“You mean the boy who’s a little bit . . . ?” one of them asked, twirling a finger beside his head. In the light of the lantern his face was leathery and grooved. Stelios said we’d just like to find the boy; did they know where he was?
“Out there,” the man said, pointing toward the harbor beyond the Venetian fortress. Takis had borrowed a rowboat from one of them, saying he wanted to get away from the banditos who were everywhere and after him; they’d even got in behind his eyes. The fishermen laughed, but the old one said with anger, “We used to call them partisans when they fought the German scum. Now they’re banditos.”
“You loaned a boat to a child at night?” Stelios asked.
“Wasn’t night when he took it,” the old one said. “He had trouble with the oars at first. But he’s probably out there somewhere.”
“He has problems,” Stelios said.
“Like spells,” Yannoula said, “when he doesn’t know what he’s doing.”
The men fell silent. There was only the clicking of their wooden needles and the hissing of the lantern. A winged beetle was flinging itself at the glass, falling back and trying again. Another man spoke but from the far side of the lantern so we couldn’t see which one it was.
“My young daughter,” he said, “she has problems also, a little light in the head, she is. Some of the local fascists—royalists or police, who knows—they broke into the house when she was alone. Four of them. When they finished enjoying her, they put a small glass up inside. They punched her until it broke.”
No one said anything. The beetle hit the lantern again and fell to the ground. “Did you report what they did?” Stelios asked.
“Who to report it to? They run the city.”
Stelios said it was terrible what had happened to the man’s daughter. One day the men who’d done it would have to pay. “But what does it have to do with giving a rowboat to a child?”
“It’s just that some of these fascists, police and others, they come to your, uh, entertainments, in the café down there. You’re in their protection. You and your friends here.” He nodded at Yannoula and me.
I thought of Theo giving the captain and his officers free seats whenever they wanted them, and how he offered them drinks and refilled their glasses without charge at intermission. It hadn’t occurred to me that this might be protection.
“Anyone can come to the plays,” Stelios said.
“Not anyone,” one of the others said. “It would not be a good idea for just anyone.”
“And what kind of man are you, anyhow?” the old one asked Stelios. “Playing with dolls in a café, bah, this is no work for a man today when there’s a great struggle going on.”
“He’s a better man than any of you,” Yannoula said, stepping into the circle of light. “Giving a boat to a child, why, you should have your faces slapped.”
The men laughed and one called out, “Me first, Grandmother.”
“No, not him,” said another. “Me first!”
“They’re not dolls,” Stelios said, “as I’m sure you know. It’s shadow theater, the ancient art.”
“Art? Ha. Listen to this.” The old one chanted a verse and the others joined in, repeating it.
We’re going to fight the bankers,
the landlords and the rest.
We’ll seal the fate of priests and monks,
those damn bloodsucking pests.
“Now, that’s art,” he said. “You can tell ’cause it rhymes. Better than shadows on a screen.”
The beetle had singed its wings and flapped on the ground. “I’m nobody’s grandmother,” Yannoula said, crushing the beetle under her shoe as she glared at the men. She turned and stalked off with Stelios and me after her.
One of the men called out, “You will find him when you will. But the fish may find him first.”
“The bandito fish,” another called. They laughed.
We searched along the beaches down from the harbor, but it was too dark and we had to give up for the night. It wasn’t until the next morning that a washerwoman beating laundry against shoreline rocks noticed a small boy struggling to row himself along the coast. He was standing as he rowed and he was completely naked. The woman called out to a friend on the next rock down, who called out to others, and soon a group of people were watching. Word got back to us at the boardinghouse and by the time we arrived at the beach there was a crowd, including Theo and some of the fishermen from the night before. Takis was rowing in to shore, where the women were all giggling and pointing. One had pulled her apron up over her face.
As Takis stepped out of the boat into the shallows, Stelios took off his shirt and tried to cover him. Ignoring this, Takis splashed past Stelios and pulled the boat ashore. His eyes were glazed when he stopped in front of me. “Listen, Aliki, the fish are singing. Can you hear them?”
Theo helped us take Takis back to the boardinghouse, asking us what was going on with him. We tried to explain that most of the time Takis was like any other boy. But then he would have one of these spells beyond his and our control.
“You mean he’s . . . ?” He twirled his finger next to his ear, a gesture I’d come to hate.
“Not most of the time,” I said. “He’s been through some terrible things.”
“But look, there’s a doctor who comes into the café sometimes. I think he works with children. Maybe he can help.”
While Theo went to find this doctor, we put Takis to bed. When the doctor arrived he gave Takis an injection, which sent him under for most of the day. I sat with him while Stelios spoke to the doctor at length outside the room and then went away with him. I didn’t see Stelios again until the evening performance. After it, I hurried back to check on Takis. He was sitting up in bed, staring straight ahead.
“What’s wrong with me?” he asked. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”
“Tell me what happened,” I said.
“They want me to kill myself. But I don’t know why. What did I do to them?”
“Who?”
“The communist banditos.”
He started hearing them just after Theo mentioned them at dinner our first night in Heraklion. When we’d all been in the lobby for my reading lesson that morning, he began to hear them even more strongly. “It was when Stelios was stroking your hand, they told me that nobody would ever love me. That I might as well be dead. They were inside the walls in the electrical wires.”
“Can you hear them now?”
“No, but they’re there, waiting for you to go away. They don’t like you.”
I wasn’t sure what to say. If the voices were part of him, did that mean there was part of him that didn’t like me? Which part was I talking to at that moment? I could tell from his tone that there was no point in my trying to reason him out of this. I sat on the bed and put my arms around him, saying that no one wanted to hurt him. He said the voices had told him to come to the harbor and row out to sea and never return. But when he rowed into the bay, he couldn’t hear their voices anymore because the fish in the water beneath him were singing a song about the caves and tunnels under the sea floor where they hid from the fishermen’s nets. He would be safe there, they said. So he took off his clothes to swim with them. But he’d been too frightened to get into the black water.
I rocked him in my arms and said nothing. We sat like that for quite a while until I could tell from his breathing that he was sliding back into sleep. I went to my room and sat staring at the wall. That was how Stelios found me.
“It’s Takis, isn’t it?” he asked, taking off his jacket and sitting beside me on the bed. He held me as I’d held Takis and stroked my hair. He said that the doctor had told him that there was a place on the island, a kind of hospital for children with problems. “Of course he’ll have to examine Takis once he’s calm. But then he’ll see if anything can be done.”
“Oh, no. It’ll be like that clinic in Kifissia.”
“We don’t know that.”
“We can’t abandon him. Think of Chrysoula—what would she want?”
“I am thinking of her. And how she would probably have had to find a place for him too, had she lived. He needs help, you know, much more than we can give him.”
“I don’t know about that.”
“Think, Aliki, think. He could turn on you or any of us and believe we’re out to get him too. He could hurt you.”
“He’d never do that.”
“And besides, we have to make a life for ourselves.”
“Do we? How can we do that? I don’t know how to do that.”
He didn’t say anything but pulled me closer. We sat there quietly for some time just holding each other. He started touching me gently, touching me all over. He loosened my blouse at the waist and slid one hand over my back and the other up my front. I said we should stop, but he said we’d be sweet to each other, touch each other in all the sweet places, here and also here. We wouldn’t have to do more than that if I didn’t want to. I thought of Chrysoula’s warnings, my breath coming in spurts as Stelios asked, does this feel good and how about this too?
“I’ve never done any of this before,” I said.
“Neither have I.” We both laughed, nervously at first, and then harder. Our laughter inflamed us and we went at each other again until all our clothes were on the floor. “Look how sweetly we slide together,” he said.
The bed was squeaking and banging the wall. We were making a lot of noise for quite a while when, gasping for breath, it hit me that Takis, next door, would certainly hear us. I didn’t want to think about that, but I started pushing myself away from Stelios. It was often jealousy that set Takis off and he’d talked about killing himself. What if he’d heard us already?
“We have to stop,” I said. I tried to pull Stelios’s head off my breast. He paid no attention, as if he was trying to swallow me whole. “We can’t do this here.”
“We can do anything we think of.”
“Takis.” I pointed at the wall. “He’ll hear.”
“Who cares?”
“We do. You and I.”
Stelios stopped and sat up. He swore, saying what Takis could do to himself.
“But isn’t there another place?” I said. “Why not your room? I don’t want to stop.”
“But you stopped us.”
“I’m afraid . . .”
“Of . . . ?”
“Of hurting him. He might do something to himself.”
“Oh, for God’s sake. Can’t we do anything without him?”
He grabbed his clothes and pulled them on in anger. As he went out the door, he said, “He has to go.” I heard him stomping down the stairs to the lobby.
I pulled the covers over me and lay there a long while staring at the ceiling. I didn’t know what to do and couldn’t calm myself. A car or truck backfired in the street once or twice. Dressing quickly, I crept down the hall to Stelios’s room, but he wasn’t there and his bed hadn’t been slept in. Back in the hall, I peered down into the lobby, but it was dark and silent. So I returned to my room and waited for the first light of morning. Retracing my steps then, I saw that nothing had changed. I didn’t know what to think.
While I was in the bathroom, Yannoula tapped on the door and said that the doctor was back, waiting in the lobby, and wanted to talk to Stelios and us about Takis. Did I know where Stelios was? I said no, I had no idea. When she’d gone back downstairs, I went to Takis’s room. He was sitting up in bed, looking like his ordinary self again. I asked how he felt.
“Better. I’m sorry about yesterday. I make too much trouble all the time.”
“Yes, well . . .”
“I don’t know how to help myself.”
“I know. But look, Takis, have you seen Stelios?”
“He isn’t here?”
“We’ve looked everywhere.”
“He must have gone away with those men.”
“What? What men?”
“I woke up in the night and was looking out the window and saw him. He was sitting in the empty sidewalk café across the street. Then an old truck full of men drove past. It kept backfiring.”
“Oh, Takis, are you sure about this?”
“Maybe they were banditos.”
“Oh, be serious. You think they’re everywhere.”
“They are.”
“Theo mou. Tell me exactly what you saw. Start from the beginning.”
He’d been awakened by some noises. He wasn’t sure what they were so he went to the window and saw Stelios come out the front door below and cross the street. The sidewalk café opposite was closed, but he took one of the stacked chairs down and sat on it, doing nothing. After a few minutes, the truck with the men roared past and turned the corner. Takis was about to go back to bed when it returned, drove slowly past Stelios, then stopped and backed up in front of him. It blocked Takis’s view, and someone in the bed of the truck began to talk to Stelios.
“And you’re sure it was Stelios over there? It was dark out—could you really see?”
“There’s a streetlight. And he had on his old jacket, you know, the tweed one he wore on the boat. That one he always wears when it’s cool.”
“Could you hear what they were saying?”
“No. But when the truck drove away after a while, Stelios wasn’t there anymore.”
“But why didn’t you come tell me? Or Yannoula?”
“No one believes me anymore. And anyway, I thought he’d walked back over here. But I was almost falling asleep standing there so I went back to bed, and when I woke up just now, I wondered if it was a dream.”
I stood there beside his bed telling myself that only the previous day Takis had heard fish talking, not to mention banditos in the wires in the lobby walls. Could he have imagined what he’d just told me or, as he said, dreamed it? But there was the fact that usually after he’d come back from one of his spells, his mind was clear for some time. What he’d said didn’t sound like his usual imaginings; no one in his story was out to get him, though it did include suspected banditos.
I went downstairs to tell Yannoula what he’d said. She’d sent the doctor away and was standing in the doorway looking up and down the street. When I’d told her, she said, “But how can we believe Takis? Look how he was yesterday. Singing fish!”
“Yes, I know. But somehow this sounds real. And I did hear a truck backfiring too.”
“That could mean anything. Maybe Stelios just went over to Theo’s.”
As we hurried there, she said it was just not possible that Stelios would go away without saying anything. “I know him. He could almost be my own son.”
I thought of Stelios leaving my room so angrily. If I hadn’t stopped him in bed, would he still be here? It was my fault, all of it, and just because I’d worried that Takis might hear. What was wrong with me? I was ruining everything between Stelios and me because of a crazy, jealous little boy I was imagining I could mother. I was going to have to choose and I didn’t like the fact that I was being weak and indecisive. I told Yannoula how it was that I’d made Stelios angry the night before. She gave me a hard look, then said it was no wonder he’d walked out. He’d probably gone across the street to cool off.
“But he’d arranged to meet the doctor to talk about a place for Takis this morning,” she said. “So how could he go off with the men Takis saw? Did he say anything about loud voices or a struggle?”
“No.”
Theo hadn’t seen Stelios since the day before. But he dismissed what Takis had said. “That boy, he isn’t right in the head, you know. What did the doctor say?” We explained that we hadn’t talked to him because of Stelios’s disappearance. Theo tapped the side of his head rapidly the way he
always did when excited. “Aliki, you know Takis better than anybody. Do you believe he actually saw what he said?”
I thought for a moment, took a deep breath and said, “I think so. Yes, yes, I do.”
Theo wiped his hands on his apron. “We’d better talk to the police.”
At the station, the captain greeted us like old friends, flashing me his toothy smile and barking at the little policeman, the same one who’d escorted us from the port, to bring chairs for us. “I love your Karagiozis,” the captain said, picking up the phone and ordering coffee.
Theo said it was about the puppeteer that we’d come. He’d disappeared. The captain put down the phone. We told him what Takis had said.
The captain sighed and picked up a leaflet from his desk. “Have you seen this? We’ve had planes dropping them all over the island.”
I realized I’d seen them blowing around the streets but hadn’t picked one up. They told of an amnesty for guerrillas, the captain said. Fighters of any kind could turn themselves in, surrender their weapons and escape prosecution. It wouldn’t matter what they’d done or who they were. Many men had already deserted their mountain groups and surrendered, signing a declaration of loyalty to the new government-backed militia. It was a way of winding down hostilities, weakening the opposition to government militia. But who had issued this, Theo asked, the government in Athens?
“No, they would never do such a thing,” the captain said. “They just want to kill!” We would hear in time that this would be known as the White Terror, the massacres of communist guerrillas by government and British forces on the mainland. “Here we take a different tactic. As a matter of fact this was my idea.” He proudly patted a stack of papers on his desk. “Just in the last two weeks, this many have signed.”
True, the guerrillas were mostly communists, but, he said, they’d harassed the Germans when they’d been in control, and saved Cretan lives. This was a more sensible way to deal with them.
We didn’t understand what that had to do with Stelios. The guerrilla leaders still up in the mountains had to replace the deserters, the captain said, so abductions of men had increased. He patted the stack of papers again. It was the young ones they were after, those who could endure life up there, living in caves, blowing up bridges, charging villagers for protection.
My Last Lament Page 17