Under the broad limbs of an oak, in a deep hollow that provided both shade
and yet was open to the breeze that continually blew in from the sea, the old man lay
down at midday, mopped his brow with a red, paisley handkerchief, and reached into
his bag for the hard, round goats cheese and the hunk of heavy bread that he had
picked up this morning when leaving his hut at first light. He fished out a small jug,
the last of the rough, dry red wine and drank. He let a few drops fall from his mouth
onto the kerchief and, rather than wiping away the dust on his face and lips, he just
managed to smear it across his jaw and nose a little more vividly. It was a frugal meal
but it would be enough to see him through to evening. It was a long walk down from
the mountain to his one-time home on the coast, a place that he barely remembered
other than for the fantastic whiteness of the walls and the deep blue cupola of their
little church. He had a few pennies in his pocket, enough to sleep in a barn perhaps
and buy a small piece of cooked meat and some potato. He crossed himself once
before he ate the bread and cheese. God willing he would make the coast and home
tomorrow.
He had chosen a simple life. It was, even after all these years, still strange to
him that he chose life at all. When she died he neither embraced the opportunity nor
did he slaughter himself in her memory so that he could be with her always. Everyone
told him it was natural to be confused and that the pain would pass with time. He had
three daughters, grown up and married when the fevers came and took his wife. He
took no comfort then in the wonderful fact that the first of her grandchildren had
called her Nana to her face before Charos stole her away from him.
“It is not as though you are alone, Michael”, they had said. “You’ll see. Give it
a few months, let the grief come and be what it is, and you’ll see. There will be new
routines, new faces, it will all happen. You’re relatively young, just fifty, you’ll rut
again.”
He came to hate the laugh that always accompanied these lascivious
suggestions. They meant well, he knew that, but how could they imagine that he could
do all of these normal things without her. The priest offered a shoulder to lean on and
a glass of raki. His neighbours spent weeks and then months cajoling him into living,
inviting him to their homes, and sometimes, when the bitter tears really did fall, they
even left him alone. In time, when he continued to hide behind the shutters, refusing
to let the warmth of their smiles enter his heart, they stopped trying to help him all
together, and he was secretly glad.
He had some savings, a little residue from a small property he and his wife
owned and which he sold shortly after she travelled to the far banks of the river, so
there was no need to work, at least not for a while. Maybe that was his mistake.
Maybe he should have been more of a man, hiding his feelings and resuming the daily
grind, putting on that happy face that she did so well even when the soul was blank.
He did not do that. He lived quietly, waiting for that moment each evening
when the reds and gold of fiery day turned first to pink and orange, then to swirling
purples and finally to the blackness of night. He waited and he watched and when the
first stars sparkled into life, he greeted his wife and then got blind drunk. He was not
brave enough a man to put a gun to his own head or to drive a knife into his own
heart. He preferred the coward’s way. Oblivion.
His daughters, of course, did their best. They invited him to Sunday lunches
and on days out with the grandchildren. They popped their heads round the door for a
quick visit and for a coffee. They held parties to which he was always asked, and he
went along with it all at first. Oh yes, he attended their functions and their family
gatherings but only so that he could stand there as if he were watching the world from
inside a goldfish bowl. He found it hard to string a sentence together, not because he
was slow, but because despite being considered an intelligent man, he simply could no
longer be bothered.
Without his wife he was nothing. He continued to live without living. He gave
up on business, spent hours writing hopeless paeans to her memory, and slowly the
light in their eyes, these daughters of his with their busy lives and their boisterous
men folk, ceased to burn for him. Yes, he had chosen a simple life. He watched as his
daughters and their husbands bumped along with the endless cycles of living, working
and with raising children. They found their way where he would not, and wilfully
failing to understand that they too hurt as he did, he chose a simple life. He ran away
from it all, throwing his hands up in the air and saying to anyone who might listen,
“My wife is dead. What is the point of anything?”
He had been saying that self-same thing these last thirty years. From his old
village he ran away with the last of his money to the city. He tried to lose himself
among the crowds, tried to make himself become so small that no one would notice
him ever again, so small that he might actually disappear. Always, always, when he
waited for the stars, with a bottle of cheap hooch in his pocket, the moon would rise,
and as he got drunk, he always thought he heard a familiar voice. He could never
quite catch the full timbre and tone, and anyway some person or other would try to
talk with him. People were like that in the city. They ignored you for long enough to
make you think that you might disappear in a puff of smoke, and then one of them
would turn round and say something. All that work, all that investment in anonymous
fading would be utterly wasted. Always someone would come and walk across the
void, filling it with humanity and possibility. No, the city was worse than his village.
Ten years after she died, nine years after he fled the village and soused himself
in the gutters of the metropolis, he woke one morning and decided that the mountain
overlooking his old home would be the best place for him. He would be closer to the
stars, and to that damned incoherent moon, and he could sit without interruption,
come winter snow or summer dust.
“Let the Bora blow itself out on my head”, he said to himself, “and then we’ll
see what’s what.”
Money, of course, was almost non-existent now. He rented a shabby flat in the
port slum and, when the coin for wine evaporated, he might work for a few nights as a
pot-washer or something equally lonely. His worldly goods fetched a laughable sum,
but who would need money on the mountain? He did need good boots, but that was
all. He bought reasonably good boots, scrimping even then to make sure that he had a
bottle or two for the journey. He walked under those stars, and always, when the
moon rose, he thought he could hear a familiar voice, but it was so far off and so thin
that he still could not make out the words. Maybe, he thought, he might find a
shepherds hut high up, somewhere where he could sit, wait for the stars and hear the
moon a little more clearly. Yes, if he could just do that. It would be enough and now
that he was sixty years old, he could wait for death. Surely the first snows would take
him.
They did not. He became so good at sitting and watching and waiting that a
local farmer who lived like a feudal lord in one of the bigger mountain villages
employed him as a geriatric shepherd boy. It was enough to keep the wolf from the
door, as indeed was he. It was a thing to wonder about. Why did he accept even that
hand, when all he wanted to do was die? Surely even he, wastrel and inconstant fool
that he was, could sit on a mountain side and wait for the chill winds and sleets of
winter to come and take him? He didn’t have to do anything, he thought. He could
simply sit, talk to the stars, drink, and maybe catch a word or two from that bloody
moon. Surely he could just sit and fade out of the world as he had always wished?
It appeared not, for here he was twenty years later sitting under the oak. His
legs ached from the walking, and his back was stiff. He shifted it against the rough
bark of the oak tree, scratching a persistently annoying itch. Down here, down
amongst the trees he could smell the wild thyme and smiled remembering her little
herb garden all those years ago.
Was it really twenty years that he had sat on a mountain? Twenty years? He
tried to measure the time, but he no longer had any reference points in the world
below. Eighty seasons. Twenty shearings. What were they in the real world? He had
not left the mountain side once in all that time. Twenty years of living on hard and
rancid cheeses, the occasional slice of meat if the farmer took pity on him, thick,
heavy bread, wild legumes and mushrooms, and, out of preference, jugs of the
cheapest, roughest wines. He was more than eighty years old, ate appallingly, still
communed with the stars and as a consequence he still drank too much, but
nevertheless here he was. It would seem that Charos had, until now, never been
interested in collecting his fee.
But then the moon…The old man knew now that he was but moments away
from death. After a long life wasted he had just a few days, perhaps a few weeks left.
He could feel it in his bones and in his waters, and now that it came down to dealing
with the ferryman, the old man very much wanted to live. The moon had finally
stopped shilly-shallying and only last night he had seen and heard her clearly. After
all these years of mumbling and insouciance she had finally come to him. He looked
up at that damned moon and saw that his wife sat there, in a little crater all of her own,
looking exactly as she had done in the days before the fevers sunk her cheeks and
turned her into an old crone before her time. She looked down on him, frowned and
told him in no uncertain terms to stop being an arse. Her exact words. He laughed. For
the first time in all these years he actually laughed. He laughed so much that now he
had a sore throat and no voice. It was so like her.
It was as simple as that. He realised now why he could not die, not without
climbing down from the mountain one last time. He must do that one thing he so
signally failed to do before he ran away. He must put right the one thing that had been
troubling him through all these years had he but seen it. It was not his wife’s death
that drove him to seek always a smaller place, always another bottle. The truth of the
matter is that after he said farewell to the woman whom he loved with all his heart, he
had simply been too scared to admit that he felt the same for all his family. He loved
her so much and she died. He summed up his fear like this; if I love them too will the
same happen to them? I could not bear it and so I will run away.
He sat under the tree for an hour, letting the noon sun burn and parch the earth.
He slept for a short while, during which time he dreamed that he could see a chariot of
flame bearing Charos towards him. He woke with a start, hauled himself up on his
stout wooden stick, slung his bag back over his shoulder and patted the oak tree,
thanking it for it’s tolerance of a foolish old man. His left leg complained with every
step but he just laughed and told it not to be an arse. As he left the shade and headed
down the mountain he said to himself, “That is why I cannot die. That is why I will
live a little longer. I am going home to tell my daughters how much I love them.”