4. Konstantine
CHAPTER FOUR
KONSTANTINE
Ido not sleep.
I sit at the desk in Marta’s old study, and I open the leather notebook to the sentence I wrote last night. I do not know yet what I am keeping her for. I read it the way I read manifests, looking for the false line, and then I cross it out.
Under it I write: She read to my daughter.
I underline that too. Five years of names in this notebook, and the truest entry in it is four words about a bedtime story.
My daughter has not let a woman read to her since she was one year old.
The staff have tried. Yia-Yia Despina has tried, and Yia-Yia raised half the men of this family with a wooden spoon in one hand.
Sophia takes the book, thanks them in her small careful Greek, which she learned from me, then waits for them to leave.
Tonight she carried a book to the room of Isadora Kallis, a woman nine hours on this island, and fell asleep against her arm before the third story ended.
Children read a house faster than any of us. I do not yet know what my daughter has read.
I close the notebook and walk the south wing at four in the morning.
I go up to the floor of the guest wing and stand outside Isadora’s door.
I do not knock, and the door stays shut.
I have come up only because I decided I would not sleep tonight, and I would rather not sleep ten meters from her than thirty. Then I go back down.
The courtyard is black and cold. I sit at the long table.
Stathis is at the camera bank in the south office.
Adrian is asleep. Theron is on a helicopter back to Athens.
Nikos is at his estate on the mainland with his new wife, his two sons, his dog.
Stavros sleeps on the north side of Kalydon at the Patriarch’s villa, where he has slept for two weeks, since the Patriarch declined to spend the autumn in the main house.
The old man says the north light is better. We let him say it.
I am alone in the courtyard at four in the morning, and I think about the daughter of the man who killed my wife, asleep in the south wing with my daughter’s warmth still on her arm and the bowl of pomegranates beside her, untouched.
I think about my wife in the photograph, turned to the wall by my own hand.
I have not wept in five years. Not at the funeral on Kalydon, when I lifted my daughter, one year old, the youngest a Drakos child has been at a Drakos funeral in three generations, and held her through the entire service.
A man holding a baby cannot shake. You hold the child still, so you are held still.
I sit in the dark until the sky over the south wall goes from black to gray, and I make a decision.
The decision is this. I will not touch the daughter of the man who killed my wife unless she asks me to, in language I cannot mistake.
No hand on her unless she has asked. Her room stays hers at night.
Food goes on a tray, never from my hand at her mouth, unless she asks.
She stays in this house, and she stays safe in it, from her brothers, from my cousins, from whatever the family decides about her is this week.
I will not be the man who takes the daughter of his enemy.
I will be the man she comes to.
If she comes.
If she does not come, then she will be safe in this house for the rest of her life, and she will not be touched, and that will have to be a kind of life for both of us.
I stand and go to the kitchen.
The kitchen at five in the morning belongs to no one.
I make a tray. Bread, cheese, and the bowl of pomegranates from her bedside, which Yia-Yia carried down last night with her opinion unspoken.
I take three of them and split them on the counter with the small knife I keep there.
I work the seeds loose the way my mother did it, palm down over the bowl, striking the rind with the flat of the spoon.
The juice runs into the lines of my hands and drips red off my wrist into the sink.
I have stood at this sink before with red running off my wrist. It is not the same, and it is close enough that I stand a moment too long looking at it, a man of fifty with pomegranate on his hands at five in the morning, learning something about himself he does not have the Greek for yet.
I rinse my hands. I put the seeds in a small white dish, the dish in the center of the tray. I carry the tray upstairs, and I do not knock on her door. I set it on the floor of the corridor, and I leave.
Then I sit in the courtyard and wait for morning, with an empty cup in front of me, because the waiting is steadier with something to hold.
At seven Yia-Yia Despina comes through the courtyard on her way to the kitchen. She goes up. I hear her knock at Isadora’s door, too far away to hear more. I do not count the minutes, because counting them would tell me what they weigh.
Yia-Yia comes down the stairs alone. She crosses the courtyard and stops beside my chair. She looks at the south wall, the way she has looked past the men of this family her whole life when she is about to hand one of them something too heavy to watch him take it.
“She has eaten the pomegranates, bratáki,” she says, in the dry voice that has not changed since I was nine. “She has eaten them sitting on the floor of the corridor. She asks if you will eat with her tonight at the long table.”
I do not move.
“Yes or no?”
“Yes.”
“I will tell her.” She goes toward the kitchen, and at the door she stops, her back still to me. “The girl folded the napkin under the dish when she finished. Convent folding. Someone taught her that a gift is answered.”
She goes in.
I sit at the courtyard table with my hand around the empty cup, and the sun comes up over my grandfather’s wall like it has somewhere to be.
I write nothing in the leather notebook for the rest of the day. There is nothing to write. The notebook is the record of the other life.