3. Isadora
CHAPTER THREE
ISADORA
The child comes to my room at midnight.
I am awake. I have been awake since the wool coat, since Yia-Yia Despina unlocked the wing for me at seven and showed me through it with the courtesy of an old Greek woman who has been told by her household to make no comment on the politics of who I am.
She showed me the bath, then the wardrobe, which is full of clothes that are not mine, black, simple, my size.
Someone in this house had my measurements before I arrived.
First the chair on the gravel, placed where I would want it.
Now a wardrobe cut to my body. This family does its learning in advance, the way mine did its forgetting.
There is a small library off the bedroom, and a bowl of pomegranates by the bed. I have not touched the pomegranates.
I was raised on the old stories, in the convent and before it, so I know what a pomegranate is for.
A girl is taken down into a rich man’s dark kingdom.
She is hungry, and she eats six seeds, and the eating is what keeps her there.
Maybe whoever put this bowl by my bed knows the story.
Maybe they only thought a guest should have fruit.
Either way, eating from it would be an answer, and no one has asked me anything yet.
I have not eaten the meal Yia-Yia brought up at eight either.
That refusal has less philosophy in it. I have not eaten in three days, and somewhere past the second day the hunger stopped being hunger and became a kind of silence I have been keeping, the last thing on this island that is still mine to keep.
I am sitting on the edge of the bed in the black dress I arrived in when the door opens. No knock.
She is six years old, in a white cotton nightgown, her hair dark and wild from sleep, her feet bare on the stone.
She holds a book against her chest with both hands, stops in the middle of my room, and looks at me.
She does not introduce herself. She studies me the way a six-year-old studies something she has decided to inspect.
“You are Sophia,” I say in Greek.
She nods.
“I am Isadora.”
She nods again.
“Why are you in my room, Sophia?”
She lifts the book.
“Will you read to me?”
I know three things about Sophia Drakos, none of them said by the man who left me in this wing.
The staff told me, in the way staff tell things, sideways, that no woman read to her since she was one year old.
Yia-Yia told me, without telling me, that her mother was killed when she was a baby, in a sailing accident that everyone in this house knows was not an accident.
No one told me the third thing. I worked it out alone, on the boat, watching the water. The accident was arranged by my father.
She is six. She stands in her nightgown at midnight in the room of the daughter of the man who killed her mother. She does not know it. One day she will. I cannot decide which of those two facts is harder to stomach.
I lift my hand and pat the bed beside me.
She crosses the room and climbs up. She fits herself against my side without ceremony, the way a child fits herself against a body she has decided is safe, and I hold very still, because I have never in my life been a body anyone decided that about. I let her arrange herself. She hands me the book.
It is a child’s primer in Greek, with line drawings, a donkey, a cypress tree, an old woman with a broom. It is older than she is. The corners are soft with other children’s hands. Books like this do not get bought in houses like this. They get inherited.
I open it, and I read in my mother’s voice.
I have not used my mother’s voice since my mother died three years ago.
She read to my sister and me every night, in the formal cadence of a woman who had been read to in the same voice by her own mother.
When she died I put the voice away with everything else of hers.
I use it tonight, for the daughter of my father’s enemy, and it comes back whole, as if it had only been waiting for a child.
Sophia, against my side, after the first page: “Your voice is like my Yia-Yia’s.”
“Is it?”
“Yes.” She turns the page for me. “Read the donkey one again.”
I read the donkey one again. She turns the page.
The cypress tree. She turns the page. The old woman with the broom, slower this time, because her breathing has gone long and even against my arm.
By the end of the third story she is asleep, her hand closed around the corner of the book, her face pressed to my upper arm.
She is, theé mou, my God, I cannot let myself think this, I think it anyway, the smallest weight I have ever had against me. The smallest weight and the heaviest one. I cannot move. If I move she will wake.
So I sit on the bed with a sleeping child against my arm, in a house that owns me. The person I would weep for, if I were going to weep, is not in this room. She is under a stone somewhere on this island, and her daughter came to me.
The door opens.
Konstantine is in the doorway, in shirtsleeves, his hair uncombed. He has been searching the house room by room, a man who has not had to search for a child in five years and has forgotten what to do with the fear once the child is found.
He sees us on the bed and stops.
I lift one finger to my lips.
He stays at the threshold. His eyes go to his daughter against my side, then to the book, then to the untouched bowl of pomegranates on the side table, where something crosses his face too fast for me to name. Then he looks at me.
“She came to you of her own,” he says, low, in his archaic Greek. It is not a question, but I answer it.
“Yes.”
He crosses the room, quietly, and sits on the chair at the foot of the bed. He does not lift her off me. He sits, at midnight, at the foot of the bed of the daughter of his enemy, and he watches his daughter sleep against my side the way other men watch the sea.
After a long while he says: “Are you hungry, Isadora?”
I have not eaten in three days. The silence I have been keeping is the last thing that is mine, and he is asking me to hand it over, in the plainest words a man can use, with his child asleep between us like a truce neither of us signed.
“Yes,” I say.
He stands and leaves the room, and comes back with a tray. Bread, cheese, a piece of the lamb the cousins ate at dinner, a small dish of olives. He sets the tray on the bed, because I cannot reach the table without waking the child.
He sits beside the tray and hands me bread. I eat it. Cheese. I eat that too. Then a piece of the lamb, offered on the point of a knife.
I look at the knife.
“I will not put my hand at your mouth on the first night, Isadora,” he says.
I take the lamb from the point of the knife with my fingers and eat it. I understand that I have just been told something about the nights that are not the first night. I am not frightened. I file that last part away to examine later, in daylight.
He stays at the foot of the bed. I stay on the edge of it with his daughter asleep against my side, and we do not speak. The wind moves in the shutters. I eat the bread, the cheese, the lamb, the olives, all of it. At the end he lifts the empty tray and stands.
“I will carry her to her bed.”
“Yes.”
He bends and lifts Sophia from my side with the careful efficiency of a father who has lifted his daughter every night of her life. He turns at the threshold, his daughter’s face against his shoulder, and for a moment the two of them are one shape in the dark of the corridor.
“Eat the pomegranates in the morning, Isadora.”
He leaves.
I sit for a long time after the door closes, the primer still open on my knee, the dish of olive stones at my feet.
Six seeds, in the old story. The eating is what keeps her there. Nobody ever asks whether, somewhere in that dark kingdom, in some small hour, she was hungry, and someone fed her. Whether it was that, not the seeds, that did it.
I lie down in the black dress, and for the first time on this island, I sleep.