Secrets Under the Sun

by Nadia Marks

  After that first lunchtime visit, Marianna hardly ever went home again for her lunch. No one missed her, or if they did, nobody seemed to care, and before long she started going home with her new friends after school too, for the evening meal. As this was becoming a habit, Katerina encouraged her to stay and do her homework with the cousins under her supervision, and eventually the girl hardly ever went home at all. Marianna had finally found the warmth and tenderness she had always longed for and as long as she was welcomed she couldn’t bear to part with it.

  ‘Perhaps we should go and talk to her family,’ Olga had said once it became obvious that the girl had become a fixture. One more mouth to feed was no problem for them. Besides, Olga liked the girl and thought it was good for Eleni and Adonis to have another friend, a surrogate sibling, around. She loved the idea of a large family, the house was big enough, and she had always wished there were more grandchildren. She herself had been an only child and had longed for a brother or a sister, and the untimely death of her younger daughter had left her with the wish to fill her home with the sound of children’s cheerful laughter.

  ‘Why hasn’t anyone enquired where she is?’ Olga asked Katerina a few weeks after Marianna’s arrival. ‘Do we know who her family is?’

  ‘Yes! I do!’ the other woman’s reply came quickly. Olga might have been too busy to give much thought to the young visitor or ask any questions till now, but Katerina had made it her business to find out.

  Marianna’s home was a shabby little room on the wrong side of town, at the back of an establishment that called itself a ‘cabaret’ but was widely known as a brothel. She lived with her grandmother, a neglectful old woman going by the name of Sotiria, who had worked there in her youth but now, too old for the job, stayed on as the cleaner.

  Soon after her conversation with Olga, Katerina went looking for Sotiria. She had recognized the signs of poverty and neglect and felt duty-bound to help the child. Marianna reminded her of her past self long ago, and now it was her turn to do as others had done for her all those years before. Marianna needed rescuing and she would now be under Katerina’s protection, come what may.

  She found the old woman on her knees, scrubbing the bar floor.

  ‘If you want her you can have her,’ she said when Katerina finished explaining why she was there. ‘I hardly see the girl anyway. I don’t know where she goes, but she’s never around here, that’s for sure. Makes no difference to me where she is.’ She shrugged and went back to her scrubbing. After that, the girl never went back to sleep at her grandmother’s, and Sotiria never bothered to seek her out.

  Marianna was the illegitimate child of Sotiria’s daughter, who abandoned the baby with her mother after giving birth and fled to Greece with a man who promised her fame and stardom as a dancer; or at least that was what Sotiria had always told the girl. As far as the father was concerned Marianna knew nothing about him, most probably because no one knew or cared who he was. ‘Your mother is a beauty, she can sing and dance like an angel and she has the body of one too! You, my girl, could never fill her shoes.’ The old woman wove all sorts of fantasies about her absent daughter and Marianna was growing up on a diet of lies. The only tangible evidence she had of her phantom mother was an old photograph of a young woman in an exotic costume dancing on a table in a smoked-filled room surrounded by men.

  Like Eleni, Marianna had a mother known to her only by a black-and-white silvery image. A mother whom neither girl remembered, whose only link to her child was a piece of bromide paper. That photograph was one of two things Marianna took with her when she left her grandmother’s house; that, and her school satchel.

  ‘My grandmother says that my mama is a great dancer and a beauty,’ Marianna had told Eleni, taking the photo out of her pocket to show her friend. ‘I think one day she will come and find me!’

  ‘My mama will never come and find me because she’s dead,’ Eleni replied as they compared pictures.

  ‘They’re both so beautiful, and they have the same hair,’ Marianna pointed out.

  ‘And the same smile!’

  ‘Just like us! We have the same hair,’ the girls would tell each other. ‘I wish we were sisters!’

  ‘We are almost like sisters,’ Eleni said and gave her friend a hug, ‘and even if we don’t have our real mamas we have Tante, don’t we? And she is the best mama ever!’

  ADONIS

  ‘She was the one person in my life who encouraged me to be myself,’ Adonis said in a whisper. Now it was his turn to speak but the words seemed to catch in his throat; emotion was choking him. ‘I know you say she was like a mother to Eleni, but in my mind she was like a mother to us all.’ He turned and looked at Anita. ‘I think she mothered everyone … including you,’ he said, looking at his mother. The old woman nodded and wiped her eyes with her lace handkerchief.

  ‘It’s true,’ she agreed. ‘We were almost the same age, but she had the maternal instinct.’

  Adonis remembered his childhood as a happy one on the whole, and Katerina had played a huge part in making it so. He had grown up in a house of women who loved him. There had been men, too, at different intervals, but by the time he was old enough to know the world, they had long gone. Olga had divorced the children’s grandfather when her girls were young and Adonis’s own father was by all accounts a scoundrel who went the same way as his grandfather when Adonis was still too young to remember.

  If Eleni and Marianna thought of each other as sisters, then Adonis was their big brother and protector. Taller than most of the boys his age, he ensured there was never a question of anybody bullying or bothering either of the girls. If they did, they had Adonis to answer to.

  For their part Eleni and Marianna adored their ‘big brother’ and when they were young they always included him in their games. He drew the line at playing with their dolls but everything else was acceptable, especially delving into the dressing-up trunk that Katerina kept for them in her room. The three would often disappear for hours to transform themselves into their favourite characters. Eleni would turn herself into a nurse, or sometimes the Austrian Empress Sissi, inspired by stories from her grandmother; Marianna would invariably emerge dressed up as an exotic dancer – ‘like my mama’, she’d tell them – and Adonis, whose fantasy was of joining the Church, would clothe himself as a Greek Orthodox priest. He would perform religious ceremonies wearing one of his grandmother’s discarded long dressing gowns while chanting and blessing the home and all who lived in it. Around his neck the girls would help him hang several old crucifixes on chains and ribbons, and holding a bunch of keys on a long piece of string he would ceremoniously swing it back and forth as he walked around, the jingling sound of the keys imitating the priest’s incense burner. He particularly liked the flamboyant ceremonial Greek Orthodox regalia, especially that of the archbishop. His mother and grandmother would encourage him to go outside to run around with the other boys playing cowboys and Indians, but Adonis was content in the company of his ‘sisters’. The rough-and-tumble games of his school friends were not for him.

  ‘I’m not so sure how good it is for him to play only with the girls,’ Olga would tell Anita and Katerina, ‘and this obsession with the Church … I don’t know how healthy it is. He’s too young.’

  ‘There is nothing unhealthy about it,’ Katerina would leap to his defence. ‘A calling to the Church is no bad thing, Olga. In any case he doesn’t only play with the girls, he’s recently started to play football too.’

  ‘I think we should encourage him to do more of it,’ his grandmother would persist. ‘He’s athletic enough!’ But Olga didn’t have to worry for too long. As Adonis grew older his religious fascination and games with Eleni and Marianna did diminish, even if they didn’t altogether cease. He gave up his ambition to become archbishop but continued to go to church with Katerina every Sunday. Olga was particularly pleased when Adonis was made captain of his football team at school, and then in his early teens with the appearance of girls other tha
n his ‘sisters’ in his life. He attracted them as few boys did at that early age. There wasn’t one girl in either Eleni’s or Marianna’s class who hadn’t fallen in love with Adonis.

  ‘I’m glad to see he has expanded his horizons,’ Olga would say with relief.

  ‘It was natural that he’d want to play with the girls when he was young,’ Katerina would reply, defending him as always. ‘I told you he was going to grow out of it.’

  All the same, Adonis was far more comfortable in the company of females than of his male contemporaries. He thanked his friendship with his sisters for that; he seemed instinctively to understand girls, he liked their way of thinking and their warmth. He loved being around them. But girls loved him more.

  Whereas other boys had to work hard at getting a girlfriend, Adonis always had the prettiest girl in town on his arm and seemed to exchange one for another with an enviable regularity.

  Eleni and Marianna, both a little younger than him, hadn’t yet reached the age for dating and would quiz him with curiosity.

  ‘What do you do when you’re alone with a girl?’ they’d ask.

  ‘Do you kiss each other?’ they both wanted to know.

  ‘Do you do the mouth-kissing thing?’ Eleni would ask, giggling. ‘You know, tongues and all that?’

  ‘Stop it, you two!’ Adonis would scold them and laugh. ‘I’m a respectful kind of boy!’ But the truth was that Adonis didn’t feel inclined to do any of that with any girl, no matter how pretty she was. He put it down to his religious beliefs.

  Tall and athletic, with a mass of black hair, olive-green eyes, strong chin and a Roman nose, he looked like one those Greco-Roman statues in the Cyprus Museum in Nicosia.

  ‘Our young Adonis, true to his name,’ Katerina would boast.

  Good looks weren’t all that Adonis possessed. He had brains, too.

  Mathematics was his subject, which made him the pride and joy of Olga and Anita, but especially of Katerina, who made sure homework was done with clockwork regularity. She hadn’t had the chance of a formal education herself and she was determined the children would, no matter what.

  ‘You carry on like this and you will be a doctor or a lawyer, my boy,’ she would tell him. But Adonis had his own plans; he wanted to be an architect.

  ‘You can go to the University of Athens and then come back to Cyprus and build beautiful houses,’ she’d tell him, swelling with pride, ‘God alone knows how badly this island needs them now.’

  Ten years on from the Turkish invasion the island was an architectural disaster. Buildings were being hurriedly thrown up everywhere unplanned in a haphazard attempt to reconstruct the towns, and the refugee camps were still evident. Although Adonis had only been a young boy during the invasion in 1974 he remembered the fear that had gripped him, and his whole family, during that time. Katerina was right; he would become an architect in order to rebuild what he remembered had been lost.

  Apart from the aftermath of those weeks of fighting and the architectural carnage left behind, Adonis remembered all too well how terrified he was, and would secretly thank God in his prayers every night for being too young to be called up. So many young men and neighbours had to take arms and go and fight. The mere thought made Adonis tremble in his shoes; he wasn’t one of those boys who romanticized war – on the contrary, he dreaded it. He recalled the panic that spread through the household during those hot summer months of fighting when Olga insisted they must take refuge in the cellar, and the fear, sadness and repulsion that engulfed him when injured people were sometimes brought to the house. The fighting, which lasted barely a month between July and August during the hottest months of the year, and which ended with the partition of the island, felt like a lifetime to the young children in the Linser household. They didn’t really understand what was happening and why suddenly there was a war. Every child growing up on the island was aware of tensions between Greeks and Turks but it didn’t really touch their lives much, nor did they imagine there could be blood spilled over it. They were just children; they only knew what the adults told them.

  ‘It’s a very complicated situation,’ Olga said when Adonis insisted that someone tell him why Turkey was invading and sending parachuting soldiers at dawn to attack the island.

  ‘Why doesn’t anyone stop them?’ he’d ask. ‘We’re only a small island – why doesn’t someone help us?’

  ‘You are too young to understand, my boy,’ Olga would try to explain. ‘It goes back so many years; they’ve been fighting over this land for centuries … It’s strategic, you see,’ she continued, struggling to explain the complexities of Cypriot politics, ‘it’s geographic. Everyone has always wanted to own this island, Adonis mou, you know that from your history lessons.’ But his grandmother’s attempts to illuminate him didn’t really satisfy Adonis, nor did he understand. He did of course know from school all about the many conquerors the island had endured over the millenniums: the Venetians, and the French, the Ottomans and the English, but that was a long time ago – it had nothing to do with now, with their modern lives. This was the twentieth century – no place for war, surely.

  The one thing he did understand and saw all around him was the hundreds of homeless people looking for refuge. The influx of refugees from the north of the island, which had been captured by the Turkish army, was now turning their family house, and every house in town for a period of time, into dormitories until the authorities could find a way to accommodate them. People opened their doors to whoever needed help.

  Whole families – parents, children, aged grandparents – fled their villages with nothing more than the clothes they stood up in. The nearest place not under siege was Larnaka, so the town was flooded with people trying to escape the hostilities.

  During that time there was one particular family that passed through the Linser household and who stayed with them for several weeks. There were five of them: parents with twin baby girls and a boy called Stavros, who was the same age as Adonis. After the fighting stopped and the family was housed in one of the refugee camps, Stavros continued to visit the Linser home to play with the children, and the two boys became staunch friends; a friendship which was to last until Adonis went to study at the university in Athens.

  When he was eighteen Adonis met Sophia. The daughter of a prominent lawyer and the sister of one of his school friends, she was a perfect match. A beautiful fiery girl with hair the colour of chestnuts and eyes to match. At seventeen she was far more mature than her years and had set her sights on the best-looking boy in town, making him once again the envy of his friends and provoking endless teasing from Stavros.

  ‘What is it about you?’ he’d joked. ‘Must be that name of yours that’s making you into a girl magnet.’ Stavros too had his share of success, but nothing like his friend. Up until the time Adonis met Sophia the two friends would date several girls at the same time, go out on double dates and compare notes.

  ‘I don’t think it would take me long to make her say yes,’ Stavros would boast, always sure about his latest conquests. Unlike his friend who preferred to take things slow, he was much more ardent in matters of the flesh.

  ‘Go on, Adonis my friend, what are you waiting for, make a move,’ he’d goad him.

  ‘I’m not like you,’ Adonis would snap back, ‘you have sex on the brain. I have respect.’ Then Sophia came into the picture and things changed.

  ‘She’s the girl for me,’ Adonis told his friend when Stavros complained that he had turned into an old man. ‘This is serious. I’m going to marry her after I finish my studies.’

  The couple made a striking sight, turning heads wherever they passed.

  The girls Adonis had dated until then had made no sexual demands on him but Sophia was different. She longed for his physical attentions and she let him know it. Her beauty dazzled him, her carnal passion confused and overwhelmed him – as far as he was concerned sex came after marriage, and as he was sure the two of them would marry at some point, sex had to w
ait till then.

  The moment of clarity and change came to Adonis while he was sitting on a bench in the sun talking to Socrates, a fellow architectural student from Thessaloniki. Adonis had been in Athens for about six weeks for the first semester of his architectural degree, and he and Katerina had travelled together so that she could help him settle in. Anita was having one of her anxiety attacks and wouldn’t get out of bed; in any case he much preferred to be with Katerina. They found a little apartment through some people his grandmother knew in Kifissia, the leafy area of Athens and close to the Metro. She stayed with him for a week before going back to Cyprus, and now he was living alone for the first time ever, enjoying the student life.

  Sophia had been inconsolable when he was leaving. ‘How will I manage without you?’ she told him through her tears. ‘You’ll probably meet another girl and forget me.’

  ‘Don’t be silly!’ he replied, stroking her hair. ‘I’ll be coming back every holiday, and you will come and visit me … it’ll all be fine, you’ll see!’

  ‘But you’ll be gone for months at a time!’

  Somehow that didn’t seem to be a problem for Adonis. He knew that he loved Sophia but he also couldn’t wait to leave, and that perplexed him.

  But sitting on that bench in the sun in Athens with Socrates, everything changed all at once for him. Everything fell into place and for the first time in his life Adonis understood – or perhaps, he later thought, he acknowledged. They were talking about something, he no longer remembered what it was, but at one point Socrates reached across and touched Adonis’s arm in order to emphasize his point. It was at exactly that moment that he recognized with absolute certainty the electric current, the piercing longing of desire, go through his body, and travel to his loins. No girl, no matter how much beauty she possessed, had ever made him feel that way.