Let Me Explain You

  I am not paying for their comfort, Stavros said. I am paying for mine. But what he meant was, Comfort does not mean understanding, and more than anything, the daughters must Understand the Father.

  None of his daughters had answered his calls tonight.

  The goat nudged his hand. Stavros came back to the dwindling night. “Do you know what is Fatherhood, Goat?” he said.

  Fatherhood is you holding a little tape; and the tape is sticky, so it follows you everywhere. Your hands are never clean, they are always sticky. You run, the tape flies after you, it is stuck to your little finger. You do not pay too much attention, because it is just tape. But then something happen: you, the father, realize what you have been holding is not actual tape. What you have been stuck to this whole time is a flypaper strip; and this many years you have been catching flies. You realize you are just a stupid idiot, and God has tricked you into trapping flies. What can you do? You cannot do one thing about the stuck fly. You cannot take off the fly legs from the fly or the flypaper. It is too late to try and change things but still you try, and nobody cares that you try, not even God, who is just sitting on a stool in the corner telling jokes about fly shit.

  The goat nudged Stavros’s hand again.

  “Soon it is all over for us,” he said to his friend. “Our mistakes will no longer have our names on them. No more, you fat kri-kri. Do you hear what I am saying, Goat, about how there is never enough time?”

  At least the goat’s head on his leg was a solid feeling, a light pressure that confirmed they were together. It was atom and atom, Stavros and goat.

  Stavros looked up at the sky, said, “Could you make a noise, maybe so I know?”

  Nothing. Nothing. It was a black night like he hadn’t seen in his life, even with the stars. The wind rustled the grass that was more dirt than grass. Stavros could sense every blade trembling, as if about to blow away, and he kept expecting them to. He thought the smell of incense would come with the wind, but it didn’t. He moved his hand from the dirt to his goat. He stroked the goat’s buckled forehead, where the hair felt like straw.

  “Ah, Goat, why not get fat?” he whispered. “Ela, we will have our Last Supper, just you and me, and talk a little.” The goat lifted its head. “What, you say ‘But patera mou, it is midnight and we have nothing to eat?’ Goat, you should see the nothing we eat in Greece, my family and I, growing up so poor.”

  Stavros took out his cigarettes, and one by one he fed them to the goat. He lit the last one for himself. A feast.

  “You know the first drachma I made, Goat? It was from a tourist who had lost his way. He asked which was the right way to go and I, Stavros, showed him.”

  He pushed smoke through his nostrils and made a sound like humph, because he was thinking of that first time he had ever been paid. Everything until this point in life had been slave labor. But no one in the world, not his brothers, surely not his mother, knew about the drachma that suddenly belonged to him. He could swallow it or buy a glyko, it was his choice. He was too young to know what that meant exactly, but the ability to choose felt important. He felt the coin in his pocket; he took it out and examined it in the sunlight. The coin winked at him. It had found its way to him.

  Like a dummy, Stavros spent that drachma. He couldn’t even remember on what. Did he regret it now? No, not really.

  The goat grunted. Stavros petted his head again.

  “You want to hear another story about Stavros growing up? If you promise not to tell, I will give you a funny one.

  “My brothers and I, there are so many of us growing up that we share beds. Not two to a bed, I am talking four big boys, one bed. I am not the smallest, but I am not the biggest, either. Therefore, Stavros is stuck all night in the middle where it is warm. There is just one small constant problem which makes his brothers so mad: Stavros pees the bed.”

  Stavros laughed.

  In retaliation, Kostas, Manolis, and Nikos had tried to set Stavros’s penis on fire. Stavros ran, but his pants snagged around his ankles and the brothers pinned him to the ground. Orange dust caked his mouth and nostrils. Marina, the daughter of the pappas, the village priest, watched from the fence. Stavros could see her hand on the single wire that keeps the goats from wandering. She was not smiling or laughing, which would have made her seeing this OK, no; she was taking what was happening seriously. This was bad, a girl giving him pity with her eyes. Stavros spit in her direction, and this excited his brothers. Nikos brought the lighter to his crotch again. Stavros, afraid he was going to lose the most important piece of him, and in front of the pappas’s daughter, became so hysterical that his sobs could have been mistaken for gobbles. Only then did his brothers let up, laughing so hard they nearly peed themselves.

  “That gave me my childhood nickname, Goat. Galopoula. It means turkey. I hated it for years, but now I am OK with it.”

  Little Stavros yanked his pants up and gobbled after his mother, who was bathing the neighbor’s three children in a metal bucket because it paid for her boys’ schooling and their shoes (the left ones, at least, Goat). The children couldn’t all quite fit in the tub, and one of them stood with a foot in the dust.

  “At this point I am so afraid my pouli is gone, I can’t even look. I can’t touch it, only point.”

  His face was shiny with snot. “What, Stavro, what?” his mother asked, but she was not paying attention, she was ordering the children to raise their arms. She went across, scrubbing all three chests and throats. Stavros Stavros ran to the other side of the bucket so she would have to look. “Nikos burned it!” he shouted. Stavros Stavros pointed to himself, but still she did not get it. “Burned what?” she said, and Stavros Stavros pointed at the pouli on the little boy in the middle of the bucket. Little Yannis stopped dancing in the water. Katerina, washing the children’s faces, wrestled Yannis’s chin with her pink hand. In frustration, because what else could he do to make his mother understand, Stavros Stavros pulled his pants down. His pouli hung there, a sun-shy worm. Katerina roared into laughter. Finally, she understood. She splashed her son’s lap with bathwater. “Don’t worry, agapi mou, it’s still there. It’s just mikro for a while.”

  “Worst of all, who is still there staring the whole time? The pappas’s strange daughter Marina. She looked sorry for me, like it was her fault. But also, Goat, it was like she was insisting on seeing the shame of Stavros Stavros Mavrakis. So what do I do? I pour out the bucket of dirty water close to the fence, and I splash her feet. What does she do, the strange keftedaki? She takes off her sandals and hangs them on the post and follows me with her eyes until I finally go away.”

  Stavros took a drag. “The things we think of at the end of our life.” He wanted that last comment to come out as a joke, but it didn’t. It was too mournful for that.

  He dragged his half-smoked cigarette against the pavement to put it out, and then he fed the last of his last cigarette to his friend. He closed his eyes. He tried to be here, now, with the goat’s head on his leg. He listened to the wind.

  A lullaby came to Stavros. One that no one had ever written, but one that every Greek knew because it had drifted down to the islands and farms from mountainous Kastoria, and it carried with it the diminutive “little,” which was spoken with deep affection, the “akis” of his surname. The lullaby had come down to him years ago, like light, and he had only just received it. Stavros sang, his voice unaccustomed to singing, but he kept going. The goat breathed out its listening and stayed with Stavros and did not ask for anything other than this.

  Nani, nani, my child

  Come sleep, make it sleep

  and sweetly lull it.

  Come, sleep, from the vineyards

  take my child from the hands.

  Take it to the sheepcote

  to sleep like a little lamb

  to sleep like a little lamb,

  and to wake up like a little goat.

  The lullaby rose up with the wind to lift the weight from his shoulders, up to the stars
to take its place in their glinting faces. The lullaby dusted itself clean. The lullaby, which Stavros felt come from the loneliest part of him, the part that was forgotten and far away, the part that wanted to be held and wanted to hold, that lullaby came and made family out of the words.

  In the morning, Stavros Stavros Mavrakis was gone.

  DAY 5

  * * *

  Bargain: Beg

  CHAPTER 14

  * * *

  Stavros Stavros Mavrakis was gone: but not before one more story, Goat! Don’t you want to know how the boy became a wise businessman?

  On the main square in the village of his island of Crete, two kafenia faced each other: one red, one blue. Twelve-year-old Stavros Stavros opened the door to the red kafenio owned by the fat Onus. In the cool white room, customers sat on broken stools and played tavli, one of them debating louder than the normal loud Greek. The black hairs on his forearms were long, groomed. The other man shoved back, and the table rocked. Onus did not intervene because this happened every afternoon. One of them would lose money, the other would buy him ouzo, and by the end they’d be boasting that they fucked one another’s sisters behind the church. The only harm was spilled drinks, which was no harm to Onus at all.

  “What do you want, mori?” Onus asked when he spotted Stavros Stavros.

  “I want to make money,” Stavros Stavros said.

  “I don’t hire children,” Onus said.

  “I want to work.”

  The man with groomed forearms took his hat off to scratch his bald, damp head. “You’re wasting your time with this cheap crook, Mavrakis. He wouldn’t give his dead mother a job.”

  Onus did not deny it. At night he sawed off the tops of all his glasses at an angle. But today he poured a free shot of clear tsikoudia.

  “Hey, crook,” the groomed man said, “what’s the Mavrakis agori going to do with that, water my squash?”

  “He’s going to swallow it like a man,” Onus answered. “And then I’ll give him work.”

  Stavros Stavros ignored all the well-deep eyes that followed him and took a sip. It tasted like it had been strained from a goat’s coarse ass hair. His tongue pushed the liquor out of his mouth. Onus wiped Stavros Stavros’s face with a stinking rag. “Tell your father that if he wishes to be a rich man, he should sell me a hunk of that nice land.”

  Stavros Stavros pushed away and left, face wet. He did not go home. Instead, he crossed the road and entered the blue kafenio owned by Takis. He didn’t know what he would do, but he did know it would take more than a fat Onus to keep him down. Inside, the kafenio looked exactly like the one across the road. The customers were identical to Onus’s—deeply wrinkled, hiding grassy ears beneath dark gray caps, counting worry beads beneath waxed white mustaches. Even Takis looked like Onus, except he was skinny and there were dark patches below his eyes.

  Without addressing Takis, Stavros Stavros picked up a towel and began to wipe down the weatherworn tables. Takis paid no attention. He continued to slice a loaf of rough bread. When Stavros Stavros began to sweep out the lizards curled like bits of dry fat, Takis interfered. “What are you doing there, comrade?”

  Stavros Stavros did not look up. “Cleaning.”

  “Don’t bother. We like things here the way they are.”

  “You’ve got spiders.”

  “You leave those spiders alone. Those spiders are socialists. Good friends of the establishment.” Takis put a wedge of bread into his mouth, followed by a hunk of white cheese.

  “I’m just doing my job.”

  “Comrade,” he laughed, “there are no jobs.”

  Stavros Stavros continued to sweep. He picked up the dirt with his hands and dumped the pile into a wastebasket. He wiped his hands on his pants and looked up. He was disappointed to see that Takis didn’t look impressed.

  “Who sent you, Mavrakis? The government sent you to spy on me?”

  “Nobody,” Stavros Stavros said. “I came myself.”

  “Onus sent you? He sent you to my shop?”

  Stavros Stavros hesitated. A nod. Takis slammed his hands on the table. “That fascist wolf,” he roared. “He thinks he can hire a peckerless runt to take care of my establishment?” Stavros Stavros’s eyes darted to the door, sure that Onus was coming to clip his knuckles with a wooden ladle. “My brother, ignorant animal that he is, does not understand that one crow does not poke out the eye of another. Crows do not behave this way, so why should men?”

  Stavros Stavros was nervous when he spoke. “I told him that your kafenio is the most respected in the village, but he says your shop gives his business a bad reputation.”

  Takis pulled a blue handkerchief from his pocket, drew it around Stavros’s arm. “That cheap goat thinks he can get his hands on my shop. Let’s see how he likes it when I take care of his.”

  Stavros Stavros, emboldened, said, “He told me you wouldn’t even hire your dead mother.”

  “I wouldn’t hire his dead mother. Now go show that goatfucker who you really work for.”

  Stavros Stavros ran across the street. He peered into the window. Onus was smoking a cigarette. He saw Stavros Stavros’s head of greasy black hair and came out.

  “Kακό σκυλί ψόφο δεν έχει. What do I need to do to make you go home, mangy pup?”

  Stavros stood there. He was afraid of Onus a little.

  Onus chewed on his cigarette. He peered into the dusk. “What are you trying to show me, mori?” Stavros Stavros stretched out the arm with the blue handkerchief. “My brother gave you a job? That poor bastard can’t even afford the water he’s stealing from me.”

  Stavros, still afraid, saw this as a chance to get back at Onus for embarrassing him. He said, “Takis says the youth of Crete won’t be corrupted by fascist wolves.” This was a favorite phrase in the village.

  “Sure they will. How would you like to make double?”

  Stavros Stavros thought about it. He nudged his chin at the red handkerchief tied around Onus’s pudgy neck. Onus pinned the cigarette between his front teeth. He untied the handkerchief and slipped it over Stavros Stavros’s arm, above the blue one.

  “There, Mavrakis. Now you look almost like a man and less like a socialist donkey.”

  Young, ambitious Stavros reported to both kafenia from then on. He washed glasses, dusted chairs, poured alcohol when the brothers were too drunk to do it themselves, learned the alchemy of Greek coffee. Within a year, Takis was training Stavros Stavros in the kitchen; not to be outdone, Onus let him take over all of the cooking. By age sixteen, Stavros Stavros was feeding all of the village men. His mezedes, especially the sardeles pastes—fresh, salted, skinned sardines—were so good, the locals said they were sweeter than maternal love. Nα τрώει ημάνα και του παιδιού να μη δίνει, they confessed: A mother would eat it and let her child starve. No longer a boy, Stavros had become a businessman with an eye for a profitable future.

  Greek coffee, forever it would be the smell of his childhood, the smell he hoped to be buried with. The long-handled brass briki, the thick grounds, the golden froth that cooked slowly to the top. It was prophetic—it spoke of a life better than this one, with riches to come.

  DAY 4

  * * *

  Acceptance

  CHAPTER 15

  * * *

  For the third time this week, Litza was on her way to the diner. She was going to make him finish the will in front of her while she drank glass after glass of milk. She was going to make him recite the letter from memory—she had memorized it, and so must he. She was going to make him tell her what he wrote to Dina. She was going to order him to leave Stavroula alone, Christ, couldn’t he see the inevitable, hadn’t he seen it coming like the rest of them? She would tell him he was the wolf crying wolf, just as he used to accuse her of being when she was young and running with the pack, pretending to be one of the animals, crying wolf! wolf! She would eat a big piece of carrot cake, slowly, while he confessed . . . whatever.
She wanted to imagine the dense white icing changing her insides, like primer, while on the outside she stayed exactly the same. The question of the will, it wouldn’t let her concentrate. She hadn’t slept all fucking week.

  Marina came out and told Litza that her father hadn’t been to the diner in two days. This was unheard of. A thrill went through Litza, a whisper that said that maybe he was dead—and if her father’s death were true, it made everything else in the letter true, too.

  “He’s not in his apartment?” Litza asked.

  “It’s not Marina’s place to go looking. But, no, I don’t think he is up there.”

  Litza went up herself and saw that he was not there. Marina said, “I always know where he is. This is the only time in twenty years that I don’t.”

  “You don’t sound worried.”

  “You aren’t worried, either, koukla.” Marina shrugged. “We both know—your father, he likes his own fireworks.”

  Litza knew that better than any of them. He was probably crying in a corner about poor Stavros because none of them had come to his stupid Facebook dinner, and he was gearing up to do his next mean-spirited thing. He’d return in a day or three days or a week.

  Litza went to her father’s office. Instead of calling Rob, she dialed the main number. She got through to a supervisor, a real 608.89. The Urethroscrotal asked her a number of annoying and personal questions until Litza exaggerated the problem and crafted a scene that involved her father’s becoming disoriented on public transportation. Yes, they had filed a missing person’s report, which she could get to them as soon as possible but, as she anticipated, the Urethro 608.89 told her that wasn’t necessary. To make her feel bad, Litza said, “My mother’s hysterical right now. I’m the only one keeping it together.”