He entered their flat and moved slowly from the hall into the parlor. The light from the windows shredded the bars of his son's bed, cutting strips of shadow and moonglow across his small blanket-covered body.
He gripped the bars and lowered himself painfully to the floor. His body ached fearfully, riots of pain razing his flesh. The socket of his wounded eye flicked with fire. He felt a segment of the torn lid congealed with blood so it would not close but remained hinged apart.
He heard steps from the bedroom and after a moment Caliope came up beside him.
"You're early," she said. "It's not daylight yet."
He wanted to tell her to return to bed but he could not assemble the words. If he opened his mouth he feared he would cry out.
"Be careful you don't wake him," she said. "He was restless all evening."
She came closer and he turned his face away. She seemed to sense that something was wrong. He motioned her aside with a gesture of his hand.
The moon emerged from behind a cloud and shone through the windows. He felt her hand on his shoulder, tugging his body around. For an instant he fought her and then resigned himself. He turned his face to the light and stared up at her seeing her cheeks a blurred oval suspended against the shadow and mist of the room.
She drew her breath in sharply. He looked back toward the sleeping figure of his son.
"What happened?" she whispered. "In the name of God, what happened to you?"
"I fought the Turk," he said slowly.
"Why?"
He thought of rising and fleeing but his arms and legs were a ponderous burden that he could not lift.
"Why?" she asked again.
He imagined her watching him, the black cold hollows about her eyes.
"I cheated," he said, and the words burned his tongue. "I cheated."
There was a moment of stunned silence and then she laughed. Yet it was not really laughter because there was no mirth in her voice, only a savage expelling of air.
"Not you!" she said mockingly and he felt the naked glitter of her eyes. "Not you with your uncompromising virtue, your lofty sense of honor, your consecrated ethics at gambling. Not you!"
He did not answer. He put his finger to the socket of his eye and felt the torn lid shoot sparks of pain through his body.
She moved from the bed. She walked to one of the windows and stood for a moment with her back to him. The curtain stirred before her, a ripple of wind passing down the filmy cloth. She turned and came back to loom dark and vengefully above him.
"Are you becoming human then?" she asked. "Are you beginning finally to walk the earth with us poor mortals? Are you starting to understand the weaknesses of our flesh?"
He felt the first stirring of cold wind from a forest of black cypresses, a wind carrying the chill of damp blossoms and wet soil. He leaned forward wearily and rested his cheek against the bars of the bed.
"Ten years," she said and he trembled at the fury rising from the marrow of her bones, "Ten years of living with you, sleeping with you, watching you indulge in the absurd ritual of your days and nights. You lodged in some place of rarefied air where only Matsoukas could breathe, a land denied the ordinary slob."
Stavros fluttered his fingers on the pillow and Matsoukas reached between the bars and drew the corner of the blanket gently over his hand.
"God, why did I marry you? Why of all the women in the world you might have graced with your studding virtues and your incomparable temperament did it have to be me? What screw of chance decided that stroke?"
He tried to close his eyes but the torn lid would not shut. The eye stared unblinking at the pale glimmer of moonlight through the curtains.
"If you knew how much I hated you," she whispered. "O God, I think hate has kept me alive. Even when I lie beneath your heaving loins with your matchless cock buried in my body, even then I think my hate is most of the passion and I wish my body were a great claw to draw you into me and devour you, destroy you."
A vision of her face in their moments of love came to him. He recalled the large luminous glitter of her eyes and a shudder swept his body.
"But I was not always that way," she said and for an instant her voice wavered. "I loved you when we married. I thought you were full of grace and strength. I did not know then you would move through life like a bird scattering shit where you wished, keeping yourself untouched, unblemished, unsoiled."
He felt her words hooking his flesh, gouging his wounds, probing for his soul.
"Even the boy, God help him, was always yours," she said. "He was your son. Only your love could save him and nourish him. I was only his mother, only the woman who held him inside her body for the months before his birth, only the woman who brought him into the world in a tide of blood and bile. When they washed him off, cleansed his body of the slime, then he was your son."
The words hissed from her mouth, sharpened and flung from the taut tendons of her rage.
"I think sometimes you were to blame! I think you believed he was the son of a God and the Gods you revere as your relations decided to smite your arrogance. They covered him with a cloud to punish you, a madman, a bastard, a fool!"
He moved his trembling hand and the soft strands of the boy's hair slipped beneath his fingers. The scalp was warm. He touched it lightly, embracing the delicate crown.
"And right to the end you indulge your absurd dreams," she said. "You tear about like a maddened animal, an insane fool seeking to carry a dying son to some land of dreams. You are mad and this dream is the maddest one of all, this dream of flight with a dying child."
He shook his head. The light beyond the window swayed again. He wanted to cry out but he could not speak.
"He is dying, Matsoukas," she said, and for the first time he heard clearly the cry of her anguish. "The boy is dying. Whether here or in Greece, he will die soon. Not even you can avert that. He is dying and no power on earth can save him from that death."
"No," he said, and the word came torn from his lips. "No."
"Yes!" she said, "Goddam you, yes! Accept that truth and there might be hope for you to join the mortals. He is dying. He will die soon. Flight is useless."
"No," he said helplessly. "No."
"Yes! Yes! Yes!" she cried. She came closer and he tensed waiting for her to strike him. "Bastard! Madman! Fool! Yes! Yes! Yes!"
A weird moan sounded in his ears. It was a moment before he understood that it came from him. He felt it gathering like a wave within his body, swelling to crest past his lungs and his heart, rising through his throat, bursting from the scar of his lips. Again and again it rose and each time the wild stricken moan broke free.
He felt Caliope's hands pulling him to his feet. She led him from the parlor down the hall to the bathroom. She snapped on the light. His torn eye burned beneath the glare.
He stood mute and unmoving while she washed him.
He felt her fingers, the warm wet cloth soaking his bruises, softly wiping away the crusts of dried blood, dabbing the sore gums from which several of his teeth had been driven. She patted his cheek with cotton pads of peroxide and covered the torn lid and socket of his eye with a square of gauze that she taped to his temple and the bridge of his nose. When she finished, as if he were a child, she ran a brush through his thick tangled hair. He saw then with a strange shaken distress that she was crying.
She left the bathroom and he stood for a moment uncertain where to go. He walked back up the hall to the parlor. He bent once more over his son's bed, reaching out his hand to touch him, trying to console his anguish in the feel of the boy's flesh.
He heard Caliope return. She came to stand beside him at the bed. He saw her face filled now with a cold hard strength.
"Raise the boy and take him," she said, and the words came quick and sharp. "I have packed his clothing and shirts and trousers for you. I will give you blankets to wrap around him. You can catch a taxi for the airport on the boulevard."
He stared at her numbly, uncomprehending.
"Will you move!" she cried softly. She thrust her clenched fist toward him. "Here is the money for your tickets, enough besides to house and feed you both for a while. Hurry now!"
For a grieving moment he thought she had impaled him with a barbarous jest. But in the light from the hall he saw the sheaf of wrinkled bills in her fingers.
She shook her head, savagely rejecting his questions, motioning to him to raise Stavros. At that instant a wild shriek of betrayal rang through the flat, a fearful scream of loss from her mother's room.
"Hurry!" Caliope cried. "I have locked her in! Go now before she wakes the dead!"
Then everything was swept aside in his frenzy to flee. He stuffed the money into his wallet. He held the boy in his arms while Caliope wrapped the blankets tightly around him, folding the corners about his head to shield his face. He moved to the suitcase by the door and remembered his daughters. He made a mute appeal to Caliope and carrying Stavros, hurried down the hall to their room. As he passed the old lady's room she began to beat with her bony fists against the wood of the door.
He bent over his sleeping daughters, seeing their blonde and lovely faces serene and untroubled. He tenderly kissed each little girl farewell.
He hurried back to the hall where Caliope waited with the suitcase by the door. He wavered, looking toward the old lady's room, hearing her crazed howls.
"I can handle her," Caliope said. "She will not let us starve. It will be no worse than before."
He moved to open the door and Stavros stirred in his arms.
"Wait!" Caliope cried. He turned back and she reached out slowly and pulled aside the blanket covering her son's face. She bent and for a long moment kissed the boy's lips. When she rose, she turned away so Matsoukas could not see her face.
He stared at her back and was afraid to touch her or to speak. He turned then, picked up the suitcase, and holding Stavros tightly in his arms, he fled down the stairs.
With their tickets secure in his pocket he sat in the huge airport terminal, in one of the armchairs before the great glass windows that ran from the ceiling to the floor. Beyond the windows the moon was gone and the night was charcoal-black.
He carried Stavros in his arms. The boy's face was visible within the folds of blanket, and in the cold gray terminal light, his cheeks were the bleak shade of a tomb. His fingers, like small brittle twigs, hung stiffly close to his lips. He slept in a strange deep slumber.
Now, in the hour of their departure, Matsoukas could feel no jubilation. He endured only a resignation and despair. He pressed his cheek against the folds of the blanket. He rested and heard the heavy slow beating of his heart. The sounds of the terminal, the loudspeaker announcing flights, faded to a drone.
When he raised his head again there had been a shift in the night, the charcoal-blackness screened to the shade of putty. He could sense a faint stirring in the earth, areas of mist shepherded, trees emerging dimly from the pitch. Even as he watched, a series of dark and gray hillocks sprang from the ground.
Their flight was announced and he rose with Stavros to walk to the gate. Raw pain and weariness spliced together in his body.
He moved from the main terminal under an archway and down a long corridor. In each alcove he passed, the long windows showed the altering sky, a partition of the shades of darkness and light, a slow veiling of the stars.
He had never before seen so clearly the ritual of the dawn. The first faint light like a dry and clean host assaulting the minions of darkness. A quiver swept his flesh.
When he reached the gate to their plane he stood with Stavros before the windows looking out across the field. The huge formless shape of their plane was still hinged to the darkness around the terminal.
Then the light, slowly, ravenously, gained dominance. Shreds of nightclouds, swarthy and grimed, were plucked like struggling chickens and silently butchered. The dark grays and deep purples gave way to faint blues. And far out at the edge of the earth, no more than a frail orange glow on the horizon, he saw the first trace of the sun.
His breath caught sharply in his throat. He raised Stavros high in his arms so that the blanket fell away. The breaking dawn swept the boy's dark cheeks with a flickering warmth. He stirred and opened his eyes.
The corona of the sun ascended. Matsoukas stretched out his hand and felt the burnished glow soothe his palm and fingers. A wild excitement tore his body.
And then the head, the lustrous scorching head of the sun broke over the curve of the earth. The last shadows hurled away, the final dull patches of night fled screaming. Like a fierce firebird the sun swooped. It rubied the fuselages of planes, crimsoned the runways and hangars, incarmined the conclave of buildings, reddened the spirals of the tower. It blazed across their plane. The wings flushed scarlet, swelling suddenly with a gleaming and fearful power.
The sun burst across the window where they stood, a radiance like a thousand rainbows streaming through the glass, sealing Stavros and himself in a blazing glitter.
Their flight was boarding and he hurried to the tunnel. Through the seams and folds of the bellows, he still felt the sun, fetal and molten, spinning and whirling through his blood.
His heart cried out. He felt the tears burst from his eyes, fitfully from the torn lid, jubilant and grateful tears. They fell in specks of flame upon the blanket of his son.
In this way, crying and holding Stavros tightly in his arms, he boarded the wild-winged plane.
###
Harry Mark Petrakis is the author of twenty-three books, short-stories, and essays, and has been nominated twice for the National Book Award. His books include the 'A Dream of Kings' (1966), set in Chicago, which was a New York Times bestseller. It was published in twelve foreign editions and was made into a motion picture (1969) starring Anthony Quinn. He has won the O. Henry Award, and received awards from Friends of American Writers, Friends of Literature, and the Society of Midland Authors. He was the Nikos Kazantzakis Chair in Modern Greek Studies at San Francisco State University and the McGuffy Visiting Lecturer at Ohio University. In 2004, the American College of Greece in Athens presented him with an Honorary Doctor of Humane Letters Degree.
BOOKS BY HARRY MARK PETRAKIS
NOVELS
Lion at my Heart
The Odyssey of Kostas Volakis
A Dream of Kings
In the Land of Morning
The Hour of the Bell
Nick the Greek
Days of Vengeance
Ghost of the Sun
Twilight of the Ice
The Orchards of Ithaca
The Shepherds of Shadows
SHORT STORY COLLECTIONS
Pericles on 31st Street
The Waves of Night
A Petrakis Reader - 27 Stories
Collected Stories
Legends of Glory and other Stories
MEMOIRS AND ESSAYS
Stelmark - A Family Recollection
Reflections - a Writers Life- A Writers Work
Tales of the Heart (Dreams and Memories of a Lifetime)
BIOGRAPHIES/HISTORIES
The Founder’s Touch: The Story of Motorola's Paul Galvin
Henry Crown: The Life and Times of the Colonel
Reach Out: The Story of Motorola and its People