The Tax Inspector

6

When she was twenty, after she had run away from both her marriage and her mother, Maria Takis went back to the island of Letkos to the house she was born in and stayed for six weeks with her mother’s uncle, Petros, a stern-looking old man who bicycled ten miles along the dirt road to Agios Constantinos for no other reason than to buy his great-niece an expensive tin of Nescafe which he believed would please her more than the gritty little thimblefuls of metries kafe he made on his single gas burner.

Petros was the worldly one. He had worked on ships to New York and Shanghai, Cape Town and Rio and to have questioned or refused the Nescafé would have been somehow to undercut who he was. Maria had not come all this way to make her life fit the expectations of others, but just the same she could no more tell him she hated Nescafe than she could confess that she was already married and separated.

Instead she said, ‘It is too hot today,’ and held the handles of his bicycle as if this might prevent him buying it.

‘It is always hot,’ he said. He had to wrench the bicycle away from her and his dark eyebrows pressed down on eyes that suddenly revealed a glittering temper.

‘No, no,’ she said. ‘It is hotter than it used to be.’

That made him laugh. He mounted his bicycle and rattled down the chalky road towards the square still laughing out loud and when her parents’ friends and relations came to meet her he would tell them, ‘When Maria lived here the summers used to be cooler.’

Everyone in Letkos found this very funny and Maria found them very irritating.

‘I didn’t remember the heat,’ Maria said, too many times. ‘Only the air. We left in the autumn and arrived in Sydney in the summer.’ She told them about how hot it had been walking the streets of Newtown looking for work with her mother – like hell, like a heat so hot and poisonous you could not breathe – but she could see their eyes glaze over as they stopped listening to her. It was not their way of thinking about Australia and they did not want to hear. Australians were all rich, all drank Nescafe. That was why Nikkos refused to apologize for the state of her parents’ house. He was meant to look after it but he had stolen the furniture and let the goats eat the pomegranate tree and he could not see that this would matter to Maria or her family. But she had grown up mourning for this beautiful little house which Nikkos had filled with goat shit. It was the place her mother meant when she said, ‘Let’s go home,’ whispering to her husband in bed in a shared house in Sydney where you could hear the people in the next room doing everything.

On the ground floor of the house in Letkos her mother had cooked preserves, fried eggplant, keftethes – the room was always sweet with spices and oil. In the house which Nikkos had wrecked they kept almonds and walnuts and dry rustling bundles of beans. Maria had sat on the wooden doorstep in a great parallelogram of sunshine, eating pomegranate from the tree in the garden.

The first house in Sydney was a painful contrast. They rented a room from a friend of an uncle in Agios Constantinos. His name was Dimitri Papandreou. He smelt of sweat and old rags and was stingy. He used newspaper instead of toilet paper. He turned off the hot water when he left the house each morning. He had a secret tap no one else could find, not even Helen, who was smaller than Maria, and who was sent climbing under the floor boards to search for it. Dimitri Papandreou’s wife worked at Glo-weave. The family therefore expected Maria’s mother to look after all of the Papandreous. Dimitri Papandreou would cook lentils or beans and keep them in an aluminium pot in the fridge for weeks. It was his way of criticizing Maria’s mother.

‘Let’s go home,’ Maria’s mother said whenever she imagined they were alone, but she never had a chance – fifteen men from the village had come to Australia and they were all working on the production line at the British Motor Corporation in Zetland. They were like men in a team.

Helen would ask their father if they could go home, but Maria was less principled. She sat on his lap and he stroked her hair.

‘O Pateras son ine trellos,’ (‘Your father is crazy’) her mother would say as she and Maria and Helen looked for work in the merciless heat (so endlessly hot, inescapably hot) of the Newtown streets. She had no English and Maria would walk with her to interpret and to help push Helen’s stroller.

‘What does that sign say?’

‘Just a room to let.’

‘It looks like a factory.’

‘No, Mama.’

‘It’s a factory,’ she said half-heartedly. ‘No, Helen, no, no wee-wee yet. He’s crazy. His life was better. He had a house – better oil, better fruit. Look what we had to carry out here – oil, ouzo – in our bags – he asks me to carry oil to him. Now he sends me out here to be humiliated.’

‘Please, Mama, don’t.’

‘Don’t don’t.’ Her mother’s eyes were more and more shrunken, like throubes, shrunken in on themselves around the small hard pip. ‘Don’t you say “don’t” to me. You think he is happy? Listen to them all when they sit around. What are they talking about?’

They came to the house. They sat in a circle in the kitchen. They were all from Agios Constantinos. They said, remember the year this happened. Remember the time that happened. They never talked about Australia.

‘What is better here?’ her mother asked. ‘Help her. Help her. She has to wee-wee.’ She was ashamed to have Helen pee in the street and turned her back even as she said, ‘Help her.’

‘The future,’ Maria said, holding her little sister suspended over a gutter between two parked cars.

‘That’s what he says, but you never wanted to go. You were only four and you didn’t want to go.’

‘I know, Mama,’ Maria said bustling her sister back into the stroller.

‘You lost the use of your legs.’

‘I know, I know.’

‘He went to Athens for his immigration tests and when he came back and we told you we were going to Australia, you lost the use of your legs. The doctor had to come all the way to Agios Constantinos in an ambulance.’

Her father always said there was no ambulance.

‘An ambulance,’ her mother said. ‘He couldn’t find anything the matter.’

‘I know.’

‘You can’t remember. Do you remember your father held out the loukoumia to you and you ran to get them. It was a trick to make you walk but if he hadn’t offered you sweets you wouldn’t have walked – you didn’t want to go. We had a house. For what did we come? So I can walk the streets and be a beggar for work? Did you ever see anyone in Agios Constantinos do their wee-wee in the street?’

The newspapers, of course, had their columns of employment ads, but the Letkos women could not read the letters of the alien alphabet. The newspapers were closed to them. They walked. They worked an area – Enmore, Alexandria, Surry Hills – going from factory to factory, following up the rumours their relations brought to the house. It was all piece-work, and her mother hated piece-work. Childhood friends competed against each other to see who would get the bonus, who would get fired.

Once a week they called on Switch-Electrics Pty Ltd in Camperdown. The women would converge on the footpath, swelling out around the Mercedes-Benzes which were never booked for parking on the footpath, pushing towards the door marked OFFICE. They would be there from seven in the morning. At eight o’clock the son would emerge. He had three folds of fat on his neck above his shirt collar. He had thick arms covered in pale hair. He had three pens in his shirt pocket.

He would point his thick finger into the crowd and say, ‘You, you.’

He was like God. He did not have to explain his choices.

‘You and you.’

One time he might choose you and another time he might not.

‘No more. Vamoose.’

The woman would beg in Greek, in Italian, in Spanish, in Catalan. They would do anything – kneel, weep – it was acting, but sincere at the same time.

The man with the pens in his shirt pocket would flap his arms at them as though they were hens.

‘Piss off. Go home.’

Sometimes the man’s mother would come out. She was nearly sixty but she dressed like a film star with tight belts and high heels. She had bright yellow blonde hair and pink arms and red lips and dark glasses. She would come out of a side door carrying a mop bucket filled with water. She would swing it back and then hurl it towards the women, who were already running backwards and tripping over themselves, spilling back through the white Mercedes-Benzes into the path of the timber trucks from the yard next door. As the trucks blasted their horns and as the women screamed, a fat tongue of grey water would splat on to the footpath and the son and daughter would stand in the doorway, laughing.

Maria’s mother lost 85 per cent of her hearing in one ear in a Surry Hills sweat-shop where she made national brand-name shirts. She would say, this machine is deafening me. The owner was Greek, from Salonika. He would say, if you don’t like it, leave.

Later she worked at Polaroid, polishing lenses. Then she got arthritis in her fingers and could not do it any more.

It was not a coincidence that, after the Tax Office began checking the returns of Mercedes-Benz owners, Maria was one of the two auditors who sat in the office of Switch-Electrics Pty Ltd opposite this same man with the fat neck and the three pens in his shirt pocket. He was now sixty years old. When he squeezed behind the wheel of his car, air came out of his nose and mouth like out of a puffball. He was a sad and stupid man, and his business was riddled with corruption and evasions which cost him nearly one million dollars in fines and back taxes.

Maria was not above feelings of revenge on behalf of all those women he had humiliated. She was pleased to get him, pleased to make him pay, and when he wept at the table she felt only a vague, distanced pity for him. She looked at him and thought: I must tell Mama.

Her mother was battling with cancer in the George V Hospital at Missenden Road in Camperdown and Maria brought flowers and Greek magazines and gossip that would cheer her up. It was for this reason – certainly not for her own pleasure – that she finally revealed what she had previously thought she could never reveal – her pregnancy.

The approaching death had changed Maria, had made her softer with her mother, more tolerant, less angry. She sat with her for ten, twelve hours at a stretch. She bathed her to spare her the humiliation of being washed by strangers. She fed her honey and water in a teaspoon. She watched her sleep. Death had changed the rules between them. The love she felt for her mother seemed, at last, without reserve.

As it turned out, the emotions Maria Takis felt were hers, not her mother’s. She had hoped that the idea of a birth might somehow make the death less bleak. She had imagined that they had moved, at last, to a place which was beyond the customs and morality of Agios Constantinos. But death was not making her mother’s centre soft and when Maria said she was going to have a baby, the eyes that looked back at her were made of steely grey stuff, ball-bearings, pips of compressed matter. Her mother was a village woman, standing in a dusty street. She did not lack confidence. Fear had not shifted her.

‘We’ll kill you,’ she said.

It was a hard death and the story of Switch-Electrics Pty Ltd never did get told.