KAIROS
‘We are the ones who confront head-on,’ said the professor, once they were out of the big airport building, waiting for their taxi. He took pleasure in deep breaths of warm, gentle Greek air.
He was eighty-one years old, with a wife twenty years his junior, a woman he had married prudently, as the air was leaking out of his first marriage, his adult children having left the nest. And it was a good thing, because that other wife now needed to be cared for herself, living out her days in a perfectly reasonable retirement home.
He handled the flight well, and a few hours’ time difference didn’t really make a difference; the rhythm of the professor’s sleep had long since come to resemble a cacophonous symphony, random timetables of unexpected sleepiness and dazzling lucidity. The time change merely shifted those chaotic chords of waking and sleep by seven hours.
The air-conditioned taxi took them to their hotel; there, Karen, the professor’s younger wife, skilfully oversaw the unloading of their baggage, collected information from the organizers of the cruise at reception, got the keys and then, accepting help from a solicitous porter – for this was no easy task – took her husband up to the second floor, to their room. There she carefully arranged him in their bed, loosened his scarf and took his shoes off for him. Instantly he was asleep.
And they were in Athens! She was happy, she went up to the window and struggled for a second with its ingenious latch. Athens in April. Spring at full tilt, leaves feverishly clambering into space. The dust had risen already outside, but it wasn’t yet severe; and the noise, of course: ever-present. She shut the window.
In the bathroom Karen tousled her short grey hair and got into the shower. Inside it she felt all her tension washing away with the soap, pooling at her feet, then escaping for all eternity down the drain.
Nothing to get worked up about, she reminded herself, deep down. All of our bodies must conform to the world. There is no other way.
‘We’re nearing the finish line,’ she said aloud, standing still under the stream of warm water. And because somehow she couldn’t help but think in images – which, she thought, had almost certainly been a hindrance to her academic career – she saw something like an ancient Greek gymnasium with its characteristic starting block raised on cables, and its runners, her husband and herself, trotting awkwardly towards the finish line, although they’d only just taken off.
She wrapped a fluffy towel around herself and applied moisturizer, thoroughly, to her face, neck and chest. The familiar scent of the cream soothed her fully now, so she lay down for a moment on the made bed beside her husband, and fell asleep without realizing.
Over dinner, which they ate downstairs, in the restaurant (sole and broccoli for him, for her a feta salad), the professor asked her if they’d brought his notebooks, books, outlines, until finally among those ordinary questions there came the one that sooner or later had to arrive, revealing the latest situation on the front:
‘My dear, where are we right now?’
She reacted calmly. She explained in a few simple sentences.
‘Ah, of course,’ he said happily. ‘I’m ever so slightly discombobulated.’
She ordered herself a bottle of retsina and looked around the restaurant. Mostly wealthy tourists, Americans, Germans, Brits, and also those who had lost – in the free flow of money, which they let guide them – any and all defining traits. They were simply attractive, healthy, moving with unsummoned ease from language to language.
At the table next to theirs, for example, sat a pleasant group, people who might have been a little younger than she was, happy fifty-somethings, hale and flushed. Three men and two women in fits of laughter, the waiter bringing them another bottle of Greek wine – Karen had no doubt she would have fit in. It occurred to her that she could leave her husband, who just then was scraping apart the pale corpse of his fish with a trembling fork. She could grab her retsina and as naturally as a dandelion seed fall onto a chair at that next table, catching onto the final chords of those people’s laughter, chiming in with her own smooth alto.
Of course she did not do so. She got to gathering up the broccoli from the placemat, which had jumped ship from the professor’s plate, offended at his incompetence.
‘Gods in heaven,’ she snapped, calling over the waiter to request some herbal tea. Then, turning back to him: ‘Can I help you?’
‘I draw the line at being fed,’ he said, and with redoubled strength went back to hacking at his fish.
Often she got mad at him. The man was utterly dependent on her, and yet he acted as though it were the reverse. She thought to herself that men, or at least the cleverest among them, must be prompted by some self-preservation instinct in clinging to much younger women, not realizing it, near desperation – but not at all for the reasons sociobiologists ascribed them. Since no, it was in no way connected to reproduction, to genes, to stuffing their DNA into the tiny little tubes of matter through which time coursed. It has to do instead with the presentiment men have at every moment of their lives, a foreboding adamantly hushed and hidden – that left to their own devices, in the dull, quiet company of passing time, they would atrophy faster. As though they’d been designed for a brief spurt of intensity, a high-stakes race, a triumph and, immediately afterwards, exhaustion. That what kept them alive was excitement, a costly life strategy; energy reserves eventually ran out, and then life would be lived in overdraft.
They met at a reception in the home of a mutual friend who was just finishing up his two-year appointment at their university, fifteen years earlier. The professor brought her a glass of wine, and when he handed it to her, she noticed how his totally outmoded woollen vest was coming apart at the seams, how at the professor’s hip fluttered a long, dark thread. She had just arrived to take the place of a professor who was retiring, taking on all his students; she was just furnishing her rented home and stocking up after her divorce, which would have been more painful had they had children. Her husband, after fifteen years of marriage, had left her for another woman. Karen was over forty, already a professor, with several books to her name. She specialized in lesser-known ancient cults of the Greek islands. Religious studies was her field.
It took a few years, after that meeting, before they got married. The professor’s first wife was seriously ill, which made it more difficult for him to get divorced. But even his children were on their side.
She often reflected on how her life had turned out, and she was coming to the conclusion that the truth was simple: men needed women more than women needed men. In fact, thought Karen, women could get along perfectly fine without men altogether. They tolerated solitude well, took care of their health and cultivated friendships, lasted longer – as she tried to think of other qualities, she realized she was imagining women as a highly useful breed of dog. With a certain satisfaction she began to expand this list of canine traits: they learned quickly, they liked children, they were sociable, they kept at home. It was easy to awaken in them – particularly when they were young – that mysterious, all-encompassing instinct that only sometimes was connected with the possession of offspring. But it was something decidedly greater – an encompassing of the world; the tamping into place of trails; the unfurling, then tucking in of days and nights; the establishment of soothing rituals. Rousing this instinct with little exercises in helplessness wasn’t hard. Then they’d be blinded, the algorithm would kick in, at which point it would be possible to pitch a tent, settle down in their nests, tossing everything else out of them, and the women wouldn’t even notice that the chick was a monster, and someone else’s cast-off.