by Leta Serafim
He thought again of Danae in her slip. The sound of her voice in the darkness.
Aye, be altogether better if he stayed alive.
Chapter 6
It grew too cold to stay in the priest’s hole, and they moved O’Malley upstairs a few nights later. The aunt held a lantern, supervising Danae and her father as they helped him across the yard. O’Malley looked up at the night sky, impressed by the brightness of the stars and the strange positioning of the constellations, so turned around and different from what he remembered in Ireland.
He pointed to a familiar cluster. “What do you call that one there?” he asked Danae.
“Megali arktos. Big bear. Same as in Latin. Ursa Major.”
“It’s ‘the Crann’ or ‘King David’s chariot’ in Ireland. Its little mate, that one there, is ‘fire tail.’ ”
He would have liked to linger outside, soaking up the darkness with her, but the aunt didn’t want them talking; neither did the father, who stood off to one side, watching them with a frown on his face. As if a bill had come due, a high one he hadn’t anticipated.
He called the aunt to lend a hand. The fact that he’d summoned her, not Danae, was not lost on O’Malley. He wondered if the man knew—if his love-sickness was that obvious.
Like the room in the cellar, the house had a cloth door. It consisted of three, maybe four rooms. It was bitterly cold inside, smoking metal braziers the only source of warmth. What furniture there was had obviously been handmade, pine tricked up with varnish to look like mahogany; an old calendar tacked up on a wall for decoration. Rugs were scattered throughout—some hand-loamed, others simple goatskins.
Outside, a wooden privy served as bathroom. Inside the privy there was no place to sit, which didn’t surprise O’Malley, having seen it before all over Greece—nothing but a porcelain platter on the ground with a hole at the center. The father showed him how to position his feet on either side, squat down to do his business, then wash everything down with a bucket. At 6’2”, O’Malley had always found it a perilous contraption, requiring great balance and concentration.
“Shit on my shoes, I will, I’m not careful.”
When it came time to sleep, the man gathered the goatskins, piled them up, and shook a sheet over them. Handing O’Malley a blanket, he said, “Germans sometimes pass here. If you hear them, you put rugs back and hide. Come, I show you.”
He led O’Malley to a closet in the kitchen. A trap door was secreted in the floor, a short ladder leading down into the priest’s hole. “I can’t show you now with your arms so bad, but if Germans come ….”
Arms or no arms, the man’s expression said. Run for your life.
Fastidious and self-contained, the man seemed restless as he stood there, filled with energy he didn’t know what to do with. O’Malley’s father had damped that down with drink. He wondered what Danae’s father used.
“You smoke?” the man asked.
When O’Malley said he did, Danae’s father handed him a cigarette and lit it for him, then did the same for himself, treating the tobacco as a precious thing. Leaning his head back, he blew a smoke ring and laughed to himself. He had a gold incisor, O’Malley saw. Glinting slightly, it gave him a jaunty air that didn’t match the rest of him, his dour and stolid manner. He didn’t try to make conversation, just stood there smoking with his eyes closed, grunting with pleasure.
He had the same ox-like weightiness as his sister, Toula—the same unyielding flesh and heavy limbs. They worked better on him, O’Malley thought, made him seem powerful and serious, a person others would listen to.
Talking apace and joking around, O’Malley worked to befriend him. “I grew up on a farm in Ireland,” he said. “Raised sheep same as you. In Dublin, they call people like me ‘bog trotters,’ ‘culchies.’ Don’t think much of us.” He went on talking for some time, long after their cigarettes were finished, speaking of his parents and the life they’d lived, how he’d gone to medical school at his father’s behest and become a doctor, planned to start a practice in Cork when the war was over. He made sure to include his father’s antipathy to the English and how his people had suffered at their hands.
Let it be said. Let him hear me say I have no allegiance to Churchill.
The man turned and gave him a searching look. “Go to sleep,” he said.
It wasn’t until O’Malley bedded down for the night that he realized he’d seen no food in the house, nothing whatsoever to eat. The aunt must have hidden it before they moved him upstairs. Been afraid he’d devour it and her both.
* * *
The tea was weak and tasted like medicine. O’Malley swirled the liquid around in his cup. Greener than what he was used to, it had grassy bits floating in it. He assumed that like the bread made of chick peas, it was something forced on the Greeks by the war.
He thanked the aunt politely, taking care to use the third person when he spoke to her in Greek. She was someone who cared how others addressed her, whether they showed her proper respect.
Danae drank her tea in silence. She seemed relieved to see O’Malley on his feet again and patted his hand when her aunt’s back was turned.
“What day is it?” he asked.
“October tenth.”
So he’d lost less than two weeks to the gangrene. Not much, considering.
She’d undone her braid and shook her head a little, smiling as though sharing a great secret, aware of the effect she had on him.
After they finished eating, Stefanos pulled a ball out from under the bed and kicked it toward him. O’Malley kicked it back and they played together until the aunt put an end to their game.
“Break glasses, is bad for Stefanos,” she said in English. “Hurt shoulders again, bad for you. You need to get better, go back to army.”
Although she spoke in a solicitous way, gesturing to O’Malley’s bandaged shoulders with a concerned look on her face, he understood: the old heifer wanted him gone. She picked up her broom and pointedly began sweeping around him, tidying up as if he wasn’t there.
“I didn’t ask to be brought here. It was your lot who took me in.”
The woman didn’t answer. Setting the broom aside, she removed the covers of the bed and shook them out, straightened the edges of the sheet.
“I’m sorry for any trouble I’ve caused.”
She turned and faced him. “Do you know what will happen if they catch you? How dangerous it is for us? Barely enough to eat and now you come. My brother says we must shelter you. We’re Greek, he said. It’s demanded of us. When I told him ‘no,’ he said I spent too long in America, only care for myself, that America ruined me.” Her voice was choked with rage.
Pushing him aside, she picked up the broom and began to sweep again, her eyes on the dirt at her feet.
* * *
“What are you doing?” Danae asked O’Malley.
“Sitting out in the yard with Stefanos. Had a bit of set-to with your aunt this morning. Thought it best if I stayed out of her way.”
He hauled himself to his feet, and the three of them walked around to the back of the house, taking care to stay close to the trees in case anyone was watching. There was the remnants of a vegetable garden and Danae stayed there, saying she wanted to search for food and motioning for them to go on. Giving a cry of victory, she discovered a couple of tomatoes and held them up for O’Malley and the boy to see, an eggplant and a desiccated pepper.
The day was overcast, clouds overtaking the sun like shifting gray mountains. O’Malley found an abandoned nest on a tree limb and gave it to Stefanos, who in turn shared a dead beetle. The bug’s body was iridescent, a jewel almost, and it seemed to glow in O’Malley hand.
The boy wanted to show him the rabbits his father kept. He led O’Malley toward a river at the far end of the field. The banks were heavily overgrown, and the area was shadowy and damp. The river was sluggish, brown with silt, and there were sandbars everywhere, breaking through the surface of the water like islands. A few
had trees growing on them, adding to the darkness.
The hutch was well hidden, buried deep in a thicket of pines by the river. An ingenious structure, it was more than four feet long and made of weathered wood the same color as the surrounding brush. A length of chicken wire provided ventilation for the animals, but kept them contained.
Stefanos told him his father had moved the hutch there to keep the rabbits away from the Germans and camouflaged it with pine boughs. There were a goodly number of the animals, their noses twitching as they caught their scent.
“Ela Foufou,” the boy said, feeding a handful of grass to one of the rabbits, a young one with a floppy ear. “Ela, Bobo kai Kiki.”
They lingered by the hutch for a few more minutes, O’Malley keeping a watchful eye out. He noticed an old woman hanging up clothes on the far side of the river and retreated back into the trees, pulling the boy with him. Although he knew he was too far away to be identified, it scared him to be so exposed.
“Time to go back, Specky,” he told the boy.
The wind picked up as they left the glade, stirring the dead leaves underfoot and bending the pine trees almost double.
Feeling its power, O’Malley wished he had a kite, a length of string to play out. No telling how high a kite would go on a day like this. Maybe he could make one when they got back to the house. He looked up at the darkening sky. Aye, he’d have just enough time before the rain came.
* * *
Using old newspapers and scraps of wood he found in the cellar, he constructed a kite on the kitchen floor, tying the framework together with twine and laying old newspapers over it. Clumsily made, it was a crude thing, but with any luck it would do the trick.
“Aetos, aetos!” Stefanos shouted. Kite, kite.
When O’Malley finished, Danae gave him a length of yellow cloth for a tail. “Old dress,” she said with a shrug. “Too small now.”
Once they were outside, the boy ran back and forth, string in hand, struggling to get the kite airborne. The wind took it a few seconds later, but its weight was poorly distributed and it careened wildly, spinning around like a plane shot out of the sky.
O’Malley stepped forward and helped the boy steady it, demonstrating how to work the string up and down with his hand. Shuddering, the kite began to rise, its cloth tail switching back and forth.
Calling to it in Greek, Stefanos coaxed it not to fall. “Min peseis, aneva ston aera kai milise me ta poulia.” Take to the air and speak to the birds.
O’Malley left him to it. He was tired now and his shoulders hurt.
Danae chased after her brother, running back and forth and yelling instructions. Caught by the wind, her skirt billowed up. She batted it down with her hands, her cheeks red with cold.
The string broke a moment later and the kite slowly tumbled down, breaking into pieces as it fell. Frantic, Stefanos tried to get it back up again, but it kept coming and crashed into a tree.
“Spasmenos.” All broken.
“No matter, sport,” O’Malley told him. “I’ll make you another.”
He tugged the tail free and stowed it in his pocket. A souvenir, he thought, a memento of this day, this hour before the rains came.
* * *
The storm broke a few minutes later, sheets of rain engulfing them as they ran toward the house. O’Malley grabbed Stefanos and swung him over the puddles, the sea of red mud that was suddenly everywhere. Lightning splintered the sky above their heads, exploding across the low lying clouds like mortar fire.
Open-mouthed, Stefanos stopped to watch, counting off the seconds. A moment later, a clap of thunder shook the ground beneath them.
“Come on, come on!” O’Malley cried, grabbing the boy and running toward the house.
Danae’s aunt was standing in the doorway. “Ela, paidi mou,” she called to Stefanos. Come, my child.
As soon as Stefanos got inside, she pulled off his wet clothes off and wrapped him in a blanket. “Why did your sister let you get so wet, my boy? Why didn’t she take better care of you?”
Danae ran into the house a moment later, soaked to the skin. Without a word, the aunt got up and retrieved the mop, handed it to her, and went back to fussing over her brother.
Funny that, O’Malley thought, studying the two of them. In Ireland, it was girls who were favored, not like here, where it was always the boys. Maybe it was the cost of marrying a girl off in Greece, the dowry required. Or maybe the custom went back to ancient times, the need for men to fight that everlasting war Danae spoke of. Not that Stefanos would ever make much of a warrior, fight with anything besides his shoelaces, the cowlick on his head.
The boy squealed as his aunt dried him off. O’Malley looked over at Danae. The expression on her face was hard to read.
She’s used to it. Bloody Cinderella.
The aunt lit the brazier in the front room and settled the boy in front of it, bringing a blanket from the back room to tuck around him. Pulling a chair close to the brazier, she called to O’Malley to come and join her, ignored her niece completely.
Speaking English, she boasted to him about her life in America, how she and her husband had lived in a big apartment in Chicago with an elevator that took them up and down. They’d had a car, too, a Buick. “It was good for me in America. Food, so much food. A woman to clean. Beautiful clothes.”
A real Lady Muck, she spoke as if he alone would understand. As if their experiences were the same because they both spoke English.
How little she knew. O’Malley supposed that’s where her dress had come from, the silly high heeled shoes she was wearing. Fine for getting in Buicks, not so good for going hungry in Greece.
He didn’t think the show she was putting on was for his benefit. No, it had something to do with Danae.
“Then my husband died and I had to sell everything and come back here.” She said ‘here’ as if it were a pigsty, someplace dirty. “All my life, bad luck.” She reached over and grabbed Stefanos, pulled him close to her. “All my life. Eh, paidi mou?”
O’Malley wished she’d leave the kid alone. He didn’t like the way she was playing with him, petting him like he was a puppy.
Danae walked over to the window and pulled the curtain aside. “Where did my father say he was going?”
“To Kalavryta. He said he had work to do.”
O’Malley looked at her sharply. There was something in the way she said it, something she wasn’t saying.
“Again?” the girl asked in a pained voice.
“Yes.” Something passed between them, some hidden message.
“Panagia mou,” Danae whispered. “How many this time?”
The woman shrugged. “Who knows?”
It rained the rest of the day. The aunt retreated to the bedroom with Stefanos to take a nap, leaving Danae and O’Malley alone in the parlor.
Opening up an old wooden trunk, Danae got out some family trinkets and showed them to him. A photograph of her parents on their wedding day, a copper dish from Rhodes. “My mother’s wedding dress,” she said, smoothing down the front with her hand. It was a poor thing with ruffles made of cheap lace and high neck, yellow now with age.
Dana pulled it out of the trunk and held it up to herself, then getting to her feet, began to waltz around the room, spinning as if in the arms of an invisible partner. The white fabric set off her skin and dark hair, her ever-watchful eyes. O’Malley had never been to a ballet, had only read about them, but he thought a ballerina might look the way Danae did just then, all thinness and grace and draped in white cloth.
“You’ll be wearing that?” he asked. “Same as your ma, the day you wed?”
“I’m just playing. I will never marry.”
O’Malley stepped closer, intending to dance with her, but she quickly spun away.
“You’re beautiful, Danae,” he said, reaching for her hand. He succeeded in grabbing her and they danced for a moment, the dress between them.
“In Ireland, men would be buzzing around you l
ike bees. By the hundreds, they’d be, swarming wherever you went.”
“Not in Greece. I have no dowry, nothing to bring to the wedding.”
“What about this place?”
“It belongs to Aunt Toula.”
“Hardly fair, that.”
“Much in life isn’t, Angle,” she said in a tired voice, done with her dancing. “You’re a grown man. Haven’t you noticed?”
Folding up the dress, she carefully put it back in the trunk. Her one great treasure. “My mother was my age when she got married. She only saw my father twice before the wedding. He was from another village.”
O’Malley wondered how her mother had felt on her wedding night, bedding down with a stranger. “Were they happy together?”
“They were poor.” Wealth was a condition for happiness, apparently. For love.
O’Malley remembered his father’s words when he’d asked him about women, a husband’s duty in marriage. “To care about her and the children, that’s what it is,” his pa had said. “Make sure they’re warm enough and have food in the larder, that the fence stays mended so the sheep don’t stray. Never let the drink take you and get your work done. Be the one the rest look to, her most of all.
“ ’Tis simple, son. Just the daily job, done right.”
* * *
The aunt fed them something called trahana for lunch, a watery broth with odd bits of dough floating in it. Although it left a sour aftertaste, O’Malley held it in his mouth, fighting not to swallow it right away, to make it last. He looked around the kitchen, curious as to where Danae’s tomatoes had gotten to, what the aunt had done with them.
Stefanos was banging on his bowl with a spoon. “Peino, Peino!” I’m hungry.
“Once the war’s over and there’s enough to eat, I’m going to eat breakfast three times a day,” O’Malley said in Greek, wanting to engage the boy in the conversation.
Stefanos got a dreamy look on his face. “Paidakia,” he said, thumping his spoon again. Lamb chops.
“Loukoumades,” said Danae, joining in the game.
“What the devil are loukoumades?” O’Malley asked.
She thought for a moment. “Donuts, loukoumades are donuts.”