Ghosts of People Past

Now

Now

A sweet sour smell creeps up her nostrils and makes her want to vomit. She looks down at her black -clad body and realizes that she is still wearing the clothes that she had worn to her cousin's funeral.  She looks at the dry crust of mud coating her boots. She bends to pull them off, so hard that she nearly topples off her chair. She picks them up and takes them out to the veranda. She looks at the first fluttering of snowflakes in the night’s deadly silence. She quickly closes the door and heads towards the bathroom, divesting her clothes on the way. Now naked, she picks them up and stashes them in the trash can under the kitchen sink. She glances at her computer screen still spewing ghosts.

The new ghost appearing on the screen is a young boy standing between the Ionic columns of the Faculty of Philosophy at the U of Thessaloniki. The year is 1971. He is wearing a long, black coat and a Russian-like fur hat. He is smiling brightly. It’s Savvas, her best friend during her years at the U. If, in her life, Nicky were the person who loved her more than anyone else, Savvas was the person who influenced her more than anyone else. She remembers that the picture was taken the day they had met. It was a magnificent, sunny day in late September and the classes that she so dreaded had just begun.

She enters the bathroom and lights the aromatic candle on the small, round table next to the bathtub. She turns on the tap, puts in the plug and throws in a handful of lavender crystals. She turns around and looks at her image in the mirror which is blurry form the steam dancing around her in tiny swirls. She writes Hamid’s name on the mirror and draws a noose around it. Then, she turns around to face the bathtub. She turns off the running water, puts in one foot at a time, testing it, then sits and slides into the warm, purple, sudsy water. Trying to relax, she deeply breathes in the heavenly scent of lavender.  She shuts her eyes and lets her mind speed down the twisted corridors of her thoughts. From her living room, the first notes of Enrico Macias’s gentle voice float to her.

 J'ai quitté mon pays. J'ai quitté ma maison. Ma vie, ma triste vie. Se traîne sans raison. J'ai quitté mon soleil …

 Behind her eyelids, she can see Hamid with outstanding clarity. He is sitting lotus style, looking like an ecstatic guru, on the floor, playing his guitar; his face alight, his eyes shut. He is singing Enrico’s nostalgic song of his country, his Algeria.

Time melts away in the flames of her fantasy. She envisions herself, young and pretty and sad, watching him. She knows deep in her heart that their love will not last,  that one day Hamid would leave her and return to his country. Which he eventually he did, abandoning her alone to fend for herself in a country that she never loved, not ever, not since that day that the plane landed in Thessaloniki and her entire world was sucked in by the scorching sun of a midsummer heat wave.