War Games

by Audrey Couloumbis

Petros ran, but not because news of the Germans was frightening or even important. His legs had wanted to carry him away since he’d laid eyes on Lambros. Only the fact that the other boys had not run made him stay.

  Petros ran, his own heartbeat loud in his ears. With Elia, he raced through the gathering darkness, Fifi close behind them.

  chapter 6

  Petros and Elia ran recklessly, tripping over rocks, with only the pale moonlight to guide them. By the time they pelted alongside the rock wall of Petros’s home, both had scraped knees and palms.

  When Elia veered off, Petros headed straight for his own gate, a little farther along the road. Panting, he hurried first to the veranda. His father could ordinarily be found there at this hour, smoking a cigarette and playing cards. Perhaps doing card tricks.

  Tonight, no one sat outside. Not Papa. Not Zola. Not Old Mario.

  Poking his face into the front room, Petros blinked against the lamplight. His sister and Elia’s sister, Maria, sat at the card table, putting the puzzle together. “Sophie, where’s Papa?”

  Neither of them looked up. “Down the well.”

  “Why?”

  “One of the tributaries has gone dry,” Sophie said briskly. “Get that goat out of here.”

  Petros heard Mama talking to her friends as they worked on their knitting in the kitchen. To take his sister’s mind off Fifi as he cut through, he said, “Lambros has come home.”

  Sophie gave him a sharp glance. “Has he been injured?”

  “His feet are bleeding,” he said.

  “Mama,” Sophie cried. She leaped off the divan and followed him to the kitchen, wailing, “Mama, Lambros is dying!”

  Clattering over the marble floor, Fifi stayed right behind Petros as he dashed past Mama and Elia’s mother and grandmother—all of them suddenly talking at once. Petros let the kitchen door slam against the house as he burst through.

  Petros slowed, letting his eyes get used to the darkness again. He saw the white of Zola’s dog turn at the sound of Fifi’s hooves on the gravel. He didn’t bark. He didn’t care to fight a goat.

  Old Mario and Zola stood looking down the well. Zola was very much the taller of the two. Petros crossed to Old Mario’s side, and they stood shoulder to shoulder. Only recently he’d noticed he was for the first time as tall as someone who wasn’t a child. He still liked the novelty of it.

  A great deal of cold air rose from the well. This was welcome in the heat of daylight, but now it chilled Petros as he leaped up to cling to the thick rock wall, letting his feet hang and his weight rest on his forearms.

  The mouth of the well was as big across as Mama’s kitchen, to accommodate the copper buckets, barrel-shaped, but larger. Petros looked down, but there was only the cold and greater darkness. He asked, “Papa climbed down?”

  Zola said, “He wants to see if a tunnel has collapsed.” This was delivered in the tone of superior logic that Zola had adopted at the old age of fifteen.

  Petros could rarely hear this tone without arguing with it. “There’s still plenty of water.” There were several tunnels bringing water to the well.

  He’d been down below to stand hunched over in one of these only once, carrying a tool to Papa when he was making a repair. It wouldn’t trouble him if he never had to go below again. It had been dark, except for Papa’s lamp, and cold. Too cold.

  “You made a lucky escape,” Zola said.

  When Petros looked the question at him, Zola said, “Papa’s thinking about bigger things than trading goats.”

  At a shout from deep within, Zola hurried to the pump house and threw the switch. The motor started with a putt-putt-putt, and the belt whined as it turned. The tarnished green buckets jerked, then began to move, the chain creaking as it stretched over the axle.

  When the buckets reached the top, water spilled into the reservoir and trickled along tiled gutters to the garden. The empty buckets shifted lower, then lower still, working up to a steady pace. Curious, Fifi put her front hooves up against the well.

  “How do we fix a tunnel?” Petros asked Old Mario. The old man made a rolling motion with one hand that suggested a great deal of trouble.

  Papa emerged from the darkness, ghostly. He stood on the edge of one of the buckets, holding on to the chain, coming up and up, until he could step onto the rock wall circling the well. His wet shirt hung nearly to his knees. He jumped to the ground, shivering like a wet dog.

  Petros began, “Papa—”

  “Bring me a dry shirt. Two dry shirts.” Papa shook himself, spraying icy water over everyone. “Go.”

  Petros ran through the kitchen with Fifi at his heels. When the women called to him, he shouted, “Elia saw him too,” over his shoulder. In the bedroom, he rummaged through his father’s drawers for shirts.

  Fifi looked as if she knew what Petros needed to do. He liked this about her. She was at least as good as the dog. Better, because the dog only followed Zola, when he followed at all.

  Mama and Grandmother Lemos reached for Petros as he ran past again. Elia’s mother spoke into the phone. Petros ducked out the back door.

  Papa wore the dry pants he’d taken off before going into the well. He shivered so hard he steadied himself with a hand on Zola’s shoulder to pull on his socks.

  “This goat follows you like a dog,” he said as the first dry shirt went over his head. “Are you sure she’s a goat?”

  “She bites like a goat,” Petros said, reminded that he was about to be in big trouble. “But then, so does Zola’s dog.”

  Papa pulled on the second shirt, now walking toward the house. “If she eats like Zola’s dog,” he said, “she’d better scare cats away from the chicken house.”

  Following Papa, Petros said, “She’s already scared off a dog,” and made Papa laugh. He saw Elia’s mother and grandmother crossing the road, surely to get Elia’s side of the story. “Papa, I saw Lam—”

  From the back steps, Sophie cried out, “Papa, Lambros is dying.”

  Petros shouted, “I was to tell!”

  Papa turned to Petros. “Where did you see Lambros?”

  Old Mario snuffed out the lamp and hurried to join them. Petros said, “He came out of the woods near the bakery. I’m to tell you the Germans are coming. They’re close.”

  Papa rushed into the house, impatiently yanking Petros along. Zola followed, peppering Petros with questions. “What else did he say? Where are the Germans exactly? Were any of the other men from the village with him—the soldiers?”

  chapter 7

  Petros offered less-careful information as the family gathered around him. “Lambros looks like a wild man,” he said. “Half naked. His feet are torn—”

  “You said he was dying,” Sophie accused him.

  “You said he was dying,” Petros said. “I said his feet were bleeding.”

  “What if it’s true?” Mama asked. “About the Germans.”

  “I need to know more,” Papa said. “I’ll go speak to him.”

  “We’ll go together,” Old Mario said.

  “Let me go too.” This was Petros and Zola together.

  “Don’t be gone long,” Mama said, looking worried.

  “Let me go,” Zola said.

  Petros wanted to plead but stood quiet. The goat began to chew on his shirttail, and he slapped at her. He was nipped in return.

  Old Mario said, “Boys must see what it means to be at war.”

  “He’s my cousin too,” Sophie protested.

  “No one needs to see war,” Mama argued.

  But Papa told them, “While we’re gone, bring everything of our life in America to the kitchen. Letters. Books. Clothing. Everything.”

  “Not dresses,” Sophie said, because she’d gotten a dress through the mail from New York City only the week before.

  “From this moment, we don’t care about books or languages,” Papa said. “We have no interest in travel or politics.”

  Zola couldn’t believe it. “What kind of Greek is that?”<
br />
  “The rare kind we’ll pretend to be,” Papa said. “The Germans can’t find anything to set us apart from the other villagers. Nothing to give us away.”

  This felt wrong to Petros. It was as if Papa had agreed with the boys in the village all along. His children were never really Greek.

  Zola said, “Surely other families have some things from America.”

  “Those things make men ask too many questions,” Papa said. “I don’t want the Germans to take an interest in me or my Greek family.”

  “If they come,” Zola said, as if Lambros could be wrong.

  “If they come,” Papa said in a way meant to give Zola something to think about, “they’ll search this house.”

  Petros understood. Not all the villagers owned large farms or fine houses.

  “My dress,” Sophie said, looking to Mama.

  “We’ll bury it,” Papa said.

  On a gasp from Sophie, Mama said, “We’ll keep it for later.”

  “On second thought, the boys will come,” Papa said. “Sophie, help your mother.”

  Sophie stamped her foot.

  At the door, Papa stopped and said, “No one here speaks English. Not German. Not Albanian or French. Whether or not the Germans are here, we speak Greek and only Greek.”

  “What about Italian, Papa?” This was Zola.

  “Greek. It’s enough.”

  Petros couldn’t speak all these languages, mainly because he’d never cared to learn. Because everyone else in the house spoke English, he’d learned a little. Enough to enjoy stories. He saw no reason to bother about a third and fourth and fifth language when he spoke to the same people every day.

  Things had changed. Where once Zola thought him too lazy to learn and perhaps a little stupid because he didn’t want to, Petros now possessed a talent—the one way he couldn’t help but stay out of trouble.

  Papa chased the goat away as they left the yard.

  He never used to shut the gates at night. Now he wrapped the chain around the bars in a figure eight before he sat down to dinner. Things had changed.

  Only weeks ago, Elia and his grandfather would come over to sit on the porch in the evening. The men would play cards. Sometimes Elia’s father came too. But then he’d said admiring things about the Germans, and Papa sat very quiet. Old Mario and even Elia’s grandfather ignored his remarks.

  One night Papa did one of his card tricks, betting a drachma that no one could tell how he did it. It was harmless, the drachma nearly worthless. But Elia’s father lost his drachma and got angry over it. Papa gave it back, which made him angrier still. Elia’s father began to stay home, and so did Grandfather Lemos. Everything had changed.

  Skinny Fifi stepped through the gate and followed at a distance.

  On the walk to his sister’s house in the village, Papa set a fast pace. Zola grumbled a little about the new rules. “What’s the good of learning languages if I can’t use them?”

  “You don’t have to look smart to be smart,” Papa said over his shoulder.

  “I may have to hide that I’m American,” Zola argued, “but doesn’t that mean I could be proud I’m Greek?”

  “Be proud,” Old Mario said, “but also be quiet about it.”

  “We could hang a Greek flag from the chimney,” Zola said. “That’s something Americans wouldn’t be expected to do.”

  “Don’t waste my breath.” Old Mario hurried to keep up with Papa.

  “We’re a family thinking about farming. And surviving,” Papa said. “We don’t hang flags. We hope this war will pass like a storm.”

  Zola opened his mouth to argue this but shut it again. Petros knew the sign of an idea occurring to his brother. This had not changed.

  “Why did we leave America?” Petros asked, thinking most of what they had to hide was there to begin with. And so were they. To begin with.

  “Business was bad for too long,” Papa said. He’d lost his grocery store in a time when no one paid what they owed him, and he still felt this wound deeply. “We were better off here until this war. Now we’ve missed our chance to go back.”

  Petros remembered a time at the dinner table—he remembered the lemon flavor of the roast chicken going sour in his mouth—Papa wanted to return to America by boat. They’d made enough money on the farm to start over, and he was ready to go.

  Zola and Sophie cheered. Sometimes Petros thought they pretended to remember America better than they really did, but he also liked the little he knew about—soft paper books and glass marbles and toy trucks.

  Before he could decide he wanted to go, Mama said she’d heard too many stories on the radio of German U-boats sinking ships. Zola argued they heard only of the ones that sank, not of the ones to reach a port, but Mama still worried.

  Petros didn’t want to end up as fish food, and secretly he’d sided with Mama. After many such evenings of talk that ended in shouting and tears, they dropped the subject. In the back of his mind now, he could see their boat safely passing the Statue of Liberty—it was the subject of one of Sophie’s puzzles—and his family wasn’t on it. He was sorry he hadn’t secretly sided with Papa.

  “Why is it so bad to be American?” Petros asked.

  “Not bad,” Old Mario said. “Dangerous.”

  “Dangerous, then,” Petros said. “Americans aren’t fighting.”

  Papa said, “The Greeks said they weren’t fighting either.”

  Zola said, “Already the Americans defend the coastlines in Greenland and Nova Scotia against the Axis. That’s why Greece had to fight. To keep the Germans out.” The family had all heard this report from Cairo the week before, but Petros didn’t feel like teasing his brother.

  The village shops were dark, but lights showed in every window of the house where his cousins lived. They found Stavros sitting in the shadows outside.

  chapter 8

  Papa said, “Is your brother home?”

  Stavros nodded. “The men are washing him down with kerosene to kill the lice.”

  Stavros’s grandmother on his father’s side, called Auntie by most people, opened the door to Papa’s knock. Half the village seemed to be gathered in the kitchen, everyone talking at once.

  Old Mario followed Papa. Zola and his dog were right behind Old Mario. Papa turned Zola around and pushed him back outside. “When I call you.”

  Zola and Petros looked in through the window.

  When someone opened the door to toss out the end of a cigarette—the red cinder of it arced like a shooting star—Zola slipped inside.

  The dog sat down at the door. Petros wanted to sneak in too. If the dog remained outside so quietly, perhaps Fifi would do the same. He decided to wait a minute or two and see how things worked out for his brother. It took only one worm to bait a hook.

  Zola didn’t get thrown out and didn’t get thrown out, and still Petros didn’t make a move to go inside. He was torn between wanting to stand beside Papa and the worrying sight of Stavros sitting alone.

  He would’ve let Stavros sulk, but today they’d seen Lambros’s feet. Baby chickens sometimes got a disease where they pecked each other until they bled, often until they died. Lambros’s feet had looked that bad.

  Stavros moved to the rock wall bordering another property.

  He didn’t look welcoming. Petros strolled over there anyway, with Fifi nibbling at his sleeve. Stavros remained with his back turned, so Petros spoke to the back of him. “Why are you over here?”

  “He’s crazy, I think,” Stavros said. He wiped his face with his arm.

  “He looked it,” Petros agreed. Then he realized Stavros hoped he’d say otherwise.

  “He says he climbed the Needle,” Stavros said. “To get away from the Germans, he climbed to the top.”

  The Needle was a narrow spike of marbled rock, all that remained of a mountain after the miners were finished with it. This tall spike was made up of smooth cold sides and sharp edges, like the needle Papa used to mend their leather sandals.

&
nbsp; Before the war, men tried to climb the Needle. Many of them fell to their death. But some climbers lived to tell of searching for a crevice in the marble, of gripping it with sweaty hands.

  Or men told of resting in the branches of scrubby twisted little trees sprouting like horns from those crevices. Petros didn’t know if he could rest, dangling hundreds of feet from the ground in such a way.

  He thought Lambros might not have meant he’d climbed alone. Those who were successful had climbed as a team. But to tackle the Needle at all, there must be ropes.

  To tie ropes, the climber pounded in hooks.

  To pound hooks, a man needed a hammer. Petros said, “Did he have a hammer?”

  “Do you think he could make that much noise?” Stavros said, still looking out into the night. “The soldiers would have shot him dead.”

  So. No hammer. “Perhaps there are some old hooks still there.”

  “He used the cracks in the rock,” Stavros said, a bullying tone creeping into his voice. To say Lambros climbed the Needle, with hooks or without, was to say he scaled the face of a wall, clinging like a spider.

  “He knew who we were, all of us,” Petros said. “He isn’t crazy. And he’s not a liar.”

  Stavros wiped his face again. “He talks to the dead. He’s crazy.”

  “That’s not crazy,” Petros said stoutly, thinking of Mama’s mother. “My grandmother Popi speaks to the dead.” He didn’t say she only did so in church.

  Pretending not to see his cousin’s tears, Petros pulled Stavros’s marbles out of his pockets. He set them in the shallow bowl of a rock.

  “When he goes into the mountains, I’m going with him,” Stavros said. Petros dug the toe of his sandal into the dirt, thinking this might be true. Then again, it might not.

  “Who’ll take care of your family?” There were his mother, Aunt Hypatia, who was Papa’s sister, and his grandmother, Auntie.

  Stavros didn’t answer this. He poked Petros. “Are you leaving tonight with the others?”

  “Leaving?” Fifi sat down as if she’d heard something interesting.

  “Panayoti and his family are going. He wouldn’t say where, but Mama said it would be Cephalonia. They have family there.”