Three Summers Read online

  •

  This translation is dedicated to my sisters, Jennifer, Sarah, and Rebecca, and my nieces, Ella, Kat, and Odessa.

  THREE SUMMERS

  For my sister

  THE FIRST SUMMER

  I. OUR POLISH GRANDMOTHER

  THAT SUMMER we bought big straw hats. Maria’s had cherries around the rim, Infanta’s had forget-me-nots, and mine had poppies as red as fire. When we lay in the hayfield wearing them, the sky, the wildflowers, and the three of us all melted into one. “Where are you? Off hiding again?” my mother called. Shhhhh. We whispered and told secrets. Other years Maria and Infanta had told the secrets, leaving me out since I was the youngest. But this year . . .

  This year Infanta lay a little farther away, all quiet, and Maria told the secrets to me. She talked and talked, turning this way and that in the hay, her cheeks aflame, her eyes taking on a strange glow. And when I stopped listening, watching the sun as it set or an insect as it made its way to its nest to sleep, Maria would get mad. “Hey, are you interested or not?” she’d ask. “It’s not for my own sake that I’m here, exhausting myself, trying to explain things to you. Go on believing that babies are brought by storks if you want! . . .”

  I was about to answer, to tell her that I knew that babies weren’t brought by storks, that maybe I’d always known this, but her laugh stopped me, a loud, jolting laugh that made the kernels of wheat tremble as it ricocheted off the mountain opposite us and came back an echo. At such moments Maria’s laugh annoyed me. I saw in it a shamelessness that took the mystery and pleasure out of things. Hearing it, I’m not sure why, I thought of the feast day of Profitis Elias last year where I had seen a small child dead, curled up in a jar of alcohol. It was just as it had been in its mother’s womb.

  After the midday meal I never took a nap, a habit of mine since I was small, when I got it into my head that not to take a nap was a revolutionary act showing great independence of mind and spirit. Now, where did I ever get that idea?

  I would climb up into the walnut tree and make daisy chains and bracelets from horsehair. Then I would wear them and look for my reflection in the well. But I never succeeded since the sun at that hour hit the water’s surface, making it glimmer like a piece of hot, melted gold, blinding me.

  I made the same kind of jewelry for my sisters. But it always disappointed me when I saw them wearing it. Not because I was jealous, but simply because they did not seem to appreciate it enough. It was as if they weren’t worthy of it, as if they expected the flowers to wilt, so they wilted immediately, or as if they knew the bracelets were only horsehair, and therefore they looked like horsehair, those ones from the horse’s tail that switch this way and that, fending off flies.

  When the sun’s glare tired my eyes and my limbs felt as if I had drunk sweet wine, I would go to the barn to find quiet, a quiet full of shade and the smell of hay. People and faraway places filled my quiet time there: colored ribbons blowing in the wind, orange seas, Gulliver in the land of the Houyhnhnms, Odysseus on the islands of Calypso and Circe. She was a wicked woman, that Circe, turning men into pigs. But how impressive that she had so much power! Would I ever have that kind of power? Not for changing men into pigs, but for other things . . . I dug myself deeper into the hay. I nodded off and slept a little, though I would never tell a soul. It was always a sweet sleep, and on waking I felt as if I were returning from another world. But the meadow was there laughing, and the grapes ripe on the vine, my hand ready to pluck them, my mouth ready to taste them, and I said to myself, Of all other worlds, and of all the stars that might be other worlds, the earth is surely the best.

  Our house was about half an hour from Kifissia. It was in the part where all the gardens were, in the middle of a meadow, set off on its own. To go to Doctor Parigori’s, the house nearest us, you needed a full ten minutes. “Shopping’s enough to lay you out,” our old housekeeper Rodia would say.

  Grandfather had built it as he wanted: large rectangular rooms with high ceilings, two terraces where we dried the corn and whatever else, the gardener’s house in a separate plot, and a little farther away the stable and the chicken coops. He had paid particular attention to the garden, not only because he had studied agriculture but because he loved trees. He planted them with his own hands, raising them like children, remembering their illnesses, the frosts, the harsh winds that bent their limbs, their grafts, and the first time each bore fruit. “The trees,” he would say, “are all of creation. Their roots in the earth show us how all creatures are connected to each other and to God.” In the spring, he would lie down under the apple tree—Grandfather’s tree we called it—and listen to the sound of the bees as they dipped into the flowers, extracting the golden pollen.

  I guess poor Grandfather kept the farm as consolation. He had lost Grandmother when Mother and Aunt Theresa were only five and seven. Death did not take her. She left of her own accord with a musician who was passing through Athens on a concert tour. At his first of two concerts she fell in love with him. Then they met each other. And after his second she couldn’t bear it any longer, and ran off with him. They were both foreigners, you see, so they got along. My grandmother wasn’t Greek, but Polish. She had green eyes. I was pretty shocked when Rodia first told me all this. I remember it was a winter evening and we were sitting in the kitchen roasting sweet potatoes. “How could Grandmother have done such a thing?” I wondered out loud to Rodia. “Silly girl,” she responded, “she wasn’t Grandmother yet. Your mother and Aunt Theresa were still small.” True, I guess, she wasn’t a grandmother then . . .“We never found out where she went or what became of her,” Rodia continued. “Who knows whether she’s even alive . . . Grandfather won’t hear a word about her . . .”

  In fact, nobody ever mentioned her name. Neither Mother, nor Aunt Theresa. We were the only ones who thought about her—we had discovered a photograph in an old chest. Oh my, was she beautiful. We called her the Polish grandmother in order to distinguish her from my father’s mother, a lady with white hair and a bitter smile from who knows how many unrequited loves.

  “What can I say, I admire her,” I told them one afternoon when we were discussing her as we lay in the hay.

  “Really?” Infanta said distractedly.

  “Why?” asked Maria with interest.

  “Well, she was brave to leave like that, without Grandfather . . .”

  “The brave person is the one who stays,” Maria interrupted. Infanta didn’t argue.

  I guess Maria was right. I probably just said that because I was young. But then later I realized that for the Polish grandmother far away was really here, not there.

  It had rained a lot all winter. The woods were soaked and had no time to dry out; the fallen leaves rotted, became soil, and then the soil, new leaves again. And in the evenings strong winds blew, strong enough to ruffle the curtains in the dining room without anyone touching them. “Who is it?” asked Grandfather. “Nobody,” we answered. “But someone knocked.” “No,” we said sighing, “just the wind, Grandfather.”

  Returning from school we would have streams of rain running down our faces. We had hoods, but we never wore them on the way home; we tossed them off and continued uncovered. Maria swayed her body left and right, her mouth half-open, as if she were drunk. Infanta marched straight ahead, always straight ahead, and when a drop came to rest on her eyelash, she wiped it away as if it were a tear. I couldn’t understand if her whole face was wet why she should be bothered by that one drop. I didn’t mind the rain one bit. I would run, my arms wide open to the heavens and the earth, and sing. Somehow, when I was outside the rain made me happy. But when I heard it from inside my room, hitting the roof and running down the windowpanes, it made me feel completely different. I would lock myself in, fall on my bed, and cry for hours all by myself. I’m not sure, though, if it was out of sadness.

  “Katerina is a little nervous,” my aunt Theresa told my mother. “She needs special attention.”

  “What kind of
special attention?”

  “You know, so she won’t turn out like her . . .”

  They meant the Polish grandmother. I figured it out from the tone of their voices, and from the look they exchanged. So she was a nervous woman? From that day on when somebody picked on me or when I fought with my sisters, I would let out loud shrieks. I took her photograph and that very afternoon held it up next to my face and looked into the mirror. For all my efforts to see resemblances I found very few. Her eyes were green. Mine were chestnut, one slightly darker than the other, odd but not uncomely; as Rodia said, it was a sign of good luck—her hair black, mine chestnut again, her skin fair, mine golden. The only thing we had in common was our neck and perhaps our chin. I was very proud of this—the way my neck grew out of my shoulders and continued up to my chin, showing off my face. That clean, strong line suggested I would someday be beautiful. It pleased me, and moreover it gave me a sense of security and self-confidence. Often when I was alone I would roll down the collar of my blouse so I could see my shoulders in the mirror. At night I did the same with my nightgown. I would sit and stare, completely absorbed in myself. It was as if nothing existed in the world besides myself and my reflection. One evening, though, when there was a blackout and I lit a candle, I really frightened myself. In front of me I saw my shadow spreading across the expansive wall, like a supernatural being, touching my bed and filling up the ceiling.

  Aunt Theresa was right to say that this year we would have lots of poppies. The seeds seemed to have multiplied with the rain and the meadow was covered in them. Even in the garden, in the unplanted parts, there were square patches of red. They seemed to insist that something was going to happen soon. That’s what Rodia says red means in a dream. I’m glad I chose red poppies for my straw hat—that way I could be in harmony with the whole world. And Maria, who chose red cherries, did all right too; their fruit is succulent and sweet. But as for Infanta’s forget-me-nots, they are so rare.

  •

  I remember those years as if they were one day, one moment. On those late spring and summer afternoons we would spread out the cherry tablecloth on the little table on the porch. And when it came time for the sun to set and the day was cooling off, you would hear Aunt Theresa bumping around upstairs as if she were moving furniture, and then down the stairs she would come with her irregular gait, which sounded as if she were going to lose her balance and fall. You would see Mother come out of the house without making a sound and sit in her usual place, not facing the woods, but looking out on the open space of the old Tatoï Airport. Grandfather would also stop work; he would wash his hands and face and arrive refreshed from a hard day, ready to sit. I can still hear the sound of water running in the bathroom and in the garden. The wind felt warm. Mavroukos, staring at the running water, would start to bark, thinking the water was alive. Then in the distance Mother Kapatos would call her children, “Kostas, Koula, Hey! . . . Manolis ! . . .” And Rodia would appear with a tray of tea and cakes. It was all perfect and melancholic.

  Below the porch was the plot of garden that Grandfather had given me to plant whatever I wanted. I planted flowers of every kind. I didn’t pay any attention to order, and I certainly didn’t make designs, triangles, squares, or lines, but instead I just sprinkled the seeds randomly, whenever it was their time for planting. Often I’d try to forget where I had put them so it would be a surprise, so it would be as if they had grown there of their own accord. The colors and the kinds were all mixed up, packed tightly one against the other: yellow, red, mauve, sky blue, orange, some tall, others short, and others completely hidden under leaves. It was either very beautiful or very ugly. I’m still not sure which. Mother said it was from such things that you could understand a person’s character; all you had to do was look at my garden and it was clear how disorganized I was. Everyone else called it “the crazy garden,” and Grandfather, looking at it one day, said something to this effect: “You love nature, but you are not her slave. I am her slave. She makes me her servant, and therefore I can never get close to her.”

  Farther away, down by the cupola, Maria had her tiny vegetable garden. She had divided it into little squares, each for a different vegetable. And truly her peas were the best on the farm. They only came to five or six pounds. We could eat them all in two meals. And every time Maria would insist on taking only the smallest bite, just a taste at the end of her fork, so that she wouldn’t deprive us of this extraordinary pleasure.

  Infanta had chosen ten wild almond trees for her own plot. They didn’t need any special care, frequent watering or digging, and as their fruit was not edible, they needed no harvesting. They were a joyous sight in the spring, and a sad one in the winter. Infanta would hold on to the branches, whether they were blossoming or bare, and rest there for a while. She was only a child then, but her hands were the hands of a grown woman.

  So at that hour when the day was cooling off, I would be digging in my flower garden, Maria in her vegetable garden, Infanta would be watching her trees, and the grown-ups would be gathering on the porch around the cherry tablecloth. Not much time would elapse before Mr. Louzis, our frequent visitor, would arrive. Every day at almost exactly the same time we would hear the wooden gate creak and his heavy footsteps making the garden pebbles go scritch-scratch as if he were cracking them, and as he walked waving his arms and cane jerkily in the air, he would shake the lowest branches of the three pistachio trees lining the dirt driveway, so much so that I would often go check whether he had broken any. But somehow he never did. The only damage was the leaves that he would break off, squish in his hand, and toss to the ground as he walked, absentmindedly passing his cane from one hand to the other.

  “Who could it be at this hour?” Aunt Theresa would always say. “I’m going inside just in case it’s a stranger. I have no desire to see strangers.” She got up hurriedly, as if someone were chasing her, and she would just manage to hide herself in the dining room off the porch, only to come out two minutes later: “Oh it’s you, Mr. Louzis. And I was thinking you were a stranger.”

  “Please sit down,” said Mother looking out over the open space of the old Tatoï Airport. “Rodia, the coffee . . .”

  Mr. Louzis did not drink tea, he said, except when he was very ill. “Don’t make him coffee,” I would whisper to Rodia secretly in the kitchen. “Why should we have to make it especially for him each time? He can just drink tea.” “Why?” Rodia asked. “Because . . .”

  In a little bit his coffee would arrive in a big teacup. Mr. Louzis sniffed it and lit his cigar. He took a sip and then a puff on his cigar, another sip, another puff, and this went on for an hour.

  He was always well dressed. In the spring he wore an English suit of finely woven light gray wool; in the summertime, white linen or Indian silk. But he was very fat.

  “So, what’s new?” asked Grandfather rubbing his hands together. Mr. Louzis knew what was going on, not only in Athens, but all over the world. He would skip from one topic to the next with exceptional ease and a certain winning manner: from the wedding of so-and-so to the latest discovery in America, from a debate on art—was such and such really an authentic El Greco?—to the best method of grafting roses. He had traveled the world and seen many things. For the grown-ups his company was an invaluable pleasure. And for my grandfather, in particular, it meant a great deal: by putting together all that he said, the weddings, the rose grafting, and the latest discovery, he could get a general picture of the world. And in this way he no longer had to worry that he was living such a cutoff existence. And free of this worry, he could get on with living the way he liked—that is, cut off from all that. Mr. Louzis, without knowing it, gave my grandfather the right to live the life he wanted without feeling guilty. And for this my grandfather was eternally grateful.

  I, on the other hand, had the sense that whatever he said carried the stamp of his loud laugh and heavy footsteps, and that things seen through his eyes couldn’t help but be colored by his character, and somehow sullied. T
he greatest discovery became a small little nothing. And hearing my mother laugh at his jokes made me hide my face in my crazy garden and cry.

  At that time we had a governess who taught us French and gave us baths on Saturday. Maria would have the first bath, then Infanta, and last of all, me. Bath day was the most exhausting day for Mlle. Zina. Just to wash Maria’s hair, which was then very long, made her back ache. She used to get annoyed at me, too, because she always found a little dirt on the back of my neck, as if, she would say, I hadn’t washed it all week. And the truth is that although I liked water, when it came time to get under the spigot I would always try to get the water to hit my back because it gave me the shivers if it touched my neck. It was only when I dove into the sea or the cistern headfirst that I didn’t mind getting my neck wet.

  So when I got into the bath last, the room was full of steam and smelling like soap; the water heater was red hot, the wood inside already embers. The extreme heat weakened my heartbeat, my eyes rolled back in my head, and it was as if I had fainted. But I didn’t say anything because I liked the way it felt. It was as if I were asleep and awake, as if I were speaking in a foreign language. And my thoughts were foreign too, and although they were fuzzy, what I remembered of them was enough to fill me with shame.

  The bath made Saturday different from every other day. We had tea earlier than usual and were not allowed any bread and jam in the event that it would be too heavy for our stomachs. In the evening we did not eat at the table, but had dinner in bed. We would slide into the clean sheets, our hair getting the pillow slightly damp, our skin shiny, our minds clean—the thoughts that only just before had filled me with shame had vanished, I could not even imagine that they had existed—and Rodia would bring each of us a tray with soup and boiled lamb’s head. We would eat slowly, licking each bone, thoroughly enjoying the chance to play cannibals. I ate all the eyeballs—neither Infanta nor Maria liked them, they said they felt sorry for the lamb—and Maria ate all the tongues. We did not go to say good night to Mother; she came in to us. She bent over each of our beds, took our heads in her silky palms, and staring into our eyes, kissed us on both cheeks. Her skin was soft and white like the flowers in Mr. Louzis’s greenhouse, and her eyes were black and shining like her hair. Mother was beautiful, very beautiful. I begged her to kiss me again, and she would either bend down and take my head in her hands again or pretend she didn’t hear and leave.