An excerpt from Fiction by Antigone Kefala
The following excerpt is from ‘The Island’, a short story featured in Fiction, one of two commemorative editions bringing together the work of Antigone Kefala published in April 2025.
The office building was four storeys high with narrow windows. The façade decorated with flowers and garlands that hung over each window in a plaster that had become brown with time. Inside it was full of small rooms and corridors all painted light-green and smelling of disinfectant – a smell of chlorine that had permeated the whole building over the years, that had become by now second nature. Even the books, in that windowless room in which I worked, had been tinged by it.
Erik Gosse, the boss, was a myopic young man, with wild curly hair. In the morning, I could hear him open the door of his office, cut the air swiftly with the flaps of his black coat, which he seemed to wear permanently, then burst in through the door of the office, lighted by neon lights and so narrow that three people could hardly stand in the middle.
After closing the door carefully, he would remain undecided in front of the spare table, then push the papers aside and sit there dangling his legs, take out of his pockets tins of tobacco and a few pipes, and fill them greedily, his fine gold-rimmed glasses falling over his nose while he talked. And I stayed at my table pretending that I was working, listening peacefully to all that blonde noise that came in waves together with the scent of tobacco, and made no moves that could possibly alarm him. But he was more resilient than he looked, having survived in that department for so long, hiding behind a series of little mannerisms, a myopic way of looking through them, as if unaware of their existence, given to noisy outbursts which he found they would never dare interrupt.
He was doing research at the time for a book on the people who had come to the Island, in mythical times, in the big canoes, and was just discovering the tales of the ‘Great Woman of the Night’, and the ‘Wingless Bird’. He spoke of his theory with which he was trying to revolutionise the attitude of the country to its past. He claimed that in order to understand history, one needed a type of vision that only people placed at the crossroads could provide. That is, people who lived between cultures, who were forced to live double lives, belonging to no group, and these he called ‘the people in between’. This vision, he maintained, was necessary to the alchemy of cultural understanding.
It was a limited hypothesis, he agreed, useful maybe only in a country such as this, in which only now were they beginning to take an interest in their past. But not quite yet, so obsessed was everyone with the future, bringing up their children as if nothing had gone before them, so that they ate and imagined that no one had eaten before them, and they built houses as if no one had built before them. Each generation that began here lived fanatically with the idea that it marked the start of the road.
As regards the past, he said, it was kept, as I could see, in all these grey metal cabinets that filled the room and had gone mouldy now, and no one talked about it in their everyday lives. It was a substance that was being examined in a few offices and universities, a secret vice, practised like taxidermy, the products of which were shown to children on holidays. And it remained in them together with the smell of antiseptic, of dust, of a decomposition that took place under glass, surrounded by artificial lights and sawdust.
He was trying his hypothesis out on me to see my reaction. I was one of those people in between. But did I have the vision? I took the idea home to discuss it with Aunt Niki and Mina over dinner. Maybe Aunt Niki had it, she was older and had been here longer. But I was still a revolutionary. I wanted other people to understand me. I wanted them all to understand me, to like me, to admire me.
I wanted us all to do marvellous things. What? I had as yet no precise idea. Some fantastic, world-shattering act. I rushed forward to give them all the gifts I had, feeling always that I was not giving enough. I was full of longing for unknown things – for open spaces, warm people, the scent of hot stones in the sun. A longing for something that would raise us, as in Byzantine paintings, make us float through the air, disappear in shafts of light, become a line in space. I was sure that there were others who felt the same. I kept watching them attentively to discern the signs.
I watched them now as I went to work, the office my first holiday job, this other side of everyday life that I had not been directly involved in before. All these morning and afternoon teas, and the lunches. Time had been divided into two categories – work and leisure. The concepts came up frequently in discussions, over lunches in the cafeteria with the formica tables and the green lavatory tiles on the walls, where they sat segregated, the women together and the men together. The men still discussing the intricacies of such concepts as ‘Officers and Gentlemen’. Work and leisure as two separate things, with rituals that were not to be confused.
Work was an uninteresting but necessary thing, like a bitter medicine that one had to take in as small doses as possible between set given hours, say, eight o’clock in the morning and five o’clock in the afternoon. This was the sacred time of work. They all moved towards it in small faithful steps, in spite of the continuous rain, and the hail, and the wind, with neat umbrellas and plastic raincoats, and lunch boxes and an apple. Armies of them, obedient and resigned.
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