by Lynn Freed
“Ruthi,” she said, coming back into the room, “I learned in the army a few things. So I got her from behind in a grip, nothing she could do, and I gave to her a small push. Now I think I am again going to throw up. Or maybe not.”
I closed her door softly behind me, crept along the passage like a thief, and into my room. It was bright with the moon, and the night was warm. I locked the door and then lay on top of the covers, my heart thundering in my chest.
All these years I’d watched with amusement as Dania negotiated the depths and shallows of whatever terrain lay between her and where she wanted to be. Rules, laws, statutes—these were there to be conquered one way or another. And if she happened to fail in the conquest, well, she suffered no fears as to the consequences. “I got this time a jerk,” she’d say. “Next time I do it another way.”
And now this.
* * *
Hester #6
When Saul left Hester for another man, and Lily announced that she wanted to go with him—then, for the first time, I was afraid for the girl. I mean, physically afraid. I’d seen Hester’s violence as a child, practiced on other children and, later, on the things she tore and gouged at home—hers, mine, ours. Her rage ran very deep, I knew, while mine flared, strong and quick and searing, and then was gone.
But, until then, Lily had been spared. She had come to understand quite quickly, I thought, the power she held over her mother—the power her words might hold as well, including words she’d not yet spoken. So she said very little, as if she were hiding the words away before they could even be thought.
* * *
I SAT AWKWARDLY AT BREAKFAST, thinking I’d wait for Dania to finish her coffee before bringing up the police again.
“Never again I will drink that uzi,” she said at last. “How can you stand it, Ruthi?”
“I’ve grown to like it.”
“Look it,” she said, trying to rally her old voice. “Today we’ll fix everything.”
“‘We’?”
She narrowed her eyes at me. “Ruthi? What are you saying? Be clear with me.”
I looked at the familiar Magyar face—the skin sallower than ever, the eyes bloodshot. “I’m saying as clearly as I can that I will not be an accessory to a homicide. After the fact.”
“This is not one of your novels,” she said with a sarcastic smile. “After all these years? I can hardly believe it.”
“Years or months would make no difference in such a situation, and friendship has nothing to do with it.” Perhaps, I thought, she was right about childhood after all. Mine, rife with emotional manipulations, had schooled me against the sort of elementary maneuvers she was trying on me now.
“Do you at least have for me an aspirin?” she said, putting a hand to her head. “Or is that out of the question, too?”
I stood up and went for the aspirin. And when I returned, Gladdy was in the kitchen doorway, holding the scimitar. “Miss Dani,” she said, “what I must do with the knife of that lady?”
Dania waved her off dismissively. “Throw it away,” she said.
“No!” I said. “You’ll need it as proof.”
“So now you don’t mind being an accessory?” she said, the smile back in place.
“Oh, for God’s sake, Dania, this is not a game! And where, by the way, did she get that thing?”
“Amos gave it to her. Cheap junk from the Old City.”
“What cheap junk?” said Bess, yawning. She was at least an hour earlier than usual for breakfast. “God! What happened to your arms?”
“Wendy happened,” I said. Perhaps, I thought, handing Dania the aspirin—perhaps I could find a way to resuscitate Gripp after all. It would redeem at least a part of this nightmare.
“I’ll have some aspirins after you,” said Bess. She was looking almost as wan as Dania. “Glad, make me some fresh coffee, please. Strong, very strong.”
But Gladdy didn’t move. “Miss Ruthi,” she said, “I lock up the knife in my room?”
“Good idea,” said Bess. “You can’t imagine what she’s got locked up in that room. Come to think of it, where are my pearls, Glad? The long rope?”
“I got them safe.”
“From whom?” I said, bristling a bit. “Or from what?”
“From Rex,” said Bess, tossing back her wonderful hair. “He wouldn’t be above hocking a rope of pearls. He hocked my diamond and sapphire bangle, and then bought it back at twice the price when Gladdy threatened him with the police.”
“What?”
“Oh yes!” said Gladdy, quite unusually gleeful. “You must watch out for your things, Miss Ruthi.”
I knew Bess was watching me, but I couldn’t help it, I flushed. The fact was, Rex had, indeed, fingered the antique tiger’s claw I wore on a chain round my neck, and also the chain itself. “Early Raj?” he’d said. “Would you take it off so I can have a closer look?”
“You should read Chéri,” I said to Bess. “Colette.”
“Oh, I adore Colette!” said Bess, who had an abiding power to astonish me. “I’ve read them all. But Rex wasn’t playing games, I assure you. He fancies himself in a James Bond film.”
The phone rang in my room and I ran to get it.
“Ruth?” said Rex. “Are you at the house?”
“Where else?”
“I’ve been trying Bess, but there’s no answer. Is she all right?”
I stood where I was, examining the towel drying over the balcony chair.
“Ruth?”
“Her phone drowned in the spa.”
“Lord! How?”
“A whole new drama.”
“I’ll be up in a tick.” But he didn’t hang up. “Listen, Ruth,” he said, “yesterday was a marvelous surprise. Thank you.”
Surprise? Thank you? I gathered my jewelry from the bedside table and shoved it under my pillow. Then I went to the bathroom to run the water for a shower and a hair wash. Whatever surprises he still had in store—whatever the nature of his devotion to Bess—I wanted to improve on the hag looking back at me from the bathroom mirror before he arrived.
* * *
HE WAS THERE WHEN I emerged from my room, chatting quite amiably with Bess.
“He thinks we should get Dinny to take us up the goat path,” she said.
Us? I’d never known her to climb anywhere willingly except up to Finn’s room or onto the window seat. “We’d have to walk, you know. No one but Dania would dream of taking a car up there. And the car’s over the edge, like Wendy.”
“Dania’s gone up there already,” Bess said. “Rex, give me your phone.”
There was between them such domestic intimacy, and she was so clearly in charge, that I relaxed, despite myself, into observing them.
“Dinny?” she whispered into the phone. “You alone? You come here? Soon? Quick?” She snapped the phone closed. “Okay, he’s coming.”
Gladdy came panting in from the outside steps. She was dressed in her church clothes again, her church bag over her arm. She went to stand before Bess, her back to Rex. “What I must tell them at church?”
“Tell them nothing. Ruth and Rex are going up the mountain to look.”
* * *
ALL THE WAY UP THE mountain I wondered how Dania could possibly have thought of maneuvering the car there. Tanks or no tanks, she was an appalling driver, talking her way out of traffic tickets the way she talked her way out of everything. Maybe, I thought, she didn’t come up here at all this morning, just took the bus down to the port to catch the ferry to Athens and then a plane to somewhere safe.
“There she is,” said Rex. He’d been taking care not to touch me, even casually, but now he took my arm and pointed.
And, yes, there she was, sitting on a rock, quite still, the wind whipping around her. I zipped up my jacket. If this was where she’d stopped with Wendy, she was right, it certainly was the perfect spot for a murder. I walked to the edge of the cliff and peered over. The wind had blown the grass and flowers almost flat. The
place was bleak, bare, lonely, and I didn’t blame Wendy for going wild.
Rex dropped to his hands and knees and crept forward, laying himself flat to look over the edge. “There’s the car all right,” he said. “Must’ve done a nosedive. Come and see.”
But I was watching a trail of dust make its way up the mountain, a motorbike leading the way. After a while, it came to a halt just down the hill, and Dionysos climbed nimbly off the back.
“Yasas!” he said, trying hopelessly to plaster his hair down in the wind.
Dania stood up then, pointing gravely down toward the car, as if she expected him to retrieve it for her.
“Did you tell him that Wendy is down there?” I asked her.
“Why don’t you tell him?”
“Down there,” I said to him, ignoring the sarcasm. “Crazy woman.” I twirled a finger at my head.
“Ne, ne,” he said, turning to the young man who’d driven the Vespa. “Yorgos,” he said. “Son of Ellie.”
I’d seen the boy roaring through town on the bike, with his earring and his aviator glasses and thicket of black curls.
“I will go down there,” he said, rolling his trousers up to the knee. “I will do it.”
* * *
à gg, Greece
We’ve been having a wonderful time in the kitchen, the three of us. Spring is well along, bringing with it the farmers and their spring produce. They line up along the park wall down at the port, gnarled hands and battered old scales at the ready, offering new cucumbers, peppers, zucchini, eggplant, radishes, lemons. There are even a few early melons and pistachios. It’s months too early for the wonderful sweet tomatoes they sell later in the summer, but there is always fresh feta, and also a soft cream cheese, sheep or goat and indescribably delicious. It costs a lot and is worth it. There is also local honey to have with it. Lettuce, endive, and much else can be had in the market.
When we want a change from the moussaka Gladdy’s Greek friends showed her how to make, Dania and I take over. You might think you’d never tire of moussaka, but take it from me, an excess of it makes you want to run a mile from anything béchamel. Better to consider an eggplant salad, especially if it’s too early for the full-blown dirigible variety.
Here’s a recipe we favor:
6 small eggplants cut into cubes
½ cup olive oil
½ cup chopped onion
4 garlic cloves chopped (you might use less if you want to be loved)
½ cup chopped olives (we prefer the wrinkled, strong-tasting ones)
fresh oregano
fresh mint
salt and pepper to taste
Preheat the oven to 425°.
Salt the eggplant and bake in olive oil until soft (about half an hour).
When cool, mix with feta and chopped olives.
Mix ½ cup olive oil, juice of one lemon, onion, garlic, oregano, and mint in a small bowl and pour over eggplant mixture. Toss.
Serve on rounds of French bread or melba toast.
* * *
Ruth, dear, great that you’re all back in the kitchen! My assistant, who’s something of a foodie, says you left out the feta in the list of ingredients. Would you check to see whether anything else was left out? Also, it would be good to know the name of the wrinkled olives (love ’em, don’t you?) and that cream cheese: Is it sheep or goat? And could you give us its name, too? And resend ASAP? We’re keen to get it into the food issue, closing Friday. Sxx
* * *
THERE WERE THREE WEEKS TO go before the first of the children would arrive, and Dionysos was supervising the cleaning of his aunt’s house down the hill. His wife was in Athens, Bess reported, threatening him with lawyers. She was always threatening him, she said, she’d even threatened to go to the police about Wendy when Yorgos found the heel of a woman’s shoe.
Except that it wasn’t Wendy’s.
“Not high enough for that pig!” said Dania, in high glee herself. It was as if Yorgos, failing to find Wendy’s body, absolved her from blame. “It’s a miracle!” she crowed. “Like the bread and the fishes.”
“Until she hacks back into your e-mail,” said Bess from her perch in the window. “Or barges in here with a gun next time.”
Dania shrugged. “Let her heck, let her barge, why do I care?”
And she didn’t. Even when the goat farmer told his wife he’d heard screams that night, and she told her friends, and the friends told the policeman’s wife at church on Sunday, and then Gladdy told them all that, yes, a woman had come screaming into our house with a knife and Dania had taken her away in the car—even then Dania was quite sure the miracle would hold.
She was still sure when the policeman himself turned up at the house with Eleftheria. “Get for me that knife, please, Gladdy,” Dania said quite pleasantly. And, with Eleftheria interpreting, she demonstrated for the policeman how the woman had wielded it. “I have for many years,” she said, “been for that woman a psychotherapist.” And when Eleftheria seemed to have trouble untangling words from word order, she turned to me and said, “Ruthi, please explain to this man.”
* * *
Sorry, Stacey! Greeks are inspired cooks and seem to proceed by instinct. So, I’ve got into a sort of grab-and-throw habit myself. Like going the wrong way down one-way streets, which I do here all the time. But that’s no excuse for leaving out the feta, and much else. See the corrected recipe below.
p.s. that soft cheese is called ξυνομυζήθρα, which translates to something like “ksynomyzithra.” It’s a more acid version of mizithra, a curdled goat and/or sheep’s milk cheese—sometimes more goaty, sometimes more sheepy. Hope that helps. Ruth
Eggplant salad (corrected)
6 small eggplant, cut into cubes
salt and pepper to taste
olive oil for baking
1 cup diced feta
½ cup chopped Kalamata-type olives
Dressing
½ cup olive oil
1 lemon
½ cup chopped onion
4 garlic cloves, peeled and chopped (you might use less if you want to be loved)
1 tablespoon fresh oregano, finely chopped
1 tablespoon fresh mint, finely chopped
Preheat the oven to 425°.
Salt and pepper the eggplant to taste and bake in olive oil until soft (about half an hour).
When the eggplant is cool, mix in a bowl with the feta and chopped olives.
In another bowl, mix ½ cup olive oil, juice of one lemon, onion, garlic, oregano, and mint until well combined. Pour the dressing over the eggplant mixture. Toss.
Serve on its own or with bread.
* * *
“SO,” SAID DANIA, AFTER THE policeman and Eleftheria had left, “that is that.”
“Not quite!” said Bess. She was in a fever of discontent now, and it wasn’t because of Wendy, I knew; it was Rex. After our excursion up the mountain, he’d asked me back to the hotel for a bite of lunch, as if we’d had it all arranged. If he’d done this to annoy Bess, I didn’t much care and, really, there wasn’t much revenge in it either. It was just a small reprieve from the drama of Wendy, and also the old charm of lunching with a new lover, the afternoon to look forward to, and a carafe of cool white wine to take the edge off any awkwardness.
“I’m leaving tomorrow,” he’d said over coffee. “My yacht’s come in. Would you do me a favor and wait till I’ve gone—say, lunchtime tomorrow—before you tell Bess?”
And so I had waited. And, of course, she’d felt very left out. “God knows how he came up with the money,” she grumbled. “You didn’t give him any, did you, Ruth?”
I laughed. “That’s about as likely as my sailing off in a boat myself.”
But then, I couldn’t help it, I felt sorry for her again. “Listen,” I said, “it was you he was here for, start to finish. Like Finn and me.”
She shrugged. “I know, I know. But it doesn’t help.” She tried to return to her magazine, but then flung it away
. “Listen, you two,” she said, “can we please decide what we’re going to do when that lunatic surfaces again?”
Dania waved a hand. “Maybe she’s in Turkey surfacing. Maybe in Timbuktu.”
I stared at her, this familiar stranger who had managed to talk the car rental agency not only into waiving her responsibility for the wreck, but also into giving her another car at no additional cost. “Amn’t I great?” she’d said. “I got for us an automatic! Even if around the corners it squeals like one of those goats!”
* * *
à gg, Greece
Short of plastic surgery, sunglasses do more for an aging face than anything else. Even with plastic surgery, Bess, for instance, seems to lose not only years but also some of her ballast when she launches forth in one of her fabulous pairs. She has a whole shelf of them, and seems to choose among them by mood. Whatever the case, they must never match what she’s wearing, she says. Matching is déclassé. When Dania suggests that being excessively concerned with the déclassé might be déclassé itself, Bess just points out that anyone who favors the peasant blouses and skirts of the sixties isn’t in a position to pronounce on such matters.
Old age Tourette’s is how I’ve come to think of all this. Without warning, it can jump out. This morning, for instance, when Dania was at it again, boasting about the seven languages she’s taught herself, Greek soon to be the eighth, I said, “Yes, and they all sound the same—incomprehensible.” I was about to go further—to say how excruciating it is, not only for us, but also for the waiter or the shopkeeper, when she insists on practicing her elementary Greek—when I saw by the color in her face that I had gone too far. And that it was too late to apologize.
It’s too late, too, when I face the sour woman who runs the English bookshop and has not had the grace to thank me for addressing her aspiring writers. I snatch up the book I’ve just bought, saying neither “thank you” nor “efcharistó” as I usually do, but, as if to myself, although quite loud enough for anyone to hear, say, “What a lousy cow!”
About this, however, I am not sorry. On the contrary, now that it’s popped out, I’m elated. I decide to go down the alley to the overpriced French shop. I want to see if he has another pair of the gorgeous outré sunglasses Bess bought there last week. I might even try to find something for Dania as a peace offering, although I’m not that sorry there either.