War Games (12 page)

“But how can you know Lambros was captured?” Sophie cried.

“There are many spies,” one of the men said. “Collaborators. It’s difficult to move through Athens and avoid them.”

“Does his family know?” Papa asked.

“We can’t go to his family,” another of them said. “Lambros has embarrassed the Germans too many times. They’ll be watched.”

“I’ll tell them,” Papa said.

“You must be careful too,” one of the men said. “If they learn you’re his uncle, they may want to question you.” Petros ran and climbed the mulberry tree in case Papa went to Auntie immediately.

Then again, maybe he wouldn’t go at all. Papa didn’t want the Germans to notice him or his family. It was everything Papa tried to do, look like an ordinary Greek.

It came as a shock to realize the danger Lambros carried with him was like an illness, catching. Petros almost hoped Papa wouldn’t go. And yet, how could they do nothing to tell Lambros’s family what had happened to him?

After a few minutes, he got a little nervous, thinking he’d come to the tree too quickly—he might have missed something of interest. The longer Papa didn’t come, the more he was tempted to climb down and go back to the window.

But he didn’t care to be caught listening in when he was supposed to be watching the road. He fidgeted with indecision until he saw a movement in the garden, at some distance from the house. He had no doubt the four men were leaving.

For the first time he considered the luck of it. They were alone in the house when these men arrived, no German commander to be considered. Or maybe it wasn’t so much luck as a matter of the men watching them for a time to be sure.

And then he considered the meaning of Lambros’s being captured. Elia’s grandfather had once said “captured by the Gestapo” meant the same thing as “soon dead,” and no one disputed it.

He couldn’t think of Lambros as soon dead. His heart fought it and his mind wouldn’t listen. Was this what Papa was going to tell Stavros and Auntie? The idea sickened him.

Papa came out the front door at that moment, walking like a man with unpleasant business. Zola, a step behind him, carried what Petros guessed to be a packet of cheese. The dog followed Zola as far as the gate, his tail held at a dejected angle.

Petros thought Zola must’ve asked to go. Perhaps Papa wasn’t so angry with him after all. “Warn your mother if anyone comes,” Papa said as he passed under the tree.

Mama called him inside a few minutes later. She took Petros and Sophie up to the flat roof of the house. They swept it clean of dried leaves and bits of twig and an old bird nest built in the twist of iron table legs.

Before the air raids at Easter, the family often ate dinner up on the roof at a large round table. They slept there in summer, when the house was too hot for an easy sleep. From here Mama could see the countryside for miles in any direction—she could see Papa and Zola.

“Do you remember when Zola made his parachute?” Petros asked Mama, and pointed at the nearly chest-high barrier at the edge of the roof, the breakfall. He could see over it with ease now, but until he was five, Papa’d held him up to look. “He threw the cat down just there.”

Mama slapped her face with the memory of it. “The devil,” she said, almost fondly. It was often this way, Mama cherishing the memories of things she had punished them for. Petros wondered why she couldn’t appreciate these adventures more at the time they happened.

“It was a fine parachute,” Petros said.

“Who would have expected such a contraption to work?” Mama said, laughing.

Sophie said, “Don’t talk like
I’ve
forgiven him. My cat spooks if I flap a sheet over my bed. She mistakes it for the tablecloth.”

“Your cat hasn’t forgotten Zola either,” Petros said. The cat often hid under the bed so she could leap out and bite Zola around the ankles. She troubled no one else this way.

Mama made an annoyed sound with her tongue.

Once they’d finished on the roof, Mama urged them to scrub the parlor floor and polish the remaining pieces of wood furniture.

Petros grumbled a little, and she said, “You’re lucky there’s no silver to polish, or linen to press.”

Petros didn’t feel lucky, but he eyed the blue draperies, thinking thoughts of silken blue kite string.

Papa and Zola were gone for two hours, at the least. They came through the gate, and Zola peeled off to walk in the orchard.

Petros caught up with him under the peach trees. “Well?”

Zola said, “Auntie told us Aunt Hypatia is sometimes here, sometimes in the mountains.”

“Stavros never said anything,” Petros said.

“That’s what he should say,” Zola said. “Nothing.”

He was in the mood for a fight, but Petros didn’t give it to him. “What about the notes?”

“Auntie forgives me.”

“Forgives you?”

“Papa blames me,” Zola complained. “Papa’s old, and afraid someone might tell them about us. He doesn’t care about victory. He wants to be safe.”

Petros kept silent. Much of the time he felt exactly that way. He wanted life to go back to the way it had been before the Germans invaded, even before the Greeks were at war with the Italians. It was good.

And now things were changed. No one knew yet what it would mean.

“It’s not fair,” Zola said. “Lambros was captured before I had written anything about him.”

“Where did those four men go?” Petros asked.

“Papa told them how to find old Mr. Katzen’s house,” Zola said. “No one goes up there now. It’s too far from the village. The weeds hide it.”

“Why is that?”

“He’s gone,” Zola said. “The Germans came and he was gone.”

Petros sometimes thought of Mr. Katzen as he tended his peppers. But there were many things to think about once he’d left the peppers behind, and he’d forgotten to wonder why he hadn’t seen the old man lately. He cringed from knowing this, but there it was.

Working in his garden that afternoon, Petros began to protect that pepper plant, putting a bit of gauze over it to keep the bugs off. When the fruit was ready, he’d save the seeds for next year. He’d remember Mr. Katzen.

During the afternoon rest, when even Zola slept—since missing so much sleep, he seemed to appreciate it more—Petros went to the arbor and cut a long vine. He stripped it of leaves and tiny green grapes. He broke the stem to shape a hexagon. The shape of his kite.

He wished, momentarily, that he’d told Zola. It seemed selfish to keep something so fine to himself. Perhaps he should have told Stavros and Elia too, but it wasn’t their feelings that weighed on him.

The division of big brother/little brother always made Petros unhappy. Perhaps it even made Zola unhappy. Now and again Petros wanted to do things differently.

He struggled with many such discomforts lately, from
wanting
to do things so he felt right about them and then
having
to do them in a way that felt wrong. The kite was one of
these things. If he thought the matter through, he might find a compromise. He could do that later. He would.

But this hour couldn’t be wasted.

Working carefully, he strengthened the corners of the kite with thinner tendrils of the vine. He climbed the arbor, set the frame on top of the thick ceiling of grape vines, and left it to dry stiff and strong in the sun.

Petros carried the wilted branches and scraps of grape leaves to the goats. All the evidence of his labor was gone in minutes. He let Fifi out of the pen, still thinking of how to get the string he had in mind.

The next morning, Papa made his marketing trip to the village. Mama and Sophie were already waiting in the truck, having packed cheese and eggs for Auntie.

Petros waited only until the truck was out of sight before leaving his garden. A better time for the tedious work of gluing the paper to the frame could not have been arranged.

Old Mario and Zola were on the far side of the garden. They believed Petros to be working in his. He retrieved the paper flag, being careful not to squeeze creases into it, and carried the frame in his other hand.

Sophie’s cat lay curled on the doorstep, a sleeping guardian. Everything was as he’d hoped. The quiet of the house was almost like being in a cave.

Petros took all his materials to his room to work on the kite. The paste wouldn’t pick up dust and leafy debris as it
would if he worked in the shelter of the arbor, and he could hide the finished kite under his bed until it dried.

There was no one to scold when he spilled a little flour on the floor. He wiped it up before going on to the next step, adding the water a little at a time, stirring the paste with a knife.

Petros loved the rattle of paper, the stickiness of paste. He loved the kite, now becoming more than a dream he watched in his mind’s eye. The paper still wanted to curl as he flattened it, but this made it easier to glue to the grapevine frame. The scissors, only last year just a little too big for his hands, worked smoothly, without fraying the edges where he cut. It was as if he were singing a song of kite making, and all the notes were perfect.

He wiped his sticky fingers on his shirt again and again as he folded the edges of the paper flag to the frame. The strong blue and white could be seen on the backs of his eyelids when he blinked. Every minute flew by so fast, he didn’t know how much time had passed.

The thought came to him to show Zola the kite before it was quite finished. His brother might be angry for a moment, for an hour even, but then the kite would win him over. He imagined he and Zola would work on it together, tying up each corner of the frame with the blue silk, light enough for the kite to carry it, strong enough to hold the kite captive, and of a color that would fade from the eye so the kite would seem to fly as freely as a bird.

The kite would take a while to dry—this was a worry. Petros was so intent on making this kite of all kites that he heard nothing until he heard Zola’s breath, drawn in fast. “I knew it,” Zola said in a voice held low and—this pleased Petros—excited. Not angry.

“I didn’t mean—” to keep it from Zola, not really. He meant to protect it. From Mama, Sophie, all of them. That’s what he wanted to say.

But Zola interrupted him. “Shah. Hide it. Papa’s coming in.”

“They’re back?” Petros hadn’t heard the truck.

“Just Papa. Mama and Sophie are sitting with Auntie for a while.”

He helped Petros slide the kite carefully under his bed. It was still wet in places but already sturdy as it disappeared into the shadows.

Papa and Old Mario entered the kitchen, disagreeing about something. Zola said, “Change your shirt. Clean up this mess.” And then he hurried out of the room so fast his shirt-tail fluttered.

After a panicky look around, Petros shoved the cup of paste under Zola’s bed. Paper scraps and the scissors went under the rug. He yanked off his shirt and wiped up the bits of paste drying on the floor.

Wearing a clean shirt, he looked into the small mirror on the dresser to be sure he didn’t have paste in his hair. He put an innocent look on his face.

In the kitchen, there was talk of buying a donkey and cart.
Papa was slicing tomatoes that were still warm from the sun, Old Mario sprinkling oil and oregano on chunks of dried bread.

Zola had taken a view that didn’t agree with Papa or Old Mario, a useful distraction. His dog had curled under the table like a dollop of soft cheese. No one took particular notice of Petros as he joined them.

While they ate, whenever he looked at his brother, Zola wore an expression of deep thought. Petros knew his brother was thinking of the kite. Petros thought he was angry after all.

But when they went to their room later, Zola’s eyes flashed with something like joy. “It’s a fine effort,” he said admiringly.

“It’s mine.”

“It’s ours.”

Petros thought this over. Wasn’t this exactly what he’d hoped they might do? Share the kite? But the work was his. And the work wasn’t done. “It’s not ready to fly.”

“No,” Zola agreed. “But someday we’ll fly it.”

Petros said, “When I get the string, we’ll fly it.”

“Where will you find string?”

“I won’t tell you,” Petros said. “The kite is—the making of it is mine.”

“Very well,” Zola said. “But the hiding of it is something we must do together. We can’t leave it under the bed. The roof!”

Petros shook his head. “Papa might go up there.”

“I didn’t say we’ll leave it in plain sight,” Zola said, a little
of the sneering big brother creeping into his voice. “We’ll put it on the roof of the stairwell.”

“A plane could see it,” Petros said, happy to spot the flaw in Zola’s planning. “Or it might blow away. It’s a kite, after all.”

Zola looked stymied for a minute. Then he said, “The back wall of the stairwell is inches from the breakfall. The space is little more than a crevice.”

“True,” Petros said. “The trellis covers that wall. No one will look there.” The trellis started at the ground but had been built up to cover the structure of the stairwell with vines.

“We’ll put it between the wall and the breakfall, hidden by the trellis.”

This was a good plan. Petros might not have thought of it himself, although he didn’t say so. Instead, he said, “Even the commander couldn’t find it there.”

While the afternoon sun baked the soil, Petros worked in his garden. He wanted to make up the time lost working on the kite.

When it was about time the others would be waking up, he washed his hands in a small bucket beside the well. Fifi butted against him, hoping for an extra treat—a bit of carrot or a leaf from a pepper plant. “You were lucky today,” Petros said, holding a frothy green fringe of sweet fennel in front of her nose. “I broke this small branch.”

Fifi snatched it from him and chewed.

“Hssst! Petros!”

Petros heard this whisper like it came out of the air over his head, and he looked up.

“It’s me, Lambros.”

This time the whisper could be felt like a breath on his neck.

“Are you a ghost?”

When Lambros laughed, the sound echoed out of the well. “Not yet, small cousin. Not yet.”