War Games (5 page)

“From now on our army fights dressed like shepherds,” Papa said. “Bravery isn’t enough. They must have cards up their sleeves.”

Petros remembered the hungry Italian soldiers who stole eggs and green tomatoes. “How will they eat?”

“There’s the problem,” Papa said. “They won’t find it easy to live off the land, especially if they’re moving or hiding.”

Old Mario said, “We won’t find it easy to live off the land either, if the Germans are taking the farmer’s machetes and pitchforks.”

This was something else they’d learned from the radio. Anything likely to be used as a weapon was being taken away. Old Mario urged Papa to take Lambros’s advice, to do as Panayoti’s family was doing, strike out for one of the islands until the war was over.

“And when we get there, then what?” Papa said. “We must stay where we are and be careful not to draw attention to ourselves.”

Lambros was afraid the Germans would send Americans north to the concentration camps. Petros thought this sounded unlikely. But then, nearly everything he heard about the Germans sounded unlikely. Only the fact that
he heard it straight off the radio made any of it believable at all.

Papa said they had to stay where they were. Mama’s family lived in Athens, where matters were worse—people were hungry and lived in great fear. There were small cells of Greek political parties that hoped to become important to the Germans and so couldn’t be trusted. Possibly Mama’s mother and brothers were right now planning their journey to Amphissa.

As this back-and-forth went on with Old Mario, Petros learned Papa had argued with his sister. She’d brought her sons to live here with Auntie, her husband’s mother, some years ago. In this way, Papa could look after them all. But Aunt Hypatia had made up her mind to follow Lambros to the mountains to nurse the injured men. Papa didn’t like it.

“What about Stavros?” Petros asked. “Will he go with Aunt Hypatia?”

“He’ll stay here with Auntie,” Zola said, full of knowing. “She’s too old to be alone. They’ll look after each other.”

At home, letters and photos and maps were piled on the kitchen table. Sophie’s fancy dolls, Mama’s alligator purse, and several pairs of shoes, including Papa’s and Zola’s best, appeared to be waiting for a bus.

Petros picked up his tractor. Papa read what remained of the lettering on the side, “John Deere,” and added, “Put it on the table.”

Petros did, very reluctantly. He’d outgrown playing with it anyway, he reminded himself. “Panayoti and his family have gone,” he said to Mama.

“He’s right,” Papa said. He emptied the coal scuttle into the stove, building up the fire. “They’re going into hiding.”

“Cephalonia?” his mother whispered, making Petros hope they’d go there. To an island west of the mainland, where pirates used to hide in the caves off the sea.

“I can’t feed my family in a cave,” Papa said.

He tossed a handful of letters into the stove, making Mama gasp. Sophie, her eyes red-rimmed from crying, came into the kitchen at the same moment. She shrieked.

“You don’t remember what these people look like,” Papa said.

“I do too.” Sophie looked nearly as fierce as Papa. “When I read the letters, I can see them.” Mama was as upset as Sophie, but she pushed her out of the room and down the hall.

Papa said, “Zola, Petros, help your mother and sister. Find everything in your room that has the faintest trace of English lettering.”

Papa stacked the newspapers he and Zola read from, anti-German. A Greek flag was printed on the front, a bright spot of blue and white on an otherwise gray paper. Mama wrapped the Sunday dinner plates in them and placed the dishes in baskets with lids.

Most of their books were to be buried, because they
wouldn’t burn easily. But Papa burned Uncle Spiro’s soft paper books. Zola argued, “I should take them back to Uncle Spiro.”

“We burn them or he does,” Papa said. “It makes no difference.”

Petros riffled the pages of one he hadn’t read yet. Perhaps some things could be burned tomorrow. When Papa left the kitchen, he told Mama, “I’d like to look at this.”

Mama said, “I feel the same way about my
Life
magazines, but I burn them all the more quickly.” Petros sighed. So much for that.

Zola silently burned his U.S. state maps and a box of colored pencils. Petros hated to see the pencils go, but he sacrificed a pink rubber ball with a lot of bounce left in it—a word printed on it in English doomed it.

In the next hour, Sophie got in trouble for complaining and Zola made Papa angry when he spoke English. Zola handed over a metal bank shaped like a man, wearing boots, a big hat, guns on his hips, and a star on his vest. Petros didn’t ask what this figure was called—it wasn’t a Greek word. He gave up his small cars, toys from America, and a red fire engine, something he’d never seen in real life. Metal toys would be buried.

Then Sophie handed him his fuzzy bear. He pretended not to mind, but he’d slept with it for as long as he could remember, rubbing his thumb over one of its glass eyes in the darkness. “Do we bury this?” he asked Mama, hoping she wouldn’t toss it right into the stove.

“A baby’s toy,” Zola said, making Petros feel ashamed.

“I remember
you
were a baby once,” Mama said.

“Papa said we bury things of value,” Zola said.

“I love this bear,” Mama said with a wink at Petros. “Don’t put it in a basket—I don’t want bugs to eat it. Put it in the metal box with your sister’s dresses and the passports.”

“I’m not saving the life of a toy,” Zola said, handing over some model ships he’d made himself by gluing the many wooden pieces together and then painting them. They weren’t for play but for looking at.

“One more sneer and you’ll be sorry,” Mama said.

But Zola had already made Petros feel he should be more of a man. Even Mama, well-meaning as she was, made him feel childish.

When Zola found a big paper flag and hid it, Petros said nothing. It wasn’t American anyway. It was a Greek flag left over from the part Petros had played in a school assembly, rolled up and forgotten once it had fallen behind some of the books on the shelf. While it truly never
belonged
to anyone, Zola claimed it, spreading the stiff paper flat under his mattress with a sweep of his arm.

Petros said nothing.

It was past midnight when Old Mario looked through the kitchen door to remind them of the time. Until then, Petros had been distracted from how tired he felt. Now he only wanted to fall into bed.

“You two start holes below the windows,” Papa said to Petros and Zola. “Try not to disturb the bushes, but dig deep.”

“Papa, it’s dark outside,” Petros said.

“How much light do you need to dig a hole?”

Petros hadn’t known Old Mario had been digging all this time, working by moonlight. He was amazed to see a fresh ditch running from the kitchen door to the front corner of the house. He went for more shovels.

Papa sent him back to the shed. “Find buckets to put the dirt into. Bring the other wheelbarrow.”

Everyone either dug or moved dirt or buried something. Zola’s dog got the idea and worked like a machine, furiously pelting soft garden dirt out between his back legs. He didn’t dig deep, but he started holes very well, and Petros soon began to follow him.

Petros realized he’d always been asleep at this hour. “What time is it?” he asked Zola, who stood knee-deep in a hole.

“Late. Or perhaps it’s early.”

“Put some shoulder into it,” Old Mario scolded as he walked past them. “It won’t be dark all day.”

Petros dug harder.

After a time, he asked, “Do you think Uncle Spiro knows the Germans are so near?”

“Don’t worry—he always knows things,” Zola said.

When there was no place left to dig alongside the house, Papa dug behind the feed shed. He buried his guns, both of them, and three machetes covered in oilcloth. The entire night passed before Papa felt satisfied their house looked like any other.

But there was more work to be done. As the sun came up, Papa spread compost to disguise the freshly dug graves of their belongings. A few of the plants looked wilted, the roots disturbed by the digging. Old Mario carried water to revive them.

Wheelbarrow loads of dirt were left over, dirt that would never fit back into the holes. Mama and Sophie shoveled this dirt between the garden rows. Mama’s feet dragged when she walked, and she stopped sometimes to lean against her shovel.

“How many more?” Sophie asked. The palms of her hands were red with soreness. She wasn’t accustomed to digging.

“Stop now,” Mama said. “They could ask how you made blisters.”

They. The German soldiers towered in Petros’s imagination, broad but flat. Now, more than during the night, as they worked they listened for the sound of the Germans’ arrival, worried they’d come too soon.

“Go inside and start breakfast,” Mama told Sophie.

“I’m too tired to eat,” Sophie moaned.

“It’ll help,” Mama said. “We have more to do.”

Petros and Zola mixed the fresh dirt with the compost. Petros discovered the weights his own arms and legs had become. He’d never stayed up all night before.

When they went inside to eat, there was no polenta, no raisins. Sophie gave them milk and coffee in which to dip dry bread. Mama sliced hard cheese to make the bread more interesting.

Papa told them he’d put the radio in the cellar room.

“Why?” Petros asked.

“Because radios will be taken away,” Papa said. “The Germans won’t want us to have any news of the war.”

“How
will
we get news?” Zola wanted to know.

“The news is coming to us,” Papa said.

“Yanni and Seraphina are old friends,” Mama said, speaking of Elia’s grandparents across the road. “They already know we have a radio.”

No one said it, but they all knew Papa had disagreed with Elia’s father. The rest of the Lemos family was practically as dear to them as Stavros and his family. Petros had known them just as long and eaten at their table at least as often.

When Petros put his arms on the table to rest his head, Mama didn’t scold, but Sophie poked him with a sharp finger. “Sit up,” she said. “You remind me how much I want to sleep.”

“We have to go on as if this were any other day,” Papa said. “No English. Forget it all.” During the night, Zola, Sophie, and Petros had all earned slaps. Petros didn’t think he would have any more trouble speaking only Greek.

Everyone rose slowly, as if trying to remember what they did any other day. Petros fed the pig and chickens. Zola tossed hay into the goats’ pen. Old Mario laid the hoes over his shoulder, making things ready for the others to join him in the garden.

Fresh dark soil lay where it had been spilled. There was something unreal about this idea of war. Even though Petros had sore muscles from too many hours of digging, the memory of it already felt like a dream. But the soil, that was real. No one talked.

So tired they were nearly sick, they raked through the dirt, walking over it so the garden merely looked well-tended.

Petros’s garden lay in the poorest corner of the farm, a little way from the arbor. He’d badgered Papa for it. Zola had given him a dozen tomato plants and six bell pepper plants grown for Papa.

Petros also seeded several rows of onions and garlic, but only a few straggly shoots had come up. The rocky patch didn’t even encourage weeds. It needed a great deal of improvement to produce anything. He was glad to see dark hills of fresh soil at the ends of his rows.

He raked the dirt in, then carried water and dribbled it slowly around the seedlings. Pouring too fast might knock them down, and if the water ran off to soak the dirt where nothing grew, carrying the pail was wasted effort. But also he moved slowly. He sat down to work when he could, where only a day ago he would have bent at the waist.

An hour later, Old Mario started the well, and more water began to trickle into Petros’s garden, making the soil muddy. Al though Papa hardly ever turned on the well before the sun was going down, when the water came, it meant the day’s work was finished.

The singsong whine of the belt that worked the well could be heard in the background, like the static on a radio. The birds sang. Tin cans, strung between the plants to keep the birds and mice away, clanked as the men brushed against them.

All of these together were the sound of peace.

Returning to the yard, Petros found that Fifi had escaped the goat pen, climbing the fence like a ladder and falling over the top. Papa couldn’t catch her.

Old Mario came to help, and with all three of them chasing her like a pack of weary dogs, Petros shut her in again. Fifi bit him as he reached through the fencing for the rope around her neck and tethered her.

“I think,” Papa said, “your uncle got the best of the bargain.” Petros grinned and scratched Fifi behind the ears. She nipped him again.

As Zola shut the door on the seedling shed, Papa said, “We’re ready.”

Zola said, “If only we knew how far away the Germans are.” All their eyes strayed to the house, where the radio was hidden beneath Zola and Petros’s room.

Aunt Hypatia came down the road then, carrying a rolled blanket on her back and string sacks filled to bulging. Papa gave her the large male kid, which would feed the men when they got to the mountains. Petros was glad he’d already taken Lump to Uncle Spiro.

Lambros, packed like a mule, followed at a distance. He’d
keep an eye on his mother, but they couldn’t walk together until she left the road, well past Uncle Spiro’s farm.

After all the good-byes, Petros’s own mama still worked in her kitchen. She’d kiss him on the forehead when she sent him to bed that night. Petros knew this wasn’t true for Stavros anymore. For an instant he fought an unnamed fear—and won, pushing it back into a dark corner of his heart.

When Aunt Hypatia and Lambros were out of sight, Papa sent Petros to turn off the well.

Ordinarily Petros played with Elia during the afternoon rest period, but today Elia didn’t show up. Just as well, Petros thought as he sat down to a late meal he was too tired to eat. Today he might do as Papa usually did, and nap.