Let Me Explain You (14 page)

Dina was not eating at all. She said, “I want to know everything, all the time I missed.”

“You missed basically all of it.”

Dina tilted her head, but this time the eye drifted left, which Litza did not like. She said, “I've been paying for my mistakes. But it doesn't have to be like that. You, me, your sister. We're going to be happy together.”

This was not the plan. The plan was two, a train, airport, then a plane for Greece. All her clothes are new, all her extended family is happy to see her, her mother's mother. They buy her Nirvana CDs, which are selling like gyros even on the island, and she goes to school and is good at Greek, and in a few years when everyone has calmed down, she and Dina come back to America, and Dina's eyes never stray, and she starts high school. “What if Stavroula doesn't want to?”

“We'll persuade her.” Dina rubbed just the one knuckle on Litza's hand, over and over, with her thumb. The longer it went—It did not feel good. Litza pulled back her hand. She said, “I have to get back to school. I'm already in trouble.”

“I will do everything, whatever it takes. I can protect you.”

“How?”

“I'm your mother.”

Litza nodded. She reminded herself that adults say all kinds of things if you let them get away with it. If they think you'll believe them. She was not yet sure about Dina, so she said, “I'll walk myself back.”

Dina said, “Take these,” and fumbled to pack the remaining hash browns in a paper bag. Litza zipped the paper bag into her backpack, knowing that Mother would smell the food and want to know where she got it. Dina said, “Do you have lunch money?” She took some bills out of her pocket and squeezed them into Litza's hands. Dina kept squeezing her hands with the money in it, not saying anything, so that the quarters jammed against Litza's fingers.

Litza walked five steps before she let herself look back. Dina was standing at the table, watching her.

And was she watching now? All Litza saw, through the rain, was the ruffle of a curtain in one of the apartment windows, all identical, and perhaps someone staring back.

Stavros sat outside the diner on a wooden pallet gazing at the startled sky. He could hear the sounds from the kitchen winding down the latest hours of the day and winding up the morning. Marina would be in soon. In the meantime, the night cooks would keep the travelers awake with sandwiches and pie. They would break everything down so that Marina could start all over again. But for now, at least, the stars were kind, and it was cold. For now, the tree branches nodded with sleepiness. The goat's head was in his lap, and they were both chewing cigarettes. Only Stavros's was lit.

He would die in five days. Less than a week now.

Stavros had trouble with sleep. He walked in slippers from his apartment. The slippers were the color of camels, and they had spills and holes at certain places and made his feet look like humps. He looked at his feet when he said, “Have you ever seen any man more pitiful?”

A sigh so gloomy from the goat. Stavros, too.

It had been hours since Stavros had spoken. He had been with himself only and he did not like that feeling when he could count the hours he had left to live. Even Marina had left early, because he had lost his temper and she had kept hers. Always, always she kept hers, and was that really fair? Was it fair that the only person who understands him is the funeral director?
We will make this as easy for you as we can
, the man said over the phone.
We will make it comfortable for your daughters.

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.

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.