‘…but one day she will be beautiful,’ Dan would say, across the island in her own exotic house, watching the same toddler explore the texture of some ancient brocade, apparently in completion of the same thought.
‘All I want her to be is happy,’ Vien would sigh to both women.
Elena would smile at that, and spill a reassuring fairytale of how it would be for Amais when she grew up and reached out to claim her place in the world. But Dan was both more pragmatic and more frightening in her response.
‘Beware of too much happiness,’ she had murmured, and had turned away for a moment as if the laughter of her daughter’s child had been a knife in her heart.
Vien was eight and a half months pregnant with her second child, heavy and graceless and swollen with a baby that could have been born at any minute, when Nikos’s boat went out one spring morning. The crew waved goodbye to such family as had gathered to see them off, as they had done hundreds of times before, and left together with a flotilla of other boats exactly the same as theirs, sailing off into the sweet newborn sunshine of a spring dawn glinting on the sapphire seas.
Seven-year-old Amais, who had woken early that morning from uneasy dreams, had been fretful and weepy, and Elena, in order to give heavily pregnant Vien some respite, had taken the child out to see her father off on his day’s fishing.
‘I will catch a mermaid for you, korimou, little darling!’ Nikos called to his daughter as the sea widened between them. ‘Now go home and be good for your mother!’
Amais had clung to that unlikely promise all day. When Elena readied herself to go to the wharf to meet the fishing boats at the end of the day, Amais insisted on going with her, wanting to be right there when her father brought the gift of that mermaid ashore for her.
One by one, the boats came back that night. All of them, except one.
Elena and Amais waited there as the other boats came in, exchanging smiles and the occasional word of congratulation or commiseration with the crews and their families as they straggled in and showed off their catch. But the sun rode lower and lower in the sky, and still Nikos’s boat had not come. Elena grew quieter and quieter, standing there carved like a statue, her eyes fixed on the horizon, her lips moving ever so slightly in what might have been prayer. She already wore the black kerchief of the widow, and was no stranger to sea death. Neither were the others, the family members of the rest of the men on the lost boat, who also waited there on the wharf. They all wore the same expression, which was essentially no expression at all – their faces were stony, as though they were already bracing themselves for the grief that was to come. Amais was too young to completely understand, but her grandmother’s hand on hers had turned into a cold and clutching claw made from marble, and the child’s own heart was beating very fast as the beautiful spring day drew to a close.
The sunset was beautiful, perhaps the most beautiful that Amais could ever remember having seen. The sky was streaked with unlikely colours – something that resembled the rich red of the wine they made from the grapes grown on the hillside above the harbour, a deep violet-amethyst shade where the sky began to darken into twilight as the sun went down, and traces of dark gold…the exact shade that Amais had imagined of a mermaid’s hair. Someone, without speaking, without asking, lit a lantern and hung it on an iron hook set into the wharf – a makeshift lighthouse, calling them home, the lost ones, the ones that most of the people on that wharf already knew would not return.
It was full dark when the first of the statues, another blackkerchiefed woman, finally moved, let her hands drop helplessly to her sides, let out her breath in a deep sigh that ended in a quiet sob, bowed her head, and walked slowly away from the sea, back to the hushed village. It was as though she broke the stasis. One by one they did the same thing, like a ritual, bowed their heads to the sea, walked away.
Elena was the last to go. Amais had been standing there with her on the wharf for hours, had grown stiff and uncomfortable, but not for anything would she have moved, would she have let go of the hand that clung to her own as though she were the last anchor in a storm-tossed world. But Elena was almost unaware of her. When she too opened her lips a crack and allowed a breath to escape – a sigh that sounded like she was letting her soul out of her body and sending it over the waves to search for her son’s spirit – her hand relaxed for a moment, and it was only then that she looked down and blinked, seeming to have just realised that she was still holding her granddaughter’s hand in her own.
‘Let’s go home, Nana,’ Amais whispered, profoundly sad, not yet fully aware of all that this night would mean to her.
‘Home,’ Elena repeated through cracked lips, as though the word held no meaning.
‘Mama has been alone all afternoon,’ Amais said, her voice taking on a tone of urgency, ‘and the baby…the baby is coming…’
‘The baby,’ Elena repeated again. It seemed as though repeating someone else’s last words was all that she was capable of right then, as if her own mind had ground to a halt, unable to move past this moment, this loss. And then she shook her head once, sharply, as though to clear it from the cobwebs of sleep. ‘The baby,’ she said once more. ‘Yes, you are right. There is the baby.’
They walked back to their house in silence, still holding hands.
There was a light in the window as they approached, a lamp lit by Vien the good wife and left to light the way home for her family. She herself was waiting inside, very pale, her hands folded protectively over her swollen belly.
She knew, long before she saw only Elena and Amais enter the house. She could hear the absence of Nikos’s footsteps, the void which his voice and his laughter would have filled. Her world was emptier for his soul. Her face was stark, her eyes very bright, and when the door closed behind Elena, who had finally let go of Amais’s hand, Vien let out a small whimper and folded over herself as though she had been stabbed in the heart.
The whimper became a moan, something that took all her breath, and it wasn’t until that first spasm had passed that Vien could whisper two words:
‘The baby…’
There was no time, after that, for going to get the midwife, for going to get any help at all. Vien’s second child, another daughter, was born just before midnight on the same day that her father had died. Elena, who delivered her, held the tiny newborn infant in her arms and stared at the child’s face. It would have been hard to find any resemblance to her son in that bright-red puckered face with its eyes tightly shut and its bud of a mouth opening and shutting like a baby bird’s when demanding sustenance – but Elena was seeing things that only a mother who had just lost a child and been given another in his place could see.
‘Her name is Nika,’ she said softly, and there was no arguing with that. It was the prerogative of the grieving mother, of the grandmother – this child, at least, her daughter-in-law’s culture would not swallow. This was her son’s child, named for him, born to be his substitute. There had been something implacable in her voice.
But baya-Dan was not one to relinquish something she considered hers, not without a fight. This child, as Amais before her, was summoned to the house where the tiny enclave of shadowed Imperial Syai was being preserved in the Elaas sunshine. The second grandmother had looked the babe over, and smiled a small secret smile.
‘This one,’ she prophesied, tracing the contours of the child’s face with one bony finger, ‘is going to look like you, my daughter. Look at those eyes, look at the shape of her face. Her name is Aylun, little cricket.’
‘Her name is Nika,’ Vien said. ‘Elena already named her for her father.’
‘Her name is Aylun,’ Dan repeated firmly. ‘You will see. You will bring this one, too,