There were deep green bushes and rough patches of grass, the unripe strawberries wore their white crowns, cotton bolls sprouted in between the cracked pavement. They reminded me of your beard, that could never grow evenly. I remember a grocer in his truck selling watermelons and you asking for the sweetest one, so that we could have it for dessert. I loved the evenings. The cuckoos would sing. People would light little fires and grill their fishes or their meats. During the cold mornings, the air was sweet, saturated with the smoke from the fireplaces. Yaya was out in the front yard, smoking. You were gutting the fishes in the backyard, and I was happy.
Things happened on a grand scale at St. Champaign. The biggest watermelons were there, the juiciest tomatoes, the fattest goats. The shops were far away and the houses remote. It was quiet most of the time. Your backyard was a jungle, where a lonely pine tree stood. We would walk to the beach, and you would speak to your fishermen friends. You would ask them about their day, and I would watch their hands, the dirt in between their fingertips. Most of them were sunburnt, and they smelled of ouzo.
At St. Champaign, I thought I would live forever. The sea drowned the city noises. There were no tyrannical buildings here; there was no aggressive honking. No one yelled and no one swore. My body stretched into a timeless dough. That was until I stepped on a sea urchin and its spine ripped through my heel. You ran to me, kissed my forehead, and said not to cry because I was big now. I sniffled.
“Which one did it,” you asked as you took a knife out of your pocket. I shook my head, not knowing, wiping my runny nose with the back of my hand.
“Well, then,” you said as you knelt. With your bare hands you pulled a couple of sea urchins from their rock. You started working on them right away by cutting them through the mouth. Once one of them was opened, you washed its insides with sea water.
“See, those are its intestines,” you showed me with your knife. I think I was too nauseated to notice the sting in my foot. I watched you as you washed off their innards, until there was nothing left but some egg-shaped balls in the colour of coral. “The eggs,” you explained as you gave me one to eat. “They are not so dangerous now, are they.” I realised I’ve had them before, but I never knew where they came from. “You can only do this during the full moon, that is when they are at their most pregnant.”
“Does it hurt? Do they feel pain?”
“Well, it hurt you first, didn’t it?”
On the way back, you were quiet. You did this sometimes. Dad did it, too. You fell quiet, so I did. You carried me with my beach bucket full of sea water and urchins. You said we would have them at home, with olive oil, and lemon, and some bread. Yaya would like that.
When we were finally home, the first thing you did was place me gently on the sofa. Yaya came through the kitchen, beating her hands on her chest.
“Ah, my little girl!” She gasped, “that is the last time you go into the sea without your shoes. I told you, I told you, but you just didn’t listen, did you, did you? And your pappous, ah aman, what an idiot this man is.”
“Come, come, now, she is fine,” you said nonchalantly with the bottle of surgical spirit at hand. We used to keep it in the cabinet in the downstairs bathroom, but you moved it whenever dad visited. I thought you knew I was setting fires in the sink, watching the blue flames dance, before drowning them in water. I learned that there was a word for that. Pyromaniac. I thought I had been found out, but you never mentioned it.
You put my foot in warm water and then took a little pin and burnt its tip with your lighter, to sterilise it, you said. I nodded, trying to be brave. After all, you never cried, and I wanted to be more like you.
“We will go swimming tomorrow,” you mentioned casually as you were prodding around with the pin. I wanted to scream. Instead, I breathed steadily through my nose. “But there will be a challenge for you. This time, you won’t be wearing your arm bands.”
* * *
I was the last one to wake up the following morning. It was my yaya’s voice that I could distinguish between the sizzling sound of frying eggs and clanking pans.
“You have finally lost it,” she was yelling, “so, now you want to teach her how to swim without her arm bands? Her mother would kill you if she knew. She hardly knows how to ride her bicycle!”
“She will be fine,” you insisted, “she has to learn at some point. And that’s how I taught Maria, too.”
I mentally agreed, not knowing that this would be the first day I would think of death. I put on my swimsuit and didn’t even eat my eggs. You said it would be better – swimming on an empty stomach, that is, otherwise I would have to wait for an hour. When I got hungry , you gave me a banana.
“That should be fine,” you remarked. “Not as heavy as eggs.”
On our way to the beach, we passed a flock of sheep, and I stopped to feed them. You took off your loafers to get the gravel out. You looked towards the sun and smiled. Your naked shoulders glistened from the sweat. They were red, burnt, yaya said, but you never wore sunscreen. I looked up, too. I had never noticed that the pine trees had plastic see-through bags, and inside there was a liquid I couldn’t make out.
“Resin,” you said. “It is like,” a pause, “a bag of tears, I suppose.”
Why are they crying, are they in pain, I thought but didn’t say anything.
Once we were at the beach, you started blowing my arm bands.
“I thought I wouldn’t be needing them.”
“Just for the beginning,” you explained, pointing at a rock, “until we are there. That is where I taught your aunt to swim.”
The waters were clean. Anchovies were swimming around our feet. I floated. You had once told me that the sea was good, that it rolled with love, that it was like the belly of a sleeping cat: rising and falling. I asked why dad loved it so much. Because it makes him feel small, you said, small and big at the same time. I didn’t know what that meant, I didn’t ask.
We reached the rock and started removing the arm bands. Suddenly, I was no longer floating. I was breathing quickly. You noticed.
“It is okay, trust me. Look at this big old rock.”
You spoke to the rock. You liked it. You said it was a good rock. Many years later, I wondered how a rock could be good or bad. It was just a big rock. But no, to you it was a good rock, and you would pat it like a dog. Sometimes I thought you were mad.
“He will help you swim.”
“How?”
“He will help you stay afloat. When you feel like you are sinking, just hold onto him. Work on your feet. Like so, it is like riding a bicycle. Make that motion.”
I wasn’t listening anymore; I was already gone. I realized I didn’t have control of my limbs. You weren’t helping. You were watching. The rock didn’t help me stay afloat. I was moving like a distressed octopus that is repeatedly thrown onto the floor. The waves lashed onto me. I clung onto the rock for dear life until the waves subdued. And then I had to let go. I could vaguely hear your voice: well done, you are doing so well, that’s it, just keep moving your arms and legs. It didn’t help. Before I knew it, I was sinking. I was sinking, and I thought I was drowning. I wouldn’t get to see yaya in the garden and I wouldn’t smell the morning air. There was water in my nostrils, in my mouth. I thought I was tasting blood. I flapped my arms. I tried to scream.
You were so calm, so composed.
“Keep going,” you said.
And so I did. I kept going.
* * *
I opened my eyes.
“This is all that is left,” Barba Takis told me, looking down. “This is the last one I own.”
The locals had all been gathered. We were giving them food and water supplies. Between shifts, firefighters were sleeping in what used to be coffee shops or taverns. The music of Evia on a hot summer’s day used to be the sound of cicadas. High-pitched, relentless, they would shrill and shriek. A veil of silence had fallen upon the island now. The cicadas were quiet. The only sound was the hushed whispers, the creak of people stepping on the burnt twigs. Occasionally, you would hear coughs and people trying to stifle their cries.
The sea of pine trees was gone, and I couldn’t tell you. There was only one sad pine left standing, surrounded by the carcasses of the charcoaled trunks. Barba Takis was holding the plastic bag close to his chest; the plastic bag with the resin. I looked around me in disbelief, I realized you were gone. You had been gone many years now. You were gone a year after you taught me how to swim, but you said we would always have this, that we would always be here.
I couldn’t look at Barba Takis. “They have all left,” he said, glancing at his hands. “My children, and they aren’t coming back. Well, I guess you aren’t coming back either, are you. But you left so long ago, it doesn’t matter.”
He said he would stay, even if the entire world forgot him, left him behind. He didn’t believe in anything anymore, not even God. You were on my mind and that lone pine tree in our backyard. The white house with the blue windows was blackened now. I stood in front of it, but not for long. There wasn’t any bleating anymore. The stray dogs no longer barked, and there were no cats on the rooftiles. I should have come sooner, I thought. I shouldn’t have been angry at you for not wearing your sunscreen, for not going to the doctor when your mole started growing larger-than-life.
If you had been saved, maybe they would have, too. I pictured the strands of possibilities. If one thing had happened differently, then everything would be different. The trees would be here, you would be here, your fishermen friends, the grocer, we would all be here. That is nonsense, you would have told me. The clearest I had heard your voice in years. This is bigger, bigger than you and me. That is what you said when the financial crisis happened, when people rushed to the food banks, when my yaya was lamenting what the future would look like even though we were comfortable enough. It isn’t about you, you said.
I looked at our house and tried to remember what it looked like. I listened out for the cicadas. It was quiet.
I made my way towards the sea.
This short story was originally short listed for the Hemingway Shorts competition and was published in the subsequent collection. You can find it in Hemingway Shorts, Volume 7: A Collection of Short Stories From New and Engaged Writers in the Best Tradition of Ernest Hemingway.
Of Ivory & Gold 