THE ISLAND OF CHARON
a novel in the series
"PLAYING ANOTHER REALITY"
CHAPTER 7. THE MOON BOOK
7.4. TATA AND MARK
…Water, water, all around is water, and a panic horror seizes me. I try to float up to the surface, but for some reason I can’t, and… I am suffocating!
***
I woke up when the Sun was about to go to sleep.
Coming down the stairs to Yanis’ cafe on the shore, I saw him playing “football” with the Girl and her little prince, the grimy Boy.
“Probably, Yanis would make a good father,” I thought and smiled.
Having noticed me, the Girl rushed towards me with a cry.
“Mu-mm-yy!”
I reluctantly hugged her and stroked her long dark hair.
“What is your name?” I asked.
“Tata,” answered the Girl, smiling.
“Hmmm…”
That was my mother’s name. I always thought to name my daughter after my mother.
Yanis came up after Tata and again gave me that mysterious look reminding of some other person…
“I see, you both are getting along!” Yanis said.
“Why don’t you want to report her to the police?”
“She doesn’t bother me,” he replied calmly. “And how was your night?”
I remembered… water-water, all around…
“Yanis! Help me to get out of here! I’m not able to understand what’s happening on the Island of Black Magicians in general, but with me personally some bullshit is going on. I visited the pier last night, and…”
“You didn’t find any schedule there, did you?” Yanis chuckled.
The Girl let me go and ran off to play with her little prince, while Yanis and I made our way to the cafe and sat across from each other.
“Yanis… The Stargazer says… the Moon Book is a book of shadows, that is, the Book of the Dead. Is that true?”
“Who is granddaughter of a witch?”
“I’ve never practiced magic!”
“Do you believe in the existence of Death?”
“I saw myself in the Moon Book. If we are dead, then…”
“You can’t be dead. At least, because you are still thinking,” Yanis stated calmly.
“Why are you here?”
“Maybe… because of you,” Yanis took my hand and stroked my fingers.
“But I want to go away!” I exhaled helplessly, leaving my hand in his palm.
“I’m sorry,” Yanis said sadly for some reason, looking aside.
“Why? And what do you want?”
Yanis grew darker. He seemed to be trying to formulate an answer, but couldn’t or didn’t want to say it out loud.
“You probably have lanterns on the Wish Tree, too, don’t you?” I asked to avoid awkward pauses, and Yanis nodded silently. So, I asked him again, “How many?”
“One only.”
At that moment I finally remembered, who had looked at me the same way, and I involuntarily smiled.
“Why are you smiling, Alice?”
“I dreamed Marcos tonight. I called him just Mark, not in Greek.”
Yanis let go of my hand and looked intently in my eyes.
“Another Greek?” he asked nervously.
“Are you jealous?!” I grinned.
“No, it’s nice to hear you talking about Greece or something related to it. So how did you meet?”
“On Ammouliani, years ago… Sometimes, for a change, I went for a swim to the nearby islands, and Mark with his friends worked part-time on the pier during high season. They took tourists for the whole day to some island on a boat or yacht.”
“So, I was right, one more Greek in your collection!”
“Not exactly. Mark has Greek citizenship, but he is not Greek. His parents are refugees from Transnistria. They settled in Thessaloniki, where Mark went to school and learned Greek and English as well.”
Yanis listened to me, obviously falling into his own memories, but from time to time he asked and clarified something so that I kept playing the background sound for his meditation.
“How many years in a row have you been coming to Ammouliani?”
“Almost ten, except for the year when all countries were isolated due to the epidemic. At the very beginning, when nothing yet foretold such a scale of the disaster, Mark left for the U.K. to his distant relatives, emigrants, too. Mark dreamed of Las Vegas and saw Great Britain just as a stopover on the way to his American dream.”
“Stop here, Alice. And those ten years of your dating on Ammouliani?”
“First of all, not ten!”
“Well, okay, nine!” Yanis grinned. “This really changes everything!”
“Secondly, we were not dating, just crossed paths. We had nothing, don’t worry!” I smiled, feeling that Yanis wasn’t indifferent to Mark.
“Then, why do you keep smiling when you talk about him!?”
“This is the strangest story in my life,” I laughed.
“So you were in love with him! If there was a story after all!”
“Yanis, isn’t it interesting to you whether he loved me?!”
“It’s impossible not to fall in love with you,” Yanis said sadly for some reason and gave me Mark’s gaze again.
“Now you’ve looked at me the way he did. When I appeared on the pier, Mark’s friends always shouted to him jokingly, ‘Yours is here!’ But we’re too different to be together. When he moved to the U.K. a few years later…”
“By the way, Alice, Great Britain is also an island! As Camotes. And Ammouliani. Are you fond of islands?”
“Yes, that’s right! Wow, really, they are all islands! I’ve never thought of that before!”
“So, it turns out, Mark got a chance after moving to the U.K.”
“His personal, yes, not in terms of relationship with me. However — the irony of fate! — Mark found me on an international dating site, and only then we started corresponding!”
“Why did you enter into correspondence with him if you’re too different?”
“I don’t know. It’s like finding a friend, or someone you know, in a big foreign city where you have no one else at all.”
“What was your difference manifested in?”
“Have you ever seen the movie ‘Titanic’? ” I asked Yanis, he silently nodded, and I continued, “I am used to communicate with people of different circle, level of education and sphere of interest. For example, Mark adored football and did not like books, and I couldn’t imagine my life without books! I not only collected them, hunting for rare copies, but also read and published and wrote them myself. At the beginning of the global panic due to the epidemic, I had several, even tiny, but my own businesses, and Mark, in order to survive the pandemic in the U.K., took a job as a loader. However, the most important was the difference in our views on the future. If briefly, it can be summed up as follows. Mark dreamed of a casino in American Las Vegas, and I dreamed of a quiet apartment by the sea in a tiny fishing village in Greece, on the border with Mount Athos.”
“Why then…”
“I can’t explain why. Not to you, not to myself. It just happens. You feel something for granted and inevitable, clearly given to you from Above. It is not an accident, but you don’t understand the reasons. Neither what exactly is going to happen, nor why you need it. Surely, Mark was well aware that we could never be together. However, he was drawn to me as much as I was drawn to him. Perhaps even stronger.”
“And you couldn’t see each other because of the closed borders, right?”
“Yes, although the U.K. in general is a difficult country for meetings. Just a thought of the necessity to fill out documents to get visa to Britain causes a headache. Mark kept inviting me to visit him, but it was unrealistic. And for various reasons, he couldn’t come to me.”
“All that time he was writing to you…”
“Sometimes he disappeared, then wrote again. Although I was ready to get no news from him anymore, I waited for his letters ly. I constantly visited my Internet page to check if he had looked at my post. Yes, yes, yes… At first completely unconsciously and then purposefully, I began to post more and more expressive pictures, signing them briefly, but with a hidden meaning… My hands were trembling, I was closing my eyes at seeing his name in the list of viewers — oh, he hadn’t given me even a like! — but I was jumping, I squealed, ‘You have not forgotten me! You want me! Oh, tell me you want me, too’!”
“Just don’t tell me now, Alice, that you didn’t meet Mark after all, as Kostas!”
“Greece was opened in May. We agreed that Mark would try to come to Ammouliani in August, the very month I used to spend my vacation there. But in the end, the boss let him go only for a weekend. Mark bought flight tickets to Thessaloniki for Friday the 13th, the eve of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary, an Orthodox holiday celebrated in Greece that year on the 14th and the 15th of August, the weekend. He planned to visit Mount Athos on Saturday, but before that to come from Trypiti to Ammouliani by ferry to spend the Friday night with me. Early Saturday morning he was to move to Ouranoupolis by the boat of his friend, with whom Mark had already agreed it in advance. From Ouranoupolis by ferry to the Athos port, Daphne. Then to climb up the Mountain till the Cross and to come down immediately, because the return flight tickets were bought for Sunday, and on Monday morning the boss was already waiting for him at job.”
“Did he dream of children and family?”
“You are listening to me inattentively, Yanis! Mark dreamed of a casino in Las Vegas! Although, at the very beginning of our correspondence, he spoke to me several times about family and children. Mark asked me if I was ready to emigrate and all that… Then he stopped. Maybe he understood I could not. At some point I even became afraid of such conversations. Perhaps so did he…”
“So, did you go to the magicians to see Mark?”
“No! Not that… There was a man… Michael… One day he suddenly disappeared, long before Mark met me on the dating site. Although, Michael always said he would be happy to see me married a foreigner.”
“Unlike Mark, Michael, of course, was of the same blue blood with you!” Yanis supposed in a rather venomous tone.
“I agree, Mark is his opposite, even outwardly. Michael was a tall stately man, and Mark was as tall as me and like a boy in character. However, Mark was more real, or rather, not fake, he hadn’t stocked up with masks yet. If Mark said something, it meant he really felt and thought that way. Although Michael, for me personally, had the only one flaw. He was endlessly married. And even if he hadn’t disappeared then…”
Tata ran up to us. She grabbed Yanis and me by the arms and dragged us to play with her and her little prince.
The Sun had already set. We played “football” for a while. The kids squealed with joy. Yanis looked absolutely happy for the first time. And for a moment I even wondered whether I should to leave…