2. Konstantine
CHAPTER TWO
KONSTANTINE
Ihave ordered pomegranates put by her bed.
I do not know why. I have not eaten a pomegranate in years.
The kitchen on Kalydon has not kept them in the fruit cabinet since the autumn my wife Marta died, the year the harbor took her.
No one banned them. No one had to. A house stops doing a hundred small things when a woman dies, and the pomegranates were one of the hundred.
In five years not one person on this island has said the word in my hearing.
This morning I sent a boy down to the village with money, no explanation.
Yia-Yia Despina set the bowl on the table by the guest bed with her face closed. Neither of us said anything.
I did it because I thought of her face, and I do not know what I mean by that.
I know what I saw in the courtyard. I saw a girl of twenty-two stand in front of five men who buried two wives because of her name, take off her dead father’s coat, and let it fall in my dust. Her brothers sent her to me as a payment.
She arrived as a verdict. Every man in that courtyard felt the difference.
I picked the coat up, beat the dust out of it, folded it, laid it on the chair, and I have been asking myself since why my hands did that.
My hands decided before I did, which is not a thing that happens to me.
I am the head of the dark cargo arm of Drakos Maritime.
I decide, and then my hands move, in that order.
This afternoon the order reversed itself over a dead man’s coat.
Marta’s study is at the back of the south wing, on the floor below the room Yia-Yia is settling Isadora Kallis into now.
It has been a study and not a study for five years.
The desk is her desk. The books are her books.
The photograph of her at twenty-eight, the wedding day, the chapel on the cliff, the small black-and-white print my mother had framed, has stood on the desk all this time.
I look at it every morning. I have never moved it, never touched it, never allowed the dust to be lifted from it.
Yia-Yia, who argues with me about everything, has never once argued about that.
I lift the photograph. She is laughing. The picture was taken thirty seconds after the ceremony.
I am behind her, holding the back of her veil where it had snagged on the chapel rail, and she is laughing at something Adrian said.
Adrian was twenty that year. He had not yet learned to be charming.
He was trying to be a man, failing at it in a way that made his cousin’s bride laugh on her wedding day.
She has been laughing in that frame for five years. Every morning I have looked at her and said one Greek sentence. Forgive me. I have said it one thousand eight hundred and twenty-five times. I know the number because I am a man who counts.
I do not say it today. I set the photograph down, and with one careful finger I turn it toward the wall.
I sit at the desk and open the leather notebook. The notebook is mine, not hers. It is where I have written, in the years since my wife died, the name of every man I have killed and every man I would kill if I could find him. The front page is the page for 2021. It has one name on it.
Vassilios Kallis.
The name is crossed out, and not by my hand’s work.
He died six weeks ago of a stroke in his own bed in Patras, a doctor in attendance, his elder son holding his hand.
I had promised myself for five years that his last face would be mine.
He robbed me the way rich men rob, quietly, in his sleep, with witnesses.
I crossed the name out the morning the news came.
Then I sat in this chair for a long time, learning that a hatred with nowhere to go does not die with the man. It only loses its address.
The page after 2021 is 2022. Two names. Then 2023, three names. Then 2024, four. Then 2025, two. The page in front of me is 2026, and it carries the names Antonios Petros and Kostas Petros, both crossed out, both of them Nikos’s work, done on his own gravel, in front of his own wife.
I turn the page, and I do not write a name. I write a Greek sentence in the small careful hand my mother taught me.
I have ordered pomegranates put by her bed.
I look at the sentence for a long time. I have done many things in five years that are not in this notebook. The notebook is the record of one kind of life. The pomegranates are the first thing I have done that does not belong to any record I keep.
I close the notebook and leave the study.
I walk through the south wing. I do not go up to the floor above, and I do not knock at her door.
I stand at the bottom of the staircase longer than I will admit to anyone, listening to a house that has one more person breathing in it than it had yesterday, and then I walk back out to the cousins’ courtyard.
Adrian is at the long table with a cigarette he is not smoking. He has been waiting. The cigarette is for his hands. The waiting is for me.
“Bratáki.” Brother. He turns the cigarette once in his fingers. “Five years, Konstantine. Five years, and you bring the daughter of the man who killed Marta into your house, and you put pomegranates by her bed.”
I do not answer. There is no answer that would not cost me more than his silence will.
“I’m not blaming you,” he says. “I’m observing.”
“I do not know why I ordered them.”
“I do.”
“Then do not tell me.”
“I won’t.” He drinks. “Stavros has been on the phone with the brothers. They want her returned inside five days.”
“They are not getting her in five days.”
“Then in ten?”
“Not in ten either.”
He looks at me for a long moment, and he does not smile, which is how I know he is being serious, because Adrian smiles at everything he does not mean.
“Not at all,” he says. It is not a question the way he says it.
“I do not know yet. I will know tomorrow.”
He nods once. He puts the cigarette away and stands, and at the edge of the courtyard he stops, because Adrian has never in his life left a room without one more line.
“Eat with us tonight. Yia-Yia is making the lamb.”
“I will not eat tonight.”
“Of course you won’t.” He leaves.
I stand at the long table in the empty courtyard until the sun has dropped below my grandfather’s south wall and the stones give back the last of the day’s heat.
Then I go back to the study, open the leather notebook, and cross out the sentence about the pomegranates.
Under it, in the same small careful hand, I write: I do not know yet what I am keeping her for.
I underline it. It is the first sentence I have written in five years that I am not sure is true.
Then I go to my own bed and lie in the dark, and somewhere above me a girl in a black dress is awake. I cannot hear her, but I know it anyway.