Let Me Explain You

  But Dina did make a mistake. A big one.

  Sometimes, Dina’s mother made Angelos do work that was beneath Angelos. Dina had to watch him scrub garbage cans (garbage!), clean chicken (clean!), wash dishes (dishes! A Greek intellectual doing dishes!). Irene didn’t want Dina helping him, just made her sit at the table and wait for him to complete his chores. And the whole time, Dina’s mother talked to Angelos as if they were close. As if he didn’t think she was a fat, ignorant, backward peasant with peasant manners and peasant hygiene.

  “You miss your home, Angelo? You miss your mother?”

  “My mother is a saint. I would call her every day if I could.”

  Dina kicked the leg of the table. “Ma-ma, we have work to do. Science project.”

  Irene turned around. Her hands were in yellow rubber gloves, and she was sponging down the face of the refrigerator. “Angelos is almost finished, and then you can start.”

  “Ma-ma, he isn’t a slave.”

  “What slave? All he’s doing is giving his aunt a little help. It doesn’t trouble him anything.”

  “To tell you the truth,” Angelos said, “it’s a nice break from all the thinking.”

  “Fine. I can dry.” Dina was already up, pulling a towel out of the drawer. She took a plate from Angelos and let herself touch the wet ridge of his knuckle.

  Angelos pulled away and, in an instant, cinched her wrist. His grip was unrecognizable—disciplinary. He looked up at Irene, smiling, and dropped Dina’s arm. “Listen to your mother, koukla,” he said. “I should have more often listened to mine.”

  Irene looked to Angelos’s hand, hanging by his side. “My daughter was never so excited for extra chores before you came.”

  Dina was quaking. “It’s not chores,” casual as she could. “It’s helping.”

  That night Angelos opened the door, but he wouldn’t let her in. He said he barely recognized Dina anymore—she was sloppy, whiny. A double agent. A brat. “I warned you,” he hissed.

  Dina cried, apologized. She said it was her mother. Her mother made her crazy. Her mother didn’t know when enough was enough. Angelos said Dina was the one who didn’t know when enough was enough. Teach me, Dina said. Teach me, she begged. Too loud, her parents’ room too close. She did not reveal that, between dinner and bed, she overheard her parents talking. Her mother saying, It’s something wrong, a man and a young girl alone in a house so much, and her father answering, He’s a good boy. He is family.

  Angelos pulled her into the room and told her to shut up. Then he said, You won’t question me? You won’t doubt my methods? Every form of subterfuge? Every expression of concealment? You won’t make stupid mistakes? You won’t act like a baby?

  Yes. I’m ready. I’m ready to learn.

  By the time he was done with her, he promised, there would be no mistakes. There would be nothing she couldn’t do. “Sometimes spies don’t have to speak to one another, even when they’re face-to-face,” he instructed, untying the drawstring on his pants. “They talk in code.”

  “Morse code?” she asked, letting him draw her to her knees.

  He nodded and scooted to the edge of the bed. “That’s right. Let me show you.”

  He showed her how to transmit information using rhythm. Under his guidance, she listened for the short and long gasps, used her mouth to send out continuous waves of current, honed a message with pulses. She never spoke, but he understood her loud and clear. He could barely suppress the dots and dashes that escaped his lips as “dits” and “dahs.” It was the only time he broke his code of silence, muffling cries into her hair.

  It was nearly four in the morning. They lay in the sallow light of his desk lamp, Angelos’s arm hanging over his chest. She said she could hear his heart, even though she couldn’t. She sat up when Angelos reached over to the night table and slipped a white pill out of a textbook. She had seen the white pills before. He hid them in socks, swab boxes. Angelos maintained that they were medicine to help him study, but then why hide them in such weird places? It hurt that he was keeping part of himself secret, but she knew it would only be a matter of time. Maybe he just wanted to make sure she was ready.

  Angelos didn’t want her to leave yet. He lit a cigarette and she took a drag, entwining her middle finger in his wiry beard. She didn’t want to leave, either. She wanted to tell him how beautiful he made her feel, but she couldn’t bring herself to talk like that. Instead, she said, “You should see the girls in my class.”

  “Oh yeah?” he said.

  “None of them are Greek.”

  “What do they look like?”

  “They have blond hair.”

  “They are probably just skinny crows with bird legs and no tits.”

  Dina clapped her hands over her smile. “You wouldn’t say that if you saw them.”

  Angelos propped himself up on his elbow. He took another puff, and the smoke filled his mouth. “Maybe that is true. When I was your age, I chased after the obvious girls.”

  Dina’s smile receded. “Tell me about them.”

  “There was only one.” And he confessed that, for a while, he had been in love with the Red Spy Queen.

  “What happened?” Dina asked, hating this woman already.

  “She revealed my true identity.”

  “She’s a stupid dog bitch.”

  Angelos frowned. “Sooner or later, they’ll get to you, too.”

  “No they won’t.”

  The frown behind his beard became a grimace. “Your father will. He’ll get you to defect.”

  Dina scowled and yanked the cigarette out of his mouth. “No he won’t.”

  “Swear to me.”

  “I swear.”

  “No,” Angelos said, his voice hard. His Adam’s apple rose and fell. He sat up. “Swear to me.”

  Dina’s annoyance disappeared. She had never seen him so close to crying. Her eyes swept over his face. She twisted the edge of his beard in her fist and yanked him toward her.

  Angelos’s eyes lit up. He chuckled, kissed her on the mouth, then the eye. Then he took the cigarette back. “My beautiful Ethel,” he said, exhaling a loom of smoke.

  It made Dina feel like she was the most important, most-loved person in the world.

  A month later, Angelos was not at the corner. Not once had he been late. Even when he had an interview in the city, he returned in time to meet her, necktie in hand. Dina waited five minutes, ten, and then she began to run. She stopped when she saw her father’s car in the driveway. Dina walked into the kitchen, making sure to appear calm. Her father had only just come home, Dina calculated, because his hair was still curled with sweat, and he had yet to shower. He was wearing work pants, a yellowed undershirt. A cigarette, the same kind Angelos smoked, held between two fingers like he didn’t know what to do with it. He did not look at Dina. Her mother did.

  Dina opened the refrigerator and poured herself some milk. She coached herself to stay silent. When people are nervous or guilty, Angelos had instructed, they talk. They need to get things off their chest. Stay quiet as long as you can: to slow their suspicion. They might know the Reid technique, and then a single twitch of the cheek would set them after her like the CIA on Perseus, the spy who tried to steal the atomic bomb for Stalin.

  Mihalis ashed out the cigarette on the tabletop. “You can start your homework,” Mihalis said. “Angelos is not coming.”

  Dina waited one, two seconds before answering. “What do you mean?”

  Her mother said, “Angelos does not live here anymore.”

  This was just falsified evidence. Angelos would never have left.

  But maybe her mother wasn’t lying. Maybe Angelos wasn’t coming back.

  Her stomach started to turn. She imagined milky tea curdled by a squirt of lemon. Angelos had been the one to teach her that you couldn’t have both. You have to choose lemon or milk.

  Dina couldn’t help herself. “He’s coming back. He would have said goodbye.”

  “Oh yeah, Mis
s America? You know so much about him?”

  “He has nowhere to go,” Dina said. “We’re his only family.”

  Irene came around the table to face her daughter. She took her hands. “He is not your family,” Irene said. “He is a nobody.”

  Dina realized her legs were shaking. But most important, she had to stop herself from crying. Crying meant guilt. An innocent person, at this stage, would scream, deny, refuse all accusations no matter how rigorous the interrogation.

  “You went to his room,” her father said, “at night.”

  “No I didn’t.” She could feel her eye wanting to look away, but she kept it as close as she would have kept Angelos. She met her mother’s gaze evenly.

  “Your mother saw you coming back to your bedroom in the morning.”

  “I was on the couch,” Dina sobbed. “It was hot.”

  “You slept on the couch when you have a nice big bed?”

  “I didn’t feel good. I had my period.”

  Mihalis faltered. He glanced at Irene. Very quickly, he realized he was in foreign territory.

  Irene gaped. “She doesn’t have that. She is too young.”

  “No I’m not.” She sank her hand into her pocket and pulled out a pad. She had found it in the girls’ bathroom a few days before. Now, she grew instantly confident. Being a good spy meant thinking fast, using resources. “I’m not your stupid little koukla anymore.”

  Irene scoffed, but there were tears in her eyes. She took Dina’s face into her hands. “What did you do, Dina mou? What did he make you do?”

  It was unexpected. Dina felt a rush. All of a sudden, she wanted to fall into her mother’s arms. She felt a coming release, relief, as if she might shake off all of the dirt that had been packed over her mouth and chest for as long as she could remember. Then Dina glanced at her father’s face, and she understood: this was all a trick. What her mother was doing was Pride and Ego Down: through niceness, she was trying to get Dina to betray Angelos.

  “He made me smarter,” Dina said forcefully. “Isn’t that what you wanted?”

  Mihalis pushed Dina into the hallway. He shouted at his wife. “From now on, you are here with her every day after school. No phones, no boys, nothing but learning how to be a good girl.”

  Inevitably, this was what all Greek fathers forced upon their daughters. Judge, jury, and executioner, Mihalis could detain her indefinitely. “This is not justice,” Dina shouted, pounding on the bedroom door. “I hate you.”

  She yelled until she was hoarse. For half an hour, she cried into her pillow. She had not felt this kind of loss since leaving Papous, who had also left her behind (for heaven). Now Angelos, too, was out of her life forever. She would never see him again, her parents would make sure of that. And then, very suddenly, Dina’s tears stopped. She sat up. Angelos would never have left without giving her hope, a sign.

  At three in the morning, Dina snuck out of her bedroom. The bathroom light was on, her parents’ door was open, but her father was snoring again. Her mother had not cleaned out Angelos’s room, thank God. The slate-blue, the smell of him, it almost brought Dina to gagging tears. Their first night in that bed came rushing back. But she had to pull herself together. She didn’t know how much time she had.

  There was a necktie hanging from a corner hook, and for a moment she thought that was it. She put it up to her nose. She rubbed it against her chin and lips. She slipped the tie on and kept looking. Patches of rug, lightbulbs, beneath and behind dressers—everything was clean. Then she unscrewed his lamp, plugged her fingers into the hollow neck, and pulled up a matchbox. She slid out the drawer. A bit of wax paper. Gingerly, she unfolded it. Inside was a single oval, flat-faced blue pill.

  A little blue pill.

  There were two possibilities. Either he had left her some of his medicine, knowing she would find it, or he had left her cyanide, knowing she would follow. She tried to think like Angelos. If he had left her medicine, his message would be about trust, about how they could be close in this one experience even if they couldn’t be close in life. If he had left her cyanide, the message was that he wanted to be with her forever, in death if not in life.

  Cyanide, she decided.

  Angelos had taught her everything so that, when the time came, she would not be afraid. Iron cyanides, he had said, were first discovered as components in the dye Prussian blue; the color had not even existed until the 1700s—might never have existed had it not been for a little contaminated potash. This is natural stuff, he insisted. It’s produced by certain bacteria; traces of it can be found in cigarette smoke, in the stones of apples, mangoes, peaches. Cyanide smells like almonds. Even the name is familiar, he coaxed—Kyaneos, Greek for dark blue.

  She had to put it in her mouth.

  He had told her about Eva Braun and Adolf Hitler, who bit into a cyanide capsule together just before the pretty young wife was incinerated in her navy silk dress. Yet she did not have to be afraid, because she knew if Angelos had left her one pill, he had taken the other.

  She bit down.

  Nothing happened for an hour. Then she began to feel happy. Cheerful. Confident. She was alert. She knew exactly what was happening to her and around her. She saw clearly, for the first time, how sad her parents’ lives were, how they had never known love and never would because they were unable to love. She had only just turned thirteen and already she had a vision they could never hope to possess, because they were close-minded peons.

  The blue pill was not cyanide. Angelos had introduced Dina to amphetamines.

  Dina made friends. She met Dill at a party she wasn’t supposed to be at, and he brought her into his van so she could “taste a little of his paste.” Dill was loud, rude, fat, unromantic, unsubtle. Dina didn’t love him, but she spent every day with him in the shed behind his grandmother’s backyard.

  Dill had rigged a stovetop, and there were a couple of blowtorches in an unplugged refrigerator. She watched him mix baking soda, insecticides—substances introduced as dilutants—into the batch. She had no idea what it was. He combined drain cleaner (sulfuric acid) with salt, lots of salt, to get hydrogen chloride gas. Table salt—he said as he gave her a hit—the most pure, most basic ingredient. It’s all over the fucking world. It’s in the water.

  Over the next couple of years Dina became, like Angelos, seriously committed to science. Meteorology was part of her history, after all: as early as 350 BC, Aristotle had described the hydrologic cycle in his writings. The Evaporation Experiment. Step 1, Record the air temperature of the room. Is Dill feeling generous today? Is he moody? Will he give her a little more than Alice? Step 2, Wet a hand towel and hang it with clothespins in the shade. Dina is the wet towel, Dina is hanging in the shade waiting for the sunshine to come; she takes whatever he’s burning in a little foil of aluminum and sucks it dry. She is not nearly as clean and white as her lungs and her brain and even the soles of her feet. Step 3, Check the towel every five minutes until it’s completely dry, determining wind presence and humidity. For some reason, Dill is blowing into her mouth, which makes her laugh, which makes him do it more. He is squeezing her wrists. Then he is squeezing his body into hers while Alice pretty much just watches. She must be the control. Or Dina is the control. She’s so evaporated, she can’t tell.

  Other experiments. Temperature and Heat Transfer, Finding Dewpoint, Pressure Change and Weather, Snow to Liquid Ratio, and, best of all, Making Thunder. Every time she discovers a new finding, she thinks, I wonder if Angelos knows that this is what I’m like. Every time she feels a new sensation, she imagines him feeling it, too. Even three years later.

  At some point Dill gives her a horse tranquilizer, and she goes blind for a few hours.

  It’s time to find Dina a husband, Mihalis says.

  Irene, unable to imagine any other solution, agrees.

  But Dina, who at fifteen has been an astronaut, a spy, and a meteorologist, is not about to just give up and be a nice Greek bride.

  STAVROS AND DIN
A MAVRAKIS

  * * *

  They landed in the City of Philos Adelphos, brotherly love. Three hundred and twenty dollars in his pockets, he liked to tell people. And not a brother in sight.

  The Lazaridises did not live in New York like Yannis Fafoutakis said, they lived in New Jersey. There were no American girls with karpouzi tits and karpouzi ass waiting to suck his big dick. That didn’t matter, Stavros told himself, party time was for the island. He was here to become important. Instead, he was given yellow rubber gloves and Brillo pads at the Acropolis Diner. The big office job Mihalis had promised didn’t exist.

  A man wearing three gold rings emerged from the big-man office where Stavros’s pay was being withheld instead of handed over each night. “Who would have known,” the three-ring man said, “a Mavrakis scrubbing my pots.”

  It was Andonis, a boy from the village. Instead of telling him ai gamisou, Stavros Stavros smiled and said, “You got fat, Andonis. Too much American food.”

  “Not just me,” Andonis said. “My pockets, too.” He flashed a bloated black wallet.

  Never had Stavros felt less of a man than he did during the three months he worked for Andonis. Like all of the other dishwashing Greeks, he was called Goatbanger and Flease—short for flap grease, which was said to build up on uncircumcised pricks after a lifetime of working in kitchens. After one of the cooks froze grease into his shoe while he was out shoveling snow, Stavros quit. If he had wanted to be shit on, he could have stayed in Crete. A man had to have pride. If not, what was the point of life?

  The next day, Mihalis called Stavros into the living room. They shared a bowl of potato chips, a poor substitute for mezedes and nothing to dip them in. The two sat facing each other, listening to the other chew. They were like male goats battling, and whoever ate the most would win.