The Slap (42 page)

‘We were all great friends,’ Paraskevi explained, holding tightly to Koula’s hand. ‘We were the best of friends.’

She turned to Manolis. ‘What happened? How did we drift apart?’

Those questions were asked countless times that afternoon. As more of the mourners arrived at the house, Manolis felt as if he had entered the Underworld and was lost among the Shades. Except that he too was one of them. What happened? Where have you been? Where do you live? Are your children married? How many grandchildren? There was Yanni Korkoulos, who had owned the milk bar in Errol Street. There was Irini and Sotiris Volougos. Koula had worked with Irini in a textile factory in Collingwood and he had worked with Sotiris at Ford. Along with Thimios, he and Sotiris had got drunk the night the junta fell, and went to the brothel in Victoria Street. Emmanuel Tsikidis was sitting in an armchair across from Manolis. His wife Penelope had died two years ago, he told Manolis, from the ‘evil disease’, cancer. First her stomach, then her lungs. They chopped so much out of her she died a skeleton. Next to Emmanuel there was Stavros Mavrogiannis, a still refined countenance, but gone to fat. His hair was thick, jet black. He must be dyeing it. His Australian wife Sandra had gone completely grey and, unlike the other women in the room, did not bother to hide it. She was still a fine-looking woman. They had seemed like goddesses, the Australian women, when they had first seen them as young men: tall, slim, blonde and Amazonian. What had happened to the Australian girls? Now they were all fat, bovine. Sandra was still graceful, straight-backed. She had surprised them all in the seventies by learning word-perfect Greek.

At first conversation was stilted, everyone conscious of Paraskevi’s grief. They asked after each other’s children and grandchildren and then they were unsure what else to talk about. The past loomed enormous, insurmountable. Paraskevi’s children, her nephews and nieces, had come in to greet each new arrival. They were polite, sad, of course, but they drifted back into the kitchen, sitting around the polished blackwood table, involved in their own conversations. They were still young men and women, far removed from death, and so soon they could not help laughing, telling their jokes. The grandchildren were outside, the youngest playing hide and seek, the older ones playing footy. Athena and Stella would come in from time to time with fresh coffee, tea, drinks, cashews and pistachios to nibble. Manolis wanted a beer but he knew it would be improper to ask for such a celebratory drink. Instead, he took a whisky off the tray. From the kitchen, in English, they could hear the kids discussing travel. One of Paraskevi’s nephews had just returned with his family from Vietnam.

Katina, Paraskevi’s eldest sister, shook her head. ‘I told them they were crazy,’ she said in a low voice. ‘I thought they were out of their mind taking the children there.’ She tapped quickly on her breast, then crossed herself. ‘The disease, the poverty. They had no right to take my grandchildren.’

Thanassis made a loud rude noise. ‘Nonsense. It’s a beautiful country. I went last year.’

Sotiris Volougos leaned back in his chair, a suspicious look in his eyes. ‘You’re playing with us.’

‘No I’m not. I went. Great food, good people.’

Katina chuckled. ‘Did you eat dog?’

Thanassis shook his head, then laughed. ‘Katina, I had dog in Athens during the Occupation. I don’t mind dog.’

The women all shrieked in horror. ‘Did you really have to eat dog during the war?’

Thanassis nodded his head slowly at Athena. ‘And not only dog.’ He made a retching sound that shocked them all. ‘I still sometimes wake up with that vile taste of snake on my tongue.’ He turned to the women on the sofa. ‘Vietnam is a great country. Beautiful. I lived like a king there for ten days. Everything is cheap. Of course there is poverty, of course. But they’re a proud race. I went down those holes where they hid from the Americans. They were living like rats. And you can still see where the bloody Americans bombed them, where they destroyed whole villages and towns. They really fucked them up the arse.’

Paraskevi grunted. ‘And who haven’t the Americans destroyed? Look what they are doing in the Middle East. It’s the same thing.’

‘Sure, sure,’ answered Thanassis. ‘But the Vietnamese defeated them because they were united. Unlike the idiotic Arabs—the English set them amongst each other a hundred years ago and they’re too pig-ignorant to see it. If they were united they could conquer the world.’

‘Bullshit.’ Sotiris used the English expletive and then continued in Greek. ‘America is not going to let anyone conquer the world except themselves. They’ll blow all of us up before letting anyone else get the upper hand.’

‘I blame that cocksucker, Gorbachev.’ Thanassis leaned in, excited. He took a cigarette from his shirt pocket.

Paraskevi raised her hand. ‘Outside.’

‘In a minute.’ Thanassis rolled the cigarette through his fingers. ‘If that animal hadn’t dissolved the Soviet Union we’d have someone standing up to the Yanks.’

Emmanuel laughed. ‘Come off it Thanassi, that’s ancient history, that’s like Homer and Troy. No, let it go, the Americans rule everything. ’

‘They destroy everything.’ Paraskevi undid the clasp from her veil, swung her head and let her hair fall around her shoulders. ‘No one dares to do anything to them.’

Emmanuel shook his head. ‘That’s not true, that lad, that Arab, he managed to bomb New York.’

‘And good on him.’

Katina frowned. ‘Paraskevi, you’ve just lost a husband. Think of all the widows who grieved in New York.’

Paraskevi made a loud squishing sound with her lips. It sounded like a fart. ‘Katina, are you serious? With all the suffering in this world you want me to care about the damn Americans?’ They all burst into merriment at the joke of it.

As the afternoon wore on, they fell into argument, and the stiffness, the forced politeness all fell away. Athena fetched more drinks and Manolis drank more whisky. Koula clucked her tongue loudly and tried to catch his eye but he ignored her. The conversation moved from politics back to their own lives, but this time with a frankness that had not been there before. The wine and the spirits had loosened tongues, but so had something else, a stepping back into the past: they were reminded of a camaraderie that was so exquisite, so cherished that only drawn together in grief over their friend’s death could they admit how much they had missed it, how intense their longing for it had been. Conversation returned to the children and the grandchildren, as it always does, conceded Manolis, amongst people as old as us, but this time the men admitted to disappointment, to failure. Tales of divorce emerged, as did curses over a child’s laziness or his selfishness or her stupidity. Wrong choices in partners, jobs, in life. Disrespect was a consistent theme, as were drugs, alcohol. The women fell silent listening to the men, their faces closed, concerned. At first they refused to admit to any doubts about their offspring, saying nothing except an occasional warning to their husbands. Shut up, Sotiri, it’s not Panayioti’s fault he married that sow. There is nothing wrong with Sammy, he just hasn’t met the right girl yet. Not another word, Manoli, Elisavet did not bring it on herself. It was Sandra—of course, it would have to be the Australian—who came over, stood up next to Thanassis, and joined in the conversation with the men. She did not, however, speak of disappointment with her children. She stated plainly that sometimes it was hard with Alexandra, sometimes it was hard having a child who was schizophrenic.

No Greek woman would admit to this, Manolis told himself, looking fondly at Sandra. Greek women are tigers when their children are successes, but they fall apart with failures. The room fell to silence. Stavros was looking down at the carpet. Was the man humiliated? To everyone’s surprise, Sandra let out a loud, honking laugh.

‘You don’t have to pity me. She’s fine, I’m proud of my Alexandra. It was difficult, for years, in and out of hospital. But she takes her medication now, we bought her a small flat in Elwood. She’s fine. Alexandra is happy. She paints now.’

‘That’s right.’ Stavros was smiling affectionately at his wife, nodding his head fiercely, boldly, a wide smile on his face. ‘You should see the icons she paints. They’re beautiful.’

Tasia Maroudis, who had been quiet all afternoon, sighed deeply. ‘We all have our burdens.’ Her voice had not changed in all these years. Soft, almost inaudible, the call of a tiny, frightened bird.

Sandra’s mouth set in a redoubtable iron grimace. ‘I tell you, she’s no burden.’

‘What are her paintings like?’

They all turned to Athena. The girl blushed.

Sandra answered her in English. ‘They are big canvases. She paints women, all different kinds of women—old women, young girls, fat women, thin women, but all painted in the style of old Orthodox icons. The colours are so rich, so strong, completely fantastical. ’ Sandra smiled down at the girl. ‘Do you like art?’

‘I want to be a painter.’

Paraskevi massaged her granddaughter’s shoulder. ‘Don’t let your father hear you.’ She turned to her friends. ‘He says there is no money in art.’

‘There isn’t.’ Sandra shrugged. ‘But that’s not why Alexandra paints.’

‘Athena, go get that painting you did of your grandfather, the one hanging up in our room. Show it to everyone.’

The girl scrambled to her feet, walked shyly across the room. She returned with a small canvas. She hesitated, then smiling shyly, she handed it to Manolis.

He could not recognise his friend in the bushy white hair, the dark wrinkled skin of the portrait. Manolis knew nothing about art and was no judge of the painting. He felt nothing. He passed it to Thanassis.

‘It’s very good,’ Manolis told her.

Athena blushed again. ‘It’s alright.’

The painting was passed around the circle of old people, each of them making appropriately admiring remarks over it. It finally landed in Paraskevi’s hands. She wiped away her tears.

‘Thimio was so proud of Athena.’

‘Why not?’ Koula was smiling at the young girl. ‘She’s a wonderful young woman, of course he was proud of her.’

Silently the girl took the portrait from her grandmother’s hands and left the room.

Tasia leaned forward. ‘Did you hear about Vicky Annastiadis’s oldest boy?’

Here we go, thought Manolis, more gossip. He recoiled from the sound of her breathless voice. She was timid, but she’d always been a bitch. He remembered now, how she’d gloat over misfortune. He turned to Thanassis to begin another conversation but his old friend had a quizzical look on his face.

‘What about him?’

Tasia’s eyes were glinting as she turned to Thanassis. ‘He’s in prison.’

‘What for?’

Tasia shrugged her shoulders. ‘He’s a thief. How and what and where I don’t know. But he was always trouble.’

Thanassis snorted in anger. ‘You’re talking crap. Kosta was a good kid. He was tough. You could rely on him.’

Tasia pursed her lips. ‘That may be, Arthur, but he’s still a thief.’ Koula tapped her fingers on the coffee table. ‘Touch wood that our kids are alright.’

‘That you know of.’

She swung around furiously. ‘What do you mean by that, Thanassi? ’

The old man laughed. ‘Nothing, my little doll, nothing. I just mean what do we really know about our children’s lives? What they tell us. But how much do they tell us?’

Tasia started to speak and then quickly stopped herself. The words had been a muttered jumble, Manolis could not be sure he had heard any of them, but her malice was obvious, it suddenly lay heavy in the room. Manolis had not heard the words but he knew exactly what had remained unspoken.
That’s why your wife left
. It suddenly struck him that it had not been Thanassis who had been brave and walked away. It was Eleni who’d left, who’d had the balls to walk. Had she really left the children with him? Or had he promised to break her neck if she defied him? He would probably never know the whole story; Thanassis was too full of shame and bluster—the story would always be shaped to reflect honour on himself, no, not honour exactly. Manolis looked at his old friend, the thickening waistline, the shaking liver-spotted, wrinkled hands with the nicotine-stained fingers, the folds of fat at the back of his neck. Thanassis was an old man who wanted to believe that he was still a bull. Those days were gone. Lost in his thoughts, Manolis did not hear what his friend replied to Tasia but he saw the reaction: Athena’s shocked gasp, a thrilled grin at the edge of his own wife’s mouth. Koula had never liked Tasia.

‘You’re a blasphemer, Thanassi.’ Tasia crossed her arms and primly turned her knees away from the men.

‘Tasia,’ Thanassis roared with laughter, ‘you’re exactly like my wife. You and she are the kind who walk with God. Which is all I need to know about religion.’

Tasia could not help herself. ‘Atheist,’ she spat out.

Thanassis clapped his hands, a ferocious sound that silenced the conversation of the younger people in the kitchen.

‘Bravo, Tasia, bravo. I am an atheist and bloody proud of it. It’s this one life we have, my little gossip, this one life. Then we become dirt, we become flesh for the maggots to feed on. That’s it.’ He suddenly drew back, his face crumpled, he looked fearful, confused. He took a cigarette from his shirt pocket and, without looking at her, mumbled an apology to Paraskevi.

The old woman grinned. Her eyes were still moist. ‘Thimio used to say the same thing. Don’t worry about offending me, Thanassi. I don’t know what awaits us after death—all I know is I will never see my Thimio again.’

Thanassis rose, chucked the cigarette to his lip. ‘I’m going for a smoke.’

Manolis followed him, and, flashing a guilty look at his wife, so did Sotiris.

 

The back verandah was as big as a room, with a fence of thick slats that rose chest-high. The sun had long set. The little children had played in the backyard all afternoon but with the coming of evening they had crowded into one of the spare bedrooms to watch a DVD.