Free War Games by Audrey Couloumbis Page A

and Mama headed for the parlor.
    Old Mario and Petros and Sophie followed them.
    “Lemos’s wife is badly upset,” Papa said. “Her dining room, their bed. At least we have our bed.”
    Old Mario nodded, but Mama sat down hard on the sofa that would be gone soon. She leaned like someone who’d been standing a long time in a strong wind. “What will we do?”
    “We’ll put the furniture they want out on the veranda,” Papa said as Zola came back inside. Zola was put right to work.
    No one could sleep that afternoon.
    Elia came over to Petros’s house to escape his grandmother’s complaints. “Let’s play marbles next to your well.”
    They’d no sooner begun than Stavros showed up. “Auntie’s spending her afternoon in the church,” he said. “It’s cool in there, but I’m surrounded by grandmothers.”
    They each tried to win the game. But they also shouted encouragement to each other as they’d never done. All at once Mama stood over them. “What’s this?” she asked, scooping up the glass marble.
    Elia was flushed with the happiness of winning. “Petros’s shooter.”
    Petros groaned. Mama turned a warrior’s eye on him. “Where’s a switch? I’ll beat all of you and feed you to the pig. Where was this?”
    Elia looked an apology at Petros. “In my pouch,” Petros said. Where he hadn’t given it one thought.
    “This came from Spiro?” Mama asked. “Are there more?”
    “No.”
    Mama turned, her arm coming up, and the boys screamed, “No!”
    She threw the marble into the well. Stavros dropped to the ground in despair.
    “You couldn’t keep it,” Mama said in a loud whisper, as if the Germans had already arrived. She left the boys slumped down beside the well.
    Petros felt drained somehow, made flat, like something run over on the road. He and Elia dropped to sit beside Stavros, all of them with their backs against the well.
    “I should have said it was mine,” Elia said.
    “No, you should have said it was
mine,”
Stavros told him, and they laughed.

chapter 18
    Later in the day, Papa sent Petros and Zola to clean the chicken house. This was hot, smelly work that disturbed the chickens. They flapped and squawked and made a trundling run or two at the boys’ ankles before escaping outside.
    At first Petros and Zola didn’t speak, only scraped their shovels across the floor and sweated. The chill of fear was fading fast. Their bellies were full, and the Germans gone. No one hurt. Perhaps things weren’t so bad after all.
    As the minutes wore on and Zola didn’t trouble him, Petros thought Zola now realized he’d been right to throw the notes into the bucket. He’d no sooner decided this was true than Zola said, “The notes we fed to the pig don’t matter. We must send out a more urgent message now.”
    “Look for the other nests,” Petros said, because several of Mama’s chickens persisted in setting up housekeeping
under
the henhouse.
    “Being commander is a big responsibility,” Zola said. He stopped working and leaned on his shovel.
    Petros could see how this was going to go. His brother haddone nothing to help when the Germans came and now acted as if he hadn’t gotten angry that Petros had. He thought enough time had passed that the whole matter would be forgotten.
    It wouldn’t be forgotten—Petros promised himself that much.
    Zola said, “He’ll go out each day like a man of business, I think.”
    Petros stopped scraping and sat on his heels, leaning against the wall. He was in the mood to torture his brother just a little. “What if he searches our room?”
    Zola looked at Petros from the corner of his eye. “There will be nothing for him to find.”
    Petros thought this was Zola’s way of asking what he’d done with the flag. But he wasn’t ready to tell. He wouldn’t
be
ready until Zola was prepared to be grateful. “So no more notes?”
    “The Germans are big,” Zola said. “We are small. We must be small and smart. Lambros said this to