by Maeve Binchy
Thomas sat with his head in his hands thinking how pathetic he was not to be able to find something to say to the boy he loved with all his heart.
“Vonni?”
“Come in, Georgi, sit down.”
“You have nice things here.” The policeman looked around.
“Some of it’s nice, yes. Thank you again for your hospitality last night, Georgi. They all loved it.”
“It’s not a time to be alone. I hear you’ve given up on teaching the widow to drive.”
“I turned it over to that nice English boy, but it was meant to be a secret.” Vonni laughed.
“In this town?”
“I know, I know.” Vonni stayed still.
He would tell her eventually what business had brought him here. “We got a call from Athens, that boy we exported, the Irishman, you know.”
“Oh, yes?” So he had called after all. Fiona had been right. Vonni didn’t know whether to be pleased or disappointed. “What did he say?”
“He said nothing. We got a call from a police station in Athens. He had been taken in for dealing in a bar. They found my card on him and wondered what I knew.”
“And what did you know, Georgi?” she asked.
“Nothing as yet. I wasn’t there to take his call. I wanted to discuss it with you. She’s such a nice little girl.”
“I know. So nice she’d probably get on the next ferry and go to ‘stand by her man.’ ”
“That’s what I thought,” Georgi said.
“You know the phrase about locking people up and throwing away the key?” she asked.
“I know the phrase and I’m often tempted. I think I’ll just tell them that we had a bit of girlfriend battering and drunkenness here. I don’t think I should say anything specific about Fiona, do you?”
“I think you’re right and we might not say anything to Fiona either. Do you agree?”
“Is that playing God, do you think?” Georgi wondered.
“Even if it is, let’s do it. God was never around to help when that lout was beating the pulp out of Fiona. Maybe the Almighty needs a hand now and then,” said Vonni with a grim smile of satisfaction.
Much later that night, Vonni went upstairs and found Thomas sitting in his chair in the dark. “Holy Saint Joseph, you put the heart across me,” she said.
“Hi, Vonni.” He was very down.
“Did you ring your son and annoy him again?” she asked.
“No, I sat here for hours wondering what to say and I couldn’t think of anything, so I didn’t call him at all,” he confessed.
“Probably wiser in the long run,” Vonni said approvingly.
“What kind of a horse’s ass does that make me, not able to find things to say to a nine-year-old?” he asked.
“I’d say it makes you like every father and son in the world, unable to communicate.” She wasn’t as unsympathetic as the words might have sounded.
“He’s not my son,” Thomas said flatly.
“What do you mean?”
“What I say. Nearly ten years ago, when Shirley and I were trying for a baby, I went for a medical. Childhood mumps had made me sterile, apparently. I walked around all day wondering how to tell Shirley. But when I got home she had something to tell me. Wasn’t it wonderful, she was pregnant.”
“Did you tell her?”
“No. I needed time to think. I had no idea that she was cheating on me. Not a clue. And then because I didn’t speak then, I couldn’t later.”
“So you never spoke?”
“I love him as much as if he were mine.”
“He is yours, in every real sense,” Vonni said.
“Yes, that’s true. I raised him with her, I got his formulas in the night, I taught him to read, to swim. He’s mine as much as anyone’s. His natural father must have disappeared from the face of the earth. It wasn’t Andy, he only turned up years later. Andy thinks he’s mine.”
“Did you bring it up during the divorce?”
“What, and lose any chance of access to Bill?”
“Of course.” She nodded.
“He’s a wonderful boy, Vonni.”
“I’m sure he is. I’m very sure he is.” There was a long silence. “Go back to him, Thomas, it’s breaking your heart to be so far away.”
“I can’t. We all agreed it was for the best this way.”
“Agreements can be changed, plans can be rewritten,” Vonni said.
“I’d be worse back there than here. Suppose I had to look at that fool every day, posturing, pretending to be his father.”
“You are his father in every way that counts.” Vonni looked at the floor as she spoke.
“I wish I could believe that,” he said.
“You should believe it, Thomas.” She spoke with a quiet certainty, as if she knew what she was talking about.
His eyes met hers and suddenly it was crystal clear to Thomas that Vonni really did know what she was talking about. The night she had told him that he had made a dog’s dinner of his conversation with Bill, she had said that she too had a child. A son that she had lost forever by making the wrong decision.
Thomas closed his eyes. He had not prayed for a very long time, but tonight he prayed with all his heart. Please may he decide the right thing. Oh, please may he not lose that little boy.
ELEVEN
Vonni and David were drinking coffee at the café with the blue check tablecloths. Maria would be out shortly to have her driving lesson.
“She says you are a very good man and you don’t shout at her,” Vonni said approvingly.
“Poor Maria, did she expect people to shout at her?” David asked.
“Well, I did, for one, and Manos did too, so I think she did expect it, yes.”
“It doesn’t get you anywhere, shouting,” David said.
“I told Maria that you taught your mother to drive. She said your mother was fortunate to have such a son.”
“She doesn’t think so.”
“Why do you say that?” Vonni asked.
“Because it’s a fact. She sides with my father over everything. She parrots him all the time . . . I have a ready-made business to walk into, I can be my father’s right-hand man, his eyes and ears . . . I am so lucky. Most men would love to have a business that they could walk into, a company built up by his hard work.”
“And can you not tell her that you love them, but you don’t love the work?”
“I’ve tried and tried, but it ends in recriminations and arguments every single time. I’ve told them that I feel uneasy and as if I’m having a panic attack or something just as soon as I go in the doors . . . but you might as well talk to that harbor wall.”
“When you go back you’ll find that they have softened,” she began.
“I’m not going back,” he said.
“You can’t run away, stay here forever.”
“You did,” David said simply.
“I’m weary of telling people that those were different times.” Vonni sighed.
“I’m taking Maria up some of those mountainy roads today,” David reported to Vonni.
“God, you’re brave as a lion.” Vonni was admiring.
“She’s fine on her own, where you don’t meet too much traffic, she doesn’t get fussed.”
“But, David, those awful hairpin bends, those bits where the road sort of crumbles away.”
“I know, but aren’t these the very roads she’ll have to drive to hill villages if she’s going to work for you?”
“Yes, but in months or weeks, not days.”
“No, she’s better away from the town, huge trucks reversing at her out of that big ugly petrol station.”
“Tread softly on that petrol station, because you tread on my dreams,” Vonni warned.
“What do you mean?”
“That was my petrol station, I worked there day and night for years.”
“Never!”
“Oh yes it was.”
“Did you sell it or what
?”
“No, it was sort of taken away from me, too long and complicated a story to tell you now. What area are you and Maria driving in today? Just so that I’ll know to avoid it.”
“I thought we’d go up to see Andreas, that’s a windy road.”
“You like him, don’t you?” Vonni observed.
“Who wouldn’t like him? He’s so kind and gentle. He doesn’t pressure people into doing what they don’t want to do.”
“He’s set in his ways, of course,” Vonni said.
“But good ways,” David said. “His son must be a real fool not to come back from Chicago and help him.”
“Maybe.” Vonni shrugged doubtfully.
“Why maybe? The boy works in a vegetable shop miles and miles away in the middle of a big noisy neighborhood, Andreas says, when he could be here in this wonderful place helping his father.”
Vonni stood looking at David quizzically, her head to one side.
“What is it?” he asked eventually.
“You know what it is, David. Couldn’t someone say exactly the same about you? You have a father, and in your case a mother too, who miss you and wonder what you are doing miles and miles away.”
“It’s different,” David said mutinously.
“Oh yes?”
“It’s totally different. My father isn’t reasonable, he’s just never wrong. No one could live with him.”
“There were ways that Adonis found the very same thing in his father. Andreas wouldn’t get lights on the taverna roof, he wouldn’t have live bouzouki music to draw the people up the hill in the evening. Adonis could suggest nothing, change nothing. Andreas was always right.”
“I don’t see that in him, not a bit,” David said a little coldly.
“No? Well, of course he’s polite and respectful to you; people often are not courteous to their own sons.” She looked thoughtful.
“Do you wish you had a son, Vonni?” David asked.
“But I do have a son, called Stravos, like his father.”
“And are you courteous and polite to him?” David asked, hiding his surprise.
“I don’t see him, to be courteous or discourteous.”
“You must see him sometimes?” David was startled.
“No. Not at all. But in the days when I did see him I was going through a rather odd period when I was polite to nobody, least of all to him. So he has no way of knowing how much I miss him and how respectful and warm I could be to him these days.”
She straightened herself up and looked purposeful again. “Right. I’m taking those children with me so that you can take their mother up the Wall of Death or wherever you want to go with her.”
She looked off, calling out something in Greek to the children, who sounded delighted.
“What did you tell them?” David asked.
“I brought up the topic of ice cream; it seemed to appeal,” she said.
“I bet you were always courteous to everyone.” He smiled at her.
“No, David, it would be wrong to think that, but don’t go asking about me, they’ll tell you nothing. The only person who can explain my troubled life is me.”
At that point Maria came out her door ready for her driving lesson. She greeted Vonni and then turned to David. “Pa-may, David,” she said.
“Pa-may, Maria,” said David.
Vonni watched, amazed, as Maria got into the van on the driver’s side, looked in the rearview mirror, and slid the van out easily onto Harbor Road. If this boy was going to stay in Aghia Anna, maybe he had a career ahead of him in teaching everyone to drive.
Andreas and his brother Georgi were playing a game of backgammon in a café near the police station. They saw the familiar van drive by that Manos had hurtled around Aghia Anna in.
“That’s Maria! Someone’s teaching her to drive!” Georgi exclaimed.
“That will be Vonni, I expect,” Andreas said.
“No, it looks like a man.”
“It’s that boy David Fine. Such a good young man,” Andreas said, pleased.
“Yes, isn’t he,” Georgi said. They sat silently for a while. “Was there any word from . . . ,” Georgi began.
“No, no word,” Andreas said quickly.
“Of course they might not have heard over there,” Georgi said.
“No, indeed.” Andreas clicked the pieces on the board.
There would be no more talk about Adonis far away in Chicago. They spoke about their sister, Christina, who had had a troubled youth but was happy now living with a kind man on the other side of the island. They didn’t talk about her past nowadays. Nor indeed did they talk about Georgi’s former wife, who would have known Manos and his friends when they were children. She had not gotten in touch either.
Thomas found the bookshop. “Vivliopolio,” Vonni had told him earlier.
“Really?” Thomas said. “It sounds like a vitamin drink.”
“You know the V in Greek looks like a mad B with a sort of leg hanging out of it. When I came here, one of the first things I wanted to find was a bookshop, and when I found it I thought that it was Biblionwakyo or something, like the French word bibliotheque.”
“Aren’t you funny?” he said to her affectionately.
“I’m a scream,” said Vonni. “What are you looking for in the bookshop?”
“German poetry, as it happens. Would you think they might have any?”
“They might,” Vonni said. “You never know.”
And she was right. The bookshop had a small section, including a book of Goethe’s work, German on one side and English on the page opposite. Thomas bought it and went outside to sit on a bench near the store. He studied it carefully until he found something appropriate. Then he took out his notebook and wrote it down:
Kennst du das Land, wo die Zitronen blühn?
Im dunkeln Laub die Gold-Orangen glühn,
He wrote the translation beside it:
Know you the land where the lemon trees bloom?
And in the dark foliage the gold oranges glow,
He would learn it by heart and quote it to Elsa. She must not be allowed to think that he didn’t know German writers.
He was just beginning to copy the next bit, which was all about soft winds, myrtles, and laurels standing tall, when he felt a shadow fall over the page. It was Elsa looking over his shoulder to see what he was reading. Then she moved back and spoke the lines to him.
“Kennst du es wohl? Dahin! dahin
Möcht ich mit dir, o mein Geliebter, ziehn.”
“All right I give up,” he said. “I haven’t read the translation. What does it mean?”
“It means . . . let me see . . . it means . . . ‘There, there is where I would go, oh my beloved with you.’ ”
And as she said it they looked at each other slightly embarrassed, as if they had accidentally uncovered something too intimate.
“Did he come to Greece, Goethe? Is this the land where the lemon trees bloom?” Thomas asked, to move the conversation into safer waters.
“It was the Mediterranean certainly, but I think it was mainly Italy he traveled in, he was mad about Italy. But of course he could have come to Greece as well. This is where I am showing my ignorance.” Elsa looked apologetic.
“What about mine? Until now I never read a word he wrote, in any language,” Thomas confessed.
“And why are you reading it now?”
“To impress you,” he said simply.
“You don’t have to, I’m impressed already,” Elsa said.
Andreas got a phone call from Ireland. “Is this a taverna in Aghia Anna?” the voice asked.
“Yes, it is, can I help you?”
“Fiona Ryan called her family from your taverna on the day of your terrible tragedy.”
“Yes, yes, I remember.”
“I’m Barbara, Fiona’s best friend at home. Fiona gave your number in case she got cut off, so I rang because . . . well, I was wondering, are they still in Aghia Anna?”
&nbs
p; “Yes, is there any problem?”
“No, not a problem really . . . Excuse me, who am I speaking to?”
“My name is Andreas, this is my taverna.”
“Oh good, and have you seen her since?”
“This is a very small place, we see almost everyone every day.”
“Oh good, and Fiona’s all right, is she?”
Andreas paused. All right? The girl looked wretched; she had been beaten by her boyfriend, who had then abandoned her and gone to Athens, where he was now in jail waiting trial on drug dealing. Fiona had suffered a miscarriage and she still thought that Shane was coming back to find her. All right? Hardly.
But even though his instinct was to tell this pleasant woman Barbara all that had happened, he knew it wasn’t his story to tell.
“They all seem to like it here,” he said lamely.
“All? You mean she’s been able to make friends with Shane in tow? Usually people avoid them like the plague.”
“Very nice people—German, American, English,” he said to reassure her.
“Well that is a surprise. Listen, Andreas, is there anywhere I could send her an e-mail or a fax, do you think?”
“Certainly.” He gave her the numbers of the police station.
“And we were all very sorry about what happened there. It must have been a nightmare.”
“Thank you. You are very kind and sympathetic,” he said.
And she was kind and sympathetic, unlike his coldhearted son in Chicago. Andreas wished over and over that he had not written that letter to Adonis. But he had promised Elsa. And it was too late now, the letter was nearly there.
Fiona had gone to see Dr. Leros for an examination and a checkup, as she had promised.
“Everything is fine,” he said. “You are a healthy young woman. Plenty more chances of babies.”
“Oh, I hope so someday,” Fiona said.
“Are you going back to your country?”
“No, I have to wait until Shane comes back here to find me. I was hoping to get a job here. I’m a qualified nurse. Is there anything I could do for you, for example, in your practice here?”
