“Hey, listen. Juliet?”
“Yeah, yes, I’m OK.” She blows her nose.
“Listen, you have had a hell of a ride. You divorced the Marvellous Mick, and not before time, but before you had a chance to adjust to single life, you moved to Greece. Now I’m not saying there is anything wrong with that, but you were very displaced when you met Aaman. New to the country, new to the village, new to being single, and with no immediate support. If he was kind to you, he is bound to have become a bigger person in your life than, say, if you had met him back here with your boys just a car ride away, when you still went to your yoga group twice a week and coffee with half of them on the other days, and when you still had weekly meetings at the ex-Greek teacher and so on. You get the picture?”
“Yes, I get it. But he has experienced fire and loss, he understands. I haven’t met anyone else who seems to understand the way he does. He allows me to feel. He gives me time and space and the safety to feel what I have never dared face.”
“I can hear you and I love him for it. But if he has gone then he has gone, and there’s nothing you can do about that.”
“Just like my dad.”
“Sorry?”
“Gone just like my dad and then I found out years later he loved me, but it was too late because he was dead.” Juliet begins to cry again, but half of her watches and is amazed at being a forty-eight-year-old woman crying for a dad who died twenty-seven years previously.
“Your dad did not want to lose you, and it sounds as if Aaman had no choice either. Neither of them wanted to abandon you. Aaman going is about Aaman, not about you.”
Juliet stops crying and wipes her nose. Her brow unknotted, she makes an effort to inhale and exhale steadily. Michelle’s words filter through her.
“You know what? You’re right. He didn’t want to leave. It wasn’t his choice. I have been thinking about my loss all this time, but what about Aaman? He had so much more to lose.”
At Omonia Square, Aaman’s first job is selling wind-up rabbits that hop half-heartedly with flashing red eyes. The owner of the mechanical rabbits has assured Aaman it is a good job and kindly subbed his food for the first day, “Whilst you get going,” he says. There are three other people selling the same wind-up rabbits on the corner he is stationed on. The toys are cheaply made and they are meant to ask five euros, “Accept four if you have to”, out of which they can keep one euro for themselves for the first two they sell in a day, two euros from the rest. He must work whilst the sun is up. He sleeps in the square, under a tree, with a stray dog he names Lucky.
After a week, Aaman sees that the odds are stacked against him. He spends all he makes on the cheapest food he can find. Some days he doesn’t sell a rabbit and he goes hungry. He also still owes the rabbits’ owner the sub for his food on the first day. He now sees the trap that it was, ensuring his return day after day or the alternative consequences of owing such a person money. He works two more days, without food, to get free of his debt, the last day spent not so much trying to sell as observing his surroundings.
Omonia Square is a congested roundabout with openings to the underground strategically placed, the central island large and open with trees and benches. The area is busy with predominantly foreigners, illegals. At the hub of the island are mostly Georgians, Turks, and Armenians. They stand in knots, looking casual in stance and alert in their eyes. Occasionally one will break away and take long, bouncing, running strides to the Pakistanis or Indians who stand at the traffic lights, at the entrances to the roundabout, offering to wash windscreens, sponge in hand, buckets at their feet, hopeful for tips. The Armenians collect up these tips from the pockets of the Indians, tip a bottle of water in their bucket, tell them to work harder, then return to their group in the square’s centre jangling their pockets like returning warriors.
Someone kicks one of Aaman’s rabbits. Thin white trainers, one with no laces, the woman stands there, her body contorted in impossible angles to stay vertical. Involuntarily bending from the waist, her knees begin to give. Her face vacant, eyes rolling. She looks like she will fall at any moment, but each time a force within her returns her to vertical and the collapse begins again. Her head just keeps nodding and, somehow, her balance remains. Aaman rescues his rabbit and shifts down the street a couple of yards, avoiding other vendors and areas of sick and dog dirt.
Another man breaks rank from the centre and goes to another windscreen cleaner. He pockets the money before he returns to his colleagues. The nodding lady sees him, her eyes gain some focus, her impossible gait propelling her towards him on the central isle, cars stopping, horns blaring, windows being rolled down, shouts, hand gestures. She reaches the man in the centre and scrabbles in her pockets. The man watches her struggle until finally she brings out some money. She passes the money over and he hands her something small from a bag around his waist, under his shirt. He grins as she leaves, a car narrowly missing her as she staggers back from the island and all but falls down the steps into the underground.
Aaman stays squatting by his rabbits until they are collected from him, his day done, the last repayment made, money left for him. The windscreen washers have their buckets and sponges taken away by the men in the middle. Aaman crosses the road to surreptitiously join them. It is a large area with sculptures and different levels and trees. Aaman finds a nook behind a tree not far from the group of men and waits.
The night has fallen and the men still talk and only break to hand small somethings from their waist bags to people who don’t stay near them for longer than is necessary. Two of the men with waist bags also have bucket and sponges lying idle by their feet, ready for out of work Indians the next day. One has a basket of rabbits with mad red eyes.
The girl is halfway across the road when Aaman sees her again. She staggers and falls against a car that screeches to a stop. She gives the driver an obscene hand signal and continues to her destination, a motorbike narrowly missing her. She lumbers toward the group, madly feeling through her pockets, digging deep, toppling but never falling. Aaman sees potential trouble and readies himself. He moves closer behind another tree.
The girl asks for something, and the man holds his hand out for money. She begins her own body search again, each ploughing of her pockets sending her off balance, she sidesteps to regain. She has on a long cotton coat with large pockets; it is stained in many places and has a rip across the back. Her eyes are rolling and her mouth stays open. Her hair is plastered to her head down one side, on the other it is frizzy. Last pocket, she is frantic, she bends low to reach the bottom, her balance goes, she stumbles into the men. They stagger in turn and shout. Aaman, like a small rat, runs between them and makes away with a bucket and sponge; they don’t even notice.
He runs for a few blocks and then finds a corner, at the back of a building, between some pipes and a wall, behind a bin where he sits on his haunches. Bucket in hand, sponge under his t-shirt, he lets himself drift in and out of sleep till morning, grateful that it isn’t cold.
The next morning, Aaman picks a corner with no Armenians in sight and totes for work for a few hours. He cleans two windscreens but only one driver pays. Twenty cents. He buys a bread ring and moves on.
He is stopped at the next corner where he totes for business by a Russian. The Russian wants to know the name of his boss. Aaman says he has no boss and the Russian find this amusing and laughs as he brings an elbow up under Aaman’s jaw. Tongue bitten, eyes roll. Balance lost. Elbows take the weight of his fall. He sees feet move. Weight rebalanced. A swinging foot. A sharp pain, he curls up for protection.