The house on the cliff

In any case, how could he change plans overnight? How could he communicate with, inform his “arrangers”? He was isolated on the cliff, stuck inside the cave, completely dependent on them, at their mercy and at mine. And who were they, anyway? How could he be sure they would not betray him to the enemy? I would never betray him, this he must surely know. He must have realised the moment he laid eyes on me that he had nothing to fear from me, as I had instantly known the same about him. He was…one of us. That was what he meant when he stressed how what a pleasure it was to meet me. (Here I nearly mistook his remembered voice for my father’s.) He too must have had, that moment he first saw me, that same sense of recognition, the feeling that he’d known me forever without being aware of it. Like a distant memory, or as if I appeared regularly in his dreams. 1949 - THE EVENING WITH LOXÁNDRA In my room, I cleaned the pine tree resin from my legs. I should have thought to do it before I got into the bath - now I would stink of gasoline all night. Before getting dressed, I rubbed my knees and elbows with lanolin, they were sore and red from being scrubbed with pumice. As a final gesture towards respectability I took a hairbrush, untangled my hair a bit and brushed it back from my face. Down in the kitchen, in the basement or half-basement as Dóra insisted on calling it (there were short wide windows near the ceiling), everything was nice and cosy, like before. With the house to ourselves, Loxándra and I fell back into our old habits. I sat at the kitchen table while she made dinner for me, my favourite summer dinner: fried eggs, a salad of tomatoes from the garden, and potatoes fried with a sprig of rosemary in the olive oil, a dinner which had been declared unhealthy (“Fried food is bad for the skin Anthí, it’s never too soon for a woman to start looking after her beauty”). I propped my book up in front of my plate and Loxándra recognised the signal, and didn’t talk to me. That summer I was keeping even her at a distance, but she never took offence. Loxándra always understood. IIIIIIIIII From behind the book I watched her as she moved slowly, ritualistically, about the kitchen. Usually when people cook there’s a moment of crisis followed by a major or minor panic - when the boiling pot needs to be lifted and the potholders are out of reach, or the milk is foaming and about to boil over, or two different things on the stovetop need urgent attention at the same instant. This never seemed to be the case for Loxándra, who slid smoothly from one stage of her actions to the next, as