Intimate Distance Read Online Free PDF Page A

Our damp Darlinghurst terrace empty. I telephoned the home a few times, not asking much, not quite sure what to say. The outlines were too hazy to be coherent. They put her on the phone and I told her how lovely the weather was, how improbably blue and cloudless the sky was every single day, how hospitable Zoi’s family were. On the other end, quiet breathing, nothing more.
    I wonder if she misses her home, her bedroom. The old bath, that stands in the centre of our tiny upstairs bathroom like a shrine. Cherished, scarred by time, by the constant friction over years of all those bodies, lying down, getting up, turning laboriously like fish too big for their tank, losing the soap in the water and searching for it, frantic under the foam. On the white walls there’s a multitude of faces, relatives long gone, faded, sepia-toned, receding into the steam as they dissolve in her memory.
    THE BATH WAS already green with age when her father brought it from town on the back of a donkey.
    â€˜Poor donkey,’ she said, then put her hand over her mouth, afraid of his rebuke.
    He soaked in it on the first Sunday of every month, an hour before church. He was a man who prided himself on punctuality; otherwise Olga would be to blame. She heated the water in the cauldron on an open flame, testing it with her elbow in case he burned himself. Too hot, let it cool, fanning it anxiously, hurry up, hurry up, prayed he would not yell for his bath, no, only six in the morning and he, supposedly asleep, suddenly stirred, calling for warm water.
    â€˜Come, daughter. Water!’
    His voice moved like a beast through the house, catching between the stones of the walls.
    Her red, raw elbow. Balancing the cauldron ahead of her with arms outstretched, she poured water into the tub, heaving and gasping while he stood aside and watched. Flicked a crust of sleep from his eye. She sprinkled handfuls of lemon leaves on the surface of the water. Averted her eyes from his careful disrobing, as he handed her the undershirt and long pants, soft lambswool stockings. Still warm from sleep, the odour of his resting body.
    If she were late washing or drying these, his only set of clothes, he would have to sit in the cooling water and watch his extremities wrinkle. Rubbing thumb and forefinger together, swollen toes, shivering. Sad penis. Scum of soap on the water as he twirled it around with his hand.
    As a child I was afraid of his photograph. Those white woollen stockings bunched at the knee, his stern face seemed to mock me. I’d never met my grandparents, on either side. Never known any aunts, uncles. Children with cousins seemed exotic to me. Only the photographs in the bathroom, my sole tangible link to a meaningful past. Grandfathers and fathers and sons, it strikes me now as remarkable that there’s a total absence of women. My mother would take her bath under the gaze of men, displaying her nudity to an assembly of patriarchs. There must have been some quiet rebellion in that.
    I told her on the phone about my trip to the temple of Poseidon, speaking into the silence. How Dimitri drove me along the winding coast road to Sounion, to see the stark ruins against the sea. Zoi hadn’t come with us. I didn’t mention that. Didn’t say he was spending more and more time with his mother, aunts and cousins, surrounded by women and food.
    Dimitri and I sat under the flowering trees of the museum café, gypsy boys begging, branches low. German tourists at other tables drank from huge jugs of beer, silent with each other, looking into the distance. I gulped mine down and Dimitri brought his hand over my lip, to wipe a drop of foam. When we came home Zoi wasn’t there and we sat on the couch together, trying our best to ignore each other.
    Zoi has found a casual job at the National University Hospital in the centre of town, works until late every day, angling for a permanent contract.
    â€˜Only for the interim,’ he tells me