Read Online The Messenger of Athens: A Novel by Anne Zouroudi - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Anne Zouroudi
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the mornings we put up with the cold; I lie on the sofa with the blankets from the bed piled on top of me, watch TV, smoke. Elpida cooks, winter food. Boiled cauliflower. Lentils. Chick-peas. Fried eggs. Stuffed cabbage. Oranges. I dream of meat, a thick beef stew, maybe roast lamb. But when it rains, we don’t work; when we don’t work regularly, there’s no money for meat. When she’s not cooking, Elpida makes work for herself, cleaning everything she can think of: the light fittings, the chair legs and, between cloudbursts, the street outside. She runs to the baker’s for bread. Me, where can I run to?
In the afternoons, when Panayitsa comes home from school, we go to Elpida’s mother’s. The TV’s always on but no one ever watches it because someone’s always babbling on about nothing: how the woman next door let her kids go out in the rain and how she never sweeps the street in front of their house; whether the women are going to the festival at St. Katerina’s tomorrow; will the ferry bring fresh vegetables. I smoke a lot, drink a lot ofsage tea. Sometimes, Elpida switches on the electric fire (but only one of the two bars) and we all pull up a chair and huddle around it—me, Elpida, mother-and father-in-law, Panayitsa and Elpida’s grandmother, the mad, miserable old crone. My mother-in-law doesn’t understand anything about electricity except that it’s expensive. She unplugs the fridge at night to save money. If there’s a break in the rain, her father goes out in the yard, burns some sticks in a brazier and brings in the hot ashes, so before long we can’t see each other for smoke. Eventually, if we wait patiently, night comes. We go home, Elpida and Panayitsa go to bed, together, for warmth. I lie on the sofa under my blankets, freezing in the dark, smoking, and I wait.
If I went out, where would I go? The boredom makes me die inside; nothing to do, nothing, nothing to do.
Yesterday my mate Short George was passing, so I chewed the fat with him for a while. He and Tall George are going to Kos for a few days for a change of scene. I used to go with them, before I was married. We used to have some good times: go to a nightclub, drink in the bars, ride all over the island on our motorbikes. Have a change from home-cooking. Go to the cinema, look at the shops, maybe buy some new clothes. Find some girls, sometimes.
I’m a married man now, a serious man with a family. That life is over for me. What could I do?
I just wished him a good journey.
Four
B ecause the house was neither here nor there—not at the quieter port, where the smallest boats came and went, nor at the village heart, where the streets were lively with wives and rowdy children—it was called the Half-way House. Along the lane a few souls passed: old men, bound to routine, ambling to valley allotments, to water gardens already soaked by overnight rain; occasionally a car, truck, taxi or lorry; on weekdays, at eleven, the postman, precarious on his scooter. And, once an hour, bald-tired and rattling, the twelve-seater bus.
In summer, when the heat was overwhelming and no cooling wind blew off the mountains until the late hours of siesta, it was a good house, shaded by the overhanging eucalyptus on the road, the back yard given shelter by the olive grove and one vigorous vine which gave no grapes. But in winter, it was a trial. Wind drove the rain under the badly fitted door and around the unsealed window-frames; water pooled on the marble floor and on the tiled sills. She piled the sills with towels, which must be wrung out and then dried, somehow; she mopped the floor, repeatedly. But the water, once in the house,carried damp into the walls, where it couldn’t be mopped, or soaked up by towels; soaked up instead by stone and plaster, it festered there, revealing itself eventually as foul, black mold. It climbed the walls, and crept across the ceilings; the spores spread like infection into their clothes, the laundered
In the afternoons, when Panayitsa comes home from school, we go to Elpida’s mother’s. The TV’s always on but no one ever watches it because someone’s always babbling on about nothing: how the woman next door let her kids go out in the rain and how she never sweeps the street in front of their house; whether the women are going to the festival at St. Katerina’s tomorrow; will the ferry bring fresh vegetables. I smoke a lot, drink a lot ofsage tea. Sometimes, Elpida switches on the electric fire (but only one of the two bars) and we all pull up a chair and huddle around it—me, Elpida, mother-and father-in-law, Panayitsa and Elpida’s grandmother, the mad, miserable old crone. My mother-in-law doesn’t understand anything about electricity except that it’s expensive. She unplugs the fridge at night to save money. If there’s a break in the rain, her father goes out in the yard, burns some sticks in a brazier and brings in the hot ashes, so before long we can’t see each other for smoke. Eventually, if we wait patiently, night comes. We go home, Elpida and Panayitsa go to bed, together, for warmth. I lie on the sofa under my blankets, freezing in the dark, smoking, and I wait.
If I went out, where would I go? The boredom makes me die inside; nothing to do, nothing, nothing to do.
Yesterday my mate Short George was passing, so I chewed the fat with him for a while. He and Tall George are going to Kos for a few days for a change of scene. I used to go with them, before I was married. We used to have some good times: go to a nightclub, drink in the bars, ride all over the island on our motorbikes. Have a change from home-cooking. Go to the cinema, look at the shops, maybe buy some new clothes. Find some girls, sometimes.
I’m a married man now, a serious man with a family. That life is over for me. What could I do?
I just wished him a good journey.
Four
B ecause the house was neither here nor there—not at the quieter port, where the smallest boats came and went, nor at the village heart, where the streets were lively with wives and rowdy children—it was called the Half-way House. Along the lane a few souls passed: old men, bound to routine, ambling to valley allotments, to water gardens already soaked by overnight rain; occasionally a car, truck, taxi or lorry; on weekdays, at eleven, the postman, precarious on his scooter. And, once an hour, bald-tired and rattling, the twelve-seater bus.
In summer, when the heat was overwhelming and no cooling wind blew off the mountains until the late hours of siesta, it was a good house, shaded by the overhanging eucalyptus on the road, the back yard given shelter by the olive grove and one vigorous vine which gave no grapes. But in winter, it was a trial. Wind drove the rain under the badly fitted door and around the unsealed window-frames; water pooled on the marble floor and on the tiled sills. She piled the sills with towels, which must be wrung out and then dried, somehow; she mopped the floor, repeatedly. But the water, once in the house,carried damp into the walls, where it couldn’t be mopped, or soaked up by towels; soaked up instead by stone and plaster, it festered there, revealing itself eventually as foul, black mold. It climbed the walls, and crept across the ceilings; the spores spread like infection into their clothes, the laundered
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