Black Butterflies (5 page)

They both look at Eleftheria, who remains motionless, snoring ever so quietly.

‘Ah. They should make it longer! Three Two One. Three Two One. Does anyone want some water?’ Roula is up and jigging to the closing music.

Marina has forgotten she is there.

‘Yes, please, Roula.’ Bobby shifts in his seat.

‘
Do you need a hand?’ Marina asks.

‘
No thanks. Grandma?’ Roula raises her voice. ‘Do you want some water?’ There is a low sound from the room beyond, and Roula takes some glasses from a cupboard and fills them from a plastic bottle by the door.

‘
I can’t understand a word Zoe senior says. Zoe can’t understand a lot of what she says either, although she pretends she can. But Roula has whole conversations with her,’ Bobby whispers to Marina.

Roula puts a glass of water on the table for each of them.

‘Oh brilliant, I love this!’ Marina follows Roula’s gaze, which is fixed on the screen again, now showing a Turkish soap opera badly dubbed into Greek. The synchronisation is so bad that the man looks like he is speaking the woman’s words, and vice versa. Marina laughs. Roula tells her to ‘Shh’, and sits enraptured.

Marina indicates the water and asks Bobby if he needs a hand, and he nods. She puts it to his lips and lets him drink before taking a drink of her own.

‘So did he die by the might of God, or the might of man?’ Bobby asks, licking water from his lips.

‘
Who?’ Marina looks at Bobby and back to the television to see if she has missed something. She doesn’t know the series and has no idea who he is talking about.

‘
No, your husband, you dizzy flower,’ Bobby says.

‘
Oh, him. It was another daft idea he had with Mitsos. They were always scheming to make money. The last scam was fishing. Using dynamite. They thought they were so clever. Drop the dynamite in the water, boom …’ Marina adds some hand gestures to bring to life the image of the explosion, spilling water on her skirt. It feels cool as it soaks through to her thigh. ‘And the dead fish float to the surface, and you gather them in a net.’ Marina sighs wearily. ‘So they were at Mitsos’ house getting ready for the first trial, and they bound this dynamite up in a package, and as a joke Manolis threw it to Mitsos and said, and these were his last words mind you, “English Rugby!” So Mitsos threw the dynamite back and Manolis missed the catch and that was that. Mitsos lost one arm and three fingers off his other hand, and an eye. I lost my husband, and Eleni and Artemis lost their father.’ Marina’s voice is very matter-of-fact.

‘
Oh, I am sorry. That must have been hard.’ Bobby shifts uncomfortably and his jacket begins another descent from his shoulder.

‘
Harder for the girls than me. I had grown wise to him. They still thought he was wonderful, swinging them in the air, telling them his mad schemes with such excitement. Poor girls, it is amazing more harm wasn’t done.’

Roula stands up suddenly.
‘He did it, him, I never liked him. I don’t know why she is crying, he wasn’t nice.’ Roula is pointing to the man on the television and shouting to no one in particular. ‘Good, it’s finished, stupid programme.’ She picks up the remote and surfs channels. ‘Yes, brilliant! I love this.’ She sits down again.

It is a cartoon dubbed into Greek; the voice weirdly accentuated, adults pretending to be children, pretending to be monsters.

‘So, your mission here?’ Bobby has the teasing tone in his voice again.

‘
Ah yes, my mission here.’ Marina shifts in her seat.

‘
Will it be a straightforward mission, or will there be some jiggery-pokery?’ He chuckles and begins to cough. Marina helps him drink some more water.

Whilst she is close to him she looks him in the eye and whispers,
‘It is a mission of the utmost secrecy. My daughter will never forgive me if she finds out. I must move like a shadow and gather the facts before I know if I need to strike.’ Marina puts the glass of water down and waves her fist as a dramatic end to her exaggerated speech, and rocks back laughing.

‘
So, much jiggery-pokery, then! And how will you begin, or have you begun already?’

There is a moan from the back room.

‘No, she’s not back yet, Grandma,’ Roula calls.

‘
I have begun, but I am not sure how to continue. I need some help,’ Marina says.

‘
Then I am your man!’ Bobby’s jacket slides even further off his shoulder and Marina hooks it back on. He twists his upper body a little to try to keep the jacket from sliding again.

‘
I think, Bobby, that perhaps you are not the man,’ Marina says, patting him gently on the shoulder.

‘
How do you know? What help do you need?’ Bobby looks offended.

Marina drops her voice to a whisper.
‘What would be most helpful would be a list of all the men aged thirty-five on the island, who have been here all their lives. But there will be no such list. I think I will need to gather from far and wide.’

‘
Like I said, I am your man!’ Bobby says loudly.

‘
Bobby, I think that I need …’ Marina is cut off.

‘
Hello, everyone, is everything alright?’ Zoe clatters up the steps and comes through the door with a bundle of bags which she dumps on the table.

Roula drags her gaze from the television and hastens to the table, picking through the bags. Zoe puts the larger items away.

‘Hi, Grandma. I’ll be in in a minute,’ she calls to the back room. ‘Everyone OK?’ She puts a few items on the hatch through to the kitchen.

‘
Fine,’ Marina answers.

‘
Have you been behaving yourself, you old rascal?’ Zoe smiles at Bobby who grins wickedly back but doesn’t say a word. ‘They had to lock their daughters up when he was a young man. A leopard never changes its spots, does it, Bobby?’

‘
Tyropita
– cheese pies – yum! Is one for me? Can I have one, please, I am starving, please.’ Roula is hopping from foot to foot.

‘
Quiet down, yes, of course there is one for you. I thought we could all have a little treat.’ Zoe separates the cheese pies from the rest of her shopping.

‘
Right, well, I’ll be off then. I had planned to go for a little walk and I don’t want to leave it too late.’ Marina looks through the door. It is late afternoon and the sun slants golden.

‘
Oh, I got you a pie too. Will you not stay and eat with us? Roula, wait until I have made some salad to go with it, and we need to see to Grandma first,’ Zoe says.

‘
But I am hungry,’ Roula replies.

‘
Thank you, Mrs Zoe, but I think I will take my walk. Bobby, it has been a pleasure. Roula, thank you for the water.’ Marina turns to Aunt Eleftheria but she is still asleep.

‘
Well, take your pie with you. It is the least I can offer for your kindness,’ Zoe says.

Marina
’s stomach responds appreciatively; she has only eaten a slice of Irini’s cake since breakfast. ‘Well, that’s very kind of you. See you all later.’

No one replies. Roula is back watching another programme. Zoe is arranging what she needs to take into Grandma. Marina looks at Bobby, who winks and mouths,
‘I’m your man.’ Marina smiles. He has kind eyes, but he is a bit of a silly old fool. She closes the door behind her feeling twenty years younger than when she entered.

Out on the balcony it appears the town is still sleepy from the afternoon
mesimeriano
, the siesta. Not many people are stirring yet and few sounds can be heard. Marina feels lighter for her chat with Bobby and heads for the steps, which the cats have now deserted. She begins her ascent at a steady pace and rests every few steps. It is a great deal easier this time and she wonders why she made such a fuss of it earlier.

She stops halfway up and admires the view, but decides not to sit down. At the top she will rest, when she reaches the doorstep of the building she once knew. But when she gets there she is invigorated, not tired, and she pushes on, trying to ignore the memories the lonely building evokes. Unwillingly, she is catapulted back through the years and remembers the loneliness she felt then, the months that ticked by. Aunt Efi was kind but Marina wanted to be outside, and she felt scared, constantly.

A little further on, the shop that was in someone’s front room has grown and extended and occupies three of the whitewashed building’s rooms now, and extends into the street. The vegetables on trestle tables are covered with a cloth to show that the shop is closed, but the hessian sacks of rice and beans sit with their top edges rolled down, ready for business.

On the left Marina sees a door she remembers. It is low with no handle and no keyhole, painted a thick, shiny brown. It hasn
’t changed at all, not even the colour. It had been ajar back then. Marina had snuck out just for a change of scenery, unbelievably bored with being cooped up. She estimated she had an hour or so before Aunt Efi would wake up from her afternoon sleep. She need never know she had been out.

It was the smell that made her curious back then. A rich smell of honey and something else she couldn
’t put her finger on. She had gone closer to the door to breath in the sweetness more fully. It was dark inside, but through the open crack she could see a flickering light. She pushed the door open slightly. The smell got stronger. The room was dim and it took a minute for Marina’s eyes to adjust, and she could see candles hovering. She stepped in, mesmerised by the apparition. The sweet honey aroma, mixed with the smell of wax, was almost overpowering once inside, and she felt pleasantly dizzy.

The room was lit by candles distributed unevenly around the walls, lodged on ledges and in niches between the stones. Years of dripping wax from these crevices had created stalactites and frozen wax rivers that ran to the floor.

The brightest light, though, came from a small fire in a pit in the floor in the middle of the room, over which stood a wide black cauldron full of gently shimmering wax. Marina took all this in but was most intrigued by a ring of metal suspended horizontally over the cauldron. It hung by chains from the rafters and had tails of string evenly spaced around it, the ends dangling just above the molten wax. The white string appeared to glow in the dull light.

The atmosphere was reminiscent of that of a church, and Marina held her breath in awe. She had turned to leave when she heard a small soft voice.

‘
You can help a little if you like?’ Out of the dark shadows a woman appeared, shorter even than Marina. Her grey hair was pinned up at the back of her head in a rather chic French roll, but wisps of hair escaped around her face, which appeared leathery and taut in the candlelight.

Marina mumbled some excuses, but the old lady shuffled forwards and whispered the word
‘Stay’, in a conspiratorial tone. Marina hesitated and turned to look once more at the candles and the pot of shimmering wax, to find the old woman had produced a wooden stool from somewhere, which she patted in invitation. She then turned, before Marina had made her decision, and took, from a wooden peg on the wall, an apron stiff with wax. Pieces flaked off as she moved it, the wax shards disappearing into the well-trodden straw that covered the floor.

The young Marina edged to the stool and sat cautiously and curiously on its time-worn wooden seat. The old woman continued without looking at her. She bent from the hips and took up a jug that had been all but buried in the straw, its edges strangely softened and its contours oddly smooth. Marina had been transfixed as the woman dipped the jug into the cauldron of wax and the jug seemed to melt, its contours becoming crisp as the dried wax turned liquid. She used the jug to swirl the lava before lifting it, full of hot wax, to the height of the hanging metal circle. Then she steadily and slowly poured the wax down one of the hanging strings. She turned the metal circle a fraction and poured wax down the next wick before bending to refill the jug and turning the ring another fraction.

The wicks became infinitesimally thicker as the woman continued to turn the ring and fill and pour the jug. The only sound was the slow chinking of the chains the ring was supported on as they become twisted with the turning, and the dripping of the wax as it ran down the end of each wick and rejoined the melting pot.

When she had completed the circle she allowed the chains to unwind. Some of the tails of the forming candles caught on each other and she separated them with her fingers before taking a fresh jug of wax and beginning the cycle again.

Marina looked more closely around the room. Behind the cauldron was a wooden table on which stood an unlit oil lamp, a cloth, a flat tin and a cake of something. Behind this, against the wall, were stacked candles a metre or more tall, tapering to a fluff of wick at their tops. Down the side of the walls were rows and rows of open-topped boxes of church candles.

The woman finished another cycle and allowed the ring to spin back again, and when it came to rest she put down the jug, and deliberately and slowly took off her apron. She turned to Marina, looped the apron over her head, picked up the jug and handed it to her, smiling. Marina remembers the excitement and just a touch of fear. What if she did it wrong, what if the old woman laughed at her attempts? The woman had smiled broadly at her hesitation, her paper-thin skin creasing at the corners of her mouth, and her cheeks pulled smooth.

Marina paused before dipping the jug and then took courage and began. The old woman took a big flat stick from behind the door and stirred the wax whilst Marina was pouring. Once happy with the consistency, the woman hung the paddle on a hook protruding from the bare stone wall and dragged a wooden box from under the table, from which she took out a wax honeycomb, dark brown, almost black, in the dim light.

Marina positioned herself slightly at an angle to watch what the woman was doing, whilst she continued to pour the wax. Down on the floor in the corner, completely unnoticed until now, Marina could see a pan of boiling water on top of a primitive stove. The woman dropped the wax into the water and returned to the table. She picked up the cake of what Marina now realised must be wax. The bottom of the cake was black. From amongst her skirts she took a knife and began to scrape the black off the cake into the flat tin.

They continued working together like this for some time, the candles growing slowly thicker, until the woman put down the cake of clean wax and went over to the primitive stove. From another hook in the wall she took a sieve and began to scoop the scum off the surface of the pan of simmering water and melted honeycomb. From under the table, with her free hand, she pulled out a newspaper and unfolded it, and onto this she upturned the sieve to tap it clean.

‘The cocoons.’ She spoke slowly. ‘The chickens love them.’ She smiled when she had finished speaking. She hung the sieve back on its hook and slowly made her way over to Marina. The woman had looked right in her eyes then, and Marina felt such kindness. The woman took the jug and put it on the floor, which relieved Marina as her arm was aching by now with the effort of repeatedly holding it up, full of wax. Then, carefully, gently, the woman lifted the apron over Marina’s head and replaced it around her own neck. She picked up the jug and began her work again.

Marina took one last look around the room before slipping out of the door into blinding sunshine, as quietly as she had entered. Her last thought was to wonder how the woman got in when there is no door handle or key hole.

She runs her hand across the door as she passes, the memory precious. She only met that kind woman on one other occasion.

Marina inhales deeply to bring herself back into the present. She turns right on a path of large, flat flagstones. Further up, the stone path gives way to a rough, narrow, cobbled lane between the whitewashed houses. Cats sprawl on doorsteps here and there. Some doors are open, revealing dark sitting rooms or steps straight up to the first floor or, in the grander houses, courtyards large and small.

Eventually the cobbles give way to bare earth, the stones sticking through where the winter rain has washed the soil from around them, baked rivulets of brown surrounding islands of pebbles. The larger stones have creases of earth above them and trailing wakes of disturbed soil below, all baked beneath the Mediterranean sun to a hard dry path.

The pine trees are close, their shade beckoning, beyond the last of the houses. The path now twists and turns on itself, down three steps to go up six, under an arch between two buildings, round the corner, too narrow for more than one person at a time. Round the next corner is the unexpected pleasure of an old woman in black, sitting on a doorstep, happy to wish Marina a good walk. A donkey to pass, some cats to stroke, some geese in someone
’s garden.

The houses thin out and give way to rough ground but Marina has remembered the path, and as it advances onto open ground, too high to build, too rocky to grow things, it suddenly becomes cobbles again and then flags and finally she is under the shade of the pine trees.

She is impressed with how well she is doing. The island is steep but the path smooth, and Marina begins to wonder what she will say to Yanni, or his mother. It is hard to imagine Yanni as a cute baby, and Marina conjures up an image of a baby with a scowl. Maybe his mother scowls too? How could a mother scowl at her child? Marina takes a deep breath. She wipes a tear away. She should have loved him more. How was she to know?

When you are just married to someone you don
’t really like, and you are only fifteen, you want to escape. It is only natural, she tells herself. Well, she escaped by playing with her friends. She would forget everything for hours at a time. She was a young fifteen and she loved to play hopscotch, tag, and a game called poison, using a length of rope. Her friends ranged from four-year-olds to sixteen-year-old girls, the boys away on the farms by that age.

The baby came very soon after they had been married. It had made hopscotch difficult near the end of her time. The baby was just beautiful. A boy. She called him Dimitri, but Manolis said he should be named after his grandfather, Socrates. But no baby has an official name until it is baptised in the Greek Orthodox church. So it was just
‘baby’ at first.

Marina’s mother helped with the baby right from the start, and as the days passed she helped more and more, until she took over altogether. Her mum understood Marina’s need to be with her peers. The baby cried a lot and would never settle down. Marina would play outside as much as she could, avoiding her domestic responsibilities. She loved her baby, but once she was outside she would forget she even had a son. It’s hard when you are fifteen, your mind’s not ready. She thought about today’s fifteen-year-olds. Girls that age don’t play hopscotch these days, they play video games and dress like pop stars. But that was then. She was young for her age and there were no video games or pop stars.

Her mother would call her in when he needed feeding and Marina would coo and cluck like any other mother. She would spend time playing with him and making him laugh, but after a while she felt cooped up and wanted to be out playing again, and besides, he looked like Manolis, which didn
’t help.

But if she had known, she would have loved him more. Her mother said she had expected it, he had been a weak thing from the start. Marina felt it was her fault. If she had loved him more, if she had fed him more
… Her mother tried to calm her, and insisted there was nothing she could have done, sometimes that’s just how life is.

Manolis was quiet when he was in the house for a while after that, and he didn
’t come near Marina, which suited her very well. She moved into the second bedroom and stayed there. Six years later Eleni was born, the product of a drunken night for Manolis. Artemis, five years after Eleni, was the result of a drunken night for Marina who desperately wanted another child.

With all her thoughts crowding in on her Marina suddenly realises she has reached the top and the pine forest is petering out. An unexpected sign tells her that the monastery is to her right, and the ridge at the top of the island to her left.