Three Summers Page 10

  Nikitas lit a cigarette and walked over toward the pavilion. His blond hair and blue eyes made him stand out like a bright spot in an already bright atmosphere.

  This was the hour when the discussion of the magazine would begin—in the meantime Petros would have arrived. We would settle ourselves in the armchairs, the wind blowing, and tease each other and laugh. But their decision was serious: they were going to publish a magazine.

  Nikitas wrote poems and Petros something he called essays on aestheticism. Beauty is this and this, he would write, or Art is this and this. The relation between Truth and Beauty is . . . Often he would refer to great poets and argue who was greater. At other times he would write about theories and modern trends, making projections about the future. “You must transcend your own time,” Petros said. “You must be original,” Nikitas said.

  I listened carefully. Their ideas worried me. Unconsciously I tried to keep their words at a distance, to hear them as if they were foreign, so that I could still have my way of seeing things. They wrote, I didn’t. I didn’t have anything to write. Although I had written good essays in elementary school—the teacher had even read them to the rest of the class—in middle school I was the worst. I was always forgetting the connection between the beginning, the main theme, and the ending. I didn’t write like they did. I also thought about how the books I read couldn’t have been written using their theories and rules, nor could those who wrote the books have been trying to be original. I attempted to tell them this one day.

  “What if writers were free,” I began, “completely free, and if . . .”

  “Is Margarita coming?” Petros broke in.

  I thought he was just being mean.

  “How should I know?”

  It wasn’t long ago that Petros asked me if I would go steady with him, and if I agreed he would go steady with me. It seemed like a funny idea so I laughed. I had no desire to have thoughts of Petros floating around in my head, making me miserable. I knew how girls suffered when they had someone on their mind. On the other hand I didn’t want him thinking about Margarita.

  “You know she stayed back a year,” I said.

  “Who?”

  “Margarita.”

  “Is that supposed to be news? We’ve known that since June.”

  Nonetheless, even though I knew how girls suffered when they had someone on their mind, one night I couldn’t sleep because that same afternoon on the road to Mr. Louzis’s I had met David, the astronomer, as they had already begun to call him.

  It was almost six months since he had returned from England and he still hadn’t visited anyone, not Mr. Louzis, not the Parigoris, not us.

  In the beginning he had closed himself off with some builders who demolished the left turret of the house and put a revolving iron dome in its place. “It will open mechanically and then we’ll see the heavens,” said Kapatos. When he wasn’t in jail he was a builder, and everyone in the neighborhood supported him in the hopes that he would get himself back on the right road—besides he never committed crimes near home. Then when that task was accomplished and the various instruments had been installed, David had started writing—at least that’s what they say—a study of a certain star. No matter how you explain it though, it was terribly impolite of him not to have visited us, even formally, since he had been gone such a long time and we were family friends.

  At first I didn’t recognize him. It had been four years since I’d seen him and he had grown a beard. I was walking along singing, whipping the air with my switch, when he suddenly appeared from behind a blackberry bush at a curve in the road. I was about to greet him, welcome him, but instead I just looked at him and went on walking.

  It was a strange moment that floated in space and then flew away before I could catch it, hazy, and yet perfectly clear because it captured all my old hatred and jealousy for the colorful rubber balls and the striped jackets with gold buttons that used to be sent to David from England. Also, I had been scared of his eyes when I was really little because they were so black and shiny like the witch’s eyes in a painting by some famous painter that hung on Aunt Theresa’s wall. I remember how their similar eyes made the two of them merge in my mind sometimes as a sort of alternative kind of being, a scary being, other times as mother and child, and still other times as the same person with two different faces that could be changed like clothes.

  And his house also had something sad about it: so tall with three floors and two turrets, one to the right and one to the left, with a very few narrow windows just where you didn’t expect them, one off in the right-hand corner, the other down to the left, the other floating in the middle. It looked like a castle out of a Mickey Mouse cartoon, one in which the mice would have wild parties at night and dance quadrilles in the holes of a huge, half-eaten cheese.

  It was dark gray with a border of red bricks around all the windows. It didn’t have a garden or a fence. Its land was sown with potatoes and onions.

  In the morning, against the backdrop of sun and sky, David’s house looked a little silly, but at dusk and at night it had an exceedingly serious air to it. This was because dusk, like a painter, gave a certain overpowering tone to the landscape that united all the colors and effaced discord so that in the end one couldn’t imagine anything suiting the night better than David’s house, nor anything suiting David’s house better than those fields sown with potatoes and onions.

  When I reached it on the way to Mr. Louzis’s I knew I had gone halfway.

  I remember the inside fairly well, not so much from seeing it, but more as if I had read a description of it in a book or had heard people talking about it. The deer antlers hanging on the wall in the entry hall; the lion feet on the table and chairs in the dining room (there was no window in the dining room); the books in the library all bound in exactly the same way so that you thought it was many copies of the same book and that if you had read one you had read them all. But none of this prepared you for Ruth’s colorful room.

  It was rose-colored the last time I saw it and the time before that, white. At other times it had been blue or yellow. Of course the walls and the floor didn’t change colors, it was just all the rest: the curtains, the bedspread, the tablecloth on the small table, the two or three pillows that lay on the floor, the chair covers. I nearly forgot the doll. It never moved from its place on the pillow where it sat coquettishly, but its dress changed often.

  “It’s a personal need,” Ruth would say. “When my mood changes”—she had her own way of speaking, a mixture of colloquial and scholarly Greek, all with an English accent—“I have to change the color around me to match.” In the same way Aunt Theresa “compensated” when the cards didn’t come out right in solitaire, and then afterwards tried to convince herself that they had come out right all by themselves, Ruth changed the color of her room, not so much because her mood had changed but because she wanted to change her mood.

  On the dressing table between the bottles and makeup, there were all sorts of tiny animals, made of porcelain, ivory, clay, grazing next to each other, a valuable porcelain elephant next to a cheap, colorful cat bought in the flea market, the sky blue borzoi next to a stumpy wooden dog. The same kind of things were also on the shelves between the books, which were never the same since Ruth gave them away as soon as she had read them. On the walls the faces of movie stars who she happened to admire at that time smiled down; sometimes they were famous, other times they were unknown, perhaps just playing the role of postman or maid, but bound for glory. And every year there would be photographs of the most recent tennis champions.

  On the whole, though, Ruth was a very simple person. And with her small build, her blond hair down to her shoulders, and her merry eyes, it was hard to imagine that she was forty-five years old and had a son as old as David. Her childish looks and manners, her blue eyes, and her pale complexion made me wonder how she could be a Jew. Even when I told myself that she was an English Jew, so of course she could have blond hair, I couldn’t ge
t rid of the image I had from reading the Old Testament of Jews as dark-skinned, pensive people with dark shiny hair. I thought of them as having olive oil skin, yellow fingers, a repelling yet intriguing nature, sweet and sneaky voices, a bitter soul.

  Ruth, on the other hand, was always laughing. She had two deep lines on either side of her mouth, but none around her eyes or forehead. She was pleasant to be around, and she wanted everyone, even children, even David, to call her Ruth. By doing this and leaving her hair down she thought she would never grow old.

  She had met David’s father in England, in a big port. Their first meeting was sort of romantic. One rainy evening when she had forgotten her umbrella and was running like a soaked cat, she slipped and fell. At the same moment a gentleman leaned down and tried to help her up. “Come, come my child,” he said, “it’s nothing”—in the dark he had mistaken her for a small child. Ruth, though, began to cry loudly, saying that certainly she had broken her backbone and that no one should move her from that spot. The gentleman, after failing to persuade her to move, was obliged to pick her up by force whereupon he saw, through the thick curtain of rain that made the streetlights yellow, that she had a slight scratch on her knee and that she was not a little girl at all.

  Ruth never stopped playing such childish tricks, just as she never stopped changing the color of her room, nor having around her the miniature animals she loved and the photographs of the actors she admired. Though this was the excuse for small quarrels with her husband, it was also the main basis of their happiness and the reason he was still as in love with her as he had been on the first day they met.

  She too was as in love with him as she had been on that first day. Leaving aside that he was a shipowner and had to deal with ships, seas, and freight, as well as his mania for good English tobacco and whiskey, she saw in him the direct descendants, on the one hand, of the heroes who fought at Marathon, and on the other hand, of the philosophers who could live off bread and water and sleep in a barrel.

  The fact that he was a Greek Orthodox and she was an English Jew had given a special charm to their relationship right from the beginning, the charm of the slightly forbidden or sacrilegious. And as they did not always live together—his office was in an English port and she preferred the climate of Kifissia—the few months they spent together always had an air of adventure.

  She was immensely happy when she was expecting his return. But she was never sad when he left, nor was there any particular goodbye ritual. She would be combing her hair or drinking her milk, and he would lean down and kiss her and say goodbye, while he distractedly stared at a vase of the season’s first chrysanthemums. And seated there, she too would kiss him and say goodbye, arranging the folds of her bathrobe. It was exactly the way they had said goodbye a few days ago when David’s father, instead of going to England, had gone off on a walk to the main square to drink ouzo with Mr. Louzis.

  We had not experienced all those things for four years. We hadn’t heard Ruth’s chattering, the calm step of David’s father, nor the music box in the front hall under the deer antlers, which would play two tunes, one after the other, after you wound it up: the monotonous Byzantine hymn to the Panaghia and Christ that Ruth loved so much, and an English love song with words from Shakespeare that also sounded like a prayer. We hadn’t had all this for four years, and we hadn’t realized how much we’d missed it. But my meeting with David brought it all back. That night after I had seen him I couldn’t sleep—all the old images passed before me: Ruth’s animals dancing to the tune of the love song, the sun-drenched field with the potatoes spreading out in front of the wall of the dining room that had no window, and David’s eyes, black and shiny, the same as the witch’s, filling me with that old childhood fear.

  •

  From that day on, my walk as far as Mr. Louzis’s took on another meaning. Every time I set out and thought to myself that I might meet David, I felt a flame dance inside of me. “When I think of him, my heart beats,” Eleni used to say about Emilios. But if there had been someone to tell me I’d meet him for sure, I’d never have set out or I’d have run home. In the evening, looking at the light and the shadows that played in the water of the cistern, I would imagine our future meeting, down to the smallest detail: what he would say to me, what I would say to him, what I would be wearing, how he would look at me. Perhaps we would sit down on the roots of an olive tree. It had been three days now since Emilios had kissed Eleni under a pine tree. That astronomers existed, I knew—just a few days ago I had seen the photograph of the most famous astronomer in the world in an American magazine. He was fat with a baby face, and wore glasses—and I also knew that poets existed. But in the same way that Jews for me could never be blond, even when I had Ruth right in front of me, poets and astronomers couldn’t have houses and beds, nor drink their morning coffee with milk. But David loved coffee with milk, and ever since he was small he would hold his cup very politely—an obedient well-behaved boy with his striped jacket and gold buttons. His house was funnier now than then, on the one side a turret, and on the other a round, iron dome that shone in the sun like an old tin can! Perhaps I should have greeted him. He probably misunderstood my silence, attributing it to my old dislike for him. He must have learned that a few months before he left, I persuaded all the other kids in our gang not to speak to him in an attempt to deflate his grand image of himself. The few times he came to our house or we went to his, he would act all distracted and either disappear or go and talk with the grown-ups on the veranda. Mr. Louzis said, “He’s an extremely clever child.” David’s tongue loosened when he spoke with Mr. Louzis, and his distant and ironic stare would reach as far as the pavilion where we would be sitting. He would say good night to us very politely, bowing before us as if we were ladies, though he wouldn’t kiss our hands. “What a wimp!” Maria would say. “How unpleasant!” I would say. And we would all agree that he was stuck-up.

  Ruth hadn’t come back yet. Too bad. If she were here she would have invited us over. But of course if someone said, “Do you want to marry David? He wants to marry you,” I would have responded, “No, no, no, a thousand times no.” When I see him next I’ll run up and ask him about the heavens and stars. Perhaps it would be more polite to start by asking him about university, and telling him about Maria’s wedding and all that has gone on here. If Petros only knew where my thoughts were now . . .

  Yesterday afternoon, seeing Kapatos return from David’s with his shovel on his shoulder, I let some time pass, and then walked that way.

  At dusk, Mother Kapatos would pull up a chair and sit in front of her house, her back against the wall. And her tired glance would not dare to wander far. It would fix on the mound of old tin cans, rusty wire, and other junk her children had gathered and stacked in front of the door. Farther away the trees bent in the wind, and Gekas’s taverna was full; farther away was Ruth’s room of many colors, then Athens, then the rest of the world.

  Kapatos’s sons, so young and poor, seemed to find consolation in gathering things that had volume and weight. In the pile by their house you could find wire too thick to bend and pieces of cans as sharp as knives. But the most valuable thing was a boat, a real one, and fairly large, too. Who knows how it ended up in the woods near here, but they found it there and dragged it home. It sits on top of the pebbles and thyme, next to the rest of the rubbish. It seems to have widened over the years. Away from the sea it looks like a drowned man whose stomach is swollen with water. But it also manages to retain a fine silhouette and a nostalgia for the sea, especially when you look at it sideways, like a woman after thirty years of marriage, wide-hipped and heavy-breasted, can still have shapely hands and legs, and a perfect nose. The boat wouldn’t float: its timber creaks and must be cracked; but this doesn’t matter because for the children it’s a toy and it’s unlikely that it will ever see the sea again.

  About this time Kapatos arrives and eats a plate of food. Then he crosses himself, lights his cigarette, and leaves. No one speaks to
him. Even Koula gives him his plate silently, as if to a dog who has no master. In the old days they were scared of him because he would beat them. Now that he doesn’t have the strength nor the temper to do that, they simply despise him. They don’t let him sleep in the house. When he’s in jail no one goes to visit him. And when he’s about to say something, their silence rises like a wall in front of him and stops him. Then he looks at them with his one eye, his left, which resembles a blue bead, while his right one, closed and covered in a wrinkled eyelid, looks inward. If the conscience like the heart resided in a certain part of the body, Kapatos’s conscience would certainly reside in his eye.

  I found them all in their usual places, the way you find actors on stage, one sitting, one standing and talking, a third staring sadly into the audience, using the same gestures and words they used yesterday at this time. Mother Kapatos was sitting with her back to the wall. Kapatos was lying two or three meters away waiting for his food. Koula was going to and fro fixing it, the boys were out, the boat was empty, and the oldest daughter, Amalia, was reading.

  Amalia had just finished high school with many sacrifices and she was planning to become a teacher and move far away. She had a passion for learning. Her eyes, even paler than Kapatos’s, took on color and life when she talked of books, in particular about those Russian books her big brother sent her from Kavala, where he was a tobacco worker. Those books talked of a different world, a world for men and women whose dream was not a house and garden but something less concrete and yet more grand.