Let Me Explain You

by Annie Liontas

  Once Katerina dropped Stavros Stavros among her other wriggling, insistent boys—all of them reaching up for something all of the time—she forgot about him. There were just too many other troubles (her older, louder children; her husband, who farmed from four until four; her blind mother; the checkbook she balanced every week, raising a family out of zero). In the morning she counted twelve boys, at night she counted twelve boys, and if Stavros Stavros was a needy little piglet with short hair, short legs, she barely noticed. He managed to walk, talk, engrave pee lines in the dirt. His mother seemed permanently out of reach until one day, squinting into the sun, Katerina caught him climbing out of caked dust onto the back of a bull. He was wearing the last good undershirt to fit him and Stavros Sakis. Katerina pulled Stavros Stavros down and whipped him until purple grapes blossomed on his naked bottom. It was a formal initiation into the family.

  Like all of his brothers, Stavros Stavros was named after his grandfather. But while the other boys had been assigned unique middle names honoring an uncle or a klepht—a Greek bandit who fought for independence—Katerina neglected to give one to her eighth-born. By default, he became Stavros Stavros. Stavros Stavros insisted that it was a sign: not even Nikos had been twice honored with the name that meant “victorious” and “crowned.” Stavros Stavros obsessed over the heroes his grandmother sang about and decided that he would become brave. A guerrilla, like those of the Second World War who wielded scythes in battle and subsisted on mountain weeds and wild tender kri-kri, a goat so elusive that it had once been worshipped as the pale, hairier, lustful incarnation of Zeus.

  His brothers, however, insisted on referring to him only as Stavros, and somehow that meant he had less claim to life than the other eleven boys who shared his room. At home, Stavros Dimitrios, Stavros Stefanos, Stavros Kostas, Stavros Manolis, Stavros Yannis, Stavros Nikos, Stavros Markos, Stavros Petros, Stavros Sakis, Stavros Tasos, and Stavros Alexandros answered for Stavros and got his share of the honey-drenched kadaifi. At school, they intercepted love notes and walked home with the girls who had been somewhat curious about Stavros. On his name day, they set off all the fireworks while he sat locked in the chicken coop, staring at the wasted bursts of yellow and red.

  Stavros Stavros was determined to escape this village life. He would go live in the caves of Malta. He would learn to squeeze water out of limestone, fight the ghosts of Ancient Romans, train hawks to shit on his brothers. His mother would climb the mountain in bare feet, confess that he had always been her favorite because he was strong and clever and self-sufficient, just as her own father had been. Every day, she would come with a basket. She’d feed Stavros Stavros with her own fingers, but he would take none of it. He wouldn’t need to, being so resourceful in the wild. She would wash his feet, out of respect. And his father, his father would ask for advice on harvesting grapes. Illiterate, he would learn from his son. Like, for example, how it was wise to plant rosebushes next to grapevines. Roses and grapes are sensitive to the same pests: the roses show rot first. (That one he had heard from the neighbor, and now that he thought about it, his father had, too.)

  But at age twelve, after a tourist put the first drachma in his hand, Stavros Stavros abandoned the caves of Malta. Far from wanting to remove himself from civilization, Stavros Stavros decided to get rich and his family could watch. He would be an entrepreneur among men, in the business of coffee.

  On the main square, two kafenia faced each other: one red, one blue, both with whitewashed doorways to invite peace and discourage ants. The kafenia were the core of men’s lives, thus the core of village life. A center for Greek politics, because talking politics was as Greek as mathematics, as Greek as Ancient Greece. A place for business and dark coffee and afternoon plates, for mail and cigarettes, for worry beads and news. A substitute for the pews their solemn mothers and wives knelt before. If you wanted a bricklayer, a harvester, a lawyer, an arbitrator, a salesman, you need only visit the kafenio.

  According to the government, all Cretan coffee drinkers were nationalists, united under Greece’s blue and white flag (colors of protection and purity). In actuality, the kafenia separated conservatives from communists. Babies born to conservatives were suckled on stories about cousins exiled to Makronisos for patriotic reprogramming; those born to communists were nursed on tales of martyrs who had fought for Greece’s liberation only to be tortured and slaughtered in the countryside, where herds outnumbered doctors by the hundreds. Only Stavros, who worked for Onus and Takis, was permitted entry into both kafenia. Stavros—and Marina’s father, Pappas Emmanuel.

  Every night, the pappas went first to Takis, whose customers bought him glasses of ouzo, and then to Onus, whose customers bought him more ouzo. When asked which was better, his answer remained, “Your mother, rest her soul, would be very proud.” When Stavros Stavros saw him coming—or, rather, heard, because the pappas always sang as he moved through the village kentro, his high black chimney-pot hat and wide-sleeved rasso collecting dust as he walked—Stavros Stavros prepared a drink for the much-beloved pappas. He waited for him at the door. The pappas, himself, confided that Stavros Stavros cooked better than even his own wife, but this was not the only reason Stavros Stavros loved him. The pappas was different from everyone he had ever met. He talked about things he knew without making it seem as if he knew too much. He said that God had enough love for everyone and that man was created in God’s image, ergo man had enough love for everyone, only man had forgotten philos adelphos, brotherly love. If man could remember compassion, the old resentments and sins would turn to rubble. Also, other wisdoms, such as:

  Why did God give you two balls? Because that’s what all the donkeys got.

  and

  How does a smart man keep his wife satisfied? He lets the neighbor do the dirty work.

  The pappas Emmanuel was the one to get Stavros Stavros thinking about a long-term business plan. “You have something going here,” he told him. “Give it a few years. Finish school, let your balls drop, and then get your father to help you open up a little shop of your own.”

  “Onus and Takis are going to set me up when it’s time.”

  “They are good guys,” the pappas said, “but they’re no sheepherders. You do all the work, they get the profit. In the Greek Church, that is called a fuck-over. It happened to Jesus.”

  Stavros Stavros crossed his arms. “That won’t happen. I’ll get them before they get me.”

  The pappas slapped Stavros Stavros’s arm. “You Mavrakises, always so serious.”

  Four years later, in 1975, sixteen-year-old Stavros Stavros had saved enough money to open a quarter of a kafenio. He went to his father about a loan, but Stavros Constantine said he was too young. “I only went to the fourth grade,” he said. “Don’t follow my mistakes, which are the ones of a peasant.” So Stavros Stavros continued to go to school, continued to work, saving for the day his balls dropped and he could hire his classmates to wash his floors. At eighteen, he approached his father again, this time with enough to buy more than half a kafenio. “I have a business proposition,” he said. “Sell a small piece of land to Onus. With the profit, we’ll buy a restaurant and you will be half owner. For two years, I will work for free. Only give me a hundred dollars to go out on the weekends, and money for cigarettes.”

  How many tourists were trickling into Crete, all of them looking for a place to drink, meet locals. He had gone dancing with plenty of European girls who wanted to know how real men—Greek men—fucked. He never told his family about them (especially not about Greta, whom his grandmother would have hated for a Nazi, rest her soul) but he knew that if he opened a place for tourists in Iraklion, he’d triple the investment within two years. His brother Tasos could run things while he completed his mandatory service in the army. His mother would kiss him in the middle of the market, in the middle of the streets, she’d feel such pride.

  Stavros Constantine said, “We will go to your mother tonight.” The land, passed down from her family, was
in her name.

  Katerina was preparing dolmades when her son and husband entered. Dropping clumps of cooked rice into the center of blanched grape leaves, she listened without interrupting. Every time Stavros Stavros identified a benefit of the plan, she rolled a leaf and tucked its arms inward, as if it were giving itself a hug. At the end of the conversation, she had lined up seventeen grape leaves.

  “Oxi.”

  “But you are giving Kostas money. You are giving to Yannis and Stefanos.”

  “You are too late for any money. There is no more money. I have two sons about to be married, another going off to military, another in the field, another building a house. And even if you had come along first, you would be getting nothing right now.”

  “Yiati?”

  “This is why,” she said, and she dropped each dolma into a richly oiled pan as she ticked off her reasons. “You want to carve up your grandmother’s land so you can open a shop for foreigners.”

  “It could make us a lot of money, mitera mou.”

  She went on. “I allow you to work for Takis and Onus never expecting a drachma, and yet here you are bragging for money. Where did it all go, you tell me.”

  “I have it here,” Stavros Stavros said. He pulled a faded slip of paper from his wallet. For five years, he had been carrying it around. It listed all of his deposits.

  Katerina would not look at it. “Last year, for no good reason, you quit school. One year away from being finished, and you simply give up. And do you come here asking for help with something that a mother could be proud of, no. You come and beg to spend money in Iraklion, which is filled with only whores and beggars.

  “And you, Constantine, should have known not to come to me with this skata. I will never share family land with strangers. Never, never.”

  His father leaning on the wall, saying nothing, the big dumb farming tool.

  Stavros Stavros couldn’t understand the power of many, many drachmas until Onus and Takis and the pappas showed him that a man is respected—a man is a man—when he is working, when he is earning, when he is imagining a life better than his father’s, when he is proving his brothers wrong, when he is making something his own, when his children don’t make their toys out of wood. Money meant that someone could reinvent himself. Money meant that someone could buy himself a wife, a family, a girlfriend, a name, a middle name, a business. Money could buy a man community and country.

  And Stavros Stavros would get none of it. He’d probably end up working for some malaka he knew from elementary school. Stavros Stavros couldn’t help himself. He swept the pan of dolmades off the table. He watched it clatter to the floor.

  Katerina bent down. She picked up the pan. The grape leaves stuck to the bottom. Only one had fallen out. She was furious. She pointed the wasted dolma at him like a finger. “What kind of son are you?”

  “You stubborn woman,” Stavros Stavros said. He should have been apologizing. “Keep that land until it buries you.”

  With every step he took, his shaking legs willed him to turn around and beg for forgiveness. Stavros Stavros kept going. He went all the way to the taverna for sunflower seeds and beer and came home loud and drunk through her kitchen. The next day, while the rest of his brothers ate sides of pork, salad, and dolmades, Stavros Stavros was served a single grape leaf—the one that had fallen to the floor. He sat through dinner without eating, and then he met his friends for a gyro. The following morning, instead of warm rice pudding and Nescafé, he received the same grape leaf, and once more at dinner.

  “What are you trying to prove? That I can’t even ask my own mother for help?”

  Katerina cut the grape leaf in half. It was brown now, wilted. “I gave you birth,” she said. “For the rest of your life, you should be wanting to make up for that.”

  Stavros Stavros shoved his plate back.

  “Don’t go, Galopoula,” Stavros Stefanos called, eyes shining. “I have your potatoes right here.” With a firm grip, he grabbed his arxidia and shook them.

  Stavros Stavros flashed an open palm, flipping him off. Then he packed a bag, determined to watch his family kiss his Greek ass. He was too young to stay buried under his mother and eleven Stavroses, nothing new in life but the name of the village whore. Whatever he needed to do to get out, he would do it.

  He got as far as Kalanakis’s Taverna, where he ran into Yannis Fafoutakis.

  “Why so angry, Galopoula?” Yannis asked through loosely spaced teeth. He was well on his way to drunk. “Have a drink, get happy. We are so young still.”

  Yannis had graduated two years ahead of Stavros Stavros, and though he was closer in age to Stavros Petros, the two met often at the taverna for table soccer. Yannis was a man bothered by nothing, but once the ball dropped, he was all wrists and concentration. No one in the history of the village had ever beaten him. For years Stavros Stavros had salivated over Yannis’s inevitable defeat, but tonight Stavros Stavros did not care about table soccer.

  “I’m going,” he said. “I’m not spending the rest of my life making coffee for old men who play with their stale balls.”

  “Where will you go?”

  “I don’t care.”

  Yannis pulled a chair up to the table. “You want to go to America?”

  “I am not telling jokes, Yannis.”

  “Neither am I. You remember my thea Irene? She moved to New York. She has a daughter, Dina.”

  Stavros Stavros vaguely recalled Dina. The last time he had seen her, they were eight, running around with all the other village kids on Easter, lamb in their hands. “So?” Stavros Stavros said.

  “So they’re ready to marry her off to a nice Greek boy.”

  Stavros Stavros snorted. “What, she’s ugly?”

  Yannis cupped his hands across his chest, mimicking breasts. “American girls are never ugly where it counts.” Yannis would talk about his own sister like this if he were drunk enough. “What do you say, my friend?”

  “I have a girlfriend.”

  “What, Poppi, the skinny rabbit? Come on, malaka. Everyone knows you’ve got one hand up her skirt and the other on your tiny prick because she won’t touch it for you.”

  Stavros Stavros chewed the corner of his lip, which he did whenever he was thinking something he knew he shouldn’t.

  “I tell you what,” Yannis said, “you don’t like her, you don’t take her. Anyway, it means a free ticket out.”

  Stavros Stavros stared at the sudsy liquor that slid down Yannis’s glass. In that moment, he began to belong to the masses who dream America, the land too good for peasant Greeks. Like all the other villagers, he had always fantasized about it from a distance—sneaking into the only theater on the island to watch Hollywood westerns, lying about his knowledge of the Big Apples. But what better place to be a man? To work, to earn, to imagine a life richer than his parents’, to prove his brothers wrong, to make something his own, to make children who would honor him and gratefully inherit his fortune. What better place to reinvent himself—to reinvent the world? To make it bigger? To make it big enough to fit Stavros Stavros Mavrakis? In America, he would open a kafenio, hire Americans to clean the floor, buy crates of blue jeans and ship them back for all of his brothers, especially Stavros Nikos. He would send back dollars, not drachmas, so they understood who he was.

  By 1980 he would be twenty-one years old, living in America, where everyone was as good as everyone else, and he would work hard to prove that he was better.

  “OK,” Stavros Stavros said. “Let’s go be big apples in the Big Apples.”

  Dina landed in Crete in May of 1979, a month before her sixteenth birthday. Stavros Stavros walked to the Lazaridis house with a good sack of coffee, to pay respects and check out Dina. He was disappointed. In the photo she was wearing a dress and her hair was combed, but now all he got was straggly hair, an oily face, this left eye—what lazy eye? He did not remember a lazy eye from their childhood, could it be possible that America had given it to her?—and stained
blue jeans. But she was shorter than him, which he liked, and her kolo could have belonged to one of his father’s sheep. The meeting didn’t last long. He and Dina didn’t talk, except to say their names. Their parents would make the rest of the arrangements.

  The next day, Stavros Stavros discovered Dina on his father’s porch. She was bent over a row of plants. She didn’t notice him (or maybe she did) because she kept picking the compact, purple-bellied leaves. She tossed back ones she didn’t want, probably because they were too small. She was very picky, Stavros Stavros thought, and wasteful. But maybe that meant she had taste. Not everything was good enough for her, just like not everything was good enough for him.

  “I will have to charge you,” he said.

  “Take it out of my allowance.”

  Stavros Stavros pushed through the screen door.

  She looked up. “Does your hair always look like that?”

  He didn’t think that someone looking the way Dina looked should judge him, but he smoothed out his hair. “I just woke up.” Her hair was different today. It was combed, pretty, the way it stopped at the tops of her shoulders. He wished he weren’t wearing farm shorts.

  She said, “My mother told me to go to the market.”

  Stavros Stavros plucked some oregano and added them to her feathery pile. “The small ones are better. More tender.”

  She nodded.

  “Like me,” he joked.

  Nothing. Not even a smile.