Free Eleni by Nicholas Gage Page A

musicians in starched uniforms singing Italian
cantatas
on the bandstand. When she was stronger, Christos led her through the maze of streets to the great, echoing Church of St. Spyridon, where she stood before the jeweled silver casket with the saint’s mummified body. Every year St. Spyridon’s corpse was said to wear out a pair of slippers performing miracles. Half the boys in Corfu were named for him. Eleni lit a candle and prayed for a boy.
    Christos bought her first European-style dress and when the blood returned to her cheeks, they hired a carriage and took an outing to the seashore. Once outside the town, rolling between the turquoise sea and the silver-green olive groves, Eleni drew strength from the air, heavy with the scents of heather, gorse, lavender and thyme. There were orange and lemon trees, wild orchids, sea gulls and flocks of turtledoves wherever she looked. The stucco houses of the villages were washed in vibrating pastels: pink, orange, mauve, turquoise and yellow. They visited the famous beach of Paleocastritsa and the thirteenth-century monastery on the cliffs above, and ate squid and lobster next to the sea.
    On the way back, the heat of the sun and the wine they had drunk made Eleni feel dizzy. The driver stopped in one of the tiny villages before a hut washed in a brilliant robin’s-egg blue and overgrown with purple bougainvillaea. A young woman came out in a white kerchief and offered the strangers glasses of cold water and apricots warm from the tree.
    It was during those sun-drenched, fragrant days in Corfu that Eleni understood what had made her ill. It hadn’t been the evil eye. She needed to break free of Lia, where everything—the people, the mud, the mountains—was etched in grays, blacks and browns. Corfu showed her the rainbow that lay beyond her own mountains. She regretted giving in to her mother’s demand that she stay behind, and longed to see the colors of America. Freeof the prison of the village, with her husband beside her, she would never be ill again.
    Christos was gratified with his success in curing his wife. He felt like a newlywed walking at her side, and if she so much as slowed her pace to admire something in a shop window, he bought it. Christos carried his American money in his breast pocket in a big roll, secured with a rubber band, and he liked watching the shopowners’ eyes bulge when he began peeling off the bills. Anyone could tell by his clothes and his manner that he was not a Greek but an American, he knew—and a big shot, at that.
    They nearly argued when Christos decided to buy Eleni a gleaming brass bed. Eleni raised her chin. No one in the village slept in a bed and she was too old to begin after sleeping on the floor for thirty years.
    Christos explained to her, as to a child. Sleeping on the floor was a filthy village custom. Every “high class” person slept in a bed. Seeing how much it meant to him, Eleni bowed her head, and the gleaming monstrosity, to the delight of the Armenian shopkeeper, was paid for and disassembled to be loaded on the caïque.
    Eleni’s two eldest daughters still remember how shocked they were, summoned out of the house by the bells of Mourtos’ mules, to find their mother, who had left an invalid, coming up the path, riding side by side with their father, both singing at the top of their voices, like two drunken gypsies at a wedding. They had never heard their mother sing before.
    Eleni’s cheeks became round again as she gathered wood, baked bread, planted the crops and carried water from the spring in the summer of 1937. Christos spent every day hunting or sitting in the coffeehouses. Within weeks of their return Eleni knew that she was pregnant, but she hugged the secret to herself for a while, certain that the child conceived in Corfu would be a boy.
    On March 17, 1938, Eleni sent for the midwife. Christos sat in the good chamber next to the kitchen, nervously clicking his worry beads and letting the girls turn