An excerpt from Constantine Jones' Book 'In Still Rooms'
Photo: Joanna C. Valente
K A I R O S
excerpt from IN STILL ROOMS (Operating System, 2020)
The bells are ringing out across the village.
Sunday morning on the island of Lesbos, 1940, and all the streets are empty. Down in the harbor, the fishing boats creak against the wind, all of them painted white and blue, sloshing against their little wooden docks. The sails are all withdrawn, heavy spirals of frayed rope draped across the decks. A lone dinghy drifting off towards a row of buoys, weighed down with empty jugs, chipped oars and netting—the name EIRHNH streaked in blue across its hull. The gulls too are at rest, wings folded on the cobbles, watching the light come in across the water. The sea coughs up its weeds onto the rocks.
The village huddles itself tight against the slope of the hillside, as if it might one day slide into the sea. At the hilltop, the old castle crouches behind grey stone, sharp pines. The houses fray out from its perimeter, stone walls and clay shingles roped together with telephone wire. The houses, even the large ones, are old. They gather there like living things, tired from having strung themselves up out of the earth long ago, having collected their own walls out of brick, stone, plaster, assembling themselves from those same hillsides where they then crawled to settle back into the earth. Brick enclosures sit crumbling behind rusted fences, their wooden gates sunbleached and splintered. Windowboxes perch beneath missing pieces of glass, and the walkways are strewn with loose shingles. In the years to come, wild vines will push their way up from underneath some of the houses, and they will sit open and empty of people. Families will move, die out, forget, leave behind entire lots of cinderblock collapsed under the weight of some crawling root. In the years to come, construction projects will begin and then discontinue, unfunded. Concrete hollows never filled in, rooms never caked in human life. The buildings are all waiting, in their own ways, to be forgotten.
But everywhere is the heavy fragrance of flowers. Rosebushes crowd the telephone poles, and thick hedges of scrub peel apart the hills. Alyssum and wisteria choke the shaded patios in clouds of yellow and purple, and offroad, the anise sprout their thin stalks high up out the dust, spreading their white crowns wide. In the fields, donkeys and cats steal their shade from the squat olive trees, whose roots have been painted white to fend off the insects. In fifty years’ time, these cobblestone alleys will buzz with Yamaha motorbikes, Kawasaki scooters, Suzuki vanettes. Merchants’ sons buzzing between the remaining houses with figs bushels, loaves of bread, anything to net them some coins to bring home.
*
In the center of the village, the bells keep ringing. Agia Barbara draws itself up, massive wooden doors open onto the marble columns, the courtyard. The elderly come dressed in black, the women in frocks and headscarves, the men’s shirtsleeves rolled down. All of the windows are open but still the church is dark, cluttered inside with candlesmoke, wooden stands and gold basins. Marble arches rise high and turquoise above the frescoed walls, the saints all come together in wood and oil with their gold flecked halos and fetishes. A woman drops a coin into the dish, shuffles over to the side altar of Agia Barbara, where a full-sized effigy of the saint sits enthroned between golden pillars. The woman pulls from her pocket a small tamata—a thin piece of tin embossed with the image of a heart—and ties it with ribbon around a pedestal beside the icon. In a glass bell jar atop the pedestal, Agia Barbara’s finger is enshrined, wrapped in cloth beneath another smaller golden dome. The woman crosses herself quietly in prayer and moves to kiss the icon, the jar. She rejoins the congregation.
Outside, soldiers rattle by in their motorized vans, hollering something.
*
Afternoon, the sun high and hot. First meal of the day, after the body and the blood. Down by the harbor, the tavernas unfurl their tablecloths. The soldiers are hungry. German words, Italian words, salt and seagulls in the air. Somewhere there are children kicking a ball beside a fence. The same way that somewhere an olive drops into the harvest netting even though nobody is watching. In the hills, people move like shadows detaching from the trees. The villagers call them gypsies and sneer if they come too close. One of these women holds out her hand. There will come a time when somebody will have a little something to spare.
*
There is a road off the main square leading away from the harbor up into the hills. The school is there, and a network of alleys strings together a small huddle of buildings. One of these is a blue house with a stone enclosure. Or maybe the house is white, and the blue is an illusion made by the weather, puffing up its ocean bruise in the sunshine. The trim on the windows, too, is a splintered blue. The curtains are some mesh color which, with enough exposure to the sun, will eventually bleach blue also.
A single lemon tree keeps the garden shaded, and an old man sits there in his wooden chair, smoking. Two other men walking down the street pass the gate to the enclosure and one of them calls out Yiassou Evangelis but Evangelis doesn’t answer, he just keeps smoking. Inside the house, two young girls in the corner of a room. They are each of them wearing the same simple dress, buttoned down to their shinbones. Dusty shoes, brown socks. Slender faces and brown curls. One of them is holding a bird, wrapped up in cloth. Moments before, it had flown against the window. When they went outside to pick it up it was breathing very fast and its eye was moving all over. The younger girl says nothing, watches her older sister try to feed it water from a spoon. After a few minutes, the bird stops breathing so fast. The older sister stands up, walks to the back of the house.
Evi where are you going, says the younger sister.
Get another spoon Sophia, says the older sister.
They are going to dig it a grave behind the house.
*
Early evening, and the heat is settling back down into the dirt. At the end of the street, the phonelines make a black triangle against the blue sky, connecting both sides of the bend. At this small intersection, many of the old men might have claimed to see a saint walking around at dusk. Sometimes she is an angel disguised as a man, sometimes she is Agia Barbara herself, clutching thunder between her four good fingers. Sometimes she comes because of fasting in the heat, and sometimes she comes because of ouzo over ice. Still sometimes it might be said that she comes because the men only want for her to come. Right now, there is no drink on the card table. No saint wandering the roads. But there is a bright moon in the blue sky, watching the intersection from the space between the telephone wires.
With the men all gone together the women steal a moment to draw the curtains and read each other’s coffee mud. A visitor, a change in weather, a small piece of bad news. The dog you know it’s never a good sign. The snake it’s ok. The bird it depends. Don’t wash your hair after receiving a compliment. Don’t wash your hands after giving one. Keep your shoes outside for the next three days. You going to lose some money if you don’t.
*
Far to the north, at the monastery at Mantamados, the monks are sweeping the courtyard. There are only a few pilgrims left inside the church, come to offer prayers to the Taxiarchis. A mother crosses herself and approaches the altar with a fresh pair of leather slippers in her hands. She kneels before the enormous icon encased in glass, kisses the ground, places the slippers beside a row of three other pairs, each newly made—the leather tight, stained dark brown; the nails driven in deep; the soles thick. Behind the glass, the impressive head of the Archangel Michael. Against the embossed silver of his armor, his wings, the jewels encrusted into his crown, his face is rust colored, severe. Behind the praying mother a father ushers his son forward, a firm hand between his shoulders. It’s a living Saint, he is telling his son. A body for Archangel Michalis, the commander, the warrior of God. You mother she’s giving him fresh slippers because he walks around sometimes. And his shoes he wears them out. You can ask the monks to show you, they never throw out the old pairs. It’s a holy thing she does.
The son is watching his mother at the altar and listening to his father’s story—how long ago a squadron of pirates landed on the beach and came to loot the monastery; how they cut the throats and spilled the blood of every monk they could find; how only one monk, a young novice, managed to escape up to the rafters; how he prayed to God for protection of His holy house; and how, at that moment, the Archangel Michael himself appeared above the sands and raised his golden sword against the sky and all the pirates dropped their loot and fled back to the ship, never to return. The blood of those monks, the father is telling his son, it seeped into the sand and stained the courtyard. And that monk who survived to witness God’s vision went down and collected the blood-soaked sand and made of it a kind of clay, and from this mixture he crafted the icon of the Archangel. Made for him a body here on earth, for him to walk around inside. He will protect us, the father promises his son, even from this.
*
At the westernmost point of the island, just north of Eresos, the sun is pouring its last light on the Petrified Forest. The earth there is rolled out in rich clay colored soil. Hardly any scrub crawls across those plains. But the trees, now stonehardened, draw themselves up in columns older than the pillars of the most ancient temples. They might have taught the ancients a thing or two of veneration. Some lay sprawled along the shoreline, their exteriors bleached white, their rings pulsing pink and blue and yellow with the minerals they have become. Others still clutch the soil deep, reaching skyward in fists of deep amber, charcoal tinted. Three thousand years ago, the gods walked there in animal shapes. Forty years from now, the land will become a protected national monument. In this moment, it is still collecting light.
*
Sun on it’s way down and looking like thunder. Back in the village, all the shutters opening back up to let the heat out the houses. A woman in her little courtyard beating out the dust from her one good rug. She is old, and either doesn’t see or pretends not to see a little girl patter down the alley by herself. Just fwoo fwoo fwoo the dust clouds coming out the rug.
Evi has it closed tight in her fist, the copper coin she found out behind the house one day. And she makes herself a little breeze across the cobblestones, the brick, the dusty roads. It’s a straight shot to the Pappas house, then a left around the corner by the old Birakis place on the corner, now all but sliding into the grasses. From there it’s just a matter of hiding in the scrub by the archway until the main road is empty—no soldiers in their shaky vans or friends of her uncle’s. No men who might see a girl alone in the streets at night and think to make it their business. The streetlight hadn’t come on yet, so she scurried across the broad back of the main road without making so much as a shadow.
Across the street there it was—the old Grammatis house. Some cousin on her mother’s side according to Theo Evangelis. Some cousin, some mother she would only hear about. Paraskevi was her name, that long-dead cousin of her long-dead mother. And she lived in that house before. She was a holy woman, they said. She saw a vision of her namesake in the well, they said. Said she spoke to Agia Paraskevi herself, asked her for gifts of healing. Theo Evangelis knew her, but that was long ago. That’s where you name come from, he told her once. You Mama she gave you that name. You got to keep it good.
The house is a tiny church now, ever since the family died. One single room with a window, a roof. She is very careful when she opens the door not to make any noise. Inside, the walls are yellow with smoke. She finds the matchbook by the basin of sand and lights the big candle. Drops her coin in the bowl. There is the usual altar, the usual icons. The Mother, the Child, the Archangels both. None of it gold. But in the center there she is—the icon of Agia Paraskevi herself. Story goes her cousin Paraskevi Grammatis saw a vision from the dry well, told the men to go down and bring back what they found there. And it was this icon they returned with. A small block of wood, weather-eaten and scuffed. The oil chipped off in huge fragments. Occasional specks of gold around the borders, a swath of faded maroon in one corner. There is a patch of blue paint so faint it threatens to shatter eggshell-like at the touch. The only part of the saint’s body still there to see—the eyes. They come out of the wood their own golden brown, unblinking. Untouched by the seasons. This is how they knew she was true. Healer of the blind, restorer of sight, physician of light Agia Paraskevi. She who could not be burned by the tar and oil. She who was strung above the fires by her hair and was not licked. Tender of wounds, this ancient witch of God. She was eventually beheaded and so in some depictions carries her eyes on a silver tray in her palm. But always they are unmistakable. In the tiny room, clusters of silver tamata embossed with open eyes are fixed to every surface. The entire room flickering, watching, still.
Evi kisses the icon, the eyes. Remember us, that’s all she asks. She snuffs the candle, closes the door, leaves the well alone. The streetlight comes on while she’s hiding beside it, looking for men on the main road. It splashes her shadow around her, a star of little shadow girls stretched out across the dust. She runs home as fast as she can.
*
Full moon, deep dark. Back at the blue house, the sisters are quiet on their cot in the shed. A family of cats has crept in, watching them from a pile of hay in the corner. Evangelis is in the kitchen presenting food to the soldiers and so has not noticed Evi’s departure or return. But Sophia is quiet in that way that has a target attached.
I don’t believe you, Sophia said when Evi told her.
But it was her, Evi said back, I felt her there. She heard me. She turned on the light behind me.
You could have—Sophia started to say, but couldn’t finish the sentence. Evi had only looked at her.
From the house they can hear the soldiers throw their words around like stones. Evangelis will remain in the house until all the food is eaten, the dishes cleaned, the soldiers given their blankets and whisky. Eventually, the only thing to hear will be Evangelis running the faucet, the house settling into itself. Until then, they lay together on the cot looking up at the chord dangling down from the ceiling, its lightbulb dead now all summer. Outside, the night noises were getting bigger. Creak of bugs in the trees, bushes swooshing against the shed. Far away, overhead, a metal beast cuts across the night sky with its propellers, splitting the air into sheets of sound.
It’s us, Evi says to her sister in the dark.
In the next ten years, Evangelis will arrange a marriage for one of them to an American businessman; he will do this by sending photos of the girls across the sea in the breast pocket of a younger cousin’s jacket, the instructions—pick one; and the American man, Cecil Warren, will choose the photo on the right, of Evi, but he will agree to let the other one come too; the girls will pack all their belongings into a single crate, board a ship to New York, promise to write; Cecil will be there to meet them, and after the marriage is finalized he will drive them back down to his home in the mountains of East Tennessee; Evangelis will die and his grave will go unmarked; when the war is over the soldiers will leave the house to its eventual collapse. But at this moment, none of that is known. At this moment, it is simply two sisters on a cot in the shed beside their uncle’s home, listening to the night.
After some time, the dead lightbulb begins to glow on its own. Warm orange eye in the dark shed. I see you, says the light. I will remember, says the electric hum. It’s you. Look, Evi says to her sister, I told you. But Sophia has already fallen asleep.
Constantine Jones is a Greek-American thingmaker raised in Tennessee & currently housed in Brooklyn. They are a member of the Visual AIDS Artist+ Registry & teach creative writing at CCNY. Their work has been performed or exhibited at various venues across the city & their debut hybrid haunted house novel, IN STILL ROOMS, is forthcoming via The Operating System on March 4th, 2020. It is currently available for preorder.
