Let Me Explain You (23 page)

How many tourists were trickling into Crete, all of them looking for a place to drink, meet locals. He had gone dancing with plenty of European girls who wanted to know how real men—Greek men—fucked. He never told his family about them (especially not about Greta, whom his grandmother would have hated for a Nazi, rest her soul) but he knew that if he opened a place for tourists in Iraklion, he'd triple the investment within two years. His brother Tasos could run things while he completed his mandatory service in the army. His mother would kiss him in the middle of the market, in the middle of the streets, she'd feel such pride.

Stavros Constantine said, “We will go to your mother tonight.” The land, passed down from her family, was in her name.

Katerina was preparing dolmades when her son and husband entered. Dropping clumps of cooked rice into the center of blanched grape leaves, she listened without interrupting. Every time Stavros Stavros identified a benefit of the plan, she rolled a leaf and tucked its arms inward, as if it were giving itself a hug. At the end of the conversation, she had lined up seventeen grape leaves.

“
Oxi
.”

“But you are giving Kostas money. You are giving to Yannis and Stefanos.”

“You are too late for any money. There is no more money. I have two sons about to be married, another going off to military, another in the field, another building a house. And even if you had come along first, you would be getting nothing right now.”

“Yiati?”

“This is why,” she said, and she dropped each dolma into a richly oiled pan as she ticked off her reasons. “You want to carve up your grandmother's land so you can open a shop for foreigners.”

“It could make us a lot of money,
mitera mou
.”

She went on. “I allow you to work for Takis and Onus never expecting a drachma, and yet here you are bragging for money. Where did it all go, you tell me.”

“I have it here,” Stavros Stavros said. He pulled a faded slip of paper from his wallet. For five years, he had been carrying it around. It listed all of his deposits.

Katerina would not look at it. “Last year, for no good reason, you quit school. One year away from being finished, and you simply give up. And do you come here asking for help with something that a mother could be proud of, no. You come and beg to spend money in Iraklion, which is filled with only whores and beggars.

“And you, Constantine, should have known not to come to me with this
skata
. I will never share family land with strangers. Never, never.”

His father leaning on the wall, saying nothing, the big dumb farming tool.

Stavros Stavros couldn't understand the power of many, many drachmas until Onus and Takis and the
pappas
showed him that a man is respected—a man is a man—when he is working, when he is earning, when he is imagining a life better than his father's, when he is proving his brothers wrong, when he is making something his own, when his children don't make their toys out of wood. Money meant that someone could reinvent himself. Money meant that someone could buy himself a wife, a family, a girlfriend, a name, a middle name, a business. Money could buy a man community and country.

And Stavros Stavros would get none of it. He'd probably end up working for some
malaka
he knew from elementary school. Stavros Stavros couldn't help himself. He swept the pan of dolmades off the table. He watched it clatter to the floor.

Katerina bent down. She picked up the pan. The grape leaves stuck to the bottom. Only one had fallen out. She was furious. She pointed the wasted dolma at him like a finger. “What kind of son are you?”

“You stubborn woman,” Stavros Stavros said. He should have been apologizing. “Keep that land until it buries you.”

With every step he took, his shaking legs willed him to turn around and beg for forgiveness. Stavros Stavros kept going. He went all the way to the
taverna
for sunflower seeds and beer and came home loud and drunk through her kitchen. The next day, while the rest of his brothers ate sides of pork, salad, and dolmades, Stavros Stavros was served a single grape leaf—the one that had fallen to the floor. He sat through dinner without eating, and then he met his friends for a gyro. The following morning, instead of warm rice pudding and Nescafé, he received the same grape leaf, and once more at dinner.

“What are you trying to prove? That I can't even ask my own mother for help?”

Katerina cut the grape leaf in half. It was brown now, wilted. “I gave you birth,” she said. “For the rest of your life, you should be wanting to make up for that.”

Stavros Stavros shoved his plate back.

“Don't go, Galopoula,” Stavros Stefanos called, eyes shining. “I have your potatoes right here.” With a firm grip, he grabbed his
arxidia
and shook them.

Stavros Stavros flashed an open palm, flipping him off. Then he packed a bag, determined to watch his family kiss his Greek ass. He was too young to stay buried under his mother and eleven Stavroses, nothing new in life but the name of the village whore. Whatever he needed to do to get out, he would do it.

He got as far as Kalanakis's Taverna, where he ran into Yannis Fafoutakis.

“Why so angry, Galopoula?” Yannis asked through loosely spaced teeth. He was well on his way to drunk. “Have a drink, get happy. We are so young still.”

Yannis had graduated two years ahead of Stavros Stavros, and though he was closer in age to Stavros Petros, the two met often at the
taverna
for table soccer. Yannis was a man bothered by nothing, but once the ball dropped, he was all wrists and concentration. No one in the history of the village had ever beaten him. For years Stavros Stavros had salivated over Yannis's inevitable defeat, but tonight Stavros Stavros did not care about table soccer.

“I'm going,” he said. “I'm not spending the rest of my life making coffee for old men who play with their stale balls.”

“Where will you go?”

“I don't care.”

Yannis pulled a chair up to the table. “You want to go to America?”

“I am not telling jokes, Yannis.”

“Neither am I. You remember my
thea
Irene? She moved to New York. She has a daughter, Dina.”

Stavros Stavros vaguely recalled Dina. The last time he had seen her, they were eight, running around with all the other village kids on Easter, lamb in their hands. “So?” Stavros Stavros said.

“So they're ready to marry her off to a nice Greek boy.”

Stavros Stavros snorted. “What, she's ugly?”

Yannis cupped his hands across his chest, mimicking breasts. “American girls are never ugly where it counts.” Yannis would talk about his own sister like this if he were drunk enough. “What do you say, my friend?”

“I have a girlfriend.”

“What, Poppi, the skinny rabbit? Come on,
malaka
. Everyone knows you've got one hand up her skirt and the other on your tiny prick because she won't touch it for you.”

Stavros Stavros chewed the corner of his lip, which he did whenever he was thinking something he knew he shouldn't.

“I tell you what,” Yannis said, “you don't like her, you don't take her. Anyway, it means a free ticket out.”

Stavros Stavros stared at the sudsy liquor that slid down Yannis's glass. In that moment, he began to belong to the masses who dream America, the land too good for peasant Greeks. Like all the other villagers, he had always fantasized about it from a distance—sneaking into the only theater on the island to watch Hollywood westerns, lying about his knowledge of the Big Apples. But what better place to be a man? To work, to earn, to imagine a life richer than his parents', to prove his brothers wrong, to make something his own, to make children who would honor him and gratefully inherit his fortune. What better place to reinvent himself—to reinvent the world? To make it bigger? To make it big enough to fit Stavros Stavros Mavrakis? In America, he would open a
kafenio
, hire Americans to clean the floor, buy crates of blue jeans and ship them back for all of his brothers, especially Stavros Nikos. He would send back dollars, not drachmas, so they understood who he was.

By 1980 he would be twenty-one years old, living in America, where everyone was as good as everyone else, and he would work hard to prove that he was better.

“OK,” Stavros Stavros said. “Let's go be big apples in the Big Apples.”

Dina landed in Crete in May of 1979, a month before her sixteenth birthday. Stavros Stavros walked to the Lazaridis house with a good sack of coffee, to pay respects and check out Dina. He was disappointed. In the photo she was wearing a dress and her hair was combed, but now all he got was straggly hair, an oily face, this left eye—what lazy eye? He did not remember a lazy eye from their childhood, could it be possible that America had given it to her?—and stained blue jeans. But she was shorter than him, which he liked, and her
kolo
could have belonged to one of his father's sheep. The meeting didn't last long. He and Dina didn't talk, except to say their names. Their parents would make the rest of the arrangements.

The next day, Stavros Stavros discovered Dina on his father's porch. She was bent over a row of plants. She didn't notice him (or maybe she did) because she kept picking the compact, purple-bellied leaves. She tossed back ones she didn't want, probably because they were too small. She was very picky, Stavros Stavros thought, and wasteful. But maybe that meant she had taste. Not everything was good enough for her, just like not everything was good enough for him.

“I will have to charge you,” he said.

“Take it out of my allowance.”

Stavros Stavros pushed through the screen door.

She looked up. “Does your hair always look like that?”

He didn't think that someone looking the way Dina looked should judge him, but he smoothed out his hair. “I just woke up.” Her hair was different today. It was combed, pretty, the way it stopped at the tops of her shoulders. He wished he weren't wearing farm shorts.

She said, “My mother told me to go to the market.”

Stavros Stavros plucked some oregano and added them to her feathery pile. “The small ones are better. More tender.”

She nodded.

“Like me,” he joked.

Nothing. Not even a smile.

“You want to go to the beach today?”

“I don't like the beach.”

“Me neither,” he said, “but girls always want to go for tans.”

“You just end up dirty.” She scrunched her nose. “Sand everywhere.”

Stavros Stavros grew excited. “
Nai
,” he said, “that is exactly the problem.” He rubbed a leaf between his thumb and forefinger and it warmed. He wanted her to stay, he realized. To get to know her, if they were going to be married. “Want to get a frappe?”

The only vehicle available was his father's farm tractor, manufactured from motorcycle parts with a bench seat for transporting animals and manure. He changed into blue jeans and they walked. Stavros Stavros escorted her through the market; he got good deals and told her so. They passed the
kafenia
, which she could not enter, but everyone acknowledged Stavros Stavros and called to him from inside the shops, and he made sure Dina saw. When they arrived at the
taverna
, it was dusk and the clouds matched the pink water. They sat in a corner, where they could look out at the shore without having to step on the beach. Stavros Stavros ordered two iced coffees, sweet and frothy. When the owner wasn't looking, he called for the doughnut boy, and through the open window they traded half a drachma for a sugared doughnut the size of a wheelbarrow wheel.

“I can't wait to get out of this place,” Stavros Stavros said. “Away from my parents.”

“Me neither.”

He looked out at the tourists beginning to cover themselves up. “America must be nice. So much going on.”