Sara Alexi - The Illegal Gardener

The chairs are deeply padded, and Aaman thinks he might sink through to the floor. He was right. There is Internet access here. Two more emails have arrived both offering interviews the next day. Aaman juggles his times and arranges to see them all in one day.

That night he doesn’t sleep despite the comparative quiet. He wonders if he has been rash to turn away from the job offers in Lahore. Dawn comes, and Aaman’s eyes refuse to open. Consequently, he is late for his first interview.

The pay is slightly less, but the cost of living in Sialkot is lower than in Lahore. The work is fascinating in all three of the offers he received. The last interview, in Urdu alone, culminates in him being taken around every department and introduced as the international programmer who will be coming to work for them. Workers stand to shake his hand. Aaman feels a fraud but also enjoys his status. It is a long way from how he felt as an illegal immigrant.

He takes the second job offer of the day. The people seem most interested in their work, and there is a feeling of excitement that he too feels about programming. He begins work the next day and the following evening he finds a flat where he can live during the week and maybe, if she still wants to be near him, his wife, Saabira, can join him. He hopes his decisions would please Juliet.

He finds working in an office more difficult than he had even considered. There is much he does not understand and he makes some mistakes. One involves the changes he made in a programme on one website going live, but he forgot to close down all the other connections that he opened to the database on his office desktop, and it caused many problems. The site has to be taken off the Internet for some hours to fix it. This is the worst mistake. But the boss declares there isn’t a person in the office who hasn’t done this at some point and tells him not to worry. Nevertheless, he does worry. He has learnt from this, and it will never happen again.

His flat is not far from work, and his days consist of work, food, and sleeping. At the end of the second week, his days take on a routine, and this gives room for him to think about Juliet and Saabira and his family. Saabira feels so far away. He feels like Juliet is with him. He tries to involve himself in the life around him. Tea with his colleagues, cinema with his boss one time. He throws himself into this integration the same way he dedicated himself to programming, singlemindedly. The result, after a month, is he is very popular at work and is known by his name at the places he visits. His confidence soars.

But he knows he has to complete his journey by returning home. It would be easier not to. But he longs to see his Ma and the oxen.

September, for Juliet, brings some relief as the temperature drops. The Greek cogs begin to turn and tourism dwindles. It is more noticeable in the town, but the village seems to continue on its perennial path, methods of a hundred years past still holding strong. The goats still taken out to pasture, left to roam along the hillsides, and brought home to be milked and fed and bedded down. Their protective dogs unleashed and allowed the free run of the village in their time off. The shepherds tend to the goats in their makeshift shacks, on land that is unusable for anything else. Too rocky, too sloping, too out of the way.

Juliet gets a trickle of work through the British Council and she secures the deal to translate the book. She feels excited about the book. She keeps her working hours to the mornings and early afternoons as she has finally learnt that she is more productive for the routine. As the heat of the day passes, she dons Aaman’s gardening gloves and potters about in the garden, most of the time not knowing what she is doing but learning gradually. Evenings are hard. What words of wisdom had she passed onto Michelle? Just adjustment, nothing bad is happening. It does not feel like that.

For a time, Juliet waits to hear from Aaman but as the weeks turn into months, she stops waiting. Hope remains, silent, unspoken, and unsought, occasionally popping up to tear open the wound.

October is glorious, warm but not hot, with gentle rain cooling the earth. Droplets hit the parched soil with an audible sigh, bringing confused kittens in wet coats inside. The vines that had grown at an incredible speed during the spring and had produced tiny buds of grapes in the early summer, now hang weighted down with clusters of tight-skinned, white-dusted, purple balloons.

Juliet discovers a small vine, which Aaman had encouraged up one of the supports of the pergola. Each white, seedless grape is no bigger than her fingernail, and yet each is packed with the flavour of a whole bunch. The passion flower has grown at a phenomenal rate and produced flower upon flower and, as they faded and died, new flowers came, hidden pockets of intense colour amongst its trailing thin leaves.

November has Juliet unearthing her lighter jumpers and wondering what to get her boys for Christmas. The big celebration in Greece is Easter, but some indication of Christmas shows here and there in the shops. In the village shop, Marina has a four-inch tall silver Christmas tree for sale on the top shelf by the bottled wine. Juliet has long since discovered that the local wine, in unmarked plastic bottles at an eighth of the price, is just as good as the labelled glass bottles, but lighter, less hangover.

“Tzuliet! Hello! Isn’t it a relief to have the temperature drop just a little? I can move now.” And as if to prove it, she stands up and pushes her crate footstool around the front of the counter to the door where she begins to fill it, one by one, with empty beer bottles lined like soldiers against the wall. “There! I have been meaning to do that for a while. Now! What can I get you?”

“I was just wondering if you could tell me what I do with the vines once the fruit is all gone? I know they will need pruning, but when is the best time to prune and where about do you cut them? Is there a rule, near a nodule? I haven’t a clue.”

“Ha! Neither have I. Best go to Mitsos. Ask him.”

“Mitsos?”

“Yes, you know, with one arm?” Juliet shakes her head, not recalling seeing anyone in the village with one arm. Marina goes to the window and points.

“Go down to the taverna here, the little street that goes up the side there.” Her pointing is indiscriminate. “Before the road turns, you’ll see, not even a few yards, there is Mitsos. He has a shop for medicines for the farmers. I think he is open on Saturdays. Pesticides, that sort of thing. He will know. He went to school with my husband. Always getting into trouble, the two of them.” She crosses herself looking serious for a moment before her face lights with a thought. “So have you any plans for Christmas? Will you be going home?”

“Marina, this is my home now. Besides, why would I want to leave here?”

“For your family of course. Which reminds me. Guess what?”

“What?” Juliet cannot help but smile at Marina.

“They are getting married at Christmas! Can you believe it? Suddenly. Bam!” She clashes her hands together like cymbals, her housecoat across her bosom shimmies in response. “I was always sure about him, such a nice family. She has not chosen the dress, or a definite date, but you must come. Everyone must come!”

“I would love to. So right by the taverna?”

“Yes, you cannot miss it. Mr Mitsos.” She adds on the prefix in the traditional Greek way for someone who is older, but not quite old enough to rank as a Papous , a grandfather.

Mitsos is not there, but his younger brother Stavros is very helpful, his young wife sitting with him in the shop, enormous with child.

Juliet walks home wiser but feeling a little alone. She misses the boys. She misses company. She knows, but does not want to even give space to it in her thoughts, that she misses Aaman.