Spies of the Balkans

“You told her, ah, what you’re doing?”

From Demetria, a tight smile. “She knows, Mama does. Knows her daughter.”

They clinked their glasses together and drank. The retsina was strong.

“Not so bad,” Zannis said.

“No, not bad at all. A good idea.” She put her glass on the floor and rubbed her hands, trying to get warm.

“Shall we get drunk and forget our woes?”

“Not that drunk.”

When she again picked up her glass, Zannis saw that she wasn’t wearing her wedding ring. And she’d pulled her hair back with an elaborate silver clip.

“I called your house, this morning,” he said. “I came home last night but I didn’t see your letter until just before I called you.”

“I knew … I knew you would call. I mean, I knew you would call to the house in Salonika, so I telephoned, from Athens. Nobody answered….” She put her glass on the floor, rubbed her hands and said, “My hands are so cold.” You dumb ox.

“Give them to me.” He held her hands, which weren’t all that cold, and said, “You’re right. They need to be warmed up.” He took her left hand in both of his and rubbed the back, then the palm.

After a time she said, just the faintest trace of a hitch in her voice, “That’s better.” With her free hand, she drank some retsina, then put her glass back on the floor.

“Now the other. You were saying?”

“That I called, from Athens….”

He worked on her hand, his skin stroking hers. “And?”

She leaned toward him a little. “And you … weren’t home.”

“No.” He noticed that the dark shade of lipstick she wore flattered her olive skin. “No … I wasn’t.”

“So I wrote it.” She was closer now.

He took both her hands, meaning to move her toward him but she was, somehow, already there. “I did get it.”

“I know.” Her face was very close to his, so she spoke very softly. “You said.”

He pressed his lips against hers, which moved. After a time he said, “So …” They kissed again, he put a hand on her back, she put a hand on his. With his lips an inch away from her mouth he whispered, “… I telephoned.” The wool of her sweater was rough against his hand as it went up and down.

It was awkward, sitting side by side, but they managed, until he could feel her breasts against him. When she tilted her head, her lips lay across his, and she spread them apart, so that his tongue could touch hers. Involuntarily, he shivered.

He knelt on the floor and began to untie the laces of her shoes. As he worked at one of the knots, she ran her fingers through his hair, then down the side of his face. “Can you do it?”

The knot came undone.

They had set the hard pillows against the iron railing at the foot of the bed in order to see out the window, where, across the bay, a lightning storm raged over Mount Olympus. The mountain was famous for that. Almost always, in bad weather, forked white bolts lit the clouds above the summit-which meant that Zeus was angry, according to the ancient Greeks. Zannis was anything but. Demetria lay sideways against him, the silver clip cold where it rested on his shoulder.

When he’d finished with her shoes, he had returned to her side and taken the hem of her sweater in his hands but she held them still and said, her voice low and warm, “Let me do this for you.” Then she stood, turned off the lamp, and undressed. It wasn’t overly theatrical; she might have been alone, before a mirror, and took her time because she always did. Nonetheless, it was a kind of performance, for she clearly liked being watched. Carefully, she folded her clothing and laid each piece on the chair, using it as-a prop? She wore very fancy silk panties over a garter belt and, after she’d slid them down, she turned partly away from him and braced her foot on the chair in order to remove her stocking. From this perspective, her bottom was fuller, as it curved, than promised when she’d leaned against the back of a sofa. And the angled form of a woman in that position suggested a seductive painting, though it was a natural, a logical, way to go about removing a stocking.

Was it not?

When she’d laid the garter belt on top of her clothes, she stood there a moment, head canted to one side. So, here is what you shall have. Was it what he’d hoped for? She was heavier, sturdier, than the naked Demetria of his imagination, with small breasts, small areolae, erect nipples.

Demetria may have taken time to undress, Zannis most certainly did not. He shed his clothes, took her in his arms and drew her close, savoring the feel of skin on skin. And here, pressed between them, was an emphatic answer to her silent question. Until that evening, Zannis had been in a way ambivalent; for in his heart a tender passion, which he thought of as love, had warred with the most base desire. But tender passion, as it turned out, would have to wait. And he was only half to blame. Maybe less.

And so?

Lightning flickered in the distance and, when a squall passed over the Hotel Angelina, wind-blown rain surged against the window. “You could, you know”-Zannis spoke the words slowly-“never go back to Athens.”

She didn’t answer, and he couldn’t see her face, but she nestled against him, which meant no and he knew it.

“No?” he said, making sure.

“It is …,” she said, suppressing the too soon, then started over. “It would be very sudden.”

“You have to go back?”

“Don’t,” she said.

He didn’t. But, even so, she rolled away from him and lay on her stomach with her chin on her hands. He stroked her back, a deep cleft in the center. “Can you stay until the morning?”

“Well, I’m surely not going anywhere now.”

“Is it a long walk? To your mother’s house?”

“Not far. It’s on the water, just around the bay. One of those stucco villas.”

“Oh?”

“‘Oh?’” she said, imitating him. “Yes, my love, now you know.”

“Know what?”

“That she could never afford such a thing. Nor could I. And you should see where my sister lives, in Monastir.”

“Oh.”

“You think I’m paid for, like … I won’t say the word.”

“That isn’t true.”

She shrugged.

“So he’s rich, so what?”

“That barely describes it. He buys French paintings, and Byzantine manuscripts, and carved emeralds. He spends money like water, on anything that takes his fancy. Have you noticed a small white ship, practically new, that stays docked in Salonika? I think it was an English ship, one of those that carried mail and passengers to the Orient. Anyhow it sits there, with a full crew on board, ready to go at an hour’s notice. ‘In case,’ as he puts it, ‘things go badly here.’ Then we will all sail away to safety.”

“Not a yacht?”

“The yacht is in Athens, in Piraeus. Not meant for an ocean in winter.”

“You will leave with him, if ‘things go badly’?”

“I don’t know. Maybe. Maybe not.” She thought for a time. “Perhaps I won’t be invited, when the day comes. He has a girlfriend lately, seventeen years old, and he hasn’t been … interested in me for a while. So, when I return, I don’t want you to think that I …” She left it there.

Zannis sighed and settled down next to her, in time laying his leg across the backs of her knees and stroking her in a different way. She turned her head so that their faces were close together. “I get the feeling you’re not ready to go to sleep.”