Scéalta Page 11

  Mama Kalanaikas, as we called her, was due to arrive at four, just as the stabbing intensity began to leach out of the sun’s rays. Her weekly arrival was as predictable as the afternoon winds which stirred at the same time every day, crumpling the surface of the unforgiving sea below us. We looked forward to her visits, Anthony and I. She, like us, was something of an oddity on the island, albeit a home-grown one. There was, I liked to feel, some kind of complicity between us. Her dark eyes often flashed sympathy, one outsider to another. Her husband had been dead for forty years, yet she never dressed in black as all the other widows did. She was a stern woman, somewhere in her late seventies, skin the colour of old bark. Her earlobes fascinated me. They were thin, the piercings a long vertical slash, heavy with a lifetime’s lapis lazuli. Every time I looked at her, the lines and fissures of her face reminded me of spidery pictures of the Nile Delta I had once seen as a child.

  ‘A woman to be respected,’ Anthony had said when we’d met her first. ‘She’s a woman not to be trifled with.’ I can still hear his tone, that casual emphasis.

  Mama was courteous, even voluble on occasion. She’d look at Anthony’s canvases, perplexed, talk up at him for a moment, and then immediately move to gaze into Anna’s cradle. Then she’d turn and pat my arm gently. Next time, she seemed to say. A boy next time. Seven sons, she’d once told me, counting on her fingers. This unspoken female collusion both touched and irritated me. It made me feel guilty – disloyal in some way to Anna. Nevertheless, I welcomed it.

  Of course, we none of us understood the words the other spoke, but it never mattered. When she’d stand up to leave, Anthony would hand her the discreet envelope containing the rent, almost as an afterthought, as though the purpose of her visits were an altogether different one. We’d had to learn the choreography of those visits, too, almost as another language.

  While we awaited her arrival that day, Anthony stopped occasionally to sip at a glass of retsina. He claimed he always worked better in the heady afternoon heat; said that the wine unleashed something in him, some pool of inspiration inaccessible under all other circumstances, at all other times. The wine-bottle was perspiring madly, great big beads of water sliding over its greenish surface. The label had begun to lurch drunkenly just below the neck, scrawled black ink bleeding and blurring into oblivion.

  ‘Are you sure Mama understands that we want to stay on right through the winter?’ I asked him. I was tired of always moving on, hiding, shuffling from one inhospitable place to the other. Besides, this was Anna’s first home. That had to count for something.

  He didn’t answer at once.

  ‘Anthony?’

  I remember that I had cut great slices of dense white goats cheese that day. It was pleasantly salty, but a little too dry for me. I ate hardly any of it, but Anthony dived into it, as usual. His long fingers plucked at the coarse, yeasty bread that showered crumbs everywhere. The crust was sharp, hard on bare feet. Peasant bread, Anthony used to call it – but with admiration, never with scorn. He always ate distractedly, often with a clutch of brushes in one hand, his fingers mottled with oils and turpentine. He’d pace as he ate, the hand with the brushes swinging in time to his long, impatient step. Up and down the terrace, up and down the beach, always on the move, always on the lookout for something. Occasionally, he would stand abruptly still, staring out to sea. On that day, he stayed on the terrace.

  ‘Please don’t question me; don’t question what I do,’ he said, finally.

  I looked up, surprised. ‘I wasn’t …’

  But he had already turned back to his canvas.

  It wasn’t Mama Kalanaikas who arrived that afternoon. Instead, it was Nikolai, her eldest son, along with three other men I’d never seen before. The family resemblance was unmistakable. Nikolai came and stood at our bottom step. Anthony waved his invitation to come up onto the terrace.

  ‘Please, please,’ he said, ‘welcome.’

  Nikolai refused with a gesture – swift and curt, strangely at odds with the gold of the sand, the suddenly stirring breeze. I sat back on my cushions, shocked. He inclined his head stiffly in my direction for a moment, without actually looking at me, and then turned his attention to Anthony.

  ‘Mama is ill,’ he said softly. ‘She send me.’

  I jumped up, alarmed. ‘Can I help? Does she need anything?’

  His eyes flickered. ‘We take care good, my mother,’ he said quietly.

  ‘Oh, of course, I didn’t mean …’

  Anthony silenced me with a glance. He turned gravely to Nikolai. ‘We wish your mother a good recovery,’ he said slowly. He reached into the little drawer of the tiled side-table and pulled out the weekly envelope. I saw his hand shake. ‘Thank you for calling.’

  Nikolai bowed. ‘We need house, now.’

  We both looked at him. His three brothers stood silently on the beach, arms folded. For a wild moment, I felt I had become one of the stallholders in the local market. Nikolai’s meaning was perfectly clear, yet I remember that I spread my palms towards him, offering him my incomprehension. At that moment, Anna started to wail. I wanted to go to her, but something kept me anchored there. Standing on the bottom step, I felt caught between my child and a suddenly looming future over which I had no control.

  ‘Our agreement is with your mother,’ said Anthony. Then he turned his face and said something else, something I didn’t catch. His tone was cold, deliberate, undercut by that jaunty energy I knew so well. Nikolai responded, his words flat and sullen, dangerous edges pushing closer to the surface. You’re dealing with me now. That’s the agreement now.

  I couldn’t look at Anthony’s face.

  ‘It’s all Greek to me,’ he used to say, cheerfully – or Italian, or Turkish, or French, depending on where we happened to be – priding himself on his inability to master even the simplest sounds. Watching these two men now, I felt the slow drag of familiarity. I knew what happened next. It would happen again, just as surely as it had the last time, and the time before that. I could still see the cool green of the courtyard in Bari, the trickling fountain, the farmer’s brown and solemn children.

  ‘Soldi! Soldi!’ he’d shouted, jabbing the forefinger of one hand into the palm of the other. Sweat had gathered across his forehead, his shirt was damp. I thought I could smell fear. But Anthony had simply smiled and shaken his head. This canvas, perhaps? Or this one? Maybe a portrait instead?

  And afterwards, always the same mantra: ‘Come on, Beauty, we’re on the move again.’

  Anna’s wail became a screech. Still I couldn’t move. For the first time, Nikolai looked at me, just for a moment. His glance was contemptuous, insolent, yet still suggestive, redolent of invitation. I fled. My cheeks burned as I lifted my small daughter and she latched onto my breast, hungrily. She quieted almost at once. I didn’t dare look towards the beach again.

  When Anthony stepped up onto the terrace, his face was tight, pinched with an anger I had seen all too frequently in our ten years together. The anger of another defeat, another scheme unravelling. He put his brushes down very carefully, wiped his long fingers on the front of his shirt.

  ‘I’m going to see Mama,’ he said, finally.

  I looked at him stupidly, before I understood.

  ‘Don’t, please – I don’t want to stay here on my own.’ I could feel my lower lip tremble, hated the whine in my own voice. I was fearful now, fearful for my own safety and for Anna’s.

  He smiled suddenly. ‘There’s nothing to be afraid of, Martha – it’s just a misunderstanding. Mama said the house was ours. It was a fair price. She agreed it was a fair price for a year.’

  ‘But you and Nikolai …’

  He interrupted me. ‘Never mind Nikolai. It’s Mama’s house – she was very clear about that.’

  I remembered. Remembered the afternoon on the beach, just days before Anna’s birth, remembered the way Mama had pointed to the house, then back to herself, nodding vigorously all the time. My house, she kept saying. Min
e. Mine. Then she had pulled drachmas out of her skirt pocket, counting and counting until she and Anthony struck a bargain on the rent.

  But that wasn’t what I wanted to talk about. I tried again.

  ‘Anthony, just now, you and Nikolai …’

  ‘A misunderstanding, Martha,’ he said, curtly. ‘Don’t go on about it.’ He stood over me, rested his hand lightly on the top of Anna’s fair head. ‘I won’t be long,’ he said then. ‘If Mama’s changed her mind, then I want to hear her say it. To my face.’

  He was striding along the beach before I could stop him. I wanted to call out, to remind him of folded arms, spreading palms, all the uselessness of words. It’s all Greek to me. Instead, I watched as he grew smaller, walking away from me towards the south end of the beach.

  I clung to Anna. ‘I’ll keep you safe,’ I whispered. ‘I’ll protect us.’

  After that, I’m really not quite sure what happened next, or how long anything took. It has nothing to do with memory: simply that days melded together around that time, hammered into the metal of sameness by the blunt instrument of loss.

  When Anthony’s body finally washed up on the west coast of the island, it was too far decomposed to ascertain the cause of death. The policeman was very careful to tell me that there were no signs, no signs at all, that any violence had ‘come to visit Mr Anthony’.

  When I left, I took his Moses sandals with me, his brushes and two small canvases. It was all I could carry. The police escorted me to the ferry, accompanied by that same, brittle politeness. They carried my suitcase; I carried Anna. Somehow, I got to Athens again, then Italy, then, finally, home.

  I’ve been thinking about Mama a lot, these days. I realised recently, with some amusement, that I am almost as old now as she was then, although my skin will never acquire the shadings of old bark. I do hope all her sons dealt with her kindly. I don’t like to think that anything bad might have happened to her – or, at least, nothing worse than happens to the rest of us.

  I still remember the bright blue of the Aegean, the garish reds and greens of Anthony’s canvases, the rakish angle of the policemen’s caps as they stood on the beach with their arms folded, watching my departure. As the last ferry slid away from the shore, I sat with my back to my future. Anna nursed quietly as I kept looking at what had once been my home. I swayed in time to the rhythm of the waves, patted her as Mama had once patted my arm.

  In the fading light of evening, the sand gleamed like bone.

  JUDITH MOK

  Pirates

  ‘My name is Rashid Gallili.’ He hears his voice echoing loudly against the houses and the wet asphalt.

  Not loud enough. She is still cupping her ear with her hand, her slightly open mouth very close to his cheek.

  ‘Could you greet the King for me?’ she whispers. Pink lipstick stuck in the cracks around her lips.

  She wants to know how the King is. It does not matter what he shouts in her ear; she’s obviously deaf. She is holding her brittle frame very upright underneath a massive mink coat.

  He has offered to carry her shopping home for her and she has graciously agreed, only because she immediately recognized him as an Iranian compatriot. It turns out to be a major task as she takes bird-like steps and the bags are heavy. How much could an old lady like that need, he wonders? After he’s tried to tell her his name and she’s inquired after the King’s health, their conversation has stopped and the noise of the traffic takes over, hissing in the rain.

  His daughter Lilly rang him today, an event that never fails to make him feel inadequate. She’s six already and lives in the countryside with her mother.

  Lilly wanted to know if they had television there too. Where? Oh, in Dublin. He laughs out loud now that he thinks about their chat. How he tends to forget that he lives in Dublin, that he met this woman there who seduced him. He was a virgin, hardly spoke any English. She took him, straight from Tehran, home to her turf fire. Came to see him five months later with a pregnant tummy. Just to show him what happens when you sleep with a woman. Left again, disappeared. Months later he tracked her down, she and the baby, and gave her all his savings. She took the money and slammed the door in his face. He did not even know the baby’s name. But he did tell his mother in Tehran on the phone that she had a granddaughter.

  Lilly had been moved around by her mother a lot, finally to the countryside. It was always difficult to find them but he had to be sure the child ate well and was properly looked after. The mother never talked to him, just took money and food from him. As she had taken him in one night when she was ovulating and ready to conceive with a total stranger.

  She wanted a baby, that’s all. His Lilly.

  He still lived in Dublin and now Lilly was talking to him on the phone about a pirate movie she’d seen. The pirates had abducted a little girl and wanted big gold coins in return for the girl. Beautiful shiny yellow coins with the head of a crowned king on them. Her voice modulated into an even higher pitch of excitement as she told him the apotheosis of the story: how they found lots of coins and the girl was saved. Did they have coins like that in Dublin? Could he send her some? When were they going to watch a movie together? Bye, Daddy. Abruptly she hung up, before he could answer any of her urgent questions.

  They stop in front of a Georgian building. He waits patiently as the old lady fumbles with her keys, opens the door and turns around to thank him with her back to the steep stairs. He offers to carry the bags upstairs for her. And again she agrees. What is it she has in these bags? He keeps wondering at their weight.

  Her apartment is very big and bare. The walls are painted in uneven shades of white, the curtains are heavy with dirt and there seems to be only one functioning light bulb. The grandiose-looking crystal lamps all reflect the opaque darkness around them. On the floor beside the fireplace there are magnificent porcelain bowls and Persian silver platters.

  She gestures towards the bags in a casually imperious manner, could he place them beside the platters? With her crooked hands she places oranges, lemons, pineapples on the bowls and platters. Arranges the fragile leaves of the clementines around the platter. I am Mrs Bahreini she says and comes towards him to shake hands. Would he care for some coffee?

  He follows her into the vast kitchen. Crusty paint on the walls, grim light, the only warmth comes from the flicker of the gas flame. She hands him his coffee in a weightless cup. Persian porcelain. Wedding gifts, her husband died ten years ago, no children in case he would like to know. Would he like to drink his coffee in the library?

  She lights candles because none of the lamps seem to be working. A thousand and one books on the shelves for him to look at, and perhaps later, he might read one?

  Suddenly he has an idea: why not let him fix up her apartment in return for his reading some books in her library. Or maybe she has enough friends who could fix up her place? Friends? A helpless movement from her crooked hands. A dry cackle, her Irish friends are scarce, dear. She feels her way around in the dark for a book that she must show him. When she has found the book she reads it out to him in her elegant old-fashioned Persian. There seems to be a bird so small in Persia that it can fly through a large keyhole. It is called an iris susah. Look how wonderful this feathered gem is! In the candlelight her face is different, lit up by dreams. Or wishes. Does he know what iris stands for? It’s just a misspelling of Irish. That is her firm belief. She laughs at her own joke. There must be a bird similar to the susah in Ireland. That is why they moved here in the first place, to look for rare birds.

  She was so sad when her husband died. She is still sad. Rashid can come back and paint the place. Read all he likes. It is late. He bows over her bony hand. It feels like an accolade to death.

  Goodnight, Mrs Bahreini.

  He walks home through the dark, thinks of what he neglected to tell her. That the King is dead. Even the Shah is dead. The Ayatollahs are alive. That’s why he is going to his Dublin home, that’s why he is getting this soaked.

  G
ood Morning, Mrs Bahreini.

  He has time enough to repair her appliances, buy paint, work away at her sad walls and tell her cleaning lady to wash the curtains. Mrs Bahreini, dressed in her furs, all set to go out, listens to his stories about his pupils at Trinity College, where he teaches Persian Studies for a couple of hours a week. She is standing in the hallway waiting for him to get changed into his work clothes. There are Persian sweets on the kitchen table, and bread, coffee, and plenty of fruit of course. Is he allowed to eat what reminds her of home, her decorative display in the bowls on the floor? He is. She will get more now that she knows somebody who can carry her bags.

  Then off she goes in hat and gloves, bird watching in the Irish wetlands.

  He likes the manual labour; it reminds him of his first year in Dublin when he was working on the scaffolds. He earned enough to be able to study. English. He was twenty and a virgin. Because his mother had warned him not to use it with women, certainly not without protection. It had made him anxious about the act. But when he arrived here there was so little light that all aspects of life seemed to have lost their contour. Even that woman Mary did not seem like a real woman, like in Persia. She didn’t smell of flowers or move with grace. She was plump and warm and she said they could do it, she was a nurse, she was safe. So he used it and it felt comforting to be with her. Even for the one night.

  The night Lilly was conceived. He paints frantically now, thinking of the hospital where Mary used to work. How he went looking for her when she had left him, yet again, without any information as to their whereabouts. The hospital wouldn’t give him her telephone number. He sat there for hours, thinking hard. He told a doctor, who knew Mary and Lilly, that he was Lilly’s father and that he had cancer and wanted to see Lilly for the last time. He got her phone number. All he wanted was to make sure his daughter was safe. He had no interest in her, Mary, he kept telling her. She finally allowed him to recognize Lilly officially at the registry office. She allowed him to give them money and she allowed him to see Lilly once a month.