Christos Ikonomou - Something Will Happen, You'll See

When she was done she rubbed her hands on a cloth she pulled out of her pocket — who knows what else she was hiding in that little coat — and then stood up tall and took two steps back and looked at the bollard cocking her head to one side and then went back to the bench. I waited. I waited for some time to pass trying to be discreet about it. Then I stood up and walked toward the bollard, feigning indifference, looking at the sea with my hands blocking the sun from my eyes, as if I were waiting for a ship that would take me to where I wanted to go or for a ship that would bring me someone I wanted to see. I was expecting her to have painted something really special but all I saw when I went over there was something that looked like a child’s drawing. A yellow smiley face with black eyes and very red lips. It was no work of art or anything but I kept on staring at it and wondering: What was it, what did it mean? What did it mean to paint a little yellow person — it wasn’t a man or a woman either — with an enormous red smile on a mooring bollard. What was it, what did it mean. The woman on the bench was also staring at the bollard — she paid no attention to me, like I wasn’t even there, though I was actually standing right in front of her wearing my welding goggles with the thick lenses and orange protective plastic. She had wrapped herself in her overcoat with her hands deep in her pockets letting the breeze muss her hair which now that the sun was disappearing behind the apartment buildings had lost its shine and grown darker around the edges like a halo in an old icon. It was like coming home after work and finding a strange woman sitting on your sofa staring silently at a painting she’s made on the opposite wall. And my mind went again to Aris. If he’d been there he would have gone over and talked to her for sure. For sure. He’d sit next to her and offer her a cigarette and start asking all kinds of questions and talking to her in his calm gruff voice.

Don’t sit here, he would finally say. This is no place for a girl to be sitting by herself. Go home and turn on the television. It’s a good thing, television. It’s like medicine. It really is. The best medicine. Really.

• • •

It was getting dark. A ship came into the port and turned itself around and docked with its stern facing the pier. It was empty, no passengers or cars either. When the ramp came down a sailor came out and grabbed the rope and pulled it over to the painted bollard. For a minute he froze in place, bent over, looked at the yellow smiley face, then laughed, shook his head and laughed again and looked around but didn’t see anything so he threw the rope around the bollard and went back to work.

I waited. A breeze had picked up and in the half darkness I could hear another rope slapping against the empty flagpole on the stern of the ship. I could pick out that sound in an instant from among thousands of other sounds. There’s no other sound like it, so lonely and melancholy, an unending sigh, an empty flagpole longing for its flag. I’d never told Aris about it, because I knew he wouldn’t believe me and also because he’d think nothing of running out to buy me a pair of ear protectors like the ones the guys wear who work the jackhammers, the ones with the spongy cushions that rest softly over your ears and make your ears all hot and he’d give them to me and say:

For the port. For you to wear when it’s windy so you don’t have to hear how sad the flagpole is. Aren’t they nice? Try them on. Aren’t they nice?

• • •

Now the wind was blowing hard. A hot harsh wind that stuck to you like old sins. I saw the girl get up off the bench and go over to the bollard. She kneeled and pulled the cans of spray paint back out of her pocket — or it might have been just one can, I don’t know, I couldn’t see very well. She did something to the bollard and then got up and stood there motionless and looked for a while at the dark sea and put her hands in her pockets and wrapped herself in her coat and left almost at a run with her head down. She went out through the gate, crossed the street and disappeared. When I went over to the bollard I saw that she’d changed something in the painted face. The smile. There was no smile anymore, she’d erased it. She’d erased the smiling red lips and in their place had put a black line that curled downward, a thick black line like a wound or scar. She’d erased the smile from the happy face and now the happy face was sad and afraid. At first I didn’t get it. Why had she done it? That smiley face had been a kind of comfort. To sit all alone at the port at night and see a smiley face on a bollard was a kind of comfort — why would she want to ruin it? But later on, when I sat down on the bench, I looked again and understood. I saw the rope squeezing the neck of the fake person like a noose and choking it. That’s why she’d erased the smile and made the happy face sad. Because it was choking. Because it had a thick rope around its neck and it couldn’t breathe.

I took off my special goggles and rubbed my eyes and looked again.

It’s an awful thing to have a noose around your neck. Even for a painting, for a fake person, it’s an awful thing. Really.

• • •

By now it was night. Off in the distance, outside the port, the lights of the ships anchored out at sea flickered in long irregular lines like the beads of a broken necklace whose pieces had scattered in the dark. I couldn’t see them from where I was sitting but I knew that’s how they were. Little shiny beads scattered in the dark — and you stretched out a hand and thought you could touch them, but that necklace had broken once and for all, no one could put it back together again. I sat down on my bench. At last. I sat there like a person who’s just come home exhausted from work — legs straight out eyes closed arms stretched to either side. I ran my hand over the peeling wood, which was warm and scratchy. I smelled my hand. It smelled like salt and sun and fuel oil.

Then I got up and went to the edge of the dock and kneeled in front of the bollard and touched the metal and the sad face that was painted on it. It was wild to the touch, wild and warm. I stood up and grabbed the thick wet rope with both hands. I grabbed the noose that was choking the painting’s neck. I grabbed it with both hands, with all my strength, and tried to pull it off of the bollard.

I grappled with the rope and sang that same song, “Sittin’ On the Dock of the Bay,” the same one I sing every night, and I said to myself that tonight I might just manage to get the whistle right, Otis Redding’s whistle, just once. It wasn’t easy but I’d give it my best. And I’d loosen the noose. I’d loosen the noose and take the rope off the bollard so that painted fake person could breathe. Man or woman it didn’t matter.

I struggled with the rope, gave it all the strength I had, told myself I had to succeed. I wished Aris were there to see what I was doing and tell me whether it was a good thing, whether it was a kind of medicine, to take ropes off bollards and loosen nooses from the necks of painted people. I wished he could tell me if that too was medicine for people like us, for poor people.

The noose was awkward and the rope kept slipping, chafing my hands until they bled.

But I wouldn’t stop, I gave it my all, I tugged at the rope with all my strength.

Please, I said. Please help me.

I struggled to take off that noose. I gave it all my strength.

It was July. Saturday was dawning. The sea breathed small choppy waves.

HOW MUCH.

Four hundred.

How much?

Are you deaf? Four hundred. One hundred times four. At the end of the month.

You said eight hundred. You said you’d ask for a whole month’s wages.