Layers

3Sweet adolescence

3

Sweet adolescence

Thessaloniki, 25 January 1986

My dearest diary Jardin,

Last night I had the strangest of dreams:

I was looking at my face in the big silver mirror by the entrance hall and through the mirror I could see that I had a hole in my head, and through the hole I entered a space with two interconnecting rooms. I walked through the first empty room into the second room, where two middle-aged men in religious gowns were sitting down on what appeared like thrones, one of them holding a sceptre. ‘Tell me the truth’, I said. ‘I want to know the truth.’

The man with the sceptre stared at me with magnetic, dark eyes. He shook his head. ‘No.’

***

‘Your dream is like Alice in Wonderland’, Lea said while they were walking along the seafront, the city’s humid wind piercing through their coats. They were downtown like every Saturday morning. The familiar scent of Thermaikos’s city waters, a mix of seaweed, salt and dirt rose to Eleni’s nose giving her pleasure. She loved the city and the sea. As she walked with Lea along the seafront heading from the old harbour to the White Tower, the cars and banter from the cafés facing the sea buzzed on their left-hand side. Lea liked to talk in riddles, and sometimes, Eleni thought this was the only reason she was quickly becoming her best friend, the only worthy point of reference in the overall distasteful all-girls private her parents had planted her in without so much as her consent.

‘Alice in Wonderland?’ Eleni said, puzzled.

‘You know, like another reality you are just about to discover.’

The magic of their stroll downtown evaporated quickly for Eleni, when they stopped at the ice-skating café at Lea’s insistence. Why did Lea love so much to mingle with the posh lot from their school, Eleni wondered. Teenage girls dressed in stupidly expensive all-American brands, flirting desperately with the boys from the 11th High School who frequented the café, perfecting the act of spending their wealthy parents’ money. The only bit that was worth it there was the ice-skating itself; Eleni had said to Lea as much.

‘I have to go’, she mumbled less than an hour after their arrival at the café. ‘You know what my parents are like, we have to sit down to lunch together on weekends and all that stuff.’ The dream had played on her mind all morning.

***

Lunch was boring again.

‘This is the most delectable cut of beef you ever had, Eleni. My friend Kostas, the butcher, reserved it especially for me.’

‘I just want pasta with cheese.’

‘But you have to try the beef.’

They all went on eating quietly, as though there was nothing more important in the world than the steaming pile on their plates.

When Eleni and Lea had walked along the seafront earlier on that morning, Eleni could already anticipate her return home, where she was expected for lunch in a couple of hours. She would start heading uphill, away from the sea, the washing lines getting more frequent the further up she was, the smell of fabric softener blending with car fumes in her nostrils, the sun not always making it through the drying clothes on the first floor balconies. When she would take the final turn into her street, she would see the alley where her mother would not allow her to play when she was little along with the other kids of the neighbourhood, and the wide wooden and glass front door of the block of flats where she lived, standing out as the poshest in their tiny street. She would then look up trying to spot their fifth-floor balcony. Since as far back as she could remember, she loved living on the fifth floor. She considered it with pride. ‘The higher, the better’, her father would always say. There was only one more floor above them, the so-called privileged penthouse. Still, Eleni had a sense that the fifth floor was just the right identity for her family. Not quite at the top, but almost. It helped that she never got to know the neighbours who lived above. She only said hello to Mrs Christou, the lovely old lady who lived just below them and who smiled at Eleni every time they met outside the communal lift. The fact Mrs Christou had given her permission to make noise, as she was just a child after all, was yet another advantage of living high in Eleni’s eyes. This was all of course before the age of six, when she still considered it a privilege to be the only child of her parents. She didn’t like her dad much at all after that, not sure why.

‘You are still not eating any of the meat, Eleni’, her father’s voice scratched her ears as though from far away.

‘It’s in tomato sauce swimming in olive oil. You know I don’t like that’, Eleni grunted.

But he did not know, that was the problem. He had not even begun to notice what she liked to eat in the fourteen or so years that she had been around. Her mother had put it right: ‘All men are selfish pigs.’ All her father really cared about was cooking for himself, as he so loved his food, and then trying to convince her that it was good for her. She was so sick and tired of seeing him day after day in the kitchen waiting for her after school, trying to force-feed her. Why could they not be like a normal family: Mother cooks, Father goes to work?

The piece of stewed beef that he had with apparent optimism placed in front of her, lay untouched. Eleni took a look at it filled with disgust. She could almost feel inside her mouth the oily red sauce coagulating around the meat. Look, man, notice! I am not eating your beef casserole. Come on, man, get out of the house, go to your business, to your girlfriends that make you feel so important. Give us some breathing space.

***

After lunch, Eleni walked down the corridor to her room. Since she had finally conquered her right to her own teenage room previously used as her father’s TV abode, Eleni had been reminded of how dark the corridor had seemed when she was little. At the age of five or six, she would lie in the middle of her parents’ big bed, look out into the long, snake-like corridor, and despite the flickering of the light from the living room and the TV projecting different shades of blue from the living room’s half-open door, the shadows would still form. In the corner, just before the opening of the kitchen, she could always make out the shadow of a wolf. Now, from the conquered castle of her teenage room on the other side of the corridor, she could still discern the dip before the kitchen door and notice the shadows gathering there, even in the middle of a bright afternoon.

‘Was I a breech or a head-down baby, Mum?’

It was the time for their post-lunch chat, just before her mother would retire for her long midday siesta, the time of day that Eleni had always found the most deadly. Eleni had been waiting for her in her room patiently, while she could hear the clattering noise of dishes being put away coming from the kitchen. It had been for a couple of weeks now that she had wanted to know more about her birth. As much as she hated her school, there were the occasional teachers that would just get through. Their new Biology teacher was one of a kind. She had spent the last class telling them all these fascinating facts about how babies were born. It really seemed to Eleni like a miracle.

‘Mum? I asked you a question’, Eleni said impatiently. Leonora had not moved or made a noise, sitting up stiffly at the end of Eleni’s bed. She seemed to be staring at the turquoise wall that Eleni had imposed after much debate with both her parents about her right to decorate what now was her own room. Could she not just get over it?

‘It’s been a long time I’ve been thinking of telling you, a long time that I’ve been living in fear that you would hear it from someone else, that they would break the news to you and hurt you.’

‘Mum, what are you talking about?’ Eleni said in surprise.

‘I tried to tell you when you were five but you would have none of it’, her mum went on, as in a trance. ‘I know you are definitely the wrong age now, in adolescence, and I am dreading how you will take this, how it’s going to affect you.’

‘I don’t understand what you are talking about, Mum. Have you gone bonkers?’ Eleni mumbled, feeling a strange numbness spreading slowly all over her body.

‘You asked me earlier on about your birth. How exactly you were born. Well, I don’t know all the details of that because it wasn’t me who gave birth to you. I took you when you were very little, only two months old. I still remember that day. Your wide blue-green eyes, how you stared at me when I took you in my arms …’

Eleni felt her hands going cold and her body stiffening. ‘Are you saying that you are not my mother?’ she asked quietly.

‘Of course I am your mother. Who else could your mother be? I changed your nappies and I rocked you to sleep and you kept me up night after night. Mothers are those who bring up a child, not those who give birth to her.’

‘So my father is not my real father either?’ Eleni mumbled, trying to restrain the tears that were quickly filling her eyes.

‘It’s quite complicated, a bit of a mess, a mess that’s certainly not only of my own making. You are adopted, but only on my side. Your father is your biological father.’

‘I don’t understand’, Eleni murmured in a shaky voice.

‘Just before your father and I were going to get married, I got pregnant. You know that his mother didn’t really want him to marry me. His mother and all the supposedly upper-class aunties, they all thought that their prince could not possibly marry a simple girl from a family of the lowest class of peasants, those who cultivated tobacco. I was not even a pretty girl. “What does he see in her?” I overheard them saying.’

‘That’s mean! You were pretty, I have seen pictures.’

‘Well, I was small and dark, not a tall, blonde, statuesque goddess like his mother. I could never measure up to her, you see. Anyway, I just knew that if I married him being pregnant with his child, they would all say that I had blackmailed him. I was very proud then. I was just about finishing my Medicine degree, I was going to be a professional, an independent woman, why on earth would I need to blackmail someone into marrying me? I had an illegal abortion. It went wrong –’

‘Stop! Why are you telling me all this?’ Eleni yelled at her. She wanted to stand up and leave the room, but her legs had turned to jelly like in a scary dream.

‘What I am trying to say is that I was not able to conceive after the abortion. We tried, month after month and year after year from our mid-twenties to our mid-thirties. It made us unhappy. Your father kept saying, “What’s the point of making all this money and having no one to spend it on?” Every day that passed, I craved a baby. I thought of the aborted baby, it was a boy, I was sure. Was I being punished for aborting him? We had all these things in our lives, successful careers, lots of friends, eating out in expensive restaurants, and yet nothing was right. There was this longed-for baby we could not have.’

‘I could not care any less about your longed-for baby’, Eleni shouted, her voice finally breaking into a silent weep.

‘Don’t cry, my darling. This is a conversation that’s been long overdue. So, one day your father came home and said to me, “I‘ve got a baby for you. Do you want it?” Of course it was not as simple as that, not at all. He had got someone pregnant, one of his girlfriends. He had researched it all, her family tree and everything, and he got her pregnant deliberately.’

Eleni had been crying for all this time and her mother did not even seem to notice.

‘You know, this is all perfectly legal nowadays’, Leonora continued. ‘Surrogate mothers, they call them in America. I read an article about them. They get paid to carry a baby for an infertile couple. That’s all it was. But of course, it was done in your father’s usual, messy way. He has never been good with boundaries. Paying her off, cutting off ties and that’s it.’

‘So who is she? Who is the woman who gave birth to me?’ Eleni asked, letting the tears and snot roll down her face and land on her not-that-white-any-more angora pullover, the one she had just reluctantly received from Nefeli as an early birthday present.

‘Oh … I don’t know. One of your father’s girlfriends, I suppose. I do not want to know about them, as you must have noticed. I never enquire. It’s an addiction really, it has almost killed him a couple of times – and then he always comes back to me, asking me to save him.’

Eleni got up abruptly. She needed a wee so badly that it felt like her body was being ripped apart. She continued checking into the toilet every ten minutes for the rest of the afternoon.

Leonora had now stopped talking. Tears rolled down her cheeks as she sat still on the side of Eleni’s bed. In her mother’s presence, Eleni felt numb, as though she did not inhabit her body at all. Every time she went to the toilet, she took time to look at her image in the mirror. Her face seemed totally new to her. ‘Who am I? I have not come from my mother’s body. I am not my mother’s daughter’, she mumbled to her reflection between sobs. ‘Who am I?’