November 1961

We went to the neighbor boy’s funeral yesterday. His name was Isander. I never knew that. We never did play together as children. I didn’t think to ask, but yesterday, I did.

It was an odd thing, we were sitting in the back row of a Trojan temple and pater had the funeral invitation in his hand. “How come I never played with Isander?” I asked him. He turned to look at me, and at first I thought he was going to ask me to be quiet.

Pater is always concerned with things like that. Be considerate of other people. Be respectful. Even when they cut off our electricity and wouldn’t refund us the money, he said not to do anything. Father was very angry that day.

I was in the bath, and there were soap suds in my eyes. I hate it when that happens.
“What’s happened to you?” father asked.
When I looked at the door I could see his feet moving in the gap underneath. Tap-slam-tap-slam, the sound of his boots.
And pater’s feet folded together, under the bed frame. He was sitting on the mattress while father paced around the room.
“Aren’t you angry at all?” father demanded. He had that note in his voice - when he is furious but fighting to conceal it. Pater says I sound the same way when I’m angry. Can anger be inherited?
“Of course I’m angry,” pater said.
More pacing.
“But Achilles. I’m tired, too. And I don’t want to lose our home. Surely you understand that.”
“What’s the matter? Are you sick?” Father would not let it go.
“... No.”

The soap in my eyes was stinging too much to stand. I dunked my head under the water, watching the soap scum staining the edge of the tub.
A few minutes later, father knocked on the door.
“Neleus. Are you done?”

The water had gone cold by then. I felt bad that I hadn’t saved any hot water for him. It takes forever to heat it up on charcoal. But he didn't say anything. He only smiled at me and went to work emptying the dirty bathwater. Father never complains about anything.

When I went into the room, pater was still sitting on the bed. Their room has a wood burner, like really old houses do. When I was little I liked huddling under the covers with them. One on either side of me, like a barricade against the dark.
“Did you have a good bath, love?” pater asked. His eyes were crinkled at the edges, the way they always are when he smiles. Father calls them crows’ feet and kisses them when he’s in a good mood. When I was little I asked for someone who would kiss my crows’ feet too.
“You don’t have any,” father had said, and kissed me anyway.

“I’ll heat up the water for you later,” I said, and jumped onto the mattress, damp towel and all. He would scold me for doing that. He didn’t scold me that day.
“I’m sorry we had to go to the funeral,” pater said. He put his arm around me. “Especially today.”
The thing was, it was my birthday. But we went to Isander’s funeral because they had invited us. As pater said, it was only proper. I didn’t mind so much. Especially since I never did get to play with Isander. It was like some goodbye to a boy I might once have known.
“How did he die?” I asked.
Pater looked startled. “He drowned in the canal. Down by the factories.”
We didn’t speak any more on the matter.

At night time we had a good dinner. It was quiet at the dinner table, but it always is. Every year I have the same cake for my birthday, and this year was no different.
“Eleven candles,” pater laughed, as he stuck them into the cake.

“Lucky boy, Neleus. We’ll be feasting on it for days, won’t we?” father asked, patting my head.

He and pater had not spoken to each other throughout dinner. But just then, they shared a look.
“Yes, lucky boy, Neleus.” Pater always gets this strange look on my birthday. Maybe he's sad about me getting older. Father leaned over and kissed him on his crows’ feet, and suddenly he was happy again.

Yes, I thought. I do want someone who would kiss me on my crows’ feet one day. And then I will be happy no matter what.

November 1961

There is a song on the radio with three guitar notes. I’m not sure how to describe it but it goes twang (pause) twang (pause) twang!! And suddenly you feel as though the guitar is right there in your hands and you’re Orpheus and the Underworlders on tour around the country.

We went crazy about it in school, we did. When the Underworlders’ new record came out I ran home. I ran past the barbershop and the Messenian grocer and old Mr. Tydides’s barking dogs.

“It’s out!” I yelled, the front door swinging on its hinges and slamming on the wall.

“Neleus!” pater exclaimed, appalled.

“Please can we go to the store. Please!”

I begged him. I had begged him for weeks. I would die if I didn’t have that record. Everybody at school would be humming the new songs and all I would know was the one on the radio that went twang, twang, twang (with pauses in between).

We have an old portable radio that pater keeps on the mantel. Sometimes he takes it out on the porch and plays it in the evening. You can listen to the news, too. It works very well, even if it gets a little fuzzy once in a while.

But I have a record player in my room (last year’s birthday gift). The only records I have for it are dusty ones that came out before I was born. All that big band music no one but the adults listen to anymore.

My friend Aphareus said I could come round and listen to the record when he got it, but the fact was, I wanted one myself. It cost 2 dollars a piece.

Pater shook his head at me. “You shouldn’t have spent all your allowance, then.”

“You’re killing me!” I said.

“Enough with the dramatics.”

“You’re killing me!” I pretended to have a heart attack, to die on the hardwood floor. It is serious business, these records. Pater watched me in silent amusement.

We ate dinner and I hummed and tapped all the way. Pater got very irritated with me because I made the soup slosh in the bowl and spill over onto the table.

“Stop that, Neleus.”

“Please, the store closes at seven. Please let’s go.”

“Finish your soup.”

I sighed and laid my head on the table. Father was not back yet. Sometimes he won't be back until eleven or twelve. It's like that, working in the factories. But father says it is a lot better than working in the mines.
“I hope you never know what it’s like to work there, son.”

I still remember it. I think he doesn’t know that. In school, maybe when I was five or six … there was a picture book about a shadow man who prowls the neighborhood looking for wayward children. It used to give me nightmares.

When I looked outside the window at night, I swore I saw him. Then the front porch light would come on, and I would hear heavy footsteps up the stairs. My door would creak open. And it was only my father, back from the mines.

He was covered from head to toe in dust and soot. And I knew that the shadow man was not real.

Where was I?

Yes. The record.

I begged pater until he was fed-up with me. He made me wash the dishes and do my homework. Father came back earlier than expected, right when I was in the middle of an arithmetic word problem. I hate those word problems.

He wiped his feet on the mat outside the front door and took off his hat. Feet, hat, coat. It's always the same thing with him. When I was little I would chant the three-word order until he saw me and said hello.

He ruffled my hair on his way into the kitchen and took his dinner out of the oven.

Pater always has questions for me when I come home from school, “how was your day?” or “what did you do?” or “why are your shoes so dirty, wash them, you silly boy”, things like that. Father doesn’t ask any of those things.

He sat across from me at the table and ate his dinner. I looked at him. He looked at me. I couldn’t concentrate on my arithmetic problem.

“What?” father asked. You can never really tell if he is in a good mood or a bad mood, not always. But he was home early from the factory, and he didn’t look particularly tired.

I chanced it. “There’s a … new record out.”

He kept on looking at me. “A new record?”

I nodded.

He didn’t answer, but he could see how much I wanted it. I looked at the clock on the wall. Almost seven.

We were out in town, side by side, before I knew it. I love going out when it’s just the two of us. Even though we never really have much to say to each other. I think I just like looking at the way he walks, hands in his pockets, strolling casually along the pavement. Do I look like that when I walk? Will I ever?

We got to the store right when the clock struck seven and father bought me the record. He didn’t even look at the price. Sometimes he’s like that. It drives pater crazy.

“You’re not to tell anyone, Neleus,” father said, as we hurried home, the record clutched to my chest, my heart on fire.

“I won’t!”

“Our little secret.” He smiled.

I love it when we have secrets, like that time he slipped candies into my pocket or took me out of school early to go to the fair. He can be such fun, but, you know. I can never tell when it will happen.

When we got home he went into their room and I heard them talking, too low for me to make out the words. Sometimes they talk a lot and sometimes it’s silent. I wonder if they ever went with their parents to buy records?

Anyway, I will tell you how the record is once I have a chance to listen to it.

November 1961

Trojan autumns are dreadfully chilly, I don’t think I’ve mentioned that before. September is the best month to see the change in the colors, October is quite alright. But this month - pater catches a bad cold every year. It’s just bound to happen.

He’ll be in bed most of the day. I like to nip round to the drug store to get his cough syrup. They have a soda fountain and he lets me get a root beer float with the change. I take it home with me and the cough syrup and we sit in the room with the blankets around us.

Did I mention they turned the electricity back on? They did it last week. Father had a quarrel with the company. He threatened to take it to the Times, and they laughed at him because who is going to listen to a filthy Pelinese, especially the most prestigious paper in the world? That’s what they say anyway.

Father’s not really Pelinese, but it is a secret. It’s not so bad these days, but back then they would have thrown him in prison or sent him back to his country. I’m not supposed to know these things.

Anyway, he reads the Times religiously. Every morning, even on weekends. He lets me cut out the cartoon strip on the bottom of the last page when he’s done, but he will read it front to back. I think newspapers are boring.

The threat must have worked, though, because the electricity came on.
“They accepted my money, at least,” father said, his eyes twinkling in that way when he’s making a joke but it’s actually not a joke.

Pater didn’t say anything because he lost his voice with how bad his cough got. When I was little, father was terrified that I was going to get sick too. He took me to the Messenian doctor who lived at the end of the neighborhood. It was very expensive. Being sick is very expensive when you’re not a Trojan citizen, is what he always says.

The Messenians don’t like us very much and I think father doesn’t like them. The neighbor boy Isander was Messenian, come to think of it. Pater is always polite to the neighbors but they give him these looks, see, because he doesn’t speak the language terribly well.

It doesn’t matter, I’ll teach him.

Father used to take me aside when we were at the store. “Don’t correct him when he makes a mistake, Neleus,” he said.
I asked why.
“How would you like it if someone latched on to what you said wrong every time you tried to speak? You try learning another language.”

Father knows three languages. And he is very smart. He always knows the answers when I show him my schoolwork. He doesn’t have to use his fingers when he counts, or scratch paper. He just does it in his head.

“How come he works in a factory, then?” I asked once.
Pater had only shrugged when I asked. “It’s what we were given in life.” As though that was the answer.

But I thought about my friend Aphareus’s father who is an accountant. Surely my father is just as smart as Aphareus’s father. He could be an accountant too, or something else. But he can’t. We’re not Trojans, and so he can’t.

“Will I have to work in the factory too?” I asked then.
Pater shook his head. “No, Neleus. You will not work in the factory.”
I wasn’t sure how he knew that. But he was certain.

Pater found out about my Orpheus and the Underworlders’ record. He didn’t get upset about it like I thought he would.
“Bring it here, Neleus. And the record player, too.”

We listened to it the whole night, and I asked if he likes rock n’ roll music after all. He laughed at me, and started coughing, and started laughing again.
“Are you kidding me, Neleus? It’s awful.”

Then why did he want to listen to it?

But he didn’t complain, and we went through both sides of the record three more times. Father found us like that, hanging off the edge of the bed.

The song that was playing was Snakebite. It’s the best song on there. You wouldn’t know unless you heard it.

“Isn’t that making your headache worse?” father asked. His frame filled the doorway.

“Strangely enough, it’s making it go away,” pater replied.

Father came and sat on the edge of the bed. And then I had this memory. I can’t explain it, sometimes I just remember these things that I otherwise don’t think about.

It was before we had the house. I’m not sure if I even remember it right but there was some sort of raid. It was already years after the war, but there were these groups of men looking for Achaian soldiers who deserted the army and fled to Troy.

We lived in an apartment at the time. Father came home from the mines and locked the door behind him. It was at night but for some reason, they wouldn’t turn on the lights.

We sat there, all three of us, on the bed.
“Neleus, what’s that song you sing in school?” pater asked.

I didn’t like the dark. But they both kept talking to me, and soon enough I had sung every single nursery rhyme I knew. There was the Wheels on the Chariot, Old Georgios had a Farm, Ba-Ba-Black-Sphinx - you probably know them all.

After that they made me count to ten.
“Use your fingers,” father said, and made me look at my fingers in the dark. He tapped each of them and counted with me.

Why had they done that?

Sitting there with them again, listening to my record, I kept thinking about it. And then I realized what had happened, all those years ago.

My father … was an Achaian soldier.

I’ve written it.

My father … was part of the imperial army, the one we learn about in school. They did all those bad things. They were the Trojans’ enemies.

And it all made sense. It all makes sense. Why he has to work in a factory, I mean. Why we had to sit in our apartment with the lights off those nights.

They don’t know I know. I don’t know what else to say. I really loved listening to the record with them, even though they both agreed it was terrible music and my generation is bound to come up with the strangest things. But they were happy about it, too. I suppose anyone would be happy. I don’t know what else to say. Until next time.

December 1961

On Sundays we dig out turnips. I like Sundays, and at the same time, I fear them. Is it a law of the universe that everything good must come before great sorrow? (M-o-n-d-a-y, let us not speak its name).

In the hot seasons we grow sweet potatoes and yams. But it’s winter now and the only thing that will survive in our garden are those hardy turnips. We have turnip soup and turnip porridge. Grilled turnip and turnip bread. Mashed turnip and turnip cakes. Turnip pasta and turnip - well, you get the gist. If there was a cookbook entitled 100 Ways to Eat Turnips, that would be our kitchen.

We started growing vegetables back when we first got the house. Usually we shop at the Messenian grocer’s, but it gets to be a bit much after a while. Once you’ve bought your bread and your butter and your potatoes you look at the bill - well, pater looks at the bill and his eyes go round as saucers - then you discover you can buy half a pound of meat at the butcher’s this week, but go without the next.

I didn’t know that the Messenians overcharge us. Once, we had to go to a grocer that is not our usual grocer, because we went out of town - come to think of it, I’m not sure why we were there. But we had spent the whole day trekking from neighborhood to neighborhood in a cold northern city. My feet were blistering in my shoes and I was just about ready to fall over.

I haven’t actually thought about it for a long time. Pater kept knocking on doors, struggling to hold onto a piece of paper in the harsh wind. After a while I started to cry, and I can’t believe I forgot this because the look he gave me then - full of anxiousness, looking at his piece of paper and then looking at me.

After that I don’t remember much except we were at the train station waiting to go home. I had calmed down by then, and pater had bought me one of those small serial comics to keep me occupied. I can picture it in my head even now.
There was a special cartoon on the last page about Troilus the Trojan Hero, and his hunt of evil Achaian commanders which they drew like safari animals in military uniforms. It’s funny, I really haven’t thought about it in ages … but here it is now, so clear in my head. I read it quickly and closed the page before pater could see. I don’t know why I didn’t want him to see it.
Now I know it would have upset him. But back then, I was only little … how did I know?

We stopped at the grocer on our way home, and I remember it taking forever. There was no line or anything, just pater and the man at the counter having a heated discussion. Our usual grocer at least lets us barter for a good price. But this was another one that didn’t know us, and so pater argued until he was blue in the face, but we still went home having paid more than we should have.

Why am I rambling on about grocers? The point is, the Messenians overcharge us.

When we got home I forgot all about how tired I was and went about cutting out my cartoons. (I have a collection. Yes, it did start that early. No, I don’t have more to say about it). Pater was sitting at the table. He heated up a can of beans for me and made some toast but he didn’t have any himself. He just sat there.

Father came home while I was in the middle of my beans. I waved at him with a soggy piece of toast and he waved at me. I hoped that he would sit me on his lap and commence Bean Ocean (how do I explain it? Father would cut strips of toast and pretend they were ship captains. He dipped them in the beans which he called an ocean and made me eat them. It was just a way of making me eat my food. I was a bit picky as a child. He only did it when he was in a very good mood.)

But, it looked like father was not going to play Bean Ocean with me that evening. He went and stood in front of pater at the table. I didn’t hear what they were saying. Only that they kept looking at me and I kept waving at them with my soggy toast.

Later on, when father was upstairs having his bath, pater settled down on the floor and gathered me into his arms. “What’s that you’re doing, Neleus?” he asked, and kissed me three times on each cheek. I’m not sure how I remember it was three times, but it was. He buried his face in my shoulder and I could feel my shirt growing wet.
Oh, he was crying. Why do I only know that now.

I showed him all of my cartoons. I must have babbled for a long time. I’ve always been a rambler, in case you haven’t noticed. The plate of toast and beans was unfinished on the floor next to me but he didn’t say anything about it. He listened to me talk about the stupid cartoons, which I’m sure must have bored him to death. Then he said he was sorry about bringing me to the north and making me walk all that way with him. He said adults sometimes make stupid decisions.

I am still not certain what it was about that day, or why it was such a big deal. But as a child I took it all in stride and said it was okay. “You forgive me?” he asked, and laughed. And then father was done with his bath and came downstairs. They didn’t look at each other, but father came and sat with us and put his hand under pater’s chin, and suddenly everything seemed all right again.

I suppose an unexpectedly large grocery bill can ruin anyone’s day.

December 1961

You know those mornings when you wake up after a long, dreamless sleep? It’s still dark outside so you think ‘ah, I have a few more hours’. Only you don’t have a few more hours, in fact, you’ve overslept. And it’s dark outside because it’s raining.

I must have forgotten to set my alarm - otherwise, the batteries don’t work anymore. It’s so strange without pater around first thing in the morning. You can usually hear the cabinets opening and closing, the faucet running, someone turning on the stove. It makes this crack-crackle sound. And then the smell of cooking eggs.

Pater’s taken a delivery job that starts very early. I used to hate it when he went away, but he can’t afford to pick and choose; no one will take on an employee with his list of health problems. He used to do all sorts of odd jobs around town.

This one is for the local bakery so he comes home smelling like bread. During the winter they have all kinds of large orders - that’s when the jobs open up. Father used to try to discourage pater from taking the winter jobs, because the cold just isn’t good for him - but nothing can stop pater once he’s set his mind on something.
“We need the money,” is all he says, and then he’s off on his job. He gives me a key to wear around my neck so I can unlock the door when I come home from school.

Maybe I should have a job too. When father and pater were children, it wasn't unusual to go out and work. But I suppose people don’t do that anymore. There is a boy who works at the butcher shop and one who works at the newsagent’s, but I think their fathers own the business.

This morning, I just about got the shock of my life because father was there when I went downstairs. I ran two steps at a time, and almost tripped over the bottom stair. He must have stayed in later to see me off.

I am not a morning person. I don’t think pater is, either, because he’s always nearly as groggy as I am when I get downstairs. But father is used to being up at ungodly hours. He was wide awake and sprightly this morning.
He had piled all the breakfast things on the table, the bread and butter and jams, the cereals and milk and beans. I just stood there looking at them for a second. Then I realized he doesn’t know what I eat for breakfast every morning, two eggs and one toast.

“Say, Neleus,” he said, when I was buttering my (non-toasted) bread. “How much do you take to school for lunch?” And he fished in his pocket for a few bills. I stared at him.
I take a packed lunch to school like all the other kids. Pater has it ready on the table for me so I can grab it on my way out each morning. I told father this; he made a humming sound, then said he would fix my lunch.

Later on at school, I got two demerits for being late to first period. I forgot all about how lonely the house seemed without pater. My friend Aphareus and I found a good spot on the second floor balcony where we could throw paper airplanes onto the empty school field. We had lunch there too, where it is nice and quiet.

When I took out my lunch box I almost thought someone had stolen my food and replaced it with another. There was a small ham sandwich and an apple, wrapped in brown paper and lying modestly in the box. It was something I could have packed for myself.
Then I remembered father had fixed it for me.
“Want to trade?” Aphareus asked, and I said no.
I don’t know what it was. I don’t particularly like ham sandwiches. But it was the first lunchbox my father had ever made for me. I think he forgot that I am no longer a child. I don’t think he even knows what I like to eat. But … he had tried.

I ate the sandwich and the apple until it was all gone. And for some reason, I could not concentrate on the rest of school. Trojan Lit passed by in a blur. Art class in a swirl of still life. Dreaded arithmetic. Then the bell rang, and it was time to go home.

Aphareus asked if I wanted to come round and try his new bike, but I told him next time. I walked past the barbershop, the Messenian grocer, and old Mr. Tydides’s barking dogs. I unhooked the key around my neck and unlocked the front door.

All houses have a sound. I know what mine sounds like. You probably know what yours sounds like too. But I stood on the doorstep and listened to the house, what it is like when all the rooms are empty and there are no people there.
The first time pater let me come home by myself, I was around seven or eight. I had the key around my neck, like I did today. I remember unlocking the door and listening to the sound of the house, just like I did today.

It is the sound of people when they were just there an hour ago, a minute ago, a second ago. And then they are gone. I heard that sound, so clearly, when I was seven or eight. It was the sound of emptiness, and I knew it for what it was.
I walked in circles around the house, through the hallways, looking in each room. The sound grew louder and louder until it overwhelmed me. I cannot explain it even now. I thought my parents were never coming home. So I sat at the kitchen table and cried.

Pater came in just then. He had been waiting for me to come home.
“Neleus,” he said. “Why are you crying?” He called me a silly boy and made me wash my face. But after that, he didn’t go off to work until I was much older.

I don’t know what I’m trying to say. Maybe it was my fault that we never had very much money. I know that’s not true. It’s just a feeling that comes up whenever I come home to an empty house.

This evening, pater came back from his delivery job.
“I have a surprise for you,” he said, and took out three croissants, you know, the kind with the stick of chocolate in the middle? The local bakery is famous for them. He would bring them back every time he worked for them. Even though he brought back three, I can distinctly remember always having one to myself and a second helping. Now I understand that he let me have his.

I sat up later than usual and finished my homework.
Pater raised his eyebrows at me. Usually he has to force me to do the arithmetic, but tonight, I opened all my books and waited up. Father came back at about half past ten.
“Still awake?” he asked, touching my hair. He looked very pleased at the open books.

I didn’t say anything. Sometimes I can’t even muster a hello at my own father. We don’t know each other very well, you see. I think we must have known each other perfectly once, when I was very little. But then all this time passes and all these things happen and I don’t talk to father the way I talk to pater. I don’t tell him things that happen at school, about Aphareus and his new bike and how I fell and scraped my knee at physical education. I don’t tell him that I don’t particularly like ham sandwiches. I don’t know how to tell him.

But I stayed up until midnight, even when pater insisted I go to bed. I stayed up watching father clean his boots out on the porch. I stayed up even when they both went to bed, watching the light underneath their bedroom door, their shadows flittering this way and that. And them talking, sounding tired and happy and tired some more. I’m still staying up, writing this. And their light is still on. The house is quiet enough that I can hear it, along with my pen scratching against paper.

I’m not sure what it is I’m trying to say. But surely someone understands. The croissants were excellent, by the way. Until next time.

December 1961

Last week at school, my friend Aphareus said to me, “I have a hair on my chin.” And so he did.
Today, he had two. That is two more than I have.
When I was little I would race to the bathroom mirror first thing in the morning, eager to see if I had grown any. This was because pater had started cutting father’s hair out on the front porch. After that, he would lather his face up in thick white foam and draw straight lines over the skin with a rectangular blade. I would sit and watch, mesmerized. There was a sound the blade would make, like it was whispering.
And then nothing but a long stripe of clean skin left behind. It was like magic.

I loved watching my father getting a shave. Even more than I liked watching his beautiful golden hair littering the wooden boards of our front porch when he had his hair cut.
“There’s my little assistant,” pater would say, when I gathered the locks in little bunches for him. I just liked looking at the way the sunlight hit them, like honey. I don’t have hair like that. The Trojans do not, either. That is how they know father is not one of them, simply by looking at him.

Pater would tell me to be very quiet, because if I made any sudden movements he could cut father with the blade. It was called a straight razor. I sealed my lips shut tight, sat very still. It was always completely silent; the three of us, the setting sun, and pater’s straight razor going whisk-whisk-whisk. Every time he drew a line he would dip the metal in water, swirl it around, and start all over again.
I could have sat for hours watching them.

Afterwards, I went into the bathroom and checked my face, just to make sure. I opened the pot with the shaving soap and rubbed it over my chin, but nothing happened.
Pater found me there.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
I shrugged, holding the soap guiltily.
He looked at me for a second. “Not like that, Neleus,” he said, and took the soap from me. He got out a small brush and showed me how to lather it up. It took a lot of work, but we got a nice foam. And then he covered my face with it, and when I looked in the mirror I had a white beard, like an old man. I grinned at him in the glass and he smiled back.
“I want to keep it forever,” I said, and he laughed at me.
There were times when pater and I were good friends.

Of course, I lost interest when I grew older. But this evening I looked outside the window and father was having his routine shave. He always sits the same way, leaning slightly backwards, watching the sky. Pater is so good at it he can probably finish in less than a minute, but he always takes his time.
“Tomorrow is a holiday,” father said, a muttered observation while he looked at birds landing on the telephone lines.
“No talking,” pater replied.

Father took hold of pater’s wrist and looked up at him sideways.
The blade went whisk, whisk, and then slowed to a stop.
I never really realized how much you have to trust someone to let them hold something so sharp against your throat (aside from your barber, of course). It was only a half-minute when they looked at each other.
But in that half-minute, looking out at them from the window - I didn’t see my parents any longer. They were two strange men, like a colored-pencil illustration in a picture book I had never read. Who were they? I wondered. Did the one sitting down make out shapes in the clouds? Did they see the same shapes? Was it why he trusted the other one enough with his own life and blood?
My head was whirling with these questions, one second after another. The clock in the hall was ticking. As it struck at the hour father let go of pater’s wrist, and the blade went whisk-whisk-whisk, like clockwork.
Time had stopped for them. I might have seen who they had been once. I might have seen complete strangers, a product of my imagination.

Pater started grumbling that father was making it hard for him to do his job, and suddenly they were my parents again. I blinked hard at them from the window. Relieved, almost.

Then father grabbed pater around the waist and kissed him. It left shaving foam all over his mouth, and father kissed him again, and again. He laughed, and it was the same sort of laugh he always has, a light rumble in the chest, like there’s something trapped within. Some people have deep, full-bodied laughs that seem to escape from their whole being. My father is not one of them. He laughs as though he is only allowed a fraction of that sound.

I felt I should not have been watching them, and turned back to my homework. But I listened to his laugh, and pater’s. They weren’t strangers, even if there were instances I did not recognize. Maybe when I am older I might look at myself in the mirror, and go “who is that, I do not recognize him at all.” But upon closer inspection I might say, “yes, I do know him after all.”
I think it was this evening that I remembered my parents are people too. And how strange, that they might have had the same silly thoughts and the same silly fears I do - or maybe they didn’t at all. Maybe they had other things to worry about.

I would say more but I’m running out of paper. I think I will go to the store tomorrow and pick some up.

December 1961

In the years I was five to six, chicken was very expensive. We only had it for special occasions, and I remember sitting on the porch and swinging my legs as I ate.
“Eat slowly, Neleus!” Pater would say, but I never did learn how to. We each had a portion to ourselves and I would get the dark meat. When I think of those days I see the flash of the metal bowl, the chicken bones left behind, which we would use to make a stock.

Today after school my friend Aphareus and I bought fried chicken drumsticks from Old Man Chryses’ stall down the road. We are convinced they are the best in Troy. And chicken is very cheap now because there is a chicken farm everywhere, whole factories, in fact.

We sat on the sidewalk and ate our drumsticks. Aphareus had fried batter crumbs on either side of his face. When we went back to his house to try his new bike, his mother came rushing out and wiped the crumbs away with a dishcloth.

How do I describe Aphareus’ mother? Well, first of all, she is always very nice. She looks like one of those ladies they feature on department store catalogues. All bright red lipstick and hair that curls outwards at the ends. You can smell her perfume and hear the heels of her shoes click-clacking when she comes through the front door.

The first time I ever saw her I wondered if all mothers are simply like that. And then I tried to imagine father or pater looking like the men in suits on the catalogues, smelling like department store cologne. When I described it to them, pater laughed and laughed until he choked on his coffee.

Anyway, Aphareus’ mother is very nice and very odd. Most of the time she seems concerned about all these little things, like if we don’t wipe our shoes on the doormat and trek mud in, or Aphareus having crumbs on his face. And other times …

Well, you see, last year there was an incident. We were in Aphareus’ room practicing with the paper airplanes, seeing how far we could throw. We do that when we don’t have anything else to do. Our best plane - and I tell you, this was no ordinary plane, but the very pinnacle of what all paper planes should be. It was a beauty. I don’t think we will ever make one like that again. It landed on the neighbor’s roof.

Without even thinking, Aphareus climbed out of the window and went to get it. If you are very limbre you can easily reach the tree in the backyard, and use the boughs to hoist yourself onto the neighbor’s roof. Aphareus is small and good at climbing. He was up there in no time.

Except this time, he must have missed. Halfway up the neighbor’s roof, he lost his footing and fell. I don’t know how loud I screamed. I don’t think I even realized that I was screaming.

The neighbor came out running. By the time I reached the backyard, he had Aphareus in his arms and I thought he was dead. Miraculously, Aphareus only had a broken arm. With a fall like that, he could have been paralyzed. After a scolding from the neighbor, I followed Aphareus into the house and we looked for his mother. Aphareus’ elbow was bulging weirdly as he held it, walking around the house, calling for his mother.

We found her standing at the kitchen window. Just staring out, listlessly.
“Mother!” Aphareus said. “I had a fall.”

She didn’t look at him. I swear my heart started beating a mile a minute, waiting for her to react. This was Aphareus’ mother after all, the one who kept her plates locked up in a glass cabinet and interrupted us every half hour to offer refreshments. She was very nice. In my head I could picture a department store catalogue entitled “mother”, and there she was printed on the first page, glossy and serene.

But Aphareus called and called his mother, and couldn’t get her to respond. “Let’s just ask the neighbor to drive us,” he said in a huff, as though this happened all the time. As we left, I looked back at his mother in disbelief. Had she seen him from the window? Had she seen him fall, and done nothing?
I thought all these things, then forgot about them, because Aphareus’ neighbor had a car and we would get to ride in it.

I stayed with him at the hospital until his father came in from work. The neighbor offered to drive me home.
“Pity,” he said, shaking his head. “Nice family and all. And I sure hope that electric-whatnot therapy does it for her.”
At the time, it flew over my head because I had no idea what he was saying.

But that wasn’t the last time something like that happened. It made me wary of going to Aphareus’ house. Today, he asked me again and again to try his new bike as we were eating our drumsticks.
“It has silver rims, Neleus!” he said, and the way he was talking about it, I suddenly, desperately wanted to see it.

We must have ridden it the whole evening long. Taking turns at first, then trying new things like riding it without using our hands. Aphareus is small enough that he can sit on the handles quite comfortably while I maneuver us along the streets. I wasn’t careful enough, though, and Aphareus ended up sprawled on the pavement with a scratched knee.

“I’m sorry,” I said. I couldn’t help remembering how often he got hurt.
“Let’s go home and see if your mother has something for that scrape.”

“Let’s not,” Aphareus replied, cheerfully.

I didn’t know what to say.
Finally, I asked. “Won’t your mother … won’t she be worried?”

“Oh, she will be. She gets too worried, it’s irritating. But sometimes I think she doesn’t feel anything at all. I think I’m made out of cellophane, Neleus, the way she looks right through me.”

“You’re not cellophane. Aluminum foil or sandpaper, maybe, but never cellophane.” For some reason it cheered him up. It doesn’t take much to cheer Aphareus up. I don’t remember how exactly we became friends, but it must have been a reason like this.

By the time I got home, pater was angry because he’d told me to come home early to help him uproot some turnips.

“Pater, would you be alarmed if I fell off my bike?”

“What?” he went, frowning because he thought I was trying to get out of being told off.
“What’s this about a bike? Don’t even think about asking for one now, Neleus, when you’re not even responsible enough to -”

The truth is, I hadn’t needed to ask. I knew how pater would be if I ever got hurt, how they both would be. I’d seen it before. I knew how parents were supposed to act when something happened to their children, and I’d always just taken it for granted.

“Pater … have you heard of an electric-whatnot therapy?”

“A what?”

“Does it help, you think?”

“I don’t know what you’re going on about. Will you set the table, please?” He still sounded grumpy.
“And Neleus, when I tell you to do something -” The start of a long lecture. Pater never lets me off the hook for anything.

Yet, I couldn’t get my mind off what Aphareus had said. Pater could have scolded me the whole night long, and I would have listened. Anything would have been better than that blank look on Aphareus’ mother’s face, blank as the paper models in the department store catalogue.

Before I knew it, I had surged forward and buried my face in pater’s chest, cutting him off.

“... Neleus?” His arms wrapping around me in surprise.

I didn’t know what made me do it. Only that if he ever stopped being angry, or irritated, if he ever stopped feeling anything for me at all - I didn’t know what I would do.

When father came home we had our arms around each other, and he stood in the doorway and looked us over in confusion.
“Are we eating?” he asked.
We ate.
I didn’t have the heart to tell them about Aphareus and his mother.

December 1961

Every year the school hosts a winter dance.
It’s a sombre sort of event - fourth and fifth years swaying back and forth on the dance floor, tree-trunk style - sixth years staying clear of it. Up above are paper streamers stapled to the ceiling. And a large bowl of fruit punch that the teacher chaperones flock around.

I was adamant about not going this year.
Pater laughed at me when I announced this. “Why don’t you take Aphareus?” he asked. “I’m sure he would want to go.”
“I can’t dance with Aphareus,” I grumbled, and crossed my arms. I couldn’t dance with anyone. They would laugh at us, anyway.
“We would dance all the time, when you were little. Don’t you remember?” Pater was in a particularly good mood because they had given him an end-of-the-year bonus for his work at the bakery. They almost never do that.

I didn’t remember, in fact.
“Let me find it,” pater said, and went upstairs to root through the old things we keep in the attic. He came down with a dusty record.
“Your father and I -” he paused and ran his fingers over the lettering.
Then he shook his head, as though waking himself up from a dream. He made me turn on my record player, and we listened to the song.

All of a sudden it came back to me, like a snap of the fingers. The thing was, I had always thought it was a dream. You know those memories that don’t seem quite real? Perhaps they never happened at all? I could picture it in my head, but I’d always had a feeling I had only imagined it.
Me, arms wrapped around a tree stump, my feet balanced on top of the roots while it jumped about to this song.

It was one of those orchestra ballads that were popular in Troy for the longest time. People used to go out dancing quite a bit.

When I squeezed my eyes shut really tight, I could picture my parents in a dark room, the window kept open, and you could see the moon swelling yellow-white like a painting. But I was there with them.

That song was playing, and I could hear them laughing. The tree stump I was clinging to was, in fact, my father’s leg. After the song was over he picked me up and grinned at me, and the moonlight reflected off his teeth and the whites of his eyes. It was the happiest I’d ever seen him.

“How about it, Neleus?” he asked. “Shall we have another go?”

And we had another go. Over and over again, step by step, my toes clinging to his polished shoe. When I looked up they towered above me, their hands joined like those plastic figures you find in music boxes at trinket shops downtown.

I opened my mouth, almost asking pater if that had been a real memory. But according to him, it had happened all the time. And so it had to be real. I can’t imagine being small enough to cling to father’s leg like that now. It’s like it happened to a different person.

I went to bed that night, orchestras and full moons and music boxes on my mind. I couldn’t sleep.

Then I heard it again, the song playing on the record player. Father was not home yet, but if I opened my window and stuck my head out I could just about see pater moving around in their room. When father came home he would hear it.

The next day I went and bought a ticket to the winter dance. I don’t know why I did it. I suppose if there was no one to dance with, Aphareus and I could always muck about with the others. I wondered what it was like, those people back then who went out dancing and ended up meeting someone.

Maybe that was how my parents met, going out on the town as two young men, laughing and drinking with their friends - then seeing each other across the room.
One of them going, “Say, have a dance with me, won’t you?”
The other agreeing.
And when it was over father would have that same grin on his face, going “How about it, Patroclus? Shall we have another go?”

And then they just kept dancing and dancing, even after the music stopped.

That must have been how they met.

And then that memory I had - it was a memory of those two people.

Later on when it was the three of us, the dance only continued.

I know it’s a silly thought, and it can’t really be true. But I like to think it is.

I forgot to go to the shop to get my paper. So now there is only a little space left. I have tried to cram all of this onto one page, but my handwriting doesn’t get very small. Let’s hope I remember to go to the store tomorrow.

December 1961

Ah, here we are on a fresh page! There are few things better than the smell of new paper.
And fresh-baked buns with a stick of chocolate on the inside.

Today, pater took me to the bakery for the end-of-year party they host annually. I think he might have taken me once when I was little, but I can’t remember much except the large machine they use to knead the dough, and hundreds of croissants arranged carefully on parchment paper.

Trojan New Year is a week-long event of food. They bake buns in the shapes of crescents and stars, and when you bite in they’re filled with fruit jam or custard or spiced cream. When we went, the bakery was filled with these orders - I must have eaten about nine.
I could die that way and be happy.

School let out the day before. On the last day of school, we usually get a class photograph. They’re such a bother. You have to dress up real nice and sit very still for the camera - but everyone was angling for a picture because their parents wanted one - including mine.

You have to be very rich to own a camera because all the companies that sell film used to be Achaian companies - Troy really only started producing their own cameras a decade ago, and they’re expensive to make. Father used to go on and on about it when he had a brief stint at one of their factories. He would joke that if we lived in Achaia, even people like us could have a fancy camera.

As it turns out, our only photograph together sits on the mantel. It was taken when I was six; father had a friend at the factory - he was Trojan, but one of the good ones, as father said - and one day, he came over for lunch. I still remember what he wore - a blue checkered shirt, and large boots that made scuff marks on the front porch. He apologized for them profusely. And he ate all of the potato salad.
Then after lunch, he took our photograph.

I remember sitting rather awkwardly, and not knowing where to look. Father and pater were not all too comfortable, either. We were sort of scattered about the deck - we didn’t know what to do with ourselves. And then father looked at pater and shifted closer to him, making him smile nervously.
When I glanced at them, father looked right at me and winked.
Then I turned to the camera and grinned wide without thinking. That was when he took the picture.
We feared we had ruined our one chance. But it came out looking rather nice, and pater liked it enough to frame it and put it on the mantel across from his and father’s name stones.

It’s still there, along with all my school pictures which pater keeps proudly displayed. I hate looking at myself when I come down the stairs. I look so silly in my school vest, the tie done right up and my hair wet with water because we couldn’t afford hair gel in my first and second year at school (it was the fashion back then).

Anyway, at school I joined the others in lining up for our photographs. Pater gave me money for it and requested two copies, in case one gets damaged. I don’t understand why he needs to have a photograph of my head. It costs 20 cents a piece. Do you know how many new year buns you can buy with that kind of money? Six.
Six buns.
Even the raspberry cream one that costs five cents more.
Of course, the lemon ones are the best, but everybody goes for the raspberry cream. I suppose they are delicious.
Then again, when you think about buns …
There I go again rambling.

Trojan New Year is not our holiday, so to speak. But everyone in Troy celebrates it. You almost feel like a Trojan, during the festivities. There are fireworks and everybody counts down and sometimes there are secret messages hidden in the buns from one loved one to another. And then you take the messages and hang them outside your room for good luck.
Pater used to put some in mine, but he can’t spell very good so it comes out looking a little strange. At some point he gave up and just wrote everything in Pelinese. But I suppose it doesn’t matter. It’s the one holiday in Troy where everyone is simply what they are - and they are still considered a part of this place.

It is funny - because I was born in Troy, but I am still not a Trojan. I am more Trojan than my parents - but that doesn’t make me a hundred percent Trojan. How many percent Trojan am I? How many percent do you have to be to be considered one of them?

I don’t know what I am, most of the time. But on Trojan New Year - it almost feels like I do. I look at my photographs on the mantelpiece and go, “yes, he is Trojan.” Maybe that is why pater displays them so proudly. Because it is a photograph of me, just like all the other schoolchildren, and who could tell that I am any different from the rest of them? I look Trojan. Trojan is my first language. And I have lived all my life in Troy.

Sometimes I wish I were Pelinese, like pater. No one wants to be Achaian, and neither do I. But I want to be something. And I can’t be a Trojan, even if father says it is the land of opportunity. Maybe it is the land of opportunity because nobody really knows what they are. They can be anyone.

But what if I don’t want to be anyone? If I am not something, does that mean I am nothing?

January 1962

The first day of the year!!
And, do you know what, it snowed!
Snow on the first day of the year.

We stayed up last night and I went in father and pater’s room to watch it outside the window. I suppose they had fireworks, because we heard them. But nothing compares to the fluttering of snowflakes against the white-powdered ground. It is like the earth is a great iced bun (can you tell I am still thinking about the new year buns?)
And then I fell asleep.

I used to be able to fit between them. When I was little I would pretend the bed was a boat. The three of us, adrift on the great Trojan Sea. We would survive on fish and rainwater. But we were happy, the three of us. Pater would lift his legs, blanket and everything, and I would be floating in the air for a split second.

The last time it snowed on the first day of the year, I hadn’t known it happened. I woke up to the world gone white. The curtains left open because it wasn’t dark at all, and I could feel how cold it was. Isn’t it strange how you can feel both warm and cold at once, yet it is very comfortable when the warmth outweighs the cold?

I turned to the side and stuck my hand underneath pater’s shirt, feeling the ridges over his skin. He has very rough skin on his back, and when I was little I was utterly fascinated by how it felt. Tiger stripes, almost, only it is skin on skin. Now that I think of it, I wonder why his skin is like that. I suppose all of us have different skin.

But I loved the way it felt, and I would move my hand over the ridges until pater woke up. He never scolded me for it. He only looked at me. Oh, it was so quiet. Do you think the world is washed anew on the first day of the year? That even sound takes its time?
It was like that today.

Even pater took his time putting the kettle on, and he usually works like a steam engine. It was almost like nobody wanted to break the silence, holding the newborn world in cupped palms like a fresh snowflake, afraid of marring its shape.
“We humans are careful with new things,” pater said.

But when they get old, we are not careful any longer. And in a few hours, the world was old enough. The sounds came back. The neighbors, shoveling snow. People taking their dogs out on walks. Snowplows through the streets, until that pristine white was scratched through to expose grey sidewalk.
New things aren’t new for very long.

“Come have your hot chocolate, Neleus,” pater said. He made some toast and I dipped them in the liquid, watching golden crumbs turn milky brown.

Even on New Year’s, we still got the morning paper. And as father settled down at the table with his copy of the Times, the minutes and hours seemed to click into place. Father quit tobacco a few years ago. But on special occasions, he will get out his pipe.

I wonder what happens in a paper factory to make newspapers smell that way. Have you ever noticed? Nothing smells quite like a newspaper. Is it the ink? Is it the paper? And when you brush your fingers over the page, your fingers are stained black. There is the crossword puzzle. And the funnies, sketched out in strips.

There are little word bubbles telling you what the characters are thinking. If there was a word bubble saying what I was thinking, it would have been empty. I wasn’t thinking anything.

I was only watching my father reading his paper. And the steam rising from his cup of coffee.

The sound of the stove turning on, and pancake batter heating up on an iron griddle. On special occasions, pater makes a Pelinese treat. They are thin layers of batter rolled around chopped peanuts, like peanut butter pancakes, but much, much more delicious. The peanuts melt into a sauce as they are cooked into the batter and they cloak the kitchen in a beautiful aroma. Pater is very good at rolling them up, so they look like newspaper rolls left in our mailbox or tossed onto the lawn by the paperboy.

The Pelinese know about good food. Everything is simple and cheap - the product of wartime. But it is delicious. I would dip my newspaper pancakes into hot coffee and watch the thin layers melting.

New Year’s Day makes you pay attention to these little things.
“Life is good, Neleus,” pater said, placing pancakes carefully onto a plate with his spatula.
“Sometimes it takes the world being reborn again to remember it.”

I remembered then, that my parents had seen the world in war. All that ugliness. All that brutality. And even after it all, they could still say, that life is good.
My father could smoke his pipe and read his newspaper.
My pater could make rolled pancakes on an iron griddle.

And I, ignorant to it all, would run out into the snow and hear my feet crunching through white powder. I would press my face into the ground and see its imprint. Sniffling, the cold running under my skin.

It is a new year. The world runs like clockwork. What changes will we see this time around? What else will remain the same?

Nevertheless, gravel remains under snow. Trees remain barren, waiting for their time in the spring. Some things will not change. Others will. And I will be waiting, to watch it all and store it away. Maybe one day I will play it again, like my Orpheus and the Underworlders' record. Spinning and spinning. Playing music that is familiar, and excitable, and good.

Happy New Year, from Neleus.

January 1962

Who came up with the word for attic?
I asked pater what it meant, and he thought about it for a while.
“An attic is a room for forgotten things,” he said, eventually.
“You take the things you don’t need anymore and put them somewhere you don’t have to think about them. Sooner or later, you forget.”
“When do you remember them again?” I asked.
It made him laugh. “Why don’t you go up there and see?”

The reason I asked was because I had grown out of some of my clothes. Pater told me to pack them up and put them in the attic. But I never go up there. Sometimes I forget it exists. There is a stepladder you have to pull down, and it creaks when you walk up. The air gets thick from dust. I never liked the attic much. So I put it at the very back of my head, where I didn’t have to think about it. Sooner or later, I forgot it.
Ah. I see pater has a point.

When I went up there, my face hit a cobweb. It almost made me turn right around and go back down. Forget about it, I thought. I would take my old clothes to the donation store in town, like Aphareus’ family does with theirs. Pater was sure to tell me off about it, but I didn’t care. He’s funny about things like that. You can never get him to throw anything away. He even keeps the wooden spoons you get on the lid of an ice cream cup.
Father sometimes makes fun of him for it, but when we pick up ice creams at the corner shop he chides me if I try to toss it. We have a jar full of wooden spoons in the kitchen, and no one ever uses them.

The attic, unlike the rest of our house, was in disarray. I suddenly couldn’t tell why I had been so averse to the place. It seemed a wonderland of sorts, full of forgotten things waiting for someone to remember them again. I hadn’t realized they had kept everything. All of our worldly possessions, year after year, season after season. Lying up here in this room, as if to say, come have a look at 1961. And the year before that. And the year before that.
You could trace our whole lives in those cardboard boxes.

There was father’s fishing rod the time he’d tried to take me fishing.

Pater had scoffed in disbelief when he’d announced it.
“You don’t even fish!” he exclaimed.

Father had been adamant.
“Fathers take their sons fishing,” he replied, firmly. No one could convince him otherwise once he had the idea in his head. He looked right at me, I must have been six or seven at the time. I hadn’t actually wanted to go fishing, but I would have done anything for him. He could have said, “let’s go coal-mining”, and I would have jumped at the chance.

We packed up and left during the weekend. It was a day trip to the River Scamander, which runs around Troy. There are camping grounds all over the place. When we got there, it was out of season for fishing - father hadn’t realized at all. We drifted about in the boat for a bit, and I was bitten by so many mosquitoes that I ended up catching a fever.

We stayed overnight in a motel while they looked for a doctor, but couldn’t find one who would see us on such short notice. I remember sitting in the bathtub with all my clothes on, pater’s worried face and his hand splashing water onto my forehead. It was the first time I ever heard them argue.
A day or two later, my fever miraculously cleared.
I think they were afraid I would have died.
We never went to the river after that. I forgot it ever happened, because father put his fishing rod away. I suppose he didn’t want to think about it ever again.

Next to the fishing rod was a box that was almost falling apart. When I looked inside, there were piles upon piles of composition notebooks, neatly stacked - the kind you can get at the corner shop for 2 cents a piece. I picked one up and peered inside. It was my father’s handwriting.
He has beautiful handwriting, and writes in such straight lines. I have to buy lined paper for my own use because I can’t write that straight. I couldn’t read it at all. It was in a different language; in Achaian. The top of the page was dated. Father had written it all the way back in 1943.

My heart suddenly started beating fast, and I flipped through the pages, thinking father had started keeping a diary too. That we were the same in that way.
But there were no more dates. I looked in the other notebooks, and they were all marked a different year. Father had started a new one every year, all the way until 1950. The year I was born.

He’d been a writer. What he had written about, I didn’t know. I could go to the library and find myself an Achaian dictionary. Then I would know.
But some part of me knew that was wrong. Father had put what he had written up here because he hadn’t wanted anyone to see them. It would be a breach of his privacy.

Why had he stopped writing the year I was born?

My heart was still pounding.

My father had a dream once.

Of course he didn’t want to work in factories, leaving at the cusp of dawn and coming home when the night grew dark. He’d wanted something else.
But somewhere along the line, he’d given it up. He’d stacked all of his dreams in neat piles, fitted perfectly in one cardboard box. Sealed and stowed away to be forgotten with the rest.

If I asked him why he did it, what would he say? But then I remembered what pater always told me when I couldn’t get what I wanted.
“There are more important things, Neleus.”
And there had been more important things than my father’s dream.

But sitting knee-deep in dust, those yellowed pages laid out in my lap - someone remembers you, I thought, stroking the lines. I wonder what he wrote, what those beautiful curves and spirals in his copperplate handwriting meant. Only he knew.

And, perhaps - some things are not for anyone else to know.

January 1962

I’m in a rotten mood.
I can’t even write straight. Not that I write straight in the first place, but my handwriting is even worse than it usually is.
This afternoon we went to the Messenian grocer’s. There’s a new store clerk behind the counter. Usually it’s the old man with the mustache and green apron, whom pater can spend hours bartering with. He used to give me these little pink candies when I was little.
Today, pater set aside 12 dollars and said he was not going to spend anything more (we always have to be a little careful at the start of the new year, when the bills go sky high).

The mustache man was not there when we went to the store. In his place was a skinny younger man. Pater put me to work gathering up all the canned goods while he took the basket to the produce aisle (he says I don’t pick the ripe tomatoes. I say to him, isn’t it better to pick the green ones? Then they will take a while to ripen, and be ready to eat when we need them. He doesn’t listen to me. But that is an entirely different rant and I’m already taking up so much space on the page.)

We always talk when we shop. I tell pater what the prices are and he tells me what he thinks he can get them for. We say all this in Pelinese so as not to offend anyone. The new store clerk had smiled and greeted us when we came into the store, but now he was giving us the eye.

When we went to pay for our things this old Messenian lady was in line in front of us. She smelled like the musty perfume samples you find in the drug store, and took ages standing at the counter - opening her purse and fishing inside, then shutting it with a click. Then she would open it again because she had not counted the money correctly.

Pater was tapping his foot impatiently, but eventually he stepped forward to see if she needed help. When she saw him, she shut her purse again with a great clack. And edged away from him, as though he was going to snatch it from her. As if anyone would want to steal pennies and dimes from some old lady’s beaded purse!

But pater turned red and backed away. He counted the 12 dollars he had brought and would not look anywhere else.
The old lady leaned towards the store clerk. She must have thought she was being ever so quiet, except her whisper could have reached the deaf.
“Whatever do you think they are?” she asked.
When she caught my eye I glared right at her.
“Who knows, ma’am?” the store clerk replied.
“Didn’t our neighborhood used to be so nice?”
The store clerk agreed with her. “Now they come here, and you don’t even know what language they’re speaking. It all sounds the same to me.”

I was as red as pater, and my hands were clenched into fists.

“Oh, but don’t they learn how to speak Trojan? I know the children do, but these parents never seem to learn. They think they can bring their children here and live off them when they grow up, surely. It’s a good thing the government doesn’t recognize them as citizens.”

I was about ready to explode.

“You old hag,” I said, without thinking.

They all looked at me in shock.

“That Trojan enough for you?” I asked, the same way Aphareus and I speak when we’re messing about, pretending we’re gangsters from the movies.

My face was burning so badly because I could feel pater’s eyes on me.

“I am sorry,” pater said, to the old lady and the store clerk.

“No, he’s not,” I cut in. “He’s not sorry.”

“Neleus!” Pater scolded, angry this time.

“We’re not sorry, we’re not sorry, we’re not sorry!” I yelled. And I ran out of the shop before he could stop me.

I still wasn’t sorry by the time I got home.
I wasn’t sorry five minutes later.
Or ten.
But by the time I realized I didn’t have a key, and pater was taking his own sweet time coming home, I was beginning to get a little sorry.

“Fucking Messenians,” I spat, like Aphareus and I had overheard the sixth years talking, except we could never bring ourselves to say it seriously. This time, I meant it.

The clouds were turning a mottled orange, and I sat on the front porch sullenly, swinging my legs and picking lovegrass from my socks. Father came home before pater did. That has never happened before.

He stood on the pavement and looked at me from a distance. I thought he knew about everything that happened, and shrank into myself. Father can get scary when he’s angry. He doesn’t say very much at all. But it’s as though you can feel that anger curling off his skin in wisps, like when you open the freezer and see the air coming off the ice cubes. It’s that dreaded, silent anger that is the worst of all. And pater says I am the same way, except this time I couldn’t keep my mouth shut.

Father must have recognized it in me just like I can recognize it in him. He came over and sat next to me on the front porch. He didn’t have a key either. We sat together in relative quiet, watching the clouds go from orange to red. It was almost peaceful.

Finally, father spoke to me.
“Don’t be like me, Neleus. When something upsets you, find a way to express it.”

I didn’t know what he meant. I took it the wrong way and thought it was an invitation to air out my grievances.

“Those Messenians,” I said. I knew father didn’t like the Messenians either. Then he would agree with me, and I would have someone on my side. No one had ever been on my side before, and I was suddenly eager for it.
“They used to be like us too. But the government made them citizens, so they think they can lord it over the rest of us -”

Father cut me off by shaking his head.
“Don’t talk about what you don’t know.”

I sat there, my mouth hanging open.

“The Messenians have their own problems. You will never know the hardships someone else faces until you see through their eyes and breathe through their lungs. So don’t talk about what you don’t know.” And he wouldn’t hear any more.

If I hadn’t been sulking before, I was now.

Pater came home a few minutes later. He kissed father hello. Then he turned to me. “Tomorrow you are going to the store. You will apologize to the clerk and find out who the lady was so you can write her an apology note.”

Before I could say anything, he unlocked the door and went inside.

I didn’t eat much for dinner. I couldn’t get it out of my head. I still can’t.
Why should I apologize to the Messenians? They were the ones badmouthing us, thinking we were too stupid or too foreign or too something not to notice. Or maybe they knew we understood and said it anyway, to make us feel even less welcome than we already are.

Pater and I are currently not speaking.
I am too angry to speak.
He and I disagree on this, what it means to be proper and respectful and what it means to stand up for yourself in a country that thinks you are scum.

“There is a difference between knowing when to speak, and only making things harder for yourself, Neleus,” he said to me. “Sometimes we have to pick our battles.”

Well, I am picking this one. It’s not the first time we’ve gotten dirty looks for simply being what we are. Why doesn’t anyone understand? Why doesn’t anyone try to understand?

And so, I am in a rotten mood.

January 1962

The Scamander Brewing Co. is father’s brand of beer. He used to work at the factory that produced the aluminum for their cans. When we hear the advertisements on the radio, it always reminds me of red-mooned summers and cicada nights. The crackle of the can opening, the settling of the froth. And father taking a large sip, head leaned back in satisfaction.

Yesterday, I went to the Messenian grocer’s to apologize to the clerk. Have you ever had to apologize to a stranger? Not for stepping on their foot or blocking their way on the pavement. A real apology. When you don’t want to say sorry. When all the sorries are dried up to a fine powder, even though deep down you know you did something worth regretting.

It’s not that I regret what I said to the old lady. It’s not that I regret what I meant. I meant what I meant. It’s the way it happened that I can’t get out of my head. It plays over and over again, like red dancing shoes that just won’t stop. I can’t forget the way that pater looked. I just can’t. That deep-rooted panic in his eyes. Who put it there?

He broke our silence yesterday. The worst kind of war is the one without words.
“Have you had time to stew?” he asked me, shaking his head slightly. Amusement, all the way up to his crows’ feet. “Too much Achilles,” he muttered, thinking I couldn’t hear. He ruffled my hair. “Not enough restraint.”

Father, from across the table, rearranged his newspaper.
“If I had enough restraint, I wouldn’t have you.”
Pater rolled his eyes at him.

“Do I have to apologize to them?” I mumbled, still slightly sore.
Pater looked at me for a long time.
“Do you think what you said was any better than what they did?”
“But -”
“Do you think insults and anger can change someone’s mind?”
I had no answer.
“Fine,” I sighed. “I’ll go.”
Pater smiled at me and told me to finish my breakfast. To him, the matter was over.

But I was the one who had to trudge all the way to the grocer’s, head hanging, my pride torn.
There was a bit of a line when I got there. I stood shifting my weight, trying to meet the clerk’s eye head-on but unable to. When it was my turn, I could almost smell his derision.
“Oh. It’s you.”

I straightened and looked up at him, the way I knew pater would.
“I am sorry for the other day. For causing a scene. It won’t happen again.”
Like taking a shot of bitter cough medicine. I grimaced at the end. But it was done.

The clerk looked slightly surprised. I expected a sneer, or plain indifference. Instead, he shrugged. “It was rude of us,” he admitted. “Oh well. Water under the bridge, eh?”
I stared at him. I hadn’t expected that at all. He had seemed such a hateful person. I realized then, how much I had exaggerated it all in my head. The store clerk and the old lady, growing scales and talons as they whispered words of poison. Me, the hero - standing up for what was right.
Really, they were just ordinary people having a gossip at someone else's expense. And I was no hero, but a child who had lost my temper. As pater would have called me, if he had been more unkind.

“Could you pass this along to the lady if you see her?” I asked, and held out the note I had written for the old lady.
The clerk scoffed at me. “What do you think I am, the messenger? Get to a post office.” But he took it and said he would.

I had written more than just an apology in the note. I didn’t know why I had done it. On my way home, I kept picturing the words again and again. Wishing I hadn’t written what I did.
When I got home, I didn’t feel good at all. I didn’t feel good even when father came home early in a terrific mood, and said we could take a walk to stretch our legs. I didn’t feel good even when we had meat stew for dinner, no turnips for once (although pater did manage to sneak some in the bread).

I lay on my bed and listened to Orpheus and the Underworlders (no, I’m still not tired of it!). I gazed up at the ceiling, imagining myself in a cardboard box. Packed away and put on the shelf, where I didn’t have to think of these things and wonder what went on in the world outside, in other people’s worlds.
Why did I care so much what someone thought about words I had written?

Dear madam, I began. I had it all memorized.
My name is Neleus Pelides. I am eleven years old. And I had just gone on and on, filling up the whole page. Telling a complete stranger, who in one scathing afternoon had made me feel like dirt beneath her shoes - telling her about my life. She must have thought it was a bunch of nonsense.

I went to sleep like that, my head like the page of one of father’s newspapers, full of jumbled up sentences and headlines. ‘Neleus Pelides is an Idiot!’ read one of them.

But then, today …

When I came home from school, there was a delivery from the grocer’s. We never get things delivered. I don’t think we’ve ever done it in my life.

It was a brown paper bag, and inside were a few things you can find in the first few aisles of the store. Sandwiches, from the icebox. Three apples. And two cans of Scamander beer. It was a packed lunch, in its own way. For us.

Dear Neleus, the note said.
I very much enjoyed hearing about the afternoon you had with your father. As it turns out, my son is also a Scamander man.

She didn’t write any more. But as pater put the things in the refrigerator, I puzzled over what had made her do it. I thought I had written gibberish. That it couldn’t possibly reach her.
But somehow, she’d found something in my note.

Pater always said I have to be careful with my words. That words have power, especially when the right person is listening. And you never know how those words make their mark in another person, even when it seems like no large thing.

I sat at my desk, tapping my pencil on paper. I put my words here, put my thoughts here, where nobody can find them. What would happen if I put them somewhere else? Who would see them? What would they think of them?
I think I understand for the first time what pater meant.

March 1962

I hear the coffee grinder downstairs. Pater grinding beans in the early morning. The beans rattle from their metal tin. When the grinder starts, you can almost feel it in your bones.
We drink a lot of coffee at home. When we first moved into the house - coffee and bread. That seemed to be all we would ever have. Coffee and bread in the morning. Coffee and bread for evening tea. I would tear off large pieces and watch it soak up the liquid like a sponge.

One of my earliest memories, in fact - was in the apartment we lived in, before we had the house. Was I three? Or four?
Father would make his coffee in a large metal pot on the stove. I could hear him shuffling about in the kitchen. The soft thud of a closing cupboard. The stove being lit with a match.

I loved the way my father lit a match. The wooden part of the stick clamped in his mouth while he shut the box. One smooth motion; the sound of the flame. And his eyes, half concentrating, half not. He did it like second nature. He did many things like second nature.
Some people seem so attuned to the world. In a past life they might have been a long shadow beneath the trees, or a rolling sunbeam against the leaf’s edge. They belong to this world. Not like the rest of us, stumbling awkwardly, in our jumble of words and rickety movements, placed here to search, and search, and search some more. Never really finding our place.

As pater says, father has a way about him. Pater shakes his head, his laugh softer than a whisper. He would watch father like an ill child gazing out the window at fields of gold. Longing, secretly longing. Loving, secretly loving.
I never really knew what pater meant at the time.

But now I think I know. I tried to copy him when I was little. The way he walked, the way he would examine things from the side of his eye, lips pursed shut. His hands in his pockets as he made his way from one side of the pavement to the other.
Father lived life slow. Never rushing through anything. He ate slowly. He spoke slowly. He would lean across from the stove and watch the coffee brewing and dripping, unhurried.
I wanted to live life slow, too. Maybe there was a trick to it. But I couldn’t.
I ran places. I got impatient when I walked with pater to the store and he couldn’t keep up with me. I talked a mile a minute, and pater would go “I can barely understand you, Neleus!” then not really listening even if I sighed and started all over again.

You see, I was thinking about all this in Trojan Lit yesterday afternoon. Mr. Anchises, who has taught Trojan Lit since - oh, I don’t know, the Mesozoic Era - called on me to read a poem out loud.

On Thursdays he chooses a new victim to torment - we call it The Anchisening (believe it or not, it was Aphareus’ idea!).

“Neleus,” he said, while a dozen eyes swiveled round to rest on me.
“Ready to come down from the clouds?”
He and pater could have a competition in dryness. If pater read Trojan they could be best friends.
Gods, I hated it.
I hate standing in front of everyone else. It makes my knees wobble, jelly-like. It makes my stomach churn, soup-like.

I went up there and read the poem I had prepared.

Looking down at the sheet of paper in my hands, I wondered why I had chosen this one.
It was called Straw Men.
A poem my father liked, written in Pelion during the war. I like to think he once read it to me, but in reality, I don’t think he ever did.

It’s a sad poem, you see. I never realized how sad it is, not until I read it in Mr. Anchises’ class in front of everybody.
I forgot about my knees and my stomach. All I could hear was the wind over Pelion City, smell the smoke curling to the sky. And feel my insides turning to straw, as those men in the quiet of night, lighting their matches the way my father lit his - talking, talking in low voices.

There is a reason why he is the way he is. There is a reason for most things, after all. But like most things, we don’t always know.
Father never read it to me because there was too much of himself in it.
Did he feel like a straw man, living life slow in a foreign land?
I don’t know.
I don’t know much about him at all.
All I know is, I think he meant for me to be something different. But I do wish he had read me the poem - I felt so lonely reading it in class, as if I were him. He must have been lonely, out there by himself.
I hope he isn’t lonely anymore.

April 1962

There is something about watching porch lights in the blue of night - that makes one feel alone. Entirely alone, as though one were a dragonfly drawn to the beam, a firefly in winter, an old, old man on the train tracks reminiscing about the good old days of laughter and frothy ale.

I sit on the front porch and hear the sounds within the silence, hear the whisper of grass and the conversation of the crickets - it’s a strange world we live in. So complete in its stillness, in its isolation.

In the streets, on a brick wall - a pair of cats begin a scuffle. Their yowling pierces the night air.

Pater grumbles about the noise and slams the window shut. The light is yellow behind the glass. It’s warm inside. One can tell just by looking.

So why am I sitting out here?
My head swims like a goldfish in a glass bowl, the memories bubbling up and disintegrating into water.

I don’t think I’ve told you before, but there are many nights like this. Nights when I choose to stay outdoors and watch my world from beyond the glass.

Pater says I watch too much. He talks about a blind man who tells stories by the roadside.
What if I were blind, and had no world to see? What sort of stories would I tell?

Inside, pater puts the soup pot on the stove to boil. His movements are practiced and precise. He has done this a hundred times, a thousand, a million. He will do this a million times more.

I wonder if he grew up watching his parents through the window, going about their lives without a thought in the world. Even when the mind drifts, the body remembers.

There was a picture book I loved when I was little. It had a lamppost with a chicken foot on the cover - I can’t remember much else.
But nights like this, I shield my eyes and imagine it hopping along.

It beckons forth with the swaying glass of its lantern head -
‘come see, come see’.
What there is to see, I’m not entirely sure of.
There were many times when I would sit outside, waiting for it. Waiting for something, anything, to take me away.

It all started with those pages.
And you know what, I never knew what the story was about; because pater could not read it to me.
I would get angry at him for it.
“Why can’t you read it to me?” I asked.
How thoughtless I was. I didn’t notice how sad it made him look. I just wanted to know what the words were saying.

“Make something up for yourself, Neleus,” pater said.
I had no choice.
I made something up.
And then I dreamed. That those words which held no meaning, would bring me somewhere else.

But I looked in the window again and again.
Always, I would see pater mumbling to himself, his lips forming his own words. I looked at him for a long time.

Maybe people dream because - they have no other choice. When life is silent and blue, like the lights going out on wooden beams - there is nothing else but to imagine a yellow path, and colored picture book pages leading you beyond and beyond.

I wonder what he’s thinking about.
Something other than our little kitchen, our little house - and the soup pot on the stove.
Maybe he’s like me, and thinks about lampposts on chicken feet.
Maybe he thinks about his home.

It’s been a long time since he’s been home.
I think he told me that, once.

He told me many things, but I didn’t listen, because I was only little.
Now I wish I had listened.

“Tell me about Pelion,” I want to say.
Tell me again.

April 1962

Today at lunch, pater made an announcement that shocked all of us.
“I’m going to learn how to drive.”

Father glanced up from his fried turnip and pasta.
He had a small smile on his face, a mischievous one. It was a pretty afternoon, more like a summer day than spring, really. I suppose anyone would be in a terrific mood on a day like that.
“Suffering from grand delusions, dear?”

He had a point. Even Aphareus’ family doesn’t have a car. We haven’t a hope in hell to get one.

Pater gave father one of his looks.

“Don’t look at me like that,” father insisted. “We could slave away until the ripe old age of 105 and still never afford a car. That’s the way it is, darling. Maybe Neleus can build you one with his bricks.” His smile was so charming it took the edge right off of it.

Pater shook his head.
“It’s the bakery,” he said. “They want someone to drive a bread van around the neighborhoods. It’s a way to boost sales.”
He hesitated. “It would mean I’d be a full-time employee.”

This was a revelation. Pater had never been a full-time employee anywhere.

“What? Do you mean they offered you the job?”

“If I can start in the summer,” pater smiled.

Suddenly, we were excited for him.

“You almost gave me a heart attack,” I told him. “At the age of eleven it would be a tragic thing.”

He looked at me, smile widening. “I’m sure you’d make the headlines.”

So this evening I went with father to the butcher shop and we bought one and a quarter pounds of chuck steak. It’s a Pelinese tradition to celebrate with a good meal. And if there was anything that was cause to celebrate, it was this.
“My father,” said father, later on when we were preparing dinner.
“Taught me how to make a breaded cutlet like this. We’d make it every third Sunday.”

He didn’t even complain when I played Orpheus and the Underworlders on full blast. The neighbors would go deaf. We didn’t care.

I didn’t say a word. I never say a word when father starts telling one of his stories. I’m afraid he’ll stop. When I was little I would hang on to every phrase, every sentence, like it was the only thing rooting me to the ground.
Father’s like that, I guess. You never really know what he’s thinking, the thoughts coming and going like colorful hot air balloons on a fairground. But no matter where you turn, he’s right there behind you.
I once read that a walnut tree has one of the deepest root systems in the world. Father is like a walnut tree.

He let me wrap the steaks in breadcrumbs and fry them all by myself. I’m good at frying, you see. I wanted to show him that I was good at something.

I wonder what my grandfather was like. Have you ever done a jigsaw puzzle with missing pieces? I have all these pieces, collected and stored away all these years. I can count on one hand the things I know about my grandparents in Achaia.

Pater will talk about his mother and father if you ask him. How they built the house in Pelion. My grand-pater was a builder and a carpenter, you see. And he made these things out of wood, little animal figures and such.
Pater had a toy dog when he was a kid. I had one too, but mine was made out of plastic. After the head broke off, we named it Cerberus-Sans-Head and he was lord over all the other toys that had missing parts, in fact it was a whole kingdom of amputees, and I made their prosthetics from plasticine - I’m rambling.

I don’t know anything about what father’s life was like in Achaia. But I guess now I know he and his father made breaded cutlets every third Sunday. You can bet I’ll remember it. I remember everything he tells me.
Maybe I’ll be a chef when I grow up.

As it turns out, pater needs money to go to driving school. And I guess that means I’ll be a little short on pocket money until summer.
But he’ll be able to drive!
Things are looking up, it seems.

Ah, damn it, my pencil broke.

April 1962

“Neleus,” Aphareus said to me today.
“Mother is in hospital.”

What for, he didn’t say. I hadn’t known anyone in hospital before. I imagined something from the movies, long corridors of thin mattresses on stilts, the ill and the dying.
They cried out desperately. They were covered in bloody sheets.

That was not the case when we went to visit.
The floors were polished linoleum. And there was only a waiting room, empty save for one boy with a broken arm sitting next to his grandmother.
Aphareus slid his hand in mine, all the same.
“What if she’s dead?” he whispered.

She was not dead.

“Neleus!” Pater scolded me, when I recounted it to him later on at dinner.
“Do you hear him, Achilles? Talking about this as though he were describing the steps to make a sandwich.”

Father snorted from where he was standing. He had gone to get ice from the freezer. It was getting hot - even in April.

“But she was fine!”

And she had been. She’d been sitting up in bed, pretty as a picture. Her hair was curled and her lipstick shiny red. She’d been expecting someone else. I knew that look - hopeful anticipation, wiped away as soon as she caught a glimpse of our sorry figures waiting to be ushered in.

She’d given Aphareus a hug and a kiss. She’d given me a hug and a kiss, and I still couldn’t get that sweet, powdery smell out of my head. She didn’t want us there for long. Aphareus had gotten her one of those hospital bouquets, wilted tulips in a plastic wrap - they were sitting on the windowsill, sad and forgotten, by the time we left.

On the way back from the hospital we passed by the train station.
“Come on, Aphareus,” I said. “I’ll buy you a chicken drumstick.”
We weren’t anywhere near school. But he looked so forlorn I knew just the thing to cheer him up.
I can always cheer Aphareus up. Maybe I’m no use with most people. But it’s always been the two of us, Neleus and Aphareus vs. the World (he claims it should be Aphareus and Neleus vs. the World. I disagree.)

He wasn’t even in the mood for Old Man Chryses’ chicken drumsticks. We walked in circles around the train station. There was an old playground behind it.

“Remember Trash Mountain?” Aphareus asked.

As little kids we would collect aluminum cans, glass bottles - any number of things you can find in the garbage. We had a map of the playground between his house and mine. This was a different playground.

At school we’d read about a couple in eastern Troy who made a house out of garbage. We decided we’d make one too. Then when the times got tough we could leave home and have someplace to live.

The thing was, it was always just a game for me.

“Let’s buy a ticket, Neleus,” Aphareus said. “You and me.”
As we walked together, going round and round the station like a pair of partygoers on a carousel, I realized for the first time that it had never been a game for him.

Aphareus didn’t wait long for me to answer. He ran straight into the station without me.

“Aphareus!” I yelled, breaking into a sprint.

“You can’t stop me!” he yelled back.

“Damn it, Aphareus, wait!”

He was angry when I caught up with him, angrier than I’d ever seen him. Aphareus just doesn’t get angry.

I think, maybe, there are lots of different types of angry. But Aphareus wasn’t just angry angry, he was sad-angry. It’s the kind of angry people keep stored away, in one of those glass bottles we picked out of the trash.

We stayed in the playground a long time afterwards. We found one of those large plastic tunnels and huddled in there until it began to rain.

“Promise me we’ll go together one day, Neleus,” he said.

No one’s ever asked me to promise them anything before. But he’s Aphareus.

“I promise.”

And that’s our pact.

June 1962

It’s happened.
The Pelides household has a licensed driver!

I don’t think I’ve ever seen pater as proud as he was when they gave him the card with his picture on it.
It was just a piece of plastic.
But I suppose it was a piece of plastic that said he belonged here, in Troy, and to someone like pater that might have meant the world.

He started his driving job at the bakery last week.
And if a bakery is heaven, then a bread van is a slice of heaven.
They don’t just sell bread. There are all the special buns the bakery makes in the hot months; you already know how I feel about buns. There are these jars of candy for the kids who come running out to get something for their parents.
And magazines. Newspapers, too.

Nobody told me that a bread van is, essentially, a portable newsagent. I guess it makes sense, because when people go to the bakery, they usually have a cup of coffee and read while they wait to be served.

Pater let me sit in the back and we went round and round the neighborhoods, even the nice ones with the iron gates and checkered lawns. Housewives came out to buy the week’s bread and get their copy of Trojan Weekly.

When pater wasn’t looking I flipped through the magazines myself. Father would like the crossword section at the back. But the Trojan Weekly has a fantastic comic strip, one to rival the Times’. I used to read one called Troilus the Trojan Hero; this one is by the same cartoonist!

I don’t know how I recognized him, except he draws clouds the exact same way. He signs his name with a great big M, all shaded in. M is at present, my favorite cartoonist. It must be nice to be able to draw like that.

I wish I could draw. I wish I could do anything, really.
And I wish I could watch television. Fingers crossed we’ll get a television!

June 1962

We started before dawn, when the light was soft and blue.

The only time I remember being up this early was back at the apartment, when we had a little balcony. Pater held me in his arms and went, “Oh, there’s a peek of sun, isn’t it? Shall we give it a little encouragement?” And he lifted me up, up and up and up, until my legs kicked out and I wriggled in his arms, laughing.
The higher up I went the further the sun rose from its sleeping spot. For the longest time I thought I could control the sun with how high he lifted me. It was a game we liked to play.
“The whole world’s at your feet, my dear, little Neleus,” he would whisper to me. “The sleeping world - now shall we say, wake up.”
I woke up, widening my eyes to watch the sun’s rays touching down on the houses below us, the apartments across the way; cars rattling along the roads and the earliest stalls opening their shutters.
It was his clever way of getting me up, even when I didn’t want to get up. We lived closer to the city, back then - and the city doesn’t wait for anyone.

I look at him now, as we drive through the slumbering neighborhood, the scent of warm bread wrapping the air around us.
I think about his cheek brushing against mine when we played the Sun Game, and the way I held out my hands in a circle to trace that bright star.

I can almost smell fresh laundry, feel the condensation on the cement balcony from the night’s haze.
I suppose I never think about pater that much. When I think about him I hear his stern voice and all his rules - the way he cuts vegetables without a cutting board, the way his back hunches over a little when he’s been standing too long.
But he is more than all that.
My earliest memory of him is of a sunrise. Perhaps, the first sunrise I ever knew.
Do you remember the first person who ever loved you?
Well, for me - it was him.

The back of the van rocks back and forth. It’s making me sleepy. Every so often I feel his eyes on me, checking to make sure. Make sure of what, I don’t know.
He didn’t want me to come. Too early, he said. But we once chased the dawn together, so why not again?

I could fall asleep with a loaf of bread as a pillow. Pater would kill me if I did. He turns on the radio, the morning news crackling through.
I think I should stop writing now.
I’ll stop.
The van makes me dizzy.
I’ll

June 1962

I threw up in the van, and now pater won’t let me ride with him anymore.

Such is life.
Full of terror.
Full of tragedy.

Now what I am going to do with myself, I don’t know. Aphareus went with his family for a holiday to Mount Ida. We received the postcard in the mail.

I have exactly ten postcards from Aphareus. I keep them on the wall next to my bed. The funny thing is, I haven’t sent him a single one. We’ve never really gone anywhere.

Father once set aside some money for a trip, but as the months passed the coins and notes just seemed to disappear from the jar. We always needed money. No matter what, something would always happen. Pater getting sick unexpectedly in the middle of August. Me spraining my ankle riding Aphareus’ bike (don’t ask, the shame will kill me).

And there was that one time father had food poisoning. He still won’t eat clams anymore.

“Someone in this family has slighted Apollo,” father would joke (Apollo is the Trojans’ god of diseases. Isn’t it funny they have a god of diseases? How do they pray to him? Heavenly Apollo, I wish cholera upon my enemy? I suppose it makes sense).
“For us to have so many accidents and illnesses.”

“Perhaps we so happen to be Apollo’s favorite,” pater would reply. “After all, we survived, didn’t we?”

I remembered then that Apollo is also the god of healing. I knew that because whenever I got cuts and scrapes as a child, pater would run down to the store and get the cheapest adhesive bandages. They came in a tin box featuring the face of a beautiful, serious, curly-haired man. I loved that box so much I kept it in my drawer, with all my other treasures, and would take it out to look at it long after the bandages ran out.

I don’t think they make Apollo adhesive bandages anymore.
Oh, where did I put my box?
I’ll have to ask pater later.

July 1962

In bed with a stomach bug. If pater knew I was writing this instead of sleeping …
But I can’t sleep.
When I can’t sleep my thoughts whirl like a multi-colored pinwheel, and when my thoughts whirl like a multi-colored pinwheel I can’t sleep.
It helps to put something on paper.

I say that, but it sounds funny, doesn’t it?
As though I were reaching into my brain with waggly fingers, picking up the scraps of thoughts, and slamming my hand down against the page.
My stomach hurts.
When I was little I thought that frogs lived in my stomach.
When I was hungry they would begin to croak, and I would say, “Pater, the frogs are at it again!”

It seems a waste to have a stomach upset during summer vacation, but if it were any other season pater would force me to go to school anyway. I can hear him pouring rice grains into the pot downstairs.
Krr-krr-ing.
Krr-krr-ing.
An oddly magical sound.

The worst is when father comes home and I can hear - no, smell dinner downstairs, steam and stew and soupy goodness. Forks and spoons scrape against plates, their voices rising in laughter and lowering in thoughtless banter.
For a moment there I close my eyes and just listen.

It’s something that lights me up on the inside. That soothes me to sleep. That makes the ache go away just a little.
Orpheus and the Underworlders sing about the sound.

The sound that shielded Orpheus from the darkness.
The sound that rose from his lyre, luring the spirits of the underworld with the promise of something long-awaited from the realm above.
The sound that was, surely, the echo of Eurydice’s footsteps.

I wonder what that sound is for everybody else.
Pater says that humans are lonely beings. We are born into the world by ourselves - and we leave it, by ourselves. But surely someone, somewhere - heard their sound, and thought for a moment, there is someone waiting for me.

The frogs are croaking in my stomach.

I must have fallen asleep.
I think I woke up a few hours ago, when the door cracked open.

“Pater, the frogs are at it again!” I whispered, jokingly - hoping he would remember. Waiting for him to tell me off for being up.

I peeked over my shoulder and saw my father behind the crack in the door, one hand on the knob. We didn’t say anything to each other. He knew I saw him standing there.

I waited for him to come in - but I knew he wouldn’t. And all of a sudden, I just ached for him, for his words, for a cool hand on my forehead. I remember his love from a long time ago.

But that was when I was little, when there wasn’t so much fear. Now we’re afraid of knowing too much of each other. He’s afraid of what I’ll see, and I’m afraid of what he’ll see - that it won’t be enough.

I wish I had verses and rhymes. Verses and rhymes like the ones he likes to read. They publish them occasionally, in the Times. But I’m no poet. I couldn’t even read Straw Men out loud without my voice going all shaky.

And now I’m simply too sad to go back to sleep.

Pater came in an hour or so ago and the pain has gone away.
He’s fallen asleep. I’m wide awake.

It was just like this, one night, years and years ago.
There was an accident down at the mines and we waited up all hours, waiting for the news.
I think he believed father was dead.

I didn’t know any better. Only that I loved times like this, when it was the two of us huddled underneath the blankets.
I begged him to tell me stories - and he did. Story after story after story.
“Now you tell me a story, Neleus,” he would go, and I would make something up; except mine were long and pointless and rambling, not like his, which were beautiful.

I looked at his face in the dark and could only make out the outline of his eyelashes. I scrambled around until I found his nose, and cheeks, and chin. Pater looked different then - someone solemn, someone still. Someone from a dream, staring back at me.

“What goes on in that head of yours?” he asked, and kissed my forehead.
No worries. No fear. I was only a child.

I didn’t realize, then, that grownups are afraid of the dark, too. Afraid of monsters. But theirs have names. Theirs have faces. And right then, pater had been afraid that father was dead.

He hid it so well I remembered it as a happy night. I remembered us having the best of times, telling stories, and never once did I imagine my father not coming home.

I wish I didn’t think about these things in the middle of the night. But when I do - I close my eyes again and try to listen for my sound - and it makes me feel all the better.

August 1962

I was always afraid of Ancestors’ Day.
It’s good fun, really.
But I think I took things too seriously when I was little. I really believed.

When father poured a can of beans onto the plate and set up the toast soldiers for battle, I believed. When pater made me conjure the sun, I believed.
Those little games we played. They were a part of me. Those little stories, they were mine.

And Ancestors’ Day was about the stories that went untold. The people remembered only through a passing thought, the names uttered under our breath.
When you burn a stick of incense, the smoke curls into the air, bringing about its musky fragrance. In the minutes and the hours, the stick crumbles to ash. The smoke disappears, scattered into the atmosphere. But the scent - it sticks to your clothes, your skin, your hair. A reminder that what is lost is never really gone.

Father tried hard to make it a special day for us. And, in a way, it was the most special day of all. It was the only day that was ours. The Pelinese, they were pater’s people. On one day of the year, they welcomed the dead back into the world of the living.

We were the only Pelinese family in the neighborhood, and our paper lanterns crowded the roof so proudly, the shadows they made seemed to echo in the stillness.

I always woke up with a sense of dread - excitement skimming on the surface. We got up very early and paid our respects to grandmater and grandpater. Pater always did this by himself, but because we stayed behind and watched him, I knew to keep very quiet.

Then I would sit in the kitchen and help pater make dozens upon dozens of lanterns. We used father’s old newspapers, and he always grumbled about it, even when he didn’t read them anymore. There’s a way of folding them so they look exactly right.
I could do about five in half a minute, shuffle-fold-press, shuffle-fold-press. But I would always get distracted watching pater do the same thing. He did them just as fast, but so carefully. The way his fingers slid over each fold of paper, compressing it into a straight line. The way he would never take his eyes off his work.

Father would come into the kitchen to cook a late breakfast and have to wade in that sea of old newspapers. When I was old enough, he let me climb up on the roof by myself. It felt like such an accomplishment, my bare feet scaling the tin shingles.

“Little imp!” father called, and I stuck my tongue out at him. He was always his happiest on Ancestors’ Day. I never knew why. Maybe it meant just as much to him, even though he wasn’t born Pelinese.

In mid August, the sunsets are magnificent. And that was when we would light the lanterns, right when the great egg yolk dipped below the horizon. They winked along the roof like a hundred eyes. Watching us, watching us as the dead might have in their stroll across the streets.

I watched the green of the trees darken to a muted grey.
That was when they came out, I just knew it.

“Silly Neleus,” pater chided, when I clung to him.
“There is nothing to be afraid of. Ancestors’ Day is a happy day - a day of celebration.”
But even as he said it I could hear the catch in his voice.
He would stand outside the house and look at the lanterns until they flickered out.
Long after father went back indoors. Long after the clouds joined hands in darkness.

I waited for him at the window. Pater is not a big man, but there was something about his slender frame that made him seem so tall at the time. In that instance, I saw the opposite. I looked outside the window and saw a small, hunched figure, gazing up at fading lights. Who could tell what he thought then?

The wind rustled through the leaves, and I shivered under my clothes at the sound of the windchimes. They were here, I just knew it. And I knew, looking down at him, that he had always been trying to say goodbye.

Ancestors’ Day is about unspoken words and unmade gestures.
All the things we never said to the living - but the dead, they speak a different language.

When it grew late enough the clock chimed in the hall.
I took a deep breath, wary of the moving shadows and the hidden spots between the trees. I always felt someone was watching me, just then.

But I could not bear to let pater struggle with words alone. I gathered my courage and ran down the stairs, out the back door; until I reached him and our hands were firmly clasped together, just as they should have been.

“Hello, pater,” I said. I was shaking hard, our familiar backyard a world of night and novelty.

There was a split second where I think he didn’t see me.
But then he would blink hard, as though coming awake from a dream. He would look at me, then at the lantern shells, swaying silently in their rhythm along the roof’s edge.

I would give anything to know what he thought about, that moment right there. But he smiled at me; and the change in mood made the darkness seem airy and beautiful once more.

“Hello, Neleus,” he said.

We walked hand in hand back into the house.

“What a day,” pater always said.
“And now we part ways again, until the next year.”

The way he said it, made my fears seem so absurd. The dead could not harm me. I feared them no longer. But I remembered the way he stood outside the house, and the words left unspoken on his lips. I hope we’ll never have to say goodbye. No, we’ll never have to say goodbye.

Ancestors’ Day is a day of celebration. It is the Pelinese way of reminding us, that life is constant in its greetings and farewells. And come what may, the people who are lost to us, may be brought to life again - like the burning of a flame, bright and golden in the heat of the moment. What comes after lies heavy on the skin, never to be forgotten.

September 1962

Pater’s favorite singer on the radio was a balladeer named Meriones Molusides, or simply, Mol.
Whenever he came on in the evenings we’d yell, “Ole Mol is on!!!” to tease him. He did not sing standards, which was uncommon at the time. In fact, we’d all heard him on national radio at the Trojan Music Festival, where he’d gotten third place.

Pater, while learning Trojan, had developed a fondness for the word “foolishness”. You could often hear him saying it. And when Mol lost the title at the Trojan Music Festival, pater had muttered “Foolishness!” rather crankily, for weeks. It rubbed off on all of us.

“Foolishness!” I would exclaim, when he demanded I take a bath.

“Foolishness!” father chimed in, when the electricity went off again.

We chanted that word like a secret code, a word for life’s grievances; but underneath it all was a kind of joy. After all, I would climb into the tub and yell the word over and over again, splashing until the bathroom was covered in a layer of bubbles. Pater stood with his hands over his ears, but for some reason he never got angry with me about the mess.

It was a word that could make us laugh, even on the coldest Trojan winters when our fingers were turning white.
“What absolute fools we are, in this merry-go-round world,” father said, the three of us bundled up in the blankets, wool over our eyes.
I imagined a carousel in a fun-fair, the three of us astride a wooden horse; we went round and round and round and round.

It wasn’t that we were blind to our worries, our pains, the little fears that clouded each day. But that word was magic, a charm against the demons; it was our life, and no one else but us could live it. So we took all the foolishness and took all the fears, and with one huff and one puff, blew it away like wolf and straw house.

You know, I never did find out why pater had such a soft spot for Ole Mol. His music went out of style when I was about eight or nine. And I’m not sure what made me think of him today, only that the other evening he came on the radio again, and out of reflex I ran to the window yelling “Ole Mol is on!!!”

Some habits never die.

The dreaded turnip season has begun, and on the weekends pater can be seen tidying up the patch. Goodbye, sweet potatoes. Goodbye, meaty yams. But I suppose we eat quite good these days, with pater driving the bread van.

I’ve gotten rather good at impersonating the announcers on the morning news. Pater always has the radio on when he drives around the neighborhoods. I can do the Ajaxes from the Telamonian Morning Show, and Cubey Hecuba with her tarot card readings.

“You make an excellent old woman, Neleus,” pater likes to say.

I do indeed.

This morning I stuck my head out the window and narrated what pater was doing.
“This just in, a new breed of turnip has been discovered in the Pelides’ backyard.”

“Don’t you have something to do?” Pater complained.

“You mean aside from irritating you?”

“At least come and help with the turnips!”

“Grumble grumble grumble!”

“I don’t grumble,” pater muttered, but his face was cracking with a smile.
After a while, he hesitated.
“Do the Ajaxes again.”

He loves my impression of Big Ajax and Little Ajax, the cousin duo who hosts the Telamonian Morning Show. It’s ironic because he can’t stand the Telamonian Morning Show. Pater has a funny sense of humor, where a lot of Trojan things do not amuse him. Yet, he will laugh at the silliest things.

“What are your opinions on the recent turnip tax crisis, Big Ajax?” I went, echoing Little Ajax’s high tenor voice.

Pater began to wheeze, and it only made me exaggerate the voices on an even more ridiculous level.

It’s a good feeling, making people laugh.

September 1962

Did I ever tell you September is my favorite month?
It’s the month when summer wanders off for the year. You call its name in a boulevard of golden leaves, nothing comes back but an echo.
As Mol sings on the radio, “When an early autumn walks the land …”
But it’s not true, is it?
There’s a breath between summer and autumn. Like that last heartbeat between living and dying.
That is September. And when it comes, so does the rain.

Our classroom is sharp and clear in the rain. Like a hand wiping through the fog on a mirror. You smell the wetness, the scent of your skin on glass. You smell rubber-soled shoes on parquet floor. Chalk, rolled between a fingertip; the sensation of powder and the white of it sticking, and sticking. Unable to be swept away no matter the effort.
I can see Aphareus sticking his nose out the window. It squeaks when he opens it; Mr Anchises’ eyes flicker up like a cat’s.

We’ve been made to write poetry.
When we’re alone, Aphareus and I entertain ourselves with silly rhymes.
When I’m alone, I sit at my desk wondering what it is I’m expected to do.
I’m ill-suited to poetry. My words have no pictures and my pictures have no words. They’re like the stasis of the classroom, wide-eyed as I am outside in the corridor. In my picture I’m looking in. I’m always looking in.

Aphareus’ shirt has a stain on the collar and I fixate on that, a glorious imperfection in our row of dreary greens and starch whites.
The truth is, I’ve always hated school. I will tell no one.
It would break pater’s heart. The way he looks at my hands, the way he’s always looked at my hands. From those early days tracing the Trojan alphabet, to now when I write in keen phrases and sentences.

I always wished I could take that look away from him. Such longing. Such adoration. Such pride. His hands were blistered and callused from digging the soil in the back of our house, from fixing the drywall. I’d always thought they were the most beautiful hands in the world.
In every line, every rough patch of skin, you could see the hours and the minutes gone by. You could see every drip of sweat, every tear ever shed, every rounding of the lip in a cry unheard.

And I can’t even write poetry when I’m told.

~~~

I woke up with a dry throat, and went downstairs for water.
I was very conscious of how the steps creaked beneath me. The clock in the hallway ticking, as if to time my very footsteps.

Maybe I’m still afraid of the dark.

But the light was on when I reached the landing, and for a minute I just stood there making out my father's figure in his chair.

You know those kinds of moments, where you can do nothing but hold your breath? As if even one exhalation would break the picture into tiny, tiny shards, never to be caught again.

He was sitting there, not really doing anything. His silence - it felt like my own.

I waited at the bottom of the stairs and tried to preserve father’s image, the white light touching his hair and the tip of his nose, and the way he thought - as I’ve said before, you can never tell what he is thinking. But you can hear it. You can sense it. If you know him well enough. If you love him well enough.

As a child, if I had caught pater in the kitchen late at night, I would have been told to go to bed. But father - he always seemed to appreciate the company. He’d never once told me to go to bed, no matter how late it was. It was as though he was oblivious to time.

I can see it like the stirring of a dream. The lone lightbulb swaying over our heads, casting shadows in every corner of the kitchen.
There is a small boy who has woken up from a nightmare. In times like this, it is always one person he goes to.

“What is it this time?” his father asks. His voice is no louder than it is in daytime. But in the night it carries a thoughtfulness, a tenderness. Perhaps the kind of emotion that can be found when one is given room to breathe - away from the demands and the ruckus of the day.
“Cerberus?” He cocks his head to one side and lifts the little boy by the underarms - his hands span the boy’s torso.

“Cerberus comes to bite me,” the boy sniffles.

“Hmm. Cerberus does not have very good taste at all, does he? One would think to choose a prime rib or a nice cut of steak - not Cerberus.”

“Not Cerberus!” the boy echoes, raising his eyebrows. His father’s lack of concern has rubbed off on him, and all his fear is gone.

“Come sit with me,” his father says. “Help me think, Neleus.”

“Alright!”
What they would be thinking about, the boy doesn’t know.

On the kitchen table, a mound of letters have been spread out. Numbers upon numbers upon numbers. Just a silly game.

“How do we solve the puzzle?” the father asks, tapping his chin. “How do we make it all go to zero?”

The boy has not quite started arithmetic in school yet.
“I don’t know, father!” he replies, after thinking a bit.

The father laughs. “Well, think some more!”

They think. They think all night.

When the sun comes up, the boy is half-asleep.
“I don’t know if I can solve the puzzle, father,” he admits.

His father looks at him for a very long time.
“I know.”
After a moment - “Do you want to go to bed?”

“No.”

“Do you want to go up to pater?”

“No. I want to help you think, father.” But the boy is already asleep.

I don’t think father ever solved the puzzle.
Never in my life have I thought he really expected me to find an answer. No - all he wanted was for me to go to sleep.
But because he was so kind, so gentle, in those quiet hours beneath the swinging lightbulb - he said anything, to make me believe I was important. That I was intelligent. That I was his equal in all things.

That is the reason why, I think - that I am always looking in. When you are born free, with the sunrise at your feet - you do not look out at the world wondering what is out there. You know what is out there. It’s an unanswered question, but there are no bars. No windows. No barricades. The world is yours for the taking.
I just wait a little longer, that's all. I look a little longer. I can’t help it.
Something draws me back. It always has.

June 1963

There is a city in Old Troy by the river Simoeis.
There’s a song about it, too.
Last summer,
at the bank of the Simoeis
That’s how it begins. I’m not sure I remember the rest of the lyrics. Only that when I think about it, I can almost feel water lapping at my ankles. And the air turning blue-green, as though I were submerged underwater.

Submarine. I think about a submarine, and the explorers venturing forth in their quest for the hidden island.

Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night with a funny feeling in my stomach.
I feel like I’m on board a submarine, and if I look out the window (porthole) I’ll see the shadow of a great blue whale.
The whale hums;
Last summer,
at the bank of the Simoeis

I glance back, wide eyed.
You know it too?

Can whales smirk? This one does.
Everybody knows it.

Aphareus has told me so many stories about his summers at Mount Ida that I often imagine I am there. I can get confused about these things. As though it were my parents lounging about by the lake, colored umbrellas spread out to block the sun - and myself, knee-deep in the water, shielding my eyes for Simoeis’ hidden island; imagining soldiers in the walls of the old city, playing hide and seek like their bready counterparts in the toaster.

“Father,” I asked, one morning when the world was still asleep.
“What is the name of that song about the river Simoeis?”
I knew he had the answer. I just knew.
I watched him from the top of the staircase and was certain it was a feeling he was familiar with.

Father had been on adventures once. That much I knew.

He thought about it, cocking his head to one side. There were crumbs on his plate from toast soldiers, and I could see them again, lining the walls of the old city.

The song is called We Danced in Water.
Father told me.

Many years ago, we lived right above a small dive bar with a jukebox. I can still remember the owner and his placid ginger cat, affectionately named Enemy of Dog. Or Ed, for short.
Ed sat on the barstool by the jukebox every night. Because of his calm and affable demeanor, people would stop by to pet his head. In the meantime, they would slip a coin into the jukebox, as it seemed to please him. They did not know that the jukebox was broken. All except for song no. 6; coincidentally, the song I am speaking of now.

Pater had a deep hatred for the song because it would keep me up all night. I was little more than a toddler at the time. We all knew someone had stopped to pet Ed on the head every time it played. Father found it endlessly amusing.
I cried and cried because I couldn’t fall asleep - I can only picture the scene.
The dirty street at night, the pungent odor of garbage. Drunks staggering into the alleyways from the bar. The sound of a child crying, anxious parents shushing him. And that song.
Last summer,
at the bank of the Simoeis.

It wasn’t even the gods-damned summer. It must have been freezing.
They raided the street one night.
Those were the worst years, as pater says.

When we were hiding in the dark, eyes watching the chain bolt on the door, we thanked whichever gods were listening that the song was playing.
Because they killed the family across the hall from us, and the one next door.
I didn’t hear it. None of us heard it.
We Danced in Water was too loud, too distracting, too everything.

I never remember the worst.
It feels like it happened to somebody else.
Like I was not really there.
Like I did not really exist.

It’s funny. It’s a song about the old city.
A traveler’s song.
It awakens inside me a desire to be free, to taste of the blue-green river air that is laid unraveled for me outside the window.
I first heard it on a night of confinement. And I cannot imagine the fear.
We Danced in Water is a special old song, a submarine song, a protector’s charm against the creatures of the deep.

When we moved into our next apartment, pater played it for me every night, because I could not sleep without it.
Funny how these things work out.

November 1963

We woke up to the sound of the bell, clanging in its tower.
Cassandra, we called her.
She was a great bronze bell, and wailed so loudly that it was said she could foretell the future. That she had seen everything.
Swarms of soldiers lining the plateau like ants. And the families, fleeing over the border lines.

This was northern Troy, where the mountains were capped in snow like peaks of whipped cream.
The school had a field trip every year. It was meant to be educational. On the bus, we sang “Troy the Beautiful” and “Lady Wisdom.” We kicked our legs against the cracked seats and craned our necks to spot the outline of the monastery.

Hundreds of years ago, they planted vineyards out here.
“Who did?” I asked.

“The monks,” Mr. Anchises replied.

Mr. Anchises was different on field trips. But his stone-faced expression never left. I squinted at the worn out building that was the monastery and tried to imagine hooded figures crowding up and down the stairs, carrying their lamps.

Next to it was the camp. You couldn’t even tell there had been wooden structures there once. But we saw the photographs in the museum map. Each of us got a stamp on the back of our hands, and Aphareus and I spent a long time comparing stamps, because his was a firebird and mine was a nestling.

The firebird is the symbol of rebirth, and so the monks who looked after the refugee children took it as their emblem. The children had come here from distant lands. They had come to be reborn. To begin a new life.

Mr Anchises led us on a guided tour of the museum. In minutes, our group was scattered; some had rushed off to muck about in the corridors, others had gone to snoop around the displays. Aphareus and I found a spot in the east wing, where part of the refugee camp still stood.

It was nice and quiet there, the dirt cool beneath our knees. We sat on the ground and unwrapped our sandwiches.
“It’s cold in here, don’t you think?” Aphareus voiced.

Up until that point, I had not thought about where we were, exactly. But people had slept here once. People had lived here. People had tried to make a life out of nothing. There were photographs all over the museum, brown and faded in glass cases. In my mind, I could not quite reconcile them to reality.

We ate our sandwiches and looked up at the sunbeams filtering through the patched ceiling.
“They’ll be looking for us,” Aphareus reminded me.

“Just a little longer,” I said.

I didn’t know why I wanted to stay. The people here were long gone. Most of the ground had been cemented over, in order to preserve the place. I placed my hand over one of the wooden beams, and imagined having to sleep here, catching a sliver of moonlight if I turned my head just so.

What had they thought about? How had they passed the time?

My fingers found rough scratches in the wood.
When I lifted them, I saw someone had carved a name.
Someone had been lying here, trying to get to sleep.
Briseis, it said. 1944.

I traced the letters with the tip of my finger.
Funny how human handiwork could stand the test of time. And now it remained here, in a glass museum. Removed, unfeeling.

I looked at it a few minutes longer. Then I stood up.
There were red marks on my knees where I had knelt and peered at it.

“Aphareus,” I called, and he came over. “Let’s go.”

One day, time and sunlight would wear out that wooden beam. And even that name would be washed away.

People can be captured in photographs, preserved in the objects they once owned. But who they were, their hopes, their fears - whatever ran through their heads, looking up at the night sky between a ramshackle ceiling - who is to say?
We will never know.

People are kept alive through memories. And there is nobody to remember these people. The ones they loved are long gone. Long dead.
When we woke up to Cassandra in the belfry, I shivered in my blanket.
I suddenly wanted very much to be home.

April 1964

I did mention I was good at frying!
It might be the only thing I truly excel at.
Old Man Chryses saw the golden flakes on his chicken and went, “Holy smokes, boy! You’ve got it!”

Old Man Chryses had decided to open a brick-and-mortar shop with a drive-thru. They’re all the rage now. You can get drive-thru ice cream! Aphareus’ father took us once in his new car.
I begged and begged pater to take us but he refuses to drive the van places for “recreational purposes” (his words, not mine).

In class, they call us the Paper Hat Boys, us kids who have a job. Even if you’re a girl, you’re a Paper Hat Boy. It all began when some of the boys started doing newspaper rounds. I think father would have wanted me to do a paper round, as it meant we would get 10 cents off the morning paper.

But my heart was set on working for Old Man Chryses in his first ever real shop. He was nearly 80 years old! Can you imagine being nearly 80 and opening a shop for the first time? We had supported his stall for years, you see!

The whole school was cheering him on when he cut the ribbon on the first day.
After that, it was a race to get a job as a chicken fryer. The thing was, half the school was also in love with Old Man Chryses’ daughter, Chryseis.
So the idea was to get the chicken frying job, get the girl, and eventually take over as Old Man Chryses’ heir when he croaked. That was the dream.

Old Man Chryses was very much aware of this consensus and used it to his full advantage.
“So,” he boomed, peering over at me the day I tried out for the job. “Here to win my daughter’s hand in marriage, eh? What you think of this one, Chryseis?”

Chryseis herself emerged from the shadows. She was twice my age, and just about the most beautiful person I had ever seen. Film stars could not compare.

“Err,” I gulped, glancing back and forth at them both.
“Yessir.”

“He’ll do,” Chryseis said, and winked at me.

“Look at the boy! All pink in the face! A real one for the older ladies, aren’t you?” Chryses exclaimed. He was quite deaf, and naturally yelled at the top of his lungs instead of speaking at a normal volume.

“Yessir,” I blurted out, not thinking.

After a moment, they looked at each other and burst into laughter. They must have laughed for a good minute, before Chryses got out the chicken and I worked my magic.

I am there for a two-hour shift after school now, and four on the weekends. I earn six cents a week.
In the summer, I will earn seven!

The first week I came home from my job, pater claimed the house smelled like chicken grease. He made me sit in the tub and scrubbed at me for what felt like an hour.
I sang all the songs about chickens that I knew, (I Want to Hold Your Hen, Whole Lotta Eggs, Piece of My Chicken, etc.)
Pater complained that he hated that kind of rock n’ roll music. But then he started humming along, and when I pointed it out, he insisted that he wasn’t.

“Pater,” I said.
“Yes, Neleus?”
“I’m going to marry Chryseis and become the heir to Old Man Chryses’ chicken empire.”
“Yes, dear.”
“Didn’t you hear me?!”
“What?”
“I’m just saying - be prepared for a life of luxury.”
“Mm.”
“You’re not even paying attention!”
That was how most of our conversations went.

Father came home early that evening and stood in the doorway in puzzlement, wondering why we were in the bathroom humming along to nonexistent music.
“Your son has gotten a job,” pater mumbled at him, raising his eyebrows in that way of his: Act proud, or else. He often forgets I’m old enough to catch onto these things by now.

Father cleared his throat and nodded at me.
“Old Man Chryses?”

I didn’t know why I was worried. That it wasn’t a good enough job. That father did not actually want a son who fried chicken.

“Well … as long as you don’t forget about your schoolwork.”

And then I remembered that father was father. He broke his back at the factory every day because he wanted me to go to school. The chicken job was what it was. A bit of fun, and an extra six or seven cents a week. It was not my future.

Still, I would not stop joking about it. It made pater laugh (sometimes, my jokes are very hit or miss), and I did everything I could to make him laugh.
“Pater, why did the chicken cross the road?”

“Stop it, Neleus. Stop. I mean it this time.”

“I have a thousand more where that came from!”

I was in a really good mood all the time, since starting my job. The truth was, I loved it there. Screaming over the sound of the fryer so that Old Man Chryses would hear me, my face heating up every time Chryseis came to visit - and the customers. It was a busy place. I had never really been at a busy place before, outside of school. It made me feel like the world was spinning fast, so fast; I was on top of a rollercoaster and my tongue was sticking out catching snowflakes at the same time.

Old Man Chryses let me have some of the chicken that didn’t sell at the end of the shift, and I would take them home with me, clutched carefully in their paper bag.
It was a treat, a real treat, as we never ate out.
To someone like pater, it was luxury food.

He would watch me tearing into the bag with a look in his eyes I couldn’t name.

“What?” I asked.

“Nothing,” he said, and smiled.

I don’t know. We were really happy, that spring. I guess everybody deserves to be happy at least three months out of the year. At least three months. We were practically spring chickens. Get it?

Undated

Is there any greater comfort than a kiss on the forehead, when you’re lying in the dark?
Love, and all the names for it. Communicated in one touch.

One night when pater was asleep I curled up in bed next to him and kissed him on the forehead.
I hoped it would do the same for him as it had done for me.
I lay there, listening to his breathing.
There was light pouring in from the window, and when I raised my hand its shadow was splayed out all across the far wall.
I opened and closed my hand, watched it move against the wall.
How easy it was to command my shadow.
Why couldn’t the rest of the world work the way I wanted it to?

It’s so strange to be the only one awake.
Everything left behind, all that was said - all that was done.
It stays.
I open my eyes and think I can see a glimmer of it, words that went away and laughter that drifted by.
And then only silence.

That’s what most of life is like, I think.
So the band played.
And then only silence.

Undated (c. 1971)

The week after they killed Idomeneus Minides, a fair came into town.
Those were uncertain times.
But there were two things I was sure of;
1) I had gotten a C in Trojan Lit, and pater was not going to find out.
2) The cat who lived in the school canteen had had kittens - I was going to take one of them home. And pater was not going to find out.

It was a Monday morning when pater turned on the radio and went white. They had announced that Idomeneus Minides was dead.
He was important. Naturally, I had no idea who he was. I was only about seven or eight.

In the streets, there were riots. We took the long way to school to avoid them, but there was no missing the crowds marching towards the downtown area, where the Times’ headquarters was located.

In school, even the teachers were talking about Idomeneus Minides.
“Who is he?” I asked.
“Hmm … I think he plays basketball at the university,” Aphareus guessed.
I figured his guess was as good as mine.

Before we had a chance to eat lunch, the school was evacuated because someone had thrown a small explosive in one of the Times’ branches. It was near enough that they thought we were in danger.

I was just happy to escape Trojan Lit. Mr Anchises was not my biggest fan.

“Pater, we got out early!!!” I shrieked, swinging the door open even though he had told me thousands and thousands of times to watch the damn door.
Pater was sitting by the mantelpiece, avidly listening to the news.
He was weeping.

Now, I have thought about this moment many, many times in my life. And in every reimagining, I see myself throwing my arms around him. I see myself asking, “Who was Idomeneus Minides, pater? Why is he so important to you?”

I asked none of those things.
I was a child, and a foolish one at that.
“Can we have lunch?”

He didn’t hear me, at first. I asked him twice more before he would get away from the radio.

Two months ago, I received a letter from the Minides family about my story. It always makes me think of that week.
Idomeneus Minides was a journalist for the Times.
In 1945, he wrote an article that shook the world.

It was not the first time a national trial had been covered from beginning to end. It was not even the first time monsters had been given a name. But Idomeneus Minides wrote about monsters as though they were men. He took away all of their power.
And with these words, he armed us; for once, we had the tools, the weapons, the courage that we had needed all along.
People like my father read the Times obsessively for its writers. He read for Idomeneus Minides, who was not afraid of telling the truth.

The man was a personal hero of mine.
When he died, it was the end of an era.
I just didn’t know it as a child of seven or eight.

If I had asked pater those questions - maybe it would have hurt less, afterwards. Or maybe I would have broken his heart. Maybe it is all just wishful thinking.
But the fact remains - I will not give this up for anything.

The next week, the fair came into town. Its calliope music could be heard all the way from our backyard.
Father came to collect me early from school.
The streets were clear, as though none of it had happened.

October 1964

Father liked to take me to see the yellow-winged blackbirds.

If you caught the train to station 41, there was a pebbled beach not far from the antiques store.

It was there that we would sit, me licking an ice cream cone, father swinging his legs over the cement landing -
He had such long legs I felt they could reach all the way to the shoreline.
Now I look at him and - they’re just ordinary legs.
But back then …

It was our little secret, you see. On Wednesdays, he took me out during recess so we could catch the train to station 41. We hardly said a word, him and I. I stuck my hand in his coat pocket so he wouldn’t get away.
It’s laughable to think of now. My father, the walnut tree.

It was chilly in late October. But father always bought me an ice cream, and I would eat it.

We waited for the yellow-winged blackbirds.
And they never came.

I saw crows. I saw pigeons. Even a seagull or two, tearing apart a piece of hotdog bun discarded on the sidewalk.

“I don’t think there is such a thing as a yellow-winged blackbird, father,” I whispered, but I didn’t dare raise my voice. I didn’t dare let him hear me.

The way he searched. It was not searching. His eyes were pinned to the far reaches of the water as though it was all he could see. As though he had been waiting to see it a long, long time.
I squeezed his hand. I laid my cheek on his arm. My hand and my cheek were sticky, but he didn’t seem to care.
I worried he forgot I was there.

When the crows, and the pigeons, and the seagulls flew away, he finally looked down at me.
The sun was beginning to set, and I realized recess was long over.
My heart began to beat fast.

“Father,” I tried. “What if -”

“There,” he said, his touch light and sudden on my shoulder.

I turned my head frantically.

In the distance, where the waning rays hit the trees, was a streak of yellow wing.

I could feel my father’s relief more than I could see it, or hear it. For a second he was so still I worried he’d frozen in the cold. Unwilling to let go, even for a moment; to let go of the sight he’d waited so long for.

He laughed, soft and easy, his laugh that I knew so well.

Then he put his arm around me, and we took the train all the way back home.

~~~

Until now, I did not know what a yellow-winged blackbird looked like in its entirety. I pored over books. I studied field guides in the library.
All I could remember was that streak of yellow. With it comes the sensation of aching feet, of windblown cheeks, of a cold tongue sweetened from dessert.

That night, I waited until father had gone out to sit on the porch before climbing into bed next to pater. He was half asleep, the record player left on in the other room so he could listen without it keeping him awake.

I was not supposed to be there, as they didn’t want me getting sick too. I drew the covers around us, and must have rocked the bed quite a bit because he woke up and looked around.
“Sorry,” I whispered.

When he noticed it was me, he smiled and closed his eyes again.
I was so afraid of losing him.
I don’t think I’ve ever said.

Some things are just … too hard to say. Too real.

“Pater?”

He made a sound to let me know he was listening.

“What if there’s no such thing as a yellow-winged blackbird?”

His smile widened, and he pulled me close.
“Did you see one, love?”

I didn’t answer. The fear had taken hold of me, as surely as it had taken hold of my father. I’d learned it from him.

I know now, that I learned it from him.

Years later, they built a factory in front of our pebbled beach, and it became impossible to access it. All you can see now when you get off at station 41 is the industrial park - places that hire people like father to make aluminum cans, fabrics, and furniture.

When Aphareus and I started attending the high school, we found a road right behind it that led right down to the canals.
This is where the sewage from the factories end up.
It is also where we go when we want to be alone. Sometimes together, sometimes not.

I have told Aphareus many secrets, and he has with me.
But I never told him about the yellow-winged blackbird.
I felt I had to find it all by myself.
I still feel that way.

When I woke up that night, pater was not beside me anymore. I scrambled out of bed in a panic. I reached the top of the stairs. Then my heart settled, because outside, I could see them.
He had gone to sit with father out on the porch.
They did not speak.

It takes a lot of courage to go on trying, to go on living -
When the world has taken everything from you and left you behind.
I think that’s what my father felt like, those Wednesday afternoons at the pebbled beach, searching desperately for a sign.
I think it was what he felt like every single day at the factories.
That this could not be his life. That this was not where he had begun. And he hoped - prayed - it was not how it would end.

He felt like a failure.

I’ve felt like that too.

We both sit, and we wait, and we don’t stop until we’ve caught sight of a yellow wing. Something, anything, to tell us, that there is something more.

I wish I’d understood, at the time.

The other day I found it, right smack in the middle of Birds of Northern Troy, Second Edition.
It was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.
If such an ordinary thing can be beautiful.
If such a beautiful thing can be ordinary.

I tore out the page and folded it in half.
I slipped it under father’s door.
Maybe he’ll go his whole life never having caught sight of it in the wild.
But he’ll have it right with him.
And I think, it will be enough.

Undated

Some people are born under a lucky star.
Others, through the use of charms - to ease their way into the world of the living.
When my friend Aphareus was a baby, his mother hung a laurel branch over his crib. A symbol of the god Apollo, of protection - of luck.

Father always said you made your own luck in this world.
He was the man who swam across rivers - would have crossed oceans - to change his own fate. To build the life that he wanted.
“To make your home in a new country is to build something from nothing,” he would tell me - in those rare evenings when he would have something to say at all.
So I had no lucky signs, lucky stars - because my parents did not believe in such things. Still, they must have believed in something -
Somewhere in the depths of the waters, they must have held on to some sort of hope - the kind greater than man’s strength, more enduring than a last breath.

And deep down inside, father must have believed in something - to give me my name, a seafaring name. Did he believe I would be like him, destined to traverse water? Did he believe I would reach places he could only dream of?

It was troubling, even tiring - to think of the hopes; the expectations. That your parents might have looked at you and seen an extension of themselves. A reflection in the mirror, one that grew its own feet and learned to sprint away.
In the years I was finishing school I began to worry that my father saw me as Achilles who never was.
That I represented the part of him he had left behind in Pelion, perhaps even Achaia.
I was young. He had been young once.
I was full of promise. As he had been, at the time.

What happens to men when they grow old?

If I had asked pater, he might have said, “Well you see, Neleus - first they begin to lose their hair - and then their teeth, one by one. Then their good looks. After that, their wits. What can we mortals do but bow down and watch it happen? Age is, of course, the eternal victor.”
Knowing pater, that is most certainly what he would have said, word for word. And then ordered me to chop some carrots.

I laugh about it now.
But my last days in school were marked with a transient fear. A phantom cloud that seemed to hang over my head no matter where I went, who I surrounded myself with.
Aphareus had been conscripted into the army to join in Messenia’s fight for independence. And I -
I was barely a columnist. An errand boy, perhaps, running to and fro completing requests for the local newspaper.

That day, when we were seventeen, we walked by the canals as we had grown used to over the years. He was my most steadfast friend, although there would be many to come. I just didn’t know it.
I also did not know that Aphareus’ name had been picked. It hardly occurred to me that such a thing was a possibility.
In my head, we would be together until the very end. What I imagined, I can’t even put in words - some hazy, smoke-yellow vision of two brothers seeing the world side by side.
We sailed on boats into the ink-dark sea.
We braved storms; stood our ground against mighty winds.
We were Neleus and Aphareus, against the world.
“And we still are,” he said.
“We will be.”

I had promised myself not to weep. He did not deserve to be seen off like that. There was always something a little bit magic about Aphareus. His magic came in the ordinary.
He could make me feel braver than I really was. Smarter. Stronger.
Without him, I was just a seventeen-year-old boy with nowhere to go.

And he would be a man, fighting the good fight with the Messenians - at least, at the time, that was what we believed.

When I went home that evening, pater could sense there was something wrong.
I kept my mouth shut. That was the age when such things embarrassed me.
But in the end, I could not keep it from him for long.
He came into my room and sat on the edge of the bed.
“When does he leave?” he asked, softly.

I burst into tears.
“Why couldn’t it have been me?” I cried out, and buried my face in the pillow.
Aphareus.
I thought about the train ticket. I thought about Trash Mountain.
Always the two of us.
Like silly children, we had made too many promises.
And now I was afraid none of them would come to pass.

Pater sighed and stroked my hair.
“You are no soldier, Neleus. If there is an Apollo at all - then I thank him you were spared.”

It was a stupid lottery.
My name was a seafaring one, the kind they threw out into the seas to fight their battles, to be forgotten.
And yet they had not picked me.
Part of me was relieved, as relieved as pater must have been. The other part -
I was heartbroken, I think. I felt I would never see Aphareus again.

Some people are born under a lucky star. Others, they have lucky charms. Aphareus was one such person.

And as it turned out, that was not the end of his story. But it would mark the last time we were Neleus and Aphareus ever again.

Neleus,

Went on a boat today. You know, I can’t remember the last time I was on one. We were patrolling along the estuary, where the Macaria River flows into the Messenian Gulf. I’ve drawn it on the bottom of this letter - do you like it? I bet you’ll like it.

The locals call Macaria the land of the blessed. I don’t know why, but the moment I heard it I thought it was something you would say. And all of a sudden I needed to write you, badly.

Pharae is a little town on the harbor twenty minutes east of Macaria - at night, we go dancing. There’s a little bar at the end of the red light district. It has a jukebox. A little outdated, don’t you think? Then again, so is everything here.

Do you remember when school let out for the summer holidays? Of course you do. You remember everything.
It seems so silly now, but I loved rattling on about the trips to Mount Ida. That look you got on your face - I knew deep down, you were envious. I suppose it made me feel special. One of a kind.

But summer after summer, and that final week of August - I would grow restless on the train ride home, my last glimpse of Ida traveling from my eyes to my brain, springing to my tongue; you were the only one I wanted to tell. The only one I could tell, who would see it the way I saw it - who would fashion it into a place far more beautiful than it ever was.

I wonder what you would make of Messenia.

What if I told you I hated it here? Would you come save me?
And what if I told you I loved it?

I think the more time that passes here, the lousier I get at telling the truth. I tell myself that I miss home. I tell myself that I don’t want to be a soldier. All these things are blasphemy in the army. But what do I know? I knew myself best when you were there to tell me how the world really was.

Now I am here, and you are there.
And the world is not what I thought it was.
So, Neleus Pelides, you are a terrible liar.
A storyteller. A fabricator.

Yet how I wish - how I wish I could see Messenia the way you would see it. The land of the blessed. Perhaps I would find something to love. Perhaps I would find something to revel in. Or perhaps - there is nothing here at all, but the sound of the jukebox playing your song in the middle of the night. I toss a coin onto the bar so it plays again.
The last of the men file out.
And it is so quiet, just me. My coin. The song.
We’re the only ones here.

Aphareus

May 1965

It all began with the iris outside our window.
It was bright purple, and had leaves so spectacularly oval like the tail feathers of a peafowl, or a trail of tears …

Pater had a name for the iris in his language - ghostflower.
I didn’t think they had irises in Pelion, but every spring he would gaze longingly at the amethyst blooms they sold by the stalk in the market - and one day, father bought one and brought it home to him.

“You’re inviting bad luck,” pater complained - eyeing the barely there bud as his hands gripped the pot.

“You don’t believe in bad luck,” father smiled.

“I’ll have to repot it. It will take over our garden before we know it. You didn’t know what you were getting into.”

“One could say the same about how it was when I met you,” father countered, one eyebrow raised.

Pater rolled his eyes.

Ghostflower.
Have I told you much about the Pelinese language?
I suppose I only wish I spoke it better.
You see, the things I can say - they’re all crude things.
“Half price on the tomatoes!” or “Pater, when is lunch?” Those kinds of everyday things we know to say without really knowing.

But language is more than just unthinking sounds. The Pelinese assign words that describe not just what they are, but what they were and what they will be. This doesn’t make much sense, does it?

The ghostflower.
A late spring bloom, the last glory of the season and its fading notes.
“It must hurt to always be last,” pater said, as he dug out the iris and replaced it into a larger pot with good drainage.
“Like a dying swan in its final flight - perhaps it is the most beautiful of all.”

I could not stop looking at the iris outside the window.
In the morning, I searched for it.
When I came home from school, the same.

It took ages to bloom.
You could see the tips of the petals peeking out just so - and you knew.
You knew how magnificent it could be, if it would only bloom.
There wasn’t a single soul in our household who didn’t wish to see it.

“My father died in late spring,” pater said, out of the blue, coming in to drain the water from the bath.
“We planted ghostflowers all along his grave. When the rain came their bearded heads drooped and bowed, as though paying homage. It’s a strange thing to have one outside the house of the living. I don’t know what your father was thinking.”
But even then, one could tell he was pleased.

We were not in Pelion, and we were not at the graveyard.
Here in the city of opportunity a ghostflower could be something else - death could become life, failures could be reborn into dreams.

And I think that was what made him keep the iris.
Year after year. Spring after spring.
He would tend to them so carefully, divide them and replant them into our garden soil.
Without fail, they met him outside the window in the mornings, in the evenings. The same way they met my grandpater at the grave.

A flower of greeting, a flower of farewell.
A way to carry the past into the future, the other way around, all in one cycle so no matter where we were, we could know each other without remembering.

“Promise me you’ll do the same for me when I die, Neleus,” he said.

Unthinkingly, I promised.

But, I’m getting sentimental. Sometimes I think those flowers are more of a pain than they are worth. Especially now that pater has all these aches and pains every time he bends his back wrong or his knees give out. One of these days, I’ll have to take over the garden.
And what a disaster that will be.

Undated (c. 1975)

“What does music mean to you?” I asked.
Every day, I asked.
And she never failed to answer.

It’s half past ten, and the train is on time.
I keep telling myself that my watch is set five minutes early. It’s a habit pater instilled in me. Even in school - he’d lean over the breakfast table before I left and adjust the hands for me.

I think I’m used to Trojan Central by now. Even when I told myself it would always be new. Always exciting.
After all, it’s the greatest train station in the world.

The frescoes on the ceiling and the heavy mahogany benches. The bustling of the pedestrians; how each and every one simply doesn’t have the time to look up from their briefcases, their newspapers, their steaming cups of coffee.
A woman passes by with her copy of the Times.
I see my name on the front column.

There was a day when my heart would have skipped a beat. Now I watch as the letters fade from view, thoughtless.
I have taken so much pride and joy in work; in words.
And now I am going to a place where there are no words.

A place where today bleeds into tomorrow, and time stands still.

—

If anyone had told me as a boy that Aphareus’ mother had a gift - would I have believed them? Even now, I remember her cruelty.
She was never malicious, never harmful in intent.
But the way she would forget. Was that not a cruelty on its own?

Still, I went. Perhaps it was out of sympathy. Perhaps I knew what it felt like, to come home to an empty room, an empty apartment.
Perhaps because I remember her, the sound of her heels clicking down the hallway, the scent of her perfume trailing by. She was always beautiful, picture-perfect. The opposite of my own parents.
Perhaps it was because Aphareus loved her.
Perhaps. It’s quite a word, isn’t it?

It was the summer of 1975.
As the clock struck twelve, the tea in my cup would have cooled to a drinkable temperature. Even when it was blazing hot, she made tea - the porcelain cool and shiny under my fingertips.
I watched the cups balanced on the top of the piano, and when she played, the liquid inside rippled.

Those days were marked with the songs of homecoming. Because we waited, she and I. The music played on because we could not bear the silence. I suppose we were similar, in that way.

One afternoon I looked at her and realized she was different.
In my mind she’d always been Aphareus’ mother, cut straight out from a department store catalogue.
We did not come from the same world, we did not live in the same world.
But right then, I thought we did. Just in those few instances of playing - I heard her longing, her desperation. I felt the same.

We waited for Aphareus again and again.

In September, she stopped playing.

—

I wonder when people cease to make sound.
Is it after they leave?

But you can hear them in your mind. You can see a last smile, a nod of the head, catch a whiff of clean hair as the breeze combs through the strands.
Is it the hour after?

But you can still hear their footsteps, the click of their suitcase, an anxious goodbye thrown over the shoulder.
Perhaps it is the hour after that.

No longer them; just the beating of your own heart, highway traffic, trees living out the last of spring.
People make such beautiful sounds, and ugly sounds, and noise. What they make can hardly be called music. But, just like music - they don’t go away for a long, long time. Not in an hour. Not in a day. Not in forever.

“What does music mean to you?” I ask.

No answer, for there is nobody there.

The sunlight reflects off the ivory of the keys;
And curiously enough, it brings me back to an afternoon with pater.
—

We are stuffing dumplings with potatoes, a tedious process.
The Descent came out today, and as is always the case with Orpheus and the Underworlders; my world is lit on fire once again.

They have not released a single record in three years, you see. But as it turns out; The Descent is not anything like I expected.
I sit on the edge of my chair, taking the record off and putting it on again. I think my ears are going bad.
It's … different.
And I am disappointed.

Pater comes to stand in the doorway just as I flip it B-side.
“Neleus, I told you not to overstuff the dumplings!”

I don’t answer, and he lapses into silence. When I look up, his head is cocked to one side.
He's listening to the record.
Pater hates rock n’ roll music. Perhaps hate is a strong word. He really doesn’t care for it.
The thing is, he's smiling.

“What?” I ask. I don’t want to tell him that I don't like the record.

He looks at me as though he’s forgotten I'm there.
“Sounds familiar,” he says.

“They’ve lost their sound,” I sigh. Perhaps it's time to find something new to listen to. But Orpheus and the Underworlders have been like gods to me for so long. I would feel lost without them.

Later, when I am home alone, I put the record on again. For some reason, I keep wanting to hear the song that made pater smile.
It isn’t anything special. Not on the first listen.
But the more I listen to it, the more it seems to seep through, like light in an empty cathedral. Filtering through the rafters. Finding the darkest alcoves, illuminating the dust motes floating through the air so that the whole room seems to sparkle.

The afternoon sun blinds me when I turn my head to glance out the window.

___

Here I am again.
That record - it wasn’t like anything else I had ever heard before. Yet, it was everything I knew best.

It reminded me of pater. In a way, it was him, only a small part.
But to me; everything.
It made me feel a strange emptiness. No, emptiness was not the right word. It was what came after.

And it’s why I played it today at Aphareus’ mother’s funeral.

No longer alone. When the music played; she and I,
we were no longer alone.

I suppose that is what music means to me.

Today, the earth darkens. Afternoon becomes night. The cry of the ravens, into silence.
I can’t help but remember, little one -
that you were born on the day of the eclipse.
It was the day the Messenians raised the laurel of victory high above their heads.
It was the day Aphareus came home.
It was the day -
Well, you know the story.

But you know all of my stories. At least - the ones I’ve had the courage to tell you. Not this one, perhaps. Not yet.

Today, you came home weeping. You said to me that it was all over. I did not know what to say in reply. You were always so much smarter - that whatever I had to say seemed foolish in comparison.
I did not know if my words would bring you comfort. I did not know if they would make things worse. But in any event, I had to try.
Here goes.

So many people grow up without ever really knowing who their parents were; too many. I never wanted that for you. There was a time when I wished that nobody knew me . I did not think they would understand.

But even if you do not understand, I want you to know. I’ve always wanted you to know. Because you are the person I love most in the world, have always, will always.

When you were six, we took you to Scamander Park to watch the planes take off for the summer sky. You pointed at the wings piercing the clouds, bright eyed.
“There he goes!” you said.

At the time, your uncle Aphareus was the greatest aviator the world had yet known.
So many years had passed since we, as boys, fashioned our paper airplanes and entrusted them to the wind.
I looked up and saw yet another one of our creations - last one - trailing past the horizon, into a world only Aphareus himself would ever see.

I suppose I never mentioned you were different from the moment you learned to walk. The moment you picked up a pen - and set it down again.
We waited with bated breath - eager to see what you would do, eager and afraid.
You learned to sing before you learned to speak. You learned to walk - but always meant to fly.

When you were in school, you learned the difference between happiness and despair. You said your mother’s work made people happy. And your father’s made people sad.
I will not lie and say my heart did not break a little - I had always wanted to be your hero, you see. Even if I wasn’t, to anyone else. I spent my life writing things that made people uncomfortable, angry, afraid. I spent my life trying to tell the truth.

I took you to meet my pater’s sister when you were old enough to walk. You might remember this, you might not.
She was an old woman by then - she had forgotten her life in Pelion, and all the horrors she suffered during the war. She had forgotten, even - the people she loved.

There were many times I turned the scene over in my head, thinking how I would recount it to you. Perhaps I would tell you that she knew me. Perhaps I would say, “her eyes lit up, and from her lips came her brother’s name, a name she had not uttered in years. It was a warm reunion, little one. We did not know each other; in that moment, we could.”

But - that is not the truth.

The truth was - my pater died without ever seeing his family again. I like to think those people found happiness, found peace; in whatever way they could before they were lost to time. Lost to memory. I like to think pater had found peace, as well.

It is what we can hope for. You see, my father always said you made your own luck in this world. I do not know if he meant fate. And no matter how ugly the truth, how painful - there were times of beauty; of joy. Moments that cannot be erased, for we ourselves create them.

Eurydice, words have always given me hope. When you place thoughts to paper, it is like releasing a great burden into the universe. A great despair, a great longing, a great love. Whatever it is. A part of you is taken out and given back to the world, whatever to become of it, who knows.

In life, I have been guarded with my words. Selfish with them, one could say. When you read this, I can only hope this last part of me stays with you. That you’ll always remember me this way. And then our goodbyes will no longer mean goodbye. Only what we always wanted to say, but could not.

My parents found meaning in a life that was cruel to them. For so long, I struggled to find the same path. I did not understand how they did it.
But the moment you pointed at the sky, on that bright summer's day - the moment you said “there he goes!”
I understood.
I am here to tell you that you can do the same.

All my love, brave one.
All my hope.
Everything I have that I could possibly give you.
Like the paper planes I made as a boy, I can only hope to entrust it to the wind - and believe it will reach you.

Dad

Dear reader,

We end here, on the coldest winter Troy has ever known.
Last night I left the office at four a.m., and would you believe it, the door had frozen shut!
I suppose you could call it my heaven. Or even, my hell.
My grandfather would have laughed at me, and laughed with me, at the same time. There was never another person so full of laughter.

And so it brings me to this.
As you well know, this year has been a series of trials and triumphs for the magazine. We celebrated new beginnings, mourned old losses - and as always, we wrote. I have to tell you that it has been a great joy publishing this column - when I first posed the idea, my editor-in-chief called me insane.
And then he shrugged, and went “Why not? Dig your own grave.”

I was seven when I knew I wanted to write. I learned to live and breathe it - as one would the toxic fumes of tobacco. Give me a pen, and I was addicted. But the thing was, I never believed I had any talent. I only wished it. I looked at the names of men in the great journalists’ Hall of Fame, and I told myself, these are your heroes.

But one thing someone much wiser than me used to say; if we can trust heroes, why not trust ourselves?
So the summer of last year, I took a break. I went through my grandfather’s old things. And I found, in every nook and cranny of the place he had called home - a story.

It was not my own. It was not, in fact, anything new. My grandfather was always scribbling in journals, you see. Nothing made him happier than to stick his head in between pages, to stain his hands with ink, and perhaps even develop carpal tunnel.

But although it was only the story of his life - I found in it the story of others. I felt, in my heart of hearts, that within his wild scribblings were events, thoughts, and memories that had been true to so many. That still are.

And he surprised me.

Even there, in that musty, murder-y, moldy old attic - I knew there was a place for this story.

At any rate, I would like to thank Chryses’ Chicken Shop for sponsoring this issue (just kidding!). No, really.
We may have come to the end of the year, the end of this column.
But there will be other stories to tell. I cannot promise they will be the same. I cannot promise they will even be good.
Yet, if they are the kinds of stories that make my editor-in-chief roll his eyes and call me insane - then you can bet I’ll keep telling them.

Stay warm out there!

Antilochus Pelides

Junior Editor