Free Intimate Distance by Katerina Cosgrove Page B

finished.
    AFTERWARD, WE SIT on rocks above the village and survey the cluster of tumbledown houses and broken fences. Everywhere there’s the smell of goats, the pungent smell of shit and earth and blood that reminds me in some disturbing way of my mother. As we sit, an old woman in a scarf waves to us. From so far away, I don’t realise at first that it’s Alcmene. She seems somehow changed out in the open, she’s put on her public face. Her movements are vigorous and decisive, she shrills and shouts at her sheep, puts her hand on her hip and watches us on the crag above her.
    â€˜Be well,’ she shouts up at us.
    We walk down to her.
    â€˜Mimi,’ I say.
    But she ignores me; it’s Zoi she’s looking at and her eyes light up with pleasure as she takes his arm.
    â€˜So you must be Angeliki’s boy! Well, well, how you’ve grown. I remember you here when you were tiny, holding onto your grandfather’s hand.’
    Her voice is different too. It’s become flat and nasal, the voice of every other village grandmother. Zoi helps her heave buckets of water from the weak, dripping tap to the trough. The sheep anxiously nudge me, climbing over each other to get to the brownish water.
    Alcmene heaves herself onto a jutting rock. She pats at the flat space by her side and Zoi perches next to her while she takes his hand. She doesn’t seem to be aware of my existence at all or perhaps doesn’t want to show we have any prior connection. Or maybe she can’t even remember yesterday. Maybe she’s slipping into oblivion. She’s no longer swimming in the child-like intimacy of her unformed thoughts, or alive to the quiet awe of the smallest detail. Today she’s decent, hardworking, ordinary. She motions with her hand down the valley, tells us to stop for a glass of water at the house, her son is there. It’s the Greek way of offering hospitality – filoxenia – literally, kindness to strangers: always underestimate the extent of the gift.
    Her son is a fat boy with heavy-lidded eyes. We walk under the awning of the hut and surprise him dozing on a chair, but he stirs as soon as we appear. He doesn’t look at me, addresses all his remarks to Zoi, and they kiss each other formally on both cheeks.
    â€˜My name is Yanni,’ he says, flicking his hair self-consciously from his forehead.
    His voice is thick and muffled; he has trouble forming the sounds. But his eyes are so kind I want to cry. He seems uninterested or vague about the answers to his stock questions: where are you from, how long are you staying, are you married, I’m sorry, of course you are, with your wife expecting, do you like our mountains? I stop answering after a while. Soon I drift away to the edge of the terrace and gaze down at the sea until it becomes blurry.
    Yanni places food on the table without asking if we’re hungry. Warm tomatoes cut into quarters and swimming in olive oil; oil thick and rich and golden, from the trees bordering these crumbling terraces and abandoned houses. He sits and broods, asking after villagers he’s not seen for months, here in his self-imposed solitude. Nobody comes to his house. It’s too far, they insist. Too far up the mountains. Yanni is the one I’ve heard talk of as the village idiot, the butt of all their jokes. Sharp laughter behind their hands, sneers among the clatter of plates at evening meals, among empty glasses at the café. I hadn’t paid much attention at the time but had been intrigued by the constant mention of his name.
    It’s Yanni who is laughed at by the shore-dwellers who have boats and women and children, who are men in the world; Yanni who did his eighteen months compulsory military service in another region and came home vowing never to leave again; Yanni who gives Zoi a black scarf hand-woven by Alcmene, demonstrating how it’s worn, dangles it over his flushed forehead, he’s so