Free Eleni by Nicholas Gage

you,” she said apologetically.
    “I know.” He took her hand. “I’m going to make you well.”
    The tears spilled over. “It hurts so much,” Eleni said and turned her face away.
    While the crowd of villagers in the yard gaped, Christos set about with American efficiency, launching his plan to cure his wife. He had brought everything he needed. First he unrolled a great coil of wire screening and nailed it up at all the open windows. Then he produced a Flit spray gun and annihilated the clouds of flies inside the house. Finally he unpacked some choice beef that he had bought in Filiates and began to cook a meal with his own hands.
    The onlookers buzzed. Did American men cook for women? they wondered. Hearing them, Eleni was embarrassed, but she vowed to eat whatever he brought her, and she did, already calmed by his presence.
    Christos had arranged for the mule driver to take them the next day on the eight-hour journey to the old port of Saghiada, where they would hire a boat that would take them to Corfu. There, European-trained doctors would examine Eleni. She was sure the long journey would kill her, but she would not disobey her husband. Also, the thought of Corfu seized her imagination. Although everyone called her “the Amerikana,” Eleni had never been farther from the village than the provincial capital of Yannina, forty miles southeast of Lia.
    The next morning Eleni put on her best costume, with a gold-embroidered vest, necklaces of Turkish piastres, a large silver belt buckle and the burgundy flowered kerchief she had worn on her wedding day. She had become so thin that the skirt hung loose.
    The immensity of the sea was terrifying to the two mountain women and the small caïque seemed to toss helplessly toward the abyss. When the boat passed safely between the two forts guarding the entrance to the port of Corfu, Eleni’s strength left her and she couldn’t stand. Christos picked her up and carried her off the boat and across the short distance to the Hotel Nea Yorki, owned by a man from a village near Lia who welcomed them like kin and gave them a room overlooking the harbor.
    Eleni was scarcely conscious when Christos placed her on one of the scarlet-covered beds in their hotel room. When she came to, she saw Christos bursting through the doorway carrying a pair of European leather shoes for her and a bottle of the native kumquat liqueur that he made her taste.
    The next morning Christos brought two doctors to the room. They examined Eleni, then consulted in the musical accents Corfiots had acquired under years of Venetian rule. They asked about the prescriptions of the provincial doctors, shook their heads, and finally announced that Eleni hadsomething called enterocolitis. Having a name for it made her feel better.
    “There’s nothing seriously wrong with her,” said the taller of the two doctors. “High-protein diet. Let her eat and drink what she wants. Give her some chicken to start.” He wrote out some prescriptions, pocketed several of Christos’ traveler’s checks and concluded, “She’ll get well.”
    Flushed with triumph, Christos rushed out and returned with a waiter bearing three whole cooked chickens. Eleni did her best to eat, and before the day was over, she had managed to walk from the bed to a chair on the balcony, where she watched as all of Corfu seemed to pass below. Unmarried youths and maidens eyed one another, and carriages rattled by, drawn by horses in flowered straw hats. Gypsies entertained the crowd with monkeys and dancing bears. Peddlers of pistachio nuts, Turkish delight and multicolored syrups chanted their wares. At the edge of the water, a molten sheet of copper in the setting sun, fishermen mended their nets.
    Corfu began to glow in Eleni’s eyes with the supernatural brilliance visible to someone recovering from a long illness. Christos and Eleni sat every day in the great Esplanade, only steps from their hotel, eating colored ices and listening to