The Messenger of Athens: A Novel (21 page)

Kypreos had invested in some land up the coast. He was going into the tourist business, building apartments for rent to a German company he’d done a deal with. Theo got talking to him and persuaded him to give him the carpentry work—doors, windows and shutters. It was
a big contract; for Theo, a coup. But Kypreos had his own ideas about how much he would pay.

“Listen,” he said to Theo, as they discussed terms, “I’ll do you a deal. Finish the job by mid-March, I’ll give you 50 per cent on top of the price we’ve agreed. Finish after the first of April, I’ll pay you half. If you work fast, you’ll come out the winner.”

They shook hands. Kypreos had clapped Theo on the back, and walked away, laughing, believing his money was safe—for when had anyone known any of these tradesmen finish a job on time? But Theo was smiling, and confident.

“I’ve made up my mind to get it done ahead of time,” he told Elpida. “I want to see Kypreos’s face when he hands over the cash.”

From time to time, she’d ask him how it was going.

“I’m working every daylight hour,” he’d said. “I’m working like a madman to get done.”

“
W
here’s Hatzistratis?” Kypreos was always loud, but today, he was shouting. There was rage in his reddening face, and in his tight, hard eyes. “Where is the idle son of a bitch?”

He stood too close to her; he smelled of fresh sweat, and warm leather, and the aniseed of ouzo. The neck of his shirt was unbuttoned too far, for a man of his age and corpulence; resting on the rise of his fat belly, a great, gold medallion embossed with the star of Macedonia hung on a heavy gold chain. Kypreos told the people the medallion
had been worn by Alexander the Great, and some of them believed him; the truth was, he’d had it made by a goldsmith whose brother owed him money.

“He’s not here,” said Elpida. “He went out, over an hour ago.”

“Well, where the hell has the son of a bitch gone?” shouted Kypreos. “Time is money!”

“I don’t know,” said Elpida. “I don’t know where he’s gone. If you want to come in and wait…”

“I haven’t time to sit around waiting for carpenters!” roared Kypreos. “You can tell him if that job’s not finished tomorrow I’ll get someone else to do it. I’ve got the glazier waiting to go to work on the window-frames and half of them are still stacked up against the wall. He’s not even been near the place for four days. He told me he’d be finished three weeks ago. And you can tell him if the job’s not finished tomorrow, he’ll not get one cent out of me.”

S
he left her shoes outside the kitchen door and, in stockinged feet, wandered to the parlor sofa, where she lay down. At her temples, a headache threatened. Kypreos’s words flew around her head, forming questions which had no answers. Theo hadn’t been there, working; when he’d said he’d been there, he hadn’t.

So where had he been?

And the money—he’d blown all that money. All the things it would have bought, all the worry it would have dispelled. Now, there’d be nothing. Not one cent.

The pulse at her temples grew stronger, and an ache
began, behind her right eye. If she’d known where he was now, she would have… killed him. But it was not the small voice which whispered of the possibility of betrayal, and faithlessness, which roused her; that, she preferred to ignore. He had lost them a winter’s worth of wages, and that made her angry—so angry, it kindled into flame a smouldering ember of rebellion which had long lodged in her heart.

E
leni found her, still lying on the sofa, fingers pressed to the pulses in her temples.

“Are you sick?” she asked. She bent over her daughter and put a hand on her forehead, feeling for fever as if Elpida were a small child. Her mother’s hand was cold; Elpida could smell vinegar on her breath.

“You don’t look well,” said Eleni. “I’ll make you some tea.”

“I don’t want tea, Mama. It’s just a headache. It’ll pass.”

“Is it that time of the month? Tea will do you good. I saw your ironing, in the kitchen. I’ll bring it through here. Then you can stay where you are.”

Elpida laid her hand across her eyes.

“You don’t need to do the ironing, Mama,” she protested. “For God’s sake, let it wait.”

But Eleni didn’t hear her. She was already in the kitchen, making tea.

“Why have you bought this starch?” Eleni held up the bright yellow can and examined the small, white rectangle
of its price ticket; the reading of small print was harder by the day, and, even compressing her eyes into a squint, the figures remained blurred. “I’ve told you not to buy this starch. Buy Evrika, I’ve told you. It’s much better. This stuff, the nozzle gets clogged up. And I’m sure it’s more expensive. Why pay more than you have to?”

“I like the smell of that one.”

Elpida sipped the green-scented sage tea. It tasted bitter; her mother had infused the leaves too long. The pain had moved to the bridge of her nose, and she drew her eyebrows together to relax the tautness in the muscles of her forehead, creating an expression of bad temper.

Eleni rolled her sleeves up to her elbows. Elpida watched her bend to the plastic-lattice linen basket and take out one of Theo’s crumpled shirts, spread the wrinkled sleeve on the ironing-board and spray it lightly with starch. Eleni lifted the iron. The tendons in her forearm tightened, and the blue veins there and at her wrists stood raised along the bloomless, winter-white skin. Elpida thought her mother had a physique, a strength, which didn’t suit a lady—beneath the mottled fat (her mother was still gaining weight, despite the doctor’s instructions), she had a laborer’s arms. Elpida looked down at her own hands. They were chapped, and red; on her fingertips and the fleshy mounds of her palms, the skin was dry and hard, and discolored brown from the juices of chopped onions.

She listened to the quietness, to the sliding of the iron over cotton, the
psst-psst
of the starch spray, the hiss of steam. The steam released the freshness of laundry blown dry in the wind; it evoked nostalgia, memories of
afternoon hours at home when she sat at her hated homework as Eleni ironed, and watched her.

“Kypreos was here a little while ago,” she said.

“Oh yes?” Her mother folded the shirt, deftly tucking the sleeves in behind the torso. She laid the shirt on the end of the sofa. It might have been slid into polythene packaging and sold as new.

“He was looking for Theo.”

“Wasn’t he at the building site?”

Elpida didn’t answer.

“Elpida?”

“He hasn’t been there for days.”

Eleni stood the iron on its base and took a small, pink T-shirt from the basket.

“So where’s he been?” she asked.

“I don’t know, Mama.” Elpida pinched the bridge of her nose, but the pain stayed the same. “Kypreos said if the work’s not finished tomorrow, he won’t pay anything at all.”

Elpida pressed the T-shirt’s sleeves: right, left.

“I thought that job was worth millions,” she said.

“It is. What should I do, Mama? If I say anything to Theo, he’ll yell at me.”

Eleni lay the folded T-shirt beside the cotton shirt, and picked out a pair of red-striped underpants.

“You leave him to me,” she said.

“Mama,” said Elpida, “why do women have to get married?”

She had dared to ask herself recently if she even liked him, or if he liked her. She knew exactly how he saw her:
malleable, pliable—the creature he had made her. His method had been simple, and she had been… in love, or fearful? Each time she failed to please him, to anticipate his wants and wishes, he dragged a suitcase from beneath the wardrobe and laid it on the bed. His message was clear: please me, or go back to your mother. She could not let the family’s good name be smeared by such disgrace. She learned to do as she was told.

He had been a bastard, but not from the first day; from the eighth. Day eight of their marriage, early in the morning. Cigarettes and ashtray on the table. Coffee on the stove. It was her mother’s doing, her mother’s parsimony.
Economia
. “Use half a spoon of coffee in the pot, Elpida,” she had said. “Then the packet will last twice as long.” He had told her for a week to make the coffee stronger. She had resisted, because that was what her mother had told her to do. She served his coffee. He tasted it, and replaced the cup in its saucer. Then, slowly standing, he had pulled on his jacket, calmly lit a cigarette, put his cigarettes in his pocket and, with the back of his hand, swiped everything, all the new wedding-day gift china laid for breakfast, off the table to the floor. She remembered the crash of china shattered, the fast drip of coffee from table to floor, the bang of the door as he slammed it behind him. She had been terrified he would never come back. She had wept as she cleared up the mess, and cried all morning before Eleni found her.

But when she told her the story, her mother had laughed.

“Kori mou,”
she had said, “all men are like that. Your
duty is to do things his way. Take care, or he’ll be running home to his mother, and think of your shame then.”

The meals she had prepared for his lunch and dinner that day had congealed and been scraped into the chicken scraps hours before he came home. He wouldn’t speak to her because there was nothing to eat. She had made him an omelet—he had sat at the table and watched her do it—and when she put it in front of him, he had stood up and, smiling, slipped it into the trash.

Now, consciousness was pricking. She felt cheated, conned, because she had kept her half of a deal which was bringing her no return. She had made a bad bargain. He was remote, preoccupied, disinterested. Uncaring.

Eleni took a pair of Theo’s trousers from the basket.

“Getting married is something women do,” she said. “They’ve always done it.”

“But why have they?” asked Elpida. “The men don’t love us. They don’t think much of us at all.”

He didn’t love her. As she spoke the words, she knew them to be true.

Her mother laughed.

“No, sweetheart,” she said, “they don’t love us. Marriage isn’t about love, or romance. Marriage is about security, and family, and having someone to provide for you. But mostly, it’s about children.
That’s
why women marry. Because then our men give us the greatest gift any woman can have,
kori mou
. They give us our babies.
That’s
where we get our love from, sweetheart, and our respect—from them. Nothing else matters. Women will put up with anything, for the sake of the children.”

A
ndreas had gone without saying when he would return. There had been no kiss goodbye, or fond waving from the quayside, just a door quietly closed and footsteps fading in the road outside. On her pillow, he left a note.
I am giving you time to think
, it read.
I love you. Your husband, Andreas
. As if she wouldn’t remember who he was.

Twelve days slipped by. At first, his absence made her glad; it freed her to obsess, and indulge in her compulsions. But the days were long, and lonely, and the night noises—the scrabbling of vermin, the sighing of old timbers, the whisperings and rustlings in leaves and grass—affected her in a way they never had before.

Then, it began to rain. It rained heavily, and constantly, throughout the night; when morning came, the rain persisted, falling steadily from heavy clouds so low they hid the mountain peaks. The day was melancholy, tedious, and cold; she went nowhere, spoke to no one. Evening came early, and still the rain was falling. Irini made hot soup, and as she spooned thin noodles from the bowl, she thought of Andreas, and wondered where he was.