Being Enough by Sara Alexi

Author:Sara Alexi [Alexi, Sara]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oneiro
Published: 2016-03-09T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter 19

Rallou feels like she has been waiting for hours. She looks up at the clock tower. With the top portion leaning, and iced with dust, the hands are stuck at four twenty-three – the time the quake struck yesterday afternoon. She shields her eyes to judge the sun’s position in the sky. It is still only morning. A gull circles high overhead, its calls only just audible.

At Vasillis’s insistence, she spent the night at his house after all. It was odd to be in her old bed again after all the years that have passed. It was hers before it was passed to Vasillis’s and Eleftheria’s second child, when he became old enough to need a room of his own. Now he is grown and married. Eleftheria made her feel very welcome.

When Vasillis pressed her about Christos in the kafenio the question was deflected by Costas Voulgaris offering more brandy. But it was inevitable that, in the evening, almost as soon as she arrived at their house, Eleftheria asked the same question, and Vasillis, who had been assessing a cracked wall in the next room, came in to hear the answer. Rallou stumbled over her words and made a couple of false starts, and in the end she resorted to an out-and-out lie.

‘His second aunt is very unwell,’ she said, and told them how he had had to make a trip to Corfu. It sounded so false to her.

‘He has an aunt on Corfu?’ Vasillis asked. ‘I know he had second cousins or something up in a small village near Saros, but Corfu?’

‘One of his aunts from the village moved to Corfu.’ Rallou felt sure her flaming cheeks would give her away.

‘Ah, it is a shame he could not wait for you to return from your baba’s,’ Eleftheria said. ‘Then you could have gone together. She must be very sick.’ She crossed herself three times, then smiled. ‘So you will be following him tomorrow? It’s all happening, isn’t it?’

And there she was again, stuck with another question she didn’t know how to answer. The easiest thing was to agree.

‘Yes, yes, of course, that is why I came down from Baba’s.’ But the moment she said it she realised that they could catch her out with this lie. How would she have known to come down? Who would have told her? There is no phone in Korifi, and Yanni was not due up there until the end of the month.

But thankfully Eleftheria’s mind was on other things. ‘I can only serve us fish soup,’ she said. ‘I’m afraid I have nothing else prepared.’

‘That will be great! Thanks, Eleftheria,’ Vasillis said, but he was still looking at Rallou.

Eleftheria had not appeared so animated for years. The disaster seemed to have shifted her away from her normal grey outlook; apparently such things can happen. But even with Eleftheria’s new-found enthusiasm the evening proved very long. To add to which, she cooked the soup in the kitchen instead of outside, and everywhere stank of fish.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.