She was half-listening for a piece of news to be inserted between the programs, as the news seemed to be interrupting everything in Toronto these days, and it was mostly about the gay people in the city. The police had done something only a month before that had finally made sense, arresting almost three hundred of those homosexual types in their prancing bath houses. But since then, the city was up in arms about it for some reason, angry protests in the streets at night, a gay rights activist announcing plans to run as a candidate in the provincial elections as a demonstration, a pastor on a hunger strike demanding an investigation into police policies, and, only yesterday, a Gay Freedom Rally, where all kinds of important personages (whom Helena had never heard of, mind you), authors, lawyers, and politicians, were speaking out in favour of the gays. Helena really had no idea what the big deal was; she just hoped her sons didn't see or hear it and get any ideas. Imagine it: Gay rights! If you weren't normal, you didn't get normal rights, thought Helena. That was obvious, wasn't it?
She finished clearing off the table, wiped it downâcareful to find the spot where Yórgos had spilt some orange juiceâdid the few dishes, and even gave the floor a quick sweep. She liked to make an effort whenever she invited future tenants into her house, liked to have the place looking impeccable, because if eleven years as a landlady had taught her anything, it was that tenants were generally the kind of people who were always watching, always looking for an opportunity to overstep the boundaries she set. If you wanted to protect yourself and your property, thought Helena, you had to start at the outset.
Not that she was expecting any problems with the young couple that were about to drop by and sign their lease. The Johnsons had let on that they wanted an apartment to rent just for the time being, while they looked around for a house to buy in the suburbs. They had a two-year-old daughter and the straight-laced air of people who did things by the book, who followed the rules, respected guidelines, due dates. In fact, so much so that when they first came by to see the apartment, and Helena learned that they were new to Toronto, she'd thrown out a few of her own “tenant terms and conditions,” just to see how they would react. She'd watched their responses cautiously, ready to amend the fact that these were justâif they didn't mind anywayâsome of her
personal
requests. But every time she tossed a proviso into the air they simply exchanged a look of mild surprise, shrugged, and agreed. Which was good because when it came time for them to leave, the figures would work out a little better on her side of things, something that, Helena believed, had happened very seldom in her life.
The buzzer, which her son Yórgos was fond of saying sounded exactly like a strike on
The Price Is Right
, let loose with an abnormally long ring. Helena took one last look at the lease papers on the table, a pen resting diagonally across them, and hurried to the door, opening it to a gust of cold air that flecked her welcome mat with a spatter of wet snowflakes. Cedric and his wife were standing shoulder to shoulder in heavy coats, smiling with plastic congeniality, their daughter in her mother's arms, straddling her waist and wearing an overly puffy snowsuit, gazing at Helena the way two-year-old children do.
Helena bent out of the doorway and scowled up at the grey sky. “Stoopid weather.”
Cedric chuckled in accord and held out his hand, shaking Helena's too firmly, as opposed to his wife, Julie, who offered her limp fingers to squeeze, which felt to Helena like the tiny wings of a dead bird.
She let go quickly, smiled. “Come in, come in, it's a freezing out hhere.”
She led them into the kitchen and pulled out the chair in front of the papers for Cedric to sit in. “I hhave to tell you something. You know, in my countryâyou know I come from Greeceâand, I tell you, in Greece, in March, it is already sooooo hot.” She closed her eyes and arced her hand through the air in the shape of a sweltering summer sky.
“But.” She shrugged. “Now I am hhere. Where, in March, it snows. And you know, sometimes, in April, it snows too? You believe it? I khan't believe it.” She laughed to herself. “Is it so cold in . . . ? Uh . . . where you come from again? You tell me Alberta, no? It's big city Alberta?” Helena pulled out the chair even farther and gestured for Cedric to have a seat. “Sit, sit.” She stepped closer to Julie and pinched the child's cheeks, leaning in close. “How are you, Kouklitsa, good?” Then up at Julie. “You guys want some coffee or sometheen?”
“No, thank you,” said Julie, putting her daughter, who had begun to squirm, down onto the ground. “We just had breakfast. But thanks anyway, really.” The little girl clung on to her mother's leg like a sloth to a tree and looked up at the three adults, wide-eyed, mouth open, the cleft below her nostrils glistening.
The adults stared back, smiling, which was a natural enough thing to do, until, Helena thought, the moment had gone on for too long and she broke the child's gaze to look over at Cedric. To her surprise, he didn't look so well, suddenly pale, gawping down at his daughter like she'd just appeared out of nowhere, miraculously.
“Melissa,” he whispered, as if he were alone in the room with her, “baby.” He squatted down to the child's level while both Julie and Helena stood by, confusedly watching him.
He brushed his knuckles across his daughter's cheek, then touched the tip of her nose with his pointer finger. She blinked hard, once, but otherwise continued to scrutinize him as warily as the two women.
Cedric shook his head. “You see? See what you were like before? Hmm? Before you . . . went and . . .” He stopped to chew the inside of his lip. A cartoon explosion bellowed from the television in the other room, followed by a clatter of animated pots and pans caroming off of one another. Birds twittered in the quiet aftermath, flying, presumably, in a halo formation around a character's head.
“You know,” Helena finally broke in uneasily, “hhi think you guys have a good idea to rent apartment for a year. Like this you can take your time and look around, find a nice house for good price, you know? No hurry like this.”
When she met Cedric's eyes, who was still squatting on the ground in front of her, she let out an unnerving simper. “What is it?” Looking up at Julie now. Another simper. “Your hhusband okay?”
Julie, a hand on Melissa's head, looked Cedric over. She seemed to agree that there was something about her husband that was most definitely not okay. He turned his manic attention back to his daughter.
Helena let out a shallow sigh. She suddenly had a bad feeling about this. You see, she thought to herself, you see? She was wrong. These will be bad tenants. Strange man with strange ways. They'll be trouble. Which meant that, somehow, in some way, the Johnsons were going to cost her money. Money that neither she, nor her family, had.
Which (Helena slouching now), anyone had to agree, seemed to be her lot in life. Why was it exactly that she
always
had to be weathering the storm of bad luck or faulty circumstances; and here, of all places, in this frozen country that God had forgotten. But what Helena considered most tragic about this was the fact that it hadn't always been this way. There had been a time, a brief time, when the universe hadn't conspired against her, hadn't revelled in her wanton hardship. And it was a time that she reminisced upon likely more than was healthy. A time that she missed with every Greek bone of her body.
Specifically what she missed was gathering eggs from the chicken coop as a girl, cupping her hand into a tangled nest of fingers and carrying them into the kitchen, gently placing them into a chipped blue bowl on the table; or running home from school to cook lunch for her family, who ran a small farm outside of Kalamata, butchering the worst-laying hen with a method she'd devised herself, which had made her father beam with pride; or the honey melon that he would bring in for breakfast in the summer, stabbing perfect cubes of it and doling them out on the end of a knife, Helena pinching the cold flesh from the end of the blade and placing it in her mouth with a shiver of sweetness; or setting out before sunrise with a wicker basket to pick mushrooms, taking a break when the cicadas started up, looking out through the pines to the landscape beyond, where sheep dotted the scrubland like ant eggs under an overturned rock.
It was all so ideal (or so she remembers), until she was sixteen and one of her cousins moved to Athens to work in a textile factory. Helena's father thought it might be a good idea for her to do the same, make some easy (and much needed) money for the family. So she left her parents' farm and entered the industrial sprawl of the metropolis only to find that she could barely earn her own keep. About to admit defeat, about to return to her family as a failure, her cousin read her a fortuitous ad in the paper that she'd cut out, which was looking for textile workers overseas. The tiny rectangular clip of text said that interviews would take place the following week in Athens. A dazzling bulb of promise lit up in both their minds. Canada.
Helena was one of the youngest women standing in line that day, the queue twisting around corners and filling several hallways of an office building. When it was finally her turn, she wiped the wet of her hands against the sides of her dress and gave a quick glance back at her cousin, who mouthed. “Kali tyhi.” Good luck. She walked into the room to find just one man sitting behind a desk, an enormous bulk of a figure who was so large she couldn't even see, let alone guess at, what kind of chair he was sitting on. She stepped forward, trying not to stare, and placed her application on the desk in front of him. “I . . .” she hadn't meant to speak, “I'm probably too young.”
He ran a heavy finger down her application form to find her age, then looked up at her, staring at her breasts. “I'd say you're old enough.” His accent in Greek was a strange one, and Helena, having never heard anything but local dialects, took it for the inflection of someone who was well educated, opulent. Still watching her, he picked up a rubber stamp, worked it into an inkpad on the desk, and thumped her application so hard that the unseen chair beneath him complained with a crackle. “Hired. We'll send a package in the mail with the details and flight times.” He began writing something on her form and spoke at the papers, “Send the next girl in on your way out.”
Her cousin was hired as well, and the two of them left the building running, out into the street, looking for a phone booth to squeeze into and give their parents the tidings. Helena talked to her father, her tone secretive, as if she were divulging a complicated plot. Her plan was to go to Canada, work for five short years, and come back rich, freeâfree to do whatever she wanted. As reluctant as he was with the idea, he assented because, really, she was right: once she was rich, she'd be free to do whatever she wanted.
The flight from Athens to Toronto was a memorable one. There were seventy-five young women on the same plane, sponsored by the same Canadian company, en route to a city where, it was rumoured, there were skyscrapers as impressive as the ones on postcards from New York City. When they landed in Toronto, they were ushered, still giggling with excitement, into a yellow school bus that had been rented to bring them from the airport to their living quarters, which, like Helena's tiny apartment in Athens, were at the edge of a large industrial tract. Only instead of apartments, these were dormitories, two sets of bunk beds in each room, with a single toilet, bath, and kitchenette assigned to every floor. A man with a clipboard gave them a brusque tour, allocated rooms, and went through the rules, the women looking around at one another while they listened, waiting for someone to complain. The man spoke Greek with the same accent as the one who'd hired them, and when he was finished listing the many rules, he also clarified some of the finer print that they may or may not have been aware of, like the fact that not only were they to live in these quarters that were nothing more than glorified berths, but they also had to pay a substantial rent for the privilege to do so, a rent that managed to carefully tread the line between just affordable and cheaper than any other option available to them in the city. It was then that a few of the bolder women spoke up, asking to see someone in charge. He countered with a terse remark and inferred a threat that was severe enough to silence both present and future griping. Did they happen to be aware, he wondered out loud, that the company could, at any time, strip a worker of her visa and immigration papers, hence taking what the Canadian government viewed as a productive worker who was contributing to its economy and turning her into an illegal noncitizen who was leaching from itâthe very kind of criminal, mind you, the authorities in this country actively pursued? Which was something they should consider before opening their little ungrateful mouths again. After all, this
was
better than jail, wasn't it? Because if it wasn't, then, hey, they were always free to go and battle for immigration themselves. In fact, they were free to do whatever they wanted. So look, see, there was the door, he dared them, go ahead, a slack wrist motioning a flick at the reality on the other side of it, see how long you last out there. The women looked first at one another, then down at the floor.
She worked in sweatshop conditions for almost two years at the textile mill, living with other young women like herself who could afford nothing outside their dormitories but fanciful wishes of finding Greek men to save them. Which was unlikely. It was harder for Greek men to get their papers than it was for women (or so it was said in the dormitories), owing to the country's focus on bolstering its population and the fact that women were the surer bet, being more liable to stay in the country once they started producing offspring. Helena wouldn't get nearly as upset as some of the other women, who saw themselves as simple pawns who had been pencilled into a government stratagem, as an italicized letter in a demographic equation, the margin of its error.