Nights of Rain and Stars

by Maeve Binchy

  How wonderful it would have been if Shane were still here and they might both have been able to stay with Thomas for a few days in this wonderful apartment. But even as she thought it Fiona knew she was fooling herself. Shane would have fought with Thomas about something. The way he always did with people. Out of insecurity. She gave a little sob.

  It was such a tragedy that people misunderstood Shane and brought out the worst in him. She lay on the bed with its blue cover and cried herself to sleep.

  In the room next door, Thomas and David played chess. They heard the sounds of weeping through the wall.

  “She’s crying over that bastard!” David whispered in amazement.

  “I know, it’s beyond comprehension,” Thomas whispered back.

  And they sat there and waited until the sobs had died down. Then they smiled at each other in relief.

  “Do you know what we’re like?” David asked. “We’re like the parents of a toddler who won’t go to sleep.”

  Thomas sighed. “Yes, there is always that moment of not wanting to leave the room until you’re sure he’s asleep, and then just when you creep to the door he calls you back. They were great days, really.” He looked sad thinking about his son.

  David thought hard about what to say. He so often got it wrong. “It’s hard to understand women, isn’t it?” he said eventually.

  Thomas looked at him thoughtfully. “It sure is, David. The exact same thought was going through my mind. Fiona crying over that drunken brute who would have beaten her senseless, Elsa going off with the man she had run a thousand miles to escape, my wife who used to tell me she loved poetry and literature and art living with a bonehead who has some exercise machine in every room of my house.” He sounded very bitter.

  David looked at him, stricken. It had not been a good thing to say after all.

  Thomas shrugged. “And you probably have your own women-are-unfathomable story, David,” he said.

  “No, that’s just the problem I was telling Elsa already. I never really loved anyone. That makes me superficial, cold, and shallow.”

  Thomas smiled at him. “No, you are none of these things. You’re a good guy, I’m glad to have your company tonight. But you are not a skilled chess player. You didn’t free up the squares around your king. He has no egress, poor fellow. It’s checkmate, David, that’s what it is.”

  And for some reason they both found that very funny and laughed, keeping the volume low so as not to wake the sleeping Fiona in the next room.

  Dieter stroked Elsa’s face. “I must have been mad to think I had lost you,” he said.

  She said nothing.

  “It will all be fine again,” he said.

  Still no reply.

  “You could not love me like that and not mean it,” he said, just a little anxiously now.

  Elsa lay there saying nothing.

  “Speak to me, tell me this has all been nonsense, that you’ll come back with me and it will all be fine again.”

  She still said nothing at all.

  “Please. Elsa, please?”

  She got up slowly from the bed and put on the big white fluffy robe that was hanging on the bathroom door. She picked up Dieter’s packet of cigarettes and lit one.

  “You gave up!” he said accusingly.

  She inhaled deeply and sat in the big bamboo chair looking at him.

  “You’ll come home with me, Elsa?”

  “No, of course I won’t. This is good-bye. You know this and I know this, so let’s not be foolish, Dieter.”

  “Good-bye?” he asked.

  “Yes, good-bye, you are going home, I am going to go to . . . well, somewhere. I haven’t decided exactly where yet.”

  “This is insane, we were meant for each other, you know that, I know. Everyone knows.”

  “No. Everyone does not know. A few people at work know and say nothing because they take their lead from you. And because you do not want us to go public, we have lived a secret life for two years. So less of the ‘Everyone knows we are meant for each other’ line.”

  He looked at her, startled. “We went into it eyes open. Both of us,” he said.

  “And I’m walking out of it, eyes open,” Elsa said calmly.

  “You aren’t the kind of woman to hold out for an engagement ring,” he said with scorn in his voice.

  “Of course not. I didn’t exactly hold out, did I? I slept with you the third time I met you. That’s hardly playing games, withholding favors.”

  “So what are you talking about, then?” He was genuinely bewildered.

  “I told you. I wrote it all down before I left.”

  “You did like hell, you scribbled twelve jumbled lines that I still can’t make head nor tail of. Life is not meant to be a guessing game, Elsa. We are both far too old for this sort of thing. What do you want? Tell me. If you’re holding a gun to my head and saying we must be married, then all right if that’s what it takes, all right, that’s what we’ll do.”

  “I’ve heard of better proposals,” she said with a smile.

  “Stop playing the fool. If it’s the only way I can have you with me, I’ll marry you. Be proud to marry you,” he added as an afterthought.

  “No, thank you, Dieter. I don’t want to marry you.”

  “So what do you want?” he cried in near despair.

  “I want to get over you, to forget you, to make you no longer any part of my life.”

  “You took an odd way to show all that.” He looked down at the bed she had so recently left.

  Elsa shrugged. “I told you I no longer trust you, I don’t admire you or respect you anymore. Sex has nothing to do with those things. Sex is just sex, a short amount of pleasure, excitement. You told me that yourself, if you remember.”

  “I do remember, but it was in totally different circumstances. I wasn’t talking about us, not about you and me.”

  “Still, the principle is the same, isn’t it?” She was ice-calm now.

  “No, it’s not. In my case we were talking about a totally meaningless drunken encounter at a film festival with some very silly girl from the office whose name I can’t even remember.”

  “Birgit. And she remembers you.”

  “Only well enough to tell you and upset you over something that couldn’t have counted less.”

  “I know, I realize that.”

  “So tell me, Elsa, if you realize this, what in God’s name is all this drama about? Why did you leave?”

  “I wrote it in my letter.”

  “You did not write it, you wrote rubbish about responsibilities and lines having to be drawn. I swear I didn’t know what you meant. I still don’t know.” His handsome face was weary with emotion. His thick, dark hair was tousled.

  “Birgit told me about Monika,” Elsa said.

  “Monika? Monika? But she was ages before I met you. We agreed that the past was past. Didn’t we?”

  “Yes.”

  “So why bring her up? I swear I never saw her since I met you. Not even once.”

  “I know.”

  “So explain to me, I beg you. If you know I haven’t seen or thought of Monika in years . . . what is this about?”

  “You haven’t seen or thought of your daughter either?”

  “Ah,” Dieter said. “Birgit really went to work, didn’t she?”

  Elsa said nothing.

  “It was never meant to happen. I told Monika I wasn’t ready to be a parent, to settle down. She knew that from the very start. There were no gray areas.” He was beginning to bluster now.

  “How old is she, Dieter?” Elsa’s voice was level.

  He was genuinely confused. “Monika?”

  “Gerda. Your daughter.”

  “I don’t know, I told you I have nothing to do with them.”

  “You must know.”

  “About eight or nine, I suppose. But why do you keep probing it, Elsa, all that has nothing to do with us.”

  “You fathered a child, that has something to do with
you.”

  “No, it has not. That was a long past incident in my life and not my fault. Monika was in charge of contraception. I have nothing to do with her child, never had and never will. We all began again.”

  “But Gerda began with no father.”

  “Stop calling her by her name, you don’t know her, you’re only repeating tittle-tattle from that bitch Birgit.”

  “You should have told me.”

  “No, if I had, that would have been wrong too. You would have said I was always hanging around a child from a previous relationship. Be fair, Elsa, you would not have liked that either.”

  “I’d have liked it a hell of a lot more than a father who opted out and left a child hoping and wondering.”

  “That is fantasy talk. You don’t know anything about that child.”

  “It’s my story all over again. My father left home and I spent years waiting and hoping and wondering. Every birthday, every Christmas, every summer. I was so sure he would write or call or come to see me.”

  “It was different in your case. Your father had lived at home with you. You had a right to think he would always be around. In my case I had nothing to do with Monika’s child. Not ever. There were no expectations.”

  Elsa gave him a long look.

  “What do you want me to do?” he asked eventually.

  “Nothing, Dieter.”

  “You’d come back to me if I made some kind of link to this totally strange child?”

  “No, I will not come back to you, ever.”

  “But all this . . .” Again he looked at the bed where they had made love. “Did it mean nothing to you?”

  “You know it did. It meant good-bye,” she said, and put on her dress and her sandals. She put her underwear in her bag and walked to the door.

  “You can’t do this,” he cried.

  “Good-bye, Dieter,” she said and walked through the manicured little rock gardens of the Anna Beach toward the gate. She slung her navy jacket over her shoulder.

  From his bungalow Dieter called after her. “Don’t go, Elsa, please don’t go. I love you so much. Don’t leave me.”

  But she walked on.

  Vonni had realized there was no milk in Maria’s house and that everyone would want it in the morning. As soon as Maria’s breathing became regular, Vonni slipped out of the big double bed and found a big pottery jug. She would go to the Anna Beach, where the kitchen would be open all night.

  She was returning with the jug that they had willingly filled for her, when she saw the beautiful German girl walking alone.

  There were tears on her face. Vonni pulled back behind a big bougainvillea so as not to encounter her. Then she heard a man calling and shouting.

  Vonni didn’t speak much German, but she could understand what he was saying. And if she were any judge at all, he meant it, whoever he was.

  But Elsa did not look back.

  EIGHT

  Thomas had gone out for hot fresh bread and figs for their breakfast. He made a large pot of coffee and rattled the cups.

  Fiona emerged pale and tired-looking, but with a grateful smile.

  David had folded the light rug Thomas had given him, and plumped up the cushions. He came eagerly to the breakfast table.

  “He spoils us, Fiona, weren’t we lucky to find a benefactor?”

  “Oh, I know,” Fiona said eagerly. “I feel much, much stronger today. I’m full of plans now, so I am.”

  Thomas smiled at her. “Tell us your plans,” he said.

  “I’m going up to the station to see the chief of police, now that I’m calm and not hysterical. I’ll ask him to help me find Shane, he might know where he would head for. We were only in Athens for twenty-four hours on the way here, but he loved Syntagma Square. Perhaps Georgi might know some policemen there who could get him a message. Then I’ll go back to Eleni’s and change my clothes. I’ve been wearing this dress for days. Then I’m going to find Vonni and ask her if she needs any help with the children.”

  Her eyes were bright and enthusiastic. The dead, defeated look had gone.

  David too seemed to be energized. “I’m going to walk up to that taverna and see Andreas again; he was such a gentleman, if that isn’t too stupid a word.”

  “That’s exactly what he is and he’d be so happy to see you again. Give him our best, won’t you?”

  “I’ll do that,” David promised.

  “And I too have several things to do today. Later on when they’re all awake in California I’ll call my son. However, first I’m going to find Vonni. She didn’t come home to her shed last night . . .”

  “How on earth do you know?” David was surprised.

  “Because normally she pokes around there with her torch; she didn’t do that last night. But when I find her this time I’m going to insist that she stay in her own bedroom. I’m getting tetchy and antsy just having her living in that place in the yard.”

  “Antsy?” Fiona asked.

  “I know, it’s a great word, isn’t it? Means something irritates you, gives you ants in your pants.”

  “Shane will love that,” Fiona said happily.

  And neither of the men could think of anything to say.

  Elsa was in her apartment. She knew that she would not sleep so she sat on her little balcony and watched the dawn come up in Aghia Anna.

  She saw the little town come to life.

  Then, as if she had finally accepted that the night with all its fears and nightmares was over, she went in and had a long shower and washed her hair.

  She put on a fresh yellow cotton dress and sat down with a cup of coffee to watch the ferry getting ready to leave. He would leave on the eight A.M. for Athens. She was very certain of this. Dieter knew she wasn’t coming with him. So why wait for the eleven A.M.? He wasn’t a person to hang about. He had sent Claus and the others ahead of him by the chartered plane yesterday. He knew there was no point in searching the town for her. He would never see her on this balcony, but she would be able to see him and know that he had gone.

  She couldn’t pick him out in the crowd that lined up before the brightly colored gangplank. Yet she knew he would be there. They knew each other very well despite everything.

  And then she saw him, his hair tousled, wearing an open-necked shirt and gripping that leather bag which she had seen so often. His eyes were raking the crowds as if he were going to see her in their number. He saw nothing, nobody he recognized, but he knew her well enough to assume that she was watching.

  He put down his bag and raised both his arms in the air. “I love you, Elsa,” he called out. “Wherever you are, I will always love you.”

  Some of the young men near him clapped him on the back approvingly. Declaring love was good.

  Elsa sat there like stone as the little ferry sailed across the sea to Piraeus, the harbor of Athens. The tears dropped slowly down her face and splashed into her coffee and onto her lap.

  “David, my friend, welcome, welcome.” Andreas was delighted to see him.

  David wished that he could have a father like this, a man whose face lit up when he approached, not a man whose features had set in discontent and disappointment over his only son for as long as David could remember.

  He and Andreas talked easily about the sad funeral yesterday and how Aghia Anna would never be the same again.

  “Did you know Manos well?” David asked.

  “Yes, we all know each other here, there are no secrets, we know everyone’s history. Manos used to come here to play with Adonis and another boy when he was a child, they made a swing on that tree over there. He used to come up here to escape from his family; there were eight of them, and Adonis was an only child, so we were happy to have people come up here and play with him. When my wife, who has now gone to God, was cooking, she could look out the window and see the boys playing with the old dog and the swing, and she knew Adonis was safe. I wonder if she can see from heaven, David . . . see poor Manos buried, see Adonis over in Chicago cutting
himself off from everything here. If hearts can be heavy in heaven, her poor heart will be like a lump of lead.”

  David wished so much that he had the gentle insights of someone like Thomas. Thomas would have said something thoughtful and helpful, he might even have found a couple of lines of poetry that would be appropriate. David could think of no quotation that was remotely suitable.

  “I only know about Jewish heaven and I actually don’t know all that much about that,” he said apologetically.

  “Well, do the people in Jewish heaven see what’s going on down here, do you think?” Andreas asked.

  “Yes, I think so, but I believe that they have a broader view of things, like they see the whole picture. That’s what I heard, anyway.”

  Oddly, it seemed to give Andreas some comfort. He nodded several times. “Come, David, share a lunch with me. We won’t see many visitors today.”

  David looked at the open cabinets of food the old man had prepared and he felt a lump in his throat. To have got all this ready and then have nobody to arrive. “I never tried that big pasta dish,” he began.

  “David, if you don’t mind, I can freeze that one. I only made it this morning. Could I persuade you to have the moussaka or the calamaria? It’s not great hospitality asking you to eat only the items that have to go today.” Andreas laughed at himself, embarrassed.

  “I’d prefer the moussaka; I only said the pasta because it was big. I didn’t want to see all your hard work go to waste,” David said.

  “What a kind person you are. Sit here in the sunshine and I will get the glasses and plates.”

  And David sat wondering what that foolish young man was doing in Chicago when he could be here.

  Eleni welcomed Fiona back. It was a shock to see all Shane’s things gone, his canvas bag, his crumpled shirts and jeans, his tin of tobacco and papers for rolling cigarettes. She had hoped desperately that he might have left a note for her here with this family. But it hadn’t happened.

  She felt very dizzy suddenly, as if she would fall down. Perhaps it was the stuffy room or the realization that Shane really had gone out of her life.