Back to Delphi

by Ioanna Karystiani

  With such as these, four loners and two couples, as the first crop, her brilliant career took off, creatures that had met with need as time rounds the bend, with the memory gaping, the thoughts blocking, the tongue stumbling, the body collapsing and the offspring beating a hasty retreat.

  After May ’98, her life drawn out, empty and simultaneously full of arthritic fingers like bunches of tangled intestines, feet disfigured by swellings, broken veins and myriads of tiny vessels like handfuls of purple threadlike kadaifi pastry, with old women like old-fashioned cartoons, rounded swollen bodies on toothpick calves, aged lungs that coughed green mucus, old asses that farted like trombones or raised a tsunami of shit when some grandfather’s intestines didn’t mean to dry up.

  All of this in an environment of partial abandonment due to helplessness and lowly pensions, worn two-seat sofas, sheets with the flowers faded from all the laundering, flattened pillows, towels with their fluffiness corroded by overuse, showers with rust around the nickel-plated pipe rings, sponges half eaten away with black muck in the holes, wounded plates and glasses, the cups and pots without handles, but everywhere lots of color photographs of the grandchildren at the pianos, the karate classes, the birthday parties, on the destroyer warship in a sailor’s uniform, at the military pilot’s training school, put up like submission forms for an extension on life, over all the objects and pieces of furniture, around the edge of the prewar picture frames with the black-and-white relatives, on the plastic St. Panteleimon, healer of bodies and souls, the laurel-

  wreathed Eleftherios Venizelos on the TV, the gilded Andreas Papandreou and his wife Mimi on the dresser, stuck with scotch tape on the fridge, pinned on the inside of the wardrobe and next to it, on the bedside table, back-to-back with the bottles of cough syrups and alcohol, so they can reach for them, so they can caress them at all times.

  Viv herself would never get a daughter-in-law or in-laws or grandchildren. She had told none of her clients that she had a son and what kind he was. How could she come out with it? In what manner? Something along the lines of, my sweet boy doing life?

  Experienced in war zones, accomplished in adversity, she transited smoothly from ballet to blood pressure monitors, from satin bows to poultices for bedsores and within six months she was renowned and much in demand, her clients, whom time had ravaged, my cadavers, as she called them even to their faces while she fed or sprayed them with cologne, bribed her so she wouldn’t leave them, with cheese pies and grape-must cookies from well meaning neighbors and disclosed their wills to her, some would only bequeath their good example of stoical endurance and others would sow seeds for future strife among the disappeared relatives, who’d be at each other’s throats over the measly two-room apartment and the fake gold jewelry.

  Sometimes in her nightly expedition to the center or north or south of the city for a change of catheter or to measure blood levels of sugar, she sat with them longer, what would she do alone in her decrepit little home, she sweet-talked them, you’ll be fine by the time you get married, and, I’ll kiss it where it hurts and, pain makes friends of enemies and, sickness brings out all the strength in us, she wheedled them for a bit of back and forth of compassionate mottos, to relieve their deranged loneliness, to lessen the abundance of silence that grips old mouths, especially just before the night’s lead sets in.

  Almost all of them knew just fine how to sum up the basics.

  It’s good being a child because at eight and at ten you’ve only a few things to remember, the one, despicable, to spend three hours trying to remember what you had for lunch, the next one is a one-liner, nobody in my family really cares what I want, they only allow me to wish for a peeled kiwifruit, the third, the fourth a variation on the same theme, they come to visit for one hour every Sunday and, instead of all of us having a talk, they sit on the couch and continue with where they left off, the fifth, from sixty onwards you need a quarter of an hour to iron your underwear, ten times the size it was twenty years ago, right from its start, life hangs on a cotton thread, the sixth, the seventh and much traveled, I’ve been to many countries but the world’s nicest nation was my table with my family gathered around, may God give us passage for our way out, the eighth and so on and so forth.

  One couple in Exarchia, married for sixty-five years, watched all the day’s news bulletins fanatically, by nightfall they had memorized national and global news, everything a pulp in the husband’s head, the fires in Attica, the tear gas at Clinton’s reception, the stock market plunge, Cathy Freeman in Sydney, the protests for the insurance measures, the wife, with an elephant’s memory and the wisdom of an owl, could listen to the initial phrase and finish the sentence by herself, she had lived through all versions of political, economic and diplomatic fiascos on the planet, a world that no longer surprised her on any count.

  A second couple were mildly deranged and overweight, like hot air balloons still moored, unable to lift up to the skies, all day and night on two armchairs surrounded by their works, second-rate writers of children’s books with seventy-odd little tomes and booklets, The Nightingale with Mouth Sores, The Half- Burnt Pancake, My Heart's Sweetheart, The Tear that Secretly laughed, The Prayer of the Sandwich. Their son, a family man

  and father of three in Salonika, had finally found the one and only way to keep them happy and perfectly well behaved, video porn. By necessity, he’d let the nurse in on the secret. So they would take their pills, a dozen each, and then would devote themselves to the night episodes of Restless Youth , as the son had told them, which they found infinitely more engaging than the day ones.

  Another client, an eighty-minus-one retired theologian, his one daughter married in Milan to a carabiniere, the second to a traffic cop in Frankfurt, himself recovering from a heavy stroke, his fourth, he’d get as far as death’s door, find it closed and come back.

  Next was a grandmother who suffered from a bit of everything, completely dependent on hair curlers and cream soaps. After her primary care, she commanded Viv to paint her nails and take out the hairs from her chin with the tweezers, all anxious about looking good at her life’s last, great date.

  Yet another, wearing on all occasions her favorite brooch, a tiny golden turtle, even on her flannel nightie, continually stroked the piece of jewelry she bore on her chest above her heart, where everything takes root, including her sorrow for her deceased mate, his Volvo now is my Volvo, his cat now is my cat, his dressing gown now is my dressing gown and his angina now is my angina.

  Further down the line was the old Cretan, crooked like a crescent moon, who made up a different rhyme daily for his tombstone, alongside all the sayings which had provided him with comfort all his life though Viv, who listened to them, found no comfort: Where the goat leaps, so does the kid, No seed out of a rotten pumpkin , and, A man’s face is a sheer cliff. It was as if they were handpicked to rekindle her own actions in her mind.

  Another, born to the poverty of rural Thessaly, a hundred different bags with dried leaves hanging on the walls of his

  room, overwhelmed her with his botanical obsessions, the weed-killing thyme, the soporific poppy, nettle for anemia, rue for the lungs, tall mallow for the digestion, and asked her if and when she could venture to certain gorges and nature spots to unearth some bulbs that worked miracles with erections. Viv was watching out for his blood pressure, every so often banging some cortisone into him for his dilapidated knees, and she gave him her word that as soon as he got himself a girlfriend, she would bring him the bulbs and would personally go to the Public Health Fund to have them prescribe him some Viagra.

  Injections affected the elderly like a truth serum, in the next fifteen minutes, before she was due to leave, they would come up with one or two secrets that weighed on them, that they’d cheated on their now deceased husband, they’d encroached on some poor neighbor’s land in the village, they’d been unfair with their second daughter’s dowry, they had unjustly accused their daughter-in-law to the son and their son had divorced her.
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br />   Viv Koleva, Sotiropoulos to all of them, was furtively rummaging through other people’s sacks and, day by day, was building a goodly stock of others’ trespasses, both petty and otherwise.

  The number of clients would ebb and flow, every two months she led at least one departing ceremony, since as a rule she was hired at five minutes to the grave, death’s sentinel and helper, hardworking, discreet, deft at hole-punching, cool- headed, brought them boiled greens in Tupperware, treated them to the odd cigarette.

  Death, a habit really. Ever since Fotis died, she’d had the upper hand on death. She was polishing her pumps when the Highbrow called with news of the fatal heart attack of Eleftheria, a fellow student in the first year of Medicine, she thought of her for a while and went on shoe shining, she was

  listening to a favorite program on the radio when the hairdresser from two doors down came in to say his sister had been killed in a car accident, she knew her, relatively young, the hairdresser left, she went straight back to the radio, she got a letter from Germany about her godfather’s death and went on calmly breaking walnuts for the pie, she went to the funeral of Aunt Zoe, the one she’d lived with during that first year in Athens, but didn’t stay for the coffee, she headed back home because she was expecting the carpets from the cleaner’s, Linus told her about a girl at school dead from heroin and within half an hour she was reading poetry, her father died and immediately he was added in her head to the three thousand dead in the Twin Towers, after three days Kazantzidis was gone as well, the idol of Fotis’s group, she was probably the only Greek who didn’t have a tear in her eye, whereas even her coterie of old folks lamented bitterly, she went to the funeral of Judy, the old English woman who turned her on to the lucrative Elizabeths, and clinched another ten orders on the spot, because, although she was done with the shop, she was far from done with the royal dolls, an untaxed bit of business, especially under the current circumstances, she had an obligation to steal from the government and, as much as possible, she did, she got paid for her work under the table, no receipts, and one of the two offices was supposedly unrented, trifles, to be sure, in comparison with the jackals of the ministries and big business, going all out for stocks and Rolexes and big scale scams.

  Her house full of paramedical supplies, Pampers, gloves, wet tissues, plastic kidney bowls, cottons, antiseptics, douches, self-adhesive bandages, dressings, masks, gauzes, syringes, dispensable aprons and slippers, under the gaze of the Elizabeths from the high shelf, they’d now become the United Kingdom of plasticized under-sheets and urinary bags.

  Sometimes, late at night, at eleven and twelve, when she

  trekked back to her place, exhausted by the hard labor and inflamed by other people’s stories, she thought that virtually all people ached over one thing or another and that she would like to give them five million analgesic injections, one each and for free, so they could have a break, get a night’s rest and have a dream, at last, deserving of the name, boats in calm seas or gardens and fragrant citrus flowers raining on smiling kids.

  No kids to be found anywhere, in her sleep or in her waking. Only her relics. For twenty years she had lived off the young girls and the adolescents with the well trained physiques. Now she earned her living from the flabby and half-rotting carcasses of the aged, barely able to drag themselves to the toilet, who were shuffling in line in death’s dance and one by one waved their handkerchiefs goodbye to this world.

  Yet all these people, strange and ephemeral in her life were actually probably very useful. In some way, by force of their agony and the nonnegotiable ending, little by little, they asserted themselves over her, something which she hadn’t known before, others having the upper hand, even briefly.

  She did not despise them, was not bored with them, did not tell them off, did not charge an arm and a leg, she worked on a Bulgarian’s wages, at times when work was scarce she even asked for less than did the Valentinas, Rummis and Stefkas. She was fond, too, of their outmoded blankets with the beige and brown leopards against a mustard backdrop, she shared in their shame when the deodorizer was finished and the room smelled bad, she respected their bony hands with the perishable skin.

  Though they did work her to the bone, they strangely did not weigh her heart down, sometimes she even felt like the old folks were her respite, the wizards of a queer, if short-lived, muscle-relaxing harmony, her “break,” like they said on TV.

  In their good moments, they narrated their lives as if they

  were a demotic song, whether from Crete or Hepeirus or Macedonia, with a sigh accentuating the pauses, a handsome old-fashioned word working its magic and resurrecting the old triumphs, which is to say, their small village, their first suit, their little garden with the now scarce crabapples and baby pears.

  She would think of things they’d said, such as, for all life gives us we only owe it one death, and she almost envied them, no matter that some were stranded in the same position on a fold-up bed, or as good as forgotten inside their private worlds. They were edging toward the end and were accepting of that, leaning for comfort on the Old Testament, A time for giving birth and a time for dying .

  If there was one thing on which Viv agreed with the Japanese, it was that the most beautiful trees are the old ones. At times, she even inwardly told herself that instead of the years passing her by at their ease, she would have liked to pass them by herself, decisively and swiftly, one stride for each decade.

  - Viv, my lass, you do sometimes mangle your words, take marjoram if you have a headache or jasmine leaves as an overall tonic, this from the old Thessalian.

  - Viv, my child, I listen to you coming up with words that aren’t right, lermon and coorkie and jarket. The mind makes the body weary and the mind can give it rest , this from the more specific old Cretan.

  Because next to all of them and all of it roamed continuously, without giving her a moment’s reprieve, the shadow of her son.

  The prison house of Korydallos is inside the city, throngs of buildings and people around, yet it is at the end of the line, that is the address, and the monthly journey there, with a load

  of clean clothes inside the two plastic bags and the Tupperware with the beef in the third, was yet another odyssey of the mind.

  During the visits, Viv spoke to Linus about far-fetched things, parrots that said Viva Maradona, monkeys that suckled orphan tigers, the antioxidant properties of olive oil and a Swiss pharmaceutical company which aimed at releasing to the market within three years, the new medicine for Parkinson’s disease.

  She fished the bits of news from papers she occasionally bought and magazines she thumbed at her clients’ houses, evaluated them and jotted them down on a small pad to have them handy.

  She prepared the subjects for days, so as not to spoil the final effect with artless words, to have them in order, which one will make a good start, that especially was very important so she could get a flow and deliver the rest with ease.

  Almost always she was the only one talking and each time she found that the fifteen minutes allocated for the visit was too long, she was standing on tiptoe and trying hard to fill the time with no breaks. Behind the glass, he held the receiver and listened absentmindedly, only at the end did he look at her with an intense stare, filled with contempt for both of them.

  On certain occasions, pretending to be relaxed, to be exclusively and earnestly interested in the world’s oddities and the progress of medical science was impossible. The elections are easily skirted, the global petrol reserves likewise, what is there to say about armament programs, the Pope’s visit and his apology for the Crusades weren’t exactly appropriate for small talk behind the glass, the arrest of the members of the organization 17 November, in the same prison as he, brooked no commentary, how could it when the communist’s grandson happens to be in for life and isn’t even a political prisoner.

  Beginning of September 2004 the fifteen minutes were taken up with the explosion of the school in Beslan. Viv

  referre
d to the three hundred and ninety-four victims, young kids mostly, to Vladimir Putin, to the negotiator Ruslan Aushev, to Chechnya’s media representative Achmat Zakayiev, to the two Ossetias, Georgia and the whole of the riddled Caucasus. She was pale, spoke curtly and evocatively, she delivered the whole thing breathlessly and she only let slip one a r,” hoorded men.

  - Do you want me to think you are unhappy because of Beslan?

  Her son rarely commented or interrupted her, if he talked, he did so straight away with his stare, faster than a gunshot. It was a good thing, then, that he put a question to her, but there was no point in replying to this specific one, Seneca had answered this already, No one is unhappy only because of the present , Yukaris mentioned him often.

  - I have made up my mind, mother, about one thing, to be unhappy on your account for all my life.

  How was she to cover the damned fifteen minutes with him? Only with monkeys, yaks, Marco Polo rams and assorted quadrupeds? Was she supposed to brag about her professional life, Work is the sickle which reaps time , Napoleon Bonaparte, again compliments of Yukaris, her gainful employment, in ordinary parlance, with folks who were fading away, some speedily and others not so fast? Was she supposed to tell him about the incontinence of the old Cretan who doused her with sayings and improvised verses? About her neighborhood which had become filled with banks and was looking for some more? About the entire city which had lost its stamina and was acquiring a look of permanent ugliness? Would he be interested in discussing where the Cyprus issue was and the enormous complications of the Annan proposal?

  They had come to an arrangement regarding things dietary and monetary, as for family news, it was delivered telegraphically and not in its entirety. His grandfather’s death had