Free The Messenger of Athens: A Novel by Anne Zouroudi Page A

his travels—where he had sailed, what he had caught, the ones that got away—and as he spoke, the stink rose off him like a miasma.
    When he had eaten, he fetched the wooden barrow from beneath the vine. They walked together, companionably, in silence, down towards the sea, passing the verges where he used to gather her posies of shy, mauvecyclamen and bright, white marguerites. But he didn’t think of posies, not today.
    At the jetty, he tied the boat in close, and loaded up the barrow. The polystyrene boxes dribbled clouded, scale-filled meltwater; within the boxes, the last of his catch—whitebait, bony sardines, petrol-blue garfish, long and thin as tubes, and gray mullet (which would go cheap; the people didn’t like it)—lay blank-eyed on chips of ice, discolored and matte from their dissolving.
    In the tiny cabin, she gathered up the blankets and the pillow from the plastic-covered mattress where he slept, and spread them on the wooden engine-casing to dry. The boat rocked gently with the movement of the sea; it swilled the bilge water beneath the deck like claret in a goblet, releasing its bouquet: spilt diesel, fish guts. She picked up his one plate—its rim held a clear imprint of his dirty thumb—his cup and bowl, the knives and fork and spoon, the empty water bottles and the beer cans, the tin of corned beef he hadn’t eaten, the remnants of a stale loaf, the peel of an apple.
    She used to ask him, sometimes, to take her with him; she viewed his life romantically, as one of exploration.
    But he, knowing the truth, objected.
    “It’s man’s work,” he said. “You’d find it too uncomfortable.” (And women at sea were bad luck. They talked too much, and felt the cold. They were nervous when the sea was rough, and prone to sickness.)
    Now she understood the facts, and straightened out the mess and never asked. His life away from her was squalor, and survival.
    “I’ll be home for lunch,” he said, and he trundled the barrow off along the seafront, calling to the women as he went, “Fish! Fresh fish!”
    Irini watched him go. The women appeared in the doorways, brandishing their purses, flirting with him for first pick and extra weight. She saw him smiling, shyly, pleased. He pulled off his woolen cap and ran his hand over his baldness; but when one of the women, laughing, reached out and touched the smoothness of his head, the jealousy she sometimes used to feel just wasn’t there.
    Around the bay, on the terrace of the café, the four chairs at Nikos’s table stood forlornly empty.
    Irini headed home alone.
    She was pleased to have an occupation. She made him
pasticcio
, fat, hollow pasta baked with rich meat sauce and cheese. He spooned in his food like a man starving, ripping lumps of bread from the loaf, wiping clean the plate. Beneath the table, one of his gifts to her—an octopus—slithered in a bucket, waiting to be beaten to a soapy pulp on the courtyard stones. His second gift—a leopard-spotted moray eel—lay on a platter, stiffly coiled, in the refrigerator, the hook still through its upper lip, a length of bright-blue nylon line attached.
    “I had to cut the bastard loose,” he said, “before it took a finger.” He feared these snake-like fish: a year before, when one had sunk its teeth into his palm it had not let go until he smashed its skull with a spanner. Turning septic, the painful wound had stopped him working for ten days.On the back of his hand, the scars remained, small dents in a jaw-shaped, curving ridge.
    His gifts were meant to please her, and she tried to be pleased, but there was gutting, and beheading, and skinning, and beating, and boiling, and frying to be done, before she could enjoy them. Money for new shoes, she would have kissed him for.
    He pushed his empty plate away, and pulled a roll of banknotes from his pocket. He counted them onto the table. He had done well.
    “Pass me the tin, wife,” he said.
    She took down the biscuit tin from its place