The Final Prophecy
Sia, 87
Perth, 2015
Sia was sipping orange juice in her bed in the nursing home. She couldn’t believe she was in this place with all these old people. She watched them staggering past her door. They were wrinkly and bent over and definitely on their way out.
She thought of the last letter she’d received from her sister, Eleftheria, before she had news of her passing. She thanked her for being a good sister and for keeping her promise. But my skin, once soft, is now taken by old age, My hair turns white from black. And my heart is weighed down and my knees, which once were light to dance as fawns, do not lift. I groan for this. But what can I do? A human being without old age is not a possibility.
Oh, Eleftheria.
Sometimes when Sia thought about where she started and where she ended up, it seemed that there was not so much in the middle. She thought her life would feel longer, somehow. Sia watched Days of Our Lives, even the recaps. But she knew what had happened the day before and of course she could guess what was going to happen the day after. People had affairs, people went into comas and woke up, people got married and divorced, people had babies, people loved and lost, people died young and old. It was all the same script over and over again. That is just what people did, and perhaps why it was so comforting to watch while she ate her bowl of yoghurt. This was a beautiful flavour – her favourite – natural yoghurt with a ribbon of caramelised fig stirred through. Delicious.
In some ways, Sia still felt young, like that girl on the mountainside burying her treasure and waiting for the day when she would come to Australia. When she would see her father again and start her new life. It came back to her in flashes, that day. There was something special about it. It was when she went to see the kafetzoú. She remembered her words, all the prophecies. They had all happened, except the last one.
She had always wanted to go back to that day, as that was the moment she felt most free, like she had her whole life ahead of her, waiting to look forward to. She thought about it often. The motion of the clouds, the fresh spring grass, the sky.
It was funny how things ended up. Now she was lying in a bed beside Koula, who commanded everyone around her, including Evan and Athena (by phone in New York) and the nurses and even the doctors.
Sia felt that she and her aunt had perhaps spoiled Koula. But Sia just wanted to protect her. Sia thought of Trina every day. She wished things had been different.
Sia’s mind bounced back and forth from Aeaea to the early years with Koula to being in the nursing home. She couldn’t control where her mind went. It did its own thing now, back and forth, like a feather in the wind. Koula told her that she was looking for treasure in her garden in her underwear and that’s why Sia was in the nursing home. Surely not. Surely Sia would not do anything so silly. But she might have. She wasn’t sure what was real and what was a dream anymore. Sometimes she would blink and she would be somewhere else. Right now, she was in the nursing home, smelling the roses that Koula had left for her.
But then she was in her old house. The one with red bricks and a wide verandah. Koula was soon crawling around and playing with the other children in the street. Sia and Thea Tasoula hovered over her. Sia had this feeling that someone would come and try to take her away. Sia never let Koula out of her sight.
On Koula’s birthday, Sia had an afternoon tea party with the Greek women she was close to. Everyone brought a gift and told Sia what a great job she was doing, especially as she was still mourning her sister.
She and her aunt were cleaning up from the afternoon tea, washing and drying plates and sweeping the floor. Koula was already asleep after a long afternoon of playing with the neighbourhood children.
Before he even opened the door, Sia sensed him there, on the porch.
She reached over and opened the front door.
‘How was the tea party?’ Michalis asked, cigarette hanging from his lips as he pushed past Sia and into his chair.
‘You could have come back to celebrate Koula’s birthday with us,’ Sia said as she wiped down the kitchen benchtop.
‘In Greece we don’t have birthday celebrations. We only have name days for the boys.’
‘I’ll leave,’ said her aunt, who took a plate of leftover baklavá as she walked out the door, shaking her head.
‘I told you, I want sons,’ he said, suddenly behind Sia. ‘I’ve waited long enough.’
He reeked of whisky and sweat, of tobacco, of everything she didn’t want near her. Sia stiffened.
‘And I told you: I do not think I am able to have more children after the first birth. I am sorry I cannot give you sons,’ she said, looking him straight in the eye. His eyes meant nothing to her. It was the easiest thing in the world to tell him that she had given birth to Koula and she was his child.
‘Who will look after the yoghurt factory when it’s finished?’ he asked.
‘We will make sure Koula marries someone good to take it over,’ Sia said.
‘I want to try and have a boy,’ he said, unbuckling his belt. ‘Let’s try now.’
Sia winced as he pushed her onto the table where she had laid out everything so nicely for the party that afternoon. She tried not to cry and just let him do it and get it over with. She didn’t want to end up with a purple face. Again. And she was his wife. It was part of the arrangement.
When he’d finished, he stumbled off to their bedroom and she heard the creak as he fell onto their bed.
Sia went to the bathroom, washed herself and tried to take it all out of her. She did not want his children. She would not have his children.
_____
Sia inhaled the scent of the roses in her room in the nursing home. Every time Koula brought roses in from her garden, Sia would think of all the weddings she had been to. Koula and Evan’s. Athena and Richard’s. Sia thought of Trina and the roses she lay at her grave. She thought of her dear sister Eleftheria and how she had never seen her again after leaving Aeaea.
She understood why her father had left Greece and brought them out here. You could do anything in Australia. You just had to work hard. Hard for yourself, for your family. It helped if you worked hard on your English. Sia always tried very, very hard.
Sia had planted one olive tree from a cutting, orange and lemon trees and many flowers. There were new flowers in Australia that she had never seen before. They were exotic and fragrant. Frangipani. She’d learned to say that word in English. Its stub had eventually grown and flowered. Those flowers had beautiful perfume. They reminded her of another flower, with a similar shape and scent, but smaller and whiter, that was on the path through the forest on Aeaea.
Sia’s mind bounced back and forth.
One minute, she was in the forest, collecting firewood. The next, she was watching the workers in the yoghurt factory. Then she was at Koula’s wedding, hoping for the best after Koula had stolen the other girl’s máti. Oh, Koula.
Sometimes Sia wondered what God thought of her after all these years. If she would be punished for claiming Trina’s child as her own, saving her dignity and memory. Or if she would be punished for the other thing.
She wondered if, after everything, it actually mattered.
‘Sometimes women die in childbirth,’ she told the woman sitting next to her bed. ‘My sister died in childbirth. I looked after her child for her. A baby girl. I promised to look after her.’
The woman frowned, as if what Sia was saying didn’t make sense to her, but Sia knew that it was the truth. Maybe this woman in her bedroom didn’t want to hear it, because sometimes people do not want to hear the truth.
The woman turned into Koula. ‘What do you mean, Mama? What do you mean?’
‘Oh, nothing,’ said Sia.
Sia remembered another time when Michalis came home after too much drinking, which was often. He swaggered around the place and hit things randomly with his fists. Sometimes Sia was in the way. The pain was shocking. Nobody said anything to her, though. Nobody offered to help Sia or speak to Michalis about how to behave. Everyone just let him do his thing.
Only once he lunged at Koula, and Sia hit him on the head with a frying pan. He passed out on the kitchen floor and didn’t even remember it when he woke up.
She knew that she would have to find a way to get rid of him or it would be like this forever. Greek women did not leave their husbands. She did not want to shame her father. But, more importantly, she had to care for Koula.
Sia knew all the herbs and plants that grew in the forest. She just had to find those herbs, make that potion. That’s all she needed to do.
But she couldn’t find the right herbs anywhere. The plants were all different in Australia. She left Koula with her aunt and went on long walks in the bush and in Kings Park. She foraged for other herbs, but never the one she wanted. It was a completely different environment. She knew they didn’t have it here.
She wrote to Eleftheria, asking for her to send a letter full of it. She posted the letter. Eleftheria was her only hope and she knew it would be many months until she got a reply.
One afternoon, Koula was playing out the front and the postman arrived. Koula ran inside with a puffy letter and Sia’s heart surged. She snatched it from Koula.
‘Mama, is it from Thea Eleftheria?’
‘Koula, can you go next door and ask Thea Tasoula if she needs anything from the shop?’
She took a deep breath and opened the letter. Her sister had written a letter, news of home, and no mention of the herb that she had stuffed the envelope full of.
‘Oh, Eleftheria,’ Sia said out loud. ‘Thank you.’
Sia never knew she had it in her, but what choice did she have? Was it really a choice? Live with abusive husband for the rest of her life, wait until he killed her or hurt Koula?
She crushed the leaves, thankful that the weeks in the mail had dried them out to their required texture.
One of Michalis’s favourite meals was manéstra. Sia bought a whole chicken, roasted it, cooked the rice-shaped pasta and made the tomato sauce.
After Koula was asleep, Sia sprinkled all the powder into the sauce. She stirred it three times and then left the dinner on the stove in the usual place for him to eat when he returned from the pub.
She stayed up, awake in her bed, waiting for the slamming of the front door. The swearing and the pungent aroma of whisky throbbing through the air. The smashing of a glass. The scooping of the dinner into his plate. The cutlery on china. The slump to the tiled floor.
Sia closed her eyes and passed into sleep, waiting until the morning light to see if it had worked. If it had, she would sleep peacefully. If it had not, he would wake up, stumble into their bed and she would know about it.
Sia dreamed of a child, painting. She dreamed of a park with red and golden leaves. Somewhere she had never been.
‘Mama,’ Koula said, pulling on her arm. ‘Baba is asleep on the floor of the kitchen and he won’t move.’
Sia shot upright and looked at the empty side of the bed next to her. Her hand ran over the smooth sheet, then she stood up and followed Koula into the kitchen. He lay flat, fully clothed. His skin was a slightly yellow colour. The dinner was on the table, the plate empty, the fork next to him on the tiled floor. She cried as she lifted his cold arm off the kitchen floor.
‘Quick, Koula, run next door to get Thea Tasoula. We need to call the ambulance.’
She quickly soaked the saucepan, plate and fork in hot soapy water and put them away in the cupboard.
Sia cried in front of the neighbours and the doctor and her father. But really she was crying for the lost dream. Of what could have been if she had been able to make her own choice. Or if her father had liked her enough or valued her enough to choose her someone better.
She did not cry for her husband.
Koula asked lots of questions and Sia directed them to the priest. He had all the answers. She stroked Koula’s hair when they fell asleep at night.
‘Daddy is with the angels,’ she said. ‘It’s just us now.’
And, with great relief, she would lock the doors at night and know that if a drunk, violent man showed up, she did not have to let him in, did not have to let him touch her.
Being left to fend for herself and her daughter was far better than letting Michalis near money or letting him drink it all away.
‘It’s a shame,’ said her father. ‘Michalis was a good worker. Who will help me now? We need men in this family to help with the yoghurt factory. It can’t just be me.’
Sia vowed that she would never marry again. She would prefer to work to the bone every day of her life than be in that situation for a second time. And nobody wanted to match with widows anyway. So she was safe.
And she kept it with her. But now, later, the words just seemed to come out. She had lost her filter, her internal editor, that she had relied on all this time.
‘I killed my husband,’ she said to the woman next to her bed. ‘I don’t regret it. I did it to protect my daughter.’
‘No, your husband died of a heart attack. He drank too much,’ the woman said.
‘That’s what they all think,’ Sia said.
Sometimes the woman would be Koula, all grown up. Other times she was a stranger. She hadn’t seen her granddaughter, Athena, for a long time. She had gone to London and then to America, each time with a different man. You could do that now. Athena had beautiful children, a boy and a girl, but Sia had not seen them since they went to New York.
When Sia realised that she was in a nursing home and looked in the mirror she saw the face of her mother and her grandmothers from her childhood. They were still in Sia; they had been all along, waiting for her. She hoped that Trina thought she had done a good job of looking after Koula. Sia had done her best. She made sure that Koula married a good man. Evan wasn’t a drinker or a womaniser. He had worked hard at the yoghurt business and was a nice person. Every day he had done the right thing.
_____
She looked at the máti on her bracelet. Sia, Koula, Athena and Clara all had them now. They were the four. Sia now realised that she wouldn’t be here for the fourth prophecy. It was for Clara.
Sia smelled the scent of roses as the nurses fussed around her. They were beautiful garden roses, fragrant and colourful. She thought of all the weddings she had been to, the babies that had arrived, the marriages that had not worked the way that they were meant to, the deaths. There had been so many roses, so many moments, so many colours. She couldn’t remember them all individually, but they were one big rainbow bunch now.
She was ready to see Trina and Eleftheria. It had been such a long time. She had so much to tell them. They were ahead of her, waving, calling out that dinner was ready, it was time to come down from the mountainside, back to the table in their whitewashed stone house. She skipped down the path, through the olive trees, into the golden dusk and followed them inside.