Katie Kitamura - A Separation

Still, as I have said, Christopher could speak on his subject with great authority. And although there is nothing essentially frivolous about mourning, he was able to talk about particular rituals and traditions in a manner that was wholly entertaining, his own interest in the subject matter was infectious. Christopher had almost certainly come to Greece in order to study its professional mourners, the women who were paid to issue lamentations at funerals. I had known this the moment Isabella told me he had gone to Greece, it was a matter of considerable interest to him, and was going to figure strongly in the book he was writing.

The ancient practice, he had explained to me, was rapidly dying out. There were only a few parts of rural Greece where it was still practiced, the southern Peloponnese, a region called Mani, was one of them. There, every village had a few mourners—weepers or wailers, as they were sometimes called—women who performed the funeral dirge at a village burial. What intrigued him about the practice was its externalization of grief: the fact that a body other than the body of the bereaved expressed its woe.

Literally an out-of-body experience, he had said. You, the bereaved, are completely liberated from the need to emote. All the pressures of the funeral, the expectation that you will perform your grief for the assembled crowd—imagine that you are a widow, burying your husband, people expect a good show. But the nature of grief is incompatible with this demand, people say that when you are grieving, when you have experienced a profound loss, you are impaled beneath it, hardly in a condition to express your sorrow.

Instead, you purchase an instrument to express your sorrow, or perhaps it’s less like an instrument and more like a tape recorder and tape, you simply press play and the ceremony, the long and elaborate production, carries on without you. You walk away and are left alone with your grief. It is a remarkably enlightened arrangement, of course the financial aspect is crucial, the fact that it is a monetary transaction makes the entire arrangement clean, refined. It’s no wonder that such a custom is native to Greece, the so-called cradle of civilization—it makes perfect sense.

He was half joking, I remember that he was actually laughing as he spoke. For a moment I was startled. It was if the man standing before me was splitting in two—on the one hand he spoke like a man who had never lost anything, not a wife or a lover or a parent, not even a pet dog, a man who had no conception of what real loss must feel like. And I knew this to be the case from a factual point of view, I knew the man’s history. But at the same time, I thought I could perceive the shadow of a man who had lost something or someone very dear to him, even a man who had at one point lost everything, in his voice—ironic and cool with distance—there was the intimation of some unseen depth.

But what such a loss could be—this escaped me. I asked him once why he was writing the book, it was more than a question of interest—the writing of a book cannot, in my experience, be sustained by simple interest, it requires something more, it is generally the work of years, after all. But he did not reply, not at once and then not at all, he merely shook his head and turned away, as if the answer was mysterious even to himself. He had spoken about the book with increasing frequency over the past year, it came up again and again in conversation, as if the unfinished volume weighed on him, and yet he could not explain his reasons for writing it.

That was why, no doubt, he was unable to finish the book. Christopher was a charming man, and charm is made up of surfaces—every charming man is a confidence man. But not even that is the point. What I am talking about are the natural failures of a relationship, even one that for a time had been very good. In the end, what is a relationship but two people, and between two people there will always be room for surprises and misapprehensions, things that cannot be explained. Perhaps another way of putting it is that between two people, there will always be room for failures of imagination.

As soon as I hung up the phone, it rang again. It was Yvan. I had called him from the airport in Athens but it had been a rushed conversation—I was looking for the driver, the arrivals terminal was chaotic, the tannoy making a constant stream of announcements in both English and Greek—and we had not spoken since. The time difference between England and Greece was minimal but the journey was long, causing a palpable lag in our communication, some kind of delay between us.

He asked how the journey had been, how I had found Christopher—he hesitated before he asked after Christopher, and I said at once that he was not here. That in fact he was nowhere to be found. Yvan was silent, and then said, What do you mean he’s not there, was Isabella wrong? It’s not like Isabella to be wrong. I said, No, she wasn’t wrong. He was here, but he’s not here at the moment, I’m waiting for him to return. Then Yvan was silent for a moment longer, before asking, How long will you wait?

I said, It makes sense to wait, doesn’t it? And after yet another pause, Yvan said, Yes, it makes sense. But I don’t like the idea of you there alone, I’m not going to lie, it makes me nervous. This was unusually blunt for Yvan, he was not the kind of man who liked to make demands. Even as he spoke his voice was mild, there was not a hint of reproach. There’s nothing to be nervous about but I understand, I said, it’s an awkward situation. Then Yvan said, Why don’t I come out and join you?

When I ran into Yvan three months ago—in the street, literally in the middle of a crossing—he suggested that we go into the coffee shop on the corner rather than stand in the cold. Even now, with the benefit of hindsight, I can’t say for certain that he made the invitation with anything in mind apart from the wind and light rain. Neither of us was dressed for the weather, the temperature had dropped out of nowhere, he said, in exactly the same tone he used to ask if he shouldn’t join me in Gerolimenas.

At any rate, I accepted the invitation. I had always liked Yvan, he was handsome but in a manner that was unassuming, there was nothing demanding about his good looks. In this sense he was different from Christopher, who was aware of his appearance and knew too well how to exploit its effect—toward the end of our marriage, only at the very tail end, it became clear to me that he knew the angles from which he appeared most distinguished, and that over time he had perfected a series of appealing looks, glances, expressions and gestures, a trait that was absurd and essentially unlovable.

Yvan was better-looking than Christopher, but almost certainly did not give that impression, you had to look quite hard to discern the handsome man behind the shambling exterior. I had never thought of him as handsome. And yet as we sat across the table from each other and he inquired, in his very kind manner, as to the facts of my life and how I was doing, it was evident that it was because I found him attractive that I told him, rather abruptly and in confidence, that Christopher and I had separated. He was the first person I told.

This was before Christopher had extracted from me the promise not to tell anyone about the separation. If Yvan was surprised, he didn’t show it, he only said that he was very sorry, that we had always seemed happy together, we had been one of the couples he had enjoyed spending time with. Then he laughed in a self-conscious way, he didn’t mean to speak about himself, regarding a matter that had nothing to do with him—but then, of course, it ended up having everything to do with him, his words presaged the arrangement that would follow, for which he did and would continue to feel guilty, perhaps he had a sense of it even then.