The Secret Sister Read Free Page A

on eating her meal: roasted lamb with potatoes. Then Anthoula brought peeled oranges that smelled of cinnamon and spearmint.
    â€œOpen your mouth, sweet child. Eat. Oranges are full of power and health.”
    I was keeping my mouth obstinately shut. When my sister isn’t here, what do I need power and health for? I want her to be here, to play the piano. To sing “The Northern Star” again. Have you ever heard such a beautiful voice? It’s like the song of the mermaids.
    â€œ
You’re exaggerating, Jonathan. If that were the case, then I’d . . .
”
    Be quiet.
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    * * *
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    The airplane is now flying at thirty thousand feet.
    â€œWhat would you like to drink?” the flight attendant asks me solicitously.
    When you grow up without a father, you make others want to take care of you. They might even think more highly of you. They sense you’re emitting an invisible fortitude, as if you’ve taken on the strength of the absent one.
    â€œIt’s the blood talking,” said Anthoula one day while you were singing. What did she mean?
    Amalia, what does “It’s the blood talking” mean?
    â€œ
Why are you asking me?
You should have asked others, back then.
”
 
    There’s no time. People die, and you have to make sure you learn, while they’re alive, all the unintelligible words they’ve uttered, the allusive remarks, the censored thoughts. There’s no time. You have to make sure you clear up the shadows before they swallow you up and then you turn into a shadowman, like so many others. Anthoula’s gone, Grandpa, Grandma, they’re all gone. I never found out what she meant by: “It’s the blood talking.”
    â€œ
That’s why people travel, Jonathan
.”
    What do you mean, Amalia?
    â€œ
That sometimes we come home to learn about all these things, before—
”
    Go on, why did you stop?
    â€œ
Jonathan, the journey is yours.
”
    You’re with me.
    â€œ
You’re traveling to Greece alone.
”
    You’re with me.
    â€œ
Alone. Don’t kid yourself. How could I be with you? Are you forgetting, or are you pretending to forget?
”
    Be quiet.
    A humming noise . . . The sky, an ocean that gives out no light, and a quilt of dark clouds inviting us to unfamiliar and therefore dangerous dreams. Sixty-four minutes have passed and still no turbulence. “Captain Watson and his crew would like to welcome you onboard . . . ” A man across the aisle wedges a pillow under his head and prepares to sleep. “The duration of our flight is eight hours and thirty-five minutes. Expected time of arrival in Athens is 9 o’clock local time . . . ” My fellow traveler hasn’t touched his tray of juice, nuts and snacks. Satiated business class passengers, Menelaos Argyriou was never one of you. His family lived with hunger, but never feared it. They grew attached to their homeland, perhaps because from the very start they missed it, it was never a given, it never gave them a sense of safety and security. They traveled far away with their minds focused on the wound. They never felt closer to their homeland than when they were far away.
    We were born and raised “far away.”
    â€œ
I know, Jonathan. New York, our city, never hurt us. Never frightened us. How lucky we were, Jonathan, to have grown up here and not over there.
”
    â€œOver there” was a dot on the map. Green and dark grey and blue. In the Eastern Mediterranean, at the southernmost tip of the Balkan Peninsula, with seas and thousands of islands, with a dry and rocky soil, with foreign-sounding mountains, lakes and rivers—Olympus, Smolikas, Voras, Tymphi, Vardousia, Volvi, Vegoritida, Kerkini, Strymonas, Arachthos, Alfios.
    The soft blanket is wrapped around the body of my unknown fellow traveler, who is now preparing to sink into a luxurious sleep. What does he have in