The Gold Letter

by Lena Manta

  “Good morning,” he was saying now, smiling politely. “What can I help you with?”

  I noticed his professional manner and the fact that he hadn’t really looked at me yet. I chose not to answer him so that he’d have to. And indeed, Simos Kouyoumdzis slowly raised his eyes, and we were so close that I could see the lightning flash in them. I looked like my mother, and I could tell that my face had violently stirred his memory. Now he was silent too as his eyes searched my features. His face darkened; his mind tried to reject what he saw.

  “Mr. Kouyoumdzis,” I said to break the heavy silence.

  His vision cleared.

  “Yes. Do you know me?” he asked unsteadily.

  “My name is Fenia Karapanos,” I continued, and unconsciously fingered the gold letter at my throat.

  The movement attracted his attention again, except that now his eyes were open wide. He may never have seen the necklace that his father had made, but he knew about it, and now here it was in front of him.

  His reaction surprised me. He reached out and took the letter between his fingers. I stood still, holding my breath. I let him examine it. He found the mechanism, and the little gold tablet with I love you written on it fell into his hand. He looked at it as if he were lost and took a step back. It took a few seconds before he focused on my face again.

  “Who are you? That locket—” His voice gave way, catching in his throat.

  I calmly took the gold tablet and put it back in its place before I looked back at him confidently.

  “I know,” I said. “This gold letter was designed by Simeon Kouyoumdzis for Smaragda Kantardzis, but it was made by Vassilis for Chrysafenia Ververis, my grandmother. I’m named for her.”

  I paused for a second, giving him time to take this in. Simos was deathly pale. He turned around and sat at his desk again. I took a chair opposite him.

  “Whose daughter are you?”

  “Smaragda’s.”

  I watched him close his eyes and take a deep breath before he was ready to face me again.

  “Smaragda got married and left for Germany with her husband.”

  “Yes.” I nodded and got ready to launch the final volley. “Except that, when she married Renos Karapanos, she was already pregnant by you.”

  Now I was silent. In front of my eyes, I saw on his face all the reactions of a man who has been stabbed in the chest. Surprise, pain, doubt, and then the stillness of death. Except that Simos Kouyoumdzis was still alive.

  “You’re lying!” he shouted loud enough to break the windows of his store. “You’re a miserable liar. Smaragda would have told me if she was pregnant with my child! She wouldn’t have married someone else.”

  “She came to tell you and found you in bed with Hecuba,” I said, holding on to my self-control. “Do you remember? She asked you to meet her at the apartment. Except that my dear aunt trapped you. And then Sekeris threw my mother out of the house, and that animal Karapanos swooped in. The day you went to find her, my grandfather said she was marrying someone right at that moment. But what you never knew was that she only married him to give a name to your child.”

  I watched him lower his face and hide it in his hands, unable to believe that his life could be upended so.

  “Impossible,” he murmured.

  “I have no reason to lie to you,” I said quietly. “I know how you feel.”

  “No!” he shouted. “You don’t! I never loved anyone but Smaragda. My whole life I never found anyone to take her place. I grew old alone with my memories. And you expect me to believe that we lost a lifetime of happiness because of bad timing and the whim of a few small-minded people? Do you expect me to accept that, all these years, I had a child and didn’t know it?”

  “There are many things you don’t know. But perhaps it’s not the time.” I got up and placed a piece of paper in front of him. “Here is my address, although you already know it well. It was my mother’s family home. I live there now. I’m ready to submit to any genetic tests you want to establish that I’m telling the truth, which I only found out recently from Melpo.”

  “Melpo?” he said, and his expression brightened. “Smaragda’s cousin! She loved her very much and thought she had lost her.”

  “Yes. Except that she recovered, and when she learned about me, she came to see me and tell me the whole history of my family. Though I wouldn’t have found out the last part if I hadn’t tracked down Kali.”

  “The housekeeper,” my father remembered.

  “Exactly. She knew my mother was already pregnant when she married. That and more. Listen, I haven’t come to ask you for anything. I thought it was my duty to tell you that you have a daughter and that my mother wasn’t anything like her father said. If you have other questions, or if you’re interested in getting to know your daughter, come and find me.”

  I left without a look back. My resilience had almost run out. I ran up Ermou Street and hailed a taxi in the square. In a few minutes, I was home, and there I could cry at my leisure. What could I expect, after all, from a man who had arranged his life around his loneliness? Did I think he’d take me in his arms? Cry with me? Become the father I’d always wished for?

  Melpo and Paschalis were waiting at the house, together with Karim. They were all worried. Sitting in the living room, they watched me fly past like a bullet and run upstairs. Melpo was the only one who dared to follow, and she found me crying miserably, facedown on the bed. For a little while, I had the illusion that my mother had come back to life, as she took me in her arms and let me cry, stroking my hair softly.

  “Hush, my girl,” she kept saying. “Don’t cry; everything will be all right.” Between my sobs, I told her what had happened.

  “Give him a little time, Fenia,” she said. “I don’t blame him.”

  “I don’t either,” I admitted, biting my lips to subdue the resentment that threatened to overcome me. “But it hurt to look at him, Melpo. If Hecuba hadn’t done what she did, if my grandfather hadn’t driven my mother out—”

  “Sweetheart, don’t make me talk in clichés. If is a word that exists only to drive us crazy. It’s meaningless.”

  “I know,” I said with a sigh. “Time only moves in one direction.” I looked at her, and a shy smile appeared on my lips. “He’s handsome, Melpo—my father. Very handsome.”

  “I remember him. They were a beautiful couple, he and your mother. No wonder they produced such a beautiful child! Enough crying now, my dear. You’re not a young girl anymore, and there’s a man who loves you. A new life is waiting. You did what you had to do; now give the man some time to decide what he wants to do. Right or wrong, whether we like it or not. Let’s go downstairs. Paschalis has some good news for you.”

  “What’s happened?”

  “Tomorrow he’ll take Karim, and they’ll go arrange his situation. In a little while, your dear friend will have legal papers and be free to stay in Greece.”

  I threw my arms around her. How much I loved this woman!

  Yannos’s one-week deadline was approaching. We hadn’t even spoken on the telephone. I knew him well. He would count the hours and the minutes, but he would remain faithful to his word. At the same time, plans were revolving in my mind. They had all come at once, while at the edge of my heart, the thought of my father kept watch.

  My legs gave way when I saw him two days after our first meeting, standing on my doorstep. Karim was away with Paschalis doing his legal paperwork, and I was alone in the house. Simos came up the stairs and stood at the top.

  “Welcome,” I said and stood aside to let him into the living room.

  He looked around him, and a bitter smile twisted his mouth. “The last time I was here, I thought my heart had stopped,” he said quietly. “When I heard that your mother had married.”

  “Like her heart stopped when she saw you embracing her sister,” I answered him with a calm I didn’t feel.

  He looked at me hopelessly. “That wasn’t my fault!”

  “It wa
sn’t hers either, yet she’s the one who paid most dearly for Hecuba’s wickedness and your cowardice—”

  “My cowardice?”

  “If, when you found out about the wedding, you’d run to find her, everything would have been different. Instead, mouths remained closed, words went unspoken, and time took a sad toll on a destroyed life. My mother’s life.” I couldn’t stop the hardness of my tone.

  “Wasn’t my life wasted?” my father complained.

  “First listen, and then you can judge,” I told him.

  Yet again I had to repeat the story, but I framed it around her life and mine from the time Renos came into it. I didn’t mince words. I told him everything just as it happened, sometimes graphically. I knew how hard I was being on him, and I didn’t understand why. On the one hand, my behavior was childish; on the other, I took a small satisfaction from punishing him for not fighting for us.

  When I finished, he was sweating. I was suddenly worried and ran to fetch him a glass of cold water. He drank it greedily and wiped his damp forehead with his handkerchief. Then he jumped up and began pacing the wooden floor. It creaked in complaint at his suffering. After a while, I got up and stood in front of him, blocking his path. He was like a vehicle that someone had suddenly pulled the hand brake on. He grabbed me in his arms, and I stood like a statue, not knowing how to respond. He leaned back to stroke my hair and put his hand on my dimple, identical to his.

  “Everyone in the Kouyoumdzis family has it,” he said, and his eyes shone with tears.

  “So you believe me?” I asked in a broken voice.

  “I believe you. And for the rest of my life, I’ll try to win your forgiveness.”

  “If you want us to do a paternity test—” I rambled, feeling pathetic.

  “There’s no need,” he said. “But we have to get to know each other. There’s so much I need to know about you. And I want to know about her too.”

  “I told you what we lived through.”

  “Not that. Together we’ll remember the real Smaragda, her smile, her eyes that were the same as yours, her beautiful spirit. And I’ll ask forgiveness from God and from you. I was young and cowardly—you’re right. Like my father and grandfather. We put it behind us instead of fighting for our love, for the happiness of the women we worshipped. We have a lot of things to talk about and just as many to experience together.”

  I knew from Melpo that, when she came from Crete, Hecuba stayed with her sister Fotini. She didn’t know nor could she have imagined what awaited her when she opened the front door. When her eyes moved from me to the man at my side, she looked ready to faint. She tried to slam the door in our faces, but my father raised his hand and stopped her. He shoved the door open wide, and Hecuba took a step backward.

  “What do you want here?” she shrieked.

  She stumbled into the next room and collapsed into an armchair. We followed, and I noticed another chair with a woman sitting in it. As I guessed, this was my aunt Fotini. She looked at us at first with an empty gaze, but then something lit up inside her; she rose and approached me.

  “Smaragda,” she said, and fell into my arms. “My little sister,” she went on, weeping.

  I sensed my father’s fury beside me. He hadn’t taken his eyes off Hecuba, and now he approached her. I broke away from Fotini’s arms, worried about what he might do. He loomed over my aunt.

  “What do you want?” she asked without looking up at him.

  “I only came to tell you that, whatever harm you did to me and Smaragda, it was nothing compared to the crime you perpetrated on our child!”

  It was as if an electric current passed through her.

  “What child? What are you saying?” she asked now and stood up with the last remnants of her courage.

  “Smaragda was pregnant, Hecuba! That’s why she came to me that afternoon when you played out your wretched game!” my father yelled. “You condemned your sister to an executioner who, once he’d managed to annihilate her, then spent years abusing her daughter.”

  Hecuba’s eyes flicked back and forth over me.

  “It’s me, Aunt,” I said to her drily. “Smaragda and Simos’s daughter.”

  “Impossible,” she managed to whisper.

  “I don’t know what you had against my mother. Nothing I’ve learned about our family explains the hatred, the jealousy, and finally the evil. Grandfather gave you the weapons, as did the times you lived in. But there’s no excuse for the harm you did.”

  I took a step closer and she edged back in fear.

  “Don’t be afraid of me,” I said calmly. “I won’t hurt you, despite the fact that, from the time I found out the truth, I’ve fantasized about beating you to a pulp.”

  “We came to tell you,” my father took over again, “that despite you and all the others, a descendant of the Kantardzis family will, from now on, take the family name she deserves. So, let me introduce you to Chrysafenia Kouyoumdzis. Now, as long as you live, I want you to know that the only thing waiting for you is the hell you deserve.”

  He took my hand and we left. The only thing he neglected to do was to spit behind him, but it was as if he had. For one crazy moment, I imagined I could see Fate herself howling with fury that all her evil games had finally been in vain.

  My information was correct. Mr. Pantazis and his daughter were in the sea. The time had come for me to meet them, and I’d taken a taxi to Vouliagmeni.

  I went to the spot a polite hotel clerk showed me and took off my sandals to sink into the golden sand. My eyes searched for my familiar, beloved faces among the many other swimmers, and when I spotted them, I smiled, watching them play in the blue water. Ino’s hair was pulled back in a little braid, and her skin had taken on a golden color. My eyes filled, and a lump rose in my throat. I had missed my little one so much . . .

  I took another step. I knew very well what I wanted and what I would do in the future. I would turn the house I’d inherited into a fancy restaurant, and Karim would make the Athenian public familiar with his country’s cuisine. My father had already set in motion the necessary process for me to take the name that belonged to me. In the next few days, I would meet the remaining members of my family: Melpo’s children, on my mother’s side, and my uncles Damianos and Loukas with their families on my father’s side. Grandmother Lefkothea was still alive, but not Vassilis. But I was sure that, wherever he was, he could make out the gold letter that shone at my throat and would always stay there.

  Without hesitating, I walked toward the beautiful life that was waiting for me, not caring that my dress was getting wet. When they caught sight of me, their faces shone even brighter than the sun. Ino shrieked happily, and her lips clearly formed the word Mama before she wrapped her arms around my neck, ready to drown me in her joy. Yannos’s arms closed around us both. Never in my life had I felt such fullness, such security, such peace. All the terrible things, all the difficulties were behind us, and there were endless solutions for the problems of the future. I didn’t know yet that, like me, Yannos had been making decisions about the future. Aside from planning our wedding, he’d begun to organize their permanent resettlement in Greece.

  I looked at him without hiding anything that I was feeling.

  “I love you,” his lips said above mine.

  “I love you both,” I whispered, and a loud, clear laugh, transparent as the water that surrounded us, flew out of me.

  I tilted my head, and the rays of the sun struck the letter on my neck. Gold mixed with gold, and the brilliance finally blinded evil Fate, whom I saw burning. She wouldn’t bother us anymore.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  A few words about me . . .

  And this time I mean it . . . just a few words about me. They’re chatterboxes, the heroes of this book. They have a lot to say, so I don’t want to add much. Besides, this particular book could be characterized as being anything from strange to tormented.

  It began one morning at dawn. I had made up my mind to take a long break f
rom my computer, and it was now . . . a long, slow pause . . . five a.m. . . . I opened my eyes and saw my husband looking at me, and quite naturally, I was really anxious. I’ll repeat the conversation to you exactly as it took place so that you don’t have any doubts.

  “Yorgos, why aren’t you asleep?”

  “I’ve been thinking about it all night: I have an idea for a book!”

  “You’re going to write a book?”

  “No! You’ll write it. It came to me as I was watching those commercials aimed at people who buy jewelry. So, imagine a woman going into a shop like that and she’s wearing a piece of jewelry that the shop owner recognizes. Someone in his family made it—probably—I’m not sure. But it has a history, that piece of jewelry,” he concluded. “What do you think?”

  While he was talking, both sleep and my decision to take a leisurely break had gone out the window.

  “You like it!” he realized proudly. “And now it’s your turn to stay awake. Good night.”

  He turned over and went to sleep while I . . .

  That’s how The Gold Letter was born in my mind. I have to confess that such a piece of jewelry exists. It was a gift from him, a custom order, which, because of a theft, is sadly no longer in my hands. The novel, however, is in yours.

  The second adjective I used to describe this book was “tormented.” A violent interruption occurred when the person who gave me the idea for it became ill. You know about that already; I told you about it along with all the other things that concern me. As we said: you and I have a different relationship that you respect and so do I. From here on, I can tell you something else: I’ve never been so frightened in my whole life. In addition to losing him, I was in danger of losing the reason for my own existence . . .