Listening

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Apart from a sliver of daylight seeping through the broken edge of the blind, nothing else illuminated the room. The clock which had been ticking away behind her, hanging over the TV unit with no TV, was silent, laying face down on the kitchen counter, its battery standing vertically on the sugar bowl. She was seated on the single armchair facing the navy- blue wooden front door. Wind swept into the room, shuffling the empty chocolate wrappers she had aligned side by side just in front of the gap between the floorboards and the door after her husband had left a few hours ago, locking up behind him. She’d specifically chosen them from the box of Quality Streets she had asked her husband to buy solely for the sound of the packaging. The chocolates: toffee penny, toffee finger, coconut éclair, were piled in a bowl on the coffee table tucked into the corner of the tiny room for one, along with the other seventy; five for each day she had been a prisoner to this room.

The wrappers swept away as a small gust blew in from under the door, and so she knew that the main door, a flight of stairs down, was open, that someone had just left the building, letting in the clang of steel as trucks drove past along the main road. She wished she’d never listened to her mother, that she’d resisted this move away, past large expanses of land and sea to where the sun never shone even if she pulled open the blinds. She rose and took five steps to the bed, bending low, and pulling out the cloth sack which once held the molehiya her mother dried in summer for thick stews in winter. She pulled open its straps and released the smell of home into the dim, lifeless room, this earthy scent of her mother. She knew she had to ration the smell, that there would be no going back. At least not for now. At the bottom of the sack, she saw the withered clusters of wheat she had pulled out of the Cyprus ground on the day of her wedding, the day before she boarded that flight. They had started crumbling; kernels falling off stems. She breathed in once more, the last inhalation of the day, two of two, and re-strapped the sack, pushing it back under the bed. She recalled the last time she laid eyes on her mother on the lower step of her childhood home leading up to the porch, waving the taxi away, the skin on her upper arm shaking back and forth. She’d glanced back through the rear window of the car, then turned around as her husband placed his warm palm on the thigh he had not touched before. After that, she had boarded the plane, the engine humming in her ear, numbing her into a deafness; distant sounds coming from her husband sitting beside her pointing to the food in little plastic pots covered with foil like the ones her mother used to wrap around the sini full of potatoes marinated with onions and covered in the juice of sun-kissed tomatoes before she placed it in the oven to roast.

She took the bottle of orange juice from the kitchen counter and poured the liquid into the sinkhole, listening to the pipes gulping down the sweet sticky liquid. She screwed back the lid and placed it on the floor next to the sofa, knowing she’d be needing it later.

The sun was setting, a pinkish hue trickling through the gap in the blind, but then a harsh- yellow light entered the room from under the door. It’s time, she thought to herself, leaning forward in her seat. She listened to the metal clatter of the door opening next door, keys jingling against the keyhole and then the door being pulled shut. She started counting, knowing that by the time she got to ten, the water would start running through the pipes of the wall she shared with the next-door neighbour. As she reached eight she heard it, the water rushing through, followed by the rattling of cupboards. She envisioned the woman looking for something comfy to wear. She knew with certainty that her male friend would be home just as the sun completely set. The woman would open the door for him, he’d murmur and then they’d fight, shouting at each other. Words she did not understand; short words released in spurts, short pauses between where she imagined them breathing, spit spewing out of their mouths. She glided her palm across her shrunken belly, its skin hanging loose over the elasticky waist of her tracksuit bottoms. Her eyes turned to the kitchen counter, but the room was almost pitch-black and she could not see the tin of baked beans, the only food she’d been eating for the last... she counts... tapping her fingertips against her thighs, eight days, the sauce reminding her of her mother’s fasoulaki, thick and sweet infused with Aleppo pepper and lemon. But there was no lemon running through the sauce in the tin. Whenever she plunged spoonfuls into her mouth, the sweet sauce left a slimy coating along the top of her tongue.

She picked up the torch, which came with the house, tucked into the back of the wardrobe under a cluster of broken plastic hangers, and turned it on, propping it back on the table, its rays a perfect circle against the door. Footsteps made their way up the stairs onto her landing, then a plastic bag fell crinkling, its contents spilling out one by one against the wooden floors in the hallway. She knew it was the boyfriend, the man who always carried things home with him, like her own husband who brought things he thought she’d like. Tomatoes not quite as red as those hanging heavy on the light-green stems of the bushes back home, their flesh warm with the sun, tangerines which were hard to the touch, lacking the floral intonations of those decorating the trees in her mother’s garden, releasing their citrus smells into the air as if summoning to be picked. She held her breath and waited for the fight she knew would start soon. She scurried to the bedroom wall and placed her ear against it, standing on tiptoes, her back hunched over, her body taut with nerves. A large sound emanated from the room on the other side, a faint roar like the empty tüp her mother would roll across the kitchen, the sitting room, then out through the front door, where it would wait until her father brought it to Halis Usta, the local bakkal, to replace it with a new one. Finally, a sound, a whooshing just outside her door. Has it happened? she thinks to herself. How could I have missed it? She knew it couldn’t have happened. Where were the sounds? The gradual inflections, the hisses, the growls, and then the hasty succession of words, loud, vibrating through the concrete walls, caressing her ear drums?

The light came on in the hallway, trickling into the room through the gap under the door, before darkness struck once more. There was an explosion, a bursting of cheeks holding in too much air, and then came the words she did not understand. She inscribed a few into the murky- green paint of the wall with the tip of her pinky finger’s nail, the only one she hadn’t bitten down to the cuticle. She’d ask her husband about the meaning of these impassioned words lingering on her neighbour’s tongues day in day out. She recalled those exuding from her mother’s mouth, as she climbed the stairs of the kahve, the wooden soles of her shoes clacking against the concrete
steps. These were words her mother would tell her to listen to carefully. “You’ll use them on your husband one day,” she’d tell her, expecting her to tag along to see how to treat a man. The villagers congregated around circular tables, some sipping on over-sugared teas, others resting their chins on their walking sticks. Spasra cards would be scattered on the table, flittering in the warm summer breeze, threatening to fly away. When they’d see her mother on the landing, they’d lean in,
whispering to each other, a smile imprinted on the lower halves of their faces, knowing what was about to happen; her mother’s shoe flying across the room, slapping against the kahve’s back wall, always just missing the crown of her husband’s head, as if threatening that one day she’d hit the target. Her father would rise when he saw her mother, his shoulders hunched, a slight sway in his body. She’d watch her mother lean in, sniffing his flesh audibly before hobbling over to her shoe. Her mother would glide her foot into it and then dawdle out, sometimes murmuring under her breathe. Behind them, her father would follow, gazing down as he passed by the villagers who told him to come to the kahve the next day only if he was the one wearing the trousers.

There was another thud at the wall, and she bent over, following the course of the sound, stopping mid kneel by the pressure in her bladder. She tried to remember how long it had been, recalling herself bending over to peek through the dark keyhole, a sign that no one was lingering in the hallway, neither her next-door neighbour, nor the girl who lived two doors away who she had never seen, but whose coughs she could hear late at night, a dry forced cough which she imagined shook her lungs incessantly. It was the noon of the previous day when she had stepped out of her room, the cold blowing from under the front door immediately causing her hair to stand
on end, her fingertips brushing against the hardened wallpaper as she tiptoed along, holding her breath, her heart beating in her temple. She’d touched the walls, feeling for the switch which she’d turned on, click, then closed the door behind her, twisting its oxidized key, breathing out once she heard the lock fit into place. A couple of shampoo bottles sat on the bathtub’s edge, a sliver of shampoo frozen midway on one, a black strand of hair, making a perfect S shape on the other.
She had released her bladder, her day-old pee trickling into the toilet bowl. She’d picked up the toilet roll laying on its side on the floor and tore off the outer layer throwing it in the bin, dabbing away with the next sheet, like she was cleaning crumbs from her chin, remembering the words her husband had uttered as he showed her the bathroom on the first day they had arrived; that people had diseases here, mounds growing on their privates that exploded like red volcanoes. They were fresh off the plane. As she had stood to pull up her clothing, her underwear’s elastic waist accidentally slapping against her abdomen, she’d heard a slam outside, and then a knock on the door. She’d froze, her trousers encircling her ankles. The voice spoke on the other side, a soft voice, accompanied by a dry cough, before it started heaving and was gone. She had gently closed the toilet’s lid and sat down, pulling her trousers up and over her bottom. She had listened to the welcome silence on the other side and tugged open the handle of the door, running down the hallway and around the corner into her room, where she could finally breathe in long spurts that clogged her lungs as if she were drowning. It will be the first and last time, she had said to herself.

The argument had subsided, footsteps paced, and there was the usual thump on the other side of the wall, where she imagined a wooden headboard. The murmuring would start soon, the headboard hitting on the wall exactly ten times before there’d be another silence, then laughter, the flushing of the toilet filling the pipes that wound around her room. The pressure in her bladder numbed the top half of her thighs. Half-bent she dawdled towards the kitchen counter, picked up the empty bottle and held it up to the fading light seeping in through the gap in the broken blind, looking for any remaining drops of orange juice, any bits of pulp which needed to be washed out. An opague drop slivered down the inside of the bottle and she washed it out under the fierce tap before placing the bottle on the floor next to the single armchair, dipping her arm under her skirt, sidling her underwear aside and letting all free, the liquid bouncing off the sides of the bottle, warm droplets marking the inside of her cold calves.

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English Translation of Turkish Words

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- Molehiya: A vegetable, similar to spinach, usually consumed in Cyprus, the Middle East and North Africa. It is traditionally cooked as a stew in tomato sauce, onion, garlic and chunks of lamb.
- Sini: A traditional Cypriot roasting tin, typically made of aluminium.
- Tüp: a gas canister used to for a stove.
- Bakkal: a convenience store
- Kahve: Cypriot version of Turkish kahvehane which means a coffeehouse. It Cypriot culture it is the gathering place of older, retired men.
- Spasra: a card game, played with playing cards, typically Cypriot.

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