Authors: Deborah Levy
At that moment my father walks in.
‘Hello, you two girls. It’s nice to see that you’re getting along.’
On my second day in Athens I offered to walk through the park with my father because that was the route he took to get to work. It was the first time we had been alone together without his wife and new daughter, the human shields he used to defend himself from his sullen, sleepless creditor.
We both know that his absence from my life is not the sort of debt that can be paid back but it is exciting to pretend to negotiate a deal. In this sense, I agreed with the graffiti on a wall near the metro that said ‘WHAT NEXT?’
I was staggering through the park in black suede platform sandals, and my father was staggering through the park with the burden of the small portion of guilt that his god had not entirely absolved. We were staggering in silence.
It was a relief when he met a colleague from his shipping business, also on his way to the office. They talked about the proposed increased taxes on shipping and then about the large sum of euro in cash they had both hidden for emergencies.
My father was obliged to introduce me as his earlier daughter, an artefact from the past he had left behind in Britain. As well as the platform sandals, I was wearing shorts and a gold-sequinned crop top. My belly was on display and my hair was piled on top of my head with the three flamenco flower clips. It must have been a shock for
my father to discover that his full-breasted adult daughter from London was of sexual interest to his colleague.
‘I am Sofia.’ I shook his hand.
‘I am George.’ He held on to my hand.
‘I am just here for a few days.’ I let him continue to hold my hand.
‘I suppose you have to get back to work?’ He let go of my hand.
‘Sofia is a waitress, for the time being,’ my father said in Greek.
I am other things, too.
I have a first-class degree and a master’s.
I am pulsating with shifting sexualities.
I am sex on tanned legs in suede platform sandals.
I am urban and educated and currently godless.
I do not resemble an acceptable femininity from my father’s point of view. I’m not sure, but I think he thinks that I am not honouring the family. I don’t know the details. Papa hasn’t been in touch for a while to explain my duties and obligations.
‘Sofia wears flamenco flowers from Spain in her hair.’ My father looked depressed. ‘But she was born in Britain and doesn’t speak Greek.’
‘I last saw my father when I was fourteen,’ I explained to George.
‘Her mother is a hypochondriac,’ my father said in a brotherly tone to George.
‘I’ve been looking after her since I was five,’ I said in a sisterly tone to George.
My father started to speak over me. Although I did not understand much of what he said, it was clear that he did not see me as a credit to him. He told me not to bother coming into the office and said goodbye outside the revolving glass doors.
I spent all day in the anthropology museum, and then I walked to the Acropolis and slept in the shadow of the temple.
I think I might have dreamed about the ancient river that is now buried beneath the asphalt streets and modern buildings, the river Eridanos, which flowed through ancient Athens, coursing north of
the Acropolis. I could hear the pull of its current as it flowed to the water fountains where slave women were waiting to fill the jars they balanced on their heads.
That night, the baby on her breast again, Alexandra sat on the soft, blue sofa reading a Jane Austen novel out loud to my father. She was practising her English, which was perfect anyway, and he was correcting her pronunciation. Alexandra was reading from
Mansfield Park
: ‘If any one faculty of our nature may be called more wonderful than the rest, I do think it is memory.’
My father nodded.
‘Mem-orr-ray,’ he said in an exaggerated English accent.
‘Memory,’ Alexandra repeated.
He shoved an orange jelly and then a yellow jelly into his mouth, and he glanced at me.
Listen to how clever she is. She’s cleverer than I am, except for choosing to marry me, of course, but I am not complaining
.
I had forgotten to tell him that memory is the subject of my abandoned doctorate.
They were a stable family making new memories.
Or perhaps an unstable family anchored by their god. They went to church every Sunday. ‘God is the Lord and he has revealed himself to me,’ my father told me, more than once. I could see that the experience of his god was overwhelming. Various members of their congregation kissed Evangeline when we walked out on the streets together. Their priest wore black robes and sunglasses. His hands were kind when he grasped my hands. This was Papa’s last shot at another life, even if his wife did complain about the age difference between them on the sly. When he walked away from his old life, he knew he had to forget it had ever happened. I was the only obstacle in his way.
Alexandra and I talk every morning on their soft, blue sofa.
We are eating the sweet cherries that I have bought with my few remaining euro for my new family. Cherries were grown in ancient Greece – Ovid mentions picking them on mountaintops. Some of the juice has spilt over the silk sun-top that Ingrid gave me to soothe my medusa stings.
‘What does it mean, Sofia?’
‘What does what mean?’
‘The word on your top?’
I start to think about how to describe the word Beloved. ‘It means to be very loved,’ I say. ‘A true, great love.’
She looks confused. ‘I don’t think that’s right.’
I wonder if she thinks that being very loved is not right for me.
‘The word is more violent than that,’ she continues.
‘Yes, it is a forceful feeling,’ I reply. ‘When we call someone beloved, it is a strong feeling.’
Last night I dreamed again of Ingrid.
We are lying on a beach and I put my hand on her breast. We both fall asleep. I am woken by Ingrid shouting, ‘LOOK!’ She is pointing to the print of my hand. It has left a white tattoo on her skin, where everything is brown. She tells me she will wear the print of my monster claws on her body to frighten her enemies.
Alexandra asks me if I could pick up half a kilo of minced lamb
and deliver it to the cook. She will make a moussaka for dinner. ‘It’s a traditional Greek dish, Sofia.’
I can’t remember, but I think my mother used to make it.
I made my way to the meat market and stood near the sheep’s heads arranged on the stalls, illuminated by light bulbs attached to long, swinging leads. These were older sheep than the baby lambs on Alexandra’s slippers. They had been slaughtered. Blood had been shed and their livers piled on silver trays in the fridges. Ropes of their intestines were hanging on hooks. These lambs were killed without any formal rituals to make their death more bearable to the eaters of meat. Yet when early man went off to hunt, it was a traumatic, dangerous activity. He lived closely with the animals, it was not easy to hear their cries and see the blood fall, and so he made rites and rituals to make the murder easier. The women and children required endless bloodletting to keep them alive.
My mobile started to vibrate in my pocket. It was a message from Matthew in Spain.
Gómez must be stopped.
Your mother had to be rehydrated at his clinic yesterday.
All that quack needs is a drum.
Why has Matthew become involved in my mother’s care?
It seems to me that Matthew’s phone is his drum, but I’m not sure what kind of message he is trying to convey. Messages communicated on drums used to save people’s lives when there were no mobile phones or helicopters, no GPS. Without the messages banged out on the hide of animals stretched across a circle of wood, people would have starved to death or been destroyed by fire or warring tribes.
I perched on a stool near the sheep’s heads and called Gómez. He reassured me that Rose was in good health. A rota of various staff were with her every day. Now that her medication had been abandoned,
‘her morale was high.’ However, she refused to drink water, so she had become dehydrated. I explained how it was impossible to find the right water for Rose and this was a problem, given the climate in southern Spain in the summer months.
‘All the same,’ I said, gazing at the flies crawling into the gouged eye sockets of the sheep’s head, ‘if the water is always wrong, it gives her something to hope for. One day it will be right, so she will have to find something else to be always wrong.’
‘Perhaps,’ Gómez replied. ‘But I must inform you that I am no longer clinically interested in the walking problem so much as the water problem.’
It was past midnight and I couldn’t sleep because my room has no window or air conditioning. I am missing brown bread and Cheddar cheese and even look forward to the autumn mists rolling over the pear tree in my mother’s garden. I made my way to the balcony to take advantage of the cool breeze. I was now working on doing things to my advantage, so I thought I would take my pillow and sheet and sleep in the open air. Obviously Alexandra and my father had got there first. They were sitting side by side on two striped deckchairs like an elderly couple perched on the edge of the shore. She was in her nightdress, he in his pyjamas. I was trapped in the corridor, not wanting to interrupt but desperate not to return to the hot spare room.
I had nowhere to go, as usual, and no money to check into a hotel. Even the cheapest fleapit would have a room with some sort of window, or the most basic air-conditioning device.
I leaned my back against the wall and discreetly watched Christos moonbathing with his bridechild.
A sort of ritual was being peformed.
Alexandra offered him a cigar from a box that was resting on her lap. He took it between his fingers, and she moved towards him with a lighter. She waited while he sucked and exhaled and when the tip was glowing under the night sky she put the lighter back into the box.
It was was perhaps an act of devotion. In the distance, the Parthenon glowed on the hill.
It curves upwards, this sacred temple dedicated to Athena, supreme goddess of war. What must it have been like in the fifth century
BC
when worshippers gathered to pay tribute to their goddess? Did an older man and a young woman, perhaps a girl, sit side by side under the stars at midnight? Did they share sacrificial meat? Girls were married off from the age of fourteen, and their husbands were often in their thirties. Women were for sex and birth, and for spinning and weaving and lamenting at funerals. It was the women and girls who did all the mourning for the loss of kin. Their voices were higher and had more effect as they wailed and tore at their clothes. The men stood further back while the women did the expressing for them.
My problem is that I want to smoke the cigar and for someone else to light it. I want to blow out smoke. Like a volcano. Like a monster. I want to fume. I do not want to be the girl whose job it is to wail in a high-pitched voice at funerals.
A snake. A star. A cigar.
Those were some of the images and words that Ingrid told me surface in her mind when she embroiders. I walked back to my bedroom and found the silk sun-top lying on my camp bed. I had been wearing it nearly every day. It smelt of coconut ice cream and sweat and the Mediterranean sea. I decided to wash it in the bath and then take a cold shower. Evangeline was murmuring in the room next door, her window wide open so her soft, black hair trembled in the breeze.
I bent over the bath which was now full of soapy water and held the wet silk in my hands. I lifted it closer to my eyes. And then closer still.
I had misread the blue word embroidered on the yellow silk.
It was not Beloved.
I had invented a word that was not there.
Beheaded.
It was Beheaded.
To be beloved was my wish, but it was not true.
I lay flat on my back on the cool tiles of the bathroom floor. Ingrid is a seamstress. The needle is her mind. Beheaded is what she was thinking when she was thinking of me and she did not unstitch her thoughts. She gave the word to me, uncensored, inscribed in thread.
Beloved was a hallucination.
The incident with the snake and then Leonardo undermining me kept colliding with other anxious thoughts as I lay on the white tiles. My eyes were wide open while the taps dripped all night long.
My sister turns her face in my direction and opens her lustrous, brown eyes. She is lying across her father’s knee on the soft, blue sofa. Alexandra rests her head against his shoulder. When he cups her chin in his hand and moves her closer to his lips, I can’t help thinking he has seen this exact move in an old film with Clark Gable playing the lead and he’s trying it out. Evangeline is beloved by everyone in the room, including me. The word Beloved is like a wound. It hurts. In this sense, Beloved is not so different from Beheaded.
I have a headache, the kind of pain my mother described as a door slamming in her head. I put my hands up to my forehead and trail my fingers down to my eyes, and then I press the tips of my little fingers into my eyelids so everything is black and red and blue.
‘Have you got something in your eye, Sofia?’
‘Yes. A fly or something. Can I speak to you alone, Papa?’
Alexandra’s childish shoes are half slipping off her feet and she’s smiling at me, her braces glinting as the sun floods into their living space. That’s what it is, a living space, and I am living too intensely in their space. Alexandra now has her arm around my father’s shoulder and her fingers are in his hair. He has to disentangle himself from her girlmotherlove to speak to me alone.
We walk to my room, and he closes the door. I’m not sure what I want to say to him, but it’s something to do with needing help. I don’t know where to begin. So many years have passed in silence between
us. Where shall I start? How do we begin a conversation? We would have to move around in time, the past the present and the future, but we are lost in all of them.
We are standing together in the storeroom but we are in a time warp. There is no air in this windowless room, yet the wind is up and we are in a gale. The wind is blowing hard and it is history. I have been lifted into the air, my hair is flying, my arms are stretched out towards him. This force lifts my father, too. His back is slamming against the wall, his arms are flailing.