Intimate Distance (5 page)

And I, who tortured myself with the sense of it all being my fault; that the happiness of three – no, four – people was on my shoulders, merely waited for my child to be born and for some action, some solution to become inevitable. What would make it so inevitable, I wasn't exactly sure. I wasn't even clear who the father was. So I thought of the child as solely mine: an immaculate conception. And I comforted myself with the idea that something must shatter, something must change, and I'd be able to leave the pieces behind and go home with my baby. My baby: nobody else's. In truth, none of us knew how this change would take shape, this change that would reveal all and relieve us of our suffering, but we hoped for it in secret, and smiled at each other with suspicion on our faces.

NOW I GO
back to bed, willing some rest. Pan kept me up last night with a bout of coughing and a stuffy nose. I took him into my bed, now I watch him sleep, smelling his pallid, milky damp on my pillow. The customary Sydney traffic is muted, the city hushed as if falling asleep itself under a blanket of drizzle.

Whenever I'm alone, I think of Zoi. It's always the Zoi he was when we first met, as if the Zoi of Athens was an anomaly, a perversion of what I perceived as his true self. He hounded me toward the end, made me relive the betrayal, blame myself. He trawled with me through the intimacy of detail, its sick splendour. Did you have sex with my brother? Yes. Did you come? No, I lied. When was the first time? It doesn't matter. How could you do it? I don't know.

There was one thing about Dimitri, when he held me he was really there. Unlike Zoi, who was mostly absent in some fundamental way, forever thinking, dreaming of our future together, yet careless of the present. For Dimitri there was no future together: so in the moment, the breath, the flesh, lay eternity. Even if he was looking away from me, even when he was asleep, he couldn't forget I was there. The delicious state of knowing I slept in the next room or close beside him kept his every nerve heightened. His thoughts bled into my dreams. His hands on me were like two eyes. Even the pressure of his thumb on my waist as he slept during our brief daytime interludes was conscious, scrutinised, balletic. If I showed him some small affection, his body stopped, frozen, listening for my desire. In the end Zoi didn't have that capacity, didn't want to have it, maybe never did; and I resented him for it.

I bought flowers for the house yesterday in a fit of extravagance, preparing for Zoi's arrival without admitting it. I took Pan with me to the grower's markets and watched as he pointed and exclaimed over blooms and fruits. He chose freesias in pastel hues, mandarins and limes, sugarplums and glacé figs like Victorian children's bonbons. Now I regret how much I spent. I don't know how to make ends meet now I'm looking after my mother and Pan. When he starts preschool I'll work some morning shifts in the tiny café down the road, the one with milk crates scattered about for outdoor seating and its relentlessly fashionable clientele. I'll do it on the days the homecare nurses are here – or maybe that won't be a problem anymore.

Pan's awake now. I make breakfast and watch him play in the front garden from my mother's bedside, while I feed her. He's talking to the flowers, bending his glossy head to them, sticking his tongue out into the centre of the petals, whispering his secret thoughts. Something in the way he bends his head and opens his mouth, pinching his eyes tight, reminds me of Dimitri. Silly. Pan's nothing like him. Then I stop, watching my son, shielding my face with my hand. My heart's stopped, breath stilled. Pan's voice chanting to the flowers is drowned by the perfume of Dimitri's presence. Dimitri is Pan's uncle, after all. Or father. Why shouldn't they share something, if only the memory of a gesture, years ago in a darkened room?

THE SHUTTERS WERE
closed although the day's heat had long since abated, and the traffic that drove me mad during the day had thinned on the coast road. I sat on the bed watching Dimitri. He bent his head and kissed my bare shoulder. We decided to go to the Hilton Hotel near the stadium, with its cocktail bar on the top floor and 360-degree views of the city.

‘Come on,' he said, standing above me. ‘Put on your beautiful dress.'

I stood, holding it up against my body. The silkiness of it cooled my skin.

‘This one? Don't you think it's too formal?'

‘No. Don't be afraid.'

‘I won't fit into it now. I won't.'

‘Yes you will.'

He watched me put it on over my head and came to my side to fasten the crystal buttons at the back. It was an empire-line, accommodating my belly with only a slight swelling to indicate I was pregnant.

‘How do you feel?'

I turned toward him, his hands still fastening the buttons, so that his arms were right around me now. I bent my head so he couldn't see all of my face.

‘I don't feel anything. Now finish doing up my dress.'

I can barely remember the occasion, only that we had to be somewhere else within the hour. Some reception in a suburban club: a christening party maybe, or an engagement. Zoi wasn't with us. Again, he was at work.

We wandered around the ruins of the stadium in the summer twilight and all the crushed colours of dusk and the distant sounds far below were intermingled. We linked arms and walked slowly, like lovers. All over me, under my skin, was an overwhelming peace, the realisation that I didn't have to talk or smile or even think. Walking with him in silence. Remarkable.

Since getting pregnant, I'd become intensely aware of the quality of light, its shifts, transmutations, its effect on my open or closed eyes as I struggled to sleep, on my tender skin, the veins of my hands and temples.

We weren't admitted into the cocktail bar. It was full or perhaps we didn't look right for the place. Dimitri was wearing a tie but his suit didn't sit well on him, he was so short. So we went to the old underground bar and he drank shots of colourless liquid. I drank water. A faded mirror across from us, heightened in the dwindling light. Searching each other's faces for who we really were.

We'd finished our drinks and ordered more when Dimitri turned to me. I found it hard to tear my eyes away from the mirror behind the bar, at my own face among the coloured bottles on the glass shelves. An unreasonable pain took hold of me then, at the injustice, the chaos of the world. I forced myself to look at him, to let his eyes travel at leisure all over my face.

He downed his drink in a gulp. Then he held the empty glass to his mouth, muttered into it, eyes locked on mine.

‘What did you say, Dimi?'

‘I really don't think we should be doing this anymore.'

‘Why?'

‘Now the baby is nearly here and Zoi is working so hard for you both, I'm starting to feel –'

‘What's the difference between now and a month ago, Dimitri?'

‘I've been thinking. And Zoi says he's taking you away for a little time, before the baby's born. He's trying to do the right thing.'

‘Where's he taking me? It's the first I've heard of it.'

He spread out his hands in a gesture of hopelessness.

‘To our village. It will be a good rest for you. It will make things easier.'

‘And you?'

‘I'm not coming, at least not yet. You must understand, I love my brother. We've spent some good times together lately, talking.'

‘About me?'

‘About you. And other things.'

‘Have you told him?'

‘Yes. No, not really. I told him as much as I thought necessary.'

‘What? What exactly did you tell him?'

‘That I'd fallen in love with you. That I wasn't in love with you anymore.'

I turned my head away from him in a savage gesture.

‘He's known all along and never let on. How could he do that to me?'

‘How could you?'

‘And you,' I snapped. ‘Don't forget your part in this. You loved me and now you don't? Am I supposed to believe that?'

‘I think you should give it a chance, Mara. You won't find anybody again who loves you as much as he does.'

I opened my mouth to speak, still looking at my own reflection, addressing the words to myself.

‘Is it the way I am now? Is that why you're doing this to me?'

He laughed mirthlessly and put his arm around my shoulders, like a brother.

I CARRIED A
pocket-sized mirror in my bag when I was pregnant, and kept it hidden. It was easier to see my face in parts without being confronted all at once with my whole body. Anxiously, when nobody was looking, I would check on my appearance, in all lights, at all times of day, frightened by the changes, the loss of control. It became a compulsion.

I fantasised about being blind. Examined my points of reference. How they would change, how the unbelievable burden of my face would shimmer for a moment, fizzle out, vanish in the blankness of not seeing.

On the bus to Zoi's village I threw the mirror out onto the road, where it dropped into a ravine, a jagged splinter of light in the foliage. But I couldn't help it; I followed my reflection in the windows of the bus, the way my face flattened over the landscape, merging with the trees, a stark outline against the sky.

 

distance

 

We're never equal to our desires. Desire isn't enough. What remains is

weariness, resignation – a felicitous near-loss of will,

sweat, distraction, heat. Until, finally, night comes

to erase everything, to mingle it with one solid, incorporeal body,

your own,

to blow damp from the pinewoods or down from the sea,

to submerge the light, to submerge ourselves.

Persephone,
Yannis Ritsos

 

11

LITHOHORI, SUMMER, 2013

I BATHE IN
sweat under goat's hair blankets. Zoi's aunt aired them for only a day; not long enough to rid them of the smell of rats and mildew and something else, indefinable, a little like disappointment. Blankets woven by her mother, carried to her husband's home on a mule, a marriage prepared for since she was seven.

‘Good dowry,' she hinted in dialect to me. ‘Eh?'

I didn't understand her northern accent and asked Zoi to explain.

We're huddled together in a single bed with blankets thick as rugs over us. I have no idea why Zoi's aunt would think we need blankets, let alone so many, in the middle of July. But the mountain nights can be cold, he says. Sometimes even midsummer nights fall to ten degrees, with howling winds. These are blankets that scratch through thin polyester sheets, shaken from old chests unopened for decades. Only one hard pillow to share; I let Zoi have it. Why am I here, in this village, empty except for old women and goats? I'm drowning in the mundane, the everyday, with no time or energy to plan for the future. Zoi's imperatives override my own more and more now that I'm in my third trimester; tired, passive, wanting to curl up in a corner and cease to think.

Roosters crow from every direction. The village rises early and I'm glad to see the sunrise. Zoi's still asleep on his back with his arms by his side, like some fallen knight on a catafalque. I'm jealous of his slumber and restrain an urgent desire to shake him awake. Instead I slip outside, wrapping a blanket around my shoulders and washing my face at the outside tap. Brown water splashes against my cheeks; I cup my hands and drink from them to wash the sour taste from my mouth. The blanket falls from my shoulders and is soiled by mud. I flick it off, rub it, the stain grows. I have no idea how I'd go about washing it here. I entertain vague images of running streams and women pounding on bare rock with no soap, using only the strength of the paddle and powerful forearms; then dismiss them. I sit for a while on the doorstep, drawing my knees up against my belly, feeling the resistance of the swelling, the hardness of the baby embedded beneath my skin. Kicking, floating in liquid, clear as sky.

In the wan sun I begin to feel sleepy and as the light grows stronger, glowing on the rim of the mountains. I slump on the doorstep, rocking, closing my eyes and opening them once more against the sun's dazzle, playing the secret, silent games of childhood. The house is perched right on the edge of the mountain, one of the highest buildings in the village. Zoi told me his grandfather built it that way on purpose. He wanted to see everything, keep an eagle eye on his ten siblings, also have the best view of the cleft between the mountains, steep cliffs plunging down into darkness. Uncharted land. He prided himself on his origins: harsh, uncompromising, brittle as rock. He boasted that the Turks never ventured into these parts, it is and always has been family territory.

‘The mountains up above us,' he would say, pushing Zoi's chin up to look at them, ‘see their bald heads. See the hawks circling round and round. Unwritten mountains, they're called. Unmapped. Nobody except us has been up there. Our people. And even we only dare go there in the summer. The Turks never got this far; our mountains stopped them.' And Zoi as a little boy would gulp, overwhelmed by his glowing heritage.

The terrace juts out from the building at a dangerous angle, teetering high over the chasm, over pines and walnut trees and away into folded mountains so far they're shrouded even at noon. Aunts and uncles and cousins trudge up and down the rough stone steps leading from the valley to the peaks. Crunching with their shoes on fallen walnuts, stripped from the trees by summer rains, hard and still green, inedible. Slipping on dry leaves crushed into the pitted stone, a mass of dead brown and yellow and black from the husks of the walnut shells. Those steps are the only thoroughfare for the whole village and early morning is the busiest time.

I don't want them to notice me so I draw my legs up under my nightgown, resting my back against the door. But I can see them all clearly. They take their goats to the high pastures where the grass is tender and the sun shines way above the clouds. Their children troop to the road above the house to catch the only school bus of the day. I can hear their sleepy chatter, the drag of feet as they carry their heavy schoolbags up the steps. They're all in summer clothes, bright colours; the girls have ribbons tying back their hair. Some of the old women stop close to me, labouring, their breath coming heavy. I see them glance at the shuttered windows of the bedroom where Zoi lies asleep. The poorer women still haul firewood up and down the mountainside exactly as their grandmothers did, to feed fireplaces and stoves and outdoor ovens shaped like hives.