Donna Has Left the Building

by Susan Jane Gilman

  The wine smelled crisp and lemony with just the faintest, faintest whiff of sharpness beneath it.

  “Yamas!” people saluted around me. “Yamas! Santé. Probst. Nostrovia. Chin-Chin.” Did I hear someone say “l’chaim” as well? One by one, the volunteers held up their glasses and swallowed, tossing their heads back with abandon, exposing their young, glistening throats to the air.

  I looked down.

  I set the glass on the table. Leave. Immediately. But I remained rooted in my chair and threw my arm over the back of it so I might appear relaxed and casual and not like I was fixating on the wine.

  Philippe poured a second round. Everyone toasted again. “Yamas!”

  “I love the local wine here,” somebody said.

  “Yes, it is so light but delicious,” said someone else. “I could drink it all day. It would help with the cleanups.” It was like a Greek chorus. Was someone actually paying them to say this stuff?

  I picked up my glass. I could just have a sip. Just hold it in my mouth like a breath. Hell, I’d just put in almost forty hours of panic-fueled travel across the globe to rescue my child. And before that: A night in a homeless shelter. A Tennessee jail. Getting punched in the face. And even just a few minutes ago: I’d nearly pulled out my back picking up some of the world’s most tragic garbage. Didn’t all of this merit one lousy sip of wine? Why, it barely even looked like wine, it was so faintly colored. For all I knew, Kostas had watered it down completely.

  I held it to the light, drew it to my mouth. Perfume. Liquid joy. Think of how fleeting life was. The evidence was all around me.

  Don’t do this, Donna. You need to stay clearheaded. For Ashley.

  “Pas du vin?” Philippe frowned as I set my glass back down.

  I looked at him squarely. “I can’t.” I stood up. “My name is Donna Koczynski, and I’m an alcoholic.”

  Inga’s voice came from the other end of the table: “Oh, that’s okay. Stay. We have no pressure here.”

  A young man in the group named Amir, with a dark puff of hair and a wisp of a mustache, patted the tabletop in front of him. “I do not drink alcohol either. You can drink water with me, my friend.”

  “Stay, Donna,” came a chorus. I looked at the bright assorted faces around the table, open, kind, then at the wine glistening.

  A cry rose from the kitchen. Through the archway I could see that a young sous-chef had dropped her knife and was shaking her left hand.

  This was excuse and cover enough. “Sorry, folks. Emergency. Out I go.” Hastily, I beat a retreat toward the back door. As I passed through the kitchen, I saw the sous-chef sucking on her index finger. Tearily, she picked up her knife again and attempted to resume chopping an enormous pile of garlic. I wanted to reprimand her for not washing her hands, but then I saw: She could not have been older than fourteen. She had no idea what she was doing. Another young sous-chef beside her—eighteen at best—was barely faring any better. He’d managed to peel only three onions, which he hadn’t chopped so much as butchered. Glancing around the kitchen at the people bent over their work, I saw a motley mix of old and young, Greek and foreign, working as fast as they could but with wildly varying degrees of ability. Some wore frilly gingham aprons printed with daisies or watering cans or chickens. A woolly-haired older Australian woman I’d seen in the square earlier was wearing one that had a print of Michelangelo’s David sculpture from the neck down. They were not preparing à la carte, made-to-order restaurant meals at all, but vast quantities of soup, bread, rice, spinach, some in enormous thirty-quart aluminum pots; the cooks had to stand on footstools over the stove in order to stir them with industrial-sized paddles. Some of this food was, in fact, being plated and handed over to the waiter at the tavern. But at the stainless counter along the far wall, an assembly line had been set up to pack it into little aluminum takeaway containers, which were then being hauled out to the parking lot by the dozens in large blue plastic IKEA bags.

  I looked at the young girl mincing garlic. She appeared to be on the verge of tears. “May I?” Not sure how good her English was, I motioned to the knife, then pointed at her to go wash her hands in the sink. When she returned, I grabbed a head of garlic and ran my nail along the natural seams delineating the cloves, showing her how to remove them without clawing through all the thick layers of skin. Taking the side of the knife, I lay it flat across a lone clove of garlic, and pressed down firmly until we heard a decisive crunch. “See?” I held out the now-peeled clove to her. By this time, the young guy next to her had stopped futzing with his onions and was looking on, too.

  I held up my finger. “Next, we do this.” I showed her how to mince quickly and evenly.

  “See?” I repeated the technique slowly, then handed her the knife. “Now you try.” She looked at me uncertainly. “Don’t worry.” I smiled at her.

  With a look of fervent concentration, she followed what I had shown her, step-by-step. It daunted her to press down on the knife blade, but when she’d minced the clove successfully, her face shone.

  “Hey,” I called out generally to the kitchen, “is there another knife somewhere?”

  The Australian woman hurried past me in oven mitts, carrying an enormous tray of bread, and barked, “In the drawer over there by the sink.”

  I retrieved a knife and began chopping garlic alongside the young girl. “What’s your name?” I shouted over the music.

  “Ayisha.” She pointed to herself. “What is your name?”

  “I am Donna,” I said and pointed to myself.

  “Donna,” she said carefully, in the exacting way of someone unaccustomed to speaking a language, testing it out gingerly. “Where do you come from, Donna?”

  “America. Where do you come from, Ayisha?”

  “I come from Syria.”

  “Oh.” All the breath went out of me. What the hell was I supposed to say to that? Oh, that’s nice?

  Ayisha motioned to the boy beside her. “His name is Bashir.”

  Bashir wore little wire-rimmed glasses and had thick brown toothbrush-bristle hair. I gathered he was her brother.

  “Hello, Bashir.” We smiled at each other dumbly until something occurred to me. “Merhaba?” I said. “Al Salaam Alekum?”

  He smiled suddenly. “You speak Arabic?”

  “A little.” I tried to think of anything else I could remember from my cooking demos. “Shukron. Ma’ah Salama.”

  Ayisha giggled, though the boy looked amazed. “How do you learn Arabic?”

  “In America, I live near a city called Dearborn. Lots of Arab people live there. Sometimes, for my work, I cook for them.”

  “You cook Arab food?”

  “A little. Kibbeh. Labneh.”

  “Oh, you make kibbeh? I like kibbeh!” He said something to the girl in Arabic and she smiled at me and pointed to herself, parroting, “I like kibbeh.”

  We grinned at one another, nodding awkwardly. It became clear: That was the extent of our repertoire. We returned to our cutting boards.

  It felt good to mince up garlic. Smash—fwip!—thup thup thup. With each press of the knife, I worked out some aggression, some fear. Smash—fwip!—thup thup thup.

  “Wow, you are very good. You are like a machine,” Bashir said.

  “Yeah, well. Here”—I pointed to his cutting board—“do you want me to show you the best way to chop an onion?”

  Moving over, I demonstrated for him. Eventually, his pace picked up considerably. I chopped onions in tandem with him until my eyes were stinging, then returned to help Ayisha again with the garlic. Through the doorway, I noticed the sun lowering behind the mountains. I needed to get back to Ashley.

  At the sink, I rinsed off my hands while the older Australian woman squeezed an enormous bottle of dish soap over an oily tray. “Well, my word, love. You’re good,” she said, angling the tray under the faucet, reaching for the sprayer. “Are you a professional chef?”

  I snorted. “Hardly.” I glanced around for a towel of some
sort. There didn’t seem to be any.

  “Hang on. Eleni!” She shouted across the kitchen in Greek. The woman who was Eleni pointed to a dishrag on the side of the stove. “I’ve told everyone a thousand times to put everything back in its place as soon as they’re done with it.”

  “Are you the coordinator?” I asked.

  Her eyes crinkled. “Ha,” she said. “Only by default. Kostas and his family are overwhelmed enough.” She waved her hand around the kitchen. “This place used to serve sixty diners, tops, during the height of tourist season. Now, we have three hundred to a thousand a day sometimes. They’ve got nowhere to go until the buses for Moria arrive. We had eighty-eight boats in twenty-four hours once—fifteen hundred people. Right here. In a village of 120 residents. Plus, we feed all the volunteers now. And the journalists—though they pay.” She shrugged. “It’s unbelievable.”

  I looked at the team by the doorway, with their hands squeezed into those condom-y food-service gloves that come in a box like tissues. They were assembling takeaway packages of rice, sautéed spinach with chickpeas, and baked cheese.

  “Are you an aid worker, then?” I asked.

  The Australian gave a hiccupy laugh. “Me? Ha. No, love. I used to work for Queensland Rail back in Brisbane. I retired only five months ago.”

  “Wow. But you flew all the way here to help out anyway?”

  “Oh no. Absolutely not. I just came here on holiday to visit my cousin. To lie on the beach for a couple of weeks, and do my sudoku puzzles, and drink ouzo.”

  The sky had turned purple, a faint chill settling over the marina. Someone had lit fires inside empty oil drums for the people huddled in the square. The flames flickered against the darkening sky, turning the barrels to lanterns.

  Back inside the apartment, I found Ashley sprawled on the daybed, tangled in one of the blankets, listlessly thumbing through a Hello! magazine I’d bought during my layover in London. Something about the room looked altered; she’d draped one of the sheets, I realized, over the wall full of sailor and clown paintings. She was wearing some of my new clothes now—a pair of black leggings and a plum-colored, button-down shirt. The shirt was far too big on her and preposterously dark and chic for Skala Sikamineas. It made her look like a little girl playing dress-up. A dirty mug sat on the nightstand, along with a wet little mountain of used tea bags, biscuit wrappers, wadded tissues, empty water bottles, crumbs, and tubes of hand cream and moisturizer from my toiletry bag. Clearly, she was on the mend: She was not only eating again, but making a mess in a room that didn’t seem to be capable of being messier.

  As soon as I came in, she sat up. “Oh my God, Mom! Where were you? I was totally freaking out.”

  I had two of the takeaway meals with me in their little aluminum boxes. I set them on the table. I’d hoped Ashley would be capable of eating at least some of the rice and the bread.

  “I wasn’t far,” I said. “Didn’t you see the note?”

  “Yeah, but, I got up at like, five, and now, it’s almost seven. And I don’t have a phone, and I couldn’t go out to look for you, because you have the key, and I didn’t know where you were, or when you were coming back, or even if you were okay.”

  “Ashley, we’re in a tiny village on the edge of nowhere. There are exactly two streets. We have no car. Where would I go?”

  She stared at me at moment, “You could’ve drowned.”

  I gave a sad little smile. “Only in garlic.”

  But she made a face and her eyes welled up and her chest started to heave.

  “Oh, Ash.” My daughter: What she lacked in humor, she certainly made up for in melodrama. I dropped down beside her and squeezed her shoulder. Slowly, I began rubbing her back the way I used to when she was little, aimlessly making curlicues and shapes with my fingers, writing little words in script for her to decipher. We called this “doodling.” “Mom,” she used to plead when I was tucking her in at night after a bedtime story and about to switch off her Little Mermaid lamp. “Mom. Will you doodle me a little, please?”

  “Mmmmm,” she said now, closing her eyes. She smelled of the Pantene shampoo I’d bought back in the US. The only light in the room was from a fluorescent tube over the sink. The studio was growing indigo in tandem with the sky beyond the windows. After a moment, Ashley turned to me sleepily.

  “So what were you doing in town anyway?”

  She readjusted her position, curling up kittenishly with her head on my lap.

  “Well, among other things—” I traced a heart and a flower between her bony shoulder blades. “I emailed your dad to let him know you’re all right.”

  She sat up with a jerk.

  “You didn’t tell him about Poz, did you?”

  I looked at her and sighed. Really?

  “No, Ash. I did not get into the details of your love life. I just told him the trivial stuff. You know, like, that you’re alive. And that you’re no longer trapped in a refugee camp with no money and no passport and a high fever and projectile vomiting.”

  She blinked at me uncertainly.

  “But of course, since you think the fact that you hooked up with a Serbian airplane mechanic is what’s really relevant here,” I said, “I suppose I could figure out some way to alert him.”

  “Hey! Now you’re just teasing me, Mom.” But she put her head down on my lap again and snuggled in, presenting her back to me again to resume doodling. “The thing is,” she said after a moment, “I know that it’s retro, and totally feeds into that meme of ‘Daddy’s little girl’ and patriarchy. But for some reason, having Dad know about my sex life just really creeps me out.”

  “You know, sweetie,” I said, exhaling at the ceiling, “I somehow don’t think your father minds being spared the details of it either at this particular moment.”

  “Yeah.” Ashley closed her eyes. She snuggled in closer. “He’s just not as open-minded and progressive as you are, Mom.”

  Chapter 19

  It was barely daybreak when I awoke at Dina’s the next morning. After a moment, I gave myself a quiz:

  You wake up at five o’clock in the morning in some Greek widow’s converted utility room—on a remote island in a foreign country—completely disoriented—and your mind is running like a gerbil on a wheel. What do you do?

  Obsessively watch your nineteen-year-old daughter sleep, monitoring the accordion of her breath for three hours—just like you did when she was an infant.

  Get up and do something.

  Ashley’s forehead was cool and dry; it was safe enough to leave her. Dressing hastily, I left her with a note (and various medicines—and, okay, a pair of my new, embarassingly-large-on-her underwear). Then I hurried quietly down the porch steps and through the vine-tangled garden.

  The dawn was enchanting. Oddly, I’d never envisioned tragedies in living color before. It was incomprehensible that they could ever occur in places of astonishing beauty. Back in middle school, watching the grainy film clips of World War II and Vietnam, it was impossible to imagine that maybe, just maybe, the hillsides surrounding Auschwitz were sometimes sequined with wildflowers in springtime, or that soldiers in Da Nang were disemboweled on opalescent beaches fringed with mango trees. Even September 11: The towers were fixed in my memory only in striations of black and white, engulfed in gunmetal-gray smoke.

  Yet in Skala Sikamineas, the sun was just rising over the mountains, violet silhouettes against a blush dawn. Trees rustled; the wind smelled of oleander and rosemary and sea salt; the crinkly rhythm of the waves on the pebbled beach in the distance was its own sort of music. As I headed toward the road, the village seemed distilled in peace with its little red-roofed houses nestled amid the foliage like gifts. As I drew closer to the port, the ground grew lumpy with bodies sleeping huddled together on the flagstones. Bodies everywhere, snoring, wheezing, quietly sobbing. Deflated rafts were heaped on the roadside like pelts.

  Kostas’s tavern appeared closed, but when I walked around to the back door, I could see that Eleni
and Cathy and a handful of other volunteers were already scrubbing down the countertops.

  “Kalimera. Need some help?” I picked up a rag.

  “Please. Parakalo,” Eleni said. “Coffee?” Without waiting for my answer, she handed me a cup.

  “This is Donna, the woman from yesterday,” Cathy announced to the others. I recognized Amir, Philippe, and Dagmar’s girlfriend, Inga, among them. “She’s the one who prepped ten kilos of onions in a blink of an eye.”

  “Hardly. You make me sound like a samurai.”

  “Oh, but you are. You’re a human food processor. Lady Chop-Chop,” Cathy teased. “That’s what we’re calling you from now on, love.”

  Kostas tromped into the kitchen. “Seventeen boats came in last night.”

  “What?” I hadn’t meant to speak out loud. “More people already?”

  Kostas’s eyes flicked to me, but he didn’t bother answering. He massaged the bridge of his nose. “One bus just left, but it means we have, what is the count?”

  “The estimate is six hundred ten,” said Amir. “Give or take fifty.”

  Kostas shook his head. “In Molyvos, they got ten, fifteen new boats, too. So Irina’s restaurant, she has no food to spare. I speak to Andreas, over in Vafeios. He says they can bring one hundred fifty, two hundred meals. They start cooking this morning. But the people who just arrive, some have not eaten for two days, they say. The children, they are fainting.”

  An African American woman with gray hair and red glasses appeared in the doorway. I’d seen her the day before sitting at the café. “Hey everyone. Yassas. For those of you who don’t know me yet, I’m Selena. I seem to be coordinating the meal distribution this week. Kostas, Cathy?” She turned to face them directly. “Do we have any word yet from the ministry, or UNHCR, or anyone?”

  A conversation ping-ponged between volunteers. No outside help seemed to be forthcoming from any of the international agencies yet. “You’re kidding,” I heard myself say. “Not even the Red Cross?” We were it? Nothing but a bunch of overextended locals and retirees on holiday and tattooed European anarchists and shmucks like me?