Madeleine Wulfahrt: 'Hydra'

   Having spruced up using what had quickly become the communal roll-on deodorant – I had left mine at home – we rolled out of our room and into a beach café across the harbour from our hotel. We didn’t want much; we were saving ourselves for a big taverna meal that evening. The café was, unfortunately, less than the nothing that we had wanted, but by the time we realised it was too late – bread was on the way, and we were on the way to hungry bad-temperedness.

   Smelling identical, we ordered glasses of cheap white wine, and two mushroom omelettes. I ate my omelet in ceaseless, nervous bites, interrupted only by sips of the wine which was already going to my head. Her plate and glass already half-empty, Liv leaned back silently, elbows resting on the arms of the flimsy wicker chair. From behind her dark glasses, it was impossible to know whether her silence represented a lull in conversation, or was the preamble to a sudden proclamation.

   This was the way with Liv. As her drama student at a private school in London, I had lived in fear of moments like these, in which I truly felt everything hung in the balance. They would usually come at the end of a rehearsal, when I would stand onstage, vulnerable, waiting for her to rip me to shreds. “Tough love,” a friend once whispered to me after a particularly explosive criticism of my Ophelia. These takings down almost always occurred in front of our entire class, the hugs and compliments in seclusion after everyone else had left.

   “You know I only say things like that to you because I know you can take it, because I know you’re the strongest actress in the class,” she would say.

   “Thank you,” I would reply, holding back tears until I was out of earshot, down the corridor, and on the way to my next class.

   We had kept in touch after I moved schools, and emailed sporadically about plays – the Strindberg she was directing one autumn, the Chekhov I was studying at university. If my decision to study literature instead of acting disappointed her she didn’t let it show. I heard from her more often after she divorced her husband, for whom she had moved to London from Stockholm not long after graduating from drama school, and with whom she had no children. After all those years of criticism, there was not a harsh word to be found in our correspondence, which had, one way or another, carried us here. Buoyed by a mutual ego-boosting, albeit weighted favourably towards Liv, we had weathered the storm of my adolescence, and her middle age.

   When I mentioned in my July email that I planned to move to Athens after graduation, I had never expected that Liv would offer to visit me. True, she had already promised to visit a friend in Kalamidi that September, but it was nonetheless a surprise when she emailed me a week later with an arrival date, and a suggestion that we spend a night on Hydra. The sudden elision of all the complications which stood between us was tantalising.

*

   It was just like her to choose the rocks over one of the more manicured beaches. Liv enjoyed the films of Lars Von Trier and Michele Haneke. As far as she was concerned, if there was true pleasure to be had, it was worthless without the prerequisite suffering. When we lay down on our self-consciously chic white beach sarongs, I felt the vertebrae in my spine grind gently against the stone. I had lost a not insignificant amount of weight since moving to Athens – the result at first of a generalised anxiety, and then a focused one in anticipation of Liv’s arrival. My body, its slimmer iteration, felt familiar in her presence.

   I had started to restrict what I ate at the age of fourteen, after Liv recommended I take dance classes with the sixth-form students on Friday afternoons. If I wanted to be a real actor, she said, I would have to learn how to control my body. Obediently, every Friday afternoon, I got changed into a pair of black form-fitting shorts, and tried hopelessly to learn to Jetée. As the weeks went by and I got better at controlling my body – at what I allowed it to consume – the shorts grew less form fitting, and the Jetées grew easier. Grace, like pleasure, was something to do with discomfort.

   I would watch from the back row of the studio as Liv herself churned out perfect jump after perfect jump. We bookended the class as baby and mother figures, in whom the intervening seventeen and eighteen-year-olds took a general disinterest. Lying on the beach with her now, I realised that I had fallen into the same patterns: muscles tensed, eyes peering out of their corners, gauging the impression I was making. In the midday light, her skin looked almost umber against her white linen shirt, which glowed with the same otherworldly pallor as the buildings which encircled us. She was sporting the kind of tan which I have only ever seen on Scandinavians – a tan which is intensified by the darkening of one’s skin synchronised with the lightening of one’s hair.

   “What’s that you’re reading?” she asked eventually, after what felt like hours of performatively holding up my book in her peripheral vision.

   “Malina by Ingeborg Bachmann,” I said, taking care to pronounce the author’s Austrian name with pointed accuracy.

   “I think I saw the movie once with Isabelle Huppert,” Liv remarked, returning her eyes to the pages of her own book, which I had already recognised as an eighties Penguin Classics edition of Flaubert’s Sentimental Education. The Isabelle Huppert remark sent a buzz from my stomach up my back. I took it as a mark of approval, since I knew how much Liv admired Huppert’s films, in which she invariably played characters who were ruthless, unrelenting, and almost unbearable to watch. I was startled, in spite of myself, that such an imperceptible compliment could light a spark under my skin – that my central nervous system was no more than the fuse for the dynamite which was wanting her to like me.

   “I’ve been meaning to read that for years,” I said, gesturing at the Flaubert with my copy of Malina, my free hand shading my eyes.

   “I’m adapting it for the next school play,” Liv stated, almost wistfully. She was always staging plays which were inappropriate for school-age children. How could an eighteen-year-old play an older woman pursued by a younger man, when she herself was too young even to be the younger man? This sounded like a better idea, at least, than her previous production of Wedekind’s Spring Awakening, which had been cancelled after the first night following a slew of parental complaints. It turned out that there was a line to be drawn between helping teenagers explore their sexuality and helping them exploit it after all.

   After several hours of back and forth between the bright-blue water and the boiling rocks, we packed our books and sarongs away into our respective museum tote bags, each of which served as a deliberate signal to passers-by of our no-less-deliberate taste.

   We strolled breezily down to the middle of the harbour. Every now and then, I caught a glimpse of her face in profile, powering on beside me. In the years that had elapsed between our last and current meetings, I had watched several films by Ingmar Bergman. I thought now of her features in their shadow. It was difficult to look at her and not think of Persona, of the famous shot of the two women’s faces melded together, but not as difficult as it was to stop looking at her altogether. That had always been impossible.

   I trod on Liv’s flip-flop on our way back up to the road, and she stumbled.

   “Oh, sorry,” I said, meaning it, and instinctively placed a consolatory hand on what I thought was her back. In fact, I had placed my hand squarely on her waist, which had been exposed without the linen shirt she had been wearing earlier, and which was waiting patiently in Liv’s tote bag for her to dry off.

   She turned sharply and looked straight at me. Or rather I assumed she did. Suddenly she lifted them, revealing lines around the edges of her eyes which had not been as deep when I was a teenager. A soft smile played around the edges of her lips. She kept looking.

   “Don’t worry about it,” she said, finally, after a pause which I thought was remarkable in its duration and intensity. There was something electric in the way our roles had so abruptly been reversed. It was now she who lost her balance, she who could so tangibly feel the power of having to be corrected, helped back into place.

   I realised my hand was still on her waist. When I took it off, I noticed a palm-shaped stencil amid the droplets of seawater which clung to her skin. It was the opposite of the mark left by a slap – as if care could leave a bruise.

*

   Dinner was at a taverna on the other side of the island, far enough from the crowds that the Greek salad cost several euros less than in the harbour. Perched over a small bay where fishermen kept their boats, the restaurant looked out on the sea from a dramatic vantage point, miraculously taking in the best of both sea and sky. The sun was already in its last phase of setting, flirting with the mirrored horizon in orange-purple rays.

   Liv made a beeline for the chair facing the restaurant, and I for the chair facing the sea. I noted these immediately as characteristic choices, reflecting our desires to be watched and to watch. And I did watch her. I watched her sparkle in the day’s dying light, as we talked our way around the strangeness of our entanglement.

   Each dish we ordered was tastier than the last. I allowed myself to indulge my appetite for the first time in weeks. Even Liv, who I remembered as a bird-like snacker on berries and nuts, ate ravenously. I was enthralled by the grilled squid, which was stuffed with melted cheese, and served with a tangle of tentacles on the side. We doused everything in lemon, savouring the rubbery flesh. I let the last piece linger in my mouth longer than I would have admitted, paying attention with my tongue to the smooth, firm rim of the calamari. The texture of squid baffled me – the way it felt like plastic but could be chewed like meat. It was like kissing a mannequin and discovering it had real lips.

   We didn’t take any photos at dinner, or at all for that matter – at least not in front of one another. There was something about our age difference which made phones feel anachronistic, as though they couldn’t coexist with our relationship because we perceived them as entirely different things. Their absence lent our time together a languorous quality, unpunctuated by cameras and thus unmeasured.

   “So you just proofread for this man, Giorgos. Is that all you do?” Liv asked, her lips pouting as she blew smoke from her after-dinner cigarette. She imbued the question with that tone of both disapproval and bluntness which only non-native English speakers can achieve. Whether by accident or design, she sounded at once to be criticising me and showing genuine interest. I decided to continue the conversation in a positive vein.

   “No – I mean it is mainly what I do. Proof-reading the wall-cards is really interesting, but sometimes I do just have to proof-read copy for their website, which obviously isn’t quite as stimulating.” I was leaning nervously on the table, my bare arms resting on the scratchy paper cloth.

   In my final year of university, I had taken a module on mythology in contemporary Greek literature. I had subsequently got hooked on both, which was inconvenient, given that I spoke neither ancient nor modern Greek. After weeks of fruitless job searching from the UK, my old lecturer sent me the contact of a friend who owned a small gallery.

   I met Giorgos the day after I arrived in a café near his gallery in Exarchia. He was a slim, tall man of about thirty-five with a decisively shaved head, pristine carpenter jeans, and a pinstripe blue shirt. The gallery specialised in contemporary textiles, some of which, I quietly believed, verged on cultural appropriation. He offered me an internship right away.

   “I think it would drive me crazy,” Liv said, rolling her eyes as she looked down at her wine glass. “Not that I don’t think it’s a good opportunity for you,” she corrected herself, having noticed that, in her slightly tipsy state, she had spoken too harshly. “But I just imagine it could be a bit tedious – couldn’t you find something which would challenge you more?”

   “I don’t think you realise how difficult the language barrier is for me – I’m lucky to have found anything at all,” I replied, detecting a note of defensiveness in my voice which trembled on the edge of tearfulness. I took a long gulp of the now-warm wine I had forgotten about.

   “No of course, I’m sure it was a great choice,” she said, turning to one side and flicking ash over the taverna railing. Her hair, tied once again in a low, balletic ponytail, was resting on her chest, the odd hair straying in the light breeze. “What’s he like? Giorgos, I mean.” The question was spun askance along with a sideways glance, which I read as insinuating.

   In all the years she had taught me, Liv’s main criticism of my acting had been a personal one. She loved to praise my intellectual curiosity – my good grades, the books I read – to other teachers, but in rehearsal often called my performances “too cerebral.” This wasn’t helped by the fact that, at fifteen, I had never had a boyfriend, a fact Liv made known to my entire class when she brought it up in a rehearsal for our production of Hamlet. Later, she told me privately that she believed my lack of “real life experience” was holding me back as an actress. I had never told her, in all these years, how this comment had held me back as a human being. Instead, I decided to tell her about the trip to Lavrio.

   The day we met, Giorgos had suggested he take me to the space he had recently bought in the coastal town of Lavrio, about two-hours’ drive from the centre of Athens. He had told me he would pick me up the next day, and would show me what he wanted to do with the building. Afterwards, we could swim in one of the bays which lipped the coast on the way back to Athens. I had feigned travel fatigue, and told him I would text him that evening to let him know whether or not I could make it.

   In spite of my own trepidation, something had made me tell him my address, and that I would wait for him outside my building early the following morning. In the car on the way there, Giorgos played Chet Baker, which lulled me into a false sense of security. I took off my shoes and put my feet up on the dashboard, my skirt blowing in the wind from the open windows. If Giorgos paid me undue attention, I was blissfully unaware of it, taking photos of the scenery and texting them to friends back in the UK.

   When we arrived in Lavrio, we parked outside an ice cream shop where he bought me a scoop of pistachio in a cone. We had been walking towards the building, eating our ice creams, when he grabbed my arm and licked my cone without asking. It was a strange gesture, unsettling in a nebulous way which made me stop in my tracks. He kept going, his Adidas gazelles leaving dainty tracks on the road, which had suddenly become a dirt path. I regained my composure, and followed them.

   At the end of the trail was a large, mid-century building on a beachfront. It had recently been gutted, and thick wires hung from the ceiling in clusters, like grapes from an invisible vine. At every opportunity, Giorgos placed his hand on the small of my back and guided me to another room, all while he enthusiastically yet vaguely described his plans for an open-plan gallery space. I gave it all the benefit of the doubt because I was unwilling to judge what may well have simply been cultural differences. I didn’t know whether this made me more or less of a feminist – more or less of a bigot.

   After the tour, Giorgos led me onto the beach, where he suggested we sit and eat the pitta and homemade tzatziki he had brought with him in a small cool bag. As we ate, he asked me about my studies, and I asked him how he knew my professor. They had studied together at Goldsmiths, he told me, which I took, perhaps foolishly, as confirmation that he could not have been a complete psychopath.

   Unexpectedly, he unbuttoned his shirt halfway and slipped it off over his head. Still more unexpectedly, he began to unbutton his trousers and slip them off along with his boxers. My heart began to race, leaping against my ribcage to the worst possible conclusions.

   “Do you mind if I swim like this?” Giorgos asked, looking me in the eye, daring me to take issue with the situation at hand – a situation which he had, I later realised, carefully constructed.

   “No, go ahead,” I told him, not wanting to cause trouble, and he sauntered to the water’s edge. The lines of his body were long, like a building so minimalist its corners are sharp to the touch. I had made an effort to imagine kissing him, wrapping my arms around his harsh edges, but the image wouldn’t stick. I couldn’t imagine having sex with him at all. I struggled, as I sometimes did around men, to place the growing discomfort in my belly – to determine whether its root was attraction or anxiety. But even if the root was attraction, it was stifled by a still greater desire to stay as far away from him as possible.

   He had stood like that for a long time, looking at the water, occasionally turning back to look at me. It was a confidence I was entirely unfamiliar with – brazen in an uncomplicated way that bore the promise of brute force. I wondered then whether all men were like this in some way, and I had simply never encountered it.

   Having spoken non-stop for what felt like forever, I paused for a moment to take a sip of water. Liv just looked at me in a way that could only mean, “go on.”

   This waiting game had lasted around ten minutes, after which he got into the water. I stripped down to the swimming costume I had worn under my clothes, and ran in before diving as deep as I could. I had thought this would be a way out of the situation, but instead, in the transparency of the Aegean, I was confronted once again by his aggressive nudity, magnified in the salty water. I rushed to the surface, out of the water, and into the towel I had brought with me. As soon as I was dry, I got dressed and went to stand by the front of the house.

   We had walked back to the car in silence, and drove back to Athens listening to the same Chet Baker album. Everything happens to me, he sung, as we drove off the highway and into the centre of Athens.

   “And he’s never mentioned it since?” Liv asked, her hand dangling relaxedly over the edge of the railing. Her cigarette, the majority of which she had left unsmoked, was now just a long chain of ash.

   “No – we’ve never discussed it. Everything has been fine since.” I said, anxiously pushing my hair, crunchy with sea-salt, behind my shoulders. But I appreciated as the words fell from my mouth, that I, as Liv would have dramatically put it in her over-idiomised English, was not out of the woods yet.

   “What a story,” she said, rubbing her temples with a bronzed hand, the underside of which was startlingly white. “Well at least he hasn’t bothered you anymore. It definitely is quite a story.”

   That was enough – that she thought my life worthy of some kind of narrative. That was what I had wanted, that was why I had told her. It was a desperate move to prove something about myself, my life, and its newfound momentum. Hadn’t Liv, consistently and confidently, proved herself to be entirely anarchic in her attitude to sex? But hadn’t she also, in her own way, led me down a path to a place where it felt like anything could happen, even though it never did?

   She paid the bill, and we strolled back to our room. I realised, upon standing up, that I felt drunk. Pleasantly so: not too drunk to walk home, but drunk enough that I knew my Giorgos story had altered something between us. Liv draped an arm casually around my waist, pulling me closer as we walked under the shade of a million firs.

*

   The litre bottles of Avra from our mini fridge lasted mere seconds in the late-August heat before we polished them off. I landed on the first of the two single beds.

   “I’m so thirsty!” I whined, goofily, planting my hands behind me and throwing my head back. I closed my eyes, waiting for the air conditioning to work its magic.

   Before I knew it, Liv was pouring cold water over my face. I was startled, and opened my eyes immediately.

   “Open your mouth! You’re making such a mess!” Liv shouted. She was standing over me now, pulling my hair back, the front pieces of which were already soaking wet. I sat there obediently with my mouth wide open, smiling the kind of smile which stands in for laughter in situations where laughing would be inconvenient. But Liv laughed, broadly and unrestrainedly. We were playing for no apparent reason, like children or animals.

   When Liv had had enough, she gulped down what was left of the first bottle and opened the second, holding it in one hand while she untied her wrap dress with the other. With her back turned to me, I watched as she made her way into the bathroom and closed the door.

   We took turns in the shower, dancing awkwardly around one another in the semi-darkness, swapping our towels for oversized t-shirts.

   “Is it ok if I take the bed next to the wall?” I asked. The pressure to ask for permission persisted.

   “Not at all,” said Liv, lying down on top of the covers, “I’m going to turn off the light.”

   We whispered goodnight.

   My heart was beating fast. Suddenly I didn’t want to ask for permission. I got up from my bed and lay down next to her. She didn’t say a word. It was impossible to sleep. I don’t know how long I was awake – seconds, minutes, hours. We didn’t touch, but I felt the strands of our wet hair mingling.

Madeleine Wulfahrt is a writer living in New York. She has written essays for Penguin Modern Classics, MUBI Notebook, The Times Literary Supplement, and elsewhere. Her poems have also appeared in publications including PN Review and The Adroit Journal. She is the recipient of a Harper-Wood Creative Writing & Travel Award and a University of Warsaw Prize for Literary Translation. Between 2017 and 2022, she spent time living in Moscow, Saint Petersburg, and Warsaw. Subsequently, she completed graduate work in Polish, Russian, and Yiddish at Columbia University. She is currently working on her first book.