Island of Ghosts and Dreams, page 3
Ikaros takes the blankets and puts them on the cot and offers the now-made bed to his younger brother before he pushes two bales of hay together on the other side of the barn. He drapes a different sheet over the bales to protect himself from the sharp edges of the straw, then pulls a thinner blanket over top of the sheet, and it’s ready, also.
“If it gets too cold out here, there are more blankets in the house,” I tell them.
They hear me but don’t answer because blankets and sheets and the chill from the mountains are the absolute furthest thing from their minds.
We leave the barn.
The boys run ahead of me and are inside the house by the time I get there and to the kitchen, and they already have their hands full of paximathia that have just finished baking in the stone oven in the corner of the room. Mana’s standing next to them and smiling and giving them more, as soon as they finish what they already have. She looks up when I come in and smiles at me, but then sees my eyes. She knows something’s happened, that something’s wrong, and can tell because she’s my mother and so she’s me, too.
“What is it?” she asks.
“Nothing,” I shake my head. “Baba’s still up in the fields?”
“He’ll be back soon. What’s wrong?”
“Maria found a palikari,” Tasos answers for me, still chewing his cookie while reaching for another. “A British one. We brought him here and he’s in our room now with Dr. Papadakis.”
“No more cookies until you’ve had dinner,” I tell them, and Tasos just smiles, my words meaningless because they know my mother will enforce no such rule. She wouldn’t do the same with me, even when I was their age, but the boys? She can’t say no to the boys who are closer to grandchildren to her than children, just the same as they’re closer to children to me than brothers, and she treats them that way, also, just the same as I do.
“A British palikari?” she asks, turning back to me.
“He was down on the beach. He must have washed ashore.”
“From where?”
“I don’t know,” I say, then try to change the subject again. “I set the boys up in the barn with my old cot and blankets. Baba will see it when he gets back.”
“They can stay here in your old room. We could bring the cot in from the barn for Tasos, and Ikaros could have your bed.”
“We like it outside,” Ikaros says quickly.
My mother looks at him, then both of them.
She recognizes they’re young boys who are almost young men, or at least one of them is almost a young man, and they want the independence the barn would give. They probably even need it, too. “Alright,” Mana finally nods. “As long as you promise to come to the house for every meal.”
They smile.
Of course they will.
Mana points up the hill and towards the fields where we take the sheep for the fresh grass that grows higher in the mountains. “Why don’t you go help Baba bring the sheep down for the night. He’ll be glad to see you,” she says to the boys, then they each grab another paximathia and run out of the house and towards the fields to find Baba.
“They seem to be handling it well,” Mana says, once they’re gone.
“They’re young.”
“You’re young, too.”
“Maybe.”
“Maybe? You are. Trust me, Maria-mou, you are. Now what is this they’re saying about a British palikari you found?”
“He’s in a coma and hasn’t regained consciousness, so we don’t know any more than that, and won’t until he wakes up.”
“Does Dr. Papadakis think he will?”
“I don’t know. He says he might, but if he doesn’t soon, then he’ll starve and die.”
“And you haven’t heard anything from Demetrios?”
“I asked Ione and Kore before I left, and Cassia when I was in Chania, and no one’s heard anything from anyone in the 5th for over a month. Not a single letter or telegram.”
She’s silent.
We’re both silent.
Ione and Kore are a few years older than I am and married to Stelios and Elias who also left our village with Demetrios, and Cassia is my best friend from when we were both very young; she’s moved to Chania and works in one of the kafeneios there now and is who I stay with when I go to the city to sell our goods and remain for the night before coming home. She sees many soldiers there that she waits on, and brings coffee and sweets to, and I know a great many of them write to her, also. She’s always been the most good-looking of all the girls who grew up here in our village, and perhaps maybe all of Western Crete and Chania, too, and she always has men and soldiers writing to her, and often more than one.
“Let me know if they’re too much,” I say to Mana as I walk towards the door.
“It’s good to have their voices here, their young voices. And you know how much Baba loves having them around. Do you want to stay for dinner, too, Maria? Let me cook for you.”
“I’m going to get back and see how he’s doing.”
“Who?”
“The palikari.”
We look at each other one more time, me by the door, Mana by the stone oven, then she nods. “Of course,” she says, then nods once more, and so do I before I walk out and start back up towards the village and the house where I live with my husband and his parents. Theirs is the largest house in our village, and Demetrios and I live in a section that’s separated from the main part, which is why we moved there rather than the farm where I grew up, where everything’s cramped and my childhood bedroom is separated from my parents’ by a paper-thin wall and a few pieces of stone and wood. Wealth on this island is measured in olives and sheep, and Demetrios’s family has an abundance of both; the groves north of the village, on the path to Chania, are the largest in all Western Crete and have been in their family for generations, and it’s the wealth from those olives that they used to buy the sheep we keep at our farm. My father was a shepherd, the same as his father before him, and when Demetrios’s family bought their sheep near Irakleio, and brought them to Chania, it was my father they hired to tend and keep them. The only problem was our barn wouldn’t hold all the sheep that they bought, so they sent their oldest son down to help build a new one that was larger and would hold every last one of the large flock they’d purchased.
I think back to that summer.
I smile when I do.
Demetrios was fifteen and I was fourteen, both younger than Ikaros is now, and it feels strange to think of it that way. I knew Demetrios before he came to work on the barn but only in the way you know someone who you nod to when you pass them on the street and say hello and goodbye and good evening and how’s the weather. But that summer I really got to know him. I brought him lunches that Mana made, sat and ate with him, and learned how funny he was as we spent the warmest and hottest months together there, at the barn, under the Cretan sun. He would smile at me. He would look at me and smile in a way that no one ever had before, much less someone my age, and then even after the barn was raised and finished and he no longer came to work, he said he missed Mana’s cooking and lunches she prepared so I’d still find him and we’d take the lunch she’d make for us up into the hills and we’d eat together. We would sit high above our village and look out, licking leftover honey and cheese from the sfakianes pites we’d have for dessert from our fingers, looking out together over our village, the olive groves and pastures and rolling hills, looking out and all the way to the great sea. We’d look out over everything. I once thought those days would last forever. My mother used to smile as she’d give me whatever she’d cooked, wrapped in old newspaper and placed into a basket always with her famous sfakianes pites, which she knew were Demetrios’s favorite, and of course she also knew what was happening before I did. I think our parents always do, and they especially do here, on our island, where families are all such large and important and inescapable parts of who we are and remain that way for the entirety of our lives.
He wanted to be a builder.
And he was, at least before the war.
We got married when he was twenty and I was nineteen, which was six years ago, and he built the addition onto his parents’ house that we moved into together and is where we lived until seven months ago when the Italians woke the Greek prime minister in the middle of the night and gave him the ultimatum of either letting their soldiers occupy Greece, without a fight, or it would be war.
Oxi. No.
That’s the single word our prime minister allegedly said, at least according to the folklore that’s sprung up around the event, but whether he actually said oxi or something else, what’s undeniable is it’s the word the whole country has resoundingly and continually repeated since the ultimatum was issued then rejected. It’s also, since that morning, been war. We’ve been isolated from the actual fighting here in the South Aegean, the southernmost of all the Greek islands and nearly halfway to Africa, but even though we’ve been isolated, we haven’t been spared.
I keep walking.
The sun’s almost completely gone as I arrive back, the last remnants of disappearing yellows and oranges spread across the tops of olives and cypress near the house. I walk in to see Giannis and Angeliki at the dining table. There’s a small glass of raki in front of Giannis, and Angeliki has a cup of malotira, Greek mountain tea, made from the plants that grow wild in these hills. This is their afternoon ritual, something they’ve done every day since I’ve known them, and they both look up when I return.
“Any change?” I ask.
“Nothing,” Angeliki tells me. “Doctor Papadakis left a few minutes ago.”
“I wondered if we should take him to the barracks, and to their own doctors there,” Giannis says. “But he didn’t think moving him would be good.”
I pause for a moment.
“We’ll take him when he wakes up,” I finally say, with more hope than I feel.
Then I leave the kitchen and go to the bedroom where he still sleeps.
They watch as I walk in to look down at the palikari on the small twin bed. His chest still gently rises and falls, just like when I found him. I see sweat that’s started to bead on his skin, and I know that means a fever has begun, even though the doctor said an infection was unlikely, so I take a cloth and dip it into the water that’s still there and gently dab it on his forehead, wiping away the sweat, trying to cool him down. I look at his eyes. They’re closed, staring at nothing at all. I wonder, what have those eyes seen? Have they seen the same things that Demetrios’s eyes have seen, and do they know if my husband will be coming back to me, to our island, the same way that this soldier has come?
I wonder.
I usually only pray for Demetrios once a day, as I’ve said, and as I’ve already done, on my way back to the village, but today I decide not to listen to what I’ve promised and make an exception as I bow my head and pray once more. I think of the last thing he said to me, before he left.
When I’m gone, don’t look for me in the sunsets, look for me in the sea.
I’ve looked, Demetrios.
I’ve looked, my love, I’ve looked every single day…
But still you haven’t returned.
2 APRIL 26, 1941
The next morning, I wake early before the sun and rise from my bed while it’s still dark. Once I’m dressed, I go to the main part of the house and peek into Ikaros and Tasos’s bedroom to see the palikari still breathing, and that he’s made it through the night. His chest is still rising and falling in weak and unsteady rhythms, and there’s no sweat on his forehead anymore so it seems his fever must be less, too. I know Giannis and Angeliki will take care of him when they wake, and Doctor Papadakis will be back soon, and can do more for him than I can, so I grab one of Demetrios’s jackets, wrap it around my shoulders, and leave. It’s still very cold in the morning this time of year and the grass that grows around the path I take north is damp from the night and clings to my ankles as I walk through fields of flowers, and that’s what I smell. This is the time of year when they first begin to bloom—the small blue ones, with the white dot in the middle that only grow here, on Crete—and the herbs are all beginning to rise as well, wild and untamed; the thymari, the thentrolivano, and the faskomilo. I can smell their fresh and ubiquitous scent as I continue to walk, mixing with the familiar and more intimate one in the jacket, the scent that belongs to my husband. I soon come to the farm. When I get close, the smell of flowers, herbs, and Demetrios begins to mix with the smell of Mana’s cooking, as she’s already awake in the kitchen making breakfast. But I go to the barn first. I go past the sheep, who are awake and waiting to be let out, and towards where I used to sleep and Ikaros and Tasos have each now made their beds. When I get there, though, I pause. I see Tasos, on the cot, still asleep, but the bales that Ikaros pushed together and threw the sheet over to make his own bed are empty.
I frown, then bend down and shake Tasos.
“Hmmm,” he says, mumbling, not yet awake.
“Where’s your brother?”
“What?” he asks, rubbing his eyes.
“Where’s Ikaros?”
He blinks as he looks up at me, then turns to the empty bed next to him.
“I had to go to the bathroom,” I hear from behind us.
I turn to see Ikaros walking into the barn, already dressed and ready for the day.
He goes past the sheep, too, and towards the donkey, where he pours another cup of grain into the trough, and the donkey starts to eat.
“Did the palikari wake up?” Tasos asks me.
“Not yet,” I tell them.
They take that in, both of them.
Then as the donkey finishes, Ikaros picks the bridle from its place on the wall and puts it around the donkey’s head and tightens it. Tasos goes from his bed to the buckets connected by rope and drapes them across the donkey’s back, then grabs the shears and pruners they’ll need for the olives and puts them in one of the buckets. There’s a saying in Crete that if you water your trees, you’re begging them to give you olives, but if you prune them, you’re ordering them to. This is the skill they’ve learned and which is in their blood. They were taught by their parents and older brother, and they were taught by me, too, who was also taught by Giannis, Angeliki, and Demetrios.
I smile at them.
They smile back at me.
We leave the barn together and as we walk out and into the darkness of the morning that hasn’t yet arrived, Mana comes from the house carrying two knapsacks of food, and Baba follows behind, pulling on a thick jacket not unlike the one I wear and tying a red-checkered cloth at his neck to act as a scarf and keep the exposed skin there warm. Mana hands one of the sacks to Ikaros, as Tasos leads the donkey behind him, then the other to me, for Baba and myself up in the mountains.
“Efcharisto,” I tell her, as I do every morning, and the boys do, too.
“Of course,” she smiles, then kisses Ikaros and Tasos on the top of their heads, and she turns and kisses me as well. She kisses Baba last, and his kiss lasts a little longer than ours, before she heads back into the house to start planning what she’ll make for dinner.
It’s her life.
It was her mother’s life, also, and her mother before that.
Will it be mine?
Ikaros and Tasos start to head north.
They walk down the path, leading the donkey behind them, on their way to the olives that are away from the mountains and towards the sea. Baba and I will go in the opposite direction. We turn and walk to the enclosure next to the barn where the sheep wait. He opens the gate and stands on one side of it. I stand on the other. This is something we’ve done more times than I can count—since I was just a little girl—and the sheep start to come. We point them south, as we also always do, and when they go in that direction, we start to walk after them, heading onward and up towards the great, white, and familiar mountains that stand tall and proud in the distance.
* * *
There are three different fields we use for grazing, and today we go to the highest one, the one farthest south. We rotate fields so the sheep don’t eat in the same place every day and the grass has a chance to start growing back before it’s eaten again. We sit on a rock together and eat fresh bougatsa that Mana’s packed for breakfast, as in front of us the sun begins to rise and bring light again, light that reaches now and touches everything; the mountains behind us, the sea in front, and the village in the valley below.
It touches us, too.
We eat in silence.
Near us, the sheep eat, also, though not silently, ripping, chewing, swallowing, and making noises as they move to new spots with fresh and longer grass, and we watch them.
Then I feel Baba watching me.
“What are you thinking?” he asks.
My thoughts go to yesterday and how I wondered if the war would come and touch us on this island. Now, as I look around me, I realize the thoughts were naïve because it already has. In fact, I realize, war has always been here. As I mentioned, the oldest city in Europe is at Knossos, and with the oldest city comes the most wars; we’re the land of Ikaros, who flew high in our sky and above our sea; we’re the land of Theseus and Minos, and their Minotaur; we’re the land and people who’ve fought Romans, Byzantines, Venetians, Muwallads, and Turks. Now we fight Italians again, and more besides, because we fight Germans this time, as well. We’ve fought against all those invaders, sometimes won, sometimes lost, but even then, when we lost and were conquered, we weren’t ever, not really; we were never actually conquered here because we never stopped fighting. Have we ever? Our island has been someone else’s more often than it’s been ours, but we’re still here, and we still fight for our families and who we are, no matter the odds, no matter the conditions, no matter the war or invader who comes. We fight because it’s our blood.
