Work Text:
Greece, 1934
A zip had broken that morning on Elisabeta's dress. She had been stuck in it, and had needed Vlad to strategically cut open a seam along the side of the dress so she could get out of it.
"You will have the money for a new dress." Vlad told her.
"I can fix it." Elisabeta said.
"You do not need to fix it, we have money." Vlad answered.
"It is only a little work on that sewing machine that you bought me." In her petticoats, Elisabeta leant over and kissed her husband's forehead. "And thank you for buying me that machine, it is a wonderful contraption."
The family that lived down the road had taught Elisabeta to use it. The people of Greece had steadily become accustomed to the modern world pushing into their country, and with it, modern troubles. The casualities and aftermath of the first world war still made itself apparent with immigration of a sort that the middle-aged Greek people would not have expected earlier in their lifes. So many British had come to the islands to make homes for the rest of their lives, then the Americans had arrived for the sake of romance, thrill and tourism. Occasionally Australians made an appearence, yet they were customarily involved with shipping, fishing, or building. They conducted business with Greek migrants in Australia, or, it was soon discovered that they were half-Greek themselves, or married to a Greek woman in Melbourne, Sydney or Adelaide. The locals got on much better with the British, Americans and Australians who were fascinated by Greek culture than the majority of the other European immigrants. Many of Vlad and Elisabeta's neighbours were in the manner of ignoring the Russians, Poles, Bulgars, Germans, and French, before speaking nastily of them in the privacy of their homes or their Orthodox chapel. They insisted to themselves, and to Vlad and Elisabeta, that the interlopers wanted to make a minature Moscow, a minature Berlin, in the beautiful land of Greece that was no place to build a minature Moscow or Berlin.
Neither Elisabeta or Vlad found it difficult to get on with the locals. The Greek people, like most others, liked their children to be thought admirable, their crafts trustworthy and special. They wanted their women thought to be beautiful, and their men moral and courageous. It was not hard for Elisabeta and Vlad to go along with that line of thought. If they did ever have a problem, their diplomatic easiness with the community made it easy to solve. One side of the community would have a screaming match with the other, and the next day, gifts of food, timber products, and a block of cheese would appear on their doorstep as a token of goodwill.
It was not lost on the couple that they were fortunate.
It was also made easier that Vlad donated money to the church instead of attending it, whilst Elisabeta went every Sunday, largely to help their neighbours with their brood of children, eight of them under the age of ten.
Whenever Vlad and Elisabeta had thought of having a baby themselves, a new war had started. Neither of them had much opinion of God, but they felt it was a sign. They both thought that it would not hurt to wait another hundred years. What if it was better by then? What if so many people had successfully blown each other up, that, by a hundred years time, the world was more peaceful because it was more empty?
The now damaged dress had been dark navy with a white collar edge with modest lace. It had possessed a waist fitted in a slim, but not tight way, to where a woman's waist naturally was. Elisabeta had not been absolutely fond of the drop-waist style. She thought it made her chest look unbecomingly enormous, and she thought it made her hips look utterly insignificant. Vlad did not at all mind Elisabeta's refusal to wear drop-waist dresses, but he had made his opinion known when she plucked off the majority of her eyebrows into the pencil thin style that had been pictured on the front of fashionable magazines.
Fortunately, they had grown back within two months. Elisabeta had massaged her skin above and below the pencil thin line with castor oil each morning and night, and had grimly agreed with Vlad that it had been a copiously silly thing to do.
"I just wanted to know what it would be like. What I would look like." Elisabeta had told him. "I know that I'm beautiful, and I know that you think I am beautiful. I just wanted to know what it would be like."
Vlad went to the dining room where there was an electrical point close enough for Elisabeta to plug the sewing machine into. She had removed the broken zip, and had found another one of the right size and shape from her sewing box. The seam that Vlad had cut open so Elisabeta could escape from the dress had been pinned close. Vlad watched Elisabeta with a half-smile; she squinted as she attempted to put the navy thread through the eye of the machine's needle. "Make me some coffee?" She asked.
"Of course. Are you hungry?" He replied.
"Do we still have fruit or did I eat it all?" Elisabeta asked.
Vlad went into the kitchen. He returned with the fruit bowl, that contained two apples, two peaches, four apricots, and four lemons.
"Plenty then." Elisabeta smiled. She finally got the thread through the eye of the needle. "A peach would be good."
"With no stone." Vlad remarked.
Elisabeta's smiled grew.
"With no stone." She agreed.
Elisabeta had chipped the corner of an incisor tooth from biting into the stone at the centre the previous year. She had laughed until she had cried at the clumsiness, at the absurdity. Embarrassing and human.
It was Vlad's plan, when he fetched a knife from the kitchen, to insert the knife through the fruit and cut a sextagon around the stone at the core of the peach. Instead, the peach was in a ripe state, so when he pressed the tip of the knife down, he was covered in the fruit's juice. Elisabeta laughed as her foot pressed at the pedal of the sewing machine at the sight of juice across Vlad's hands, wrists, front and lap.
"Is it rotting?" She exclaimed, pushing the machine so she did not hurt her fingers as she looked away.
"It is quite ripe." Vlad agreed.
He went to the kitchen to put it into the bucket of scraps that Elisabeta would take to the neighbour's compost each evening. It prevented accumulating filth and smell in the dustbins.Since the first world war, Elisabeta and Vlad had grown accustomed to living with private wealth on peasant means. It was how they had first viewed it, until their travels, and their thoughts, had changed. A small stone cottage with simple furniture, a sealed roof, a toilet, and access to clean water was better than a mansion with fine furnishings and targetable by any malicious anti-government coup.
Greece had seemed imperfect, a temporary place when they had arrived. Too much sun, political problems with Albanians and Turks along the coast that could incite riots in the villages and towns. Greek was a difficult language and possessed an even more difficult alphabet. Elisabeta had primarily been concerned about she and Vlad being scorched, and that fact that although Vlad was a good fighter, he could not save the two of them from a battalion of maniacs hellbent on destruction.
Elisabeta spent some of the morning sewing the new zip into her dress by hand. Vlad made coffee for her, and he read from the daily local newspaper, and the daily national newspaper, to her. It launched them into a discussion about the aftermath of war crimes. What would the war crime trials of the modern age have said about what the Ottomans inflicted on Wallachia? Vlad had become subdued when Elisabeta had pointed out that any war crimes tribunal would have also had something to say about the actions of the various voivodes of Wallachia and Moldavia, what they had gotten up to in the various conflicts and invasions. Elisabeta lifted her husband's mood slightly by agreeing that her own family in Serbia would have been up to their necks in dire consequences for the behaviour they also had gotten up to, as well as the horror that had been inflicted upon them.
When Elisabeta was finished sewing the zip into her dress, she put it away into she and Vlad's shared wardrobe. She dressed in a dark purple dress of a similar cut to the dress she had mended, but with a collar the same colour as the dress, without the decoration of lace.
"Would you like to come for a walk with me?" She asked him.
Vlad agreed. He gave her his elbow to hold onto as she changed her shoes, and she waited with her eyes clothes as he tied her headscarf in place around her hair. Elisabeta put a golden medallion decorated with an icon of the Theotokos around her neck. It sat exposed on her decolletage, and it always went well to wear it in public.
Their walk began with a descent down a mild hill on a yellow dirt track that was relatively smooth. When it had been raining, it was easy to discover tiny shoeprints left by the neighbour's children. There would be larger shapes of bouncing balls, and tracks from horse-and-carriage toys, model trains brought outdoors and inevitably caked in Greek mud. Sometimes the prints of dogs and cats would be observable. During their last walk they had been insistently followed by an old mousing cat that had lived in the town for more than a decade. It had not attempted to claw or bite them, it had simply kept them company. It had made Elisabeta laugh until the humor faded and her skin had prickled with discomfort. She had asked Vlad if he thought the cat was possessed, and he had struggled not to laugh as he had assured her that it was simply an animal accustomed to humans.
"I dreamed of feta cheese last night." Elisabeta said. "Am I going mad or am I turning into a Greek woman?"
"What else did you dream of apart from cheese?" Vlad asked.
"I dreamed an old man in the town was diagnosed with cancer, and a Doctor told him that if he ate two small bowls of yogurt each day for six weeks, it would go away." Elisabeta said. "The man did this, and miracuously, he was cured. The whole town became insane with anger. They said the yogurt treatment had not been offered to their relatives who had died of cancer, and they had relatives who had eaten yogurt every day, all of their lives, and they had still died of cancer. The Doctor held a meeting at the Church and had enormous drawings of the inside of the human body. He alledged that the bacteria in the fermented dairy ate the cancer cells and killed the cancer. Low and behold, a newspaper runs a story, and makes a discovery. Apart from eating yogurt, the old man had been exposed to arsenic. He made paintbrushes, and men who do that job use arsenic for the animals hairs they use in the brushes. Another Doctor from Athens said that the old man's cancer symptoms had been delayed by exposure to the poison, and he was not cured, simply given a longer chance to live. Apparently arsenic kills all of the health that you need to survive, yet it also kills matters that poison you, feed off you."
"When did the cheese appear?" Vlad asked.
"I do not know, but I was convinced that I was actually eating it in some way." Elisabeta said. "I woke up and looked for a bowl of it on the table, on the floor beside the bed. I even looked in the bathroom. I also dreamed that a tourist omnibus crashed into the apricot grove of that bad-tempered farmer who wanted to take the victims of the crash to a court of law. His suit was that in the aftermath of the accident they ate approximately two hundred pieces of his fruit and did not pay for them."
Vlad laughed.
"That will happen one day." He said. "Or another situation that is similar."
"Do you remember that poor woman who had a pomegranate tree in her garden and all of those old women would shout at her for having Turkish fruit on her land?" Elisabeta asked.
"Someone poisoned the tree." Vlad said. "She went to the police station to make a complaint. Nothing happened. One of the women who complained most strongly about it was the mother of the senior sergeant."
"How distasteful." Elisabeta groaned. "Typical."
At the sound of an approaching car, Vlad and Elisabeta stepped over into the grass, their hands entwined together.
A taxi car drove by, an open-roofed American model that looked as though it had already suffered three layers of ill-suiting paint. It was a fashion in the mediterranean world to apply a fresh coat of domestic paint to a car body each year to refreshen it, and attempt to convince the neighbours that it was a new car, and you were rich enough to have a new car each year. It was a fussing, ridiculous facade. It was exactly the sort of thing Romanians would do, Vlad thought with humor. It was driven by a short man with a round head and a moustache. He wore a tight fitting cap of brown fabric, and a scarf around his neck that was tucked into his shirt which had three buttons from the collar open to accomodate the wool.
"A man with dirty manners." Elisabeta complained. "That foul driver. Deceitful, contrived - a waste of oxygen."
"What did he say to you?" Vlad knew his wife. She did not have degrading words to say about a man unless he had done something to warrant it.
"He said that you were ugly. He said you looked like a toad with shining eyes before the tongue comes out to eat a fly." Elisabeta said without hesitation and without any quandary of diplomacy. "He said it in front of the whole marketplace but I did not tell you because one of the fishsellers urinated all over the vegetables he was selling. No one saw but I, but when the fool returned, the stench of it was undeniable."
"I wish that you had of told me." Vlad said. "It amuses me."
Elisabeta laughed.
"At my age I must be able to do well on my own!" She protested.
"You are a married woman, this is folly." Vlad dismissed. "What is my employment if you deny me experiences such as this?"
Elisabeta laughed more.
"Forgive me!" She boasted. "But we must buy flowers for the wife of the helpful boy. I will find out his name."
"Do you know the name of the man who insulted me to you?" Vlad asked.
"No." Elisabeta replied.
"I will find out who it is." Vlad said.
"The matter has already been dealt with." Elisabeta insisted.
"It was not dealt with by myself." Vlad told her.
"Obstinate man, his income was covered in urine, he had to throw it all away. He was placed where he should be." Elisabeta said. "Do not make a crime, start a feud. Where would we go from here? We are too distinctive."
"We may go anywhere we choose to and any time that we choose to." Vlad said.
Elisabeta's brows lowered, and stayed lowered.
"Do not be like this, beloved." She warned him. She regretted ever opening her mouth. She felt how angry he was, his frustration, and the memory of women dead for centuries warning her of the character of men rang in her ears. It was a tempestuous and scornful series of recollections. She knew so; of course she knew so. It was her abscence of self-control that had now opened that terrible pandora's box. Her loss of intention that would now, she knew, cause trouble.
He does not like that a man, a stranger, accosted me in the street with this, Elisabeta thought. If the man had told me that I was ugly, that I looked like a toad, I would have liked to see his teeth broken. But it was not the event; it was not like this
It took a month, and it was not a period of time where Elisabeta's consience became any lighter. They were still much the same, yet she knew the incident griped at her husband. Whenever she returned from going out, he asked her twice if anything had happened. She was always truthful when she told him that a few silly boys had merely wolf-whistled at her, or the baker's daughter gave her too much change. For the next four Sunday's, Vlad came with Elisabeta to Church, but waited outside the chapel amongst the Cyprus pines.
"Is he here?" Vlad asked each time.
"No." Elisabeta answered for the first two weeks. On the third week, she told Vlad that he was. She pointed out the man to Vlad. On the fourth week, Vlad left her to walk home with their neighbours and their children. Elisabeta hoisted a baby higher on her hip and hummed in vague agreement to her neighbour's wife as she talked about tomato cultivation as she saw Vlad begin to follow the man at a distance back to the village.
She slept alone that night, and felt frightened. Vlad never usually excluded her from his plans.
He knows that I know all too well what he will do, Elisabeta thought.
She suffered dark dreams that night. It made her pulse flutter discordantly, pressure that came and went in her ears. She was all too present, yet far away, as her mind predicted how Vlad would repeatedly assault, downright torture, the man for bothering her in the street. Attempting to humiliate her in such an insidious way.
Elisabeta's heart opened like a flower to the morning sun as Vlad returned. There was blood in his hair and on his face. It went down his body to the soles of his shoes, and Elisabeta wondered if the man remained in the world of the living.
"You are in a state." Elisabeta held a shawl around her nightdress as she let Vlad in through the back door of their house.
"It is you who decides how I look." Vlad said.
"You'll have to have a cold bath." Elisabeta told him. "I haven't got any water boiled yet."
One side of Vlad's mouth lifted.
Elisabeta smiled too.
"I'll kiss you once you wash the blood of that other man off." She told him.
Vlad met her halfway by lifting her hand to his mouth after he had ran his tongue over his upper lip to clean away the blood before he kissed her knuckles.
"Being agreeable never did a woman ever good." Elisabeta reminded him.
"Being humble never did a Prince any good." Vlad replied.
Elisabeta burst out laughing.
She dropped her shawl, and her nightdress. She climbed up into her husband's arms, and he easily held her naked figure to his bloodied body. She kissed him, her arms entwined around his neck, their noses bent out of shape against the other's cheeks.
"You barbaric man." Elisabeta laughed and praised, the words spoken into Vlad's mouth.
"You enjoy me this way." Vlad replied.
"Eros." Elisabeta murmured.
"Psyche." Vlad replied, and let Elisabeta's naked body get them to the floor.