Sophia pauses, giving me time to absorb this.
“You have no idea what it was like for us because of that. Didn’t you ever wonder why we didn’t have the farm anymore, or why Nestor became a schoolteacher instead of following his father into the business, or why we lost the nice house on Korinthou? It was because of this, what your mother did. Our father was forced to work as a simple employee under an Italian who knew nothing about the business. Every day, he dragged himself to the warehouse and had to answer to this Italian fool. Until the Germans took over and he had to work for them, earning even less than the Italians had paid him. But do you know what might have been the worst?” Thalia takes her sister’s hand, and Sophia seems emboldened by her grasp. “The
worst was that he had to watch his own countrymen betray him.” Now Sophia is glaring at me, and her voice is shaking. Thalia caresses her hand but makes no move to silence her. “When the Germans left, the business should have been restored to us. But instead of thinking about restoration, we Greeks were at one another’s throats. For five years we killed one another and stole from one another. How’s that for national unity after a war?”
“I know, Sophia,” I say. “I know the civil war was a terrible time. But you can’t blame my mother for the fact that PASOK didn’t give the business back.”
“I’m doing no such thing. And it wasn’t a civil war,” Sophia scoffs. “It was a
guerrilla
war, because communists were attacking the government of Greece.”
“We’re supposed to call it the civil war now, Sophia,” Thalia says.
“Just because Papandreou decreed it twenty years ago? No, thank you. You can’t change history just by calling it something else.”
I remember this Michalis that Thalia said Sophia loved and wouldn’t marry. Is this why her hatred of the left runs so strong?
“So, yes, it was a terrible time, Calliope. Ask the parents whose children were taken away to Bulgaria and Romania to be turned into baby communists. Ask the people whose husbands and boyfriends had their throats slit with the lids of tin cans.”
“Sophia.”
Sophia pulls her hand from Thalia’s and smooths her hair into its bun. “I’m fine.”
“But
Papóu
wasn’t hurt,” I say.
“Not like that,” Thalia says gently. “But in 1949, the communists gave the business to someone on their side, and we never got it back. Your grandfather never recovered.”
Sophia starts to say something and catches herself before beginning again in a steady monotone.
“From 1940 to 1949, we had war and famine and death. During all that time, our family could have had some security and wealth. But instead we had nothing. Your mother couldn’t go to the School of the Arts. Nestor became a schoolteacher, always at the whim of the local government. Your grandfather went from owning an international business to working as a warehouse clerk. We lost a business and a farm that would have protected all of us for years. Your mother is my sister and I will always love her, but she was the one who brought this pain into our lives.”
Sophia is finished. In the brief silence, I can see that she is utterly drained.
“Sophia, I understand all this now, but you can’t blame my mother, can you?”
“She angered the enemy. During a war.”
“We told her not to see him,” Thalia says.
“
Theies
, read the letter she wrote to him. She wasn’t the only one involved. It was Nestor too. That’s what he wanted me to understand.”
“What letter?” Aliki says. She has come into the room and is leaning against the wall, hugging herself.
I pull the page from my mother’s letter out of my pocket and hand it to her. The aunts follow the paper with their eyes, and I can see that its presence in the room has rattled them.
“Nestor did something,” I go on. “He made it so your father found them out.”
“Calliope, you don’t have to defend your mother,” Sophia starts.
“I’m not trying to defend her. I’m trying to tell you what happened.”
Sophia laughs. “Sixty years ago and you’re telling
us
what happened?”
“We kept telling her to stop,” Thalia says, “and she wouldn’t.”
I don’t know what to say. It’s as if they can’t even hear me. This all seems ridiculous—a chain of events linked now by the memories of wounded and perhaps resentful old women.
“She was a teenager, for Christ’s sake. She was in love.”
“A very expensive love, it turned out,” says Sophia.
I know she’s right, but I can’t listen anymore.
“I need to go,” I say, pushing myself to my feet.
“Cousin,” Nikos says. He pulls me into the dining room. “You just got here. Give the old ladies some peace of mind. Stick around.”
“Do you hear what they’re saying, Nikos? God knows I know my mother is trouble, but this is ridiculous.”
“If you’re going, then go talk to your mother.”
“Why?” I know I sound petulant, but I don’t care.
“Ask her about that machine-gun cartridge. I think she knows more than she’s telling.”
“Nikos, I don’t want more mysteries. I want solutions.”
“Just try. Ask her. It might help.”
I look at Nikos’s round face and his round eyes. I laugh, once again surprised by his patience and kindness.
“Sometimes he has good ideas, Paki,” Aliki says. “Why not try?”
“Fine,” I say. “I’ll go. Can I have the letter, Aliki?”
She places the letter into my outstretched hand. She holds my hand for a second in both of hers and looks at me.
“Are you okay?”
I nod.
I turn to the aunts and tell them that there’s no need to worry.
“Thank you for telling me what happened,” I say. “Thank you.”
I start walking to my mother’s apartment. As I walk, I picture myself stepping through her door, handing her my coat, sitting in front of the giant walnut mirror. But I can’t think of how to begin. Should I ask her why she didn’t join the others in wondering where I’d gone tonight? Or why she never told me the truth about the loss of the family’s wealth? Or do I really start with a question about that cartridge, which seems so irrelevant now to what I’ve learned?
She buzzes me in and stands silently in the apartment door when I step out of the elevator. She’s still dressed in what she must have worn to the memorial service—a wool skirt and a trim sweater—but she has slippers on her stockinged feet. She watches as I take off my coat and toss it on a little chair. On any other day, she would pick it up to hang it or would scold me for being so careless with my clothes.
“You don’t seem surprised to see me,” I say. “Or worried,” I add, in spite of myself.
“Calliope.” She sighs. “Do you want me to make a fuss over you? You’re thirty-five years old, for goodness’ sake. What you do with your private life is no concern of mine.”
“What? You think I’ve been with some guy, don’t you?”
“No. I asked Thalia to let me know when you turned up. She just called.”
“Make up your mind. You
are
concerned or you’re not?”
“Calliope, stop it. I’m your mother. Of course I’m concerned.”
I realize that she assumed I would come to her sisters and not to her when I was back from wherever I’d gone. I wonder how that feels, to be your daughter’s second choice. But then I remind myself that I know how it feels to be your mother’s.
“Thalia said Sophia told you a long story tonight,” she says.
“Yes.”
She goes into the kitchen and fills a glass of water from the tap. She drinks almost all of it down and turns to face me, leaning against the sink. She seems younger, in a strange way, as if the knowledge that the truth is out has restored her energy. Or maybe she is simply mustering her strength to deny whatever it is I’m going to say.
“Well.” She is waiting.
My face heats up and I can feel my pulse beat faster. I am afraid. Afraid to ask a question that might heap more unpleasant truths onto what I have already learned, afraid to arouse my mother’s wrath or to summon the kind of anguish that can overwhelm her and me both. I look at her and see that her face is relaxing. She thinks I’m going to back down.
“Okay,
Mamá
. Tell me about that cartridge.”
“What cartridge?” She says the word as though she doesn’t really know what it means.
“The bullet thing. In the box. You said it must be from Yannis and his hunting, but Nikos says it’s from an Italian gun.”
“So maybe Yannis had an Italian gun.”
“An Italian machine gun. A Breda, I think. From the war. Nikos says the only way to get the cartridge from a Breda is to pull it from the ammunition clip. Who had this cartridge,
Mamá
? And who gave it to Nestor?”
She turns back to the sink and drinks more of the water. She runs the tap and fills the glass again, drinks again.
“
Mamá!
Are you trying to drown yourself or something?”
There’s a long silence and she remains with her back to me. I realize that I am holding my breath. When I take in air again, I do it quietly, like sipping something that will burn my lips.
Finally my mother turns around, and I see that any youth I spotted in her moments ago is gone.
“That is what your uncle and I argued about in the hospital.”
“The cartridge?” I can’t help but sound surprised. I picture the two of them arguing over possession of it, but surely that can’t be the case.
“In a way, yes.”
My mother sits down at the kitchen table, her hands in her lap.
“Your uncle Nestor and I share a great shame. He wanted to tell you his part in it, but I didn’t. Not because I wanted to preserve my own honor. But because I wanted to preserve his. You don’t believe me, Calliope, but it’s true.”
She must see the doubt in my face, but she goes on.
“War has a funny way of making people behave the opposite of what you think, Calliope. It confuses things.”
“You couldn’t have done anything shameful. You had no power.”
“Why on earth would you think powerlessness exempts you from shame? Even the occupied can behave in shameful ways, Calliope. That’s one of the things an occupation does to you: turns an honorable person into a cheat, turns an innocent into a guilty soul.”
I sit down now, barely pulling the chair out so that the edge of the table presses against my ribs.
“Nestor got that cartridge,” my mother goes on, “from the partisans. Greeks who had gotten weapons from the Italians when they surrendered to the Germans.” She must notice the confusion on my face, because she breathes an irritated sigh. “It was complicated, Calliope. The Italians occupied. Then the
Germans occupied. And the Italians who didn’t get caught hid in the hills and ended up helping the partisans.” She waits a moment, but I don’t say anything. “One day, after the Germans had taken over, we went to the camp where the Germans kept their Italian prisoners, and one of them called to us from behind the fence. I should have walked away right then. Everything would have been different if I had walked away and taken Nestor with me.”
She stops, fighting against a decades-old frustration. I can see her twitching slightly in her chair, as if she could pull her teenage body away from what became so obviously the wrong course. I reach across the table and touch her shoulder.
“
Mamá
, do you mean you wouldn’t have lost the farm?”
I don’t see how this is possible. But maybe I can offer some source of solace she has overlooked in all these years.
“No. Why would you say that?” She looks at me, and I can see her trying to piece together what exactly her sisters have told me. “This is worse than that. All these years, Nestor and I have had a much bigger worry than money and wealth. We had a darker sin on our conscience.”
I lean back against the chair, my mind scrambling to think of what she could possibly mean.
“We knew this soldier. Giorgio. He had befriended Nestor at the start of the war. Nestor went to talk to him. I gave in and I let him. Nestor gave him something to eat. The Germans were starving them. They were starving us all. In Athens, but even in Patras, people were dying on the streets.” She looks up at me sharply. “Do you understand that, Calliope? Can you imagine such a thing?”
I nod. I know she’s not telling me the whole story about Giorgio but I don’t want to disrupt her momentum. After a moment she starts up again.
“Nestor must have gone to the camp again without me, and Giorgio told him where the Italians were hiding with their weapons in the hills, and Nestor told Yannis and must have brought him there for the guns. Yannis had left us when we couldn’t pay him anymore, and we suspected he had joined the partisans. Probably on the communist side, but who cared as long as he was fighting the Germans. One day Nestor and I were the only ones home. Your aunts were out in the
plateia
and my father was at work. I don’t know where my mother was that day. Maybe none of this would have happened if she had been there. Two German soldiers came after Nestor, and they said they would kill him if he didn’t tell where Yannis was. They said Yannis had led a partisan group that had killed two Nazi soldiers the day before.”
“But how did they know about Nestor?”
“Maybe he boasted to someone, or maybe they saw him talking to someone. But they were right. He had been to the partisan camp. And they came after him to get to Yannis.” She takes a breath. “So I protected him.”
She stops and closes her eyes. I wait for a while, but she doesn’t move. I’m afraid that she will begin to cry.
“You protected Yannis?”
“No. I protected Nestor. I
betrayed
Yannis. That’s all, Calliope.”
“What do you mean? How did you betray him?”
My mother opens her eyes and looks at me with a sadness I have never seen.
“I’m only going to say this one last thing,” she says. “Yannis was found the next day hanging from a tree.”
We sit like that for a long time, and I discover a rhythm to the whir of the refrigerator. I pick at a tiny scratch in my chair, rubbing a fingertip over the spot where the scratch cuts across
the edge of the seat. At some point, it occurs to me that my mother has forgotten I am in the room, even though I am just across the small white tabletop from her. I can’t imagine what she is thinking, but I know that I am struggling to see through a kaleidoscope of muddy shards of glass.