She hadn’t said anything to Nikitas yet. She hadn’t even shown it to him, saying “Look, what a nice tree.” But tomorrow, yes, tomorrow . . . She closed her eyes and felt the tears beneath her lashes wetting her cheeks. Tomorrow . . . Now she knew that she wanted him the way she wanted to fall into the cistern on hot days or drink water when she was thirsty after a walk and heard the sound of the crank pulling up the bucket. She would lean back her head and close her eyes. He would kiss her then on her lips, on her hair, but mostly on her lips. How she wanted him to kiss her on the lips. But she would never tell that to Aunt Theresa . . .
•
“Shall we go together to the shooting gallery?”
For the first time Infanta’s voice was sweet and patient. They got lost among all the people.
I go up to Maria. She is alone now. I’m also alone. I don’t love David, or anyone else. I only love Maria. I sit next to her pretending to be indifferent. “So, are all these people making you dizzy?”
“No, I like it,” she says, “I like it.”
“And the walk didn’t tire you out?”
“Not at all. My body doesn’t feel as heavy when I’m walking.”
Her eyes are slightly swollen, so are her cheeks.
“Are you thinking about the birth?” I ask, putting my arm around her shoulder.
“I think about it,” she says looking away, “but I can’t explain it, you won’t understand. I am kind of looking forward to that pain again, what can I say, that moment . . .”
Her eyes are shining now, people are coming out of the church, the fireworks have started up.
“I’m happy,” she whispers.
Her voice has a slight tinge of melancholy.
In the spring when you see the grass come up, you don’t think about how long it has been growing under the earth, or the earth’s agony. I say this to Maria.
“When you’re pregnant, isn’t it a bit like that?”
“Yes, something like that,” she says seriously and then laughs.
Her laugh is rich, jolting, like old times when we used to lie on our backs in the hay and she would tell us that storks didn’t bring children. But it has a different warmth.
“I must go. Marios will have returned from Athens.”
I look over at the café.
“Why don’t you ask Mrs. Parigori if she wants to go with you? Marios always walks back with his father.”
“I don’t think she will want to”—she turns her gaze toward the café—“she’s an odd woman.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, sometimes she seems to me like a girl of sixteen who still hasn’t decided what she wants to do with her life, and who always seems to be on the verge of something, uneasy, waiting. Doesn’t she seem that way to you? Her eyes . . .”
I feel like saying everything, letting it all out in a burst of anger. But that wouldn’t do. Mrs. Parigori is Maria’s mother-in-law.
“I don’t know whether her behavior is like that of a sixteen-year-old, but she is certainly quite old when it comes to looks.”
Maria smiles.
“I must go,” she says. “Marios is sure to be back.”
The church gets dark inside; a woman dressed in black makes the rounds collecting candles and blowing them out. The venders turn on their gas lamps; the plastic bracelets catch the light nicely. When we all lived in the same house with Father, Dick would scratch at the door in the morning and wake him up by licking his cheek. “Look who’s here. It’s our Dickie,” Father would say. And Mother would get annoyed because Father seemed more interested in the dog and in his walk than in her. Father loved Mother more than Dick, of course, but it’s easier to say sweet things to dogs. You can show your affection without being embarrassed. And Dick all the while would be jumping on Father pretending to bite him as soon as he got out of bed and ran down the hall. Dick would follow him, with Father saying one nice thing after the other—he had never said such things to us. Once Mother wanted to give Dick away because he was a nuisance in the house, and Father without saying anything picked him up and took him in the train to friends in Kiourka. Not even a week had passed when Dick came back on his own. People say they saw him boarding the train like a regular passenger. After that Mother agreed to keep him. I know that part from Maria, but I myself remember quite well how Dick would jump up on Father and how Father would say “Dick, Dickie, my dear dog Dickie.”
“Perhaps you are thinking about the locked drawer, that mysterious locked drawer?”
David snuck up on me silently, slyly, as always. I jumped.
“You have such an unpleasant way of creeping up on people,” I said loudly.
I would like to be alone in the world, all alone, and to think about Father and Dick. But David moves in close to me as I sit there on the stone bench. He touches my hand, tentatively at first, like the wind or a leaf. Then he squeezes it until it hurts; later he loosens his fingers again and they play with each other like a leaf in the wind. I want David to be near me like this forever, to be even closer to me than he is now.
“I can’t remember if I’ve ever told you that I love you, Katerina.”
“No, it’s the first time.”
“Well, I love you.”
“Me, too.”
Then he takes my hand and kisses each finger one by one on the tip where they are most sensitive.
“You know I don’t like that.”
“I’m trying to teach you to like it,” he says, and laughs softly.
I’ve got pins and needles in my legs, I don’t know why. I shake them. I kick them up and down, I begin to chatter about this and that. David is still laughing, the lights playing on his face. I pull back slightly.
“There’s no need for people to see us.”
And then, “How did you manage to get away from Mrs. Parigori?”
“Ruth came by and took her for a walk.” He had gotten used to calling his mother Ruth, a practice that struck me as stupid and unnatural.
“Do you find her attractive?”
“I like women who seem distracted. You also seem distracted . . .”
He comes over close again and takes my hand.
“I’m going to the shooting gallery.”
I get up. He gets up, too. He won’t leave me alone tonight, not until he kisses me. When he touches my hand he always wants to kiss me afterward. In the olive grove that day he scared me. The gaslight makes it impossible to see the stars, only the moon. Everyone is shoving each other trying to get into the Great Monster Show, a green tent with red crocodiles on it.
“What’s your name?”
“Gorilla.”
“Where were you born?”
“In Africa.”
“What do you eat?”
“Everything.”
The cut-off head can say all that.
Infanta beats everyone in the shooting gallery. She puts the gun on her shoulder, closes one eye, and the bullet, steady, goes right to the bull’s-eye. The target happens to be the heart of a cardboard doll, which shakes its arms and legs when you hit it. Infanta starts to laugh. Her eyes glow. Why did she run away like a frightened deer in the morning? She should tell Nikitas that she didn’t mean to, that her feet had just taken off on their own. She aims again and shoots.
“Bravo, bravo!” everyone shouts.
It’s nice to win. Nikitas smokes silently.
“Bravo, bravo!”
A shrill female voice cries. Nina’s voice. I turn my head.
“Good evening, everyone.”
She takes a step and gives me her hand, then she looks over at Nikitas. Nikitas doesn’t know what to do, how to behave. Nina laughs. Her mouth is redder than ever and everything else about her is earth-colored, even her dress.
“Do you know each other?” Nikitas says for the sake of saying something.
“Yes . . . that is . . . we met at the pastry shop, if I’m not mistaken.”
“You’re not at all mistaken,” says Nina. She
’s a good actor.
“And your sister?” she continues with a polite, questioning tone, almost protective.
Infanta is standing aloof watching the whole scene. She still has the rifle in her hand. Nikitas introduces everyone. Infanta’s smile is cold, Nina’s is overly warm, as for David he has on his ironic, unpleasant look.
“You are a wonder,” Nina says, taking a step toward Infanta. “And I’ve heard you’re also good at riding . . . You even beat Nikitas once, isn’t that right?”
And without waiting for an answer, “You know, Nikitas, the Swedish professor is here, the one I talked to about you. I read him some of your poems. He’s at the café waiting for us. Good night, everyone.”
She turns to David and Infanta. “Nice to meet you.”
With her usual affected naiveté she takes Nikitas’s arm, and before we know what’s happening they are lost in the crowd.
“Don’t wait for me,” I tell David. “I’ll go home with Infanta.”
His face darkens. He won’t get to kiss me, that’s good revenge for him having sat all afternoon with Mrs. Parigori.
I find Infanta’s hand and we walk down the hill together. The celebration is in full swing. The ouzos are being ordered two rounds at a time. The songs and the nostalgia for songs rise into the night air.
When Nikitas started home it was already late. The moon, though, hadn’t gone down yet. The poplars played with their shadows. He could still hear Nina’s drawl echoing in his ears, and her laughter: “You believed all that about the Swedish professor? I just wanted to be alone with you, silly child . . .”
So he had offered her a cigarette because he didn’t know what else to do, and she had started to laugh and she kept on laughing all evening. On the dark road back, though, when she came up close to him, he put his arm around her waist. “I see that you’re braver in the dark,” she said. And she began choosing the darkest roads, the ones where the moonlight hadn’t found its way through the trees.
He kissed her by a fence. It was totally mad. His lips refused to let go. He wrapped his hands around her throat so that she couldn’t get away. “I thought you were going to strangle me,” she said slowly and seriously, with a different voice, as soon as she could catch her breath. “Your eyes are like a weasel’s,” he responded, wanting to kiss her again. But she pulled back. “In the morning I usually take a walk,” she said. “Come by tomorrow to pick me up.”
Nina was a woman, a real woman. Her waist bent, her slight body changed shape in your hands, and her mouth tasted like carnations and smoke, bittersweet and dangerous.
He thought of Infanta and felt a pain inside. He had dreamt of her so often and now look . . . How did she get away from him this morning . . . Just when he had finally touched her lips. She was a strange girl, wild. Yes, but they couldn’t go on being just friends forever. They were grown up now, he couldn’t bear it any longer, this going with the horses and sitting on the grass at a distance from each other. Infanta with such beautiful eyes and such beautiful lips.
The pain grew stronger. “I must forget her,” he whispered. Her face made him anxious, a strange, worthwhile kind of anxiousness. The same way he felt when he wrote a poem or when upon waking abruptly just before dawn, dressing half-asleep, he would find himself hungry, running across the meadow. A bird must have woken him, and he liked to think that of all the sleeping people he alone had heard it, that he and the bird shared something sacred, a secret. And it wasn’t only in the morning. Sometimes his heart would beat faster because he had seen something beautiful and he would feel like shouting. Hot tears would come to his eyes, as if someone had touched a secret part of him.
Now that part of him was harder and harder to find. In the same way that he no longer woke early and wrote poems. There were his studies now. He gave himself to his studies systematically and patiently. Nina, after all, was a very charming woman. Tomorrow morning he wouldn’t go to the well. He’d go by Nina’s and pick her up and they’d go for a walk, perhaps to Ekali or Kokinara. In Kokinara there was a gorge with a thick canopy of leaves overhead. That would be very pleasant.
When he arrived home the garden was all lit up. Two or three tables were set up on the grass and people were playing cards. His mother, young and beautiful still, wore a pastel dress and moved easily among the guests. “Welcome, my boy,” she said when she saw him. And when she leaned down to kiss him, “You must be more careful the next time,” she whispered, laughing. “Your lips are covered in lipstick.” Nikitas laughed. He was glad to find the people there. He even asked his mother if he could take her place in the game for a round.
The sky grew pale in the east when he climbed up to his room. He looked out the window, closed the shutters, and, falling onto his bed, cried. It wasn’t long, though, before he was asleep.
IV. THE COUPLE
THE MEADOW has the color and the power of buffalo with their curly horns just after a rain.
A large herd passed by recently. They stretched across the whole plain. Some were beautiful, cinnamon-colored or white with brown patches and shiny coats, while others were old and weak, their bony hindquarters sticking out a foot above the rest of their body, sharp enough to slice the sky. The udders of the old cows hung down. They were going to the slaughter house. They say they plunge a knife right between the eyes and then it’s over. It doesn’t last a minute; they don’t even know they’re dying. Only the pig suffers when you kill it because you have to cut into its heart.
Felaha got better, thank God. The swelling went down, she got back up on her feet and went out to the meadow to graze. She also saw the herd go by. She watched it until it disappeared. This year she has the company of a kid. In the beginning all it wanted to do was suckle. It would run away only to come back and jump up on her or butt against her. Now, though, if the grass is tasty it stays away longer.
Little Yannis likes crawling around in the grass and has struck up a friendship with the kid. As soon as he sees it, he opens his eyes wide, smiles, and begins to laugh just like when Maria dresses him and tickles his feet.
Maria also laughs then . . . It’s a funny sight to see that little naked body so pink and round, his fingers so tiny, the nails as small as the head of a pin. And when he wants to speak and he can’t . . . He pronounces a syllable, says it again, and again, loudly, even angrily. Maria laughs . . . Sometimes out of habit the child tries to reach through the opening of her blouse for her breast. When she first weaned him she couldn’t hold him without his hand going there. Maria worried, “Perhaps he thinks he’s lost his mother,” and she would lean down and whisper in his ear that she couldn’t give him any more milk because soon they would have another baby. When she stopped nursing him it was their first separation. They’d never be so close again. She thought about how there would be a time when she wouldn’t even be able to hold him in her arms, and then not even on her knees. And if he traveled when he was grown up? “God, don’t let him go away,” she would say and then laugh. Wasn’t she being silly, little Yannis wasn’t even a year old.
Now that she was pregnant for the second time, in the evening sometimes when she had finished with the housework and little Yannis was breathing the even breaths of sleep in the next room, she would go out on the veranda and cry softly for no reason. Then she would be filled with a sweet calm, something like apathy, and she would dream, but as if it were someone else dreaming, not her, not Maria.
One New Year’s her father had brought her a beautiful doll for a present, one of those dolls that opens and closes its eyes and cries “Mama” when you rock it. She held her breath and wrung her hands in excitement, and then taking the doll in her arms, she sang to her. Suddenly, though, she shut her back up in the cardboard box and ran to get her old doll, the one with no color left in its cheeks and no hair, and she clasped her firmly to her breast to show her that she would always love her, even if the other doll was so beautiful and new.
On Sundays when they used to go to the sea and she would swim and th
en get out and lie on the beach, her body would become a little pebble. She would watch Katerina and Ellie sitting cross-legged eating pears, Infanta with her changed expression telling stupid jokes and flinging her arms around excessively, Uncle Agisilaos going on and on with his stories. How had she come to know these people and how can you eat pears if you’re only a little pebble?
Last winter, sometimes, before the sun had risen, the church bells would wake her. There are women, she thought then, who get up at this hour, wear their black scarves, and go to church for confession. Their knees must freeze on the stone floor. One morning when it was still dark she got up from her warm bed, crossed the damp meadow, and found herself in church, kneeling with women in their black scarves. She didn’t know if she was praying, nor did she understand the words of the priest, she simply bowed her head down, all the way to the floor. And when she was walking home she remembered her little garden where she had planted all sorts of vegetables, Mr. Louzis sitting on the veranda, Marios who would come over on Mondays to tell them what had happened on Sundays, and that day when they played castles for the last time, and then Mavroukos’s death and Katerina’s cry, “Mavroukos, Mavroukos, Mavroukos is dead.” And then she remembered unfamiliar faces, people she had happened to meet on the same day, the taste of peas—“a little dill would make them even tastier,” Aunt Theresa said before she had even brought the fork to her mouth—and Mr. Louzis’s look when he turned and saw Mother embarrassed by Infanta’s insistence over the horse; Katerina had hid under the table she was so embarrassed. And the day of her wedding, “I will now become as pure as a lily. It’s nice to be pure, eh Katerina?” And the dressmaker who was as dark as a gypsy and liked to tell everyone about her unhappy love affairs, but as soon as dusk fell you would hear whistling and a young man with a tipped hat would be seen waiting outside the garden; he looked like the ticket taker at the cinema, also a bit like the waiter at the pastry shop. How many faces does one see in a lifetime? . . . Impossible to count them. You begin with one and then another comes to mind, a third, a fourth, a chain of them. It is strange the way things from the past come back to haunt you, things you didn’t really notice when you were living them.
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