The Daughter (27 page)

‘Roubini, my child, I called you’ and I see it’s Mum speaking to me, with an old woman’s voice.

‘Mum! You spoke!’

I didn’t want to admit that old voice had anything to do with my own mother. I was almost insulted that she suddenly found her voice.

‘Come close to me, Roubini my child.’

Mother never did accept ‘Raraou’.

‘Mum, your voice, it came back?’

‘Come close to me; I’m going to die. I never lost my voice. I just didn’t want it no more. From back then. Don’t cry.’

I wasn’t saying a word. I was paying attention to her voice; it came out twisted, with effort. 

‘Yesterday when you were out, Roubini my child, something happened to me. It was serious. I knew it, but I didn’t call for help. If it comes again, I might die … or lose my mind. Come close, I want to give you my blessing; and to say thank you. For everything. For all these wonderful things and for then. For the water you gave me, back then … there on the truck. You did the right thing, not to get married.’

She caressed me, then drifted off.

‘Mum, I ask her, all these years you could talk and you didn’t?’

She stared at me, then looked at the wall.

‘What for? It wasn’t worth it,’ she says. And fell silent again.

‘Do you want anything, Mother. Water? Shall I call the
doctor
?’

‘I want, Roubini my child. My little Roubini, when I die I want something special: bury me here. Don’t send me back. (She didn’t say the word Rampartville.) I don’t care how you do it, but get me a lifetime grave.’

‘It’s bought and paid for, Mother. A two-placer. And it’s ours, for all eternity Mother. So don’t worry.’

‘I never made you do anything else. Don’t you ever let them take me back, not even my bones.’

Then she fell silent.

A few days later she had her second stroke and she was gone.

After they buried her there was only quiet to keep me
company
. Only then did I figure it out: death isn’t the big thing; the big thing is the dead.

God bless and keep her.

Every Holy Week I go and visit Mum, on Easter Sunday, in the afternoon. All around are mourners, a lower class of people for the most part, decorating graves with plastic flowers and washing and scrubbing the gravestones. Makes you feel good, mourning gives you a good feeling, like drinking a glass of wine to the health of the dear departed. I strike up a conversation 
with the ladies even though they are from a lower class of
people
and I don’t feel like quite such an orphan.

Everything’s so nice and quiet. So lovely, I say to myself. Death comes and goes, only the dead remain.

When I do a little meditating or watching the sky I think how I’ll be heading for paradise, and how nice I’ve arranged
everything
, just so, my conscience is clear, no doubts in my mind, nothing. Only one thing that bothers me: what’s God’s name? Mine is Raraou, the other guy’s name is Harry, let’s say, but what’s God’s name? That’s what I wanted to get straight in my mind the other night when I didn’t feel like going straight home.

Because the other night on my way back home, after a delightful little get-together with some other pensioners from the theatre it was, I didn’t really feel like unlocking the door. Come on, Mademoiselle Raraou, put your key in the lock, I say to myself. But I stand there in front of the keyhole and I can’t move. And then it hits me like a bolt out of the blue, there’s nobody waiting for me in my apartment. And I didn’t want
anybody
waiting for me, now that Mum was gone all these years. Still, I was frightened. A big fright. I pull the key out of the
keyhole
, almost creep across the street, and I stay right there in a kind of fenced-in vacant lot and I won’t leave before the light comes on in my apartment. Right away I make up my mind: you’re not going to put anything over on me, no way. I’m not setting foot in there unless you open the door. No, I’ve got
conditions
, I said: somebody’s got to be there to greet me.

And so I went off for a little stroll; it was quarter past two, on the dot. A little stroll. Give them some extra time to open the door for me. The officer who escorted me back home at
twenty-five
after four treated me properly, said he wouldn’t run me in for disturbing the peace, he recognized me, for sure.

‘Merci,’ I tell him. And ring my doorbell. Off he went. But they just ignored me, wouldn’t open the door. So that’s when I 
go and ring all the bells in the apartment building and it was only later in the ambulance when I finally realized the truth about the sky. The sky is alive. A living beast. Never could
figure
it out before, seeing as it’s blue beast and it never moves during the day. Never moving. Lying in wait for us. But when night comes and we aren’t watching the Sky beast starts
crawling
towards me. Like a lily. Far as I’m concerned, I say, well, it’s an honour, still all these Lilies and Annunciations? Me, a grown woman, with two pensions at that? Now that I can’t conceive any more?

I’m in the ambulance, does that mean I’ll pull through like everybody else? Every night when it gets dark, Sky beast comes to life and starts moving, just imagine what it’s doing to us and us, we don’t even realize we’re defenceless.

That’s why I avoid going out after dark. Who needs the lily, anyway? So I sit and watch television, bought a colour TV with easy payments; paid it off last spring.

Nowadays I go out mornings mostly. Call on actor friends of mine, look at the posters, visit Aphrodite’s mum, Mrs Fanny. Still doesn’t have a phone. One day I ran into Mary,
Thanassakis’s
sister from Vounaxos village, the son of Anagnos the schoolmaster. Recognized me right away, Roubini, you still look as spry as ever, she said. She’s looking well, not like me of course, but then, what can you do? She told me about her brother who’s getting ahead in Boston, he’s got a university of his own over there, why he’s even been honoured by our
government
, kind of a half-national benefactor is what they’ll declare him, seeing as he brought civilization to our country.

‘See Mary,’ I say to her, ‘when you come right down to it, we all succeeded, all made it in Athens, all us kids from
Rampartville
. Kostis the pipsqueak as a stage director, our own little Thanassakis in book-learning, me on the stage, all us poor kids from Rampartville, we all got our heart’s desire. Me, for instance, I’ve got my apartment, my stereo and my record
collection
, 
free medical care, pensions, recognition. Why should we complain? We’ve all arrived.’

She had to admit it.

Just what Mrs Kanello and I were talking about a couple of days ago. All her kids are doing fine, and now Mrs Kanello is a happy granny. As provincial as ever and proud of it, but then, who doesn’t have their little shortcomings. She keeps me up to date. Rampartville isn’t what it used to be, of course. Before the war there were four elementary schools and a municipal brass band and now only two of the schools are open. Not enough kids for the other two. Even the graveyard where we kids used to play hide and seek, it’s gone to seed. Most of the graves have been forgotten and the statues have lost their paint. Only Mrs Chrysafis, the dead partisan gendarme’s mother, she’s still a regular. Didn’t they call him Valiant? His ma still visits his grave but not so much as she used to. Only on Saturdays,
nibbles
a bit of earth and lights a candle, she’s got to be very old now, but she keeps on begging, God Let me live so I can come to my little one, because if I die I’ll forget him.

Well, that’s progress for you. Most of the inhabitants of
Rampartville
moved up to Athens. And they’re all doing just fine. Lottery sellers, doormen, Aphrodite’s mother in her blockhouse, you should see how she’s fixed up the place, a dream. All she does is crochet. Must be close to eighty, and she’s still bringing in the money, what good is it to her, at her age, God forgive me!

Strictly between you and me, I looked into buying a little piece of land myself, but it didn’t work out. I said to myself, what’re you going to do with the land, Raraou? It’s nothing but earth. I can’t for the life of me figure out what I wanted to do with it.

Another time, when some officer escorted me back to my place I refused to tell him where I live. So he opened my
handbag
looking for my ID card and my address, but he never
spotted
my age, the brute. And all the while I was waiting at the 
police station for the officer to escort me back home, the cop on duty keeps asking me my name and where I’m from. And it all came to me.

‘The place where I come from was a little girl name of Roubini,’ I say. ‘Who had a little garden under her bed and her best friend was a little chicken with bright coloured feathers.’

And then I understood right away why everybody loves and respects the earth, why they want land: the land is full of graves.

Nothing sad about that; why should it be sad? That’s the way life is: full of death. Nothing to be sad about, it’s a natural thing. Natural, like how my mother stopped speaking.

Doesn’t bother me one bit I have trouble remembering Mother’s eyes. Forgot which one of Fanis’s hands is the busted one. Can’t even remember the colour of his hair. Forgot how to be sorry. Makes me sad, a little. All the colour is running out of my sadness.

But what can you do?

Me, I remember my little pullet. I’ve got the trick now if I have a fit when people are asleep. Stick a hankie in my mouth and that way the neighbours can’t hear a thing, all right, so I learned it from the moving pictures, you’re going to say, but anyway.

That’s right, doctor. But I don’t have my fits anywhere near so often any more.

I got my little pullet to remember, doctor. With those
bright-coloured
feathers of hers, died of hunger in my mother’s house. She was the only friend I ever had. Turned and looked me in the eye before she fell over and died.

Me? Who will I look at?

No matter.

By now my little darling will be part of the earth.

And so will I. One of these days.

Maybe two or three centuries later, I say to myself, when my pullet and me will be nothing but dust without a care in the 
world (that’s what I hope), maybe one day the same soft breath of wind will raise us up and unite us in the air for an instant. Just for an instant, together.

End

Pavlos Matesis
is a prize-winning Greek playwright, novelist and
translator
, who has been described by
Corriere della Sera
as ‘the most talented Greek writer today’ and by novelist Alan Sillitoe as ‘a master of the art’. His fiction includes
The Ancient of the Days, Always Well
and
Sylvan Substances
. His novel
The Daughter
, an international bestseller in nine languages, has sold over 150,000 copies in Greece alone.

His plays include
The Ceremony
(winner of the National Theatre Award) and
Nurseryman
(City of Athens – Karolos Koun Award for Best Play of the Year),
Guardian Angel for Rent, Roar
and
Towards Eleusis
(the latter four plays published under the title
Contemporary Greek Theatre Volume 2
, edited by Theatre Lab Company and published by Arcadia in 2002).

Pavlos Matesis is also a noted translator into modern Greek. Classical authors he has translated number Aristophanes (commissioned by the Epidaurus and Athens theatre festivals), Ibsen, Ben Jonson, Molière, Shakespeare and Stendhal. A listing of contemporary writers he has translated includes Peter Ackroyd, Antonin Artaud, Bertolt Brecht, William Faulkner, Jean Genet, Eugène Ionesco, Frederico García Lorca, David Mamet, Arthur Miller, Joe Orton, Harold Pinter, Sam Shepard and Tennessee Williams.

Pavlos Matesis lives in Athens.

About the translator:
Fred A. Reed
is Canada’s foremost authority on Islamic Iran. His books include
Persian Postcards: Iran after Khomeini, Salonica Terminus, Anatolia Junction
and, with Massoumeh Ebtekar,
Takeover in Tehran
, the first eye-witness account of the takeover of the US embassy by Iranian student militants in 1979. He has reported extensively on Iranian, Balkan and Middle Eastern affairs for
La Presse
, Canada’s largest French-speaking newspaper.

Fred A. Reed ranks high among Canada’s literary translators. In 1991, his translation of Thierry Hentsch’s
L’Orient Imaginaire
won the Governor General’s Awards. Writers he has translated from the Greek include
Giorgos
Ioannou, Nikos Kazantzakis, Pavlos Matesis and Kostas Mourselas.

Fiction

Aphrodite

The Ancient of Days

Sylvan Substance

Always Well

Theatre

Biochemistry

The Ceremony

Deposition

The Ghost of Mr Ramon Navaro

Her Highness’ Football Evening

Lower Civil Law

Wolf, Wolf

Exile

Nurseryman

Towards Eleusis

Roar

Guardian Angel to Rent

The Hum

Contemporary Greek Theatre Volume 2
(Arcadia Books)