The Broken Book

Ena, Dio, Tria, Tesera, Pente, Exi, Efta, Okto, Enia, Deka, Endeka, Dodeka, DekaTria (Deka + Tria), DekaTesera (Deka + Tesera etc). Any number from 1 to 1 000 000 is always a combination (e.g. 500 = Pendakosies. For more than a thousand you say the number plus the word Chiliades). Phonetics: Forget about the alphabet for a moment and concentrate on the sound. E.g. How much does it cost? Poso kani? Me lene Katerina. Me lene Katerina.

My name is Katerina. As a birthday present the girls and their friends sang me the formal Happy Birthday song for my birthday yesterday—as opposed to the informal version, I suppose. TriandaTria. Thirty-three years old. Between them, Anna and Lil translated as they went:

Long may you live Kyria Katerina

And may you live many years

May you grow old

With white hair

May you spread out everywhere

The light of knowledge

And may everybody say

There, is a wise woman.

Well, I am certainly spreading out everywhere. I am certainly growing fat on cheap Greek wine, psomi, Greek words. My poor head, not one more word, please. Not one more twist of the tongue. Both David and I are still taking lessons from Thanasis, the mayor. Our second year of him coming to the house for our lessons, wearing his one and only tie, full of bluster and self-importance. The girls are often around, sniggering in the background, Lil cannot comprehend why adults have to sit down with their books and pencils just like she does at school. ‘It’s easy, Mama! Just talk!’

Just talk, she says. Just free your stupid English tongue. Isn’t English strewn with thousands and thousands of Greek words? Hasn’t Greek given us the words for science and medicine and botany and technology? Hasn’t Greek given us the language of poetry and art? Ne, Ne! Poso kani? Poso kani?

How I love our beautiful whitewashed house with its bright blue door. How I love the cool damp of the kitchen, the giant flagstones still cool underfoot even on the hottest day. It takes days and days of 100 degree heat for the whole house to grow murky with stifled air, but still the kitchen is dark and cool—some nights I creep down with a blanket to lie alone on the cold, hard floor. I have my kerosene stove, my stone sink, no running water yet (the town well is directly outside the front door—we are frequently woken in the mornings by that chatterbox Soula, and often kept awake by her drawing up the bucket with her chums late at night). I love my kitchen, its battle-scarred table, its earthenware jugs and woven baskets, its little anteroom to the side. A hanging cupboard with a wire mesh door, just like we had all those years ago at Kurrajong Bay. No refrigerator yet, only occasional blocks of ice from the island’s only fridge, located proudly in the main room of Kostas’s shop.

I don’t think I have ever loved a house more. Two entrances, one at the front near the well, which opens into the largest room, with its glorious wooden fireplace. Then into a room which has the other entrance door, placed at the side; then into the kitchen. No connection between the upper and lower floors yet, all of us have to pile out the side entrance (which is enclosed in a courtyard) and up the outside stairs.

Ah, but the roof! The most amazing ascension into the blue, the whitewashed stone houses all around, the hundreds of steps behind and around leading up even higher. The infinite swoop of the sea and the sky, the knowledge that we are but fleeting, elemental as water and air. On the roof at night I feel the pain of trying, of all my moments rich in hurt and joy and incompleteness, heavy with struggle. Up there I try not to yearn for that which is lost but to count what is near. What is near is my daughter Lil’s milky skin, my daughter Anna’s vanishing self. Anna is leaving us second by second, growing into her mature self and the child is dying: the fat baby hands, the tiny teeth, the boneless nose. Let me hold her soft bones one more time before she goes, let me hear her undeveloped voice, her irritating pipe. Let me record how she is before she leaves, my disappearing girl, evanescent, swift as life. Alone on the roof at night I count each day’s fleeting gifts.

I note the dignity of Stavros the donkey boy passing beneath the house, the dark of the streets, the moon revealing his slow progress. Stavros, the boy born with cerebral palsy, son of the donkey keeper, making his shaky way up the path beneath our house. The sound of the donkey’s feet stopping, myself peering over the stone buttressing wall of the roof, watching Stavros removing the hessian bag attached to the saddle, slowly and shakily taking from it the wooden handled broom to sweep up the crumbly mass of donkey shit into the bag. What dignity, what grace. This is the community which embraces the shaky dignified boy, the drooling crone, the retarded girl. This is the place where the boy who stole money from Kostas’s shop so shamed his family that they felt the only recourse was to move away. Seven years later, everybody still talks of the only robber the island has ever known.

This is the place, too, where my fat-bottomed neighbour Soula believes she has the right to walk into my house, unannounced, at any time of night or day. ‘Katerina! Katerina!’ I hear her bellow at the very moment I am trying to capture the perfect word. She wants to give me some eggs, still covered in feathers and shit, or teach me how to make tiri. I don’t want to make bloody cheese, I don’t want to cook and clean any more than I have to. She believes my children to be improperly looked after—hasn’t Anna been baptised yet? Why don’t they go to church? She doesn’t know it but she is teaching me to speak, she is teaching me how to answer back. What are the words for I am busy, you old sticky-beak, leave me alone? I was amazed to learn that she is in fact two years younger than me—I thought she was at least ten years older. Perhaps it is because she is already a widow—her husband, a fisherman, was lost at sea. He may be gone but his presence is everywhere, from Soula’s eternal black widow’s weeds, to his stony photograph on the wall and on the mantelpiece, to Soula’s insistence on quoting his long-gone words. Also, his three children: beefy twelve-year-old twin boys, Theo and Mikos, and bossy little Cassandra, Lil’s best friend. Cassandra is bound to grow up and turn out exactly like her mother; at eight she is already a plump Greek housewife, all jowly chin and disapproving presence.

Let me sing of the pleasures of freshly washed sheets. Let me recite the alphabet of a clean scrubbed house, the tiles newly mopped and gleaming, the beds neatly done like a sum. Praise the cut mountain flowers mourning their roots, the captured bright froth of them blossoming in the jar. Sing of the swept fireplace newly bereft of its ash skirt; the last of summer’s plucked fruits and the sea’s stones on the windowsill, the life of art, the art of life. Still life, life stilled, the earthenware pots, never before so round and whole, still life created by this most lacklustre of ordinary housewives. The rewards of the toil of my fingers: the polished glass, the made beds, the straightened cushions, all brought to momentary order. Life will wreck it all; tumbling life will cause it to crumble into disarray, but pause for a moment, regard! Happiness dwells in the walls of the house, happiness lives in the whitewash, in the skin of its living, breathing walls.

Haven’t had a minute since the lovely Rosanna en famille appeared. She has cast her eye upon everything: our house, our marriage, the girls, our Greek friends, our little expatriate circle—I have felt ourselves to be on display, that I have to have everything in perfect order to justify our choice to live here. Why should that be, I wonder, when I know Rosanna to be the most generous of friends, the least judgemental of women? I suppose it has more to do with me proving myself rather than anything to do with Rosanna, with me needing to show that my choices have as much validity as anyone else’s. We had a party for them during the week and everyone came: the mayor, his wife Maria, all the teachers at the school, every shopkeeper, our new friend Stephanos, the cultured, well-travelled banker from Athens who has just bought the house next to ours as a weekender, and his wife, Katina. Even Lieutenant Manolis came, the fussy senior police official here who issues the residency permits for all foreigners living on the island. He spent the early part of the evening looking like he might arrest someone, but by the end of the night he was dancing with the best of them. There was much showing off, much raucous dancing and plate smashing; at one point Pan climbed on top of the roof and played his lyra. Afterwards we sat in our little walled garden, the night luminous, the air scented with all the flowers we have grown. Stephanos lingered on, although his wife had left; David and I sat close together, the tips of our knees touching. Rosanna was holding Claudio’s hand.

‘I could never leave my country,’ Stephanos said,‘my country is who I am.’

David lit another cigarette. ‘Perhaps that’s because you’re Greek, Stephanos. Not all of us are born so fortunate,’ he said.

‘I disagree. I have travelled to many other places which are just as beautiful, where I have felt that I could live. But I always hasten back to Greece because I do not want to become a divided man.’

Claudio, who had been silent, suddenly spoke. ‘Everyone is divided, Stephanos. To be human is to be divided.’

Stephanos sucked on his cigar and considered this. ‘Perhaps. But one can certainly reduce the number of divisions. One can stay where one is born so that there is one less thing to feel divided about.’

Stephanos turned to me. ‘But surely you are merely suspending reality? Surely the idea of returning to your native shore hangs over you like an unanswered question?’

David laughed at my ferocity. ‘I wish I could feel as certain as you, darling. I can see there might come a time when one feels one doesn’t belong here—but neither does one belong back in Australia.’

‘Citizens of the world then, that’s what you are,’ said Claudio, raising his glass to us.

‘Belonging nowhere,’ said Stephanos. ‘Take my advice, my friends. Go home while you still can or you will end up having no home at all.’

‘Oh, I don’t see any reason why they should go home,’ Rosanna said. ‘From where I sit I think Kate and David are living in paradise.’

David and I smiled at each other, convinced for the moment that it might be true.

Ever since Rosanna left, everything has fallen apart. Perhaps it was the strain of feeling I had to show her the face of perfection, but I don’t think her leaving and my little trough of despondency are necessarily linked—I think it’s more to do with life’s natural peaks and troughs. Last night with the girls was awful, awful … What a gulf between one’s dream of motherhood and its daily practice.

Am I a hothead? Is David a hothead too? Of course! At our worst both of us are full of passionate intensity, easily roused, our nerves practically standing up and waving—why should I be surprised that our children are like us, all teeth and blood? Last night things got out of control so quickly I felt winded, as if I had been unexpectedly punched.

Anna and I have always had a difficult time of it. Is she too like me, or not like me enough? I can spend all day comfortably with Lil, but with Anna, everything I do is wrong, wrong, wrong. Yesterday started badly; she kept waking up in the night complaining about an earache. This is the very thing that always makes me want to rush back to civilisation—what if anything should happen to the girls? What if they should need a doctor in the middle of the night? There is no hospital here and only one ‘doctor’, a retired ancient specimen from Athens who is very deaf. Last summer I was almost blind with the most appalling conjunctivitis and Soula’s peasant remedy of the sap of vine leaves had no effect whatsoever. ‘You must cry the fullest tears to wash out the eye,’ the old doctor told me while I sat there foolishly hoping for antibiotic drops.

In the night, cradling a weeping Anna, I prayed that her ear was not so badly infected that her eardrum would burst. I had some ancient aspirin tablets left over from London and I gave her two in a big glass of water, hoping that children were allowed to take aspirin. I couldn’t remember! I was panicking, thinking I would get the first boat to Athens in the morning.

In the morning she was perfectly well. No temperature, no earache, the whole thing was probably the result of a nightmare from which she could not properly awaken. Anyway, she was fine by the morning, a bright happy colour, but clearly she did not want to go to school. ‘Can I stay home with you, Mama?’ she asked in such a plaintive way that I mentally put aside my work and agreed. I wondered—not for the first time—if she was happy here, if we have placed her in jeopardy through selfish desires of our own. When she is older will she curse me for a childhood spent flying through the air, hanging on to my aspiring coat tails? On the surface at least she seems happy enough, slipping effortlessly into this life of the elements. She is still young enough, too, to regard me as her moveable house; wherever I am is her home. Well, anyway, Lil was already running off up the hill to school before I had time to think, holding hands with portly Cassandra without a backward glance. David was off, up the ladder to his studio on the roof, which left Anna and me.

‘What would you like to do today? We’ll have a special day to ourselves, just Mummy and Anna,’ I said, stroking the last of her wispy, disappearing baby hair.

It was wet, cold; the last thing I felt like was a picnic. ‘I’m afraid the weather’s terrible, darling.’

I continued to stroke her hair but she flung me off. ‘You’re a liar! You said it was my special day!’

I examined my conscience: was I saying no because of my fear of her catching cold or because of my own dislike of going out in the rain?

‘Oh, all right, let’s go,’ I said, already growing bad-tempered. I got our boots, our raincoats, our rain hats, and started packing up a lunch. This is the time of year when food is at its worst—the last of the summer fruits are going, the winter vegetables are yet to come. So, psomi, a withered old tomato, some halva, two boiled eggs. I was in the kitchen getting this together and Anna was at the table, bleating.

‘She has not,’ I said. ‘I put it away carefully in your room. Why don’t you start putting your own things away?’

She pushed her chair back and rushed from the room. ‘Where did you put it? Where?’

‘On your chest of drawers!’ I yelled, growing more bad-tempered by the minute. I heard her slam the outside door, then I heard her thundering about upstairs. She must have been flinging open cupboards, slamming drawers shut, generally behaving as if she had misplaced the bloody crown jewels.

‘Where? Where?’ I heard her screaming, through the floor. Then she came thundering downstairs again. ‘Where did you put it, you vlaca!’

I put down the knife. ‘Don’t call me vlaca, please. It’s rude.’ (Roughly, it means ‘stupid’ or ‘dummy’. In its mildest sense at least—it can also mean ‘moron’.)

I slammed the knife down, wiped my hands and stalked out of the kitchen, out the door, up the outside stairs, to her room. Her papers were exactly where I said they would be.

She looked at the floor. ‘Sorry,’ she said in a surly voice, barely more than a whisper.

I kept walking. ‘You’ve just had breakfast! I’m sorry but you’ll have to wait.’

‘It’s not fair!’ she said. ‘I’m hungry and you said it was my special day!’

I tried to breathe, slow and deep, the bloody rain all the time washing down the back of my neck. ‘It’s not far to the cove, Anna. I’m sure you can wait.’

And with that she ran off down the lane, full of righteous, wounded anger, her little back stiff with pride. I stalked after her and in this way we finally came to the cove. We walked without speaking past the figs at the corner, past the rocks and the cave where we swim. Our feet followed the curve of the road which runs around the island, the sandy, rocky unpaved road where we walk all our days. I tried to raise my eyes to heaven, to the beauty of the sea, to the figure of my little girl striding so purposefully ahead. Why do I find you so difficult, I asked her yellow raincoated back, why do I find it easier to mother your sister rather than you? Was this why I was so instinctively jealous of my own sister? It’s not that I love Anna less than Lil—in fact because my love for Anna is so hard won it sometimes feels infinitely more precious—but, treacherously, I enjoy Lil more.

As we approached the cove I caught up with Anna and said, ‘Don’t ever talk to me like that again.’

She looked at me, surprised, as if she had forgotten what she said. She nodded, momentarily cowed.

We got there, we sat on a rock, we ate our lunch. Anna thawed out, as she always does, gathering sticks to throw into the waves, a dried fig leaf which we used to make a little boat. As we launched it into the sea I said, ‘One day, when you are very old, you can tell your grandchildren that you once sailed a boat with your mother into the Saronic Sea.’

She looked at me blankly, a young girl with no use for time. We knelt together on the wet gritty sand looking at our frail boat as the rain fell. Suddenly she turned to me and said: ‘I don’t care if I die, Mama, because then I can go to heaven and sit on a cloud.’ She stood up, gave me a kiss, and ran towards the water.

Well! What happiness is this when Lil comes home from school and immediately bursts into tears because Anna triumphantly gloats that she has been to the cove with Mama? ‘It’s not fair!’ cries Lil. ‘I never get to go!’

Isn’t this the cry of humanity itself? Isn’t this the cry of the world? It’s not fair! I don’t have enough land. Enough success, enough money, enough love! Surely this is the crux of all humanity’s woes—economic, religious, social, political, personal—that someone, somewhere, feels that there is not enough to go around? In Lil’s cry, in Anna’s; in the faint, long-ago childish cries of Ros and myself, someone feels themselves to be standing too far outside the warming light.

From worse to worser. Daddy has gone off to the waterfront to join the other stateless geniuses. Mummy is home with the children, gritting her teeth. ‘You were the one who wanted them!’ he said, smiling, a joke with a wire in it.

‘Bye, Daddy! Bye!’ the girls cried as we settled around the fire, ready for stories. Earlier I had promised to take both Lil and Anna to the cove for a picnic on the weekend, in order to shut Lil up. ‘I’m going to take Scruffy,’ Lil said. ‘He’ll get wet!’ Anna replied. We were reading The Little Prince on the sofa and Anna said she intended to become a nurse to tend any pilots who should fall to earth around us. I was just getting to the part where the Little Prince describes his people, when there was a knock at the door. ‘Sit quietly and read please,’ I said. ‘Anna, keep reading to Lil.’

It was Stephanie, the French composer from the house on the corner. We have known each other since we first arrived, yet somehow we have never become friends: I always know it is her at the door because hardly anyone ever knocks. ‘Excuse me, Katerina, but I was wondering if you could borrow to me any kerosene? My stove has exploded! It is good that I have a second appliance!’

I led her into the kitchen, even though I could hear a fight breaking out in the other room. She began a long story about how she normally never ventures out alone at night; she heard another girl was raped last summer by some of the naval cadets from the island’s naval academy. I was listening to the sounds in the other room, only half listening as I filled her tin.

When I opened the door to the front room I saw a feathery rain. The girls were having a pillow fight and had split some cushions; duck feathers or goose feathers or whatever feathers they were flew up to the roof, down to the rug, landed in their hair like confetti. They had knocked over and broken a pottery vase, my favourite blue one I bought in Dieppe, a picture was off the wall and the clock on the mantelpiece was in danger of falling too; every cushion, every rug, every sofa cushion had been ripped from its moorings to fly with the feathers round the room.

They ignored me and continued to whack each other with abandon. ‘Anna! Elizabeth! Stop at once!’

I was screaming now, at the top of my voice. ‘Right! That’s it! We are not going to the cove on Saturday! Did you hear that?’

They stopped immediately and Anna flung herself, shrieking, prostrate on the floor. ‘Oh, please, Mummy! We didn’t know! We didn’t know!’

‘You didn’t know what?’ I screamed. ‘You didn’t know you weren’t supposed to wreck the room?’

At which point the childless French girl opened the door to the screaming mother and her weeping children.‘Get upstairs now!’ I yelled at them, and they ran screaming from the room. Why must girls scream so much?

I followed her to the door then turned on my heel and flew up the stairs like a mad woman. ‘Anna! You are eight years old! Old enough to know better!’

Why were these words so quickly in my mouth? Haven’t I heard them somewhere before?

‘I hate you! I hate you! I am never going to bed, ever!’ Lil was shouting, refusing to move from the top of the stairs. Anna was there too, holding on to the railing like a chained suffragette willing to die for her cause.

‘Anna, I will give you five. One. Two. Three.’ I was trying to count slower. ‘Four …’ Usually by four she had stopped whatever it was that she was doing.

I was up the stairs like an avenging angel, wrenching her arm free. She turned herself into a starfish so that I could not carry her up the stairs; Lil was simply standing there screaming at the top of her lungs. I was blindly wrestling with my eight-year-old daughter on the outside stairs in the cold rain, trying to manhandle her into her room; my other child was screaming hysterically. Why was I surprised that Soula burst through the side door, her kind Greek heart bent on rescue?

‘Katerina? Katerina?’ she cried, in all her black presence, in all her puzzled face and Greek neighbourly closeness. My Greek completely deserted me and I started bellowing to her in English, ‘Thank you for your assistance, I am all right, I do not need your help, thank you!’

Reluctantly she closed the door, by which time I had managed to frogmarch my daughters up the stairs. Lil still refused to get into bed; I flung her down upon the bed, pushed a blanket over her, and tucked her in. She pushed it straight off, I tucked it back in, she pushed it off and attempted to get up again. I tucked her back in but this time I physically held her down, a grown woman holding down a seven-year-old. I was unhinged! I was slapping her hard on the bottom with my open palm and she was screaming. Anna was sobbing in bed and then I was sobbing too, the three of us, howling at the moon. I crept into bed with Lil and she was still weeping, her little chest heaving with hiccups.

For much of today I have been sitting here wondering where everything went wrong, at which particular point I might have prevented the whole thing from happening. Was it at the start of the day, when Anna said she was hungry? Should I have simply given her something to eat? Should I have found her papers for her, even earlier than that; should I have calmly surveyed the room when I opened the door on the pillow fight and not lost my temper like I did?

My children have shown me to myself, at my best and at my very worst. They have revealed my fullest self, in all its failed entirety, myself writ large, or rather myself writ painfully small. Motherhood has forced me to cast my eye back towards my own childhood, to the day Ros and I were fighting so much our mother threatened to ring the children’s home on our new telephone to ask them to come and pick us up. We continued to fight and it was only when she picked up the receiver that we flung ourselves hard at her feet.

Once I thought my mother was monstrously wicked for doing this, but if I’d had a telephone last night I would have picked it up and unhesitatingly pretended to summon the police.

I wonder why I have not been in the right frame of mind to practise spreading out everywhere the light of my knowledge. Right now Kyria Katerina feels like she will never practise anything again.

Soula is taking the girls for the night—she’ll give them dinner and promises to take them all to the cove in the morning (that’ll be a sight—I don’t think Soula has walked further than the port since 1947!).