Let Me Explain You

  “She’s just a child. There’s nothing she needs to know.”

  Papous’s voice rose. “She is just a child, you stubborn malaka. This will change her whole life.”

  Dina smiled. Yes. The circus would change everything. She would be the only child in the neighborhood to own a three-hundred-pound pet. She imagined making a leash out of strings of lights, so her elephant would glow during their walk to school. It would wait for her outside, and when the teacher wasn’t looking, she would slip it ripe red karpouzi through the window. It would eat the karpouzi whole, seeds and all. Dina was so wrapped up in the fantasy, it took her a moment to realize there was shouting from the kitchen. Some words she couldn’t make out, then a plate, silence. Someone was coming down the hall.

  Papous entered her room. He stared at her through the darkness, and she couldn’t help but wrinkle her face into a smile. He came over and sat on the edge of her bed. A big wide nose, heavy eyes, and a gummy mouth made him look like a camel. She loved him for it. She loved him for lots of reasons.

  “Bad girl,” he said. “Always up later than even the adults.” He put her pink doll on his lap, stroked its curls.

  Dina sat up. “Why are you crying, Papous? Is it because Ba-ba didn’t get you a ticket to the circus?”

  Papous wiped the doll’s dress against his face. “I don’t want a ticket,” he said.

  “Don’t worry, I will bring back a present for you. A big one that you can keep on your land, and all of the kids will pay you to come and see it.”

  Her grandfather smiled. “Koukla mou,” he said, “I would keep it only for myself.” He collected her in arms the color of saddles and buried his stubble into her neck until she collapsed into weak laughter. When he said good night to her, and good night to her left eye, which he had nicknamed Sleepy, the tears came back.

  Breakfast was bread and some cheese wrapped in cloth. Her father tried a paper cup of American coffee, threw it out. Dina kept looking out the window at the taxicabs, which were taking people away from the Athens airport, but her parents ignored her when she suggested that they get rides, too. Then there was an announcement, and they were running, there was a connecting flight. The phrase made Dina think of twin birds rising from a mountain, their wings hooked together. She tried to keep up. She was panting. Her mother had stuffed at least three more dresses into her luggage, and it was too heavy to hold. It kept knocking against her ankles, making her stumble. “We’ll miss the circus, Ba-ba,” Dina said.

  Her father lifted Dina’s suitcase, added it to his pile. “There will be lots of circuses in America.”

  America! The word, it glittered. America was stickers and television. It was Mickey Mouse and more Coca-Cola. There was no school in America, only things to be curious about. There would be lots and lots of circuses. She could get two elephants—one for her, one for Papous. They could raise them together, ride them up the mountains instead of the donkeys. Dina let go of her mother’s hand so she could run alongside her father.

  He was pleased. “So you like America?”

  Dina grinned. It felt good to have him look at her that way. Like Papous.

  It wasn’t until they boarded and the plane was pulling away from the gate that Dina realized she had been tricked. She looked at the luggage her father was stuffing into the overhead, counted the suitcases (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6) he had checked. She thought of all the family members and friends who had come to see them off, and she realized they were going to America for good.

  Her mother was in the middle seat with her eyes closed. All morning she had been nervous, uptight, the way she usually got on trips to the bank or doctor. Dina whispered into her ear, “When is Papous coming to America?”

  Her mother did not answer.

  Dina reached over her and tugged her father’s arm. “When is Papous coming to America?” she asked.

  Her father wiped sweat from his forehead and tucked his kerchief into his jacket. “Your papous is not interested in America.”

  “But I will be there,” Dina said. “Does he know that?”

  Her father nodded, stiff. He glanced over at his wife. “Not everyone gets to go to America. Only the very best.”

  “Papous is the best,” Dina said.

  Dina’s father shook his wife. She did not respond. He pulled out a cookie and handed it to Dina. “You want a glyko?”

  Dina took it. It was soft from his pocket, but she ate it anyway. The plane was getting hot. The old man behind them sneezed. At the front, pretty women in blue uniforms were checking on passengers. “When do we go back home?” Dina asked.

  “America will be our new home,” her father said. His eyes too were shut now.

  “How far away is it?”

  “How far away is America?” He smiled. He looked over at her. “It is years into the future.”

  Dina did not understand what he meant, but she didn’t have to. She would not see Papous three times a week anymore, she would not pick green beans with him or scrape the dirt from his work shoes. Papous—she swallowed, an elephant bone in her throat—would be years away. Dina fought back the only way she knew how—with a tantrum. She screamed, she kicked the seats, she pounded her fist against the window, which felt more like concrete than glass. Her mother sprang up, but Dina was going to let everyone on the plane know that her parents were liars.

  “Shut that little girl up,” someone grumbled in English.

  Dina’s scream carried into the fuselage chamber. The propellers spun in sobbing circles, the wings flapped their mechanical flaps. Dina’s rage, not the propulsion units, pushed the plane forward. The pilots felt something overtake the controls. The passengers felt it, too. Grief thrust the aircraft into the air. Dina’s scream took them out too far, too fast. Oxygen masks dangled from overhead compartments. She drove the aircraft farther, farther, into the thermosphere. Just shy of crossing the Kármán line, the thin airless boundary between atmosphere and space, Dina looked down. Her beloved Crete, remote as a quasar. Her papous not just years away, he was ten billion light-years away. She shut her mouth. The scream stopped. The plane dropped. Unable to overcome orbital velocity, Dina plummeted to the earth: a crash landing in New Jersey, 1971.

  For four and a half years, because she no longer believed anything her parents told her, and because she missed Papous, and because she was a foreigner who was treated like a foreigner, and because the kids at school made fun of her lazy eye in a way the villagers never had, Dina rebelled. Adults watched her with suspicion, and she learned that she was not pretty enough, not quiet enough, not obedient enough, not worthy, not gentle, not good, not smart—but she was certainly shrewd. By twelve, she was practicing espionage, and she and Angelos had them all fooled. Before his arrival, Dina had been too unworldly—having traveled only to the edge of space—to know about transnational deception. Now she was cosmopolitan enough to be guilty of treason.

  Angelos, a third cousin of her father’s, was a chemistry student. None of the Lazaridises had ever met him, but according to the stunted, artificial intimacy imposed on immigrants, they were family. Anyone Greek, anyone from the island, was family. Mihalis was obligated to help. His invitation was warm and heartfelt: Angelos’s father had supported Mihalis’s sister when she was ill and no one was able to pay for her hospital visits. Angelos was not charged rent. In return he fixed the refrigerator, cleaned the furnace, and tutored Dina in science.

  “You like chemistry?” he asked. He glanced at the D on her quiz.

  “We don’t do that in seventh grade.” She avoided looking at him.

  “What do you do?”

  She did not want to say, because she didn’t want to sound stupid. “Boring stuff.”

  He broke off a piece of his chocolate bar and pushed it across the table. She put it in her palm. It was half melted from being in Angelos’s pocket. “Maybe it wouldn’t be so boring if you had a fun teacher,” he said.

  She shrugged. He passed along another square of chocolate.

 
She put it in her mouth. “Last year we learned about kingdom, phylum—” She paused.

  “Class,” he said.

  “Order,” she returned. “I forget the rest.”

  He smiled. “Family.”

  She got an A on her next quiz.

  Before Angelos came, she had nothing to look forward to—wool skirts, long division, desk inspections, which she always failed. Changing for gym class, the girls told her she smelled like their mothers; something about her was like an old woman pushed into a girl’s body, mournful and dumpy. It didn’t matter now, she had Angelos. She loved Angelos. It was not a difficult thing to do. He was nice to her, he nicknamed her left eye Sneaky, and he had a nose that reminded her of the Fonz. His wavy auburn hair he kept in a loose ponytail that Mihalis disapproved of and Dina adored. He grew a brown beard that made her think of Jesus; he could have passed for a Greek priest, but Dina could tell his thoughts weren’t about God when he daydreamed. Nearly thirty, Angelos had been to college, and he was starting his PhD in the fall. He had traveled to San Francisco, Paris, Geneva, Bangkok. He knew all about the world, and he was going to share it with her.

  Every day, Angelos met her at the corner after school, and they walked home. She told him about what they were reading, imitated the humpbacked secretary. He asked about the dirty words the kids used on the playground and laughed when she was too shy to say them. He helped her with homework. Once, he even let her cut his beard. She held it in her hand as if it were a defenseless rabbit. She trimmed the edges, unaware that she was holding her breath until she realized that he was holding his, too.

  Her favorite was watching him work on her father’s car, which was always breaking down. He named the car parts for her. He opened the hood. He pulled a wrench from his pocket. Her eyes followed his hands. So firm when he held the clamp in place, so tender when he cupped the twin cams.

  That evening, after Dina took a bath, she lay down to think about nothing but Angelos’s hands. He held forks as if they were instruments, spoons as if they were sensitive scales. She could imagine him in the lab—fingers poised to grasp the beakers or glass tubes or whatever it was that chemists used. His hands could fix anything. They could even fix her, and had once, when she scratched the back of her leg hopping off a fence. She remembered the warm pads of the fingertips that gently pinched her calf when he rubbed a streak of iodine over the cut. This is good for you, he explained; she winced. Iodine is a halogen, like chlorine and bromine and fluorine, only it’s much more gentle. Your organs, like your skin, soak it up every day. Trust me, he said, squeezing the back of her knee. Your body needs this.

  Dina pushed off the blankets and crept through the hallway. Her father’s snores were all the permission she needed.

  His eyes were open as if he had been waiting for her. There was a book lying on his bare stomach. Loose gray boxer shorts, and nothing but a single tangled sheet beneath him. “You come for a math lesson?”

  “I couldn’t sleep,” Dina answered.

  “Me neither.” He sat up. The book fell to the mattress.

  She was suddenly nervous in his space, surrounded by his things. Everything was slate-blue. The closet open, she could see his collared shirts hanging. On the desk next to his bed were a stack of magazines, batteries, an old plate, a can of paint. She had never been in his room before, not even in the daytime. “It smells in here,” she said, not bothering to whisper.

  He shifted to the edge of the bed and grasped her by the wrists. His hold was not demanding, only guiding. He placed her in front of him. He moved to the edge of the bed. Their knees were nearly touching. “Don’t talk so loud.”

  “What are you reading,” she asked, unable to look into his face.

  He smiled. “You wouldn’t like it.”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s not really for kids,” he said.

  “I’m not a kid. I’m almost thirteen.”

  He took her wrist and rubbed it against his stubble. “It’s confidential.”

  He must have sensed her tensing, because he stopped, began to talk. “It’s about spies in the fifties. The Russians have the bomb, the Communists are invading South Korea.”

  “Like 007?” Voice shaking. “That’s stupid.”

  She was pulled onto his lap, which was warmer than the rest of his body. She laughed in surprise, embarrassment, but stopped cold when he wrapped his arm around her waist. He stroked her back, drawing her in so that she could face him. She could feel her heartbeat in her teeth. “What’s so exciting about it,” she said from very far away and also up close.

  He nuzzled his beard into her neck and said, “Oh, everything. Everything.”

  There was surveillance. There was bugging. There were dead-letter drops, arranged so two spies could transfer materials without ever meeting. He kissed her earlobe. He raised her nightgown above her waist. There was wetwork. There were honeypots. He flicked his thumb over her nipple, and Dina realized that no one other than her mother had ever seen her breasts before. The KGB thought that Americans were sex-obsessed. They trained girls to be swallows. Their job was to seduce secrets out of CIA officers.

  Angelos’s tongue slipped over her collarbone, and Dina was dragged down into the molten core she never suspected in her body. She knew she had to leave, and then a moment later, less than a second, knew she had to stay. She didn’t recognize his hands when they grabbed her because they were so rough, and yet at the same time she knew they could not have belonged to anyone else. She was suffocating, she was more afraid than she’d ever been in her life, but she could not be anywhere else. It felt important, what she saw in Angelos’s eyes.

  His fingers crept under the elastic of her underwear. They found the small tuft of hair and slipped easily inside. Dina gasped, her heart pounding. Then his entire body was inside. In a shock, she saw that he was too much, she was too full of him. It hurt. She tried to pull away, but he clenched the small of her back and pushed deeper. Her eyes teared. She was cold from the pain. Just as she began to sob, terrified that her body was being torn apart, it stopped.

  Dina was trembling, unable to move. Angelos sighed. He shifted her weight to his right leg. She could feel his heart beating. He was shaking. She believed he was scared, more afraid than she was, and her own panic receded. She rested her chin on his damp shoulder and pressed her hands against his back. She listened to his heavy breaths, they matched hers. “Tell me more,” she whispered.

  He was quiet. Then, “There were the Rosenbergs. They were the most famous of all. They loved each other so much, nothing could come between them. Not even death.”

  “What happened to them?”

  Angelos fixed her underwear, nightgown. He prodded her to her feet. “They were executed for selling the Russians classified information about the atom bomb. They were scapegoats for the government.”

  “They were married?”

  He nodded. “They sang to each other through the thick concrete walls of Sing Sing. Ethel and Julius, loyal until the very end.”

  Dina smiled.

  He pushed a jolt of black hair from her face. “You won’t betray me, will you?”

  “I would never,” Dina said and she meant it, though she did not know what it meant. She would do anything for him, she wanted to say.

  He lay back down and gestured to the door with his chin. “Don’t worry about the blood,” he said, voice throaty, tucking a pillow behind his head. “That only happens the first time.”

  Dina crept to the bathroom to wash. In the morning, when she was sore, she did not worry. He had prepared her for that, too.

  One of the things Angelos taught her was how to evade suspicion. This started with her left eye, which could reveal her at any moment. He showed her exercises: he stood behind her and, with his own palms, cupped each eye. She put her hands over his and interlaced her fingers over her forehead. They stood like this for five minutes, ten minutes. She wanted it to be romantic, but what she felt was self-conscious; she worried he was
laughing at her. But she trusted him. When he brought her home an eye patch, she wore it faithfully, even though she would have burned it had her parents been the ones to insist on it. She started to feel proud of the eye. She started to feel like it was why he picked her.

  One day, missing Angelos like crazy even as she sat next to him, she took out a pen and wrote a note, slid it across the table. Angelos continued to read his book. She pushed the note again. Mihalis flicked his paper so that the corner bowed low enough for him to see her over it. “Let Angelos work,” he said. “Go play.”

  She waited for Angelos to defend her, but he just turned the page.

  Late that night, she went to his room. It was locked. At breakfast, she swallowed a pastry that tasted like paste. When Angelos came in, she offered him some just to see how he’d react. She even said, “Try it, it tastes like glue,” in a voice that was stronger than expected. He smiled at her the way the school principal did and said, “Just a coffee.” All was lost. Then her mother said she wasn’t feeling well, and could Angelos walk Dina to school today?

  “Sure,” he said, but the answer had everything to do with her mother and nothing to do with her.

  Dina followed Angelos. He carried her bag over his shoulder. She wasn’t sure if that was a good sign or not. It could mean he forgave her for whatever she’d done, that he would carry her and her things with him forever; or it could be a knapsack of pity to let her down easy. Dina couldn’t help it. She started crying. She walked ahead so that he wouldn’t see.

  He caught up, stopped her by the shirt. “Listen, koukla,” he said, “you have to be smart about this. You can’t just write notes with everyone looking.” Not everyone was as evolved as they were, not everyone would understand. Some people, some parents, were old-country.

  “OK,” she said, eyes still wet, “but it’s hard.”

  He told her about a case—a spy who searched the daily paper for an advertisement that read “Dodge Diplomat, 1971, needs engine work, $1000.” If it was printed, that meant that his contacts overseas needed to reach him. Dina could do something like this—they could have a special sign—if she really needed something. “But you have to promise not to be so obvious,” he said. “You have to get stronger. You have to do your eye exercises. You have to be cunning.” Dina liked that word, cunning.