The Secret Beneath the Veil

* * *

“Your head is not in the game today,” Erebus said, dragging Viveka’s mind to the távli board, where he was placing one of his checkers on top of hers.

Were they at plakoto already? Until a few weeks ago, she hadn’t played since she and Trina were girls, but the rules and strategies had come back to her very quickly. She sat down with Erebus at least once a day if she was home.

“Jet lag,” she murmured, earning a tsk.

“We don’t lie to each other in this house, poulaki mou.”

Viveka was growing fond of the old man. He was very well-read, kept up on world politics and had a wry sense of humor. At the same time, he was interested in her. He called her “my little birdie” and always had something nice to say. Today it had been, “I wish you weren’t leaving for Paris. I miss you when you’re traveling.”

She’d never had a decent father figure in her life and knew it was crazy to see this former criminal in that light, but he was also sweetly protective of her. It was endearing.

So she didn’t want to offend him by stating that his grandson was tearing her into little pieces.

“I wonder sometimes what Mikolas was like as a child,” she prevaricated.

She and Erebus had talked a little about her aunt and he’d shared a few stories from his earliest years. She was deeply curious how such a kind-seeming man could have broken the law and fathered an infamous criminal, but thought it better not to ask.

He nodded thoughtfully, gesturing for her to shake the cup with the dice and take her turn.

She did and set the cup within his reach, but he was staring across the water from their perch outside his private sitting room. In a few weeks it would be too hot to sit out here, but it was balmy and pleasant today. A light breeze moved beneath the awning, carrying his favorite kantada folk music with it.

“Pour us an ouzo,” he finally said, two papery fingers directing her to the interior of his apartment.

“I’ll get in trouble. You’re only supposed to have one before dinner.”

“I won’t tell if you don’t,” he said, making her smile.

He came in behind her as she filled the small glasses. He took his and canted his head for her to follow him.

She did, slowly pacing with him as he shuffled his cane across his lounge and into his bedroom. There he sat with a heavy sigh into a chair near the window. He picked up the double photo frame on the side table and held it out to her.

She accepted it and took her time studying the black-and-white photo of the young woman on the one side, the boy and girl sitting on a rock at a beach in the other. They were perhaps nine and five.

“Your wife?” she guessed. “And Mikolas’s father?”

“Yes. And my daughter. She was... Men always say they want sons, but a daughter is life and light. A way for your wife to live on. Daughters are love in its purest form.”

“That’s a beautiful thing to say.” She wished she knew more about her own father than a few barely recollected facts from her mother. He’d been English and had dropped out of school to work in radio. He’d married her mother because she was pregnant and died from a rare virus that had got into his heart.

She sat on the foot of Erebus’s bed, facing him. “Mikolas told me you lost your daughter when she was young. I’m sorry.”

He nodded, taking back the frame and looking at it again. “My wife, too. She was beautiful. She looked at me the way you look at Mikolas. I miss that.”

Viveka looked into her drink.

“I failed them,” Erebus continued grimly. “It was a difficult time in our country’s history. Fear of communism, martial law, censorship, persecution. I was young and passionate, courting arrest with my protests. I left to hide on this island, never thinking they would go after my wife.”

His cloudy gray eyes couldn’t disguise his stricken grief.

“The way my son told me, my daughter was crying, trying to cling to their mother as the military police dragged her away for questioning. They knocked her to the ground. Her ear started bleeding. She never came to. Brain injury, perhaps. I’ll never know. My wife died in custody, but not before my son saw her beaten unconscious for trying to go back to our daughter.”