Chapter 77: Ch-77: Lucifer Cleans House..Again Pt 1
Eleven days had gone by since Nikos came back from the boat with his own face on him and something else behind it, and Eleftheria had ceased, sometime around the fifth, to call them days in her own head because a day was meant to open and close.
To spend itself and leave, and this thing had done neither. It had simply remained.
Morning after morning it was there before the light properly was, sitting in the house ahead of her, waiting for her to wake into it like a punishment that had learned the habits of the room.
She had known from the sound of his step.
That was the part that humiliated her when she revisited it, because it sounded dramatic when put into language and because language, she had discovered these eleven days, was not to be trusted once fear got hold of it.
It made patterns out of smoke. It draped cloth over furniture and called the shape underneath a certainty. Yet the knowing had been real. It had happened before she saw him.
He came up the stone path outside the house and the step was wrong -- not wrong enough to accuse, not wrong in any useful way, but wrong in the tiny domestic register in which wives learned the world.
Too deliberate. Too placed. As though each foot had been lowered after consultation.
Nikos never consulted his own doorstep. His body had known that path longer than some people knew their prayers.
She had been in the kitchen with the coffee pot in her hand and the first pour steaming into the cup when that little wrongness arrived at the threshold of her hearing and stood there.
Even before the latch turned, something in her had drawn tight.
Then the door opened and she turned, because not turning would have been a kind of surrender and she was not yet ready to surrender anything, not to a sound, not to a feeling, not to the early superstitions of a frightened woman in her own kitchen.
"Nikos," she said.
He looked at her. Same brow. Same tired dark under the eyes. Same mouth. The little pale scar near the chin from a hook in 1996. The sea on the coat. The morning on the shoulders.
"Yes."
It was the right word in the wrong house.
No -- worse. It was the right word in the right house spoken from half a step outside the life that should have been behind it.
"You’re early," she said, because some part of her believed, absurdly and with total sincerity, that if she offered the world one ordinary sentence the world might remember its job and become ordinary around it.
"Yes."
"How was it?"
A pause. Not long. Long enough.
"Sufficient."
The coffee pot almost slipped in her hand.
She smiled then, because a smile was what one used when something small went crooked and one wished to bend it back without making it aware it had bent.
"Sufficient," she repeated. "Since when do fishermen from this village come home saying sufficient?"
He considered her. She hated that word for what he did to her with his eyes now, but there was no better one.
Nikos had always looked through things when tired, at them when interested, past them when annoyed.
This was different. This was attention without intimacy.
"I have said it now," he replied.
Not I’m tired. Not it was fine. Not bad, rough water, nothing worth telling. A sentence like a piece of cut wood. Straight, finished... Dead.
She set the coffee pot down before she dropped it.
"Come in," she said.
He was already inside.
Still, he stepped further in at the invitation, and she had the mad, immediate sense that the house noticed.
That was how it began.
Not with levitation. Not with voices from the walls. Not even with fear, not truly. It began with the slow education of familiar things into unfamiliar ones.
His coat on the wrong hook. His silence at the wrong times. The way he stood in rooms not as a man stood in the house he had paid for with his back and hands, but as though each room were being tested for its uses.
By the third day she stopped asking him how the sea had been.
By the fourth she realized he was not eating.
By the fifth she hated herself for noticing that he was not getting thin.
That was the part that made her anger feel useless. If he had grown hollow, if his cheekbones had sharpened, if his hands had trembled, then at least the horror would have had the decency to choose a recognizable costume.
But he remained exactly normal. Flesh neither giving nor gathering. The body of her husband behaving as though food were a local custom it had no wish to offend and no need to adopt.
She continued to put plates near him.
Bread, cheese, olives. The old triangle of necessity.
One morning she crouched and set the plate on the floor beside him because he had, sometime during the second night, stopped sitting in chairs. He preferred the kitchen floor now. Not sprawled. Not collapsed.
Simply there, with his back against the lower cabinet and his hands loose over his knees, like something waiting for a train in a country that had forgotten to build stations.
"Eat," she said.
He looked down at the plate.
Then up at her.
"I do not require it."
The sentence filled her with such violent, helpless dislike that she had to grip the edge of the counter to keep her face from showing it.
"Nikos," she said softly, because anger had not worked on the previous morning and perhaps softness would shame whatever this was into giving him back. "You have to eat."
"That was true before."
Before.
The word fell into the room and sat there like a damp rag. She heard herself inhale.
"Before what?"
He did not answer. Or perhaps he did, in the way a locked door answered by continuing to be locked.
He only looked at her again with that intolerable calm, that patient vacancy masquerading as composure.
She picked the plate up and, because she could not bear the sight of the untouched food and could bear even less the thought of carrying it away untouched, set it down again in exactly the same place as if the movement itself might alter something.
"You’re frightening me," she whispered.
And then, because she had not intended to say it and because saying it made it real, she stood too quickly and left the kitchen before he could answer.
At night the house acquired a second pulse.
That was not true, but it was truer than anything else she had found. There was a sound, except it was not a sound in the ordinary sense, because it did not travel through the air so much as remain inside it.
It did not come from the kitchen; it colonized the thought of the kitchen.
Low, continuous, below language and somehow more intimate for being beneath it, like the house had developed an internal murmur that did not belong to timber or plumbing or human sleep.
She lay in bed with the door latched and listened to it.
The latch had begun on the fourth night.
That fact shamed her too. There was no one to see it and still it shamed her.
Forty-three years married to a man and on the fifth night of whatever this was she had shut a piece of metal between herself and his body because she could no longer tell whether the body remained argument enough.
Father Anastasios came twice.
The first time he arrived with the solemn briskness of a man who has spent his life entering grief before it had fully admitted itself and means to get there first. He stayed four hours.
He prayed in the kitchen. He addressed Nikos by name, by patronymic, by the old baptismal sequence.
He laid two fingers on his forehead and flinched so slightly that only a wife trained by eleven days of looking could have seen it.
"Do you know me?" the priest asked.
"Yes."
"Who am I?"
"Anastasios."
"And who are you?"
"Nikos."
Eleftheria had stood in the doorway gripping the hem of her cardigan until the stitching cut into her fingertips.
The priest pressed on. Of course he did. Men like him had been given work by which they believed the world could still be made to answer.
"What are you doing in this house?"
"I am here."
It was such a useless answer, and it struck her with such force, because uselessness was precisely what had entered her life and taken the chair at the table.
When Father Anastasios left four hours later he looked ashen -- not in the face alone, but in the spirit, as though some brightness of assumption had been quietly removed from him.
The second time he stayed forty minutes.
No prayers aloud. No brave sequencing of ritual. He spoke less and looked more and when he left he did not meet her eyes. He pressed a small icon of the Theotokos into her palm.
"Keep this with you," he said.
She closed her hand around it.
"Will it help?"
He hesitated.
If he had lied, she might have hated him. If he had said no, she might have loved him for it.
Instead he said, "Keep it with you."
Which was neither answer and contained both.
So she kept it in the pocket of her house dress and touched it with two fingers when the sound in the night thickened and when Nikos looked at her too steadily and when the dawn came and found her still awake.
On the eleventh morning she woke before the light.
No -- she woke into the sense that something in the house had changed shape.
The front door opened.
Not the way it had been opening these eleven days, with that minute, intolerable care, as though the hand on it were still learning the significance of thresholds.
This was cleaner. More decided. A hand that knew the latch. A turn without thought.
The thing in the kitchen noticed.
She heard that more clearly than she heard the door itself. The under-sound -- the low occupancy that had been filling the nights -- grew careful.
Not louder. Not weaker. Careful. Like an animal that had scented something for which it had not prepared.
Then a voice.
Not Nikos’s.
Not Father Anastasios’s.
A man’s voice she had never heard before, low and level and without the smallest frill of urgency on it, and because she could not make out the words, the quality of them struck harder: not command, not pleading, not prayer...Judgement.
That was the word that came to her later. Not then. Then she only knew that somebody had spoken in her kitchen with the tone of a man setting a crooked picture frame straight.
The sound from the kitchen stopped.
It did not fade. It did not retreat. It was there, and then it was not, in the way a hand snuffs a flame and the eye is left staring at the shape where the light used to be.
She was out of bed before she consciously chose it. Her feet found the hallway rug. The icon struck warm against her thigh through the pocket as if it had been waiting for the motion.
"Nikos?" she called, and even to herself the name sounded wrong now, too small for the thing that had occupied the kitchen for eleven days.
No answer.
She moved down the corridor and had the half-ridiculous thought that she should have taken something with her -- a knife, the rolling pin, one of the brass candleholders -- but the absurdity of defending herself against the last eleven days with a kitchen instrument arrived at the same time as the uselessness of it, and both thoughts vanished as she reached the doorframe.
Nikos lay on his back on the floor.
The room looked larger.
That was the first thing. Not brighter. Larger. As if some pressure that had been drawing the walls inward had released them.
A man crouched beside Nikos with his back to her. Dark coat. Dark hair. Stillness so complete it did not read as stillness at all at first, only as a kind of finishedness, the bodily equivalent of a ledger balanced and closed.
His hand hovered over Nikos’s chest.
Open. Palm lowered. Not touching.
The space between his hand and the cloth of Nikos’s shirt had become the center of the room. She could not have said why. Nothing visible passed there.
No light. No smoke. No spectacle to excuse itself after. And yet the air inclined toward that hand, drew itself in that direction with the silent certainty of water finding a fall.
Something was being taken.
Not torn out. Not dragged.
It was being removed.
With such flat, workmanlike efficiency that horror and relief arrived in her at the same moment and could not be told apart.
"What are you doing?" she said.
The man did not start. Did not turn. Did not even seem surprised that a voice had entered the room.
He only answered, as if the answer had been ready because the question was ordinary.
"Taking what does not belong to him."
"That is my husband," she said, and hated the helplessness of it the moment it was spoken, because of course the stranger knew that. Everyone in the room knew that.
"I know."
No cruelty. No softness. The statement merely stood there, undeniable and unstroked.
Her throat worked around a second question.
"What is it?"
His fingers closed.
The motion was small. Final.
"It was a trespasser," he said.
The kitchen warmed.
Not metaphorically. But spiritually. It warmed the way a room warms when a window has been shut after days of winter air.
The ordinary, indecent sweetness of heat returning to a place that has been made to do without it.
Nikos inhaled.
Not the shallow, preserving motions his body had been making, but a full human breath, one that began somewhere deep and arrived all the way at the mouth.
The sound of it struck her harder than the stranger’s voice had. She had not understood until that instant how starved she had been for something so simple.
The man stood.
He opened his hand once, then closed it, like someone clearing dust from the fingers after unpleasant work.
"Wait," she said.
He paused at once, which unnerved her almost more than if he had ignored her. Men who could ignore women did so.
Men who stopped without resistance had already decided exactly how much of the world to admit.
"Is he -- " She swallowed. "Is he back?"
"Yes."
The answer was so immediate she nearly didn’t believe it.
"Completely?"
"Yes."
"Will that thing come back?"
"No."
"How do you know?"
Then at last he turned his head slightly, enough that she saw the line of his cheek and the dark, calm profile of a face that looked too composed for the hour and the room and the species.
"Because it no longer has permission to exist," he said.
The sentence should have sounded absurd. It did not. In the kitchen, with Nikos breathing like a man again and the warmth settling itself back over the cupboards and the table and the poor abandoned plate on the floor, it sounded like law.
"Who are you?" she asked.
This time he did not answer.
He went to the back door. Opened it. Stepped out into the courtyard and the gray edge of pre-dawn beyond.
By the time she looked up again from Nikos’s face the door was closed.
She crossed the kitchen on her knees more than on her feet. Her hands found Nikos’s cheeks. Warm. Familiar.
The stubble at the jaw from a missed shave. The exact little roughness near his left ear where he always cut himself and never learned not to.
"Nikos."
His eyelids twitched. Opened.
For one second -- the longest second of the eleven days -- she was afraid she would find that same terrible almostness looking back at her, that the room had only changed costumes.
Then his eyes cleared.
"Eleni," he said.
Her name. The private household version of it. The one only he used, as if the other syllables people called her by in the village belonged to public life and this one belonged to the marriage.
She made a sound she had not made since she was young enough to be ashamed of crying in front of others.
"You’re here," she said into his face, into his skin, into the shape of his mouth as if the words could pin him there. "You’re here. You’re here."
He looked dazed, exhausted, like a man dragged out of deep water with no understanding yet of how he reached shore.
"What happened?" he asked.
She laughed once through tears. A hard, broken laugh with no amusement in it.
"I don’t know," she said.
And for the first time in eleven days the not-knowing did not feel like defeat. It felt like mercy. It felt like a door she did not have to open.
She stayed with him a long time on the floor.
Later, she would boil water. Because the body, treacherous and blessed, demanded continuation.
Later, she would make coffee and watch him drink it and watch his hand shake slightly from hunger and relief and whatever absence he had returned through.
Later, she would take the icon from her pocket and place it by the window and think about Father Anastasios and his unfinished answer.
Later, she would remember the stranger’s voice and understand that gratitude and fear were not enemies but housemates, and that sometimes the thing which saved you did not come shaped for comfort.
But not yet.
For now she held her husband’s face in both hands and listened to him breathe.
And outside, beyond the courtyard and the lane and the low wall and the sleeping boats, the sea remained the sea -- gray, unhelpful, innocent of houses and of men and of what sometimes came home inside them.
Which, after eleven days, was almost tenderness.
