26

The Tomb of a Goddess

A week before daphne’s arrival, Fanis realized he was out of drinking water. He placed an order, but he knew that the service could take all day, so he put on his coat and went down to the minimart. Its Anatolian proprietress was sitting on her doorstep with her chin in her palm, probably waiting for her grandchildren, who came every afternoon to play with the balls kept in a net pinned to the shop’s exterior wall.

“Welcome, Uncle,” she said.

Fanis gritted his teeth at the respectful title, mumbled a “Well we find you,” and scanned the crates of onions, tomatoes, lemons, and potatoes lying on the sidewalk. He asked for a half-liter bottle of water.

After finishing his errand, he should have gone straight home. Instead he moved on toward the inevitable. He looked frequently over his shoulder to make sure that the next truck did not flatten him like roadkill. He turned into Ağa Hamamı Street and continued walking until he arrived at the dreaded cul-de-sac. For years his heart had been breaking whenever he unwittingly caught sight of the satellite dishes, crumbling stairs, corrugated plastic sheets installed as awnings, and other signs that the mansions of Kalypso’s street had become poor tenements. On that day, however, he received an even greater shock: the exterior of the wooden house where she had lived had been completely renovated. Its front stairs had been redone with new marble, its corroding door replaced with a steel security door painted bright green, and its shingles varnished to a shine he had not seen in over fifty years. Fanis ascended the alley. Two little girls sitting in the doorway of another house giggled. They were probably laughing at him, a short old man turning in circles and looking up at those houses as if he were lost not in space, but in time.

Fanis returned home and went straight to his mother’s room, which he maintained exactly as it had been during her lifetime. He sat down on the violet-embroidered coverlet that his mother had made before she was married. Above the headboard, in a heavy, gold-painted frame was a vista of the Bosporus lined with pine trees. On the nightstand was his parents’ wedding photograph, taken on the steps of the Panagia. He knew that if he looked into the armoire, he would find all his mother’s clothes protected by prodigious amounts of naphthalene and lavender. Since her death he had not dared open it even once.

He did not pull back the lace curtains that shielded his view of the street. Instead, he imagined his neighborhood of vines hanging from wires between the houses. He saw Ağa Hamamı Street torn up for repaving, as it had been the previous summer. He envisioned the men who had set up their plastic chairs to watch the bulldozers as if they were at a sporting event. He saw his mother and wife step out of a beauty parlor that had closed decades ago. They were whispering as they walked, and he was sure that they were talking about him.

“Mother,” he said out loud. “Why did you tell me not to go?”

Fanis took off the two wedding bands he had worn on the same finger since his wife’s death. He placed them on his mother’s pillow, took Kalypso’s photo from the side table on which he had left it after Murat’s visit, and exited the building. He climbed Turnacıbaşı Street, merged into the pedestrian traffic in the Grand Avenue, and turned off into the byway leading to the Panagia church. There he found the bishop half asleep in an office chair.

Fanis cleared his voice to wake him gently. When that didn’t work, he said, “Your Eminence.”

“Leave off with the fancy title,’” said the bishop, pulling himself up straight. “You know I’m not fond of protocol.”

Fanis stuck his nose into the narcissus flowers on the bishop’s desk and inhaled spring. “Do you remember, Elder,” he said, “when we were not alone?”

“Of course,” said the bishop.

“And do you remember when Pera was full of churches?”

“It still is. But more than all that, I remember when Pera was full of pastry shops. A step and a pastry shop. Another step and another pastry shop. Those were the days. Now tell me, what brings you here?”

“Confession,” said Fanis.

“You haven’t confessed for as long as I’ve been a cleric.”

“Then it’s about time, isn’t it?”

The bishop removed his tie and jacket, donned his vestments and pectoral cross, and said a prayer. Then he sat down across from Fanis, in one of the armchairs in front of the desk. “Behold, my child,” he said. “Christ stands here and hears your confession.”

“I have been licentious my whole life,” said Fanis. “I was unfaithful to my wife countless times . . .”

“Why don’t you tell me something I don’t already know?”

Fanis took the photo of Kalypso from his breast pocket, kissed it, and handed it to the bishop. “It was the name day of my fiancée’s grandmother,” he began. “I was supposed to close the shop at six and go to dinner at her grandmother’s house in the Old City. Instead, when the troubles started, I saw to the shop and my mother. My fiancée’s father went to protect the family business. My fiancée, her mother, grandmother, and siblings were left alone.”

“There is no sin in looking after one’s mother,” said the bishop, quietly passing the photo back to Fanis.

“Perhaps there isn’t, but while I was looking after my mother, my fiancée was . . . raped on the steps of her grandmother’s house. People saw. When those things occur behind closed doors or in secret places, the girls can attempt to face the world as if nothing has happened, as if the shame doesn’t hover between them and their family, friends, and neighborhood. They aren’t forever known as one of the girls dishonored on the night of the pogrom. But Kalypso—”

“Still, it wasn’t your fault.”

“It’s not just that, Elder. My real sin—the weight I have been carrying all these years—is that I didn’t go to visit her immediately afterwards. I thought there was time. I didn’t want to cause her any more distress. My mother said it was better to let a couple days pass, let her womenfolk attend to her, and I was so angry at those men I didn’t know . . . I wasn’t sure if I could control myself, or if I could listen to details if she chose to tell me—”

“Fanis, caring for a loved one who has survived trauma is difficult, to say the least. You need to be a bit gentler with yourself. You didn’t know what to do. That’s all.”

“But, Elder, that has to be why she killed herself.”

“How do you know?”

“I feel it. She thought I’d abandoned her.”

The bishop sighed. “The secrecy of the mystery of penance is indisputable,” he said, staring up at the yellow watermarks on the ceiling. “But”—he lowered his gaze—“when the penitent has already passed to the other side, and when one of those in this life can be helped, perhaps a disclosure is in order . . .”

“Elder?”

“The girl’s father came to me before the family’s sudden departure for Canada. He, too, blamed himself for the suicide. Apparently, despite what happened, the girl didn’t want to leave the City. Whether it was for you or because she didn’t want to leave her home, or both, I don’t know, but Petridis insisted on taking her away from here, shouted in his frustration even. A few hours later, after the others had gone to bed, she did what she did, God rest her soul.”

“It wasn’t that she knew I knew? That I didn’t tell her it was all right, that it didn’t matter, that it made no difference to me? It wasn’t any of that?”

“Fanis, what happened was terrible, but it certainly wasn’t your fault. Or her father’s. You were both traumatized. Secondary survivors.”

“What does that mean?” said Fanis, annoyed that the bishop would choose a time like this to show off his English.

“My niece—the smart one who did her PhD in Boston—taught me the term. It’s what American psychologists call the family of trauma victims. In a way, you, too, are—indirectly, of course—a rape survivor. And survivors must never blame themselves.”

Secondary survivor? Fanis had never thought of himself in that way. If he had called himself secondary anything, it would have been secondary criminal. Or secondary murderer. Certainly not secondary survivor. Tears came to his eyes.

The bishop ran his fingers along the edge of the embroidered stole. “What brought you here today, Fanis? After all these years?”

Fanis glanced down at the sunburned girl sitting on the church wall. “I need to say goodbye to her, Elder. I . . . even if what you say is true . . . I feel I need to erase the old notebook, as they say. I don’t want to live with ghosts anymore. And . . . I never visited her grave. I just couldn’t. I guess I thought that maybe, if I didn’t see her grave, then it didn’t exist. So, you see, I abandoned her in death as well.”

The bishop cleared his throat. “Listen, Fanis. It’s true that, as Orthodox Christians, we have no past and no dead. Our past is always present, and the dead are always with us while we are in church. Still, the dead should not be a part of our daily life. Put your hand to the plow. Stop looking back. And take a good look around you: now is quite different from then.”

“Yes, Elder.” Fanis crossed his arms over his chest and bowed at the waist.

The bishop covered Fanis’s head with his stole and gave the absolution: “Whatever you have said to my humble person, and whatever you have failed to say, whether through ignorance or forgetfulness, whatever it may be, may God forgive you in this world and the next.”

The bishop whistled—the same piercing whistle with which he had frightened girls when he was a teenager. “Get the car ready,” he called to Samuel, his assistant. Then, to Fanis, “I’m on my way to Şişli Cemetery for a Trisagion. Would you like to come? We’ll say a memorial for Kalypso as well.”

“So you remember her name?”

“Of course I do. You’re the only one who pretends to have forgotten her. Now, are you coming or not?”

Fanis sat in the back of the bishop’s black Opel Astra with nervous anticipation. At the cemetery gate, the bishop gave him an affectionate shoulder shake and went off with Samuel to read the first Trisagion. Fanis asked the Antiochian caretaker to look up the location of Kalypso’s family tomb. Both her death and her funeral had been kept quiet by her family. Fanis hadn’t learned of either until she was already in the grave. He had thought of buying poison and going by night to join her, like Romeo unable to live without his Juliet, but he knew that his mother would never have been able to bear it. So he had never gone.

The caretaker spent a few minutes searching for the record of Kalypso’s burial in a dusty leather-bound book. Finally he put his finger on a listing: “There she is.” He turned to the cemetery map and pointed to the rear left corner.

Fanis was surprised. One of his friends was buried close by, yet he had never noticed Kalypso there. Then he realized that he had brought nothing—no flowers, no potted plants, no whirligigs, votives, or incense. In a childlike manner, he stated his predicament.

The caretaker grabbed a pocket knife, exited, and returned with three hydrangea mopheads. “We have plenty of these, Uncle. I don’t normally cut them, but never mind.”

“Brother,” corrected Fanis.

“Excuse me?”

“Brother,” Fanis repeated. “I prefer that you call me ‘Brother’ instead of ‘Uncle.’”

The caretaker patted him on the back.

They picked their way over the slippery mud, and cobbles still wet with the previous night’s rain. At one point Fanis nearly fell. The gardener caught him and offered to carry the hydrangeas so that Fanis could hold onto his arm with both hands. Ten minutes later, they came upon a bare metal cross.

“There must be a mistake,” said Fanis. He had always imagined that Kalypso’s tomb would be covered with a marble slab and crowned by more marble, oval photos, and carved lilies.

“No, we’re in the right place, Brother. That’s Kalypso Petridou’s grave. Says so right there.”

Fanis examined the marker more closely. Circling the four points of the cross was a metal wreath on which her name and years had been engraved and blackened. Then he remembered the state that the cemetery had been in at the time. The family tomb had probably been destroyed.

The caretaker stepped away to smoke a cigarette beneath the cypress trees. Fanis threaded the hydrangea stems through the metal wreath and knelt on the damp earth. He ran his fingers over the letters etched in black. The moisture on the ground seeped through his pants and made wet circles on his knees. Kalypso probably hadn’t had a visit since her funeral.

“Are you all right?” said the caretaker.

“Fine.” Fanis could hear the clinking of Samuel’s censor and the light shuffling footsteps of the bishop.

“Is that your wife buried there?” asked the caretaker.

Fanis ran his fingers over the first letters of her name. “No,” he said. “It is the tomb of a goddess.”

He heard the sweeping of cloth on the dry leaves and then the chant, “Blessed is our God always, both now and ever, and to the ages of ages.” He rose to his feet and crossed himself. He tried to concentrate on the prayers, but instead he heard Kalypso humming their song. He closed his eyes.

Kalypso slipped her hand into his and led him down Faik Paşa Street. Through shop windows that had existed decades ago, Fanis saw the quilt maker kneeling on a piece of pink satin and covering it with down. The maid of the stately gray–mauve building finished watering the window-box geraniums and brought out a bucket and mop to scrub her employer’s front step. The dusty silk crocuses in Fanis’s next-door neighbor’s window boxes came to life.

Fanis’s street became a beach. Kalypso in her white summer dress, laughing her careless laughter, conjured a warm land breeze. Just before stepping into a sailboat, she threw her arms around his neck, licked his outer ear, and nibbled his lobe with a tender ferocity that made him moan with pleasure. She said nothing. There was nothing to say. They both knew that the way she had gone no longer mattered.

Kalypso cast off the stern hawsers by herself. Fanis, recovering from the ear treatment, pushed the sailboat into the moonlight. She leaned on the oar, keeping the Great Bear and Orion to her left, and sang “My Sweet Canary.”

Fanis took a deep breath and opened his eyes to the swaying of the cypresses in the spring breeze.

The bishop chanted: “Establish the soul of His servant Kalypso, departed from us, in the tentings of the Just; give her rest in the bosom of Abraham; and number her among the Just, through His goodness and compassion as our merciful God.”

Fanis crossed himself again and said out loud, “Farewell.”