigarette pack, going through papers and receipts in a drawer, reading some old poems and shaking his shoulders as if he’d been electrocuted, barking at Buddy on all fours, blind drunk, leaving the house abruptly in the middle of a meal, but coming back very soon to help with the dishes, not holding his own in conversations with Viv, getting knocked out already in round one.

  He remembered two awesome, horrible wordless fights without anything at all being spoken, his parents moving like spinning tops from bedroom to kitchen, from living room to balcony and back again, each in a different direction, pushing against one another in the hallway and the narrow passages next to the dresser, between the sofa and the big table, chairs being overturned, doors slamming, windowpanes creaking.

  Crouching behind the carved chair, Linus was whispering in fearful obeisance, I’m being quiet, I’m being quiet, even before being told by the grownups who were, at all events, causing the whole ruckus by themselves.

  The things that finally remained were quite a few, if they were actually true, but even if they weren’t, he’d thought about them so many times that they’d become regular memories, massively enforced by the things he saw in his dreams, all mixed up together, a healthy savings account, a till overflowing with shadows.

  When he was younger, some nights when he was asleep, or half asleep, he dreamt that he and his dead father were going in and out of shops and dealerships with gardening tools, they

  admired and haggled over new and used shovels, some red, some yellow, with wooden handles, with metal handles, short ones, medium ones, painted, unpainted, many together standing against the wall, in eights and tens and dozens, like spears, like bayonets waiting for the soldiers to come pick them up to go to battle with.

  In his half-sleep they always bought two rusty ones, costing next to nothing, splattered with dried mud and on their way back home, bouncing along as happy as larks, the dead man and his kid banged them on the sidewalks and the sewer grilles to shake the mud off.

  For the first Christmas Linus had asked for a shovel as a present, Viv was puzzled but she nevertheless bought him a red one along with a watering can and a guidebook for young gardeners, my weird child, her endearment as she delivered them and then, sit still, you’re giving me a headache, as the shovelbearing kid assaulted the living room with the war cry
of zdoop and gupp and targeted his mother, dueling and shoveling air.

  And at the village, during the first summer of orphanhood, he kept right at it, scraping and shoveling the dust from the stone hard dirt of the yard, he’ll be a digger, an orchard tender, an agriculturalist, Grandfather proudly commented on his devotion to the earth, to him the earth was the paramount blessing, like for every poor farmer, he’ll be a gold digger in the Far West or even an oil miner in Texas, his godmother upped the ante, a weekend guest at the village to flirt and parade her graces around the countryside.

  Viv refrained from comment, even though she constantly watched him, her mind’s eye was trained somewhere else.

  The new white-blue shoes were a perfect fit, of course they were, nice and snug, the soles light as a feather.

  He spent the day with no food or drink covering on foot half of the city of Athens, zigzagging among Datsuns loaded with cantaloupes, bike riders in army shorts, double-parked

  cars, scooters on pavements, piles of cardboard boxes and rows of fossilized old men, more encumbered by the sun with every hour, deeper and deeper and ever more lost in the vast desert of strangers, white noise in his ears, flies before his eyes, ants on his skin, wasps in his belly, snakes in his mind.

  When it got dark, he started on his night patrols, stumbling back and forth along the main streets and, around ten, he withdrew to more remote neighborhoods, until, breathless, he nailed himself, a lonely piece of driftwood, on a bench at Attica train station.

  The air was hot but he shivered, he couldn’t make heads or tails even of the weather. And the head couldn’t make sense of the body, a constant scrape, a feud that was years old already, ever since he put on long trousers.

  He didn’t want it to happen to him again, the torment of the last few months, some nights when he felt his body shrink like a piece of fabric in the wash and then, in a confusion of complaint and anger, helplessness and violence, everything inside him changed and he managed to finally muster his courage and become bold, to get up some steam and get horny, it took him months before he got his shriveled tongue to unfold, turn it into a sword that ejected the panegyrics about cunts and cum.

  The trains pulled up in front of him, they emptied and filled up again, people in a hurry, full shopping bags, plastic water bottles, crumpled newspapers, laughter, see you soon and hi and goodnight, many lit up cigarettes as soon as they came off, an Albanian asked him for a light, a junkie for some change, an elderly woman asked him what the time was, Linus sat with eyes of cement and sealed lips, though inwardly he was talking nonstop, sometimes to some stranger, sometimes to his own self as if he was looking at him from a few inches away or as if his left eye was spying on the right. His stories were hundreds, in slices, mixed-up settings and mixed-up years.

  He needed to make the night stop, to stop it from advancing and overtaking him, needed to put up some resistance.

  With the frog in his palm for company, he leaned against the bench, a beat-up dog, shoulders scrunched up, ears drooping, eyes bleary from the thick tears, head swollen by the assault, like hail, of successive outlandish scenes, ballerinas exploding, staircases breathing, alcoholic drinks sleepwalking, apples biting, loaves of bread keeping their silence, hair fainting, pianos sinking, forests swimming, the dead giving birth, streets frothing, barley and pomegranates creaking, shovels having hysterics, the dirt tasting bitter.

  •A.

  Little baby Christs who are sprinkling snow.

  And snow that is sprinkling little Christ babies.

  Christmas trees that sing lullabies to ghosts.

  And ghosts that sing lullabies to Christmas trees.

  Marmalade biscuits giving birth to puppies.

  And puppies giving birth to marmalade biscuits.

  Birds that are strangling clouds.

  And clouds that are strangling birds.

  In the late hours of the night, Linus Kolevas returned home barefoot, locked himself in his room, sat on the edge of the bed, snuck into the heart of winter and the heart of his childhood years with Buddy, who had been waiting for him like always, royally sprawled on the sheets, they took up their whispering repartee, careful to not disturb.

  From patient listener, the dog, after death, had evolved into a skilled practitioner of the post-midnight simulations of holocaust that his master, friend and brother Linus sought, scrunched up into a ball, befuddled inside the overturned days and nights and crushed by the bedlam of events, the human

  gold and the human filth all rolled in one, and the mind springing up and veering into crooked rainbows, billowing rivers, fields sailing off, cities stammering, crowds shimmering, New Year’s Eves afflicted by old age.

  Leaping off the bed onto the floor, Buddy licked the dust from Linus’, soles and softly growled his contribution, blind people taking aim, deaf who answer back, cripples parading, one-armed men making the sign of the cross.

  The small cocker spaniel had watched unremittingly the developments sparked all these years by the faces coming in and out of the house, and Rhoda was his number one dislike, he’d bitten her in the calf twice but unfortunately she had been vaccinated and he failed to turn her rabid and pack her off to the hereafter.

  Every Maundy Thursday, the madam, torn between atheism and the observation of certain traditions, brought her godson Easter candles with the badges of organization for the protection of nature, of every manner of minorities and of those victimized by plutocracy and, in addition, she delivered them with a thirty-minute discourse so that the child knew at four about Pinochet’s bloody coup, at five about the crematoriums at Auschwitz, at six about the persecution of the Palestinians, at eight about the embargo to Cuba, at ten about Chernobyl and the defunct nuclear reactors that will blow up and thousands of people will die from cancer and by twelve or thirteen he hadn’t missed out on any source of misery, any occasion for mass destruction.

  Every year, Buddy’s young master was starting to turn pale already from Holy Monday, unable to figure out a way of getting out of the trial of the imminent Maundy Thursday. His godmother had the officious air of a harbinger of ills and the status of an intellectual who didn’t allow anyone not to be terrorized by her statements. Along with the shocking candle, she always brought gifts, all purchased overseas, a large drawing pad

  from recycled paper decorated with fish and seabirds dead from Exxon oil-spills, a T-shirt with a logo against furs, a poster by a famous photo-reporter full of dead people, a pair of ecological footwear with silk-screened images of the nearly extinct Red Indians of the Amazon.

  Linus would have been about thirteen, first year in high school, when one night, alone at home, he stuffed it all in an old suitcase, along with his mothers beige shirt towards which he still harbored a resentment, and went and left it at an isolated bus stop, the suitcase could travel where it pleased, as long as it was away from him.

  The night was slowly fizzing out, sleeplessness and exhaustion were slowly getting the upper hand. When Buddy, the much loved ghost, rested his head and softly rubbed his cheeks and ears on his pal’s knees, he heard him repeat words by the ignominious godmother in three installments, unforgettable audio documents of the loss of his virginity.

  First installment, I like the way you turn your body towards the door. Second installment in a bit, I like the tone of your voice when you say don’t, godmother, hands off, be proper. Third installment, a couple of minutes later, she was licking her fingers at the table and moaning, what a great-tasting, big, juicy sausage this is.

  When did three years go by? Why didn’t he fill them with something worthwhile?

  Dead tired, Linus lay on the floor and went out like a light for five hours, a sleep without dreams, without nightmares. The previous night, Wednesday July 2nd, 1997, was never going to be erased from his mind but it was as if it had happened to someone else, the protagonist was a stranger, he himself had nothing to do with the white ankles that shone in the dark, unmoving on the single pine needles, no trace of himsel
f in the second rape.

  In the night, at the small park by the Hill of Strefi, in an alley with sickly trees, hidden behind a tree trunk a strange,

  frightening guy with a fur hat, standing dead still for two hours, soles without footsteps, a walker without a path.

  In the yellow light of a distant streetlamp, he checks the late passersby, first some middle-aged men coming home one by one, then three young boys running and giggling, later two heavy sixty-year-old women prattling, all moldy necks and rotting breasts, melting underarms, the apocalypse of aging flesh and, finally, by herself, a girl with a Walkman in her ears, hurrying along and as sprightly as a young horse, the stripped black-and-white skirt split up the side, the T-shirt short, the hairstyle modish, the nipples puckish, the belly button churning, a body at boiling temperature.

  She didn’t see the man, he let her pass by his tree, then sprang after her, grabbed her from behind, gagged her mouth, dragged her deeper into the copse of trees, threw her down on the pine needles, covered her face with the fur cap and ejecting two coarse zdoop, he did his business in three minutes.

  The girl was so scared that she didn’t utter a sound, didn’t muster the strength to scream even when he took back his hat, got up and waltzed off, like a true gentleman.

  This was the same guy who, a few hours earlier at Attica Station, as the last train was pulling in, got up from his bench and silently hurled himself into the railroad tracks, more than willing to be crushed to a pulp.

  If it wasn’t for the two damned Albanians who, at risk of their own lives, jumped in and dragged him off at the very last instant, with one of the two then forcing his beer down his throat and the other fanning him with a flyer for a pizzeria till he was able to stand on his feet and silently go off to wherever, the zebra at the park would have been spared the brutal fuck.