Three Summers Page 16

  I jumped out of bed and turned on the light, picked up my nightgown, slipped it on, and went out into the hallway. Infanta’s room was right across from mine. I knocked on the door. I knocked again.

  “Who is it? What’s up?”

  “It’s me, Katerina.”

  “What do you want at this hour?”

  “I have to tell you something. It’s urgent.”

  I heard her get up and unlock the door. She always locked her door. I don’t know why.

  When she opened the door I fell into her arms.

  “Oh, Infanta,” I said, “I am madly in love. I just want to die.”

  At first she went pale, but then she smiled.

  “A dream?” she asked me tenderly and stroked my cheek.

  “I just want to die, I tell you. I’m too in love. It’s as if something is leaping up and down inside me, cutting off my air supply. The time will come when I will want to breathe and I won’t be able to. That’s how my life is sure to end.”

  I cried a bit.

  “Sit down,” Infanta said. “You’re all worked up. Or better yet, lie down on my bed.”

  She was being nice to me. I couldn’t complain.

  “How long have you been in this state?”

  “Since this evening.”

  “Hmm . . .”

  She smiled again.

  “No—you don’t understand. I’ve been in love since last summer, or rather since last fall. But this wanting to die only started tonight.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Up until now I wanted to see him and when I saw him I got all confused . . . But today . . .”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know . . . It feels different.”

  “So who is he?”

  I hesitated a moment. It had been almost a year that I had kept this secret. Was I going to give it away now?

  “David,” I said.

  “David? . . . David? . . .”

  She thought this was strange. She said his name again and again, her eyes wide with astonishment.

  “David? . . .”

  “Yes, David.”

  For a second she looked dreamy.

  “So?” she said.

  “What? You don’t like him?”

  “His eyes scare me. He seems wicked.”

  She was scared of his eyes too. It couldn’t be that . . .

  “So, you don’t like him?” I insisted.

  “No, I don’t.”

  I went over and kissed her.

  “I, on the other hand, like him very much,” I said with a sigh. “And I want to know if he likes me. That’s what I came to ask you. How do you tell?”

  “How should I know?” said Infanta, and went and stood in front of the window the way she had the day of the fire.

  “How did you know Nikitas was in love with you?”

  She turned abruptly toward me, her eyes flashing.

  “I forbid you to say such things!” she screamed.

  Her hair was up, but when she shook her head a hairpin fell out and it came undone on one side. She was wearing a white nightgown with lots of pleats. You couldn’t tell the shape of her body inside.

  “Ah, so you are also in love . . .” I said. “And I am . . . All of us are. We’re all in love.”

  Her anger seemed to vanish.

  “Come, talk to me, Infanta.”

  A sweetness spread across her face. She leaned over and picked up the hairpin with her delicate hands, and again with those delicate hands put her hair up again. Her gestures were like waves after a storm, but before the sea has completely calmed down.

  “Come on, Infanta . . .”

  At that same moment a cry was heard. Then footsteps, and voices. We stayed where we were, motionless. Only that Infanta’s hairpin fell out, and once again her hair came undone on one side. Someone was coming down the stairs. It sounded like Aunt Theresa.

  I opened the door and rushed out.

  “Aunt Theresa, what’s going on?”

  “Maria’s gone into labor.”

  I stayed at the top of the stairs and watched her go down. My heart had stopped. My feet refused to go forwards or backwards. Of course I knew that Maria was going to give birth, but I hadn’t been able to imagine this exact moment.

  Meanwhile Infanta had come over.

  “Maria . . .” I began to say.

  “I heard,” she said.

  We clasped hands and started down the stairs. We hadn’t walked that way for years. Though now it was as if the two entangled hands between us were Maria. Oh, we loved Maria, we loved her very much. And now she was about to bring a child into the world. Maria, bringing a child into the world. We heard another cry. That couldn’t be Maria. She didn’t shout like that . . . My God! We squeezed hands. Maria, Maria . . . You must know how much Infanta and I love you. Another scream and then silence. Infanta was trembling. Me too.

  “Go put something on,” Mother said when she saw us. “And calm down. All women give birth. And all people on earth are born of women.”

  I guess she’s right. There’s no denying that all people are born of women.

  “Besides she isn’t in pain right now,” continued Mother. “In the beginning that’s the way it is. The pain comes and goes.”

  It must’ve been one o’clock. We got dressed quickly and came downstairs again.

  “You can still go see her,” said Mother. “Go keep her company.”

  Mother was sitting in the dining room at the table as if about to eat. She seemed peaceful.

  “I’ll come over later. I’m waiting for the doctor now.”

  We left the house shivering. The truth is, it was cold.

  Maria’s house was all lit up. Marios was at the door. When he saw us he smiled and his jaw trembled. Maria was standing up straight and tall in the middle of the room.

  “Good evening, Maria,” we said.

  “Good evening, Infanta, good evening, Katerina.”

  It was stupid to say good evening at this time of night.

  “How are you, Maria?”

  “Fine.”

  We were worlds apart at that moment, but we loved her and she loved us.

  We sat down.

  “Won’t you sit down too, Maria?”

  “I can’t.”

  She was standing up straight and tall in the middle of the room wearing a cherry-colored robe. Her hair had grown during the pregnancy. It now reached her shoulders. It had a healthy and vibrant sheen. Nothing could happen to Maria. Her skin was bursting with health. It was soft and pink, even now. Only her eyes had circles under them, and her palms were sweaty. She kept wiping them with a handkerchief. Her forehead was sweaty, too. As for her belly, I had never seen anything so huge in all my life. It took up all the space in the room, pointing upward provocatively.

  “How was your walk?” she asked. “I saw you go off with David.”

  She tried to tease as usual, but at that moment her face went tense and her eyes grew wide with pain. She grabbed the chair in front of her with both hands and squeezed hard.

  “Does it hurt, Maria?” whispered Infanta.

  “If only we could . . .” I said.

  She wiped her forehead and smiled.

  “See, it’s over,” she said.

  “Do you remember when we hid outside of Tasia’s?”

  They heard a car pull up.

  “The doctor,” she said with relief.

  She had been waiting anxiously for him though she hadn’t said anything.

  “Now you go on inside,” said Mother, who soon showed up with Mr. Parigori and another doctor. “Take Marios with you.”

  Until then Marios hadn’t moved from the door—not in or out. He wore a silly, distracted expression, and his jaw trembled.

  We recrossed the garden and went into the dining room. Aunt Theresa was pacing about with that uneven gait of hers. Grandfather was sitting, his stillness concealing his uncertainty. They were like each other, Aunt Theresa and Grandfather. Only t
hat in the one case the uncertainty and lack of resolution came out in nervous futile gestures, whereas in the other it was concealed by silence and stillness. Grandfather rarely spoke, almost as if he wasn’t taking part in our lives; Aunt Theresa had an opinion on everything. But deep down they were the same.

  “I kept telling you she should go to a hospital,” Aunt Theresa was shouting as we came in. “But that Maria is a stubborn one.”

  Not a word from Grandfather.

  “In the hospital everything is easier, the disinfectants and all that.”

  The phone rang. It was Mrs. Parigori wanting news. Before twenty minutes had gone by the phone rang again: Mrs. Parigori. Father, even though he knew, didn’t call.

  “Perhaps he’s already forgotten his daughter is in labor,” Aunt Theresa whispered loudly, but I shut her up with a look.

  We saw Marios running around in the garden. He couldn’t bear standing in the door any longer with that silly smile on his face.

  The clock struck three, three-thirty, four.

  “A difficult birth,” said Mother when she came over to get something from the house. “Everything will be fine, though.”

  Rodia came and went, crossing herself every so often.

  The clock struck four-thirty, five.

  And again Mrs. Parigori was on the phone.

  Five-thirty.

  We heard some screaming, some horrible screaming. The child was born. It was a boy. Dawn broke and the sky was a whitish, uncertain color.

  •

  When Father came the next morning with a bouquet of half-wilted flowers Maria was still asleep.

  The house was unusually calm.

  “It’s a boy,” Mother cried out, about to run to him. But then she must have remembered they were divorced.

  Father sat near the table and rested the bouquet in front of him. They were white roses. Some had only the stems left and others fell apart the minute you touched them.

  Nobody spoke. Everybody knew that Father wouldn’t ask questions, and instead of making it easier for him they made it more difficult. It was as if there was a secret agreement between Mother and Aunt Theresa: “If he wants to learn he can ask. We’re not going to tell him anything.” So Father waited.

  He looked out at the garden from a slit that was left between the drawn shutters. In a minute Yangoulas, Mother Kapatos’s black sheepdog, ran by.

  “Whose dog is that?” he asked.

  “Mother Kapatos’s,” I said. “She’s a woman who lives near here.”

  Father lived in Athens. He of course didn’t know of Mother Kapatos, or her children, or Amalia who read Russian books. I wanted to tell him so that he would know something about our life. We didn’t know much about his either. He never spoke of his friends to us, nor of the blond woman.

  “Shall we take a walk in the garden?” I asked.

  And before he could answer I took him by the arm and pulled him outside.

  “Mother Kapatos,” I began, “is a poor woman. Her husband spends most of the time in jail, and when he’s out he does odd jobs around here. At David’s, for example. David is a young man, an astronomer. His house looks like a Mickey Mouse tower. Amalia is the daughter of Mother Kapatos and she plans to be a teacher.”

  But all that was rather stupid since Father was really waiting for me to tell him about Maria. He looked absentmindedly ahead, longing to hear about her. Finally I squeezed his arm a bit and began narrating the events of last night down to the smallest detail. The only thing I left out was Aunt Theresa’s phrase, “Perhaps he’s already forgotten his daughter is in labor,” because it might have hurt him. He listened attentively. He bowed his head slightly. His eyes were like deer eyes.

  I always felt there was something removed about Father. And perhaps this will seem strange, but this was related in some way in my mind to Rodia. In the same way that Rodia’s soul was related to Mavroukos’s eyes at those times when his bulldog face was flooded with kindness and melancholy.

  Father tried not to show any interest in anyone. And in front of Mother and Aunt Theresa, just out of childish stubbornness, he wouldn’t ask about Maria.

  But with me things were different.

  “Was she in much pain?” he asked.

  “Yes, a great deal . . .”

  “Like how much?”

  “Well, in that final moment she let out such a scream you’d have thought the house would crumble. Up until then, though, she was very brave.”

  “And the child?”

  “The child is a monster,” I said without thinking.

  And after I had thought a minute, “It’s because he’s a little baby. Not even a day old . . .”

  •

  Maria woke up around midday. I have never seen her more beautiful. Her face had a radiance that I will never forget. Her black hair was all over the pillow, and she lay with her head to one side, and her eyes, oh her eyes, had both a brightness and a mistiness about them, an extreme expression of submission and pride.

  Father leaned down awkwardly and kissed her.

  “He brought you some beautiful flowers too,” I said softly.

  Then it seems Father remembered to look in his pocket. He took out a small package and unwrapped it.

  “An icon,” he said with a certain embarrassment. “If you like, put it in the cradle with the child.”

  He didn’t say anything else. Grandmother, though, had once shown it to me and told me that when she herself had been born, her uncle, the prime minister, had hung it in her cradle as a gift, and the same icon had hung in her father’s cradle, too. It was the Panaghia with Christ. Maria looked at it carefully.

  “I will certainly put it in the baby’s cradle. I really like it.”

  She sent me off to fetch a ribbon.

  “A pale blue one,” she called after me.

  By the time I had brought her the ribbon, we had hung the icon and looked at the baby for a minute, Father wanted to go. He said goodbye in an extraordinary hurry and didn’t even want me to accompany him to the door.

  “Miltos, if you like, come and see the baby again,” Mother had time to say.

  And oddly enough, the same afternoon when I went to open the door of the living room where I had just heard Mother playing the piano, I found it locked. And when I went out into the garden to calm my nerves after the excitement, I saw her leave all dressed up, although it was certainly her duty on such a day to stay at home with Maria.

  V. MARIA, LAURA, RUTH

  MARIA wakes up at dawn every morning to nurse the child and to start working. Now her days are full.

  Every once in a while she remembers when she was first married, how she and Marios would wake up at noon just in time for a walk in the woods. Then night would fall and the day would be over. Time slipped away, leaving only the faint scent of cyclamen and heather and the oncoming rain.

  And even before that there were long, empty hours spent with Nikos and Stephanos. As for that afternoon in Kritikos’s hut, it was because the lavender had bloomed and Stephanos was being such an idiot. It didn’t come out of nowhere. It had been maturing inside her for a while, torturing her. Ever since, she had lain on her back in the hay, or strained her ear to hear a cry in the night. It was the continuation of the moment when at thirteen a boy first kissed her, and even before that, when the letters of her school books danced before her eyes and she shivered to hear her own laugh.

  The odd thing is that she had started to think about Marios just after leaving Kritikos’s son when she started up the hill on Elia Avenue. That’s who she had in mind when she said “I want to get married” in the midday silence of the dining room. The next day when she met Stephanos she let him know that they would no longer be seeing each other. “There’s no room for why,” she added. And it was true. There was no why. It’s just the way things happened, no need for an explanation. It was the natural turn of events.

  And look how it had all brought her to this, a child. Something real. You could touch him, grab bot
h his feet in one hand, even nurse him.

  The breast-feeding hurt in the beginning. Her milk hadn’t come in fully yet and the baby pulled on her nipple with an unexpected harshness, almost as if he wanted to hurt her. But after a few days there was plenty and it no longer was painful. What an indescribable sweetness to feel him there sucking away, his eyes closed. She liked to call him “my little kitten,” “my little bird,” and other animal names, but Marios got angry and said it wasn’t right. “Since we know we’re going to baptize him Yannis, we should start calling him that now.” But Maria couldn’t call him Yannis, he was too little. When she talked to him she would string various syllables together, creating new words like “my koukouki.” It was silly, but it pleased her and she had the sense that the little one sort of understood her. She spoke softly and in secret. It was their language—hers and the baby’s. No one else needed to hear.

  Spyridoula, one of Kalomoira’s daughters, came to help her with the housekeeping. But Maria tended to all the child’s needs. She insisted on washing his clothes herself and hanging them out to dry. This was the task she liked best of all. To hang the white clothes on the line, the wind blowing, and every once in a while to feel a drop of water. She would sing the “little white boat” and many other songs. It was odd, but the older she got, the more she returned to the songs of her childhood. Her voice would get swept up by the wind. She would lean down, take a piece of clothing, and hang it up. It would fill with air, making the sound of a sail when you untie it and move it from one oarlock to another. The boat would come about, how nice . . . the sea would grow rougher . . .