Intimate Distance (8 page)

He sits down with his back against the wall, legs splayed. A shaft of light falls through a fissure above his head, illuminating the rock face behind him. I'm half-aware of a picture, or a series of pictures, scrawled on the wall. Are they fish, skeletal, the flesh eaten from the bones? Can I see the faint outline of a head, horned, with an open mouth? Chalky redness fades into stone, in the dim light from the opening. Outside, again there's only the sound of those birds I can't name.

I can only discern a blunted emotion in myself: a long, wailing, protracted unease. I try to concentrate on Zoi: his smooth body, his gravel voice. The goats are still and watchful around us. He doesn't take off his clothes. This I find faintly disturbing, somewhere in the periphery of my thoughts. He takes his penis out from the side of his shorts, the erection rising slowly, weighty, like a portent. I lower myself onto him, still wearing my sandals, not even stopping to take off my underpants. He pulls them aside with his hand, hurting me. And suddenly he's thrusting beyond his own will or control, and it's finished.

AFTERWARD, WE SIT
on rocks above the village and survey the cluster of tumbledown houses and broken fences. Everywhere there's the smell of goats, the pungent smell of shit and earth and blood that reminds me in some disturbing way of my mother. As we sit, an old woman in a scarf waves to us. From so far away, I don't realise at first that it's Alcmene. She seems somehow changed out in the open, she's put on her public face. Her movements are vigorous and decisive, she shrills and shouts at her sheep, puts her hand on her hip and watches us on the crag above her.

‘Be well,' she shouts up at us.

We walk down to her.

‘Mimi,' I say.

But she ignores me; it's Zoi she's looking at and her eyes light up with pleasure as she takes his arm.

‘So you must be Angeliki's boy! Well, well, how you've grown. I remember you here when you were tiny, holding onto your grandfather's hand.'

Her voice is different too. It's become flat and nasal, the voice of every other village grandmother. Zoi helps her heave buckets of water from the weak, dripping tap to the trough. The sheep anxiously nudge me, climbing over each other to get to the brownish water.

Alcmene heaves herself onto a jutting rock. She pats at the flat space by her side and Zoi perches next to her while she takes his hand. She doesn't seem to be aware of my existence at all or perhaps doesn't want to show we have any prior connection. Or maybe she can't even remember yesterday. Maybe she's slipping into oblivion. She's no longer swimming in the child-like intimacy of her unformed thoughts, or alive to the quiet awe of the smallest detail. Today she's decent, hardworking, ordinary. She motions with her hand down the valley, tells us to stop for a glass of water at the house, her son is there. It's the Greek way of offering hospitality –
filoxenia
– literally, kindness to strangers: always underestimate the extent of the gift.

Her son is a fat boy with heavy-lidded eyes. We walk under the awning of the hut and surprise him dozing on a chair, but he stirs as soon as we appear. He doesn't look at me, addresses all his remarks to Zoi, and they kiss each other formally on both cheeks.

‘My name is Yanni,' he says, flicking his hair self-consciously from his forehead.

His voice is thick and muffled; he has trouble forming the sounds. But his eyes are so kind I want to cry. He seems uninterested or vague about the answers to his stock questions: where are you from, how long are you staying, are you married, I'm sorry, of course you are, with your wife expecting, do you like our mountains? I stop answering after a while. Soon I drift away to the edge of the terrace and gaze down at the sea until it becomes blurry.

Yanni places food on the table without asking if we're hungry. Warm tomatoes cut into quarters and swimming in olive oil; oil thick and rich and golden, from the trees bordering these crumbling terraces and abandoned houses. He sits and broods, asking after villagers he's not seen for months, here in his self-imposed solitude. Nobody comes to his house. It's too far, they insist. Too far up the mountains. Yanni is the one I've heard talk of as the village idiot, the butt of all their jokes. Sharp laughter behind their hands, sneers among the clatter of plates at evening meals, among empty glasses at the café. I hadn't paid much attention at the time but had been intrigued by the constant mention of his name.

It's Yanni who is laughed at by the shore-dwellers who have boats and women and children, who are men in the world; Yanni who did his eighteen months compulsory military service in another region and came home vowing never to leave again; Yanni who gives Zoi a black scarf hand-woven by Alcmene, demonstrating how it's worn, dangles it over his flushed forehead, he's so overwhelmed at the visit, sees perhaps six strangers a year; Yanni who mixes resin wine with cola and hands it to us in glasses with a scum of red dust on them; Yanni who hides up above the village among the shells of empty houses because he's young and impaired and afraid; Yanni whose mother comes running down the sloping path holding pies in her grubby hand, hot and flat and fried on a griddle, with goat's cheese inside; Yanni who brings us honey so old it's candied through, and smears it on the pies.

As we sit and sip and crumble our food into the oil, sopping it up, I look away down to the water so far below us and the wind rises, coating the glasses and plates and table still further with dust, until we too, just like Yanni and his mother, are dirty. Alcmene has built their hut beneath olive trees with gnarled branches, ancient roots thrust deep into the soil, red soil; the cave paintings of their forgotten ancestors.

15

THIS MORNING ZOI
and I went for a walk to the village chapel. It's half-hidden among oaks; leaves casting patterns, a moving mosaic of copper and green. The one place we've both agreed would be ideal for our mythical wedding, where we could actually envisage getting married. And it's most propitiously the church of Saint Nicholas, patron saint of travellers. But not now, maybe sometime, later on, when things are different, better.

To the left of the chapel is an overgrown walnut tree with an old bell hanging from it, thick rope wound around the mossy bough, and a wide flat space for feasting and dancing. Zoi skidded over the fallen walnuts, crunching them under his muddy boots. We'd been fighting all the way up the mountain, arguing about what had happened in Athens, but without mentioning names. It deteriorated further when we got there.

‘You know what's wrong with you, Zoi?' I said. ‘You're too nice.'

He squatted in front of me and broke the fallen nuts open with a stone. Smashing hard, to make me jump. I watched the wrinkled meat of walnuts in his hands. He began eating them, raw and fleshy, white under crinkled skin.

‘Nice,' I mocked. ‘You can never think badly of anyone. Including yourself. You're afraid to really look at yourself, to take a good look at yourself.'

My voice was shrill, hunting him as he turned and strode away, crashing through the dry leaves and undergrowth that snagged at his trousers, twigs that tore at his legs. Thin lines of blood appeared on the pale flesh of his inner arm. He stopped and sucked at the drops springing up on his skin. I could still see him in the clearing through the trees.

‘I should take a look at myself?' he yelled. ‘What about you? Look at what you're doing to us. To your own child.'

He was still shouting and his voice was coming nearer now.

‘Do you really think I don't know? I was stupid before, I didn't want to see, but now I know.'

I opened my mouth to speak. My hands moved to my belly as he came running toward me and I didn't realise what he was going to do until he was standing over me. He put his hands to my throat. His hands large, black in front of me. Go on, do it. Show me how you really feel. Yet as I felt his fingers closing on my neck, they pinched only a moment and then became soft and caressing, circling my veins and tendons in strange, slow movements. I stood up unsteadily and he held me, his breath hard in my mouth. We staggered against each other, glued together in shared confusion. What do we do next? Can I forgive her? Can I trust him? I almost fell and he lifted me up a little under the arms.

‘Zoi, I did want to hurt you, of course I did. But now – '

My breath was cut short. In an instant he had me down on the ground again and was bearing down on my shoulders with both hands and I became frightened for the baby and lashed out, kicking him in the groin.

‘You bitch.'

He was gone, stumbling through the trees. I wanted to chase him, tackle him, hunt him down. Pinpoint him, wriggling, till he stopped and heard what I was saying. The sun was blinding. I got up slowly and untwisted the thin wire holding the chapel door shut. In the coolness of the interior, I sat on one of the chairs facing the altar. There was a peculiar smell in the air: damp, jasmine, old incense. A shaft of light through the western window fell on the altar screen. Two serpents met with open mouths, eternal, metallic green, glinting on either side of the altar, writhing against each other. I sank to the floor. It was so good in the cool. So good resting my head on porous stone, so good. The frescoed angels looked down at my inert body with no particular expression. I didn't know where to go next, what to do.

ALCMENE, WITH HER
shadowed eyes and the raised mole behind her left armpit. I spy her naked tonight and want to press myself softly against her, in a moment of submission, perhaps tenderness. I've arrived at the hut in darkness, straight from the chapel.

‘Can I stay here?'

Alcmene brews tea for me and puts me to bed in the middle of the room, sharing her own coarse blankets. I sit up among them and fish out floating flowers from the tea with my fingers, to suck at the petals. The dried flowers have swelled up and regained their colour and plumpness.

‘What are they, Mimi?'

‘Wildflowers I gather from the highest slopes. They don't have a name.'

She comes towards me and kneels close.

‘You lie down and go to sleep now. I'll have a quick wash so I don't disgust you with my old woman smells.'

She goes outside and I can hear the bucket being lowered into the well. I stand up, teetering on my mound of blankets. I hide by the door and then step forward into a circle of light so Alcmene will know she's being watched. She doesn't look up to acknowledge my presence; continues to wash herself with slow deliberation, letting the water roll down the outline of her body in the light from the moon.

I want to touch her body, be familiar with it, become intimate with its secrets. But I can't. I stand apart instead and see the way time has sliced through her skin. Underneath my absurd pity, my fascination, is revulsion. Revulsion: for the body of a woman so different from myself. The marks of brambles and thorns, the sunspots and freckles on her arms and legs like burnt sugar. The skin thinning over her breasts, the girth of her, capable waist, thickness of thighs. I walk away in resignation and let her be.

As I turn over in the darkness I feel her slip in beside me. She's careful to keep to her side of the mattress. Then there's a sound and I sit up. The moon glistens gold and full in a tender sky.

‘Sssh,' Alcmene soothes. ‘It's only the animals talking to the ghosts.'

A donkey cry late at night. Immense sadness, mournful pain.

IN THE MORNING,
I lie with Alcmene on the bed, sheets pushed down to my knees. It's a hot day, voluptuous in its humidity, its heaviness. The shutters are closed to keep out the heat and there's a green limpid light from the trees, thick leafed and luxuriant, clustering at the windows. A simple decadence about the way we lie there, together, like the hot mornings of summer holidays I would spend at home with my mother, not a care in the world. Alcmene boils white rice for breakfast, with sheep's milk and her precious store of sugar. We eat in bed, and I sit up and peel plums, watch the curling skins on my plate. Discolouring, turning brown, and still I haven't touched the slices of fruit, soft, gold, warm in the heat.

‘Mimi?'

‘What do you want, my child?'

‘Were you never married?'

‘Nobody in the village wanted me.'

‘Oh?' I hesitate, looking at her slumbering face. ‘Why not?'

She moves her lips very slowly and resolutely.

‘Father gave me too much schooling for them. My head was always in the books. These men didn't want anyone who could turn out to be smarter than them.'

She opens her eyes, shockingly yellow, and turns her head to me. Her voice changes, ridiculing the accents of village matrons.

‘All that book learning and where did it get her?'

She laughs a small dry laugh.

‘At least I wasn't out tilling the fields for a man's brats, putting food on the table for them.'

‘What do you mean?'

‘The only one who wanted me was a widower. He had too many children and I was far too young. Only fourteen and didn't know how to cook or clean like the other girls. And as you know I had a baby of my own to look after.'

This she says under her breath, with sadness.

We drowse together, my leg beneath hers, afraid to move it for fear of waking her. My pins and needles are shooting stars, the electricity of my dreams. Lying on my side, the weight of my belly resting on a pillow, my mouth near her ear: I let myself breathe openly, long and deep, close my eyes, see the greenness of light from behind closed lids, open them again.

Alcmene snores gently. The birds outside argue. They fight about the position of nests. I close my eyes again, surrender to the greeny blackness. At the bottom of a still pool, an earthy pool in a forest glade. Lying on my side in the mud, sloshing my toes, squirming my fingers. Nostrils thick with soil. My child kicking out arms and legs inside me. A screen of leaves obscuring the sky. The sound of female voices as if from very far away: speaking a language of rises and falls, of drawn-out vowels. They carry me with them on these waves of sound, freeing my body, splitting consciousness. Am I here or aren't I? Grunting out my baby, looking up at the pattern of the oak-leaves, giving birth with no effort at all. A sense of loss for only a moment – then release. A newborn child gurgling at the bottom of the still pool, hardly disturbing its tranquility.