Indians on Vacation

by Thomas King

  “Look, they have ham and cheese.”

  Mimi gets a yogurt and two sandwiches along with a couple of bananas. I slide past the containers of lunch meat floating in jelly, displays of Kinder eggs, and the rack of candy bars in bright colours.

  Mimi picks up a coconut and weighs it in her hand. “What do you think?”

  “You want to buy a coconut for the trip to Budapest?”

  How about we buy the coconut, says Kitty, and stay in Prague.

  “You’d need a hammer to break it open.”

  Didi and I would like an ice cream, says Desi. Ice cream always cheers us up.

  I don’t see much protein here, says Chip.

  “Or we could just hit it against something hard or drop it on the sidewalk,” says Mimi.

  Where it will splinter into a million pieces, says Kitty, and put someone’s eye out.

  We leave the coconut in the basket and pay for our purchases. Mimi walks back into the main terminal and stands in front of the digital display. Every so often, the train times shuffle and change. At 7:45, the platform still hasn’t been announced.

  “Maybe the train has been cancelled.” I try to sound concerned rather than hopeful, but I’m not successful.

  At 7:53, our train number pops up. Platform twelve. Boarding right now. All aboard.

  “This way,” says Mimi.

  Eugene gives Kitty a push. The twins skip ahead. Chip brings up the rear. I have the backpack, and Mimi has the tickets and brochures.

  And just like that, we’re off on our Hungarian adventure.

  VI

  So we’re in Prague.

  And while we don’t know the Prague train station at all, Mimi finds platform twelve on the first try.

  Even Kitty is impressed.

  We do make the mistake of getting on at the wrong end of the train and, as a result, have to squeeze our way past passengers and step over luggage stacked up in the aisles. And we’re still walking from car to car when the train lurches out of the station, tossing me against a large man who is not all that friendly, especially when he discovers that I don’t have the language and can’t appreciate the full extent of his grievance.

  But eventually, we do find our seats.

  Mimi settles in next to the window. I take the aisle. When we travel in a country where we don’t speak the language, it doesn’t matter if the train is crowded or empty. We’re on our own, and unless dumb luck intervenes and drops an English-speaking tourist in our laps, the only person we’ll be talking to for the next six hours is each other.

  “Are you hungry?”

  “No.”

  “Sometimes when you’re hungry, you get grumpy.”

  “I’m not grumpy.”

  “But you don’t think going to Budapest is a good idea.”

  “It’s an adventure.”

  “Here,” says Mimi. “Eat a banana.”

  “I don’t want a banana.”

  “Eat it anyway.”

  The train from Prague to Budapest is not as well appointed as the train in the 2017 remake of Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express, with its ornate and opulent carriages all tucked up with brocade upholstery and heavy draperies, soft surfaces and shaded spaces.

  A Victorian parlour on wheels.

  Our train is iron and steel, cold and brutal, a Trans-Siberian prisoner transport on its way to a gulag.

  “It’s not that bad,” Mimi says. “Beats driving the 401 at rush hour.”

  Twenty minutes into the trip, an older woman steps into our carriage and sits down. I smile. She smiles. I look out the window with a practised nonchalance and begin my Sherlockian deductions.

  WE WENT TO GREECE after the financial collapse and before the big fires. Mimi spent a good month planning the trip.

  “First we’ll go to Crete,” said Mimi.

  “Crete?”

  “Then we’ll stop in Santorini. We can’t go to Greece without seeing Crete and Santorini.”

  In Chania, we stayed in the Palazzo di Pietro on Agion Deka, a small hotel run by a daughter and her father. We toured Old Town, wandered the narrow streets, stopped at the shops and the open-air craft booths, ate at small restaurants recommended in the guidebook. We walked the seawall that protected the harbour and got an Australian couple to take a picture of us in front of the Venetian lighthouse.

  In Oia, we rented an apartment that turned out to be less than advertised. It was supposed to have a view of the caldera, and it did, if you leaned out over the edge of the roof. The rest of the panorama was blocked by a grocery store with a second-floor restaurant. From our bedroom, we could see tourists enjoying the view we had been promised.

  I was cranky about that, but Mimi had been undeterred. “It’s not a big deal,” she said. “If we want to see the caldera, all we have to do is walk along the main street.”

  We toured Oia. We wandered the main street, stopped at the shops, ate at small restaurants recommended in the guidebook. We walked the three hundred steps down to Ammoudi, dodging tourists mounted on mules and stepping around piles of mule shit. We caught the bus to Fira and hiked the trail along the edge of the volcano.

  “Athens won’t be as touristy,” Mimi promised. “We’ll check on Uncle Leroy and the Wild West show, and then we’ll go up to Kymi and look for your grandfather.”

  We weren’t going to find my grandfather. He had died when I was three. I only knew him through the stories my mother told.

  The time I tried to follow him up the ladder.

  The day I put on my cowboy hat and robbed him at gunpoint.

  The afternoon I sat with him in the garden and ate tomatoes right off the vine.

  “Maybe you’ll find a great aunt,” said Mimi. “Or a cousin once removed.”

  “He left Kymi in the early 1900s. We’re not going to find anyone who remembers him.”

  And even if we did find relatives, what was I going to do? They would be strangers. Family is not just about blood. We wouldn’t have any stories to share. We wouldn’t have any memories to polish. We would have a single individual in common, loose change in a pocket, and nothing more.

  “Are you excited about going to Kymi?”

  “It’s a fool’s errand.”

  “And we’re just the fools to do it.”

  THE WOMAN SEATED ACROSS from us is wearing a light wool suit, windowpane plaid, the lapels too wide to be current, a faint smell of moth balls floating on the fabric, something she’s had in the closet or a trunk for a while.

  I wonder if Mimi notices these sorts of things.

  I decide to call her Olga. She’s middle-aged. Her skin is clear, her hair neat, her teeth straight. A fastidious person.

  And then there are the contradictions. Her clothes would suggest a woman who does not have a great deal of money, while her presence in a first-class compartment would argue against such a conclusion. The fact that she’s travelling to Budapest with no luggage leads me to believe she is a widow on a pension, a Hungarian returning home from visiting a daughter or a son in Prague, a grateful child who purchased a first-class ticket for their mother.

  I want to share my findings with Mimi, but there is the remote chance that the woman can speak English and would not like her impoverished life aired in public.

  Through the window, I can see the Czech countryside fly by. There’s nothing to distinguish it from other places in the world. We could be travelling from Guelph to Toronto or through Central Valley, California.

  Mimi leans against my shoulder.

  “It’s amazing,” she whispers. “Last week we were in Guelph, and now here we are on a train to Budapest.”

  I don’t notice the man until he is at the entrance to our compartment. A large man, blond hair, sweaty face, slacks, blue polo shirt, dark windbreaker. He’s dragging two large suitcases behind him.

  “Next time,” he says to my Hungarian pensioner, “we fly.”

  AS FAR AS UNCLE LEROY and the Crow bundle were concerned, Athens was a bust. There wa
s no record of any Wild West show having passed through within Leroy’s time frame and nothing to suggest that a Leroy Bull Shield had ever been to the city.

  “We have the postcard,” said Mimi, “so we know he was here.”

  We went to the Acropolis, strolled by Hadrian’s Gate, checked out the Acropolis Museum and the National Archaeological Museum, and made our way through the anarchy of Athens traffic to a komboloi shop on Amerikis.

  “You should buy a set.”

  “An Indian with Greek worry beads?”

  “You’re not just one thing, Mr. Mavrias,” said Mimi. “‘I am large, I contain multitudes.’”

  I had never much cared for Whitman, but I was tempted by a particular string of ebony beads with bronze inlay.

  “We can take them to the next powwow,” said Mimi. “Blackbird Mavrias. Drumstick in one hand, komboloi in the other.”

  So I bought the beads, and the guy at the shop showed me how to swing them around my finger and catch them in my hand.

  “Look at that,” said Mimi. “You’re a natural.”

  We stayed in Athens for two nights. The drive to Kymi was only about two and a half hours, but after watching the motorists and the pedestrians play chicken all along Andrea Syngrou, I arranged for a car service to take us there. I could have rented a vehicle, but driving unfamiliar roads and trying to read signs in Greek while listening to Kitty in the back seat making disaster noises would have been unsettling.

  The next morning, our driver was waiting for us when we came out of the hotel. He was holding a handwritten sign that said “Mavrias.”

  “I’m Mavrias.”

  “Good morning, good morning.”

  “Car service to Kymi?”

  “Kymi. Yes.”

  “How long is the trip?”

  “Kymi. Yes.”

  When I booked the service, I had asked for an English-speaking driver. I just hadn’t specified the degree of fluency.

  “So, you speak English?”

  “Kymi. Yes.”

  I would have preferred someone who could have pointed out any sights along the way, someone who did not spend most of the trip talking on his cellphone.

  “It’s his girlfriend,” Mimi whispered to me as we drove north. “Or his wife.”

  “You don’t speak Greek.”

  “Don’t need to,” said Mimi.

  Looking at the map, I had thought that Kymi would be right on the Aegean. But it wasn’t. It was in the hills above the port, a village of about two thousand, built into the slopes and angles of a rocky landscape.

  “It would have been smaller when your grandfather was a boy,” Mimi told me as we drove along the main street. “But I’ll bet it hasn’t changed all that much.”

  I had booked a room at the Archontiko Kymis, with a view of the village and the ocean.

  “It’s only four thirty, but I’m hungry.”

  The woman at the hotel spoke enough English to give us a recommendation, a place called the Kapitsalio, just down the street and around the corner.

  “It’s the restaurant we saw when we came into town. The one with the sign of a guy holding a beer and a fork,” said Mimi. “Let’s hope they have an English menu or something with pictures.”

  The Kapitsalio was in a yellow stucco building with a small covered patio at the front.

  “You want to sit outside or in?”

  “Outside,” said Mimi. “We’re in Greece.”

  I wasn’t sure what “Greece” and “outside” had to do with each other, but the weather was pleasant, and we could sit and watch the cars go by.

  The menu was all in Greek. My Greek wasn’t completely nonexistent. I could ask to borrow the car, and I could sing “Christos Anesti” from the Greek Orthodox Easter service.

  “Signomi, milate agglika?” I asked the woman who had brought the menus.

  “Okhi,” said the woman with a shake of her head.

  “So, we’re going to have to guess?” said Mimi. “That could be exciting.”

  “Perimene ena lepto, parakalo.” The woman held up a hand, then turned and went back into the restaurant.

  “What do you want to do?”

  “I say we close our eyes and point to something on the menu,” said Mimi. “Put our fate in the hands of the gods.”

  “There are no gods.”

  “If you made a noise like a chicken, we might get an egg dish.”

  I studied the menu hoping that I would see a word that looked vaguely familiar. I was going through the menu a second time when a motorcycle pulled up to the restaurant and a tall man with a beard jumped off.

  “Hello, hello,” he said with only the trace of an accent.

  “Hello,” said Mimi.

  “I am Nikos,” the man said, spreading his arms out as if to embrace the world. “I am your English menu.”

  Nikos, it turned out, owned the restaurant, and to Mimi’s great delight, he sat down at the table and took us through our options. Mimi ordered spaghetti and chicken. I went with a pork dish in a creamy white sauce with fries.

  “I worked in New York,” Nikos told us. “My English is from there.”

  “Mimi Bull Shield,” Mimi told Nikos. “Blackfoot from Alberta, Canada.”

  “Blackfoot?”

  “And this is Blackbird Mavrias. He’s Cherokee.”

  “Mavrias?”

  “Yes.”

  “But this is a Greek name.”

  “Bird’s grandfather was Greek,” said Mimi. “Matter of fact, he was born and raised here in Kymi.”

  “No!”

  “Yes.”

  “Your pappou?”

  Pappou. Another word I knew. Grandfather.

  “He is from Kymi?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I’m hoping to find some relatives.”

  “Yes, of course,” said Nikos. “But Mavrias, this is not a name I know in Kymi.”

  “No?”

  “But there are villages there, there, and there,” said Nikos, indicating several directions at once. “Very close. It is possible that he is from one of those.”

  The food was excellent. The kind of homemade that was really homemade. I had a taste of Mimi’s chicken. She ate most of my pork.

  “Androniani,” Nikos told us over coffee. “And there is Vitala, and Maletiani as well.”

  “My mother told me he was from Kymi.”

  “What you must do is to go to the town hall. They have all the records there. If he was born here, they will have his name in a book.”

  “You hear that, Bird,” said Mimi. “Town hall has the records.”

  “You are fortunate that it is your pappou,” said Nikos. “If it had been your grandmother, the records would be more difficult to find.”

  I wasn’t about to ask why. I had already figured it out. I was sure that Mimi had too, but she asked the question anyway.

  “Why?”

  “Well,” said Nikos, “until the 1930s, no one keeps track of the women.”

  “Unless they married.” Mimi wasn’t smiling, but to someone who didn’t know, what was on her face might have seemed to be a smile. “And they had children.”

  “Exactly,” said Nikos. “Of course, now such a thing would be . . .”

  “Sexist?”

  Nikos shrugged. “But back then . . .”

  We sat around the Kapitsalio well into the evening, while Nikos alternated between his other customers and tales of his time in Manhattan.

  “Busy. Noisy. Anything you want, you can get. Many things you don’t want, you can also get.”

  Mimi had never been to New York. “Why did you go?”

  “All Greeks wish to go to New York. Big Apple. New York Yankees. Statue of Liberty. Central Park. My uncle went to New York. So did two of my cousins.”

  The bill came to less than fifteen dollars.

  “That’s where Bird’s grandfather landed.” Mimi paid the bill and left a generous tip. “Ellis Island.”

  Nikos walked us up the street to the c
orner. The lights of the village were soft and warm. Overhead the stars filled the sky. I wondered how much had changed since my grandfather had been a boy.

  “Town hall,” Nikos called out as he headed back to the restaurant. “Tomorrow. Town hall.”

  THE WOMAN ON the train is Trudy. Her husband is Jim. The Blunds, from Orlando, Florida. Trudy taught elementary school. Jim was a sales representative for Nestlé. Both retired.

  “Just sold our home,” Trudy tells us, “and here we are.”

  “Goodbye, Orlando,” says Jim.

  “We had a very nice home,” says Trudy. “Golf course. Community pool. Tennis courts.”

  “Twenty-four-hour security,” says Jim, “for all the good that did us.”

  “Six months ago, we had a break-in.” Trudy straightens her jacket. “Took both televisions, bunch of jewellery, a stereo, and Jim’s laptop.”

  “Turned out to be one of the security guards,” says Jim. “Wouldn’t give you two cents for gated communities.”

  I’m willing to let the conversation die and sit quietly in silence the rest of the trip, but I can see that Mimi is intrigued with Trudy and Jim.

  “So, you don’t have a house to go home to?”

  “Nope.”

  “Where are you going to live?”

  “Well,” says Trudy, “first we’re going to take our river cruise, and then we’ll decide.”

  “From Budapest to Amsterdam,” says Jim.

  “Friends of ours did it last year,” says Trudy. “Said it was spectacular.”

  “Except for the problems with the water levels.”

  “They had to get off the boat in a couple of places and take a bus.”

  “Not much of a cruise, if you have to take a bus,” says Jim.

  “So, I researched all the cruises that go from Budapest to Amsterdam,” says Trudy, “and found a company with shallow-draft boats that can manage low water.”

  “You think you’ll go back to Florida?” says Mimi.

  “I don’t think so,” says Trudy. “Florida is filling up.”

  “With all the wrong people,” says Jim. “We’ve lost control of our neighbourhoods.”

  “Our daughter lives on the Oregon coast,” says Trudy. “I wouldn’t mind living on the ocean.”

  “Wouldn’t give you two cents for the ocean.”