Sorry, Niki said. She turned to look straight forward again and stirred the ice in her drink with a finger and took a sip. I didn’t mean it. That you don’t have anything. I didn’t mean it. You’ve got words, that’s for sure. And imagination. Go on, I’m listening. What kind of boat would it be? Rowboat or sailboat? Motorboat? Tell me, I’m listening. How long has it been since you told me a story? Talk to me. Talk.
• • •
They were sitting under the old olive tree in the garden drinking martinis out of plastic cups. That morning they had sent off the last of their things by truck. All that was left was a single suitcase and an old mattress for them to sleep on that night, their last in the house. Eminent domain. They had been living in that house for five years. Five whole years. It was the nicest house they’d ever lived in, a real house, the kind they don’t build anymore. There wasn’t another like it in all of Salamina. Old, sure, but solid as a fort, with stone walls like ramparts, wooden beams, a tile roof, huge rooms — cool in summer, warm in winter — with fireplaces and a cellar and big windows that looked onto the sea. And around the house an enormous garden, an estate, really, with olive and orange trees, pine trees, and eucalyptus trees that on summer afternoons cast their shade over the low stone wall and in the sunny gaps between shade lizards lay motionless gathering sun to warm themselves, small ones and big ones, all of them green, salamanders and geckos with bulging eyes and long skinny tails.
Eminent domain. They were expropriating the property. The new road to the port on the far side of the island, behind the mountain, would pass through here. The guy who owned the place hadn’t fought it at all. He didn’t care. It was a lot of money and he lived abroad, he was a foreigner now, had emigrated to Belgium or Germany a long time ago, hadn’t set foot on the island in years.
Eminent domain.
• • •
At night the locals came and took stones from the wall around the property. They came with pickup trucks and brought tools to loosen the stones and casually loaded them onto the beds of their trucks, slow and easy, taking their time. They were beautiful stones, big solid hand-chiseled slabs, they made you happy to look at and touch. The first night the locals came he yelled at them. Get lost, you buzzards, he shouted. You buzzards, you crows, aren’t you ashamed? There are still people living here, get lost. Buzzards. Get out of here. He shouted and cursed and at one point it almost came to blows. But eventually he got tired of shouting and cursing and fighting. What was the point? What difference did it make, today or tomorrow. What was the point. A soul that’s ready to leave will leave.
No use wasting our energy, he told Niki. We need to keep something in reserve for the future, for whatever’s in store for us up there. It’s a tactical move, see.
• • •
They were leaving for Kyustendil up in Bulgaria. A friend of a friend had opened a hotel up there and was looking for employees, he didn’t trust the locals. He was looking for people he could depend on, without obligations, willing to work hard. The money was good. Good for Bulgaria, at any rate. They thought it over pretty hard, discussed it, and in the end said they’d give it a shot. He’d been the one to insist, he thought they should go. It’s an opportunity, he told Niki. You see what’s happening here. There’s no way of getting ahead. It’s over, we’re over. It used to be that you worked your whole life for a bit of bread, now you work for a handful of crumbs. It’s Bulgaria, sure, but that doesn’t bother me. They say it’s nice up there. Countryside mountains rivers forests. There are hot springs. And cherries. People say they grow the best cherries in the world up there. Lord, fresh cherries. And waterfalls, too. Here you can’t even drink from the tap anymore. We spend fifty euros a month just on bottled water. It’s over here, it’s all over. You can’t get ahead.
I say we go. It can’t be worse than here.
• • •
Now, in the yard, he didn’t respond. He reached down, tossed some ice cubes in his cup and filled it, then glanced at the hourglass that was rapidly shrinking and vanishing over the dark murky blue waters. He wasn’t a warrior. A warrior fights to protect things he has and doesn’t want to lose, or fights for things he doesn’t have but wants to obtain. A warrior doesn’t flee the field of battle to go and work for someone else. At a hotel. In Kyustendil, Bulgaria. Hot springs. Like Aidipsos, only in Bulgaria.
Niki closed her eyes, threw her arms back and stretched in her chair, then sat there as still as a gecko gathering sun to warm its cold blood. In the sunlight her armpits gleamed white and soft and smooth. He raised his sunglasses to his forehead and stared at her for a long time. He wanted to lick her armpits. Wanted to lick the sweat, which smelled of apples and salt, from her armpits. He wanted to suck up all the air between them and make it disappear, to demolish the distance between them, to destroy all the things that kept them apart.
In June he had killed a lizard. Sunday afternoon, a heat wave, he’d been sitting in the garden drinking just like now. He’d been picking up pebbles and tossing them at the lizards that had come out to sun themselves on the stone wall. He was throwing little pebbles at the salamanders for no real reason, just to pass the time. He wasn’t thinking about what he was doing. He wasn’t thinking about the pebbles or the lizards. He was daydreaming. He dreamed that they’d made lots of money and quit their jobs and bought this house and a brand new motorboat with a pointed prow and strong engine and they spent whole days out at sea — they rode around in the boat and fished and went to neighboring islands and swam and in the evenings as the sky grew dark they lay down in the prow and ate huge cold bowls of fruit salad — watermelon honeydew banana pineapple — and licked the salt tang off each other’s bodies and lay arm in arm watching the red sun fading out in the distance and the little lights flickering on along the shorelines of the islands and on the ships further out at sea — lay watching the stars appearing in the sky and there were so many of them and they were so far away that when he and she lay silently staring at those stars they felt a kind of pain inside. That was the kind of dream he was dreaming, dreams of a summer afternoon. And then without even realizing what he was doing he picked a bigger pebble up off the ground and threw it at the wall and the rock hit a lizard and killed it on the spot. He jumped to his feet, ran over, looked. A tiny green lizard with a long tail, identical to all the others. Motionless on the thick stone of the wall, a red spot between its eyes where the rock had landed. He poked it with a stick, blew on it, talked to it. Nothing. Just like that, quickly and simply, he had killed a lizard.
He looked around. There was no one there, nothing had changed, everything was the same as before, just as it always was, the trees the low wall the grass the flowers the house and inside the house Niki reading or sleeping and behind the house in the distance the sea the boats the ships the trash in the water the islands the people the world. Nothing had changed.
Quickly and simply.
As quickly and simply as god surely kills people all the time, tossing absentminded pebbles at the world, dreaming his own dreams.
• • •
They gave me a card at the bank, he said.
He put his sunglasses back on and looked at the hourglass over the water. It had shrunk by half and didn’t look anything like an hourglass anymore.
Six thousand with no annual fees. So, I’ll buy you a boat, he said. Nothing fancy but it’ll do the job. We’ll be fine making the payments. I’m not that useless, I can pay off a credit card. How does that sound? I’ll find a place where we can leave it and in the summer when we come back here we’ll have a new boat waiting for us. I’ll start playing the lotto, too. I’m sure they have stuff like that up there, there’s no place that doesn’t have lotto. You’ll see. I can’t buy back all the years that have passed but I can buy you a piece of tomorrow. You’ll see. It’s enough if we’re together and happy. Love and faith bring luck. You’ll see.