Intimate Distance by Katerina Cosgrove Read Free Book Online Page A

myself to look at him, to let his eyes travel at leisure all over my face.
    He downed his drink in a gulp. Then he held the empty glass to his mouth, muttered into it, eyes locked on mine.
    â€˜What did you say, Dimi?’
    â€˜I really don’t think we should be doing this anymore.’
    â€˜Why?’
    â€˜Now the baby is nearly here and Zoi is working so hard for you both, I’m starting to feel –’
    â€˜What’s the difference between now and a month ago, Dimitri?’
    â€˜I’ve been thinking. And Zoi says he’s taking you away for a little time, before the baby’s born. He’s trying to do the right thing.’
    â€˜Where’s he taking me? It’s the first I’ve heard of it.’
    He spread out his hands in a gesture of hopelessness.
    â€˜To our village. It will be a good rest for you. It will make things easier.’
    â€˜And you?’
    â€˜I’m not coming, at least not yet. You must understand, I love my brother. We’ve spent some good times together lately, talking.’
    â€˜About me?’
    â€˜About you. And other things.’
    â€˜Have you told him?’
    â€˜Yes. No, not really. I told him as much as I thought necessary.’
    â€˜What? What exactly did you tell him?’
    â€˜That I’d fallen in love with you. That I wasn’t in love with you anymore.’
    I turned my head away from him in a savage gesture.
    â€˜He’s known all along and never let on. How could he do that to me?’
    â€˜How could you?’
    â€˜And you,’ I snapped. ‘Don’t forget your part in this. You loved me and now you don’t? Am I supposed to believe that?’
    â€˜I think you should give it a chance, Mara. You won’t find anybody again who loves you as much as he does.’
    I opened my mouth to speak, still looking at my own reflection, addressing the words to myself.
    â€˜Is it the way I am now? Is that why you’re doing this to me?’
    He laughed mirthlessly and put his arm around my shoulders, like a brother.
    I CARRIED A pocket-sized mirror in my bag when I was pregnant, and kept it hidden. It was easier to see my face in parts without being confronted all at once with my whole body. Anxiously, when nobody was looking, I would check on my appearance, in all lights, at all times of day, frightened by the changes, the loss of control. It became a compulsion.
    I fantasised about being blind. Examined my points of reference. How they would change, how the unbelievable burden of my face would shimmer for a moment, fizzle out, vanish in the blankness of not seeing.
    On the bus to Zoi’s village I threw the mirror out onto the road, where it dropped into a ravine, a jagged splinter of light in the foliage. But I couldn’t help it; I followed my reflection in the windows of the bus, the way my face flattened over the landscape, merging with the trees, a stark outline against the sky.
    Â 
    distance
    Â 
    We’re never equal to our desires. Desire isn’t enough. What remains is
    weariness, resignation – a felicitous near-loss of will,
    sweat, distraction, heat. Until, finally, night comes
    to erase everything, to mingle it with one solid, incorporeal body,
    your own,
    to blow damp from the pinewoods or down from the sea,
    to submerge the light, to submerge ourselves.
    Persephone, Yannis Ritsos
    Â 
    11
    LITHOHORI, SUMMER, 2013
    I BATHE IN sweat under goat’s hair blankets. Zoi’s aunt aired them for only a day; not long enough to rid them of the smell of rats and mildew and something else, indefinable, a little like disappointment. Blankets woven by her mother, carried to her husband’s home on a mule, a marriage prepared for since she was seven.
    â€˜Good dowry,’ she hinted in dialect to me. ‘Eh?’
    I didn’t understand her northern accent and asked Zoi to explain.
    We’re huddled together in a single bed with blankets thick as