In the night at Haneen’s flat we slept in separate rooms, but later she crept into my bed and begged me to hold her. She was alarmingly thin, with sharply protruding bones. I had a glimpse of small, drained breasts. I felt immeasurable sadness on her account, and perhaps also on mine. It was all I could do not to weep.
I knew it was true: she has been crushed.
As we approach Symi,
Aegli
sinks lower into the water again as it finds its way into the harbour; it’s not flying now; it’s more a case of butting its way through the water. Above us rise the strange classical houses of the town, built in a time of wealth from the export of sponges. The port is crowded with boats, but
Aegli
has her own mooring, and we head confidently there. From a distance, half submerged, I imagine she would look like a nuclear submarine.
A man with a handcart meets us and loads up. He speaks some English. He is lame and it seems a little demeaning for him to be pushing this cart, but he refuses my help. He moves pretty fast, almost skipping along the quayside road. Outside a whitewashed wall, he hands us the keys and points to a blue door. He follows us in with the luggage. Our house is a joy, with a balcony overlooking the harbour, just a narrow track between us and the water and a little courtyard at the back, shaded by an old, knotted grape vine, a blue table and two blue chairs in the deep shade. Small birds are busy in the vine. They rustle and whistle. Down below, tied to the sea wall, is our boat. I feel good about having a boat, as though it will enable us to explore freely and to be happy.
There are two bedrooms, one overlooking the sea and the other further back. The house is already stocked and a huge bowl of bursting figs rests on a table. The owner, who lives near by, comes to see us and asks if everything is OK. She speaks her small allocation of English confidently. She has strong, wiry hair. She looks at Noor, and says, ‘You must eat. Greek food makes strong.’
Noor smiles. I think it is the first time I have seen her smile in two days.
It’s evening. The port is busy as we walk towards the shops. In a long, straggling line, a flotilla of small dinghies, bearing children, is hurrying anxiously home, as small craft have done for millennia. Above us, high above, the bells of the church of the Virgin, Panaghia, ring around the bay. The sea is now golden and the hills beyond Emporios are being coated in a light wash of caramel so that their outlines melt.
We buy more food –
loukanica
and wine, and a warm loaf of country bread,
psomi
. In another shop, close to the start of Kallistrata, I buy a canteloupe. The shopkeeper sniffs the melon to make sure it is ready; she tells us it’s good. When we get back to our house the riding lights on the working boats and the yachts and the grand palaces of the very rich and the very criminal are bright. The harbourmaster can just be seen gesticulating and blowing his whistle sharply and irritably, to indicate where the boats should wait their turn or where they should moor when their turn eventually comes. From the town, music drifts towards us. I think of Jerusalem. As the boats come in, we can hear singing and conversation. It’s true that voices carry across water.
‘This is a lovely place, thank you for bringing me here,’ says Noor as we sit, interested spectators, on the balcony.
I look at her. She doesn’t seem unhappy, but I am on edge.
‘Tomorrow, Agia Marina for the day.’
I am speaking hopefully of tomorrow, but already I am dreading the night to come, when Noor will again be seized by her memories, which will cause her to convulse and moan, before waking up and clinging to me desperately, while I try to calm her. For now, we watch the last, late boats docking. Across the water there are strings of naked light bulbs on the quays and draped on the trees in front of the bars, and the music and laughter of carefree people reaches us. I hope that a few glasses of red wine will calm Noor – and me for that matter. She sips cautiously. Her legs are stretched out imploringly towards the sea. She turns to me.
‘Please don’t watch me all the time. You are making me nervous.’
‘Sorry, I want you to be happy, that’s all.’
I watch instead a small gecko hovering around the outside light. It moves quickly to catch the moths that are drawn to the light. Its eyes roll happily as it swallows. Noor turns to me again, the side of her face caught in the light from inside the house. She looks ethereal. I think of African spirit children, who are believed to be at risk of being recalled at the whim of the spirits; they barely have a foothold in this world.
‘Richie, are you OK with being my brother?’
I don’t know what she means. She may be asking if I am able to live as her brother rather than her lover, or she may be asking if I want – now that everything has changed – to move on. I can’t answer her question. We sit in silence.
When I called Cathérine from London to tell her that my half-sister had been in hospital and I was taking her away for recuperation in the sunshine, she was a little surprised. She said she would go to a book fair in Paris for a week in that case; no problem.
Noor is staring fixedly at the sea now. She prises her gaze from the sea and turns to me.
‘Richie, I haven’t come to try to relive what we had. I know that’s not possible.’
Her face, the map of her torments, is fully exposed to the weak, yellowish light. She wants me to say something but I cannot speak: I feel shame and despair. Here she is, helpless, crippled by her memories, and I . . . I have been cavorting cheerfully in bed with Cathérine. (Who looks like my father’s lover.)
‘I have come to say goodbye, Richie.’
‘No, Noor, please. The whole point of this holiday is to make it work. To see how we can keep close for ever. I won’t desert you.’
But I know I am not convincing her, even if that were possible.
‘I am here to say goodbye, Richie. Haneen was right all along: it would have been better not to have had hopes.’
‘Why? Why?’
I am deeply hurt, despite my treachery.
‘Because even just seeing you, and knowing what we could have had, gives me too much pain. More than I can bear.’
‘Come with me to Agia Marina tomorrow. We will take our little boat. And then tell me afterwards what you want to do. Please give me that time. I love you, Noor.’
‘It may be true that you love the idea of me, but I am not the same person you loved. You know that, Rich, you know it.’
‘You are down; it will change. Tell me how you feel tomorrow. And practise your
Mamma Mia!
songs. Will you give it a chance?’
‘OK. But I would like to go to bed now, by myself. It’s not fair on you to have to sleep in a room with me. I’ll have the back room, it’s quieter, and I will take a sleeping pill. Goodnight, Richie.’
I help her move her things out of the big bedroom, and I tuck her up, kiss her, and go out to sit on the balcony in the cooler air. I finish the wine and the salami. Noor is quiet, and I am pleased she is getting some rest.
43
In the morning
she was dead. She had brought many sleeping pills and tranquillisers with her. It turned out that she had come to say goodbye, just as she had said. She had removed her turquoise ring from Sinai, and put it beside the bed for me.
As I picked up my phone, I had the feeling that it was going to be the most difficult telephone call I had ever made.
‘Haneen, it’s Richie.’
‘Oh, Richard, morning. How is she? She called me last night very late, and left a message, whispering, saying goodbye. I was very worried. I tried to call her but her phone was off and so was yours.’
‘Oh God, Haneen, this is awful, dreadful: all I can do is tell you that she is dead. I don’t know how to tell you any other way. When I went in to see her in the morning – she went to bed early – she was absolutely still. Our landlady called the ambulance, and they declared her dead. She left a note reading:
Goodbye, Richie, my lover and my brother for ever
. I’m so, so sorry, Haneen.’
She is crying, and gasping.
‘It’s terrible. Terrible. But I don’t blame you, Richard; I should have told you I was worried that she would try to take her life. She tried twice in Toronto, but I didn’t want to tell you. Do you want me to come?’
‘Please come, I can’t do this alone. Thank you, Haneen. Thank you.’
I give her some details of how to get to Symi and she says she will ring back when she has a flight from Tel Aviv Ben Gurion.
The rest of the day is harrowing. The police ask a lot of questions, with the help of an Englishwoman who runs a local estate agency. I explain that Noor has been ill in Toronto, and that we had made a plan to go on a holiday together when she recovered; she was my half-sister, raised separately in Canada. I have to fill out ten pages of statements. Many of the questions seem to me to be misguided, ignoring entirely the human nature of what has gone on, as if suicide were a wilful nuisance that mostly requires assurances about payments as a redress. The questions are offensively practical. Was she a citizen of the EU? If not there is no repatriation allowance. And so it goes on.
The doctors confirm late in the day that she had swallowed a mixture of anti-depressants and sleeping pills; as she translates the doctors’ report, the Englishwoman smiles and nods, as if to say she has been on my side all along. Later she tells me that the Greeks in these parts abhor suicide; they are superstitious about it. I don’t know if this is true.
Haneen arrived from Tel Aviv, via Rhodes, on
Aegli
, the following day. I met her at the mooring. She came off first, with the fat man carrying her luggage:
noblesse oblige
. She hugged me. We stood for a while against the background of the harbour, rocking gently but insistently like ships at anchor. She took my arm so that we could stand out of the sun next to the butane gas depot to talk.
‘Richard, the first thing to understand is that it is absolutely not your fault. I should have told you that she was suicidal, and had tried to kill herself before. But she said how much she was looking forward to this holiday and she said she was sure she would recover. I only half believed it, but I had to give her the chance. And I didn’t want to be the one who told you how depressed she was. I am to blame, if any of us is. But of course those who are most to blame are those monsters in Cairo. By the way I have spoken to my brother and his wife. They are hysterical. It’s terrible. Can we go to see her now?’
‘Yes, it is all arranged. It’s not far but a car is waiting.’
I can’t go into the clinic again with Haneen. I stand outside and I call Cathérine. She is in Paris, at the book fair. I tell her that my half-sister has died, suicide, that this wasn’t her first attempt and that I want to come to France to see her.
‘Of course. I’m so sorry for you. Life is very cruel, I know. When will you be arriving?’
‘I could meet you in Paris, day after tomorrow, and maybe we could travel to your house together?’
‘Perfect. Forgive me, Richard, I was a little bit worried that you were really going away with a girlfriend. So in one way I am relieved. That sounds terrible; it came out wrong in English: I feel very, very concerned for you. It must have been awful. But I love you – I think you know this already. Is that a good thing?’
‘It’s everything to me. Everything.’
It takes me a few moments to compose myself.
I want to tell her that I love her too, but a few yards away Noor is lying dead, in a thin mortuary gown that reveals, mercilessly, her fragile body, and at the same time her humiliation and despair. Her bridge, replacing the teeth she has lost, is lying with her clothes in a wire basket. I just can’t utter the word ‘love’.
When Haneen emerges, she is silent. I hold her around the waist. She is rocking slowly.
‘Haneen, are you all right?’
Her haughty eyes, her paprika eyelids, her arched eyebrows, her flared nostrils, her shrewd mouth, her long neck – they are all struggling for meaning in the chaos of life.
‘She looked happy for the first time in months,’ she says. ‘That at least is a blessing.’
The cicadas on the hill are screaming. Haneen and I are bound together; only we know the full story.
44
Before I left
Symi, I took the little boat moored in front of the house, and set off to the monastery of Panormitis. After leaving the harbour I kept close to the coast. Thoughts of buying land – I was looking at a small bay with one or two deserted stone houses – seized me. Perhaps I could live here, with a boat for transport, and write what I know. I think it is true to say that I have enough material. Parched hills and small islands went by to my left; the landscape was absolutely free of life, although out to sea, in the direction of Kos, a low blue-grey form on the near horizon to the east, I could see small fishing boats. The entrance to the bay of Panormitis is narrow. After travelling for nearly two hours I wondered if I had missed it. But suddenly, as if looking through a narrow doorway to a painting beyond, I saw the bell tower of Panormitis, rising like a rocket at Cape Canaveral above the much lower, white buildings of the monastery. I had forgotten how wide and how nearly perfectly circular the bay was.