Christos Ikonomou - Something Will Happen, You'll See

Watch it, I say. The last thing we need is for you to lose a finger.

The twenty-first of December. Saturday afternoon. Four days until Christmas. Out the kitchen window I can see colored lights blinking on and off on the balconies and in the windows and yards of nearby apartments and houses. Red green yellow blue. Stars and garlands and Saint Vassilises and sleighs pulled by reindeer. An incredible number of lights. Like you’re in an endless casino and all the houses are slot machines. Cement, poverty, and colored lights — Bangladesh meets Las Vegas. Kids are riding their bikes in the street and women are watering flowerpots full of bushy plants. I see men in shorts grilling meat and drinking beer on the rooftops of apartment buildings. I see a bird circling in the air around a birdcage and the bird inside flaps its wings too but in a surprised kind of way. The sky is completely clear, the air as dry as the mouth of a person who’s very scared. Just a few days before Christmas but nothing looks like Christmas. Except for the lights. It’s as if Christmas came and went and now it’s spring but for some crazy reason everyone forgot to take down their decorations.

A few days before Christmas and something in the air around me is burning like a slow fuse. I wonder. I wonder when the fuse will burn down to the end and when the explosion will come and what will happen after that.

The other day I caught myself standing in front of a shop that sells hunting gear looking at the knives and switchblades in the window. Then I went in and bought a Buck knife, one of those American knives with a blade twenty centimeters long. It’s no joke it’s the real thing it can do some serious damage the heft of it in your hand makes your mind go dark. I carry it in my boot just in case, as they say. I didn’t tell Lena about it. But at night when I can’t sleep my mind wanders to things like that. Fuses and explosions and guns and knives. And I wonder what the hell is happening and where it’s all heading. It scares me.

And then there’s Lena dicing orange peel at the kitchen table. Slicing it silently with a knife in an utterly silent house. A silence like you wouldn’t believe, like what they say about the silence before an earthquake. And I think about how if there’s an earthquake maybe the weather will change, maybe it’ll rain and get cold and maybe even snow. If there’s an earthquake big enough to shake the whole world maybe something will change. And it scares me to be thinking those kinds of thoughts. What kind of life can you live without anything good, I say to myself.

What kind of life can you live when you’re waiting for something bad to save you from something bad.

• • •

There’s half a bottle of wine left from yesterday. I fill a glass with feigned indifference, as if it were water, and Lena looks at me and starts to say something but I beat her to it.

Monday, I say. On Monday when I get my Christmas bonus I’ll pay off the rest of what we owe at Kotsovolos. Okay?

Fine, she says. That’s great. I can stop worrying.

She grabs another piece of orange peel and starts to slice it with the knife. Her fingers are yellow.

Do you maybe, just maybe, have some idea of how much we owe? she asks me. Take a piece of paper and start writing. Two months of building fees is two hundred euros. The car insurance expired on the fifteenth. That’s another two hundred.

Rent. Kotsovolos. A hundred and forty to the electric company. The fucking credit cards from the fucking bank of fucking Cyprus. I have two cavities that need filling. By the time I’m forty I’ll have no teeth at all. Who knows how much the dentist will cost. Why aren’t you writing? You should be writing. And if you add it all up you’ll see that to make ends meet we need the Christmas bonus and the Easter bonus and the bonuses for next Christmas and next Easter too. Write it. Write it down.

I grab the knife from her hands and throw it in the sink. She looks at me as if I were a stain on a white shirt and then opens the drawer and takes out another knife and goes back to cutting the peel right where she left off. Her fingers are yellow and trembling.

Lena, I say.

Write, she says.

• • •

I look out the window. The sky. There’s a strange color in the sky again this evening. A gray like the underside of a piece of cardboard. Endless gray. No sun no moon no stars. Neither day nor night.

Not the sky but the underside of the sky.

Lena is on her second glass and second orange, peeling it and slicing the peel into tiny slivers which she lines up at the edge of the table. Her nails are yellow. The knife is yellow. Even the table is yellow. I wonder whether I should go and get my new knife and sit across from her and start slicing orange peels, too. To take my mind off things. So I don’t have to see that sky that’s the color of clouds without actually having a single cloud in it at all.

I’ll ask Vassilis for a loan, she says.

Which Vassilis? The saint?

A thousand. For the stuff that won’t wait. Then we’ll see.

A thousand? Are you crazy?

Calm down, he’s your brother. If you can’t ask your brother for help who can you ask. Sonia’s offered a hundred times. Whenever you need, she said. We’re doing just fine, she said. They’re going to Paris for New Year’s, did you know that? To Disneyland. They wanted to go to the Asterix village but it’s closed in winter. It opens in March or April I think. She said they’ll go to Jim Morrison’s grave.

She stops slicing and looks out the window. A piece of white stuff from the orange is stuck to her chin, hanging there like a tiny thread over an abyss.

Jim Morrison, she says. That was so long ago. I use to love him when I was younger. I was completely in love. Crazy, passionate love. People are streinz. People are streinz ouen yioura streinzer faces louk agli ouen yiouralon .

She sings in a sweet husky voice and slices the orange peel and her voice as she sings sounds like a lullaby in the silence of the house and I think how I’d like for us to go to sleep and sleep for whole hours whole days and when we wake up it would be evening and raining and we would drink hot cocoa with cinnamon and eat grape must cookies with sesame seeds and then go out onto the balcony and smell the rain and the wet earth and there wouldn’t be any knives or fuses or rent or debts — all those things will be gone and we’ll have woken up new strange people with no nostalgia for anything. Nostalgia. A mangy dog with gunk in its eyes licking its wounds. It tricks you into reaching out to pet it then bites you as hard as it can.

I lean over and pluck the orange pith from her chin and roll it into a little ball and toss it into the sink.

Monday, I say. I’ll take care of it all on Monday. Myself. No Vassilises and no Sonias. Okay?

She looks at me and then looks away.

I never expected this, she says.

What do you mean?

Nothing.

Tell me.

Nothing.

Then she cuts herself. The knife slips and cuts her on the thumb. But she doesn’t say anything doesn’t make a sound. She lets the blood run, looks at it calmly and indifferently the way brave people do on television. I go to grab her hand but she pulls away. She licks the blood, sucks at it then takes a paper napkin and wraps it around her finger. She looks at me with pursed lips and squeezes the napkin around the wound and the napkin turns redder and redder and then black.

Let me see, I say. Lena. It’s me. We’re not enemies. It’s just me.

But she’s looking at me as if I were the knife.

• • •

On Christmas Eve it seems like I’m having a dream. I say seems like, because for a long time I’ve been seeing things at night when I’m in bed and even though they seem like dreams I know they aren’t because when I’m seeing them I’m awake. Of course I’m never quite sure anymore when I’m sleeping and when I’m awake. It seems to me that those two things have become one — or nothing at all. I’m sure the weather is to blame. It hasn’t rained in seven months and now it’s December but outside it’s spring and the sun is as hot as two suns put together and every night I remember the winters we used to have and the cold and the rain and the snow. Some nights I get out of bed like a sleepwalker and open the cupboards and stick my head in the closet and smell the winter clothes and a sorrow like you wouldn’t believe comes over me as I look at those winter clothes hanging in the closet and wonder if we’ll ever wear them again or if they’ll just hang there forever getting eaten by the dust and the mites, like ghosts of winters past, ghosts of a past life, our ghosts, the ghosts of us.