By the Light of My Father's Smile (7 page)

There was a day, perhaps it was even the evening of the day of their arrival: out in the courtyard that was slowly cooling from the day's heat, the sunflowers nodding in the corners like drowsy old men. They sat around a wooden table, the very one into whose sides he'd carved his and Anand's names while they were boys, the day that Anand had vowed never to abandon Greece and
he had vowed to leave it as soon as he could, and Susannah, her eyes watering, drank ouzo for the first time, and nibbled a home-preserved olive. Look! she whispered urgently to him. Look at this! She was looking down and pointing at the table. Was he to look at the brown loaves of bread, with their soft white ends; or at the dark olives in an old blue crockery dish he remembered from when he was a boy? Did she mean the two dusty green bottles of wine? The fava beans swimming in oil? Did she mean, Look at the peaches—which did, in fact, smell exactly of heaven? Did she mean, Regard the plums, luscious and dark as goddesses? But no; she meant, giving it a tug, Look at the tablecloth!

The oilcloth with a black background and cabbage roses of white, red, and pink on which all the delicious food lay. Remember this, she whispered. This tablecloth.
It is a sign.
Then, laughing, she made the motion of zippering her lips—a movement, a signal for secrecy they shared—that made them cackle loudly, as the ouzo hit the bottom of their jet-lagged bellies, and the old ones looked on in amusement and a little alarm.

It was the beginning of the end, even so. Even though, that very night, in the small white bedroom next to his parents' room, the room that had been his as a boy, they, with their firmly zippered lips, moved as silently against each other as two snakes. Kissing was not speaking and was therefore exempt from the ban. Slipping to the floor, at the foot of the bed, silently thanking her for loving his parents and not considering them grotesque, as he had feared, he took her small brown foot into his large pale hand and kissed its sole. Sitting on the floor beside the bed, tired, a bit drunk, he made not a sound as he brushed both her feet, back and forth and back and forth, with his thick mustache. The bed shook with her laughter, but she also did not make a sound. She felt herself warm, beginning to tingle inside, and thought: All play leads up to this moment.

Through the wall they heard the old ones shifting their bodies. They heard them sigh, begin to snore. By then he had climbed up into the bed, was on top of her, was inside her, was soaking in her scent of lemongrass and cloves. He floated on her, his penis a rod, a branch of the olive tree, no, the very olive tree itself, whose olives she loved. The ancestral tree that fed all of Greece. Moving in her, to his parents' snores.

Long and sweetly they played, connecting worlds that rarely glimpsed each other, and then usually in travel brochures; continents foreign to each other as the moon. More foreign, because the moon at least could be seen. Cultures connected only by the warmth of a mother's eye, a new daughter's receptive look. A lover's kiss. He could feel her orgasm coming. It was a shivering, like wind, around his tree. And as it blew downward he raised his trunk to greet it, his free mouth—with its wild mustache like a wreath of leaves—in silence growing wider and fuller over her own.

He had thought she might become pregnant from that night. He had had the distinct impression of their being in the embrace of nature. Certainly he felt as if he had planted something in my daughter that would not cease to grow. Exactly where she was broken, in her willing response to him, to his parents' sweetness, the delicious food and burning drink, to the balding, fading oilcloth on the table, to the little white room itself, he was not able to discern. And yet she had turned from him, finally, that sacred night, and had fallen asleep. Satiated. But incomprehensibly empty.

She was curious. A woman of curiosity. That was so American of her. She wondered why many of the old women wore black. Why they stepped aside with deference when men passed. What was that quality of resignation in their joy?

She noticed that the leader of our country had a tall blonde from the American Midwest as his wife. And that all the little wifelets of his deputies had lightened their own dark hair by several shades. She asked me about the killing of the adulterous woman in
Zorba the Greek.
Did Kazantzakis tell the truth? And if he did, did such things still happen?

As she forged ahead, I saw a shift occur in my mother's look. Very odd. For I had known it all my life to be a face with a certain limited range of emotional expression. I did not recognize the looks she was beginning to give my inquisitive wife.

I saw my mother begin to awaken, against her will. As if from ancient sleep. To shake herself, as an animal after hibernation might do. I saw her rouse her memory. I saw her look down at herself, as if for the first time since girlhood, over sixty years ago,
and see all the black clothing shrouding her, and the kerchief, black, in all this Greek heat, tied under her chin. I saw that she feared what might happen to her, under Susannah's curious questions. And that her solution was to entice Susannah into becoming a tourist.

Go to the church, she croaked, pulling us toward the road. Take Susannah to see our precious sites, she said, grinning grimly so that her worn gold tooth showed.

She had made a pun without realizing it. In America one went to see the sights. In Greece to see the sites. Susannah and I smiled as I explained it to my mother, who looked desperate. A look which actually made us laugh, even as we hoped our chuckles would not be perceived as condescending.

The sun was hot. It seemed hotter even than when I was a boy. The stones so hot a glancing footstep caused them to shed their dust. I took Susannah's hand. She was dressed completely in white, her hair lifted off her neck in one thick, coiled braid that accentuated her height and her elegant, gliding walk. In Greece I did not feel too short for her. Men were often short in Greece, and something in our psyches, Susannah said maybe it was an ancient memory of gods and goddesses, revered the stately woman. I felt instead only pride to be stepping out with her.

And so they entered the small white church, the shrine of St. Theodore the Merciful with the tiny brown virgin at his feet, and witnessed a ritual Petros had not seen or even thought about since he was a boy: the local women entering the church, pulling their shawls over their heads, praying silently as they approached the large statue of St. Theodore, but then, prostrating themselves, furtively kissing the small virgin's feet. Look, said my observant
daughter, poking her husband in the ribs, as they watched the adoration with which the women did this. Look. Look. There (meaning the women's kissing of the brown virgin's feet) is the reason you fell in love with me!

It was in the church that they encountered the dwarf.

At first I honestly did not remember her, though I had seen her every Sunday the entire time I was growing up. She was a fixture of the church. In fact, she lived there.

I felt Susannah poking me as the old women rose from their prostrations, placed their waxy white lilies in the urn left for them, crossed themselves, adjusted their scarves, and backed out the door. I thought she meant to ask about their backing out, a sign of respect to the virgin, as I saw it now, though as a boy I thought it meant deference to St. Theodore. But no, she was nodding toward the edge of the sacristy, where a very short woman, the top of her graying head just visible above what in America is called a pulpit, had already begun to sweep away the dust blown in by the worshippers, tourists, and other aimless travelers.

Her name is Irene, I said to Susannah in a whisper. She lives here. She is the caretaker of the place.

Irene appeared to hear my whisper, if not its content, and sent us a black, blazing look.

Her look appeared to scorch Susannah. It was as if she and the dwarf shared a moment of recognition. What I had interpreted as
a black look was in fact, according to Susannah later, a deep gazing into each other's eyes. A joining. And why was this? Of course Susannah, the American, wanted to know. Why should an aging Greek dwarf look so intensely into her eyes? What about the eyes of all the other passionate-looking Greek women around? And come to think of it, in Greece it was easy to see why the word “passion” also denoted suffering. So many of the women, when they smiled, seemed to smile through tears. It was in the eyes, said Susannah, wondering aloud if even the women themselves were aware of this ancient, indelible grief.

She wanted to be introduced. I explained it was out of the question. That no one actually talked to Irene. Susannah was aghast. How is that possible? she asked, staring. And of course she wouldn't speak English, I added.

Oh, murmured my wife, appearing to sink into herself, to actually become shorter, somehow. Oh, she said, as if to no one in particular, as if, in fact, to throw the words against the hot dry wind: Oh, but she has eyes, she finally said. And with these words, as we walked away, defiantly, she turned and looked back. But the dwarf was nowhere to be seen.

After the experience of meeting Irene's hot gaze in the small, cool church, Petros and I walked outside and began to climb the hill that rose behind it. As a boy he and Anand had played there; as a young man he had walked among the rocks with young girls. For them, at that time, the Fifties, the biggest experience of the week, quite frequently, and if you had a girlfriend, was the sunset.

His mother had sent me to the church, a tourist attraction more than anything else, these days, to get rid of the questions about women that I posed. I had begun to embarrass her. And yet, she was responsible for connecting me with Irene. However, Petros cautioned that I should say nothing about her to his mother. That she had no doubt forgotten Irene would be there, and that I would be curious. His mother, he said, would shrug off my questions; she would have nothing to say.

And you, I said, what do you have to say?

Only what the old stories tell us, he said, holding my hand as we stepped along the narrow path. Irene's mother was raped. Her father and brothers chose not to believe this. She was beaten. No
one ever again spoke to her. When Irene was born, her mother died. Irene was a dwarf. God's punishment for her mother's sin. She was given at a very young age, as a servant, to the church.

Petros pointed down to the church, which seemed almost a miniature in the distance. Off to the side,
there
, in a separate square, is where her mother is buried. See the flowers on her grave? They are always the same lilies that the old women bring.

The ones from inside? I asked.

Yes, he said.

No one knows how or when Irene learned that that place was her mother's grave. No one was supposed to tell her, just as no one is supposed to speak to her. But somehow, all these years, she has known.

I will tell her that I also know, I said.

Petros smiled at me. Whoa, he said, imitating an American cowboy, his favorite American hero. She knows. She does not need you to know. Don't be an American busybody.

Was it at that moment that I began to draw away from Petros? Suddenly I felt absent from the Greek landscape through which we walked so admiringly. Even the thought of his parents' oilcloth, identical to one my grandparents in the South had had—a small square of which I had framed and hung on my college dorm wall—could not restore me. We stood watching Irene stomp out of the church's back door, her arms filled with white lilies, reminding me of a painting by Diego Rivera; her short, stocky form, all in black, nearly hidden from view. She made her way to the most distant part of the cemetery, and then beyond it, until she arrived at a space that seemed empty—by comparison to the regular burial plots, their white tombstones glittering, all around. There in a large urn were the old flowers, which she plucked out. Then, thoughtfully—critically, it seemed, even from such a distance—she
placed the lilies one by one in the receptacle. Finished, she ducked around the side of the church and returned with a bucket of water. After pouring the water through the flowers she stepped back, crossed herself, and backed away.

We watched as she entered her own small room at the back of the church, and I heard Petros sigh, perhaps at the thought of her loneliness, as we watched the shutters come together—but not before we'd caught a glimpse, just before the final banging shut, of something that looked suspiciously like bright red window curtains inside.

What was the life of this woman? This woman dwarf? How could she be so punished for what she was? For being her mother's child? For being? And who had cradled her through babyhood? Comforted her through adolescence? Who had instructed her how to serve both her mother and the church?

It is too much! I said in agitation to Petros as we walked home. Back to his mother's beans, rice, salad, and lamb stew.

I agree, he said sadly. And then, with a sudden violence he added, stomping on the ground: I hate this place.