by Paul Preuss
She did not have to wait long before the next contraction squeezed her, forcing her to cry out. She fell back on the stony bed; her eyes sought out the polychrome of Saint Nicholas that her mother had brought from the village and pegged high on the curving wall, where Sophia could see it whenever she lay down. Wordlessly she beseeched him. Nicholas was the patron saint of children—of maidens, not mothers—but Sophia was still a child. Her eyes bored in upon the saint’s dark eyes under his high, curly-fringed bald dome, her vision narrowing as wave after wave of pain engulfed her below.
She screamed until her throat was raw, until she felt rather than heard herself. The heavens echoed her cries with distant thunder, as if the sky had been hollowed out. She thought she would die and tried not to wish for death.
Hours passed; the fire blazed and then collapsed into embers which slowly cooled to ashes—
—and at last everything was silent and dark.
Then Sophia heard a tiny cry. She was so spent that she wasn’t sure she hadn’t died. She tried to move. Reaching down between her legs she found the bloody child and brought it to her breast, dragging the umbilical across her empty abdomen. A male child. He rested there, wrinkled and twitching, crusted with white wax and splattered with red blood, crying a long time before his cries faltered into whimpers.
The dog came and licked at her shoulder, shy and suspicious, then sniffed with great interest at the bloody afterbirth that had slid onto the floor, until she hissed at him and made him retreat. She sat up then, swaying with fatigue and loss of blood, and when the dizziness passed she stood carefully and laid the baby on clean raw wool on the floor beside the bench. She bent to bite through the cord, then knotted it, expecting him to cry again, but he made no sound. Her head swam as she made an effort to gather the bloody blankets from the bed and wash the gore off the stones. She tenderly rinsed her baby in the iron tub she had filled with spring water. His miniature fingers and toes enchanted her; they twitched against her breast and ribs.
Naked, holding her son, she pushed aside the rug over the door and went into the cool morning air. The western sky was black and full of stars, but in the east, toward the peak of Lazaros, the horizon was already glassy red. As she looked up, a bright meteor scored the sky, and a few seconds later another followed, even brighter. It was August, and the dawn sky was alive with falling stars.
Sophia walked a few steps farther, to the edge of the cliff. The water from the stone trough bubbled as it fell; a breeze was stirring the pines below, invisible in the darkness. The sheep bleated in their pen. After the night’s rain, the earth smelled fresh; it smelled of pine sap and thyme, of astringent limestone, of wet sheep and new babies. She felt the coolness of the air and hugged her baby closer. She turned back to the hut.
Moments after she entered it, the ground heaved once, then settled. Outside, vested ravens cawed at the brightening sky, their ill-tempered screams echoing from the peaks.
Katerina had risen long before dawn and started the climb from Ayia Kyriaki, leaving the donkey behind, bringing with her only a little marmalade in a pottery jar and a loaf of fresh bread. The last part of the climb in the dark exhausted her, as it did every time; the slope was loose dirt and rocks lying at the angle of repose, falling away with every step. After an hour’s hard work she reached the crest of the ridge and stopped to catch her breath.
Sophia’s child was due, and still Katerina did not know what to do about it; she had no one to ask for advice. Kriaris the priest was her brother-in-law, his wife her own sister, but she didn’t trust them or anyone else in the village. She couldn’t take the time or risk the gossip of making a trip to Kastro, where perhaps she could talk to someone in the metropolitan’s office—to ask about charities, or possibly to find honorable employment for Sophia. If one thing was clear, it was that neither Sophia nor her child could live in Ayia Kyriaki.
Katerina saw the first hint of dawn in the east and set off grimly along the path. She was almost in sight of her father’s stone hut when the earth heaved and made her stagger. When for a moment it steadied, Katerina trudged on. No one on Crete was a stranger to earth tremors.
But when the whole mountain jerked sideways with a screech, pulling the ground out from under her, she cried out, “All-Holy Mother!” and fell down hard. She lay on her side, clutching her bag close with one hand and crossing herself repeatedly with the other, while loose rocks clattered and skipped past her head. The ground shook for almost half a minute. When she could get up, she ran.
The hut lay all in a heap, its dome collapsed inward. Seeing the ruin, Katerina cried out again, wordlessly, and threw herself upon the rubble. She pushed the square-cornered stones aside as fast as she could; they were heavy, and she had no strength, perhaps because in her heart there was no hope.
She found the dog first, its black-and-white fur matted with blood. It whined and snapped at her, and she left it half buried where it lay. She worked to pull the rocks away from the fire pit, supposing, without thinking it through, that anyone inside the hut would have been beside the fire. But when she had made a hole all the way to the bare earth, she found no one.
The bench next. She pulled away a rock to which the paper icon of Saint Nicholas was attached. She pulled away another, and found her daughter’s foot and ankle beneath it, bruised blue. Crying aloud, half choking on her sobs, she pulled the rest of the stones away from Sophia’s body. Sophia lay there naked, coated with blood and dust, unmoving, making no sound.
Beneath Sophia’s arm, between her dead body and the stone bed, a baby wriggled and choked and sneezed on the dust.
7
“I believe my grandmother must have considered doing away with me right then, with the handiest chunk of rock.”
Anne-Marie was sure Minakis was joking, but she waited with what she hoped was an unreadable expression. He grinned at her confusion.
“Fortunately for me, there was the matter of the property.”
“What property?” She begrudged him the question. Beneath the surface of their exchange a struggle of uncertain dimensions was going on, of which they were both aware.
“Katerina had brought to her marriage a few parcels of land near the village, some almond trees, which her husband had neglected, being too inebriated or perhaps too proud. He was from Lasithi, not from our village, and he must have suffered the common slander that he was living off his wife’s dowry.” Minakis twirled his worry beads carelessly, as if to suggest that all this was unimportant. “Nevertheless, with him vanished and their daughter dead, when Katerina died her relatives would inherit.”
“Her relatives? You mean the priest’s wife?”
Minakis nodded. “My aunt Eleni, yes. And through her Kriaris and eventually their son. But even if I was a bastard, that land was legally mine when my yia-yia passed away. Kriaris was almost as poor as Katerina, and a much more desperate and greedy character. It was only a matter of time until he tried to rob us—through some legal fiction or by simple violence.”
“You really think your grandmother would have killed you because of that?”
“At the moment, seeing the daughter she loved lying dead and a raw newborn helpless in the rubble…?” Minakis paused. “Of course, she would have had to hide my body.”
“What a gruesome thought.”
“Katerina was capable of gruesome acts, like all desperately poor people. But—like all village women—she was also fervently religious. I owe my life to her faith.”
Having made the decision to sacrifice honor on earth for the sake of honor in heaven, Katerina confronted practical choices. The first she made automatically; she killed the tortured dog, smashing its head with the largest stone she could lift. Then she took up the baby boy and washed him in the cold water of the trough. She laid him aside while she carefully covered over her daughter’s body with the stones that had crushed her, to protect her from the ravens.
Most of the flock had panicked and scattered, but a few sheep loitered in the bro
ken pen. She got a little milk from a ewe; the others she let go.
The morning air was sharp and clear, cool but growing hotter under a cloudless sky. Katerina, the baby bundled in her arms, went the long way down the mountain, picking her way slowly over hard rock, avoiding the steep saddle where the clay, always ready to slide, had been turned into a kind of red grease by the night’s rain. She reached Ayia Kyriaki in the heat of the afternoon, when everyone else was inside or napping in the almond groves under what shade they could find.
She laid the baby on her bed and unwrapped him, studying him at length for the first time. He lay there, alert, making no sound except quiet grunts and sighs, his milky eyes unfocused but searching. His sex was swollen and red, and the severed cord that hung from his belly was as purple as a bad bruise, but he was at peace with the world, and intensely curious.
As she peered into those new eyes, it seemed to Katerina that there was something supernatural about his calm. She’d fed him from a twisted rag she’d soaked in ewe’s milk, and it had satisfied him all morning long. Now she fed him again—he accepted the rag as if it were a natural teat—and after crossing herself three times, she left him there alone in the shadowed house.
She walked through blinding sunshine and midday heat to her sister’s house, the priest’s house beside the chapel. The two buildings formed a little courtyard in front of the one-room school where a teacher from Lasithi taught the village children twice a week. Katerina banged on the door. After a long time, Eleni opened it.
“What do you want?” Eleni’s eyes were heavy with sleep; her stiff black locks had escaped their ribbons.
“I must have a tama from the chapel. I must offer to the All-Holy Mother. It’s an emergency.”
“You’re being silly. Come back later.”
“This minute. I have to see Kriaris. Ade.”
Eleni looked at her sister’s face with resentment, but whatever she saw there persuaded her. “All right, come in. I’ll get him up.”
Kriaris came out of the back room, his clothes askew, his shirt-tails hanging out of his trousers. He pulled at his beard, the symbol of his spiritual authority. “What do you want, Sister?”
“I want a tama. Show me what you have.”
“Can’t this wait until a decent hour?”
“Are you so busy?” Katerina pushed her face at his. “Have you been slaving in the almond groves all day? Making yourself thin chasing sheep?”
“You are making yourself hateful,” Kriaris complained. “What do you want of me?”
“I told you, a tama.”
“Come on then.” Furious, Kriaris pushed past her, out of his house and into the chapel a few steps away.
Katerina followed him into the cool, frescoed barrel vault. He had already disappeared behind the iconostasis, a carved cedar panel made splendid by icons of Nicholas and George and the All-Holy Mother. Defying the custom that women were barred from the mysteries, Katerina pushed through the curtain; it was, after all, just a wooden partition, and Kriaris was back there rooting through his collection of tamata.
“Which one do you want?” he demanded. “They’re all here, all that I have. Look for yourself.”
She looked into the tray and saw the pressed tin cartoons lying in heaps like discarded playing cards. Eyes, hearts, stomachs, limbs, figures of men and women and children—they had been used before, some often; they were blotted with candle wax and had scraps of faded ribbon stuck through their perforations. That did not annul their efficacy. Katerina poked among them with a forefinger until she found the image of a fat, smiling baby. “This one,” she said, holding the tin rectangle up to the light from the slit window.
“Difrango,” said Kriaris without looking at it, his hand out.
An extortionate amount, but after some fumbling she produced a worn two-drachma coin from her apron pocket and pushed it into his palm. “For the tama and a candle.”
She went back through the screen and set the offering on the rail beneath the icon of the All-Holy Mother. She looked at the baby lying there, smiling under Maria’s protection, and tears started from her eyes. From a nearby table she took a wax taper and lit it from the oil lamp burning in front of the Virgin. She crossed herself and, bowing her head, murmured a prayer.
Kriaris squinted at her through the curtain. “One of your relatives has been blessed with a child?”
“I have been blessed,” said Katerina. “Do not remove this”—she touched the tama—“I don’t want you selling it again. Tell me when you require another contribution.”
In the half light his goatish eyes swelled with curiosity. “I don’t understand you, Sister. You say you have been blessed?”
“My beloved daughter, Sophia, has been taken by Christ and Maria this day into heaven.” Katerina fixed her brother-in-law with a penetrating stare, trying to search out the representative of Christ that lurked within the covetous village priest. “If by now you have had enough time to wake up from your nap, you can help me bring her body here for burial.”
“Sophia is dead?” His tongue darted out to slicken his lips.
Katerina said nothing, only left him standing there, astonished, as she walked to the chapel door and, to his weak sight, dissolved into the dazzling midday sunlight.
“The priest did his sanctimonious best to help my mother to a decent burial. The whole village turned out to burn candles over her corpse, piously reassuring themselves that she was dead. They put her in the churchyard under a slab of limestone, the best my grandmother could afford.”
“You were safe, then?” Anne-Marie asked.
“Safe?” Minakis grinned, showing his teeth under his mustache. “I’m told that I never cried; it was almost as if I understood my precarious position. Days went by before Kriaris learned that Katerina’s interest in the tin image of a baby had nothing to do with sad memories of her daughter, but with the reality of me.”
“How did he find out?”
“She brought me to him and demanded that he baptize me.”
“Impossible! You cannot ask it of me. Go down to Kastro, make your confession there.”
“I have nothing to confess, Brother.”
“I will not condone your daughter’s sin.” Kriaris looked at the calm baby in her arms as if it were something loathsome, a thing of filth.
“Whatever his mother’s sin, this child was born into the world with no more sin than you or I.”
“Are you teaching me the doctrine of the church?”
“The doctrine of the church is God’s love, not your ignorance.”
At which he cursed himself for ever lending her his seminary texts, where such theological questions were argued. “I won’t do what you ask. Find somebody else.”
“Brother, you haven’t heard me. I want you to baptize him.”
“I heard you. I refuse.”
“And I want you to be his nonos.”
“Get out! Get out!” He took Katerina by the arm and tried to shove her toward the door, but she was stronger than he was and stood her ground, pulling the baby away from him. He stumbled and had to let go to keep from falling. He turned on her, screeching in fury. “You mock me! Sponsor a bastard? You do not even know his father’s name!”
“It would be a generous thing for you to do. It would be honorable. I understand all that, and so—”
“You understand nothing.”
“So for nothing I will sell you half my land.”
“What? What are you saying?” He hesitated, his face wet with perspiration. “Your land for nothing—what does that mean?”
“Be the boy’s godfather. Take half of my land—his land—now. We’ll make up a bill of sale.”
Through his open mouth, spit dribbled onto Kriaris’s beard.
“If he survives, you’ll get the rest too,” Katerina continued. “I’ll make a will and give it all to my sister.”
“You can’t do that,” said Kriaris, who understood these matters; neither custom nor law would pe
rmit Katerina to disinherit her descendants.
Because Katerina was a reader, she too understood these matters. “Perhaps the boy will not be good to me in my old age. Perhaps I’ll be forced to repudiate him.”
The priest wiped his mouth with the blood-spattered towel he wore around his waist—he’d been dressing a lamb in the schoolyard when Katerina had barged in on him. She was right: if the boy survived, he could make his own living; he wouldn’t need any land. It would be generous, an honorable thing for Kriaris to do. “You must say nothing about this,” he said.
Katerina held the baby closer to her breast. “My left hand will not know what my right hand is doing.”
“And so I was baptized. The little church was full of the curious. It was a bit unusual for the priest to be the godfather too, but Kriaris managed it without making obvious mistakes. He sprinkled the oil on the water and said the priestly words and then the godfather’s words—‘I surrender this child, baptized and anointed and given over to God’—and handed me back to my grandmother, who had succeeded in making Kriaris the guarantor of my safety on every possible level, spiritual, physical, and social.”
“So now you were safe.”
Minakis laughed. “I’ll tell you how much Katerina trusted her neighbors. The day she brought me down from the mountain she went out and cleared the ground around the house of weeds and trash, anything flammable. She repaired the gate, and she scattered broken pots along the walls and around the edges of the roof, to make noise if anyone disturbed them. She sat up late every night with her father’s shotgun across her lap, a weapon with a fearsome reputation, with which the old man claimed to have killed a Turkish soldier in the rebellion of 1889. She made sure her neighbors knew she had it. No one had ever thought of Katerina as being as terrifying as her daughter, but for my sake she was determined to make herself terrifying.”
“She must have succeeded,” said Anne-Marie.