Eye

by Marianne Micros

  I draw all night, while my mother coaxes. After the sun comes up and the rooster crows, Mamá goes out to the well for a moment — the Virgin leaps from my fingers onto the paper.

  “Here she is, Mamá.”

  She takes the drawing and runs to Aleko’s house.

  I wait for two hours, then walk down to the village. Through the window I see Aleko’s wife in bed — sleeping, I think, not dead. There is a cradle next to her. Yes, the child is breathing. In the corner is an icon — a real icon — the Virgin smiles.

  My mother comes out now.

  “You didn’t need my drawing,” I say. “They have an icon.”

  “No,” she smiles, “that is yours, you made it.”

  “But look!” I point inside.

  “I know. Magic. The magic of Christ. Christiana.”

  I don’t understand, but I say nothing. We go home, to eat and to make medicines for tomorrow’s callers. We go to bed, but I cannot sleep. A shadow at my window frightens me.

  “Maria.”

  “No, it is me — Christiana.”

  Lefteris puts his head inside the window. He lowers inside the bag he carries everyplace, reaches down to open it.

  “I am sorry that I borrowed your mother’s icon. I wanted her to worry a little.” I can see his eyes shine in the moonlight, his teeth sparkle, and he winks. “Here you are. Goodbye.”

  I am holding an icon. I light the candle to see it better — it feels too light. I am looking at my drawing of a smiling Virgin. She smiles at me. I quietly put her on the table. In the morning, will the Virgin be made of blue ink on paper, or of bright paints in a frame? I take my pen and paper and draw a baby wrapped in a warm blanket. It looks like Aleko’s baby. It also looks like the baby I will have someday. I see that it is my baby. I place the drawing on the table next to the Virgin. I smile contentedly in my sleep, for I am untouched.

  ii. The Same Thing

  Christy’s birthday it was Christy’s birthday her thirteenth lucky unlucky thirteen and she whipped round and round on the tilt-a-whirl her eyes shut tight her head leaning on the shoulder of the dark-haired boy. He was eighteen and wanted to whirl with her. She was happy little chills ran through her new body she was tall and curvy. She could hear Elvis Presley’s voice —“ooo—ooo—ooo—ooo—ooo—ooo— I’m all shook up,” and imagined his swively body.

  The ride stopped and he wanted to take her home. But her mother was there waiting for her. “No. He’s too old for you. Don’t you know what he’s after? They all want the same thing.” She grabbed Christy’s arm and walked her home.

  Christy dreamed about the dark-haired boy for nights, but he ignored her in school and was always holding hands with a blonde girl whom people said was “easy.” Then he was killed in a car crash. She cried in bed that night and then forgot him.

  “I want to be a writer,” she thought. She always said that to herself when she was depressed. She tried to see life as a writer would and searched for metaphors. “Life is a rainbow with a pot of gold at the end,” or “Life is like a tilt-a-whirl, with twists and turns, threatening to cut your head off but only making you throw up” or “Life is a poem that ends in a couple of gasps” or “Life is a comedy and God a stand-up comic who sometimes muffs his lines.”

  She hadn’t thought about writing in a long time only about boys their smooth hips and long legs. Her body felt nice. But her mother wouldn’t let her go to parties or dances or movies with boys.

  “I wish I had a father.” Her father had died in the War, and all she knew of him was from the glazed-eyed picture on the piano. Her mother hardly talked to men now, and almost every day she would say to Christy, “They’re all after the same thing.”

  Christy wrote down a dream she had had once. Her mother was the Virgin Mary and she was the baby Jesus crying in her lap.

  Mama you are too pure you are too clean.

  Then her mother turned into a lascivious whore a slut dressed in red, winking.

  no mother no where is my father

  you have no father child only God

  so far away so bodiless

  sex my child is like a cooking pot the more you are heated the blacker you get

  One day a strange man came to the door. Oh where had she seen him before his dark eyes his black hair. Her mother knew him, but wouldn’t let him in. He came back again and again, wanting to see Christy, until he was allowed to step inside, smile, and pat Christy’s head.

  “Who is he?”

  “An old friend.”

  “But who?”

  She began to see him in the restaurant where she and her friends had Cokes after school. He was waiting until she was alone.

  “Hi, Christy. I’ve missed you, you know.”

  “Who are you?”

  “Hasn’t she told you yet? Oh, for heaven’s sake. I’m your dad.”

  “No, you’re not. You can’t be. My Dad was killed in the War. He’s dead. Dead as a doornail. Dead as a torpedoed rat. Or are you his ghost?”

  “That was your mother’s husband. He died before you were even conceived. She should have told you. You’re old enough now.”

  Christy ran home. He couldn’t be her father he wore ragged old clothes stained with paint had holes in his jeans he was an artist or something. She looked in the mirror. Did she look like him? The image blurred on her she could never see what she really looked like if only she could be someone else looking at her.

  Her mother had to tell her the truth now. “I was an evil woman, Christy, and I deserve to be punished. I wouldn’t blame you if you hated me. But I want to make you into a better woman than I am. You don’t help me any, the way you shake your hips when you walk.”

  A story jumped out at Christy, a story about a pure woman who decided never to have relations with men, but one day she found a baby in her bed and a note that said, “Happy Birthday. Love, God.” Christy wrote it all down, describing the baby in great detail until she could see it, almost feel it in her arms.

  “You are my own child,” she said to the story, “my own forever. And you will never hurt me.”

  iii. Times Three

  I have turned thirteen many times; thousands of years ago, or a long way inside myself, is an image of thirteen that has been repeated time after time, perhaps person after person. The face looks into a well, a mirror, or another face, and says, “Is that I?” and then “That is I.”

  Now I am three times thirteen and my daughter is thirteen. She blows out the candles all at once and yells, “I’m a teenager!” She jumps and dances around the room.

  I help her brush her hair and we look in the mirror at ourselves and each other. Her hair is lighter than mine, her face fuller, her eyes less black. For once, there is no petulance to the shape of her lips, no gloom in her eyes. She will always be shorter than I am — that’s good. But I was once she. She will be I.

  I know that tonight she will tease her boyfriend until he kisses her. I know that she will slap him when he tries to touch her slightly below the breast. I know that she will defiantly come home one-half hour late, because she will wait outside for that long before she comes in. Then she will smile and say, “Don’t worry. I’m a big girl now.” Or her eyes will say it.

  But there are many things I don’t know. I don’t know what kind of mother I have been, what kind of mother she will be, what I have made her into. I have tried to be the opposite of what my mother was. I have never said “Sex is dirty” or “Men are no good.” I have called sex “dangerous” and men “over-anxious.” I often say, “Come home early” or “Be careful.” I am nervous about tonight, her first date. She is only thirteen.

  “Well, have fun. Be . . . have a good time. Come home at 11 o’clock.”

  “Sure, Mom.”

  Then she hugs me. “I love you, Mom.”

  The doorbell rings.

  “Are you going to be alone tonight, Ma? No dates?”

  “No.”

  “Heck. We’ll stay here with you and watch T
V.”

  She clutches my hand. She is perspiring.

  “Get out of here!” I stick out my tongue and nudge her, until she runs to the door.

  In the mirror I see myself at thirteen — a face vulnerable, shy, pretty but unformed — and over it another face — older, somewhat creased, heavier, more interesting. I take out my sketch pad and draw us blurred together, two people — no three — my daughter is here, too, and countless other girl-women.

  I tack the picture up on the wall of my studio and walk through the house, a house of many doors and windows, of many mirrors. My own house. A house belonging to the woman in my sketch, the many myselves, and to my daughter in all her ages. It is not a house for men. Widowed, never again married, I don’t expect that a man will ever live here permanently. My daughter’s stay is temporary, too. When will she leave? How long will I be here?

  But tonight I am thirteen again, changing, turning, growing, looking at my newly-developed self . . . until she comes in the door, flushing and breathless. I go out and another comes in. We wait for our next thirteenth birthday.

  Eye

  A MAN WAS hanging from a tree, swinging back and forth, in the very place where animals are butchered. His head dangled, casting a strange oblong shadow that moved rhythmically as his body swayed. He was dressed in dirty work pants and a rumpled white T-shirt. His eyes were bulging out, his mouth swollen. The noon sun was burning his skin. The rope was tight around his neck but not so tight that it had caused his death. It was Stavros Yorgopoulos, the mayor of our village. An overturned chair underneath gave the appearance of suicide — but I did not think so.

  His wife Chrysoula had collapsed at his feet. She had grasped his one foot and was trying to pull him down, but her weakened state, as she lay in a half-faint on the ground, made that impossible.

  Three men came with knives to cut him down. As they struggled with the body, I led Chrysoula back to her house. When Stavros was brought home, I would help her wash and dress him. That was one of the jobs I held in the village — to prevent death when possible, to prepare the dead for burial, to comfort the living. Now I made tea for Chrysoula while we waited, but she continued to wail and cry, not even looking at the cup I placed before her. We had moved the table to one side and placed a cot in the middle of the room. I had filled some pails with water and brought some strips of cloth for washing the body.

  After the body had been carried in and laid on the cot, I inspected his neck. I could see that someone’s fingers had made the dark bruises. It was not the rope that had killed him.

  “He did not commit suicide,” Chrysoula said. “He was a happy man.”

  “You are right. Someone choked him to death.”

  “Help me, Katina,” Chrysoula cried. “Find out who did this.”

  People in the village frequently asked me, a middleaged lady, unmarried, with no children, for help. I was known to do magic with my herbs, my potions, my touch, my words. People in Athens were starting to laugh at such things — but not here. I was all the villagers had to keep the darkness away. They did not know that the darkness is always there — that darkness can even be comforting.

  I had many clients, mostly women, who came for help — with love, with childbirth, with ending a pregnancy, with repelling the evil eye or blocking a curse. Sometimes people wanted me to cause harm to others — but I always refused. Men visited me, too, hoping for success or money. I would not guarantee the results. A few people asked me to contact the dead. Though I had had experiences seeing the dead, I could not force them to come to me or to speak through me.

  Many people asked me to heal physical and emotional illnesses. Kyria Mavropoulou brought her six-month-old baby to my door. I had noticed him many times — a healthy, chubby boy, always laughing and holding his arms out, even to strangers. But now he looked flushed and tired. There were dark circles under his eyes, and he was shaking, but was not fevered. There seemed to be no reason for his sickness. He also was yawning repeatedly. Right away, I recognized the symptoms of the mati, the evil eye. I asked Kyria if anyone had recently admired her baby. She, of course, said that everyone did — but I asked her if anyone in particular had exclaimed about the child’s beauty.

  “There was the foreign girl, the xeni,” she said. “She is visiting the Yorgopoulos family. She said he was beautiful and even held him.”

  I thought this was likely the source of the illness. People could give the evil eye without even meaning to. I took a glass of water and dropped olive oil into it. The oil fell to the bottom. Now I knew that this was the evil eye. I made the sign of the cross three times and spat three times into the air. I gave Kyria Mavropoulou some medicine that I had spooned into a small bag, mostly to appease her, but I knew that I had to do more than that.

  It was noon now and the sun very hot. I washed my face and hands and changed into my church dress. I wanted to look good when I met the foreigner. She wouldn’t be afraid of me, the way some of the villagers were. She surely wouldn’t believe in the powers of healing and magic. I had my medal of the Virgin Mary around my neck. I touched it for luck.

  The stones were sharp along the path as I walked to the Yorgopoulos home. I needed new shoes. Perhaps the xeni would pay me to get her out of this trouble. Soon word would spread that a foreigner might have caused a baby’s sickness. I did not want the villagers to take action. I must do something first. I walked around the chickens strutting down the dirt path and looked down to watch for donkey droppings and to avoid the sun’s rays. The young woman was sitting out front in a chair, basking in the hot sun. I wanted to tell her that this was the most dangerous time of day — but I did not.

  She smiled when she saw me approach and spoke to me in hesitant Greek. “Yiasou,” she said. I spoke to her slowly. She understood me quite well. Her parents had always spoken Greek to her in Canada, she said. She said that in Canada people called her Mary but that I could call her by her Greek name, Maria. I asked her about herself — she was a university student on holiday, seeking information about her background. “I believe Kyria Yorgopoulou is my cousin,” she said excitedly. “She has told me to call her Aunt Chrysoula.”

  She offered me a chair and went inside to drag one out. I was relieved that the family was not at home. They would probably not want me sitting in the open, right in front of their house, though they had come to me often when they needed something. In fact, Chrysoula had used my love spell to win her husband, Stavros, to take him away from the promiscuous Soula.

  Now I sat and spoke in a friendly way with Maria. She did not have a boyfriend, she told me, though she liked one of her fellow students very much. But he thought of her only as a friend. They studied together. If only he would just look at her!

  “Oh, I think he will do that soon,” I said. “I have a feeling about that.”

  “Do you get intuitions? I sometimes do, too. I just feel that this man is the one for me.”

  “Yes,” I said, nodding. For a moment, I worried that Maria would be my rival in the arts that I knew so well.

  Maria offered me some cold water. When she came back with two glasses, I looked her in the eye. She began to yawn. How could I explain? I decided on the direct approach. “Have you heard of the evil eye?”

  “My mother is superstitious about that, but I never believed it really,” she answered.

  “You need now to believe.”

  I told her the truth, about the baby and the mati. Maria was horrified. She said that she would never hurt a child, that she wanted children herself and loved them.

  “Please, Maria, we must go to Kyria Mavropoulou’s house and tell her that her baby is not so beautiful after all. That will surely work. But first I will pray with you.”

  We held hands and closed our eyes. I said the prayer silently to myself. The prayer passed on from woman to woman throughout the generations must never be revealed to strangers. I crossed myself three times, and Mary did the same.

  She and I walked to the Mavropoulos house and
knocked on the door. When she opened the door, Kyria Mavropoulou looked angry and frightened. I passed her and went directly to the baby’s cradle. He was so still that I was frightened. His mother rushed to him, blocking Maria’s way. “It is all right,” I told her. “We are here to reverse the spell.”

  Maria called out, “Your baby is not so beautiful. He is just average, not even average.” We spat into the air three times, as I prayed. Then we left.

  Kyria Mavropoulou knocked on my door the next day, holding her smiling and healthy baby. “Thank you,” she said. “And thank you to the foreign girl.”

  I went to see Maria then, carrying a little packet, one with a love potion. “This is for the boy you like,” I told her. “Thank you,” she said, smiling. “Is the baby okay?”

  “Yes, he is perfect.”

  “I will come back with my new husband and my own baby someday. I will come to see you.”

  That night I dreamed that Maria and her baby came back to the village. They were both dressed in blue. Her husband had died, she told me, in a car accident. She would live here with me now. And when I died, she would carry on my business.

  I went to warn her, but she was gone. Chrysoula gave me her address and I wrote, but the letter came back to me, with a note that she was no longer at that address. She had left a photograph of herself standing in front of the Yorgopoulos house. “Would you like this?” Chrysoula asked me.

  I took the picture and placed it on the small table just below my icon of the Virgin. Every day I mix my herbs, waiting for Maria to return. Every day — but today is different. I have been asked to investigate a suspicious death.

  Chrysoula and I slowly took off Stavros’s shirt and pants. She motioned for me to stand back while she pulled down the underpants that were digging into his flesh and gently moved them down his legs and feet. Together we washed him, Chrysoula sobbing as her hand moved softly across his flesh. We dressed him in the suit he wore to church and combed his hair.