by Paula Fox
“What way?” she asked, startled out of her reverie.
“You look asleep with your eyes open. It’s creepy.”
“You should see how you look when you get up in the morning,” Lily retorted. “Super-creep!”
“Now, children,” their mother murmured as she went out into the yard.
“Come with me right now,” Paul said to her urgently. She knew he hoped Jack would be at the acropolis.
“I hate to go up there,” she said.
“You can take a book and sit on the path with the goat. Maybe I’ll find some valuable coins.”
“All right,” she agreed reluctantly.
For the next few days they went up the hill. Lily stayed by the nanny goat, reading. After an hour or so Paul would come slowly down the path.
“Any coins?” Lily would ask.
One morning he said in a discouraged voice, “I don’t really know where to look.”
“Okay. Let’s do something else.”
That afternoon she went down to the quay with him and sat under a plane tree while he and Manolis and the boys who could afford a few drachmas to rent them rode the battered bicycles back and forth along the water’s edge. Girls didn’t ride. She had rented a bike once, when they first came to the island. Just as she had taken hold of the handlebars, the handsome policeman had appeared from an alley leading to the quay and stood in front of her. He had smiled apologetically. “No, not for little girls,” he had said gently. “Very dangerous.”
She hadn’t known enough Greek then to argue with him. Now that she did, she’d lost interest in riding. All the boys did was to shout and try to cut each other off. Most of them didn’t speak to her. They look shyly at the ground when she greeted them. Only Manolis, and Nichos and Christos, the young sons of Costa, the museum keeper, exchanged a few words with her. On the evening promenade she had noticed that teenagers didn’t mix unless a boy and girl were engaged to be married. Then they could walk together. People were kind and affectionate in Limena—they hugged each other and kissed when they met—but there were some strict rules about the way you were supposed to behave that you found out only when you broke them.
Mr. Corey had hit a good work period and stayed at his table until late afternoon. The beach took too long to reach, so they went off to the rocks to swim, wearing their suits beneath their clothes. When they reached the embankment above the old city, Lily saw one of the French archaeologists. He waved to the Coreys, then squatted down to study something in the pile of dirt near his feet. It looked awfully far down to where he was.
“I saw you riding Christos on your handlebars here today,” she said in a low voice to Paul. “You shouldn’t do that. What if you fall?”
“Don’t be a prune,” he said. “I only did it once. Why don’t you go hide in the cellar? You’re so scared of everything.”
“I’m scared of what’s scary,” Lily said.
“Aren’t you great!”
“Yes, I am,” she said, looking at him slyly out of the corner of her eye. She could tell by his face he was trying to think of something to say that would get her. But she had always had the last word, at least so far.
It was a lovely hour of the day. The wind would rise soon, as it did in the late afternoon, and blow away the heat. Shadows lengthened. The light lay in long golden swaths across the hills and village and on the fishing fleet, where the men were making things ready to depart at twilight. Flocks of homing birds flew swiftly toward the woods. People in the streets walked quickly, buoyantly, refreshed by the coolness, looking forward to their evening meals. As the Coreys scrambled down to the smooth, large rocks from which they could drop off into the water, Lily looked up the hill and saw a section of the marble wall gleaming among the pines.
Paul was the first one in, but he rose up almost at once with a watery cry, a grimace of pain on his face. He clambered up on a rock, hunkered down, and gripped his head. Mr. Corey pulled his hands away. Lily saw the black spine of a sea nettle sticking out of his hair. Mr. Corey pulled at it, and Paul let out a shriek.
They hurried back along the path toward home, Mrs. Corey, her arm around Paul’s shoulders, promising she could take out the spine with tweezers.
Stella was washing down the stone walk to her house. She paused to ask Mrs. Corey what was wrong, and when she heard, she looked sympathetically at the groaning boy. She dropped the wet rags she had been using and said she knew exactly what to do.
In the Coreys’ kitchen Stella made Paul sit down at the table. He was making an effort, Lily saw, not to cry. Stella went to the wire mesh where Mrs. Corey kept olives and cheese, took an olive, and heated it over the flame on the stove. When it was smoking, she dashed to Paul and pressed the olive on his head where the spine had entered. Paul howled. Then he looked surprised. Stella was holding up, for all of them to see, the smashed olive with the spine sticking out of it.
“It stopped hurting just like that!” Paul exclaimed.
“Have coffee with us?” Mrs. Corey asked Stella. She shook her head. She had to go home to finish her work. In the afternoons everyone in the village cleaned up their yards and washed down their stone paths and then themselves. When they appeared later in their gardens or on the quay, they looked sea-washed as though they’d just emerged from the Aegean.
“Saved by the olive,” remarked Mr. Corey.
“It is beautiful here,” Mrs. Corey said. “But so full of stinging, biting creatures. In fact, it’s so dangerous, I feel like eating out tonight.” She took Paul’s hand and pressed it in her own.
“Could we go to the movie after supper?” he asked.
“The film breaks a dozen times, the children cry, the sound is fuzzy, and we’ve seen that awful movie twice,” Mr. Corey protested.
“It sounds wonderful,” Mrs. Corey said. “We’ll see.”
Lily went to her room and changed into the cotton dress she wore when they went out to eat. It seemed a little tight, though it had fit her a week ago. Flowers and trees grew so wildly on this island—perhaps she was growing wildly too.
People ate late in Limena, so Lily settled down with one of the books Mr. Corey had brought back from the American library in Kavalla a few weeks earlier. It was a history of the wars between Persia and Greece. It was often boring to her, but on Thasos, she was desperate for anything to read. The one thing that interested her in the book was the plight of the farmers. Whether it was the Greeks or the Persians who advanced across their land, the farmers always found themselves in the same fix, trying to hide their flocks and grain from soldiers. They hardly ever had time to complete a harvest, and when they did, the soldiers from both sides made off with all of it.
Paul wandered into her room.
“What do you think happened to him?” he asked. It was the first time in days he’d referred to Jack, even indirectly. Lily had been practicing forgetting him, and she had almost been successful.
“Maybe he and his father have gone back to wherever they came from,” she answered with an indifference she didn’t feel.
Paul’s face fell.
“Or he’s up in Panagia with his father,” she added quickly.
“I guess he has friends there,” Paul said.
“Well—you have friends here in Limena,” Lily noted.
He stared at her but she wasn’t sure he was seeing her.
“Do you think this dress is too tight?” she asked him.
“Ha-ha!” he cried. “Too tight! You look like a balloon in a Christmas stocking.”
“Thanks.”
“How do I know if it’s too tight?” he asked. He picked up a deck of cards from the stone sill of the window and began to shuffle them. Lily went back to her book; the words were packed so tightly on the page, they looked like a mob of ants.
“What are you reading?” Paul asked.
“Herodotus,” she answered. “About the wars between the Persians and the Greeks.”
He looked rather sad as though she’d given him disappoin
ting news.
“Listen, Jack will turn up,” she said impulsively.
Paul was staring at the king of spades. “He’s crazy,” he said suddenly.
She was startled but said nothing.
“You want to play cards?” he asked.
“Okay. But don’t get sore if I win.”
“You won’t win. And I never get sore.”
The sky was darkening. Lily turned on the unshaded lamp on the floor. They played a few games. Paul began to look more cheerful. When a donkey brayed, he imitated it silently, opening his mouth wide and nodding his head up and down. A sudden breeze swept through the window, bringing with it the evening smells of Limena. Roses and chickens and squash flowers, Lily said to herself, and roasting lamb, dahlias, the black, tight smell of Turkish coffee, and the almost flower-like smell of the sea.
“And there’s that piney smell,” Paul said.
“You read my mind.”
“I didn’t, Lily. You’re sniffing the air like Rosa does. It isn’t hard to figure out. You want to make everything seem like magic … a mystery.”
She pondered that for a moment, selecting a card from the pile on the floor.
“Everything is, in a way,” she said as she laid down her hand, the ace of hearts she had just taken from the deck making a full run.
“You’ve destroyed my winning streak,” Paul said.
“Magic,” she said.
“It’s only one hand. I’ll allow it because I’m going to win anyhow.”
She heard her mother laugh. She felt weightless, suddenly, buoyed up by happiness. It was lovely to go to the village in the evening, lovely to be greeted with a special evening gaiety by people whom they saw in the daytime. It wasn’t that the food would be so wonderful at Efthymios’ tiny restaurant where they usually went for supper. It was the cheerfulness of the place that drew the Coreys there. Its four tables would be set outside on the pavement Efthymios washed down every afternoon with buckets of cold water. There would be pots of geraniums at the door, and Efthymios, the chef and only waiter, his clean, frayed shirt open at the neck, would stand patiently beside the Coreys’ table, waiting for them to tell him what they wanted—which he already knew since each of them always ordered the same thing. Lily would have pastitsio, macaroni and lamb in a sauce; Mr. Corey would have sardines fried in oil; Mrs. Corey would take the soup of beans and macaroni that had been cooking slowly for hours in the dark little kitchen; and Paul always chose the omelet. The restaurant was the smallest in Limena. For a joke, people called Efthymios “Onassis,” which had been the name of a rich shipowner. In his placid way he appeared to enjoy the joke himself.
“Let’s go, children,” called Mr. Corey.
Paul played his last, and winning, card. “Once again!” he cried.
“How boring it must be for you,” commented Lily.
“It’s never boring to win,” Paul said with a grin.
As they passed Dionysus’ shrine Mr. Corey said, “It looked like this in the moonlight on an evening two thousand years ago.”
“It couldn’t have, Papa,” said Lily. “It was new then. There were statues inside it, and the columns were standing.”
“You could set yourself up as the local historian,” said her father.
If they hadn’t all been together, she would have spoken to him of the great banquet she had read about that had been given for Xerxes, the son of Darius the Persian, 2,462 years ago, probably close by where they were now walking. But she knew it would annoy Paul; he’d say she was showing off or being horribly boring. If they were by themselves, Paul seemed to like it when she told him something she had read about the place they were exploring. But not around their parents.
She thought she knew why—it was because she was a better student at school than Paul. Her mother had said once that Paul was often lost in dreams. But Paul didn’t know it was difficult to be good at learning. It seemed to her that everyone felt sorry for people who were lost in dreams. Her parents weren’t sorry for her. Now and then she made herself into a heavy lump and replied dully, “I dunno,” when her father asked her what she was reading or studying these days. He’d just laugh and pat her on the head. But when Paul stood as though frozen by such questions, Papa looked dreadfully worried and lectured him for hours.
It was unjust. She could lose herself in dreams too.
On an impulse she took her father’s arm and held him back while Paul and her mother went on ahead past the police station.
“Papa, listen. When Thasos was called a continent and the Thasians ruled cities in Thrace and had a big navy and trading fleet, Darius told the people they had to sink their warships. Then he made them give a huge feast for Xerxes and his army, and it bankrupted the treasury. And Mr. Kalligas was telling me about another big feast that the people here had to give a Bulgarian garrison during the second world war. And that was only forty years ago. There was a cook in Limena, and he told the fishermen to bring him a catch of dolphins. He cooked them up and served them, and the whole garrison—two hundred eighty soldiers—got violently sick because you can’t eat dolphins, Mr. Kalligas said. Then the cook and the people who served the feast had to hide up in the mountains until the war was over.”
“That’s so impressive, Lily,” her father said.
“No, no!” she protested furiously. “Don’t talk that way!”
“What way?” he asked mildly.
“It’s not impressive. It’s what happened. But what I wanted to tell you was this. You know that sleepy old man who sits on the bench near the baker’s every morning? Well—he was the one who cooked those dolphins!”
“I’m speechless,” said her father.
“Not quite,” Lily noted tartly.
Mrs. Corey and Paul were down the street near the butcher’s, talking to the handsome policeman. As Lily and her father joined them, she saw the reflected light of a street lamp sparking off the policeman’s dark glasses. He wished them all a good dinner, bowed, and went on by. Rosa waddled confidently toward the tables of a taverna where her master, the lawyer, was sitting with friends, all of them nibbling at little bits of dried squid, which they ate with their drinks of ouzo. As usual, the lawyer was wearing his prosperous-looking suit of salt-and-pepper tweed. He stood up and shook hands with all of the Coreys, and Rosa wagged her tail once. Mr. Corey had let Lily taste ouzo; it reminded her of licorice. The Greeks always served it with water. They served water with nearly everything, it was so precious on the island.
Efthymios welcomed them, flicking a napkin at the only table that had an umbrella. They knew he prized it, and although they would have preferred to sit at another table—the umbrella made them feel a bit as though they were in a cave—they felt obliged to accept the honor of sitting beneath it. Still, though the faded canvas flaps drooped down, Lily could watch passersby—the best thing about eating outside on the street.
An old man went past carrying a loaf of bread shaped like a discus; two girls arm-in-arm, laughing, their hair combed up and teased into enormous dark beehives; a plump lady, hurrying, her face peering out from a huge bouquet of roses she was carrying; couples; several families with small children; and an old fisherman in a black sweater, whom Lily and Paul had seen setting out in his caique to fish by himself. Although the fisherman’s face was ridged with deep wrinkles, his hair and beard were black.
“Odysseus,” Mr. Corey said to Lily.
“Too short,” said Paul.
“Too short for what?” asked their mother. “I’ve seen him stand in his boat and lean on those huge oars, and it looked like he was rowing away the whole Aegean.”
People stopped to speak to them, to ask them if they liked their supper. They even made comments about how the fish was fried—too long, said the cobbler—and how thick the soup was—the right way to make it, said a sister of Stella’s who lived on the road to Panagia.
They hardly ever spoke about home anymore, Lily observed to herself. When they’d first come to Thasos, they�
��d compared life here and back in Williamstown. They’d found the house uncomfortable, not having dependable electricity or plumbing or a refrigerator and furniture, and there was not much either, it had seemed at first, to choose from in the markets. She recalled how, on their third day in Athens, before they had come to the island, she and Paul had spotted a dusty box of American cornflakes in a grocery shop window and how they had stood in front of it for what seemed an hour, wishing they could eat it all up.
But they didn’t notice the discomfort anymore. When Lily walked into the kitchen and saw the table covered with huge strawberries, or yellow-green zucchini as slender as her fingers, or four pomegranates, blood-red in the sun, she couldn’t think of anything that was missing.
“I’ve been thinking about it, and I don’t believe I can bear seeing that movie again,” said Mrs. Corey. “What if, instead, we go to the pastry café and eat cake?”
Everyone agreed to that. Mr. Corey paid Efthymios-Onassis, and they set off for the café on the quay, which was usually crowded all evening with people drinking coffee and eating ices, or cakes made from walnuts inside honey-soaked leaves of pastry so thin they looked transparent, or small, hollowed-out chocolate buns filled with cream, or puddings redolent of oranges and cinnamon and vanilla.
On their way they passed through the main square, which was, Lily thought, like a vast living room for the entire village. Beneath the overarching branches of two enormous plane trees were shops that stayed open until late evening, a tourist restaurant, and several tavernas in which the older men of Limena often came to sit and visit with each other, drinking wine or ouzo very slowly during the hot, still hours after midday. Sometimes a young boy from a nearby coffee shop would pass among the men carrying brass trays with small white cups of Turkish coffee and tall, moisture-beaded glasses of very cold water. Lily, crossing the square of an afternoon, had heard the clicking of the amber-beaded circlets that the men moved rapidly through their fingers—worry-beads, the tourists called them—and that were said to calm a restless mind.
Local people as well as Greeks from the mainland were laughing and gesturing and eating at the tables set out in front of the pastry shop. Next to where the Coreys sat down a whole family watched raptly as a plump little boy about two years old was fed by his mother. After each spoonful of honey cake he crowed like a rooster, and his dark-eyed, black-haired mother would laugh, holding up her head and leaning back so that Lily could see a thin chain of gold closely circling her beautiful, long neck.
