Elegy of a Wasteland Migrant
I left off from Agios Stefanos today in search of a new life.
I pulled on my wool socks and squeezed into my wool jumper. It was hardly enough to stave off the cold bite of the morning. I could only have left in the morning. Victor Maianou would have talked me out of leaving. The village only has him now. Victor and a thousand sheep to graze on dust and groundwater.
I breached the horizon of our broken vale long before the sun. Beyond the limits of the town’s sunken pit, the flat expanse of Thel’s ‘holy’ wasteland receded like lonely aeons. I knew that somewhere, on the edge of the ancient continent, the Florian sea roiled with turgid winds that even now blasts me against the sallow plains. There is no escape from its gusts. Except in pits of wallowing poverty or at Canon City, the World City, the Windy City, God’s City. That is what awaits me. I made the sign of the cross and set off northwestbound.
When at last the Great War for Canon City’s sovereignty ended, Agios Stefanos was a decimated husk of its prior population. We had huddled meekly in our hovel as the biplanes scuttled overscalp, spitting miasma across the already barren landscape. Between the greys of the smog and the terrain, it was almost impossible to see the legions which feasted and died on our doorsteps, our brothers and sisters slain over a city that belonged neither to us nor our enemy.
It had to be today. One more day surrounded by sheepsfilth and dull vicissitudes would have rotted me, transformed me into the same soulless husk of a man that Victor now is. It had to be this morning. One more hour and Victor would have caught me, pleaded with me to stay. This way, Victor will wake up, have his stale coffee, tend to the sheep, and probably forget I even existed. He will survive on his own until the chill takes him or until the wolves which have plagued our flock catch on to his helplessness. Then, Agios Stefanos will be a dilapidating ruin, another landmark in the shimmering marsh.
Now, I trudge through slovenly puddles alongside unfaltering boulders. A mass of rubble seems to roll by as I transgress the otherwise unchanging open landscape. The horizon is unerringly flat and glistens with the light of flittering pools of water carried on distant winds from the unabideable sea. I pass by a low cairn which warns of another sinkhole. As I pass by, circumventing the edge of the pit, its abandoned structures bleat at me in helplessness. Another town lost to modernity.
After the war, Barbara Distinis had been the first of us to make a heading for Canoniç. She rode off with some cavalrymen passing through town after hearing about the great urban sprawl of the city. Apparently, the city was bigger than anything we would ever see, and the buildings were tall enough to block the sun. None of us had seen anything taller than the willow tree which shuddered softly in a nearby grove. When her letter returned a year later in 1917 smelling of paper cash and telling of opportunity and prosperity in the big city, almost every household in the village sent a representative to earn his way in Canoniç. Soon enough, our urbanised cousins were paying for their families to join them in the City of the World. By 1923, only a few villagers were left in Agios Stefanos.
Two days ago, Magda Boskova died. Her body had had to be stored in my house, being the closer to the surface of our two houses. (That is, between the two living residents of the hole we called a village). With only a table and a bed to my name, I spent the night trying desperately and vainly to avoid looking at the dreadful corpse of the only woman I had ever loved. Was it too late to tell her then, how I felt? From the discomfort of my bed, I watched her still silhouette spread across my table in the dim morning light as I waited for Victor to wake so we could bury her.
Eventually, the knock came. “Grigorias? Wake up you sack of stones,” he called, already grating me with his inhospitable personality before the day could even start. I opened the door to the familiar sight of Victor’s wrinkled and pitted visage shaded by his faded green shepherd’s hat.
“Hello, uncle,” was all I managed to say.
We loaded Magda into the hearse and drew the dark box by hand up the slope of the town to the surface. We spent most of the morning digging the hole, which neither of us had any experience in. Despite there being a crematorium in the chapel at the base of our sinkhole at Agios Stefanos, Boskova had expressed to us that she wished to be buried in the marsh — the first to be buried there since centuries. Once it was deep enough (as far as Victor could tell at least), we gently set her down in it. I had no strength nor desire to speak, so Victor simply said, “Born in the earth, die in the earth. Welcome to your bothros, sister.”
It was when Victor left to tend to the sheep and while I filled in Magda Boskova’s grave that I decided to leave today. There is nothing left for me in Agios Stefanos. I erected a small epitaph of dark stone and went to my early slumber.
Here I shuffle, condemned by my own ineptitude to roam nigh-on aimlessly toward the greatest city in the world. The wind is strong and it snatches at my ankles through my thin trousers. I pull my coat in close to stop it flapping against my face. The leaves of a willow rustle wildly nearby. The occasional spray of muddy water or stinging dust causes me to shield my eyes, and I have to look around after to regain my bearings. The horizon continues to glide into eternity with scintillating pools, marked only by dead trees and cracked boulders. I scramble over a mass of drying rubble and moss. At the zenith of my climb, I spot a short cairn in the distance marking another sinkhole.
As I march toward it, ever northwestbound, I trip over a stone of black onyx on a mound. I am reminded of Magda Boskova, and I weep for her and for Victor as I take my lunch on the edge of the sinkhole which contains only rubble.
When my cousin, Ionas Ascanius, left for the city, he left behind his flock of sheep — the best and largest in the region. He entrusted it to me, and I thought I had inherited the livestock of the gods. My wool won best yarn that year in the town hall farmer’s competition. Next year over, his cousin, Gabriela Mazdic, who had herself come into possession of a great plethora of inheritances left behind by the emigrants of Agios Stefanos, left to become a window washer in Canon City. Once again, I was entrusted with her property — by then, there was hardly anybody left to take it on. By ’22, these inheritances were meaningless to me. I had been gifted, left in charge of, or entrusted with so many homes, sheep, clothes, and sundries that I neither could manage it, nor did I care to any longer. The food sat mildewing in the storehouses; the clothes were chewed by moths; the sheep became sickly and gaunt. I chose to move into Ioanna Ioaninou’s house — the small one on the ridge — to minimise the work for myself and to move closer to Magda (what good that means for me now…). Well, Victor will care for it all now. He is officially the richest man in Agios Stefanos! Victor Maianou, Prince of Rot!
A yellow haze settles over the spoilt plain now, likely winds from the desert in the north. I am surely drawing close to the main road, where I can flag a truck or a coach to ferry me to the city. According to their letters, this was the way the others travelled to reach Canoniç.
What opportunity must await me there! Perhaps I could open a cafe? or work in a hotel fetching cars for the high-rolling customers? or try my hand at poetry? I wonder how receptive the citizens of the world city would be to a shepherd’s goat-song. Ionas Ascanius wrote to me that his home is a coffin, and his work is a prison, and this is the way things are in the great city. Still, I imagine his pockets must be full and his mind at peace, which is more than I can say for living in Agios Stefanos.
So, still I proceed along the dark dust and frigid puddles which stain my socks like a smoker’s fingers. The lingering sun dances on the skyline, piercing through smog and wind. I rub my hands desperately against the lances of the wasteland gales. I cross under an arch of rubble where sheep play and graze, and I spot a cairn in the distance which marks a warning for travellers against falling into a sinkhole. When I reach it, I look down into its depths and spy a stranger in a shepherd’s hat among empty buildings. I press on.
At the edge of town, I stumble on a dark rock next to a heap of soil. I feel inspired to mark my journey, to be remembered. I kneel down and scratch off whatever inscription was on the surface of the rock to write my own:
Here walked Grigorias Stefanios. Find him on the road to Canon City!