It was a square-looking house, blocky and plain and sharp around the edges, perched on a ratty lawn. The land sloped sharply at the back and bordered on a school field. The fence was old and made of wire, with a sunken bit in one place where the kids would cut through. There was a cabbage tree out the front, a lone gesture to decorative foliage, stooped and vaguely depressive. There was the driveway, where he’d once stood screaming for a long time. They’d locked the doors. It had gone on for a while, and then stopped. A welcome silence had oozed around the doorframe, and a bird chirped. The children finished their crying. That night they’d all made nachos, and her mother had said to invite her friends over, as many as she wanted. The feeling inside the house had been like that of an air-balloon basket just before take-off: the balloon was prepped and full of volatile gas, the edges of the basket inching off the ground and then jolting downwards, the balloon almost, but not quite, leaving the ground.
Most days when she’d come home from school there had been a smell inside the house, mould overlaid with too many cleaning products. It had been the cheapest place they could find. Everything was polished and ironed, perfectly hanging in time. The brown ‘70s carpet and beige curtains, the nets in the windows like bridal veils, the mottled vinyl surface of the kitchen bench. There was a window between the lounge and the hallway made of dark orange glass. There were murky lampshades, with tassels. Everything was achingly clean and scrubbed. The hallway was always cold but, look, right now there’s sunlight streaming onto the couch in the lounge room and the TV’s on and it’s her mother’s favourite show and, there, the sun is falling right onto a pile of clean, freshly folded washing. Her mother’s, the baby’s, the other kids’.
‘We’re poor,’ her mother had said. ‘We’re poor now, but at least we’ve always been clean.’
He sipped his coffee, took a bite of tiropita.
‘And when the Turks invaded the city of Smyrna,’ he said, ‘when they occupied and burnt and massacred the Greek Orthodox Christians and the Armenians of Smyrna, it was a holocaust.’ He gestured wildly, ‘A holocaust, one that the world still has not properly acknowledged, you understand. This is in 1922. There were hundreds of Christians slaughtered. When they invaded, it wasn’t an occupation. It was genocide.’
She was uncomfortable at the table. It was warm in the café and the air was fugged with the smell of other people’s breakfast eggs. She was in her favourite clothes: brown corduroy pants, boots, an op-shop shirt. When she had told her mother she was going to see him her mother hadn’t answered for a long moment. And then she’d looked her up and down, fussed at her collar, brushed at her shorn, boyish hair.
‘You could at least wear something nice,’ she had said. ‘Show him we’re not beggars.’
‘Mum.’
‘I don’t know why you insist on wearing that sort of thing. You look like a hobo.’
‘Mum!’
‘If you’re not back within an hour, I’m calling the police.’
‘You need to understand, I’m telling you this because it was covered up and they still haven’t taken responsibility for this travesty and this massacre but we know,’ he said, sipping his latte, ‘we know, we remember, that’s what you have to learn about your people. We are a people who remember.’
She paused, took a sip of coffee. When she brought her cup back to the saucer it rattled slightly. She looked him carefully in the eye.
‘It was my understanding that the Turks did apologise,’ she said.
He looked at her, his eyes moving rapidly. He was sometimes capable of being handsome, but now his colour was high, and in the heat his face was florid. She looked more like him, she knew, with her black hair and dark eyes, her soft rounded face. Every morning when she looked in the mirror she wished for her mother’s sharp cheekbones, that face certain of it’s own direction in the world, not this formless sulking moon. She would shave off the edges of her face if she could, so that it matched how she felt. She would chisel her real self out of this blurred mass till she looked hard and real, directional, less like a thing that was acted upon.
‘Yes, but for so long it was covered up,’ he said, ‘with the complicity of the Anglo-dominated Western world. And when they did apologise, it was a token apology. They only did it because of international pressures. There were no reparations offered. No proper apologia.
‘Understand,’ he said, ‘I’m only telling you all this because I see your mind working away in there and, God knows, you’re a beautiful girl, but I see you have a good mind too, a critical little mind. There are a few of us in the family, thinkers. That’s how we’re similar, you and I.’
Something happened in her body. She felt she might throw up, or burst. But she kept her eyes steady on him. Her mind was critical, but little? They were similar, she and him? She was beautiful, but could also think? What did that even mean?
The waitress came over to check on everything.
‘Everything’s great, thank you sweetheart,’ he said. He stared hard at her departing form. The waitress looked back, straight at her where she was pinned to her chair. She was sure her face was red. The waitress’ ponytail swished lushly. She was a couple of years older than her, just out of school. The waitress didn’t raise her eyebrow. She didn’t have to. She came back, filled her water glass, and put the jug on the table, in front of him, without filling his glass. He didn’t notice.
‘It was done with no honour. They invaded at night, they snuck in the back door. It was carefully planned. The Greeks and Armenians, they had no warning, no chance to defend themselves. It wasn’t an honest fight.’
She sipped her coffee. Her mother didn’t let her drink coffee. In this mood, he would have bought her whatever she wanted, as long as it had conflicted with her mother’s rules. She should have asked for a bottle of vodka.
‘Like how we left you?’ she asked. ‘In the middle of the night, so you didn’t have a chance to stop us?’
Afterwards, she was picked up by her friends in a bright yellow Toyota Corolla filled with cigarette smoke. Her friends waved to him obnoxiously as they pulled away, in a way that could only just be construed as friendly. They knew all about her father. For a moment, she felt sorry for him.
A critical little mind.
She texted her mother: ‘No need to call the police. I’m with Phillip, Kelly and Jen. Back tonight. Don’t worry about my dinner.’
Her mother texted back: ‘Was he alright?’
Not ‘Are you alright?’, but ‘Was he alright?’
Someone rolled her a cigarette out of a pouch of tobacco. Someone lit it for her. She cracked open the window, blew out a smooth stream of bitter smoke. The text message could mean, ‘Did he behave appropriately?’ It could also mean, ‘Was he okay?’
There had been one time, amidst the worst of it, when they had left her alone in the house in the wee hours of the morning. He’d had enough, he’d said. He’d had it up to here with them. There had been the usual scuffle, in which she had attempted to intervene. He went off furiously, on foot. It was a work night.
Her mother had left her with the children, and the baby, who was awake. She drove off to look for him, afraid he wouldn’t come back, afraid he would get lost or do something to himself. Most of all her mother feared her father’s job being put in jeopardy, the ensuing scandal if her father didn’t turn up to work, if the marriage broke up, if it all came out.
The baby was still breast-feeding, and had kept crying and snuffling at her flat chest. The second youngest wouldn’t go down.
‘Why don’t we all get into my bed?’ she had suggested loudly, over the baby’s cries. ‘I’ll read a book, and we can have a sleepover!’
They crept in, one by one, but the second youngest had wet herself in the confusion and had to be changed. She had given the baby to her brother, who looked blankly at its wide open mouth.
‘Just bounce her,’ she said.
‘I’m tired,’ her brother replied, laying the baby on the bed, where it continued to scream.
She had read to them until they fell asleep. She stayed awake. If she slept, she thought, the baby might be rolled on and suffocated, or one of them might fall out and, in crying, wake up the others.
She had watched the blinds for any sign of headlights. Her body was as alert as if it was first thing in the morning and she was taking an exam. It was a test. She had to keep her eyes open. She had to know when they arrived, prepare herself for the opening of the door. Her brother’s foot had slipped out from under the covers and she covered it quickly, as though leaving it outside the blankets would mark her as negligent. No one could say that she hadn’t kept them warm. Their collective breaths had made the windows mist at the edges, till the condensation ran down in drops. It was close to morning when her mother returned. Her father was with her, mute and pale, and silent.
‘He’s had a hard time,’ her mother had said to her, before they all went to bed.
‘Hey!’ Her friend Phillip was speaking. ‘Hey, man, you were totally somewhere else. So I guess it wasn’t great?’
‘Seeing Dad?’ She wished she had some other word for him. ‘I guess not. I guess it wasn’t great.’
There was a moment where none of her friends spoke, and the tinny pop on the radio triumphed. It was cheap stereo, and only played AM stations. But no one else had a car, and so no one cared. Unlike the houses where they lived with their parents, this car was their real home.
‘Hey guys, I think it’s time for the plan,’ Jen said.
‘The plan?’ Her own voice sounded pathetic, thin. She wished she were better at acting fine.
‘The plan, the plan!’ Kelly cheered, Phillip joining in.
‘There’s one thing,’ Jen said to her. ‘You have to agree to be blindfolded.’
‘What?’ She drew hard on the cigarette. She wasn’t sure she was up for this.
‘Come on!’
‘It’s a surprise…’
‘We’ve been wanting to do it for ages…’
‘Alright.’ She knew if she didn’t agree to it, they would hassle her forever. And what better thing was there to do?
‘First, we have to have a proper smoke.’ Phillip was businesslike.
‘Who knows a place?’
‘Who has some? How much do we have?’
She settled back into the cheap vinyl seat, and turned up the radio. She texted her mother.
‘He’s just fine.’ She wrote. ‘Just the same.’
Her mother wrote back: ‘Good to hear.’
She was probably feeding the baby, or cooking dinner. It wasn’t that she didn’t want to pay attention. She just didn’t have any more attention to give.
He hadn’t expected her to speak plainly to him. He hadn’t prepared for that. He was endlessly amazing in his ignorance, her father. He was wholly closed, self-possessed, moving through life with a muted force, like a blunt sledgehammer. He offended people without knowing it. He got laid off from most jobs, always after some personal issue with management. He liked to challenge people directly, particularly if he they were a part of three overlapping groups; the moneyed, the intellectuals, or what he liked to call the conservative Anglo mainstream. He would pick fights with anyone who might be sympathetic to same sex couples, or environmentalists, or the unemployed. But the groups he most despised were those that comprised the ‘white elite’. She supposed it was this aspect of him that her mother had found attractive, coming as she did from her working class immigrant background, where people spoke openly and emotions were yelled out over the spaghetti.
They were similar, she and him, he had said.
But she knew herself to be dough-like, malleable. In some ways she felt it was her body that rendered her porous, this female form that had lately begun to betray her in its corporeal unpredictability. Of course she had resisted, when she was blamed, or when the two of them fought, and then a rage would come out of her that was almost entirely unconnected to who she was. Sometimes she had blacked out in the midst of their fighting, and would come to, to find herself pushing, sweaty and desperate, physically between them. She was largely ineffectual. She was not strong enough to hurt anyone. At those times, his eyes had always remained on her mother, and her mother’s on him. She herself hadn’t ever been able to disrupt the flow of whatever they had started. Her mother would push her aside, out of his trajectory. She was sure he had never really even seen her in such moments, that she was a part of her mother, just another incidental opposition. She had never been solid enough to block his hand.
The waitress came back over. She wore black skinny jeans and a torn t-shirt, and possessed an unquestionable glamour. She asked if they wanted more coffee, speaking only to her and not her father, swinging her hair over her shoulder. He ordered more of everything, even though she didn’t know how he could be hungry. There was a brief interval while they waited for their coffee. He looked around as if he was in a foreign country, even though he had been the one to choose this café, a Greek-owned one, of course. Their coffees came and she smiled at the waitress. There was a spot of white foam at the corner of her father’s mouth. She was glad it was there, glad he didn’t know about it. She focussed on that spot.
‘Sweetie, I’m not drawing parallels here,’ he said. His voice was soft. ‘What your mother did, taking you and the kids from me, that was one thing. She’s a good woman, your mother, don’t get me wrong. I’m just talking about honour, about how the Turks ambushed the Armenians and the Greeks in the night. That wasn’t an honourable act. I’m just educating you as to your history. God knows, bless his holy name, no one else is going to.’
She reached over to his plate and took a forkful of his tiropita. He watched her lift it to her mouth. It was delicious.
‘They came in the night and they burnt their houses. Some escaped, many didn’t. But I wanted to tell you a story about the women.’
She cut another piece off his pie, lifted it to her plate. He considered not sharing food an Anglo-Saxon flaw. He wouldn’t challenge her.
‘In Smyrna, fire spread through the city. The Turks, God forgive them for they knew not what they did, they were looting, burning, murdering the Armenians and the Greeks in their beds. And the women of the city they got up, and they started to clean.’
They went to a reserve and smoked until their talk scattered and spread and filled the inside of the car and time stopped working normally. The top of her head felt like it might come right off at the merest provocation. She heard her own laughter, disembodied, moving up and away across the ceiling to where it fell in with the others’ in a tinkling pool. The others! She loved them passionately, gratefully. Oh, how she loved them.
‘It’s time,’ Jen said.
‘Time for the blindfold.’
‘Blindfold her! Do it!’
If she had loved them less, trusted them less, it would have been frightening. But she accepted the scarf that Kelly strapped across her eyes blithely.
With sight gone, she expected the other senses to be heightened, but they weren’t. Instead she felt cut off from everyone, half-deaf as well, and strangely incapable of speech, as though the barrier installed was a body-size dome instead of a blindfold. She shifted on the seat as they careened around a roundabout, her body loose and reactive without the benefit of sight. Her friends whooped and yelled. She realised they were going around again, and again, so that she soon lost any idea of what direction she was facing, of where she was.
‘Alright in there?’ Jen asked.
‘Yes.’ Her voice was oddly formal.
‘Ciggie?’ Kelly handed her a smoke she must have rolled. Suddenly she was free, absolutely and luxuriously. Malleable, permeable, but unafraid. This was her, absolutely vulnerable, open to wherever they were taking her, and entirely safe.
They drove for a long time. She had no idea where she was, but she knew Phillip was driving down odd side roads, taking the most circumlocutory route he could find. It seemed to go on for hours. Finally the car stopped, and Phillip cut the engine.
‘Take off the blindfold,’ he said.
When she got home that night she was late, much later than she had ever been before. It was a school night, and her mother was up waiting, her face pinched and strained.
She put her bag on the table and waited for the onslaught. She wasn’t nervous about her mother smelling smoke on her. Her friends had regularly visited this house in various states of inebriation, and they had established that her mother had a talent for wilful ignorance.
‘What’s up with her?’ Kelly had asked once. ‘If I came home with red eyes and raided the pantry stinking of smoke my mother would be all over it. Does she really just not know?’
She had avoided answering. Her place became the favourite for hangouts and snacks, her mother always welcoming but busy with one thing or another.
‘It’s like she can’t really see us,’ Jen had said.
She hadn’t answered this either. But tonight her mother was angry.
‘Where have you been?’
‘Where I told you I was. With my friends.’
‘I didn’t say you could stay out so late.’
‘You didn’t say I couldn’t.’
‘You can’t stay out this late on a school night. You’ll ruin your studies.’
She couldn’t help it; she laughed. It burst out of her, a laugh so loud it might wake the children in that thin-walled house, where they slept two or three to a room. A laugh that could turn into something else. But she didn’t let it change, she just kept on laughing.
Her mother’s face went slack, and then, quickly, she composed it.
‘You haven’t even apologised!’
‘Apologise!’ she said. ‘Apologise!’
It was a hilarious word, a foreign word. What was it he had said? An apologia. The Turks need to make reparations, they need to issue a proper apologia. They needed to say sorry.
‘What is it you expect me to apologise for?’ She laughed some more.
After a while she noticed her mother’s hands were shaking.
‘I better get to sleep, Mum,’ she said. The words she wouldn’t speak hung between them. I’m sorry. She kissed her mother’s cheek, the impenetrable cheekbone, the high brow arching above it. She left her at the kitchen table and went to bed.
She began to feel ill because of all the coffee. But she finished it anyway, drinking all the way to the bitter grounds at the bottom of her cup.
‘The women of Smyrna knew they were defeated, but they were people of a proud race. When they heard the Turks coming they cleaned their houses. They dusted. They made sure the dishes were put away. You have to imagine, they could hear the fire coming, and the screams floating across the city. They could see the wood of the houses burning and smell the smoke. I’ve seen pictures. Before that, it was a pretty town. You know, the white houses, the blue water, all of that. The women of Smyrna, they could smell other things burning, worse things than wood. But they didn’t just leave. They cleaned their houses. Then they gathered their children, and left.’
The waitress looked over at them and approached, but at the last moment something caused her to veer away and clear another table. It was at that point that she realised her whole body was clenched, like a fist.
‘I’m not sure where it comes from, this story,’ he said. ‘I heard it from my father when I was a boy. It must have come down from someone who survived. They say someone asked these women, that night, why they were cleaning. And they said, “We would not give them the pleasure of saying they have burnt down a dirty house.”’
He looked at her. The moment grew uncomfortably long.
‘Right’ she said.
‘This tells you something about their pride. This tells you about their standards. “Let them say they have destroyed us,”’ they said, ‘“But let them not say we have lived like pigs.” That is what the women of that city said, and then they put their brooms away, and closed their doors, and ran.’
When they took the blindfold off the colours rushed into her head like an explosion. Sound was back, and touch, and she herself was back, real and present and sitting there in her own, perfect, flawed body, her hand holding a cigarette and braced against the car door, the light falling into her eyes at hyperspeed, making her blink.
From her place in the front seat she could see a wide, almost featureless field. Because she had been deprived of sight the green of the grass was glowing uproariously, the few small flowers proclaiming their obscene yellowness. The sky was a slate grey, and in the distance she could see the grafittied walls of warehouses, some kind of old industrial complex.
‘Are you ready?’ Phillip asked.
‘What’s the time?’ Kelly asked.
‘It’s time. Don’t worry,’ Jen said. They were nervous. She didn’t understand why; surely in losing her this thoroughly, in bringing her to this surreal open landscape that they’d somehow found close to their built-up city suburb, they had achieved something.
She was about to exclaim how beautiful it all was, the field, the open sky, when she heard the train.
The sound came from the left and, when she squinted, she saw the straight line cutting across the grass was a train track. It was old, and seemingly unused. Her friends were silent, watching her for a reaction. The train grew louder and louder, but she could see no train. It should be coming up the tracks but it wasn’t; it simply wasn’t there. It was louder and it was louder and then it was passing but, still, she could not see it. It was there, undeniably, but it was formless, invisible.
When it had passed and the sound had completely gone away she found that her mouth was hanging open.
They waited for her to speak. At length, Phillip broke the quiet.
‘Pretty awesome, right?’
They waited.
‘Guys,’ she said. She found now that she was crying freely, the tears moving down her cheeks without a sound. ‘Guys. It was the most perfect thing I’ve ever seen.’
Many years later she would ask Jen, with whom she would stay in touch, where the field was. Jen wouldn’t say.
‘But what was the deal with the train?’ she would ask. ‘The ghost train?’
Over the years she would consider many theories: the train must have passed behind the distant warehouses, only seeming to pass in front of them; there was another track behind the car, somehow concealed; the sound was an aberration caused by the architecture of the place, some weird conspiracy of echoes.
‘We just wanted to give you a buzz. We promised,’ Jen would say, hand over her heart, ‘that we would never tell you.’
She supposed she could go looking for it herself, that strange urban field hidden somewhere in the city. But she never would.
‘Pride is a tricky thing,’ he said. ‘A good amount of it is valuable, but then there are those that have too much of it. You’re a smart girl, that’s why I’m telling you. It can backfire on you, pride, it can be dangerous.’
The waitress came and cleared their dishes. She swept a cloth across the table directly in front of him, though there were no crumbs there. They rose to leave. The girl half-smiled at her, and she ducked her head. He took care of the bill, and then went on as though he’d never stopped.
‘Pride makes you angry. It makes you takes risks with the things you love. But it pays to have a little pride, in this world. Or else people, they take you for granted.’
‘You might want to look at getting some help,’ she said. ‘You might want to do some thinking about the things you’ve done to us.’
She looked into his open face, his moon face, in which the anger was rising. She could almost feel its heat.
‘If you don’t sort yourself out, I won’t see you again,’ she said. ‘And when the kids get old enough to decide, they won’t want to see you either.’
She walked out the door ahead of him, into the street. When he came outside he wore a puzzled expression. He stood awkwardly by her side, half looking into her face, half, it seemed, afraid to look.
She got into the car and caught him squinting at her as she closed the door, studying her intently, as if he was for all the world trying to figure out where he had seen her before. As if he was trying to work out who she was.