Pan Bouyoucas - Portrait of a Husband with the Ashes of His Wife

“Monsieur, monsieur!”

It was the Dutch woman, running toward him, gasping for breath.

“I heard you talking with the priest.”

Yet another who was going to tell him how romantic and touching was his reason for coming here…

“May I take the liberty of suggesting a place?”

She pointed to the mountain that overlooked the cemetery, the village, and Alinda Bay.

“There is nothing but rocks. You won’t have to ask anyone’s permission, no one will search for anything there, and I know where you can get a shovel.”

He gazed at the mountain and his face lit up with a smile.

“Yes…”

He looked for the sun in the sky.

“You won’t have time today.”

She was right. The sun was already sinking behind the mountain. If he were to go down and get the urn and the shovel and then come back up, this whole side would be in the dark.

“Since you’ll be free this evening,” the woman said, “would you give me the pleasure of dining with me? I know, you’re in mourning but I can’t stand to eat alone any more. Neither can you for that matter, I noticed earlier when I came back from my walk.”

He wanted to spend this last evening alone with the ashes but how could he refuse when the Dutch woman had just relieved him of such a great concern? After all, dinner would last for an hour, two at most.

“You’re right, I don’t like eating alone in a restaurant.”

“Nine o’clock then? At the café where I saw you at noon. It’s the only one where they don’t play that never-ending music and you can still hear the lapping of the waves.”

SHE ARRIVED ATthe café after a shower, hair done, scented, and wearing a dark silk dress with a generously plunging neckline that reminded Doctor Maras of the one that Alma had worn when they had their final meal together. As well, just like Alma over the past few years, before she sat down she would check the sources of light and choose a table where the lighting was softer, on the pretext that they would have a better view of the bay. On the other hand Alma, who usually applied perfume to all her pulse points, used none on Leros, the better to appreciate the scents all around her.

“One evening, during my first time on Leros,” the Dutch woman said when she’d finished settling in at the table, “I was sitting here and, when I saw the full moon appear on the horizon, I wished for a power failure. Suddenly, I swear, all the lights went out. For a good halfhour, the moon alone lit up the island, as it must have done at the beginning of the world. At the age I was then, I saw it as a message from fate: Every day would be for me a blank page that I could cover as I wanted, according to my dreams and my wishes.”

She heaved a sigh that raised her bosom and then, with the ease that people have when travelling, as if it were less painful to open up to a stranger one will never see again, she told him the story of her life.

Her name was Yannick Haakman. After studying Fine Arts in Amsterdam she had spent a year on Leros with her lover, he painting oils, she doing watercolours, until they knew every hue that earth, sky and sea can display between sunrise and sunset.

“Then we went back to Amsterdam where we did our best to tear one another to pieces.”

She made a nervous little laugh that heaved her bosom again and her perfume wafted to him.

“I apologize. You came to dispose of your wife’s ashes and I keep moaning and groaning. Were you married for a long time?”

“Twenty-four years.”

“Twenty-four years! Bravo! What was her name? Was she a doctor too? Do you have any children?”

She was as curious as Alma and her questions kept taking him back to the past so that now and then he forgot where he was, despite the water lapping at his feet.

“An actress! How did you meet? You worked in such different fields.”

Or:

“For some time now I’ve been seeing spots floating in my field of vision. What could that mean?”

Or else:

“Weren’t you afraid when you were your daughter’s age that you might make the wrong decision about your future? We’re catapulted onto the stage of life without knowing our part, forced to improvise everything. And we aren’t given a second chance to correct even one gesture, or to go over a word.”

She listened to his replies with her head bent to one side, now and then watching the movement of his lips or his hands, then her gaze shifted to small boats swaying gently at the end of the jetty, then towards the lights of Agia Marina, the little harbour of Platanos that streamed across the bay to them, and a shadow of nostalgia swept over her face.

“Is there really an age when we aren’t afraid of something? Even at my age and after all I’ve had by way of adventures, however much I wish, before I leave Leros for good, not for a power failure — those things only happen once in your life — I wish for an hour in the arms of a man, somewhere beside the water where there are no lights, but I don’t dare ask for fear I’d be laughed at.”

Doctor Maras looked down.

The woman’s fingers fiddled briefly around her glass. Then:

“Yep, life doesn’t have many parts for aging women only in the theatre and the movies.”

She drained her glass in a gulp.

To avoid looking at her, he busied himself pouring what was left of the wine into the two glasses.

“Is that to give me courage?” she asked with the audacity of despair.

This time he did look her in the eye, gently.

“I want to spend the night with Alma.”

The woman forced herself to smile.

“I’m happy for you. Your journey will end well and you’ll go home with the satisfaction of your mission accomplished.”

Raising her glass, she added:

“May your joie de vivre return very soon.”

HE STAYED UPall night with the ashes and left his room before dawn when all the islanders were still in bed.

Leaving the lights of the hotel behind him he plunged into the silence and darkness of a winding road that rose between houses buried in eucalyptus and pines, climbed two hundred metres beyond the last one, hearing nothing but the crunch of pebbles under his feet.

When he finally stopped, the sky was beginning to turn pale at the approach of day, and wasps were already buzzing around a caper bush.

The air was mild and a pale halo surrounded the stars still twinkling in the sky, while below the hill, small crests fringed with foam broke over the feet of the sleeping village.

He put down the urn and began to dig the dew-damp soil while a few metres away from him two sparrows were quarrelling over the carcass of a cicada.

He did not waver until it was time to place the urn in the ground.

“I’ll miss you, my love. Your laugh, your sparkling eyes, the energy you put into everything, that revived me when I came home in the evening, drained… I was so happy with you that I thought I would never know the agony of loneliness. But don’t worry: I’ll let nothing show and I’ll do my best to help Mélissa to find her way and to rediscover the beauty of the world. And one day I’ll come back here with her children. I’ll take them to see the place where I buried their grandmother’s ashes and just as you’d have done I’ll teach them to say jasmine, oregano, and thyme, not simply the words but how to recognize their scent…”