A cumulonimbus theatre towered over Athens’s Syntagma Square. The mist smeared under the wipers, the cab window squealing.
Rain in a foreign city is different from rain in a place you know. I can’t explain this, while snow is the same everywhere. Naomi says this is also true of dusk, that it’s different wherever you are, and once told me of the time she was walking in Berlin alone, lost on New Year’s Day, trying to find her way back to her hotel. She found herself at the end of a blind street, at the Wall, cement on three sides, in the near dark. She says she started to cry because it was twilight and New Year’s Day and she was alone. But I think it was Berlin that made her cry.
I felt a surge of companionship with the eaters around me as they took comfort from the bulwark of hot food and drink. It was the third day of wet weather. People chewed thick slabs of bread with a crust that worked their jaws, dipped buns and biscuits into massive mugs of steaming milky coffee.
Tavern, oasis, country inn on the king’s highway. Way stations. Dostoyevsky and the charitable women in Tobol’sk. Akhmatova reading poetry to the wounded soldiers in Tashkent. Odysseus cared for by the Phaiakians on Scheria.
Animal and field smells rose from wet wool and oiled jackets, even at the most popular café in downtown Athens. The restaurant was a cavern of noise; the espresso machine, frothing milk, loud conversation. A flash turned my head and I saw the two cuffs of gold snuffed out by her hair as Petra lifted its black mass from her neck. Then they reappeared, the rings of Saturn. She stood up. A man, his hand on the middle of her back, steered her between the tables into the crowded street.
I reached the door of the restaurant just in time to see them pass, like the bracelets lost in her dark hair, through the wall of light at the edge of the square. I watched as they disappeared into the unlit lanes of the Plaka.
It had stopped raining. People were already beginning to wander back out into the streets. Even the moon was emerging. Only the noise of cafés penetrated the darkness, and soon even the loud voices of drinkers dimmed into silence as I followed the dark lanes further into the Plaka, like an ant lost in the black type of a newspaper.
I found myself twisting up the mountain, the narrow market alleys gradually giving way to broken pavement, grass growing between the stones, empty lots between houses. Soon Athens in the valley was barely visible, flickering like moonlight on water, below the giant prow of the escarpment.
Jagged sidewalks, industrial fence, old wire and broken bottles, pinpoints of moonlight. Box gardens, clothing leaning over balconies, kitchen chairs left outside, the flooded remains of a meal forgotten on a small table. The houses were more settled in the rock, more decayed and vital, the higher I climbed. The debris of use, not abandonment.
The road emptied into an urban field littered with broken furniture, cardboard boxes, soggy newspaper. The garbage gave way to wildflowers. I waded through the soaked grass and looked out for a long while at the city below. The air was cool and new.
Then I realized I was sharing the darkness. I knew by their voices that the lovers weren’t young. I didn’t move. The man made his small shout, and a few moments later, they laughed.
It was not the proximity of their intimacy that unlocked me, it was that little laugh. I thought of Petra, turning to me in the dark, her eyes serious as an animal’s. I heard their faint voices and imagined them rearranging each other’s clothes.
On the boat from Idhra I’d overheard one young man explaining to another that in countries of big families husbands and wives often have to sneak from their small houses into the fields to escape the ears of the children. “No first born is conceived in the grass, but all the rest! Besides, a woman likes to look up at the sky.”
I heard the skim of their clothes as they crossed the field.
The light turned flimsy. By the time I found my way back to my hotel, the sky seeped with day.
When we married, Naomi said: Sometimes we need both hands to climb out of a place. Sometimes there are steep places, where one has to walk ahead of the other. If I can’t find you, I’ll look deeper in myself. If I can’t keep up, if you’re far ahead, look back. Look back.
In my hotel room the night before I leave Greece, I know the elation of ordinary sorrow. At last my unhappiness is my own.
For hours, leaning against the cold window, above the thick unmoving Atlantic, I foresee my return.
It’s five-thirty, Naomi’s just getting home. I imagine her at the front door struggling with her keys. A book, perhaps Hugill’s Shanties from the Seven Seas, in one hand. In the other, a bag of groceries. Tangerines, their fragrant skins, their sweet vitamins. Bread creased by the oven’s heat, soft dough forced open from the inside. Naomi’s face pink with cold and mist, the backs of her stockings spattered with slush.
In the night cab from the airport I look out from the back seat of my parents’ car, remembering winter Sundays as a boy. We pass through the haunted emptiness bordering the lit city, pass flat farmland under the congealing November sky. The first starlight is a skin of frost over the fields. My boy’s feet are cold in my boots. Small city lawns, streets narrow with snow. The sound of a walk being shovelled somewhere in the neighbourhood, an idling car.
The cab passes the yellow glow of windows above purple lawns; perhaps Naomi isn’t home, the lights on in every house but ours….
– In Greece I saw someone with a scarf just like yours. I remembered you wearing it. Do you still have it?
– Hundreds of women must have that scarf. It’s from Eaton’s. What’s so important about a scarf anyway?
– Nothing, nothing.
Now, from twenty thousand feet, the ragged edge of the city appears, the wobbly boundary of a cell wall.
In bed I’ll tell Naomi about waterspouts that inhale luminous creatures, seaplants, in their path and become glowing, twisting tubes, swaying across the midnight ocean. I’ll tell her about the half-million tons of water lifted from Lake Wascana and the tornado that rolled up a wire fence, posts and all, like a ball of wool. But not about the couple who hid in their room until the tornado passed, opening their bedroom door to find the rest of the house had disappeared….
Naomi sits in the dark kitchen. I stand in the doorway watching her. She says nothing. It’s November but the screens are still on, damp leaves stuck to the mesh. The screens blur to grey glass and I’m frightened by the way she looks down at her hands on the table.
My wife shifts in her chair, her hair slashing her face in half. And when her face disappears like that, the sound will be in my mouth: Naomi.
I will stop myself from confessing I was on Idhra with a woman, that her hair fell from the edge of the bed to the floor….
Naomi, I remember a story you told me. When you were a little girl you had a favourite bowl, with a design painted on the bottom. You wanted to eat everything, to find the empty bowl full of flowers.
The plane descends in a wide arc.
Once, I saw my father sitting in the snow-blue kitchen. I was six years old. I came downstairs in the middle of the night. There had been a storm while I slept. The kitchen glowed with new drifts piled against the windows; blue as the inside of a crevasse. My father was sitting at the table, eating. I was transfixed by his face. This was the first time I had seen food make my father cry.
But now, from thousands of feet in the air, I see something else. My mother stands behind my father and his head leans against her. As he eats, she strokes his hair. Like a miraculous circuit, each draws strength from the other.
I see that I must give what I most need.