“But, Dad, the murderer was white!”
“What murderer?”
“He killed Bambi.”
I show them where I buried her. Mom is sobbing. Dad asks, “What is that?”
“A piece of cricket, so she has something to eat in her grave. I didn’t have any candy or lollipops.” I made a mistake, again. Bambi’s head is in the sea. She has no mouth to chew with.
This year Walkmans are all the rage. At the beach you see girls with headphones drumming their fingers against their knees. They tap their feet to the rhythm, whistle or sing off-key, in a world of their own. And when they take the headphones off, they look surprised, dazed by the sudden onslaught of reality. That’s how I’ve been living all these years: with headphones on. And then Anna, who always knows better, who’s always one step ahead, comes along and yanks my headphones off: “It’s not another little girl, Maria, it’s your doll!”
“How did you know about any of that?” I ask. It’s past dawn now, and we’re lying in bed, wrapped tightly in the sheets. Exhausted mummies.
“Your mother told Antigone, back when we found you on the beach in Aegina. You know, after Angelos and I. . She was crying because you were eating crickets and grinding your teeth, just like back then.”
“She told you about that, too?”
“How could you eat crickets, Maria?”
“Think of it as practice, for prison.”
“You really think they’ll put us in jail?” She wraps herself even tighter in her sheet, curling into the corner of an imaginary cell and looking at me despairingly. The room smells of mildew, just how I imagine a jail cell would smell. I picture Antigone and Mom sobbing during visiting hours. Anna and I in rags, gnawing on crusts of bread, plagued by guilt. Direct Action has been discovered and the media are distorting our cause in light of our crime. They describe us an anarchist fringe group whose members include fanatic nationalists. They blame us for the recent attacks on Albanians. “Young people with confused ideas and no vision for the future,” the newscasters declare.
“We have to split up,” Anna says. She’s pacing up and down in the room, biting her thumb.
“What?”
“We have to leave here right away, and never speak again.”
“You mean to one another?”
“Yes, to say goodbye forever. Abandon Direct Action. Forget it all. It’s the only way.”
We have to dig a hole in our heads, as Aunt Amalia would say. Put in the Albanian who didn’t know how to swim. And then we’ll bury one another, too. I’ll bury Anna in her marinière, holding her drawing of Patty Hearst. And she’ll bury me in my school uniform with the Mao collar and my Savings Day prize.
Anna leaves first. She packs silently, shoving her clothes into her duffle bag as if they were dirty laundry. She makes a vague gesture with her hand. She doesn’t kiss me, doesn’t hug me; for once there’s no drama. She just stands in the doorway long enough for some parting words: “You know what Mayakovsky said? That a true revolutionary burns all bridges behind him.” And then she shuts the door.
I sit on the bed, I don’t know for how long. Hours. A whole line of Annas parade by me, at all ages, striking pose after pose, making faces, with their white eyebrows, the dimples in their chins, those big blue eyes, deceptively calm. Then I pack my suitcase as hurriedly as she had, tossing in books and clothes. I understand the plan: she’ll head to Paris and never look back. I, meanwhile, need to go someplace where Direct Action won’t find me. Somewhere with sand, heat, tropical rain.
For a start, Aegina will do.
“I want to ask you something. But I want a french fry first.”
Martha gets up from the sofa in a funny way: first her stomach, then her. She chooses a french fry off the plate — she prefers the underdone ones — and bites into it with pleasure, with her front teeth, like a beaver. A butterball beaver that purrs, rubbing its belly. She has on a loose dress of gray flannel and tattered cotton socks. She’s turned out exactly as I would have guessed: she and her husband live in what used to be her family’s summer home, that two-story house with the stuccoed walls, sliding doors and watercolors of angry seascapes on the walls. The only thing she’s gotten rid of is Kyria Pavlina’s flypaper. And their goat has long since died of old age. Her husband is so shy he blushes whenever you talk to him. He’s a notary public who works in Pireus.
Martha used to work at a travel agency by the port, but now, about to give birth and naturally chubby to begin with, the most she can manage is to stand up and sit back down again. She has no one to help her. Fotini is living in Thessaloniki with an out-of-work actor, the absolute opposite of the Harlequin romances the two sisters used to read. Kyria Pavlina is confined to her bed, suffering one kidney stone after another. As for Angelos, he married an Italian, Romina, and took over the management of her family farm somewhere outside of Sienna. They smile at us every day from a gold-framed photograph, brandishing muddy shovels as if they were tridents.
All day long I fry potatoes. Martha has a weakness for fries. The smell of hot oil makes me queasy, but it suits the melancholy familiarity of this house, with the television always on in the afternoon, a housewife curled up on the couch.
“You’re going to stay with us, right?” Martha asks the same question every afternoon while I drink my coffee and she eats her fries. Nanny, governess — now there’s a job that never crossed my mind. The older I get, the closer life brings me to Gwendolyn. “You’ll have your own room, you can do your art in there and play with the baby, right?” Ever since she was little Martha has spoken almost exclusively in questions. She opens her eyes wide and looks at you as if the end of the world has arrived.
“We’ll see.”
My room is Angelos’s childhood room. There are still pencils and erasers in his desk from when he was a teenager and would shut himself up for hours, before he started breaking girls’ hearts. There’s still something masculine in the air, a lingering smell of stale aftershave. Martha brings in roses from the garden and little pots of basil, but to no avail. Only when winter has finally come and in place of those flowers Stella’s toys sprout one by one do I forget that I’m sleeping in Angelos’s old bed.
At first I don’t go near her crib. I’m afraid of those tiny fingers that shape themselves into fists, afraid of the furrowed skin, the tongue that paints her toothless gums with spittle. Then she starts to make the most thrilling sounds: deep vowels full of existential doubt, guttural noises that sound like attempts at a laugh. I could watch her for hours on end and never get bored. Now that the hole in my head has opened and let out the cave and the burglars, Stella is a comfort, a replacement for lost siblings, dolls, and childhood friends.
Martha senses it, and has stopped asking.
“You’ll stay,” she says.
•
I knit socks and hats for Stella. The only art I still remember is this circular form of fencing: knit, purl, slip stich. I knit until my needles spark. Beside me on the sofa, Martha is nursing the baby, watching her afternoon shows out the corner of her eye. The baby drinks greedily, eyes closed, like a cat. For an instant I feel like I’ve returned to my childhood house and am watching my mother nurse my little sister. I’m afraid I might be losing it. It wouldn’t take much, just a few more holes in my head to unbury themselves all at once.