Excerpt
The Dancer
It was a cloudy April day; one could hardly discern the mountains to the north shore, where two mountain peaks resembling lions stood facing each other as if they were playing a good game of chess without any concern for the people of Vancouver, down by the shores. These two lions were so symbolically attached to the lives of Vancouver citizens that they had named the bridge which connected the Lower Mainland with the North Shore ‘Lion’s Gate Bridge’, the same way the Hellenes had the Lion’s Gate at Mycenae.
Costa was sitting by the window of his one-bedroom suite and kept writing a few lines of the novel he had started a few months earlier, as his eyes suddenly left the paper and gazed at the expanse towards the North Shore, on the other side of the harbour. Indeed, Vancouver was a beautiful city situated on the edge of the land by the Pacific Ocean, on the west side of which the lands of the Orient were located, including Japan, Korea, China, Vietnam, and, to the south, Australia.
He got up to refill his coffee mug and lit a cigarette. It was Tuesday, his day off, so he didn’t have much to do other than write a few lines and perhaps go to Stanley Park for a stroll until his wife came home. His mind ran to the nasty letter he got from his father when he disclosed to them that his girlfriend from Athens had joined him in Vancouver and that they lived together and perhaps they’d get married soon so she could stay permanently; his girlfriend had come with a visitors visa which meant she had to leave in three months unless Costa married her thus making her wife of a legal immigrant.
Manolis Aligizakis 