Palimpsest: A Novel. Chapter 4.

Welcome to Palimpsest: A Novel. This is a subsection of my personal newsletter, Metanoia Road. Every Thursday, I share a chapter of this novel (first published in 2010), and I invite you to read along with me. If you’d prefer not to receive these chapters, follow the instructions here to unsubscribe from this section only. This way, you can continue to receive other letters & writing from me, and we can stay in touch. If you’ll be reading - thank you - you can catch up on previous chapters here. 💙

Dear You —

Welcome back to Palimpsest: A Novel. Here is Chapter 4. You can read previous chapters here.

Previously, our protagonist Kally Palamas travelled to Zelopolis village in Greece with her mother, Anastasia, after her father - Akindynos Palamas - was found dead on Zelopolis beach.

In this chapter, we follow Kally who attends Akindynos’s funeral and reunites with her grandmother Kallisto.

By eleven a.m. the next morning Akindynos was made up, dressed, boxed, and buried. But before we buried him we took him home for the night. The sisters had already made all the arrangements with the funeral director, one Jason Polites. Originally from the city of Agrinion where the women had migrated years ago to secure tobacco-processing jobs, his funeral parlour, or Office of Rites as it would be literally translated from the Greek, was situated between a butcher and a lingerie store on Eleftherias Avenue in Perasma city.

Jason Polites booked the priest and directed the gravediggers to dig up the Palamas family plot to make room for Akindynos. He prepared Akindynos: washed him, dressed him, placed him into the box, pressed his lips together and straightened his legs. The sisters had already ordered the headstone (the standard marble) and the coffin (a tasteful taupe), and they had chosen a matching coffee-brown suit to dress their dead brother one last time. Anastasia was granted the final symbolic act of closing the funeral deal and paying for it. When the time came Akindynos would rest on top of what remained of his grandfather, grandmother, uncle and father.

Akindynos’s home – the one he had shared with his mother for the past decade – was situated one-hundred-odd metres from the point on the beach where he’d been found dead, half a kilometre from the Zelopolis village central square, and eight kilometres north of Perasma city. The house was built into the hilly edge of Zelopolis and, huddled there, fronted the Ionian Sea.

I stood out on the porch with Thomas. He’d just finished telling me the story so far, and I just smiled. Quiet politeness was about all I could manage. Thomas paused. He’d narrated everything from the moment he discovered Akindynos to the moment he recognised me on the porch. Now he followed my gaze to the outline of life somewhere in the distance. Thomas explained that on a clear day one could see the grey geography of the Paxoi islands deep in the horizon. To the far left a faint configuration of lights signalled the presence of the massive rock of Lefkada and much closer, the village of Monolithos with its brighter configuration. Thomas stretched out his arm and fingers to complete the join-the-dots of lights that linked the Monolithos lighthouse to the long line of fishing boats in the sea.

Inside the house the mourners’ attentions were focused on the dining table where Akindynos reposed, tucked into his coffin like an exhibit in an Egyptian pyramid. The sisters had dragged chairs and armchairs around the dining table as if some ghastly meal had been prepared and Akindynos was to be the main course.

The sisters sat to their brother’s left. In order of appearance: the blonde, slender and jewelled Argyro; the greyed, short and heavy Maria; the thin, fidgety and dirty-nailed Stamatia; the balding, spite-wrinkled and narrow-shouldered Eleni, and the big-eyed, thick-skinned and wide-hipped Calliope. Grandmother Kallisto sat to her son’s right, her long grey hair almost invisible under a thin black scarf, save for her back near her coccyx where a tuft of grey hung below the hem. I came in from the porch to sit opposite her at my father’s feet.

It had been twenty-three years since I’d seen my grandmother. I stared over my father’s body at her and felt again my little hand in her big hand. I remembered that she was the adult who had held my hand and had walked me to and from Coober Pedy Public School. Back then, she’d taken the long flight to Australia and had stayed with us for while. It was she who left me at the playground’s southern corner where I had to climb over the school fence. And it was she who would give me the push from behind I needed to get me over. Then I’d run off through the playground and up to the portable classrooms at the top end of the school. In the afternoon, Grandmother Kallisto would be the one waiting for me at the fence. On the way home she’d be the one talking about Greece. And there was my first memory of Greece – enclosed in the geography of my grandmother’s palm. ‘See my hand,’ Grandmother Kallisto would stop me in the street. She’d turn me to face her and then stretch out her left hand, her fingers, turning her palm up towards me so that, if I’d been schooled in reading the lines of a hand, I’d have been able to know her intimately. With her right finger she’d trace the outline of her palm and say, ‘This is Greece.’ Then she’d run her finger down from wrist to thumb and say, ‘Here is Athens.’ And then she would continue down to the point where her thumb joined her palm and then up again to the tip of her index finger and say, ‘And here is Mani,’ and then to her big finger, ‘And Monemvassia,’ and to her ring finger, ‘Githion,’ and her little finger, ‘Pylos.’ Then she would run her finger all the way up toward her wrist and stop where the heart line began. ‘This,’ she would say, with a look I later saw in my father’s eyes, ‘is Zelopolis. Your real home.’

Grandmother Kallisto now sat at the other end of Akindynos’s casket, withdrawn, her face concave from age and mourning, her hands, one tucked into the other and both tucked into the black folds of her dress. My late grandfather, Diogenes, loved to look at the two of us side by side, or so my father would tell me (I was too young to remember). My father could take any fact from our family’s history and transform it into myth. He hailed us because we carried the proud name of Callistus, the great theologian, advocate of the quiet prayer and disciple of Saint Gregory Palamas. Diogenes was a descendant of the Palamas family, pious and priestly for generation upon generation. But upon my father Diogenes bestowed two names. The second, the name of the other Gregory, the anathematised Gregory Akindynos, the student turned anti-Palamite. The heretic. Diogenes wanted his son, from his very birth, to know the Manichean nature of man, to know that it was in man where the battle of reason and faith, and of education and supplication, was fought, and not beyond him. And so, through the dualism of his two namesakes Akindynos embodied the blessed and the cursed, the sacred and the profane, the philosopher and the prophet. But Akindynos was not interested in these holy wars. He thought the Christian history of Greece a dark and barbaric one, and he always rejected its persistence in the beliefs and habits of our family history by reminding me of the Hellenic etymology of my name.

‘Callisto was the most beautiful nymph of all,’ he would begin with a wink, his fuzzy brows rising off his forehead like two devil horns, ‘and she made a big promise to herself. She promised herself that she would never go with a man. But Zeus, ruled by his passions, for this is what a true Greek God is like, took her anyway. So now, Kally mou, he had to hide this affair from his wife! What more could he do than turn the nymph into a bear! Eh, if it wasn’t Zeus then it was Hera who transformed the little nymph, because Hera always came to know the truth, like every Greek wife should. But whatever truly happened, when Kallisto died she was transformed again, this time into the brightest pattern of stars in the sky.’ Akindynos would then point up to the sky to any formation of stars and say, ‘Now, she revolves around the Polaris.’ Then looking directly at me he’d conclude, ‘the stars will live longer than the Greek Orthodox Church, and you, Kallisto mou, will be immortal in the minds of men who look to the sky.’

The sisters wailed. The sisters whispered. They all took turns resting on the sofa or in Grandmother Kallisto’s bedroom. Anastasia made coffee, served cognac, passed biscuits around. Grandmother Kallisto had managed to outlive her only son. It was a tragedy.

Thank you for reading! See you next Thursday for Chapter 5.

Hey, thanks for reading. Over the course of this serialisation, I’d love to hear your thoughts on the story, the writing, the themes, as well as your own obsessions and explorations into forms and genres that hold your stories.

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