The Name's Day of Kostas and Eleni

The tragedy of man is what dies inside himself while he still lives. Albert Schweitzer

Kostas and Eleni were neighbours. Their families had lived side by side for two years. Eleni and George had three sons, Kostas and Mina had two. Since both families were emigrants from the same country they did not ignore each other, as neighbours sometimes do, but became almost like family. Their children often played together.

Eleni's boys played soccer, and she became an enthusiastic supporter, so much so that it was usually Eleni and not George who drove the boys to the soccer field and stayed to watch them play. Whenever there was a match, Eleni would shout encouragement to her sons, much to the amusement of Kostas, who took his own two sons to training and to matches.

It may seem odd that, being such good neighbours, they didn't share the transport duties but the reason was that somehow neither Kostas nor Eleni wished to forego the pleasure of seeing their sons play. Nor, for that matter, the pleasure of seeing each other seeing their sons play. Neither suspected that this could lead to anything perplexing, such as a growing attraction, much less love . . . After all, both Kosta and Eleni loved their spouses. Both were too devoted to their families to let their loyalties waver.

Nevertheless, there were certain signs that both dismissed as inadmissible. Eleni, who had always been possessed of great vitality, became increasingly radiant. Her dark eyes were alight with new enthusiasm and she felt an unaccustomed lightness in her limbs as she moved about her daily chores.

Catching sight of herself one morning in the bathroom mirror, Eleni paused for an instant on an indrawn breath. Was this woman with the glowing face and eyes the mother of three sons, a housewife from Kithira , a respectable matron? "1 must be enjoying life," she murmured to herself. "This must be my little summer of Saint Demetrios, before the frost comes creeping up and steals the colour from me ..."

But Eleni didn't have a lot of time for such reflections. There was always work to do in the house and garden. She found herself more often in the garden these days, among the Mediterranean trees — the olive, fig and pomegranate — tending her plots ot spinach, aubergines, and glowing crimson peppers and tomatoes, plucking pungent bunches of dill and rosemary and basil, fussing over the grapevine on its trellis, checking to see whether the leaves were large enough to gather for wrapping rice and herbs 10 make dolmades.

Kostas worked a lot in his garden too, since Mina was not robust, and preferred to 

 sit on the front porch doing her embroidery, with some of the older women of their community for company.

Eleni tried not to notice how her heart gave a lurch every time she glanced up and caught sight of Kostas, working on the other side of their common fence, but somehow a glimpse of his lithe, tanned torso and prematurely silver hair would strike chords in her that she could not account for. Especially in view of the fact that Eleni loved her husband, and never ceased to be thankful that hers was such a happy, fortunate family. Just the same, she had taken to lighting an extra candle at the church, as a precaution against the evil eye.

The windows of Eleni's kitchen overlooked the back deck of the house next door, where Kostas liked to sit and read. Eleni would blush if she looked up from preparing a meal and caught his eyes on her over the top of his lowered newspaper.

One afternoon as she was preparing coffee, Eleni on an impulse held up the long-handled coffee pot and made a sign that Kostas was welcome tn a rim nf bpr pnffpp

Eleni knew that Mina had gone out for the day, to do the shopping and keep some medical appointments, and Kostas looked somehow lonely on his balcony, without a cup of coffee for company.

Eleni carried the tiny cup of coffee and its accompanying glass of water downstairs on a tray to the fence at the side of the house. As she passed the tray across to Kostas, their eyes intercepted one another and locked, deep and long. There were questions in both that neither would have dared ask. There were answers in both that neither would have dared utter.

From that moment, Kostas and Eleni became lovers, even though they had never lain in each other's arms.

It may seem strange that they should not seek opportunities to do so, but both had internalised codes of conduct anathematising such acts of love as theirs would have seemed. They were imbued with similar notions of mutual respect and self-respect, which could not, it seemed, prevent them from loving one another, but which would never permit them to act out that love. Or only, that is, in acceptable ways, which both set out to discover.

But it soon became clear that it was not enough for Eleni to prepare coffee for Kostas when his wife was out, and for Kostas to bring Eleni fresh artichokes from the markets, or to share his catch with her when he went fishing. These were small, ordinary kindnesses one does for one's neighbour in any case. They did not adequately express what each was feeling.

One Sunday morning after church, Mina told Eleni that Kostas was going back to Greece for an extended stay. His parents were old and frail, and he wanted to spend time with them in the village before it was too late, helping them harvest their meagre crops and repairing their cottage.

 

Kostas and Eleni had behaved with such decorum that neither. Mina nor George had any inkling of their feelings for one another. Mina would rush next door to show Eleni  cards and letters from Kostas never imagining, as Eleni devoured every word of them, that her neighbour felt they were somehow meant for her.

When Koslas returned after several months absence, Eleni stayed out of sight, ironing George's shirts and thinking that perhaps the unacknowledged closeness between her and Kostas had come to an end, telling herself that it would be for the better if Kostas were to look upon her with indifference.

The smell of scorching fabric filled her nostrils, only moments before Kostas appeared at her door, his hands full of gifts from Greece for her sons. "There is nothing for you," he murmured, "because nothing I could give you would be enough." He turned and went out the gate, leaving Eleni wondering if she'd imagined what he'd said. Soon after Kostas returned from Greece , Eleni's radiance began to fade. A kind of febrile agitation took its place. She felt guilt and grief, and rage at the injustice, that into her happy, untroubled life should have come an impossible love.

^-   What could they do, Eleni asked herself, she and  Kostas, without bringing down the wrath and curses and punishment of their community upon their heads. They would be treated as people without honour, whose feelings for each other were cause for shame. That was something she and Kostas would find terrible to live with, more than they could bear...

Living here, in Australia , was even more constricting in some ways than living in Greece . There, you could go to Athens , lose yourself, make new friends, start a new life. It was more difficult to do such a thing here, without renouncing contact with people of your own kind. Everyone was related to everyone else, it seemed, or at any rate they minded each other's business well enough. And they judged transgressors of their laws mercilessly. The family was inviolable and inseparable. This was the law that had enabled her people to take root, branch out and flourish even in inhospitable soil. Besides, what about the children? In her heart, Eleni knew their laws were just. They were her laws as well.

Whereas Eleni became gaunt, Kostas began to eat with a morbid appetite that was never appeased. Some men under duress gambled, some drank, some sought the company of women. Since all of these options were unthinkable for Kostas, he ate. Eleni watched with dismay as his torso thickened and his expression grew dull and defeated. She no longer ran to the fence with coffee, but kept her blinds half closed so that she could see without being seen. Who would want to look at her anyway, she reflected, now that her lustre had vanished in drab skin and hair.

George remarked that Eleni seemed to have lost interest in soccer. Her garden withered for lack of water and attention. She had an increasing tendency to glance mistrustfully at the icons in her living room, muttering "Panaghia mou'" in a tone that implied betrayal. Saints Konstantinos and Eleni stared back at her from beside the image of the Virgin, their Byzantine face patient and grave. Were their namesakes, Kostas and Eleni, who shared the same name's day, expected to be as silently patient to the end of their days? Like saints? More like martyrs, Eleni reflected darkly. They had never asked to become saints.

 

Eleni became prey to nightmares and nameless fears. As her name's day approached, she had the same dream, twice. In her dream, she saw herself reduced to an x-ray, the flesh becoming ghostly on the spectral bones. Then half of her dissolved away before the image faded. She woke, asphyxiating with a kind of dread. What did it mean 0 Theos mou? What did it mean?

On the name's day of Kostas and Eleni, friends telephoned their greetings. Kostas had left for work early that day, so there had been no chance for him and Eleni to exchange good wishes for the day they shared in name if not in deed. Eleni found herself listening for something, even as friends chatted on the phone to her. Listening for what? The sound of his car arriving home next door? Somehow, underneath the jollity of friends and family, there was a brooding, inexplicable silence. The first strangled scream from Mina was followed by others, indescribably unnerving. Eleni froze, and waited. It was almost a relief to hear the sounds she had so often wished to utter, but had forced herself to stifle. The sounds of a soul in torment, a life in hell.

Kostas had escaped. He would no longer share the dark dream that their two lives had become. A small paragraph in one of the local newspapers told how a forty-six-year-old man, foreman of works on an inner-city construction site, had overbalanced and fallen from the scaffolding after apparently being overcome by dizziness. He had been gravely injured in the fall, sustaining a multiple fracture of the spine and other injuries, and had died on the way to hospital. An autopsy had revealed the probable cause of the accident as a heart attack. Since Eleni did not read newspapers, it was George who found the paragraph and read it to her.

In accordance with tradition, mourners came to strip Mina's closets of the clothes Kostas had worn. While they were busy upstairs, Eleni took a risk she could never have contemplated while Kostas was still alive. Running next door, she slipped under the house and snatched an unwashed shirt from the top of the washing machine. At home, locked in her room, she held it to her face, too utterly bereft even to weep.

Many times since then Eleni has asked herself if, with foreknowledge of Kostas's fate, they might have behaved differently. Each time she has concluded that truth to oneself must be unconditional, not subject to change with a change of circumstance. It is never wrong to love, Eleni told herself. It is only what people do with that love, and in the name of love, that is sometimes wrong.

Mina returned to her family in Greece , taking her children. Now there is little next door to remind Eleni that Kostas once lived there. Unobtrusively, she has taken Mina's place at the cemetery. She goes there while the boys are playing soccer, to be close to Kostas. Nobody else seems to go there at that time, so there are just the two of them. To the casual observer, Eleni may look like any other widow grieving for her husband. Only she knows the difference.

George has remarked that things are not quite as they used to be for him and Eleni. But he takes things philosophically. It probably just means they're getting old, he says.

Jena Woodhouse.