Postcards from Rhodes
(Fragment)

by Flavia Cosma



Wednesday, March 30, 2005

Tonight, I will go to to Pericles for the last time. I come downstairs at seven o’clock. Uma, Bertha, Sean, and Mark silently sit waiting for me in the four armchairs of the large entrance hall. Ragnar won’t come with us. Jo has some food in her room and is being careful with her money. She wants to go straight to Rome from Rhodes for a conference and needs to ensure that she has sufficient funds. When I descend the massive wooden staircase, the floors squeak, following my footsteps with a slight delay. It always gives the impression that someone else is coming down a few steps behind. I like to think that the ghost of Governor Smith or the Admiral who succeeded him is trailing me through the house.
“Am I that late?” I ask, worrisome.
“You are three minutes late,” says Sean.
“And why then are these funereal expressions on your faces?”
We leave in silence. I am given the honor of choosing the way up, stairs or streets. I opt for the stairs, knowing it would please the group. They take us high up the mountain ridge, with a view of the sea and town at our feet. In the pallid evening light, the sea takes on a silvery color. The city lights glimmer, soothingly.
On the narrow sidewalk, the same pine trees bent sideways.
“It’s beautiful!” Mark observes.
“It’s beautifully sad,” I agree.
Occasionally, speeding cars rip the purple blue with the brutal flash of headlights. At Paradiso, I talk with Pericles in French.
“Today you have to spoil me. It’s my last day here. And give me your address. I would like to stay in touch.”
Pericles looks after us with the same, usual care. For the first time since we have been having dinner together, Mark orders red wine. He knows that white gives me headaches. He and the others drink in moderation. Everyone behaves impeccably. The two lady smokers retire one by one to smoke. Now and then Uma looks at me piercingly, at length. At the end, Pericles brings me a small parcel wrapped in cling wrap. “Halva for the road,” he says, softly smiling. By the entrance, he embrace me so forcefully that my left cheek continue to hurt for a while after.
“I’ll give you some ice for your face when we get home,” says Sean, obliging as always.
On our way back, we cross paths more than once with a guy on a scooter, who is stopping at every garbage bin to look inside. High on the ridge, he checks the last one and then whooshes past us, laughing wildly.
“What do you think he does?” I ask Mark.
“He is looking for something that can still be used,” he answers.
We hold hands all the time now. Now and then we sigh. Now and then he whispers, “Oh, my girl…!”
The others lag behind, discreetly. We reach the Residence and retire for the night. Sean and I take two chairs outside to the terrace. I drink tea. He drinks wine. Around us there are two, and later on three, cats who start a complicated dance, holding their tails straight up, like hooks.
“You see,” Sean says, “this is a sign of intense pleasure for cats. The yellow one with stripes is a ginger. The gray one with stripes is a tabby. The white one with brown and yellow splashes is a tortoise shell, and is always a female. Trust me, I am an expert in cats.”
Jo comes downstairs and all three of us chat for a while longer. The evening is warm, perhaps a tad sultry. The small surf gently breaks against the shore.



Thursday, March 31, 2005

I wake up at three in the morning, with my hands terribly itchy. I begin to worry, thinking I have gotten food poisoning at Pericles. I figure it out quickly, though. In the room there are at least two mosquitoes. I try to find them, but there is only buzzing in the darkness. I go to the window. A cruise ship glides slowly by. In the night surrounding it, its colored lights shine like a Christmas tree. It feels like a fairy tale. I fall asleep again around six and wake up for good at eight. I begin throwing the rest of my things into suitcases. I am anxious, fearing that they exceed the airport’s weight limit, but in the end I didn’t have any problem with them.
I go downstairs to say goodbye to my colleagues and friends. First is Bertha, who promises to visit Romania in May and asks me to find her a place to stay there for a week. Then is Ragnar’s turn, who asks me if I am happy to be leaving. I say that, for me, departures always have a touch of anticipation and joy.
“That’s how I see it too,” he says.
Eleni, the office clerk, suggests that I should apply for Residence again next year. “The months of March and April and October and November are the best,” she assures me.
The only one I am deliberately ignoring is Johann. Johann is indeed married in Austria; his wife phones him at the Residence sometimes. “Won’t you be sorry?” asks Uma while she gives me a gift of a small bottle of liquor she had bought at the monastery they visited while I was away with Mark. “No,” I say truthfully.
I take my garbage out and on my way back I stop and knock on Mark’s door. He opens and I step inside, leaving the door open behind me. We silently embrace. I give him the envelope I am holding in my hand. In it there are two pictures, the two of us at the restaurant, and Mark posing in front of the statue of the three naked men. On the back of one of them, I have scribbled a single word: sagapo.
“Did you write me?” he asks.
“No,” I shake my head.
“What’s inside? Pictures?”
“Yes,” I nod.
“It was very good to meet you.”
“Same here.”
My eyes fill up with tears. I am going to ruin my make-up, I think. Mark comes out to the hallway after me.
“I will write you. You will write me. We will keep in touch.”
I am not that convinced. Without concerning himself that someone could happen upon us at any moment, Mark takes me in his arms and, for the first time, kisses me softly on the lips.
Without uttering a word, I turn and leave.
It is raining with heavy drops. I want everything to be over, the sooner the better. I want to be at the airport, in Athens, in Bucharest, nowhere. It is a quarter to twelve. Sean sits at his desk with his door open, typing on his laptop. As he sees me, he greets me.
“Is it the time?”
“Yes.”
Sean and Jo help me carry my luggage down the steep stairs. Uma comes down with us. She is pale, whispering something about how she had been waiting for the storm for three days. It was the reason, she says, for her stress. Too much electricity had been in the air. “Static electricity,” I add. “From now on, I promise, I won’t drink. Just a small glass at time. I’ll drink water like you with my meals,” she says.
“Good. Do as you say.”
The fog is dispersing over the sea. My palm tree is as mute as everything around. With its branches hanging motionless under the heavy raindrops, it seems to wait for something to happen as well.
Downstairs, the taxi waits under the main entrance’s canopy. I hug Sean and tell him I had a farewell speech for him, but had forgotten it. “Anyhow, thank you for the lesson in cats,” I say.
I say to all of them, “Take good care of yourselves. I’ll write as soon as I arrive in Bucharest.”
It is raining hard on our way to the airport. Sometimes I hear thunder in the distance. We drive through a neighborhood of new houses and villas. The For Sale signs are in English. I catch glimpses of the sea, gray-blue and dirty.
The plane lifts off and flies close to the coast for a while, then moves northwest. Rhodes remains behind. Among the clouds, the sun appears, lighting the water’s surface where small waves are now become visible, breaking upon the blue expanse like white butterflies with ragged wings.
Some flocks of clouds hurry back to Rhodes.
Some rocky islands poke out of the water.
The coast of Greece’s mainland opens up in front of the plane like stale and hard bread, upon which Zeus has placed a crown of laurels. We land in Athens.
Behind me descends a father with a lovely little girl, apart from the fact that she doesn’t have arms or hands, only little wings that float in the wind. I think back to the bird of the sea, the half-seagull, that hovered above my palm tree each morning.
“Go back, little one. Go home to Rhodes. Maybe at home you can grow stronger wings and you’ll be able to fly as well.”
Both the passengers and customs controllers address me in Greek, speaking at length. Have I possibly managed to integrate myself so well? A feeling of joyful warmth arises in my chest to envelope me.
Rhodes, this house of mine, where I will surely return.
“When?” Tanasos asked me Tuesday evening at Pavlos.
One day. Maybe one day soon.