The pain shoots up his leg to his stomach and chest and throat. He hops on one leg and his eyes tear up with pain. Incredible pain. He thinks he hears something from behind the door, something like panting, but he isn’t sure.
Years ago he used to get it on with a girl from Nikaia. Olga. From a good family, she was a student at the nuns’ school in Piraeus. Her mother didn’t like him and made her break it off. And when they went on vacation — it was summer, August, same as now — he broke into her house one night. He’d been drinking all afternoon and at night he broke into the house with a bottle of cheap whiskey and sat on the sofa and imagined all kinds of things. He was drunk, blind drunk. He imagined that he had a pocketknife and slit open all the cushions on the sofa and then all the mattresses and pillows in the house. He spray painted the walls and the mirrors, clipped all the wires, slashed clothes and tore up books, broke trays plates knick-knacks. He imagined shoving a rag deep in the toilet and another in the bathroom sink. All night he drank and imagined. But in the end he didn’t do anything.
Except before he left he went into the bathroom and turned on the tap in the sink. That was all.
And now he’d like to do the same thing if he could. Go into the house and drink and then break things and tear things and leave the place filthy. He would piss in the fridge and cupboards and on all the beds. And the dog — he’d leave it for last. If only. If only he could do all those things and then run off to someplace far away. Forget the apartment the car his job and disappear like one of those black tornadoes you see on television that come out of nowhere, destroy everything, and vanish again. Only he doesn’t want to lose Effie. He wants for them to stand naked at night in that enormous house and pretend it’s theirs, pretend that they’re people who aren’t afraid or worried about money and work. People who have shaken themselves free from the meaning of life and from the creeping passion for things, things they don’t have and will never have. And peaceful and fearless they’ll let their bodies lean on one another and peaceful and fearless they’ll feel the dizziness that’s born of the union of bodies. That’s what he wants. The union of bodies.
He limps away from the door and limps along the wall. His foot has swollen inside his boot, his palms are shriveled, sweat is dripping into his eyes. And though he no longer hears any barking he knows that the dog is also walking along on the other side of the wall. And when he gets back to the gate Leben is already there and jumps up onto its hind legs with its front paws on the bars and starts barking again and biting the air. Foam like white blood drips from its mouth and there’s a crazed look in its dark eyes.
He looks at the dog. He looks at the sharp green glass on top of the wall. And above that the sky spreading itself endlessly out in the pitiless light of August.
I have something to say, he says.
But there’s no one there to listen.
• • •
He gets into the Nissan and rolls down the window and looks at the dog that’s stopped barking and is staring at him with its mouth hanging open and its ears pricked. It’s laughing at him. It’s watching him and laughing. It’s clear as day, the dog is laughing. A laughing Belgian sheepdog. Belgian shitdog. Belgian shit-eating dog.
He lights a cigarette and leans his head back. His foot is numb and has started to swell inside his boot. He can feel the pieces of broken glass on the top of his head but he doesn’t want to touch them.
He’ll wait. He’ll wait. Something will happen. At some point the dog will get tired and go off somewhere. It’ll get hungry, or thirsty, or go to sleep. And as soon as that happens, he’ll let himself into the house. And then he’ll do something.
He’ll wait. He’ll sit all night in the car and wait. He’ll wait for the whole night to pass. He’ll stay there all night and the next day and as many days as it takes. He’ll wait.
The swollen orange sun disappears behind the mountain. Night is falling. The glass on the top of the wall isn’t glittering anymore. A bird flies over the wall and vanishes as if the sky swallowed it up.
He’ll wait.
It’s still only the third of August.
Go Out and Burn Them
MARCH EIGHTH, a day of wind and no sun. Through the kitchen window I watch as my father hangs clothes in the yard. He lifts them out of the basin shakes them out and clips them to the line with clothespins. Since Sunday after the memorial service and the hassle of relatives coming and going he’s set himself to washing all of my mother’s clothes — he won’t leave a single stitch unwashed. Skirts shirts nightgowns. Winter and summer clothes. He’s even washing her underwear. I thought he was doing it to kill time, to keep himself occupied, so he wouldn’t think, wouldn’t remember. But now I see him hang a cream-colored bra on the line and then a pair of panties with a little kitten on the front wearing a red bow — I see him standing there for a moment caressing that printed kitten with his thumb and I don’t know what to say.
If only the kitchen had no window so I wouldn’t have to see.
• • •
When I got there we drank coffee and smoked a cigarette. We didn’t say much. How things are going at work, if I’ll be able to get some vacation time around Easter — that sort of thing. Then I asked about the recycling. The blue bins the municipality set out in the neighborhood and the bags they distributed for people to collect aluminum cans and plastic containers. Oh, that, he said. Keratsini, riding the wave of progress. Mark my words, soon they’ll be recycling people, too. Why not? After all, don’t they already treat us like garbage? I wanted to bait him a bit more, see what he’d say about what happened the other day, but he pretended not to know what I was getting at, he didn’t even mention it. At some point he pulled a packet of stamped letters held together by a thick rubber band out of his coat pocket and laid them on the table.
I found these yesterday afternoon in the attic. I had no idea she had them hidden up there. I stayed up all night reading them. We were married forty-three years and she never said a word. Take a look if you like, it’s something to pass the time. They really threw me for a loop.
What kind of letters are they? I asked. Love letters?
He lowered his head and looked at me over his glasses.
No, he said. Nothing to do with love. All the love stuff I’ve put in the wash.
He ground out his cigarette in the ashtray, licked his finger and tapped a speck of ash off the table and flicked it into the ashtray, too.
If we’d gone to Germany we could have saved her, he said. You remember what the oncologist said. Put a hundred thousand in your pocket and go to Germany. Sure, a hundred thousand. As if he were talking about drachmas, not euros. He had no idea. And the banks haven’t caught on, either, have they? They should be giving out cancer loans. The way it’s mowing people down they’d be making money hand over fist.
What are you talking about, Dad? Have you lost it completely?
I know exactly what I’m talking about. It’s what to do that’s beyond me.
He stood up and emptied the ashtray into the trash, rinsed it and set it upside-down in the sink. Then he took the basin of wet clothes and the basket of clothespins and went outside.
• • •
I make more coffee then sit down and take the rubber band off the packet and spread the letters out before me. They’re mostly from the ’60s, but a few are even older. Letters my mother wrote to her parents in Crete. Letters from her brother Drakos to their father. Letters between the siblings — my mother was one of six. Other letters from friends and relatives. Most are difficult to read — the ink is faded in places or the paper has stains or little holes as if mice have been chewing on them. I choose one at random and try to make out what it says. As I read, I keep coming across little gems, unexpected turns of phrase of the sort people wrote back then in their letters, in the good old days when the postman brought actual mail and not just bills and ads and notices about unpaid bills.