The Other Language(5)

The winter was hard on the father. He felt lonely and at times even desperate. To find himself suddenly responsible for the three children turned out to be more than he could handle. He had no time to grieve, busy as he was taking the kids to school before the office, picking them up, making sure they ate proper meals and got new shoes whenever their feet went up one size. In the spring he consulted with friends and family and he recalled for them how the Greek holiday seemed to have had such a beneficial effect on the children—so much so that it seemed worth repeating. The younger aunt, their mother’s sister, told him the kids had talked all winter about the friends they’d made in the village. Apparently Luca had exchanged a few letters with Nadia, whereas Emma kept talking about the two English boys. The father asked, puzzled, Which English boys? He had hardly noticed them.



They took off again the following July. The children couldn’t wait to arrive; their excitement mounted to a frenzy when they got off the ferry and started hearing Greek being spoken again. All winter long they’d fantasized about this moment: the memory of the village—of their immaculate rooms, of the deserted island across the beach—had haunted them, and they couldn’t believe the place still existed as they’d left it.

It was a relief to find that not much had changed during their absence. Iorgo and Maria’s taverna looked identical, except for a new coat of slightly darker blue paint. Nadia and her large family had just arrived from Athens a few days earlier, and she was already positioned on her towel working on her tan. The two humps of the island were there, so were the goats; in the kitchen, under the lids, pots and pans disclosed the same moussaka, keftedes, and chicken with chips. Nothing had changed. If anything, it was the children who had.

Luca’s voice had turned into a mix of hoarse and strident trumpeting, his legs were now just as hairy as the Greek boys’. Monica’s face had rearranged itself in a different order, the tip of her nose had settled into a slightly more rounded shape, she didn’t look like any of the pictures from the previous year. Emma’s figure, too, had reassembled itself. She had just gotten her period and with it a new softness around her hips, so now she had a waist, small breasts and a bottom. She looked at Nadia with overt suspicion: the roundness of her curves and bosom were an anticipation of what was yet to come. Luca was besotted more than ever by Nadia but soon realized the new guy from Athens who smoked Marlboros and played backgammon with her every afternoon must be the new boyfriend. This was at first a disappointment but Luca quickly devised a new strategy: he had no hope against such a masculine antagonist and so pursued the role of harmless admirer, in order to maintain his privileged position with the queen. Nadia organized her usual after-dinner singing around the bonfire, which allowed furtive kisses among her teenage friends to be exchanged thanks to the dark. She also encouraged her court to join sirtaki dancing with the locals under the string of lights hanging across the taverna’s roof. She led the dance with the old fishermen—her jet-black hair loose on her shoulders, allowing glimpses of her soft cleavage to show—and insisted on teaching Luca the steps. When the dance reached a climax, the fishermen would each grab a plate from one of the tables and smash them on the floor, which sent the audience into a frenzy of applause and cheers. Emma found this form of entertainment irritating and refused to join in, declaring Greek music repetitive and too loud for her.

The previous winter at school Emma had been taking a weekly English class, but the teacher, an elderly woman from Palermo, spoke it with a thick Sicilian accent and the sentences she gave the class to translate didn’t go beyond “the pen is on the desk” or “Mary is a very good student.” Emma had higher ambitions: she needed to pry open the secret of the language she longed to master in view of her forthcoming—she hoped—encounter with the dark-haired English boy. She had been playing the Beatles’ White Album and Joni Mitchell’s Blue incessantly in her room, making a point of learning the lyrics by heart and singing along. She had looked up every single word in the dictionary and had painstakingly attempted to paste the pieces together in a way that would produce an intelligible sentence. She found out from a magazine that one of Joni Mitchell’s songs, “Carey,” was about a hippie girl living on Crete.

The wind is in from Africa

Last night I couldn’t sleep

Oh, you know it sure is hard to leave here Carey

But it’s really not my home



There was so much joy and excitement in Joni’s voice. Emma sang the lyrics over and over in an endless loop. There was something so seductive in the image of a free-spirited young woman on a Greek island, a wind coming all the way from Africa. One day soon, might that person be her?



Once back in the village Emma had checked right away for signs of the English boy’s presence but the villa’s blue blinds were always shut, no car with an English plate was parked in front of it, and she began to sulk.

In the meantime she’d been practicing her swimming technique; she wanted to be ready. Emma went every day to Kastraki by herself and now she could easily swim halfway to the island and back. It was her secret, which she had kept even from her siblings. She didn’t want her father to know she was training for the crossing; he would not allow it because he still didn’t trust her as a swimmer. It was true, she wasn’t very experienced, but she saw that each day she managed to reach a bit farther; her strokes were getting more powerful and her breathing more controlled. All she needed was time, and in a week or two she might be able to reach all the way.