A Separation

12.

Another driver was sent to escort us on our journey. Mark gave no indication of surprise at having been asked to make the alteration, it was true that the previous encounter had not been felicitous, uncomfortable was in fact exactly the word for it. Mark was not the kind of man who liked making a scene and he had done precisely that in the back of Stefano’s car.

No doubt he had no intention of doing it again. He sat in the front seat with an abstracted and somewhat dignified mien, without looking at the driver, who had not introduced himself to us. Isabella and I sat in the back. There had been no question of either of us sitting in the front beside the driver, it was Mark’s natural instinct for chivalry asserting itself, as though Isabella and I needed to be shielded from the driver, the discomfort of sitting beside a stranger.

As we pulled down the hotel drive, Mark asked the driver if he knew where he was going and the man said yes, Kostas had explained everything to him, he knew the place. As if we were going to a local restaurant or tourist attraction. Isabella looked out the window with a tense and bewildered expression, she still could not understand what had brought her son here, it would never be anything but confounding, no matter how long she stayed in Greece, whether or not she saw the place of his death. In that sense she was right to leave, there was nothing for her to learn or understand here. I heard Mark say to the driver, We want to see the place where our son died.

I still don’t know why he said this, he was not the kind of man who was prone to taking strangers into his confidence, he did not have the impulse to ingratiate, nor was he a man for small talk. But although the driver did not respond, apart from a small nod of acknowledgment—it was hard even to know how much English he had, the man had barely spoken a word, he might not have understood what Mark had said, this fantastical statement—Mark continued unprompted, It’s something we need to do before we can leave, and the driver nodded again, as if to say that he understood, that he agreed.

Evidently the driver was a good listener, proficient in silences, perhaps it was necessary in this trade, although in my experience it was always taxi drivers who had been the ones to strike up conversation, the ones who had things to get off their chest, hadn’t Stefano been like that, at least with me? After a brief silence between the two men, the driver said to Mark, his English almost flawless, These things are important. An empty phrase and yet Mark nodded, his eyes brightening, as if the driver had said something profound, deeply sympathetic.

Perhaps Mark wanted to share his grief with someone other than Isabella, other than me—a stranger, who is without his or her own grief, around which you are not obliged to step, can be of greater comfort than those who are in loss’s trench beside you—or perhaps he was enjoying the contact with another man, he was a man who liked to be among other men and he was mourning the loss of his son, it had been the two of them and Isabella and now he was alone in the marriage. Mark continued, You know that my son was killed, and the driver again nodded, yes, a terrible thing, he had two children, he could not imagine anything worse in this world.

Mark turned toward the driver. We could stay, but what would be the point? Our lawyers say that we can continue to pressure the police from London. There will be an inquest in England, the British government will be involved—after all, a British citizen has been killed, it’s a matter of some interest. But that will not bring Christopher back. It will not even necessarily find the man who killed him. He paused. The incompetence of the Greek police is a force beyond comprehension.

There is no reason for us to stay. But at the same time it is hard to leave, hard to leave without feeling as though we are abandoning Christopher—our son, his name was Christopher. We are taking him back with us, he will be buried in England. But even so, I feel as though we are leaving him behind, there is unfinished business here. Isabella was still staring out the window, as if she could not hear a word Mark was saying, perhaps she had grown accustomed to not listening to her husband. I suppose the living will always feel this way, Mark said, everything you do is a betrayal.

This was even more intimate than what he had already said to this man, it had the quality of a confession. He stared at the road ahead, as did the driver, two men staring at a road. After a brief silence—the driver remained silent, as if at last Mark had confounded him—Mark turned to look out the window on his side of the car.

We had driven farther inland than I had been before, through several villages and then onto an empty stretch of road. There was burnt brush on either side of the single-lane road, in amidst it stood clusters of singed cactuses, their arms drooping and partially melted. Through the blackened earth small green shoots were beginning to show, although it wasn’t the season for things to be growing, further evidence of madness. It might have been a place like this, between two villages, an evening walk, Christopher was prone to doing such things.

The driver cleared his throat. He must have been unnerved by Mark’s speech, he would have known that it was out of character, not in keeping with the tense and upright demeanor of this Englishman, the stony façade crumbling due to grief. He had been speaking the simple truth when he had said that he could not imagine it—the grief, the loss of the child. We are near, he said, almost reluctantly.

Isabella stiffened, the whole of her body going rigid at once. In front, Mark resumed speaking, as if he had not heard the driver, as if to deny or at least postpone the meaning of his words, he would have liked to keep driving, for hours if possible. No father expects to outlive his son, he said, it goes against nature. But even as he spoke, the driver slowed the car and we came to a halt outside a small village and then Mark did not say anything further. Without the noise of the engine it was suddenly silent. Isabella shifted in her seat.

Is this it?

Her voice was harsh and disapproving, she sounded as if she were being shown a substandard property by an incompetent real estate agent, I’m sorry but this house will not do, it does not meet my needs at all. But there could be no house wide enough for her grief, with an abrupt movement she unbuckled her seat belt and stepped out of the car. Mark sat in the front seat with his hands resting in his lap, he did not look at Isabella, who stood outside with her hand resting on the roof of the car. The driver also opened his door and stepped out, Isabella then moved away from the vehicle.

How do you know this is the place?

The driver looked away. Isabella’s tone was imperious, as if grief were a service industry like any other, her experience of grief was failing to meet her standards, she would like to speak to the management. Inside the car, Mark inhaled—a noisy, ragged kind of a breath, the man was gathering himself—and then opened the door and stepped outside. After a moment, I followed, I could not remain in the car, although I would have liked to.

Are you sure this is the place? Isabella insisted.

The driver then nodded, Yes, this is the place, without doubt. I wondered then if he, like Stefano, had chanced to drive by that morning, if he too had seen the roadblocks and the police car, perhaps even the body, or what was visible of the body, the legs under the tarp, the feet askew. That road is the fastest route between the two villages, a dozen people must have driven past that morning alone.

I turned to look for Mark and Isabella, they had not gone very far, they were perhaps twenty feet away. They stood side by side, looking out across the stretch of blackened dirt. The horizon was cluttered with telephone wires and abandoned shacks and rusted oil drums, a cluster of squat concrete buildings. Mark and Isabella were still, they were not touching but they were physically close, in some ways more intimate than I could remember seeing them since their arrival in Greece, than I could remember seeing them in recent years.

And yet it did not seem to be a moment of reconciliation, much less one of closure, they looked like an elderly couple who had gotten lost in a foreign place and who could not rely on each other to find their way out, a terrible fight could easily follow, one of them walking off into the distance without looking back, the other remaining by the car, waving a map helplessly in one hand. How has it come to this? What am I doing here? They looked at the black dirt and the charred or wilting vegetation, they might have hoped that it contained clues, but there was nothing, it was a place like any other place, there was nothing they could hope to learn from it.

I watched as they stepped, wobbling—Isabella reached out to steady herself on Mark’s arm—off the road, onto the verge. They suddenly looked much older, as if the place and not just Christopher’s death had aged them, and for a moment I could have believed that it was haunted, that a malignant spirit had drawn the life out of them, there were many such stories in Greece, it was part of their tradition. This was, I remembered, what had brought Christopher to Mani—regardless of what Isabella said, it would have been about a woman, Christopher never could keep his cock in his pants, the cult of death had drawn him here.

Almost as if he had come here to die. He was not suicidal, Christopher would never have killed himself. But he had come to Mani searching for signs of death, for its symbols and rituals, its obscure leavings, he had looked at this landscape and converted it into a pattern of rites for the dead and dying. How could his own end not have factored into his speculations about death in general, how could its possibility not have occurred to him? It was impossible to contemplate his final days without seeing the pall of death, even his philandering—an irrepressible habit formed over a lifetime—began to look like a vain protest against the end that was impending.

After a certain age, it is a question of mere decades, two or three if you are lucky, hardly any time at all. And feeling this presence of death, how would he have regarded the state of our marriage? Even if he did not regret the separation, he might have been susceptible to the feeling I now had, that we were old to be starting again. Christopher was eight years older than me. What had he seen, when he stood here, in those final moments? Perhaps nothing—perhaps it had only been an ordinary place, the circumstances entirely normal, until the blinding crack on the back of his head.

I looked around me. The feeling had passed, it did not seem like a place where someone we loved had died, it didn’t have that intimacy—the way the bed where someone we loved slept, the desk where someone we loved worked, the table where someone we loved ate their supper, had that intimacy, immediately and without effort—rather it was only a desolate stretch of road, desolate but not desolate enough, in the distance you could see the village, crossed with telephone wire, there was garbage in the burnt shrub, at our feet there were crushed beer cans and cigarette stubs.

I stared down at the stubs, all fairly new, their paper only a little yellowed, they were everywhere, they covered the ground. It was extraordinary that people could stand in the middle of this torched landscape and throw a cigarette—perhaps still burning, who knew—to the ground. Maybe they thought the landscape so much destroyed there was nothing to preserve, it was true that there was nothing here, in fact it was inexplicable that someone would have stood here long enough to smoke a cigarette, inexplicable that anyone would be standing on this road at all. Even us, our reason for being here—it became more indefinite by the minute.

I looked up at Christopher’s parents. I remembered meeting them for the first time, I had not met Isabella and Mark until Christopher and I were ourselves engaged to be married, by which late point I had already heard a great deal about them from Christopher, almost none of it good. He had spoken about them very little and then he suddenly had a great many things to say about them and their marriage, whether because he was now proposing to get married himself—he was not young when we married, he had managed to postpone it for some time—or simply because that particular box, that repository, Christopher’s feelings toward his parents and Isabella in particular, once opened, was difficult to close, it had to spill its contents at least a little bit.

And so I was apprehensive, even more than might be usual—and it is rarely classified as an easy encounter, meeting your future in-laws—although I expected it would not be as bad as Christopher said, he had himself declared, You will probably love them, they are very charming, as if it were a betrayal I had already committed. But I did not love them, and I did not find them especially charming, and that strain had showed in my relationship with them ever since. I remembered sitting across the table from them—one of many interminable dinners, once I was introduced to them it became a regular occurrence, the monthly dinner with Isabella and Mark, without discussion and almost without my noticing, something I never could have foreseen at the outset of our relationship—and thinking how much I hoped that our marriage, Christopher’s and mine, would not be like that.

I say hoped. In fact I was blithely confident, it seemed impossible that we could be like Isabella and Mark, I could not conceive of a future that would produce such a dire result. In the end, I had been right, we had not ended up like Mark and Isabella, although not for the reasons I thought then. At the time, I was like any young person looking at an old person—even if I was not that young, and nor was Christopher—and like any person who cannot believe that they will grow old, much less die, I could not believe that our marriage could become like their marriage, much less fall apart completely.

And yet it had, after five years. Five years—a fraction of the length of Isabella and Mark’s marriage, which continued, which was continuing now. They stood with one foot of air between them and their marriage accrued further hours, greater length, minute by minute. It might have been a terrible marriage, built on betrayal—although what was really meant by the word terrible, there were betrayals that looked unforgivable from the outside and that were nonetheless forgiven, and there were forms of intimacy that looked nothing like the name—but it was nonetheless a marriage.

Whereas mine had ended—twice. It was not surprising that I would now look at Christopher’s parents and see their marriage anew. It seemed incredible that I had ever looked at it and seen anything to scorn, the word sounded too strong but it was nevertheless accurate, it was the truth. One of the problems of happiness—and I’d been very happy, when Christopher and I were first engaged—is that it makes you both smug and unimaginative. I now looked at Isabella and Mark’s marriage and saw that I understood nothing, about it or about marriage in general, they knew things that Christopher and I had not had, or had not taken, the time to find out.

Abruptly, Isabella turned and came back to the car. I think we are finished, she said. The driver nodded and Isabella climbed into the backseat. Her back was rigid and as she stared at the back of the driver’s headrest, I saw that her eyes were glassy with tears. She grimaced, as if she had no intention of letting the grief get the better of her, then straightened her shoulders and said, Mark? Are you coming? I would like to go, I don’t want to be here anymore.

Mark nodded to the driver, together they got into the car. The driver hurriedly put the key into the ignition and started the engine, we pulled away with a screech. Isabella’s back and head swayed with the motion but the grimace did not go away, nor did the tears. Where should I go, back to the hotel? the driver asked, and Mark nodded, Yes. Back to the hotel. When do you leave Greece? the driver said, and Mark replied, As soon as possible, as soon as we can pack our bags.