by Alex A King
Go where?
Stepping into Dr Triantafillou's office is like stepping onto the sun. The room is so bright secrets have no place to hide—that's what Helena thinks. Today the head doctor is in a pink dress made of scarves. She looks young, carefree. Yet she is a mother, so how carefree can she be? Mothers worry constantly. Look at how she fusses over Stavros. Always there is a pain in her heart waiting to happen. Even when he is in the room with her, she frets he will leave.
"How are you today, Helena?"
"Wonderful," she says. "Who can be sad in summer?"
"Not me," Dr Triantafillous says. "But sometimes people experience sadness all year round. If they experience heartbreak, if they have lost someone, if things aren't good at home." She moves smoothly to her next question. "How are things at home?"
"Wonderful. They are always wonderful."
"Your marriage is happy?"
"Of course. My husband is a good man. A good father. He works hard for our family."
"How did you two meet?"
"How does any Greek couple our age meet? Through our families. Our parents were in business and friendship together."
"Was it an arranged marriage?"
"Yes. But we already liked each other." Helena smiles. "He was so handsome. A lot of girls wanted to marry him, but he saw only me."
"That sounds very romantic."
Helena shrugs. "It would not have mattered if we liked each other or not, the marriage was destined to be."
"Would your parents have forced it upon you?"
"It was expected. And in those days we did not defy our parents. Not like children today."
"How about your relationship with your son? I understand he was to be married." Her words have the lightness of air, yet behind them, Helena believes, is a hammer. And that hammer will strike if Helena is not careful with her words.
"Yes," she says slowly. "He was to marry my friend's daughter, Kiki. We decided when they were young."
"Was he okay with that?"
"Of course. If he was not, he never said so. Stavros trusted me to find him a suitable wife."
He never told her so, but that makes it no less true. It was an unspoken agreement between them.
"What made … Kiki, was it?" Helena nods. "What made Kiki a good choice for your son?"
"She comes from a good family. We have the same values."
"What does Kiki do?"
"She is a teacher at the high school in Agria. She is the English teacher."
A moment ticks by.
Helena glances out the window into the sun. She can't look it in the eye for long. Her gaze drops to the ground, to the cars bouncing in and out of the parking lot below.
"When were they to be married?"
Helena swallows. For some reason her throat is filled with powder. She makes spit in her mouth to wash it down, but she's too dry. "What was the question? Sorry."
The doctor looks worried. There's a V forming between her brows. "Would you like some water or coffee, Helena?"
"No. No, I'm fine. What was the question?"
"I asked when their wedding was to be."
"April. There were to be married in April. But the honeymoon was not until June when school was out."
"What happened on the wedding day?"
What happened?
"Kiki would not marry him."
Wouldn't she? Helena can't fill in the details. She remembers the church, the waiting, her phone that never rang. She recalls a bride stomping into the church, demanding they leave because there was to be no wedding that day.
Somebody died, then there was a funeral, and Helena vaguely recalls sitting in the bathtub with a towel over her head, hiding from … from something. Or maybe someone.
There were too many questions in her living room, too many voices asking her how she was doing. Why did they care so much about how she was feeling? Why not ask the mother of the dead boy? She needed their condolences, not Helena.
"Kiki never wanted to marry him," she says. Her words have the thick, slow, stickiness of the honey syrup that drowns baklava.
"Do you think she wanted to choose for herself?"
"Perhaps. But what do young people know? They choose poorly all the time. And now we have divorce, even in Greece."
"How do you feel about Stavros and Kiki not being married?"
Winter's finger slides down her spine. "He will find somebody else."
"Will you choose for him again, or let him find his own wife?"
"He wants me to choose. He told me so."
"When was this?"
"This morning. Every morning since he—"
She won't turn her head, meet her son's eyes. His judgment awaits; he has weighed her heart and found it too heavy to be good.
"Do you believe in the old gods, Doctor?"
"Yes, when it suits me."
"That is very honest. And maybe also foolish."
"Truth is what we do here," the psychologist tells her. "Do you believe in the gods of Olympus?"
"I do. I believe in our gods more than the God. They were as we were—not some nebulous creature poking us with a pointed finger when it suits Him. Our gods walked among us. We drank together. Loved each other. Sometimes we made children and war. They were gods and men in the very best and worst ways.
"I am not Prometheus, but his punishment has become mine, and I do not understand why. What crime have I done? Every day I am happy. I spend time with my son, and we laugh. But at night, when I am supposed to be sleeping, the crows come for me and peck out my liver. All night long, peck, peck, peck. I never scream because I do not want to wake my husband. A good mother would worry that a scream would wake her child, but when the crows come for me, the voices tell me I have no son, that he is dead. And I believe them. Until morning comes and I see his smile."
Helena buries herself in her hands, but it's such a shallow grave.
35
Leo
The phone takes its sweet time making the connection. When it does, the ring sounds gritty, like it's boring its way through the Earth to reach the other side. But when his father says, "Hello?" his rich voice fills Leo's ear.
"Dad, it's me."
"Leo! Are you still in Greece?"
"Yeah. I'm waiting on paperwork" He looks out the door. Socrates is trotting to the outhouse with today's newspaper. "How's Mom?"
"Better, I think. She looks better."
Lie. But he gets it. Dad's killing two birds with that single stone: if he convinces Leo his mother is better, then maybe he will believe it himself.
"What do the doctors say?"
"Nothing that I can understand. I wish they'd just speak English. They cannot write it, they do not speak it."
His old man can't see him, but Leo hides the smile anyway. All those years in the states and Dad's accent is still as thickly Greek as egg and lemon soup.
"Veterinarians are just as bad," Leo says. "They teach us big words in college so we have fancy ways of saying your cat's got a bellyache."
His father mutters something about how the Virgin Mary is a prostitute. "Put your grandfather on."
"He's in the outhouse. He took the paper, so he's going to be a while."
"The poor chickens," his father says.
They hang up not long after. Not wordy men, the Karas men. They love each other, but they don't say what doesn't need saying.
36
Kiki
"You took a bomb to the police station? Ay-yi-yi!" Mama shakes her hands at the sheet of blue sky draped over the yard. "Why you do that, Kiki? The doctor, he did not drop you on your head when you were born. Soula—yes—her they dropped. But not you. You are smarter than that. Did you leave a note?"
"Of course," Kiki says. Who does Mama think she is? Only an idiot would leave an anonymous package on the police station's doorstep. Great way to throw the town into panic.
Mama goes from shaking her hands at the sky to shaking her freshly dyed head. Now that her forty days of mourni
ng are up, Margarita has thrown herself overboard with the self-pampering. Today she's not just wearing makeup, she's wearing all the makeup. "My Virgin Mary! They will see the bomb, and then they will come for you because you left a note. What do you think they will do to you, eh? A little murder is nothing compared to a bomb. They will send you to Korydallos!"
Korydallos is Greece's high-security prison. It's in the port city of Piraeus, one of Greece's steepest, sharpest edges.
Yiayia pats Kiki's hand. "Do not worry. If they send you to Korydallos, I will sell all your things and rent a helicopter to help you escape.
* * *
Truth is stranger and funnier than fiction. One prisoner has escaped Korydallos twice. And twice he made his escape thanks to a helicopter.
Twice.
Once? Eh, that is not so bad. Like shit, it happens.
But twice …
Very Greek.
* * *
"Or," Yiayia continues. "You could cause a riot and take control of the prison! Kiki Andreou, my granddaughter the warlord."
* * *
That happened, too.
In 1995, inmates battled security and the police for days, before all fifteen hundred or so of them were beaten back into cages designed for four hundred. They wanted better food and a less cramped living situation, but Greece said, "You are very funny. No."
* * *
"My Virgin Mary," Mama swears. "My daughter will be in Korydallos with the lesbians and the communists. What will people think? What will they say?"
"What won't they say?" Yiayia tells her. "Our family will be infamous."
It's dramatic, the way Mama rubs her forehead. Could be if she presses hard enough, a genie will pop out and make the family's troubles disappear. "I am going to lie down. Kiki, write to me from prison, okay?"
Jesus Christ, the drama. Where's an amphitheater when you need one?
"We don't even know if it is a bomb," Kiki says in her own defense.
"What else would it be?" Mama asks.
"I don't know. It could be anything."
Her mother doesn't look convinced. It's a bomb—she's already decided. Anything less than a bomb and prison sentence will be a disappointment now. Kiki needs to change the subject. Twist it away from her toward something less dramatic.
"Where's Soula?"
"Asleep," Mama says. "That girl always sleeps late. People do not buy houses early in the morning."
Yiayia cackles. "She is probably still playing with the big penis."
It's eerie the way Margarita Andreou turns slowly to face her mother. "What did you say?"
"She came home with a man last night. A man with a big penis."
"A man!"
Kiki shuts her eyes, wishes she were somewhere else. Anywhere else. Maybe a nice one-person solitary cell in Korydallos. It would be quiet there. No shrieking. No gossip. "Soula dates." Someone has to stand up for Soula. "It's not like it's a secret."
Now Mama is multitasking. Like patting your head and rubbing your belly at the same time, simultaneously shaking both hands and head at the sky takes talent.
"For this we build her a house, so she can take men up for sex. Not a husband, but a parade of men. Always a different one. That girl has a revolving door on her mouni."
Kiki gawks at her mother. Margarita Andreou never uses that word. The world must be ending.
"We didn't have sex," Soula calls out from her balcony two floors up. She vanishes, then saunters down the stairs, slides into the chair next to Kiki. She's dressed and fully made up for work. "Not that it's anyone's business."
"Why not?" Yiayia jumps her chair closer, leans in as though they're sharing a secret. But her voice never got the memo. "Did he lie about his penis?"
It's Greece's best actress who rises from the chair and storms into the kitchen. Mama makes her displeasure known with the crashing of pots and pans.
Soula shrugs. "I never saw it."
Yiayia looks horrified. "Why not?"
In the kitchen, Mama rattles the pots and pans harder, mutters a colorful string of swear words.
"No chemistry."
"Really?" Kiki asks, astonished. "No chemistry with him?"
"You met him, Kiki?" Mama calls out through the open window.
Yiayia's hand shoots up. "I met him first. A very good-looking boy. He looks like he knows how to show a woman a very bad time." She winks at Soula.
"Is he someone we know?" Mama asks it casually, but it's obvious she's suppressing an explosion.
"He's Kyrios Karas's grandson," Soula says. "The one who went to America."
"Socrates's grandson? Then he was not lying about the big penis!"
Mama looks out the window, up at the heavens. "Please, God, do not let my mother speak again. Strike her mute."
"Socrates took me out a few times, before I married your father, Margarita. My chaperone only had one good eye, so he would feel my—"
"Leonidas Karas?" Kiki says. Did she squeak? She squeaked, didn't she? "Leonidas Karas from school?"
There's a wicked grin on Soula's face. "So you remember him, eh?"
Shrug. "Vaguely."
Total lie, and Soula knows it. That's why she's watching Kiki with a very interested look on her face. We will talk about this later, her face is saying, when these hens are not around.
And Kiki's face is saying, Not later, not ever. Nothing to talk about.
"Time to go." Kiki jumps up from the table.
"Where are you going?" Mama calls out.
"Work. Vivi gave me a summer job doing some translating work."
"What about the bomb?"
She shrugs. "If it's a bomb we'll hear about it. I figure Detective Lemonis will have something to say, either way."
* * *
First she shoved her finger up Leonidas Karas's ass, and now he has seen her naked.
Fantastic. She's really winning at life, isn't she?
It's a kid's move, but she kicks the road, dislodges a rock, sends it flying a couple of meters.
Leonidas Karas. Wow. It's been a long time.
He was so hot when they were kids. But even as teenagers he was more man than boy. Intimidating. And now …
Not her problem. But a man like that, he looks like he's some woman's problem. Probably a lot of women's problem. Kiki doesn't need a problem, and neither does Soula. Good thing they didn't have sex.
Different day, but it's the same walk, only cooler. People are scurrying around, getting things done before the sun shoves them into their houses and slams the shutters in their faces.
Kiki tosses out a lot of greetings, waves to everyone she sees, but the waves come back at her limp, the greetings soggy. Agria's people are in a difficult position. They want to ignore a murderer, but what if she's not? They can't not be polite, otherwise, if Kiki is proven innocent, they will be the branded ones.
Reputation matters.
"Hooray, I'm a pariah," she tells Vivi.
"Been there, done that, have the T-shirt. They're going to look stupid when this is over, and they know it. Then you can gloat."
"I don't want to gloat. I just want things as they were."
Vivi pats her on the shoulder, slides a cold frappe onto the table in front of Kiki. "Things are never as they were. Even when they seem the same, they're not."
"You sound like Kostas."
"That's because I stole his words. You don't think I'm that smart on my own, do you?" Vivi grins. "Not even close."
Kiki smiles. "What am I doing today?"
"Paperwork. So much paperwork. We live in the computer age, but Greece's government is too busy dancing to read the memo. Its response is to make more paper, more forms, in protest. This isn't really a paycheck I'm giving you, it's guilt money. I hate dumping this on someone I like."
Kiki takes a long sip of the cold coffee. "It could be worse. I could be in jail."
The other woman sighs. "Been there, done that, too. Twice."
"Was it terrible?"
"
The second time I was in a cell with my mother."
Kiki considers that scenario. "My God, so it was hell."
"Hell, but one of the outer circles. The one filled with Greek mothers."
37
Helena
It is not easy living under a microscope. Everywhere she goes, eyes follow. Home, town, the doctor's office. Eyes delivering messages to analytical minds. Everyone of them measuring her sanity against some invisible scale.
What is the range? she wonders. Who is sane enough to be the beginning point on the measuring stick? And who sits on the farthest edge?
Zeus, of course. There is nobody crazier in Greek history or mythology than the king of the gods. At the other end sits nobody; men and gods all have a little madness in them. Without madness, a person is not fully alive.
She feels those checking her mental pulse while she cooks in her hot kitchen. This summer it is more cramped than ever. The walls seem to inch closer each day.
"How are you?" Kristos asks.
"Fine."
Not ten minutes later: "How are you?"
"Fine."
His mouth opens one more time.
"I'm going to bed," she says.
"Fine," he tells her.
* * *
The next day, Stavros is on strike. He will not eat, will not speak.
"Eat a little something, eh?" Helena begs him. "Or you will get skinny. Women want a strong man, not a feather."
He ignores her. Sits there staring at nothing.
She knows why. It is because of the psychologist. Stavros does not approve. He thinks Helena tells her too much.
"I will not see her again if it upsets you so much. Just talk to me—talk to your mama, okay?"
He smiles but it's the smile of a doll, fixed and flimsy. Wherever she goes, he watches her with his flat, paper gaze, but does not say a word.
