by Maeve Binchy
“But you’ve left it?” His words were simple.
“Not because of the work.”
He looked at the telephone.
She nodded. “Yes, you’re right, it’s because of Dieter. It’s a long story, someday I will come back here and tell it all to you.”
“You don’t need to.”
“I do, oddly, but I’d also love to know you had written to Adonis. In Chicago. Tell me that you will.”
“I was never a great letter writer.”
“I’d help to write it for you,” she offered.
“Would you?” he asked.
“I could try to speak with your voice. I might not get it right.”
“Well, neither might I.” Andreas looked sad. “Sometimes I know the words and I imagine myself putting my arms around him and he says, ‘Papa’—other times I imagine him being very stiff and hard and saying, ‘What has been said cannot be unsaid.’ ”
“If we were to write a letter, it has to be one that will make him say, ‘Papa,’ ” she said.
“But he would know it was not from me, he knows his old father does not have the power of words.”
“It’s often the timing that’s important. He will read in the newspapers of this tragedy, even in Chicago, this disaster back home in Aghia Anna. He will want to hear from you. Sometimes things are bigger than we are, more important than our little fights.”
“And could that be the same for you and Herr Dieter?” he asked.
“No.” She shook her head. “No, that’s different, someday I’ll tell you, I promise you I will.”
“No need to tell me your business, Elsa,” he said.
“You are my friend. I want to tell you.”
But they heard the others approaching.
Thomas was the spokesman. “We must let you sleep, Andreas, tomorrow will be a long day,” he said.
“We think we should go back down the hill, back to where we are staying,” David began.
“My brother, Georgi, is sending a truck up this way for you soon. I told him I had friends who would need a lift, it’s a long way.”
“And can we pay you now for our meal . . . our long day and night with you?” Thomas asked.
“As I told Georgi, you are friends. Friends do not pay for their food,” he said with simple dignity.
They looked at him, old, slightly bent, poor, working hard in a place where they had been the only customers today. They had to pay him, yet they couldn’t insult him.
“You know, Andreas, it would make us feel bad to go away from here without sharing in the cost of our meal together, as if we were all friends in a way,” Fiona began.
Shane saw it differently. “You heard the man say he doesn’t want the money.” He looked around at them all, people who couldn’t see a free day’s eating and drinking when it was looking them in the face.
Elsa spoke slowly. She had a way of capturing their attention. The others all stopped to listen. She seemed to have tears in her eyes. “What do you say that we make a collection for the family of Manos and his little nephew, and the other people who died in front of our eyes today. There will undoubtedly be a fund for them. We can gather what we think our food and drink here would have cost in another taverna, and then get an envelope and put on it: ‘From the friends of Andreas.’ ”
Fiona had an envelope in her shoulder bag. She took it out and without a word they poured their Euro onto a plate. The sound of a police truck was heard coming up the hill.
“You write the message for the people, Elsa,” Fiona suggested.
And Elsa did, with a steady hand.
“I wish I could write in the Greek language,” she said to Andreas, and looked at him as if they had a secret.
“It’s fine—your generosity, all of you, is very fine in any language,” he said, sounding very choked. “I was never good at writing any sort of letter.”
“It’s just that the first words are always the hardest, Andreas,” she persisted.
“I would begin: ‘Adonis mou,’ ” he said haltingly.
“Now you’re halfway there,” Elsa said, and held him to her for a quick moment before they climbed into the truck to go back down the hill to the little town which had changed so such since the night before, even though the stars looked exactly the same.
THREE
They traveled in silence as the little van bumped its way down the hill. They all knew that they would never forget tonight. It had been a deep and emotional long day. In a way, they had learned almost too much about each other too quickly. But they all hoped that they would indeed see the old man Andreas again. He had told them that he had a putt-putt bike with a trailer attached and that he came down the bumpy road to what he called the Town every day to buy supplies.
None of them slept well that night. The only thing that united them was that they could not lie under the warm, dark Mediterranean skies and find sleep. They tossed and turned, the starlight too bright somehow and seeping into their bedrooms. A million little pinpoints up there, preventing them from getting the sleep they needed.
Elsa stood on the tiny balcony of her apartment hotel and looked out at the dark sea. She was staying at the Studio Apartments, run by a young Greek man who had learned the property business in Florida and had returned with this idea of having six little self-contained units, simply furnished, Greek rugs on the wooden floors, colorful Greek pottery on the shelves. No one balcony overlooked any other.
He charged a lot by Aghia Anna standards, but his apartments were always full. Elsa had seen an advertisement for them in a major travel magazine and had not been disappointed. And from her balcony, the dark sea looked so safe and comforting, even though twenty-four people had perished outside that very harbor earlier, and that same water had not been able to rise and douse the flames.
She understood for the first time why someone very sad and lonely might want to end a life in the arms of the sea. It would be foolish of course, there was nothing romantic about drowning. Elsa knew that it wasn’t just a matter of closing your eyes and being swept gently away from the problems of life. You would thrash about and panic and struggle for breath. She wondered had she meant what she said in the message to Dieter . . . that she wished she too had died today.
No, she hadn’t really meant it. She didn’t want to fight with all her body against overpowering torrents of water.
Yet, in one way it would have solved everything. It would have sorted out the terrible situation that she was running fast away from but that was following her everywhere.
She knew she wouldn’t sleep for hours. There was no point in lying down. She pulled out her chair and sat with her elbows on the little wrought-iron balcony, looking at the patterns the moonlight was making on the water.
David’s little room was too hot and stuffy. It had been fine up to now, but tonight was different. The people in the house were wailing too loudly for anyone to sleep. Their son had died on Manos’s boat today.
When David had walked into the house and discovered the family and friends comforting each other, he had been stricken. He had shaken hands awkwardly and fumbled for the words to express what could not be said. They spoke little English, and they looked at him wild-eyed, as if they had never seen him before. They hardly noticed when David came downstairs again to walk in the night air. Their grief was too great.
David wondered what would have happened if he had died on the boat. It could so easily have happened. He had just chosen one day for a tour rather than another. People’s lives are changed and destroyed by innocent choices like that.
Would there have been wailing like this in his home? Would his father have rocked back and forth in misery? Or would David’s father have said grimly that the boy had chosen his life and he had to live with that choice and die with it?
Suddenly David felt very anxious as he walked around the sorrowing town. He hoped he might see some of the people he had spent all that time with earlier that night. Not Fiona’s awful boyfriend
, Shane, of course, but any of the others.
He thought he would go to a small taverna where people were still sitting talking about the terrible events of the day. He might even meet Fiona and speak to her about Ireland, a place he had always wanted to go. He could ask her about nursing, and if it really was rewarding as people said. Did you get a glow of pleasure as patients got better, did they remember you and write and thank you? Were English people welcome in Ireland as tourists or as workers, had all that hostility died down? Were there any crafts courses in the West of Ireland? David had often thought he would like to be a potter. Do something with his hands, anything far from the world of making money.
Or if he ran into Thomas, he could ask him about his poetry: what kind he wrote, why he was going to be so long away from his university, how often he got to see his little boy.
David loved to listen to people’s stories. It was why he was so useless in his father’s investment broker business. Clients needed him to tell them what to spend and how. David was much more interested in asking about their houses as homes rather than investments. He unsettled them by wanting to know would they have dogs or an orchard, when all they really wanted to talk about was a quick turnover.
As he walked, he saw Elsa on her balcony but didn’t call out to her. She was so calm and in control, the last thing she needed was a bumbling fool like him in the middle of the night.
Thomas had booked for himself two weeks in a little apartment over a craft shop. It was owned by an eccentric woman called Vonni—in her late forties, always dressed in a different floral skirt and a black shirt. She looked like someone you would have to give money to for her next meal, Thomas thought—but in fact she owned this splendid luxury apartment, which she rented out to visitors. It was expensively furnished and had some valuable little figurines and pictures in it. Vonni was English, he gathered, though she didn’t want to talk about herself. She was a perfect landlady in that she left him alone. She offered to take his clothes to a local laundryman each week and she left an occasional basket of grapes or a bowl of olives on his doorstep.
“Where do you live while I stay here?” he had asked at the start.
“I sleep out back in a shed with the hens,” she replied simply.
Thomas was unsure if she was joking or was in fact somewhat simple in the head. And he asked her no more—he was happy in Vonni’s place.
He would have been happy somewhere one-tenth the price, but he needed a phone in case Bill wanted to call him.
Thomas had always resisted the cell phone back in the States. Too many people were slaves to it. He felt it would be intrusive on his travels, and anyway, people were always complaining that they couldn’t get a signal in remote places. And what did it matter how many Euro he spent on an apartment with a telephone? He had nothing else to spend his professor’s salary on, and even his poetry was beginning to earn money.
A prestigious magazine had paid him to go abroad and write travel articles, in his own style, from wherever he wanted. It had been the perfect assignment when he realized that he needed to get away. He had wanted to write about Aghia Anna, but now the world’s press would be arriving tomorrow and Aghia Anna would already be notorious.
Once he had thought it would be easy to go on living in the same town as his ex-wife, seeing his son Bill as often as possible, keeping a civilized and noncombative relationship with Shirley. After all, he didn’t love her anymore, so it was easy to be polite. People had even admired them for being so nonjudgmental, so unlike the other bitter couples who had separated and who revisited the scenes of their resentment over and over.
But now things were different.
Shirley’s new boyfriend was Andy, a car salesman she had met at the gym. When Shirley announced that she was getting married to Andy, it changed everything. It meant things were easier if Thomas were not around. She explained that she had found a real and permanent love. She hoped that Thomas would remarry also.
Thomas remembered how he had filled up with anger at the patronizing way she spoke. As if she were rearranging the furniture. Thomas had been surprised at how much he resented it.
Andy wasn’t a bad guy, it was just that he moved too easily into the house that Thomas had bought for Shirley and Bill. “Because it’s all so much easier,” Shirley had explained.
Bill had said that Andy was okay and that’s just what he was: okay. But he was a bit of a jock and not into reading, not into saying to Bill at night, “Come on, you choose what to read and we’ll read it together.”
And to be fair, Andy had sensed the awkwardness of it all. He had suggested that Thomas visit Bill between five and seven when he, Andy, was in the gym.
It had been reasonable and sensible, sensitive even, but that had annoyed Thomas even more. As if he were being tidied away to a place that didn’t impinge on their lives. Every time he visited he had come to hate the house more, the jars of vitamins and health supplements all over the kitchen and bathrooms, the rowing machines in the garage, the magazines about health and fitness on the coffee tables.
When the chance to get away came, Thomas was sure he was right in taking it. He could keep in touch with his boy by phone, by letter, by e-mail. There would be less chance of getting annoyed or resentful. He had convinced himself it was better for everyone.
And for the first few weeks it had worked well. He did not wake up angry anymore, or drive himself crazy thinking about his son’s new household. The break had been a good thing.
It was just that the events of today had changed everything. All those people dead, a village plunged into mourning. He could hear the sounds of their crying floating up to him over the harbor. There was no way he could sleep, and his thoughts kept buzzing round like angry insects.
Thomas paced Vonni’s apartment all night. Sometimes he looked down at the shed at the end of the tangled, vine-filled garden. Once or twice he thought he saw her tousled head at the old window—but then again it might have been an elderly hen.
Fiona too was awake in the room in the cramped little house outside town.
It belonged to a thin, anxious woman called Eleni, who had three little boys. There didn’t seem to be any sign of a husband.
She didn’t normally take in guests. Fiona and Shane had found the place by knocking at various doors and offering a small handful of Euro in return for overnight accommodation. Shane had been adamant. They had no serious money to throw away on luxuries. They must get the cheapest on offer. Eleni’s simple house proved to be the cheapest around.
Now Shane lay thrown in the chair asleep—the only one of them who had managed to get a night’s rest.
Fiona couldn’t sleep because Shane had said out of the blue that they should move on the next day. She had been startled. They had both thought Aghia Anna the kind of place where they might stay awhile. But now Shane had changed his mind.
“No, we can’t stay. It’s going to be a creepy place, after all this,” Shane had said. “Let’s get out, we’ll get a boat to Athens tomorrow.”
“But Athens is a big city . . . it will be so hot,” she had protested.
But Shane said that he had a fellow to see, someone there he just had to meet. Nothing at all had been mentioned about this fellow they were to meet when Fiona and Shane had set off a month ago. But Fiona knew from experience that it was not wise to upset Shane over something so trivial. And in a way it was trivial whether they were here or in Athens, after all.
It was just that she had wanted to go to the funeral for Manos, the handsome, sexy Greek who had pinched her bottom and said she was orea, which meant wonderful, beautiful. He was a silly guy, but good-tempered and cheerful; he thought all ladies were orea, he drank wine from the bottle, and he danced Zorba-like dances for them, reveling in the pictures that were taken of him for albums all over the world. But there had been no harm in him; he didn’t deserve to die with his little nephew and his workmates and all those tourists who had been having such a great time.
And
Fiona would have liked to see the people from today again. The old man Andreas had been so gentle, so generous. Thomas, the college professor, was a wise, good person, and she might even have encouraged David a little to be more outgoing.
And as for Elsa . . . Fiona had never admired anyone so much, for knowing exactly what to say and when to say it. No wedding ring, and yet she must be about twenty-eight. Fiona wondered whom she had telephoned in Germany.
Shane was still asleep in the chair. Fiona wished that he had not brought out the pot in front of Andreas and the others today, and that he had been a bit nicer to them all. He could be so prickly and difficult at times. But then he had lived a confused life, with no love in it.
Not until he had met Fiona, that was.
And she alone knew how to reach the real Shane.
The room was very hot and pokey. She wished they could have stayed somewhere a little better. Then Shane might not want them to move on so quickly tomorrow.
During the night, as the stars shone down on the bay, Andreas wrote a letter. He wrote several versions and decided that the last one was the best. By morning he was ready to post the first and only letter he had ever written to his son in Chicago.
When the sun came up he got on his putt-putt bike and made the journey to the Town.
When the sun came up on Aghia Anna, the phone rang in the tasteful apartment over the craft shop.
It was Thomas’s son Bill calling him.
“Dad, you okay?”
“I’m great son, just fine. Thank you for calling. Your mom gave you my number?”
“It’s on the board, Dad. It’s just that Mom says it’s always the middle of the night out there. Andy said I should try anyhow.”
“Say thanks to Andy.”
“I will, Dad. He got out the map in your atlas to show me where you are, when we saw the fire on television. It must have been scary.”
“Well, it was sad,” he said.
“It’s a long way away, where you are, Dad.”