Elena Violaris

Chapter 1

[Switch On]

Zenovia loved aeroplanes: the slick safety cartoons, the shrinking of streets and houses, the switching of cultures and climates. Through the round window, she watched Trepassey shrink to the size of a sweet, its liquorice streets wrapped in clouds. These clouds were the portal between Trepassey, where she lived, and Massia, where she was from. But there were many Massias within Massia, divided by spiky lines. To cross these lines, you had to show your passport. Zenovia thought this was exciting, but her parents found it exhausting, and her aunt found it infuriating.

Aunt Sofia loved Massia – too much, her mother said. If her aunt had lived in a different time, Zenovia thought she would have been a Massian saint, defending the country from dragons and snakes. She even looked like a religious icon, with her dark curly hair and fierce eyebrows and transparent face, which revealed all of her thoughts and feelings. Except now she was framed by the blue seat of the budget airline as she helped Zenovia’s sister, Amelia, colour in a unicorn. Zenovia and Amelia insisted their aunt sit in the middle because she was happy to entertain them. When they rated adults according to how much they understood children, Aunt Sofia got 100%.

Zenovia turned back to the window, wondering if the sky contained ghosts of their previous flights. Every year, her family travelled to their ancestral village of Meloria, where they stayed in the house in which her mother and aunt were born, and where her grandparents returned to retire. The journey transformed everyone into fairytale characters. Zenovia and Amelia became long lost princesses, lavished with attention by relatives, and their aunt was a fairy godmother, delivering gifts from Trepassey. Days were packed with mountains and monasteries, festivals and feasts, games with distant cousins. During evenings at home, neighbours dropped by the veranda, and Mamári Katia filled crystal bowls with sweets. Aunt Sofia sparkled with enthusiasm: talking, laughing, in the centre of every conversation. Whenever she saw Zenovia and Amelia, she winked and waved them over to perform a magic trick.

If Meloria was a kingdom, their grandparents’ house was a castle. The sisters were archaeologists, searching the outhouse for hidden treasures, or magicians, sourcing prickly pears to make potions. The veranda was a lookout, and if an enemy approached, they hid in their grandparents’ canopied bed, wrapping themselves in mosquito nets. Sometimes, Zenovia had a sensation that her perspective of a room had switched angle – as if she were looking through someone else’s eyes. Amelia said this was because the memories in the house were floating between people’s minds. Births, blessings, marriages and deaths had all taken place on their family’s plot, which had been passed through the female line for generations. Aunt Sofia said it would one day pass to Zenovia and Amelia, then to their children, and so on forever.

The seatbelt sign lit for landing, and Zenovia watched a veil of clouds part to reveal Massia glittering like jewellery on velvet. As the plane descended, the necklaces of light unlinked into streets, houses and the amber checkpoints on Massia’s barbed lines. Zenovia pretended to trace the geometry of Meloria. She plotted the dot of her grandparents’ house, and teleported her mind to that point.

[Cut]

Zenovia sat on the starlit veranda. Her mamári recounted Melorian gossip, while her papáti smoked a cigar in the corner – a stray clasp in their crescent of chairs. When Aunt Sofia left for the bathroom, Zenovia noticed her mamári lean towards her mother.

‘Angela,’ she said. ‘I have decided to sell the house.’

‘What?’

‘It’s expensive to maintain. We can move somewhere smaller.’ Mamári Katia linked her fingers. ‘I invited a surveyor to come on Monday.’

Zenovia could not stop herself. ‘No, mamári! We’ll have nowhere to stay.’

‘Have you told Sofia?’ said Zenovia’s mother. ‘You know she’d rather sell her soul than lose this house…’

Mamári Katia sighed. ‘It’s time for Sofia to accept that she doesn’t live here. Your lives are abroad, you visit once or twice a year. You can book a hotel when you come. Massia is cheap for you.’

That moment, Aunt Sofia returned. ‘What’s going on?’

Everybody was silent.

Mamári Katia stood up. ‘Come. I want to speak with you inside.’

‘I estimate thirty seconds,’ muttered Zenovia’s mother. But Zenovia counted fifteen before the sound of yelling streamed through the shuttered windows.

Early on Monday, the surveyor arrived. Aunt Sofia marched through the house, declaring its flaws. Zenovia and Amelia flanked her like bodyguards, while their mother and mamári tried to calm her down.

Amelia pointed to a streak of water on the living room wall. ‘The house is crying! It doesn’t want you to sell it!’

‘Just a small leak,’ said Mamári Katia, trying to conceal the stain with a cabinet.

Zenovia watched the surveyor with apprehension. Once he finished, everyone sat on the veranda with coffee and sweets made from thickened grape juice. Amelia sat on Aunt Sofia’s knee – though she was getting too big for that, thought Zenovia.

The house needed some repairs, said the surveyor, though the structure looked sound. Then he sat back in his chair and sighed. ‘But you cannot sell it.’ He gestured opposite the veranda. ‘No Massian will buy a house with this view.’ Zenovia looked, and experienced the familiar shift in perspective she often felt in the house. She was so used to this view that she had stopped noticing it, but now it appeared with renewed force.

Their veranda looked onto the ruins of Meloria’s old primary school, bombed in the 1988 civil war. Many Melorians were still grieving or angry, so the ruins had been left as a memorial, surrounded by locked railings like a museum display. In front of the railings were toys, fresh flowers and framed photos of the children who died. Zenovia shivered. She was eleven years old, and Amelia was nine, so they felt disturbingly similar to these children, frozen in their own phase of life. They liked to pretend that the boys and girls from the school had not really died: that they were simply hiding inside the ruins.

At the surveyor’s words, Aunt Sofia’s face filled with relief. Her arms tightened around Amelia, and she kissed her on the cheek.

After that day, there was no more mention of selling the house. But since the surveyor had drawn attention to the ruins, Zenovia could not stop noticing them. In a strange way, she thought, the ruins had saved the house from being sold. And the house, in return, kept the memories stored by the ruins alive. Too alive, Zenovia thought, as she began to see the ruins everywhere: when she walked to the shops with her aunt, when she played on the roof with her cousins, when she swung on the swings by the square. It was almost as if the ruins were following her – trying to get her attention. This feeling increased when she heard the adults talking. Twenty years had passed since Massia’s second civil war, but it was never far from conversation.

On their last night in Massia that summer, the street outside their house thrummed with noise. Neighbours clustered in groups, their faces shiny with sweat, talking in different tones to those they used with children. Telephones rang like alarms announcing an emergency, or bells soliciting celebration. Zenovia glimpsed Aunt Sofia, waving a cigarette, pinching her fingers to her thumb in the Massian gesture of emphasis.

‘…but what is the real reason they want to make this documentary? Who is profiting from this?’

‘Isn’t the result more important than the reason?’

‘It is dangerous to wake history,’ said another voice. ‘They should let the dead sleep.’

Deciding they would learn more if they eavesdropped instead of asked, Zenovia and Amelia wove between the adults, collecting words and tones. Then they pooled their information, stitching the seams into sense: a man from West Massia, called The Director, wanted to make a documentary about the bombing of Meloria’s primary school in 1988. Zenovia had an odd sense that the surveyor’s words had somehow switched on the ruins, that they had got this Director’s attention as well as her own. Amelia said the adults had mixed feelings about the documentary because their words came in different colours. Some were red and angry, some purple and flattered, some white and hopeful, others orange with the unstitching of old wounds. Even the houses were alert to the news: their windows open like eyes, their doors unlocked like mouths, figures flowing in and out like streams of speech. Friends and family lost in the civil wars surfaced in the minds of the Melorians, extending outside them and assembling in the streets. The news of the documentary was like a magic wand, tapping memorials and photographs – releasing their representations.

[Magic Wand]

Zenovia had a sudden instinct that they were being watched. She glanced at her sister, who wore a similarly spooked expression.

Then she noticed a spindly figure standing in front of the ruins.

‘Who’s that?’ Amelia whispered.

‘I don’t know.’ Zenovia took her sister’s hand and they walked towards the railings. As they drew close, she realised that the figure was not a person but a camera, standing on a tripod. A red light glittered like an eye.

Recording.

Amelia shrank back, but Zenovia was transfixed. Had the documentary already started? She followed the camera’s gaze to the school: half of the building was collapsed, the other half upright, its broken walls revealing rows of desks, with memories of the children still sitting at their chairs. It occurred to Zenovia that the children were trapped, locked in the ruins by Meloria’s insistence on preserving the past. Maybe they didn’t want to be remembered like this: as victims of violence, tied forever to their deaths. Maybe they wanted to escape – to exist as happier thoughts. And yet, something was holding them back. The longer she looked, the more Zenovia was convinced that there was a reason why the ruins were still here: that there was a message to be delivered before the ruins could be removed and the spirits set free. The message was on the cusp of her understanding, like Massian spoken too fast for her to grasp.

Zenovia put her eye to the lens. To her shock, the scene was flooded with daylight: the school intact, the children animated, the sky bright and blue. She had a curious sense that both versions of the school existed in the same space, and the version you saw depended on your lens. She revolved the camera on its stand, observing the rest of the surroundings in the same paradisical hue – until she reached her grandparents’ house. Something about it was different, but she could not put her finger on what. Bright bougainvillea climbed the walls. Roses laced trellises like the ribboned ringlets of a child. Aunt Sofia stood on the veranda, waving. But something about her was different.

With a sudden feeling of foreboding, Zenovia wrenched her eyes from the lens. She looked around for the camera’s operator, but there was nobody there. The only faces she saw were, at the base of the railings behind the camera, the children who had died, smiling from their photographs.

As if the children were filming.

Amelia covered her face with her hands. ‘Switch it off!’

Zenovia fumbled with the device and found the power button. The light vanished.

‘I’m going to find Aunt Sofia,’ said Amelia – her typical reaction to fear. Zenovia nodded, but did not join her, returning instead to the house. The house radiated the same sense of consciousness as the ruins: soaked with memories, stirring with souls. But there was something ominous in this animation; the house was tired, sad, weighed down with a knowledge that did not belong to the world of the children, but to the world of the adults. The house, Zenovia thought, knew exactly what the ruins wanted to say. It had witnessed everything: the bombing, the violence, the mourning. It even bore scars from shrapnel on its front wall.

Her ominous feeling growing, Zenovia climbed the stone steps to the roof. High places made her feel secure; up here, people became patterns, the houses of Meloria lit like candles in a shrine. Above, the clear sky was silk, clasping the moon like the orb of a crystal ball. Below, the silk was sliced by the ruins like scissors. Ahead, the silhouettes of the mountains articulated a different pattern of time: something ancient and immense. This vastness and silence shrunk Meloria and its sufferings to a burning match. Her heartbeat slowing, Zenovia closed her eyes and imagined Trepassey. Ghosts were not real in Trepassey, and neither was war; ruins were posters in history lessons, and bombings were special effects in movies. Zenovia made sense of her two countries by deciding that reality depended on belief. Because Trepassians were sure that the world worked one way, and Massians were sure it worked another. The world worked however people thought it worked, she thought. Each country was like its own DVD, with a select series of scenes, projected on psychological screens. Even the houses displayed different graphics. Massia’s had stone walls and verandas and sprawling shapes, while Trepassey’s were ordered rows of boxes like copy and paste.

To switch between them, all she had to do was press eject.

[Eject]

Chapter 2

[Play]

In Trepassey, mountains became maps, oranges became orange-flavoured sweets and stars became stickers. Massia turned into a fairytale world: hot and strange and secret. Zenovia usually stored it in a corner of her mind that she visited during boring lessons. This year, however, Massia did not stay inside its mental box. Each afternoon, when the adults collected the children from school, Zenovia saw a camera standing beside Aunt Sofia on the playground. But as soon as their aunt caught sight of her or Amelia, it transformed into an ordinary object: a tree, a railing, a parent.

Since their mother worked long hours as a nurse, and their father night shifts in a hotel, Aunt Sofia had taken care of Zenovia and Amelia since they were born. When they woke up in the night as infants, they cried for their aunt – and she always came immediately, soothing them until they slept. Zenovia’s mother said Aunt Sofia had insomnia, which meant she didn’t sleep well. That was why her eyes was so black. Zenovia thought her aunt was different to normal adults because she told them not to do what she did, like staying up late and smoking and eating sugar. Her back teeth were full of gold and silver fillings which Amelia called dental jewellery.

During games, Aunt Sofia acted whichever role they wanted. In Police, she was the thief, stealing toys until they locked her in prison. In Doctors, she was the patient, letting them wrap her legs in toilet paper bandages. In Hairdressers, she sat patiently while they brushed her dense mass of dark hair. Once Amelia had discovered a grey curl, and anxiously asked if she was damaged. But Aunt Sofia laughed and said it was silver: an award you get when you reach a certain age. If she was lucky, she’d get platinum white.

Sometimes, their aunt went on dates in the evenings, where she put on make-up and lipstick which made her look almost pretty. Aunt Sofia was not pretty, Zenovia thought: her nose was too prominent, her face too angular. But there was something compelling about her carved features, something that made you want to look at her. A sparkle. An excitement. A mystery. When her aunt returned late at night, Zenovia tried to spy on her conversations with her mother – but Aunt Sofia always caught her.

‘You are my little spy!’ she would exclaim, kissing her cheek. ‘You have to know everything, don’t you! I should take you with me. You can sit at a table in disguise, wearing dark glasses, hiding behind a newspaper. Hmm?’

‘You’re the only one that ever catches me,’ Zenovia would reply. ‘Did he like you?’

‘They always like me, melásta.’ Her tone was teasing, but Zenovia knew this was true. She thought it was because of the sparkle and the mystery. Or maybe because they wanted to protect her.

Because sometimes, Aunt Sofia looked extremely sad. When there was nobody around, she sat alone on the sofa with her legs crossed, her expression far away. Zenovia did not know why she was sad, but it scared her, like the silver strand of hair that had scared Amelia. In these moments, she would enter and hug her as tightly as she could. At her touch, her aunt’s expression brightened, the sadness vanishing so completely that Zenovia thought she had solved it.

Since their visit to Massia that summer, Aunt Sofia was not sad, exactly – but suspicious. And the more suspicious she became, the more frequently the camera appeared. Zenovia saw it standing in the corner of her aunt’s bedroom, or hovering above the television, or sitting on the kitchen counter. Zenovia had a desperate urge to see through the lens, but whenever she approached, Aunt Sofia’s attention switched, and the camera became a book, a lamp, a cup.

Meanwhile, their aunt scoured archives for previous documentaries about Massia’s two civil wars, arranging viewings at the Massian community hall.

‘Each documentary shows a certain point of view,’ she said. ‘History is a story. The way it’s told depends on the storyteller. A hero in one story is a villain in another, so you need to look at lots of versions before you decide what is true. This is called interpretation.’

‘What’s your version?’ asked Amelia.

Aunt Sofia looked thoughtful. ‘We left Massia just before the first civil war, melásta. So, my version is the one from abroad.’