Box Of Lies
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“I’ve always wondered how you can stand having to eat your own cooking for every meal.”
She looked at me, smiling. “I have a secret weapon,” she said and took off her shirt.
“What? What is it?” I asked as my mouth opened in shock.
“It’s called exercise and a lot of it,” she explained with a grin. The next moment we were laughing about the silliness of our situation while making love on the deck of her little fishing boat. When she was finished, still half-asleep, we got up together and went back inside so that she could get ready for work.
We kissed goodbye – or rather, I kissed goodbye. She would be too busy at work to kiss until later in the day when there’d be more time to do things properly if such a thing existed any longer. Then we both turned and walked away into the misty morning where nothing much happened for some days after that.
After one night out on the town, she came home with us. We all had a lot to talk about. And after a couple of nights with no sleep and very little food, she told us what really happened in the war zone, which we already guessed from her scars and the way she acted sometimes.
After the first night out together, we never saw her again. It seemed like she just disappeared from our lives altogether. I tried calling her number but there was never an answer, nor would there be ever one again.
In hindsight, perhaps I should have paid attention, maybe even taken steps to try and find her. But somehow her disappearance did not seem important. There was something else happening at the time, some new thing to worry about instead: it was like being on a rollercoaster ride that kept going higher and faster; soon enough you don’t notice anything else but the speed and the height.
For a while, the only person who worried about what happened to her was Dov. He was always the one asking and trying to track down her phone records, but it didn’t matter. She was gone, and he accepted that, as we all did.
Then, suddenly, the world changed completely. It began to feel like a whole new place. I woke up one morning to find that everything around me had become unfamiliar, like a foreign country where everyone spoke another language.
People were saying terrible things about each other, people we thought we knew well. Even Dov and I started to drift apart. We argued constantly, though never about the same thing. We’d sit there with knives ready and wait for the other to say something wrong and then stab him.
We talked about the weather and the economy and why there wasn’t enough money to pay our bills, and all the while there was tension between us that we couldn’t escape. The only thing that saved us was the fact that our marriage remained intact, as solid as ever. I guess if you’re stuck with someone you know you love, you just go along with it as long as you can.
The last straw came after a particularly heated argument one night. As we drove past an intersection, Dov pulled his car over and pointed up ahead at a building. “There’s your house,” he said, “just like you left it.”
He’d been drinking heavily since she’d gone, and now he was starting to get angry. “Don’t start that again! You can take the money back if you want it so badly!”
We argued about that for a while before turning away from the road toward the waterfront district of Kavala. “This is where we used to live!” Dov yelled in my face as we walked through the empty streets, past boarded-up shops and deserted restaurants.
“Yes! This is where you lived! Now get lost!”
Dov turned and walked off without me, leaving me behind alone with a broken heart. I stood there staring up at my former home and wondered what was going to happen now. How could we possibly return? Everything was gone, including us. All we had left was the memory of her, and that, I feared, might turn out to be the final thing that kills us all.
***
In the beginning, there was only fire, and it burned everywhere at once, consuming whatever it touched.
When the gods looked down on their creation, they noticed that many of the creatures that wandered across the earth were consumed by the flames of the burning land, or were caught and roasted alive in the heat of the sky above. They watched as these unfortunate beasts died, and so they created the First Men to save them.
With the help of the First Men, the god’s fashioned shields and swords from the metal that was found under the soil and on the shores of the great lakes; they also carved tools and weapons from bronze, stone, and wood.
With these gifts the First Men were able to defend themselves against the wild animals that roamed freely, killing those that got in their way and stealing what they needed for their own survival. Some of the animals were killed to eat, others were tamed as pets; a few were hunted for sport, and others drove away.
Over the centuries the First Men built cities and towns, roads and bridges, and they made themselves masters of the land around them. Eventually, even the gods became concerned over the destruction caused by the First Men, especially since they continued to use weapons and machines that could kill and maim.
They decided to intervene directly in the affairs of men, but this was impossible because the humans were already too powerful; their power was growing every day, and in time they would destroy themselves anyway.
So the gods took the most important things from them – courage and strength, intelligence and curiosity, the desire to fight and conquer, and a passion for life – and left the rest in order to let them die naturally.
“I’m going to be brave and strong, just like my father,” I tell myself whenever I think about how we’re all destined for death sooner or later. “It’s not worth getting worked up about. Life has a price.”
My parents’ names are Dimitrios and Maria. I don’t remember much about them, though I still have faint memories of their faces and voices. When I think about them, I sometimes imagine my mother as an old woman wearing a white dress with lace sleeves, and my father dressed in his favorite blue robe.
My mother’s hair is dark, my father’s blond; both had the same eyes: bright green, wide open. But my memories are nothing more than impressions, like flashes of light during a thunderstorm. If they really existed, if they did all this stuff with my grandparents, then surely I must have a memory of it somewhere, buried deep inside my mind.
Yet there it sits, hidden away in a dusty corner like a forgotten treasure, waiting patiently for somebody to take notice and claim it as his own. I’m afraid that if I try too hard to recall anything at all, it might be destroyed. Or maybe I’ve never really known them.
The one thing that’s certain is that they were married at a church in Istanbul when I was a baby.
After their wedding, they moved to Athens and began raising children together. My brothers and sisters were born within five years, and each was named after something Greek – Stavros for my brother, who died young; Alexios for my sister, the first to survive; and my younger brother Nikolas, whose name means “victory.” I was supposed to be called Anastasios – “God-willing,” which meant I would bring good fortune to our family.
As it was, my parents gave me that name later on, after my father died. They said he would have liked it better that way.
There wasn’t much space inside my father’s little taverna, and we ate most of our meals sitting on the floor. My mother would put a wooden board down on the dirt and lay out bread, cheese and salted meat for the three of us.
We’d dig out crumbs using our fingers, and my father would pick through the garbage bins in the street nearby until he found an onion. He’d chop the root into small pieces, boil them in water with a handful of raisins and sugar, and give us each a cupful to sip while we talked over the events of our day.
Then he would wash up and prepare dinner for himself; we were allowed a small share of what my mother cooked for him, but we were never allowed to touch her cooking pot. Sometimes she let us lick our plates clean, but we weren’t permitted to eat any more than we needed.
She would say that there was enough food in the world to feed everyone, so there was no need for us to steal from anyone else’s supply.
She used to tell me stories about heroes fighting against monsters and demons, and kings ruling vast empires with great armies at their disposal. I didn’t believe in the stories anymore, but I liked to pretend that I did, and I’d ask her questions about everything, trying to figure out exactly what was real and what was just a myth.
It’s strange now, but back then I was sure that my father knew every last detail, and if only he told me more often I could have learned even more. But he always smiled at my questions and told me they were best left unasked. He was probably right. I’ve never been very clever, and I can’t seem to do anything without being told how to go about doing it.
When I was six years old, my father taught me to throw a stone with accuracy. He showed me how to place it carefully before throwing it so that the rock would land where I wanted it to.
He showed me how to aim at specific points in the distance; he explained that rocks would travel faster when thrown uphill and slower downhill, and he told me what the moon would look like at various times of the night.
Once, I watched him shoot at the stars as they rose above Mount Parnitha at the end of the season, aiming for each individual one as it passed overhead. He hit three of them, I remember. I thought he must have been a master of archery or some other kind of warfare, but he said he’d simply been lucky that particular evening.
“You’re getting better,” he said. “If you work hard at it, someday you may become quite good.” That’s what he’d say whenever I did something well. I tried not to disappoint him.
I was thirteen when I went off by myself to hunt down a bear. The forest was covered in snow, but I didn’t mind because it made the bears easier to spot. For two weeks, I walked in circles around Mount Kouris, following a stream down into a canyon where the trees grew closer together.
I followed the creek upstream as far as I dared, but when the ground became too steep and rocky for me to climb down the bank, I came back to the river and waited. At midday, I heard the roar of a passing train and peered through the trees to see its shadow move along the valley. When I couldn’t find the sound again, I set out for home.
It took me ten days to reach my village, where my father greeted me with hugs and tears, and congratulations. It was unusual for anyone to come back alive from hunting a bear alone, and he seemed especially proud of me.
In fact, my father had never felt any pride for me until then, and I’m sure he’d done things like this many times before. Perhaps that’s why I never realized until that moment what all the fuss was about.
After that, my father began encouraging me even more. He bought me books from the local library, and I practiced reading aloud so he could listen to me. I read the tales of King Midas and the story of how the gods punished his greed.
I read about Achilles and Ajax and Hector. One of the books even contained the whole history of the Trojan War – something which I still haven’t gotten around to telling you, by the way. There were also books with pictures of men and women dressed in fancy clothes, and another book full of words with strange shapes and letters that looked almost like magic spells.
I asked my father if these were stories, and he said yes, of course. “You have to learn how people lived long ago,” he said. “That’s part of growing up.” So I kept on learning, and eventually, I could recognize the shape of every letter in my own name.
I could write it out with my fingers, or with brushes dipped in ink, and I could draw those same letters and shapes into the paper with a pen. After a while, I’d sit for hours in the evenings and try to memorize the names of my favorite characters, but I found it hard; there were just so many.
My father would encourage me. “Keep working on it,” he said. “It’s important. You’ll be glad someday you know your alphabet.” And I believed him.
“The next year, you can start to learn our language,” he said. “But for now we need to practice our numbers.” He brought me a stack of papers and pointed out each number in his native script, and after that he gave me piles of clay tablets.
They all bore a single number, one of the ones I hadn’t seen before. Each tablet had been cut in half lengthwise. He showed me how to roll up a sheet and stick it under my armpit to make it thicker and rounder.
Then, one at a time, he helped me break off little pieces of clay, press them against the wet paste underneath until they stuck, then let go. He did this with each of the other numbers too; I learned how to do it over and over.
One day, my father was busy preparing dinner when he asked me if I knew how to count. I nodded. “Well, now we need to add a few more numbers,” he said, looking around for a bowl. I didn’t understand. What else is there to count?
But then I saw that there were only twelve of us. “We don’t have enough bowls,” my father said. “You have to help me get more.” I was confused, and so he explained. We needed six bowls. “So you must take a clay tablet, and put in three marks in the left-hand column, and one mark in the right-hand column.
Then you roll up that tablet and place it in your belt pouch.” And so he did, and then he told me to repeat the process for two more tablets and bring them to him. He stacked them neatly on the table: one tablet with three marks, then two tablets with three marks, and a mark in the bottom row of the second tablet.
My father looked up from them at last. “Now you do it,” he said. So I took his example and rolled out a tablet, and used my knife to make an x in the leftmost line of the second tablet, and a dash through it, and then I pressed the tablet down and lifted it to find it stuck.
My father smiled proudly, and I thought that he wanted me to smile too, but I didn’t feel much like smiling. So I went home, sat in front of my books, and tried to work out what I had done wrong. I couldn’t remember exactly, but I knew I’d made some mistake.
I had no idea how I should have done it, or how anyone else might have figured it out without ever having seen these numbers before. And so, when I got bored with trying to figure it out myself, I decided to ask the next person to visit my father for help.
I waited, impatiently. The sun was hot on my face, and my eyes were tired from staring at the pages, and when it was evening, I decided to go home. It was already dark outside, and the sky was full of stars.
I climbed down from the rocks and walked along the beach as far as I could before finding my father’s door again. The door was closed, and I knocked softly and listened for him inside. No reply. I turned back the handle and pushed my head into the opening, but there was only darkness beyond.
My father had gone home; perhaps he was asleep. And so I slipped quietly away and headed home myself.
When I arrived, my mother was there, and she told me my father had been called away. “He’s not feeling well,” she said. She looked at me, worriedly; she was still young and beautiful, and she always made me feel guilty about being so clumsy, so slow, and so ugly. “Are you sure you’re ready for lessons?” she asked. “Perhaps we should wait until your father is here.” But I shook my head firmly.
“Don’t worry,” I said. “It was just a misunderstanding.” I felt embarrassed, even though she couldn’t see me, and I knew she would never understand that I didn’t know any better than to try to teach these things myself.
“Then you can sit by the fire,” she said, and I did so while she prepared supper for both of us. After a moment, she began to speak.
“I’ve heard that men are beginning to talk more, and listen less,” she said. I wasn’t really listening. I was thinking, that they must have been speaking all along; they simply hadn’t bothered to tell me yet. But she kept going.
“They say you’re learning fast enough now,” she said, after a little pause. “But maybe we shouldn’t rush things.” Then, with a sigh of exasperation, she added: “I don’t want to be a grandmother before I’m even thirty.”
And then, abruptly, the world exploded in my mind. “Grandmother!” I shouted. “That man has been talking to my grandfather! You told me he had gone away!”
My mother looked alarmed. “Who told you he was coming back?”
“Someone—you told me—”
“You mean someone who was telling lies?” My mother sighed. “What kind of people do you think we live among, now that you’re old enough to be taught? That man hasn’t been back to our town for years.”
And she went on to tell me, patiently, how my grandfather had come here with my father and stayed for a few weeks to work in the fields before they had returned to the city because they wanted to save money for their retirement.
She explained how my father worked hard in the fields every day, and she described the terrible conditions he faced, the terrible things he saw, and how much he missed them both. And when I grew bored with this, she brought out a bowl of stewed fruit for me.
When we were finished eating, she helped me wash the dishes and put them away in her cupboards. Then she led me to my room and told me to take off my clothes and get into bed. For a long time, I lay awake, listening to my father’s footsteps approaching the house.
I wondered whether he would come to my room first, or if his wife would stop him. Perhaps my mother would let him stay the night, or perhaps she would insist that we sleep apart. If he came to my room alone, he would see that I was already undressed; perhaps he wouldn’t notice.
Or perhaps he would. In the morning, I was to follow him to the fields and learn whatever I could from watching him, and then I was to return home and begin my training properly.
For some reason, I was too nervous to eat breakfast, and instead, I followed him from my bedroom to the kitchen, where he stood silently beside his wife as she cooked for him. “Good morning, child,” she said. There was a hint of disapproval in her voice. “Did you sleep well?”
“Yes,” I answered. I had slept badly, and I hoped my father noticed. “Are you ready?” he asked, looking at me expectantly. I nodded nervously. My father took hold of my arm and guided me toward the door. He had never touched me like this before, not even once.
My father paused for a moment and turned around to look at me, before pushing open the front door. His hand remained tightly wrapped around my wrist until he stepped out into the sunlight. The morning air was cold. We walked slowly down the path and across the field.
My father’s feet splashed through puddles left by last night’s rain. The grass grew higher than my knees, and everywhere was damp earth, soft underfoot, smelling faintly of manure and wet earth and wet wool. It had rained again the night before; it was always raining somewhere now.
We walked all the way to the stream which separated our village from those who lived beyond. A small group of children played in a mud puddle by the banks, kicking at each other with sticks, and throwing stones into the water. They stopped as soon as they saw us.
“Hello,” one of them called cheerfully. “Where is your daughter?”
“She will come later,” my father said absently. “Now we’ll go to the next field.”
He led me along the muddy bank of the stream, and we waded into the shallows until we reached an ancient stone bridge overgrown with weeds. I could hear the faint sound of voices drifting up from below and after a minute or two of waiting there was nothing but silence again.
The ground beneath my bare feet was slippery where it had been recently disturbed by a footfall, and when I bent over to tie my shoes I lost my grip on them and almost fell into the stream. My father caught hold of me with a quick tug. I struggled briefly against his sudden grasp, feeling foolish; but when he lifted me to my feet I didn’t resist.
“What are you doing?” I demanded, indignantly, as he led me back to the bridge again and began walking across it.
“Your shoes are ruined. Look what happened just now,” he said, pointing at my sodden stockings. “We’ll have to walk faster, now that we can’t use your feet for brakes anymore.” And indeed, I did feel as if I could run forever, as long as my father was beside me.
There were no paths along the edge of the river, but we found a narrow strip of level earth where the grass had grown thin; and then we followed the bank on either side as far as we could, while my father explained how to pick berries and dig clams, and gather wood for fuel, and dig wells and hunt for deer; and then, after several hours’ work, we rested on the opposite shore, and sat in silent companionable companionship while I ate the food my mother had packed for us.
After a time my father got up and returned to our camp. As soon as he was gone, I stripped off my soggy shoes and stockings and waded into the stream. I stayed there only as long as I needed to cool myself before getting back onto the bank.
When I stood up, I felt suddenly dizzy. The sun was high in the sky, and I had never before noticed its full heat before since it had always been hidden behind clouds before.
I watched him approach, moving steadily along the bank with a small fishing rod and a large leather sack of fishhooks slung over his shoulder. His clothes were stained white with clay, and he looked older than the rest of the people who lived here.
For a moment I wondered if he was an old man. Then he reached into the river to splash the water from his hair, and I realized he was no more than twenty years old. I stared at him blankly, wondering what I should do, and then remembered that I had never before seen a boy like this. I thought quickly about how I ought to greet him.
“Good afternoon!” I called out politely, although I could already tell that he was deaf. In fact, everyone was deaf. It seemed impossible that there ever had been someone else like me.
The boy turned around slowly and came forward, holding out his hand to shake mine. I accepted it awkwardly, and we looked at each other wordlessly for several seconds, until he gave a slight shrug and turned away again. He held up the bag of fishhooks and made an impatient gesture.
“They’re fresh! Fresh today!” he exclaimed eagerly when he finally caught sight of me. “You won’t get anything fresher than these.”
I took a careful look at the fishhooks. They were all sharp points with blunt tips; the pointy end was covered with tiny hairs so they wouldn’t catch in the fish’s skin. I tried one carefully, and it slipped right through the scales.
If this was the sort of thing you used to catch fish, there were plenty of fish to eat. But the boy was still talking. “If you don’t need them yourself, sell them to some of the men—they’ll be glad to buy. Or trade for things you want,” he suggested generously.
“Thank you,” I said automatically, though I had no idea what he would want with anything else from me. We walked together back along the bank to our camp, where my father was preparing lunch over the fire.
“Here’s somebody we met along the way,” my father told him casually. “A stranger from another country. A young man who speaks our language perfectly. What are you going to do with him?”
It was not a question I would have asked anyone else, except perhaps my mother. But my father was asking me. That was why I knew that whatever we decided, we both had to agree.
My father took a piece of fish out of the pan and handed it to me. He had already prepared another two meals and set them aside without waiting for an answer. I took one and began chewing.
“Why do you live here?” I asked him finally. “And how is it possible that none of you speak my language? How long have you lived here, Father?”
He shook his head slightly. “This has been my home since my grandfather brought me here, almost forty years ago.” He smiled briefly, and I saw that his teeth were crooked and discolored yellow-brown, like mine. Then he looked away as if he had said enough. He put down his knife and fork and turned his attention back to the fire.
That was as much as he could or would say about himself. So I asked the boy instead: “How long have you lived here?”
His face became serious again. “For a hundred years, just like him,” he nodded toward my father.
“Are you really a hundred years old?” I asked, surprised.
“No, not quite, but a little more than fifty,” he replied easily. “We are the oldest generation, you see since no new ones are born.”
In truth, I had heard stories like that from other children, though never before with such unbelievability as at that moment. Children always talked freely to me about strange things, because they believed that I was an adult, even if only pretending to be one.
“But what about children?” I asked, trying to understand. “Where do they come from then? Where do they go when they grow up?” The boy laughed softly and touched the scar on his face tenderly for a moment, before replying.
“Sometimes one of the younger men will take a wife and have babies. And sometimes a woman will fall in love with a man, and he will make her pregnant.”
That was news to me. I had always imagined a man taking a girl for marriage, or a man being forced to marry a certain woman by a powerful man—”the man of the house,” in our terms.
I remembered the way my mother had cried after my father had gone away, and the way he had stared out into the darkness and muttered that his father had forced him.
“Then why did your father choose you to leave?” I asked quietly.
“Because he loves me,” the boy answered simply. “He wanted us to share everything.” His voice was very sad.
“What does that mean?” I asked curiously. “Everything?”
“Yes, absolutely everything,” the boy answered patiently. “Even the most important things. For instance, when he went away, he took my mother’s wedding ring with him.”
My stomach tightened involuntarily at the thought of someone stealing something precious from my family. I didn’t know whether it was better or worse to have a brother steal from you.
“Does it matter? My father says that when one of them dies, the other inherits their property. It belongs to us both now.”
The boy spoke slowly as if he found it hard to explain. “They are brothers,” he explained. “Brothers and sisters are like that.”
“So what happens when a man marries?” I asked, confused. “Does that mean he gets all the money too?”
“You must marry, or you will never get anywhere,” the boy told me seriously. “Marriage means everything in this world.”
I felt myself becoming anxious. I glanced around and saw that my father was watching us silently from the shelter, and the other men were staring intently. The boy watched me closely for a moment before answering.
“Of course, it depends on which marriage you choose,” he admitted quietly. “If a man wants to marry a woman he is attracted to, she is free to refuse him.” He shrugged lightly and turned away. “As you can imagine, there are many women willing to accept a husband in exchange for wealth and protection.”
I looked up quickly. “Is that what happened with you? Did some man take you from your father for a wife?”
The boy shook his head impatiently. “No. There are many reasons people don’t get married. But we don’t have anything else to do so we stay with our families until we die.”
“What about love?” I persisted. “Does anyone ever want to marry for love?”
Again the boy laughed softly, and I realized that the question had hurt him badly. “There isn’t any choice in life for love. You might as well ask if a tree falls down if it likes to fall down.” He paused a moment before continuing, choosing his words carefully.
“Some people choose love, you know. They think they can find love in another person—that it won’t hurt when it dies. But they forget that love is like food, a thing that must be shared between people; it is nourishment, and when you share it with others, it is sweeter for the taste.”
I thought about the way Mother had cried. She loved me, and she loved Father too, I knew, but she didn’t love him enough to give me up. She would have chosen me over my father if she could. I wondered then how I was so different from all these other children who had no mothers and fathers, and no love in their lives.
I turned away abruptly and looked out across the sea of stars to the distant mountains.
The End