Back to Delphi

by Ioanna Karystiani

  You don’t say? And what about the lace, then? What was that there shoelace? What color? It hadn’t come off a pair of moccasins, had it, now?

  From the living room came the sound of ads for ice cream, insecticides and cockroach bait.

  Viv slipped into the kitchen, put the tray down, stuck her hand in her pocket with the black trophy and stood looking, as if hypnotized, at the broad beans soaking.

  Even when she heard her son go to his room, she stayed right where she was, staring at the pulse for hours, waiting for it to soften.

  It was almost dawn when she started peeling and counting them one by one, she knew you’re not supposed to peel them before baking but, at long last, her hands sprang into action, they’d found a way, the only one, for the night to pass.

  And it did. At a quarter past six, she opened the garbage bin and emptied into it the white mound of skins and the four hundred and twelve white-fleshed broad beans.

  Noon. The morning passed with cleaning the store windows, disinfecting the toilet seat and the small sink at the WC,

  soaping the small fridge, madly dusting the shelves’ five hundred bits and odds and with a group of three idlers who came into the Tutu, took up Viv’s time asking the prices of the flamenco dancer candlesticks and the belle epoque aromatic candles and left without buying a thing.

  Viv Koleva ran a disgruntled eye over all her ethereal ballerinas, stretching their limbs in unnatural poses that made you think of dislocated limbs and heads in deadlock.

  At half past two, she turned her key in the lock, she was in no mood for home, sleepless and worn-out from the general cleaning, she felt her body defeated and succeeded in thinking only about her swollen toes and stiff back. She let herself wander, looking at shop windows to get ideas for more attractive merchandise, maybe beach towels with Travolta’s mug on them, maybe sorbet glasses with ice-skating champions, she still had time to put an order in for some pieces, cheap stuff, gaudy and low quality, in case it worked in the massive heat and moneylessness of summer.

  But how come she was saddled for all these years with such stock? What had come over her in her youth to get a store like this? Why didn’t Fotis put his foot down? Why didn’t they leave Greece to go live somewhere else and make their fortune? But then, what did the deceased know about business, he was perfectly capable of opening a fireplace business in Africa and selling swimming pools in Greenland, of importing wood to the Amazon and sheep to New Zealand.

  Streets and more streets, the place churning under the stifling heat, the buildings shimmering before her eyes, the city a cooking pot of food that was turning to mush and was in danger of its bottom singeing.

  She crossed paths with a big hirsute fifty-year-old man who looked like a German shepherd, she overtook a minuscule old lady with an off-white dress full of pleats that made her look like a poodle, she was given right of way by two youths dark

  and robust like Labradors, she pulled to the side to let pass a short-legged Filipino nanny who resembled a Chihuahua, dragging two kid-puppies, everyone reminded her of the poster with the canine breeds, the poster reminded her of Buddy and, naturally, Buddy brought Linus to mind with a vengeance.

  Where was the masterless mongrel roving day and night? He didn’t go to any kind of job, didn’t go to the school, had no bosom buddies and there couldn’t be a girl around since his face didn’t shine and no smile appeared on his lips unprovoked, as when you are courting.

  A square, two kiosks, three cafeterias, five trees. Completely worn-out by this time, she sat on an isolated bench under a straggly bitter orange. She lit up, counted the few pedestrians, the red cars, the black motorcycles, the dog turds on the flagstones, the occupied and the empty chairs under the tents, the Nescafe on the tables, until she was struck as if by electric current by a group tumbling from a side-street, six turquoise, yellow and orange miniskirts. The girls in the square were like fresh fruit in summer’s platter.

  They took an adjacent bench by storm, they straddled each other’s laps, a heap of colors and thin limbs, a tutti-frutti of their interests, six mouths yakking at once about concerts and parties, bikinis and discounts, city beaches and island beaches, a George and a Tolis, they finished off about one Alex, took up one Danny, from there to the proficiency diploma of English, then a short round of personal deodorants, that’s what young girls do, they tell each other everything, down to a T, they get all worked up and they settle down with the telling.

  There was no chance, damn it, that they might mention one poor Linus, the girls had never heard of him. She wondered, was it him who’d sent Sylvia and Margarita off or had they been the ones to say, fare-thee-well? Did he fall in love with someone else, young, old, divorced, married, and who? And if

  not, will he ever fall in love again, and when? Why is he taking so long? Let him not delay further, the age of twenty needs plenty of lovemaking, the central switch needs to be permanently on.

  The six lasses had now gone back to the chain of boys, Jimmy, Petros, Vaggelis, Leo, madly excited, they were going at it full steam ahead, teasing, stroking, kicking and kissing one another.

  Viv Koleva turned her head away and her eyes skyward, another sight, another subject, balconies were something that might occupy her attention, perhaps immediately, perhaps very shortly. At the apartment building across from her, two narrow balconies were proper open-air galleries, tableaux with flower compositions, one dotted with gazanias like the mayor’s flower beds, the other seething with basil and marigold, in the Peloponnesian style. Her own was how? Plain dismal. Tomorrow, she’d go at the crack of dawn to the open-air market to buy three flowering potted plants and, then, come October, she would take on the balcony as a whole with ten hanging jardinieres and forty bulbs, tulip, hyacinth and daffodil, she would orchestrate next spring’s surprise.

  Is this me? she wondered. She didn’t recognize herself.

  Return to the gray house. Shops were closed for the afternoon, so she bought a newspaper and headed home as if this were her life’s last itinerary, to the gallows.

  She went up to the apartment, her son gone. Had a quick shower, swallowed two spoonfuls of marmalade, opened the paper, forced herself to become interested in international finance and Parliament’s summer sessions and eventually turned to the two-page centerfold of local news.

  Unsolved cases of the rape and murder of women, the Albanian girl who was identified by a birthmark on her elbow, the unforgettable bride-to-be, dead and surrounded by wedding bonbons that had spilled out of a box, the beautiful mother of

  twins, a nurse, on her way to her last night shift, the tragic incidents abounded, Viv devoured the article and, line after line about strangled prostitutes, carved up migrants and unsuspecting girlies found dumped here and there, she was greatly reassured.

  The first of the nine open cases occurred thirteen years ago, when Linus was seven years old, and then when he was eight, ten, twelve and fourteen-except for the last one with the damned shoelace that had planted in her mind such horrific suspicions about her child.

  Coolly now, she went over the common threads, all the victims were blonde, all the rapes and murders had been committed in summer, all in tree clumps and small parks, no beaches and no rocks, and happily, if not overjoyed, she, like the policemen and the psychiatrists putting together the madman’s profile, arrived at the conclusion that the evidence pointed to one perpetrator who had been around for years, wreaking havoc.

  The shoelace did confuse them somewhat. The crimes had not been committed in wintertime, when the man might have used a pair of pantyhose on the women, and in the last incident, probably, some noise made him flee before he had time to untie and retrieve the murder weapon, his own shoelace, since all the victims wore heels or sandals and the latest one wore clogs.

  From old and recent statements by women who’d gotten away with their lives, and some who had escaped the rape as well because they’d run like hell, the descriptions of the veteran were understandably contradictory. The
brute was both of average size and big, both thin as a spider and strong like a bodybuilder, his ample hair was both full of curls and straight, both blond and jet-black, and as, according to one witness, he roared and snarled incessantly, there was the possibility of him being a deaf-mute.

  For Vivian Koleva it was now a child’s game reading

  through the smaller columns devoted to infamous perpetrators, to master rapists and to dilettantes of rape, and the statements of women who were working late and had to pay a cab to take them home since they didn’t dare walk alone even for short distances. One of these, a natural blonde, said she was forced to dye her hair black. She finished with the call by police for more information that might contribute to the maniac’s arrest, left the paper on the small table next to her and wondered, at long last, who those poor souls might have been, what names the mothers of the dead were calling out, maybe some of those mothers had set up small votive stands where their girls had been martyred, under the trees, their death preferred greenery, didn’t much fancy the seaside.

  I’m sending Linus for a swim in the sea whether he likes it or not, she said out loud, it suddenly seemed to her terribly important, we simply can’t disobey the laws of summer. She wondered why whenever we think of rocks we always think of them in the range of gray even though, she told herself, there are rocks the color of wheat, of green almond, of unripe plum, rocks with scales of rust and with sardine skins.

  She felt heartened, got up, pulled back her sleeves, mentally arranged the house chores in order of importance and counted them off on her fingers, first she would put chops and potatoes in the oven, second she would put music on, she would set out the table properly with the immortal turquoise tablecloth and her good set of immortal plates and glasses, and fourth, she would welcome her son no matter what time he came in, in a chatty mood, they could relax a little, shoot the breeze a little, enough already with the silence that was running amok.

  With the potato peels, finally, the shoelace was also thrown in the bin and good riddance.

  The imperial sunset touched the house with gold and Viv decorated the throne room for the imminent arrival of his highness, methodically and in high spirits. Her bones, nor-

  mally a pile of rusty iron rods and corroded springs, unhinged and creaking at every awkward move, responded to the maternal alert like a brand new electrical appliance.

  It must have been about ten-thirty, the music was rioting, tambourines and flying notes, when her son came home, filthy dirty and, evidently, having had a good cry, the tears still shone on his cheeks and there was a shiny trail of dry snot on his upper lip.

  - What happened? Did you get beat up? What have you been up to?

  He made no answer. He was standing in the middle of the room and his sorry state promised anything but the unfolding of the perfect dinner as planned.

  Viv noticed his gaze, distressed, the irises tracking haphazardly left and right inside their yellow-white nests, enlarging like black stones and being hurled at the unexpected preparations and the lugubrious setup. But also at the open paper on the small table. He rushed over and stood above the paper’s main spread.

  Now, Viv didn’t much like this development, it had been amiss of her not to put away the newspaper with its varied atrocities, she did so now, closed it, folded it, the two needed to focus on their stuff, to find a way to breathe easy.

  - I’ve turned the hot water on, she told him.

  - Give me the car keys.

  - The chops will get cold.

  - I want the car.

  - There’s ice cream as well.

  He looked at her dumbfounded.

  - The car, he said again in a faded voice.

  - No can do. I need it.

  She came up with an excuse, despite the late hour, she would be making a delivery to an aged client whose daughter- in-law was picking her up in the morning to spend the summer

  day at Sounion, she had promised she would drop off a feng shui ballerina.

  Some packets around the house were proof of her claims, normally she’d take those to the indisposed and those accustomed to being taken care of in the next few days, there was time.

  Nevertheless, Linus didn’t stick around to be informed of the details about feng shui and Italian porcelain, he’d opened her bag right there and then, had lifted her six fifties, and was out the door, Viv heard the elevator going down.

  She went out to the balcony, just in time to glimpse him turning the corner. She stood frozen, till the music gave up on her, too, CD over, dead silence. She lit a cigarette staring at the windows across the street on the off chance she might forget herself in others’ lives.

  A mother was combing the freshly shampooed hair of her baby daughter, a fat forty-year-old guy, the Cypriot dental technician, was putting up a mirror.

  She had the last drag and went in, looked at the food and the plates all set out, left them there.

  Went to the rubbish bin, stuck in her hand, pulled out the shoelace, shook it, wound it up and put it back in her pocket.

  She returned to the living room heavy, the wings she had spread earlier now withered.

  She turned on the TV.

  Bat-fish, cabbage-reefs, the oscillating frequency of sharks and striped pajama-squids.

  JU JU

  A A />

  Can’t even get the coffee down. What coffee? She’d been making them by the dozen, at home and in the shop, spent all day and all night bent over the cup and the phone.

  Her son had been gone three days now, hadn’t called her, wouldn’t pick up his cell phone.

  From day two she’d been calling him nonstop, she memorized his number again which she had forgotten, Linus had forbidden her to chase after him, if the reason you got it for me is to be on my back all the time, you might as well keep it yourself, he had made himself perfectly clear.

  Had he gone off just like that? He had. For how long? For twenty hours or thereabouts. The trip to Hepeiros and back on the bus, the first time he’d skipped school, at fifteen, the train to Salonika was the second one, a little after, on the way back he’d brought her a box of chocolates.

  On the afternoon of the second day she called the Orthopedic Hospital, the Laikon, St. Olga’s, and every other major hospital, nothing. Should she call the police? She rejected the idea, she was too frazzled, the words that might escape her could cause damage.

  A coffee cup or a coffee glass? Sugar or no sugar? Viv Koleva began to know less and less, she was giving herself a headache as much for good reason as for no reason at all.

  At some point, she swallowed her pride, called at Sylvia’s and at Margarita’s, she never threw out the old phone numbers, she played it cool. Their mothers surprised, almost annoyed and certainly abrupt, informed her that as soon as summer rounded the corner, the daughters had taken up island hopping with a vengeance, they well and truly needed it after all the studying, the former had demanded it after all the philosophy, the latter after all the German.

  Whyever was she calling them? And whyever did she also call two old fellow students of his and then a third one, everyone whose number she had. One father confessed utter ignorance about his son’s whereabouts, everyone else was away.

  She called the village, fat chance that her one and only would run into his grandparents’ arms, Viv did not ask specifically, she fished around, we are alive, her mother said, they exchanged greetings to those there and those here, they rang off.

  And then, there was the newspaper buying at the kiosks, rifling through the car accidents in the countryside, dead and injured from motorcycle crashes, pileups, drunken driving, every one of those had a first and last name, no Linus Kolevas, nobody unidentified in case her son didn’t have his ID with him. Did he?

  She closed the shop early and ran home, looked through the pockets of his black jacket which had, by her son’s decree, to hang winter and summer on the hallway rack, she went into his bedroom, found the ID in the desk drawer under tabs of anti-inflammatory pills
, expired vitamins and loose batteries. Still, after making sure to lock the front door to the apartment from the inside, so the prodigal son wouldn’t catch her in his room if he appeared suddenly, she continued her meticulous rifling through his videos, books and papers. Among the pages, the stub of a cruiser to the island of Paros, the date recent, an attempted holiday, which is to say wasted money, a bunch of cutouts of cartoons by famous satirist KYR and sketches by Arkas of pigs and roosters, pamphlets of foreign universities, a washed-out black-and-white postcard from Stalingrad, verses about the dog, a photograph of Fotis, the one with the eyes swollen from alcohol and sadness and two mysterious letters from one of his sisters, when had those come and why wasn’t Viv told? Why had the kid saved them? Why had his father given them to him or else where had he found them?

  The first one, March 14, 1984, my beloved brother Fotis, only two lines this time, just so you have the time to read the following, I love you very much, in case you even glance at my letter before you throw it out—Kiki.

  Which was to say, more letters had been sent. Had they been kept or thrown away? And to what address had the woman been mailing them for Viv never to have seen any in their mailbox? Under different circumstances, she would devote some

  time to weighing the matter up, though it was a frayed thing of the past. But this, now, was of no interest to Viv Koleva.

  What was she trying to find? She recalled that a few days ago, Linus had thrown out two large bagfuls of stuff. Could it be that he was getting rid of evidence? Such as what? If it was him, he certainly wouldn’t be holding on to mementos. No, it wasn’t him, he wasn’t the wanted veteran, he was barely twenty and besides, the room cleaning had taken place in June, it must have been June, yes, June it was, before the shoelace.

  She lit a cigarette and scanned the pigsty. The hawk mother trains her chick, the bear her cub, the cat her kittens, herself, a bitch that taught her pup nothing worthwhile.

  There was no denying it, her son didn’t have the foundation for a normal development, the plaything of a terrible, silent rage, buried under a ton of mistakes, hers, his father’s, grown-ups’ in general.