Intimate Distance (7 page)

Alongside it is a photograph of Dimitri taken in a booth. He's making a face and his big hands are also in the shot, palms outspread on his chest. His laughter seems to make a mockery of the photograph nearby, of me. My face so serene, almost ridiculous in its nobility, rigidly immortalised next to his.

I feel behind the two photographs. There's something else there, hidden behind the other two, wedged in tight. I take it out, spread it open. It's a standard size Agfa print. The colours are not so vivid as the passport shots; washed out, grainy as an old film. There's a deep crease between the two figures in the centre. Zoi. His brother.

Zoi looks straight ahead at the camera with his peculiar green-eyed stare and Dimitri's head is turned sideways to seek him. But there's something different about Zoi's face; it's open, trusting. He appears happy, free, his energy lurking somewhere beneath the surface, in the curve of his arms, in the tightness of his belly. I haven't seen that expression on his face, not once. Not ever in our first days together when we took photos of each other all the time, not once when we talked, not once when we made love, not once, not at all, not ever.

I sit on the edge of the bed, holding the photograph between my fingers. My face, my heart, static as a photograph. Then I fold it quickly, how easily it creases in the centre, how it's meant to be in that soft leather wallet, secretly behind the other, these images of the two people Zoi loves.

13

THE FIRST TIME
I meet Alcmene alone I have no words. It's my third day in the village and I've left Zoi to fix what he can in the decrepit house.

‘Where are you going?'

‘Just to the square.'

‘Don't get lost. Keep to the village paths.'

I don't keep to the well-worn trails that cut through the village. Instead I take the main road leading out of the settlement until it veers sharply down into a valley. I climb to the top of a crag from where I can see the village spread out below me: silly, inconsequential, harbouring no danger. I turn around, walk away from it, always higher. I seem to know where to go, plunging through bracken and tree roots until I find Alcmene's home.

The old woman stands awkwardly in her dirt backyard. She looks as if she's about to run away. Her sheep lean against her; protective, possessive, and one of her hands rests casually on the head of the closest one. She has dark, weeping sores over her cheeks and chin. I'd failed to notice them before, or perhaps they've become worse in the intervening days. One is heart-shaped and purple. She motions for me to come into the house.

‘You can call me Mimi,' she says. ‘The people who loved me in the past would call me Mimi.'

Mimi, in Greek can mean sore, scratch, wound. It can also mean help me, mother me, make me feel important.

Alcmene lives in a single room with her son, Yanni. I know this from Zoi, from the gossip that very morning at Pandelina's kitchen table. She was pregnant at fourteen and gave birth to her child alone up in the mountains one spring night rather than risk the village judging her transgression. Nevertheless they found out and pressed her for the name of the father, which she never told. I know Zoi's theory: the man who made her pregnant was her own father. ‘That's why the boy's an idiot,' he said. ‘Bad blood.'

As I stand in the doorway of the hut I see no evidence of Yanni's presence. It's a female room, womb-dark, fire-lit, untouched as a nun's cell or a cave. Candles everywhere, even in the warm pink light of afternoon, and nubbled garlic hanging in every crevice, permeating the folds of Alcmene's clothes. There are apples too, from last season; cold apples strewn on the stone floor. Alcmene gives me some and we eat together, not speaking; they're small, soft and ripe under the skin. Bursting sweetness on the tongue.

‘I'll show you my tree,' Alcmene says.

She takes my hand.

An apple tree in summer is a beautiful thing. Trembling against a china sky, growing new leaves. We sit beneath it and watch the delicate patterns made by the branches, designs that seem almost Japanese, tracing over our faces and bare necks.

‘I no longer remember the words,' she whispers.

‘Excuse me?'

I'm beginning to think the old woman is mad. No wonder she's an outcast.

‘I'm forgetting the words for things,' she says. ‘I can see the object in my mind's eye, I can see its colours, remember the way it feels to the touch – but the word is gone. I can't remember the words; for the top part of a shovel, the smell of earth after rain, the –'

‘Like my mother,' I say. ‘That's the way she felt before the Alzheimer's hit.'

‘Hmm?' She turns to me. ‘I don't know what that is,' she says carefully.

‘It's a disease of the brain.'

My Greek is faltering.

‘It gets worse,' I say. ‘I hope not.' She laughs. She seems to be thinking of something else. ‘I tell fortunes,' she says. ‘From the apple leaves.'

‘Can you tell mine?'

‘Of course I can.'

She smiles artfully and I catch a glimpse of what she must have been like as a young girl. She strips a low branch of its leaves and lays them on my palm.

‘Now you squeeze them together and then fling your hands out as if you're drying them. Whichever leaves are left will show us the future.'

I feel the leaves disintegrate as I rub them. When I've shaken my hands out, five leaves still cling to my palms: two on the right and three on the left.

‘First the bad news. Give me your left hand – that's it, show me.'

Alcmene leans over my palm, so close her coarse grey hair tickles. She picks over the leaves with the tip of her finger.

‘Oh,' she says. ‘I see three people hurting each other.'

I look up, scan her face.

‘Who told you?'

‘I know nothing, child. I only speak what the leaves tell me. Now, show me your right hand.'

I stare down at the two leaves, glued to my palm and translucent with sweat. She grabs my fingers and spreads them out and up to the light.

‘Good news. Two people will reach a safe harbour.'

She studies my face, speaks slowly.

‘But it may take a long time.'

Then she looks up.

‘Look at the leaves dancing. Don't you love them?'

I stay with Alcmene to watch the leaves.

14

WE'VE BEEN IN
the village two weeks; and I feel close to my time, although I know it's still months away. This morning I sit on the terrace gazing at the view: mountains cleaving together in numerous rifts, close, close, closer, until I'm caught in two folds, squeezed by the earth without an inch of air to breathe in. A shredded sky. But my far-off glimpse of the sea consoles me. The blue is limitless, full of possibility. Our only hope, I realise now, lies in the birth of my child, whoever the father is.

I've set up a table and the ubiquitous chairs sold by the gypsies from the back of their trucks. Each week they peddle the sort of produce nobody in these mountain hamlets can make or grow for themselves; oranges from Israel, packets of fine-ground coffee and sugar, white boxes of Turkish
loukoum
. And these cheap plastic garden settings. Each night we sit on them, waiting for the evening breeze that begins every day at exactly the same time, coming off the pines. Twilight hugs the coast, the mountains, our faces and hands, like a lover. From the kitchen I bring small bowls, cold food given by relatives and neighbours. Just to help out, they say, and offer fresh eggs with grey feathers still clinging, dried lines of blood in the cracks. A round of hard yellow cheese, a jar of briny olives. Rose-hued wine out of an old whisky bottle. As we eat, the sun disappears behind the mountains, Pandelina crouches on the floor of her kitchen sifting grain for still more pie; we can see her from the terrace and avert our faces. Alcmene is also there, banished to the courtyard to pick through black-eyed beans from last winter, Pandelina's rejected crop. She beckons to me with one hand, come and help, but I pretend not to notice.

Now Zoi comes out of the house with our towels slung over his shoulder, still damp from yesterday's swim. He pulls the door behind him and leaves the shutters open to catch the breeze. There's no need to lock anything; we're safe here, among family.

‘I'm going for a walk,' he says. ‘Through the gorge.'

‘I'll come with you.'

On the path down through the village the heat is white, hurting our eyes, burning out every shady corner in its glare. I can feel it sizzle up through the soles of my sandals. Zoi leads the way down a back path to avoid as many people as possible. We're both sick of smiling, talking, stopping, idling, exclaiming over nothing. Even so we make sure to wave or nod at each person, each open window or door, even if we can't see who's in the house, shrouded in darkness.

‘A walk again? In this heat. You've become like a foreigner, Zoi. We see them all the time, trekking up and down the mountains with packs on their backs like donkeys – '

He laughs without conviction. The villagers are always incredulous when they see us on one of our walks. In Greece you only walk for a single reason: because you have no choice. We refuse all invitations to come inside for a glass of water, a saucer of spoon-sweets, a quick coffee. We refuse with differing degrees of courtesy and determination.

‘Come, come, my children, new grapes from the vine.'

It's Pandelina. She frowns at me, examining.

‘Are you in so much of a hurry you can't spare a moment for an old aunt? And you shouldn't be walking anywhere in this heat, Mara. In your condition. How far gone are you by now?'

‘Thirty weeks,' Zoi replies. ‘But she's feeling very well, aren't you, Mara?'

I smile. Pandelina closes her mouth with a deliberate sound. Perhaps she's learned something. She waves her hand at us, dismissive, and goes back into the coolness of her arbour. Zoi stops and considers, looking torn, before following me down the village steps. Pandelina shouts.

‘Wait up, my boy.'

She runs after him, thrusting two bunches of grapes into his hands.

We walk down a twisting path, past pines and silence and resinous odours, the tinkling of bells. Closer. There's a company of goats in the cemetery at the edge of the sea. Cool light and cast shadow here, cypresses tall and dark and watchful. We pass plain marble headstones from saner eras and the lugubrious angels favoured by families of the recently buried. The goats shy away from us in a rush, finally halting under the furthest tree. They're still, except for the slight twitching of their faces.

Once down in the gorge we're alone. The sun beats in shimmering waves over rocks rising up on each side, pressing down on us. At our feet, pebbles crunch into splinters: glittering pebbles from the days when this gorge was a seabed and the steep cliffs rose from deep underwater. A bird whirls through, emerging out the other end. All around us the goats follow, silent as statues. At first I hadn't noticed them. Then gradually as my eyes grow accustomed to the tricks of light and shade in the gorge, I can distinguish them from the colours of the pebbles. Now I see them clearly, staring down at me with their malevolent eyes, pinpoints of black. They hide in small patches of shade cast by overhanging rocks, balance precariously in crevices, surviving only by standing still until the noon heat is over.

We're almost there. We can smell the sea now, its salt breath, the roar and bellow and rush of it raise our spirits. As we emerge from the gorge the sun is suddenly blotted out by cloud and the landscape changes, fizzles, disappears. We've come out into a grey watery world: no people, no movement. There are white pebbles far away but as we draw closer I see this unrelieved whiteness is composed of stones of subtle colours. At the water's edge we strip off, walking into the sea without disturbing it. The waves are gentle, almost too small to be noticed. Further out, away from the shore, we float in still water like oil, keeping apart from each other. The mysterious day is vibrating, mystic in its stillness, its withheld significance. The sun struggling, constricted. I still feel stifled by Zoi and his brother's relationship, their tight undercurrents of loyalty and dislike. But now, watching him here, so serene, so intensely present to me, there's a possibility of hope, of something unbreakable between us. I plunge my head under. The sea is cold beneath, reminding me of my own vulnerability. My baby. I can feel the warmth of the sun on my body fizzling, and darkness spilling into me.

We get out, and suddenly I'm afraid someone is watching, hidden in the caves, and quickly slip into my clothes. The sun is poised, glowing for an instant on the edge of the sea. We are being watched. More goats huddle together in the shade and stare at us with their unreadable eyes. Dimitri's name comes back to me, repeating, repeating, pushing against my skull. The eyes of the goats glitter like bits of mica. Now the sea has turned ominous, sun sinking low, high tide. Zoi's face is like a bed whose sheets have been smoothed clean of any significance; the brief moment of understanding forgotten. The wind has picked up and howls high in the village, exhaled in a rush by the mountains. I walk the few steps to a rock pool, bend down to the seawater, taking a little on the tips of my fingers to wash my face. Rock pools all around, shimmering yellow streams of water, inconstant, like the sequins on a woman's dress. I feel him crouch behind me, his thighs wrapped around my waist, head heavy on my shoulder. He takes my breasts in both hands through the thin cotton of my blouse.

‘Let's go to the cave.'

His whisper is urgent. Once there the goats shy away, rushing out in a wave of flanks and hooves and the sharp rasping of their fear. I stand looking after them, mesmerised by their escape, the way they move as one. He stands behind me and begins edging up my blouse, feeling for my nipples, breathing heavily in the cool sinister light. He leads me further into the dark. I feel his hand, alert and sweating. The only point of contact I have, straining into the blackness, is the pressure of those fingers on my palm. His touch alive and glowing.