Let Me Explain You (22 page)

Stavroula did not move. She was swallowing, again and again. There were many questions trying to get out, but it was also as if the questions were bees and Stavroula was protecting them both by keeping her mouth closed. Maybe Litza was not alone? Maybe Stavroula would be with her, sit with her? She would say to their father,
She's not going anywhere. We're sisters, we go together.
Together, they would get real loud, louder than him, because they were two and he was one.

Stavroula knew, didn't she, why Litza had to be loyal to Dina? No, not even that—why she had to be loyal to herself? Stavroula pretended not to see her, but she did, actually, didn't she? She saw who Litza was, deep down, because, really, could they be all that different?

Their father had gone quiet waiting on Stavroula. He propped himself against the wall with his left hand. His right, swinging against his body as if it were weak. She knew it wasn't. She looked up at the arm pressing against the wall. It was as wide as her face, wasn't it?

“Your sister, the eel,” he said, almost slurring, “she is putting my two feet in one shoe. She betrays her family.”

The three of them, they knew it was true.

His breathing picked up. “The police come. She did that. She and Dina got the police on your Mother. The woman who raise you.”

Stavroula was not moving. Was she thinking about how the police had come to Mother with legal papers that called her a bad mother? How Lady State had asked the two daughters questions about how they were treated and, concluded, looking around the house,
This is a nice big dream your parents have
? Or was she remembering what Litza was remembering? The two of them sitting on a park swing, singing
eeska deeska bella
. They had lost their Greek, the language had become nonsense to them, but it was OK—the words
eeska deeska bella
they held on to. They kicked, swung, sang their nonsense. They pushed off the earth as if it were a sure thing. They swung together, like this, their faces cast up to the sky, their feet touching down at the same time.

Stavroula pulled out a duffel bag and unzipped it, put nothing in it.

“They will come for you next, Stavroula,” their father said, his voice rising. “They take first one child, then the next. That's how this country deal with accusations like this.”

Stavroula dropped a shirt into the bag. The sleeves hung over. She was being slow, not careful.

Litza got to her feet. “He doesn't care about us. Only himself.”

Her father reeled, so far back she thought he had lost his balance. His hands came up as if he were going to grab on to her, rather than the wall, to steady himself. He did not steady himself. He took a sharp breath no thicker than a cracker, and he spit into her face.

She shut her eyes. And then she pushed
him
, made her nails into claws, but he was laughing. She yelled for the police, for the neighbors. Dina, the police, they would get him, they would get him.

“They get me? For what? For what?” She stopped thrashing. The look on his face, mean. Like he could crush her, and would. “What they get me for? Explain me, what you think happen?” He looked at Stavroula. “You see something happen here?”

Litza's ears pricked for Stavroula's voice.

“Something happen here?” he said.

“No,” Stavroula, from inside the closet.

“
Ela
, what you see here?”

“Nothing.”

“That's right,” he said to Litza. “Nothing here except a waste of life.”

Litza opened her mouth—

“Scream your face off, then I don't have to look you no more.”

She screamed at the wall long after he left. She screamed through him saying to Mother,
That one? She is the biggest mistake of all
. She screamed until she heard him say to Dina over the phone,
Take her out of my life.

Then she was quiet and faced Stavroula, still cowering in the closet. For the remainder of her life she would never feel bad for Stavroula, but in this one moment she did. Because Stavroula did not yet understand what kind of man their father was.

Stavros Stavros “Steve” Mavrakis is survive by women, many women, but also: his beloved diners and many customers. In the place of flowers, please bring stories to share so that he will not be forgot.

Most people will say that what they remember about Stavros, or Steve, is that he is a kind man who works hard to make only one life for his children: the best. What he will most be remember by is how he creates this new life in America out of nothing. He is preceded to heaven by his brothers Stavros Yannis, Stavros Nikos, Stavros Markos, Stavros Petros, and his two parents, Katerina Mavrakis and Stavros Constantine Mavrakis.

Stavros Stavros Mavrakis, born in 1959 on his home island of Crete on a farm near Iraklion, was number eight of twelve sons.

Seven years older than the youngest, seven years younger than the eldest—regretfully, Stavros Stavros's birth was mostly nothing. The day after, Katerina attached him to her nipple and returned to the fields. Heavy rains threatened the vines; gray rot had already begun to creep over those closest to the ground. So many fungal spores settled on the grapes. Katerina only had to put her hand out to know that it was alive, with its thick eyebrows and coarse leg hair. And like the Greek women who had lived through the war, there was nothing gentle about this fungus.

In 1950 the Rockefeller Foundation concluded that Cretans had a potential need for everything, and no one knew that better than the Cretans. Greek soil had been cleared of Turks, Italians, and Germans, but occupation and civil war had made the land arid. Families that could grow only rocks stripped the bark off trees for boiling; children sucked on olive stones long after the meat was gone. This was not the glorified fight of World War Two, when Cretans ran out of their kitchens with knives and walking sticks to club parachuting Germans to death. This was not the Andartiko of the Second World War, which took triumphantly to the mountains. This was not the Resistance, which abducted the Butcher of Crete, General Heinrich Kreipe. This was cruel, shameful, emasculating hunger. And Katerina knew, as late as 1959, that if they lost the grapes, they lost everything. A new child, even a son, was not worth all that.

Once Katerina dropped Stavros Stavros among her other wriggling, insistent boys—all of them reaching up for something all of the time—she forgot about him. There were just too many other troubles (her older, louder children; her husband, who farmed from four until four; her blind mother; the checkbook she balanced every week, raising a family out of zero). In the morning she counted twelve boys, at night she counted twelve boys, and if Stavros Stavros was a needy little piglet with short hair, short legs, she barely noticed. He managed to walk, talk, engrave pee lines in the dirt. His mother seemed permanently out of reach until one day, squinting into the sun, Katerina caught him climbing out of caked dust onto the back of a bull. He was wearing the last good undershirt to fit him and Stavros Sakis. Katerina pulled Stavros Stavros down and whipped him until purple grapes blossomed on his naked bottom. It was a formal initiation into the family.

Like all of his brothers, Stavros Stavros was named after his grandfather. But while the other boys had been assigned unique middle names honoring an uncle or a
klepht
—a Greek bandit who fought for independence—Katerina neglected to give one to her eighth-born. By default, he became Stavros Stavros. Stavros Stavros insisted that it was a sign: not even Nikos had been twice honored with the name that meant “victorious” and “crowned.” Stavros Stavros obsessed over the heroes his grandmother sang about and decided that he would become brave. A guerrilla, like those of the Second World War who wielded scythes in battle and subsisted on mountain weeds and wild tender
kri-kri
, a goat so elusive that it had once been worshipped as the pale, hairier, lustful incarnation of Zeus.

His brothers, however, insisted on referring to him only as Stavros, and somehow that meant he had less claim to life than the other eleven boys who shared his room. At home, Stavros Dimitrios, Stavros Stefanos, Stavros Kostas, Stavros Manolis, Stavros Yannis, Stavros Nikos, Stavros Markos, Stavros Petros, Stavros Sakis, Stavros Tasos, and Stavros Alexandros answered for Stavros and got his share of the honey-drenched
kadaifi
. At school, they intercepted love notes and walked home with the girls who had been somewhat curious about Stavros. On his name day, they set off all the fireworks while he sat locked in the chicken coop, staring at the wasted bursts of yellow and red.

Stavros Stavros was determined to escape this village life. He would go live in the caves of Malta. He would learn to squeeze water out of limestone, fight the ghosts of Ancient Romans, train hawks to shit on his brothers. His mother would climb the mountain in bare feet, confess that he had always been her favorite because he was strong and clever and self-sufficient, just as her own father had been. Every day, she would come with a basket. She'd feed Stavros Stavros with her own fingers, but he would take none of it. He wouldn't need to, being so resourceful in the wild. She would wash his feet, out of respect. And his father, his father would ask for advice on harvesting grapes. Illiterate, he would learn from his son. Like, for example, how it was wise to plant rosebushes next to grapevines. Roses and grapes are sensitive to the same pests: the roses show rot first. (That one he had heard from the neighbor, and now that he thought about it, his father had, too.)

But at age twelve, after a tourist put the first drachma in his hand, Stavros Stavros abandoned the caves of Malta. Far from wanting to remove himself from civilization, Stavros Stavros decided to get rich and his family could watch. He would be an entrepreneur among men, in the business of coffee.

On the main square, two
kafenia
faced each other: one red, one blue, both with whitewashed doorways to invite peace and discourage ants. The
kafenia
were the core of men's lives, thus the core of village life. A center for Greek politics, because talking politics was as Greek as mathematics, as Greek as Ancient Greece. A place for business and dark coffee and afternoon plates, for mail and cigarettes, for worry beads and news. A substitute for the pews their solemn mothers and wives knelt before. If you wanted a bricklayer, a harvester, a lawyer, an arbitrator, a salesman, you need only visit the
kafenio
.

According to the government, all Cretan coffee drinkers were nationalists, united under Greece's blue and white flag (colors of protection and purity). In actuality, the
kafenia
separated conservatives from communists. Babies born to conservatives were suckled on stories about cousins exiled to Makronisos for patriotic reprogramming; those born to communists were nursed on tales of martyrs who had fought for Greece's liberation only to be tortured and slaughtered in the countryside, where herds outnumbered doctors by the hundreds. Only Stavros, who worked for Onus and Takis, was permitted entry into both
kafenia
. Stavros—and Marina's father, Pappas Emmanuel.

Every night, the
pappas
went first to Takis, whose customers bought him glasses of ouzo, and then to Onus, whose customers bought him more ouzo. When asked which was better, his answer remained, “Your mother, rest her soul, would be very proud.” When Stavros Stavros saw him coming—or, rather, heard, because the
pappas
always sang as he moved through the village
kentro
, his high black chimney-pot hat and wide-sleeved
rasso
collecting dust as he walked—Stavros Stavros prepared a drink for the much-beloved
pappas
. He waited for him at the door. The
pappas
, himself, confided that Stavros Stavros cooked better than even his own wife, but this was not the only reason Stavros Stavros loved him. The
pappas
was different from everyone he had ever met. He talked about things he knew without making it seem as if he knew too much. He said that God had enough love for everyone and that man was created in God's image, ergo man had enough love for everyone, only man had forgotten
philos adelphos
, brotherly love. If man could remember compassion, the old resentments and sins would turn to rubble. Also, other wisdoms, such as:

Why did God give you two balls? Because that's what all the donkeys got.

and

How does a smart man keep his wife satisfied? He lets the neighbor do the dirty work.

The
pappas
Emmanuel was the one to get Stavros Stavros thinking about a long-term business plan. “You have something going here,” he told him. “Give it a few years. Finish school, let your balls drop, and then get your father to help you open up a little shop of your own.”

“Onus and Takis are going to set me up when it's time.”

“They are good guys,” the
pappas
said, “but they're no sheepherders. You do all the work, they get the profit. In the Greek Church, that is called a fuck-over. It happened to Jesus.”

Stavros Stavros crossed his arms. “That won't happen. I'll get them before they get me.”

The
pappas
slapped Stavros Stavros's arm. “You Mavrakises, always so serious.”

Four years later, in 1975, sixteen-year-old Stavros Stavros had saved enough money to open a quarter of a
kafenio
. He went to his father about a loan, but Stavros Constantine said he was too young. “I only went to the fourth grade,” he said. “Don't follow my mistakes, which are the ones of a peasant.” So Stavros Stavros continued to go to school, continued to work, saving for the day his balls dropped and he could hire his classmates to wash his floors. At eighteen, he approached his father again, this time with enough to buy more than half a
kafenio
. “I have a business proposition,” he said. “Sell a small piece of land to Onus. With the profit, we'll buy a restaurant and you will be half owner. For two years, I will work for free. Only give me a hundred dollars to go out on the weekends, and money for cigarettes.”