Free Enemy and Brother by Dorothy Salisbury Davis Page A

the kafenia. The talk was politics no less than usual, but the consensus, if I judged it right, was that since Paul was coming home all must be well with the government in Athens: political leniency was the sure sign of stability.
    I approached Constable Rigi and remarked on the excitement. He shrugged and said, “People remember what they want to remember. To me it is no great honor to have been in prison. But if I said that now….” He made the gesture of cutting his own throat.
    I watched and listened with a kind of horror, not because of my own feeling about Stephanou—who here would believe me if I told of his false testimony? Constable Rigi!—but because I kept remembering the lawyer Helmi’s description of him. I wanted to prepare the people, particularly Vasso. I watched her come from the house to the restaurant, her arm across Michael’s shoulders. She sped him on to join in the children’s vigil.
    She smiled as I came up. “You will like the Greeks tonight, Professor Eakins.”
    “I do not have to wait for tonight. Have you seen him, Vasso, since he went away?”
    She shook her head.
    “There are few afflictions worse than blindness,” I said.
    “He will have a hundred pairs of eyes.”
    I said no more. Going into the cottage, I looked up the correspondence between Byron and Sir Walter Scott.
    He came as the first shadows fell upon the valley. I knew it from the ringing of the church bell, then from the sound of the grandmother as she ran past my window. I looked up in time to see her cross herself again and again as she ran. I closed my books and went out. Everyone was gathering in front of the restaurant, the boys’ chorus, the giggling girls. The priest came out from his house, striding in black magnificence, his wife scurrying after him.
    The car came down the hill, the dust in its wake veiling the children who ran after it, the flowers still in their arms. That it had not stopped for their gifts was to me the first omen.
    As the car drew to a halt, the singing master signalled and began himself to sing, but the boys, far more interested in the passenger than in their director, sang in neither tune nor time. And one long moan went up from the women who had glimpsed the men in the back seat. The butcher’s wife handed her husband a towel in which he wiped his face. Vasso, waiting with towels for the others, could not get the back door open and no one helped her until I pushed through the crowd and, reaching through the front window, unlocked it from the inside and opened it. Paul Stephanou sat like a stone man, his face grey, save for the pinched red lids that concealed the sightless eyes. His closely cropped hair was white and his lips tight, the color and shape of a slashing scar. I would not ever, ever have known him.
    Beside him old Modenis sat staring ahead, his fierce dark eyes blinking. He was like a poised eagle.
    Vasso held the wet towel close to Paul’s hands and said his name. He pushed her hand from him and said harshly, “Butcher, drive on!”
    The priest came up, trying to move Vasso away and himself take over, but she elbowed him back and slammed shut the door of the car. I thought she was going to faint, such was the pallor of her face. I offered my hand and she caught it and held it fiercely as the car moved slowly, jerkily, from the curb. The white towels lay at her feet.
    The chorus faded out altogether with the sound of the car’s motor and mercifully did not start up again. Only the moans of disappointment. What in hell had they expected? The return of a laughing boy?
    I said one word to Vasso, “Courage!”
    Her lips were parted. She nodded a little without looking at me and then, letting go my hand, followed after the car. She walked in the slow march of a ritual to where Modenis had gotten from the car in front of his cottage. He put the small, cheap suitcase on the ground and gave his hand to the blind man who then got out of the car, cane in hand, and permitted his