The Secret Sister

by Fotini Tsalikoglou

  “I had your mother when I was almost forty,” she began, as she sat next to me, speaking in a calm and determined tone. “I’d been trying for over ten years, absolutely nothing, ‘It’s not God’s will,’ I’d tell myself. ‘And Frosso up there probably doesn’t want it.’ My daughter was to take her name. The child I would have would be a girl, no question. No doubt in my mind about that. And she would take her name. In ten years, I’d dreamed of my sister three times.

  “‘Don’t do this to me,’ she’d said, ‘don’t bring me back to life. I’m fine here.’

  “But once again I didn’t listen to her, Jonathan. Once again, I only thought of myself. Like I had back then, like I have always. With the daughter I’d have, I’d bring her back to life, do you get what I’m saying, Jonathan, tell me, do you get what I’m saying? Not only would she have her name, but she’d also have her beauty and her grace, her eyes, her hair. Oh, Jonathan, you can’t imagine Frosso’s face, yes, she looked exactly like your mother, exactly the same. I’m going to Hell, Jonathan, and if there is no Hell, it’ll be made to exist just for me. I disobeyed my sister a second time, when she left with Menelaos and it was as if my homeland and my home had burned down a second time, because how would my life be without her, without my little Frosso, and yet at the same time jealousy was gnawing at me, here she was, going off to a new land, with a husband, a handsome strong husband, she was off to a new continent, her eyes would see such marvels, she’d be leaving behind this war that was about to break out and everything that would come in its wake, she wouldn’t know the hunger, the savagery, the fear, the bombs exploding next to us, the conquering army in our neighborhood and in our home, she wouldn’t live through the Occupation, and—the time has come for me to reveal it to you, Jonathan, my beloved grandson—as soon as little Frosso left, it was as if this sharp pain made me see everything that would happen to our country, I don’t know how or why, I saw before me death approaching, I’m not afraid of my words, Jonathan, no one about to die is afraid of revelations, and mark my words, I won’t be around for much longer, so anyway, on that first night, when I was left alone in the empty house, I got on my knees to say my prayers, as we always did with little Frosso, ‘God of our homeland, rest the souls of all those who were not fortunate enough to come here with us, Mama and Papa and all those who were lost in the scorched land.’ But my lips, as if of their own accord, whispered something else that night: ‘God of our homeland, make something happen, please, make something—anything—happen, some inconceivable and unrestricted and unlimited something is what I’m asking for. Make something happen so that I leave here and go and live in America, just get me out of here.’ And God answered my prayer, Jonathan, and that’s why I’m going to Hell, unless it was the Devil who heard me, which makes my god the Devil, and what can I say . . . What can I say . . . What more can I say . . . The Devil-God answered my prayer, my little Frosso was out of my life, and as if that wasn’t enough, I won’t just let her be, even when she tells me she’s fine, I want to bring her back, as if then my sins would be blotted out and forgotten, through a young girl, my daughter, whom I will name after her. And that’s what I did, Jonathan, and twelve years later the new Frosso was born, my daughter. Your mama, Jonathan, your beautiful, accursed mama, your dead mama, Jonathan. One day, when she had become a young girl, she put on a miniskirt that barely covered her underwear, the whole house shone with youth and innocence, she put on her first pair of tights, black silk, that she’d bought from the Saks boutique, and a blouse which was open at the chest, it was March and spring was awakening in the Big Apple, your mother was thirteen years old and her chest had begun to awaken and not fit into her old clothes, and I saw Menelaos, your grandpa, in the dining room, I saw the gleam in his eye as he stood before his daughter so resplendent, ‘Frosso,’ he said, and as God, as the Devil’s my witness, as either of the two is my witness, or both of them in one, I caught in the air that the name ‘Frosso’ didn’t refer to his daughter, but to his dead first wife, my sister, and that his voice was filled with lust and sexual yearning, Jonathan, a father for his daughter, Jonathan, and we’ll all burn together, Jonathan, it was the same voice that I had heard twenty-six years earlier on Ergasias Street in New Ionia, telling my sister: ‘Frosso, I’m going to make you my wife.’ He felt it too and it upset him no end, and from then on he began to work late more and more and to stay at home less and less. He was growing old fast, I knew I wouldn’t have him for much longer. And your mother, who knew nothing, it was as if she knew everything. When we went to Athens, she didn’t even want to hear about coming with us. ‘I’ll stay here.’ She was the same age Amalia is now. When we came back, it was as if years had gone by, even though we’d only been away barely a month. You had to be told all these things.”

  “Let’s go home, Grandma, the sun’s gone down, let’s go home.”

  “My sweet Jonathan!”

  It was you I was thinking of, Amalia, the whole time Grandma was talking, I kept thinking how you must never find out.

  “How naïve can you be, Jonathan? Did it never occur to you that there were no secrets? We all knew. We all pretended not to know what we knew.”

  But I . . . Amalia, I . . . I . . .

  “You?”

  I love you, Amalia.

  “You’re attracted to death, why don’t you relax in your seat, you still have a few more hours of traveling ahead of you, look at how calmly your fellow passengers are enjoying their flight, there, there now, just shut out my memory.”

  Everything was changing, Amalia. Grandpa was no longer with us. We were growing up, we graduated high school, you were studying music at college and I was trying to find myself, making plans I never went through with. At home, Bellino had given his place to Demosthenes, whom you had found as a newborn one day near the river. Unlike Bellino, he would sit at your feet for hours, purring. The white couch was worn; dust and damp covered the old stains. The smell of alcohol had faded. Mother hadn’t stopped drinking, she’d just switched from whiskey to vodka.

  One day, Grandma moved out. She did it: Lale Andersen. Without asking us, without thinking it over, she just decided that Grandma wouldn’t be living with us anymore. Her new address was the Serenity nursing home in Upper Manhattan.

  “They’ll take better care of her there,” she told us.

  Anthoula also left. We didn’t need her anymore, she said, and sent her off to some relatives of hers in Astoria. She didn’t care what we thought. One evening, just like that, without warning, when we came home, Grandma was gone.

  “Starting today, your grandma doesn’t live here anymore,” she announced.

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  You went straight to the piano and began to play.

  “I couldn’t bear to listen, Jonathan, I just couldn’t bear it.”

  “Why did you do it, Mama?”

  “She’s protected there. Here everything’s . . . everything’s . . . open, open windows, drafts, noises. She’ll have peace and quiet there.”

  You started playing louder, Amalia, banging on the keys ferociously. Demosthenes cowered in a corner.

  “I couldn’t bear to listen, Jonathan. I just couldn’t bear it.”

  I felt the anger welling up inside me.

  “Whatever you feel like doing,” I threw in her face, “whatever harebrained idea you get into your head, who are you to decide about our lives, who the hell are you?”

  And it all came pouring out of me at once. I asked her about our father. For the first time.

  “Who is he? Forget the lies you’ve been feeding us all these years and just tell us.”

  “What does it matter?”

  “How dare you? Who are you to decide what matters?”

  She began mumbling something.

  “He’s a stranger, I didn’t want it to go any further, an unknown father leaves no traces. I didn’t want any traces.”
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  “Was he indigent? Homeless? At the Blue Mountain there was a man who called me his son, was it him?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Was it the same stranger with Amalia?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is she my full sister? Same mother, same father?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why don’t you just die?”

  That was when you stopped playing, Amalia, your fingers, which had been running wildly over the keys, stopped in midair. “I’m leaving,” you said, but you didn’t, you stayed there, looking down at the piano keys as if you had kept on playing.

  “Why don’t you just die?”

  She looked at me without moving. Like a statue. As if gazing at me from afar. She bowed her head, touched her chin, and I remembered the funerary stele at the museum.

  “Why don’t you just die?”

  She began speaking gibberish. I couldn’t understand what she was saying.

  “No, Jonathan, it’s not true, don’t play hide and seek with your memory. Mama answered you, she didn’t speak gibberish at all, she said:

  “‘I can’t die because dead people don’t die, I can’t die because I’m already dead, from the moment I took the place of a dead woman. My family saw to my death before I was even born.’

  “That was what our mother said, Jonathan. And it was then that I stopped playing, I stood up and left the room, remember?”

  It’s been a long time, Amalia.

  “Fourteen years, Jonathan. January 2013. You’re traveling to our land of origin.”

  Amalia, you shouldn’t have . . .

  “There’s no such thing as should or shouldn’t have, Jonathan. Who are we to say? Who are we to change it? The destiny of the world is more important than our own.”

  Once or twice a week I would visit Grandma. She was growing old with a quiet dignity. Her health was good and her mind was in fine form for her age. At first, you’d come along too, but then you stopped visiting. I would go alone.

  “Grandma wanted you there alone, Jonathan, my presence prevented her from speaking.”

  Eight years went by. Menelaos’s diner was sold to an Italian. Its name was changed from “Ellinis” to “Bella Napoli.” Once a month you played piano there and sang. Your friends would come along, Michael, too. Music won you over. You kept practicing and playing the piano. And I would sit and read for hours on end and look for a job to justify my existence. We were too old to go roller skating or ice skating, too old to feed the squirrels in the park and play hide and seek with them, too old to ask: “Mama, where do you drift off to, why won’t you speak to us?” The colorful crowd was always there, in the streets, on the avenues, despite the unbearable winter cold and the stifling summer heat, the crowd was unfailingly there. Noisy and detached from our story, the crowd flooded our city, which could never embrace us in its silence. We were growing up with this unchanged crowd. It was in its company that we ushered in the new millennium. At Times Square, the universe was ablaze, thousands of fireworks embroidering the sky, “Happy New Millennium,” “Happy 2000.” We put on paper hats, we blew on party horns and waved American flags, we burrowed into the pandemonium. The sky was turning red. I saw you with Michael, he had his arm around you.

  “He was just a friend, Jonathan, nothing more, you glared at him like he was a thief.”

  No stranger could ever make you happy, Amalia.

  “You needn’t have worried. Happiness and I never got along that well, Jonathan.”

  My head grew heavy. I couldn’t take any more celebrations. I went home hoping no one was there. But she was there. Alone. Drinking. She offered me a glass of champagne.

  “Happy New Year, son!” she said.

  “Happy New Year, Miss Andersen!” I downed the drink with one gulp and went to bed.

  It was January 1st, 2000. I went to visit Grandma.

  In a clean room, a TV set, a table, an armchair, soon she’d turn eighty-five, there was no room or need for anything more. Every two hours a nurse made a cursory check—blood pressure cuff, oxygen tank, serum IV at the ready, urine sample cups. The dining room was on the lower floor, there was a young volunteer who’d wheel her down there, “She’s absolutely fine,” the head nurse assured me. In a corner on the windowsill, among the skyscrapers, a little plastic plant pot with a flower that looked like a cyclamen stood out like a sore thumb, no doubt a gift from Anthoula, no one else came to see her. “She’s almost completely silent all day long,” the volunteer said, and when I asked him, “And how about at night?” he didn’t reply. I stroked her hair like you would have. She was sitting in the armchair, I couldn’t tell if she was sleeping. I adjusted a lock of her white hair which fell limply to the side. She half opened her eyes and gave a faint smile.

  “Amalia, is that you?” she said.

  “It’s not Amalia, it’s Jonathan, Grandma.”

  “Frosso?”

  “It’s Jonathan, Grandma.”

  I didn’t stay. Next day, the exact same thing. As soon as she saw me, she sat up in bed, and when I touched her hair, with lifeless eyes and an almost nonexistent voice, she said:

  “Amalia, is that you?”

  “Yes, Grandma, it’s Amalia, didn’t you recognize me?”

  With something that looked like a smile on her lips, she whispered:

  “But of course I recognize you, what a thing to ask, come and sit next to me, canım.”10

  “I put on your eyes and I caressed her, Amalia.”

  “But, Jonathan, you told the truth.”

  The turbulence persists, growing heavier. The flight attendant takes the glass of red wine that has just spilled over the white napkin that was spread on my lap. When Grandpa ate, he would always tie a white napkin around his neck. Do you remember, Amalia? Grandma also had a white napkin tied around her neck, the volunteer had just finished feeding her.

  “She didn’t make a mess at all,” he said to me. “We did really well.”

  A few days went by and I went back to see her. It was as if there was someone else in her place. The young volunteer was waiting for me.

  “She’s restless,” he said, “very restless.” And then added: “She’s been waiting for you.”

  “Whom?” I asked anxiously. “Whom has she been waiting for?”

  “You, of course. Aren’t you her grandson?”

  “Yes, I am,” and I asked him to step outside for a bit.

  Grandma Erasmia lay there with her eyes wide open, without looking at me, and she opened her mouth and words, meanings, her broken-down regained train of thought began to pour out like the sea.

  “I don’t like skyscrapers, they make our souls dizzy, I never got used to them, did you know that?”

  “Yes, Grandma.”

  “I’d look at the Empire State Building and the Twin Towers and all these tall buildings and I’d close my eyes, and then I’d see stone houses and dovecotes and carved churches.”

  “Calm down, Grandma, stop thinking now, stop remembering.”

  “How easy it is to leave, easier than one might imagine . . . I’m ready now, I’m ready, şimdi bu akşam.”11

  “What are you talking about, Grandma? You’re going to be fine, we’ll go back home, Mama’s waiting for you, and so is Amalia, they couldn’t come today, Amalia wasn’t feeling well, they’re getting the house all spruced up, they’re expecting you. From the moment you left, Demosthenes has lost his appetite and won’t come out from under the bed, can you believe it? Everyone can’t wait for you to come home!”

  “Yes, yes, evet,12 I know, biliyorum kalbim,13 Menelaos, Frosso and Little Frosso, Amalia, Seraphim and Sakis. But they’re also waiting for me: Isidoros, Avraam, Katina, Anastasia, Aglaia, Nikitas, Cemal, Hassan, Spyros. Hills covered in orange groves, fairy caves, it smells of lavender and lemon, it’ll be so bright, white and red together. T
he sun setting in the sky, not a scorching fire.” She was gasping for breath. “Tall buildings and skyscrapers make me dizzy, you know they do, tell me that yes, you know.”

  “Yes, Grandma, I know.”

  “Fatma, Şehrazat, Bulent, Özgur, Onur, Tarik, Nazlı, they all want to come and see me, and Mehmet with his oud from Talas.”

  “No, Grandma, no, catch your breath,” but there was no taming her tongue as she tried to get all the names in, “no,” I pressed my hand to her lips, “no,” I wet her lips with some water, “no . . . no . . . ” A torrent of names came gushing out, it would have swallowed us both up if I had let it, we would have drowned, Amalia.

  A crazy child thought its mother was many mothers in one. It screamed that she had two heads. The mean one would try to eat the child, while the other was tender and compassionate. The child sang while it was being slaughtered, singing to the blood it was losing.

  She suddenly stopped, exhausted . . . Oh my God . . . it’ll happen now, I said to myself, and I’ve never been with someone at the end, I don’t know how strong I am, how much I can take, how fearful I might be . . . I know nothing about myself, Amalia . . . I am here . . . but I’d like to run far away, somewhere else, to another country . . . to leave her here alone to settle her accounts with God . . .

  She held onto me . . . She grabbed my arm tightly by the wrist—where did she find so much strength in that skinny body?

  “Don’t go,” she said, forcefully. “No one else will want to help me. Stay. Sit by me. I’m scared. Don’t listen to what I was saying earlier, when I pretended to be brave. There’s nobody more scared on this earth than me. D’you hear me?”

  “But why?”

  “Because once I wished someone dead, a loved one, my most loved. I wished for it.”

  “Grandma, we’ve all wished that, there isn’t a person alive who hasn’t wished someone they loved dead.”

  “But with me it’s different,” she said.

  “Why?”

  “Because she actually died, she drowned . . . I took her place. What I dreamed came true. My daughter (love her as much as you can!), my daughter is protecting me. Let her drink, my boy, she drowns in booze and it calms her soul, my daughter’s hiding from me so that I don’t see her and have horrible images awaken inside me, she doesn’t come to see me so as not to make me remember, it’s out of kindness that she hides from me, she was only a little girl and I would hug her and she’d avoid me, it was out of kindness that she didn’t want me to love her, to keep me from being sad, to make me see her as a stranger and not as my daughter and my sister both, as living and dead both, my daughter became hardhearted for my sake, it was I, it was I, well, not I, but our story, Jonathan . . . Who are we to set out to change our history? My daughter hard-hearted? Don’t you ever say that again about your mother, hardness often hides kindness, we’re only a toy in the hands of history, that’s what we are, a toy, an insignificant little toy, başka dünya yok,14 my daughter’s just like her, my daughter’s punishing me, have they forgiven me? Who can tell me? I didn’t want to stay in Greece, I wanted to get out of there, after my sister left with Menelaos, how was I supposed to stay on in Podarades? How could I suffer a second uprooting? Soon after, the war would break out, in a war people are divided. Friends, neighbors, relatives. Nikitas would be with the good guys, Costas would be with the bad guys, they’d change their names, their clothes, their smell, their voices, the good guys would become bad guys, the bad guys would deceive us using foreign kindnesses, there’d be that smell of burning again, everything would go back to the fire, again I’d see red across the sky and I wouldn’t be able to tell if it was a beautiful sunset or a fire and roofs of houses being torched, I wanted to leave, to leave. What’s true, what’s a lie, what’s a beautiful sunset and what’s a fire that burns and destroys? I’m afraid, Jonathan. The story will never stop repeating itself. That’s how people are made; it’s human nature not to be able to prevent repetition. That’s what ‘human being’ means: that which cannot prevent repetition. Even more than death, Jonathan, what I fear is repetition. So does your mother. She’s learned to dread repetition too. Terror, I’m to blame, I’m to blame, fear, I’m to blame, I’m to blame, fear, I’m to blame, I’m to blame, fear, fear, fear . . . ”