Lily and the Lost Boy

by Paula Fox

  Then Mr. Kalligas had found them a house to rent. He had strolled over to them one evening as they sat around a table at Giorgi’s taverna, introduced himself, sat down, and spoken to them in his quick, odd English, which, he told them, he’d learned during the years he’d been a cook in the British navy. It was clear from that first meeting that he’d appointed himself their guide and friend on Thasos.

  “Come on, Lily!” exclaimed Paul. “You’re dreaming.”

  He hadn’t spoken to her so impatiently in a long while. “As if you didn’t stand around half the day like an owl,” she said sharply.

  “There’s Mr. Kalligas,” Paul said. Far down the path, she saw the old man in the dark blue suit he always wore. He was making his way around the temple of Dionysus, carrying a platter covered with a cloth. He would be taking a roast home from the baker. The Coreys too, like almost everyone in the village, took their roasts to the baker to cook in his large oven. Only bread was baked in the small clay ovens people had in their yards.

  They reached a high wall beyond which was their own yard. “Wait!” warned Lily.

  An ancient woman was dragging herself by her hands across the path to her house opposite the Coreys’. Behind her the pipe of a public water faucet poked out of the ground. Every afternoon she came to it to wash her feet. Lily heard her groaning and sighing. She looked like a long bundle of sticks tied together, quite like the sticks they had seen her gathering as she crept and crawled about in her own yard. It was her chore in her family, collecting firewood for their bread oven. Her great-great-granddaughter, Stella, told the Coreys she was 103 years old. Almost ten times her own age, Lily had figured, born in a time that was nearly as remote to her as the great marble wall.

  Paul was fidgeting. Lily touched his hand. “Another minute,” she said.

  “Another hour,” he grumbled.

  “She’ll get upset if she hears us.”

  The old, old woman spoke some mumbled words, as indistinct as though they’d risen through deep water. Her stiff body trembled now and then with the tremendous labor of dragging herself into her yard. The last they saw of her were her narrow feet, yellow and fragile as late autumn leaves. With a jerk of her shoulders, she pulled herself out of sight.

  Lily and Paul went around the wall to a high filigreed-iron gate, and Lily yanked at a cord that lifted a latch. They ran in, and the gate clanged shut behind them. Along the wall meandered a huge wisteria, its whale-colored branches nearly hidden by cascades of purple blossoms. Everything looked good against a stone wall, Lily had decided. A few yards beyond the front door of their house, shading the uppermost terrace, stood a large mulberry tree under which Mr. and Mrs. Corey sometimes read in the afternoons. Mulberries could stain, but the tree had been divested of its fruit since the morning a group of women had come to Paul and asked him to climb up among its branches and shake them as hard as he could. They had spread large cloths to catch the berries as they rained down and had taken them away to make preserves.

  Lily loved to wander, but she loved coming home, too. The wild beauty of the garden still startled her. New flowers were always blooming; fruit swelled and ripened on apricot and peach trees. She didn’t venture down to the lowest terrace. She was sure there were snakes there, coiling and uncoiling in all the tangle of bush and grass. She imagined Jack visiting. He and Paul would leap from terrace to terrace and laugh at Lily and her fears.

  The front door was open as usual. One morning when someone had forgotten to close the gate, five goats had run into the long hall that went from one end of the house to the other, and had raced, their hooves clattering, into Lily’s room just as she was putting on her socks. Bleating, their bells jingling, they had jumped through her window and out into the yard.

  People came to visit with no more advance notice than the goats. Cousins of the woman who had rented them their house had come one day and spent the afternoon, drinking coffee, smiling at Mrs. Corey as she tried to make sentences from nouns, and looking sympathetically at Mr. Corey as he struggled to produce a small, correct sequence of words. Stella came too, when she could spare an hour from her large family, and Mr. Kalligas, of course. Mr. Corey was especially happy to see Mr. Kalligas, with whom he could speak English. Mrs. Corey fared better with Greek; she wasn’t afraid of making mistakes. Their neighbors and the butcher, the baker, and Mr. Xenophon, who owned a small grocery store where the Coreys shopped, seemed delighted by her efforts.

  Paul and Lily walked into the cool dark hall as their mother crossed it to the kitchen.

  “Mom, there’s another American on the island,” Paul said.

  “That’s nice. After all, it’s not our island,” Mrs. Corey said. She was cranky, Lily guessed, because of the supper problem. Except for breakfast, meals took a good deal of thought. The children followed her into the kitchen. On an oilcloth-covered table lay a large bowl of strawberries.

  “If we could only live on strawberries and honey and eggplant and bread,” Mrs. Corey said, sighing.

  “And Swiss canned milk,” said Lily. Though both the children liked goat cheese and yogurt, they couldn’t get down goat’s milk.

  Mrs. Corey was staring at the stove. It sat on a stone shelf in a niche. It had two burners and an extra tiny one for making Turkish coffee. Except when they went to a restaurant, most of what they ate was fried or stewed.

  “There are eggs,” Paul reminded her.

  “And chocolate,” added Lily.

  “It’s the main dish that’s hard,” their mother said.

  Mr. Corey walked in through the back door.

  “I’ve finally solved that problem,” he said. “I’ve built a barbecue pit.”

  They all went to look. Beneath the washing line, which stretched from a branch of the mulberry tree to a wooden post, Mr. Corey had dug a hole. He’d surrounded it with stones and laid a wire mesh across it. Inside the hole were twigs and tight rolls of newspaper.

  “And I bought hamburger. At least I think that’s what it is,” he said. “It took me two hours and five hundred grammar mistakes to get the mesh. I think in one shop I asked for a bale of hay, but Mr. Kalligas came along and rescued me.”

  “We’ll be able to grill fish and chicken,” Mrs. Corey said. “Wonderful! Only now I’ll have to learn the names of fish.”

  “We must learn everything well,” Mr. Corey said.

  Paul made a gargoyle face at Lily.

  “If a fly goes by, your face will stick that way,” their father observed.

  “Lily, take in your clothes. They’re dry.” Mrs. Corey pointed to the washline. Hanging next to Lily’s cotton skirt and blouse on the line was the octopus Paul had caught that morning, fishing from the breakwater in the harbor. When it was completely dried out by the sun, you could eat it. Like goat’s milk, it was a thing Lily didn’t care for.

  She took her clothes to her room and stood for a moment at her window. The fire was burning brightly beneath the mesh. Darkness was spreading over the vast sky, coming, Lily imagined, from a huge smoke pot somewhere in Turkey. And the sea was the color of dark wine, just as Homer had described it in The Odyssey. The flames leaped, then subsided. She looked at the faces of her brother and mother and father. They were smiling, their expressions expectant as they looked down at the meat Mr. Corey had placed on the mesh. Her family! She thought she would always remember how they looked at that moment.

  There was movement along the top of the wall. Many of their neighbors, including Stella, were lined up along it, gazing down at them in amusement. Stella said something and everyone laughed.

  When the meat was cooked and put on a plate, the neighbors all waved at the Coreys, wished them a good dinner, and went away. At the kitchen table Mr. Corey said, “They were laughing because only barbarians would cook meat outdoors.”

  “They weren’t laughing meanly. They don’t do that,” Mrs. Corey said.

  “Perhaps not, but they must think us strange,” said Mr. Corey.

  Lily had nearly forgotte
n the taste of hamburgers. In the coming winter, when they were gathered around the table at home for supper, far from the honeyed air of Thasos, they might be eating hamburgers, speaking about this very moment. Thinking of that time in the future, she felt a touch of dizziness.

  “No ketchup,” complained Paul.

  “No piccalilli,” their mother said.

  “Piccalilli is an Indian condiment,” observed their father.

  “You’re always teaching, Papa,” said Lily.

  “Not when I eat strawberries,” Mr. Corey said.

  “What would happen if you couldn’t remember anything?” Lily asked pensively. They all looked at her.

  “I can’t think of much worse than that,” Mrs. Corey said.

  “You wouldn’t be able to learn—or teach,” said Mr. Corey.

  “But you wouldn’t be afraid of going to the acropolis, Lily,” Paul said, “because you’d forget about the vipers.”

  “I’d forget about the acropolis, too,” Lily remarked.

  After Paul had washed the dishes in hot water Mrs. Corey heated on the stove, and Lily had dried them and put them away on a shelf, Lily went to the balcony. She sat down in one of the two canvas chairs and looked out at the night. Moonlight silvered the brush and trees. In the Temple of Poseidon goats and chickens would be asleep now. The fishing fleet, its lights twinkling, was far out on the water. A distant murmur rose from the long row of stone buildings that were called the fishermen’s houses, though not everyone who lived in them was a fisherman. Amber lights, glowing along the wharf and in front of tavernas, pulsed like little heartbeats, the heartbeats of rabbits throbbing away inside the dark. When the moon was full, its radiance dimmed all other light and picked out as though with silver ink every broken column, the stones of the breakwater, the huddled shapes of houses. Tonight thin splinters of black clouds drifted across the sky. The island of Thasopoula glittered like a tangled string of black beads.

  Lily had read about Thasus in her book of myths. He was the grandson of Poseidon and was said to be the first colonizer of Thasos. Perhaps, she thought, his spirit lived on in that tiny island, watching Limena as it changed over thousands of years from a city of eighty thousand people to a small village, itself only the topmost layer of many layers of settlements going all the way down to that great city.

  Often the Coreys went to swim from the rocks on the other side of the village. To reach them, they crossed a high, narrow embankment beyond the fishermen’s houses. From the embankment Lily had looked down thirty feet or so to part of the ancient city and seen marble streets, the walls of stores, and ceremonial arches, some still half-hidden by the earth that had piled up over centuries. When she looked back to the path they were on, she saw small white houses, their gardens, a single street lamp at the end of the embankment, and once the yogurt boy’s bicycle leaning against a wall—everything that was of this moment perched on the edge of the past.

  Her father had turned on their small battery radio in the kitchen, and Lily heard the high wail of Turkish music. Sometimes her father tried to find an English-speaking station to hear news, though he was less interested in it than when they’d first arrived on the island.

  Paul came out on the balcony and sprawled in the other chair.

  “They’re going for a walk soon,” he reported. “I hope they don’t stay out late.”

  She and Paul often went out at night but only for a short while, staying pretty close to the house. The idea of going all the way to the Gate of Herakles worried her.

  A donkey brayed somewhere in the hills behind the village. Another donkey answered it from closer by. Paul began to sing in a whining voice, imitating the Turkish song.

  “I don’t see why we couldn’t meet him in the daytime,” Lily said.

  “It’s better at night,” Paul said. She had a sudden vision of herself in front of their house in Williamstown. She and some friends were shouting and running in the street, in and out of pools of light cast by street lamps. To shout wildly and laugh, to run, were things you wanted to do on a summer night when the grown-ups let go of you for a while, and familiar things were in shadow.

  “They might look for us later and be worried if we’re not here,” she said.

  “They never wake up,” he said. “Even when we’ve dropped things in the kitchen.”

  “I still don’t see—” she began. But Paul brayed like a donkey and pulled her from the chair and pushed her into her room. The radio was off, and Lily, hearing the gate clang, knew her parents had gone for their evening stroll.

  She and Paul sat on the floor and played cards. There were only two tables in the house, one in the kitchen and one in the room where Mr. Corey worked. Lily had grown to like the bareness of the rooms.

  Paul won every rummy game. She didn’t mind. At home her face would have turned red, and she would have been furious. He would have jeered and danced around her, holding up his hand like the champion. It was part of the difference of the way they were with each other here.

  “Time for bed, children,” Mr. Corey said from the doorway.

  They had to brush their teeth at the kitchen sink. Once Lily had discovered three huge slugs the color of bruises clumped around the drain. They had come through the kitchen window. She had seen their slimy trails in the morning through the grass. The Coreys took baths in the kitchen, too—sponge baths, their mother called them—with hot water heated on the stove. Their house had an inside toilet of sorts, unlike many of the village houses. It was in a narrow room with a high window. You flushed it by pouring in a jug of water. They had found a dozen large terra-cotta jugs in the musty cellar.

  Lily got into bed and took up her book. She had started to read about the Minotaur and Ariadne and Theseus. The murmur of her parents’ voices came from the balcony, comforting like the babble of a stream. Suddenly Mrs. Corey’s voice rose. “It does worry me,” she said. “Not for Lily. She’ll catch up. But Paul was close to failing math. Missing those months of school—” Her voice dropped.

  Lily couldn’t hear her father’s reply. She could guess what he’d say. Even though he talked so much about the importance of school, he would declare that living here was the chance of a lifetime. “It is a golden place,” he’d told Lily once. Someone else had said that, the only other American she had met on Thasos besides Jack Hemmings.

  He had been a tall, skinny man, like a scarecrow in his crisp summer suit, his skin dry and brown as a paper bag. He’d been standing in front of the museum looking down the path to a huge stone statue of a youth with a ram slung around his shoulders. As she walked by, he turned and stared at her.

  “I can tell by your long yellow braid that you’re an American,” he’d said in English.

  She’d said she could be Finnish.

  “Aha! Not with that accent,” he’d replied.

  He told her he worked for an American company in Istanbul, and always came to Thasos for his leave. “It’s a golden island—Eden,” he said.

  “Except for vipers,” Lily remarked.

  “Oh, but there was a snake in Eden, too. So you see, it is perfect. For the moment, at least.”

  The book fell from her hand. She yawned and leaned over the edge of the bed to turn off the small shadeless lamp on the floor. She sank gently into sleep, sinking down through all the villages to a great marble city, and waking, in her dream, in another time.

  Then Paul was shaking her foot, whispering, “Lily! Wake up! Let’s go!”

  It was hard to get out of bed, but his words gave her energy. At home he wouldn’t have said, “Let’s go.” He would have said, “Take off! I’m busy.”

  She pulled on a T-shirt and slacks and slipped into her sandals. They went out the kitchen door, Lily shuddering at the thought of stepping on a slug, and around the house to the gate. Paul opened it carefully so as to not make any noise. Lily heard the public faucet dripping as they passed it on their way down to the center of the village.

  When they came to the shrine of D
ionysus, where the path became a street, she saw that her father had left their garbage there, as he did once a week, wrapped in a sheet of the Kavalla newspaper in front of the steps.

  THREE

  “Who takes the garbage away?” Lily had asked Stella, who was the one who had told them to leave theirs at the shrine.

  “Someone comes at night,” Stella replied vaguely.

  The Coreys were the only family in their part of the village who had garbage to leave. Tonight a donkey was tethered close to the broad steps of the shrine and appeared to be staring down hopefully at the small package of empty milk cans. But when Lily was a few feet from the animal, she saw that its eyes were closed. The donkey’s owner might be at Giorgi’s taverna. When he came to collect it, he would take the cans too. The Greeks, Lily noticed, saved every piece of the slippery paper their meat and groceries were wrapped in and every piece of the string that secured the wrapping. Empty cans, she thought, must be especially valuable.

  They passed the police station. A light glowed in one large window, and through it she saw the handsome policeman who always bowed so deeply to the Coreys when he met them. He was wearing dark glasses as usual and reading a newspaper.

  Ahead of them was a long lane, parallel to the waterfront, leading to the main square. In front of all of the houses were pots of flowers, their colors deepened and darkened by the streetlights. A lean orange cat appeared suddenly from some hole, slunk along a few feet, and vanished. And at that moment the children heard the mandolin-like notes of a bouzouki, which fell into the late night hush like pebbles striking tin. Lily knew it was Dimitrious, the barber, playing in the taverna on the quay.