I saw Lefterio what you wrote to me about your aunt Stella that she and her husband left for Argentina but that was a mistake. Things are much better in Athens than in Argentina where great poverty has fallen the whole place is poor it would have been much better for them to go to Canada than to go there they will regret it and wont stay long before they leave. Poverty is a terrible thing my Leferitsa here too we have many expenses I have my son Thodoris in California studying at the university who needs 2,000 dollars a year and it will take him 4 years to finish so Stella did wrong to go to Argentina but thats how it is so many people talk of leaving Greece and its best for them to go anywhere at all they might as well go anywhere since there is poverty all over now even here in America many people are without jobs and stay home and live off the state which is why it is so hard today for a person to imigrate to America because things are not too good and every year there are fewer jobs and so Ill stop there.
On Saturday my husband and I went to see Eftychia Karatzakis and stayed there most of the day. She and her husband will leave on May 20 to go home to Crete. I asked her if I could put together a little package I begged her a thousand times but she said no because she says she has too many things and cant take anything else. In the end I started crying and asked if I could send at least one little dress a dress for my Lefteritsa who I love so much and she said yes and so I am sending you a dress Lefterio so you can wear it on the feast day of Agios Pavlos and go to church and remember your godmother who is in foreign lands.
I saw Lefterio that you wrote to me that I should take care to find you a husband even if hes old so that you can come here. My sweet one just as a blind man wants to see the day so too do I want to bring my people here to save them from the troubles of Greece because its true that here it is a real paradise. But if imigration was open the way you write everyone would pack their bags and come to America not just from Crete but from the whole world. Ever since I came I have been trying to bring my brother Spiros and havent been able yesterday I went again to the imigration office with my husband Fotis and they told me I have to be married for 3 years to have the right as an American to invite someone. And my aunt Maragkoudaina in Koufo asked me to make a place for her granddaughter Athina in my home and I answered her that I cant and my aunt got angry and stopped writing to me. There are strict laws Lefterio because if it was that way all of Greece would pack its bags and come here. I know my dear that life is very dramatic like you write to me and that your heart hurts and I tell you my heart hurts too because I love you so much my good little girl which I know you are and I know you deserve a good fate my dear sweet good girl but I think you will understand that I have only been here a short while and I am not yet an American. The law says that I have to be married to an American citizen for 3 years in order to invite one of my own people here.
Lefterio please do not be sad I beg you. I beg you please do not do anything silly of the kind you write to me because it is a shame and unjust to God for a golden girl like you to have her heart poisoned like that. God is great my Lefteria. Be patient thats all I write to you.
I send greetings to everyone from my husband Fotis and from all my children give all my greetings to my relations your parents and to all your brothers and sisters and may we meet soon and please give my greetings to everyone and to all the neighbors and anyone who asks after us.
Goodbye and as a gift from me your godmother Eleni Varipatakis in my next letter I will send you a memento two dollars to remember me and to buy yourself a pensil.
• • •
My father comes into the kitchen. He sets the basin on the table and takes off the orange gloves and washes his hands at the sink. Then he sits and smooths his hair which the wind had mussed and reaches for one of my cigarettes. His hands are shaking, his palms are red and wrinkled. Who knows how many loads of wash he did again today.
I’m making lamb chops, he says. And Dina from next door brought pastitsio. I’m not eating meat but I’ll boil some greens.
But he doesn’t get up from the chair. He sits with his elbows on the table twirling the lit end of his cigarette against the ashtray and staring at the letters spread before him.
I get up and pour another tsikoudia and look out the window. I can see the cream-colored bra and the panties with the kitten on them fluttering on the line. It occurs to me to ask if they were a present from him. Because I can’t imagine my mother going into a store and buying something like that. Panties with a kitten on them. Jesus. I certainly can’t imagine her wearing them. Panties with a kitten. A kitten with a red bow. My mother.
Did you read them?
He stubs out his cigarette and sweeps the pile of papers over to his side of the table and starts to neaten them.
Not all.
On the very top of the pile is the postcard with the ship. He grabs it and brings it up to his eyes then flips it over. He rests his glasses on his forehead and rubs his eyes with two fingers. He looks at the blue envelope with the red ribbon that I’ve set aside and the long letter from Atlant Siri. He picks up the ribbon and wraps it around his hand and ties a bow and then puts it in his coat pocket.
Did you read this one? he asks.
I did.
A thousand times better, he says. A thousand times better if she had left. They have good doctors there hospitals and machines and things. They don’t just let people die like a dog in the vineyard. Of course not. America America, he sings. How right they are who say your streets are paved with dreams of gold.
He rubs his eyes again, harder this time. The refrigerator is making strange noises. Crick Crack. As if there’s something alive in there that wants to get out. I read the tiny letters on the freezer door. I read the brand of the stove and of the toaster and of the clock on the wall. I’ll look at anything to avoid my father’s eyes.
Give me some of that.
He grabs my glass and takes a few sips. His Adam’s apple slowly rises then sinks back down to its place.
He sets the glass on the table and then stands and picks up the basin.
I’ve got a load of dark clothes in the machine, he says.
In the doorway he pauses and pulls his glasses down off his forehead and looks at me.
I didn’t know she wanted to go to America. What does it say in the letter? You wrote that I should find you a husband even if he’s old. She was sixteen years old. You know? Just a girl, sixteen years old. And she wanted to get married even if the groom was old. I never knew. I swear to you. She never said a thing to me. Forty-three years together and she never said a thing. Other people did, though. Sure. I heard from other people. We all take a secret with us to the grave. Big or small everyone has one. People told me but I didn’t believe. Impossible, I said. Lefteria and I won’t ever have secrets. Not in life and not in death, either. That’s what I said. Big words, sure. But I believed it. God knows I believed it. And now what’ll happen, can you tell me that? How are we supposed to live now.
He turns his head and looks at the letters splayed out over the table. His eyes seem so small and red behind his glasses. Two strange creatures staring petrified at the world from behind a glass wall.
Burn them, he says. Go out and burn them. Don’t throw them in the recycling. In a hundred years if the world still exists people will know everything about us and how we live now. Have you ever thought about that? How in a hundred years there won’t be any such thing as the past. Who am I kidding, a hundred. It’ll happen way faster. Sure. Time will be an endless present. Ever thought about that? Even our trash will still be around. That’s why we have to destroy whatever we can while we can. Memory without gaps isn’t memory. It’s death. Go out and burn them. Just don’t get any ash on the clothes out there. My back hurts from bending over the bathtub. Mind those clothes, you hear?
And then he leaves.
I pour another tsikoudia and drink it standing up in front of the window. Then I take a swig straight from the bottle.
I wonder if I should take my father
to see a doctor.
I wonder what my mother did when she read that letter from Atlantic City.
I wonder if she closed her eyes and cried or if she forgot or if she kept on hoping. If that dress ever came if she wore it if she went to church. Whatever became of that dress, I wonder.
Outside the whole world is letting loose. The windowpanes are shuddering, the wind whistles through whatever crack it can find. My mother’s clothes are whirling on the line like captive ghosts struggling to escape.
I wonder if that memento ever arrived.
If those two dollars ever came from America, if my mother ever bought that pencil.
People Are Streinz
SEVEN MONTHS without a single dream. Seven whole months. The twenty-first of May was the last time I had a dream. I remember because it was also the last time it rained around here. And I remember because it was Lena’s name day and I said it was a good sign that it rained and I finally had a dream for the first time in a long time. But I haven’t since then. And it hasn’t rained again, either. No rain and no dreams. Dead silence.
Dreams and rain. Who knows. Maybe they go together these days.
Lena doesn’t care about the rain. She doesn’t care that it’s almost Christmas and it’s still twenty degrees outside. She doesn’t care that everyone’s walking around in short-sleeved shirts and outside the birds are singing like it’s April. She doesn’t care about dreams, either.
I don’t dream, she says. I’m better off without dreams. What good did dreams ever do me? I just have the same one all the time, that I’m falling off a cliff and there’s no one to catch me. Why sit there worrying about stupid dreams. You’ve got plenty else to worry about. Yesterday they called again from the appliance place and asked about our payments. We’re three months behind and this and that is going to happen if they take us to court. Did you hear? To court. Can you believe it? The guy had this tone of voice like he was talking to I don’t know who. I wanted the earth to open up and swallow me whole. To have him humiliate me like that, and there was nothing I could say. And if we have to go to court they’ll make us pay the lawyers’ fees, too. Are you listening? Why don’t you worry about that for a change. About stuff like that. Not dreams and rain.
She’s holding a strip of orange peel and slicing it into pieces with a knife. She’s already cut it into a thousand tiny slivers but she won’t stop won’t give up. She slices it into tiny pieces and then smaller ones and even smaller than that. A thousand slivers. And she’s still at it.
Watch it, I say. The last thing we need is for you to lose a finger.
The twenty-first of December. Saturday afternoon. Four days until Christmas. Out the kitchen window I can see colored lights blinking on and off on the balconies and in the windows and yards of nearby apartments and houses. Red green yellow blue. Stars and garlands and Saint Vassilises and sleighs pulled by reindeer. An incredible number of lights. Like you’re in an endless casino and all the houses are slot machines. Cement, poverty, and colored lights – Bangladesh meets Las Vegas. Kids are riding their bikes in the street and women are watering flowerpots full of bushy plants. I see men in shorts grilling meat and drinking beer on the rooftops of apartment buildings. I see a bird circling in the air around a birdcage and the bird inside flaps its wings too but in a surprised kind of way. The sky is completely clear, the air as dry as the mouth of a person who’s very scared. Just a few days before Christmas but nothing looks like Christmas. Except for the lights. It’s as if Christmas came and went and now it’s spring but for some crazy reason everyone forgot to take down their decorations.
A few days before Christmas and something in the air around me is burning like a slow fuse. I wonder. I wonder when the fuse will burn down to the end and when the explosion will come and what will happen after that.
The other day I caught myself standing in front of a shop that sells hunting gear looking at the knives and switchblades in the window. Then I went in and bought a Buck knife, one of those American knives with a blade twenty centimeters long. It’s no joke it’s the real thing it can do some serious damage the heft of it in your hand makes your mind go dark. I carry it in my boot just in case, as they say. I didn’t tell Lena about it. But at night when I can’t sleep my mind wanders to things like that. Fuses and explosions and guns and knives. And I wonder what the hell is happening and where it’s all heading. It scares me.
And then there’s Lena dicing orange peel at the kitchen table. Slicing it silently with a knife in an utterly silent house. A silence like you wouldn’t believe, like what they say about the silence before an earthquake. And I think about how if there’s an earthquake maybe the weather will change, maybe it’ll rain and get cold and maybe even snow. If there’s an earthquake big enough to shake the whole world maybe something will change. And it scares me to be thinking those kinds of thoughts. What kind of life can you live without anything good, I say to myself.
What kind of life can you live when you’re waiting for something bad to save you from something bad.
• • •
There’s half a bottle of wine left from yesterday. I fill a glass with feigned indifference, as if it were water, and Lena looks at me and starts to say something but I beat her to it.
Monday, I say. On Monday when I get my Christmas bonus I’ll pay off the rest of what we owe at Kotsovolos. Okay?
Fine, she says. That’s great. I can stop worrying.
She grabs another piece of orange peel and starts to slice it with the knife. Her fingers are yellow.
Do you maybe, just maybe, have some idea of how much we owe? she asks me. Take a piece of paper and start writing. Two months of building fees is two hundred euros. The car insurance expired on the fifteenth. That’s another two hundred.
Rent. Kotsovolos. A hundred and forty to the electric company. The fucking credit cards from the fucking bank of fucking Cyprus. I have two cavities that need filling. By the time I’m forty I’ll have no teeth at all. Who knows how much the dentist will cost. Why aren’t you writing? You should be writing. And if you add it all up you’ll see that to make ends meet we need the Christmas bonus and the Easter bonus and the bonuses for next Christmas and next Easter too. Write it. Write it down.
I grab the knife from her hands and throw it in the sink. She looks at me as if I were a stain on a white shirt and then opens the drawer and takes out another knife and goes back to cutting the peel right where she left off. Her fingers are yellow and trembling.
Lena, I say.
Write, she says.
• • •
I look out the window. The sky. There’s a strange color in the sky again this evening. A gray like the underside of a piece of cardboard. Endless gray. No sun no moon no stars. Neither day nor night.
Not the sky but the underside of the sky.
Lena is on her second glass and second orange, peeling it and slicing the peel into tiny slivers which she lines up at the edge of the table. Her nails are yellow. The knife is yellow. Even the table is yellow. I wonder whether I should go and get my new knife and sit across from her and start slicing orange peels, too. To take my mind off things. So I don’t have to see that sky that’s the color of clouds without actually having a single cloud in it at all.
I’ll ask Vassilis for a loan, she says.
Which Vassilis? The saint?
A thousand. For the stuff that won’t wait. Then we’ll see.
A thousand? Are you crazy?
Calm down, he’s your brother. If you can’t ask your brother for help who can you ask. Sonia’s offered a hundred times. Whenever you need, she said. We’re doing just fine, she said. They’re going to Paris for New Year’s, did you know that? To Disneyland. They wanted to go to the Asterix village but it’s closed in winter. It opens in March or April I think. She said they’ll go to Jim Morrison’s grave.
She stops slicing and looks out the window. A piece of white stuff from the orange is stuck to her chin, hanging there like a tiny thread over an abys
s.
Jim Morrison, she says. That was so long ago. I use to love him when I was younger. I was completely in love. Crazy, passionate love. People are streinz. People are streinz ouen yioura streinzer faces louk agli ouen yiouralon.
She sings in a sweet husky voice and slices the orange peel and her voice as she sings sounds like a lullaby in the silence of the house and I think how I’d like for us to go to sleep and sleep for whole hours whole days and when we wake up it would be evening and raining and we would drink hot cocoa with cinnamon and eat grape must cookies with sesame seeds and then go out onto the balcony and smell the rain and the wet earth and there wouldn’t be any knives or fuses or rent or debts – all those things will be gone and we’ll have woken up new strange people with no nostalgia for anything. Nostalgia. A mangy dog with gunk in its eyes licking its wounds. It tricks you into reaching out to pet it then bites you as hard as it can.
I lean over and pluck the orange pith from her chin and roll it into a little ball and toss it into the sink.
Monday, I say. I’ll take care of it all on Monday. Myself. No Vassilises and no Sonias. Okay?
She looks at me and then looks away.
I never expected this, she says.
What do you mean?
Nothing.
Tell me.
Nothing.
Then she cuts herself. The knife slips and cuts her on the thumb. But she doesn’t say anything doesn’t make a sound. She lets the blood run, looks at it calmly and indifferently the way brave people do on television. I go to grab her hand but she pulls away. She licks the blood, sucks at it then takes a paper napkin and wraps it around her finger. She looks at me with pursed lips and squeezes the napkin around the wound and the napkin turns redder and redder and then black.
Let me see, I say. Lena. It’s me. We’re not enemies. It’s just me.
But she’s looking at me as if I were the knife.
• • •
On Christmas Eve it seems like I’m having a dream. I say seems like, because for a long time I’ve been seeing things at night when I’m in bed and even though they seem like dreams I know they aren’t because when I’m seeing them I’m awake. Of course I’m never quite sure anymore when I’m sleeping and when I’m awake. It seems to me that those two things have become one – or nothing at all. I’m sure the weather is to blame. It hasn’t rained in seven months and now it’s December but outside it’s spring and the sun is as hot as two suns put together and every night I remember the winters we used to have and the cold and the rain and the snow. Some nights I get out of bed like a sleepwalker and open the cupboards and stick my head in the closet and smell the winter clothes and a sorrow like you wouldn’t believe comes over me as I look at those winter clothes hanging in the closet and wonder if we’ll ever wear them again or if they’ll just hang there forever getting eaten by the dust and the mites, like ghosts of winters past, ghosts of a past life, our ghosts, the ghosts of us.
Something Will Happen, You'll See Page 16