Eteocles has his slingshot with him. The tomato field is a good half hour walk each way, and the path takes them through an olive grove where Eteocles may be able to use his expertise in shooting the round stones he carries in his pockets. Anthony has his spade on his back but keeps watch for a good target for his cousin, and just before they reach the beginning of the grove he spots a skylark on the ground, more than likely close to its nest. Eteocles sees it too and starts walking slowly and silently toward the busy bird until he judges he is close enough. Then he aims, shoots, and misses. The skylark takes off, chirping loudly as if mocking Eteocles, but he doesn’t really mind. He enjoys the hunt even when it doesn’t produce results. “He’s still laughing,” Anthony says, referring to the skylark, and both boys start laughing too. They continue on their way and soon reach the tomato field. Anthony goes to the edge of the field and opens the gate that lets water into the first canal leading toward their tomatoes. Eteocles watches the water slowly move like a huge, crawling monster little by little taking over the dry soil and filling the ditch that runs alongside the first row of tomatoes. Eventually the muddy water reaches the end of the first ditch, and at that point Anthony directs the flow to the second ditch and the thirsty tomato plants in the next row get their share of Cretan refreshment. There are about thirty ditches to fill, and the whole job takes about two hours, with two boys taking turns in directing the water from one ditch to the next. Halfway through they take a break to get a watermelon from a neighbouring field. Anthony has his own special way of selecting the best melon. He hits each melon with two fingers and selects the ripest one by the sound it produces. Sure enough, when they slice it open, it is deliciously ripe and full of sweetness. After sharing this treat, the boys finish the watering, and around ten o’clock they go back to the village. It is almost time for their daily swim. All the village boys go to the sea at least once a day. Everyone counts how many swims they do, and the one with the highest number at the end of the summer is written on a verbal log the boys keep in their minds…
‘And Dervla?’ ‘Thriving.’ Danny escorted Caitlin into the yard and closed the iron gate behind them. ‘Motherhood suits her. And every day this week she’s had her friend from the cottage visiting.’ Caitlin stopped walking. ‘Her friend from the cottage?’ ‘Connie. She and Dervla go way back. They were at school together in Lisnaglass.’ ‘Didn’t Connie go home to Belfast with Robert?’ ‘No. Robert’s coming back on Monday, so Connie decided to stay in the cottage. Have a short holiday. I would have thought you knew.’ ‘Michael must have forgotten to mention it.’ Caitlin turned to the back door of the farmhouse, a frown on her forehead. ‘I’ll see you tomorrow, Danny. Regards to Dervla.’ ‘Thanks, Caitlin. Yes, tomorrow bright and early. Good evening to you.’ Caitlin entered the scullery, placed the eggs on a shelf, and started to make tea for her and Michael. She paused occasionally to look up the hillside, but she could not see the cottage from the scullery window. Michael came in an hour later, greeted Caitlin with a kiss, and washed and dried his hands at the sink. ‘We’ll finish the shearing tomorrow,’ he said. ‘There’s only a few left in the catching pen.’ ‘I don’t know why you don’t hire a professional shearing team,’ Caitlin remarked. ‘There are enough of them around.’ ‘I’ve been shearing sheep since I was seventeen,’ said Michael. ‘I can handle it myself. And Danny’s good with the shears too. If we had a bigger operation I might build a shearing shed.’ ‘You’ll be glad the shearing’s all done, though, won’t you?’ said Caitlin. Michael filled a tin mug with water from the tap and leaned his haunches against the sink. ‘Ay, that I will.’ Then he drank thirstily. ‘Danny was tired when I met him on his way home.’ ‘He’s worked hard this week.’ ‘You didn’t tell me Connie was staying in the cottage on her own since Robert left on Wednesday.’ ‘Didn’t I? Didn’t you see her in the loaney? She’s been going down to visit Dervla every day.’ ‘I must have missed her,’ said Caitlin. ‘Anyway, let’s eat.’ If Caitlin had had any suspicions about Michael and Connie Hanlon, remembering how Connie had come on to him in the square in Corrymore on Tuesday, she did not show them. She wondered how she would react…
…protocols and ways that all members adhered to, which was to slow down and do things the way others have done them before since here no one did things to impress the boss. Therefore, after Mike had finished his cigarette, he decided to go to the can, although he didn’t feel an urgent need, to give Luigi enough time to do his part of the job. He sat on the toilet and suddenly the same image of his hero came to his mind when he frantically searched his pocket, into which lucky enough, he discovered the pencil he used to write down the number of gallons that filled the occasional engine tank, to make sure that later in the day, he didn’t enter the wrong number on the official logs of the company. With the pencil surely in hand, he took a piece of toilet paper and, folding it in two just so the pencil wouldn’t poke holes in it, Mike started unfolding the image he had in his mind. He had plenty of time, according to Luigi, who preferred things done slowly; suddenly, the image changed, as if in a revelation, and became a new one which he described as softly as he could so he wouldn’t pierce the soft paper. Mike knew he had to rewrite it sometime later, yet he slowly unfolded it on toilet paper, and when done, he folded it in two and placed it in his pocket. He went out only to realize that Luigi had finished his work and was standing at the side of a bench, talking to another Italian, Giovanni, an engineer, who was on the afternoon shift like them. One could understand, that here in this big corporation for which Mike worked, there were men of different backgrounds, Italians, Hellenes, Chinese, and other nationalities, however, the Italians were just like the Hellenes, Mike remembered that back in Athens we used to say, una fatcha una ratsa, meaning that Hellenes and Italians were so much alike, just like one race and they never talked about the war of 1940 when the Italians attacked Greece. Luigi then informed Mike that it was time to go for their coffee, so all three headed towards the small coffee room out in the yard. It was a pleasant afternoon to the point of making Mike feel nostalgic. The sun was passing the west horizon slowly, just like Luigi liked things to be done, towards Stanley Park to the west of the city…
“When’s the next return connection, please? And where do I catch it?” “What connection you talking about? You got ID?” The guard is surly, he picks at a scab at the corner of his mouth, and then presses a red button above his intercom. This is all happening too quickly. Lucas can only speed into a convoluted improvisation about a lost student railcard,. As the fabulation becomes increasingly riddled with internal contradictions, Lucas can hear his voice rising to a fractious squawk. Now he’s a public spectacle. The guard has been joined by two colleagues, and there’s also a random gathering of people from the concourse, a man carrying a huge china dog, an elderly Asian in flared trousers, someone with a combination-lock briefcase chained to his wrist. They’re all staring. Their throats start moving in unison, out of his control, they’re inhaling nasally, to produce a thick hawking laughter. Through their din, Lucas can hear fragments of a security conference: “. . . sure this is the geezer ID Division is after?” “They want him to have special ID treatment, for crissakes . . .” “They’re not really Operational yet. He might be some random nut who’s wandered in from the rain.” “If he is just a random, Transit will want some action, you bet.” Lucas now knows what has to be done. Crude physical action can refute any illusion, even a bad dreamscape. Material conditions determine consciousness. That’s what Mummy said. So just hit out. He punches the iron pillar nearest him, bruising his hands on the protruding bolts. Nothing collapses. So this Terminal of Babylon is going to be a stubborn bugger? On a rush of adrenalin he pushes aside the guards and staggers into their booth, tugging at the intercom, to tear out its reality by the roots. It comes away in a clutch of wires. His ankle collapses and he falls back through the cubicle doorway, but the momentum won’t stop, his fists swing into their grinning faces. “I can’t wake . . .” he shouts between gasps. “I can’t wake up!” Now they are rolling and tumbling in the rubble; he can smell one victim’s aftershave, and blood trickles all over his hand, he’s broken a porcine nose, or a porcelain dog, and lightbulbs are swinging— More figures in peaked caps block the light—their gloves grip Lucas around the neck and legs, bending him into balletic contortions, counter- stretching every tendon in his body.
The grin left his mouth and he began to look wary. I was the one who got straight A’s, the only one in this pack of D’s and C minuses. “Ten bucks, Paulie. You can read, can’t you? Go look it up. A British blue cheese. And if you lose, you also gotta buy a pound of the shit, and eat it with a pair of chopsticks.” That did him in. He waved me off. “So what. You know cheese. But you don‘t know shit about tools. Thought yer ol’ man was a engineer.” “Yeah, well, what you think you’re talkin about here is a Stilson, a Stilson Wrench. Adjustable, with teeth and a long handle. A plumber’s tool, fool. What you want one of those things for?” He tried to look like a poker player holding a pocket pair. “Get me one and I’ll show ya.” I thought about that for a second. I knew where I could get one, but the sure bet had bit the dust and here was another chance to do business. “Cost ya a buck an hour.” “Don’t need an hour.” “Buck an hour or any fraction there-fuckin-of. Final offer.” Paulie laughed. “Some altuh boy, wid a mout like dat …” but he dug into his pocket and came up with a coin that looked like it had been dipped in chocolate and dusted with tobacco bits. “Heah’s fifty cent. The rest when you delivuh.” Paulie had achieved heroic status when he organized the now famous watermelon raid earlier in the summer. A boxcar had been left for several hours on the spur track behind number five park and Paulie had picked the padlock, releasing hundreds of tubby fruits into the city. Kids from as far away as Railroad Avenue were toting melons on their shoulders, or sitting in small groups, slicing them up with kitchen knives, their faces and hands drenched with sticky juice. It was a hard act to follow, but whatever plan he’d hatched for the Stilson, it was designed to maintain his legendary, outlaw image. And as supplier of the necessary technology, I would earn a small slice of his notoriety pie. But I needed help with this enterprise, and I knew who I could count on. Anthony Morga was the smallest but scrappiest member of our tribe at Holy Rosary School, and I could get him on board for a tithe of the buck I’d make from the rental. He was a wary kid, always kind of skittish about promissory contracts, and as we made our way down the unpaved alley that ran like a neglected country
Tanya also decided that the palomino could use a quick bath, and together, they led their horses to the wash rack. Even though they were stabled at the far end of the show grounds, it was amazing how many people were finding their way back there to say hi, offer their words of encouragement, and take a look at the horses. Joel never was a social animal, but even he found himself saying “howdy” to the folks who wandered by. He recognized a few faces from the Great Falls Show and he suspected that they were part of the Montana contingent who had been cheering on both him and Tanya. After bathing their horses, the consensus was to get a bite to eat. They had a light salad and a bowl of soup at a restaurant, then it was time to return to the horses and start thinking about saddling up for the evenings performance. It was already seven as they passed the arena on their way back to the stables and could hear the national anthem and the roar of the crowd heralding the start of this evenings’ performance. This ought to be something, Joel thought to himself as he nervously strolled along between Tanya and Cindy. As they saddled up, Joel thought the horses could tell that this was something special. This time, the warm-up pen was much less crowded. With only twenty horses and riders making it in to the finals, there was lots of room to move around, but Joel didn’t want to allow his nerves to get the better of him and start to work his horse too hard. What was different this time was that there were probably more people around the warm-up ring, watching the horses and riders prepare, than there were at many horse shows. This evening they would be riding in the reverse order that they finished in the preliminaries the previous day. For Joel, being in fifteenth position meant that he would be the fifth rider in the ring, and for Tanya, in second, she would be the nineteenth rider. With all of the horses separated by only a few points going into the final go-round, it really was anyone’s show. After all, they were competing in front of a crowd of thousands…
They travelled in silence, tired. Demetre couldn’t find a way to take him away from his thoughts, although he surely wanted to talk to him about Magda. But the young man was in a melancholic mood, just like the overcast sky over them and the monotonous light rain of Crete. The monotony that overburdened a heavy heart or a wandering mind that only knew how to find disturbance and make it its own, that only found imbalance and made it its own, as was Hermes’s mind and heart this fine cloudy evening. And it was that certain heaviness on his chest as his mind travelled to the years he’d be faraway from this land he was born into and raised, this land with its poor people for who Hermes had strong feelings of understanding and empathy, these people for he felt he had to work his best to alleviate their daily burden by making sure one day they might carry a lighter burden and they might be able to have a decent living comparing them to the citizens of other European countries, since he had spent many hours studying and educating himself with regards to the standards of living in some European countries and he knew things could change to the better if the proper legislature was passed and if new and modern rules were put in place, he had many thoughts of the how and the when, yet he also knew it was very difficult to change things people had been doing for eons, but he also knew he had to try nonetheless because he truly believed that when the going gets tough, the tough get going, as a familiar saying went. When they arrived at his parents’ house, he had in mind to show them the graduation papers which he had brought along and which were resting inside his small briefcase. He wanted them to feel pride for his diploma, something many people would love to have, yet he had this unbearable weight on his heart and he could see it with the eyes of his soul, a soul big enough to take in the whole world, the world with its poverty and disease, with its wars and disasters…
Pip: Manolis Aligizakis runs a site that could double as a library card catalog for the Mediterranean soul — except the catalog keeps writing back.
Mara: Today we're in the territory of Greek and Mediterranean poetry, translations that carry grief and habit and beauty across languages, and fiction excerpts that range from colonial frontiers to Cold War escapes. vequinox is behind all of it.
Pip: A lot of ground, a lot of voices. Let's start with the poetry.
Translations, Memory, and the Weight of Greek Verse
Mara: The anchor here is the work of translation — bringing Greek poets like Tasos Livaditis, Yannis Ritsos, Katerina Anghelaki Rooke, Constantine Cavafy, and others into English, and what gets carried across and what gets left in the original silence.
Pip: Livaditis sets the terms pretty early. The poem "November Wind" opens with a door being closed and a reckoning beginning, and then it lands this: "I think music is the grief of those who never found the time to love."
Mara: That line does a lot of work. It takes the whole poem's accumulation of lost letters, absent friends, and unanswered words and names the feeling underneath — not sorrow exactly, but grief as an art form practiced by people who ran out of time.
Pip: Ritsos shows up twice, and both poems are about absence made physical. "Emptiness" is a house stripped bare where the mirror refuses to reflect the void, and the nails left in the wall after pictures fall still catch the last light — still expecting something to hang on them. "The Sick Man" is quieter, a man returning from some interior collapse, speaking in a detached voice while making a gesture of strange tenderness with an imaginary handkerchief.
Mara: Katerina Anghelaki Rooke's "The Goddess Habit" works a different register entirely. The poem personifies routine as a protective deity, and it earns its ending: "Yes, goddess Habit, I believe in you and I serve you. You too, stay loyal to me until I get tired of you." That's a prayer and a negotiation at the same time.
Pip: Cavafy appears twice, and both poems are portraits of performance. "Leader from Western Libya" is a quietly devastating sketch of a man who learns to dress and speak Greek to impress Alexandria, and ends up so terrified of making a grammatical error that he says almost nothing — all those unspoken words piling up inside him. The later Cavafy piece, "Days of 1909, 1910, and 1911," is a young blacksmith's elegy: beautiful, unrecorded, wasted.
Mara: Titos Patrikios's "Final Defeat" is brief and brutal — a man who stuttered wanted to say something, and the speaker was always in a hurry. Antony Fostieris's "Five Painters" turns that inward: an aging artist who has just finished his most important work sits quietly at a restaurant corner, contemplating the thorny crown of the critics, while his companions talk about nothing.
Pip: The remaining poems spread the emotional range. "Impulses" holds a mastectomy at its center — the word repeated twice at the close, once as descriptor, once as fact. "Hours of the Stars" moves through water and myrtle and skylarks with a ceremonial lightness. "Introspection" names its destination plainly: the word "arts" appearing like a destination on the climb toward a destined Ithaca.
Mara: "Wheat Ears" and "Entropy" and "The Incidentals" and "Ugga" fill out the edges — a man reading the morning paper's catalog of violence before going to war again with his coffee pot, a coal seller sweating through summer to sell winter, primeval souls climbing from pages of books, and the twentieth century's art movements battling while Dali embraces Lorca timidly.
Pip: All of it circles the same question: what survives the passing of time, and who gets remembered. The fiction asks something similar, just with more people in the room.
Voices Across Frontiers: The Fiction Excerpts
Mara: The fiction segment covers a wide range of settings and genres, but the posts share a preoccupation with people navigating systems — political, social, colonial — that are larger and less trustworthy than they appear.
Pip: "Arrows" is the sharpest example. Friar Salvador is caught in a military council where the power dynamics are shifting in real time, and the excerpt ends with a sentence that earns its weight: "Not one day among the Spaniards, and already I smelled unshed blood."
Mara: The tension in that scene is precise — Infante's insubordination is theatrical, Losada's tolerance of it is suspicious, and Salvador reads the whole room correctly while being unable to do anything about it. The approval that follows Infante's suggestion to interrogate the caciques is described as mockery rather than respect.
Pip: "Jazz with Ella" has a completely different energy — a group smuggling a Soviet musician out of the USSR, the airplane cabin full of people pretending not to know each other, and Jennifer barely containing her relief while picturing Volodya hearing live gospel music for the first time in Vancouver. It's one of the warmer excerpts here.
Mara: "Water in the Wilderness" is quieter tension — Tyne waking up and walking into a kitchen where Moe and Ken are already dressed and waiting, and the whole scene turns on whether she can read their faces before she sits down. The line "Have you heard anything?" comes out as little more than a whisper.
Pip: "Blood, Feathers and Holy Men" is the most expansive excerpt — a Celtic woman named Ula, sold to a convent for six chickens and a pig, who has ended up among Indigenous people in what reads as early North America, and is slowly being reached by a monk named Rordan through the shared medium of song. The detail about the children calling him Mountain Thrush for his happy laugh is the kind of thing that earns a reader's trust.
Mara: "Redemption" follows a young man named Hermes preparing for a meeting with a university dean, coached by his aunt to find out the conditions before agreeing to anything, because nobody offers something without expecting something in return. "Poodie James" puts a lawyer for the Great Northern Railway in front of a civic hearing about hobos, and the exchange between the committee chair and the railway counsel is drily procedural — the shortest speech ever heard from a lawyer.
Pip: "Wellspring of Love" is a quieter domestic register — a girl named Rachael sitting by a stream, overhearing herself described as running with someone fast, and trying to figure out who she could ask about it without causing more trouble than the question is worth.
Mara: "Ken Kirkby — Warrior Painter" is a biographical excerpt tracking how Kirkby's Arctic paintings became nationally recognized, and how the Inukshuk eventually became the symbol of the 2010 Vancouver Olympics — a consequence that started with a single ministerial meeting and a well-timed exhibition in Spain.
Pip: "In the Quiet After Slaughter" closes on a man who spots someone he may or may not recognize — a face with a distinctive mark — returning to a place that once meant something. He could verify it, but he chooses not to. "I preferred to believe it was him," the narrator says, "because it's what I did. It's who I had become."
Mara: "Straits and Turns" is a travel piece set in Madrid, a narrator exchanging an imperceptible kiss with a Minoan-featured stranger across a restaurant, and "Twelve Narratives of the Gypsy" is a scroll and a water well and a horse riding toward a country of castles that threaten the wide open skies. "Red in Black" ends the range — a love poem about texting instead of writing a letter, and being called a student of the old school, and sending a kiss from the other side of the planet.
Pip: What stays with me is how much of this — the poetry and the fiction both — is about the gap between what people mean to say and what actually gets said.
Mara: The stuttering man in Patrikios, the unspoken words piling up in Cavafy's Libyan prince, Salvador reading the room and leaving afraid. The gap is the subject.
Pip: Next time, we'll see what else is waiting in the archive.
“Get out of my sight,” Finn yelled with more passion. “Get out of my sight till Caitlin comes back. And if she doesn’t come back, or if I find out that you’ve harmed her in any way, you’d better stay out of my sight. Otherwise I’ll kill you.” Michael rose from the table without a word and left the house. He walked like one in a trance as far as the barn, then he leaned against the wall and wept. The tears brought some relief to his tortured mind, but as he climbed the rest of the way to the cottage his fear grew again like a nauseating vision of eternity. Remorse tightened its suffocating lock on his throat. He wished he could die. Michael opened the door of the cottage and stepped inside. For a heart-lifting second of hope he expected Caitlin to be there, waiting for him by the fireside. But the cottage was empty and cold. In deep despair he was about to flee, about to rush down the hill again and give himself up to the law in Lisnaglass. But fear of the consequences stopped him. Anguished and frightened he lay on the straw-filled tick on his bed and suffered the cruel torture of the demons in his mind. That which hurt most was Finn’s banishment. To be cast out by such a man was a more atrocious punishment than death. What a strange revenge of fate, Michael thought, remembering the bleak November day when he drove his own father to the railway station and told him not to return. He had used almost the same words as Finn had: “If you come back, I’ll kill you.” His father had not come back. He did not even look back as he walked away from the horse and trap on which his youngest son had driven him to the town. He carried only a canvas bag containing all that his profligate life had left to him. That canvas bag was the last tangible remains of his father that Michael ever saw, for it somehow caught on the door of the train as his father went aboard and fell on to the platform. The stationmaster picked it up and handed it into the compartment. That memory had returned to Michael frequently during the past ten or eleven years. He often wondered where the bag was and whether his father still owned it. Strange to recall the bag more than the huge, round, florid-faced man who owned it. Stranger yet when the man was as memorable as Thomas Carrick: memorable for his flaming yellow hair and a face that glowed bright red as if burnt by the fiery aureole of his hair; memorable for the mountainous bulk of his body and for the inexhaustible energy with which he drove it to excesses of work, to excesses of drinking, to excesses of lust, to excesses of cruelty.
Ibrahim comes and leads him away as Emily is busy talking to Mara and three other women. “Come with me, son. I’d like you to meet a couple of important people.” “Gentlemen, this is my son, Talal, from the United States,” he addresses a group of men standing together in a small circle. “Talal, this is the Minister of Finance whom you met before, Omar Salem, the Minister of Transportation and Tourism, Khaled Al Marsi, and the Minister of Natural Resources, Omar Bin Housein.” They all shake hands with Talal and exchange the customary greetings. “He’s a chemist,” the Minister of Finance says to the other two, referring to Talal. “Now, here is one person I would like to have working for me,” Omar Bin Housein says. “We’d all like to have the generation of educated people with us now at this time when our country needs them the most. You are the people who will take charge of our future. I welcome you back to Iraq anytime, young Talal,” the Minister of Transportation and Tourism says. Ibrahim tells them all, that although Talal is coming back soon, he needs him as well, so they had better not become too aggressive in recruiting him for their ministries. “But, of course. After all, this is one of your orphans, isn’t he, Ibrahim?” Omar Salem asks. “Yes, he’s one of my seven sons.” “When I’m back, I’m sure there will be plenty of work to be done, and gentlemen, I’m not about to disappoint any of you,” Talal says with a light laugh.He notices Emily is trying to get his attention, so he excuses himself and goes to her. Omar Bin Houseing bows slightly to his host. “My dear Ibrahim, your Talal is a very fine young man. You must be very proud of him.” “I’m proud of all my orphans, my friends. Yet, the one I’m most proud of is my beloved Hakim, whom you’ll meet soon.” “I hope he comes very soon, Ibrahim,” the Minister of Finance says. “Yes, he will.” Ibrahim is assertive in his tone. Emily is on the far side of the big room enjoying the attention she gets from Mara, who introduced her to her closest friends. At one point, Mara tells Emily, “You’re my invited guest, my dear, and it’s my privilege to present you to my friends and other visitors; after all, you may be here for a longer period the next time and these women, whom you have met today, will also consider you a friend when you return.” “I just hope I haven’t taken you out of your way, Mara.”
