Fire on the Island

by Timothy Jay Smith

  Vassoula pulled up and got out of a truck. She waited for the saws to fall quiet, which they did, one by one, before she said to Lukas, “I hear you’re giving away wood. I could use some. It’s already turning into a cold winter.”

  “I’ll give you my wood!” jeered one of the guys.

  “And your syphilis!” she spat back.

  “And I always blamed that on you.”

  “You gave it to yourself. Malaka!”

  The other men laughed.

  Masturbator! she had called him, the most bandied-about word in Greek, used as a joke or a slur; and in that instance, Vassoula meant it as both. She knew all the guys. When they were younger and smelled better, she’d kissed a few and sometimes did a little more. They never forgave her for not marrying one of them; or for continuing to deny herself the pleasure of them when she no longer had her virginity or fidelity to protect.

  “A couple of you guys want to load her up?” Lukas asked.

  More than a couple of them competed for the task, heaving thick branches and splits into the back of her truck. “I’ll cut those into logs for you when they dry out some,” one guy offered.

  “Takis can do that for me.”

  “I didn’t know he could do anything for a woman.”

  The men snickered, until Vassoula stared them into silence. “My brother came back to help me when none of the ‘men’ in this village would. Thank you for the wood, Lukas. I know you didn’t want to cut down your trees. At least your house was spared.”

  She got into her truck and drove off.

  Every man standing there fantasized about the one shot he’d like to have with her. Then someone fired up his angry chainsaw. A second one started, and a third. Soon a cloud of sawdust was rising over their heads again.

  “So, am I over the top?” Shirley asked.

  Lydia spun around to her mother, hip askew in the doorway, and wearing the leopard pants. They shimmered in the bright morning light, as did a gold braid looping through her hair. “The Mount Everest of over the top,” she replied.

  “I knew you wouldn’t like it.”

  “At least get rid of that hair thing.”

  “Yes, I know, it doesn’t always work.” Shirley pulled it out.

  “Sometimes, listen to your own doubts. Who wants to kill you?”

  “Kill me?”

  “Yes. You, or Dad, or both of you. Who pops into your mind?”

  “You!”

  “Be serious. I’m trying something.”

  “Well, I don’t know what you’re trying, but I’ll be ready to kill somebody if there is no coffee left.” Shirley took a mug from the cupboard and filled it.

  “You don’t seem very concerned that the arsonist might have been trying to kill one of you.”

  “Kill one of us? Nonsense! Some fool threw a cigarette out the car window. Anyone knows, it’s been dry enough for a fire.”

  “Someone set it, Mum. They found a detonator.”

  “A detonator?”

  “One of those lumpy Styrofoam things.”

  “They’ve been finding them everywhere.”

  “It wasn’t found everywhere, it was found here, down the hill from your house when the winds were blowing in this direction.”

  “That could have been coincidence.”

  “The winds? They’ve been blowing in the same direction this time of year since anyone thought to mention the weather.”

  “Who would want to kill us?”

  “That’s my question.”

  Shirley sipped her coffee. “No one. So if that’s your bad news, I don’t believe anyone wants to kill us. They just put that thing where they could.”

  “Maybe. But that’s not my bad news.”

  “I could have guessed as much. Go ahead, try again to ruin my day.”

  “I’m closing the restaurant.”

  “I know. You told me. In two weeks.”

  “I mean permanently.”

  “Permanently?”

  “I’ve barely managed to survive for the last two years, and this year is even worse. The shitty economy was hard enough to deal with, and now the refugees.”

  “You’ve also managed to feed your family and give Athina a job.”

  “That’s called robbing Peter to pay Paul, and Peter is officially broke.”

  “Oh honey, I’m sorry. I know how hard you’ve worked. Do you need to make the decision now? They’re predicting the economy will improve next year.”

  “They’re also predicting more refugees, so they can predict what they want but I pay the rent. I don’t want to pay it all winter if there’s a chance that I won’t reopen.”

  Shirley poured herself more coffee. “I can’t think of a time when there wasn’t a restaurant in the family.”

  “Neither can I, and that’s part of the problem. It’s all Athina knows. I want her to have a chance to do something else.”

  “Does she want to do something else?”

  “How can she know until she gets some experience? I’m going to encourage her to use it as an opportunity to spend a year with her cousins in Australia. It would also solve another problem before it becomes a bigger one.”

  “Oh dear, more bad news?” Shirley asked.

  “Athina thinks that she’s in love with Ridi. She’s not said or done anything, which makes me think it’s serious. Usually she’s all gaga by now and can’t stop talking about a new boyfriend. This time she’s being secretive.”

  Lydia sighed, recalling the girl’s many admirers, and how much trouble they had always been. Every testosterone-driven male had gawked at her—almond-eyed, tawny, and tall—and a few had tried to do more than that. Lydia knew the day was coming when one of them would succeed. She hoped it would be someone special and not an Albanian kid in heat.

  “Isn’t he a nice boy?” asked Shirley.

  “I didn’t say he wasn’t a nice boy.”

  “And hardworking? And handsome?”

  “He’s got bad teeth.”

  “Bad teeth? Have you looked at some of the boys in this village? What if she truly loves him?”

  “I don’t care if she truly loves him. We’re finished with restaurants in this family. We don’t need an Albanian waiter.”

  “You are trying to arrange your daughter’s life, and she won’t like it.”

  “I’m trying to encourage her to do better, not arrange her life. It’s just all happening serendipitously, that’s all.”

  “Serendipitously?” Shirley asked. “What, that she loses her job, loses her boyfriend, and is sent into exile all at the same time?”

  ◆ ◆ ◆

  NICK BOUNCED UP THE ROUGH track and pulled into the square of an abandoned village. Weeds grew in the cracked and tumbled down walls of the buildings that once surrounded it. On the tallest surviving wall, a red hammer and sickle had been freshly painted. According to Lydia’s map, the arsonist’s first fire had been there—or at least the first fire attributed to the arsonist. There was always the possibility that fires had gone unnoticed, too remote or burning themselves out too fast, and briefly Nick wondered if those other fires would change the pattern on Lydia’s map enough to suggest a different target. He decided not. The arsonist had sent the worry beads to make sure the threat to Vourvoulos was not underestimated.

  Walking around the ruined square, he imagined the shops and houses that had been there, easily identifying the common well by its basin and the bakery for its clay oven, and finding a couple of broken chairs in what he guessed had been the kafeneio. The largest building had partially caved in, but half its dome ceiling remained, and where the flooring was missing, an elaborate drainage system was revealed. It had been a hammam, Nick guessed, so the village had been Turkish before the Exchange.

  He poked around the ruins looking for traces of the fire, and finding none, followed a rough path into the fields where he came to a cemetery enclosed by a low wall. He pushed through its drooping gate and walked alongside the graves, each demarcated by a lo
ng slab of marble flush with the ground. Solemn photos of the deceased looked out from behind squares of cloudy glass mounted on simple headstones. Examining them, Nick realized many had been young men who died in the civil war that followed on the heels of World War II. That would explain the hammer and sickle in the square: it had been a communist village, and probably evacuated by the government when it was defeated. The villagers would have been exiled, and apparently none had returned. Or had someone? Who painted the hammer and sickle?

  Nick came to another low wall. On the other side, he spotted a partially burnt tree amidst a second section of graves with elaborate headstones. He found the gate into it. The flat groundstones were chiseled from local rock, not marble, and the headstones were tall, skinny, and capped with carved fezzes. Nick realized it must have been the Turkish cemetery before the Exchange, and looked as if it hadn’t been tended since then. All the headstones tipped at odd angles, caused by tree roots, or were toppled by earthquakes, and were overgrown with wild lavender roses. He saw where some bushes had burned and scorched the tree over them, but the fire hadn’t spread, probably because it had been set in December when everything would have been green. But why had the arsonist chosen to start a fire at that particular spot when there were many off-the-beaten-path spots easier to reach? Why an abandoned cemetery? Did that spot in the cemetery have a special significance?

  Nick took pictures of the headstones immediately surrounding the burned shrubbery with close-ups of the calligraphy he guessed to be the deceased persons’ names. He rolled over a couple of headstones that had fallen over, and when he overturned a third, hundreds of black widow spiders scrambled in every direction, some springing onto his shoes and pants. Frantically he hopped around brushing them off his legs. Stumbling backward into the Greek section of the cemetery, he pulled off his pants and turned them inside out to make sure no spiders lingered there. Confident there were none, he dressed, and returned to his car to find the second fire.

  ◆ ◆ ◆

  “I KNOW IT’S ALL SECRET and everything, but who is she going to be?” Shirley asked, plopping into one of Lydia’s easy chairs, careful not to spill her wine. “If we don’t know who she’s supposed to be, how can we criticize her costume?”

  “I think she’s asking us for helpful hints, Mum, not criticism.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “Yes, but will Athina know what you mean?” Lydia sighed and sank into a chair beside her mother, so the two women appeared to be waiting for a movie to start. “Cheers, Mum,” she said, and sipped her own glass of wine.

  “Isn’t it at least two hours until your approved cocktail hour?” her mother pointed out.

  “I need this,” Lydia said, and she did. The lunch crowd had gone almost before it arrived. No latecomers, no lingerers over an extra bottle, no last-minute change of mind to ditch the diet while on vacation and order dessert. Her few midday customers had been as lean as the whole mean season. “Besides, isn’t it all right that I take after you?”

  “Oh darling, of course it’s all right! But did you have to marry a fisherman, too?”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “There are never enough fish.”

  Lydia set down her glass. “Half the time I don’t know what you mean.”

  From the hallway, Athina called, “Are you ready?”

  “We’re waiting!” her mother answered.

  The girl stepped into the room draped in a white sheet, looking adoringly at her teddy bear pressed to her breast as if nursing. Her hands were wrapped in gauzy white bandages.

  “She’s so pretty, isn’t she?” Lydia whispered.

  “Yes, but I don’t know who she’s supposed to be. Not everyone knows all that hocus-pocus well enough to recognize Saint Hoozits at her spinning wheel, or Saint Peter turning himself into a fish, or maybe it was a fish into wine—or whatever they all supposedly did.”

  “Try to be helpful,” Lydia urged.

  “I could be more helpful if I knew which saint had a teddy bear.”

  “I’m sure it’s only symbolic.”

  “That’s my point. Symbolic of what?”

  Athina stopped and cast her eyes heavenward, feigning a pious look.

  “What’s she doing?”

  “Be patient, Mum.”

  Suddenly, the girl’s expression turned ferocious and she flung the teddy bear against a wall. She clenched her fists at her chest as an Amazon warrior might, and then flung open the sheet to reveal a second costume.

  The two older women gasped.

  The girl wore a black miniskirt that started and ended in the six inches above patterned stockings that disappeared into red tennis shoes. A shoulder harness held a pillow against her stomach making her look very pregnant. “I still need to make something to cover the pillow. I didn’t have time to work on it because I had to clean Grandma’s car. These—” she held up her bandaged hands—“are because of the cats.”

  “I told you to be careful.”

  “Thanks, Mom. Can you guess who I am?”

  “You’re the Panayia!” Shirley exclaimed, using the popular name for the Virgin Mary.

  “Grandma! How did you know?”

  “It’s obvious. Mary is the only saint who got pregnant.”

  “It’s not the Miss Saint Contest, Grandma. It’s the Miss Icon Contest.”

  “Saint or icon, it doesn’t matter,” Lydia interjected. “You are not dressing like that. I’ll not have you embarrass this family.”

  “I’m part of this family, too.”

  “It will embarrass your father.”

  “Why will he care? He’s not religious.”

  “In villages, people care about these things.”

  “That’s because they’re old-fashioned. I’m portraying Mary as a modern woman.”

  “Don’t you ‘Mary’ me when you look like a knocked-up whore.”

  “That’s my point exactly,” Athina defended herself. “Mary, a virgin? How real is that? She was too embarrassed to admit she got pregnant by Joseph and blamed it on God? How repressed is that? I want to show both sides of Mary, because women have two sides: the side society allows us to show, which means what men allow us to show, and our other side. Our natural side.”

  “It’s rather wonderful,” her grandmother said. “Like one of those Shakespeare plays set in modern times that’s meant to be symbolic that nothing has changed for people.”

  “You stay out of this, Mum. You’re only here to criticize.”

  “At least one of you gets it, but will everybody? Will they think ‘Mary’ or just see a ‘knocked-up whore’ like you do? Maybe I should hold my teddy bear like she always holds Jesus, you know, feeding him?”

  “You will not make a mockery of things people respect.”

  “I’m not mocking anything. I’m trying to make a point about men, and especially about men taking responsibility.”

  “You’re too young to know about men.”

  “Are you kidding me? I’m eighteen.”

  “Not until next week. If you participate in the procession dressed like that, Father Alexis will use it to convince everyone that we are heretics. We will never get the fuel tank moved.”

  “Is everything in life about the fuel tank?”

  “If it explodes and kills us, yes, it is.”

  “And you call me dramatic!”

  “You need a crown like Mary has in the church,” Shirley suggested. “Whores don’t wear crowns. That way everyone will get it instantly that you are a Mary for our times. I’m sure you will win the contest on creativity alone!”

  “Do you see, Mom, how that’s a helpful suggestion, and not criticism?”

  ◆ ◆ ◆

  NICK ENTERED THE CITY HALL’S gate and found himself staring at Mayor Elefteros’s generous rump. The old man was bent over touching up the tangerine-colored paint on the steps.

  “Kali mera,” he greeted Nick.

  “Good morning.”

  “
Have you solved the mystery of our fires?”

  “You might be able to help me.” Nick explained that he wanted to examine the land records to see if there might be a clue why the arsonist had chosen the specific sites for the fires. Was there some link, something they shared, beyond being secluded? Secluded, that is, until the Dingo Fire.

  “We don’t have exact maps,” Mayor Elefteros warned him. “Only the church has always used surveyors. Everything else is speculative.”

  “Speculative?”

  “You will see.”

  The mayor closed the lid on the can of paint. “Walk on this side,” he cautioned, and led Nick into the building.

  A minute later, they descended the narrow spiral staircase into a spacious underground room. In the middle stood a sturdy table and chair, and around them, a circle of filing cabinets. “Our land documents are in drawers on this side of the room,” the mayor said.

  “And in the others?”

  “Our memories.”

  “Your memories?”

  “You will see.”

  The mayor left, and Nick, curious about the memory drawers, started with them. Several were crammed with photographs dating back decades, a visual record of how much—or little—the village had changed. A couple of shots from the port up the hill suggested it hadn’t expanded much, in terms of size or structures, but the port itself had been transformed. For decades, only the Coast Guard station, an ice house for fishermen, and a couple of shabby restaurants had shared the wharf. A photograph dated 1923 showed the fuel tank being erected during another refugee crisis. Decades later, the ice house had been converted into what became Lydia’s Kitchen. Eventually, the euro prosperity that had rippled through Greece reached tiny Vourvoulos as well, filling every waterfront space with restaurants, cafés, and free-spending tourists—until the economic crisis.

  Other drawers contained Bibles and diaries, letters and notes—some bound by ribbons, most in a jumble. A pile of ornate worry beads filled another. Obviously old, they were made of polished stones or ceramic beads, and the silver caps for their tassels were hand-worked. What he initially mistook for designs he realized were Turkish letters. He picked up a set, and flicking it back and forth, thought how he would like to hear the stories the beads had witnessed.