Koukla

Koukla

Sevasti sat calmly at her kitchen table, her worn and sun stained skin lightly tinted by the reflection of the dim sunlight on the bright green counter tops, and watched the dog piss on her floor. It bothered her no more than usual, since she had felt a sort of reflexive animosity toward the animal since it had entered her life and home. While it was now still a puppy, and such blasphemous behavior would be considered far from unexpected by the average pet owner, the maelstrom of exuberant, unwanted affection, wiry black hair, and unrelenting shit and piss that now trounced around her house all day and night had brought her no comfort, only dull irritation. As she watched the urine form a small pool in the little circular divot of the linoleum tiling and rivulets start to rise free and roll toward the crack beneath the stove, her mouth filled with the hot tasteless air of disgust, but she did not move or call out to the dog.

After the funeral, Sevasti had been rendered paralytic. She had suffered no sharp fall shattering the fibrous tissue of her brittle bones, and the sinew of her spinal cord, while weak and relatively distended, had not been severed—but as she sat staring at the urinating dog from her kitchen table during mid-day, her face half-illuminated by the intrusive, presumptuous light sneaking in through the unlit room’s single window, the absence of meaning or intent in her sterile expression clearly demonstrated her position trapped in the cold lethargic grip of non-movement. Now, she was forever static.

At long last, Sevasti had become a widow. Her husband’s death a few weeks earlier had been neither surprise nor tragedy. Just two weeks shy of his 96^th birthday, Tassos had decided to die. His death was peaceful and pleasant, occurring in an adjustable bed in a well lit bedroom in their daughter’s house, and devoid of the antiseptic air of hygienic, systematized death in hospitals. The room had been stripped for his arrival, and was clean and bright. There hung an icon of Saint Nektarios, patron saint of travelers, above the bed (which did little to comfort anyone except the daughter) and the gold leaf of the icon glinted obnoxiously reflecting the bright sun from the picture window, which also cruelly exposed crags and deep blotches on Tassos’ aged arms and face. During his last two weeks, he was accompanied at his bedside in the bedroom at all hours of the day by either his daughter or eldest grandson, as he slipped through an increasingly hazy effluvium into total unreality. Every chance was afforded for last testaments and final goodbyes.

While the hushed dramatics of natural death played out in the bedroom, Sevasti sat in either her daughter’s kitchen or family room inventing meaningless tasks for herself while episodes of Bonanza or I Love Lucy played on the television at a low volume. Sevasti could not follow the episodes’ plot lines if she tried, but it did not matter; at times they convinced her that someone was muttering to her softly. For awhile, she drew elaborate charts detailing her pharmaceutical regiment, with columns and rows to denote, times, days, quantities, types of food eaten before ingestion, liquids consumed with ingestion, and even a concealed column to record frequency and consistency of her bowel movements. This column she wrote in Greek, so that in case a passing stranger might happen upon her charts she would not be embarrassed. Once they were completed, there was ample room to document the ins and outs of the two pills she took daily: one half milligram of Lorazepam for anxiety (a small grey pill not much bigger than a pin’s head with a series of microscopic numbers imprinted on it,) and Centrum Silver Complete (large, oval, and brownish yellow.) When not engaged in some labor, she liked to look out the window onto the pine tree in the back yard, and think how if she only had some nice sharp pencils, it would be a scene she would love to sketch. She had always wanted to sketch, though she never had, as she had never had any nice, sharp pencils. The week leading up to the death she realized that she didn’t know how long the events in the bedroom would take to reach their inevitable conclusion, and that she was still paying for the utilities at her house while it remained empty. Shocked and horrified by this, she endeavored on a crusade to rid herself from the wasteful burden, and with repeated phone calls requested that the services be de- and then re-activated for free at the proper times. She failed in this, even after repeated cries that her husband was at death’s door. Not once did she sit by her dying husband’s bed, but her absence was not felt on either side, for neither of them thought it necessary.

After a visiting nurse was unable to find Tassos’ pulse on a balmy Wednesday morning, and the family at last accepted the finality of his state, Sevasti busied herself with the tasks of the death. Under the weight of emotional fatigue, the daughter and eldest grandson had simply collapsed for a while to regain their strength, and they handed all responsibility for the funerary arrangements and all other immediate business to Sevasti. This was her single greatest triumph in sixty-two years of marriage.

There were financial matters to be settled: social security, his machinist’s pension, and veteran’s benefits. Also the handling of a meager amount of Annheiser-Busch stock which had been purchased 30 years earlier with the winnings of a lotto ticket and now had to be sold, as the company had been bought out by Belgians a few months prior. There were disconnected relatives and friends to be called, the matter of alerting the priest so a notice could be placed in the next church bulletin to make the local Greek American community aware of the news, an obituary to be written, and money to be unwillingly pried from government organizations. Sevasti executed this work vigilantly and efficiently, with an unwavering and calm determination, sitting at her daughter’s kitchen table. She spoke to all in a clear, stable tone, and attached emotional significance or humor to her words only when both necessary and prompted. This was not hard, and emotional outpourings of any kind were rare. Not only had everyone been expecting Tassos’ death for years, but the few still-living acquaintances he had were shallow at best. As for family outside the immediate, there was only one nephew/godson living outside of Athens, Greece, and Tassos’ relationship with Sevasti’s family had always been tumultuous. While outright hostility had broken out between them only a few times in their sixty-odd year relationship, they could never effectively conceal their distaste for each other.

While Sevati’s family had been refugees from the failed Greek expansionist attempt into western Turkey and the subsequent 1922 Treaty of Lausanne and population exchange (a series of events that Greeks still refer to simply as “the catastrophe,”) her siblings, all American-born, and their desire for complete American cultural homogenization was not lost on Tassos, nor was their contempt for him as a low-born orphan immigrant. They had refused to speak Greek to him, and although they all lived in Toledo, they had seen each other a rarely as possible. Sevasti’s family had even refused to visit Tassos in the hospital when he suffered a stroke twenty years before.

The only genuine sense of loss that Sevasti encountered when doing these chores came from Haralambos, the Athenian nephew, whose distress poured through the earpiece in a series of trebly cries which strained the mechanics of the device and seemed to threaten to crack the phone’s plastic.

The funeral had been pleasant. As Toledo’s paunchy and balding Greek Americans meekly filed into the church Sevasti sat in a high-seated chair next to the coffin while they passed by and offered their condolences: the pursed lips, shallow nods and darting eyes that second generation Greek Americans offer up to a group of elders they neither care about nor are able to understand, a hushed disinterest that masquerades as reverence or respect. Once the ceremony began and Sevasti was no longer being bathed in pleasantries she became slightly irritated, and her exhaustion began to show in her squirming and the distempered look on her face. She knew the service would be long (the Greeks failed to wrap up any ceremony invoking the almighty in less than 60 minutes,) the incense stung her nostrils, and the mournful bellowing of the chanter made her anxious. Although it was a secret she would take to her grave, Sevasti had always detested Greek Orthodox chanting and its whining, strenuous tone.

While the pomp of the ceremony unfolded around her, she let her eyes wander and survey the decorum of the church. There was red velvet and gold-plated, starting-to-tarnish brass everywhere, garish candles burning offensively bright and illuminating the rank purple smoke of the incense, and icons depicting bible scenes, feast days, and saints painted with the taught, angular Byzantine style that makes every turn and fold in every image forced, struggling, and painful. On the other side of the coffin was a table displaying photographs from the many important turning points of Tassos’ life. Him at four years old, dressed for mourning with his siblings, on the day of his mother’s funeral. A portrait of him at nineteen in his Greek naval dress, shortly before being exiled for participating in a failed coup de tat. Him in his U.S. infantrymen’s uniform before discharge. Finally was a picture of him on his wedding day, the only one in color, which was a fortunate coincidence, because showed the bright pink Johnny Carson line suit he was married in. It was also the only one wherein he was bald, and though Sevasti personally remembered him looking much more youthful on their wedding day, in the photo he looked weathered and fatigued, as though he’d already fathered and raised many children and grandchildren. Finally was a painting, recently done, of him as a young man in the harbor of Piraeus, his native city. It was one of two portraits and one carnival caricature which had been painted of Tassos during his lifetime. I’ve lived 84 years and I’ve never had my portrait painted, thought Sevasti as she looked on it.

After the funeral, normalcy set in again with a rage. Her daughter’s husband had insisted that she immediately leave his house after the final arrangements were carried through and the extended family left. He could not tolerate her stuttering, high strung speech anymore, her fidgety busy bodying, her relentless need for explanation of the simplest scenarios and tasks. She returned to her home, a small brick one story with red carpet and green countertops and trim, with her eldest grandson and his little black shit machine. Her relationship with her grandson was strained, but functional: he cooked one big meal every Sunday for the two of them to share throughout the week, and did all petty chores he was asked to, but she had always found his nature brutish and his company obnoxious. He was short tempered and selfish, he refused to speak to her conversationally and seemed to make sport out of engaging in various petty addictions, the signs of which spread themselves about her house, carelessly left on nightstands or stashed away in drawers. He seemed to rush in and out of the house in a flash, not a presence, just a series of quick, dodging movements, leaving her only constant companion the dog. Most of her free time, which was ample, was spent in moments such as this, sitting silently in the dark, and watching the animal slowly destroy her home.

When the dog had finished emptying his bladder he looked up to her briefly, with a disconnected expression, but after a few short moments he realized she had no response to his action, negative or otherwise, and trotted happily out of the room, probably to defecate on something else of hers, she thought. Sevasti remained at the table and turned her face back toward the window. The snow was beginning to melt, and the few plants foolhardy and arrogant enough to not to go into dormancy in the neglected flowerbed outside showed their battered, wrecked leaves. It was still too cold to go outside. It would be so for some time.

She looked down at the table where she kept the “things she worked on.” Once all bills for funeral services and condolence cards had been answered, this was reduced to the daily mail, usually nothing more than an assortment of advertisements, which she sorted and dealt with accordingly. Today a small sheet of paper with coupons for Arby’s had arrived, and now she endeavored on clipping them neatly and adding them to the paper clip stuffed with fast food coupons. As these sorts of advertisements came daily, and she and the grandson had not eaten anything purchased from anywhere other than the Save-a-Lot down the street since Tassos’ death (him lacking an automobile and her lacking the mobility to leave the house,) the stack was swelling and the paperclip was overwhelmed. With precision, she led the scissors straight down the dotted lines separating the coupons, her attention always focused sharply on the line, never drifting to the visual temptation of heaps of steaming roast beef. Even though her attention did not wander to the pictures of food, she reflexively thought, oh, that looks good. Upon finishing she took the stack of coupons from next to her, and shoved an eighth of an inch more into the strained paper clip. It was bent now at almost a complete ninety degree angle, making it functionless.

After she finished with the mail, she looked down sharply at her thumbnail, and pressed it hard against the table until it began to discolor a bit. After finishing a job, she liked to bask in satisfaction.

A few more moments passed before Sevasti hoisted herself onto her walker and began to hobble behind it toward the family room. She wanted to check on her new TV. Tassos had been an incredibly tight-fisted man, and his death had liberated the funds to her. She could now indulge in all of the repressed spending of sixty-two years of marriage. First she had bought the television, a flat screen Vizio that awkwardly bulked over the frame of her broken, 40 year old television stand. It had cost five-hundred and sixty-two dollars. Next she had gotten cable, the most basic available: fourteen dollars per month for all free network channels plus the ABC Family Channel. Later tonight, as every night, she would turn on the television for exactly one half hour, from six-thirty to seven o’clock, to watch the NBC nightly news with Brian Williams. This was the only television she ever watched. However, she had taken to walking into the family room once every forty minutes or so to make sure that the television was still in its designated spot, that silent burglars had not somehow broken in and taken it while she turned the other way.

Finally, she had purchased a new seat for the toilet, a large rubber donut three feet high designed for the handicapped which made the seat into a booster seat. This was her favorite of her purchases. She sometimes had trouble climbing atop it, and had to pull all of her hefty weight up with her brittle wrists, but she enjoyed an immense feeling of satisfaction while sitting on it with her feet dangling carefree below her. She got to see a whole new perspective of her bathroom, and it overjoyed her to see such a familiar scene with fresh new eyes.

After checking on the television, which remained steadfastly in its place, she turned with her walker to go to the bathroom. She noticed the unusual sensation of not being bothered, and realized that the dog had gone off somewhere. Her grandson was off, she had no idea to where, and had closed his door before leaving with the express intent of keeping the dog out and letting it do all its damage to her things instead. She stopped in place briefly, to wonder where the dog had gone too, but quickly realized that she didn’t care, and continued on.

She reached the bathroom, with some effort pivoted left, turned on the light, and saw her throne awaiting her. She began to undress, to take off her skirt and slip, as the danger of wearing these while mounting the toilet might cause her to slip and fall onto the harsh linoleum and suffer a setback from which she might not recover. Once undressed, she sidled up to the toilet, reached out with her right hand to get a firm supporting grip on the towel-rack, while her left pushed her up from the sink. After a few quavering moments of uncertainty she managed to position herself securely, and surveyed her surroundings with a slight smirk on her face while urinating. She looked down to the floor and it’s the differing glazes of its stains in the fluorescent light, to the bathtub and the deteriorating plastic grip pads stained pink with soap-scum, to the bathroom scale, the delicacies of the rings holding the shower curtain in place, to the light dusting of pubic hairs lying along the caulk of the tub on the floor, to the blotchy orange and yellow floral patterns of the towels. She felt her height, and noticed for the first time her close proximity to the light-piece above.

Taking it all in, she noticed an incongruity. From this angle the light shown differently on the shower wall, and it seemed to be highlighting something etched into the grout. Sevasti again gripped the towel rack, and leaned forward to try and make out the etching. She strained her eyes and posture, squinting hard and contorting her face while leaning forward at such an angle that she was in danger of plummeting from the top of the toilet. She leaned further and further, over the edge to the closest position that gravity allowed. Squinting even harder, Sevasti thought she could make out two words. She wasn’t sure, but it looked as though someone, using a safety pin or maybe a paper clip, had carved “FUCK YOU” into her wall.