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Freefall 2009, day 4Sandra said May 28, 1:49 PM: |
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I seem to be having a hard time navigating the waters of my process and journey from Deena's retreat along with my 'writing' (or is it 'writer') self at this Freefall retreat. ———- Michaelis was tall for his age and finely carved like a Praxitele’s Apollo. His arms and legs moved loosely, effortlessly it seemed to others. He was the son of a fisherman and it was said of him that he was born on a fishing boat. This was not true, his mother had birthed him just like any other child of the village, on the cool white-tiles of bathroom floor, mopping up the bleeding with bedsheets because she was early and the midwife was fast asleep dreaming she was trying to strangle a boy-baby with his umbilical cord because the child was an abomination, covered in animal fur, little trotters for feet. His mother died when he was two days old. Sometimes he stuck nails into his feet for penance. Into the soft white underbelly of them, a place no one would think to look. Michaelis might as well have been born on a boat because by the age of three he was helping his father haul nets bubbling with silvery anchovies, incandescent blue mackerel and eight-armed octopus spitting black ink into the air. Poseidon’s fuckjuice, his father said. Michaelis didn’t know what fuckjuice was. He wiped the ink into his cheeks and chin to look more like his father. That was after he’d put his head in a bucket of bleach, hoping to turn himself blonde like the gods. It didn’t work. All he got for that was twelve lashes with a knotted fishing rope and a half blind eye. When the children came to the village Michaelis was eighteen years old. He had seen nothing like them other than in his dreams, other than in the stories his grandmother used to tell him at bedtime, her scarred face wrapped in black shawl so as not to frighten him. Stories of Apollo the bright and shining, blue eyed Athena, golden headed Aphrodite, glittering Briseis and Agamede, Hyacinth coloured Odysseus. Only Poseidon had dark hair. His son, Theseus, Michaelis’ hero, was as the others, blonde haired and sparkling eyed, both eyes. His grandmother didn’t tell him about the other golden haired man, the man who branded her three times on each cheek with a kitchen knife, the one who came in the night and raped her while her husband hid in the wardrobe, shoving his fist into his teeth. To stop herself from screaming she had bitten into something on the man’s uniform and torn it off in her twisting, swallowed it when he forced his cock into her mouth, pressing her bleeding face into his sweating groin until she passed out. Three days later she found an eagle swimming upside down in her watery shit. She did not wash it. She slipped it between two floorboards and glued to the wall above a faded black and white photograph of a painting of Saint Agatha, her sweet brown eyes gazing softer than a young deer, Saint Agatha, holding her breasts on a plate. Sometimes she took the eagle out and sniffed it to make sure it still stank, and then spat on the swastika in its claws. The scars on her cheeks eventually healed. The ones inside did not. Michaelis did not know these things. He wondered about Saint Agatha’s breasts sitting there like puddings but kept his wonderings to himself. It was not wise to ask his Yaya too many questions, she’d shut her lips like a clam and finger the evil eye hanging against her wrinkled throat, and later, when the American had been shot, she’d shut her lips forever. When the children came he knew they were a sign, a message from the gods, a gift for him, him alone. When the children came he knew his life had a purpose other than the smell of dying fish and sea-urchin guts. He knew he had a task to do but he wasn’t sure exactly what the task was. He made offerings to all the gods, hoping for an answer. He lit a candle for Saint Agatha as she seemed to know something he didn’t. He listened for dreams but they were filled with water and the hollow sound of waves pawing at his father’s boat as if trying to get in. He burned more candles, long thin ones dripping like stalagtites. His knees bruising against the damp stones of the chapel floor as he breathed in air intoxicated with beeswax and ghosts. The Gods were silent. He even walked the twenty kilometres to Gouverneto and pressed his forehead against its crumbling walls, praying to Our Lady of the Angels for guidance. She was as quiet as the olive trees watching him with their beady black eyes dropping to the earth like goat turds. As a last resort he stole a goat from his uncle, slit its throat under moonlight and held it’s twisting body until it lay inert and still in his arms. He could not close the goat’s eyes. He wondered what he had done. The moon slid underneath a blueblack cloud and stayed there. He had forgotten to bring a torch. There were no stars to light his way, to show him how to put the knife into the animal’s belly and take out the liver. The goat’s body seemed to grow heavier and heavier in his lap, until he felt unmoveable as a statue. A treeroot poked into his thigh, a stone into his ankle bone. He realised as he sat there, anchored to the ground, blood pooling into his hands, that even if he did carve out the liver, he wouldn’t know how to read it. Only his Yaya might know how but she had always kept such things secret. So he just sat there, waiting for the dawn. She’d be rosy fingered and wipe away his tears he thought, but she didn’t, she was an ordinary sun, boring into his half blind eye until it wept its own tears. Not his. Not anymore, he told himself as he dug with his hands into the hard, smallstoned earth. He was a man now, he’d made sacrifice. He’d survived the night like a Spartan. He dug until his fingernails wore down to the quick and then he tore a dying branch from the tree and used that for the last bit. He had to bury the animal well or his Uncle would kill him. The boy was easy to make friends with. You like? Michaelis said, holding out the torch to the boy. It had been a gift from his father. It took four D-Cells. It was black and heavy and sometimes he used it to club the larger fish. Wow, said the boy, taking it, peering into the bulb, measuring the torches circumference with his thumb and forefinger. They could not meet. He pressed the switch on and off, on and off. Wow, the boy said again. It sounded like a good word so Michaelis repeated it, Wow, holding it in his mouth like a ripe apricot, letting it out over and over until he was making a siren sound and the boy laughed and threw his head back, his silverblonde cowlick flying up and then falling down again into his pale blue eyes. The boy handed the torch back but Michaelis tipped his chin forward, making a ts noise. Ochi, he said. Eina ya sas. Eina ena thoro, he said when the boy frowned. Father Chreesmas, Michaelis said and the boy tilted his head to the side, his pale blue eyes slipping like water over Michaelis’ heart. It beat so loudly he was sure the boy could hear, he was sure the boy would back away and turn and run and it would all be for nothing, all the praying and all the burning candles and his rock stripped fingers, still stinging from the bucket of cod he’d salted that morning. But the boy didn’t run. He put the torch into his left hand and stuck out his right hand, like a little man standing there in his kahki shorts and his little man’s short sleeved white shirt, a blue inkstain bleeding through the pocket. Michaelis took the boys hand in his own. It felt like a bird, a small thing with bones, a thing he could crush if he wished, but he would not, he was here to take care of this boy, he was here to teach him, to show him the ways of men. I’m Michael, the boy said after they had shaken hands. He pointed a finger at himself, tapped it against his chest. My name is Michael. What’s your name? Michaelis tried to talk but he had a hot stone in his throat. Pos ton lene? the boy asked, looking uncertain. The Greek was wrong, but nothing else was wrong. It was so right Michaelis thought he’d fall right down there and then, prostrating himself but he didn’t, he just tried to swallow the stone down but it was stuck there and no words could come out. His heart was now beating like the wings of a great bird. His sign had come. Michaelis, he finally said, his voice sounding like his grandmothers, splitting like rocks. He hadn’t done that for years and his face flushed in shame but the boy didn’t seem to notice, he was unscrewing the bottom off the torch, taking out the batteries, examining them closely before he put them back in. I have to go now, the boy said. Michaelis didn’t understand the words, but they sounded like music. He’d have to learn this music, he realised, and quickly. The boy turned and then turned back, putting his hand out again. Efaristo, he said, Thank you, and before Michaelis knew it, the feel of the small bones still in his palm, the boy was running, his feet in little man shoes, socks rumpling around his ankles. Michaelis didn’t need to follow. He knew where the children and their hollow eyed mother lived. Their house was well known in the village because Alan Bates had lived in it when Zorba the Greek was filmed on the island. Michaelis wanted to be in the film but his father wouldn’t allow it. The day of the auditions he had taken the boat out in a gale force wind and nearly killed the both of them. The house was said to be haunted, cursed with the evil eye. It was said you could still see the blood stains on the kitchen wall. It was said that at night the air filled with the acrid smell of Nazi sweat. The villagers had been happy for a foreigner to live in it. Not one of them, never one of them, not that house. From the boat he’d watched the lights from the children’s bedroom turn on. He’d used his father’s binoculars, he’d seen the girl unbraid her long golden hair. He’d seen her staring at the moon. The girl was more difficult to befriend. She seemed to live in a world of her own. She was younger than the boy, seven and a half years old, she said quietly when he asked. Michaelis had read his English primer until his eyes were crossed. He recited the lists of vocabulary like an incantation. His dead mother would be proud, he thought, rubbing his thumb across the small round scars in the arches of his feet. When Michaelis was five years old he had found a book in the drawer of her things, the drawer his father kept locked, the key around his neck. Michaelis had taken the key one night, his father dead drunk on scouthia and humming the shiftatelli, saliva and vomit trickling from his black toothed mouth. The book was not written Greek. It had pictures he’d never seen before. A golden angel, her arms and wings outstretched to a red beast bearing down upon her, his tail curling like fire behind; a three-headed beast with a ewe on his lap, a winged dragon twisting above. He thought the book was written in a language of magic, a thing to make spells with and he’d kept it under his pillow until he went to school and discovered it written the language of the people who had run from the invaders, leaving their bullets and their dead behind. It was written in English, the language of the boy and his sister. Seven a good age, Michaelis said, taking the girls arm in his. She pulled away, clutched her stuffed brown dog. Michaelis let her be. He was happy to watch her run barefoot in the sand, her long braids flying behind her, unravvelling like Medusa snakes. She liked small things. Tiny sky blue flowers, ants. He once found her sobbing over the tiny body of a dead kitten. Is alright, Michaelis said, I give you new one, but she didn’t stop crying until her brother held her about her thin shoulders, stroking her trembling hand as if it were the kitten itself. Sometimes he saw their mother, bringing shopping back from the market. Raising her arms up and down trying to make herself understood to the woman who cleaned their house. She seemed half-crazed sometimes, smoking like a man, her eyes hidden behind dark glasses. She looked like a movie star, she looked like the American woman, the dead president’s wife. They had all seen the photographs, her sprawled across his car, trying to get away. His grandmother had crossed herself and refused to talk after that, not a word, not even to tell him the old stories, the ones she loved the ones he loved. Their mother wore short sleeveless dresses, showing her long legs and slender ankles, glued to the eyes of the fishermen who pretended they were darning nets. Michaelis was only interested in the children. He knew he was there to save them. He knew he was to stand in place of their father, the mother could not be saved, it was not his business. She was too broken, he could see that, her too red lips clinging to cigarette after cigarette. He knew she took men in at night, after the children’s bedroom light was turned off. She was a whore, a poutanas, not fit to mother these angel children, no that was his jo. He would do it all, friend, father, mother, protector. He would love them and hold them and keep them tight, he’d make sure no harm came to a single hair on their beautiful heads, he’d kiss them and love them like he was once loved, held in his mother’s arms, those two days, those forty eight hours, her breast in his mouth, her breath his breath. Sometimes at night he could not sleep for wanting, he wanted them beside him, one on each side, the sweet almond smell of them, the silk of their hair, the boys ice blue eyes melting in his, the girls mermaid green eyes swimming in his mouth. Sometimes he would turn them in his heart at night as if basting a pig on a spit. He knew the girl loved mermaids. He’d seen her kneeling in the sand, dragging her finger like a pencil on paper, drawing a dollshape with a fishtail. She found tiny pink shells for eyes, seaweed for hair. He’d come close, he wanted to tell her she was his mermaid but she rubbed the drawing out with her foot. He took stopped her running, put his hand between her shoulderblades, pulled her close. He was kneeling in the sand, her height now, she’d not be afraid but her eyes dipped away from his so he took her arm gently in his hand. She giggled a bit, ticklish. So small he said. She pulled her arm out, bent her elbow, clenching her fist. I’m strong she said, look. Michaelis laughed. Neh, you strong he said. But me stronger. He grasped her bicep in his hand, measuring the circumference with his thumb and forefinger, like her brother had done with the torch. His fingers touched. I can break, he said, looking into her seagreen eyes. She looked down at his hand around her arm. Just one squeeze, he said. He let her go. She rubbed where he had held. Now you say, he said. You say after me, okay? The girl stood, unmoving. Her straight sunbrown legs like little sticks. She looked over his shoulder for her brother, but he was far away, chasing a lilo in the wind. You say, Michaelis repeated. “I your mermaid”. The girl said nothing. She stepped back but he put his arm around her again, his hand feeling the edge of her tiny shoulderblades. Say, please. Parakalo. For me. Say it. “I your mermaid”. She bit her lower lip. He could see she was going to cry. That wasn’t right. He slipped his hand up to her neck, to her hair falling down her back, snarled and knotted. He tried to comb it out with her fingers but he knew he must be hurting her so he just stroked her head, patting her like he patted his uncles black dog who bit if you were not careful. Parakalo, Michaelis whispered, I your mermaid, say it. And then the girl did, she said it to him, she said, I’m your mermaid and he knew she meant it because the tears fell onto his hand like salt spray. Good, Michaelis said, standing up, feeling like Apollo towering over Cyrene, like Theseus over Ariadne, yes, that is what he would call her, his Ariadne, his golden thread. Tomorrow he would take her to the cave. Maybe not tomorrow. It was too soon. He had to plan carefully for this trip, he would have to find a way to take the children away from their mother for a whole day. The cave was near the monastery at Gouverneto where he had prayed to Our Lady of Angels. Yes, it was important to plan the trip correctly. Tonight he would go to chapel and burn a candle, tonight he would kneel to St Agatha, tonight he would kiss his grandmother goodnight and make the sign of the cross over her heart. He would do this right. He would take the children to Jesus. |
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