Chapter 19
If I didn’t already feel guilty for exaggerating my connection to Georgios, I do now. Eleni and Thomas’s grandmother, Petra, keeps adding more food to my plate. Petra’s also insisted that Eleni sleep on the floor so I can use her bed.
“It’s fine,” Eleni says. “I’ll take Thomas’s bed.”
“Where will I sleep?” Thomas asks around a mouthful of lamb.
“I don’t care.” Eleni steals some of the lamb off Thomas’s plate.
Their mother, less interested in news of Georgios than the rest, and decidedly uninterested in a boring Dutch folklorist, excuses herself.
“She drinks with her friends in the evening,” Thomas whispers loud enough for her to hear. She blows out a loud puff of air and waves as she leaves.
Their grandmother sits at the table at last, satisfied everyone has enough food.
Petra has countless lines on her face and gnarled, callused hands from decades of work.
Her back is stooped and her hair is silver but her eyes are lively.
I like her immensely. There’s something beautiful about seeing so much experience worn well.
Their home, too, feels exactly how Eleni described it.
The tile floors are spotless, the walls washed with a light pink color, hung with portraits and simple paintings.
Their dishes are mismatched in a way that implies a collection spanning generations, added to only when something at last breaks and needs to be replaced.
Petra wears a hand-knit shawl around her knobby shoulders, and I wonder whether she made it, or whether she’s wrapped in the work of her mother or her mother’s mother.
Petra takes my hand and pats it. “Georgios cheats you with the olive oil prices,” she says without preamble.
I laugh. “I’m certain he’s fair with my mother.”
She nods knowingly. “When you go back, you tell him that I said you get our price now, not the price for the stupid…” I don’t catch the last word, but it’s clearly a derogatory term for people from my area of Europe. I’m fine with not knowing what it means.
“I will.”
“Good. Now, Eleni says you want to hear stories of the vrykolakas. Why would you want to hear about terrible things?”
Eleni leans back in her chair with a scowl. “They aren’t always terrible.”
“That’s true.” Petra toys with several long white hairs growing out of her chin.
“There’s something that happened when I was a girl.
Not in our village, but in a village over there.
” She waves in a vaguely western direction, which, given the chair she’s sitting on, just leads back to the ocean.
“There was a widow. There was never enough food, never enough clothes—even the children’s shoes were falling apart.
She remarried, a kind man who loved the children like they were his own, always repairing their shoes so they didn’t have to go barefoot. Then he died.
“But the villagers noticed something strange. The children’s shoes didn’t fall apart.
They were kept in perfect repair. Every time they got worn out, pssh!
” She holds both hands wide. “The shoes were repaired. And the family always had enough food, even though they should have been destitute again. It was like the husband never died. The priest began watching. And sure enough, the husband had come back. Every night he shuffled into the village, opened the door to their home, and sat down at the table to repair their shoes. And when he left, the cupboards had just a little more food than they did before.” She pauses and points at me.
“This is odd, you see, because usually vrykolakas spoil the food of any house they enter.”
“Oh?”
“Yes, it all goes bad. But not this time. The woman knew, of course. Women always know. When the priest told her it was unnatural and they must put a stop to it, she wept. She said he wasn’t hurting anyone.
He simply couldn’t rest while he knew they still needed him.
But the priest wouldn’t listen. He had the other men dig up the body and nail him into the ground. After that, the visits stopped.”
“What happened to the woman and her children?” I ask, invested in the strange tale.
“The children’s shoes fell apart. They didn’t have enough to eat. Eventually they were forced to leave the village in hopes of finding something better elsewhere, and no one knew what happened to them.”
“He wasn’t harming anyone,” Eleni says.
Petra points her finger at Eleni this time. “But what kind of example is it if they allowed a dead man to live among them? He wasn’t harmful. But the next one might have been.”
“They needed him, though.”
Petra shrugs, shifting in her chair. “Everyone needs their family. And everyone’s family eventually dies. Was the priest wrong to enforce that order?”
Eleni lets out a huff that implies she thinks he was.
Thomas isn’t bothered by the story. He leans forward intently. “Tell her the one about the shepherd and his brother and the gun and the lightning!”
Petra gives him a sharp look. “Why should I, when you’ve just told the whole thing?”
Thomas laughs and launches into it himself. “A shepherd’s brother died—”
“In this village?”
“No, not in this village, in a village over there.” He waves vaguely eastward and restarts.
“A shepherd’s brother died, but wouldn’t stay away.
He followed the shepherd every day, scaring the sheep.
They died of fright, or ran away so the shepherd had to spend all his time searching for them.
Sometimes his brother was a man, sometimes he was a black dog.
One day the shepherd decided he’d had enough. He got a gun, and he shot the dog.”
“And then he was left alone?” I ask.
“No. It didn’t work. The vrykolakas continued to follow him and make his life miserable. Nothing the brother did made it stop. Then one day there was a terrible storm. Lightning struck the tree where the vrykolakas was standing, and he was gone, never to be seen again.”
Eleni holds up three fingers. “The stories always end in one of three ways. One, the vrykolakas kills whoever it was plaguing. Because sometimes death is coming for you and there’s nothing you can do.
Two, the person being followed by the vrykolakas says the right prayers or sings the right hymns or gets to the church in time, and the vrykolakas is either destroyed or moves on to someone less clever and righteous.
Because if we’re very good, God will protect us. ”
“Not always!” Thomas says. “Remember the village with the wolf drawn on the wall of the church? Whenever they had problems with vrykolakas, they’d take soil from beneath the drawing of the wolf and spread it on the problem grave.
Their wolf would eat the vrykolakas—problem solved.
So, was that God, or was it something else? ”
“Was that this village?” I ask.
Eleni waves in a vaguely southward direction.
“Not in this village, in a village over there. Or three,” she continues, determined to finish her point, “the vrykolakas lingers long enough for nature to correct itself and get rid of it. Because sometimes you just have to wait out the terrible thing and trust that eventually life will be good again.”
Petra pats her granddaughter’s hand. “My Eleni gets impatient with the stories.”
“Because everyone always tells the same ones. Especially when they think you haven’t learned your prayers or scriptures well enough.” Judging by Eleni’s expression, she’s speaking from personal experience. “That’s why I like the one about the widow.”
“Because the priest is the villain,” Thomas says.
“No, because no one is the villain. The vrykolakas wanted to help so much that he defied the natural order of things. The woman was lonely and desperate and felt justified saying nothing even though a dead thing was coming into the village every night. And the priest believed that he was doing the right thing in keeping the dead and the living apart. It makes no sense and everyone loses in the end, and that’s why it’s the only honest vrykolakas story. ”
“The way the stories make it sound,” I say, “the entire island is crawling with restless spirits and undead family members. Except this village, apparently.” I mean it in jest, but it’s not taken that way.
Petra frowns, the lines of her face so deep her lips practically disappear into the expression.
“We have a special place here. Protected. But everyone knows someone who knows someone who has seen one. Life on Lesvos can be hard and lonely. It’s what draws so many young people to the cities.
It can also be beautiful and peaceful. It’s why so many of us stay where we were born forever.
Sometimes the dead don’t know how to move on.
Either they’re angry they never got away in life, or they’re desperate not to be taken away now. ”
This is my chance. I tear a piece of my flatbread, trying to look thoughtful instead of desperate. That’s what ruined my chances in the market. “Georgios mentioned one of the stories he always heard as a child. Something about the lost town in the mountains?”
Eleni freezes. Petra’s eyes go soft and far away. But Thomas looks excited.
“Grandma’s mother was from there!”
Petra nods in confirmation. “It’s true.”
“So, the story is true?”
Petra nods once more, firmly. “Yes. Not all our stories are meant to have morals, no matter what my little Eleni thinks.”
“Will you tell me?”
Petra is quiet for so long I think that’s my answer, but then she takes a deep breath and talks.
“It was a bad place. Maybe not always, but for as long as anyone who lived there could remember.
The people grew hard like the rocks around them, cold like the winters, bitter like the plants they harvested for their thin soups.
My mother left when she was barely past girlhood.
She ran away with my father, down the mountain to this village.