Nicolai looked up at Achilles. “You haven’t changed one bit,” he said, taking his friend’s hand.
Achilles kissed him on both cheeks.
He smelled of the same stale cologne they used to slap on their faces when they were teenagers. His hair was as long as it had been in high school. His pants were tight; his shiny shirt unbuttoned to where a growing belly stuck out. He wore sandals and that same silly, almost hopeful grin he’d had as a boy.
Nicolai’s mother looked up briefly, but went back to her salad. “This onion is sour,” she said.
“What are you doing here?” Achilles asked.
“He comes to visit us,” his mother said, edging her chair away.
“Hello.” A woman stood behind Achilles. She ducked around him and leaned down to kiss Nicolai’s mother on each cheek.
Nicolai stood up and his chair fell backwards. “Hello,” he said, letting the chair drop as he took her hand.
“You don’t remember me?” Her face grew red.
“Should I?”
“Dimitria. Your cousin. You used to tease me and pull my hair.”
“But you were a kid with braces the last time I saw you.” He righted the chair. “Please, sit. I’ll find more.” An image came to him. A time when they were kids playing alone in her bedroom. They were barely teenagers.
“We are at the bar,” Achilles said. “You enjoy your lunch. But we should get together soon.” Achilles put his arm around Dimitria’s waist. “Right?”
“Yes.” Nicolai shook Achilles’s hand. Dimitria offered hers. He took it in his. She had a strong grip, a man’s hand. Sara’s hands were small. They were the first things he noticed about her. Even in this place, far from home, he couldn’t get away from Sara. He was sure there were moments when he didn’t think of her, but he couldn’t say when.
He watched Achilles and Dimitria move to the other end of the café before he sat down. “You have to be careful with that one,” his mother said. “He has big ideas for this and that and no money. He is all talk.”
Nicolai tore at his bread, then dropped it, uneaten, on his plate.
“Dimitria thinks she’ll get Achilles to settle down, but he’s not the type. You can knock on a deaf person’s door forever. He will never answer.”
“He had all the girls following him in school.” Nicolai gazed over at the bar. Achilles sat close to Dimitria, whispering in her ear. She nodded. “I guess he’s got whatever it takes to make a woman happy.”
“He feeds women lies and they believe him.” His mother glanced over at the bar and shrugged. “She’ll never find a good man.”
“Maybe his way is better.”
Her head tilted towards the bar. “He has nothing. You have a daughter.”
“Yes, the one my parents refuse to acknowledge.” He folded his hands, clutched them together in his lap.
The lines around her mouth deepened. “Your father is old-fashioned,” she said at last. “He thinks we shouldn’t mix cultures.” She patted her mouth with her napkin. “Differences or no differences, family is all we have.”
He leaned back in his chair. A group of men squeezed around the table beside them were arguing. One man smacked the newspaper. “Athens can’t understand what we need.”
“But we put them there,” one man said. Others shouted in agreement and they all started talking at once.
“Someone is always mad,” Nicolai said. “What kind of family is that?”
His mother picked at the last bits of salad and threw her fork into the bowl. “Nothing left here to worry about.” She looked around the café and beckoned the waiter. “We need a good cup of coffee.”
Nicolai glanced again at Achilles and Dimitria, wondered what they were talking about. His mother put her hand over his, stopping him from tapping his spoon against the table. “It’s a good thing some things stay the same.”
He faced the café rather than her. “He’s ashamed of me.”
“It has nothing to do with you.” She moved her hand up to his forearm. Her skin looked dry, flaking. It was so thin he could see the blood pumping in the dark, swollen veins. He wanted to hold her delicate hand, make things better, but how could he take away the years of washing dishes, cleaning up after him and his sisters? His father? “We have to understand,” she said. “Life was not so easy for him.”
“The war ruined him.” He said it like a catechism. His fingers drummed on the table. “I’ve heard it all before. That’s no excuse.”
She picked up her napkin and folded it once, then shook it out and folded it a second time along different lines. “He wanted to go to America or Australia or England, anywhere, just to get away.” She shrugged and snapped the napkin. It drooped open.
“I know the story. He met you in Patras and fell in love.”
“We have you, Christina, Katarina and Maria.” She threw the napkin down on the table. “They will clean this. I don’t have to do it for them.” She swallowed her coffee in one mouthful. “Bitter,” she said, her face scrunched up. “I don’t know why I’m surprised.”
“He didn’t want any of us.” Nicolai leaned toward her.
“Something very bad happened to him. None of us can understand.” She moved her chair back and snapped her fingers at the waiter. “Stop passing off your dirty water as coffee.”
Back at the house, he stood at the kitchen table and watched her wash potatoes in the sink. He was never quite sure what to do with himself in the kitchen. It had been the same with Sara. She commanded the kitchen, had her system and knew what she was doing. His mother put a peeler in his hand and said, “You can help, you know.”
When his father came in, he continued to the bathroom without greeting them. He returned to the kitchen a half hour later and turned on the radio. “Is dinner ready?” he asked, sitting down in his chair at the head of the table. Nicolai sat at the opposite end.
“What did you do today?” His father wiped his fork and knife against his sleeve.
“He helped me,” his mother said before Nicolai could respond.
“Good.”
“And your day?” Nicolai leaned towards his father. Was it possible that they might finally have a real conversation?
“My days don’t change. One day is the same as another.”
“Yes, I suppose that’s true.”
“If you hang around women, you’ll become like them.”
They ate. In the background, the news anchor’s voice droned the day’s events and catastrophes. When his mother said something, his father silenced her. “I’m trying to listen. I can’t hear you and the radio at the same time.”
She would stop talking, then start again. “That coffee was awful today. Dish water couldn’t taste worse than what they tried to sell us.”
Nicolai smiled and nodded. “No one can make a cup of coffee as good as yours.”
His father got up, walked over to the radio and turned up the volume.
His mother shook her head. When she turned to glance at Nicolai, he averted his gaze.
He finished dinner and went to his room, leaving his parents at the table, the weatherman’s voice now in the background, warning about the high temperatures, dry conditions and wind gusts. The day had passed and now it was too late to call Alexia. He calculated the time difference. She’d be in school. He’d make sure to call her tomorrow.
The phone woke him. He hadn’t heard his father leave. This was the first time since he’d arrived that he’d slept without dreaming of Alexia. Sara. His mother called out his name from the kitchen, came to his door and knocked quietly. “Telephone,” she said.
“Give me a minute,” he said, slipped into his pants and went to the phone.
“How’s the sleeping beauty?”
Nicolai recognized Achilles’s voice right away and smiled.
“Does he want to get a coffee this morning?” Achilles asked.
Nicolai arrived at the same small café where he and his mother had had lunch the day before. Achilles
was already there, reading the newspaper and sucking on an ice cube. His iced coffee was a milky brown.
Achilles stroked the tuft of hair on his chin and nodded towards the train outside. “It brings tourists to see the gorge and Kalavryta. They stay for a night or two in our village before and then again after they come back from that place. There are many ways to make money here.”
Nicolai ordered a coffee.
“I want to show you my project. Do you have the time?” Except for the hint of a beard, Achilles’s face was as smooth as when they were children. His smile was mischievous, as if he knew a secret about you that you hadn’t told anyone else. Achilles hadn’t followed the usual path of families around here, farming his father’s land, or at least Nicolai could see no signs of it. His fingernails were not stained like those who had worked the fields. Despite their best efforts, they could never wash away the dirt rooted day after day beneath their nails.
They walked across the railroad tracks, past the school and down to the narrow pebbled beach. A slice of crumbling blacktop ran between the beach and a large, empty field. Remnants of a newspaper blew across the road and flapped against a twisted and decaying olive tree.
“Can you imagine what someone could do here?” Achilles placed his arm around Nicolai’s shoulders. “Think of restaurants and cafés. We could build a boardwalk all along the beach with lights. Tourists could stroll anytime they wanted. It could be beautiful.”
“I suppose so.” Nicolai walked ahead.
Achilles caught up. “This could be ours. Together we could make our little village special. If it doesn’t change, it will die.”
“It’s been the same way for hundreds of years. They can’t kill us off so easily.”
“But we could do better, don’t you think?” He laced his arm through Nicolai’s. “I think about settling down sometimes. Doing better. Maybe this is what I need.”
“I won’t be staying. I have a daughter in Canada.”
Achilles stopped and tugged at Nicolai’s arm to make him stop. “Is she with your wife? Are you divorced? This is what is said about your return to the village. And this is not the only thing.” He shook his head. “I tell you this as your friend.”
Nicolai kicked at a stone. “My wife died,” Nicolai said. He picked up the stone and threw it into the water. The breeze blew sand into his eyes. He blinked once, and then again. The tiny grains remained, grating.
“I never heard you had a daughter,” Achilles said.
“I didn’t marry a Greek girl.”
Achilles nodded. “Come out with your cousin and me tonight.”
“I don’t know.” He rubbed his eyes and blinked again. “I’m not much in the mood.” He was barely functioning. Couldn’t Achilles see that? Nicolai couldn’t handle going out and trying to make conversation, pretend to take an interest in what they were doing. He tapped his thigh, stood staring at the distant mountains beyond the bay.
Achilles put his arm around Nicolai again. “It would do you good to get out of that house.”
He met Achilles and Dimitria at the old bouzouki in the centre of town. Achilles ordered a large platter of barboni, a couple of bowls of olives and several plates of grilled vegetables and potatoes. He waved and more baskets of bread came.
“This is too much,” Dimitria said.
“Ella. How often do we have a special guest from America? We have to celebrate. Isn’t that right, Nicolai?”
“I’m with my cousin on this one. This is too much.”
Achilles shrugged. “So, as I was saying, I have spoken to a few people about this project and they’re as excited as I am.”
Nicolai put a couple of potatoes on his plate. He felt Dimitria’s eyes on him. He looked up. She smiled and looked away. She leaned back into her chair and tilted her head towards Achilles. She wore a light green turtleneck. Nothing unusual or special about it. Why had he noticed?
“It’ll be an exciting project. You need to get your mind off things.”
“What things?” Dimitria asked.
“I don’t think I was supposed to say anything,” Achilles said.
“My wife passed away a little while ago. My daughter is with her godparents,” Nicolai said. He suddenly felt tired. He leaned his head against his hand.
The music started. Achilles raised his voice. “I have big plans for us.”
“I don’t make plans anymore,” Nicolai said. It was nice that she didn’t ask him anything about Sara, whether she was Greek or not. All those silly questions.
Dimitria wiped her mouth, dropped her napkin on her lap and patted his hand. That image again. Her father found them asleep, her head on his chest. They were scolded. He was told to go home and tell his father what he’d done. He hadn’t done anything so he said nothing. He didn’t see much of her after that.
Nicolai picked up his napkin and wiped his mouth. Her hand fell away.
After dinner, they listened to the music for a while, then Nicolai said he was tired and was going home. “We’ll come with you. Let me get this,” Achilles said, pointing at the check in the middle of the table. He opened his wallet and flipped through the bills, counting under his breath. Setting the bills down, he took his change purse from his jacket pocket, opened it and picked out a few coins. He shook the purse as if looking for more, then emptied it onto the table. He looked at the check again. “Interesting.”
“I can help.” Dimitria pulled her purse from the back of the chair.
“No woman of mine has to pay.”
Nicolai reached for the check. “I’ll handle it.”
Achilles picked up the bills, put them back in his wallet and leaned forward to tuck it into his back pocket. Dimitria elbowed him. He smiled and said, “You Americans are very fortunate. Yes?” He scooped up the change and dropped it into his change purse, clicking it closed.
Nicolai ignored the comment and paid the waiter.
“How is it living with your parents again?” Achilles asked.
“My father hasn’t changed.”
“Kalavryta was hard on that generation,” Dimitria said.
“My father got over it,” Achilles said, “but he was young. Yours was older.”
“What do you mean?”
Dimitria squeezed Achilles’s hand and shook her head.
“What did I say?” Achilles asked. Smiling at Dimitria, he said, “People react to things differently, that’s all I wanted to say.”
Achilles walked a little ahead of Nicolai and Dimitria along the dark streets. He whistled. The breeze pressed against them, cool and persistent. Dimitria pulled her jacket off her shoulders, Nicolai held it up for her, and she slipped her arms through the sleeves. Had she leaned back against him? Or was he imagining things? He hadn’t been close to a woman since Sara died. He pulled away.
They dropped Dimitria off at her house and Nicolai recognized it as the one he’d walked past the day he’d arrived. She must have been the woman he’d seen working in the field. He’d forgotten a lot about this place.
At the next corner, Achilles veered down one street, Nicolai took the other. “I’ll call you,” Achilles said. “To talk about a few things.”
He could still hear Achilles’s whistling long after he rounded the corner for home.
The next day, Nicolai ran into Dimitria on the street on his way to the butcher to buy a roast for his mother. Four bags of groceries were inching their way down her arms, just as she tried to hook another one on.
“These are bigger than you are,” he said, taking her bags. Her forearms were scored red. “Look at your arms,” he said.
She pushed the sleeves of her sweater down. “This will pass.”
Nicolai chatted about the food they’d had at last night’s bouzouki, how he couldn’t get Greek food like that in Canada.
“You’re not happy to be home, though.”
“Why does everyone have to read more into what I say?” He was tired of watching what he said around his father. And if he wasn’t ca
reful with his mother, he knew she’d put words in his mouth. And now Dimitria was doing it too? He was so sick of all of this. He picked up his pace without really intending to.
She pulled his arm and stopped him. “I only meant these aren’t the best circumstances for your return.”
He nodded. They continued walking towards her house in silence. When they arrived, her mother opened the door. “And who is this?”
“Don’t you remember Nicolai?” Dimitria said.
The woman was dressed in black from head to toe. She squinted. “Why can’t you carry your own bags? It is not a man’s job to do this.”
“I’m a relative, Thia. It’s okay for me to help my cousin.”
The woman grabbed the bags from Nicolai and shook her head. “Young people today don’t know what to do.” She disappeared somewhere in the house. Nicolai and Dimitria stood on the front step.
“My mother is suspicious of all men,” Dimitria said. “She wonders why I haven’t married and had children like all my friends.”
“How about Achilles?”
Dimitria put her finger over her mouth. “Don’t let her hear you.”
“I don’t expect many mothers like him.”
She shrugged. “We pass the time together. We’re just friends. There is nothing more to it than that.”
I guess everyone needs a friend, he thought. “I suppose asking you out to lunch is out of the question.”
The eagerness he saw in her eyes scared him. Why the hell had he opened his mouth?
“Yes, but you should do it anyway,” she said.
He looked away. “Okay, so how about it?”
Dimitria opened the front door. “I’m going to the café for lunch, Mamma. I will return soon.” She slammed the door behind her.
Her mother came from the back of the house and hurtled out the front door behind them. “Why not have lunch here?” she asked. “We have food at home. Why waste your money?”
“Thank you, that is very nice of you, Thia. I could take the two of you out.”
“Look at me.” She pointed to herself. “I’m not dressed. Stay with us and tell us about your life in America.” She kissed him on both cheeks, put her arm in his and led him up the walkway and through the front door. Nicolai heard Dimitria scuff her feet behind them. As a child she used to do the same thing when she didn’t want to play with him or his sisters.
Nicolai's Daughters Page 7