Cambridge (26 page)

This rain had caused a family of cockroaches to germinate in the depths of my toilet. They usually scampered around near the outlet at the bottom, but they sometimes walked up to the rim below the seat, where they lurked, waving their black antennae and, as in London, making me completely constipated. I could pee, because I could arch my back and shoot my pee into the bowl. Sitting was the problem. If I sat, I felt their crackly many legs skittering about on my behind. I felt that even though it
wasn’t happening and had never happened. It might happen, and the idea of it was ghastly.

We were planning a real, four-day trip. I was going to miss Thursday and Friday at school. George was coming with us; he and my father were taking two days off from their so-called work. We had two nights reserved at La Belle Hélène, the archaeologists’ hotel in Mycenae. Then we were going on to Nauplion to see the remnants of Venetian rule. I couldn’t wait. I was finally going to meet my second family, the House of Atreus.

“I don’t think it will be too cold,” George said at dinner the Tuesday before we left.

Kula had made one of her trademark terrible dinners. She had three or four of them. This was the tough lamb stewed with tomatoes and accompanied by a bowl of boiled potatoes, which she dotted with limp parsley, drowned in second-rate olive oil (“Why? Why?” my mother said. “In the land where olive oil was born!”), and placed with averted eyes before my father: an offering to the godhead. Kula was in awe of my father. When he got home in the afternoons from doing nothing at Doxiadis, she scuttled up behind him as he sat on the sofa, bringing a dish of glistening black olives or three peeled figs on a plate. Every morning the lotus-orange awaited him at the breakfast table, some days adorned with a jasmine blossom. “She’s in love with you,” my mother said. “No, no,” said my father. “To her, I am Zeus.” “That’s just what I mean,” my mother said. “It’s not the same,” said my father. “Anyhow, I enjoy being Zeus.” “Who wouldn’t?” said my mother.

“At least during the day,” George went on. “The nights could be quite chilly. And it might be cold in the day if it’s windy. And since it’s high up, it might be—”

“In short,” my mother cut in, “prepare for everything.”

“That would be wise,” said George. “It’s often very windy, even in the summer. Have you got scarves, for instance?”

“I have a lot of scarves,” my mother said, “and I will bring them all.”

My father shook his head. He didn’t like scarves. He didn’t like hats or gloves either. He liked to stride out the front door with his overcoat unbuttoned and flapping around him. In Cambridge this often was not possible. But we were here, in Greece, where he could do as he wanted.

“I’ll bring that black one for you, just in case,” my mother told him.

“I don’t need it,” he said.

“Do we have to Look Nice?” I asked. Looking Nice meant uncomfortable clothes for visiting people we didn’t really know or going to fussy restaurants where there was nothing I wanted to eat.

“Maybe once, in Nauplion,” my mother said. “Bring the new middy blouse with the red embroidery on the collar.”

Kula was back with a plate of melon slices.

My mother put a hand on George’s starched bright-white cuff. “George, can you explain to Kula that we want to use the good olive oil? I can’t seem to get that across.”

George lifted his head toward the ceiling and moved his chin in Kula’s direction. She skated over to his side on her noiseless felt slippers and stood at attention. Sharp, curt instructions from George; whispery protests from Kula.

“She says it’s very expensive,” he told my mother.

“I am paying for it. And it’s what I want.” My mother lit a cigarette for emphasis.

George explained that. Kula bowed her head. As she scooted back to the kitchen, she glanced at my mother, the smoke-goddess
of extravagance, and looked away quickly, before my mother saw.

My mother saw. It was impossible not to see how much Kula hated us. We didn’t know how to have a servant. Kula knew how to be a servant and that was all she knew. But she couldn’t do it alone, and none of us could play our parts.

My father came the closest. That was probably why she worshipped him. He was naturally imperious, so the expressions on his face and his way of flicking his hand at something he wanted or something he wanted taken away were familiar and correct in Kula’s eyes. It didn’t matter that he couldn’t speak Greek. Maybe it was better: no words to dilute his desires. They had come to an arrangement. Kula deposited sculpted fruit in front of him, and he ignored her existence unless he wanted her to remove a dirty plate, and that suited them both.

My mother was the problem.

If she had George around to back her up, my mother could make an occasional show of command, over the olive oil, for instance. But she couldn’t maintain any authority. Her usual methods were seduction and charm. She wooed people and made them eager to please her by giving them the feeling that she appreciated them. Maybe she even did appreciate them. (It was hard for me to tell.) None of this was any use with Kula. Kula was not going to be enfolded into the family à la Frederika, coddled into behaving in a helpful way. Kula’s position was below, and she was sticking to it.

My mother’s feints at camaraderie in botched Greek got Kula upset. She would hide in the back kitchen. This was her inviolate space, off-limits to us, where she slept on a camp bed beside the crusty two-burner stove. Once, my mother had tried to go in there. Kula darted up in an unusual display of personality and
flapped her arms as if shooing out vermin: Forbidden, forbidden, she’d said.

Two kitchens and she can’t make a decent dinner, was my mother’s complaint. But her real complaint was, I don’t understand her and therefore I can’t get her to do what I want.

George, naturally, was the source of Kula, who was the niece or the sister or the cousin of a woman who worked for his mother on the island of Aegina. During our first months, my mother had many consultations with George about Kula and what to do with her.

My mother was horrified by the back kitchen. “There’s no window, there’s no shower, her bed is jammed next to the stove. It’s terrible.”

“That kitchen is as big as the main floor of her house on Aegina where she lived with two other people,” George said. “This is the Grande Bretagne, for her. She can wash at the sink. She’s here in Athens with a secure job. You do not need to worry about it.”

“But she could have her own bedroom,” my mother said. “We have several extra.”

George shook his head. “You are being sentimental.”

This caused a rift between them.

“He’s a heartless bastard,” my mother reported to my father. “Like all communists.”

“You’re generalizing,” said my father.

“From experience,” my mother said.

“Why are communists heartless?” I asked.

“They look at the big picture,” my father told me.

“Their theories are more important than reality,” my mother said.

She forgave George within the week, because she was fond of
him and because she needed him. We all did. Each time George showed up, with his thin black tie, his cuff links fashioned from antique drachmas shining in his perfectly ironed sleeves, and replete with his knowledge of where to find the most honey-saturated baklava, the darkest mavrodaphne, the least-bumpy road to Eleusis, the person to bribe in order to see the largest, loveliest Pantocrator mosaic in Athens (in a church under restoration that had been closed to the public for years), we all relaxed. George would help. George would explain it, or organize it, or get rid of it. My father, initially resistant, had turned into his biggest fan, even to the point of defending the communist outlook.

“You have to see it in context,” my father said. He was talking to me, but my mother made a face. “Nazis or communists. That was his choice. You can’t be surprised he picked the communists.”

“That was
then
,” my mother said. “Anyhow, you—” she added. She didn’t finish her sentence. It was a reference to the communist diamond-dealing grandfather, who’d sent my father to communist Hebrew after-school every day. My mother had been raised a socialist.

“I don’t understand why George said you were sentimental,” I said. In fact, I understood almost nothing about my mother’s quarrel with George, or about the communist-versus-socialist arguments that now and then took place between my parents.

“Concern for the individual is a bourgeois value,” my mother said. “One person’s situation isn’t important.
They
say.”

“I thought communism was about equality, that everybody is as important as everybody else,” I said.

“Right,” said my mother.

“Are we bourgeois?” I asked.

My father looked around at the chandeliers and the gilded
mirrors and the matching beige silk sofas across the room from the dining table. “I’d say so,” he said. “We’re certainly doing a good imitation of it.”

“The bourgeoisie should be so lucky,” my mother said. “We’re living like tsars.” She put her head in her hands and pulled her hair. “Oh, god, this country. I really can’t take it.”

“Annette,” said my father in the tone he used when I was being especially balky.

My mother hated it here too, I saw. This surprising realization cheered me up.

But that, as my mother would say, was then. Now, several months later, two days before our journey to Mycenae, my mother was cheerily asking George what to pack and doing a good imitation of looking forward to the trip.

No imitations for me. I was buzzing with anticipation. I was sure that, like the Parthenon, Mycenae would still be what it had been—not a bunch of broken pieces like Knossos or a map of something it once was, like the Sacred Way at Eleusis. Up there on the citadel where Clytemnestra had unfurled the crimson carpet and Cassandra had said farewell to the sun, I was going to feel the pulse of the old, cursed bloodline. I knew it. All that family murder: I wanted to see its locus.

Wednesday night I was packing the little green suitcase my mother had got me before we left Cambridge for Greece when I felt a ripping sort of belly pain. I was used to bad belly feelings from constipation, and I kept on packing. Then there was another rip, somewhat worse. Also, everything in the excretory area felt peculiar, full and soggy. I went to the bathroom and looked into the toilet to check on the cockroach population: none. I sat down.

When I relaxed my knees, my underpants stretched out between them, and there I saw a little heap of dirt. It was dark
and fragmented, chips of what I hoped was not poop. When I touched it, it crackled liked dried mud. I peed; the toilet paper (useless, glazed Greek toilet paper) came away with a red glob of jelly on it. Blood.

I was going to die without seeing Cambridge again.

I went back to packing. But I couldn’t resist going to sit on the toilet every few minutes to check for blood. First I had to check for cockroaches. Each time I checked, there were no roaches but there was blood. It wasn’t like nice, regular blood from a cut. It came in nasty jiggling blobs, as if it were carrying my insides along with it. That explained why I felt I was ripping. I was. Whatever was causing the blood was ripping me apart.

I didn’t want to sit on the bed in case I bled on the blanket. I didn’t want to sit on the toilet because I felt I’d used up my cockroach-free minutes. For quite a while after I finished packing I stood at the window watching the tangled Athenian streets revving up for their nightly explosion of activity. As I stood there I felt the blood oozing out of me, adding to the mess in my underwear.

Eventually I went looking for my mother.

She was rummaging in her bedroom closet. The big khaki suitcase with the leather edging was open on the bed.

“What?” she said, with her head still in the closet.

“I have blood,” I said. I’d come up with this phrase while standing at my window. I was pleased with it, because it was true, it wasn’t hysterical, and it seemed to strike the right tone. As soon as I’d said it, though, I started wailing. “There’s blood down there that just keeps coming and coming and it hurts.”

My mother emerged from the closet and sat down next to the suitcase. She patted the empty part of the bed beside her. “Come here,” she said. She patted again.

“But the blood!”

“Don’t be afraid of the blood,” she said. “The blood is fine.”

“I’m going to bleed on the bed! I don’t want to bleed on the bed!” I was getting wound up.

She reached into the suitcase and took out the black scarf my father wasn’t going to wear and put it on the bed. “Sit on that, if you’re so worried about it.”

I sat down.

“This is a big day,” my mother said. “This is your first period, and it’s an important moment.”

I stared at her. “It is?”

“Yes. Now you’re a woman.”

I kept staring at her. “What does that mean?”

“Let’s see.” My mother was gathering some sort of speech, I could tell. “It means that you have become physically mature. Physically, you’re a grownup.”

“I am not a grownup,” I said.

“No,” she said. “But now you can have a baby.”

“I don’t want to have a baby,” I said.

“That’s good,” said my mother.

“So what’s the point? I don’t want all this blood.”

“It’s normal. It’s completely normal and fine and it’s not going to hurt you. It means you’re healthy and you’re growing the way you’re supposed to. It’s good.”

“What’s good about it,” I said. It wasn’t a question. “And it hurts.”

“It can be a bit painful in the beginning,” my mother said. “That doesn’t last, usually. It gets better as your body gets used to it.”

“You mean I’m just going to be having blood forever, just leaking out blood all the time! Why didn’t you tell me about this?”

“I did,” my mother said. “But you weren’t listening.”

“When?” I had no memory of her telling me anything.

“Back in Cambridge,” she said. “When the—ah—chest development started.”

“Oh.” If she had told me, then she was right; I hadn’t listened. “But—but now always blood? All the time?”

“No. Just once a month for a few days.”