Content Warnings (click to reveal)
Discussed: loss of partner, drugs
The Picture of Marina
The old man reached out for the railing of the tram door, gripping tightly as he embarked. He took out his wallet to tap on. A black and white photograph sat within it.
“Kyrie eleison,” Efstathios said to his wife’s picture. He kept her in the wallet’s translucent sleeve so he could look at her whenever he opened it. Marina, dark-haired and solemn faced. The daughter of the holiest man in Exoghi. She blessed his every purchase, his exchanges of tens and twenties overseen by her image. She protected him as the card of the Madonna protected the Orthodox cab drivers, infant messiah in arm, guiding their steering wheels so that their cars never veered.
Marina was his Madonna. In life, she was afforded the religious proximity of being born to the village priest of their township. Efstathios had been called foolish to try courting a girl of such stature. But he had seen her swim in the Polis Bay inlet and could not forget. Watching her move through the water with the grace of a siren, he had imagined himself as Odysseus must have, many millennia ago — transfixed by tendrils of dark hair in the sea.
Efstathios had watched her languid strides across the beach. She had held gaze with him as she idled across the rocks and turned to the summit of the hill.
He had waited for her in the passing afternoons, sitting perched like a gull with his knees drawn to his chest. The pockets of his pants were filled with figs. Purple, bursting figs, which she began to accept after her evening swims. The two would hike the mountainous terrain of the island and chew on the fruit as they walked.
At first they did not talk; the crunch of fig flesh was enough. Efstathios would dare a glance at Marina to see that she was looking back.
“I had thought,” she said one afternoon, “that it was a woman’s obligation to woo a man through his stomach, and not the other way round?”
Efstathios had blushed. The crunch of pebbles underfoot replied for him. He had kept his gaze on the trail, looking at Marina’s polished shoes, which were fastened by brass buckles; they winked in the sun. He looked at his own shoes. The leather was as wrinkled as the skin of his Yiayia.
“Can’t a man woo a woman with food, as well?” He said.
She had laughed. “Spoken like a true husband.”
He had taken the last fig from his pocket and bitten into it, tearing away the flesh with his teeth so that half remained.
Shyly, hardly believing his own daring, he had passed her the other segment of fig. Marina had smiled at him and taken it into her grip. He had felt himself blush again as she accepted his kiss by proxy, her saliva meeting his own in the act of putting the fruit to her lips.
Unbeknownst to his encounters with Marina, Efstathios’s mother had been dismayed at his lack of appetite for their evening meals.
“You’re not eating the stifado!” she had cried. “Are you sick?”
“I’m fine Mama,” he had told her. “Just not very hungry.”
Beneath his belt, his belly was bursting with figs.
That had been a lifetime ago; it had been decades since his Mama’s death. In Australia, on the days where the suffocation of his loneliness squeezed him like a fist, Efstathios pulled out the wallet to look at his wife. He sometimes spoke aloud to her, like in prayer to a saint.
In Ithaca lay his youth, and on the other side of the blade of age was his present day as an old man. The two lay either side of each other, as opposing as day and night, sliced by the cut that was time. In Exoghi, he had braved almost vertical inclines without breaking a sweat. Now, on a tram in Melbourne, his rheumatic knees protested when he the thought of standing for the entire journey home. He looked for an empty seat but found none – until at the back of the vehicle, a thin man stood and gestured. He held tightly to a skeletal bicycle frame. He was clad in blacks, but they hung from his body; sliding past, Efstathios noted how the man’s bicep sprung from his wiry arm. His cheeks were sunken in below the bone. In his Grecian youth, Efstathios had never seen the starving look of a body on amphetamine. For him it had not existed.
Efstathios massaged his left knee as the vehicle lurched forward. The doors opened and a group of teenage boys got on. Their voices were loud and competing with each other for dominance. They were what his Yiayia would have called mikra katharmata – little bastards. They lay sprawled across multiple stretches of seats, their backpacks claiming the occupancy of empty spaces. They spoke in low, bellowing tones. Their sentences were punctuated by swearing; Efstathios wrinkled his nose. A middle-aged woman nearby looked up from her book, and averted her gaze down again.
The thin man looked at the boys, but stayed silent, even as their voices rose to shouts.
“Oi, where we getting off?” one asked.
“Hawthorn Street,” another boy said.
“This whole street is Hawthorn Street, dickhead!” The retorting boy had red hair, cut very close to his head.
“They only said Hawthorn,” the first one said again.
“Go through your messages,” the red-headed boy said. “Check which corner.”
The first boy’s brow twitched. He pulled out his phone. “Fuck. We passed it.”
“You fuckwit! How’d you not know where we were getting off?”
“Shut up,” the red-headed boy said. “Tell him to meet us at the end of the line.”
Efstathios stared at the teenager. He was maybe sixteen – there were downy flecks of blonde at his upper lip. Dots of hormonal red on his cheeks. He was also very thin – like the man with the bicycle. Did this boy’s mother not feed him? Or did he take drugs, too?
The boy took out his phone and began to play music from its speaker, abrasive and tinny in frequency. Efstathios had the urge to put his fingers in his ears. He tried to look elsewhere – the passing streets from the tram windows, or the cover of the book the woman was reading across from him – but the boys’ voices dropped in on him like the sear of static on a radio.
The tram halted and a woman got on with a baby. She took an orange-clothed seat near the doors. Efstathios looked back at the boys. He waited for them to lower their voices, to drop the obscenities from their talk; they wouldn’t dare to act so badly in front of a mother and her child?
Efstathios stiffened in his seat as the red-headed boy took out something thin and metallic. He sucked on it and blew smoke into the tram. The woman rose with her baby and took stilted steps down the carriage, trying not to fall off-balance with the tram’s rocking. The boy, unseeing, inhaled from the vapouriser again.
Efstathios caught the woman’s eye, and noticed the colour of her hair. Dark strands that coiled and fell thickly from the centre part of her head, falling to frame her face. It glistened, almost wet — like the curls of his young wife’s hair, as she emerged from the sea, so many years ago…
‘Hey,” Efstathios said. He had spoken without meaning to. His heart was palpitating in his chest. “Why you smoke inside for, hey? There is a baby in here.”
The chorus of the group fell silent, and the red-headed boy turned. Efstathios could see that his eyes were blue.
“What did you say to me?”
“Stop smoking.”
A whining, high-pitched ping went through the air; the hollow man with the bicycle had flicked its metal bell. Both Efstathios and the boy looked for the sound. A warning call.
The boy turned back at the older man and smirked.
“Nah,” he said. “I don’t think I will. Fucking pedo.”
Efstathios was caught without a reply. The insult had thrown him. He grew hot. The red in his cheeks prickled to his nose as the group cackled and wriggled in their seats. They were like animals, Efstathios thought, wild animals. Dirty, crude Australian boys, who knew nothing of hard work or respect for their elders. Not for a mother and her baby. The memory of something distant came to him, white and oblong and hewn down at the edges. A bar of soap. On an island, far away, and many years ago, his Yiayia had washed out his mouth for saying a swear.
“How dare you use those words with me,” he said.
“What are you going to do about it, you daft cunt?” The boy inhaled again and blew a cloud in Efstathios’s direction. It smelt sickly — a chemical sweetness.
“You stop it, or I throw you off the tram!” Efstathios found himself shouting. He waited for the red-headed youth to bite back an insult, or to cross the carriage and punch him. Efstathios tensed and readied himself.
The boy did not move. His lips were upturned. “Okay,” he said finally. “We’ll get off.”
Efstathios felt his mouth slacken at the boy’s sudden acquiesce. The youth stood. He was tall, and the old man gripped the steadying pole beside him as the boy came close. Efstathios felt the brush of the boy’s shoulder as he went past, but nothing else came. The others sprung up to follow their leader. They piled together at the tram’s doors, preparing to exit.
The red-headed boy turned back to Efstathios. He was grinning.
“Catch ya, boss.”
The doors squealed open. The boy raised his hand. He held Efstathios’s wallet aloft in the air.
The old man opened his mouth to yell, but the boy had already leapt from the tram and the others were following in succession. The group began to run. Although Efstathios stumbled off after them, onto the pavement, they were already metres away. He watched their bodies begin to merge into the shapes of the street; the red-headed boy ducked behind a passing car. Their laughter was becoming faint. Come back, Efstathios cried weakly. He stumbled forward; there was no chance of reaching them.
There was a rush of air as a dark shape went past him. Efstathios started in shock; a shadow? He realised, as he saw the wheels of the bicycle spinning rapidly, its rider bent double over the frame, that it was the thin man.
The bicycle grew smaller and turned a corner in pursuit of the boys. Efstathios slowed his jog to a walk. His heart was racing; he felt a wave of nausea. His breath caught in his lungs and a stretch of coughing overtook him. In the other direction, the green of the tram was shrinking to a point on the horizon.
He felt his jacket pocket. The boy must have slipped his hand in and stolen the wallet as he went past. Efstathios put his hand in the pocket again, feeling the insides of its edges. His fingers searched for the leather package and the precious image inside it, but there was only the raised crease of the stitching.
From around the corner, the man on the bicycle reappeared. Efstathios watched his figure grow larger as the man rode closer, weaving across the road and onto the footpath. He dismounted gracefully, as if from a horse. For a moment Efstathios thought of someone else.
“The little shits,” the man called out to him. “Just dropped it and ran.” He held out his hand. Efstathios could see green tattoos on the thin man’s fingers. In his palm was the leather wallet. Efstathios reached out for it. His own hand was shaking.
“I’m sorry, mate, they left it splayed. I think the money’s all gone.”
Efstathios flipped the wallet open. A sob rose in his chest. He pulled the thin man into an embrace. “Thank you,” he said. “Thank you.”
The wallet’s inner fold for notes was empty, but sitting securely in its sleeve, unblemished and intact, was the picture of Marina.
Soraya is a female-identifying writer and filmmaker whose chosen mediums flow between creative nonfiction, short story, and screenplay. Studying Film and Television at Swinburne University of Technology, she directed the 2033 documentary ‘BEATMATCH’ and wrote the screenplay for the upcoming graduate film ‘My Sister Charlotte’. Soraya has been previously published by Mantissa Poetry Review. She plays guitar and piano, she loves to sing, and to dance with her friends.
Locative Magazine 