In Vourvoulos, the priest had another concern. The small church had few icons that interested the Russian, the Crowned Madonna being the most interesting, which is why Father Alexis delayed painting it as long as he could on the excuse it was the most difficult technically. Once Vladimir had the Madonna, the priest wondered how many more commissions he could expect while stuck on that miserable rock in a sardine-laden sea. No, he had to accept Nick’s offer, there was no doubt about it. Somehow he would delay the Russian. Maybe he would simply be honest. The irony was that Vladimir wanted the original painting while Nick thought he was buying a copy, so in theory, Father Alexis could give each man what he expected to buy, except for the troublesome detail that the island’s most renowned icon would be missing. He considered if any of his other Virgin Mary knockoffs-in-progress could be upgraded to a full-fledged forgery, but they were obvious copies: too facilely executed rather than attuned to every detail. He didn’t have time to make another masterpiece. He briefly contemplated a to-hell-with-it strategy of selling them both and claiming that the original had been stolen—could he blame it on the deaf boy?—but that sounded like a Pandora’s box he did not want to open.
An equally urgent question was how to keep the Russian from taking the Crowned Madonna that very day, when that was what Father Alexis had arranged for him to do? Vladimir could be coming up the hill that very minute! He panicked, until his eyes lit upon his painter’s palette. Wet paint! He could put Vladimir off using it as an excuse and gain a couple of days to sort out a solution.
Hurriedly he swabbed more gold paint on the already gaudy frame. The icon deserved to be displayed far more beautifully, but the priest’s notion was that the cheesier the frame, the more likely the trafficked painting would be overlooked by customs officials, dismissed as a copy, albeit a good one.
The Russian flung open the vestry door. “Papoose!” he cried, and pushed past him to stand in awe before the Crowned Madonna. “She must be the original,” he finally murmured.
“She is,” Father Alexis admitted.
“She will be the queen of my collection. From the first time I see this Mother of God, I see my mother. She is exactly my mother!”
“She must have been a beautiful woman,” Father Alexis replied, as he did every time the Russian repeated himself; and not for the first time wondering how they each saw their own mother in the Crowned Madonna, when they themselves bore no resemblance whatsoever.
Unexpectedly, Vladimir burst into tears. He grabbed the icon off the easel and pressed his lips to it, not realizing the frame had wet paint.
Horrified, the priest wrestled it from him. “Let go! You’ll ruin it! You have paint on your hands!”
The Russian looked at his hands. “It is not ready today?”
“I touched up the frame for you.”
“You know I destroy your frames.”
Father Alexis passed him a rag. “That’s not the point. They get you through customs. Now I need to repaint the whole thing.”
“I come later to take it.”
“This paint needs two days to dry.”
“Now that she is finished, I must have her.”
“And risk ruining her? Besides, you have to put it in something— you can’t just walk out of here carrying it—and for that, it needs to be completely dry.”
Vladimir grunted. “Two days,” he said, making it sound like a threat. He turned to leave, and that’s when he noticed Nick’s pile of banknotes on the table. “What is this?”
“Someone bought one of my copies,” the priest replied, chagrined that he hadn’t put the money out of sight. It would have been tantamount to accepting Nick’s offer, so he left the money on the table, wishing the whole foul situation would simply go away.
The Russian looked at him suspiciously. “It’s a big price for a copy.”
“He’s an American. He doesn’t know what prices should be.”
“You are lying. You sell my Mother of God!”
“He wants the copy, not the original. He offered a lot of money.”
“And you give me what?”
“You get the original as soon as I paint another copy.”
“Not in two days!” the Russian bellowed, and swept Nick’s money onto the floor. From his own pocket, he pulled out a wad of bills secured by a rubber band and plopped it down. “I have paid for my painting. In two days, I take what is mine!”
Vladimir stormed out.
The priest’s hand was shaking when he closed the door behind him.
◆ ◆ ◆
NICK SET A TRAY WITH a coffeepot and mugs on the small table. The honeysuckle arbor was especially fragrant in the warming sun. Down in the port, a tour boat tooted its horn signaling its departure, while out to sea a small regatta raced past Bird Island.
“You must love waking up to this view,” Takis said. His hair was still wet from the shower.
“I could get used to it.” Nick chuckled while pouring coffee.
“What is it?” Takis asked.
“That was a pretty funny wake-up call this morning.”
“Athina? She doesn’t matter. I’m probably the only guy in the village who hasn’t tried to fuck her, so she’s okay with me.”
“Who are you when you’re not here?” Nick asked.
“I’m a techie. I wanted to do something in Australia other than work in a restaurant. If that’s all I was going to do, why leave? Forgetting for the moment that I hate the place, and if I was leaving to meet guys, I could probably meet guys in Athens. But I wanted a real job, not a restaurant job, and I wanted to meet a guy who wasn’t totally fucked up about sex—and that man probably doesn’t exist in Greece, that’s how fucked up this country is for gay men. If I wanted a job, I knew I needed a skill, and learned how to code. At least enough to get a job, and I did.”
“That’s great.”
“If what happened to Omar hadn’t happened, I would never have come back. It was just too terrible for Vassoula, and I knew nobody was helping her. Ironically, what happened to him sums up why I hate this place.”
“Tell me.”
“You have to remember that Omar was as handsome as Omar Sharif.”
“Omar Sharif was Egyptian, not Turkish.”
“It didn’t matter. That’s what the girls called him, and he did look like him.”
Nick poured more coffee. “Now I’m really intrigued.”
◆ ◆ ◆
VASSOULA WOKE UP IN A lonely bed. It had been lonely since Omar disappeared. She couldn’t bring herself to say died or killed himself because she hoped that, despite how gruesomely the skinheads had cut him, he would miraculously come back to her whole again. In that fantasy she envisioned handsome and dancing the syrtaki better than any Greek, a black stubble generously shadowing his cheeks— his cheeks that went missing.
Omar. He had given her a life when he came into hers. Unless she married, she was destined to remain her wretched mother’s handmaiden; and Vassoula would have nothing to do with the local boys, certainly not enough to marry one. She was darker complected than the Vourvouliani, and the boys, starting in their teens, called her Gypsy bitch for not putting out. She was adopted, so they freely assigned to her any origin that they wanted, but Vassoula knew she wasn’t Gypsy. She was Turkish. A nun at the orphanage disliked her for it, and wanted to be rid of her enough not to mention it to prospective parents. Secretly, Vassoula reveled in her Turkishness. She nurtured it because it nurtured her to know she was different from the people who treated her so harshly, abusing her verbally—and otherwise, as some did eventually, before she was liberated from the orphanage’s form of incarceration to become a servant in another.
Ten years of mopping floors later, Omar arrived in Vourvoulos. Movie star handsome with dark moody eyes, clever, and Turkish; she had conjured him many times, dreaming only of men like him when she gave pleasure to herself. Beyond that pleasure, she dreamt of a man to free her from servitude, not trade one enslaved situation for another. In
stinctively, Omar understood that. His family, too, had suffered from discrimination for being Turkish, or certainly the consequences of it. Only after she moved in with him did he confess that his family had once lived on the island; an extended family, and prosperous when you added up all their land; land too rocky and scrubby for the Greeks to bother with, though their ancient ancestors had been the first to terrace it. It was those stony plots—sometimes no bigger than four strides long and two deep—that Omar’s peasant ancestors had worked, finding them sufficiently fecund to sustain their families.
All that ended with the Exchange, when the diaspora Turks and Greeks were forced to trade places, overnight becoming refugees in their own countries. Omar’s great grandparents left Vourvoulos with little more than their crying fifteen-year-old son—his grandfather— unable to understand why he had to lose all his friends, Greek and Turkish. Once back in Turkey, everyone knew, they knew they’d never recreate their village no matter how much they would miss it, but instead would flee to relatives if they knew their whereabouts, or be shuffled off to temporary camps—as was Omar’s family—while a useless bureaucracy scrambled to do what little it could for the many tens of thousands like them. Omar’s grandfather, having just wished his boyhood Greek friends a forever farewell, had to do the same to his Turkish mates only a few hours later when their boat made its landing in what still stood of Smyrna.
Though the fires that destroyed the legendary city had been put out, a charred smell hung heavily in the air. On the docks, hucksters and shysters descended on the refugees even as government agents shunted them into buses to take them to a camp—equally rife with hucksters and shysters. Thus began decades of poverty inflicted on Omar’s family, starting before he was born. All his growing-up years, he heard reminisces of their lost island: its fresh air, azure sea, and wild lavender roses—a sharp contrast to their stuffy apartment in a shanty neighborhood of sprawling Istanbul.
Omar had simply appeared in Vourvoulos one day, not ten Greek words in his head, and soon became the curiosity of the village. Turks rarely visited the tiny village, and still fewer stayed for more than a night or two, but Omar rented a room for a month, letting his landlady know that he would likely keep it longer. He only did the usual things tourists do—hike in the hills, swim in the sea, learn the four-syllable Greek word for thanks—but that didn’t stop rumors from spreading that he was trafficking drugs or might be a white slaver. Certainly, he was up to no good; no Turk ever had been. Omar, though, was undaunted. At once, he was enamored with the mythical lost island of his storied childhood, and equally glad to escape the grinding conditions back home. He had no intention of leaving.
Omar kept it a secret that his family had lived there for generations. If it were known, he worried it would only stir up fears that he had returned to reclaim property or seek revenge, when he wanted neither. He wanted the idyllic life described from afar, not hardscrabble Istanbul, which was becoming more unbearable under the growing power of intolerant imams. By age twenty-five, he’d made the decision not to spend the rest of his life kowtowing to men who dressed their women in sacks, forbade everyone simple pleasures, and governed through fear. Fending off his mother’s relentless efforts to get him married, he waited tables in two restaurants, earning excellent tips because of his extraordinary good looks. By the time he was thirty, he had saved enough money that he wouldn’t arrive in Greece a penniless refugee, but an immigrant able to sustain himself until he found a way to make a living. He’d gambled and he’d won.
The risks Omar could not have anticipated were the threats posed by Greece’s internal turmoil, especially its Depression-era economy giving rise to a fascist insurgency. Or so Vassoula was mulling over that morning, after rousing herself from her lonely bed to sip coffee on the terrace, perched high over the village with a clear shot of the long beach stretching into the distance until it melded with the coastline. That view had once brought her such joy, not only for its beauty but for what it represented: her second escape, and the first into an unexpected freedom. Her first escape had been from the orphanage, the second from her adoptive servitude. She had escaped into Omar’s liberating arms, holding her on that terrace through long talks she had never imagined possible; and when they felt like making love outdoors, they did.
She could almost see him again, walking down that long beach, becoming a speck before turning back. He worked hard, he partied hard, he loved hard—and he needed time alone. He needed a time not to talk to anybody, though he talked to himself, gesticulating and working out whatever needed working out. He did that most mornings while other village men gathered in the kafeneios for their first coffee. Initially Vassoula was suspicious of Omar’s need to be alone, and spied on him through the binoculars, watching him approach Poustis Point because it was there that her father loitered; and sometimes it was there where Omar turned back, but not always, not if he was having a particularly troubling conversation with himself. But never once did he disappear out of sight too long to be accused of her father’s sort of sordid absence.
The morning when it happened, their lovemaking had been especially tender. Only the night before, they had decided to have a baby, and made love then, too. When Omar left for his walk, she felt a special longing—a worried hollowness—and took the binoculars from the cupboard. She knew his body language better than her own and easily spotted him.
Omar, distracted by the conversation with himself, approached Poustis Point. She saw the skinheads before he did. Three of them hovering in the rocks, conferring and planning their attack. Turn back! she wanted to shout. Stop talking to yourself and look up! But her voice would never carry that far.
She saw everything that happened.
She even knew what was said because Omar survived to repeat it.
“Do you have a cigarette?” a skinhead asked.
“I am sorry. I do not smoke.”
“Maybe the problem is, your cigarettes are wet.”
Vassoula saw Omar tip his head questioningly.
“I am sorry. I do not understand.”
“Maybe you help your friends swim across.”
“I do not swim here. I walk here.”
“Did you hear that, guys? He walked here.”
“Then he must’ve walked on water,” a second skinhead scoffed. “With his accent, he wasn’t born here.”
The third added, “He’s probably a Turkish cocksucker.”
“Is that why you’re out here? Hoping to get your cock sucked?”
“Probably by a refugee.”
“Or do you suck theirs?”
The skinheads laughed.
Omar sensed he was in trouble. “I don’t understand.”
“Hear that guys? He doesn’t understand. What can we do to make him understand?”
“I go home,” he said, and pointed to the village. “My wife waits for me.”
Vassoula saw him point. Come back! she was screaming inside.
“You should never have left home,” sneered the first skinhead. “None of your filth should’ve.”
“I go back now.”
Omar turned and took a couple of steps.
“Not so fast,” the first skinhead said. When Omar didn’t stop, he barked, “Hey!”
Omar paused.
Just keep walking! Vassoula begged.
“I’m not finished with you.”
Omar faced the skinhead. “My wife waits for me.”
He turned away again.
The skinhead signaled, and his two pals ran up and grabbed him. Omar struggled to defend himself, but together they managed to wrench his arms behind him.
The first skinhead approached him, menacing him with a knife.
Vassoula, seeing it flash in the morning sun, was going mad. Please God, no! No!
He kicked at the skinhead, who laughed, and stepped around him and put the blade to his throat. “Please don’t,” Omar begged.
“Fucking. Faggot. Filth. Feeding the refugees then fucking them. The
re’s probably some Arab greasing up his asshole waiting for you behind the rocks.”
“My wife is waiting for me.”
“Fucking bitch is going to wish you never came home.”
Vassoula, through the binoculars, couldn’t make out what happened next. She saw the skinhead flick his knife twice, each time tossing something to the seagulls on the beach. Then they released Omar and his hands instinctively covered his face. For a moment, she thought they had cut out his eyes; and later remembering that first thought, she would wonder if it might not have been more merciful than letting him see his own ruined face.
At that moment, though, she wasn’t thinking of anything except saving Omar, and flew out of the house. “HELP! HELP! Omar’s been stabbed! Help!” she never stopped crying as she flung herself down the village path. A dozen people trailed after her, looking past her wild hair to Omar stumbling toward them. For Vassoula, the blood seeping through his fingers glistened so bright red that the rest of the world turned gray.
They stopped, only feet apart. Vassoula could see they hadn’t cut out his eyes, but what the skinheads had done would forever haunt them. Omar would never see anything the same again. He certainly would never be looked at in the same admiring way.
His eyes pleaded for help as he lowered his hands.
Hers expressed horror when he did.
His knees buckled and he collapsed.
Four men ran up and grabbed his arms and legs to haul him cumbersomely back to the village. Another two trotted alongside, stripped of their shirts that they pressed to his slain cheeks to stem the blood. Vassoula stumbled after them, too shocked by what she had seen to believe it possible; and yet there was Omar, being toted in front of her, the tagalong women ululating their distress as if he had already died. He wouldn’t, not then. He would survive to live a freak’s hell.
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