Intimate Distance (10 page)

‘Dimi,' I shout, involuntarily, and turn to Zoi and Pandelina, apologetic. ‘What's he doing up so early?'

We wait in silence as Dimitri brakes. He leaves the lights on and we're all illuminated in the greenish glare as he gets off.

‘What are you doing here?' Zoi asks.

‘I was out all night,' he says, addressing his reply to me. ‘I rushed back to say goodbye to you.'

I step forward awkwardly and hold out my hand to him.

‘Goodbye, then.'

He pulls me to him and kisses me on the cheek.

‘I hope you'll be okay. I'll be back too in a few weeks, before the birth, I promise.'

‘We don't need you to come back,' Zoi says. ‘We'll be fine without you, I promise.'

Dimitri finally looks at his brother and Pandelina steps in, seeing the dangerous look in his eye.

‘Time for us to go now, Dimitri.'

He doesn't turn around and she grabs his arm high up near the armpit.

‘
Ela
, I said. You can give me a lift back.'

She gets on the bike, showing her fat legs in their rolled-up stockings, and all three of us can't help laughing after all as Dimitri revs the bike and waves goodbye.

19

WHEN EVENING COMES
in Athens, the dying light spreads flat over the public squares and congeals like blood, egg yolk, tears on a cheek. When evening comes, the church bells on every street begin to clang for vespers. When evening comes, the protesters assemble on street corners and plan their next attack. Inevitably, they are tear-gassed and hauled off to prison, but there are always more. When evening comes, I stop on the landing between the second floor and the third, uncertain what to do.

Stars stud the milky glow of yet another sunset. One, two, then a group of three, come out at the same time. Tonight we walk the steep path to a special place overlooking the city and harbour. My tread is heavy now. I never thought I'd be one of those women who clutched their lower back all the time when pregnant, but I do. Soaked with sweat, we sit on the cool ledge that wraps around all four walls of the chapel. It's a stone ledge worn by centuries of people, sitting, resting under the soothing cypresses. Hills with round shoulders crowd the trees.

When I turn my head finally to look at Zoi he's lying down and his head is thrown back. I put my hand out to touch his Adam's apple but draw it back again. His thin shirt sticks to his nipples. Then I touch him, with tenderness, as if I'm saying goodbye. Down the mountain; from the height we can reach after a half-hour walk the city looks careless, unstructured, thrown together as if by a child.

At home, it's a little after dinner. Kiki clears away the last of the plates, leaving Zoi lingering over his. He's a slow eater and still picking at the remnants of his food, delicate with his knife and fork. I've long since finished. Kiki doesn't serve us meals at the formal dining table any longer, as she did that first night. Only once did we have the honour – all family now.

I lean back and massage my belly. My navel protrudes like an olive. All day I've felt pains, woken at six in the morning thinking the baby must be coming today. But the contractions have been bearable, unpredictable. I was determined to have a morning swim then walked the whole length of the beach. When I got home, in the shower, the pain intensified. Now I feel needles pushing through my abdomen, a wrenching apart as if someone with huge solid hands has come to prise me open. Zoi looks at me. A gush of water. All about me now, the smell of the sea.

‘You alright?'

‘I think my waters have broken.'

I rush to the bathroom. The back of my dress is wet through. In the bathroom I sit on the toilet, shoulders hunched. My lips are dry.

‘Zoi,' I call as loudly as I can. ‘Zoi!'

Instead Kiki comes in, putting on her jacket, throwing her apron to the floor. A gesture so out of character, betraying her agitation.

‘
Ela
,
ela
, let's go. Better there than here.'

‘Where's Zoi?'

‘He's putting your things in the taxi. Come, come, let's tie your hair back. We can't have you looking like a gypsy.'

She comes back with a pink elastic.

‘I don't want to move.'

Kiki hoists me up by the elbow.

IN THE HOSPITAL
I'm put in a wheelchair. Nobody seems to hear me. I can feel my wet dress sticking to the vinyl seat. In this moment, without the pain maddening me, I can sense the leaking between my thighs, the opening up to vulnerability.

‘She's early,' I can hear Zoi saying. ‘This isn't meant to happen until October.'

The orderlies wheel me into the ward, Zoi running alongside.

‘You'll be fine,' he says.

The whole universe is an egg, as is the rising sun. In the Orphic texts, Chaos was created first, then Night and the round Abyss.

I'm rolled onto a bed very high off the ground, with pale blue sheets that crackle in their stiffness. The contractions are coming on strong now. Regular as a metronome, Zoi counting the spaces between. The time between pain is still, white and unruffled. I breathe easily, talk of nothing, joke with the cheerful midwives. Then the pain is red and sharp, dismissing all that came before. There's no time, no next moment. There will be no time in the future when pain doesn't exist.

‘No drugs.' I can hear Zoi yell to the midwife. ‘Not unless absolutely necessary.'

I can still register somewhere in the sane, quiet part of my mind that his Greek is very formal, almost aristocratic. He's talking down to the women around him, these women that hover around me like ministering sisters: calm, tender, with soft hands and soothing words. I hold his arm, bear down on it.

‘Let me get up. I want an epidural.'

‘No, no,' the midwife soothes. ‘Try to kneel on the bed. Like a frog.'

The word in Greek sounds strange to my ears. I have no language now, no pleasantries; I'm one huge, black, roaring mouth. I want to squat on the ground. In the deep abyss Night gave birth to a wind egg. She moaned wordlessly in the time before language and pulled the egg out of her from open legs. Large and blue and with a shell so fragile it cracked at the force of her last birthing cry.

The midwives hold me up by the elbows. My sheets are splotched with blossoms of red. The doctor is called in. I lie on my back again, too exhausted to hold myself upright. The doctor's rubber-gloved hands are already spattered. He looks up over my knees to Zoi, gives him an encouraging look.

‘Head's crowning. The hard part's nearly over.'

He puts his own tired face close to mine, whispers.

‘It's up to you now, my girl. Push when I tell you, pant when I don't.'

He twists the baby's head gently, prising it with his fingers from my grip. I writhe, eyes so wide they can't see. Thus Chaos produced Chronos, which is never-ageing Time.

I feel the huge, hard egg between my legs, the burning, the impossibility of the task, the ludicrousness of it. The relief of blood lubricating me. I sit up, lean forward with both hands to catch my baby.

‘Not yet,' the doctor cautions. ‘Not yet.'

The shoulders are out and the rest of the body springs forth in a rush. I fall back onto the bed and the doctor pushes the baby up toward my belly, just one little push on its bottom, the cord dangling like a purple tail behind him. He's screaming and his face is scarlet.

In the split second before, the doctor held him and checked his air passages for mucus, the child was still. A second that lasted forever as we looked to the doctor, looked at the midwives, at each other. Then the magnificent wail. The doctor holding him high for a suspended moment and the baby's face raised up, mouth open, containing all. Numinous, as though in the presence of divinity.

In turn Chronos gave birth to an egg from which sprang a hermaphroditic god with golden wings, the head of a bull and springing from his head a snake. This god was called Phanes, the shining one.

My baby is slippery and shiny with blood and vernix. His white hair is plastered to his skull. I hold him in the crook of my arm, where he's heavy, limbs flailing. He begins to suck as if this is all he was born to do. My breasts are golden with colostrum, nipples big as plums. Zoi cuts the umbilical cord and a spasm passes over my baby's face as our bond is severed. I look at him and don't care who his father is. He's mine.

There is psychic wholeness in an egg, for it contains the whole world. But the egg is split into two, into Earth and Sky. Then there's Zoi's face close to mine and my baby has his eyes open as he looks away, beyond us, into nothing.

20

THE HOSPITAL ROOM
is bare, walls painted yellow to catch as much of the little sunshine that there is. It struggles wanly through gaps in concrete buildings, with crazy television antennae as far as the eye can see, on every apartment, every house, every hotel. Even as far as the Plaka quarter and the Parthenon, mercifully free of cables so high, yet shrouded in
nefos
, the mist of modern Athens. Those celebrated columns coated with multiple layers of dust.
CARYATIDS
hold up the pediment of the south wing, mute, long suffering, their wide eyes blinded by pollution. Dust so thick on the wall opposite my window it furs like the skin of an unknown animal. Waving in the breeze blowing high above buildings, down elevator shafts, looping through the fissures between balconies.

I pull myself into a sitting position, prop myself on two pillows. This way I can even catch the flame of the city far away, faintly erotic in winks of light. I notice there's no phone on my bedside table. I want to call my mother today, even if she won't understand a word. Say to her, he's beautiful. He wasn't a mistake. I'm not aware of anything much except his breathing in the plastic crib by my bed, mauve creases covered by a thin blanket, cloth-nappied bottom in the air. Other concerns exist only on the periphery of my thoughts. When the pain of the stitches disturbs me, it tears through the veil momentarily. But I can't move from this position once I've found it, balanced on the small of my back, squashed on the thin mattress.

My body's soft and moist and relaxed but it feels no desire. So strange, this dead feeling, for the first time in so long. All that passion and striving, eradicated. All that prodding and poking after the birth. The lilypad placenta, glowing unnaturally under fluorescent lights. I wanted to take it with me, bury it under a fig tree in Kiki's garden, but the midwives whisked it away before I could formulate my intention. I felt like a clammy-mouthed child, an alien who had given birth to something more alien than me. Beneath it, a sense of violation, as if I should have given birth in secret, under cover of darkness.

The sheet is stippled by light. My baby continues to sleep. His name is Pan, we decided last night. Pandeleimon, a medieval saint. I wish he was in bed with me, but when I fell asleep this morning with my arm beneath him the nurses came and took him away, scolding, telling me it's too dangerous. I know now that it's the most natural thing in the world. I take him back from them every time, wake from my naps in between feeds with him nestled between my breasts.

There's a light tap on the door, a grazing of the fingertips. The door opens and Zoi comes in grinning, his right eyebrow cocked in a question. I see with blurred disappointment he isn't holding any flowers. Not even a box of chocolates. He was always one for upholding the clichés, the received manner of doing things. He's wearing his best suit; just come quickly to see me on his lunch break. He didn't wear it for me. His silk tie, Italian, chosen with so much care by me in the mirrored atrium of an Athenian department store, flops out of his back trouser pocket. He's somewhat embarrassed, as though having accidentally stumbled into a daydream of mine.

‘You awake? Up to a visitor?'

‘I could do with some company.'

We speak to each other like strangers, enunciating the words clearly with rounded vowels. He drops a kiss on my mouth, his tongue meets mine briefly, a flash of recognition, and then I abruptly shut my mouth. I look away from him and over to where Pan lies, eyes wide open now, strange sightless grey eyes staring up to nowhere. The innocent unpeeled eyes of an underwater creature unaccustomed to seeing, with a scum of grey over blue, obscuring the real colour beneath.

‘Can you pick him up and bring him to me? Has he changed since you last saw him?'

Zoi picks Pan up with confidence, and I quickly scoop him into my arms.

‘He was covered in a lot of blood then. Much prettier. And you. Slept all morning, I hope. You seem rested.'

I shake my head, wanting him to acknowledge my fatigue regardless of the facts.

As he bends over me and Pan I can see he's struggling to speak and I know one of those intense unexplainable waves of love has come over him. His eyes glitter with tears, wells of water that stay there, caught dangling on the rim of the eye without being shed. Pan stirs, moving his head with his limbs kicking, wanting to free themselves from the folds of the thin blanket wrapped around him.

‘Take him,' I say.

But he's afraid now and hesitates, putting out his finger to touch the white floss at the top of Pan's head awkwardly, as if approaching fire. As he does so, there are whispers and giggles on the other side of the door and loud knocks.

‘Not your parents. I told you not to let them come so soon. Tell them I'm asleep or something – '

He's already at the door, shrugging his shoulders at me with an agonised expression. There are bottles of whisky under the men's arms and the women bear arrangements of flowers like trophies.

‘
Mara mou
,' they chirp. ‘May the child live for us.'

I straighten my nightgown and sit up. I'm glad Dimitri hasn't come. Can't manage a smile. It doesn't matter. They don't see, swooping down with kisses on each cheek, male whiskers and ouzo breath, smears on the side of my mouth. Good wishes for the mother and child.