John Berger - Lilac and Flag

You know why I did.

To set me an example! But we had our laughs. It’s a good two years since I’ve seen you laugh.

Not many jokes come my way, Susanna.

I’ll tell you a joke.

Later.

Of course! Wait till he orders his joke! Then place it on a tray and serve it with salted almonds. How do you like your joke cooked, sir? Crude, medium or well-done?

Susanna, I’ve had a hard day and I’d like to eat. Perhaps it would be good for you to eat too.

The Superintendent would like to eat what his wife has spent the afternoon preparing. Well, his wife has prepared a very special menu tonight. She’s prepared a joke with a shallot sauce!

Shh!

Shallot sauce, yes.

Don’t drink any more now, Susanna.

He let himself out of the French window and walked across the lawn. In the house next door lived a young couple who were both dentists. Soon they would make enough money to move on to a bigger house and garden. How am I going to end my days here? he asked himself for the thousandth time. And for the thousandth time he heard a child’s voice say: I’d rather die.

The last time he had tried to persuade Susanna that when he retired they should build a house in his village, on the land he had inherited from his aunt above the Republican Lyre, Susanna had finished her glass, put her swanlike arms round his neck, and said: You must be out of your mind, darling, I’ve told you a hundred times I’m not going to end my days living with a nag-who-has-a-broken-leg! That’s how the bled is called, isn’t it?

Now he walked across the lawn towards two flowering azalea bushes. It came to him that the common names of moths and butterflies resembled some of the nicknames given to criminals and their companions: the Fiancée, Robert the Demon, the Big Tortoise, Morio, the Mourning Suit, Blue Eyes.

From where he stood between the azaleas, his head full of names, he could distinguish the sea he wanted to cross and the arc lights of the docks.

Ram, she called, come and listen to my joke …

SUCUS WOKE UP early. Every morning the living room smelt of ironing. He could see two piles of ironed table cloths and napkins on the table. They were pale green and they came from a restaurant at the fashionable end of Cachan called Las Vegas. In the middle of each table cloth, when it was unfolded, there was printed a silhouette, wine red, of a dancer walking on tip-toe. Since Branch’s death, his mother took in ironing.

A southwest wind off the sea was blowing rain against the living room window on the fourteenth floor. The walls of the room were still covered with scarves to hide the damp stains. A chink of light appeared under the bedroom door. Behind it Wislawa was putting on her dressing gown, which, since her husband’s death, had become too big for her.

For men it is different, they don’t have the same habit of following as women do. Men mourn, of course. Marcel, who kidnapped the inspectors, placed flowers on the table by the empty side of his wedding bed every night after Nicole died. Men feel left behind, abandoned. Women grieve more than mourn, and they grieve for what has happened to their dead. This is why they follow them through the underworld.

Each morning when she came into the living room, Wislawa had the look of a widow who had been travelling throughout the night.

Here’s a clean pair of underpants and a vest for you, she said.

It’s raining, said Sucus.

It’s bound to rain from time to time.

It was raining yesterday too.

I’ll make the coffee. You get out of bed. You’d do well to take your oilskins today.

Can’t work in them. Are my shoes dry?

Wear your gum boots.

They fill up with water.

Then empty them from time to time.

From time to time! From time to time! You’ve no idea what it’s like on a building site. You’ve never worked on one, so you don’t know.

Your father did.

He didn’t.

Clement did every job under the sun.

He told me he opened oysters for forty years and nothing else.

At least your poor father has one worry less, now you’re earning.

Doesn’t he have better things to think about where he’s gone?

Not yet, not yet, it’s too soon.

You’re going to make the coffee?

Not till you’re out of bed.

Please!

If you work well, you could be a foreman one day.

A foreman! God forbid. You should see Cato … A crane driver, yes. But, you need a certificate of some sort.

You could go to evening classes and work for the certificate.

In the evening, Mother, I’ve got better things to do. Did Zsuzsa come round yesterday?

Out of bed! No, she didn’t.

What have you got against her? She brought you some fish and she cooked them.

She cooks well.

So then?

Nothing. Get out of bed.

She cooks well, so?

Clement should be here to see you like this! You’ll be late for work.

All over Troy, the rain of the summer’s end was pouring down rooves: rooves of tile, concrete, slate, corrugated iron, tarpaulin, wood, schist, cardboard, glass, old sacking, cement, polyester. From some it ran off into shining galvanised gutters, into others it soaked, and some it destroyed. West of Cachan, in the direction of Swansea, in the district of San Isidro, Yannis lived on the third floor of an apartment block.

On the same wet morning, his mother came out of her bedroom in a dressing gown borrowed from Sonia, her daughter-in-law, which was too skimpy for her. At home, on the island, she put on a dress, not a dressing gown, as soon as she got out of bed. She had a face so weathered by the sea and the sun that she almost looked as if she had been smoked like a ham or a fish. But her eyes, despite her age, were clear and blue. Whatever she was doing — putting up her long white hair into a chignon, pouring hot water onto coffee, washing clothes, making tarama — she did with such assurance that it was impossible to help her, or even be beside her.

At first she had been delighted to see her granddaughters and had been reduced to silence by the sight of so many new things and people. Then, after about a week, she had started to make her comments. First she spoke to her daughter-in-law when the two women found themselves alone, after the girls had gone off to school. But when it became clear to her that Sonia only understood a few words of Greek — she was an Armenian — and, furthermore, pretended to be deaf, she muttered to herself for hours and became singleminded about seizing every opportunity of talking to her son whenever she could corner him. This was why she got up at half past five in the morning to make his coffee before he went to work.

You have a good job, Yannis, she said, you earn good money and you deserve it. There were five beautiful women on Samos who would have packed and arranged and unpacked their doweries every night, so eager would they have been to marry you, if you gave the word, you who work up there alone in the sky like a heavenly fisherman. So you married a foreigner here in the city and your daughters don’t speak Greek and your wife has not yet given you a son and you earn good money, this is what I want to tell you, but you do not husband it, you let it be wasted, the good money you earn in the sky, this money is spent on the first whim that enters her head. She spends as if she had no faith in the future, she’s bird-witted. Look in the bathroom, Yannis, I did not know there were so many different lotions on this earth for women.

Some are for me, said her son.

The Siren sisters did not have more and they lured men to their death. Open the wardrobe in the children’s room and it is like, it is like switching on a television set! Nothing, nothing in it will last, there’s not a rag there for your grandchildren, it is trash. Why are there cockroaches in your home? I will tell you, my son. They have come because there is no husbandry here, cockroaches are a sign of heedlessness.