Hard Word (18 page)

‘Hardly slept a wink,' she would say one morning, apropos of nothing. And then if Dad didn't answer:

‘A man?' she'd say, full of scorn. ‘You? Call yourself a man?'

When in fact I'd not heard him say anything at all.

‘You're not a man's bootlace,' she'd say.

And, finally, he'd sneak a look at me, and the humiliation on his face – though not its source – was so plain.

‘Vera,' he'd plead. ‘Please. You know I've got to get up. To go in the night.'

Go
, I knew, was code for toilet. But why he had to go in the night and what it had to do with being a man, I never understood.

Nowadays, of course, people talk about things, in ways they never did then. And I've begun to wonder. My father died of bone cancer. But where did it start – in the bone? The liver? Or was it the prostate? And was he impotent, and was that what it was about?

And whom should I pity most, then? Mother – so successful, she'd driven everyone from her? ‘Be something, Miriam,' she'd say, ‘make something of yourself. For Mother's sake.' Or Dad? For his humiliation, his browbeatenness, the
littleness
of his life?

And anyway, I ask myself, can you manufacture pity, love even, through retrospective understanding? Or is sympathy the best anyone can hope for?

The second trip to Greece lasted not for six days, but nearly six years. And it wasn't Stavros who drew me back there – to ruin his life and mine – but myself. When Laura was eighteen months I returned to teaching, and she stayed during the day with Mother. And it was
that
which drove me back to Greece. Not romanticism about Greece, or the Greeks – three years of marriage, and I'd soon got over that – and it wasn't ambition for Stavros who was heading for thirty and starting, physically, to go to seed – married life had begun to suit him more and more, the less it suited me – and not for my own sake either but for hers, for Laura's. I had to get her free. Before she was two, I'd begun to see how she was already being ensnared in a web of duty and propriety and tiny love. Even then, at eighteen months, as we taught her to walk, her first steps, out of Stavros's doting hands, were always towards
her
, towards Mother – ‘Come to Grandma Vera, come to me, to Grandma' – not to her mother, to Mum, to me. This terrified me. I was determined Mother would never have her. It would be much easier, I decided, just to leave. But where? Melbourne, Adelaide, even Perth – she'd have followed us to any of these. Greece, I thought, would be just about far enough.

It was too far. Three years there, and I'd produced nothing. No greater sense of freedom, no harmony with Stavros, not even – to her disgust – another grandchild for Yiayia Irini, and no speech, in English, from her. Any movement had to be from me, in Greek, towards her. Laura was our only bridge. Not only between her and me, but also to Stavros. Who had changed so much. Or rather changed back, reverted, so that I barely recognized him. He even began to object to me walking in the streets alone. Without him or Yiayia Irini. It was a source of shame here, he said. This wasn't Sydney where women paraded themselves in the streets, on the beaches, barely clothed.

I couldn't understand this change, how small Stavros had grown here, at home, where he should have been most confident, most serene. What had happened to the Stavros I'd known, the carefree Stavros of Bondi and Clovelly, of Bronte and Lady Jayne, who had himself worn the skimpiest of togs, who'd insisted I do the same, and who'd laughed and whistled – even when I was with him – at other girls on the beach? But for his belly, which now swelled with the cheap bread and oily soups of Mama Vassilopoulos' kitchen, Stavros began to resemble more and more the one photo of his father in the house. I imagined him in fifteen years, in plastic shoes and three-quarter socks, shrinking even as I gazed at him. Something mortal had happened to Stavros.

It was partly simple things – the lack of equipment, the dearth of exercise after years of relentless gymwork.
That,
I now realized, and not Nature, had been the source of his muscles, his build. That, and something artificial – maybe steroids? – which he could no longer obtain. Yet it was even more than that that was wrong with him. Each day for three years he took the bus into the city and worked in a carpet factory – an unskilled labourer, which, outside a gym, was exactly what he was. And each night he'd come home depressed – I understood that, I was the same myself. But he refused to share it. He'd eat, mostly in silence, and head out to the taverna.

‘Stavros,
do
something,' I'd try to encourage him.

‘What something?' he'd say.

‘Anything. Set up your own gym. Start a soccer team. Talk to the school about it. Do
something
–'

‘What, here?'

‘Why not?'

And for a week or so his spirits would lift, and he'd go about, walking the streets of the village, his hands in his pockets, his eyes half shut and whistling through his teeth, as though he had a secret. But then, just as quickly his mood would fall away again because he could see no way of getting anything started. I even suggested going back to Sydney – now Laura was mine – but he wouldn't hear of that either. He'd settled somehow for what was here, perhaps for what he'd been before he came to Australia. He'd lost all confidence, in himself, in me. And I was full of guilt because I knew it was me who was injuring him. Dimitros was one joy in this time. He came to see us once a month, and I could walk with him – a brother.

‘You are not happy,' he'd say, without asking. ‘I will make you laugh.'

Stavros, I thought, had once made me laugh.

Dimitros had the spirit, the simple wit of a child. I loved our walks, he made me laugh. But then he began to come more often, it became difficult, Mama Vassilopoulos cleared her throat, and Stavros wouldn't let him come again. And then all I had again were Laura, and the sea. Together they saved my life.

By now Stavros and I scarcely bothered with sex. Either he was uninterested or, when occasionally he was, he stank so much of retsina and the smoke of the taverna that I wasn't. We quarrelled, cursed one another – twice he struck me and I struck him back and clawed his face. Mama Vassilopoulos bathed the scratches, and shook her head, and – after the second time – Stavros took to sleeping in the middle room, Dimitros' old room, between Mama's and mine. He was torn, I think, and if he was going to make any move at all, I realized, it would not be towards me. Seeing this, I was less depressed for myself than sad for him, and for what I'd done to his life. And after another year of this half-death, half-life, we found we could begin to talk about it, and even about my going back. The struggle would be over Laura. But, I told him, I would never leave – he would never be free of me – without her.

I began to work. There was an army training base just outside the city, and three mornings a week now I was the one who took the bus and then the train, and went for the day to work. The army was modernizing for NATO, and the trainee officers were required to speak and to read English before they could command other troops. I was hired as soon as I applied, being qualified – but, much more importantly, being local and therefore cheap. The English school at the base was staffed from Britain – mainly British Council and other expats – and hiring a local meant none of the trouble of selecting, accommodating and paying British wages and expenses. But the money – given what we'd had to make do with for four years – was liberating. Two-thirds of what I earned, I gave straight to Stavros, hoping, even now, that he would find the energy, the imagination, to use it. He pissed it away against the wall of the taverna. I was sad at that, but that was his life now. The other third accumulated in a bank in the city, for Laura and me. For fares, for resettlement. For going home to Australia. Mother would have given me the money, of course, but that would have been a debt for life.

Work broke my depression, brought me back to life. Just having something to do – even though the students were hopeless, country boys plucked from the local towns to make up the numbers – that, and company, intelligent, cheerful, two other women teachers like myself, and Rex, quintessentially British, clever, disappointed – he'd come out to Greece expecting golden boys, not bumpkins, unwashed, with pimples on their chins – but such funny company, all of this brought me back to life. Mordant, ironic, Rex risked the sack every day:

‘Instructor, instructor,' one of the boys would demand. ‘What is this? On womans, what is this?'

Preparing materials in the room next to Rex's class I'd peer round the door to see what was going on. This was the only time the boys came alive – when anything to do with sex was involved. They were totally repressed, by their families, by the church, the State, and now by army. And so, despite all their swagger and their obsession with sex, they were still amazingly ignorant at the same time. Like Stavros, in fact, who simply thought of his penis as a pile driver with a miniature atomic blissbomb on its end. By my second day of classes I'd learnt to wear mid-length skirts, so that the students wouldn't spend the entire class retrieving dropped pencils from the floor. Whenever they could, they'd turn the conversation in class to issues of sex, no matter how remote. This was, I recognized, partly boredom with grammar and rules, with the frustrations of English, and partly the mischief of boys. But, beyond that, it was also a sad and genuine longing to know. They loved to hear the words –
thighs, breasts
… Even
arms
and
legs
would warm them on a cold day. I saw little harm or malice in it. Towards me, anyway. But Rex was a different matter.

‘What this, instructor?' the boy repeated to Rex on this particular day. Through the crack of the door, I saw the boy had both hands inverted on his chest, the fingers spread like cones over his pectorals, his rounded wrists facing Rex. ‘On womans,' he said, ‘what this?'

‘That?' said Rex. They suspected him, they sensed his ambivalence towards them. They always had more questions of this sort for him than any of the rest of us. It was dangerous for Rex, though you'd never have known it. ‘That, young man,' he said, ‘is arthritis.'

‘Arthritis
–?'

Rex got closer and closer to being reported.

‘Instructor?' One of the boys had brought an English newspaper to class. ‘What this mean, what this
birth defect
?'

There was a pause. Rex looked tired, hung over. For one second, though, his eyes lit up.

‘Ask your parents,' he said.

The inevitable occurred – though it wasn't the complaint and dismissal we'd long expected. It happened off-base one weekend, at a taverna on the Piraeus docks where Rex had gone cruising. Drunk, he'd chosen the wrong bar, the wrong night. The wrong boy. A brawl had erupted. Rex was beaten up, his nose and cheekbone smashed with a barstool. He was lucky not to have been knifed. The Army and the Council covered, and he was shipped home.

‘Don't be sad, Mirry,' he said when I visited him in hospital. ‘We've had some good laughs, haven't we?'

But I
was
sad. He was a friend, one of only two males in the English school, and he'd made me laugh so hard sometimes I imagined I was the one who'd be sent home injured. He was a man, I liked him very much, and never once did his dick get in the way. Somehow – though I didn't understand it then – all of that fitted together.

Laura had her own separate life with Stavros and Mama Vassilopoulos, especially in the last two years when I was away so much, working in the city. I had at least – despite whatever other injury I had done them – maintained enough generosity to be glad about that, especially for Stavros. And in the end, I think it was this, my willingness to let her go to them, enjoy being separate with them, together with my promise that I would do the same again, later, when she was older – if that was what she wanted – that swung them to let me go. And Laura with me.

‘Well, Eleni,' I say. Are you ready to read your story?'

Eleni intrigues me. I've always skirted around the subject of Greece with her, because for me it carries such echoes of pain and sadness. Unlike poor Theo Kostas, I cannot place her, not by looks nor by accent. The North, obviously – one has only to look at her, the angularity of her features, the boniness of her face, the questing expression of the icon – to tell that. But where exactly, I have no idea. Just as I have no idea of her age. Twenty-seven? Her hair is jet enough for that, undyed, yet not a strand of grey. But her face, and the heaviness of her hips – has she had children? – say older. Thirty-seven? Forty? There is something very hard to catch about her. Her clothes are always neat, faultlessly pressed but practical, unfashionable. Sensible shoes on her feet. The only decoration of any kind she wears is a small silver cross at her throat. It's shaped like an ankh with a loop in place of the upper limb. She has something – an air – I know I should recognize, but can't. She's neither beautiful, nor plain, and certainly not serene – in fact beside some of the Asian girls, she always looks slightly troubled, though again not in a frowning or worried way but always giving this sense of being in search of something.
Questing
is the closest I can come. She has no special friends in the class, though she often teams up, in work pairs or at any social event, with Hafize, the Turk, a combination one wouldn't necessarily have picked.

‘Yes,' Eleni says now. ‘I am ready.'

‘Good. Just take it easily then, and read at your own pace. It doesn't matter how slowly you go. Listen carefully now,' I say to the others. ‘Listen to Eleni's story, and think of a question you might ask her at the end.'