“Your grandfather is tempted by the devil,” hissed the young nun breathlessly, looking Evdokia straight in the eye. Flustered, the latter lowered her gaze.
“. . . believe in the true faith,” Petrania concluded.
The nuns waited to see how this unequal theological debate would end. Mother Superior continued filling the jars. In the intervening pause, I finished off my volley. “Grandpa isn’t bad. He doesn’t beat me.”
“Look, my child,” Mother Superior began in her deep voice, “a person wants to be good, but he is not bound to good alone. He can choose both to sin and to suffer. Choice is what separates us from the animals and brings us closer to God.”
The table under the vines fell silent. I got the feeling that I was getting into something I didn’t understand. I felt the truth somewhere within myself, but I couldn’t express it. I started itching all over. I felt confined and I wanted to jump or run, so I told Mother Superior I was going down for a swim. Efrosinia nodded.
As soon as I poked my nose out of the monastery, the wind struck me. I closed my eyes and gave myself over to it. I blew through the branches of the almond trees, floated above the water, I was the soft grass on the hills, and at that moment, I knew.
I took off, running down the steep path to the sea. I dived in, dress and all, so as to wash the red juice out of it, then flopped down naked on the hot sand. Good thing it was a dark blue print with little violet roses, so the red didn’t show much. I wore it when I went to the monastery, because once the young nun had said that it wasn’t proper to tramp around the cloister in my underpants, as was my wont. I went back into the water. I really loved diving at the cape. Marble columns from some old temple gleamed on the sea floor, and there were huge, completely preserved jars in which all sorts of creatures hid. When I pounded on one of the jars, a silver wine of thousands of tiny fish frothed from the inside. I had just taken a breath to dive back down to the jars when from up above I heard my grandfather’s piercing whistle. Only he could whistle like that; I envied him terribly for this. I was also a good whistler myself, so much so that when I got lost, which happened all too often, my grandpa could find me by my whistle. I swam toward the shore and, wet as I was, pulled on my dress, ironed out by the sun and the salt, and climbed up the steep path to the monastery.
Up above, Grandpa was lining up gifts on top of his old quilted jacket in the wooden cart—a bottle of amber plum brandy, a jar of hot chilies with tomato sauce, a basket of yellow pears, and ears of corn. Evdokia came running over carrying a loaf of bread with a little cross baked on top, waved goodbye to us, and we started bumping along the narrow dusty road through the almond forests—which made eating the corn really difficult.
At home, Nikula took one look at the gifts and knew we’d been to see the witches again, as she called the nuns. She tossed aluminum plates filled with leftovers on the table and sat silently somewhere on her beloved porch. Grandpa winked at me, and I went to pick some of the hottest chilies for him and some of their babies for me. When I got back with the peppers, he had already cracked open a big head of garlic.
Rufi and I liked roaming the beaches most of all. We would lounge on the dunes, spy on the nudists, and swim in the sea despite the bans. Once the season started, we would use a flour sieve to sift the sand around the changing rooms, since money and all sorts of valuables would fall out of the pockets of those changing. The other way of gathering funds was collecting empty bottles. We would return them to the store and they’d give us some money. We would split up the day’s haul. Rufi, who was older and in first grade, knew a thing or two about money. Gathering all the coins in his palm, he’d say, “Take your pick.” I, of course, would take the little gold coins while he, to my amazement, picked the silver ones. Afterward when we went to the store, he would buy himself a whole box of chocolate bars and maybe even a soda to boot, while all I’d get were a few candies. This was surely because the clerk was some aunt of his and that’s why she gave him more stuff. Once, we dug up a man’s watch and decided that Rufi should wear it, since he was in first grade, knew what time it was, and was a man. We didn’t tell anyone about our treasures; we squirreled them away in our secret hiding place in the fort we had built in the crown of a huge tree in the forest that began in front of our houses.
Once, at dusk, we found two silver fifty-cent pieces in the sand by the changing rooms and we split them up, each taking one. It was too late to go to the hideaway. At home, as I was getting undressed for my bath, the coin fell out of the Indian leather pouch around my neck. Grandma grabbed it and asked me where I’d gotten it from.
“I found it.”
“You’re lying! You stole it. Who’d you take it from?” Nikula insisted.
“I didn’t take it from anybody! I found it.”
“Where?”
“On the street in front of Rufi’s house.” We had agreed not to tell anyone about the trick with the sieve.
“You didn’t say anything? You didn’t ask whose it was?”
“There was nobody around!”
“Oh, so you waited for the guy to leave.”
“What guy?”
“What were you going to do with it?”
“I don’t know. Buy candy or soda.”
“Good God, I’m raising a little thief.” Nikula hurled herself onto the couch, like she had fainted. She was staring at the ceiling, where the instructions for what to do with terrible children were written. “Now I’ll teach you a lesson!” She disappeared into the room where the sewing machine was. Soon she returned, held a needle in front of my face and asked, “Which do you prefer to be jabbed with: a hot needle or a cold one?”
Picturing the white-hot iron, I pulled away and started squealing: “Cooooold!”
“Fine,” Nikula said. Sitting on a chair, she pressed me between her knees, stuck my left hand under her armpit so I couldn’t defend myself and began quickly jabbing my right one, shouting: “This’ll teach you not to take other people’s money and things that don’t belong to you, you miserable little thief!”
“I wooooon’t,” I screamed from the pain, trying to break away and hoping somebody would appear. But the house was empty. My grandmother wasn’t fooling; she laid into me with the needle like nobody’s business, egging herself on in the name of honesty all the while: “My children don’t steal! Where did this filthy little Sofian fiend pop out of?”
When I was sufficiently perforated, she let me go and told me, as calm as could be, “Stop crying. I’ll disinfect it with iodine.”
At the thought of the burning iodine, I bolted out of the house and slipped into the woods across the way. I ran until I reached the tree with the fort. My hand was bleeding and stinging. It was starting to get cold. Good thing we had brought an old blanket to the fort. I spread out some newspapers and curled up under the blanket. I heard Nikula calling me until late into the night, but I didn’t dare go home.
My grandmother had a very fluid concept of honesty. In late autumn, she would organize the kids on hand and we would glean. Whatever the pickers had overlooked in the orchards and vineyards was ours. Our bags filled up with all sorts of earthly goods, some of which did not seem “overlooked” at all—unless, of course, the pickers had decided to pass over whole fields. There was some sort of joyful thrill in our quick and quiet roving through the fields by the sea at dusk. The best was when grapes were the target of our picking. If they were fit to eat, we would set some aside and dump the rest in a large wooden trough. My grandma would wash my feet with soap and then let me stomp the grapes until every last one was squashed. This made a thick, sweet nectar, which we strained and drank to our heart’s content, then poured the rest into large glass bottles for wine.
At