“I’m sorry, Aliki,” I repeat.
“It’s all right,” she says. “Stop apologizing.”
I’ve made her laugh, and that makes me happy.
I lie in bed for a while, thinking of everything I did last night. At first, I’m embarrassed. I drank too much and got carried away. But that’s not quite right, and the truth is that, though the alcohol made it easier, I knew what I was doing. I run my fingers over the beads of my new bracelet. Something more could have happened with Stelios. As this thought forms, another comes suddenly: Something still could. In the three years since Jonah and I got together, I haven’t touched another man that way. But it feels as if his proposal has changed everything. Now that we’re engaged, he seems cautious and I’m afraid. Marriage looms over me like a sword of Damocles, hardly a good image for a blushing bride.
I’m not sure what I’m most afraid of: that my marriage to Jonah will fail, or that I might actually achieve the happiness I long for. As I stare up at the guest-room ceiling, I ponder the easy way out. If I ruin the marriage before it has a chance to start, I can save myself the despair of failure. Jonah won’t be a laceration of the heart that I will have to bear forever. He’ll be like Luke, and Sam, and Pete, just a guy who didn’t work out.
It’s now five in the morning Boston time. I sit on the edge of the bed for a while, as if at sea, letting my vision settle in its gimbal. I resolve to stand up and, holding on to the walls and doorjambs, I make it to the foyer, wondering if I should call Jonah again and explain. But I don’t reach for the phone. I don’t trust myself. Or, more accurately, I trust my body; I just don’t trust my heart. I sit there for a while longer and then gingerly make my way around the apartment, getting dressed for another session at Nestor’s house.
I go slowly down Ellinos Stratiotou, breathing in the damp air off the Gulf of Patras. My head begins to clear, but I still feel as though the slightest provocation will bring a repeat of Aliki’s toilet. I have not eaten anything this morning. I feel in my pocket for Nestor’s key, with its fob in the shape of a thistle, the words AULD LANG SYNE embossed on the back side. A souvenir from one of his trips. There is, doubtless, a vial of coarse Scottish beach sand or a chunk of Scottish rock somewhere among all his boxes.
I hang my coat on the rack in the foyer and stand looking at the scene of all I have to sift through. It is too much. Repeating Aliki’s steps from the day before, I make a passable cup of coffee and take it to Nestor’s study, where I stand looking out the French doors to the back garden. During my summer visits, the garden was always an arid space, almost unbearably hot, with the sun baking off the walls and the paving stones.
Nestor ventured into it only twice a day, to fill a bowl with water for those tortoises he kept there. Not turtles, as my mother so promptly pointed out. It must have been a suitable environment for the tortoises, because I remember seeing them every summer until I grew too old to play with them. Though I knew better, I always snuck out into the searing heat of the garden during the middle of the day, when I was supposed to be resting. Nestor would doze off as he listened to music, and I would click open the glass door that led out from the cool of the study and feel the sudden pressure of the sun on my skin and clothes. Within seconds, my scalp felt hot enough to lift off my head, but I never retreated. Around me were three high walls and the tall glass doors of the house; above me was a simple square of pale-blue sky; at my feet, the ordered black and white squares of the garden tile.
I could never induce the tortoises to do anything except pull their heads into their shells. They rejected my offers of lettuce or water; they refused to be steered toward the shade of a bushy weed. When I dared to place them on the paving stones, as though they were pieces in a board game, they snapped at me and drew their heads back inside. I suppose these were odd pets for me to be playing with. But to me then, the tortoises were exotic, something I could be proud of in a way. When I daubed water on them, I brought out the rich pattern of browns on their shells. With their heads pulled in, they became perfect disks of color and design.
I wonder if this is what Nestor was thinking—that I would see the order in the chaos of his belongings. Perhaps he trusted me especially to find the design among all his collections, the rich pattern of his life as he had recorded it in apricot pits and grains of sand. A man of details, perhaps he thought I was better suited than the rest of his family to find the significance in them.
This idea puts me in an expansive mood and, as if to conduct some kind of conversation with him, I decide to begin today with Nestor’s photographs. My coffee finished, I draw the curtains open and ease myself onto the couch, flipping through endless black-and-white images on stiff scalloped paper. I know I shouldn’t be doing this; I will never finish if I go so slowly over every item in the house. But the photographs are compelling. Familiar faces in their prime swim up at me from scenes of tennis courts, balconies, horses, beaches.
I go through a few more boxes and set aside roughly a dozen photographs from a box labeled 1940: three shots of a family group standing by a fence; my grandparents in tennis whites, holding wooden rackets with long handles; the farmhouse taken at different times of day, with shadows inching across the porch; and a photo of all the children in a line arranged by height, with my mother at the head; they are all wearing sailor-style collars. I am in the kitchen, looking for some sort of box to put them in, when I hear the doorbell’s soft ring.
I leave the photos in the small shoe box I have found and peer out to the foyer, fearing one of the protective neighbors Aliki has warned me about. I see a tiny figure silhouetted against the glass. It could be a child—a beggar selling trinkets—but I realize as I approach that it is my mother. Here, too, it seems, she has been given no right to enter without permission. Thalia and Sophia come and go as they please, but my mother appears to be welcome nowhere. Even I, the visitor with my “Auld Lang Syne” key, have more access than she does.
I consider hiding until she leaves; with my hangover, I don’t want to deal with my mother. But I realize that one sure way to find out why she doesn’t want me in this house is to let her in and see what happens. Anyway, she must know I’m in here, and she will wait, aloof but demanding, certain I won’t be able to resist her.
She turns slowly as I swing the door open and she steps into the house. I take her camel-hair coat and hang it on the hat stand. We kiss on the cheeks.
“You’re all dressed up,” I say. She is wearing gray wool trousers and a belted navy sweater with a scarf tied, foulard style, around her neck.
“You expect me to go around Patras in overalls?”
She looks me up and down, taking in my jeans, boots, and turtleneck sweater.
“No,” I say carefully. “Where are you going?”
“I’m going here, Calliope. I’ve come to see my brother’s house.”
She pushes past me and clucks at the sight of the boxes piled in the living room. I resolve not to take my eyes off her.
“Look at all this junk,” she says. “I told you.”
She glides around the room, peering into boxes with disdain. She picks up an occasional object, glances at it, and then shakes her head before setting it back down. She wipes her hand on her jacket.
“This stuff reeks of mildew.”
“What do you want, Mamá? If there’s something you want me to be on the lookout for, I’ll be glad to set it aside.”
“The idea that my own daughter should be in charge of my brother’s things! This is ridiculous.”
She is only partly right. It’s not ridiculous; but it is sad. I think of all these things from her family home that my mother never got to bring with her to America. Maybe that was why they argued that day in the hospital. For Nestor to deprive her of some keepsake from the life she shared with him seems cruel, if that’s what he was really doing. Surely he understood that by giving the stuff to me he would be rubbing this deprivation in his sister’s face. Or was he making me the gatekeeper? Was he hoping for
moments like this one, when I would see my mother’s loss and would look for something to give her?
“Look, I don’t know why he did this, but I told you: If there’s something you want, just tell me.”
“You don’t know why?” She keeps roaming around the living room, lifting books by their corners and letting them fall in tiny clouds of dust. “You were always his favorite, Calliope. He loved Aliki, but he adored you. He remembered everything you ever told him. And he was always telling me about you. Me, your mother! He always knew your flight information. That’s how I found out about your last two visits. From Nestor.” Her eyes give away nothing, no knowledge of how my last visit to her ended. “I used to think you were the daughter he never had, but that wasn’t it. You were his friend. I think he thought of you as a peer.”
I feel tears brimming and I pray they don’t roll.
“Just a minute.”
I go to the kitchen and wipe my eyes, peeking around the doorjamb at my mother, who is now bending sideways, looking into the recesses of a bookcase. I know she was jealous—is jealous even now—of Nestor’s connection to me. I can offer her something to make amends. I grab the shoe box with the photographs I have been poring over and return to the living room.
“I found some pictures you might like. Come sit.”
With a sigh, she comes to sit down next to me on the couch, scooting to the edge so that her feet will reach the floor. She doesn’t look comfortable.
I leaf through the box and place a photo on the coffee table.
“Here,” I say. “Here’s all of you in matching outfits.”
She picks up the photo.
“I remember this.”
She places the tip of her finger below the image of her teenage face and holds it there, as if she were summoning her younger self to return. She reaches into the box and spreads the rest of the photographs over the table. Her hands wander over the images, sliding them clear from one another as she takes them up to study them. Her glasses hang at the end of her nose, and over them her eyes are beady and dark in a face whose coloring has dimmed with time. She stops at one of the photos of the family group—the aunts, Nestor, and several adults—standing stiffly by a wooden railing.
“Those are the Agnostopoulos cousins, right?”
“Hmm?”
I point out the figures I know.
“And these must be Popi and Marianna, right? And I can’t tell where it is. Their house somewhere?”
“I didn’t know he had this,” she says softly, then, after a pause, “Where did you find it?”
“In one of these.” I gesture at the boxes around the couch, but my mother doesn’t take her eyes off the photograph.
“We’re at the farm,” my mother says finally. “These are the refugees who came to live with us.”
“What refugees who came to live with you?”
She sits back and tosses the photograph onto the table.
“A family, I think. And one or two others. After the first bombings, we moved out to the farm and these people showed up one day. My father put them to work around the farm.”
“There’s a little boy here.”
“Well, he didn’t work, did he?” She snorts at me. “But the adults, yes. It was the least they could do for being given safety. Who knows where they would have ended up if we hadn’t taken them in.”
“You said they just appeared.”
“And rather than send them away, we let them stay. Satisfied?”
“No,” I say, and she starts at my dissent. “I think it makes a big difference whether you were at the farm alone or with strangers.”
“Evidently I don’t, or I would have told you about them.”
And yet this is a fundamental change to my notion of the farm during wartime. The farm is no longer a sort of cocoon where the family returned to safety. Now I see that the place was porous, open to the outside world with its dangers, threats, and losses.
My mother stands up and gathers the photographs together.
“May I take these?” she says, with mock courtesy.
“Yes, Mamá. I’m not going to keep you from having any of this stuff.”
“Oh, thank you so very much.”
She heads for the foyer and hands the box to me briefly while she puts on her coat. I stand there, waiting for my vision to clear from having risen too quickly. My stomach rumbles and creaks and I remember I have eaten nothing.
“Maybe we could go get something to eat, Mamá. My treat.”
“Not today.” She barely seems to think about it. “I’d rather take the box straight home.”
“I can carry it for you. We can sit at Plateia Georgiou.”
“I’d rather keep this safe, not at some café table.”
“We could leave it here and come back for it after. It’d be nice to sit with you,” I say. “Or we could watch the street performers. The Carnival looks fun.”
“It’s garish now. They’ve ruined it, just like they’ve ruined everything from the old days.”
“Come on, Mamá. Is it really that bad?”
She laughs. “Yes, Calliope. It’s really that bad. May I go now?”
“I am trying, Mother, to be sociable. But, sure, don’t let me keep you. Go have a great time looking at your photographs.”
She whisks out the door while I am still shaking my head in resigned astonishment, if there is such a thing.
The pounding in my head grows more insistent, so I decide to go back to Aliki’s, where I can eat and rest. Equipped with a key, I make my way up and find the apartment, thankfully, empty. I grab a glass and down two large drinks of water, though there is no hope of Advil. I slice some of the pound cake that Aliki has left and manage to keep it down.
“Fuck,” I say, drawing the word out.
I have screwed everything up. I am estranged—that has to be the word for it—from my fiancé, I have worried my cousin with my irresponsible behavior, I have disappointed my one niece in the whole world, I have led on some strange guy I know nothing about, and now I have renewed hostilities with my mother. And she is bent on ferreting something out of the vast piles of Nestor’s possessions, and I don’t know what that is.
I drop down onto the couch, as focused on my aching head as if I were watching it on television.
The ring of the phone wakes me—a harsh double peal that sounds like Morse code. I remember the standard phone greeting: Léghete, speak. Invitation couched in the form of a command.
“Neh?” I say instead. Yes?
“Miss Calliope Notaris, please.”
“Who is this?”
“Your friend from the alleyways.”
“Stelios,” I groan. “What do you want?”
“Pleased to hear from you too,” he says. “How’s the head?”
I grumble.
“Don’t ask for me like that on the phone,” I say. “My cousin already thinks I’m reckless.”
“Aren’t you?”
I don’t answer this. “Why did you call?”
“Some of us are going to try the Treasure Hunt today. Want to come?”
Feeling the way I do, I don’t understand how they can stomach the idea of walking around the city for hours.
“Absolutely not,” I say.
“Lazy.”
“Jet lag.”
“What about later?”
“Give me your phone numbers. I’ll call you.”
He tells me his and Anna’s mobile numbers, which I write on the pad by the phone.
“Promise?”
“No, I can’t promise,” I say, putting the paper in my pocket. “You’ll just have to take your chances.”
“Still wearing your bracelet?”
“Pact.” I shake my wrist so that the beads clink together.
I am back to sitting on the couch, doing nothing, when Aliki and the others come in, returned from the Children’s Carnival. Demetra and her two friends are full of excitement, but when they see me, they quiet down and move war
ily out of the foyer. Down the hallway to Demetra’s room, they burst into laughter.
“Someone had fun last night,” Nikos says, grinning at me.
Aliki smacks his hip, and I remember Anna smacking Andreas for his wandering fingers. The one gesture made in real—or false?—prudishness, the other in flirtation. This is the new Aliki, the careful wife and mother trying to shepherd her wayward man. I wonder if Anna will turn out the same way once her carefree youth is over. She will find herself no longer on equal footing with the men who surround her now.
I excuse myself and head down the hallway to Demetra’s room, where the girls are passing brightly colored magazines between them.
“Demetraki,” I say. All three of them look up at me, aghast at my intrusion. “I’m sorry about the parade last night.”
She begins to blush.
“I actually came to meet you at the Plateia. Did your mother tell you? But I couldn’t find you after all.” I feel my own face heating up as I realize how pathetic I sound. “How about if we go to another parade, just you and me?”
She nods, wide-eyed.
“We’ll look at the schedule and pick something just for us, okay?”
I hear muffled giggles behind me as I leave. I’d be laughing too if I were their age, snickering at the grown-up who’s afraid of a little girl.
In the foyer, Marina’s husband, Phillipos, grins along with Nikos as Aliki marshals them toward the kitchen. They return to the living room with glasses and baskets of chips and nuts. Nikos turns on the television and I move over to make room for the two women beside me on the couch. Nikos surfs through a talk show, a Spanish telenovela, an episode of Friends, and settles on footage of last year’s Carnival, broadcast nationwide. With the music and the shouting playing in the background, I listen as the four of them slide into conversation about people I don’t know.
It feels strange to be sitting here, among family and their friends, with children playing down the hall and food laid out on the table where shoeless feet rest. I try to hide my fascination as I take this all in. It is something I cannot get used to: this easy sense of being at home, this assumption—obvious in the relaxed curve of Aliki’s back and the slow rubbing together of Nikos’s stocking feet—that home is where the self lives. No matter what happens with us, I have made a home with Jonah, and I’ve propped my feet up on his parents’ coffee table many times to watch a football game. But I have not yet captured that sense of self, of my self. No matter where I go, I seem to be always trailing too many worries and ideas. Like the string of tin cans so incongruously weighing down a newly married couple.
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