by Maeve Binchy
It turned out to be David, later that afternooon.
Thomas and Elsa had gone for a walk down the coast, and Fiona had gone to ask Georgi if there had been any news from Athens.
David sat on the harbor wall with his Greek phrase book, and Vonni came to join him. She helped him with some pronunciation. “You’ll be speaking like a native soon,” she encouraged him.
“Hardly. But I do like it here; people have proper values, they’re not obsessed with making money.”
“Scratch them and you’ll find that a fair few of them are,” Vonni said.
He told Vonni about the invitation to his father’s award ceremony back home, how ludicrous it would all be. He took the invitation from the little music case he always carried, and she read it carefully.
Then he handed her his mother’s letter to read as well. To his surprise she had tears in her eyes.
“You’ll go back, of course?” she said.
“No, I can’t. Six months later it would be something else. I’d never escape, I’d be sucked back in. No, Vonni, you of all people understand how important it is to get away. You never went back to Ireland, did you?”
“I wanted to, a thousand times I wanted to go back and see them. Like for my sister’s wedding, like for my father’s retirement party, when my mother was in hospital. All those times and many more. But I was never welcome, so I couldn’t go.”
“How do you know that you would not have been welcome?” David asked. “Did you have friends you kept in touch with?”
“No, my friends were all furious with me; I had done all the things they would love to have done—had sex with a grown-up man, abandoned school, cashed a rocky check in the bank strike, ran off to the isles of Greece. No, they didn’t keep in touch, but oddly Jimmy Keane did. I think he felt guilty. If he hadn’t sacked Stavros, none of this might have happened. So he alone replied to my letters. I told him that I was delighted he had sacked Stavros. I think that made him feel better. Anyway, he told me all that was going on and I knew something about Ardeevin, not much but something.”
“And he kept writing then?”
“Yes, but you see I went mad then and that sort of changed everything.” She spoke as casually as if she were saying that she went somewhere on the bus instead of out of her mind.
“It wasn’t really ‘mad,’ was it?” David asked.
“Oh, I think so. It was because of Magda, you see. She had a terrible husband, very violent over nothing, always imagining that Magda was flirting with people. But the truth was that she tidied her house, cooked her husband’s meals, and kept her head bent over her embroidery. That’s what we thought the truth was, anyway. And it might well have been. Possibly she didn’t raise her head from her embroidery until Stavros was kind to her. Who will ever know now?”
“And you liked her at first?”
“Oh yes indeed, she was a lovely, gentle woman with a beautiful smile; she had a hard life—no children, and a man who was unreliable. Sometimes she had bruises or a cut, but she said she was clumsy or tired and had fallen. Stavros played tavli in the café with her husband, like the other men. He didn’t really want to hear stories of what went on in that house: ‘It’s their life, Vonni, their marriage. We should not interfere.’
“And I suppose because I was so busy working long hours and looking after little Stavros . . . well, I went along with it. Until one day I went to collect a tablecloth, and she was sitting there, the blood dripping down onto the white material. I ran for old Dr. Leros, the father of Dr. Leros who is here now. He patched her up and said that this could not go on, we needed a strong man, someone like Stavros, to do something. So I told Stavros what he had said. And for once he listened to me and brought two of his friends with him.
“I don’t know what happened, but I gather they held Magda’s husband down on the floor for a while and told him what would happen to him if there was another incident.”
“And did he take them seriously?”
“Very seriously apparently, and Magda stopped being clumsy, as she called it, and walked with her head high and looked people in the eye for the first time. That was when people realized that she was very beautiful. Up to then we just thought she had beautiful hair,” Vonni explained in a small sad voice.
“Did you suspect that Stavros was . . . well . . . interested in her?” David asked gently.
“No, not at all. I was the last to know, the very last person in Aghia Anna. I had heard it’s often the way, but I didn’t believe it. Or if it happened I thought the wife must be spectacularly thicko. Anyway, it finally dawned on me.”
“How?”
“Well, not the best way, really. Little Stavros was at the petrol station. He was four then going on five. He asked why was Magda always so tired. I said I didn’t think she was and little Stavros said she must be, she always had to go to bed when she came to our house, and Papa had to go and sit with her. I remember that moment as if it were this morning I felt so dizzy and faint. Magda and Stavros? In our house? In my bed? It must be a misunderstanding. It had to be a mistake.”
“So what did you do?”
“The next day, I closed the petrol pumps and went home. Little Stavros was playing in the garden. We had a house over there behind Maria’s. I took him by the hand across to a neighbor, then I went back. I opened the door very quietly and went in. It was silent, then I heard them laughing. He was calling her his little furry rabbit, something he used to call me when we made love. I opened the door and stood and looked at them.
“She was beautiful with her long dark curls and her olive skin. I caught a reflection of myself in the mirror.”
There was a silence between them. Then Vonni spoke again. “And now it was all out in the open. I thought, Why had I come home and disturbed them? If I hadn’t come back we could have gone on forever, pretending everything was all right. All of us. But as I looked at her, and how beautiful she was, I knew I had lost. Of course he would want her, not me.
“So I said nothing, just looked from one to the other for what seemed a very long time. Then Stavros said, ‘Please don’t make a scene, Vonni, not in front of the child.’
“That’s what he thought of first, not upsetting little Stavros! To hell with upsetting me—I had left my family and my land to be with him. No worry about upsetting Vonni, who had stolen money to buy him a garage and worked it from dawn to dusk every day to make it a success. Suddenly things seemed as if they had tilted, like a picture being crooked on a wall. Nothing was right anymore.”
David listened, chilled by her intensity.
“I walked away. Out the door of our bedroom, out of our house. Past where little Stavros was playing with other children. I walked up to the top of the town and into a little bar. A place where normally only the old men sat and drank. I ordered raki, you know, the very rough spirit they have. It’s like poitin back home. I drank until I could forget the way her round beautiful shoulder had snuggled against his chest. I drank until I fell on the ground.
“They carried me home. I remember nothing of it. I woke up the next day in our bed. There was no sign of Stavros. I remembered her there in the bed and I got up to be very sick.
“There was no sign of little Stavros either. I went to work but the smell of the petrol and the exhaust of the cars made me sick again. I went to the bar where I had been the previous day, apologized for my behavior, asked them how much I owed them. They all shook their heads; they were not going to charge me for becoming incapable on their terrible and probably homemade liquor. Nervously I inquired what the reception had been when they took me home.
“Magda had taken my child, my child, to his grandfather the barber. Stavros had just pointed them to the bedroom and left. They couldn’t help me further. I had brandy this time, good Metaxa brandy to get me over the shock, and then I sort of crawled back to the petrol station, but I couldn’t talk to anyone so I went home. Home! Huh! There was nobody there. Four days and nights of drinking, then I realized they h
ad taken my child away from me. I heard like in a dream that Magda’s husband had gone away on a fishing boat in another island. And then I remember waking up in the hospital on the Kalatriada road.
“Christina, who had been Stavros’s first love, came to see me. ‘Pretend to be calm, pretend to be better, they’ll let you out,’ she said. So that’s what I did, pretended.”
“It worked?” David said.
“Only for a bit. Stavros would not speak to me, wouldn’t tell me what he had done with my son, and I knew I must not raise my voice again or I would be back in that hospital where they locked every door behind them.”
“And Stavros?”
“Had gone across the road, was living with her. I knew they were all watching me, so I couldn’t drink in the place at the top of the town. I bought a bottle here, a bottle there. I drank until I passed out. Apart from the night when they carried me home, I never slept in that bed again, always on the sofa. I don’t know how long it went on. Christina helped me pull myself together. And so, a lot cleaner, tidier, and relatively sober, I went up to see my husband.
“Politely he asked me to go away, to leave him. I could stay in the house. He had changed all the locks on the petrol pumps. The station was in his name. There was nothing I could do. He said that our son was living in Athens with his aunt and that I would never see him again. He explained as if he were talking to someone with mental problems that soon he would sell the garage, his garage, and that he and Magda would go and find little Stavros and settle somewhere new and build some kind of a life for him again. And suddenly I realized that this was exactly what would happen. I would be without my son, my love, my garage. Unable to go home, owing two and a half thousand pounds . . . I had paid five installments of one hundred pounds a year, which was hard enough going when I was working nine hours a day. How was I going to find that money now?”
“But in fairness, Stavros knew about the debt; surely he must have said he’d help you?” David was shocked.
“No, he never knew about it. I never told him. He thought it was my money, my savings,” Vonni said.
Then she moved away and left David sitting on the harbor wall with his Greek phrase book, to think about the story he just heard.
“Do you know what I don’t understand?” Fiona said the next day as they were adding David’s jigsaw pieces of the story to what they already knew.
“Why she didn’t get a lawyer?” Thomas suggested.
“She was in no position to do that. Stolen money in her background, he did give her the house, and she didn’t really know their customs and their ways here in a foreign community,” Elsa said.
“No,” Fiona continued, “I don’t understand how Andreas said that little Stavros came up to the taverna on the hill to play with his son Adonis and climb trees. He couldn’t have done that at four.”
“Maybe Stavros and Magda stayed for a while longer, a good time longer,” David suggested. “That would have been even harder for her to bear if her child just lived across the road.”
“Well, she’ll tell one of us; she promised that she would,” Thomas said.
“I didn’t want to push her anymore,” David apologized.
“You’re an easy person to talk to, David. I would not be at all surprised if she came back to you,” Elsa said to him with her wonderful smile.
Vonni came back to David sooner than he had expected.
“Can you do me a favor?”
“I’d love to,” he said.
“I have to deliver some potting clay and molds to the hospital, for their rehab classes. Will you come with me? You see, I just hate going there on my own. I keep thinking that they’ll lock the door behind me as they did before.”
“But you weren’t there very long,” David said. “Didn’t Christina get you out by telling you to pretend?”
“Oh yes, that was the first time. But I went back. I was there for years, really,” Vonni said casually. “Will we go and pick up Maria’s van now and head off? Will we?”
“We will, we will.” David smiled.
“Are you imitating my accent, young fellow?”
“Imitate you, Vonni? I wouldn’t dare!” he said.
“There’s a very nice part of the garden I’ll show you,” she said when the goods had been handed over. And they sat together looking down from one of the many hills that surrounded Aghia Anna, and she picked up her story once again.
“Once I knew I had lost everything, I didn’t see any point in pretending. I sold things out of the house, his house I always considered it, and bought drink. So I was back in here and out like a yo-yo. Stavros explained to everyone that I was an unfit mother. We didn’t have courts or laws or social workers then . . . or if we did I wasn’t sober or sane enough to understand them. I saw little Stavros once a week on Saturday for three hours. There was always someone else there, not him, not Magda, but my husband’s father sometimes or his sister, or Andreas, they trusted him.”
“Everyone would trust Andreas. You did too?”
“Of course. But the visits were not a success. I used to cry, you see, cry over all I had lost. All that could never be. And I would clutch at him and tell him how much I loved him and needed him. He was terrified of me.”
“No, no,” David murmured.
“Truly he was, he hated the meetings. Andreas used to drive him up the hill to his place, to the swing on the tree, to cheer him up after he had to deal with me, then I would get bladdered with drink to get over it. It went on for years. I mean years. He was twelve when they took him away.”
“They?”
“Stavros and Magda. It was in 1982 . . . and oddly it was when they were gone I decided that there was still a life to be lived. A man here killed himself that year and it shocked us all, particularly the drunks. That had been his little problem, you see. So I got sober. Sounds simple. It was far from simple, but I did it. But it was too late. My son was gone. No point in my trying to find out where. The boy’s grandfather was even kind to me in the end. But he wouldn’t tell me. I wrote him a letter on his birthday through his grandfather and later through his aunts every year. Even this year, when he was thirty-four.”
“And no answer ever?” David asked.
“No answer ever.”
“Does Andreas not know? He’s such a kind man, he’d tell you or he’d let your son know what you are like now.”
“No, Andreas doesn’t know.”
“He’d understand too; his own selfish son won’t come back to him from Chicago. Andreas knows what it feels like.”
“David, listen to me.”
“Yes.”
“There are two sides to everything. I was a pig of a mother when young Stavros was growing up, so how does he know I am mellow and easygoing now?”
“Someone might tell him,” David said.
Vonni brushed it away. “Listen to me, David, Andreas felt his way was the only way to run a taverna when Adonis was growing up. How does Adonis know that his father is lonely and sad, and wants him to come home?”
“As I said, Vonni, someone could tell him. Like you, for example.”
“Don’t be ridiculous, David, why would Adonis listen to a mad old fart, nearly as old as his father? He has to discover for himself that it might be worthwhile.”
“Well, they are so foolish, these young men, Adonis in Chicago and Stavros wherever he is. Why they can’t see sense and come back to you both is beyond me,” David said.
“There are probably many people in England who wonder the same about you,” Vonni said.
“It’s totally different.”
“Do you still have that letter with you?”
“Yes. But that doesn’t mean anything,” he said.
“David, you fool, I do like you hugely, but you are such a fool. That letter from your mother, she’s begging you to come home.”
“Where does she say that?”
“In every line. Your father’s ill. He may be dying for all you know.”
&nb
sp; “Vonni!”
“I mean it, David,” she said, and looked out to sea, as she had so many times from this place when her mind was gone.
THIRTEEN
Elsa had written nothing back to Dieter. She still needed time to think about it. There was no doubt that Dieter meant it. If he said he would marry her then he would be prepared to do that. It would not be easy for him; after years of being on his own he would get a lot of flack from his friends. He would hate the guilt of admitting that he had abandoned his own child. Which he would have to admit if he opened up a lifeline to little Gerda. He was prepared to do that for her also; he had said as much.
Up to now he had genuinely believed that their lives could run easily together and that there was nothing about the situation that needed to be altered. But when forced to make a choice he had made it. It was up to Elsa to tell him when she would be back home, and he would be there, waiting for her. So what was holding her back?
Elsa walked on her own up one of the winding roads away from town. She had not been this way before, and since she would be leaving soon she wanted to imprint the whole place on her mind. No smart restaurants, traditional tavernas, or craft shops on this road. Small, poor dwellings, sometimes with a goat or two outside, children playing among the hens and chickens.
Elsa stopped and looked at them. Would she and Dieter have children? A little blond boy and girl, different from these dark-eyed Greek children in every way except for the smiles. Would that take away some of the pain? Would her children grow up knowing that they had a stepsister, Gerda, who didn’t live with them?
She was smiling to herself at being so fanciful when unexpectedly Vonni came out of the house.
“Lord, Vonni, you’re everywhere!” Elsa exclaimed.
“I could say the same about all of you! I never move but I fall over one of you,” Vonni said with spirit.
“Where does this road lead? I just came up this way to explore.”
“It doesn’t really lead anywhere, just more of the same, but I have to deliver something a bit further on, come and walk with me, I could do with the company.” Vonni looked uncharacteristically downhearted.
