HOW WELL WE UNDERSTAND EACH OTHER, WE WHO LOVE ONE ANOTHER

Translated from the Greek by Yannis Goumas

Margaret lived in Canada. She wore a fur hat in winter and padded gloves. She loved fresh snow before it froze and turned transparent like breathed-on glass, only harder to break. Come Christmas, she’d decorate the tree with greeting cards sent by friends. She kept them in a biscuit tin; the happy new year smelt of butter! Her husband adored her clockwork joy, looked proudly at his long-legged beauty. He enjoyed popping his head in at the door when she was having a shower and give her a start behind the curtain.
Fifty is a tricky age. For a few days now Thomas had felt a pitter-patter on his left side, as if flies were scratching their wings round the heart. Worried, he went for a checkup. Just a routine operation, advised the doc-tors. He lay opened up on the operation table when they summoned Marga-ret. The head surgeon drew her aside. “Look,” he said, “his arteries are blocked; something we didn’t expect; if we are to operate you must sign the consent form; it’s up to you. He might not even make it, we can’t tell. It’s your decision; otherwise we’ll have to sow him up again. Without surgery he won’t last for more than a month.” She took the chewing gum out of her mouth, rolled it between her fingers, and stuck it under a fingernail. She set pen to paper and signed.
She sat on a settee for five hours, eyes glued to the door opposite. Her stomach rested on her pelvis, ready to turn inside out. “He’s slipped into a coma,” they announced. The poor man’s finished, let him be. She applied for a life-support system. She sold the house and rented a flat. Every after-noon she came and sat at his bedside. “Do you recall, Thomas, the day we got engaged? Stony-broke, you placed a tiny plastic heart on my finger, ringed with gold-plaited wire. I’ve kept it, you know. It was so narrow, it squashed my finger. Then you went and bought me that solitaire that cost a packet. Do you remember that time on my birthday when you promised to take me for a picnic and it rained? I was crestfallen, and you drew me into the bedroom and laid out the food on the bed. We itched with crumbs for days! And what about that New Year’s Day in 1982? The woman on the phone was beside herself. ‘It’s Bill,’ she screamed, ‘come quickly, I’m go-ing out of my mind!’ His car caught fire in a collision; they recognized him by his fillings. Your best friend. For eight months you wouldn’t speak his name. You tossed about in your sleep all night. You’d leave the light on to allay the load of darkness. At the time I wanted so much to have your baby. If I ever lose him, I said to myself, I’ll have a child to remember him by. Then came visits to the doctor, therapy, and I reconciled myself to the fact that as long as we lived there would be just the two of us.”
For four long years she gave a day after day account of their life to-gether. And loudly so, that he might hear her wherever he was. She held his hand all the while she said what she was saying. Then one day she felt his palm moisten. His eyelids flickered open. His eyes goggled out of their sockets. He was saying something to her without speaking. She understood. She heard the blood vessels on the lids bursting. She peeped through the small glass window to make sure nobody was looking and, face bathed in tears, kissed his eyes. Then she removed the plug. All monitors ceased, his life had ended. She allowed for a few minutes to pass before reactivating the instruments. On her way out, she advised the doctors that tomorrow the bed would be available.





Translated from the Greek by Yannis Goumas

It was snug in there, and dark. It kept its eye skinned, wrapped in a slimy black thing, a coat of seaweed. It developed with time. It thought it caught a glimpse of light. A teensy-weensy particle of light. A tap, and the shell cracked. A lemon yellow chick dazzled by a bright light. It stepped on the cement floor and scurried to its mamma.
All day long it pottered about. Mamma in front, the chick behind, flexing its legs, claws scratching the floor. At night it nestled close to her, hearing her soft motherly cackles. Asleep, it dreamed of bathing in a pond, legs propelling it through the water. The breeze fluffed its feathers. The chick pecked at its breath, made holes in its mesh. It woke up feeling happy.
It rubbed itself against her with a sigh of content. Gadding about and cuddling, it lived in clover. It ran round her legs in circles until it felt dizzy. With a shrill voice it awoke her, wanting to play – toc-toc, it pecked at her soles. It cuddled up to her, infecting her with fleas. One day they came and took her away. Broken-hearted, its head hung as if disjoined, as if the spring had slackened, and how now joyfully bob up and down? Thus it remained for hours. Afterwards it fell asleep. Next day it wouldn’t eat, not a drop of water went down its gullet. It scraped along the wall looking for affection.
Puzzling, wrote the scientists in their report. Observations and evaluations indicate that the fowl was not affected by change. For days in front of lights and wires, it pressed its tiny belly against the metal, listening to the hum of the mechanical device. There was a public slide projection. ZN15, an original model, “the first electronic pullet,” bore no resemblance to a pullet.
Before the announcement could be published, they saw through the glass partition the chick sticking its beak in the socket, being tossed by elec-tric shock, and incinerated in a matter of seconds. They daren’t look at one another. The incident was a prey on their minds for years. The socket was the electronic pullet’s. How the devil did it uncover it? It wasn’t curiosity, that’s what bedeviled them. The experiment was not resumed. Various or-ganizations lodged a complaint, there was a press expose of experimental conditions, and the company withdrew financial support. Thesis after thesis was torn up, and certain people who groomed themselves for professorship made a slow comeback.




Translated by Yannis Goumas


Katerina, daughter of Efstathios Glanoudis, a twenty-seven year-old Greek belle, and a spinster, domiciled in Romania – in Bucharest – met Captain Nikolaos Topouzis at the Embassy ball. She was wearing her grandmother’s ruby diadem, necklace and bracelet, and a black taffeta gown with a gilded border, the period of mourning for her mother now in its fifth year. She sat on a sofa in the ballroom facing the orchestra, and wrote down on her card the dances that she had promised hopefuls of her age. The Captain was cap-tivated by her hair: black like the ocean at night - and those eyebrows: eaves of darkness. He came forward and introduced himself: “Nikolaos Topouzis, Captain in the British Mercantile Marine. I made the acquaintance of your father in Nauplia. Would you honour me by having the last dance with me?” He waited until she made a note of it before retiring. When the orchestra struck up a cotillon he returned, bowed formally, and opened his arms in full view of everyone, smiling. They were wedded inside of a fortnight. He took her on his ship to a seaside village on the Aegean. He built her a home with pebbled walls; the waves licked the courtyard enclosure. “That’s why I made no provision for windows,” he told her, “that the sea should not inun-date the house in winter.” So she would light the gas lamps bright and early; they would lunch by the light of candles; wax stained her skirts. She missed her piano. On the living room table she drew a black and white keyboard, set the metronome ticking back and forth on its single leg, and banged her fingers on the wood. Her nails broke, whittled away; she filed them even shorter. After dinner she engaged in lacework on pillows and sheets, but never crochet. “That’s for housemaids, nannies and drudgers,” she would say in all seriousness. She embroidered cherubs, deer and hare, and rose-edged topsheets. Captain Nikolaos came home once a year, put her in the family way, and pushed off
again. In five years, five daughters learnt to live in dark rooms; out in the light they were obliged to wear hats, even in the afternoon. Katerina, now aged thirty-three, took to embroidering linen in dark blue thread interweaved with mauve ribbons – suggestive of Good Friday – and other frills, which made the laundresses’ lot a hard one. On Wednesday, 30th November, she put on her black taffeta gown, a trifle too tight now, a sign of the passing years; stitches strained and snapped; the slim-fitting garment bulged with the fulness of flesh. She made her way down to the sea cave, shod in sandals; the soles slided on the glistening pebbles; she walked gingerly; eleven more steps and she turned left into the chamber. Light seeped through the roof of the cave and plumbed the depths. She stood looking at it for a long time. She dipped her fingers in seawater and dabbed her eyelids, causing a sharp stinging. “Ah, Nikolaos, plying the oceans and calmly observing the sun’s orbit, teach me to measure the day with light.”
In the Black Sea, Nikolaos Topouzis, standing on the ship’s bridge on a foggy day, felt a stinging sensation in the eye sockets, as if scraping against shingles and dried seaweed. Years later, Viennese physicians looked astonished at the symptoms. “Herr Nikolaos,” they declared much to their chagrin, “you are losing your sight, the causes of which we are unable to di-agnose.”





Translated from the Greek by Yannis Goumas

“A large carton of milk,” breathed Kitsa, quick on her pins. A hoary-headed crone in a dressing gown with frayed cuffs and slippers down at heel, her bunions stuck out majestically, all but through. “A large carton of milk,” she kept on repeating for fear of forgetting. All the way downhill she said it again and again. Once at the dairy-cum-confectionery on the corner, she paid for the milk with the loose change in her grip. For years she had been feeding herself on milk and yogurt. Occasionally she boiled rice to pap, over which she emptied a bowl of yogurt.
She always kept some milk for the neighbourhood cats. They gathered in the old cemetery, stray cats, every so often with young. She would leave a plastic bowl for them every other day. They recognized her, rubbing them-selves against her ankles. She stroked their heads briefly, cooed a word or two, and shuffled away in her worn-out slippers.
Kitsa lived by herself; everybody in the neighbourhood knew that. Some years earlier a pale blond girl had appeared, wearing grey tights and a white T-shirt, black spots on her nose and forehead. “Please, where can I find Mrs. Kitsa? Kitsa Souleimanoglou?” she asked around. “She must be about seventy or seventy-five. Tall. They told me she’s tall.” They showed her the building, in she went. The place stank. Not that Kitsa was slovenly. But there was something wrong with the drains for days now. She put off calling the plumber; relieved herself in a pan. A horrid smell, especially in the corners, where it accumulated. The girl pretended not to notice and stayed awhile.
Next morning Kitsa had a caller. Eurycleia came, bringing rolls and new cake. She pestered Kitsa with questions about the girl. All these years in the neighbourhood and no one had asked after her. “Just a niece, re-motely related. She brought me news of my daughter. She died a few days ago. Cancer of the bones. In pain to the last.” Eurycleia daren’t ask what daughter she was talking about; nobody knew of her existence. For thirty years now Kitsa had been going in and out of her building alone. She re-ceived neither letters nor messages. Eurycleia placed the goodies on the ta-ble and left.
That same month strange things happened. Kitsa’s groundfloor flat swarmed with cockroaches. Black and bloated, they crawled over pots and pans, dragged their fat bellies in the bathtub, splashed about in a can beneath the dripping washbasin. The drains oozed smells, worms licked the filth. They left trails of a slimy substance, which made their cleaning unbearable. For hours Kitsa rubbed away with wire wool; she squashed them with a pa-per napkin before getting rid of them. Afterwards she poured chlorine and hot water on her fingers, causing them to sting as if she had rubbed skin and flesh into small pieces on a grater. At night she heard moans in her sleep. Wrapped in a blanket, she waited for dawn.
Of late, all sorts of rumours were going round about Kitsa. People were saying that her daughter was an easy lay. That Kitsa, both a mother and a needy widow, would drag her by the scruff of the neck to keep her out of harm’s way. That the other one, artful to the core, always managed to outwit her. That at the age of sixteen she ran away with a dark-eyed seaman, a glamour boy, apparently responsible for many a broken marriage. The mother went down on her knees before the icons and uttered imprecations at the hour of her daughter’s wedding. “Cursed be the wedding wreaths on your heads! Gall the rosewater!” Time passed, but the mother’s curse fi-nally worked. Her daughter also died a widow, in great pain.
Nobody believed little Eleni when she blubbered out what she had seen. From the kitchen window that looked towards the old cemetery she had seen everything. Mrs. Kitsa went for her milk. She caressed the cats, but hesitated with the ginger one. She turned it over and began tickling its belly. The cat purred contentedly. A knife. She slit the cat with a knife. It died instantly, without stirring. Kitsa stuck her warped, blitchy-skinned hand inside the animal’s exposed innards, took out something, and chewed it. Afterwards she wiped her hand on a paper bag and left.
Next day they found a cat lying dead in the street. “Bloody drivers,” complained the neighbours, “they’ll be knocking down children next!” Lit-tle Eleni was done for. I told a fib, she said; and the matter was forgotten. On the ground floor the smells gradually disappeared. They sprayed cock-roaches to get rid of them, and within a week the place was spick and span.
Twenty years went by; and little Eleni, a young mother now, fed fruit cream to her baby. “Don’t you dare spit it out,” she shouted, “or God help you!” The spoon fell from her hand into the pureed pears on hearing her aunt speak. “Mind your language. Scold him if you must, but let every harsh word turn into stone inside you. A mother’s curse works; it’s written in the books. It brings death, a painful death at that. A child’s soul finds peace only if the mother slaughters an animal fed on milk and swallows its spleen. Some even say that the mother, herself, must feed the animal for ten years. Such a terrible ordeal for a curse!”